Brotherhood of the Tomb

EIGHTEEN

Milk-white light filtered through long curtains, simple, without form or substance. He had once thought the Holy Spirit must be like that: simple, dove-white, light spun from light, the Word made luminosity. Out of habit, his eyes travelled up to the wall above his head. It was bare: no red light, no crucifix.

Father Makonnen could not remember coming here: the bed in which he lay, the room, the plain rust-coloured carpet, all were unfamiliar. His head was aching, and it hurt to open his eyes. He turned away from the light and pulled the bedclothes over his head. Sleep returned.

He dreamed he was in a tomb. His body lay cold and anointed on a marble slab. On the wall someone had painted the outline of a fish in red. Around him, hooded figures chanted a litany in a language he had never heard. Candles flickered like gemstones in the dark. Echoes moved across the walls like shoals of fish twisting and turning beneath the tide.

Suddenly the voices fell silent. The candles were extinguished. There was the sound of a rock being rolled into place, a heavy rock. He could hear sounds of hammering, metal upon stone, orchestral almost. Then the hammering fell silent and he was utterly alone. And at that moment, in the darkness, in the silence, he heard someone moving.

His eyes opened and he was in the strange room again. He turned and squinted at the light from the window. In his head, he could still hear the sound of hammering.

Suddenly, memories of the night before flooded back with appalling intensity: Balzarin’s dead face, white and uncomprehending; Diotavelli gunned down in his arrogance, his nightgown bright and angry with sudden blood. He relived the chase through the house and grounds, the wind that tore his flesh, the capture, the drive to the canal. But after that all was blank, as though someone had dipped a sponge in water and wiped it across his brain.

He threw the bedclothes aside and stood up. He had been sleeping in his underclothes, something he never did. His outer garments lay draped across a wooden chair.

Crossing to the window, he drew back the curtain. Squinting in the sudden brightness, he looked across green fields to a steel-blue lake. Wooded hills girdled the shore, and above a serried tracery of leafless trees rose a pointed tower of dull grey stone. In the water, the pale images of clouds moved slowly on the breeze like white smoke.

What was this place? Who had brought him here? He dressed quickly and made his way to the door. A small landing led onto a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. Through an open door on his right he could see a wash-hand basin and part of a bath. The next door was closed. He opened it and found another bedroom, much like the one in which he had woken.

Coming out onto the landing again, he heard the sound of voices talking quietly below. Cautiously, he started down the stairs. A flagged passage led to an open door and a smell of fresh coffee.

He paused in the doorway. A man and a woman sat facing each other across a scrubbed pine table on which lay a heap of papers. He recognized the American, Canavan, but the woman was a stranger. Canavan looked up and caught sight of him. He smiled and pushed back his chair, standing.

‘Father Makonnen. I hope you’ve slept well. How are you feeling?’

‘I ... I’m feeling a little confused. Last night ... I can’t remember very well. Where am I? What are you doing here?’

‘It’s all right, there’s nothing to worry about. I guess you could do with a coffee and maybe something to eat. Oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t been introduced. This is ... my friend Ruth Ehlers, from the American Embassy. She knows who you are already. This is Ruth’s house, or her weekend cottage, I should say.’

The priest remained standing. Yesterday’s events were crumpled and blurred in his head.

‘I don’t remember coming here,’ he said. ‘I was ... I remember going to the canal. Two men ... drove me there. Then ...’

‘Come and sit down. You’ll feel better when you’ve had some coffee. How would you like it?’

Canavan took his arm and guided him to a chair.

‘I... Black, please. With a little sugar.’

He sat down. Deprived of the conventions of the seminary or the nunciature, his world was coming apart. He still had not said his morning prayers.

‘Coming up. What about some breakfast? We’ve got mushrooms - Ruth picked them this morning. There’s wholemeal bread from Bewley’s, plenty of real Irish butter, black cherry jam.’

‘Just the coffee, please. You said “breakfast” -what time is it?’

‘Well, perhaps “breakfast” isn’t really the right word. “Lunch” would be more appropriate. It’s just after twelve o’clock.’

‘How long have I been asleep?’

“We got here just after five. You were still pretty agitated. Ruth gave you a couple of sleeping tablets.’

‘I see.’ Makonnen paused and looked round the room. It was clean and bright, with tall windows that looked out on the lake. ‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘where is “here”?’

Patrick glanced out of the window.

‘Don’t you recognize it?’

‘No. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.’

The woman spoke for the first time. She was beautiful, he thought, but troubled by something. He had been trained to resist beauty, but not distress, and he found himself unwillingly drawn to her by it. She wore a soft dress of European manufacture, without the gilding he had come to expect in American women. Even his African eye, calibrated more to the nuances of poverty than style, could sense how finely her limbs were habituated to well-cut garments.

‘This is Glendalough,’ she said. As she spoke, she raised one hand nervously to her cheek, and he noticed how her fingernails had been chewed. What was making her so ill at ease? ‘The valley houses an old monastic city founded by Saint Kevin in the sixth century. That’s the round tower you can see just above the trees. It used to be the belfry. And a place to hide when the Vikings came burning down everything in sight. There are ruins all round it. You’ll see it all later.’

The priest nodded. He had heard of the place and often planned to visit it. There were close links between the early monks of Ireland and those of his own church.

He turned to Patrick, who had just finished pouring coffee into his cup.

What is going on, Mr Canavan? Why have I been brought here?’

He was not angry, just frightened, torn from everything familiar.

‘We were hoping you would provide some answers to your first question yourself, Father. As for why we brought you here, surely you know your life is in danger?’

‘Danger. Yes, I understand.’ Again he could hear footsteps pounding after him in the dark. He had to force himself not to look round. ‘I remember... what happened in the nunciature, then being taken to the canal. But everything after that is a blank. You must know what happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to know.’

Patrick paused. ‘Very well,’ he said at last.

While he ate, Patrick told him all he knew, and in turn prompted him to explain the events that had led up to his capture at the gate of the nunciature -Balzarin’s death, the phone call to Fazzini, the arrival of the gunmen.

When the priest finished, Ruth poured more coffee for everyone. Back in his chair, Patrick indicated the papers strewn across the table.

‘So these don’t include the papers De Faoite sent to Balzarin?’

‘No. I took those to Fazzini in person. These are all from the nuncio’s safe, except for that mauve file, which I found on his desk.’

‘The one he was reading when he killed himself?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

There was a pause.

‘Have you looked at these papers, Father?’ The question was put by the woman.

‘Only at one of the folders of photographs.’

‘I see. We haven’t gone through those yet. We thought you might help us identify some of the people in them.’

Makonnen sighed. As the coffee cleared his head,

he began to understand just how deep had grown the waters in which he was swimming.

‘Please, can you tell me what this is all about? I want to know. I am willing to help you, but I must know what is happening.’

Ruth looked at Patrick, then back at Makonnen.

‘Father,’ she started, ‘I have to insist. Whatever Mr Canavan or I tell you must remain absolutely confidential. You must swear not to reveal it to anyone else without our permission. Do you understand?’

The priest shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you must know that is impossible. I am a priest. I have taken sacred vows. Under my vow of obedience, I would be obliged to reveal any information I possessed to those set in authority over me.’

Patrick leaned over the table. Something in his manner told Makonnen that he and the woman were lovers. But he sensed an awkwardness between them, like an electric charge that was constantly ready to flare up.

‘Forget it, Ruth,’ said Patrick. ‘We can trust him.’ He turned to the priest. ‘All we’re asking, Father, is that you be discreet. Your vows do not require you to volunteer information, do they?’

For the first time, Makonnen smiled.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘they do not.’

Patrick leaned back.

‘Then I think we can begin.’

NINETEEN

Patrick went first. He spoke carefully, as though conscious that he had to forge a bond, a sense of trust between himself and the priest. The fact that he had saved Makonnen’s life and gunned down the two men who had threatened it was meaningless. For all Makonnen knew, he had fallen among fresh thieves, subtler and more well-meaning than the first, but thieves and killers for all that. Good Samaritans are not supposed to carry guns.

‘Father Makonnen,’ he began, ‘I think we may assume that, by now, Cardinal Fazzini has been alerted to the fact of your disappearance. He will not know how you came to make your getaway, and I imagine it will be some time before he learns what happened to the men he sent to kill you. In the meantime, he has to deal with some awkward details, the most embarrassing of which is likely to be Diotavelli’s body. Ruth will find out what she can through the American embassy, but it’s unlikely to be very much.

‘One thing is certain. If you return to the nunciature or the Vatican, you’re as good as dead. That you are in essence ignorant of Fazzini’s machinations is of no concern to him. You know too much, and you must be silenced. If it is any consolation, that applies to me as much as it does to you.’

Makonnen remembered Fazzini’s request for Canavan’s address.

‘They asked me where you lived. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Did ... Did anyone try to ... ?’

‘Why do you think we’re here?’

The priest leaned forward.

What if I go to someone else in the Vatican, someone I can trust?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘Not until we know more about what’s going on and who is involved. You’re a marked man in every way. But in principle, yes: we shall need access to the Vatican, and for that we shall need your help.’

‘Please,’ Makonnen pleaded, ‘what is this all about?’

Patrick betrayed hesitation for the first time.

‘The simple answer to that question is that we don’t know.’

‘When you visited the nuncio yesterday, you said that a national intelligence bureau was involved in this. I assume you meant yourselves, the CIA.’

Patrick smiled.

‘At that point, no. I was referring to our distant cousins, the RGB.’ He spoke of them as a priest might, after Vatican II, have spoken of ‘our separated brethren’ in the Protestant churches. That was the first intimation Patrick had of how close they stood to one another, the spy and the priest - hand in hand almost, fingertip to fingertip, bullet to book, initiates into the most ancient of mysteries.

‘But I now think the CIA is involved in some way.’ He exchanged glances with Ruth. ‘To make things entirely clear, my own role in all this is, as far as I know, entirely personal. But I did at one time serve as an agent with the CIA, and the possibility of that connection cannot entirely be disregarded.’

He paused. Makonnen looked at him curiously, as though hearing his confession. Patrick felt uneasy, thinking back to the grille in his church at home, the priest’s voice prompting, seeking out sin like a scalpel probing for tumours.

‘Miss Ehlers is a sort of monitor,’ he went on. ‘She serves directly under the CIA chief of station at the embassy here. Her job is to monitor intelligence traffic into and out of the various embassies in Dublin. Most of that traffic is intercepted by the National Security Agency listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. They pass it on to the British through their liaison office at Benhall Park in Cheltenham.’

Ruth broke in.

‘Patrick, I don’t think Father Makonnen needs ...’

‘Please, Ruth, I know what I’m doing.’ Patrick spread his hands in a placating gesture. ‘The Father is a diplomat. If you imagine that anything I’m telling him is not already intimately known to his superiors in the Vatican, you’re being very naive about the Catholic Church.’ He turned back to Makonnen.

‘Benhall Park puts this material together with what GCHQ gives them from their own monitoring stations at Hacklaw and Cheadle, as well as their telecommunications intercepts from Caroone House in London. It’s actually more complex than that, but the point I’m trying to make is that Ruth’s material is extremely comprehensive and extremely reliable.

‘Mostly she’s involved in assessing data for its relevance to the Irish situation. She checks through translated Arab material, for example, to see if it refers to possible links between, say, the Libyans or the PLO and the IRA. And you’re probably aware that your own transmissions are checked for much the same reason.’

Patrick did not have to spell out his meaning. In the late seventies and eighties, the Vatican nuncio in Dublin, Archbishop Gaetane Alibrandi, had attracted notoriety for his repeated contacts with IRA members. Alibrandi’s motives had been noble enough -to understand and, perhaps, to intercede with men of violence. But the unfavourable attention the nunciature had then drawn had not diminished under his successors.

‘Then you knew Balzarin was up to something. You were trying to draw him out.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘No. Until yesterday afternoon, I had no reason to suspect Balzarin of anything. He had some papers I wanted to see, that was all I knew. But when I spoke with him, he behaved like a man with something to hide. After I left the nunciature, I phoned Ruth and asked her to run a check on it. Phone calls, diplomatic telegrams, radio messages - everything. I think she’d better tell you what she found herself.’

Ruth hesitated. For some reason the priest made her anxious. For all the range of her parents’ friends, she had had little contact with Catholics and almost none at all with priests. Like many women, she found their conscious option for celibacy a rejection of something essential to herself. She supposed men felt the same about nuns. For the first time in years, her social skills betrayed her. She was ill at ease and aware that she showed it. The fact that he was black made her feel even more awkward. Racial distinctions had never meant anything to her, but that very fact made her more conscious that her uneasiness might be misinterpreted.

‘Father Makonnen,’ she began, ‘you probably know that your people - I mean the Vatican State - and the CIA regularly exchange intelligence information. As Patrick ... Mr Canavan so kindly pointed out, you naturally understand that we also like to keep ourselves independently informed of any items of interest that may for any reason have been omitted from our regular briefings. And I’m sure your own intelligence people have their ways of informing themselves of some of our less well-kept secrets.’

She hesitated. There was no telling how Makonnen might react to what she had to tell him. She took a deep breath and plunged on.

“Yesterday,’ she said, ‘after Patrick phoned, I went across to the embassy and looked up some old computer files. Patrick has explained to you that we were looking for something with the word “Passover”. He didn’t mention that, on one occasion, we ran the word “Easter” through as well. “Pasqua” in Italian. Well, all we came up with were a few messages to and from the nunciature. Nobody even bothered to read them. After all, what could be more normal than the Vatican talking about a major Christian festival?’

She paused and glanced out the window. A large bird circled the tower, its wings catching fire momentarily in the early afternoon light.

‘But someone had been careless. “Passover” isn’t the sort of word our translators usually have to handle. Anyway, it turns out that Pasqua isn’t just Italian for “Easter”. It’s also the word Italian Jews use to refer to “Passover” if they happen to be talking to Christians: Pasqua Ebraica - the Jewish Easter.

‘So I went back through the messages involving the nunciature. The first two could have referred to either Passover or Easter, it wasn’t clear. But the third was more puzzling. It was dated February third, it was in code, and it was signed, not with a proper name, but with a sort of pseudonym -Il Pescatore, the Fisherman.’ She paused. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

The priest thought for a moment. She saw the faint shadow that crossed his eyes, sensed his hesitation.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it means nothing to me.’

But she knew what he was thinking, that Peter had been the first Fisherman of the Church. And the first Pope.

‘The message was addressed to Balzarin in person. It instructed him to have courage. All was going well. Plans had been completed. Pasqua would take place in exactly one month, on March the third.’ She paused. ‘Someone should have noticed that Easter this year isn’t until April nineteenth.’

Makonnen listened with growing bewilderment. Where was this leading? He fumbled with the beads of his rosary, moving them nervously in a form of silent prayer. He felt compromised and abandoned, like a child on the verge of adulthood.

‘And the Jewish Passover starts on March the third?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘No. That’s what’s puzzling. Passover begins a few days before Easter. But in the message Pasqua definitely means “Passover”, not “Easter”. The writer speaks about “the day the children of Israel fled from captivity in Egypt”. And both De Faoite and Chekulayev spoke quite clearly of “Passover”.’

Makonnen got out of his seat. He felt trapped, as though this Fisherman in the Vatican had him fast by a long line and a hook. He went across to the window and looked out, at the grey tower and the winter trees, at the dark water, the gathering clouds. Even in winter it was green here, green and wet beyond all his childhood imaginings. Why is the world so desolate, he thought, so empty even when it is full?

Why are we talking about this here?’ he asked. Why are you telling me? You have a huge organization: men, computers, files. I’m just a priest, I can’t help you.’

Ruth glanced at Patrick. Her expression was one of exhaustion, of despair almost.

‘We can’t do that, Father,’ Patrick said quietly.

Makonnen turned and looked at him.

‘Why not?’

In answer, Patrick picked up the file Makonnen had found on Balzarin’s desk. He opened it and took out a sheet of paper. Gently, he laid it on the table for the priest to read. It was a small sheet of headed notepaper. At the top was a round shield, underneath which was inscribed a biblical quotation: ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’.

Makonnen came to the table and picked up the sheet.

‘My brother? the letter read, 7 have received your letter and that of the Pillars. May God bless you and all you seek to accomplish in His path. The hour of Passover will soon be upon us. Rest assured of my prayers and my assistance. If there is anything you or the brothers need that I can supply, do not hesitate to ask. All that is mine is yours: you know that. I have given the instructions you requested. You will not be interfered with. Give my greetings to Cardinal Fazzini. In His name, Miles Van Doren.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Makonnen, handing the letter back to Patrick. ‘What does this mean? What’s this shield at the top?’

‘The shield,’ Patrick said slowly, ‘is the official seal of the Central Intelligence Agency.’ Ruth was looking away, her eyes fixed on the distance. ‘The words are from the Bible: you can see them any day of the week if you walk into the entrance lobby of the Agency out at Langley.’

‘And this man, Miles Van Doren - who is he?’

Ruth watched a cloud pass like a veil behind the tower. She had chosen this place for its silences. But the world had followed her and was filling her grey spaces with its own sounds.

‘Miles Van Doren,’ she said in a voice so quiet Makonnen had to strain to hear it, ‘Miles Van Doren is my father. He’s the President’s Advisor on Foreign Intelligence and a Deputy Director of the CIA. Those were his men who picked you up at the nunciature. Not ordinary agents. Special Operations men fresh from Honduras. He sent them into Ireland three weeks ago. The two who came for you weren’t the only ones. There are others.’ She looked up, the expression of pain in her eyes unbearable. ‘They’re looking for you again,’ she said. ‘Only this time my father’s with them.’

TWENTY

In spite of the fire it was growing chilly in the room. Ruth threw on another block of peat and poked the ashes, sending bright sparks up the chimney.

‘I’m going out,’ she said. ‘I’d like to take a walk about, see that everything’s all right out there. I might go on down to the lake.’

She took a green Barbour jacket from a hook near the door and slipped it on.

