And he smiled.
He helped me back into my rightful place, dropped a stoppered bottle of warm water into my lap, and resumed his position. Carlo, too, rose to his oar. In moments, we were skimming towards Venice proper.
My fingers managed to extract the cork. I poured water down my throat. I sat as we slid between San Giorgio and the Giudecca, and out into the San Marco Basin. Just before I stirred, to remind him of our bet, Giovanni spoke.
“My sister, the mother of Carlo, she is there in that place. Her husband”—both men paused to hawk and spit over the side—“came into money. Not a lot, but money. And so he has a pretty young girl, in Mestre, and my sister, she gets a little angry one day as she is making ravioli and hits him with her ravioli pin. He shout, the polizia come, and my sister, she keep hitting, and so…We think, San Clemente a good place to rest, to be calm, si? But her husband”—again the noisy demonstration of disgust—“he pay to keep her there. The judge agree, because she hit the polizia, and because the judge a friend of her husband”—it seemed as automatic a gesture as the sign of the cross—“she stay there.”
“For how long?”
“Two year, three month.”
“Good Lord. Can’t you get another judge to hear the case?”
“He will not. Her husband”—hawk; spit—“is now member of Milizia Nazionale.”
A Blackshirt. Was that him on the launch? No—the Capitano was too young. Still, the mere sight of his clothing would explain why they had hurried to get out of its way.
Near the entrance to the Grand Canal, Giovanni asked where I wished to go.
I pointed ahead of us, just past San Marco. “I’m staying at the Beau Rivage.”
He corrected our angle, and soon put in amongst the forest of pilings. Carlo held us against the dock as Giovanni handed me up and out, waiting politely as I retrieved money from my purse. I added a dignified sum on top, to make up for the blow his masculinity had suffered in turning his boat over to a woman, then paused, purse in hand.
“Giovanni, would you like to work for me for a few days? Esclusivamente?”
The negotiations took a while, and had they been written down would have had enough codicils and amendments to satisfy an Inner Temple barrister, but in the end, I had a pair of taxi drivers available to me day or night, at a daily rate that would be added to depending on how much and at what time I required their service. I handed over the first day’s fee and wrote down his instructions on how a message might reach him, day or night. We three shook hands, and parted amidst the consternation of half a dozen more handsome and more decoratively dressed gondolieri, who were clearly wondering what I saw in these two poorly-turned-out examples of their breed. And though I hadn’t specified that their contractual obligations included complete discretion, I thought I might have gained it, regardless, if for no reason other than their pleasure of keeping secrets from their fellows.
Back at the hotel, I called for food, drink, and a large bowl of ice for the swelling in my pained hands. I sated my gut, soothed my hands, sluiced the day’s soil off the rest of me, and finally stretched out to read what Mark Twain had to say about Venice. Three lines in, I fell into a dark and bottomless hole.
Chapter Thirty-two
HOLMES DRAGGED ME FROM THE dark hole no more than two minutes later. I cursed him under my breath, then gasped as I tried to shift the huge weight of my body on the bed: somebody had lit me on fire.
“What is wrong with you?” My unfeeling husband had crashed in, thrown what sounded like a full drum set onto the marble floor, and set off a Niagara in the bath-room taps.
“Oh God,” I wheezed. “I’ve strained every muscle in my body.” Even the arches of my feet felt pulverized.
“What was that?” His huge bellow echoed through the room, or perhaps just through my skull. I moaned. When he dropped onto the edge of the bed so as to hear me, the reverberations made me whimper. “Russell, are you injured?”
To give him credit, he did by now sound a bit concerned, although less than he might have been if he’d actually seen blood on the floor. Cautiously, I worked myself up a little on the pillows, trying to ease my burning neck and shoulders. “Holmes, have you ever rowed a gondola?”
The heartless scoundrel actually laughed. “Oh, yes. It makes use of muscles one didn’t realise one had. Let me add some more heat to the bath.”
He dumped a hefty dose of brandy into a glass and placed it in my hand. When it was gone and the bath-tub filled, he helped me stand, helped me cross the room, helped me into the water.
More brandy; two aspirin; heat.
Twenty minutes later, I thought I might live.
The shower-bath next door ran for a while. He came back in, gleaming and shaven, carrying a third dose of painkiller, and turned on the hot tap for a while—too long a while, in fact.
“Stop, Holmes—I feel like the entrée in a cannibal feast.”
He closed the tap. “How far did you row?”
“From Santa Maria to the start of San Giorgio.”
“Then I imagine you’re more than ready for dinner. Shall I have it brought up?”
“I just ate a platter of sandwiches. Wait: is it dark already?”
“It has been for some time.”
I’d slept for considerably more than two minutes. Long enough that dinner on our terrace, without having to struggle into formal dress, sounded an excellent idea.
From soup to nuts, I slowed down only as I approached the zabaglione. The waiters, who had been in and out serving the various courses, poured our coffee and left us to the night.
I felt nearly human.
Holmes propped up his heels and balanced his coffee atop his thighs, a manoeuvre that would have me leaping up from the scalding liquid in my clothing. I set my own cup on the table beside my chair, and enjoyed the lack of pain.
