Stone Virgin (42 page)

I am at the end of things now. There is only one more thing I can think of doing.

Raikes paused, and the horror descended on him that had never been far away since his visit to the police station the day before, when Litsov’s things had been handed over. It was this, he saw now, that had invaded and darkened his sense of the past, the same stain spread over both, the same elusive presence, everywhere answering, but never sufficiently, to the pressure of his mind, the touch of his curiosity. Like a sponge, he had said. Everywhere you touch it … But dirty liquid, in past and present alike, no pure distillation this, but an ooze of treachery and crime. Everywhere his mind looked there was the same flinch of horror, even in the small details of memory, the half-drowned boat at the landing stage, the groping weeds, the languid crabs against the wall …

He was rescued from this by the appearance of Signora Sapori with his breakfast. He had no appetite but he drank the coffee. With it he took another thirty milligrams of phenobarbitone; and when, shortly afterwards, he left the house, the plastic cylinder went with him in his jacket pocket.

It was early still and cool, though the sky was almost cloudless – a few last wraiths dissolving without stain in the luminous east, over the Adriatic. A thin mist still lay on the water but all the promise was for a hot, clear day. Raikes took a
vaporetto
to the station, crossed the canal by the Scalzi bridge and began to walk in the direction of the Frari. In the maze of narrow streets south of San Simeone he went wrong twice and had to ask the way. He came out finally on the north side of the Campo dei Frari and found himself by a lucky accident exactly where he wanted to be, immediately in front of the large, square-fronted building which houses the Venice State Archives.

In the little cubby-hole of an office he made a preliminary explanation, in his careful Italian, to a pale, sleepy attendant in uniform. He was asked to wait. After some minutes a youngish, courteous, bald man arrived. He listened carefully, brown eyes mildly intent on Raikes’s face.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is possible to refer to the records. You must have someone with you, unfortunately,
devo accompagnarla
, since you have no authorization, you understand …’

‘Yes, of course,’ Raikes said. ‘Thank you. It shouldn’t take long.’

‘Is it the proceedings of the Signori di Notte or the Quarantia you would like to see?’

‘I’m not sure about the difference.’

‘It is a murder, you say?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘In that case it would be the Quarantia, almost certainly. They were the higher court. So we must look at the records of the Avogadori di Comun. They presented the evidence in criminal cases. We have no detailed records of the evidence, but we have the notes that were made on completion of the trials.’

They went up three floors in a lift and passed into a long room with tables down the centre, shelves of volumes up the walls, a steady, evenly distributed light from high windows. There was another, much older man working at a small desk, who rose when they entered. After some consultation with his colleague and some manoeuvring of a step ladder at the far end of the room, he took down a thick quarto-sized volume from one of the upper shelves and brought it to them.

‘Each volume covers ten years.’ The younger man smiled. ‘
Tanta criminalità
,’ he said. ‘A lot of crime.’ He laid the heavy book on the table. ‘Perhaps the Signore would like to sit here?’

Obediently Raikes sat down and drew the book towards him. With the two officials maintaining a discreet distance, he began to look through the pages. These were the original entries of the magistrates, page by page, a bare statement of dates, names, verdicts, punishments. In many cases a brief laudatory phrase had been appended, as if to compensate these unfortunates for the harshness of their fate.

He found what he was looking for quite soon. It was an entry for 6 November 1432 – scarcely a fortnight after the date on Fornarini’s letter to di Rovereto. Girolamo shared the page with two others: a young man named Francesco Natal, apprentice sailmaker, sentenced to three years in the galleys for stealing sacred objects from the church of San Samuele, (
giovane dotto et intelligente
), and a sixteen-year-old maidservant, burned for arson (
galante et bella
). Below these, at the foot of the page, Girolamo Satta, stone-mason, age 33, hanged for the murder of Bianca Pellegrino, (
e morì valorosamente
).

My age exactly, Raikes thought. He felt that oppressed sadness we feel when reluctant suspicions are confirmed. The brevity of the entry, this terse disposal of a human life, appalled him. It had ended here then.