‘Take care. Don’t walk too far. We’ll look after things in here.’ Patrick knew what Ruth meant when she said she would see that everything was all right. In this business, constant vigilance was the price, not so much of freedom as of life itself.

The door closed gently behind her. Patrick indicated the easy chairs by the fireplace.

‘Let’s sit down over here.’

For a while they sat, drinking coffee, watching the flames rise through the soft peat. The priest needed time to digest what he had just been told, to understand that his ordeal was not over, that it had only begun. When the coffee was finished, Patrick found some sherry in a cupboard, an old Manzanilla, very dry and very pale. It would have been better chilled, but he poured it anyway. They began to talk, returning before very long to the mystery that had brought them there.

‘Chekulayev was killed,’ Patrick explained, ‘by the same people who killed Eamonn De Faoite. Eamonn knew about Passover. The papers he sent to Balzarin must have contained details: names, places, dates -whatever he’d been able to dig up.’

‘Why would he send them to Balzarin?’

Patrick shrugged.

‘My guess is that he knew something about Fazzini, maybe the Vatican connection in general. He must have thought he could trust Balzarin. Eamonn was a clever man, but in some ways very simple. He would have regarded the nuncio as the proper person to approach on a matter that concerned the Vatican.’

‘It wasn’t the correct procedure. His own bishop...’

‘Perhaps so. But Eamonn was never one for correct procedures. And if he thought there was no time to lose ... Anyway, we’ll never know now.’

‘What about these papers?’ Makonnen gestured towards the pile on the table. ‘The ones I found in the nunciature. What have you found in them? Apart from ...’

Patrick sipped his sherry and put the glass down on the floor. He went to the table and brought some of the papers back to the chair.

‘Several letters,’ he said. ‘Some of them date back years and relate to different stages in Balzarin’s career. There are letters from various cardinals and bishops, by no means restricted to the Vatican or Italy; a number from Italian government officials or influential people in countries to which Balzarin had been posted; a few from bankers, industrialists, the heads of finance houses; two from military officers. The most recent ones are Irish: a senator, a judge, and a member of the board of the Bank of Ireland.’

As he took the file of letters from Patrick, Makonnen commented in Italian.

‘Era piduist. He belonged to P2.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘No, I don’t think so. There may be a connection, but I can’t see any evidence of that as yet.’

Makonnen had been referring to P2 (pi-due), a secret and powerful Italian Masonic Lodge whose public exposure in 1981 had led to the collapse of Aldo Forlani’s coalition government. P2’s influence had reached as far as the Chigi Palace. Many feared that its power had not been wholly broken.

As the priest looked through the letters, Patrick continued.

‘All of these letters refer in one way or another to an organization known as The Brotherhood or, more simply, the Brothers. There are several references to a tomb, which members seem to venerate. More than one correspondent mentions the Pillars.

We also found a diary in Italian, written in what we think is Balzarin’s own handwriting. That will have to be translated in full, but even at a glance we can see there are going to be problems: people are referred to by initials or titles, places by abbreviations. Some of the entries have been heavily crossed out, as though the keeper of the diary had second thoughts about them. Which makes us think, of course, that what is left may not be as revealing as we would like.’

He handed Makonnen a medium-sized volume bound in soft burgundy leather. A small label inside the front cover declared that it had been manufactured by Olbi’s in Venice, but it bore no other distinguishing feature.

‘Father,’ Patrick went on, ‘I’m going to be frank with you. We are all in terrible danger. Two days ago, Ruth and the team working with her at the embassy received strict instructions to drop the case. They were told it was being handled at a higher level. We no longer believe that to be true. With any luck we may be safe here for a day or so, but that’s the most we can hope for.

‘As I told you, we think you are personally at considerable risk. I don’t want to sound offensive,

but you have to understand that here in Ireland you are conspicuous, even if dressed in a layman’s clothes. There are almost no black people in this country. For that reason, you can’t afford to move around freely.

‘Fortunately, Ruth has money and contacts. We intend to take you out of here tonight and find somewhere safe for you to stay until this is all over.

‘And how long will that be, Mr Canavan? A week? A month? A year? You say “until this is all over”. But how long has it been going on? Some of the engravings in that folder date back to the eighteenth century.’

Patrick paused before answering. Even in the warm room, before the fire, he felt cold. The hallucination - if that was what it had been - of two days ago still troubled him. He wondered if he should see a doctor.

Or a priest.

‘Father, I didn’t want to say this, but perhaps it’s better if I do. There’s every possibility that none of us may ever be safe again. I can give you protection for a while, but I can’t guarantee it for ever. Perhaps not even for a week. Our only hope is to find people we can trust, people powerful enough to take action against this group. I don’t have to spell out for you just how difficult that may prove to be.

‘But at least we can make a start. We can identify those whose names we know from letters, and anyone you think you can recognize from his photograph.’

He passed the first folder to Makonnen, the one containing engravings and photographs of clerics.

Makonnen did his best. The better-known figures, even those from the past, were easy enough. Some he had seen in newspapers, others in textbooks on church history. One in particular he singled out.

‘This man,’ he said, pointing at the close-up of a severe face that bore the unmistakable stamp of a lifetime spent in positions of authority, of whole generations accustomed to obedience.

‘His name is Cardinal Giancarlo Migliau. His family came to Italy from Spain after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews. That would have been about the end of the fifteenth century, I suppose. They would have come through Provence to Piedmont, where I think they settled round Turin. But one of his ancestors went on alone to Venice, where he converted to Christianity and made a fortune trading with Egypt and the Levant. He married a girl from a poor branch of a noble family, but for all that remained an outsider.

‘His sons and grandsons continued to trade with the Sultan, mainly in pepper. They bought land at Montebelluno and a villa by Palladio near Maser. By the seventeenth century, when the Great Council put noble status up for sale, they had enough money and enough influence to get their name entered in the Golden Book. They are one of the last noble families surviving in Venice.’

Makonnen paused, his eyes fixed on the photograph.

‘Migliau was made Patriarch of Venice three years ago,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a popular appointment, but the Pope insisted. He may not be liked around St Mark’s, but he has considerable influence in the rest of Italy. In many quarters people are already speaking of him as papabile, a suitable candidate for the Papacy. If the present Pope were to die soon - which God forbid -there is no doubt that Migliau would be the favourite of the conservatives.’

‘I see.’ Patrick paused. ‘What about the men on this page, do you know any of them?’

Makonnen looked carefully, but there was no one he recognized. By the time they reached the end, Patrick knew they would need the services of a good photo library.

The second folder contained prints and photographs of nuns, their habits indicating a variety of religious orders. Makonnen gave up quickly on these.

The last item was an album rather than a folder. Patrick had left it on the table, where it could be viewed more easily. He got up and arranged two dining chairs side by side.

It was an old volume, elaborately bound in a fashion popular in France in the seventeenth century. The binding had been carefully removed from its original contents and resewn onto pages more suitable for holding engravings and photographs. On the first leaf, someone had inscribed in copperplate the words I Morti. The Dead.

Underneath was a Latin inscription in the same hand: An ignoratis quia quicumque baptizati sumus in Christo Jesu, in morte ipsius baptizati sumus? Consepulti enim sumus cum Mo per baptismum in mortem... Patrick recognized it as a passage from Romans: ‘Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.’

He turned the page. A row of faces stared at him, the dead staring at the living, across more than centuries. The paper felt old and slightly mildewed, as though it had been buried for years in a tomb. He felt it beneath his fingers, fusty and slightly rotten.

The arrangement of the pages that followed differed from that in the folders. At the top of the first page was a name: Benedetta di Rovereto. Patrick recognized the name as Venetian, an old family, nobles from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Underneath and on the next page were arranged engravings and then photographs of young women, the earliest from perhaps the second half of the seventeenth century. There were seven in all.

As he looked at each face in turn, he became aware of a family resemblance between them. The clothes changed, the hairstyles altered, but the eyes, the noses, the chins all spoke of a common ancestry. They might have been sisters or cousins, except that decades and centuries separated them. Did they all carry the same name? Was that it? A single name carried through several generations in the same family?

The next set of portraits were of men. The name at their head was Giovanni Carmagnola. Again Patrick saw the resemblance running through their faces like a single thread drawn through a many-patterned fabric: a feature disappearing here, only to return later, less pronounced but unmistakable; a second dying away to be replaced by another; a third persisting in each generation, like insect fossils creeping unchanged through strata of ancient rock.

Page by page, the dead were ranged in front of them, living only in a single moment. Who they were, what they represented, what their deaths signified remained a riddle. Had they all died young, soon after these portraits were drawn or these photographs taken?

Patrick turned the pages as though hypnotized, drawn from picture to picture, as though a child, having taken him by the hand, was leading him through vast chambers hung with the portraits of his ancestors. On average, there were about seven or eight pictures to each name. But some names had fewer, beginning at a later date, while one or two had more and went back much further, to the sixteenth and even fifteenth centuries.

The etchings showed their subjects in formal poses, usually seated, often beside a statue of the Virgin or a crucifix. Even across a range of generations, there was little variation. The photographs largely followed the formalities of the earlier drawings, but here and there a note of innovation had been introduced. Some stood in front of the portrait of a predecessor, others before a family tombstone.

He had just passed the half-way point when he felt his mouth go dry with fear. For a moment he did not even know what it was that had frightened him. His hand froze on the page as though turned to stone.

‘Mr Canavan, what’s wrong? What is it, Mr Canavan?’

He heard Makonnen’s voice, but it sounded dull and remote, as though it reached him from behind high walls. He did not reply. He felt as if he had been struck dumb.

There was no need to look at the name at the top of the page. The faces coalesced into a single face, the eyes became a single pair of eyes, the mouth a single mouth. At first he thought another hallucination had begun, but as the moments passed he realized that what he was seeing was wholly real.

Her photograph was at the bottom of the right-hand page, the very last in the series, the most recent. It was both fresh and painfully familiar. In a box at home, buried beneath dust and trivia, he had an album of his own, filled with photographs like it. Francesca alone, Francesca with a group of friends, Francesca and himself together, on the bank of the canal, taken by Paolo on an autumn evening seventeen years ago. They had been in Venice together on holiday, staying with her family. A year later, he had returned to bury her among mist and cypresses, in a vault of crumbling stone on the cemetery island of San Michele.

TWENTY-ONE

A crack runs through the centre of the universe. Images of Francesca fly through his brain like moths - moths with jagged tearing wings, hungry for light. He fears the onset of further hallucinations, of madness, of desperation. Another reality, a phantom world, takes on form and substance all about him. It threatens to suck him into itself, to drag him down like a crippled ship, into eternal cold and darkness. He fears ghosts, sees mottled faces touch the edges of his vision and shy away again.

But there is nothing ethereal about the picture: it is physical, tangible, as solid in its materiality as himself. His fingers can touch it, just as they can touch the table or his own face. He clings to it like a drowning man to wreckage. It is not a ghost. It will not shimmer in the darkness. It will not go away.

Slowly, a piece at a time, the world fits itself together again.

Breathing hard, Patrick slipped the photograph out of the old-fashioned corners that held it and closed the album. Makonnen watched him, perplexed and a little frightened. What could be in the photograph that disturbed the American so much? Patrick glanced at the photograph again, then put it into his jacket pocket.

‘Father,’ he said, turning abruptly, ‘will you please stay here in the cottage? I want to go out to look for Ruth. She’s been gone a long time.’

Beyond the window, the first signs of approaching evening had appeared. Patrick took his Burberry down from the wall and pulled it on. It was a city coat, out of place here in the country. He lacked Ruth’s ability to blend into her surroundings.

At the door, he paused.

‘Father, please lock the door when I’ve gone. Only open it to Ruth or myself. You’ll find a shotgun in the cupboard behind you.’

‘I can’t...’

‘I don’t expect you to fire on anyone, but I would suggest you hang on to it. If anybody looks like making trouble, try waving it at them. Look as though you mean business. I won’t be long.’

He tied the belt of his coat tightly and pulled the collar up against the cold. As he stepped through the door, he shivered. Behind him, he heard Makonnen turn the key in the lock.

She was nowhere in the garden. He called her name gently at first, then loudly, but there was no reply. At the end of the garden, a low gate led onto the road. He looked up and down it: a tractor trundled slowly in the direction of Laragh, towing a cart stacked with bales of hay. The light was fading from the air. In three-quarters of an hour it would be dark.

He crossed the road and walked down to the path behind the hotel. An atmosphere of melancholy had settled over everything. It suited his mood perfectly. The lake was to his right, out of sight from the path. Closer at hand, the round tower and the cluster of slate-grey ruins that circled it were visible through the trees.

Out of season, the ruins were deserted. He saw a bent figure among the gravestones and called Ruth’s name; but it was an old woman in a headscarf arranging winter flowers on a recent grave. He nodded and went on. New graves gave way to old, domes containing plastic flowers to moss and lichen. In place of sharp inscriptions in English, the slabs bore faded

lettering in Latin or Irish. Or do Diarmait, A prayer for Dermot. Or do Pddraig, A prayer for Patrick. He turned his head, but the old woman had vanished.

He had come here once with Francesca. It had been spring: the end of March or early April. He remembered pink blossoms on the trees and sunlight on grey stone. The following day, he had written a poem for her. He could still remember its opening lines:

By a sharp stone in Glendalough

I saw a raven stand and shiver in the wind;

and I saw Kevin walk

over dark waves

from shore to sorrowing shore.

Even now, in that dank, unlovely graveyard, his fingers stained with innocent blood, and the years lying like a great wilderness between, the words of the poem came back to him out of the past. The words came, and with them images they conjured into life in the thin air of the present: long hair falling against a dimly-lit shoulder, grey eyes in the half-light of a book-lined room, white teeth against soft lips, the slope of rounded breasts against thin fabric. And a gold pendant engraved with the sign of a seven-branched menorah, topped by a cross.

As he walked down to the lake, his thoughts turned restlessly to the photograph in Balzarin’s album. That it was Francesca, he was absolutely sure. An entire section of his memory was devoted to her face. Already the photograph from the album had lodged there, among a thousand other images. Calmer now, he considered it again, trying to understand what it could be doing pasted among the rest. More than that,

he struggled to see how, if at all, this changed things. Was this the real connection, the knot that tied him to De Faoite, Chekulayev, and their killers?

Turning a corner, he slipped on damp grass and fell awkwardly against a gravestone, winding himself. As he started to pick himself up, he noticed that the lettering on the stone was worn and illegible. Nothing remained to identify the white bones underneath: no name, no age, no date of birth or death.

And in the next moment, as he straightened up, leaning his weight against the weathered stone, a thought of the purest horror came to him. He staggered, dizzy, almost retching. For the second time in less than an hour, he felt his world lurch and crack from side to side.

‘It can’t be true!’ he thought. But in his heart he knew it was. He reached inside his jacket and took out Francesca’s photograph. It had not been obvious at first. There had been tombs in so many of the photographs. And his thoughts had been fixed on Francesca herself.

But now, as though emerging from the winter mists that had once shrouded it, he saw quite clearly the tombstone in the background. Francesca had been photographed standing in front of her own grave, alive, half-smiling, a ghost trapped in a trick of sunlight.

TWENTY-TWO

In the west, the sun had started its long journey towards the Atlantic. There was a sound of birds preparing for night. The wind was rising again, bending the naked tops of the trees. There was still just enough light to see by.

He continued on down towards the lake. His first priority was to find Ruth. She had not responded to any of his calls, and he was growing anxious.

The lake came into view directly ahead of him. This was the smaller of the two lakes at Glendalough. Dark hills ringed it about, and along its fringes tall, slender reeds waved like ripples of woven silk. Across its surface, a solitary white bird glided, its feathers touched red by the setting sun. Light and water fused in its wake. In the shadows along the shore, a bittern boomed, welcoming the darkness.

He looked up and down the vast expanse of reddening water. The light made searching difficult, and he knew her green jacket would camouflage her at any distance. Cupping his hands together, he hollered loudly. But only a faint echo came back, as though mocking his concern. Perhaps she had already started back towards the cottage, taking a different path from usual.

Taking the left-hand path, he walked quickly along the lake-shore. As he turned a bend, he saw her several yards away. She was sitting among the pebbles near the water’s edge, her back against a large rock. A few minutes more and she would have been invisible, merely a dark green shadow fading to grey. He called her name and hurried in her direction.

He noticed the blood before anything else. A small pool of it lay at the base of the rock. Then he saw the angle at which her head was bent.

Her hands had been trussed firmly behind her back and a gag thrust hard into her mouth so she could not cry out. The gun had probably been silenced. The blood had dried around the tiny bullet-hole in her forehead. Most of the bleeding had been through the larger exit hole at the rear. Her eyes were still open, staring across the lake, as though watching the gliding bird. He closed them and removed the gag, then stood looking at her, wondering what to say. He felt awkward and embarrassed. She would have known, he thought. She would have known exactly what words were appropriate. But the only sound was the lake stirring beneath a cold north wind.

He stood up and looked across the grey water. It shivered furtively, but told him nothing. He clenched his hands, the nails cutting into his palms, drawing tiny flecks of blood.

A sudden sound brought him back to himself: a helicopter passed by overhead, swooping low, as though looking for a place to land.

‘Jesus!’ he thought. Makonnen was still in the cottage, alone.

Tearing himself away from the lake, he turned and ran to his right. A short-cut went over the fields, across low stone walls and down to the road. He ran jerkily, avoiding rocks and tussocks scarcely visible in the rapidly thickening darkness. The thin air scoured his lungs. Underfoot, the ground was damp and yielding, dragging at his feet. He scrambled through bracken, up a steep slope. The helicopter passed again, tail-lights winking, one red, one white.

At the top, he climbed the last wall and dropped down to the road. The cottage lay to his right, with three bends of the road between. He headed towards it, at walking pace, his heart pounding, forcing himself to remain calm.

As he drew near the gate, he made out the silhouette of a man standing outside, just on the grass verge.

‘Is that you, Michael?’ he said as he approached within speaking distance. The man did not reply.

