The Last Building in Venice
“This is Achille,” Tullo says. “I’ve known him since we were this high. Very trustworthy.”
Zorzo has just arrived at the warehouse with the red tiled roof that Sybille described, and found the two gondoliers waiting there. He casts his eye back along the path, but apart from some fishermen coming ashore, no one else is in sight.
“It’s Giorgio, isn’t it?” Tullo’s friend says. “Barbarelli?”
“Yes. Do we know each other?”
“Achille, from Bellini’s studio,” the man says. “Years and years ago. You were arriving as I was leaving.”
Zorzo’s head has been such a jumble of thoughts it takes him some moments to place the man. “Achille, of course, I remember. I was there just earlier, at Bellini’s. Achille. How are you?”
“It must’ve been eighteen years. Giorgio Barbarelli. I’ve followed your career, sir, seen how well you’ve done. Royal commissions. What a fine life you must be living. I hope I wasn’t too much of a brute to you, sir. I was rather pleased with myself back then.”
Zorzo is embarrassed to be called “sir” and be lauded by a fellow who was once his senior. He remembers Achille used to be striking looking, and confident with it—a little like Teodor is now—befitting of his name, but age, and drink, by the look of it, has withered him, physically, and taken the self-certainty from his eyes. Zorzo wonders how Achille has ended up doing favors for someone like Tullo and wants to ask if he still paints. He says instead, “If you were a brute, I don’t remember. The Bellinis were the ones who terrified me.” He and Achille share a laugh at this, and as the sound of it ebbs away across the lagoon, Zorzo returns to the here and now, and his preoccupations about what lies ahead.
“What is this place?” Tullo says, motioning toward the open barn door of the warehouse. Zorzo peers inside at the empty space and has the sense it was cleared out in a hurry, as storerooms often are in Venice, between shipments. The other warehouses nearby, which Zorzo passed on his way, are locked up for the most part, guarded by the occasional dog, which can be heard but not seen.
“Listen,” Zorzo says, turning back to the gondoliers. Since he left the red house, he’s been devising a new plan to put to Sybille. “I will make sure you’re both paid the full amount I promised, but when the lady I told you about gets here, I’m going to try to persuade her not to go at all. But don’t worry, as I say, you will be paid. You’ve both been very amenable.” He’s keen to stress this, not least because he has an inkling that Achille has fallen on hard times. “Wait here. Let me see if she’s coming.”
He goes to the water’s edge, to get a better view of the path from the city, but Sybille is nowhere in sight. He looks the other way, over to the monastery, which is just a black shape against the dusk. The storm has gone from the rest of the city, but remnants of a charged wind still seem to whistle around San Isepo’s belfry and chimneys.
He’s about to turn back to the others, when he notices a boat passing around the eastern headland in the distance, catching the light of the sunset: Fugger’s barge. Pressing back against the warehouse wall so he won’t be noticed, he watches it disappear for a minute behind the much larger San Pietro church, before turning into the final stretch to San Isepo. There’s Tomas and another man, and two men rowing, while the shadow of a person under the gondola’s awning belongs to Fugger.
Zorzo goes back to the others and the three of them wait. To fill the excruciating silence he asks Achille about the work he’s done since leaving Bellini’s, though he is too distracted to take in much of Achille’s answer: a long tale of how he painted signs for a while, how his family had always been boatmen and he was the odd one out, how his dreams of having his own workshop faded when his wife became pregnant, how he has four children now and was probably never cut out for the life of a painter. “Too much uncertainty,” he says in conclusion. “What about you? Did you start a family?”
That question again. It seems to fill Zorzo with more regret and unease every time he’s asked it. Luckily Tullo saves him from answering.
“There.” The gondolier points to a woman in hood and cloak walking toward them at a swift, even pace along the side of the next warehouse. It’s Sybille for sure, all in black, black as coal, dress, coat, gloves, collar. Even the fur about her cuffs is the color of a panther. She’s a shifting shape of profound darkness. The only contrast, like a treasure of porcelain within the gloom of her hood, is the cup-shaped line of her jaw and the smaller carmine bow of her mouth. It’s as if night, herself, were arriving.
Achille wipes his hands on his jacket, while Tullo says under his breath, “Now I understand your nerves, sir.”
Zorzo goes to meet her. She’s carrying the bag she had at the Arsenale. “You’re here,” she says, halting before she gets to him.
“I said I would be.” Zorzo can’t see her eyes, just two faint stains of light where they should be.
“And those are the gondoliers? What a good man you are. I’ve been waiting on the promontory there, next to San Pietro, for my husband’s barge. It passed by minutes ago. He’s inside by now. Alone.”
