Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth Page B

immensely pleased. It always gave him innocent pleasure to be in possession of facts and able to impart them. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and chuckled slightly. ‘Met them a year or so ago. She is Chiara Litsov now, but she was Chiara Fornarini before her marriage.’
    ‘That is most interesting,’ Raikes said. Wiseman must have been saving this up all through lunch, he thought, waiting for the most effective moment to come out with it. ‘Of course, you know everybody,’ he said.
    ‘I think they would remember me. Would you like to meet them?’
    ‘Well … yes. Yes, I would.’
    Raikes’s hesitation had been caused by the fact that he had no real reason for thinking there was any connection at all between the Fornarini family and his Madonna. Mistaking its nature, Wiseman said, ‘They are an interesting couple. He is an artist, a sculptor, very talented, beginning to be successful. They don’t live in Venice itself, but on one of the islands in the Lagoon, rather remote. You have to get a boat from Burano. But they have a telephone. Litsov himself is something of a recluse, he doesn’t often leave the island. In fact he told me when I met him that he had only been away twice in the previous six months. She is more sociable. She is a remarkable woman, I think.’
    ‘I’d like to meet them very much,’ Raikes said, more firmly.
    ‘And so you shall, dear boy,’ Wiseman said. ‘Leave it all to uncle Alex.’
    On this amiable note they parted, Wiseman to return to his office off the Calle Larga San Marco, Raikes to carry out a purpose that had been on his mind since the previous evening, since first his wavering torchlight had settled on that page.
    He had been already that morning to the Central Post Office to check on the address and it was fortunate he had done so, as neither street nor number was now the same. There had been a reorganization of the whole system in the 1930s, and Calle Guanara did not now include the house, which was known as Casa Fioret and given as being on the Calle dei Savi, number 6.
    It took him something like an hour to walk it, proceeding northwards from behind the Piazza San Marco, steering roughly by the glinting water of the Grand Canal, constantly glimpsed on his left and lost again. The street ran between the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo and the Malibran Theatre. It was narrow, with tall houses on either side, bounded by a green and malodorous canal. Casa Fioret was the last house on the right, with its doors opening on to the street and the canal running at the side, immediately below its walls. There was no bridge; the street ended at the stone steps that led down into the water. From the third-floor balcony of Casa Fioret to the corresponding balcony of the house opposite, there was a double line of washing.
    The street door was massive, six or eight feet across with a high rounded arch and stone pillars at the sides with acanthus-leaf decorations. On the facing of the arch, in the centre, there was a huge lion’s head with a snarl that had weathered into amiability; and set into the wall at one side, like guardian eyes, twenty-eight bell pushes in a rectangular panel – Raikes counted them as he stood there. Twenty-eight separate lots of people now lived in Casa Fioret.
    The promiscuous sheets and pyjamas and petticoats waving overhead, the evidence of multiple occupation staring Arguseyed at him, gave Raikes a chilling sense of anticlimax and futility. What could all this have to do with the Madonna? He had assumed at least some sort of continuous occupation, somebody he could question. He felt like a gambler who had suddenly run out of luck.
    The heavy door was not locked; it swung open to his push. He passed through and found himself in a large paved area like an interior courtyard, with a marble well-head in the centre and a flight of stone steps, leading presumably to the upper floors. The stairs had a carved banister, made of heavy dark wood, with large smooth bosses