‘Sure, and I thought you was me friend Michael,’ he said, drawing closer. If the man was looking for an American, he hoped the phony accent and the darkness would deceive him.

He reached one hand into his pocket and saw the tell-tale stiffening as the stranger reached inside his coat. He drew out a pack of cigarettes and the man relaxed.

‘Have you got a light, sir?’ he asked, taking a cigarette from the pack. ‘Jeez, and I could do with a smoke!’

The man fumbled inside a pocket briefly and took out a box of matches. Patrick stepped up to him, the cigarette in his mouth. The stranger struck the match. As it flared up, he saw Patrick’s face and realized too late his mistake. Patrick punched him with all his strength, full in the guts. As the man jack-knifed, breathless, Patrick brought his knee up hard, connecting with his chin. There was a crisp snapping sound and the man toppled backwards onto the road, striking his head hard against the tarmac.

Patrick found the gun and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers. He straightened and looked up and down the road. No sign of anyone. But the helicopter might have landed nearby and dropped more men. He had to act quickly. Quickly and silently.

Between the gate and the cottage lay about two hundred yards of garden, mostly overgrown. There were lights in the kitchen, which lay to the right of the front door, to Patrick’s left. He could also make out a light in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

He removed his Burberry: it would only serve to give him away in the darkness. Beneath it he wore a dark jersey and slacks. Bending, he rubbed his hands in clay and smeared his face with it.

Keeping away from the path, he moved towards the cottage, a shadow gliding through the darkness. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and he was familiar with the terrain. So far, things were going in his favour.

There was a clump of rhododendrons near the front of the cottage. Crouching low, he moved up behind them. He could just make out the shape of a single man keeping watch by the door. A strange car had been parked next to Ruth’s Mercedes.

Turning to the left, he skirted the house. All was quiet at the back. There was no rear entrance, just a pair of low windows. He could go in through them -but that would leave the guard at the front and anyone in the vicinity he was able to call for help. He decided to deal with the guard first.

A month ago, he and Ruth had set rabbit snares among the trees at the rear of the cottage. It would be difficult locating any of them in the dark, but he thought he knew his way well enough to try. He found the large ash tree that had been partly burned by tinkers the year before. There should be a snare a few paces to the left.

It was still there. He fumbled in the grass, untying it from the stake that held it in place. Moments later he had a length of heavy wire. It was far from ideal, but it would do. He found a handkerchief in the pocket of his trousers and ripped it in two. Wrapped round the ends of the wire, the strips made reasonable handles.

On tiptoe, he crept to the corner of the cottage on the far side from the kitchen, and glanced round. The man was still by the door. He carried an automatic rifle in one hand. Patrick’s problem was to get behind him without being seen.

There was a sound of muffled voices. A man’s voice was raised in anger, rough and menacing. He could just make out Makonnen’s reply. The priest was still alive. But for how much longer?

The guard was making an elementary mistake. His attention was fixed more on the area to his right, where he had illumination from the kitchen window. Patrick lowered himself to the ground and began to crawl towards the man, keeping himself close in to the wall.

Suddenly, the man turned his head and looked off to the left. Patrick halted and held his breath. Things were still in his favour: turning from the lit area to the pitch dark on his left, the guard’s eyes had not adjusted. Patrick waited until he looked away again, then started crawling once more.

This was the worst moment, the moment he had to make his mind up to kill. Any hesitation could prove fatal. He thought of Ruth, of her blood freezing on grey stones by a dark lake. His hands gripped the wire and he started to rise.

The man turned, his eyes opening wide in horror. Before he had time to recover or call out, Patrick was on him, slipping the wire over his head and jerking it tight against his throat. The wire cut into his hands, softened only by the thin cloth of the handkerchief. There was a clattering sound as the rifle dropped to the ground. The man reared up and backwards, hands thrust to his throat, fumbling helplessly. Patrick felt the wire dig into the flesh and pulled harder, ignoring the pain in his hands, the pity he felt for his victim. There was a low gagging sound,

the guard grew frantic, twisting, throwing what was left of his strength into a final effort. But Patrick held firm, sliding the wire back and forwards, slicing it deeper into the soft throat, as though slicing cheese.

He felt the man go limp and caught him as he fell, lowering the body to the ground. His hands stung, but that was all he felt. No remorse, no anger, no disgust. Those would all come later, if at all.

For over a minute he crouched in the shadow of the wall, gun at the ready, watching the door. No one came. He heard voices again: the rough voice, then Makonnen’s, pleading, and finally a third, precise and cold and measured. He wanted to take at least one of them alive.

He opened the door slowly, desperately trying to remember whether or not it creaked. It did not. A moment later, he was in the passage. The kitchen door was on his left. He took a deep breath and reached for the handle, praying his luck would hold.

TWENTY-THREE

Surprise was on his side. The door opened to his right, giving him a clear line of fire along the main kitchen area. There were two men with Makonnen, dressed alike in dark green anoraks. One was standing, the other seated at the table, facing the priest. Patrick swung round the door, moving directly into a firing posture, legs apart, arms at head height.

‘Freeze!’

Everything shifted into slow motion. The standing man threw himself sideways, pulling Makonnen with him to the ground. As the chair went from under him, the priest slipped, toppling away from his assailant. There was a shot. It went wild, missing Patrick by several feet. He fired back through the table, two shots in quick succession. The man on the floor grunted and fell silent.

At the table, the second man remained unmoving. Patrick trained the gun on him.

‘Put your hands flat on top of the table! Don’t move a muscle!’

He took a step into the room.

‘Father Makonnen,’ he called out, ‘are you all right?’

There was a brief silence, then the priest replied.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

What about him?’ He meant the man on the floor.

Another silence. When he finally spoke, Makonnen’s voice was accusing.

‘I think he’s dead.’

‘In that case, help me tie up his friend. I want to take him with us. He has some talking to do.’

For the first time, the man at the table spoke. His had been the cold voice Patrick had heard through the window. Even now, he was emotionless, bleak. He was tall and gaunt, aged about sixty, with pearl-white hair worn a little long. It had been a long time since he and Patrick had last met.

‘You’re wasting your time, Patrick. There’s nowhere to run to. Not now. Why not give up? While you’re still alive. We don’t want to hurt you, Patrick. We just want you to keep some things to yourself for a little while. It’s not your fault, you weren’t to know.’

Patrick did not reply. Keeping the gun trained on the man, he helped Makonnen to his feet. The priest was bleeding from one temple, but seemed otherwise unharmed. Patrick was nervous. Had there been only four men, or were there others, already alerted by the shooting?

‘Are you alone?’ he asked the white-haired man.

The stranger smiled but said nothing. In the grate, the fire had burned low. A faint smell of cordite hung on the air. Darkness crowded thickly against the windowpane.

Patrick stepped up to the man and levelled the pistol at his temple.

‘I asked if you were alone. Believe me, I will shoot you if I have to.’

He cocked the pistol. The man smiled at him: cool, deliberate, unconcerned.

Makonnen stepped forward.

‘Mr Canavan, you ...’

‘Please, Father, let me handle this.’

The priest held back, uncertain how best to act. Canavan had seemed a moral man, or, if not that exactly, one determined to prevent unnecessary killing. And yet he had to his knowledge killed three men already and was threatening to shoot a fourth.

The man in the chair held Patrick’s gaze unwaveringly. It was not a simple lack of concern that showed in his eyes, but something more: certainty, conviction, acquiescence? Yes, thought Patrick, perhaps that was it: a willing acceptance rooted in an absolute certainty of his own Tightness. But what did Miles Van Doren have to feel righteous about?

Why did you have her killed?’ Patrick demanded. He had to struggle to keep his voice steady. ‘She was your daughter. Your own daughter.’

Van Doren looked at him caustically, much as a cat looks at a noisy child, with studied disinterest. His eyebrows were thicker and darker than his hair, and they canopied his eyes, darkening and enriching them. His skin was meagre, stretched over the bones of his face like waxed paper. Tiny veins ran threadlike in a clumsy mesh beneath the surface of the skin, purple against its grey terrain, like rivers clustered incongruously on a map of a pale and lifeless desert.

‘Don’t get excited, Patrick. You’re mixed up in something you don’t understand. This isn’t Agency business. Shall we say that Ruth was ... a sort of payment? A debt, a sacrifice - hard for you to understand. I had no choice. Truly. She knew things she had no right to know. She’d got in too deep. Just like you, Patrick. You should have dropped it after the business with Chekulayev. There’s too much at stake for us to play games.’

Patrick was growing nervous. He sensed that Van Doren was playing for time. There was a humming sound in the distance. Patrick recognized it as the helicopter approaching.

‘On your feet,’ he snapped. ‘We can talk about this later, once I’ve got you out of here.’

‘I’ve told you already, Patrick, you’re wasting your time. Put the gun away. You’ve nothing to worry about if you act sensibly. I have influence, I can see to it that

you come out of this unharmed. Otherwise ...’ Van Doren shrugged his shoulders.

Patrick started to reply, but his voice was drowned by a sudden roaring. The air filled with it, and a second later an eruption of light tore the darkness apart, as though a giant hand had ripped a thick, black curtain from top to bottom.

Patrick recoiled from the window, half-blinded by the blaze of light. Van Doren took his chance. He pushed back his chair, grabbing for Patrick’s arm. The gun went off, missing Van Doren’s head by inches. The shot was blotted out by the roaring from outside as the helicopter steadied itself for a landing on the lawn.

Patrick was pulled off balance, towards his assailant. Van Doren spun him round, yanking his right arm painfully behind his back, forcing the gun to drop from numbed fingers. Outside, darkness rushed back as the helicopter set down, throwing dead leaves and twigs high into the shuddering air.

Holding Patrick’s arm high against his back, the shoulder close to breaking point, Van Doren used his free hand to draw a gun. He rammed it against the nape of Patrick’s neck, without words, not quite gentle, not quite hard. And as he did so, he bent forward and kissed the top of Patrick’s head: a soft kiss, such as a lover might lay on his sleeping partner.

Outside, the pilot switched off the engine. A profound silence washed through the night. Patrick could hear his heart beating, strokes away from sudden death. He could sense Van Doren’s tension, knew that his finger was tightening on the trigger, that it was over, that the kiss had been an act of betrayal, or perhaps contrition.

‘Please drop the gun.’ It was Makonnen who spoke, nervous, yet firm.

‘Don’t make me shoot you. I don’t want to, but I will if I have to. Believe me.’

Van Doren did not relax his grip, either on Patrick’s arm or the pistol. He glanced round almost casually.

Makonnen had taken the gun from the man Patrick had shot. His hand was not entirely steady, but he was too close to his target to miss.

‘What happened, Father?’ Van Doren asked. ‘Have your scruples suddenly deserted you?’

The priest shook his head. He was not a man given to sudden revelations or moral shifts.

‘You misunderstand,’ he said. ‘I would not have had Mr Canavan shoot you in cold blood. But this is not cold blood. To save his life, I am willing to take yours. Do you understand now?’

Patrick sensed Van Doren’s hesitation. Makonnen took another step forward. Feet ran across the gravel outside. Someone shouted. Van Doren half turned, shouting in reply. ‘I’m in here! I’ve got Canavan, but the priest is armed. Be careful.’

There was a crash as someone kicked the door open. Two men in green anoraks burst into the room carrying automatic rifles. Makonnen did not flinch or even turn his head. He held the gun in both hands now: his grip was growing steadier by the second.

The newcomers hesitated. They levelled their rifles at the priest, but knew the risk of opening fire.

‘Put the gun down, Father,’ said Van Doren. He continued to hold Patrick in a painful arm-lock.

‘I will fire,’ said Makonnen. ‘Tell your friends to lower their rifles.’

‘Be reasonable, Father. If you kill me, my men here will gun down both of you half a second later. What will that accomplish? You will simply die with my blood on your hands.’

Makonnen wavered. Van Doren gazed straight at him, as though daring him to shoot. He dropped the pistol to the floor.

One of the newcomers stepped up to Makonnen and grabbed him roughly by the arm.

‘Take him out to the helicopter,’ ordered Van Doren. ‘I’ll take Canavan. We’ll take them both to Migliau. He has some questions he wants answered.’ He turned to the second of the gunmen. ‘You’ll have to stay here with Mark until I can send someone back for you: there won’t be enough room in the ‘copter for six. Go and tell John to start the engine. We’ll be straight out.’

The man turned and went outside. A moment later, they heard the whine of the helicopter engine being restarted. Patrick was jerked round and pushed towards the door. Makonnen followed with the other gunman.

As they walked towards the helicopter, Van Doren slipped the gun back into his pocket. Patrick stumbled on the gravel, but the older man kept his grip. They bent down, ducking under the rotors. At the door, Van Doren let go of Patrick’s arm to enable him to climb into the machine.

Patrick had been waiting. The instant his arm was free, he spun, grabbing Van Doren around the waist. Before the other could do a thing, Patrick lifted with all his strength. There was a sickening crunch as the rotor blades whisked Van Doren’s head to cream, followed the next second by a high-pitched whine as the rotor mechanism became unbalanced. Blood sprayed everywhere. Van Doren’s body jerked twice and went limp. Patrick dropped it and ran out from beneath the crippled rotors, straight for Makonnen and the man holding him.

The gunman had frozen in horror. Before he could recover, Patrick had knocked both him and the priest to the ground. There was a shot as the other rifleman opened fire over their heads. Patrick whirled, snatching the automatic from the ground, and raised it, pulling on the trigger. The gunman staggered and fell back.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’ He bent down and pulled Makonnen to his feet. The man he had knocked down made a grab for his leg, but Patrick side-stepped and kicked him hard in the teeth.

Ruth’s Mercedes was standing where she had parked it, just in front of the cottage. The key would be in the ignition, where she always left it. Patrick ran towards it, half pulling, half pushing Makonnen with him. He bundled the priest into the passenger seat. There was a burst of automatic fire from behind them. Patrick turned and fired back wildly, then ran on round the car, into the driver’s seat.

‘Take this!’ he yelled, thrusting the rifle into Makonnen’s hands. ‘Use it if you have to, to keep them back.’

The priest sat trembling, his lips moving in repeated prayer. He was sick and numb. Patrick tossed the rifle into his lap and turned the key. The engine started first time. Another burst of fire just missed them as Patrick let in the clutch and roared off in first. He only remembered to put the lights on after they had turned onto the road and driven half-way to Laragh.

The Dead

Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead.

Revelation 1:5

TWENTY-FOUR

Venice

No sound. A great and bitter silence over everything. Blackness punctuated by small yellow lights like corpse-candles on a stretch of lonely marsh. He was in the darkness moving, and the silence all about him, insistent and faintly menacing. As he moved, his eyes began to clear, and he was able to make out something of his surroundings.

He was being rowed in a small boat of some sort. It lay low in the water, gliding soundlessly across a patterned solitude of light and dark. He felt it rock softly from side to side as it moved through the water in a straight line, creasing the surface gently with its prow. With a start he recognized the prow’s distinctive shape: the bladed ferro of a Venetian gondola.

He cast a quick glance backwards. At the stern, a tall gondolier, dressed all in black, angled himself across his long oar, twisting it in that curious Venetian fashion through its wooden rowlock. Somehow he knew the rowlock was called aforcola, but he could not remember having learned the word. A light hung from the pointed stern, leaving a trail of broken gold on the water behind. But the gondolier’s face remained hidden in shadow, beneath a soft, wide-brimmed hat. He turned his head, facing in the direction of travel once more.

His seat was a high-backed chair, delicately moulded and decorated with gilded dolphins and brass sea-horses. His hand brushed against the cushion on which he sat: it was thick velvet, soft to the touch. He leaned back, expecting to hear the plash of water or the turning of the oar against the forcola, but there was nothing. He must be in Venice, but where exactly? And who was rowing him? And why? He tried to form the questions, but his mouth would not open.

At that moment, the moon slipped out accommodatingly from behind heavy clouds, throwing a bland, whitish light across the trembling water. He was on the Grand Canal, gliding down the very centre of the great channel, flanked by tall houses and gilded palazzi. Everywhere he saw pointed windows, many of them covered with awnings and aglow with candlelight. There were torches on poles where the fondamente and rive straggled down to the edge of the Canal. Outside the palaces, massive lamps hung at the landing stages, casting strange flickering light on the mooring poles and the little craft tied up at them.

There was something terribly wrong. He could not at first tell what it was, only that something was false, that there had been a change of sorts. But whether the physical world had undergone a transformation, or there had merely been a shift in his own consciousness, he could not say.

Other craft bobbed or darted past them - slim sandoli rowed with cross oars, and long, black-painted gondolas, many complete with felze, the curved black cabins that kept the passengers’ identity secure from prying eyes. Light traghetti ferried people from bank to bank, weaving their way skilfully through the other traffic.

He recognized the fagades of palazzi on either side. Francesca had taught him well, pointing them out to him on their many trips up and down the Canal. In art and architecture, as in love, she had been his guide. He noticed that they were travelling from north to south, away from the terrqferma towards San Marco and the Lagoon. On his right, he could make out the Fondaco dei Turchi, a crumbling ruin that had once housed the headquarters of Venice’s Turkish merchants. Almost facing it, on his left, stood the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, where Wagner had died, mad and alone.

The names of the palaces and the families who had inhabited them passed through his head like grey ghosts: Bastaggia, Errizo, Priuli, Barbarigo, Pesaro, Fontana, Morisini - a litany of the dead, their great houses rising like tombstones out of the moon-touched water. He knew something was amiss. But what?

They reached the Ca’ d’Oro, with its gilded reliefs and bright capitals twinkling in the light of a hundred torches, each of its tall windows bright with a thousand candles. Between the gold, panels of red and blue, cinnabar and aquamarine, shimmered in the moonlight.

The boat passed on, down to the Ca’ da Mosto, marking the beginning of the bend where the Canal turns down to the Ponte di Rialto. Slowly, they rounded the broad corner. The bridge came into sight like a great ship, lights burning in the windows of the shops that formed its central section. Suddenly, in the distance, west of the bridge, the sky was filled with flashing lights. Fireworks exploded soundlessly above the Campo San Polo. Rockets turned the night red and gold. Fireballs burst, scattering showers of rainbow-coloured sparks across the sky. Fire cascaded like rain, illuminating rooftops and pinnacles and the tops of high towers.