For some time longer he sat there looking at the names, as if they might provide some clue to this remote act of violence. Girolamo Satta, Bianca Pellegrino. Laughter in a sunlit room, water on naked bodies, lines of shadow … This was why no more work had come from the hand of Girolamo Piemontese. No voluntary abdication this, no private failure like his own, but a death in public view.
E morì valorosamente
, he died bravely. Raikes became aware again of the slight but pervasive heaviness of his limbs, a thick feeling in his tongue, not unpleasant.

He closed the book, stood up, the attentive officials came forward. The mutual courtesies, the descent in the lift, were barely registered in his consciousness. He found himself out in the open again, in the sunshine. The air was full of pigeons, loud with their wings. Something must have alarmed them, he thought. He looked blankly for some moments at the façade of the Scuola San Rocco across the square, then began to walk slowly in the direction of the Grand Canal. At the San Tomà landing stage there was a boat just casting off and he scrambled aboard at the last moment.

The weather in this brief interval had become brilliant. As they passed beneath the Rialto Bridge and rounded the upper loop of the canal, he was forced to squint against the dazzle from the water, the shimmer of pale brick from the celebrated façades on the opposite bank. Venice had paled in this drier air, the reddish tones of damp had gone, colours were everywhere more delicate now, more quiveringly responsive to light.

He descended at San Marcuolo and made his way northwards to where the cleansed Madonna awaited her final seal of wax. He was anticipating this eagerly, the comfort of the cool stone under his hands, the safe enclosure of the cubicle, the hours of physical work and the boon of weariness that would follow them.

However, as he began to cross the
campo
towards the church, his sense of gaining sanctuary vanished at a stroke: Chiara Litsov was standing alone at the side of the main doorway. He had an immediate, craven impulse of flight; but she was looking towards him, she had seen him, it was clear that she was waiting for him there. Drawing near, he saw that she was smiling. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘What happened to you last night?’

She leaned her face forward to kiss him. He felt the brief warmth of her lips on his, felt his own unwilling response. Awkwardly he placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he said, realizing that of course he should have expected it, should have known: responsibility for severance did not rest with him at all; it was she who would not be able to tolerate silence, uncertainty, the thought that something had gone wrong.

Something now in his tone or touch seemed to alert her, she raised her head to look fully at him, seemed about to speak. Then she moved away a little, the smile disappearing. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’

‘We can’t talk here,’ he said. ‘Come up with me.’

He led her across to the foot of the ladder. The repairs to the church floor had been completed two weeks previously, there were no workmen standing about today to take an interest in her ascent. She went up before him, sure-footed, negotiating the narrow rungs with entire confidence. Then they were standing together in the small enclosure with its odours of dust and sun-warmed plastic – odours of refuge hitherto for Raikes.

He had time to marvel at the resplendent whiteness of the Madonna, work of his patient hands, her face and upper parts radiant in the sunshine; time to remind himself that she was vulnerable still, there was the need to seal her beauty against the aggressive impurities of the air. Then he turned to Chiara and said, ‘I picked up your husband’s things yesterday.’ His tongue felt thick and slow. He looked at her as if in hope that this bare statement would explain all, resolve all. But she was silent still. ‘Then Lattimer had them picked up from my house,’ he went on. ‘Did he bring them to you?’

‘No, he phoned to say he had disposed of them.’

‘Did he say anything about them?’

‘No, what should he say? He said only that he had disposed of them. To spare me pain, he said.’

‘To spare you pain?’ An involuntary twist of a smile came to Raikes’s lips. ‘Chivalrous fellow,’ he said.

She was looking at him narrowly now and it seemed inimically. ‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ she said.

Of course, he thought, Lattimer would say nothing. Why should he? He was cool, even if he was mad. Slowly, haltingly, looking away from her in shame, sometimes at the dreaming face of the Madonna, sometimes across the rooftops to the glitter of the Lagoon, he told her the stages of his suspicion, of his knowledge.

‘Only you could have phoned Lattimer,’ he said. ‘No one else knew that your husband was set on going to the mainland that night. That was unexpected, wasn’t it? His decision to go, I mean. I could tell from the way you reacted. You and Lattimer were in it together, you were using his moulds to make extra casts, then putting them into circulation as originals. I priced a sculpture at Balbi’s gallery. Litsov was prolific as an artist, wasn’t he? Five thousand pounds a cast would not have been a bad return on no outlay to speak of. Then he got suspicious.’

