Scrapings

By Garry Disher

Colby was drawn, one sodden morning in February, to a magazine kiosk by a canal bridge, to certain cold-hearted figures staring from the calendars on display for the tourists. Febbraio. Carnevale. Within a hatch, behind banked newspapers and wire racks, sat the vendor, an old woman almost in darkness. Chill and gloom clung to her. Colby stamped his feet on the wintry stone. In every calendar treacherous, two-faced figures were populating the parapets and squares of the city. They were whiter than ghosts and blacker than midnight, still and watchful in their black capes, and Colby felt unsettled by them, sensing blood on the flagstones. Until that moment he’d felt almost at home, able to move unencumbered through the city and his daily affairs, but here was a reminder of his provisional state. No-one had informed him that the city had a carnival. Nearby a butcher heaved open a metal shutter, disturbing the pigeons. They erupted, leaving a detritus of grime and fluff on the green iron canopy of the kiosk, and in the smaller canals the ice was splintering.

Colby turned away and climbed the approach steps of the stone bridge. He could feel the blank faces of the calendars behind him, withholding, utterly still, as if wailing for a death. He crossed the canal, entered the narrow corridor beyond the bridge, and turned side-on to avoid the wall-scraping umbrellas. People ducked and weaved around him, on their way to work, muttering permesso, scusi. The men wore cashmere overcoats, the women furs, and their gleaming shoes rang out in the hollows of the city.

The little street opened onto a deserted square. At the far end a woman entered a bread shop. A cafe proprietor swept his doorway with a twig broom. Colby began to cross, avoiding the erupted roots of the solitary tree and the water collecting in pools between the flagstones. He liked to take this route because of the well at the centre of the square. A ring of white stone, polished by shoe leather over the centuries, was set into the base of a low, circular wall. A black iron lid covered it, hinged and massive. It was Colby’s daily habit to trail his fingers over the knobs on the lid. There were a number of them, smooth and cool, every one irresistible.

But at that moment school children ran into the square, met at the well, and ran on again, and Colby missed his chance. A boy more daring than the others called ‘Ciao bella,’ to the girls. The girls swung their cases, pushed open their tartan umbrellas, and took one another by the hand, while the boys played up to them and again the pigeons rose and flapped away.

Colby trailed the children into an alley between the wall of a barracks and the side window of a framing shop, in which an empty gilded frame sat upon a velvet chair. Then the dusty window gave way to crumbling plastered stone and Colby found himself in a region of dampness and urgency again. Rain fell. People hurried by. Above him a man opened his shutters and hauled in a clothesline. Someone was brewing coffee in the apartments opposite the barracks. As Colby passed the studded doors, the sentry on duty turned negligently, the eye of his machine-gun sweeping across Colby’s chest.

The street ended at a path that ran beside a small canal, and here Colby came upon the children again. They prowled along the tatty wall posters, jostling and declaiming: ‘Miles Davis . . . I Musici . . . Jurassic Park . . . Madonna.’ At once they all sang out: ‘Who’s that girl . . . ?’ A black gate opened. The children disappeared into a courtyard. Colby glimpsed a cat twitching its tail, a small fat Pan, weather-stained terracotta urns, a palm tree set in chips of white gravel.

A hot country in the cold season.

* * * *

‘Signor Colby.’

Colby paused at the steps leading down to the crypt.

‘Signor Colby,’ said the caretaker again.

The man had been in the shadows behind the pitted column of the church, scraping up candle wax with a little trowel Colby had once given him. Colby waited. The caretaker reached him and gestured with the trowel.

‘Yes?’

‘Signor Nye was here. He asks you to join him in the Bar Rocca this morning at 10.’

Colby thanked the caretaker and descended into the crypt, a dim, low-ceilinged place that attracted the flood-waters. The electric fires were burning but still the stone walls and floor exhaled dampness.

Piera turned from her work, smiled, said good morning. Her face was hawkish and dramatic in the spotlights, and her movements were reproduced in alarming black swoops across the fresco. The electric fires spat and popped. ‘Good morning,’ Colby said.

He called up to Allesandro: ‘Good morning.’

Allesandro was crouched on a plank, preoccupied with the helpless white hands of the Virgin. His shoes shifted in answer. Colby left it at that. Allesandro was an uncomfortable man, full of insupportable burdens. He sought order at work, but he didn’t always find it. Colby was the Australian. There had been one before him and when his year here was up, there would be another Australian. They were barely tolerated by Allesandro.

Colby hung his overcoat on a hook, stepped into a pair of overalls, and rummaged in his locker. He found his razor—an old bone-handled cutthroat—and began to scrape minutely at the shoulder of the Archangel. Colby’s predecessor had reclaimed the robes. Colby was working on the wings. They were half furled, with beautifully articulated joints, and eyes that hunted one another down the plunging feathers.

Piera said companionably: ‘They are very beautiful. The colours.’

Together they admired Gabriel’s wings. Colby asked:

‘How is your snail?’

‘He is quite patient. He waits for me to finish the tiles.’

Piera had discovered a snail depicted in the bottom corner of the fresco. She called him ‘he’. He had perfect, questing horns and he was gliding, unconcerned, across a tiled floor. He helped to establish perspective in the picture: snail in the foreground, Gabriel kneeling at the centre, the Virgin approaching through an archway at the top.

Piera touched her fingers to the whorled shell on his back, as if that would give her luck. ‘On your way, snail,’ she said.

At that moment her wrist, turning and flexing, seemed to be joined in beauty with the snail and the angel, and Colby felt an appalling need to touch her. But that wouldn’t do. He returned to Gabriel, reason lapping and coiling-inside him.

* * * *

Colby went to the Bar Rocca knowing that Nye would be late. Coldness had reached deep into his bones and so he ordered a pastry cornet and coffee with hot milk. He slid them to the end of the marble bar and stood there, eating rapidly, before Nye could arrive. Colby didn’t want Nye to see him eat. Nye never ate anything when the two men met like this, and he never drank coffee. It was Nye’s habit to drain a tiny aperitif.