In the light of the fireworks, he caught clear sight of the facade approaching on his left. He recognized the building as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a sixteenth-century complex that had contained the lodgings, offices, and warehouses of the old German merchant colony. The side and front of the building glistened with colour. Two great frescoes covered them, the work of master artists. He remembered their names. Giorgione and Titian, both commissioned after fire destroyed the original edifice in 1505.

And there, he knew, quite as though a part of his brain that had been sleeping until then had come fully awake and whispered the awful truth into his ears, there lay the real horror, the true madness. There should not have been frescoes. Giorgione’s was long fallen into ruin, a mere fragment left in the Accademia gallery, his only documented work. Titian’s was no more than a haze of faded colours on the Fondaco wall, a reminder of past glories, nothing more. The Fondaco itself was a post office now, drab, artless, without vibration.

He thought back to each of the places they had passed. The Fondaco dei Turchi should not have been in such a state of disrepair: it had been rebuilt in the last century and later turned into a museum. There should have been a forest of television aerials on the roof of the Palazzo Vendramin. The gilding and the coloured paints had long ago flaked away from the golden palace of the Contarinis.

And now the madness settled in him like a snake, coiling and uncoiling through his body. He had seen no motoscqfi, no vaporetti, not a single motorized craft anywhere on the canal. Gondolas had not carried felze since the last century. There had been no imbarcaderi crowded with passengers waiting to board the water buses. No police boats, no vigili urbani, no ambulances, no electric lights.

He looked up. They were about to go under the bridge. High above, looking down at him from the bridge, dark figures huddled against the parapet. They wore black capes and tricorn hats, and on their faces low white masks, beaked, like birds of prey: the bauta, the carnival costume of the eighteenth century.

The gondola slid without a sound beneath the low arch. The lights were blotted out. All became darkness.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Are you all right?’

Patrick sat up in bed, shaking. Someone had turned on a light. Makonnen. He heard his voice again.

‘Are you all right, Mr Canavan?’

He was sweating. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the Canal in darkness, the white masked faces peering over the bridge.

‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I’m okay. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.’

They were sharing a room in a small pensione on the Rio della Verona. On the day before, they had flown to Rome from Glasgow and taken the first train to Venice.

‘What time is it?’ Patrick asked.

‘It’s after four o’clock. You were shouting in your sleep. In Italian. You were shouting in Italian.’

What was I saying?’

Makonnen hesitated.

‘I ... don’t know exactly. I couldn’t make out all the words. Once you cried out “Chi e lei? Dove mi sta portando - Who are you? Where are you taking me?”

Those had been the words he had tried to shout to the gondolier. He had not forgotten. He had forgotten nothing. The gondola, the dark fagades, the bridge lit up by fireworks: his memory of them was real, and as clear as that of the hallucination he had experienced in Dublin. But this had been a dream, surely nothing more.

‘What are you frightened of, Mr Canavan? What is it?’

Patrick felt the sweat growing cold on his skin.

The night was chilly. He could feel the all-pervading damp of Venice rising from the small canal outside.

‘You know what frightens me,’ he said.

‘No,’ replied the priest. ‘I do not mean that. That frightens me too. That is natural. You are right to be frightened. But there is something else. Something else is frightening you.’

Patrick did not reply at once. He had not told Makonnen about Francesca’s photograph or his discovery that the object in front of which she was standing had been her own tomb. There had been no time to think properly about it. Nor had he spoken of the hallucination he had had in Dublin.

‘Tell me, Father,’ he began, ‘do you believe in ghosts?’

Makonnen looked at him uneasily.

‘Ghosts? I’ve never really thought ... You must know that the Church does not encourage tampering with the supernatural.’ He paused. ‘Do you think you have seen a ghost? Is that what you are frightened of? A ghost?’ There was no mockery in the priest’s voice, no hint of a rebuke. Men could be frightened of the dead, that was natural. In Ethiopia, in many parts of Africa, the dead were not so separate from the living.

Patrick shivered.

‘Listen, Father. I’m not sure I believe in a God, much less in spirits. But...’

Carefully, he explained to Makonnen what he had found. He took Francesca’s photograph from his pocket and showed it. The inscription on the stone was clear, there was no mistaking it. Only Francesca’s identity remained in doubt. For Makonnen, but not for Patrick. When he finished, the priest did not speak at first. They lay silently in their cold beds, listening to the water lapping the edges of the canal.

‘Is that why we have come to Venice?’ Makonnen asked finally. ‘To find this woman? You think she is still alive, that something very cruel has been done to you. Is that it?’

‘I came here to find Migliau. To discover what he knows about Passover.’

‘But you want to find the truth. You want to find this woman, if she is still alive. If she is not, after all, a ghost. That is so, isn’t it?’

Patrick nodded. It was true. Until this moment, he had not admitted it to himself. That was why he had chosen Venice over Rome as a place in which to start their investigation. But he did not speak of the hallucination or the clarity of his dream. Were they connected in some way? He might have to see a doctor. Perhaps the stress of the past few weeks, combined with the pressures that had led him to leave the Company...

‘Turn out the light, Father. Let’s get some sleep. We have to start early in the morning.’

He woke at seven, unrefreshed. Makonnen was already up, whispering prayers in a corner, underneath a small bronze crucifix. He was dressed in clothes Patrick had bought for him in Belfast, on the day after their escape from Glendalough. A heavy, rust-coloured sweater, brown tweed trousers and dark tan brogues. He still seemed uneasy in his new clothes, as though he wore his priesthood like a carapace between his flesh and the alien, layman’s garb he was forced to wear. At first, indeed, he had been reluctant to exchange his clerical dress for new garments, but Patrick had persuaded him that it was essential for his safety. Somewhere, hidden eyes would be watching for a black priest. Makonnen could not change his blackness, but he could at least avoid drawing attention to his vocation.

From Glendalough they had headed straight for Dublin. There had been no immediate pursuit: clearly, Van Doren’s messy end had disabled the helicopter and thrown his surviving agents into confusion. Patrick had driven like a madman down twisting roads, with Makonnen beside him, very still, very subdued, staring into the cone of light ahead as though transfixed by something ungodly torn out of the surrounding blackness.

In Dublin, they stopped long enough to draw money from a cash machine and to hire a fresh car from Boland’s on Pearse Street. They left the Mercedes near Trinity College: with any luck, it would be days before anyone realized it had been abandoned. By seven o’clock they were heading north on the Swords road. An hour later they were nearing the border.

Instinct made Patrick cautious. The Irish border is simplicity to cross - and simplicity to watch. He knew an unapproved road that turned east after Dundalk. It ran high along the cliffs overlooking Dundalk Bay, then down towards Newry, skirting Carlingford Lough. He knew it would be impossible to travel that way at night. The road turned and twisted, and in parts only feet separated it from the cliffs edge: without lights it would have been suicide. But lights would have drawn the attention of British border patrols watching for illegal traffic.

They spent the night in a guest house in Dundalk and left early the following morning. Patrick waited until the main road was clear of traffic before turning right. The road was little more than a country lane with a tarred surface. It rose through a series of bends before opening out over the sea. There were mountains beyond it. And the river coming down to meet it, dressed in silk. A red sea, and a green sea, and a blue sea, catching fire, and the mountains heavy and full of mist.

Soon after that they crossed the border, though there was no marker to say that they had done so. No one challenged them. And before long they were back on the main road, heading into Newry.

They passed in silence through a changed world. Makonnen was in a black mood, a mood that matched the landscape. There seemed to be a church on every corner: a blind and obsessive religious force lay like a dull cancer at the heart of the country’s darkness. By the roadside, as regular as traffic signs, tin plates had been nailed to the trees. They bore painted admonitions for the ungodly: ‘Prepare to meet thy God!’, ‘Christ Jesus died for your sins’, ‘Ye must be born again’.

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

Children of Israel out of Egypt. Abraham laid his only son on a high altar, bound as a sacrifice.

In another panel, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And in the centre a group of weeping disciples laid the body of their crucified Lord in the tomb. It did not immediately strike Patrick that there was something very strange about that scene.

He had bought a small flashlight in a shop on the Merceria before looking for the water-taxi. Switching it on, he squeezed through the half-open doorway.

He found himself in a vast, unlit chamber hung with cobwebs. The beam of the flashlight swept steadily over the walls. Behind marble slabs, generations of Contarinis slept. In one corner, empty niches waited for their future inhabitants.

Slowly, he made his way from slab to slab, reading the inscriptions. He found the resting-place of Lucrezia Contarini, the aunt Francesca had been visiting when she died. Next to it Francesca’s mother Caterina had been interred: La Contessa Caterina Contarini. 25 Febbraio 1920 - 18 Marzo 1977. Hic jacet pulvis cinis et nihil: Here lie dust, ashes, and nothing. She had died six years after Francesca. Withered flowers stood in a dry vase beneath her faded photograph.

But however hard he looked, he could not find Francesca’s tomb anywhere. He started again at the beginning, systematically following the slabs, going from one to the next with the care of an archaeologist. Nothing. He felt his flesh go cold. It could not be possible. He had been here, his fingers had touched her name. With a trembling hand, he removed her photograph from his pocket. The slab was just as he remembered it. And there, just beside it, was the edge of another slab. Only a few letters were visible, but they were enough to tell him that the second tomb was that of Francesca’s grandmother. And that Francesca’s mother now lay buried in the niche where her own coffin had been interred. Hic jacet pulvis cinis et nihil.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Outside, the rain still fell in a steady stream. The cemetery seemed to have emptied of people, and as he traced his way back past weeping angels and the idealized busts and photographs of the dead, he noticed that the funeral cortege had already embarked on its journey back to the city. Venice lay hidden behind a grey curtain, separated from its dead by a wintry channel of rain-lashed water.

In the cloisters he found a young Franciscan monk who offered to take him to the sacristan. The original monastery of San Cristofero was long closed. Now a small contingent of working monks was attached to the island’s church, a building of severely classical appearance, designed by Coducci in the fifteenth century. The monks’ chief function was to smooth the path from Venice to the grave. They tended the cemetery and supervised the burials, greeting each funeral party as it arrived, stoical or weeping, at the landing stage.

The sagrestano had a small office off the main cloister. The room was virtually bare, devoid of either luxury or grace, a sort of antechamber to the tomb. Grimy windows looked out directly onto the necropolis. The young monk asked Patrick to be seated, then turned and disappeared on sandalled feet. Ten minutes later, the sagrestano appeared in the doorway and introduced himself as Brother Antonio.

Pulling back his rain-soaked cowl, he drew a chair up to the green-painted metal desk that provided the room’s only working surface. He was well advanced in years, with a few pathetic wisps of grey hair adhering to a wrinkled bald head in nervous imitation of a tonsure. There was an almost shocking gravity about him that tended almost to severity. Perhaps a long life among the dead had impressed on him too deeply the blatant horrors of earthly existence. Or perhaps he had simply grown old and crabby by degrees, like anyone else. Small, deep-set eyes scrutinized Patrick a full half-minute before he spoke.

‘Buon giorno. Posso parlare Italiano? he asked. His voice was scratchy and asthmatic.

‘Ma certo.’

‘This is unusual,’ he said. ‘We receive few foreign visitors here on San Michele, especially at this season. The island is not on the tourist itinerary. Each year a few lovers of the Russian ballet come to pay their respects to a man called Diaghilev, who is buried in the Orthodox plot. And even fewer bring flowers to the tomb of an Englishman called Baron Corvo. I suppose they have read his books. I could not tell you. I have not read any of them myself. I am told they are mischievous books. And that he was a man of great depravity. And not even a Baron.’

He paused, sensing Patrick’s impatience.

‘I’m sorry, signore, but you must understand that this is San Michele, not Pere Lachaise or Montmartre. We have no Chopins here, no Prousts, no Delacroixs, no Oscar Wildes. You must go to Paris for that. But our church is very fine. It is the earliest example of Venetian Renaissance architecture. There are three altar pieces by Carona and a bust of Bernini’s. The son, I mean, not the father. One of the younger monks would be happy to show you round.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘I haven’t come here to look for celebrities,’ he said. ‘I came to find the tomb of ... an old friend. But I need your help.’

The old man relaxed a little. Looking for tombs

was something he understood. His breathing grew a little easier.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘My apologies, Signor...’

‘Canavan.’

‘Signor Canavan. From time to time, tourists call at the island. They expect to be entertained, to be shown the sights. They weary me a little. But an old friend - that is different. That is very different. I shall be pleased to help you.’ He folded his wrinkled hands in front of him. ‘Now, your friend - what was his name?’

‘Her name. She was buried here twenty-one years ago. I’ve gone to the family tomb, but there’s no sign of her ever having been there.’

Brother Antonio nodded.

‘And the family - what is their name?’

‘Contarini. Her father was Count Alessandro Contarini.’

A momentary shadow seemed to pass over the monk’s face, then it was gone. He nodded gravely. ‘Contarini, si. La grande tomba romanica. In the south-west sector. You say you have been there.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you found no trace of this friend.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Perhaps you are mistaken. Perhaps she was never buried in the family vault. That sometimes happens.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘She was buried there. I know -I was at the funeral.’

Brother Antonio shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He looked shrunken inside his ample habit, rather like an apple that long exposure to the air has dried and wrinkled.

‘I take it, Signor Canavan, that you understand something of how this cemetery ... works. It is not like most habitations for the dead. We have very little

space. Of course, we try to do our best to create new land on the east of the island. But space is limited, and in the meantime people most inconveniently insist on dying and being born. We bury them every day, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, and still they keep coming. Praise God, signore, we are not pagans here. We do not burn our dead or leave them out to rot. And we shudder to think of the crabs and lobsters at the bottom of the lagoon.

‘Normally, unless their families are prepared to pay a good deal, the common dead are disinterred at the end of twelve years. We throw away their little headstones and dispose of their bones. In the old days, a barge called here every month to transport them to a little island further out in the lagoon, Sant’ Ariano, near Torcello. Sant’ Ariano was the city’s ossuary until several years ago. Now we have enough room to bury everyone in a common grave to the east of the main cemetery.’

The monk fixed his eyes on Patrick.

‘Does that seem bizarre to you, Signor Canavan? Primitive, perhaps? I know it is not what you Americans would do. You try to keep your dead forever, in lead coffins. But our custom is different. The bones are nothing to us. Not many years ago, we used them to refine our sugar. We Venetians have a sweet tooth, you understand. And we are a little in love with death.’

Patrick broke in.

‘Surely what you have just told me applies only to what you just called the “common dead”. The Contarinis are wealthy, their tomb is one of the biggest on the island. If anyone rests in peace here, surely the Contarinis do.’

Brother Antonio looked uneasily away. Patrick followed his gaze. Through a window of cheap glass, a confusion of tombs barricaded the sea. Above the window, an unpainted crucifix hung on cracked plaster.

‘No one rests in peace on San Michele, Signor Canavan. Least of all the Contarinis. There is sea all around us. There is damnation. There is a resurrection to come.’

The old man’s vehemence surprised and wounded Patrick. More than anything, he was looking for a sign that Francesca was at peace.

‘I’m not speaking of their souls, Father. Just their bones. Surely once they have been interred, no one will remove the bones of a Contarini.’ He did not refer to the possibility that one of them, once buried, might walk again.

The monk paused and returned his gaze to Patrick.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You are quite right. The Contarinis rot in undisturbed splendour.’ There was a note of mockery in his voice. He sighed. ‘What was your friend’s full name?’

‘Francesca. Francesca Contarini. She died in 1971. On January the fifth. She was brought here for burial on the sixth.’

‘Have you evidence of that?’

‘No, of course not. But I thought that you, perhaps, might have a record.’

For just a fraction of a second, Patrick saw the monk hesitate.

‘These are family records, signore. Requests to examine them are normally made through the families concerned. If the Contarinis ...’

‘Please, Father, I don’t have time. Francesca was ... a very dear friend. It’s over twenty years since I visited her grave. I’m only in Venice for a few days.’

The sagrestano seemed about to refuse. Instead he sighed and eased himself slowly to his feet.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But perhaps we will find nothing. Or learn that her bones have joined a million others in the heap out there. God knows, there will be a terrible muddle when the resurrection comes. No doubt I shall be in there with the rest of them, trying to sort myself out. I pray God my bones are not mixed with those of an amputee. I might lose an arm or a leg in the confusion.’

As he spoke, going over what was no doubt an old and favourite joke, he creaked across to a row of shelves running the length of one wall. They bore over one hundred leather-bound volumes, arranged in groups of years.

‘What year did you say?’

‘Nineteen seventy-one. The sixth of January.’

The monk took down one of the more recent volumes and carried it back to the desk. He started to open it, then paused.

‘This friend of yours,’ he said, ‘she was not -forgive me - she was not a suicide?’

Patrick shook his head firmly.

‘It was an accident. She drowned. I saw her buried here, I followed her coffin.’ He struggled to keep control.

Father Antonio opened the ledger and began to leaf through the pages, muttering under his breath all the while.

‘Maggio ... aprile ... marzo ... febbraio ... ah, gennaio! Bene. L’undici ... I’otto ... il sette ... ah, ecco! Il sei gennaio!’

His finger crept slowly down the page. Patrick noticed that the nail was black, in places turning yellow.

‘Taglioni ... Trissino ... Rusconi ... Lazzarini...’ The old man intoned the names as though reading a roll-call. ‘Bastiani... Giambono ... Ah, so sad, a baby that one. I remember them, they were very unhappy ... Malifiero ...’

Patrick held his breath. The old man’s finger reached the bottom of the page and rested there, trembling fractionally, like a leaf that senses a storm building in the distance.

‘There is nothing,’ he said. ‘No entry of that name.’

‘There must be some mistake.’

‘No mistake. Unless you have given me the wrong date.’