Zorzo doesn’t mention he saw the barge too. “Sybille, come in here.” He gestures toward the entrance of the empty warehouse. “So we can speak for a moment. It’s best the boatmen don’t hear us.” He goes in and she reluctantly follows. Large patches of the ceiling have come away, so the dusky light makes a dappled pattern on the floor. Zorzo goes over to some upturned crates, sets one straight and wipes the top with his hand. “Sit here.”
“Why?”
“To talk for a moment.”
“Talk? Why? To have me change my mind?” Her hand clutches the neck of the bag. Zorzo can see the shape inside it, the bronze box with the pine-cone handle.
He pauses before saying, “Don’t sit if you don’t want to, but hear me out. I have thought about this business. All day, I have considered it carefully, from your point of view. I have understood everything you’ve told me, and you must go no further. I had originally thought of suggesting you leave the island straightaway, flee your husband, but I now believe—and I’ll explain why—you should return home and leave with him tomorrow as planned. I have told the men we will settle their bill and they may go home.”
“No.” Her voice, at once sharp, echoes around the rafters of the building and a couple of pigeons take flight through the broken roof.
“Sybille, listen to me.”
“It’s no business of yours.” She lets the bag drop to the ground. The box inside is so heavy it makes a hard thump. Zorzo peers over, just to make sure the lid hasn’t been dislodged and the contents spilled out. She notices him looking and takes a step forward, as if standing guard over it.
“Just hear what I have to say, please. I have gone almost mad with thinking. It has been the strangest day of my life, but I have a plan. A possible way through. Just hear it, please, and decide afterward. I beg you, Sybille.” He motions once more at the upturned crates, but she remains on her feet.
“Put up with your husband a few days longer,” Zorzo begins.
“And I tell you I cannot.”
“Just until you’re back in Augsburg. Bide your time, in the knowledge you’ll suffer only a little more. Less than a month. You say your brother is in Ulm?” When she makes no reply, he asks, “That’s right, yes?”
“What of it?”
Zorzo feels his point must be obvious, but clarifies anyway. “Well, the two of you are very close, no? You saw each other the day before you came to Venice.”
“I can’t live with him, if that’s what you insinuate.” Zorzo notes how, on the subject of her sibling, her tone becomes defensive, and not for the first time. She’s obviously aware of it too and says more reasonably, “He’s set in his ways. In how he lives.”
“Then your parents are close by, too?”
“Yes. Though old.”
“And no doubt you have cousins? A wider family?” She shrugs. “What I’m trying to say is, go to them, your kin. That must happen first. Understand? Safety. And then—think who you can tell what you told me earlier. The list of names. The meeting in your house. All your fears about Jakob. Rack your brain as to who will have ears for it. I can’t tell you who, but you’re already sharing air with these people, Sybille. You say your husband rules Europe, but I do not believe he is the only one. There will be great men, or women, who have the same mind as yours. Doors open for you, Sybille. You’re a Fugger. That is a great advantage. In time, you’ll find the people you need. And you’ll convince them. You’ll look them in the face, you’ll be reasonable, forceful, respectful—as you were with me—and they won’t be able to deny you. Sybille, nobody wants to live in a world like the one you described to me this morning. But this is all by and by. Safety is what you need first. Forget murder, do you hear? Even if it were easy to do, which it cannot be, one mistake and you’re done for.”
Sybille has been standing in a dapple of light beneath the broken roof, but in the time they’ve been talking, dusk has thickened outside and she’s almost pure shadow now. When she speaks, though, her voice has bite: “I’ll not go back. Not for a minute more. Or it will never end.”
“Listen, do not misunderstand me. I hate to even talk about your leaving. I shall miss you. I burn with it, truly. That has been one of the agonies, thinking what might have been—had we been thrown together another way.”
Her shadow sighs and there’s silence for a short while before Zorzo continues. “What you told me this morning, and what you said the night you came to me, have affected me so much. I tell myself I’ll be immortal through my paintings. I won’t. I know. And what’s more, it’s almost certain that I will be forgotten in a decade or so—while the great wheel of time keeps on turning. With you, it’s different. You can influence, because of who you are. Because of your position. You have power. But I promise you, if you do what you have planned, I know in my very bones you’ll do nothing but harm to yourself.”
Sybille’s still for a while. She’s thinking, Zorzo can almost hear it.
