Lucifer's Shadow

3 A name from the past

Giulia Morelli sifted the report sheets on her desk. Giulia was duty captain on the evening shift. It was hot inside the modern police block by Piazzale Roma, and the work was beginning to bore her. Sometimes she thought of applying for a transfer. Rome, maybe, or Milan. Anywhere she might find some kind of challenge to keep her mind turning.

Then she stared at the pages in front of her and felt the years roll away in an instant. The dead girl’s name seemed to yell at her. Giulia Morelli stabbed at the phone and managed to catch the reporting officer. He was changing before coming off shift, and none too keen to hang around the overheated police station. The tone of her voice ensured he would not leave without telling his story.

She listened keenly for five minutes, finding herself increasingly perplexed, then put the phone down, walked to the window, threw it open, and lit a cigarette. Outside, the last commuters were heading for their cars in the vast multi-storey close to the bridge to terra firma and Mestre, where most of them lived. She watched the straggle of figures and thought about what the officer had just told her. It made no sense. Perhaps it did not say anything about the case of Susanna Gianni at all.

They had been called to San Michele by an irate undertaker whose party had arrived on time for the ceremony, only to find the superintendent missing. They finally found the man in a building used for disinterments, apparently in some kind of distress. When the undertaker remonstrated with him, the superintendent turned violent and attacked two of the party before being restrained.

The senior officer called to the incident attempted to interview the cemetery employee, but to little avail. According to the report, the unfortunate event was caused by a sudden loss of temper in the heat. The superintendent was cautioned for minor assault, then allowed to go home. The authorities were to be told, but there would be no formal action. Only one unusual detail was noted on the report, and the officer had again confirmed it, though with no further information, when she had spoken to him. In the disinterment room was the coffin of one Susanna Gianni. It had been opened to expose the corpse. And, so it seemed to the officer, something had been removed from the casket. The shape of a long object, perhaps a metre high, was superimposed against the remains of the cadaver.

With the care and foresight she had come to expect of the uniformed branch, the officer had thought this worthy of mention but not of action. Once he had arranged for the superintendent to be taken home by police launch, he had allowed the removal of the casket — and, with it, Susanna Gianni’s bones — to continue. It appeared there was no private arrangement. The disposal of the body was carried out that afternoon by the city cemetery service. The box would be ashes by now. What remained of Susanna Gianni — even the girl’s name still made the policewoman’s blood race — would be strewn among the sea of skeletons which made up the public ossuary on one of the lagoon’s smaller islands.

Giulia Morelli lacked the energy to curse the idiot. She picked up the phone, arranged for a launch, and within five minutes found herself heading up the Grand Canal for Cannaregio, wondering what might have made a cemetery superintendent, one surely used to dealing with corpses over the years, lose his mind so quickly and in such unusual company. Wondering, too, about who had taken that mysterious object from the murdered girl’s coffin, and why.

She ordered the launch to dock at Sant’ Alvise and walked briskly south into the tangle of fascist-era apartment blocks. She had told the launch to wait for her and, against standing orders, planned to conduct the interview alone. The details of the Gianni case were now, a decade later, somewhat hazy in her memory. Even so, she recalled the care with which it was discussed, particularly in the company of a lowly cadet as she was then. There was no reason to raise a fuss now, not until she saw something worth fighting for.

He lived in a block at the edge of the development. The building was clean but shabby. She walked into the dingy communal hallway and pressed the light switch. A perpendicular line of dim yellow bulbs came on overhead. His apartment was on the third floor. She looked for the light. It was out. Giulia Morelli, for no reason she could fully understand, found she was patting her purse to feel the shape of the small police pistol that lived there.

“Stupid,” she hissed quietly, and began to climb the stairs.

The third floor was in virtual darkness. She cursed herself for having left the flashlight behind, wondered, too, why she had been so anxious to interview the man alone. The case was a decade old. The uniformed officer at the helm of her launch had not even been in the force when Susanna Gianni died.

