Lucifer's Shadow

4 Spritz! Spritz! Spritz!

Three weeks after the opening of Susanna Gianni’s grave and the death of a certain cemetery superintendent in Cannaregio, Daniel Forster walked out of the arrivals area of Marco Polo airport carrying a violin case which was neither old nor malodorous. It was as modest as the instrument inside and the small, soft suitcase which hung from his other arm and contained almost his entire wardrobe: enough clothes, he hoped, to see him through the next five weeks. The flight from Stansted had taken two hours, crossing the snow-covered Alps before descending rapidly into the northeast corner of the Adriatic. Though he had just turned twenty, this was Daniel’s first trip abroad. His new passport, still without a stamp inside, sat in the pocket of his green cotton windcheater along with the plastic envelope from Thomas Cook which contained 300 euros, almost the entire contents of his student current account.

He stood a little under six feet tall, with flowing fair hair and a pleasant, innocuous face still somewhat unformed by adulthood. Hovering uncertainly in the airport hall, he looked like a trainee tour-guide waiting for his first assignment. Then a large man dressed in dark trousers and a baggy blue sweatshirt marched over, bent down to peer in his eyes, and inquired, “Mr. Daniel?”

Daniel blinked, surprised. “Signor Scacchi?”

The man laughed, a grand, booming noise that rose from somewhere deep within his vast stomach. He was in his late thirties, perhaps, and had the ruddy, weather-worn face of a farmer or fisherman. There was a bittersweet smell of alcohol on his breath. “Signor Scacchi! Do I look like a peacock? Do you think I can trill? Come! Come!”

Daniel followed this stranger out of the hall and found they were, within a few steps, by the side of the lagoon. A dozen or more sleek water taxis, each with finely polished wood decks, sat waiting for customers. They walked past them to the public jetty, where an old blue motorised fishing boat sat. In the prow, slumped against each other like lovers, were two slender men. In the mid part of the vessel, a woman wearing jeans and a purple T-shirt bustled over two plastic picnic hampers, her back turned. Next to her, a small, pure-black field spaniel with short ears and a compact nose peered curiously at the contents of the boxes and was shooed away, constantly and to little avail.

The large man looked at the passengers in the boat, waited for a moment to see if their attention would come his way, then, realising this was a lost cause, clapped his hands loudly and announced, “Please! Please! Our guest is arrived! We must welcome him.”

The smaller of the two men stood up. He wore a fawn suit, well-cut, and was, Daniel judged, in his late sixties. This was, he assumed, his host, Signor Scacchi. His face was tanned and lined, almost to the point of emaciation. He appeared ill, as did the younger man by his side, who now lay back on the pillows in the stern of the boat and favoured the newcomer with an expressionless glance.

“Daniel!” the old man said, smiling to reveal a set of too-white dentures. He was short, with a slight hunch. “Daniel! He has come! See, Paul. See, Laura. I told you. Ten days’ notice and us complete strangers. Still, he has come!”

The woman turned to face him. She had a fine, attractive face, with round, full cheeks tapering to a delicate chin. Her large eyes were an extraordinary shade of green. Her hair, long and straight, falling to her shoulders, was a subtle shade of auburn. She peered at Daniel as if he were a creature from outer space, but with a friendly curiosity, as if his presence somehow amused her.

“He did come,” she said in a soft voice only lightly coloured by the Venetian accent, then almost automatically reached into her handbag, took out a pair of large plastic sunglasses, and placed them on her face.

“Well, who’d have thought it?” Paul murmured. He was, Daniel thought, American. He wore a faded denim shirt and jeans of a similar colour. Sprawled in the front of the boat, he had the awkward lack of grace of a teenager and, at first glance, young looks, too, though a moment’s consideration showed them to be cracked and faded, like those of a fifty-year-old trying to appear thirty.

“Of course,” the large man said, then passed the luggage to Laura and extended a huge hand to help Daniel into the lazily shifting boat. “Who wouldn’t come to Venice when asked? I am Piero, since no one seems minded to conclude the introductions,” the man announced. “The fool of the family, though a distant relative so that scarcely matters. And this is my boat, the lovely Sophia, a lady who is loyal, true, and always starts when you need her, which means, I guess, she’s no lady at all. Not that I would know about such matters — there, I said it before Laura said it for me.”

The dog nudged at Daniel’s trousers. Piero reached down and ruffled its head with affection. “And this is Xerxes. So called because he is the finest general of the marshes you will find. No duck escapes his beady little eyes, eh?”

