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T he regional headquarters of the Arma dei Carabinieri, one of Italy’s two national police forces, were located in the Campo San Zaccaria.

Capitano Luca Rossetti was attached to the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony, better known as the Art Squad.

Gabriel occasionally served as a consultant to the unit and had worked with Rossetti on a major international forgery investigation.

Despite a regrettable case of mistaken identity in a darkened corte in San Polo—one that left Rossetti with a broken jaw and Gabriel with several fractured bones in his right hand—they remained the best of friends.

“Where?” asked the Italian policeman.

“Walk through the sotoportego . You can’t miss me.”

Rossetti hurried downstairs to the campo and, phone in hand, sprinted through the passageway that led to the Riva degli Schiavoni, the monumental waterfront promenade stretching along the Grand Canal. There were the usual tourists and vendors, but Rossetti saw no evidence of a dead body.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see you.”

“I’m in the water taxi about a hundred meters due west of Maggiore.”

Rossetti spotted the vessel at once. Gabriel was hanging over the starboard side, a phone in one hand, a rescue pole in the other.

“Whatever you do,” said Rossetti, “don’t let it go.”

Because this was Venice, the Carabinieri maintained a substantial fleet of vessels, the first of which arrived just three minutes after Gabriel’s call.

Five more craft appeared soon after, along with waterborne units of the Polizia di Stato, the Guardia di Finanza, and even the Coast Guard.

The armada quickly established a blockade around the crime scene, temporarily halting traffic on both the Grand and Giudecca Canals.

Gabriel grimly maintained control of the corpse for several more minutes before surrendering it to a pair of Carabinieri crime scene technicians.

As they hauled the body into a flat-bottomed pontoon boat, the pilot of the water taxi turned away and was violently sick over the port gunwale.

“Shall I take us back to the basilica?” asked Gabriel.

“It’s against regulations.”

“I think they’ll make an exception in this case.”

Gabriel started the taxi’s engines and crept forward, breaching the blockade between two of the police craft. The traffic on the Grand Canal was at a standstill. He guided the taxi past motionless barges and vaporetti and slid into an empty spot along the quay.

“Are you feeling any better?” he asked the pilot.

“A little. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget what I saw this morning.”

Neither would Gabriel. He had once discovered the body of a notorious Italian tomb raider in a vat of acid. This was worse.

He stepped onto the quay and headed up the steps of the basilica.

The nave was teeming with tourists, seemingly unaware of the commotion outside.

Gabriel was glad of their company. He climbed the scaffolding to his work platform and switched on the halogen lamps, flooding the Titian with dazzling white light.

“Sorry for the delay, Signore Vecellio,” he said quietly as he prepared his first swab. “But you’ll never guess what I just discovered in the Canal Grande.”

***

The doors of the basilica closed promptly at noon, and a heavy silence fell over the nave. Gabriel worked without a break until half past one, when he received a call from Luca Rossetti.

“We need a statement.”

“On what particular subject?”

“This morning’s discovery. The lead detective would like you to drop by the stazione .”

“I’m sure he would, but I’m rather busy at the moment.”

“In that case, we’ll come to you.”

They arrived twenty minutes later and, as instructed, knocked on the side door.

The detective was a tall, gaunt figure called Baggio who wore on his shoulders the three silver stars of a colonnello .

Gabriel explained that he had spotted something floating on the surface of the laguna at approximately 11:00 a.m., that he had hired a water taxi to investigate the matter, and that the object in the water, as he had feared, turned out to be a human corpse.

The advanced state of decomposition made it impossible to say with any certainty whether the decedent was a man or a woman, but it appeared to Gabriel as though it was the latter.

“That is indeed the case,” replied Baggio.

“It looked as though she had been in the water for a while.”

“Perhaps, Signore Allon. But in my experience, the laguna is most unkind to the dead.”

“Is there any evidence of trauma?”

“Our investigation has just begun. But you needn’t concern yourself with such questions. As of this moment, your role in this unfortunate matter is officially over.”

“I would appreciate it if you kept my name out of the papers.”

Colonel Baggio shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. “Leaks happen, Signore Allon. But I assure you, the press won’t hear anything from me.”

Gabriel showed the two Carabinieri officers out and resumed work on the Titian. The crowds returned at three o’clock and remained until five, when the attendants herded them out the door. Gabriel waited until the nave was empty before switching off the lamps and descending the scaffolding.

Outside, he crossed the quay to the vaporetto stop. A Number 1 was traversing the Grand Canal diagonally from the direction of San Marco. He boarded it a moment later and went into the passenger cabin. Chiara was seated in the first row, her eyes on her mobile phone.

