The Mourning Emporium Read online

  “Godspeed, Sargano,” called the professor. “You know where I’ll be. I’ve got a ship to shape up.”

  Just across the water, at the Hotel Danieli, a lady with a row of kiss curls on her forehead sat at her dressing table, admiring her beautiful face in the mirror.

  She’d had the luck—or the foresight—to insist on a room on the third floor, well above the ice flood. She’d just finished dabbing her wrists with perfume and was tucking a pistol into the belt that cinched her waist, when she was summoned to the window. A seagull was tapping on it with his yellow beak.

  “You have news for me?” she asked, drawing on her gloves. Her voice was cold and clipped.

  She opened the window and let the bird in. “Is there news of the insufferable Studious Son?” she demanded. “And of the accursed and as yet Undrowned Child?”

  On the night before Christmas, the city had been caught by surprise: a brutal, murderous surprise.

  Venice was used to floods. Fifty times a year, several feet of water tumbled into the great square of San Marco and other low parts of the city.

  “So?” the Venetians asked, and shrugged. “What’s a bit of water?”

  The next tide always pulled it out again. People usually managed to extract some fun from this practical joke played by Nature. Gondoliers would pole people straight into cafés and they’d drink a glass of wine at the bar, still standing in the boat.

  But on Christmas Eve, 1900, the sea had risen swift and silent in the night. The hydrometers of the Brenta Canal were simply swept away, so they could warn no one. Coils of gray water snaked deep into the city. Venice had never seen floodwater like this, slithering on its cold belly through the streets, carrying on its back flotillas of cruelly sharp miniature icebergs and ice floes in jagged sheets.

  Many Venetians had been to midnight Mass; others had sat up late, enjoying the Christmas Eve feast of fried fish and reminiscing over Christmasses past. Everyone went to bed overfed, overtired and very happy.

  So no one heard the poor tethered dogs of Venice barking until the water closed over them. As the sea crept up the walls, a few Venetians who lived on the ground floor woke. They were the unlucky ones. Alerted by a slapping noise, they innocently opened their doors. A mountain of water gushed in and swept them away.

  The ice floes clanked as the waves surged higher. The snake of water lashed its tail. The ice nudged, scraped, rattled and finally shattered the windows of houses, shops and churches. Suddenly, the narrow streets were flowing with a shocking soup of food and furniture, Christmas wrappings and baubles, baby carriages and chamber pots, children’s toys and human beings. Rings and necklaces tumbled from the jewelers’ windows. Coffins floated out of funeral chapels to jostle among the icebergs. The jaws of the water snatched the dead fish from their baskets at the Rialto Market and bore them away in limp shoals down the Grand Canal.

  The next people to be woken were the staff of the Accademia Galleries, home of Venice’s finest paintings. With the water rising over his knees, the night watchman telephoned for help. Soon all the museum curators came sloshing through the city in the thigh-high boots all Venetians kept for flood times.

  But it was too late to save the paintings of Venice herself: portraits of the city painted by Bellini, Carpaccio and Canaletto. The priceless masterpieces floated through the smashed windows to join the thickening soup.

  The sorrowful light of Christmas dawn revealed a drowned city. The ruins of gondolas lay like the skeletons of slender whales. In front of the shops, the remains of their wares, sodden and black with mud, were heaped in funeral pyres, waiting to dry out enough to burn. Venice looked like an enormous flea market, one that sold only pitiful damaged goods.

  The first outsiders the Venetians saw were photographers and journalists, who called comfortably from their safe, dry boats, “Are you Venetians freezing and wretched? Have you lost your mothers? Any babies swept away?”

  Mute with misery and cold, the Venetians stared back at them. The journalists jotted furiously while swigging hot whisky-and-orange from their flasks.

  “Row on, man!” they ordered their boatmen. “This lot aren’t wretched enough. See if you can find a motherless child crying, will you?”

  Everywhere Venetians were asking each other one question: “Why?”

  After all, Venice was famous for her great seawalls, the murazzi. How had the murazzi failed the city, just when they were needed the most? A party of fishermen set off in salvaged boats to see what had happened, and to forage on the islands where Venice grew her food. As they approached the Lido, the men paled. The murazzi had been flung around like toy building blocks. And the orchards of Sant’Erasmo were sad ghosts of themselves: bleached, flattened and poisoned with salt.