He looked at her finally. She had turned white but her eyes continued to meet his without wavering. There was a slight frown on her face, a look of what seemed genuine puzzlement.

‘But what has made you think that someone phoned Richard?’ she said. ‘Me or anyone? Why should you think that anyone went to the island at all? The police have said that Litsov was alone, that the death was accidental.’

‘There was only one cufflink,’ Raikes said. He was in the corridors of the nightmare again now, with the fat, shrugging policeman and the brown carrier bag. ‘Only Lattimer would have been capable of doing that,’ he said. ‘He took one of Litsov’s cufflinks after drowning him. He … collects things, you know. I suppose you know, you and Lattimer are obviously on intimate terms.’ He paused for some moments, then added heavily, ‘I have thought and thought about it. There is no other explanation. You must have known it.’

‘Known it?’

The sudden rage in her voice dumbfounded him. He had not envisaged her reactions very clearly, being too much subject to the hideous unease of saying such things to her; but whatever he might have imagined, it was not this voice, not this white face of anger and contempt.

‘Known it?’ she said again. ‘How would I know such a thing? Do you think he would boast of it to me? To you, more likely. It is you who are interested in fetishes, not us, you, all these dirty little boys who cannot grow up. Is it my fault the fool is still
in calzoncini corti
, what do you say, in shorts?’

‘In short trousers,’ Raikes said.

She had paused for breath, looking at him with no abatement of rage – indeed his correction seemed to make her angrier. ‘Ah, thank you,’ she said. ‘So you are the detective who says who is guilty at the end of the book and everyone is astonished by his cleverness. Tell me, why do you come to me with this talk of a cufflink?’

‘I did not come to you.’ He was nettled by this misrepresentation. ‘You came to me,’ he said.

‘But of course,’ she went on, ‘there is no one else, is there? You will not go to the police because you are not a man for that, and besides it would be useless, you have already lied to the police in various ways. In any case you have no proof at all. What is a cufflink? You can’t even prove he was wearing them both. You are as mad as Richard, with your cufflink.’

‘I lied to help you,’ Raikes said. ‘You asked me to do it.’

‘Shall I tell you why you have spoken like this to me?’

‘I wanted to give you a chance to explain.’

‘To you?’ She made a sudden passionate gesture with the flat of her hand, waist high, as if cutting outwards at something. ‘Why should I? What claim do you think you have on me? I am not accountable to you.’

‘Who then?’ Raikes said. ‘Who are you accountable to?’

‘You don’t see me as I am – how can I talk to you? Because we spent a night together and liked it, that gives you rights over me? You come with that air of reasonable, injured man. “Oh dear, I am disappointed in you, I did not think you were that kind of woman.”
What kind of woman?
Tell me, please.’

Raikes was bewildered. She had struck him before as reticent, rather. The spate of words, the furious mimicry, were completely unexpected. ‘I didn’t say –’ he began.

‘And all the time,’ she broke in impetuously, ‘the real reason has got nothing to do with Litsov, it is your self-esteem that is hurt, because you think I used you for my safety and had my pleasure from you at the same time and said nothing, all commonplace things, but you had decided I should be your Madonna.’

‘Commonplace? Do you know what you are saying? Those are not commonplace things in my world.’

Even to his own ears this sounded self-righteous and even rather ridiculous. ‘You are quite wrong anyway,’ he added. ‘I was not looking for a Madonna.’ How had he got into this position, how had it come about? She had somehow forced the thing on to the plane of argument, and he was losing. With all the trump cards in his hand, he was being obliged to defend himself. ‘Quite untrue,’ he said.

‘It is true, Simon. You go at once into a dream about women. I knew it from the first time we met. I saw it on your face that day we met on the path and I was planting the seedlings. Simply it was a person doing some work in the garden but that could not be enough for you, could it? I saw you then beginning to make a shape for me. You do it and we are fools and we join in the business. Then again, though by that time I was beginning to like you a lot, I saw that same stupidity, that day in the Campo of the Maddalena, the poetry of Biagi,
me vogio êsse eterna
, remember?’