Colby saw Nye enter, shake the drops from his umbrella and edge through the room toward him. All the customers seemed noisier suddenly, the crystal lights and cut-glass cheerier, the smell of coffee much sharper, as if Nye had woken the place up. He reached Colby at the bar. As was his custom he half bowed gravely, toasted Colby with his aperitif, and said in a low, well-bred voice:

‘Michael.’

‘William,’ Colby said.

And Nye drained his glass.

They scarcely knew each other, and this gesture of Nye’s was apparently harmless, yet Colby always felt subtly insulted by it.

‘Still scraping away?’ Nye asked.

One could only say ‘Oh, yes’ to a question like that. ‘And you?’ Colby said.

‘Busy.’

Colby had never been to Nye’s studio. Few people claimed to know where it was. And Colby couldn’t imagine Nye daubing paint onto a canvas. That day Nye resembled a fashionable actor in the successful middle years of his career, a talk-show professor or a minor count—a man easily deflected by pleasures but, still, a man you’d not want to cross. As Colby thought these things, people came and went in the Bar Rocca, catching Nye’s eye.

Finally Nye turned his back on them and made an effort:

‘Listen, Mike, are you going to be around for the next day or two?’

‘Yes.’

‘My niece is arriving tomorrow. Unfortunately I won’t be here. Would you meet her for me?’

Nye was known to disappear for days at a time. People said that he delivered his canvases and had mistresses and attended exhibitions in other cities. It was said that he had houses here and there, all over Europe. ‘Fine,’ Colby said.

‘She’ll be on the four o’clock train from Rome. You should hold a sign up, Morag Nye. Settle her in at my apartment, maybe treat her to dinner.’

Nye took money and keys from his wallet and pushed them into Colby’s coat pocket. ‘I must go,’ he said, looking at his watch.

‘I’ll walk with you.’

‘Delighted.’

Again Colby was reminded of his provisional state. Nye took him on an inconceivable route to the water-taxi stop and they crossed squares Colby had never seen before, or only from a different aspect. At one point Nye indicated a restaurant and said, ‘Bring Morag here tomorrow night; it’s very good,’ and at another he made Colby stop on a stone bridge and look along the canal.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’

The rain had stopped. Clouds merged and parted above the two men and the illusory sun lit the ochred walls and lay pale and greasy on the surface of the canal. A barge went by. It ploughed over the sun, leaving it stretched and ragged in the water.

Colby heard voices and looked up. Three small children had appeared on the bridge, full of tricks and secrets. Their faces were masked with white greasepaint, their eyes delineated with broad red and gold commas, and they wore black cloaks. Colby didn’t think there was anything innocent about those children, but Nye beamed. ‘The first sign,’ he said.

The children came closer. Colby watched them warily, but he was too late. In an unprotected moment they threw confetti over him, gouts of it like blood, and rushed on by.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ Nye said.

* * * *

Colby returned to the crypt. He peered into Gabriel’s wings, agitating the filth with a brush this time, thinking of Nye’s niece, a stranger, from Sydney, a strange place that had once been familiar to him. He could not recreate Sydney in his mind’s eye except as a place with altered and unlikely contours. He found himself brushing and sluicing thoughtlessly, risking error. Nye had that effect on him.

At six o’clock Colby cleaned his razor, brushes and trowels, put on his overcoat, coughed uncertainly. ‘Piera,’ he said.

She looked up.

‘There is a lecture, if you would care to come.’

But she smiled, shook her head, opened and closed the fingers of one hand in the local gesture of farewell. Colby managed a smile. ‘Until tomorrow,’ he said, returning her wave. As he climbed the steps, and drew level with the top of the fresco, Allesandro seemed to hunch, close and irritable, at the Virgin’s wristbone.

The lectures were arranged by the British Institute and held in a church the Americans were restoring, in a precarious upstairs room lighted by candles and subject to air currents. The wooden floors, banisters and wall panels were heavily scored and worn and seemed close to collapse. There were tapestries decaying on the damp walls, grim depictions of martyrs, visions, entombments, the expulsion from the garden.

At the front of the room a slide projector cast a hot square of light onto a plastic screen. Colby was late. He’d first heard about the lectures from Nye, who had wanted to make him feel at home. He’d found himself being introduced to people who said, ‘Ah, we knew your predecessor. Would you care to lecture to us too?’

Colby eased unnoticed into a metal chair at the back of the room. The white screen brightened and dulled as shapes passed across it. Last week it had been Scottish new-towns: cement-and-glass shops, banks, housing estates. This week it was carnivals, carnivals in hot countries where flesh was bared and blood was spilled. Soon the elderly Britons, Americans and Anglophile Italians in the room were muttering. A man at the front thumped his cane on the floor. Women turned to one another, their fur coats brushing at the shoulder. They clicked their tongues. ‘Would you look at that?’ one woman said. Colby imagined their lives: half the year in Venice, half in New York, Nye canvases on their walls.

The lecture finished and they clapped. Clapping, the British Consul’s wife walked to the front of the room to thank the lecturer. ‘May the spirit of our beloved Carnevale never be turned around,’ she said.

On the way out, all those fur coats pushed Colby against the wall. He overheard laughter and planning. Seven o’clock: friends and lovers to meet, everyone pressing into the squares of the city.

There was a black mist in the alleys, rolled in again from the sea. Colby walked in darkness to his apartment, navigating the stone corridors from one community of laughter and floating light to the next, and as he passed his wishing well a figure leapt onto the iron lid. A man, gold-faced, wearing a three-cornered hat, a cape and breeches. Colby stood, paralysed. He opened his mouth to protest but the figure cut him off, drawing a gloved hand across his throat.

* * * *

Four o’clock. Passengers from the Rome train streamed past Colby and on to the main platform. Above him a speaker crackled. He waited, a paper sign held at chest height, and saw a sudden shift in the composition of the pushing crowd as a young woman cut across to where he stood. She set down a heavy suitcase; there was a bulky pack strapped to her back. ‘I think I’m the person you want.’