  From a distance, the fishermen glimpsed swollen bodies on the shoreline of Pellestrina.

  “More dead,” they sighed, unrolling blankets. “Will it never end?”

  But as the fishermen approached, the bodies emitted loud honking sounds. Those icy beaches were now home to some new inhabitants. The ice storm had swept a colony of monk seals north from Croatia. The seals cried their fear and loneliness in the unfamiliar environment.

  And now snow was falling in thick threads, weaving a white blanket over the town. Fragile roofs sagged under quilts of snow; churches were folded away in blank curtains of ice. It was as if the city had died, and now lay pale and otherworldly in a soft white shroud.

  And so it was, on the afternoon of Christmas Day, that Teodora Gasperin came to be standing on the frozen water that jutted into the lagoon. Until the moment she’d encountered the Vampire Eel under the ice, Teo had been wondering about her adoptive parents, a mile away across the water.

  While Venice froze and drowned, at least those two must have been safe at work in their beautiful new laboratory perched high on the island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, where they were the proud directors of the new Lagoon Museum. Knowing them—Teo smiled fondly—Leonora and Alberto Stampara probably hadn’t noticed the icebergs sweeping past the island. Their eyes would have been glued to their microscopes.

  “They didn’t even come back for supper last night! Christmas Eve!” Teo grumbled. “I know they’re on the verge of a breakthrough, but really, how can the locomotion of the common squid be so interesting that they forget to come home and watch me open my presents?”

  She sighed indulgently. “Well, it’s not the first time.”

  And when they did come home, she knew they’d be their usual affectionate selves, liberal with hugs and praise. She couldn’t have asked for kinder adoptive parents. And a little absentmindedness on their parts meant that she and her friend Renzo were free to explore the city and islands to their hearts’ content.

  All was also dry and snug back at their third-floor apartment near the Fondamente Nuove, where the family’s housekeeper, Anna, was boiling cauldrons of soup and roasting slices of pumpkin. Teo had spent her day trudging through the streets to deliver buckets of soup and trays of pumpkin to neighbors whose ground-floor rooms were still pitifully damp and whose ovens were clogged with mud. The hours had passed in a steamy haze of onions, hot water and the grateful tears of the people Teo visited. She imagined Renzo doing something similar where he lived, over in Santa Croce, on the other side of town. Renzo’s mother was just the sort of woman to tuck up her sleeves and throw herself into helping those less fortunate than herself. Teo pictured her busy in her blue shawl, bringing as much comfort to people with her lovely face as with her kind, swift hands.

  “Of course Renzo’s safe,” she told herself. “Of course he is.”

  But she still asked everyone she met, “Do you have any news of Santa Croce?”

  They shook their heads. Teo had glimpsed the lists of the dead on the walls. They were so miserably long that she could not bear to study them. In tiny Venice, everyone knew everyone else, or was related to someone who did. The names of people Teo knew and loved were bound to be written on those sheets of paper.

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nbsp; There was no doubt, fortunately, that their friend Maria was out of harm’s way: the convent school where she boarded was on high ground over on the island of Giudecca. A neighbor told Teo that the nuns were taking in people made homeless by the flood. Maria would be in her element, sorting out warm clean clothes for everybody, choosing the prettiest dresses for the saddest girls who needed them the most.

  And Teo too had tried to bury her own worries in hard work. All day, the sun had hardly dared to show its face, as if it knew that it was irrelevant to the desolate city. The orange glow of Teo’s hot pumpkin was a cheering sight in the bitter mist and inside houses lit only by stubs of candles.

  At last, when everyone possible had been comforted with soup and hugs, Teo had slipped away for a little time to herself. Standing on the lonely shore at the Fondamente Nuove, she finally allowed her shoulders to sag. She was tired to the marrow of her bones. She’d slept fitfully the previous night, tortured by a nightmare.

  Some of it had already come true.