The merest mention of the word “duck” had set the dog’s stumpy tail wagging. Piero chucked him lovingly underneath the chin, then reached into one of the hampers and fed a small circle of salami into Xerxes’ gaping mouth.

Scacchi leaned forward, rocking the little motorboat, pumped his empty hand up and down in a drinking gesture, and announced, “Spritz! Spritz! Spritz!”

“Naturally,” Laura replied from behind the sunglasses, then reached into the second hamper, withdrawing a set of bottles.

“Seats, please,” Piero bellowed, then, with a tug on the starter rope, brought the small diesel engine into life and clambered to the rear to steer it. One of the water-taxi drivers sitting on his gleaming vessel stared at the grubby little boat and said something in a dialect which Daniel could not begin to understand. Piero replied just as unfathomably and extended a single digit at the man. The boat lurched back to clear the jetty, and then they were moving, out from the airport, out into the flat expanse of the Venetian lagoon. What had for years been an idea, an entire imagined universe inside Daniel Forster’s head, suddenly became real. In the far distance, rising from the sea like some bizarre forest, the outline of Venice, of campaniles and palaces, slowly became visible, growing tantalisingly larger as they travelled towards it.

“Spritz,” Scacchi repeated.

Laura gave the old man three bottles: one of Campari, one of white Veneto wine, and a third of sparkling mineral water. Then she made up five glasses with ice, a segment of precut lemon, and, from a small jar, a single green olive in each, and passed them to the old man.

Scacchi looked at him, and for the first time Daniel saw something sly in his face. “You know what this is?”

“I read about it,” he replied. “I wondered what it would taste like.”

“You hear that?” Scacchi declared. “Such a fine Italian accent! This is spritz, my lad, and it tells you much you need to know about this city. Look. Campari, for our potent blood. Wine for our love of life. Water for our purity — no laughing there, Paul. An olive for our earthiness. And, finally, lemon, to remind you that if you bite us, we bite back. Here.”

He passed him a glass, full to the brim with the dark-red drink. Daniel took a sip. It was mainly Campari, strong and with the same bittersweet aroma he had smelled on Piero’s breath.

Laura smiled at him as if expecting some reaction. “And food too,” she said, offering a plate full of flat breads filled with cheese and Parma ham. Daniel took one and realised he had no idea of her age. The plain, cheap clothes and obscuring glasses seemed designed to make her look older, and in this they failed. She was, perhaps, twenty-eight or even younger, not in the early to mid thirties which her dress seemed to indicate.

“To Daniel!” Scacchi announced. The four of them raised their glasses. Xerxes barked softly. The boat rocked a little. Scacchi wisely went back to his seat next to Paul. “May these next few weeks open his eyes to the world!”

“To Daniel!” they repeated.

“I’m honoured,” he said in return. “And I hope I shall do the job well.”

“Of course you will,” Scacchi said with a wave of his skeletal hand. “I knew that when I asked you. For the rest, I have fixed some amusements. All other time is your own.”

“I shall try to use it well.”

“As you see fit,” Scacchi said with a yawn.

Then the old man took a long swig from the glass, placed it on the wooden bench seat that ran around the interior of the boat, leaned his head against Paul’s shoulder, and, with no more ado, fell fast asleep in the prow.

The moto topo Sophia edged its way out towards the wide expanse of the lagoon, following the channel from the airport at first, then picking a shorter route to the miniature city perched on the bow. They fell into silence while Scacchi slept. Paul touched the old man’s hair occasionally. Piero drank. Laura offered Daniel a cigarette, seemed pleased when he refused, lit one anyway, and tapped the ash over the side. After a while Paul slept, too, curling his arms around Scacchi, placing his head against the old man’s in a fond gesture which seemed touched with sadness. Piero and Laura exchanged glances. She refilled Piero’s glass more than once. The July day was beginning to fade, casting the city ahead in a gorgeous pink-and-gold light.

Piero whistled softly to the dog and it came to the stern. He held out a small leather loop attached to the tiller and waited as Xerxes turned to face the prow, then took the strap in his mouth.

“Avanti!” Piero whispered, and the dog’s eyes fixed immediately ahead of the boat, on the far horizon. “Go straight, my little beauty. Papa needs a break.”

He came and sat with Laura and Daniel in the middle, balancing his weight on one side against their combined on the opposite.

“You see this, Daniel?” he asked, looking at the two sleeping men. “This pair love each other like a couple of little doves. Don’t mind the American, now. He’s Scacchi’s choice, for better or worse, and jealousy’s such a mean little thing. Men loving men…I don’t get it. But what’s it to me? Nothing.”