She briefly touched his palm with sunburnt fingers before snatching back her hand and plunging it into the deep pocket of her coat. The collar was up, trapping wings of sun-bleached hair. She looked bored, healthy. As though willing herself, she asked: ‘Who are you?’

Colby told her. ‘Your uncle had to go to Vienna.’

She laughed, a short laugh, no more than audibly cheerful. ‘Or Nice or Milan or Heidelberg.’

‘He does have that reputation.’ Colby crumpled the paper sign and dropped it into a wire bin. ‘Let me take your case.’

They boarded the canal ferry, where Morag Nye seemed to take up a mistrusting position at the brass rail. The sky was low, darkening, trapping sounds to the surface of the canal. The metal gate slid crashingly in the ferryman’s hands. A barge passed and the ferry tossed in its bow swell, the diesel motor muttering at the waterline, and as they swept down the canal the gondolas rode at their mooring poles like alerted horses. Colby wanted to point things out to Nye’s niece but all the while she faced outwards, staring at the palaces, a withdrawn figure amid the tourists winding their desirous cameras. Finally he moved out of the cold air, into the shelter of the wheelhouse.

A short time later she joined him, but said nothing. She hunched deeper into her coat. Colby said, uselessly, ‘You must be feeling the cold.’

‘Sydney was having a heatwave.’

The ferry slowed, bumped gently to a stop, and the ferryman looped a rope around a stanchion. Passengers edged past, onto the quay, and Colby drew back with Nye’s niece until they were shoulder to shoulder against the chilly wheelhouse wall. She said:

‘Have there been any messages for me?’

‘Messages?’

‘Yes. Messages. Or letters.’

Embarking passengers began to fill the nearby spaces. Colby said, ‘Your uncle didn’t mention any.’

The gate clanged; the water surged again. They slid past the casino, galleries and damp, iron-hard buildings. Lighted chandeliers bellied behind flawed window glass in all the palaces along the canal.

‘Next stop,’ Colby said.

‘I know.’

Colby stiffened. Her manner with him was curt, almost as if they were acquaintances who had last seen each other in some extreme—of love, or hatred, or disappointment. So Colby told himself: It’s not my problem.

It’s not my problem. He’d forgotten that expression. He hadn’t used it in months. It was as if he’d forgotten a whole language, the careless, unconsidered, borrowing language of the country he’d left behind him. But now, in an instant, he was miserably at home again: a staff room, dim and populous, everyone wearing an odour of complaint and envy; petrol thick in the overheated air outside; endless tiled roofs baking above pinched and bitter plots of prickly lawn.

The ferry stopped. Colby took up Morag Nye’s heavy suitcase and stepped onto the quay. In the apartment above Nye’s the opera singer was running through her scales. Colby unlocked the groundfloor door to the building and at once the singer slopped, as though listening for intruders, to climbing footsteps on the stairs at night. It wasn’t Colby’s problem, her fear.

There were two locks in Nye’s door on the second level. The keys fitted and turned poorly and Morag pushed the timer switch for the stairwell light as Colby struggled. She knew there was a switch. She said nothing, merely waited, giving off a hint of exasperation.

When finally the lock tumblers fell into place, they did so secretively, precisely, reminding Colby of Nye himself. He pushed open the door and Morag entered the hallway ahead of him and hung her coat on a hook on the hallstand. She wore a dark pleated skirt which she smoothed briefly, looking down at her dark-stockinged legs and ankle boots. Then she looked about as if searching for changes. The hallway—small, elaborately tiled and well preserved—had not been redecorated for a hundred years. Candle globes illuminated it, dim behind fussy pink-tinted glass. She tried the first door. ‘Bathroom,’ she said. ‘I remember now.’

Colby hooked his coat on the hallstand and indicated a door at the end of the hallway. ‘The kitchen is through there.’

‘I know.’

He followed her and they looked around at the modern benches, the glossy white cupboards, the slender white wall oven and refrigerator. ‘It used to be old and cluttered,’ she said.

Colby opened a door in the corner. ‘Like the dining room.’

‘Yes.’

By now she had softened a little. She wandered good-naturedly about her uncle’s dining room, her expression amused and luxuriating. Nye had once held a small dinner party here for Colby, to introduce him around, his manner exaggeratedly, unseriously formal. The room was perversely old and polished and dark and heavy. Morag picked up and set down again the vases and the photographs in their silver frames. There was no dust, the carpets were not worn, but Colby had an impression of dustiness, of decay in the old, over-decorated fabrics. The curtains—clean—looked soiled, and they pulled down on their supports and brushed the tiles. Nye rarely used the room but he’d left flowers in Morag’s honour, two tight red rosebuds in a vase and a camellia head floating in a shallow crystal bowl.

‘It’s just the same,’ Morag said.

‘How long has it been?’

‘Since I was here? About three years. I had just finished my final exams.’

Colby smiled. ‘The big trip to Europe.’

A mistake. Her face sharpened into lines of beauty and intolerance, as if Colby had been assuming common yet mortifying experiences between them. ‘Not at all. I’d been several times before.’

‘Right.’

Colby followed her back to the hallway, where she opened the door to Nye’s living room, a long, well-lit, relaxing room. She began turning over papers and envelopes left on a small table next to the largest armchair. Once or twice she stopped to examine both sides of a postcard or letter.

‘Any messages?’

It took some time for her to notice Colby there in the room with her. He saw an alteration begin in her face, as if she were finally casting off the coldness in favour of joy and bright possibilities ahead. ‘No messages. Let’s break open the Scotch.’

She made her way directly to a glass-doored cabinet, took out two glasses and malt whisky, and poured two large measures. They sat and toasted each other. She appeared to Colby to be quite at home and she had the attractiveness of those who are knowing, greedy and unsentimental. ‘Good old Uncle Will,’ she said.

