He's dead.
Gatusso wriggles free of the monk's corpse. Acolytes steady him and he looks across at Lydia. The accidental fire has cremated her. She's nothing more than a pile of blackened bones.
He turns to the remaining Satanists. 'We need to find the girl. Spread out.' He points. 'Two of you that way. Two around by the shore. The rest of you, come with me.'
Ahead in the distance, Tanina doesn't know where she is. She has no idea where she's running to. But she's running. Faster than she's ever done.
Unseen brambles snag her feet. She stumbles. Knocks into a low-hanging branch. Drops one of the tablets.
It's gone. Vanished. Lost in the dense grass, weeds, brambles and rutted earth.
She stops.
Scrambles for it. Finding it seems almost more important than getting away. Her fingers feel something.
Twigs.
She throws them to one side.
Not twigs. Bones!
Human bones.
The tablet has slipped into a shallow grave. One of dozens on the island. Sad stacks of dead left by the plague.
Tanina hears rustling behind her.
They're coming.
The tablet bearing the demon's face lies somewhere in the grave.
She swallows hard and digs both hands deep into the trench of bones and dust. Not to find the artefacts, but to find a place to hide.
Footsteps crackle on twigs all around her. Torchlight flickers through the long black limbs of wintry trees and voices grow closer.
Tanina lies in the foot of the mass grave, her body covered with a rotting blanket of skulls, ribs and legs.
The voices are right above her. She dare not scream or move.
Her skin is covered in maggots and worms, woken from their indolence by the smell of fresh meat. She can feel them slithering across her neck, making their way patiently to the juicy jelly of her eyes and the warm orifices of her face.
Still she does not move.
Her hair is alive with creatures, her scalp unbearably itchy, and she all but panics when she has to blow some form of creature off her lips.
But she suffers it all. Suffers it in a silence that her mother would have been proud of. Suffers it all until daybreak.
Tanina moves slowly.
She strains to listen for any trace of movement or voices in the woods. There are none.
She is safe.
She sits upright, scattering bleached white bones and gasping for air.
In a near frenzy she rubs her hands through her hair, scratching hard at her infested scalp, vigorously shaking out the insects rooted there.
Her heart's beating so fast she fears it will burst.
Tanina can see the water of the lagoon and longs to run into it. Instead, she forces herself to plunge back into the grave and search for the missing tablet.
Right at the bottom of the trench, below skeleton after skeleton of perished Venetians, she finally finds the slab of silver.
Sweat is dribbling off her. Her skin raw with bites and blotches. Nevertheless, she is now in possession of all three tablets. The fact reminds her of her mother's wish for them to be kept apart, not brought together.
So be it.
As soon as she has escaped, she'll hide them. Somewhere undiscoverable. Somewhere far, far from the grounds of this place.
She looks around. There is water but no boat, and she knows she cannot risk looking for one. Nor can she contemplate staying in Venice for long either. She gathers rotten planks from around the side of the grave and finds more wood along the shoreline.
Quickly, Tanina walks into the dark lagoon and ducks her head beneath the cool water. She emerges and shakes her hair, grateful for the brief respite from the dirt and the itching. Now she rips fabric from her sodden dress to bind the wood and form a precarious raft. Other strands she uses to secure the tablets to the largest plank.
Carefully, she re-enters the water. The contraption floats and seems to be holding.
She says a quick prayer – partly for her mother – mainly for the brother she never knew who gave his life so she might live.
Tanina takes a deep breath and pushes off from the shore.
If she makes it to the other side, she'll head south. Maybe Rome. Start a new life where no one will ever find her.
PART SIX
CHAPTER 70
Present Day 6th June Carabinieri HQ, Venice Lars Bale's final painting turns out to be the serial killer's most confusing and complex work.
At first light, Vito gives up guessing and orders his team to find him an expert.
It comes in the form of forty-two-year-old Gloria Cucchi, a former head of art at the Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia and now owner of the highly respected Cucchi Galleries.
'It is indeed very complex,' she says, circling a high-resolution colour print of the untitled painting laid out on a long, glass conference table. 'Personally, I think the work is horrible, a complete miasma. Yet there is true beauty in its ugliness and flashes of genius, reminiscent of Picasso and Picabia.' She taps the print. 'These heavy cubes illustrate strength. They show square men, machos lifting things, perhaps titans of industry, finance or commerce, building a city.' She holds the edge of the A4-sized print and smiles. 'This angular cameo here is striking, it looks like a waterfall in the Canal Grande but he has it pouring blood, not water. How provocative!' She backs off from the print, changes her perspective, clears her mind of presumptions and prejudices, then dives back in again: 'Now I look more closely, I can see that he has borrowed style and substance from many artists. Certainly Dali, in the sense that there are multiple mirror images and some strokes of savage surrealism. Certainly Picabia too – there are faces whirling like demons in a mist.' She leans over the table like a long-necked bird about to peck at seed. 'But beneath it all is the most powerful influence of – Giovanni Canal.' She allows herself a smug smile. 'Better known as Canaletto. His father, Bernardo was also a painter, hence his sobriquet Canaletto – "little canal". Now, come around the other side, you'll see things somewhat more clearly.'
Valentina and Vito follow her, wondering why she didn't just turn the print around. 'You have to stare beyond all the bolder images and look to the background. The artist's first pass on the canvas is Giovanni's 1730 "The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute", probably his most recognisable work, it's been reproduced in prints and postcards all over the globe.'
She dips down low, like a surveyor checking levels. 'Very good. Actually, it's very, very good.' She traces above the print with her fingers. 'See here – this is the mouth of the canal, there are gondolas in the foreground, but look closely at them and you'll see he's fashioned them from blackened corpses. No doubt an allusion to the Plague. Then we have waterfront houses on the right and the dome of the Salute on the left, like a glimpse of a pale breast, perhaps Mother Venice dying.'
Vito doesn't like the comparison; he wishes the woman was less jovial and indelicate. 'And these?' he asks. 'What do all these cubes and rectangular shapes over the top of things mean?'
Gloria nods. 'Violence. Passion. Aggression. That's what they mean. Some kind of explosion, a release of tension and anger. You can feel the potency pouring off the painting.'
Valentina remembers part of the lengthy briefing they were given by the FBI. 'Are the shapes anything to do with Da Vinci and…' she hesitates for fear of sounding stupid '… Golden Ratios, Golden Rectangles?'
Gloria looks impressed. She tilts her head back and forth at the work. More tracing with her hand, but it's done so quickly, neither of the officers can follow her finger lines. 'You're absolutely right. How clever.' She grabs Valentina's hand and uses her finger like a stick. 'Look here!' Gloria slowly traces the face of a man in profile. 'This is Da Vinci's famous black-and-white illustration from De Divina Proportione – his illustrations here, the way he overlaid the rectangles to show the symmetry of the face, led scholars to speculate that he used the Golden Ratio to create the bewitching magic in the Mona Lisa.' She looks up at the puzzled detectives and hopes they're catching enough of her drift for it to be of use. 'Certainly Dali used it all the time, especially in The Sacrament of the Last Supper, and if you look here you notice symbols from that work too.'