Gabriel sat down next to her. “I was promised a drink.”

“Tough day at the office?”

“Eventful.”

“So I heard,” said Chiara, and handed over her phone.

The lead item in Il Gazzettino concerned a grisly discovery in the waters near the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.

The story was accompanied by a photograph of a man with platinum-colored hair leaning over the side of a water taxi, a retractable pole in his hands.

The object pinned against the side of the hull was faintly visible. “Care to explain?”

“I invited you to have coffee with me. And you, of course, refused.” Gabriel returned Chiara’s phone. “Do the children know?”

“Irene was the one who told me.”

Gabriel sighed. “You really should limit the amount of time she spends on the computer. ”

***

The palazzo stood on the northern bank of the Grand Canal not far from the San Tomà vaporetto stop.

From the broad loggia of its piano nobile , the Rialto Bridge was visible in the east. The furnishings in the spacious adjoining drawing rooms were contemporary and comfortable, and the walls were hung with an eclectic collection of paintings, including works by Gabriel’s mother and grandfather, a noted German Expressionist and disciple of Max Beckmann.

In the master bedroom suite were a pair of Modigliani nudes that Gabriel had painted on something of a dare.

Propped on the easel in his studio was a canvas by Sebastiano Florigerio, a pro bono favor for the director of the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Gabriel was supposed to be chipping away at the painting in his spare time, but tonight he hadn’t the strength, so he sat atop a stool at the kitchen counter, drinking from a large glass of Brunello, while Chiara prepared dinner.

The menu, at Gabriel’s request, was vegetarian.

Nothing with bones and flesh, nothing from the sea.

His phone lay face down before him. He turned it over and looked again at the photograph displayed on the screen.

It had been snapped, according to Il Gazzettino , by a passenger on a Maggiore-bound vaporetto.

Precisely how the newspaper managed to identify the man holding the rescue pole was unclear, though the level of detail suggested a leak from a well-placed official source, probably Colonel Baggio of the Carabinieri.

Gabriel shared his suspicions with his wife but received no reply. She was typing on her phone.

“Who is it now?”

“Bianca Locatelli from La Repubblica .”

“Please give her the same answer that you gave the reporters from Il Gazzettino and Corriere della Sera .”

“We should at least issue a statement.”

“Why?”

“If nothing else, it might be good for our business.”

“Only if our business was finding dead bodies. Besides, I’m not the story.”

Chiara placed an assortment of antipasti on the dining room table and summoned Irene and Raphael.

Gabriel was suddenly ravenously hungry, but his appetite faded when the children began to question him about the awful events of the morning.

The account he gave was nearly identical to the one he had provided to Colonel Baggio, though he left out any description of the condition of the body.

“Where is she now?” asked Irene.

“In the morgue, I imagine.”

“What’s a morgue?” inquired Raphael.

“It’s a place where the dead are kept until they can be buried. A specialist known as a forensic pathologist will try to determine what happened to her.”

“Who was she?”

“The police don’t know yet.”

“Did someone kill her?” asked Irene.

“They don’t know that either. It’s quite possible she simply had an accident of some sort.”

It was also possible that the woman had taken her own life, but Gabriel had no wish to spoil the meal further with talk of suicide.

Chiara, sensing his discomfort, deftly shifted the topic of conversation to Saturday’s protest march.

It had been Gabriel’s brilliant idea, but he had wisely left the planning in his wife’s hands.

The march would begin, she explained, in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Castello and conclude—three hours later, provided the children maintained a steady pace—in the Piazza San Marco.

Eight other parents had agreed to help supervise the affair.

Venetian social etiquette dictated that the arduous trek be followed by a celebratory lunch. Chiara had yet to settle on a venue.

“How many marchers are you expecting?”

“It could be as many as a hundred.”

“In that case, we’ll need outdoor seating.”

“Unless we hold the luncheon here.”

“Where?” asked Gabriel.

“In our apartment, darling. We have more than enough room, and I’m sure the other mothers will help me prepare the food. This is Venice, after all. It’s what we do.”

Chiara slipped into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a steaming bowl of risotto alla Milanese .

Gabriel devoured two portions of the saffron-colored rice while Irene and Raphael excitedly worked out the details of hosting a luncheon for one hundred of their schoolmates.

The sound of their voices chased the nightmarish vision of the corpse from his thoughts, but it returned later that evening as he stood at the balustrade of his loggia, watching a water taxi beating its way up the Grand Canal.

The laguna , he thought, had indeed been unkind to her.

Now she lay on a tray of cold metal in the Venice municipal morgue, alone and in darkness.

A woman without a name. A woman without a face.