The Borgia Portrait, page 19
She sniffed. ‘You’re never going to make a tour guide, you know.’
‘I’ve no wish to be one, thank you very much. That’s a job for a local.’
‘A story, Arnold. All these places Mum mentioned seem to have a story. Maybe that’s important. I don’t know.’ People were turning up, visitors with cameras and guidebooks in their hands. Like us, waiting for the scuola to open. ‘That’s what they’ve come for too.’
Always best to show as well as tell in my experience. Especially with someone like Lizzie Hawker.
‘Come on,’ I said, and we walked to the church of San Rocco opposite the scuola. That was empty – almost everyone came for the place across the way. I led her to the painting I had in mind and said, ‘Tintoretto. You’ve heard of him.’ She couldn’t stop looking at the huge, long canvas on the side wall. ‘Although really he’s called Jacopo Robusti – Tintoretto comes from the fact his father was a dyer of fabric. So “Tintoretto” means “little dyer”. This was one of his early works when he joined the scuola.’
San Rocco healing the sick, an extraordinary scene, light and shade, the saint, complete with golden halo, administering to plague victims, their blisters, their wounds, their pain, in an almost too realistic medieval hospital. Lizzie seemed drawn to images of death and suffering. Many people are, I imagine, which is why artists choose those subjects so often.
‘The story …’ I began.
The young Tintoretto painted the work in 1549, a tribute to the saint interred in the high altar, attracting a growing number of pilgrims who saw their journey as a votive ritual against the plague. The result was so admired, he entered a competition with three other artists for a rich commission, the painting of the walls and ceilings of the great scuola across the way. Desperate for the work, on decision day Tintoretto secretly produced not the sketch that was asked for, but a finished canvas, and somehow managed to instal it in secret in the room where the organisation’s leaders met.
‘This fait accompli won him the commission as the principal artist for the entire scuola.’
‘Sneaky,’ she said.
‘His rivals certainly thought so.’ I checked my watch. ‘Time for you to see.’
The small queue of visitors waiting for the place to open was gone. We went inside, lingered briefly on the gloomy ground floor, then ascended the broad and grandiose staircase. She was wide-eyed by the time we stepped into the vast Chapter Room, but no stopping there. I marched her straight through to the Sala dell’Albergo. Tintoretto’s St Roch in Glory, the work that won him the commission, above us in the ceiling. But she didn’t look at that when I mentioned it. All she could manage was what most of us did when we walked into that room: stare at the vast, dramatic Crucifixion on the opposite wall, Christ high on the cross, soldiers raising the two thieves who were to die with him, the grieving Mary, spectators, some horrified, some entertained, a landscape full of activity and life amidst death.
‘It could be a movie,’ Lizzie whispered.
‘I suppose back then it was. But where’s the sightless Fury?’
‘So many paintings …’
As Luca Volpetti said, sometimes there was too much to see. One missed the important details.
‘Wood,’ I said, and walked back into the main hall. True, there were paintings everywhere, the walls, the ceiling; thirty-three in all, Luca’s leaflet said, all Tintoretto, with assistants, among them the son, Domenico, we’d met already. But the room was also lined with panels in dark walnut, only one of which I’d given much attention to in all this magnificence. I took Lizzie to see it: an old man with a beard, a tortured expression on his face, paintbrushes in a pot in front of him.
‘Tintoretto,’ I explained. ‘From life. An allegory of painting. Perhaps he was so exhausted …’
She was gone, marching a few yards along. And there it was. Another figure in agony, a winged angel, blindfolded, fury on his face. Next to him the shelves of an exquisitely carved bookcase, the volumes so real you felt you could reach out and take one to read or annotate with the quill in an inkpot set in the middle. On the other side, a figure hiding himself inside a billowing cloak and beneath a floppy hat, a spy with natty black boots.
‘The secret fellow is a bit overdramatic,’ Lizzie said. ‘The most obvious spy I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you never noticed all this before.’
