Rogue's Gallery (10 page)

‘This is too silly,' she said, standing tall and losing all trace of girlish manner or lack of confidence. ‘You followed me the other day, didn't you? I slipped into a dark doorway and saw you driving round and round Bergen's one-way streets. You'd think an ex-policeman could do better than that, wouldn't you? In fact, you were generally a little bit bamboozled. You thought you were following a schoolgirl dressed up as an adult in stuff from her mother's wardrobe, didn't you?'

‘Your governess's wardrobe, more like,' said Svein sourly.

‘Neither. You see, when I'm in fancy dress is when I'm here, being Daddy's little girl.' She put her hands up to her chin in a girlish gesture and fluttered her eyelids at us. Even Svein realised that while she had been talking she had been growing before our eyes into her real age. ‘You see, Daddy has a problem – boy! Does he have a problem! He only fancies little girls. Mummy had me when she was fifteen, though they were married in Thailand and have always lied about her age here. Mummy's problem has been the same as mine: she's grown up. I seem to have gained about a year since I was eleven, though that was six years ago now. Daddy's been so
awfully
careful of me, so keen on shielding me from premature adult experience. Pity he didn't realise that Chris and I were discovering an adult relationship he hadn't even considered a danger.'

She stood before us, a young woman in girl's clothing,
a sort of goddess of revenge, her eyes glinting, her face glowing with a long-delayed satisfaction at being who she really was. She went and stood behind Chris, her hands on her shoulders, proudly, and she suddenly gave the impression of being in reality the dominant partner.

‘And do you know,' she said, ‘just as exciting as finding out who I was and what I wanted, was the knowledge that Chris had done her degree at Middlesborough University on ‘The Economics of Art'. All the money side was child's play to her.'

A car drew up outside. Her father got out and strode towards the house. Ingrid left her place and went towards the door. When it opened she threw her arms around her father's neck, a schoolgirl again.

‘Hello Daddy! It's lovely to have you home! I'm just telling all the people here about our little games together – all the funny little things you do to me. Of course I know it's always been our own precious secret, but I think most of them could guess, don't you, when I was never allowed to grow up. And of course I had my own little game, that you never guessed about: slipping into your room to get the key to the Munch room at night when you were drunk to the world. This nasty man has accused me and Chris of stealing the Munchs, when really I was only taking payment for all my services rendered. Payment that will finance Chris and my life together.'

She looked at him triumphantly. At the table Anne-Marie's hand was clutching Vidar's. For a moment Fjørtoft's face was absolutely and characteristically blank. Then, unnervingly, he sank to his knees and started to
blubber. It was a horrible sound, like a little boy refused a second helping of rømmegraut with currants. Svein watched for a moment, then went over and spoke close to his ear.

‘What you do now is up to you. Call the police or hush it up, it's your choice. Hushing it up will be more expensive, but calling the police will be nastier. I shall be sending in my bill, and it will be large.'

Then he beckoned to Semyon and his interpreter and we went through the hallway and out of the front door. In the fresh air the interpreter went straight to the car. Semyon thought for a moment, then went towards the stable. I think the interpreter had been translating all that had been said into Russian, and he sensed he might be on to a good thing.

I stood for a moment or two. The last time I had had a pee had been outside the photocopying shop. I raised my leg beside the door frame and out it came. On and on it went. On and on. My bladder was very full, but I think I was also making an existential statement: the harder you push the plug in on nature, the more it will look for a way to burst exuberantly forth.

I jumped into the front seat of the car and we drove towards town.

Violetta knew she had made a mistake almost as soon as she got into the shop. She had come in because she noticed a sign saying ‘English Books' in the window. English newspapers had been easy to obtain in Parma, books less so. Now she was inside the shop she realised just from casting her eyes around the covers of books on display that she was in a religious bookshop. Not at all what she needed. She was in Italy for experiences, but not for religious ones, or not Christian ones. She dawdled around the pokey interior only to avoid the ungraciousness of walking straight out again.

The face hit her before she even found the section of English books. The sepia image of a bearded man, infinitely kind, unendingly forgiving: the picture of a man (Violetta thought) who grieved for the sufferings and forgave the transgressions of his fellow men – strong, loving, understanding. Who was he? She struggled with the title of the book:
II Sudario di Torino.
She frowned. Torino
she knew. It was one of the places she had put among the possibilities on her itinerary: Turin. Then ‘sudario' – but of course! She didn't even need to scrabble in her bag for her pocket dictionary: this must be the face of the man on the Turin Shroud.

She looked again, concentrating on the face. The man seemed to look back, equally intent on her. Again she felt that the eyes of the man
saw
, saw
into,
understood. It was as if her whole life, her rackety, unstructured, uncertain journey through this and that enthusiasm or commitment, was in this man's brain as he gazed at her, and as if his insight gave the whole messy cycle a meaning and a purpose.

‘Do you have this book in English?' Violetta asked the woman behind the counter. She shook her head slowly, but went over to the two or three shelves of English books to check. Then she shook her head more decidedly.