“You appear to have missed the last vaporetto to the Lido,” he noted.
“Not tonight. And lest you think it’s because I’m exhausted, I decided against it before the day’s adventures. Best not to appear too eager.” Or—yes—to collapse face-down on the table. And before I did so here—“Holmes, can you get a coded message to your brother?”
“Rather than a trunk call?”
“I may be a touch paranoid, but I don’t imagine dictators would hesitate to listen in on international telephone calls. And when it involves the lives of innocents…”
“What do you need?”
“There’s a woman named Dalser in the San Clemente asylum who has something to do with the Fascists. I don’t know her first name, but the mere mention of her makes the residents sweat with terror. And, there’s a militia Captain who comes all the way out to the island for a daily report on her.”
“Suggestive.”
“And while you’re wiring to Mycroft, could you also ask him to check on the whereabouts of the Marquess? I don’t really think it was Lord Selwick I saw, but still, I’d be happier to know he’s in England.”
Without comment, he set his cup on the table and went to find paper and pencil, to compose a coded message that seven hundred miles and three languages’ worth of telegraphist could not render impenetrable.
In sympathy to the cause, I forced my body to stay upright and vaguely conscious until he went off to send it.
* * *
—
I did not hear about Holmes’ day until Thursday morning, as we sat on our balcony watching the modern-day Canaletto come to life on the San Marco Basin before us. It was still reasonably early, and I’d soaked the residue of stiffness from my shoulders before the rattle of our breakfast tray roused me from the bath.
“I was too weary last night to ask about your day.” I concentrated on manoeuvring a large dollop of grapefruit marmalade onto a crescent roll.
“Unlike yours, mine was harder on the l
iver and lungs than on the muscles. I spent most of it at the Cole Porters’, in occasional musical interludes intruded upon by a constant tide of rich and titled visitors, American and European.”
I’d caught a whiff of his discarded clothing when I opened the wardrobe, its fabric ripe with cigarettes, strong drink, and—oddly—women’s perfume. “I hope for your sake the music was bearable.” I aimed the laden bread at my face.
“Much of it was not to my taste; however, it was eminently bearable.”
My mouth being occupied, I could only look a question at him: Holmes tended to be unforgiving when it came to music. Also when it came to much else in life, true, but particularly music.
“Mr Porter, despite being a remarkably talented young man, wishes nothing better than to write light musical pieces for the theatre. Songs, rather than sonatas. And he chooses to build those songs around the stuff of infatuation: champagne and shining hair, a longing gaze and a bit of witty repartee.”
I replied, somewhat stickily, “We can’t all be gloomy Germans, Holmes. Especially not young men married to wealthy and indulgent women.”
“Yes, it’s easy to think of Porter as a dilettante—and indeed, he pretends his interest is superficial. However, I’ve seen a slavey put less effort into scrubbing her steps with the housekeeper looking on than Porter does when no one’s in earshot. And though it is true Linda encourages him, it is more than mere indulgence.”
“That’s his wife? Linda?”
“Yes. An interesting relationship. One of considerable affection, and yet, by all appearances and much local gossip, the marriage is a ‘lavender’ one.”
I coughed on a bit of bread—I wouldn’t have imagined he even knew the phrase. “An arrangement of…convenience?”
“Hmm.”
“Does she suspect?”
“Oh, I’d say she is quite aware of his outside interests.”
“Good Lord. Oh, the poor thing.”
He stirred his coffee as he considered his reply. “Russell, I imagine that you have had any number of acquaintances make assumptions about your marriage to me.”
I was so startled, I could only stare at him.
“In fact, the permutations of marriage are wide and many. One such is that of the Porters. On the surface, theirs appears a façade, convenient to both but ultimately sterile. However, having spent the day in their company, I saw nothing but affection and respect. I saw two people for whom solitude is loneliness, and loneliness is horror. So, together they face the world, and amuse one another when the world is elsewhere.”
“I see.” Although I wasn’t entirely sure I did.
“I would also say their social life stands in for the kind of shared interests that bind more conventional couples.”
“Parties are their children?”
“The guests are, certainly. Pampered and groomed, their preferences considered, their entertainment paramount. The Porters’ guest lists are closely discussed for balance, size, and personalities.”
Did I hear a point coming, out of this most unexpected conversational detour? “Are you talking about their invitations for the party on Saturday?”
“I am. I have not yet seen it in detail, but I am to understand that it includes not only the cream of Venetian aristocracy and American wealth, but key members of the new Italian power structure as well.”
“Fascists?”
“That is, after all, where power currently lies. One can hope there are enough footmen to keep them away from the Socialists.”
“You think a rich American homosexual would invite Fascists to a drunken bash?”
“Until one has seen Blackshirts kicking a man, Fascism may be merely a political party. I imagine that, unless something comes along to remove Signor Mussolini from power, most high-ranking Italians will join the party, at least in name.”
