The Remedy (27 page)
There are lists of prices from a distillery they use regularly, the very one he hopes shall now provide for his plans with the Venetian nostrum. There are sketches of hollow candles from a waxworks. There is an address near the fish market, which is where Tom’s body was found. But Valentine already knows that there is no such house. Whoever sent Tom there had given him a wrong steer and perhaps meant to lure him to his death. There is the faint possibility that Tom made a mistake in writing it down, too. He was sometimes careless of detail, and it had got him into trouble before.
There is nothing in the pouch that spells a reason for Tom’s murder.
His mind goes back to the refined, evil face he saw behind the sweet visage of poor Mimosina Dolcezza, struck with horror at the sight of Tom’s body in the depository. He is again consumed with a visceral sureness that Tom’s murderer had come all the way to London to behold his handiwork one last time. “His face raped with fish”—the phrase reasserts its horrible thrall over Valentine. A man who could murder so sadistically was also capable of such perverted voyeurism, and would enjoy the view of the grief he had caused and would travel many sore miles to see it.
Without doubt he could.
He could kill a man stone dead in a scant second, that dog.
Valentine Greatrakes tries to picture every feature of that face, but finds it fast dissolving. It is replaced by the lovely features of Mimosina Dolcezza, fainting to the ground, her mouth open in a mute appeal, which, in the end, he had ignored.
When Valentine at last looks up from the impenetrable papers, Smerghetto is lighting candles, deferential and correct even in this small duty.
The ruins of the afternoon have long since sent slim shadows into the room where he sits. It is winter, after all, even in Venice. The brave light is already compromised by three in the afternoon, definitively breached by four and vanquished an hour later.
A crowd of heavy footfalls can be heard approaching the apartment. Valentine starts and shudders, his eyes fixed on Tom’s leather satchel. His first instinct, now he is so close to the scene of his friend’s destruction, is to feel himself threatened. His hand reaches for the dagger in his pocket.
But hearing a quick tangle of curses and laughter, he relaxes and stands up, smiling.
By evening Smerghetto supplements his meager presence with that of two large half-idiot boys from
terraferma.
Tofolo and Momolo trot into the room, bounding up to him affectionately, overspilling with delight to serve their master again. In the two years since he has seen them, the
signorettini truncheoni
as Tom christened them, being unable to differentiate between the two, have added a foot of solid flesh to their mid-sections. When Valentine pokes at their bellies in a playful interrogation, they tell him, through Smerghetto, that they have married wonderful cooks! Not to mention their new mothers-in-law! With relishing gestures, the young men add that these grand old ladies can slaughter pigs with the finesse of a
bravo
slicing up a foreigner in the middle of the night.
The faces of the
truncheoni
suddenly fall as they realize, too late, their catastrophe of tact. In unison and harmony they compound their offence, moaning,
“Poveretto! Povero Signore Tommaso! Mondaccio! Che tragedia.”
Valentine’s face has already darkened because these two were supposed to have guarded Tom, just as they now guard him. The
streets of Venice, so amiable by day bristle with footpads by night.
When the boys commence to snivel and weep, he stills them with an upraised hand. How is he to explain to them that he cannot bear this operatic display of emotion? Not in the room where Tom spent his last night. Not at this time, so many weeks after the deed, when his feelings are worn out at the elbow, and his own eyes become so quickly sodden every time they light upon Tom’s satchel.
“Peace,” he mimes at them, “I want only an explanation. Not your blood” (he draws an imaginary
stiletto
across his own throat and points at them, shaking his head vigorously).
“Tom sent word that he did not need us for two nights,” the men explain, partly through Smerghetto and partly with gestures. “We guessed, naturally, a romance. His message said that for what he was doing, we were not needed.”
Each of the
truncheoni
cradles an imaginary woman in his hands and kisses her passionately. Then they stare mournfully at Valentine, knowing that he has several times given the same instruction himself when a spell of feminine company has been arranged for him.