“You say you’re certain to succeed,” he goes on. “But how can you be so sure? Just think what happens if you don’t, if you go in there and you’re caught. You’re taken away, you’re put in prison, or Jakob does what he wishes with you. You’re removed. Possibly dead. It would be the worst of all worlds, don’t you see?” Even in shadow, he can tell from her stance she’s starting to come around. “There would be no one to stop Jakob anymore. He’d be left to commit these atrocities unchecked. You will have made the situation worse, not better. And you will have sacrificed yourself for nothing.”
She comes over and there’s a tremble in her words when she says, “You’re right.” She feels inside her coat, which is lined in dark pink, the color of sea anemone spikes, a surprising tone against her cloak, and the darkening day. She produces a metallic object, a little larger than her hand. It’s heavy; Zorzo can tell by the way she holds it.
“To think this little thing cost as much as my father’s house in Augsburg,” she murmurs, looking down at it, turning it in her hand.
Zorzo edges closer. The pistol is shockingly new, bright steel and brass, fiendishly intricate. In the way it snatches the last of the day’s light, it puts him in mind of the golden tureen Tomas produced in the harbor inn in Mestre. “Can I see it?”
She passes it to him. “My brother explained it to me. That spring turns against a piece of pyrite. It makes an intense spark and ignites the powder in the pan, which flashes through a touchhole. That sets off the main charge in the barrel, and—it happens. It can be fired with one hand, even by a little bird such as myself.” Whatever wildness has been taking hold of her, it seems to pass, and when her eyes fall on Zorzo once more, they are calm. She returns the pistol to the pink lining of her coat. “Truly, you are right. In everything you say. Thank you.” She kisses him on the cheek and Zorzo notices how cold her lips are. “Go and tell the boatmen they’re not needed.”
“Good. Good, Sybille. You do well.” He goes, but then turns back again. “I’m sorry to ask. I promised I would pay them for their time. I have almost enough on me, but I’d like to be generous, they’ve been so patient.”
“No, no, you shall not pay anything.” She takes out her purse and opens it. It’s full of jewels, emeralds and sapphires, all twice the size of the stone Zorzo pawned, as well as a small fortune of gold—for her escape, presumably. “How much?”
Zorzo takes two of the smaller gold coins. “That will be more than enough. They’ll be content. This is no night for journeys anyway. I’ll speak to them, then I’ll take you home. You are doing the right thing,” he assures her, holding on to her shoulders.
He goes back to Tullo and Achille and hands over the money. “Thank you. We’re destined to go on these strange escapades, you and I,” he says to Tullo. He feels so grateful to him he takes what little money he has in his own pocket and hands that over too. “To buy some wine later.”
“There she goes,” Achille says and Zorzo turns to see Sybille escaping around the other side of the warehouse and hurrying toward San Isepo bridge. He daren’t call out for fear of being heard by the men on Fugger’s barge who must be just out of sight; but he must stop her. In Sybille’s chaotic state, she’s bound to fail, be caught at the first instance. He quickly runs to the warehouse, grabs the bag with the box of prince orient where she dropped it and takes it back to Tullo.
“Keep this safe for a moment, will you?” He wonders if he should tell them there’s nothing more valuable in the world than what’s inside, and whether he can trust them. He can, he decides. What choice does he have? His connection with Achille alone, he reasons, is surely guarantee. “Can you wait here?”
Tullo holds up his gold. “You’ve been more than kind.”
Sybille is speeding across the bridge, her black dress giving off flickers of anemone pink. When she reaches the monastery, she circles the side wall and peers around the front of the building—presumably to check on Tomas and whoever else is waiting on the pontoon—before she doubles back and slips behind some bushes, down a stone staircase at the side of the building and then disappears from view.
Zorzo hurries across the bridge. He thinks of his workroom, his waiting garzoni. For their sake, he should leave this business now, once and for all, turn around, collect his casket of pigment and let the Fuggers fight their battle. He presses on, though, praying he can stop her before it’s too late.
He follows the route she took, skirts the perimeter wall to the front and peers around the corner. The pontoon is fifty yards away, Fugger’s barge moored to it. One of the gondoliers lounges at the front, skimming his finger back and forth through the water, while Tomas and the other men sit talking behind him. Zorzo gathers himself, retraces his steps and pushes apart the bushes covering the way to the staircase. His palms and forearms burn, from nettles, he realizes too late. He descends, careful of where the stone has crumbled. The steps turn a corner and arrive at a low door. It’s ajar. Sybille must have tried to close it: he can see by the way the weeds are bunched up against its base. He shoulders it open and steps into a cold, dark space.