‘You’re close to him?’

Colby felt a searching scrutiny before her face shut down again. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you see much of him?’

‘Several times here, plus he flies to Sydney twice a year.’

She seemed to want to get away from the subject. ‘Has he done this to you before? Got you to meet people for him?’

‘Never,’ Colby replied. ‘I’m not even sure why he asked me. I scarcely know him.’

‘You don’t have to look after me, by the way. I’m perfectly capable of entertaining myself until he gets back.’

‘He mentioned my taking you to a restaurant tonight.’

‘I don’t think so, thanks.’ She stood up. ‘I don’t remember those.’

Colby watched her cross the room and peer at the paintings on the wall behind him. Her thighs filled the space before his eyes and then she was moving along the wall.

‘Egotistical bugger,’ she said, ‘they’re all his.’

Colby joined her. He had nothing to say about the paintings. When she strolled through a door in the corner, he followed her, and they were in Nye’s study, then in his bedroom, a small, unappreciated room with a plain bed and a plain wardrobe and a glass of water on a chair next to the bed. There were no disregarded, familiar or comforting objects in the bedroom and Colby had a sudden and frightening intimation of deprivation in the artist’s life.

The telephone rang in the study. Morag stiffened, luxury giving way to unease. ‘Will you get that, please?’

‘It will be your uncle.’

‘Just answer it!’

Colby called down the line mockingly: ‘Nye residence, may I help you?’

‘I’ve been trying for hours. Is Morag there?’

It was not Nye. The voice was younger, and loud, competing with background noises, in a bar perhaps. Colby looked across at Nye’s niece. She knew; she took the receiver from Colby and began to talk into it, her voice stodgy, telegraphic: ‘Ivor, we’ve been through this before . . . You can’t . . . There’s no room . . . You can’t ... I wouldn’t feel right . . . Ivor, I don’t want you to ... ‘

Colby returned to the living room and began a circuit of it. Morag came in. She stood, tired and adrift, by the door.

‘He’s coming here. He’s around the corner in a bar.’

‘Who is he?’

But she drew back the curtains and opened the balcony doors. A smell layered in dampness, commerce and wintry night rolled in and Colby realised how warm the room had been. They both shivered. Hastily, Morag shut the doors again.

* * * *

The city’s cheap hotels are near the station, down alleys or among souvenir shops in the streets behind the palaces on the canal. Colby stood in the rain outside Nye’s apartment building, explaining this.

Ivor hoisted the straps of his duffle bag over one shoulder. ‘Is it far?’

‘Ten minutes by ferry.’

‘I’ll walk.’

The rain fell, stubborn and niggling. Ivor disregarded it. He was young, his face narrow and fine-boned as if reduced by coldness, rain and apparent poverty, but he seemed jubilant to Colby, buoyant, a little crazy.

‘Have you been here before? It’s easy to get lost.’

Ivor shrugged and smiled and made another hoisting movement with his bag. ‘I’ll manage.’ He turned in the wrong direction.

‘I’d better come with you,’ Colby said.

Colby’s life had become irregular, suddenly. He set off along alleys and over the tiny canals that fenced in Nye’s segment of the city. Ivor kept pace with him, apparently unsurprised and ungrateful. Ivor was dressed in a long, oil-treated stockman’s coat and a black airman’s beret, absurd dress that attracted stares from the elegant men and women hurrying to restaurants and concerts. He was inept, and like most inept people he was literate and talkative, bumping Colby’s elbow in the cramped streets, talking above the sounds of rain and harsh, crushing footsteps. Colby didn’t know the young man’s surname. Morag had simply said, ‘This is Ivor,’ then closed the street door on them.

At one point Colby said carefully, ‘Morag didn’t seem overjoyed to see you.’

Ivor laughed. He was a youth who laughed at setbacks and discomfort—which doesn’t mean that he knows how to deal with them, Colby thought.

‘I trailed her all the way from Sydney’

‘Have you known her long?’

And Ivor replied, pointing at the glistening flagstones, ‘I could write “eternity” all over this city.’

He was young, young and unformed, his head full of strange, soft, sad notions. With relief, Colby delivered him to the Villanova, a hotel at the intersection of six stony streets behind the casino. Then, stricken at the sight of the young man’s hollow cheeks, he said: ‘Come on, I’m treating you to a hot meal.’

Ivor beamed. Colby found a tiny restaurant in a back street. Just as they were waiting for a table, Colby saw Piera step from one room to another in the cramped family quarters behind the servery door. So this was where and how she lived. He had time to notice a lilac tracksuit and a cigarette, and he heard her shout at her mother, her mother shout back. Then Piera saw him, put her slender fingers to her temple in an odd gesture of irritation, and disappeared. To Colby the encounter was almost like calling unexpectedly on a new lover in an unguarded moment, when she is faintly close and muggy, her mood scratchy. His face burned.

They ate. Colby didn’t see Piera again. He took Ivor back to the Villanova and left him. Ivor was not his problem.

This time Harlequin and Columbine found him. He was passing the fish market when they materialised from the shadows, paced silently with him to the next corner, then veered away, fading into an alley that Colby was convinced went nowhere but simply stopped dead at the canal wall.

* * * *

The next day was Sunday. On Sundays Colby liked to walk, roaming wherever the streets took him. He was like a zigzagging pinball, striking a glancing blow to churches, galleries, palaces, a wall of Moorish windows, a well with a black iron lid. He didn’t need a map. He would walk for hours, startling the pigeons, watched by silent cats in barred windows.

Nye found him in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Colby had stopped to watch the tourists, who were in a buying mood. Stallholders had been allowed to set splintery trestle tables on the stones, and the tourist were buying masks, gowns, three-cornered hats. They were not buying from the Wannabuys on the perimeter, the thin north Africans who sold belts and cheap watches displayed on blankets and whispered, ‘Wannabuy?’ Colby watched, and heard Nye call his name above the whispers.

Then Nye emerged and clasped his shoulders. ‘Michael!’

