Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Pampolini stared at me. ‘You’re shaking.’

‘Yes, well. I’ve never killed anyone before.’

‘You’re all right, though?’

I nodded.

He yawned, then rose to his feet and led me down a dimly lit passageway. ‘Busy night,’ he said, rubbing some life back into his arm. ‘Sixteen injured in that football game.’ He paused outside a metal door; his top lip glistened. ‘I think we’ve got something here that might interest you.’

I followed him into a long, cold room. Lying on a marble-topped table was the naked body of a girl, her skin mauve-white and damp-looking. Her hips and ribs were streaked with mud, and weeds had wrapped themselves around her legs. Her hair was an autumnal colour, not brown or red or gold, but somewhere in-between, and a few coiling ringlets had spilled over the edge of the slab and hung halfway to the floor. A small black pool of water had formed below. Every now and then the stillness of the pool was shattered by another tiny drop.

‘A beauty, isn’t she?’ Pampolini said.

Earhole slipped past me and occupied himself at the far end of the room.

‘What do you know about her?’ I said.

‘Not much.’

A dredger had brought her in. He had been working his way along the river-bank, collecting sand. As the light faded, he had drifted towards Sardigna. The smell of rotting carcasses was so pungent that he had to tie a rag over his nose and mouth. For that reason, perhaps, he had been alone on the water. The girl’s body was lying next to the remains of a dead mule. She was still warm when he knelt beside her. That frightened him. He felt the person who had done it might be close by, watching. He hadn’t seen anyone, though. He took the body straight to the hospital, where Pampolini had given him a few coins for his trouble. Pampolini had told him to forget everything that had taken place that evening. The dredger shrugged; you got used to all sorts, working on the river. Before he left, he admitted that the grazes on the girl’s body had happened when he heaved her into the boat. He regretted his clumsiness, he said, then he disappeared into the night.

‘That was quick thinking,’ I said, ‘to buy his silence.’

Pampolini chuckled. ‘I even surprise myself sometimes.’

‘Sardigna, though. What a terrible place to end up.’

‘You know it?’

‘Yes.’

He walked round the table. ‘We don’t have any idea who she is, or how she died. She might have been murdered — that’s what the dredger thought — but there’s no evidence of violence. She might have killed herself. It might even have been an accident — though there’s the small matter of the missing clothes …

‘It’s a shame about the clothes, actually. They would have told us a lot.’

‘Maybe that’s why they were taken,’ I said.

‘In any case, no one’s enquired about her yet.’ He bent down and studied the fingers of her right hand. ‘I have the feeling she’s a foreigner. I’m not sure why.’

‘But apart from the grazes, there are no marks on her?’

‘Now you come to mention it …’ Pampolini turned the girl’s body on to its side, and I saw patches of indigo across her thighs and the small of the back where the blood had pooled. ‘Lift the hair away from her neck.’

I did as he asked. Her hair was unusually heavy, perhaps because it was still wet. It felt eerie in my fingers.

‘See it?’ Pampolini said.

At the top of the girl’s spine, above the first cervical, the head of a dog had been carved into her skin. Judging by the pointed muzzle and the jagged rows of teeth, the person responsible had had a particular breed in mind.

‘It’s not an injury, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t look like something that happened accidentally.’

‘No,’ Pampolini said.

‘Can you tell how long it’s been there?’

‘The wound’s still bleeding, and there’s no sign of inflammation. It looks recent.’

‘So it could have been done after she was dead?’

Pampolini looked at me. ‘Or just before.’

In that moment, a revelation flashed across the inside of my brain. Ever since that drink with Jack Towne, I had been aware of the need to build something ambiguous into the commission. I’d had no idea how to go about it, though. Now, for the first time, I thought I saw a way forwards. If I were to incorporate the dog’s head, I would be creating a piece of work which, depending on what Towne called one’s ‘angle of approach’, could be viewed on at least two different levels.

‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ I was trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

Pampolini shook his head.

I let go of the girl’s hair and walked away from the table. ‘A dog …’

There was a sudden retching sound. Turning, I saw Earhole bent over a stone sink at the back of the room. I looked at Pampolini. ‘He’s not squeamish, is he?’

‘It’s not that,’ Pampolini said. ‘He was mauled by a dog when he was a baby. That’s how he lost his ear.’

He lowered the body on to the slab and stood back, rubbing the palm of one hand slowly against the other, then he fetched a bottle and two glasses, poured large measures, and handed one of the glasses to me. I downed the contents in a single gulp. An oily fire spread through my belly.

‘Quite fitting, really,’ Pampolini said. ‘It was an omen of the plague, wasn’t it, the constellation of the dog?’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘There’s no evidence of disease, though, is there?’

‘None.’ He looked down into his empty glass. ‘So — are you interested?’

‘How long’s she been dead?’

‘I told you what the dredger said. She was warm when he found her. And there’s no stiffening in the eyelids yet, or in the fingers. I don’t think she’s been dead for more than about three hours.’

‘All the same, there’s no time to lose.’

He said he could have the body delivered to my workshop immediately.

‘On this occasion, though,’ he added, ‘since these aren’t what you might call normal circumstances, I might need a little reimbursement.’

I looked at him steadily. ‘How much?’

He mentioned a price.

‘That’s a bit steep,’ I said.

He yawned, his jawbone cracking. ‘But then again, she’s exactly what you’re looking for, isn’t she? Just think how thrilled your client is going to be.’

I shook my head. ‘You’re such a Florentine.’

‘Actually,’ he said, with the smugness of a card player who is about to display a winning hand, ‘I was born in Padua.’

The black geraniums I had planted outside my workshop bent in the wind as the porters carried the stretcher down the track, the girl’s body blurred by the threadbare cloth that covered it. The dark shapes of the overhanging myrtle trees swirled above our heads, the flesh of the night sky peeled back to reveal the white bone of the moon.

Before leaving Santa Maria Nuova, I had come to an arrangement with Pampolini: I had agreed to pay what he was asking, but only on the condition that I could borrow his assistant. With rigor mortis looming, I would have to work fast, and I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Not only was Earhole accustomed to the dead, but he had also been party to the irregular circumstances in which I had acquired the corpse. In hiring him, I would be ensuring that the circle of confidentiality stayed closed. Earlier that night, he had asked me to trust him. This was his chance to prove himself worthy of that trust.

Once the porters had lifted the girl’s body on to the dissecting table, I asked Earhole to escort them back to the gate. As soon as they were gone, I removed the covering. Pampolini had put coins on the girl’s eyelids to keep them from sliding open. He had also fastened a piece of rag around her head to hold her jaw in place. I reached down and gently wiped away the mucus that had seeped from her mouth during her journey across the city.