“You did well,” he tells them, forcing himself to smile. “I do not blame you for what happened. Now we are going to find out who did it and give them some very special treatment of their own.”
His gestures are unmistakable.
And Momolo and Tofolo contort their every fiber to assure him of their enthusiasm for the work, never mind how grim. So long as Valentine Greatrakes is here to perform the intellectual feat of solving the crime, they are ready to execute the punishment.
Take powder’d Mustard seed half an ounce; conserve of Rue 2 ounces; Syrup of Stechas 1 ounce and a half; Oil of Rosemary, Lavender, each
4
drops, mix.
It penetrates into the Nerves, opens their Obstructions, and puts a new spriteliness into the clog’d Spirits.
By day, he works. By night, he hunts.
Galling up a nonchalant air, he goes looking for her in the theaters. While pretending not to look for Mimosina Dolcezza, he endures
Armida Abandoned
at the San Benedetto,
The Woman Mute from Love
at the San Samuele,
The Deceptive Wedding
at the San Cassiano, and more of the same at the San Salvador, the SS Giovanni e Paolo, the San Angelo, the San Giovanni Grisostomo, the SS Apostoli, the San Luca, the Sant’Angelo, the San Moisè and the San Fantin.
One night after another he hears what all the giants and the pigmies of the Venetian Parnassus have to offer, and what warbles—
amabile, strepitoso
, or
arcistrepitoso.
Unable to pose the questions he needs to ask, he spends a wretched evening in each theater, scanning the stage for Mimosina Dolcezza, felled by disappointment when she fails to materialize, slumping back into his box, his spirit clogged with loneliness, but not quite able to call for a theater-girl and draw his shutters.
How discouraging, he thinks, for the performers, to see that more than half the boxes are shuttered, or that they frame aristocratic couples in the latter stages of foreplay, in animated conversation or busy at cards. Worse still must it be when the shutters burst apart to reveal tableaux of flushed satiety.
Valentine scans the boxes over and over, waiting for another to pop open. Between rounds of the boxes, he leans over to the
parterre
, where a turbulence of common people makes open demands on the actors, roaring at them to revive the corpses of popular performers killed off too early in the piece, flinging themselves to their knees in front of peerless examples of beauty and virtue. Baked apples and pears, sold at stalls outside the theaters, are the preferred missiles slung at actors who fail to please: the exploding fruit makes such a satisfying squelch. The other foods, sold by brave girls roaming the
parterre
in the
entr’acte
, are too delicious to waste on poor talent. Instead, the audience whistles and yells thickly through their mouths full of
fritelle
and roast chestnuts, inadvertently spraying fragments on their neighbors in moments of irrepressible passion. Some sit on wooden benches, but more mill around angrily waving their arms or enthusiastically kissing their hands to lovely actresses, both sides miming all kinds of proffered services. The only thing that stops the self-described geniuses of love from running on to the stage and seizing their brides is the empty space just in front of it, clearly labeled both with a sign and by its redolence as the area for relief of women suffering from an incontinence of urine.
Even there the eyes of Valentine Greatrakes seek out Mimosina Dolcezza, and down among the trampled crowds, upon whose loused heads rains the picturesque refuse from the boxes: orange peels, petulantly discarded bouquets, even, sometimes, rejected bracelets, and items of intimate apparel.
The last night at the week’s last theater, and Mimosina Dolcezza has not yet made an appearance, not on the stage, not in the boxes, and most definitely not in the pit. His hopeful eyes have painted her on every backdrop, have seated her in every piece of cloud machinery, descended her from cardboard stairways, and risen her from dusty graves, yet the woman in her own flesh has still not appeared. Valentine is losing heart, and it seems that the audience lacks the bowels for the latest revival of Goldoni, too. The theater is half-full: Under this circumstance the gondoliers are permitted to enter. But few of them do so: The reputation of this play is dismal, and rightfully so, as far as he can tell.