It was an uncharacteristic display of enthusiasm. Colby looked past Nye and understood. Morag was with him, and Ivor, and both were laughing, their teeth very white in their brown faces. They looked larger than life among the tidy Europeans, as healthy and prancing as young horses. As Colby watched, Morag held a gleaming white mask to her eyes, and it had the effect of shutting down her face before she reappeared, her eyes shining. Ivor meanwhile spun around on the spot, his cape flying around him.

Colby turned to Nye. ‘When did you get back?’

‘This morning.’

‘Shopping for carnival costumes?’

Nye clasped Colby again. ‘We must make a party of it one night.’

Colby said, ‘Those two are getting on better. Last night I—’

Nye came close to him, lowering his voice. ‘It’s an act. He bores her. He’s bored me in the few minutes I’ve known him. She’s being kind to him.’ He stood back. ‘Thanks for meeting her. I’m most grateful. Needless to say I didn’t know about the other business.’

By ‘other business’ Colby supposed that he meant Ivor. At that point Ivor kissed Morag and both men witnessed it. It was a simple act of affection but it was also a crashing mistake. Morag froze. Hatred glittered on Nye’s tartar’s face. Colby thought: Forget it, Ivor. Go home.

* * * *

At six the next morning Colby was woken by a punt delivering crates to the bar across the canal from his apartment. He showered in his tiny bathroom, set coffee to brew, and slipped out, in the local manner, to buy bread and a pastry for breakfast. He arrived at the crypt at eight, before the others, and started work on Gabriel’s wingtips. The floodwaters had softened them badly. It was like working with a soggy biscuit.

Piera came in, gravely beautiful, wearing soft wool and leather. She watched Colby for a while. ‘What is your friend doing today?’

Colby explained that Ivor was not his friend, that he’d never met the young man before.

Piera pursed her lips and there was a hint of judgment in her dark eyes. He has somewhere to stay? The city is full for Carnevale!

Colby named the hotel. He said again, ‘I don’t know him. What he does is his business.’

He felt a little hostile, sensing hostility. Piera said, ‘I think he is lonely.’

That was the end of it and they worked through the morning in silence. Then at one o’clock Nye arrived with Morag. At once Allesandro and Piera grew animated. They liked Nye; they approved of him. Colby found himself stepping back as Nye and Morag were shown around the crypt. Morag’s face was composed of high cheekbones and hollows, constantly shifting in the light of the lamps and the electric fires. She seemed to be in a state of suppressed excitement. So did Nye. They stopped to examine the box of tools, trowels, brushes and scrapers, and as Morag touched them she trembled a little.

They left a cold centre behind them when they departed. ‘Michael,’ Nye said, at the bottom of the steps, ‘we’ll see you later in the week. We’re off to the Dolomites for a few days.’

He didn’t mention Ivor.

Ivor appeared on Colby’s doorstep the next morning, huddled stiff as rope in his waterproof coat. His long face broke into a grin. ‘Could I ask a favour?’

Colby felt his heart sink. Ivor had a daypack on one shoulder, the duffle bag on the other. ‘Look, I’m sorry, my place simply isn’t big enough, no spare bed, only two poky rooms.’

He was rattling on. Ivor cut him off, laughing. ‘No need to panic. I just need to store this’—he dropped the duffle bag onto the doorstep—’for a few days. Some family from Munich has my room booked till after the carnival. Everywhere else is full.’

He looked at Colby. He was a youth brimming with goodwill. ‘Sure,’ Colby said. ‘But where will you stay?’

Ivor gestured carelessly. ‘Oh, I’ll just hit the road lor a few days, travelling light.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘But Morag’s taking me around the islands in the lagoon first. Great morning for it!’

Colby frowned. ‘Are you sure? Isn’t she going to the Dolomites with Nye?’

At once Ivor looked moody, hunted, all his youthfulness gone. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ he muttered.

Colby guessed that he meant the first time she’s stood me up. ‘Visit the islands anyway. You might find a hotel on one of them.’

‘Michael,’ Ivor said, looking directly at Colby, ‘do you think there’s anything going on between them?’

The moment Ivor said it, Colby knew it was true. Nothing else explained the languorous familiarity between Nye and the niece, the sense they gave of a secret history together.

He tried to formulate an answer, but Ivor saved him. ‘Sorry, forget I said it, sorry,’ he said.

* * * *

The city seemed to tremble and hum now, marked by nervous energy and display. Colby could feel it when he walked in the evenings. A piazza that had been flat and stony damp one day might be hung with lights and flags the next. Bands played under the arches of the fish market on the Grand Canal. Young backpackers idled around fountains and monuments, and Colby recognised the songs they meekly sang, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. He bought himself an eyemask on an elastic strap, and in the streets and on the humped bridges he was ceaselessly brushed by capes and gowns as soft and richly coloured as a monarch’s.

He trembled. He joined the thronging crowds, got to bed late, worked an unimagined magic on the Archangel’s wings by day. The razor was missing from his locker, lost or strayed or stolen, yet he scarcely grieved for it. Even the city’s underside caused his blood to beat—the broken glass, unaccountable tears and cries and dejection in the hidden corridors deep in the night, the discarded syringes on the icy flagstones outside his front door.

Finally he said, late in the week: ‘Piera, dance with me tonight.’

She uncoiled from the fresco. She had found the shadow cast by her snail, no more than a faint smudge of darkness on the tiled floor. Her teeth flashed at Colby. ‘Dance with you!’

It was not a question or incredulity. Colby understood that Piera was considering him, an evening with him. ‘Where?’

‘Piazza San Marco. There is an orchestra. Everyone dances.’

Colby felt alive and he saw a warm light show in her face, getting warmer.

‘We must be masked and costumed,’ she told him.

‘Of course.’

Allesandro was soundless on his plank high in the crypt but Allesandro didn’t have to speak to communicate his disapproval. Colby could feel it crackling over the surface of the man’s crouched spine. His problem, not mine, Colby told himself.