I turned and did a three-sixty on my heels, looking at the ceiling, the walls, the entrance to the Sala dell’Albergo with its cinematic Crucifixion.
‘Fine,’ she conceded. ‘But we have riddle six cracked, don’t we? The map …’
I took it out and showed her where to draw the dot for San Rocco. The rough circle was now around three quarters complete. One more stop in San Polo, then a last one across the Grand Canal, which would reveal the loop back to the Scuola Grande di San Marco.
‘Arnold. Let’s face it. There’s no point in keeping asking about this Corneille thing, is there?’
‘I don’t think so. Your mother did make it clear there were no shortcuts. Quite why …’
‘Thank goodness I’ve got you.’
And Luca, I thought. Fabrizio Ricci, too. We weren’t alone in this, even if it felt that way at times. The trouble was, it seemed they were genuinely lost about where we might go after San Rocco. As was I.
‘Ideas?’ Lizzie asked.
‘We could always call Valentina Fabbri and find out why she wanted to see you. She’s not a woman to turn down.’
‘And I’m not a woman to be ordered around either. The cops can wait.’
There had to be some kind of logic to Lucia Scacchi’s thinking. This wasn’t a random list of obscure places in Venice. A taxidermy dwarf in an anatomy museum even Luca hadn’t heard of. A hidden passageway supposed to protect against the plague. Dead statesmen in a crypt. The Dominican hounds of the Lord and an ossuary named after all the saints. Now a blindfolded Fury and a spy who would not show his face.
What was she trying to say? Something about heartless cruelty and a blatant disregard for life. But also, I thought, a need for salvation, a redemptive act. A countervailing balance of kindness to set a crooked world right. Truth against lies. Compassion against callousness.
Perhaps. First we faced another mystery.
Traitor, not a traitor, nor painter, homeless by the Dolphin and the Anchor. Loc. Col. Bai. The. MCCCX.
Somewhere between here and the Grand Canal lay the penultimate discovery. I needed books, faster broadband, my laptop. More than anything, I craved a fresh eye on all the material I’d been struggling with, trying to decode the next stop along the way.
Eleven
The Column of Infamy
Lizzie was the second woman to walk through the door of my one-bedroom home near San Pantalon, the first being my ex-con cleaner, Chiara. Thanks to her, when we arrived, it was far too organised and spotless to be classed as a bachelor flat. Eleanor had found the place, Eleanor had negotiated the sale. Weeks before we were due to leave for Italy, my ever-active wife had ordered the furnishings, arranged for the power and gas to be turned on, and dealt with a welter of local bureaucracy that would have been quite beyond me.
Then, very suddenly, she collapsed and died, with a heart ailment she’d hidden from me entirely. Confused, racked by grief and entirely lacking any sense of direction, I’d simply followed the path she’d set, moving into a home she’d created but would never set foot in when it was ours.
The place was modest, a former shop worker’s flat, on the ground floor of a cul-de-sac that rose just enough to keep the floor an inch or two above the worst acqua alta the city had known in recent years. Thanks to MOSE, that threat now seemed gone. The neighbours were local, only one rented tourist property in the entire street, novel for the city these days. From time to time I’d hear a little noise from revellers exiting the nearby bars and barging their way across the bridge. But it never lasted long. The narrow rio at the back was used by canal traffic night and day, even by a delivery boat at three in the morning on occasion. The previous owner had installed a floor-length glass door by the water side, meaning I could step out and sit on a tiny jetty if I was so minded (which I never was, too worried about tripping and falling in). Overcautious, Eleanor would have said, since she’d have lugged a deckchair out there and chattered with the pensioners who occasionally rowed past with bottles of wine and lunch boxes amidships.
And now I had Lizzie Hawker wandering around, checking out the bedroom, the bathroom, the tiny kitchen and the front room I used mostly as a study.
‘If I’d known you were coming, I’d have bought flowers,’ I said, for want of anything better.