Daniel was silent.

“And nothing to you, my new friend, I know,” Piero added. “That’s not why Scacchi invited you here. He told me. Not that a fool like me pretends to understand. He says these things you wrote…”

“My paper,” Daniel offered.

“Yeah. He says they’re the best. OK? But…just be patient. See that dog?”

Xerxes stood stiffly in the stern, eyes on the horizon, leather strap lodged firmly in his jaws.

“He’s a marvel,” Daniel observed, and truly believed as much.

“More than that. He is proof of the existence of God.”

“Piero!” Laura scolded him. “That is sacrilegious.”

The big man’s eyes were a little glassy. Daniel did not want to consider how much Campari had been consumed on the long, slow voyage across the lagoon to the airport.

“Not at all. He is a proof of the existence of God, and I shall tell you why. You are aware, Daniel, that he is a G-dog. I may not say the G-word out loud, of course, since he’ll be off that tiller in a moment, sending us around in circles, barking like a she-wolf in season, and waking those two slumbering lovers over there. You understand my meaning?”

Turning his body to ensure the dog did not see him, Daniel mimed the action of pulling a shotgun to the shoulder and releasing the trigger.

“Exactly. Yet he is the most ancient of breeds. Why, I shall take you to Torcello in the good ship Sophia one day and show you the great, great-to-greatest grandfather of this very dog sitting in a mosaic on the wall there. All that, long before the G-things even existed! Explain that, my girl.”

Laura slapped him on the knee. “It is called evolution, you fool.”

“It is called the work of God. For God, you see, does not know time as we do. When He invents the spaniel, He does so understanding that one day some other of His creatures shall invent the G-thing. So He places within the animal’s blood the knowledge of it there already, saving Himself the trouble of inventing some new animal when the need arises. For God, Time is just another of His creations. Like trees. And men. And water. And…”

He extended the plastic beaker. “Spritz! Furthermore…”

Laura filled it to halfway, tut-tutting. “Furthermore, Piero, you are dead drunk.”

He looked miserable all of a sudden. “I guess.” Then he sniffed the air as if it had changed, and peered at the dog, with its dark, damp nose held high in the stern. The boat had shifted direction to the east, though no one had noticed. Piero walked to the back of the boat and straightened up the tiller to put them back on course.

“Avanti, Xerxes,” he said gently. “We go home to Sant’ Erasmo later. After we drop these good people off in the city. Home.”

Laura threw him a couple of pillows from her side of the boat.

“Home,” the big man repeated, then stared at Daniel. “Scacchi said you didn’t have one. That right?”

“My mother died a year ago,” Daniel answered. “My father left before I was born. But I have somewhere to live.”

“No relations?”

“None close.”

“And you a clever guy too?” Piero seemed surprised. “So much for what the books say.”

Laura tut-tutted again, stumbled to the other side of the boat, made the pillows into a makeshift bed, then came back to sit beside Daniel.

“A man who has no home has nothing,” Piero declared. “Like that Paul there. It’s Scacchi’s choice. OK. And God knows the old man pays for it, what with that disease the American gave him. But this isn’t his home. He doesn’t have one. Where are they going to put him when he dies? Probably in a casket on some plane back to America, where he came from.”

“Piero,” Laura said with only the hint of scolding in her voice. “You sleep, now. Please.”

“Yes,” the large man said, and lay down on the pillows, fitting his enormous frame onto the narrow wooden ledge with a precision that could only have come from much practice. In the stern the dog gave a low whine but never once let go of the leather strap. Daniel Forster looked at Laura. She raised her glass to him and said, “ Salute.” San Michele, with its endless round of recycled graves, was beginning to make itself apparent to their left. Daniel touched his plastic beaker to hers and tried to think of the famous names buried there: Diaghilev and Stravinsky and Ezra Pound… The city had lived inside his thoughts for so long, its districts memorised, its history picked over for months on end. He had wondered if the reality might turn out to be a disappointment, a living theme park preserved only for the tourists. Something told him already this would not be the case, but also that the real city, the real lagoon, would be different from the picture he had built in his imagination out of the constant stream of books he had borrowed from the college library.

His thoughts clouded over, became confused. Then he realised that Laura had extended a long, slim, tanned hand and that she was very pretty indeed.

“I am the servant here,” she said. “I am cook, housekeeper, nurse-maid, and anything else you can think of. You must know that Scacchi, while he has his foibles, is the kindest man on earth. You will remember this, please, in your dealings with him.”