* * * *

He discovered another side to Piera.

‘The Bridge of Sighs, eight o’clock,’ she’d said. He waited. At twenty-five minutes past the hour he felt an old blackness settle in him, compounded of the damp hour and old, remembered hurts. The people of the city were parading past him, pirates, courtesans and ermined counts, and Colby waited, exposed on the Bridge of Sighs. Those cruel, dead white faces: Colby imagined the cruelty and deceit behind the masks.

Until, for the fourth time, a figure passed so close to him that he was forced to press against the balustrade. She was dressed in black, eye-masked, a tiara flashing in her black hair. He said, ‘Piera?’ his fingers trailing over her departing cape.

She turned and grinned. ‘This way, that way, this way, that way, for ten minutes now. Is my disguise so convincing?’

She didn’t say Or are you an anxious and thereby unperceiving man in love? but her tone was faintly teasing, and Colby spun her away from there, toward St Mark’s Square. He talked and laughed, to regain lost ground. He took her past a poulterer’s, where scrawny plucked hens dressed as barmaids and musketeers swung against the plate glass. He gave her coins to toss to a clutch of Brazilian pan-pipers. He bought her a drink in Horian’s, where she told him about Keats and Shelley. The noise: they had to shout, and her breath was warm against Colby’s ear, her arm warm against his own. Colby felt a great affection for all the hooded figures now, after days of being spooked by them. He’d been mistaken. They weren’t heartless or unreadable, white-faced and black-hearted: they simply loved life. He loved life.

Colby and Piera looked out onto the square. Dancers swirled, and Colby counted the beat: one two three, one two three. As he watched, a transfiguring sea mist rolled in and the dancers became dream dancers. It was an embracing mist this time. It wasn’t the kind of mist that would hunt a friendless Colby through dripping stone corridors, licking and coiling at his heels as he made for home after some buttoned-down British Institute lecture. He dragged Piera onto the square and their capes flew out like fans, stirring the mist.

He saw Nye. Colby was sure it was Nye, exposed briefly in a pocket of clear light, bending to take Morag’s earlobe in his perfect teeth. He saw Morag draw in her neck, raise her shoulders, wrap herself around her uncle.

Then the mist and other figures reclaimed them and Colby gave himself up to Piera’s flexing waist and legs and her healthy delight.

There was no reason to suppose that it was uncle and niece. It had felt like them, that’s all, some memory trace stimulated by just that conjunction of lips and chin, just that angle of the throat, just that hint of giddy laughter and greed.

* * * *

In the crypt the next day Piera glanced warningly up at Allesandro and Colby knew that he should not embrace her or otherwise reveal his turbulent spirit. But she did touch his wrist, she did brush against him.

He worked on the Archangel. The floodwaters had smeared a wrack of industrial waste and detergents on the unfurling wings. Gabriel was as helpless as a gull caught in an oil spill—that’s how Colby felt about him, and he crouched close with a brush and soapy water. He needed his razor for this, some gentle scraping to rid the wings of the mass binding them, then finish with the soapy water.

‘You haven’t seen my razor, by any chance?’

Piera had been in a trance at the glistening track of her snail. Colby had to say it again. She focused on him. ‘When did you lose it?’

He shrugged. ‘I noticed it missing a couple of days ago. I last used it when Nye was here with his niece. I don’t recall using it after that.’

She knew nothing and had nothing to say. Colby tipped back his head. ‘Allesandro? Have you seen my razor?’

Nothing. Allesandro had cleared a space around the dove in its descent on the Virgin. The dove represented the Holy Ghost, and Allesandro wore a hallowed silence as he recovered the true white of the lily borne by the dove. Colby sighed and returned to Gabriel’s wings. Anyhow, Allesandro disapproved of Colby’s scraping techniques, disapproved of his razor. He would know nothing about the razor and nor would he care.

Unless he had hidden it out of spite or disapproval. Piera lived in a tiny apartment in her parents’ apartment, three tiny rooms separated from their quarters by a door at the head of the stairs above the restaurant. ‘Sit,’ she said, pushing Colby into an armchair. She poured him a glass of wine and found the evening news for him on her television set. ‘Wait,’ she said, and disappeared down the stairs.

They were showing footage of Torcello when she came back carrying heaped plates on a tray. There had been a murder. Piera stared, aghast, at the screen. Everything about her fascinated Colby. He had seen her poised and unreadable, he had seen her carefree, and now he saw dismay and fear. She had no appetite for her father’s cooking. ‘That poor boy,’ she said.

The body had been discovered in the drainage channel that ran between the isolated ferry stop and the ancient distant church. The camera made a half circle sweep and all you could see was emptiness, flat empty spaces with only a hint of the lagoon, the rushes and the flat island. A perfect place for a killing. The only time Colby had visited the place he had been the only tourist. He remembered thinking at the time that he’d made a mistake, no-one lived there. The land itself was scarcely above the waterline, the water swelling and sucking through the reeds. A perfect place to ambush a young man and slice open his throat.

Piera watched, appalled. No belongings, no identification, no witnesses, no apparent motive. Eels had stripped the flesh from his hands and face, rendering him unrecognisable. So young. So many dangerous places and dangerous men in the world. She said suddenly, ‘How is your friend?’

‘My friend?’

‘The young man you brought to my father’s restaurant.’

Colby explained.

‘Oh,’ Piera said, when he was finished. She did not sound convinced. She seemed to Colby to be chiding him, telling him that a young man adrift in the world was owed charity, that he was everyone’s responsibility, no matter who he was or where he came from.

‘I’m minding his bag for him,’ Colby said.

* * * *

The appointed day came and Ivor did not collect the bag.

Colby left a note and a map on his door, but Ivor didn’t come to the crypt to find him. He waited in his apartment after work, but there was no knock, no phone call. Later he went out to meet Piera, leaving a note. The note was there when he got back.