This cheerful morning conversation was interrupted by a rapping at the door—my new beach pyjamas, each one proving more exotic than the last. Holmes gave a polite shudder and went off with his new violin. I chose the garment I judged least likely to cause a riot, packed it into my bag alongside a small set of binoculars and a large map of the lagoon, and put on normal clothing to go hunt down my gondolieri.
As I mentioned, the Lido is a long, thin sand-bar that keeps the Adriatic away from the calm lagoon waters. Tides rush in and out through a series of channels, three of which are suitable for ships. The oldest, and for most of Venice’s history the only deep channel, is in the centre, called Malamocco. Halfway between it and Venice proper—and thus ideally situated both to serve incoming ships and to be a first line of defence against a seagoing enemy—stands the island of Poveglia.
It, too, had spent some time as the quarantine place for suspected plague ships. It, like San Clemente and San Servolo, changed purpose as Napoleon closed the houses of religion, as the plague faded—and, as roads provided an alternative route to invaders.
My detailed map of the lagoon showed Poveglia as a patch of some fifteen or twenty acres divided into three sections. A foot-bridge joined the two northern parts. The small southern bit had the octagonal shape of a military fortification.
That was the full extent of my knowledge of this island—that, and it was haunted.
Not that spirits weren’t commonplace throughout the Venice lagoon. Even that most populated of tourist sites, the Piazza San Marco, has an entrance that locals automatically veer around, since the space between the two columns (stolen from elsewhere, like most of Venice’s landmarks and treasures) was long used as the city’s execution ground. Suspect islands ranged from San Servolo’s “windowless, deform’d and dreary pile” to the wailing surrounds of San Clemente and the long-time leper colony of San Lazzaro. Further out, where lights and bustle gave way to swamp and mists and tidal mutters, there were places where fishermen hesitated to cast their nets, where the stoutest of gondoliers would not go even by day.
And chief of those, it would appear, was Poveglia. Which was why it seemed a good place for a closer look.
My chief gondolier did not agree.
“No, Signora, no no no, you do not wish to go there. There is nothing on Poveglia. Ruins and ghosts, evil things. No, it is a bad place. Very bad.”
Sounding better and better.
“You may be right. Still, I’d like to look at it, even from a distance.”
“The vaporetto to Malamocco,” Giovanni decided firmly. “It goes past. Very, very close. But there is nothing to see, nothing but ruins and mad things.”
The last phrase caught my attention, but Giovanni’s growing agitation made it obvious he was on the point of ending our arrangement. Since I doubted that any of his prettier colleagues would prove more stout-hearted, I stepped away from my insistence, gave them an alternative assignment, and made my way to a steamer that meandered its way down the Lido.
The day’s haze was just beginning to rise from the water as we chugged near to the haunted island. I raised the field glasses, propping my shoulder against the boat’s cabin to keep them steady.
The northern island was solidly framed by a sort of hedgerow composed of small trees and large shrubs, its interior hidden from anything short of an aeroplane. Vegetation leaned over a narrow waterway, then resumed on the other side. In this middle section, buildings could be seen above the greenery: vine-draped roof-lines, a derelict church tower. Then came the octagonal section I had seen on the map, its sloping sides made of tightly fitted stones that would hold it above the winter storms.
As we approached the Malamocco dock, I asked the vaporetto man if this boat continued south, or turned back up the Lido. He gave a brusque nod in the direction we had come, so I resisted the disembarking crowd and went for a word with the man at the wheel.
“Signore, I would very much like to go back by way of the other side of Poveglia. Just for my interest. Perhaps…??
?? He glanced down at the lira I was slowly passing from one hand to another. I paused, added another, paused. At the third, he nodded and the bills vanished.
“Grazie mille, Signore,” I told him, and returned to my position at the starboard railing.
The island’s western side was something of a duplicate of its other half: octagon, water, middle part with buildings, a second canal with a foot-bridge, then hedgerowed wilderness. However, the buildings were not as ruined as the eastern passage had suggested: there was a closed boat-house with a new door, and fresh tiles in the roof of the long building facing the octagon. At their back, a glimpse of bricks and wheelbarrow suggested active renovations, although I saw no one moving. I could feel my fellow passengers watching me, with a figure at my elbow in the colours of the vaporetto company’s uniform, but not until Poveglia was receding from view did I lower the glasses.
The passengers turned away; the uniformed man did not—clearly, the helmsman had told him of our change in route. “I was interested in the island,” I said—truthfully enough.
“È un luogo maledetto,” he growled.
“Perché?”
Either his vocabulary was insufficient or his emotion too great, because rather than explain why the place was malevolent, he grumbled for a while in the Venetian dialect, then stumped away.
However, a gentleman who had overheard the exchange volunteered some information. “Tens of thousands of souls died here, Signorina,” he explained. “Of the plague, primarily. They say the soil is made of bones and hair.”
I nodded. “My boatmen wouldn’t bring me here.”
“They may be wise. There are sounds at night here. I have heard them, over the noise of the motor. And…smells, smells that linger on the offender.”
“It looks as though people live there.”
“Two, three years past, a doctor came, with…followers?”
“You mean patients? A health resort?”