Brotherhood of the Tomb (19 page)

After a short stay in Belfast to cash money and change cars, they headed for Larne. They reached the harbour in the middle of the afternoon and crossed on the ferry to Scotland. No one stopped them. There were no security checks to pass through at either Larne or Stranraer. For the first time since leaving Glendalough, Patrick had started to breathe a little more easily.

There were regular flights to Rome from Glasgow. They stayed overnight in order to take the 07.40 British Caledonian/Alitalia flight via Amsterdam, rather than pass through Heathrow. Makonnen still had his passport. His arrival at Fiumicino airport would be recorded, but that could not be avoided. At Rome, they took the first rapido to Venice, arriving after the fall of darkness. Only forty-eight hours had passed since their escape from Glendalough. It seemed much longer.

‘Did you sleep in the end?’ Makonnen had finished his prayers and was standing now, slightly defensive,

as though some trick of light had revealed Patrick to him with another face.

‘Yes. Very well, thank you.’

‘You did not dream again?’

Patrick shook his head. Curiously, he still remembered his dream. This had never happened to him before, such clarity, such breadth of detail.

‘I think we should have breakfast,’ he said. ‘I want to discuss our plans.’

This was the first time either man had mentioned the making of plans. Each stage of their flight had run into the next, each destination the one before, as if some force of nature were driving them. There had been no planning, no intent.

They breakfasted in a small downstairs room, facing the canal. Patrick gazed through the window, watching the dull winter light fall heavy and unannounced on the high water. There was nothing special about the view: just the weathered facade of a small palazzo, grained and marbled with age and damp. But it told him all he needed to know: that he was in Venice once more, that he could be nowhere else. It was as if he had never been away.

Yellow plaster fell away from bare brick, like skin exposing bone. In places, heavy iron staples pinned the bricks together. Grilles covered half the windows, giving the whole the semblance of a prison or an asylum. High up, a single window lay open where someone had hung a carpet out to air. A large white cat sat on a low windowsill, eyeing the dirty water malevolently with one blue and one yellow eye; God alone knew how it had contrived to get there or how it would get away again.

Patrick felt tired. The weight of the past was

so heavy here, it lay on everything and everyone. Even in the centre of Cairo or the suq in Damascus, he had not felt so strongly the presence of the past. Here, he could believe that a crack might open up between it and the present, a fissure between the thick walls separating the years from one another. He looked away from the scene outside and poured strong black coffee into Makonnen’s cup.

‘Father, there may be risks in what I am about to ask you to do. If you don’t feel able to take them, you just have to say. I don’t want to force you to do anything.’

The priest looked up from his coffee and gave a rather glum smile.

‘I’m afraid I have already been forced by circumstances. I did not choose to come here. I did not choose to be involved in any of this. But I am here. I am involved.’

He sipped from the cup and spread a little butter

on a brioche.

‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you should let anyone hear you referring to me as “Father”, do you? My Christian name is Assefa. And perhaps I can call you Patrick.’

Patrick nodded. They were the only guests in the small dining-room, but even Venetian walls -especially Venetian walls, he thought - have ears.

‘Very well. Listen. It will have to be your job to investigate Migliau. Find out what you can: his daily routine, his movements over the next few days, anything unusual that people may have noticed.’

‘But I can’t just turn up at the basilica and start asking questions. Maybe you could do that. You could pose as an American journalist or a writer. American journalists are a sort of infestation - nobody thinks twice if he sees one crawling in his direction, unless

it’s to get out of the way. But who ever heard of the Ethiopian press?’

Patrick slipped a piece of focaccia into his mouth and washed it down with a sip of coffee.

‘Is there anyone you know in Venice? A personal friend, someone from the seminary or the Accademia?’

Assefa pondered. His friends from the Accademia Pontificia had all entered diplomatic service, mainly abroad. He had lost track of most of his friends from the seminary. And then he remembered Claudio. Claudio Surian. He had been in his fourth year of training for the priesthood when, quite abruptly, he had abandoned his vocation. He and Assefa had been close friends, but not even Assefa had known how serious Claudio’s problems had become. Claudio had refused to answer his letters and made it clear that a visit would be out of the question.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have an old friend here. He is not a priest. But he may know the answers to some of your questions. And I am sure he will know how to find the answers to the rest.’