“Yes,” he replied, shaking the hand awkwardly, wondering whether this was a warning about his own behaviour or that of the master of the house. Wondering, too, whether she really expected him to kiss that small patch of tanned flesh she held out to him.

“And as for Piero,” she continued, “he is a holy fool. Paul and Scacchi are — you have a phrase in English—‘like two peas from the same pod.’ It is just that one bears his fate more bravely than the other, though perhaps a sense of guilt has something to say about the matter there also. I love them both, and will be grateful if, for the period of your stay here, you either learn to love them, too, or affect to do so.”

“I shall, of course.”

She tapped him lightly on the knee. “Silly boy. How can you say that? You don’t even know us yet.”

He smiled, feeling she had caught him out. “Then what would you have me say?”

“Nothing. Just listen. And wait. I know men find these things difficult. Oh, damn!”

The boat had shifted direction again. Xerxes was trembling in the stern.

“To think he can let a dog steer us home.”

Laura made her way carefully to the back of the Sophia and took the tiller from Xerxes. The dog let out a grateful growl before perching on the rear platform of the vessel, where he lifted a leg and let loose a lively stream of liquid over the side. Then Xerxes stared balefully at Laura until he realised she had no intention of letting him regain the tiller. The animal shuffled amidships, placed its muzzle tenderly in Piero’s groin, and closed its eyes.

Three sleeping drunks and a dog called Xerxes. And a strange, intriguing woman staring at him from the back of the boat, carefully directing them towards the city. In his head Daniel Forster had played the scene of his entry to the city on many occasions. None of these imagined arrivals came close to matching the reality.

Nor could he have predicted what occurred next. As the ancient boat made a slow but steady passage along the Cannaregio waterfront, they were joined by a long, sleek police speedboat which came alongside, then slowed to match their speed. Laura sat in the helm, unmoved by the vessel’s presence. In the rear of the speedboat stood a thin woman with short blonde hair. She wore a two-piece blue suit with a tightly cut jacket and a skirt that stopped just above the knee. In her hand was a megaphone. Daniel looked at the three sleeping men, as did the policewoman. Then the police officer stared at Laura, who merely smiled back at her and shrugged her shoulders.

It was too noisy and too distant to be certain, but Daniel felt sure that the policewoman had sworn at this point, then barked an order to the officer at the wheel of the launch. The boat lurched under a surge of power, then raced off, buoyed on its own seething platform of foam.

“See,” Laura noted. “Even the police come out to greet you, Daniel.”

But he scarcely heard her words. The Sophia had veered sharply and was now headed for the mouth of what he surmised was the Cannaregio canal. It was busy with small boats. A ’52 vaporetto chugged towards them. They passed beneath the odd, geometrical outline of the Tre Archi bridge, Laura dodging the traffic expertly, and then the Sophia set off along the straight haul to the Grand Canal. To his left, Daniel knew, lay the older part of Cannaregio, with the original Jewish ghetto hidden somewhere in its midst. To the right was the busy commercial and tourist quarter around the station.

“You know why you are here?” Laura asked, unflustered by the multitude of vessels of all shapes, sizes, and colours around her.

“To catalogue Signor Scacchi’s library,” he said, speaking loudly over the sound of the canal.

“Library!” She laughed out loud, and it made her seem much younger, he thought. “He called it that!”

The junction with the Grand Canal was ahead of them. The Sophia bobbed on the swell from the throng of boats milling in the busy waterway.

“Then why am I here?” he yelled, not knowing where to look.

She beamed at him and said something that was lost in the angry horn of a vaporetto shooing a gondola of Japanese tourists out of its way. Daniel was unsure, and did not want to ask, but wondered if she had answered: To save us. There was no time for introspection. They had turned, abruptly and with a sudden burst of speed, and were now midstream of the Grand Canal. Nothing — no photograph, no painting, no words on the page — had prepared him for this sight. The city’s beating jugular lay before him. Great buildings rose on both sides, Gothic and Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical, a startling juxtaposition of styles in which the centuries tripped over each other’s feet. Vaporetti and water taxis, haulage boats and gondolas bustled across the water like insects skating over a pond. It was a world which appeared to live in multiple dimensions: on every side, above in the towering palaces and churches, and below in the shifting black waters of the lagoon.

“And one thing we all forgot to say,” Laura added.

“What was that?” he asked.

She removed the sunglasses, and a pair of warm green eyes appraised him. “Why,” she said with a thoughtful smile that briefly made him forget the view, “welcome to Venice, Mr. Daniel Forster.”