The snap of a switch extinguished the overhead fluorescent lights. Then the door closed, and the darkness was absolute. They were alone now, just the two of them. Five minutes was all the time they would have together. It was all the time Gabriel required.
He reached down and laid his gloved hand on the portion of exposed bone and ligature where a face should have been. His examination was thorough but gentle, as though his subject could feel his every touch. The bones of the forehead and nose, the orbital bones of the eyes, the zygomatic bones of the cheeks, the mandible bone of the lower jaw. She appeared to him at once and with photographic clarity, a plain and pale girl in her late twenties with shoulder-length blond hair, deeply set blue eyes, an upturned nose, and a pronounced dimple in her chin. She was sitting alone at a café in Venice, a circular gold pendant around her neck. The café was Bar Dogale in the Campo dei Frari. Gabriel and the children had been sitting at the next table.
5
The Rialto
During the return trip from the mainland, Gabriel managed to convince himself that he was mistaken. Yes, there had been a young woman at Bar Dogale on the afternoon in question—an afternoon approximately two weeks earlier—and, yes, Gabriel and the children had been sitting at an adjoining table. It was half past three, the weather was warm and sultry. Irene and Raphael were snacking ontramezziniand discussing their day at school. The young woman, who had arrived before them, was drinking a cappuccino. She wore jeans, a sleeveless cotton sweater, and canvas trainers. Her pale blue eyes were searching thecampoas though she were expecting someone. She seemed anxious, not at all like someone who was enjoying her visit to Venice. Several times she consulted her phone, which she held in her long-fingered right hand.
Gabriel made no mention of the woman at Bar Dogale during the ride across thelaguna. Indeed, he spoke not a word. Colonel Baggio finally asked how long it might take him to produce a sketch. Gabriel replied, inaccurately, that he required a week at least.
“The sooner, the better.”
“I’ll do my best.”
They dropped him at the San Tomà vaporetto stop, and he headedstraight for the palazzo. Upstairs, he found the apartment deserted. Then he remembered it was Thursday, the day Raphael met with his tutor at the university. Gabriel would have the apartment to himself until nearly six.
He went into his studio and closed the door. The pathologist had allowed him to keep the three X-ray images of the woman’s skull, along with a single photograph of the head and shoulders of the corpse. He consulted them only briefly before taking up a Strathmore Series 300 pad and a Faber-Castell pencil. His method was rudimentary, a simple oval bisected by faint horizontal lines for the eyes and mouth. Contrary to what he had told Colonel Baggio, it was only a few minutes before he had a finished sketch in hand.
It was the young woman from Bar Dogale.
He tore the sketch from the pad and laid it on his worktable. Surely, he told himself, it was not possible. He had simply given the dead woman the face of a woman who had caught his attention. With his near-perfect recall for visual images, it was entirely understandable. Besides, what were the chances that the two women were actually one and the same? It was a question, he thought, only his son could answer.
Somehow he had to clear the anxious young woman from Bar Dogale from his memory. He did so by concealing her beneath a layer of imaginary obliterating paint. Next he scrutinized the four photographs at considerable length. He even laid his hand on the frontal X-ray of the skull and probed the fourteen bones of the face as though he were reading a page of braille. Finally he reached for the Strathmore pad and began to sketch, the tip of his pencil moving swiftly over the smooth surface of the Bristol paper. The result was a near-perfect copy of the first sketch.
To produce his third and final sketch he used an assortment ofcolored pencils. He gave his subject a simple shoulder-length hairstyle, a spray of freckles across her nose, a beauty mark above her lip, and a circular gold pendant bearing Michelangelo’s image of God imparting the spark of life to his creation. The expression the woman wore was unsmiling, guarded. The gap between her two front teeth was hidden from view.
Gabriel photographed the finished sketch with his iPhone, then digitally cropped and darkened the image. No, he thought as he stared at the screen, he was not mistaken. Exactly nine days before he fished a woman in her late twenties from the waters of thelaguna, the very same woman had been sitting next to him in the Campo dei Frari, waiting anxiously for someone who was running late.
***
Chiara rang a few minutes before six to say that she and the children were leaving the university. She then declared that she was too exhausted to cook and that they were going out. Gabriel suggested Vini da Arturo, a trattoria on the opposite side of the Grand Canal in San Marco. They traveled there bytraghettoand feasted on antipasti and veal cutlets. Irene and Raphael spent the entire meal raving about their father’s bravura performance at the Salute. His lecture, it seemed, was the talk of thescuola primaria.
Leaving the restaurant, they decided to walk home over the Rialto Bridge rather than utilize the time-saving convenience of atraghetto. Gabriel encouraged Irene and Raphael to lead the way. Then, quietly, he told Chiara about his involuntary visit to the mainland, his brief reunion with the corpse he had discovered in thelaguna, and the conclusion he had reached regarding the young woman he had seen nine days earlier at Bar Dogale.
“Impossible,” said Chiara.
“Unlikely. But not impossible.” Gabriel handed over his phone. “Have a look at her.”
“Pretty girl,” remarked Chiara.
“Not really. Most people wouldn’t have noticed her.”
“But you did.”
“That’s because I notice everything.”
“Including a beauty mark on her upper lip?”
“And the freckles,” added Gabriel. “I remembered she had a few freckles.”
“What about the pendant?”
Gabriel instructed Chiara to enlarge the image.
“That might be the world’s smallest copy ofThe Creation of Adam.”
“She was wearing it when she was murdered.”