Valentine sits in his box, too dispirited even to work on the script for his Venetian nostrum, too tired to call out for the
truncheoni
to come up from the pit where they sit dozing. He can recognize their snores, twenty feet up. The pit audience is eating even more heartily than usual to compensate for the lack of meat on the stage, and are starting to look greenish with the variety and sequence of foodstuffs they have consumed in fast order. Unable to stop himself watching the relentless passage of food into hundreds of crumb-haloed mouths, Valentine starts to feel himself awake inside a nightmare. Thousands of teeth crunch down in time to the music. Hundreds of greased fingers reach out for more paper-wrapped cutlets still shaggy with rust-colored flesh. He envisages ugly scenes when they start to pour more wine into their queasy stomachs, and decides to leave alone and quickly.
Padding the silent streets he feels a loneliness descend of a kind he has known only since he met Mimosina Dolcezza, for it is a sensation that is particular to her absence. No other human company would satisfy it. Not even Tom’s, and yet it is compounded of Tom’s absence too, for did he not misguidedly choose the actress for himself as a consolation for Tom’s loss? If Tom had not died, he would not have been made so permeable by grief that a simple actress could reach into his breast and pull out his heart.
As he walks he examines his memories, turning them over in his mind, his heart panging like church bells at certain vignettes etched in flesh tones by candlelight.
At each crossroads he stops a moment, imagining that he hears her light step.
He carries his love for her in front of him. In Venice, in the absence of his lover, he has no need to protect himself from the truth. He loves her. He is in love with her. He has let her go. She is gone.
It is my own fault entirely.
And now that it seems impossible to have her, it is painfully obvious that the only thing that would entirely repair everything out of order in his life is the return to it of Mimosina Dolcezza.
In this moment he even thinks how her presence would surely help him to solve the problem of Pevenche. What the girl needs more than anything is someone upon whom to model herself, from whom to take subtle instruction in the ways of a lady. Grace is what the girl lacks and what the actress has in superabundance.
He realizes now that the ill-fated London tea party with the Widow Grimpen was something of a rehearsal in his mind. He admired the young woman’s reticence and quiet ways. He had thought her well-fitted to take Pevenche in hand, cultivate her a little, perhaps teach her something of the feminine arts. Had the meeting gone according to plan, he might have made Sylvia Grimpen an offer to install her as a companion to Pevenche, some kind of gentle and constant influence.
God knows a little timely instruction is needed on how to charm a fellow or two.
Of course something about Sylvia Grimpen rankled with Pevenche—
what?
—but perhaps the girl was right, thinking herself destined for better. For what is the humble mantua-maker, Widow Grimpen, in comparison with Mimosina Dolcezza? And what is a paid
companion
compared with…? He shrinks back from the direction of that last thought.
Mimosina Dolcezza: How he loves those words on his tongue.
They are a poem in themselves
, he thinks, and rehearses their recital in a dozen different expressions.
Sometimes he asks himself, what if the love
she
offered had been smutted with a little gamey venality? What of it? He knows in his heart that he would still have wanted her. And indeed there was nothing of the fortune-hunter about her: remember how she had refused all those diamonds! In fact it is a little frightening, the fervency and purity of her love. He almost wishes for it to be fissured with a minor fault to make its perfections less intimidating. In truth, he has always welcomed the slight tawdriness of her profession. It makes her seem less impossibly high.
Valentine Greatrakes is only an ordinary man, accustomed to pleasant but ordinary and light-footed loves.
When a great love came his way, he did not even know how to recognize it. He let it slip from his grasp like a clumsy child. He
quite possibly does not even deserve a woman as arrantly wonderful as Mimosina Dolcezza.
And yet, and yet, his heart is aching for the want of her.
For his sleeping quarters Valentine has chosen not Tom’s last room directly overlooking the garden but one that glimpses it and also surveys the Campiello de la Pasina. In the early hours of the morning he lies abed, listening to the chuckle of light carts and the rasp of laden trolleys over the stones, and the voices of the Venetians, gruff, emphatic, and ironic.