‘Look again. Try the fifth, or the seventh.’

Brother Antonio shrugged his thin shoulders and resumed his search. Again his gnarled finger travelled down the names of the dead and the details of their interment. And again it came to rest. He shook his head limply.

‘Surely,’ Patrick urged, ‘you must remember. It was a big funeral, an important family, their only daughter. There were reports in the newspapers, I remember.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Brother Antonio, closing the ledger. He seemed ill at ease. ‘I have no recollection of such a funeral. But there are so many every day, the details slip my memory.’

‘You remembered the baby, the one you said was so sad.’

‘For its sadness, yes. But a Contarini - that would not be so great a tragedy.’

Patrick changed direction.

‘What about her mother? Do you remember her funeral?’

‘Perhaps. What was her first name?’

‘Caterina. Her maiden name was Querini. She died on the eighteenth of March 1977. I think she was buried in a section of the tomb that had originally been her daughter’s burial place.’

The monk replaced the first ledger and took down a second.

‘That would be unusual,’ he said, ‘but not unheard of.’

He consulted the ledger.

‘Contarini ... Contarini ... Ecco, ci siamo! “Contessa Caterina Contarini, of the Palazzo Contarini, Campo San Polo 2583. Born 25 February 1920, died 18 March 1977. Buried in the Tomba dei Contarini, plot no.7465, 19 March 1977.” ‘

He looked up.

‘That is all, Signor Canavan. There is no mention of a daughter. All is in order, as you see.’

He walked back to the shelf and replaced the volume. For a few moments, he stood facing the rows of ledgers, as though hesitating before taking yet another from the shelf. Then, abruptly, he turned to face Patrick. His face was hard and set, betraying a determined effort at self-control.

‘Signor Canavan, please forgive me. I am an old man. My sight is feeble, my hearing is growing dim. Soon, very soon, my name will join all the others in these ledgers. The ink will dry and before long another ledger will be added to the rest. Every day, several times, my successor will take the new ledger from its place and add more names. Sometimes the sun will shine. Sometimes, like today, there will be rain, or a heavy mist among the cypresses. The gondolas will come and go as they have done all these years. Nothing will change. San Michele will grow a little fatter with its dead, the bones will lie more heavily in the earth. Perhaps, in time, Venice will sink beneath the sea and no one will come here any more. But at heart things will be as they have always been.’

The old man paused. He took a couple of steps towards Patrick, his back bent, his thin hands clasped painfully in front of him.

‘Let the dead rest in peace, Signor Canavan. Where they come from and where they go are no concern of yours. The mausoleum of the Contarinis is already falling to dust. There is grass on its stone, and moss. It does not matter who sleeps there and who does not. They are beyond your reach, all of them. Go home, signore. Pray for us. And we shall pray for you.’

He paused a brief moment longer, then pulled his cowl about his wizened head and walked stiffly to the door.

‘Do not return, signore. There is nothing here. Nothing but grief.’

Patrick watched as the old man opened the door and walked out into the glistening rain.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Makonnen was waiting for him at Florian’s as arranged. The priest seemed ill-at-ease among the gilded mirrors and red velvet banquettes of the cafe’s luxurious interior. He was in a corner, drinking an espresso ristretto from a tiny white cup. Between sips, he stared haplessly through a window painted with mermaids at the people passing down the long arcade beside the Piazza San Marco.

Patrick sat down beside him and asked for a Fernet-Branca.

‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked Makonnen. The priest shook his head.

Would you like some?’

‘Not really. I’m not very hungry.’

‘Nor am I. But I suppose we’d better have something.’

When the waiter arrived with Patrick’s drink, he ordered one plate each of prosciutto crudo and bresaola, with a bottle of Recoara. The waiter took the order with a flourish, gave an almost imperceptible glance of disapproval at Makonnen, and left. Opposite, in a corner, an elderly grande dame sat at a table alone, watching her rouged and prune-like features ripple in a rococo mirror as she lifted a cup of hot chocolate to pursed lips.

Apart from them and the old lady, the cafe was almost empty. In Venice, no one much minds the acqua alta when a spring tide brings the sea sweeping in to the city and floods the Piazza. But on a cold day towards the end of winter, when rain rushes in from the Adriatic and there is no shelter to be found anywhere in the streets, those who can do so stay at home and warm themselves at their stoves.

‘Did you find your friend?’ asked Patrick.

Makonnen nodded. He seemed a little distrait.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He still lives in his old house. His mother died last year, and he stays on there with his father. The old man’s eighty-five now, and Claudio has his hands full looking after him. He can’t afford a housekeeper or a nurse, so he has to do everything himself. He washes and dresses him, helps him to the toilet, feeds him.’ Assefa paused, staring at his empty cup.

‘It’s strange,’ he continued. ‘But it’s like a vocation for him. He seems to lead a celibate life. Never thinks of himself. Every moment, he’s there to help the old fellow. Like a saint. We were so ashamed for him when he left the seminary, as though the priesthood was the only thing that mattered in life. Some of us thought he was damned, that he had damned himself by turning his back on the Church. And now he wipes an old man’s backside and thinks nothing of it. Not as a penance or anything like that, but as a sort of love.’

‘He sounds like a good man, your friend.’

‘No, that’s just the point. He’s not a good man. He’d hate to hear you say that. Truly he would. He drinks a lot and swears, and I think he has terrible tempers. And he hates the Church. But you’ll see for yourself. He wants to meet you. This afternoon.’

Patrick sipped his Fernet-Branca, grimacing as its bitterness reached his palate. The grande dame lifted a jewelled hand to her scrawny chin and glanced at them coldly. Pale steam rose in lazy spirals from her chocolate.

“What did you tell him?’

‘Only what you told me to, that my life is in danger, that we need help.’

‘Is he able to help us? Did you tell him what we need to know?’

Makonnen nodded.

‘Yes. He has contacts. Old friends from the days when he was an altar boy. And more recent friends. He’s a Communist now, or says he is. Before his mother died and he had to look after his father more, he belonged to some left-wing clubs in Cannaregio.’

An English family came in, shivering, handing their Burberries and streaming umbrellas to a patient waiter. There were four of them, a husband, wife, and two blond-haired children aged about seven, a boy and a girl. They seemed self-conscious, almost timid, as the English always do in foreign parts. The dowager eyed them through gold pince-nez, as though irritated to be thus disturbed by tourists out of season.

‘What about you?’ Makonnen asked. What did you find at the cemetery this morning?’ he asked.

Patrick described his fruitless visit to the island, his conversation with Brother Antonio. He heard himself speak, yet it seemed as though he stood somewhere apart, watching, listening. Detached from his surroundings, he watched the English family seat themselves, the contessa sip her chocolate, the waiters come and go like acolytes in a glazed and gilded temple.

He had come here many times in the past with Francesca, to escape the crowds in the summer, to listen to the orchestra play old dance tunes, to watch the world reflected in the mirrors, everything back to front and yet somehow more real than life, more intense.

He wondered if Ruth had ever come here. She would have fitted in, he thought, a figure out of Henry James or Fitzgerald. Americans like that were almost an extinct species now. Hollywood and Disneyland and Burger King had all but wiped them from the face of the earth. And now Ruth had joined them, a victim of a different kind of greed. It seemed crass, but he thought he loved her more now that she was dead. It had been that way with Francesca too. Would Assefa regard that as a sin, he wondered.

‘Are you all right, Patrick?’ The priest leaned over the table, a look of concern on his face. Patrick came out of his reverie.

‘I’m sorry. I must have drifted away. I was thinking about Ruth.’

‘That’s all right. You don’t have to explain.’

The waiter brought their food. They ate in silence, washing the meat down with glasses of mineral water. They were almost finished when Patrick noticed the grande dame pay her bill and take her coat and umbrella from the waiter. Instead of going straight out, she came across to their table.

“You an American?’ she asked Patrick. With a shock, he recognized the accent - Boston or maybe Cambridge. His contessa was a character out of The Aspern Papers after all.

He nodded.

‘Take my advice,’ she hissed, bending over him and clutching his shoulder with a claw-like hand. Close up, her skin was taut and mottled with age. Her breath smelled of chocolate. ‘Next time you’re here, leave the nigger outside. He doesn’t belong.’

Before Patrick could respond, she had turned and was stalking towards the door. At their table, the English family sat and talked about a thatched cottage they had just purchased somewhere in Surrey. The door closed and their tinny voices filled the little room.

They took a water-bus as far as Santa Marcuola and walked the rest of the way into Cannaregio. The rain had eased back to a drizzle. Here and there a handful of cats had ventured out to look for scraps. As they headed down towards the Ghetto, the streets became tighter and the houses taller, hemming them in. An old woman in a tattered overcoat passed, carrying shopping in a plastic bag. In a doorway, a blind man sat scraping lines in the ground with a white stick. They passed over narrow bridges, across side canals in which rotting vegetables and dog turds floated. Everywhere there a smell of poverty and neglect hovered in the air. And a deeper, more insidious smell, age mingled with despair.

Claudio Surian and his father lived on the top floor of a six-storey tenement. On the street outside, scruffy children played with a battered football. From a broken gutter water trickled down the front wall, leaving a dark, rusted stain on the ancient brickwork. The house had never been very beautiful, but once it had possessed a certain dignity that was now almost wholly eroded. Assefa pushed open the huge wooden door that led into the courtyard.

A stone staircase led up to the apartments. Assefa and Patrick climbed slowly, their feet slipping on worn steps made slick by the rain. A faint smell of urine greeted them on each of the little landings. On the wall opposite, a shutter was pulled back and a woman’s head looked out. She watched them climb, her eyes suspicious, her expression hostile.

Someone had sprinkled disinfectant on the top landing. Assefa knocked on a heavy door from which all but a few scraps of red paint had worn away. After about a minute, there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. The door opened several inches on a chain before being pulled back more widely to admit them.

Patrick’s first impression of Claudio Surian was that he had tried to commit suicide and failed. There was a look of resignation in his face, especially marked around the eyes. It was the face of a man who knows that his despair is rational and therefore unavoidable, who has considered hope among other crutches and rejected it as useless. He seemed ill. His thin cheeks exaggerated what his eyes betrayed. But his clothes were neat and tidy, and he was clean-shaven.

‘Entrate, vi prego,’ he said.

To Patrick’s surprise, the voice was pleasant, almost kindly, with not a trace of the sourness or bad temper he had expected. He shook hands with Surian and followed Assefa through the door.

The room was dimly lit, except for one area over what appeared to be a workbench. The walls were covered in masks - some white, some painted, others half-and-half. There were masks in the shape of suns and moons, masks with tall hats, chequered masks with stars for eyes. There were several examples of the plain white bauta, some complete with tricorn and long black veil. The best examples were masks of the Commedia dell’ Arte - the black half-mask of Arlecchino, Pulcinella’s long nose and pointed hat. In the centre of the floor stood a steaming cauldron filled with papier mache. Small tins of paint, bottles of thinner, and brushes covered the workbench.

‘I’m sorry,’ Surian said, finding chairs for his visitors. ‘I have very little space. This room has to serve as my workshop. My father is resting in his bedroom. If you don’t mind, we’ll talk in here.’

The only source of heat was a small paraffin heater in one corner, but the room was warm, even stuffy. A haze of cigarette smoke hung over everything like a bluish mist on the lagoon.

‘So many masks,’ exclaimed Patrick.

Surian snorted.

‘It’s our boom industry, didn’t you know? No tourist leaves Venice without at least one mask. About fifteen years ago, there were only a dozen or so mask shops in the whole of Venice. Now there are nearly three hundred.’ He sat down on a rough wooden stool. ‘I’m building up stock now for the summer season. I sell my masks to shops on the Strada Nuova mostly, and a few places near the Rialto.’

‘But these are much better than the average tourist masks.’

‘Thank you.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘It isn’t what I wanted to do with my life - but I’m sure Assefa has told you that.’ He paused and drew his stool closer to his visitors. ‘I understand you want information about our good Cardinal Migliau.’

Patrick nodded. ‘I’m willing to pay you for your time.’

Surian laughed.

‘What makes you think you could afford me? I won’t be patronized, signore. If I help you, it’s on Assefa’s account. He says he’s in danger. Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘For something he did?’

‘For something he knows. Something we both know.’

‘But you won’t tell me what it is?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘It’s very complicated. There’s no need for you to know, and I think you could be in danger if you did. Please trust us.’

Surian looked at Patrick keenly.

‘Vaffianculo!’ he swore, his manner changing abruptly. ‘I don’t trust anyone, least of all an American. You fuckers have air bases all over this country, all over Europe. You pull the strings and

we dance. And if there’s a war, we’ll do the dying while you watch. So please don’t ask me to trust you.’

‘Claudio, please ... he’s trying to help me,’ Makonnen pleaded, trying to pacify his friend.

‘Sure he is. And from what you told me, he needs a little help himself. But before I start helping strangers - and I include you in that, Assefa - I want to know what’s going on.’ Pausing, he reached into his shirt pocket to draw out a tin of tobacco and some Rizla papers. He began to roll a cigarette, carefully teasing the strands of tobacco onto the thin sheet.

What are you?’ he asked. ‘CIA?’

‘This is private,’ Patrick argued.

‘Nothing’s private to the CIA. Go and ask for my file, if you haven’t done so already. See how private life is here.’

‘This isn’t a CIA matter,’ Patrick insisted. ‘Except ...’

There was a querulous shout from an adjoining room.

‘Claudio! Claudio! Corri qui, sbrigati!’

Surian excused himself and went through a door on his left. Patrick heard the sound of a raised voice behind the thin partition.

‘Con chi stai parlando, Claudio? Che e questa gente? Ti ho detto che non voglio amici tuoi a casa mia!’

Then Surian’s voice, abruptly gentle again, patience in every syllable, placating, pacifying.

‘Nessuno, papa. Solo vecchi amici - se ne vanno subito. It’s no one, father. Just some old friends. They’ll be gone soon.’

A minute later, the door opened and Surian returned. He took his seat once more without a word and finished rolling his cigarette. He replaced the tin in his pocket and took out a box of matches.

‘Do you mean to harm Migliau?’ Surian asked. He lit the thin cigarette and raised it to his lips.

Patrick hesitated.

‘It’s nothing to me if you do,’ Surian said, blowing a ribbon of acrid smoke into the air. ‘Perhaps you would be doing some people a favour if you ... put him out of the way.’

‘I don’t want to kill him. I just want him to answer some questions, that’s all.’

‘And you think he will answer you?’

Patrick shrugged.

‘Perhaps I might have to be a little rough with him.’

Surian smiled sardonically.

‘I’m sure. Well ...’ He pulled on his cigarette. ‘I wish you luck.’

‘You aren’t going to help?’

‘I didn’t say that. Yes, I’ll help if I can. Migliau’s bad news. A lot of people would like to see him out of action. There’s just one problem.’

What’s that?’

Surian stubbed the last of his cigarette out on the edge of his stool.

‘I made some enquiries after Assefa left this morning. A friend of mine works in the local office of the party newspaper, l’Unita. He was a little surprised when I told him I wanted information on Cardinal Migliau. What do you think he told me?’

Patrick said nothing.

‘Early this morning, his best contact in the Carabinieri was in touch. Nobody is supposed to know, but it seems that Cardinal Migliau has been missing for three days. He was last seen going to his bedroom in the Palazzo Patriarcale on Monday. On Tuesday morning, his servant found the room empty. The church authorities waited twenty-four hours for a ransom note, then contacted the Carabinieri yesterday. A GIS squad arrived in Venice yesterday evening from Lavarno. Now, signore, suppose you tell me just what’s going on?’

TWENTY-NINE

It was dark by the time they left. The rain had stopped, but the atmosphere still held a muggy dampness, through which a nagging chill crept like neuralgia through bone. Patrick walked with Makonnen and Surian as far as the Rio Terra San Leonardo, where they parted company. The priest and his friend continued along the main street to the Lista di Spagna, where Surian had arranged to meet the reporter from l’Unita in a cafe.

Patrick headed down to Santa Marcuola, where he took the water-bus across to the opposite bank, disembarking at San Stae. From there he plunged into a maze of narrowing lanes and alleyways, losing himself in their bewildering complexity. Yet he was never really lost. Each time he took a wrong turning, it came right in the end. He was guided by a directional instinct he had picked up during the two summers and single winter he had spent in Venice with Francesca.

Little had altered since then. Shops had changed hands, street lights stood where none had been before, a few buildings had received fresh coats of paint. But the configuration of passages and bridges was just as he remembered it.

Deeper and deeper he sank into the skein of alleys and canals, twisting and turning, yet always heading in the general direction of the Frari. It was not late, but the streets were nearly deserted. He passed a small pasticceria, where a group of men stood drinking coffee and talking in low voices at the counter. A scrawny cat ran across his path, darting from one doorway to the next. Patrick paused on the next bridge to take his bearings.

Surian’s news had rattled him. He had managed to convince the mask-maker that he knew nothing about Migliau’s disappearance. But he could not rid himself of the nagging thought that there was a connection between it and the recent events in which he himself had been involved. Had Migliau been kidnapped? Certainly, that seemed more probable than that the cardinal should have taken flight simply because Patrick had uncovered some photographs in Dublin.

There was, however, a third possibility: that Migliau’s disappearance was in some way connected with Passover. If that was true, it could mean that fear of exposure had panicked the Brotherhood into bringing the date forward. For all Patrick knew, Passover could be starting at this very moment.

He walked on, wetting his feet from time to time in unseen puddles. People were at home, watching television, eating. He felt hungry, but he wanted to get this over before it grew much later. The calle through which he was walking seemed familiar. The house was not far now. But the closer he got, the slower his steps became. He looked round nervously, as though expecting to see Francesca tailing him. These were her streets. If her ghost walked anywhere, it walked here.

The house faced onto the Rio delle Meneghette, but the land entrance was at the end of the Calle Molin. The Contarinis had bought the palazzo in 1740, when the last of the Grimani-Calerghis died without issue. It was by no means the largest or the finest of the many palazzi in which different branches of the Contarinis had lived over the centuries. But it was the last of them and, in some ways, the closest to the family’s heart - the closest, even, to the secret they had kept alive for generation after generation.