‘Excellent. But you must be sure to swear him to secrecy. He must understand that your life is in danger. Tell him enough to make him appreciate that fact, but no more.’

‘I understand. Don’t worry - he will be very discreet.’ Assefa drained his cup and reached for the pot. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What do you intend to do?’

Patrick glanced at the wall on the opposite bank. It was so close he felt he could reach out and touch it. The past was like that, close enough to hold. Yet a man could drown in the waters that separated him from it.

‘I also have some old friends to see,’ he said.

if they are still alive. And if they will see me.’

Assefa reached out his hand and laid it on top of Patrick’s.

‘Be careful, Patrick,’ he whispered. Someone had come into the room and was sitting down several tables away. ‘You have said several times that my life is in danger. You have saved it twice already, and I am very grateful. But I am more afraid for you than I am for myself. Only my life is in danger. But you, Patrick, I fear that your soul is in peril.’

TWENTY-SIX

The water-taxi dipped and bobbed through heavy waves, throwing up a light spray in its wake. Out in the open, it was growing choppy. A fine drizzle fell, reducing visibility and covering the windows of the small cabin with a veil-like condensation. The motoscafo had taken the most direct route for San Michele, down through Cannaregio, along the Canale della Misericordia, and out into the lagoon.

Wherever the truth might lie, Patrick’s search began here at Venice’s cemetery island. He had to start where he had left off eighteen years earlier. When news of Francesca’s death reached him, he had been in Dublin. She had gone to Venice to visit an aged aunt, while he stayed behind to catch up on work after the Christmas vacation. The telegram had reached him a week later: TERRIBILE INCIDENTE. FRANCESCA MORTA. FUNERALE DOMATTINA. ALESSANDRO CONTARINI.

He had already arrived in Venice before the reality of her death hit him. It had been like a punch, heavy and hard, leaving him breathless and filled with a dull, incomprehensible pain. They said she had drowned while rowing alone in the lagoon, that her body had been recovered by fishermen who had witnessed the accident. The next day, tired and numb, he had followed the funeral barge in a gondola draped in mourning. There had been mist all along the Grand Canal, and a deep chill over the lagoon.

Her father, mother and brothers had been polite but distant. They had never approved of the relationship and saw no reason to grant him further access to their tight family circle. They were Contarinis,

descendants of Doges, rich, vain and powerful. They had made it clear that he would not be welcome to stay on once the formalities of mourning were over, and the day after the funeral he had returned to Dublin with his grief still intact: unshared and ultimately unacknowledged, it had festered in him for years and left wounds that would never heal.

As the little motoscafo approached the landing-stage on the north-west corner of the island, Patrick caught sight of a mournful procession directly ahead of them. A cortege of gondolas festooned in black struggled to keep pace with the motorized hearse that led them. In front, the chief mourners stood rigidly in the thickening rain, all dressed in heavy black coats. Among rows of black umbrellas, one stood out, bright red, like an obscene gesture. Dark plumes hung bedraggled above the hearse, drenched in sea-spray and drizzle.

They hung back until the mourners had landed. Patrick had come full circle. It would not have surprised him to have recognized the faces in the procession, or to have seen one of them beckon to him, summoning him to the graveside.

The mourners wound their lugubrious way past tall, dark cypresses and frowning monuments of granite and marble. The bier was draped in black and gold and topped with winter flowers. At the front of the procession, a tall priest walked with his head bent, reading prayers from a rain-drenched book.

Patrick told the driver to wait and stepped off onto the landing-stage. He passed directly through the cloister bordering the church that stands guard over the entrance. Death began here, in the form of huge stone plaques, lovingly inscribed and less lovingly covered in graffiti.

The cemetery itself was carefully laid out. It dated

from the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon had decreed that the dead of Venice be brought here for burial. It was a small city, an intricate maze of streets and lanes and passageways. Rain-sleek domes and gabled roofs and the pinnacles of dark mausoleums formed a jagged line against a slate-grey sky. Tall tombs of white Carrara marble towered over the modest resting-places of the middle-classes and the pitiful headstones of the poor. Gates of wrought iron led up to heavy, studded doors. But no one passed in or out, and there were no windows anywhere.