“Sybille?” he whispers in the darkness and his voice seems to take a moment to come back. “Sybille?” He can see nothing of the crypt, except for the little pool of light beneath his feet from the doorway. He moves forward and trips on the step down to the actual floor, which is flooded in inches of water. He listens, terrified of the sudden explosion that might come from above. How loud is a pistol? He’s never heard one fired. There are hollow drips of water, remnants of the storm; while from above, barely audible through the thick stone, the Eucharist is being spoken. “Sybille?” His chest rises and falls; his hands and arms throb from nettle stings. He forges on, getting used to the dark, and portions of the space configure: pillars here and there, sections of curved vaulting, sepulchres. He spies in the far corner a pattern of dim rectangles: stairs going up. He wades over to them. Basements anywhere are grim, but in Venice doubly so. The sea always wins in the end. He wonders how often the tombs down here have been drowned beneath the tide and the skeletons levitated in their beds. He finds the foot of the stairs and ascends carefully, as the baleful, monotonous voice of whoever is administering Mass grows clearer.
He comes up behind a screen at the back of the chapel. At the far end, in a pool of light from a single, elaborate standing candelabra, a private Mass is being conducted. An abbot in surplice and stole—an ancient man, pale as dust—recites from the altar step. Jakob Fugger kneels before him, while three more priests attend, one bearing the monstrance, a second sounding an altar bell, the last curving a censer in a slow half ellipse so its incense falls around Fugger’s head. The rest of the nave and chancel are in almost complete darkness. He scans from wall to wall in search of Sybille, longing for her not to be there, hoping she changed her mind, that she has now left the building again.
He keeps looking, to be sure, every moment growing more accustomed to the gloom. The church belongs to a long-ago epoch, when Venice must have been still young, still superstitious. Its walls are decorated with frescoes of people, real-height renditions of biblical figures and saints, every painted eye peering out at the knave. They’ve watched the proceedings here, in the chapel of San Isepo, for hundreds of years. Zorzo scans the cast of characters, the good people of history, each with a battered golden halo to denote it: Abram, Isaac, Moses, David, Saul, Elijah. On the side wall, behind the choir, standing among them, the only figure without a gilded corona, is Sybille.
Zorzo stops breathing and the whites of her eyes turn slowly, deliberately, on him. He can see she brandishes her pistol. She blinks slowly, steps forward to the edge of the pool of light. She waits for the abbot to notice her, stop speaking and for her husband to look up. She lifts the pistol in both hands, the grip against her chest.
“Sybille, no,” Zorzo cries.
There’s an explosion, his ears pop, the church is washed in phosphorescent light—each fresco seems to gasp—before the tide of brightness washes out. Stone crumbles from the ceiling. “Here! Murder!” Fugger shouts and someone overturns the standing candelabra; there’s a cartwheel of flying lights, a crash of metal against floor, candles rattle across it and snuff out. For a moment the room is pitch-black and silent, before footsteps hurry from outside, the main door flies open and men rush in, Tomas first. “Sybille,” Fugger gives a second strangulated cry. “Murder.”
Zorzo watches her tear down to the crypt, an almost invisible sweep of black. The men rush to their master. Zorzo tries to see if there’s blood on him, but the men are helping him to a chair. The abbot and his priests are looking on in horror. Zorzo edges back and slips down after Sybille, into the waterlogged basement again.
“Are you there?” It’s too dark to see anything, except for where the door leading to the outside is half-ajar. “Sybille?”
“Did I strike him? I don’t think I did.” Her voice is shaking. She’s standing by a lopsided tomb and there are little clicks of metal as she passes the gun back and forth between her hands.
“We have to go. Now.” Zorzo moves toward her, but she sidesteps him.
“I must finish the job. It’s my duty.” Her voice is shrill and loud and Zorzo puts his finger to his lips to quiet her. “Sybille, please, leave this now.” He keeps his voice low and steady even as rage burns through him.
“You don’t understand. My duty.”
Zorzo bears down on her and almost gets hold of the gun, but she lashes out. Her elbow lands hard against his jaw. There’s a click of metal, a burn of sulfur, an intense light shakes in the gun’s chamber, the room seems to silence, before air rushes in from all directions. Zorzo falls back, his head smacking against the corner of the tomb. Sybille shrieks. He feels a strange, almost calming sensation, a pounding heat against the top of his leg. He rights himself, grabs the gun in one hand and her wrist in the other and pulls her to the doorway. “Get out!” he hisses, kicking it open and dragging her up the stairs, even as she totters to keep up.
“I’ve hurt you, I’ve hurt you,” she’s saying.
His trousers are split open at the thigh and the skin scorched black beneath from the bullet, while blood comes from below his hair, from where he struck his head. He pulls her to the top, through the thicket of nettles, careless of her protests, and drives on, squeezing his eyes against the shock, his throat against the stench of saltpeter. He tosses the pistol into the lagoon. There’s a whirl of brass and steel and it drops, gone. Never letting go of her wrist, he hauls her over the bridge.
