Brotherhood of the Tomb (18 page)

‘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’.