Seen from the back or the side, like all Venetian mansions, it was unprepossessing. An old street lamp cast a baleful glow over a low wall from which the plaster had fallen away. Behind the wall, Patrick knew, there lay a courtyard, and beyond that the rear of the palazzo itself lay draped in a cloak of shadows. Here, leading onto the street, was a rickety door from which the paint had peeled, exposing the wood beneath. A corroded knocker shaped like a Moor’s head hung crookedly in its centre.

Patrick grasped the knocker tightly and banged several times. Hollow echoes rang along the calle. Footsteps sounded further back, then a door closed with a loud crash. But in the Palazzo Contarini, all was silent and dark. He raised the knocker and banged again, three times. A church bell rang in the distance, as though in mockery.

All at once he heard the sound of bolts being drawn deep within, and a door opening, and slow feet limping across the flagged courtyard. He pictured it, its blue and black and yellow tiles worn down with age, the ancient well-head carved with lions and a leaping unicorn. The footsteps reached the outer door and stopped.

‘Chi e? Che diavolo volete a quest’ ora?!’ The voice was that of an old woman, thin and petulant, speaking in the lugubrious accent of the Veneto.

‘My name is Canavan. I want to see Alessandro Contarini. I want to speak with him.’

‘Allessandro Contarini e morto. Dead! Please go away!’

‘Tell him I have to speak with him. He will remember my name. Canavan. Tell him my name is Patrick Canavan. He knows who I am. He will know what I have come to speak about.’

‘I tell you the Count is dead! There’s no one here. No one at all. Go away.’

Suddenly, a light went on in an upper window. He saw a shadowed face against the glass, then a hand throwing the window open.

‘Chi e, Maria? Che cosa vogliono? What do they want?’ A man’s voice this time, old and tired, but aristocratic.

‘He says his name is Canavan. He is asking for the Count.’

There was a long pause. Then the man at the window called again.

‘Tell him the Count is dead. There is nothing for him here.’

Patrick cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘I’ve come to talk about Francesca! You owe me this. Your family owe me an answer!’

There was a longer pause. In the alleyway, a crippled dog went past, dragging its hind legs. Patrick felt the rotting and the paralysis all about him, pervading the city. Death and decay, and a terrible stillness of the will that had lapsed into inertia.

‘Let him come up,’ the man replied at last. ‘I’ll speak with him.’

The window closed heavily. Patrick waited by the door. The dog had dragged itself into a space between two houses and lay down whimpering. Was it in pain? Patrick had no strength for compassion; there were no empty spaces left inside him. He heard a key turning in a heavy lock.

The old woman swung the door open, stepping aside to let Patrick through. She carried a hurricane lamp in one hand, but her face was turned away, shrouded in a raddled weave of shadows. She held back until he had passed, then closed and locked the door.

A shaft of yellow light fell across the courtyard from the window on the second floor. Patrick’s eye followed it up to the window itself. He could just make out the indistinct shape of someone standing near the glass, peering down into the courtyard.

The old woman slipped the key into her pocket and stepped in front of Patrick. As she did so, light from the lamp slanted across her face, revealing a little of her features to him. A sliver of memory scraped his flesh.

‘Maria? Is that you, Maria? It’s me, Patrick Canavan. Didn’t you know my name? I used to come here with Francesca. All those years ago - do you remember?’

‘Non mi ricordo di lei. I don’t remember you. No one came here with the Lady Francesca. The Lady Francesca is dead.’

But she did remember: he could hear it in her voice, sense it in the way she held back from him, as though afraid. What was she frightened of? The past?

They entered the palazzo through a low doorway on the ground floor. Generations ago, this had been where the family stored merchandise and laid their gondolas to rest through the long winter months. Not many years ago, when Patrick had last been here, there had still been boats and oars and curiosities from the Contarini past: the marble heads of Doges, three plaster angels, cracked and wound with string, great seals of state bearing the motto Pax Tibi Marce, several candelabra, each filled with a thousand candles of yellow wax, the remains of a fifteenth-century altarpiece, glittering with gold and lapis lazuli, a gaming table from the Ridotto casino, puppets dressed in faded Commedia dell’ Arte costumes, and a miniature theatre in which they could perform. He had gone there several times with

Francesca, to make the puppets dance and sing, to sit in a chair in which the last Doge of Venice had sat, and to make love silently, away from the sharp eyes of her ever-watchful family.

Now the long rooms stood cold and empty. As Patrick followed Maria to the staircase, something small and grey scurried past, fleeing the light. There was a noise of scampering, then silence again.

The stairs led to the mezzanino, once the floor on which the Contarinis, like all rich merchants of the Serenissima, had conducted their business. Even in Francesca’s day, there had been busy offices here. But now, like the floor beneath, it was hollow and echoing, and smelled terribly of neglect. Patrick thought of the weed-choked mausoleum on San Michele. He could not understand what was going on. What had happened to the Contarinis in such a short space of time? Had they suddenly lost their wealth? Or had some other, less material calamity overtaken them?

Finally, they arrived at the piano nobile, formerly the heart of the house, where the family had slept and eaten and entertained their many guests. Maria opened wide the curiously carved door that led into the great central room, stretching the length of the floor and fronting the canal outside.

The room was lit by three weak electric bulbs suspended from a cobwebbed ceiling. In the centre, the old electric chandelier hung dull and unlit, festooned with long strands of web and choked with dust. On every side, the ravages of long neglect were apparent: chairs and sofas, ottomans and tabourets, their fabric damp and rotting; unpolished tables and sideboards on which the bodies of dead cockroaches lay in shiny carapaces; broken ornaments heaped together on an uncarpeted floor.

But something else caught Patrick’s eye. When he had last been here, the rear wall had been hung with a great Gobelins tapestry sequence, almost as long as the room itself. The tapestry was no longer there, but in its place a mural had been revealed. Patrick could make out few details, but the general theme was clear. The mural was divided into panels, each depicting a scene from the life and ministry of Jesus. Something in the style reminded him of the work of Tiepolo; certainly, the fresco dated from the eighteenth century, no earlier. The figures were lightly drawn, turning pigment to light and story to form with great skill.

Clad in the damask robes and jewelled turbans of Ottoman Turks, the Wise Men laid tribute at the feet of the Infant Jesus. In the next panel, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt while, in the background, Herod’s soldiers smashed the skulls of the newly born against marble pavements and pillars of brass.

Towards the centre of the mural, the artist had woven the Stations of the Cross into a continuous narrative sequence: the flagellation, the first faltering steps on the Via Dolorosa, the first fall, the nailing to the cross, the deposition. And finally, the scene at the Tomb, as the disciples bring Christ’s mutilated body to be buried.

Patrick faltered, recognizing in this last scene the original for the representation on the door of the Contarini mausoleum. And at last he saw what he had missed on San Michele. It was obvious and simple, and it took his breath away. In most versions of the Entombment, there are four besides the crucified Christ: Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the two Marys. Here, there are ten disciples and no women. But it is the figure of Christ that fills Patrick with horror. For in this painting, Jesus is alive and bound and struggling as they carry him to his grave.

THIRTY

‘The artist was Tiepolo. Not Giambattista, but his older son Domenico. The style’s a little lighter, less allegorical. He painted it in 1758, just after he finished work on the Villa Valmarana. That was a few years after his father came back from Germany, of course: my grandfather used to say Giambattista helped him with some of the larger figures.’

The voice was that of the man who had called to Patrick from the window. He was seated at the far end of the room on a high-backed chair. The electric light made him look drained. He seemed smaller than Patrick remembered. His hands were white against the arms of the chair.

‘What happened to the tapestries?’ Patrick asked.

Alessandro Contarini smiled.

‘They were sold. I believe they fetched a lot of money. More than you can imagine. Much more than even I could afford. I think you will find them gracing the walls of a bank somewhere in Texas. Or is it California?’ He smiled again and looked directly at Patrick, as though the location of the tapestries were a confidence between friends.

‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘do you think that is possible? Will the walls of a bank in Texas become more graceful simply because they have been covered by antique tapestries?’ He paused, folding his hands sweetly on his lap, like a well-behaved child. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps not.’

He lifted one hand as though to admonish the thought of grace in such an alien and uncultured place, then beckoned, a nervous gesture, more Asiatic than Italian. So soft and so deliberate.

‘Please, Signor Canavan, come closer, let me see you better.’ He made a faint, dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘Leave us, Maria. We wish to be alone.’

Patrick heard the door close behind him with a muted click. He took several steps towards the count, approaching within a few feet of him.

‘Basta! That’s far enough, Signor Canavan. I can see you well from there. You’ll find a chair near you - please sit down.’

The chair was grimy but fairly dry. Patrick brushed it gingerly before seating himself on the edge.

Alessandro Contarini had aged dramatically in the past twenty-one years. Patrick remembered him as a handsome man in his late fifties, with smooth grey hair brushed back from his forehead, exquisite clothes, and skin that was still almost without wrinkles. Now he looked like a desiccated replica of his old self: his skin was grey and mottled, his cheeks hollow, his eyes sunken and haunted. Thin white hair straggled untidily down to his neck. The exquisite clothes were stained and torn, the polished white teeth that had once smiled so patronizingly had turned yellow or disintegrated to blackened stumps.

‘I’m sorry you do not find the palazzo as you last saw it,’ he said. His voice was strained and hesitant, with a tight, wheezing note; yet beneath the surface, Patrick could detect something of the old hauteur.

Patrick said nothing. The image from the fresco had embedded itself in his mind: a group of hooded figures circling about their helpless victim, dragging him towards a stone sarcophagus in a dark tomb set about with vines.

‘It was something of a shock to see you standing there tonight,’ the old man went on. ‘Did you know that someone was here this morning asking about you? No, I can see from your face that you know nothing about it. That is very curious, is it not? How long is it now? Twenty years?’

Who came here?’ Patrick asked. ‘What did they want to know?’ He was frightened. Who the hell could have known so quickly that he was in Venice?

The count ignored his questions. ‘It must be more than twenty,’ he said. ‘And now you come to my attention twice in one day. You aren’t famous, are you, Signor Canavan? You haven’t won a lottery or killed a president? No? And yet important people come here asking questions. They wanted to know about the past, about your friendship with my daughter. And now the past turns up on my doorstep howling demands into the night, “You owe me an answer!”’

The old man paused.

‘Is that all you think I owe you? I seem to remember that, when we last met, I offered you money. That was immodest of me -I apologize. Perhaps we understand one another better now. You were a child then, little older than my son, Guido. And yet your grief was real, not a child’s grief at all. I am sorry you were hurt, sorry you were made to suffer. Please forgive me.’ He sighed, passing a long white hand over his cheeks.

‘At my age, nothing is left but forgiveness. So many things left unsaid, undone. And so much said and done that I regret. It will come to you in time, Patrick Canavan.’

‘Where is Francesca?’ Patrick asked softly.

‘Francesca is sleeping. Francesca is dead.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ he said. He wondered why he was so calm, why his voice had fallen to little more than a whisper. ‘There’s no need to lie any longer. Just tell me where she is, that’s all I want to know.’

‘You speak as though she were alive.’

‘I’ve been to the tomb on San Michele. There’s nothing there. And I have a photograph.’

He took the crumpled picture from his pocket and passed it to the count. Contarini looked at it for a long time.

‘Where did you find this?’ he asked finally.

‘Does it matter?’

The old man shrugged.

‘Perhaps not. Well - what is it you want?’

‘An explanation.’

‘There are no explanations that would make sense to you.’

‘Suppose you let me be the judge of that.’ Patrick hesitated. He leaned forward, softening his voice. ‘Signor Contarini, I don’t think you understand. I loved your daughter once. I believe she loved me. Twenty-one years ago, she was taken from me. Someone, for reasons I cannot even guess at, pretended she was dead. I was summoned here by you and made to go through a mock funeral. I saw no reason to ask questions then. I left when you asked me to leave. But I will not leave tonight without answers.’

Contarini handed the photograph back to Patrick. His hand was shaking, and Patrick noticed tears at the corners of his eyes.

‘Signor Canavan, please believe me: Francesca loved you as much as you thought, and maybe more.’ He looked up. His face bore a look of infinite, irredeemable sadness. ‘I think...’ He faltered. ‘I think she still loves you. Or at least your memory.’

The count straightened and looked directly at Patrick.

‘Do not try to find her, Signor Canavan. She can never come back to you, never return to the world you inhabit. For you and your world, it is as though she had died. Don’t try to change it. Leave things as they are.’

Patrick took a deep breath. Contarini’s words were like a finger tearing back a scab, exposing an ancient wound. He had thought the pain of Francesca’s loss something wasted and bereft of strength, but in a moment it had returned with renewed vigour, like a blunt knife suddenly sharpened, cutting his flesh.

‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why?’

The count did not reply at once. He sat in his high-backed chair like a faded Renaissance prince whose court has deserted him.

‘Signor Canavan,’ he began, ‘there have been Contarinis almost as long as there has been a city called Venice. Eight Doges of the Republic bore our name. We owned palaces and ships, warehouses and trading houses here and throughout the Mediterranean. From the beginning we sat on the Great Council and the Senate and the Council of Ten. Now there is only myself, an old man waiting to die in a house that is already a ruin. Nothing you can do or say now can hurt me or help me.

‘But you want the truth, and the truth is precisely what I cannot give you. It is, I suppose, too shocking. Not for me, perhaps; but others would find it so. And in their rage, they would do what the many-headed crowd has always done: destroy what they do not understand.’

The old man paused again. His pale eyes scanned the dimly-lit room as though seeing it for the first time.

‘There are ghosts here,’ he said. ‘This room is full of them. Some of them I can see, others only hear. Perhaps they are not literal ghosts: I do not think they could harm us, at least not in any physical sense. But they are real all the same. Listen, Signor Canavan, let me tell you about them.

‘Centuries ago, when Venice was still a vassal of Byzantium, a group of merchants defied the Emperor’s ban on trade with Egypt and sailed to Alexandria. They filled ten ships with spices, silks, and carpets and came home rich men. One of them was my ancestor, Pietro Contarini. Two years later, he and another man returned to Alexandria; but this time they had not come for spices or cloth. They stole the mummified remains of Saint Mark and smuggled them back to Venice. The mummy was laid to rest beneath the High Altar in the Basilica - and Venice became a great pilgrimage centre.’

The count fell silent. On the canal outside, a motor-powered boat chugged slowly through the night. The sound of the engine filtered past heavy shutters into the room, rising briefly, then dying away as the boat turned a corner and vanished.

‘Pietro Contarini,’ he continued, his voice reduced almost to a whisper, ‘brought something else back to Venice along with the body of the saint. He had discovered something which, to him, was infinitely more valuable than the bones of a holy man. Pietro’s discovery was not a relic or a piece of merchandise or a box of treasure - it was the truth. A truth so devastating that he kept it to himself for the next forty years.’

Patrick fixed his eyes on the count’s pale lips as he related his tale. In the shadows of the room, he imagined others crouched and listening.

‘On his deathbed, however, Pietro told one of his sons, a man of over forty himself by then, Andrea. In those days, merchants were still trading regularly with North Africa, in spite of the objections of the Pope and the Byzantines. Andrea took a ship to

Alexandria, then made his way overland to Palestine. To Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.’

In the room, nothing moved. Even the shadows held still. Outside, all was silent. Patrick could hear his breath coming and going in the stillness.

‘Over five years passed before Andrea returned. He had seen with his own eyes what Pietro had only heard about. And he had met the keepers of his father’s secret. In the few years that remained to him - for he died six years later of the plague - he confided in members of his family and a few, carefully-chosen friends.

‘That, Signor Canavan, was the beginning of our rise to power. Pietro’s secret was, indeed, more precious than silks or spices.’

Contarini paused.

‘But power has a price,’ he resumed. ‘A man cannot have power and riches, yet possess his own soul. No more a family. The Contarinis, the Barbaros, the Grimanis, the Sagredos ... all the noble houses who came to share our secret - all paid their price. Our families, our private affections, our faith, even our souls ... all for the sake of a truth the multitude could neither understand nor tolerate.’

He fell silent, folding his sallow hands together like the wings of a giant, broken butterfly. A tremor passed through them and grew still. Outside, the lapping of water against stone was the only sound.

‘How,’ Patrick asked, ‘does this explain Francesca? Her death, her being alive?’

Contarini sighed. It was a deep sigh, almost a moan.

‘Don’t you see? Francesca was my price. Her happiness was the sacrifice I had to make. And you were her sacrifice - all she had, all she wanted.’

‘For this?’ Patrick rose angrily, gesturing violently at the crumbling damp-stained walls, the broken and rotting furniture.

The count shook his head. The long white hair had fallen across his face like a veil.

‘No,’ he said. His voice had changed in timbre, acquiring vigour from some hidden reserve. He raised a hand and pointed, jabbing again and again at the great fresco.

‘For that, you fool! For that!’

THIRTY-ONE

Patrick left the palazzo in a daze. Contarini’s anger had subsided into a fit of coughing, and Maria had hurried in to tend him and chase his visitor away. He had left quickly, chased by shadows, harried by ghosts, out into the awful night.

The crippled dog still lay crouched in its corner, shivering with cold. Patrick felt torn between disgust and pity. He wanted to throw stones at it or break its neck. Its misery appalled and frustrated him: to drive it away or put it to sleep were the only options he could stomach. But he did neither. He lacked both courage and conviction.

Instead, he turned his back on the dog and the palace of the Contarinis, and walked quickly out of the calle. A freezing mist had moved in off the Adriatic and crept across the city while Patrick talked with Contarini. It had worked its way slowly along the streets, and now lay flat on the surface of the canals, obscuring the rounded backs of bridges and drifting into every calle, fondamenta and rugetta. Like wisps of white smoke, its tendrils wandered through the sleeping streets, curling about the infrequent street-lamps, blurring and softening what little light there was. In archways and sottoporticos, thick masses of it lay like predators, waiting for the unwary.