Ivor did not appear the next day or the next. Colby reasoned: If I tell Piera, she will urge me to inform the police. But I have delayed too long, further proof of my lack of charity. So I will not tell her. Colby knew that this was not enough, but he hoped Ivor would simply show up and sweep all his doubts away.

Then one morning Piera failed to appear at the crypt. A migraine, according to Allesandro. She gets them from time to time, crippling ones. Colby worked badly through the hours, and after work he went to the restaurant. They would not let him go up. The signora shushed him, frowning furiously, turning him around in the corridor and urging him out onto the street. ‘Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after,’ she told him.

The city was winding down. The tourists had gone and Colby saw only locals as he made his way to the square. The days and nights seemed icier; he heard ice cracking on the surface of the smaller canals. Colby didn’t know why he was returning to the square. There were no dancers, no flags or bunting. There might never have been orchestras playing there.

‘Colby,’ Nye said.

Nye was approaching arm in arm with his niece along the cloistered walk near the famous bars. Colby stopped. He said immediately: ‘Have you seen Ivor?’

‘Rather too much of him,’ Nye said. ‘But I expect you mean: Have we seen Ivor recently? The answer is no.’

Morag said, He could be anywhere. Rome, Vienna, Crete. He would like to be regarded as a vagabond, a freewheeling spirit. He’s a little out of date, is our Ivor.’

‘And out of his depth,’ Nye muttered.

Why were they having this conversation, standing face to face like this on the chilly stones? A simple ‘no’ would have done. ‘But I’ve still got his bag,’ Colby said. He hasn’t been back for it.’

A kind of wary stillness came over Nye and his niece. Then Nye beamed expansively. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

Colby felt a costly overcoated arm slide around his shoulders. Morag was close on his other side. He turned willingly, almost in relief, almost as if Nye and Morag were draining off all his troubles, and let himself be walked by them across the hard square to the muted yellow lights on the other side. He found himself babbling:

‘Incredible to think that I was waltzing right on this spot just a few nights ago.’

‘Marvellous,’ Nye said.

‘I saw you,’ Colby said.

Fingers tightened on his elbow. ‘What shall we have? Amari to burn away the cold?’

They settled into velvety chairs around a gilt table. For a moment in the dimness Colby saw scratchmarks on Nye’s forearm. ‘Your costumes were the equal of any that I saw during the festival,’ he said. He wanted obscurely to flatter them.

Morag said, ‘I don’t think so.’

She was unsmiling and level with him. ‘We were in the Dolomites.’

‘We got back yesterday,’ Nye said.

We. A simple word but it was a loaded word in the mouths of Morag and Nye. It was loaded with more than simply We are uncle and niece. Colby watched for tiny shifts of the body, tiny signals, the lack of signals. ‘They’re banging like a shithouse door,’ he told himself, an expression from his old language, a satisfying antidote right now to all this good breeding, polish and high art, all the secrets of the ancient city.

‘Ivor wouldn’t be dead, would he? They fished a body out of the water while you were away.’

Morag threw back her head. ‘Ivor? Ivor has nine lives.’

Nye was calmer and steadier. ‘Our young friend will show up, you’ll see. Or he’s latched on to someone and he’ll send for his bag.’

‘Exactly,’ Morag said.

‘You didn’t take him to Torcello?’

‘Michael,’ she said, ‘you are beginning to annoy me.’

* * * *

Half awake in the half-light of morning, Colby sees his razor move, scraping the waterlogged flesh from Ivor’s face, scraping him featureless. Then, turnabout, Ivor’s nails rake deeply down Nye’s forearm, catching traces of skin. But, before the forensic pathologist can act, the sluicing waters shift in the lagoon, washing the evidence away, leaving Nye to walk a free man upon the earth. Leaving Colby the one with questions to answer. Gloved fists pound upon Colby’s door.

Colby sat bolt upright, thinking: Get rid of the bag.

He listened. If that had been a knock, it was not repeated. Boots clumping on the bridge, a punt delivering crates of vegetables, the neighbour flinging her shutters open against the wall—all these could account for the sound of a gloved fist pounding upon his door.

Colby sank into his pillows. The last days of the young man called Ivor may have gone like this:

Nye and his niece are lovers. It would not do for the family to learn of this. Perhaps it would not do for the dowagers of Venice to learn of it. Ivor learns of it. He becomes a threat to Nye. Perhaps Nye, sixty and getting older, has additional reasons for fearing the young man.

Ivor becomes a pest. He will not leave the pair alone. Nye is not a man to be crossed, he is not a man to wait. He lets the world understand that he and Morag are in another part of the country, lures Ivor to the lonely towpath, slices open the young throat.

Nye being interviewed by the carabinieri:

‘We had nothing to do with that young man. However, I understand that Mr Colby spent some time with him. Mr Colby found him a hotel, I believe, and took him to a restaurant. I also understand that some of the young man’s possessions are with Mr Colby. In fact, it is entirely possible that Mr Colby was the last person to see him alive.’

Colby put all that together with Nye’s visit to the crypt, the missing razor, and saw how neatly he’d been framed, a tidy configuration of circumstantial facts.

Get rid of the bag.

Colby in the interview room this time:

‘No, comandare, I threw the letter away. It simply said: “Please forward my bag to ...” ‘

Where? Colby tried to think of a likely destination.

The razor. Should he buy another one? Scratch and age it convincingly, say that he’d found it again? But wouldn’t that announce his guilt? Surely the police had the original razor, left by Nye at the scene, all part of fitting Colby up? Colby pictured Piera and Allesandro in the office of the comandare, presented with the two razors. Are you able to identify which of these is Mr Colby’s original razor?

But the police don’t know the identity of the corpse laid out on the slab. Who will point them in the right direction?

Nye.

Colby sat bolt upright again and the light in his eyes was very bright. Not Nye. Not now that he knows I saw him here in Venice when he was supposed to be visiting the Dolomites. He won’t say anything.

Colby sank back.

Unless Piera voices her doubts. Piera full of scruples, grieving for all the youngsters sliced open by madmen.