  In her dream, shadows had flitted through black water. There had been tails with jewel-like scales, and pale, slender arms bearing away flailing humans and tumbling paintings. A black ship with cobwebbed sails had cast nets down into the water where drowning souls thrashed and screamed. There had been images of giant squid pushing children into their thorny maws, and of a dead Venice trapped and perfectly preserved beneath a hundred feet of crystal ice. Over these scenes had floated a gray eminence, not quite man-shaped, not quite bat-shaped. It had swooped to whisper in Teodora’s flinching ears: “Death, and worse, to all Venetians.”

  The distant honking of the lonely monk seals brought her back to the present.

  “Poor seals,” she thought, “swept away from everything they know.”

  And that was the moment when Teo had looked down and seen the red gills and the winking eye of the Vampire Eel, and known for certain that Venice herself, and not just the unfortunate seals, now stood in the loneliest and most terrifying kind of danger.

  Under her knitted cap, the cold suddenly gripped her, as if wrenching the hair off her scalp. She whispered, “Oh, Renzo! Where are you?”

  Renzo carried the bucket into the dark house and threw its contents over the terra-cotta floor his mother had always polished to a shine. Each pailful loosened a little more of the stinking mud that slimed up to his ankles. Renzo’s mind was blank, but his feet automatically followed the path to and from the well in the courtyard. His numb hands sent the bucket plummeting down through the ice. Then his aching arms lifted the dripping pail and carried it into the ruined kitchen.

  Upstairs, his mother’s body had been laid out on her bed by two kind neighbors. The funeral gondolas were busy with dozens of victims of the ice flood. The rich and noble were buried first. Renzo’s mother had to wait her turn. In this raw cold, the bodies of the dead remained perfectly preserved. Renzo’s pretty mother looked as if she had fallen asleep. There was only a small cut under her hairline to show where the iceberg had struck as the swiftly rising waters lifted her up. Unconscious, she had drowned while Renzo flailed through the black water, screaming her name.

  After every hundredth bucket, Renzo allowed himself to warm his hands by the brazier for the count of twenty, and to climb to his mother’s bedroom and stroke her hair, pick another strand of wet tinsel from it and clasp her hand. Then he returned to sluicing out their home.

  Against his will, a sweetly sad image invaded Renzo’s mind: the cemetery on the island of San Michele. He saw the cypresses pointing to the heavens over the pink brick walls, just across the water from the cavern under the House of the Spirits, where the mermaids dwelled. Yes, he would bury his mother alongside his father, who had been taken from them by bronchitis. His friend Teo’s real parents were buried at San Michele too. During this last hot summer—the mere thought of warmth comforted Renzo for a moment—he and Teo had rowed across in the gondola to take daisies to his father’s grave and roses to her parents’. Then they had shared a ferociously spicy piri-piri pea pie with the mermaids.

  “We’re both orphans now, Teo and I,” Renzo realized.

  Bajamonte Tiepolo, Orphan-Maker.

  The words brushed across Renzo’s brain for a second. Then he exclaimed, “No! I won’t even think it. We got rid of him!”

  But memory throbbed painfully in his ribs, two of which had been broken in single-handed combat with Bajamonte Tiepolo eighteen months before. And with that memory came questions: How had the mermaids fared in the ice flood? Was Teo with them now?

  The latest bucket of water had dislodged a tinkling object from the mud. Renzo knelt to pick it up. He cradled the small china money-box against his chest, even though it was clotted with dirt.

  One corner had been smashed, and all the money had washed out. Renzo ignored the coins scattered underfoot. Tenderly, he wiped the mud off one side of the money-box, revealing A PRESENT FROM LONDON stamped beneath an etching of Tower Bridge’s Gothic ramparts. The money-box had been a gift from his father, a souvenir of a short visit to London made with Renzo’s Uncle Tommaso, just after the splendid new bridge had opened on the Thames.

  “I’ll take you to London, for your thirteenth birthday,” his father had promised six-year-old Renzo, handing him the china box. “You can use this to save your pocket-money for that trip!” And he had gone on to talk of London’s narrow cobbled streets, the quaint bookshops in Paternoster Row and the graceful gray cupola of St. Paul’s.