‘Is not 'ere in Eenglish. In Torino maybe you find.'

‘I'm going to Turin,' said Violetta, suddenly definite.

‘Turin, yes. You find there per'aps. We 'ave phamplet in four languages. Maybe you like, so you read a little first?'

Violetta took the proffered ‘phamplet', and immediately decided to pay the four thousand lire demanded for it. The face was on the front page, and English was one of the four languages, along with French, Spanish and German. She went out into the morning sunlight with a strange feeling of lightness, almost of happiness. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt almost happy.

She didn't look at the pamphlet when she got back to her hotel room. She saved it up. She showered, made herself up as if going to a party, then went back into town and made
for the great square in front of the cathedral and baptistery. She walked purposefully across its cobbled expanse to the Angiol d'Oro nestling in the corner. She had been saving up one of the few remaining good restaurants of Parma, and tonight was certainly the night. She had no need of a book to console her loneliness. She watched the other customers, relished the food slowly, and dreamt of the bearded face that had somehow – miraculously? – been preserved on the shroud. She ended with the best gorgonzola she had ever had in her life, relished the last of the wine, then headed back to her hotel.

The pamphlet was still nestling in the big, shabby old bag she always took with her on these exploratory holidays. She took it out, then sat on her bed feeling replete, contented, and above all full of anticipation.

She read the text of the pamphlet first. It was aimed at the faithful – and Violetta had never been that, in any sense. It did not shrink, however, from the findings of modern research. Scientists were of the opinion (they did avoid the word ‘proved') that the shroud was in fact of
thirteenth-or
fourteenth-century provenance, just the period when mentions of this wonderful relic of Christ's death began to be recorded. The image of the man was not made by any conventional paint, stain or other artist's material. Indeed, it seemed that science was unable to suggest what the image consisted of at all, other than with such (unscientific, surely?) images as ‘a burst of radiant energy'. That conjecture tickled Violetta's interest almost as much as the face itself. She looked back at the cover.

Violetta was a great frequenter of art galleries – hence
Italy, hence the Italian cities slightly off the usual tourist trail. Her interest in art was amateur but intense. And she could swear that the image of the man on the shroud was like no image of a man in any thirteenth- or fourteenth-century painting. It was too realistic, not stylised enough. This was a man you could touch, imagine embracing. It was like an old sepia photograph of one's great-grandfather as a young or youngish man. Even if the image were of paint, Violetta could not have believed it was made in the thirteenth century.

As it was, it was not of paint; it was made by some substance or process unknown even to modern science, and it was an image startlingly modern in its realism.

Violetta got up and poured herself a whisky from the litre bottle she had had to trail around Parma to find. She had been devastated to discover at Heathrow that duty-free bottles were no longer available to travellers within Europe.

‘Bugger the Common Market!' she had shouted at the girl behind the till. Still, she had at last found a supply in Parma, and would get more before moving on, just in case.

Walking around her hotel room, whisky and water in hand, Violetta decided that she was rather pleased the shroud was of medieval material. It removed the religious trappings which roused no resonances in her own mind. It left, though, the image of a medieval man, and the mystery of an image of him projected on to his shroud by no known means. That was exciting.

Violetta had always felt she had a gift for the paranormal, just as she had had a series of flirtations with alternative therapies and folk medicines. Karmas and Eastern thought
systems and even simple hypnotism were things that fascinated her, and she had been ‘into' many of them with great thoroughness, before passing on to the next enthusiasm. She had no problem with an image, whether of Christ or of some medieval man, projected after death on to the shroud in which his body was wrapped. She definitely preferred the idea of its being a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Christ was a known factor: both the worshipper and the sceptic had a picture of him based on things he did, things he said – or was supposed to have done and said. But the medieval man had mystery: the nature of this figure who lived life so intensely that his image projected itself after death onto his shroud was no problem to absorb for one who had taken spirit manifestations and advice from the great beyond in her stride. Its attraction was that
she
could create him from his image. From the fact, that body, she could mould a figure in whom she could believe.

‘A man of Turin,' she said out loud. ‘Perhaps the ancestor of a man, even many men, living in Turin today.'

Two whiskies later, as she drifted off into sleep, the image of the man was gaining substance. A man who filled every minute with vitality, experience, passion; one who ‘loaded every rift with ore' because he sensed that his life would be short. A man who lived and understood life so completely and intensely would be one who understood others, saw through to their essence, knew and forgave them because life was not for the saints and the mystics and the hermits. It was a messy business for all the rest – people who tried to engage with it totally.

The next day Violetta took the train to Turin. Coming out of the magnificent station she saw the Grand Palace Hotel. Somewhere a little bit grander than she was used to. Somewhere where she might entertain people … someone. She walked across, found they had a room vacant, and took it.

That evening she did no more than prowl around the environs of the hotel and station, dropping into a little restaurant for pasta and then swordfish. She read the Terry Pratchett she had brought with her. It would be ostentatious to read about the shroud in Turin itself.