Patrick turned his collar up against the chill air. In his agitation, he had taken a wrong turning shortly after leaving the palazzo. Now the mist was playing with him, teasing him, leading him further and further astray. His footsteps echoed between the close-packed buildings on either side -a desolate sound that only emphasized how alone he was in this half-deserted city.

He picked up speed, but the further he walked the less familiar his surroundings seemed. Reason told him to knock on the first door he came to and ask the way. But it was after midnight, and the bolted doors and shuttered windows he passed held out no prospect of a warm welcome.

After a while, he came to a deserted square. He found the name on a blue and white plate high up on one corner: Campo dei Carmini. But it meant nothing to him. Along one side of the little square, the dark facade of a baroque church loomed menacingly out of the mist. Its troubled pillars and sinister windows reminded him of the tombs on San Michele, as though the church had been constructed for the dead and not the living.

Leaving the square, he paused to read the name of the street he had just entered. As he did so, he heard a sound behind him. It had resembled a foot scraping against stone. And it had not been an echo.

Pressing himself against the side wall of the church, he listened carefully for the sound to be repeated. He could not be certain, but he thought it had come from the square. Contarini had said that someone had been asking questions about him. Was there someone out there now, following him?

He moved on, walking more slowly now, straining to distinguish between his own footsteps and the echoes they raised, listening for the tell-tale sound of someone tailing him. If he could lead his shadow on, then double back and move in from behind, he might be able to collar him. But the mist and his own disorientation limited his freedom to act.

A narrow alleyway opened out onto a bridge. In a window opposite, a light was burning. He crossed the bridge, then halted, waiting. The silence was thick and oppressive: he wanted to call out, to tear it to pieces without remorse. It came again: a single scrape in the alleyway. Through an arch, he caught sight of another canal: the passage ran down to the water and, as far as Patrick could see, ended there. If he could trick his pursuer into heading that way, he might be able to trap him.

He headed slowly down the passage. ‘Don’t lose me now, for God’s sake,’ he whispered. The mist thinned out a little here, but he had to step carefully lest he mistake the edge of the bank and plunge into the water. His guess turned out to be correct: the passage ended at the water, and there was no path either to right or left.

Intuition had suggested that someone would have left a boat tied up here, otherwise there would have been little point to the small landing area at the end of the passage. Through the mist, he could make out the shape of a small sandolo covered in a heavy tarpaulin. He pulled the boat nearer with the painter and slipped over the side, almost losing his footing on the slippery cloth.

He crouched down in the shallow vessel, thankful for the mist, just able to see the end of the passageway over the edge of the bank. And there, at last, an unmistakable footstep! He felt tension build in his stomach and all through his muscles.

A shadow moved. Patrick held himself ready to spring. Everything depended on how close his pursuer came to the edge: far enough, and he might be able to grab him and pull him over. At least he had the element of surprise. The mist parted and the shadow became a dark figure. Patrick held his breath. ‘Come closer, damn you! To the edge. Come on!’ The figure hesitated, frightened perhaps that he might lose his footing in the mist and fall. Patrick felt the sandolo rock uneasily beneath him: it made a poor platform from which to launch himself at his pursuer.

The figure paused, then turned abruptly and began to walk back along the sottoportico. Patrick flexed his legs and jumped onto the bank, falling on his knees. As he landed, he saw the figure look round and catch sight of him. He scrambled to his feet in time to see his pursuer stumble into the mist.

‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘I want to speak to you!’

There was a sound of running footsteps. Patrick broke into a trot. He reached the street again just in time to see the mist fold round a moving shadow. Footsteps rang out like bullets in the darkness. Patrick set off in pursuit, following the sound.

He ran breathless through a maze of alleyways, across bridges, along narrow embankments, the sound of footsteps luring him on, deeper and deeper into the swirling mist. Sometimes he thought he had lost his quarry: he would take a false turn and all but lose the scampering footsteps, then suddenly he would come out along a different passage and hear them ahead of him once more. Twice he caught sight of the running figure ahead of him, a dark blur in the mist.

Out of breath, he stopped on a little bridge to catch his wind. Leaning against the metal balustrade, he looked up and caught sight of someone on a second bridge, just yards away. The mist parted momentarily, giving him a clearer look. His head felt light. He could feel the blood pounding in his temples, his heart pumping wildly in his chest, making him giddy. Had he been mistaken? He looked again, but the mist had swept back. There was no one on the other bridge.

‘Francesca!’ he called. ‘Francesca, fermati!’

Running footsteps sounded on the riva just beyond

the bridge where the figure had been standing. Patrick felt a new energy sweep through him. He dashed off the bridge, almost falling down a short flight of steps in his haste.

The footsteps were on his right now. Spinning, he hurried down a mist-choked alleyway, coming out onto a wider street just in time to see the figure vanish again. Gasping for breath, he set off in pursuit. A sharp, stitching pain flared up in his side, making him bend almost double. Gritting his teeth, he pressed on. His legs were like lead, and his head was swimming.

‘Fran.. .cesca ... Per grazia di Dio!... fermati!’

His breath was coming now in harsh, laboured gasps as his lungs struggled in the damp air. A broken paving-stone caught his foot, sending him sprawling on his face. Winded, he lay for half a minute, his head spinning, fighting for each breath.

Closing his eyes against the pain, he pushed himself up and took a step forward. A pang of pure agony stabbed through his gut. Lights exploded in his head. His legs buckled and gave way. He felt himself falling, his body out of control, then all feeling left him and he was plunging, disembodied, through the deepest blackness he had ever known.

He opened his eyes. It was still dark, but the mist had cleared. His head ached intolerably, and his eyes were painful. Blinking, he thought he could make out stars in a black sky. He was lying on his back against something hard. With an effort, he pulled himself to a sitting position.

On either side, dark buildings slipped by as though in a dream. There were no lights anywhere, but as his eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, he could make out the pattern of the Grand Canal. He was in

the mysterious gondola again, being rowed alone by a nameless and faceless gondolier. They were further down the Canal this time, heading for St Mark’s. The torches and candles of his previous dream had been extinguished, and the water was empty of other craft. All was silent as before.

It disturbed him that he could remember everything of his earlier dream, that he knew it had been a dream, and that he was certain, as he had been before, that he was not at this moment dreaming. And yet he could neither hear nor speak.

The gondola began to veer towards the left bank. As they drew close, he thought he recognized the twin-arched windows and ornamented upper storey of the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli. The boat slipped into a narrow side canal and made its way slowly through a labyrinth of channels, some only wide enough to permit the passage of a single craft. Unseen, they passed the backs and facades of tall houses. Here and there, Patrick could see a taper in a high window. Once, he caught sight of a woman watching them from a low balcony, her blonde hair combed loose in long, weeping tresses, and pale breasts cupped in tired hands, like offerings.

They slid beneath low bridges, the gondolier stooping down to get through. Once, in the distance, he could see through a gap between tall houses part of a wide campo. A bonfire had been lit, and in the centre of the square, a group of blind men wielding long knives chased a frightened pig in ever-decreasing circles. Then the scene was blotted out by a high wall covered in ivy. The gondola slipped deeper into the maze.

They passed near an embankment on which a crippled dog dragged itself painfully along. Patrick was sure the dog reminded him of something, but he had forgotten what it was. He realized that, although he could neither hear nor speak, he was not wholly cocooned from his surroundings. He could feel the chilly air against his skin, and, if he dipped a hand into the water, it would come out wet and cold. And yet he sensed some sort of barrier between himself and this world. He had been brought here as a spectator, not a participant. But what was it he had been brought to see?

The boat slowed suddenly, and Patrick noticed that they were turning in towards the bank. Out of the darkness loomed the canal gate of a large palazzo. Two torches flared on either side, held fast by iron brackets, and a third was held by a servant dressed in a bauta, waiting just inside the open gate. Above the gate, a large moulding represented a lamb carrying a cross.

They swung in to a low flight of stone steps, and the gondolier tied up skilfully at the nearest mooring post. The gondola twisted round and scraped against the steps. The servant stepped forward, holding his torch high.

At that moment, something happened to Patrick’s ears, as though an invisible blockage had been removed. He could hear the sound of water lapping around him, and the wooden hull of the gondola scraping the steps. Like the dog he had seen earlier, the scraping sound reminded him of something. He stepped out of the gondola onto the first step. The servant bowed from the waist, then straightened. Patrick noticed his eyes, gazing at him from behind the mask: the lids were heavy, the pupils glazed and flecked with tiny specks of gold.

‘Abbiate la grazia di seguirmi. Isignori vi attendono. Please accompany me, sir. Their lordships are awaiting you.’

THIRTY-TWO

‘Can you hear me, Signor Canavan? Please nod if you can hear me.’

The voice sounded muffled and remote, but the words were English. Why were they speaking English?

‘Please try to answer, Signor Canavan.’

He tried to open his eyes, but they felt as though someone had stuck them together with glue. His lips would not move.

‘Is all right, Signor Canavan. Just let me know if you can hear me.’

He nodded, and, as he did so, experienced a wave of intense nausea. The nausea gave way to blackness. Then out of the blackness the face of the servant in the bauta came towards him. The mouth opened as though in speech, but Patrick could hear nothing. The face was swallowed up by blackness.

‘Can you hear me now, Signor Canavan?’

This time his eyes opened. He saw a blurred face staring down at him, a man’s face, wearing a look of concern. The words were English, but the accent Italian.

‘Yes. Who ...?’

‘My name is Doctor Luciani. You are in the Ospedale Civile. Capisce? Do you understand?’

Patrick nodded feebly.

‘You were brought here last night. Una signora ... a lady brought you here after she find you in the street. You were unconscious. Can you remember anything? Did you have an accident?’

Patrick shook his head. He felt as though last

night’s fog had been concentrated and decanted into his skull. His stomach was nauseous. It was like a migraine, only worse.

‘You mean - not have an accident ... or not remember?’

‘Mi ricordo ... la nebbia ... I remember ... mist... running ... a gondola.’

Patrick had replied in Italian; strangely, he found it easier, as though English had become foreign to him.

‘Ah, parla Italiano. Benissimo.’ The doctor paused. ‘Signor Canavan, I want to carry out some tests. They are merely to establish whether or not you have suffered some injury to your brain. You may have fallen or been struck. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Later, I would like you to have an X-ray. And possibly an EEG. Just to be sure. But at this stage, I only wish to test your reactions to stimuli. There’s nothing to be worried about.’

Patrick’s sight was clearing. His head still throbbed, but his thoughts were less confused. Memories of the night before were beginning to flood back: Contarini in his kingdom of rats, a lame dog whining among shadows, the fresco on the wall of the palazzo.

A nurse came forward to assist the doctor. Patrick was in no condition to argue as she and Luciani began to prick and prod various parts of his anatomy. They flashed lights in his eyes, took his temperature and blood pressure, examined his ears for signs of blood, and tested his reflexes.

He remembered getting lost in the mist, then chasing someone who had been tailing him. What then? Had someone attacked him? Without warning, the image of a bridge formed in his mind, and on it a shadowy figure, half-hidden in mist.

‘Doctor!...’

‘Please, Signor Canavan, relax. We’ll soon be finished.’

‘No, please ... You said ... a woman brought me here. Una signora ... What was she like? What did she look like? Per piacere ... e importante ... molto importante.’

The doctor shrugged.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get a very good look at her. You were my first concern. When I went back to reception, she had gone.’

What age was she? Young, old?’

‘Did you know her? Is that it? She said you were a stranger, that she had been out late and found you in a state of collapse.’

What age!?’

‘About forty, I think. Quite thin, she was quite thin. And smallish, not a tall woman. I’m sorry, I can’t remember. Perhaps one of the nurses ...’

Patrick lay back, helpless. Images of the dream that had followed his collapse were forming in his brain: dark water peeling back beneath the sharp prow of the gondola, stone steps thick with moss, a huge pig, bleeding, running in tightening circles, eyes flecked with gold behind a carnival mask ... He was frightened that the dream would pull him back into unconsciousness again. Desperately, he forced his eyes to stay open.

‘I miei vestiti... Where have you put my clothes?’

‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ the nurse reassured him. ‘They’re in this locker by your bed. Everything’s safe, don’t fret.’

‘La mia giacca ... my jacket, please look in the pocket. A photograph ... there’s a photograph.’

The doctor looked up impatiently from his examination and motioned to the nurse.

‘Take a look while I finish this. It may help jog his memory.’

The nurse found Patrick’s jacket and went through the pockets carefully. Everything was there - wallet, passport, keys, money - everything except the photograph.

By mid-afternoon, Patrick’s head had cleared completely. Dr Luciani allowed him a little light food, and the nurse propped him up in a half-sitting position. They left him in a side ward, with nothing for company but a battered television permanently tuned to a children’s channel. He asked them to contact Makonnen at the hotel, and an hour later he arrived, anxiety written all over his face.

Patrick smiled and reached out a hand.

‘If I didn’t know better,’ he laughed, ‘I’d say you were looking pale.’

‘I am pale,’ Makonnen answered, sitting down. ‘I didn’t know what to do last night, when you didn’t come back to the hotel. You said you’d be back before midnight. I thought of contacting the police - but what could I tell them?’

‘I’m sorry. Things got a little ... difficult. I found ... Francesca’s father.’ He paused. ‘Assefa, I think they may be on to us. Someone was asking about me at the Contarinis’

‘How could they have found us so quickly?’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, we’d best move to another hotel. Or better still, find lodgings through your friend Claudio. By the way, what did his reporter friend have to say last night?’

Assefa shrugged.

‘Migliau is still missing. There has still been no demand for a ransom. It’s as though he’s vanished into thin air. The Carabinieri are growing frantic. The official view seems to be that he was kidnapped, but that something went badly wrong. They expect his body to turn up in a canal any time now. However...’

‘Yes?’

‘As I said, that’s the official view. Claudio’s friend has other ideas. His name is Aldo Siniscalchi. I’ve arranged for you to meet him. You’ll like him: he thinks, asks questions, gets impatient. For several years now, he’s been keeping a file on Migliau. Well, not just Migliau, but the Church in Venice generally.’ He paused. A nurse looked in, glanced curiously at the American and his visitor, and left again.

‘Patrick, did you know that three of the eight popes elected in this century have been patriarchs of Venice? As I told you before, some people think Migliau may be number four. He got to be what he is now chiefly through family connections, but Siniscalchi thinks there’s a lot more to him than a coat of arms.

‘He got interested in Migliau originally because of the Cardinal’s extreme right-wing stance. Migliau has never hidden his opinions: he has been consistently outspoken in his opposition to reform in the Church or, for that matter, in society at large. No birth-control, no abortion, no divorce, no married priests, no women priests - the usual stock-in-trade of an ecclesiastical reactionary.’

Patrick smiled.

‘I take it you don’t see eye to eye.’

Makonnen shook his head.

‘No. But I have no choice. God did not do me the favour of ensuring that I was born in Europe or America. From the Third World, things look very different. Don’t get me wrong - I’m actually quite conservative in many matters. I don’t approve of Claudio or the communism he has espoused. That’s not the answer. But the communists are right about some things. You can’t preach the Gospel to a man with an empty belly. You can’t enthuse about the Kingdom of God to someone living in daily fear of arrest by a right-wing death-squad. And I don’t think you can promote the growth of democracy by bolstering up dictatorships.’

‘And Migliau thinks you can?’

‘He doesn’t see the relevance. For him, the Church’s mission is to save souls, not lives. To rebel against the state, even if that state is steeped in injustice and bloody to its elbows, is a cardinal sin. To practise birth-control, even when you and your family are starving, is to contravene God’s eternal law.’

‘But that’s little more than the Pope himself has been saying for years anyway.’

Makonnen sighed.

“You don’t have to remind me. How do you think Migliau got to be Patriarch of Venice? But he wants to go further. If he had his way, he’d turn the clock back in ways you can’t imagine. Even I had no conception until last night.

‘He’d declare Vatican II invalid, abandon the principle of collegiality, reintroduce the Tridentine Mass. He’d ban all dialogue with other churches, prohibit relations with non-Christian religions, restate the dogma of Jewish culpability for the death of our Lord. With Migliau as Pope, the Church would take a major step backwards. There’d be an Index of Prohibited Books again, heresy trials, widespread excommunication.’

Patrick shook his head in disbelief.

‘You can’t be serious.’

Makonnen raised his eyebrows.

‘No? What makes you think I can’t? Compared

with thirty or forty years ago, the Catholic Church is positively giddy with modern thinking. And yet people like you - even people like myself - think it’s all but standing still. Men like Migliau are scared stiff. They see what the reforms have done, what they are still doing; they think forward another thirty or forty years, and in their imaginations they see the end of the Church as they know it: no Mass, no priesthood, no hierarchy, no papacy - perhaps not even a God. I think that’s an exaggeration, in fact I know it is - but try telling that to a hardliner like Migliau.’

Patrick shrugged.

‘So Migliau’s a Catholic fundamentalist afraid of change. What’s new? Conservatism and the Catholic hierarchy are scarcely strangers.’

‘Perhaps. But Migliau goes yet further. One of the cardinal’s greatest fears is that fundamentalist Protestants will start to negotiate for political influence in Europe just as they have been doing in the States. If that happens, they will draw away a lot of the God-fearing right whose support would be essential for a moral and religious revolution. Migliau knows he has to get in first.

‘Siniscalchi has evidence that the cardinal has had meetings with politicians from the extreme right, not just here in Italy, but in France, Spain, Germany, Austria, and possibly elsewhere. There are no documents, of course, nothing that l’Unita or any other paper can publish. But one report suggests that Migliau has offered to do a deal. If he becomes pope, he will instruct his bishops in each of those countries to see to it that their flocks vote for his candidates. Once in power, they will pledge political and legislative support for his campaign against modernism in all its forms. Migliau will be the first pope in centuries with more than encyclicals as his weapons. He’ll have a police state at his disposal.’

