The doctor shrugged. “I called you yesterday. If you had come, there would have been no smell then. This is summer, ice is expensive. Next time go to Padua.” He moaned. “I do my best for you. If I was caught, I would be punished, I’m risking my reputation for you, Tintoretto, I have done for years.” He mewled. “ But do you thank me? And how do you repay me for my kindness? With a painting!”
“A painting of your wife.” Tintoretto retorted, walking around the mutilated corpse. “Surely, Norillo, you are not disappointed with my work?”
“Nature didn’t make her handsome, but you managed it.” The doctor replied grudgingly. “The bitch let me into her bed last night for the first time in years.” He looked at the corpse and then folded his arms. “It’s a while since you’ve been here. I would have thought you knew enough about the human body by now. You’re famous all over Venice now. Although some say that’s only because Titian’s away and you’ve got an advantage. Some say —”
“Some say anything,” Tintoretto interrupted. “I need more light, hold that lamp up for me.”
“Titian is in Germany now, working for the King —”
“He is a great painter.”
`“And he admires you,” Norillo said, holding up the lamp. “Or he wouldn’t have thrown you out all those years ago. Titian doesn’t like competition.”
Tintoretto turned back to the old doctor. “He has nothing to fear from me —”
“Liar!” Dr Norillo replied, rearranging his glasses and shrugging. “No one comes to Venice to fail.”
“I didn’t come here, I was born in Lombardy and that’s part of the Republic.”
“Then it’s your duty to succeed!” The medic snapped, his tone softening. “I saw your painting of the Miracle of the Slave in the Scuola di St Marco. There was quite a queue to see it. People were staring and wondering how you could paint the bodies to look so real, so solid.”
“I use little figures, models,” Tintoretto admitted, flattered despite himself. “You see, I make them from clay and position them to see how they would look in a painting…” He picked up a scalpel and drew it down the length of the woman’s neck on the right side, from her ear to her collar bone. “… Then I put the little clay figures in a box and light them with candles to see how the finished picture would look –”
“Like a child playing.”
Tintoretto nodded. “Yes, like a child playing.” He bent further over the corpse and studied the exposed jugular vein, his forehead wrinkling. “But now and then I need to see a real body to remind myself, to assure myself that am right. There is always something more to learn.” He stepped back. “How did she die?”
“Not of the plague.” The doctor replied, mockingly. He gestured to the mutilated torso, minus its arms and legs. “She was murdered. Her corpse dismembered, God rest her soul.”
“D’you know who she was?”
“Unknown to me and unclaimed by any family.”
“And no one knows who killed her?”
“No one cares!” the medic replied. “The body was found in the water —”
“Like this?”
Norillo nodded. “Like that. Four days ago and brought to the hospital’s anatomy room.”
Tintoretto studied the torso. “The wounds where her arms and legs were severed are old, there are no new cuts.” He looked at the shoulders and thighs where the limbs had been removed, the muscles grey, the bones the colour of soured milk.
“No, no new wounds. Apart from the one you’ve just made,” the medic agreed, nodding. “You know how it works. When a body’s brought here I let the medics know it’s available for dissection in the Anatomy Theatre —”
“For a fee?”
“Of course for a fee! Everything’s for sale in Venice. I’m an old man, I need to provide for my family. If anything should happen to me they need to be safe. We all know how the poor live in Venice, I don’t want them to suffer.” Norillo whined on. “But I take a risk with you. The bodies are only supposed to be used by doctors, not fucking artists.”
“You get more from me than the doctors. That painting I did of your wife is worth good money, so don’t try and fool me, Norillo.”
Wrong footed, the medic shrugged. “What’s all the interest anyway? D’you know the woman?”
“She looks familiar,” Tintoretto admitted. “I think – maybe – she sat for me a year ago. I can’t be sure, she’s different —”
“Everyone looks different without their arms and legs.” Norillo said snidely. “I can tell you one thing for certain, she drowned. But she was cut up first. Whoever killed her tortured her before they tossed her into the water.”
Tintoretto flinched, then looked back to the corpse. “And no one came to see her?”
“No one.”
“In four days, no one came to claim her, or view the body?”
“I’ve told you, no one claimed her.” Norillo hesitated, the rush light flaring as a draft entered the dank chamber.
The pause was enough. “Who came to see the body?”
“It’s not my position to say.” Norillo whinged, moving from foot to foot.
“Who came to see her?”
“Why does it matter —”
“Who?”
“He thought it was a woman he knew, but it wasn’t —”
“Who thought?”
“Baptista. Adamo Baptista.”
The name curdled in the damp air; it sent a shudder through the old medic and made Tintoretto pause. Adamo Baptista, artist, gambler and Pietro Aretino’s spy; a Florentine who moved around Venice untouched. A man suspected of a dozen crimes, about whom rumours flourished in the dark like mushrooms; a man who escaped the authorities by stealth -shielded under the protection of the dissolute Behemoth, Aretino.
In silence Tintoretto took out a small vellum pad and sketched the woman’s mutilated torso, then her face. He took great care over the details, making hurried notes about the colour of her lashes, the chip off one of her front teeth and the faint indentations on either side of the bridge of her nose. When he had finished he turned back to the medic, who was tapping his foot impatiently by the door.
“See to it that she gets a proper burial.”
Norillo shrugged. “The girl’s bound for the Autopsy theatre tonight —”
“Can you not stop it?” Tintoretto asked.
The doctor pulled down the corners of his mouth in a grimace. “No, I cannot stop it - and why should I? The doctors have to learn, you know that. Besides, you’ve never bothered about a corpse before —”
Tintoretto looked down at the disfigured girl.
“For pity’s sake, don’t let them cut her up. Hasn’t she suffered enough?” he turned back to the old man. “You know what will happen, they will leave after they’ve finished with her and then talk about it, describe what she looked like, what had been done to her. They’ll share the details all over Venice.”
“That’s not my concern.” Norillo replied shortly, pulling the sheet over the corpse. “She’s passed feeling anything.”