‘Bit of a waste given you’re round my place for the duration.’ She picked up an ancient photo I kept on my desk. Eleanor and me outside the old Historical Manuscripts Commission building in Chancery Lane, before we were merged into the National Archives and moved to Kew. It was the day of our registry office marriage, a return to work for a small reception, a logical step since most of our friends were fellow employees too. There was confetti all over our shoulders. She wore a smart two-piece suit; I was in what I thought of as a green tweed sports coat and rather creased navy slacks that even with the faded colour of an old picture very obviously clashed.
‘You look very happy,’ said Lizzie.
‘We were.’
She pointed at the photo. ‘I like her smile. She looks a handful.’
‘My wife was never in need of assertiveness training, that’s for sure.’
‘Thirty-four and a bit years …’
‘A long time.’
‘You don’t look that much older.’
‘Well, I am.’ I gestured at the bookshelf dedicated to my reference works on Venice. Norwich, Morris, Ruskin, Lane, and an excellent translation into English of Tiziano Scarpa’s Venezia è un pesce – Venice is a Fish. ‘Can we get to work?’
She pulled up a stool and gestured for me to take the office chair at the desk. ‘You’ve read all these, time and time again, haven’t you?’
‘True.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing stands out, to be honest.’
‘You don’t really expect me to go through them all now, do you? That one alone …’ she pointed to the Norwich, ‘is absolutely huge.’
‘True again. But—’
She grabbed my laptop. ‘It’s the third decade of the twenty-first century. If we seek answers, we seek them here.’
The browser was open already. She typed ‘Corneille Venice’ into the search bar.
‘Luca’s been through all that, Lizzie. A lot more sources than Google. Nothing.’
She pushed the laptop away. ‘I give up. Is anything in this city simple? Straightforward?’
Yes, I thought. Most things, in truth. Provided you were able to see them correctly, through the distorted prism the city demanded. We were coming at Lucia Scacchi’s riddles from the wrong direction. As outsiders, trapped in the logic of foreigners. It was no coincidence that the solutions only appeared courtesy of Venetians – an attendant at Giovanni e Paolo, Ugo Abate, Valentina herself, Fabrizio Ricci … and Luca Volpetti by stealth.
‘When in doubt,’ I suggested, ‘coffee never goes amiss. There’s a place round the corner.’
‘Do they do ideas?’
‘No. But the pastries are excellent. Lots of them. And some savoury things too.’
‘Later.’ Lizzie tapped at the laptop again. ‘What about the Dolphin and Anchor? It sounds like a pub. Did you look it up?’
‘There’s no pub in Venice called the Dolphin and Anchor. Believe me.’
More taps. ‘But you didn’t look it up? Great name for a boozer.’
‘No. I—’
‘Can’t even pronounce this, Arnold. You?’
She turned the laptop round and showed me the page she’d somehow arrived at. It was the last thing I’d expected to see. The front cover of a very old book.
‘Oh. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.’
‘That’s a mouthful for Waterstones.’
I’d heard of the work. Luca had mentioned it once, wondering if he could find a copy for an exhibition he was working on. It was a bizarre and complex love story from the very end of the fifteenth century, set in a dream world and illustrated by woodcuts that would later inspire the likes of Aubrey Beardsley. Full of arcane references written in a mix of Latin and Italian, it was not my cup of tea and never would be.
‘Look,’ said Lizzie. ‘It says the dolphin and anchor was a graphical device used to represent the saying “Festina lente”, meaning “make haste slowly”. Not sure how that works, but …’
‘The anchor represents the slow and steadfast. The dolphin speed. Obvious, isn’t it?’
‘If you say so. What do you make of it?’
‘Look up Aldus Manutius.’
She asked me to spell it, then rattled the keyboard again and there it was. Not an answer, but the start of one. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was one of the first works produced, elegantly and to great acclaim, by Manutius, a Venetian publisher. He would later adopt the dolphin and anchor as the printer’s mark for his imprint, the Aldine Press.
‘Uh-oh,’ Lizzie muttered, scanning the article quickly, in a way an old archivist like me never would. ‘Here we go.’