In the streets, no one played or laughed or sang. Here and there, visitors paused to read the inscription on a monument or bent to lay flowers against a gravestone. Patrick could not remember exactly where the Contarinis had built their family vault. He walked up and down the rain-soaked paths, growing more confused with every turn he took. The rain fell in a steady stream. Everywhere he turned, another vista of silent tombs opened before him. The blank faces of angels met his gaze, and Virgins of white marble, and Christ crucified in stone. He felt cold. Bitterly cold.

It took him a miserable hour, trudging from mausoleum to mausoleum, before he found the tomb. He turned a bend and saw it looming out of the rain at the end of a long pathway: a grey stone monument in the Roman style, flanked by obelisks and guarded by gaunt sphinxes with the faces of women.

As he approached more closely, he noticed that it had grown shabby from neglect. The fence surrounding it had rusted and fallen in places. Weeds grew where there had been grass. The steps leading to the door were cracked and overgrown. Perhaps he had made a mistake after all. But the family name

was still there, carved in tall letters above the lintel:

CONTARINI.

He felt alone and terribly afraid. Involuntarily, he looked over his shoulder, back along the cypress-bordered path that led to the tomb. No one was there. A shiver ran through him. A regiment of ghosts had gathered round and were pressing against him, inhaling his breath, kissing his lips, licking his flesh for warmth. And on the dank, decaying steps Francesca’s ghost stood waiting with pale eyes.

He shook his head and was alone again. Nervously, he stepped up to the gate. It would not yield to his efforts: a heavy, rusted padlock held it solidly shut. He gave up and walked along the fence to a spot where several bars had broken away. Squeezing through, he found himself on spongy ground, among grasses that rose to his knees. As he approached the steps, his chest felt tight and his breathing grew thick and hampered.

Dio ha chiamato a se la nostra sorella Francesca...

He remembered the priest at Francesca’s funeral, assuring the mourners of everlasting life. They had gathered round the tomb, in no particular order, while the priest stood on the steps, facing her coffin, proclaiming the resurrection of the flesh in a house of bones.

Ma Cristo, primogenito di coloro che risorgono, trasformera...

Standing alone and unconsoled, waiting for her brothers to carry her into the tomb, Patrick had felt his faith melt away like mist fading across the lagoon. Afterwards, he had entered the mausoleum to join the line of friends and relatives filing slowly past the niche in which she had been placed. He had wanted to see her again, but the coffin had been firmly closed. The slab bearing her name and the dates of

her birth and death was already in position. He had touched it and bent to kiss it when someone jostled him from behind and he stumbled forward, leaving her forever.

That night, her father had summoned him to his study and offered him money. At the time he had thought it simply a pay-off, a douceur like that paid to an awkward and undesirable suitor to see him out of a favourite daughter’s life. But Alessandro Contarini’s daughter was dead. There had been nothing crass or indelicate about the offer or the manner in which it was made: only arrivistes are clumsy in such matters. The wealth of the Contarinis went back centuries and their nobility even further.

‘Patrick, per favore, non fare l’orgoglioso. Please, Patrick, try not to be so proud. Accept my offer. You need a vacation, time to be by yourself, time to recover from your loss.’

The count’s words had been thoughtful, almost kind, but Patrick had sensed behind them the steeli-ness of an ultimatum. He refused the money, but left the next day. It had only been after his return to Ireland that he realized for the first time that he had seen none of Francesca’s family shed a tear during the whole of his short visit. He had never contacted them again, nor they him.

He thought the heavy door might be locked like the gate, but with a little effort it swung partly open. The door was made of cypress wood and set with panels of heavy bronze portraying scenes of classical and Christian life. Grave figures processed with palm branches or sacrificed at flower-decked altars. Both men and women were dressed in flowing Roman garments, pulled over their heads and reaching to their feet. High up, Adam and Eve crouched naked and guilty beneath the Tree of Life. Moses led the