THIRTY-THREE

Patrick felt the breath thicken in his chest. It sounded plausible, too plausible.

‘You say Siniscalchi has evidence of this?’

‘Of a sort, yes. But hard proof, no.’

‘Can he get hard proof?’

‘Yes. He knows someone who has access to Migliau’s office. He wants to see you tonight -he may have something for you then.’

‘You said he disagreed with the police theory about a kidnapping. What’s his explanation for the disappearance?’

‘Just that the kidnapping theory doesn’t hold water. No one on the right would dare lay a finger on Migliau. Nor, to be honest, would they want to. The same goes for the Mafia. That leaves the left. Siniscalchi has more contacts than the police with left-wing factions and terrorist groups - or so he told me - and he swears that Migliau’s disappearance is as much a mystery to them as to anybody else.’

‘What does that leave?’

‘It leaves the possibility that Migliau has dropped out of circulation from choice. For reasons known only to Migliau and whomever Migliau confides in. He thinks it could tie in with our problem, though he doesn’t know how.’

Patrick paused.

‘How much have you told him?’

‘I . . .’

At that moment, the door opened and Dr Luciani came into the room. He smiled and introduced himself to Makonnen.

‘I wonder if you would mind waiting outside,

Mr Makonnen. I’d like to have a word with your friend.’

When Assefa had gone, the doctor sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Patrick.

Well, Signor Canavan, how do you feel?’

‘Much better, thank you. Completely well, in fact. If you don’t mind, I’d like to leave as soon as possible.’

A frown creased Luciani’s high forehead.

‘Actually, Signor Canavan, I do mind. You may feel well, but I would like you to stay here for at least another twenty-four hours.’

“What for?’

‘Just observation. There are a few more tests I would like to run. In a few days’ time, I would like you to have a CT scan. We don’t have the equipment here, but the hospital in Mestre has had a scanner installed recently, and I think I can have you booked in there for an appointment later this week.’

Patrick felt a stab of alarm.

‘Is that necessary? Is something wrong?’

The doctor shook his head vigorously.

‘No, no. I have no reason to think so.’

‘Then...’

Luciani interrupted.

‘Signor Canavan, have you been experiencing ... any auditory or visual disturbances recently?’

‘I don’t understand. Disturbances?’

‘Perhaps hallucinations would be a better word. Allucinazioni. Any of the senses could be affected. You might taste or smell something that was not there. A food or a perfume, flowers perhaps. Or it might be a sound - music, a voice ...’

Patrick looked away. He heard water lapping, smelt a woman’s body, warm and close.

‘No,’ he lied. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘You are sure? Think very hard.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Why do you ask?’

The doctor hesitated.

‘On the basis of what happened to you and the test results I have had back, I think you may be suffering from a form of focal epilepsy. Please, don’t be alarmed. It need not be serious. And there are other possible diagnoses. I only want you to help me.’

‘But it may be serious. That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?’

Luciani did not reply at once.

‘Signor Canavan, I have no wish to alarm you. Diagnosis in such matters can be extremely difficult: that is why I would like you to undergo further tests. And even if a firm diagnosis is made, establishing the aetiology - the cause - will be far from simple.

‘The most common cause of focal epilepsy is a lesion of the temporal lobe of the brain. That is why I want you to have the EEG and, if possible, the CT scan. If there is a lesion, it will normally give rise to hallucinations of some kind. The lesion may be minor or, at your age, it may be a tumour. I say that, not to frighten you, but to convey some notion of the potential seriousness of your condition, and, therefore, of the need for your co-operation. Tell me, have you had episodes like this before?’

Patrick hesitated.

‘No. Not exactly ... There have been dreams. Dei sogni.’

What sort of dreams?’

Patrick attempted to explain. When he finished, Luciani nodded.

‘Very well. I would like to speak about your case with one of my colleagues here. He is a specialist in neurological disorders. I think he may be able to see you some time this evening. I must emphasize that you take what I am telling you very seriously. I realize

that you are perhaps in ... some kind of trouble. That is not my business. But your well-being is.

‘If you have had episodes such as the ones you have described, it is likely that the lesion is quite far advanced. You may have to undergo surgery. Whatever matters are troubling you right now, I would ask you to do your best to put them out of your mind. This must take priority. Otherwise, the consequences could be serious. Do you understand?’

Patrick nodded. He felt numb. There was no pain, only shadowy visions. How could shadows kill him? There must be some mistake.

‘I have to leave now, but I’ll be back this evening. I hope to bring my colleague with me. Please don’t worry. We have excellent facilities here and in Mestre. Even if we have to operate, there is nothing to be concerned about. There will be a nurse on hand at all times: let her know if you need anything, or if you experience any fresh symptoms.’

At the door, he paused.

‘Signor Canavan, I think I should tell you that there is a Carabinieri inspector downstairs. His name is Maglione, from the station at San Zaccaria. He has been waiting for permission to interview you.’ He glanced at the floor. ‘Do you have any idea why he wants to see you?’

‘No, I ... There must be some mistake. I’ve done nothing.’

‘Please don’t play games with me, signore. We found a gun in the pocket of your jacket. It has been placed in the hospital safe until we decide what to do with it. Now, I can ask this gentleman from the Carabinieri to leave; but if he insists on seeing you, I may not be able to stop him. As your doctor, I would prefer you not to be placed under any unnecessary stress at the moment. Frankly, I’m

worried in case it triggers another attack. But I cannot refuse a reasonable request from the police. So, you tell me: what shall I do?’

Patrick thought quickly.

‘Let him come up,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. But I’d like a little longer to speak with my friend, Mr Makonnen. It’s a private matter, and it is important to me. I promise you it has nothing to do with a criminal offence of any nature.’

Luciani took a while to make up his mind.

‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll tell Maglione he can see you in ten minutes. Will that be enough?’

‘Yes, I think so. Thank you.’

As he left, Luciani spoke briefly to Makonnen, who was still waiting outside.

‘Assefa, please close the door,’ said Patrick as he entered.

‘What is it, Patrick? Are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m fine. Listen, Assefa - we don’t have much time. There’s a policeman waiting for me downstairs. God knows what’s going on, but I don’t intend to hang around here to find out. You’ve got to help me find a back way out of this place.’

‘But the doctor said ...’

‘I don’t give a damn what he said. I can’t stay here. Nor can you. Passover starts in a couple of days. We don’t have any time to lose.’

THIRTY-FOUR

They walked to Cannaregio through the clamorous dim light of mid-afternoon. Like refugees nearing an ill-marked border, they looked about them constantly, at every moment fearful of arrest. Every face, every gesture seemed to threaten betrayal or discovery.

Gradually, they left the more populated streets behind and began to relax. Patrick told Assefa what had happened after leaving him the night before. He described the chase after someone he had thought was Francesca, his collapse from exhaustion, and his dream. When he finished, Assefa walked beside him for a while in silence. They crossed the Rio di Noale onto the long stretch of the Fondamenta della Misericordia. A boat carrying refuse passed, headed for the Canale della Sacche. The driver waved at them and smiled. A faint smell of rotting garbage hung in the air for a moment.

‘You say you passed a square in which men were chasing a pig,’ said Assefa at last.

“Yes. Blind men. With knives.’

With knives, yes. And this scene - did it mean anything to you?’

‘Mean anything?’ Patrick could sense his friend’s unease. He watched the heavy boat piled high with rubbish chug out of sight. Why should it mean something? It was the sort of thing you see in dreams. Nonsense, really.’ But he knew that could not be true. Nothing else in his dreams had been nonsense, they had all made perfect sense: and he could remember the details with all the exactness that an invalid remembers pain.

Assefa shook his head.

‘No, Patrick. Not nonsense. In the eighteenth century - are you listening, Patrick? This is important - in the eighteenth century, on each of the two Sundays of the Carnival every year, the city would arrange for blind men to gather in a square in order to slaughter a pig. It was a sort of spectacle, something for the nobili to laugh at, to feel superior about. Are you telling me you’ve never heard of it?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘And yet you dreamed of it. You knew nothing about it, yet you dreamed it was happening.’

By the time they reached the Ghetto area, it was almost dark. Centuries ago, the Jews of Venice had been confined to this section of the city, the first of a multitude of ghettoes throughout the world. Now, only a couple of synagogues survived on the edge of squalor. As they passed the Scuola Canton, Patrick wondered what Migliau would do with the Jews if he came to power. Would he return them to their ghettoes, force them to wear the letter ‘O’ on their chests or yellow hats once more, make them pay over and over for the supposed crime of killing his god? For a moment, he dismissed such thoughts as ridiculous: not even a pope could bring the Middle Ages back again. And at once he remembered the small plaque that faces the main synagogue in the Calle del Ghetto Vecchio, commemorating the deaths of two hundred Venetian Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

There, just ahead of them, was the tenement in which Surian and his father lived. In a city where a new building is almost a contradiction in terms, the block seemed not merely old but ailing, as though infected by some insidious and wasting disease.

Drawing closer, they noticed a small knot of people milling round the front entrance. At first he took them for a group of casual loiterers, but it was soon apparent that they had a purpose in gathering there. A handful of schoolchildren, satchels still in their hands, skittered about, excited yet curiously silent. The rest of the crowd was made up mainly of women and old men. Patrick and Assefa were about to push through the crowd when they noticed a policeman at the centre. He was trying to take a statement from one old woman, but everyone else insisted on talking as well.

‘Che cosa e successo? E morto qualcuno?’

‘Poveretto, si e ammazzato.’

‘Chi era? Tu lo conosce vi?’

Patrick’s first thought was that someone had taken note of their visit here yesterday. But that would scarcely explain the crowd or the excited jabbering. At that moment, a small boy tried to squeeze between Patrick’s legs, in order to get to the front. Patrick reached down and grabbed him by the neck. The child squealed and tried to wriggle free. A woman looked round at them and laughed. Patrick smiled at her reassuringly.

‘Hang on,’ Patrick said to the boy. He could not have been more than five or six. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Stronzo, lasciami andare! Lemme go! Get yer friggin’ hands off of me!’ shouted the little brute.

‘Not until you tell me where you’re going.’

‘Inna house, where d’you think?’

‘What for?’

‘See the man.’

‘The man? What man?’

‘The dead man, stupid. Jumped out of the winder inter the courtyard. Lemme in.’

A chill passed through Patrick. Without another word, he let the boy go. His hand was numb and useless.

‘It may not be him, Patrick.’ Assefa had moved to Patrick’s side. But his voice carried no conviction.

They squeezed their way through the crowd. No one challenged their right to pass. The main door stood open, leading into the courtyard.

Only a weak light managed to struggle past the high walls. The windows round the courtyard were lit up, as though in celebration of some festival. Indistinct faces stared out into the gathering dark, some curious, indifferent, but each drawn by the same fascination with violent and unexpected death.

The child’s courage had failed him a couple of yards inside the entrance. He was standing nervously, unable to take another step, yet rooted hard to the spot by morbid curiosity and a last pale ghost of bravado. On the other side of the courtyard, a huddled form lay unmoving on the ground. Patrick and Assefa went across. Someone had covered the body with an old bedspread. Blood had spilled out from underneath, forming a dark, sludgy pool on the concrete. Patrick bent down and raised the edge of the coarse fabric.

An imperfect, wounded light sloped across the lifeless face beneath the cloth. Patrick’s first thought was that someone had played a joke on them. The face staring up at him was not human at all, but a dummy’s face, white and hard, with painted eyes and varnished cheeks. It was the face of Arlecchino, cracked down the centre and smeared at the base with common blood. Patrick’s fingers fumbled at the mask, pulling it back to reveal Claudio Surian’s face. The back of the skull had caved in: fragments of white bone jutted out awkwardly, as though desperately trying to break free of their harness of blood and flesh.

It was dark by the time they got to the Lista di Spagna. Assefa still felt numb. Neither he nor Patrick thought for a moment that Claudio had jumped to his death. They were pilgrims come to a dark temple: godless, blind, sick at heart. All about them, veils were being torn and lamps extinguished. The city had become an altar for mad gods, a slab for the perfection of sacrifice. They could sense the blood in the air, smell it in their breath, like rotting garbage, feel it warm and intimate against their flesh.

The shops on the Lista were brightly lit, though less busy at this time of year than at the height of the tourist season, when they took the brunt of the daily excursions arriving at the railway station nearby. L’Unita’s offices were in a calle near the station. They turned out to be little more than a cluster of rooms above a travel agency, cramped, stuffy, and crammed full of files, typewriters, telephones, and telex and fax machines. There seemed to be no room for human beings, yet half a dozen reporters had managed to squeeze themselves miraculously behind an array of barricades: desks, filing cabinets - anything that might serve to keep colleagues and the world at large at bay for half a minute.

Assefa forced his way past a large, bearded man who was trying to strangle the handset of a telephone while shouting obscenities at it at the top of his voice:

‘Porca puttana, andate tutti a lagare, mi avete rotto i coglioni!’

Behind the bearded man, seated at a desk piled high with reference books, and about forty discarded plastic cups, a young woman was furiously mangling the ends of her fingers against the unresponsive keys of an antediluvian typewriter.

‘Permesso?’ Assefa said, but his voice was drowned by the booming of the man at the telephone. He called again, more loudly this time, but there was still no response. The woman remained impregnable behind her desk. Exasperated, Assefa found a copy of Devoto’s dictionary, opened it at the middle, and slammed it shut with a bang like a gunshot.

Heads everywhere looked up from work, startled. Only the bearded man seemed oblivious of the report.

‘That wasn’t very amusing,’ said the woman at the desk. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Siniscalchi, Aldo Siniscalchi. Do you know where I can find him?’

Her mouth opened and closed. She was not a pretty woman, and the action lent her something of the appearance of a fish. She glanced at Patrick, who was standing a few paces behind the priest, then back at Assefa.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. Abruptly, she had passed from simply brusque to defensive.

‘I’m a friend of his. An acquaintance, anyway. Claudio Surian introduced us - we met last night at Bartolini’s. Aldo had arranged to see me again tonight, but...’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice sounded stiff and unnatural. ‘I can’t help you. Ald... Signor Siniscalchi was shot two hours ago outside the trattoria where he’d just eaten lunch. He...’ For a second, she seemed on the verge of tears, then she took control of her emotions again. This was a newspaper office, Siniscalchi’s murder was tomorrow’s front page lead.

‘Some fucking fascist from Ordine Nuovo gunned him down,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’ve been threatening him for months. He’s been doing a series on them. Fascist bastards.’

‘You’re sure?’ asked Patrick. His heart was beating in long, uneasy strokes. He felt sick and tired.

‘Sure?’

‘That it was Ordine Nuovo. You’re sure they were responsible?’

‘No, of course I’m not sure! They didn’t sign their names. But who the fuck else would do it?’ Then his accent seemed to register with her. ‘Hey, who are you anyway? American? CIA?’

‘He was following up this Migliau business. Isn’t that right?’

She raised her eyebrows, little pale eyebrows that scarcely gave definition to her eyes.

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘Everything. Forget Ordine Nuovo. Dig up anything you can on. Migliau. Find him and you’ll find your friend’s killers.’ He hesitated. ‘And Claudio Surian’s as well.’

He turned with Assefa and made for the door. Just as he reached for the handle, the woman shouted after him.

‘Hey! American! What’s your name anyway?’

Patrick turned.

‘Canavan. Patrick Canavan. If you find Migliau tell him I was here. Tell him I haven’t finished yet. Tell him I’ve just started.’ It was like the child in the tenement, a soft, faint hint of bravado, a muted whistle in the dark.

The woman looked hard at him, puzzled, a little disturbed.

‘What’s your friend’s name?’

Assefa turned and answered her.

‘Just a moment,’ she said. Getting to her feet, she picked her way with practised ease across a series of obstacles to another desk. After rummaging for half a minute, she surfaced triumphantly, brandishing a fat padded bag.

‘He left this for you,’ she shouted above a din of clattering typewriters and ringing telephones. ‘Said he wouldn’t be here tonight when you called, that he had some big lead to follow up.’ Her face fell. Again tears threatened to displace her false toughness. ‘You don’t think ... ? Cristo! Anyway, he said I was to give this to you. I think it’s a book.’

THIRTY-FIVE

The book turned out to be a rare copy of Corradini’s Famiglie Antiche e Nobili di Venezia, or Ancient and Noble Families of Venice. It was a respectable, heavy volume bound in dull burgundy leather and edged with gilt; the date of publication was 1791, at Venice. The book’s author was Marco Corradini, a man of aristocratic birth and political aspiration who, like so many Venetian noblemen of his day, found himself in penurious circumstances. Unlike most of his fellows, however, Corradini was possessed of brains, a personable manner, and a classical education.

Patrick and Assefa knew nothing of the work, save what they had been able to glean from a florid preface by a certain Professor Enrico Battistella. They had taken a taxi at the Piazzale Roma and crossed the causeway to the mainland, where their driver had deposited them at a shabby pensione near the docks in Porto Marghera.

Coming here, it was as though the magic of Venice had been abolished by a single stroke of a rival magician’s wand. The dark industrial streets of Mestre and the gaunt, high-stepping cranes of its port were the apparatus of a different sorcery, their weary inhabitants the succubi of another, flatter dream. A smell of refined oil wafted through blind and congested streets: there were no spices here, or precious oils, or unguents. Necessity, not vice or luxury, paved the streets of Mestre.

The pensione had not asked for proof of identity, nor had it required them to sign its register, if it had one: a small extra payment had taken care of that. Surian had mentioned the place the evening before,

when Assefa told him the whereabouts of their first hotel. He had said the pensione was sometimes used by members of Prima Linea and other underground groups of the far left. But as far as Patrick and Assefa could see, the clientele was made up chiefly of prostitutes serving the port, their clients - mainly merchant sailors - and a handful of migrant workers from Sicily.

Siniscalchi had placed two slips of paper in the book, the first in the chapter devoted to the several branches of the Contarini family, the second in a much shorter section that dealt with the house of Migliau. In the margin, he had marked in pencil several passages that must have seemed to him worthy of note.