Manutius, the article said, was a friend of Lucrezia Borgia, who greatly admired his publication of ‘enchiridia’, handy-sized works of popular classics, like modern paperbacks. They were beautifully produced, using newly designed typefaces and designs – it was Manutius who invented italics – and brought reading to a wider audience beyond the upper classes. The dolphin and anchor device came from a coin from Vespasian’s reign given to Manutius by none other than Pietro Bembo, Lucrezia’s lover, the man who had brought her missing erotic portrait to Venice in the first place.
‘But who on earth is the traitor who’s not a traitor? And not a painter either? Mum, I hate you.’ She slapped her own hand. ‘Just kidding. Must stop saying things like that.’
My head was starting to spin. ‘When in doubt … coffee.’
She was heading for the door already, making nice noises about what a lovely little home I had. Not a palazzo on the Grand Canal, I replied. But enough for me.
The temperature seemed to have gone up a good five degrees while we’d been inside. There was that pressure in the air too that sometimes brought on a migraine. More puffy clouds wondering whether to form an anvil shape, grey bases threatening thunder.
We walked through Campo San Pantalon, past the stall that sold tourist tat and newspapers. I couldn’t help looking round to see if someone was watching. I’d never noticed Luca Volpetti following us that morning. This kind of thing was not my forte.
If there was, they were better at subterfuge than me. And they wouldn’t be wearing that obvious cloak and floppy hat of the wooden spy in San Rocco.
As always, a billboard with the local news headlines was parked outside the stand.
I came to a halt, heart pumping, staring at the words there. Aware immediately why Valentina Fabbri had summoned Lizzie to her office, and how rash we’d been to ignore the call.
‘Arnold?’ Lizzie said, and touched my arm. ‘What’s wrong?’
The billboard said simply: Ca’ Scacchi Mystery – Now It’s Murder.
‘I don’t ask twice.’
We were back in the San Zaccaria Carabinieri office, Valentina Fabbri looking troubled across the desk. No coffee. No offer of it.
‘You shouldn’t have to,’ I said quickly, before Lizzie could explode. ‘We were wrapped up in the story. It tends to consume you.’
That interested her. ‘You’ve made progress?’
‘Just two left. The traitor who’s not a painter—’
‘You have no ideas?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’
Lizzie looked ready to scream. ‘Could you please stop talking about riddles and tell me about my mother?’
‘I wanted to. First thing.’
‘Instead, you told the newspapers.’
‘No.’ Valentina hesitated, wondering whether to go on. ‘I did not. For that, I suspect you can thank Enzo Canale. He has friends everywhere. Here. In the city. In Rome.’
‘Dad didn’t kill her. I don’t care what you say.’
‘I don’t think Valentina is suggesting such a thing.’
The Capitano’s face remained impassive. ‘I’m suggesting nothing at all. I wanted you to come here so I could explain what we’ve learned as a result of a very problematic post mortem.’ There was a blue folder on the desk. She flipped it open. A printed report with photographs. ‘You don’t need to look unless you want to. It’s in Italian, of course.’
‘Just tell me.’
The autopsy was complicated because of the state of the remains. It wasn’t just that the body in front of the altar had lain there for thirty-five years. The ceiling collapse had made the work more difficult and protracted. Specialists had had to be brought in from Milan and Rome to try to separate old injuries from new. Expert advice sought from medical examiners with experience of buried remains from war zones, the graves of conflict victims.
‘You said my mum killed herself.’
‘I said that was how it appeared. What you told us. What your father told you.’ There was a moment’s hesitation again, so unlike the usually confident Valentina Fabbri I’d come to know. ‘Canale believes your father had been violent towards her on more than one occasion. That he was aware the two of them were still having an on–off affair. While she knew he was removing items from the palazzo and selling them on the black market. If this is true—’
‘I don’t believe a word that bastard says. Dad loved her. Sometimes he’d tell me he didn’t think she was dead at all. One day she’d walk right back into our lives. I lived with him. I know he couldn’t have hurt her. He never even raised a hand to me. God knows I gave him cause sometimes. I …’
