Lucifer's Shadow

18 The Grand Canal

After some frantic scribbling and a swift shower, Daniel was downstairs in Ca’ Scacchi, ready to catch the vaporetto to San Marco, six pages of solo violin tucked inside a clear plastic envelope. Laura joined him, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, hair swept back behind her head.

“Night off,” she said. “And tomorrow too.”

“Ah.”

Scacchi and Paul wished him well. Then he and Laura walked to the canal, caught the boat, and sat together in the stern. For once she did not wear the sunglasses. In some odd way he felt this was a victory for him.

“On a date?” he asked hesitantly.

Laura glared at him. “What an impertinent question! I am going to see my mother. As I do every Wednesday, if it’s any of your business. She’s in an old people’s home in Mestre.”

“I’m sorry. Is she ill?”

“No. Merely old. I was a late child.”

“I was being presumptuous.”

“True.”

“I thought there must be a man.”

Her green eyes opened wide. “A man! Daniel, do you not think that Scacchi and Paul are enough men for one life? Furthermore, I seem to have acquired a third child of late, and one who can be just as infuriating as the others. You think I am short of men?”

“Oops,” he said softly, smiling at the water. Her anger, which was clearly feigned, was amusing. Laura loved Scacchi and Paul. She enjoyed his own presence, too, he believed, which disturbed him mildly. He had avoided relationships in the past. There had been other cares: his mother, studying, and the part-time work he was always seeking to pay his way. When he thought about the kind of woman he hoped one day to meet, he always had the same image: of a person around his age who carried a fiddle case from concert to concert and shared his interest in old books and music. Someone from a similar mould, not a delightfully eccentric servant, and one who was older too.

“Oops,” she repeated with a wicked gleam in her eye. “And what kind of English word is that?”

A tourist, a burly, bearded man in his late fifties in shorts and a tennis shirt, several cameras laden round his neck, stared at her.

“Oops!” Laura bellowed at him gleefully. The fellow got up and walked to the middle of the boat. They both laughed.

“And since we are now allowed to ask personal questions, Daniel Forster, you will kindly tell me about yourself. There is, I assume, some English rose of a girlfriend back home? Come. Tell me.”

He was aware that he was blushing, vividly. Laura’s face fell.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I forgot. You looked after your mother. It was for so much of the time?”

“A lot,” he replied. “And I never regretted a moment.”

Laura watched the water and said without looking at him, “And is this when your life begins, then? With the crazy strangers in Ca’ Scacchi?”

“Perhaps.”

She folded her arms and, determined to steer the conversation elsewhere, murmured, “I suppose this American girl is pretty. The Locanda Cipriani. I have lived here all my life and been there just once.”

Daniel thought about Amy Hartston. “She’s very pretty,” he said. “In an American way.”

“I know,” she hissed. “Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect ass. Always smiling. Always polite.” The bad English accent returned. “ ‘’Ave a nice day!’ ”

“I think that may be stereotypical.”

“Huh!”

“And I hope,” he added, “she can play the violin better than me.” He waved the plastic envelope. “Because this stuff is hard.”

She picked up the paper and looked at his neat, upright rendition of the notes on the staves. “Doesn’t look too hard.”

“Oh, doesn’t it? You know about these things?”

“No. But it’s just a few sparrow droppings on the page, isn’t it? Not like those spiderwebs you see them staring at in the concerts.”

He sighed. “It starts like that but soon quickens. In any case, I shall let you in to a secret about music. Sometimes, dear Laura, the slowest parts are the hardest. There is, you see, nowhere to hide in all those quiet spaces.”

She regarded him closely, thinking. “There are occasions,” she said eventually, “when I don’t know what to make of you. What a very mature and perceptive thing for a young man to say. Furthermore… Oh! Oh! See, Daniel! Tell me the name of that house, please.”

Laura was pointing at a small palace on the starboard side of the boat. Daniel stared at it. This was not one of the buildings he recognised, yet it was undoubtedly remarkable. The narrow building sat crookedly a little way down from the Guggenheim gallery, a small pink-and-off-white oddity, with three rose windows set off-centre to its right and a skin that appeared tattooed with smaller glasswork. Three rows of arched glass ran from the first to the fourth floor. A set of inverted funnel chimneys topped the flat roof.

“I haven’t a clue,” he said.

“Hah! So much for education! That is one of the oldest on the Grand Canal. Even after all these years I stop to look at it every time I go past. Ca’ Dario. Fifteenth century. There’s a rumour it’s cursed. Plenty of murders and suicides over the years.”

“And is it?” he wondered. “Cursed?”

The corners of her mouth turned down in a wry gesture he was coming to recognise. “It gave me nightmares. When I was a child.”

Daniel studied Ca’ Dario. It was unfair that the mansion was dwarfed by the palaces around it. The design was unusual and interesting. “How could a house like that give you nightmares?”

“I was a child! And it was doubtless a dream. I was coming back from confirmation, in my sweet white dress, standing in the back of the vaporetto, feeling the most important person in the world.”

She hesitated.

“And?” he asked.

“It was Carnival. I looked up at a window. There. On the second floor. The long one second from the left.” The boat was moving steadily past the house now. “There was a face. A man, holding up his hands. I thought he was screaming.”

“What did he look like? Young? Old?”

“I don’t recall. It was a dream, probably.”

“Or the house is cursed.”

She laughed, thinking he humoured her. “I don’t think so. Though Woody Allen nearly bought the place a couple of years ago. Now, that would have been scary.”

“You’re a wicked, sharp-tongued woman, Laura,” he observed. “Can one visit it?”

She shook her head. “Private house. Mind you, I believe your friend Mr. Massiter maintains an apartment in the neighbouring palace. Perhaps he will let you peer in from there. With your pretty American girlfriend, naturally. ‘ ’Ave a nice day.’ ”

He decided he would not rise to that particular bait. The vaporetto rounded the end of the canal, with the great grey slab of Salute to the right. Laura stood up, scanning the jetty, and he followed suit.

“Massiter’s not arrived yet,” she said, pointing to a walkway beyond the public stop. “He’ll pick you up there, I imagine, where the taxis dock. The manners of the man. Why couldn’t he come for you?”

“I’m grateful in any case.”

She gave him a fierce look. “Grateful, grateful. You spend too much time being grateful, Daniel. No one does anything without a reason, not even Scacchi.”

“But…”

It was too late. In true Venetian fashion she had elbowed her way through the crowd. The sunglasses were jammed on her face once more. By the time he reached the pavement, she was a distant figure, marching off towards San Marco.

Daniel waited. Ten minutes later a sleek, polished speedboat docked exactly where she said it would. Hugo Massiter sat in the open back, sharing a bottle of champagne with Amy Hartston. As they left the jetty, Daniel, too, held a glass of the exotic liquid in his hand, feeling as if his world had suddenly expanded.

He looked back at the departing San Marco shoreline. There, standing in the small park, was the tiny red-and-blue figure of Laura watching him go, believing, he felt sure, she was invisible in the distance.