  “And the Londoners!” Renzo’s father had enthused. “Fuller of purpose than an egg is full of goodness!” But he coughed the last word. The coughing soon got worse.

  Last summer Renzo and Teo had argued about London. Renzo couldn’t wait to go there and was saving hard.

  “Imagine,” Renzo said dreamily, “the attics full of scribbling poets, the historic London rain beating softly on their roofs—”

  “Rain is not historic, Renzo,” Teo had interrupted.

  “And the picturesque London urchins …”

  “You mean poor children, Renzo?”

  Renzo continued, “The cozy Inns of Court, where white-wigged lawyers …”

  “Strip people of their inheritances, according to Mr. Dickens,” Teo pointed out.

  “Teo, do try to understand. Remember how you felt about Venice before you even saw her? Well, that’s how I feel about London. Just from seeing them in books, you loved the palaces and canals of Venice. Well, I already love the Houses of Parliament on the Thames, the flowerbeds of Kew Gardens …”

  Flowers! Renzo thrust the broken money-box into his pocket. How and where, in this deadly cold, would he find flowers for his mother’s funeral? She loved violets. He had to salvage and wash her best dress for her to wear in the coffin. He must remind the priest of her favorite hymn. And above all, he had to clean the floor. His mother would have been horrified to see their spotless little house in such a filthy state.

  What would happen to Renzo himself did not concern him at all. He seized the bucket and ran back to the well.

  Unfortunately, just at that moment, someone else had Renzo’s destiny right at the forefront of his not notably excellent mind.

  The Mayor of Venice wriggled toes clad in silk socks in front of a cozy fire. His sumptuous second-floor office was cheerfully lit by a four-hundred-year-old candy-colored chandelier burning fifty candles at once. He dipped an almond biscuit into a glass of sweet Malvasia wine. You would never have guessed that a city lay broken and suffering outside his sparkling windows.

  While Venice struggled with the flood’s aftermath, the Mayor had passed happy hours designing a new form in triplicate for anyone who was homeless or needed blankets and food. That was when he wasn’t on the streets, elbowing the firemen and policemen out of the way when photographs were taken.

  For the Mayor of Venice had just two ambitions: to bring more rich tourists to the town, and to get himself photographed in a smart top hat for as many newspapers as possible. True, the ice flood was a sore setbac
k to tourism, but it had allowed the Mayor more photographic opportunities than ever. He’d already kissed a dozen muddy babies for the cameras that very day, making them cry with his stiffly greased mustache.

  And now, by the glitter of his chandelier, the Mayor of Venice was signing a document that bore the name Lorenzo Antonello at the top. The Mayor’s mustache twitched as he handed the paper to one of the police officers who always protected him. Since June 1899, when he’d misled the world about certain dangerous events in the town, the Mayor had not been the most popular person in Venice.

  “See that it’s done immediately!” the Mayor ordered Officer Gianni.

  The officer read his orders and a queasy expression came over his face.

  As the policeman went trudging down the stairs, an officer of the Carabinieri—the policeman’s cousin, as it happened—hurtled past him toward the Mayor’s luxurious office. Pausing, he panted, “Gianni, there’s been a kidnap! The Lagoon Museum Director and his wife—snatched! Too clever for their own good, that pair. Knew too much about underwater loco-moco-thingy-you-know. Now they’ve got press-ganged into service for a foreign power, that’s what they’re saying!”

  Officer Gianni showed his cousin the document he’d to deliver to Renzo. The water officer raised his eyebrows. “Did the Mayor eat an extra bowl of stupid this morning? Lorenzo Antonello? Isn’t that the gondolier’s widow’s kid? Signora Antonello’s on the drowned list—che tragedia, that was one sweet woman. Now, to send the boy away to a floating orphanage …!”

  Officer Gianni stammered, “The—the Scilla’s a kind place. They look after the boys, don’t they just?”

  His cousin growled, “That old crock, in this weather? Have you seen the sky? Have you looked at the barometer?”

  Gianni pulled his collar up and wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck. But he stopped in the act of donning his hat: “Those scientists kidnapped from the Lagoon Museum—don’t they have a daughter? Adopted, wasn’t she?”