It was—no, be honest: it might have been—one of the men from the vaporetto the previous evening. I had seen both men from the side, and this could have been either—or someone else entirely. In any case, the newcomer, too, wore black: black trousers, black belt, black shirt, and a black neck-tie—with incongruous splashes of white in the shape of spats on his fashionable two-toned shoes. Shiny buttons and glints of silver on his collar suggested this was an officer’s uniform, but he was hatless.
He must also have been hot in the sun, because he stormed impatiently past the island’s…guard? Greeter? Head nurse?—towards the shade. I retreated instantly, holding the door just a fraction clear of the jamb, my ear pressed to the crack.
The fairly one-sided discussion that followed was more comprehensible than that of my gondoliers, being Italian rather than Venetian, although portions of it were swallowed in the newcomer’s rapid-fire speech and his use of words I did not know. It seemed that his appearance here was a regular thing—daily, apparently—albeit one he liked as little as the island’s employee did.
His presence was due to a patient by the name of Dalso or Dalser, newly arrived and (according to Signor Albanesi) creating a tremendous uproar over being separated from her young son. “She screams, Capitano. All night and much of the day. There will be questions.”
“And you people cannot deal with questions? Bah, these are women, slap them and they shut up. Are you all——that you suckle at your mama’s tit?” I missed the word, but could tell it was a rude one.
“Capitano, I am married with three sons!” Ah: it meant homosexual. “But she is a woman, even if a mad one. She longs for her child. And I understand the boy is only ten years old.”
“It is being seen to,” the Captain snapped—at least, I thought that was what he said. In any event, it seemed to relieve Albanesi, who gave unctuous thanks—retreating thanks, as it turned out: the five minutes he had promised me were over. I just hoped my gondolieri hadn’t abandoned me entirely.
Albanesi stood more or less at attention until the motor-launch was halfway back to the Giudecca, at which point his shoulders slumped and he pulled off his hat to mop his brow with a handkerchief.
Returning inside, he gave me a sickly smile and dropped into the chair behind his desk.
I sat down across from him. “That man is a Capitano of the MVSN?”
He blew a puff of air over his sweating face. “The squadristi of Venizia are decent men, most of them. When we receive one from Roma, well…” His shrug was eloquent.
“I heard him say he brought a patient here? Signora Dalso?”
“Dalser,” he corrected, then stopped, the sickly look creeping back onto his broad features. “You did not hear that name, Signora. Onestamente, it will be better for you to forget that name.”
“Who is she?”
“Per favore, Signora Russell. La scongiuro.”
I tipped my head, which he could take as an agreement if he wanted. “So, tell me instead about this nameless pale-haired woman who came last week. May I see her?”
He was more than eager to substitute one wayward lunatic for the other, although it took some time to make an arrangement with the actual staff of the manicomio. While he went off to do so, I went out to check the docks, and was pleased to see my two gondoliers, stretched across the cushions, chatting and smoking.
At least I wouldn’t have to emulate Lord Byron’s swim across the lagoon.
After a bit, a nurse came to inform me that the nameless patient had taken her lunch and was being led to a bench beneath one of the trees in the garden, where I was invited to go and look at her. I asked if I might be permitted to speak to her, and although it was irregular, the nurse had to admit that since no one else had succeeded in making any contact with the woman, my attempt could not harm anything.
But it was not Vivian.
The garden was a patch of dry grass and spent flowers. A dozen women clustered in the shade beneath the trees, talking—with themselves or others—and reading or gazing out over the lagoon. Birds fluttered about in a tall cage, their chatter and squawks not quite drowning out the manic speech of a couple of women and some cries from the windows overhead. The solitary figure the nurse led me to was, as the guard had suggested, white-haired rather than blonde. She was almost thirty years older than Vivian and with the looks of the Mediterranean—Iberian, I thought, rather than Middle Eastern. I settled onto the bench beside her, feeling her eyes flick up as far as my chin, then go back hurriedly to a study of her clasped hands. They were not the hands of a woman of the highest classes, and her teeth were in need of attention, but she felt to me like a person of a certain amount of education. I began with English. “Your family is wondering where you are.”
No reaction, although she did not seem to be deaf. So I repeated the phrase in German, then in Hebrew, and again in one language after another, stringing them together to make it sound like one friendly and conversational monologue. There was a slight twitch in her fingers when I recited it in Spanish, so after a couple more tries—Hindi, Latin, and a rough facsimile of Japanese—I said it in Portuguese.
I got no further than, “Sua família se pergunta—” when her head snapped up. To my surprise, she looked not relieved, but terrified.
I shot a glance around the garden, hoping the nurse wasn’t watching too closely, then hurried to reassure the woman in a mangled but apparently comprehensible attempt at her language. “Senhora, is there anything I can do for you? The nurses here, they don’t know who you are. They only want to help. I won’t tell them you’re Portuguese, if you don’t wish it.”
She went still after that last reassurance, her gaze eloquent with question. “All right,” I told her, “I won’t give you away. But do you wish me to get a message to someone outside?”
A minute shake of the head.
“Very well. I shall leave you here. Although,” I added as a thought occurred to me, “Senhora, I wonder if you’ve heard of another new patient, named Dalser?”
Her ageing eyes flew wide, then fluttered up past my head before she leapt to her feet and scurried across the sun-scorched lawn. I made no attempt to go after her. The poor creature was clearly terrified of something; I had only made matters worse.
But before I left the garden, I studied the building in the background—the building the Portuguese woman had stared at in horror before running away. Its windows were barred, some standing open to catch a little sea breeze, but from somewhere up there came a madhouse sound that tied this place to Bedlam: a long, thin keening noise with neither direction nor word. Like an animal in pain—or a woman separated from a young son.
No: I was not likely to forget this patient named Dalser.
Chapter Thirty
HOLMES TOOK A TRAGHETTO ACROSS the Grand Canal, landing on the wrong side of a small waterway from the Porters’ Ca’ Rezzonico. However, a circuitous walk brought him to a bridge and the palazzo’s gates. As the servant led him up a ceremonial staircase and through the stunning, high, light-filled ballroom beyond, Holmes reflected that this was a house built to make lesser mortals feel that the gods dwelt among them. The family motto might as well have been sumptibus parceretur, as clearly no expense had been spared: a site on a magnificent sweep of the Grand Canal, its architect the greatest one available, with a bottomless purse to tempt all the Names of the Baroque to decorate its many surfaces. Putti and tapestries, frescoes and trompe l’oeil, gilt and marble and crystal, a ballroom that could host hundreds—there was even a garden the size of a decent campo, unheard of in this tightly-built city. Ca’ Rezzonico was a massive, magnificent, mind-boggling temple to excess, the cost of which could have comfortably set up entire nations.
Today, its occupant was a small man at a piano.