The apartment was at the end of the corridor, somewhere in an inky pool of darkness. She called the man’s name and immediately sensed she had made some kind of a mistake. There was a noise coming from ahead. A glimmer of dull yellow light leaked out from behind a door that stood no more than an inch ajar. She edged closer to it, hearing more clearly: it was a long, breathy moan, a sound that could betoken anything from ecstasy to death.

She reached into her bag and took out the police radio. The signal was dead. Mussolini had built these old apartment blocks well. Giulia Morelli kept the handset tight in her left hand, then reached into the bag for the gun, grasped the weapon, and walked briskly through the door, taking care to stand in the shadow cast by the wan light from a single bulb.

There were words in her throat, cold, officious words, ones which worked on most occasions, sending a little fear into the small-time crooks who were, almost exclusively, her customers. The words died before she was able to say them. Giulia Morelli took in what she could of the scene — the light was poor and the protagonist was deep in shadow, his face invisible to her. All that was apparent of him was a single, lean arm wielding a long, bloodied knife and a smell: cheap, strong cigarettes — African, maybe — and the rank odour of sweaty fear.

She could think of nothing but the painting, the damn painting that had haunted her ever since she’d seen it as a child. It stood in the chancel of San Stae, Tiepolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, depicting a man apparently in rapture, arm raised to heaven, a half-hidden attacker carefully testing his skin, wondering where to begin with the blade. She had asked her mother about the painting, always seeking to know the story. Her mother had evaded the question, mumbling something she failed to understand: that the saint was to be “flayed.” It was only later, when she found the word in a dictionary, that she understood. This was the moment before the horror. The executioner was planning the act, that of skinning his victim alive. And the condemned man was looking to heaven in bliss, awaiting his deliverance with joy, something Giulia Morelli knew she would never understand.

The cemetery superintendent was not in rapture. He was, she thought, dead already, or at least she hoped as much. His throat was cut, carefully, from side to side, revealing a broad, bloody band of flesh and sinew. And his murderer, who remained out of sight — though he was, she knew, now moving — was slowly finishing the job, stabbing into the tendons, severing what he could find in the man’s throat.

She gripped the gun. It wriggled in her sweaty grasp. Her fingers twisted on the grip, then slipped, and she heard the metal clatter on the tiled floor. Giulia Morelli could look at nothing but the dead man, wondering, wondering.

A shape rose to her left. A leg came out and kicked her hard. She fell to her knees, waiting for the blow, wondering if she had the courage to look upwards, to heaven, to nothingness, like the saint in the painting. But he was there and she did not wish to see his face.

She tried to speak, but there were no intelligible words in her head. Something silver flashed in front of her eyes. She felt a sudden slash of pain in her side, followed shortly afterwards by the rush of warm blood. Her breath came in sudden, jerky gasps. She waited.

And then the radio came to life in her palm. She had, she realised, been gripping tight on the panic button. Somehow her faint call for help had leaked out of Mussolini’s brickwork and found a human ear. A voice barked at them. At the foot of the stairs outside in the communal hallway, which might have been on the far side of the world as far as she was concerned, there were footsteps. Too soon for the police, she knew, but the dark shape above her, dropping blood from the knife onto her face, could not know that.

“You are under arrest,” Giulia Morelli said, and wondered why she felt like laughing. He was gone. There was no one else in the room. No one but the dead superintendent, who stared back at her with glassy, terrified eyes and a gory gash for what was once a throat.

She placed a hand on her side, felt the wound the knife had made. She’d live. She would find this man. She would discover why he had robbed Susanna Gianni’s grave and what he had stolen from it. There was work to be done, much of it.

Giulia Morelli stumbled to her feet. There were men at the door. A caretaker, perhaps. Another resident. It was important, she knew, to take control.

“Touch nothing,” she said, trying to think straight, trying to establish the kind of control which was required.

They gaped at her, half-amazed, half-terrified. She followed the direction of their gaze and saw the blood staining her jacket, running down her short skirt, coagulating hot and sticky on her knees.

“Touch…” she repeated, then felt her eyes turn upwards in her head, saw the murky yellow light of the apartment turn black and, finally, disappear altogether.