Tullo and Achille are coming toward them. “Get back,” Zorzo shouts. “Unmoor.” For a moment they stand frozen. “Do it! Unmoor!” Zorzo can barely hear his own voice and it doesn’t seem to belong to him anyway. The city and all its campanili slop back and forth and he has to crouch as he goes, to keep his center of gravity low, to stop himself capsizing into the sky.
“I’ve hurt you, I’ve hurt you,” Sybille repeats over and over.
Zorzo pushes her on board. “Hold her,” he says to the others, but they’re still too dumbfounded for anything. Zorzo jumps in and takes Sybille by the jaw. “You stay, you understand? Here.”
“Of course, of course. Where would I go? I’ll never leave. What have I done?” Zorzo’s fingers leave stains of blood on her face.
“Go! Mestre,” he shouts, before peeling the material of his breeches from the face of the wound. The bullet has grazed his leg, not entered it, but sulfur has burned the skin away, down to the flesh, and trickles of blood ooze through it. “What are you waiting for? Go now!” Tullo casts off into the lagoon only for a thought to come to Zorzo. “Prince orient. The bag I gave you?”
“There,” says Tullo, pointing to where it’s stowed beneath the bench.
“Grief.” Sybille has thrown off her gloves and her trembling hands hover above the wound. “What can I do? Tell me what I can do.”
“Shut up.” Then, “I pray you did not kill him. For all our sakes. Is it possible you did? Did you strike him at all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Did you see blood?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Take that off.” She undoes her cloak, gives it to him and with both hands he tears it in two, the thick black front and the pink lining beneath. The sensation is pleasurable, not just for itself, making waste of a great blanket of velvet and satin, a tiny revenge on Sybille. He wraps the strip around the top of his leg, twice, and knots it tight. He looks back at the monastery; Fugger’s men have come out onto the pier and Tomas is scanning the island. Then their master exits too, unsteady on his feet, but apparently with no fatal wound. He’s a long way off, but as Zorzo stares back at him, Fugger looks over. For a fraction of a moment, their eyes meet, Zorzo’s sure of it, before he ducks from sight.
Once Tullo’s boat has rounded the San Pietro church at the end of the island and started to double back along the eastern shore, Zorzo points to a pontoon and says, “Stop there.”
“What? Why?” says Sybille.
“Be quiet!” Zorzo turns to the others. “I’ll need someone to go back to my workroom, warn my fellows.”
Tullo guides the boat over and Achille takes hold of one of the pontoon posts.
“Go to the Campo San Francesco della Vigna,” Zorzo says to him. “Do you know it, just past the Canal Galeazze?” Achille nods. “In the corner of the square, there’s a red house. There’ll be a boy at the door called Uggo. Tell him you bring an urgent message from me and go upstairs to the workroom to speak to the other fellows. Paulino is quick-witted, find him.”
“A red house, Uggo, Paulino,” Achille repeats.
“I should go myself,” Zorzo says, pushing himself up only to collapse. He presses his palms into his temples. Even trying to find simple words is a struggle.
“I can do it, no trouble,” Achille is saying.
“Tell them to go to the house of Leda Sitruk. Immediately. Paulino knows where it is, in Cannaregio on the Calle del Forno. If you forget her name, say the bone queen. They must not delay, pack nothing up. Just leave. Understand? Tell them to wait there until they hear from me. Give them this, so they know it’s me.” Zorzo tugs his scarf off and hands it over.
“Shall I come back here?” Achille says.
“No, we have to leave. Go home afterward. Run.”
Achille jumps out and sets off at speed.
“He’ll do it all right,” Tullo assures Zorzo, seeing the worry on his face, then casts off into the lagoon and turns the boat toward the mainland.
Zorzo takes up the spare oar, sits propped against the center thwart and rows with it, shaking his head impatiently at Sybille’s attempt to help him. Over and over Tullo drives the oar down through the rowlock, which sets off in a rattle when the oar touches the seabed and returns. And with each repeating stroke, the dreadful minutes in San Isepo unspool in Zorzo’s mind: the explosion of sulfurous light, the startle of saints’ faces. Then, worst of all, Fugger just now, staring across the lagoon and, maybe, maybe not, catching Zorzo’s eye.
“You’ll be all right,” Sybille is saying from the other end of the boat, still wringing her hands. Gradually the city recedes, all of it, swinging side to side—and Zorzo thinks the pain and the shock will send him mad.