Get rid of the bag.

* * * *

Colby drew on gloves, just as a killer might. He wiped the bag. The first ferry left before sunrise. Colby stashed the bag by a sea wall on the island of the lacemakers and was crouched at the Archangel’s wings well before Allesandro arrived for work.

When he got back from siesta there was a note from Nye. Nye had been called away unexpectedly. Would Colby escort Morag to the station on Sunday? Back next week.

* * * *

The postcard dropped through the flap on Saturday. It was a postcard of Florence, postmarked Florence, exactly the kind of card a backpacker might send. The handwriting was round, vowelly, unformed, exactly the mark of a young man. The tone: full of hesitations, apologies and exclamations. Colby listened for Ivor’s voice in it. Would you please forward my backpack please, care of the British Institute? Sorry to be such a drag! Uni starts next week! Ciao!’

I don’t know your handwriting, Colby thought, but I do know it was a dufflebag you had, not a backpack. Unless you’re sloppy with your terminology.

Or Nye heard me say bag and interpreted it as backpack.

* * * *

When he called for Morag the next day, Colby said, ‘You should travel light, as Ivor does.’

He was feeling marginally safer now that he’d got rid of the bag. He didn’t fear Nye or the niece. The niece might still lure him to some dark place but, still, he felt secure enough to needle her a little. Hauling her heavy suitcase to the top of the stairs he said, ‘What have you got in here? A body?’

Morag turned, her backpack scraping plaster flakes from the wall. ‘Just shove off, Colby. I didn’t ask you to help me. I can make my own way to the station.’

‘Nope. Your uncle asked me to help you, and here I am. Where’s he gone this time? Florence?’

Morag plunged down the steps ahead of him. ‘That’s right.’

She stopped suddenly, curiously embarrassed. ‘No. Paris. He went to Paris.’

‘Sorry, sorry. Ivor is in Florence, that’s right. I just heard from him.’

Carefully: ‘Did you?’

Nodding: ‘I sent his bag on.’

‘Good.’

‘What’s Nye doing in Paris. A wealthy client?’

‘If you must know,’ Morag said, ‘a gallery wants to stage a retrospective of his work.’

Colby got her to the station. He helped her on to the train. There was no doubt that she was on it when it left the station, meaning she wouldn’t be luring him to where Nye could kill him, supposing Nye were still in the city, supposing Nye wanted him dead to begin with.

Colby walked back through the stony passageways, feeling the rain in his shoes, muttering permesso, scusi.

Paris, or Florence. Morag had been uncertain, just for a moment, about Nye’s destination. It was as if she’d been coached by Nye to tell everyone that he’d gone to Paris, but knew full well he’d gone to Florence in order to fake a postcard from Ivor, and in a momentary lapse of concentration had named the wrong place. You might make a lapse like that if you were under pressure. If you thought you’d been found out, for example.

* * * *

Piera returned to work on Monday, white, hollow-eyed and closed-down from her days of pain, and when she saw what Colby had done, any dreaming they might have shared together evaporated around them. ‘My snail,’ she wailed. ‘What have you done to my snail?’

She poked at the grey sludge accumulating on the stones at the base of the fresco, the pollutants and the mud left by the floodwaters, the plaster too ancient and friable to cling any longer to the wall. ‘Where is he?’

‘I’m sorry, Piera,’ Colby said.

He’d completed his restoration of the Archangel, and Allesandro on the plank near the ceiling had been cold and repelling, so he’d turned to Piera’s snail glistening across the coloured tiles in the foreground. She had been working on his little shadow. Colby had gently washed and brushed, washed and brushed, then watched, helpless, as a plaster flake the size of a child’s hand had fallen to the floor and turned instantly black. He’d fished for it. It had crumpled and dissolved like a wafer on the tongue. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

She shook her head. She had no energy. Above them, Allesandro’s spine seemed to say, ‘I told you so.’

But they were experts. This was their craft. Piera touched the tiny, shallow crater in the wall, a smudge of darkness that took in half of the snail and a few centimetres of his shadow beneath him, and murmured, ‘I shall fill in the hole, then match the colours and give him back his soul with my paintbrushes.’

She turned and looked up at Colby. ‘But it won’t be the same!’

‘I’ll help.’

She hardened. ‘No.’

Colby looked around the crypt. Behind the spotlights and the electric fires were the other walls. He had photographs from the archives to guide him. He would be careful, extra careful.

After lunch—bread and soup with a straggle of tourists along a glass wall above the Grand Canal—Colby prowled the margins of the city, conversing uselessly with ghosts. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

* * * *

Nye was emerging from the crypt when he got back. ‘Just wanted to thank you,’ the artist said.

He looked relaxed, a man with no unfinished business hanging over him. To wipe that off his face, Colby said, ‘How was Florence?’

Nye knew. It seemed to tickle him as he walked away. ‘Paris, old son. Gay Paree.’

‘Of course.’

Colby stepped down into the crypt. He worked through the long day, his back to the stiff and reproving backs of Piera and Allesandro. St Sebastian roped to a stake, riddled with arrows, surrounded by the bowmen—no, the killers—bending their elbows for another volley. Colby couldn’t bear it. He searched the fresco for a place where blood had not stained the soil. According to the archival photographs there were olive groves behind Sebastian, cypressy hillsides.

At one point he was obliged to hunt in the communal box of tricks for a certain brush. That’s how he discovered his razor. He picked it up and rolled it from palm to palm, touching every familiar scratch in the blade, every nick on the ebony handle. There was no blood.

He stood for a while, staring through a window of regret, down the decades to his grandfather who stood lathered before a shaving mirror. Even the smell of the soap was in his nostrils. He could have done more for the old man, could have visited him on his deathbed, for example.

That razor. Nye finishing unfinished business? Allesandro making a point? Or had Colby himself misplaced it? Colby could elect any one of these, but he was still a stranger in a strange land, he still couldn’t come in from the cold, he didn’t think.