The next day she really set out to explore the city. She walked and walked, her eyes darting everywhere as she fluttered from wide street into spacious square.

Eventually, she knew, she would go and see the shroud. The real thing was on exhibition for millennium year. Normally only a copy was shown, even to the faithful. But the shroud could wait. She skirted the great squares of the old Piedmontese capital, sometimes glancing at the expensive shops, but usually trailing her eyes restlessly from face to face, from besuited business executives to overalled plumbers and builders, from waiters and bus-drivers to tourists in shorts and loud shirts. After an hour or more she sat down at a table in an outdoor cafe on the Piazza Castello.

‘
Una spremuta d'arancia, per favore,
' she told the waiter, after subjecting him to a prolonged but unsatisfactory scrutiny.

Restlessly she resumed her inspection of the townsmen from afar. Absentmindedly she stirred sugar into her
spremuta
. Tasted it – delicious. She sat back in her chair.

Then suddenly she saw him. She would have said to the end of her life, if she had lived long, that an emanation from him came across the huge square from towards the royal palace at the far side and seized her. Perhaps the truth was that he was standing in the middle, and matched from afar the specifications of what she was seeking. Tall, bearded – and even from a distance, she felt sure, magnetic. She slapped notes down on the table and left the cafe, crossing the road, then moved into the main body of the Piazza Castello. Now she could see him from a distance of twenty yards or so, still looking in her direction. Suddenly he turned and walked in the direction of the royal palace. There was no question what Violetta would do. She had already marked it down as one of her sort of places. Now it moved to being a top priority.

She strode ahead, almost running in her eagerness not to lose sight of him – past tourists feeding the birds, past a news stand with a placard reading:

ANCORA UNA DONNA UCCISA.

She gained the entrance to the palace and saw him coming out of the ticket-office-cum-bookshop. Breathless by now, she ran in and again slapped money down. The woman behind the grille told her that a tour started in five minutes. Trying to get her breath back, she stood for a moment outside, under the dark arches that bordered the central courtyard. There was a little knot of people to her left, and cautiously she went over and mingled with them. Almost all seemed to be tourists. But there, among them, he was: tall, solidly built, with the bushy beard and long hair of the shroud giving him the air of a young patriarch. He was half
turned away from her, so she could not see his eyes. Then a small woman came along to herd them together, apologising for her poor English, but explaining that in every room there was a notice in three languages explaining the room's contents and purpose. Violetta wondered whether the Man of the Shroud spoke English.

Once they got past the magnificent staircase it was easy to keep close to him. Sometimes she darted up to the notices and ostentatiously read the English text. It was in the third room, the Queen's Reception Room, that he came up behind her and spoke to her.

‘You like palaces and such things?'

His voice was soft but urgent, his English heavily accented but seductive. Seductive on a high intellectual and spiritual plane, Violetta decided.

‘Very much,' she answered, smiling up at him. Now she could see his eyes, which had a piercing intensity. ‘This one is very fine, if maybe a little musty.'

‘Musty? What is musty. You hexplain?'

‘Musty – well it's old, a bit shabby, decaying a little.'

‘Ah, I understand. But it is old. Nothing 'as been done to it for years. The kings of Savoy, they became kings of Hitaly, then kings of nowhere at all. You see?'

‘Very well. You speak beautiful English.'

‘Not at all. I need a good teacher. So you see, no one 'as lived 'ere for years, for a century and a 'alf. So it become a bit musty, like you say. But full of 'istory.'

‘Yes, it's certainly that. Was this king who became King of Italy the one called Victor Emmanuel, or was that later?'

‘Italy have two kings called Vittorio Emanuelle, two called Umberto. The wife of the first King Umberto, Queen Margherita, she 'ave a pizza named after her.'

‘Oh, of course.'

‘The second Umberto, 'e die in exile, and 'e give the shroud to the Cathedral.'

‘
Really
? The shroud! … Has anyone ever told you that you look like the man in the shroud?'

The man – still she did not know his name – shrugged. ‘Some.'

‘Plenty of women I should think.'

‘Some. Men and women.' He said it distinctly, as if offended.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest you were a ladykiller.'

She did not notice his faint start.

‘What is that – a lady-what?'

‘Ladykiller. It's another word for a Don Juan or a Casanova.'

‘Ah – a Casanova. Maybe all Italian men have a little bit of a Casanova in them.'

‘Maybe they do … Do you live in Turin?'

‘Yes – I have a little flat.'

She nearly asked him what a native of Turin was doing going on a conducted tour of one of its monuments with a party of tourists, but she bit the question back.

‘It must be a wonderful city to live in.'

‘It is very hexciting. It suits me. I live my life fully and eagerly.'

‘I'm sure you do!' She said it not flirtatiously but seriously. ‘I felt that, too, about the man in the shroud.'

‘You did?'

‘Scientists who have carbon-dated it say it's not two thousand years old, just six hundred or so. I had the idea, the image of a man of the middle ages or the Renaissance who had lived life to the full, with such energy, such zest … Eagerly, like you said.'