Deadly to the Sight

by Edward Sklepowich

  She grabbed her bag and stood up. She leaned toward the Contessa.

  “Money, Contessa! Money for information about someone dead! Think carefully, but make the right decision! Good-bye!”

  “But you can’t go!” the Contessa cried out, once again drawing the attention of the art students and the man who was now beside her. To her surprise it was Giorgio.

  Nina Crivelli said nothing more. She didn’t even acknowledge Giorgio’s presence. She made a wide angle around him and scurried across the stones of the church out into the square more quickly than the Contessa would have thought she could have moved.

  “Giorgio!” the Contessa cried out, feeling embarrassed and agitated at the same moment. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Are you all right, Contessa?”

  As she started to get up, he put out a hand as if to steady her. She fell back into the chair. She was trembling. Her head was light.

  “I—I’m all right, Giorgio. Let’s go,” she said after a few moments.

  She declined his help as they went out into the busy Campo Santa Maria Formosa. With Giorgio silent and solicitous by her side, she walked a short distance around the church, looking in vain for the lace maker. Could she have ducked into a shop or private residence, or somehow managed during those few moments to take one of the eight routes that led away from the square toward San Marco or deeper into the Castello quarter? It seemed impossible, but nonetheless there was no trace of her.

  She returned to the base of the campanile for one final look around the area.

  “Do you want me to look for the old woman, Contessa?” Giorgio asked.

  “No, of course not!” she said sharply. Then, more softly, “Go back to the boat, Giorgio. I’ll be there in a little while.”

  Reluctantly, he left, walking with his slight limp and casting an occasional concerned glance over his shoulder.

  The Contessa opened her purse and withdrew a small vial of perfume. She unscrewed the top and inhaled the musky scent. It somehow steadied her, and also dispersed the odor from the old woman that had been lingering in her nostrils.

  She was about to follow Giorgio to the boat, when the monstrous, leering head at the base of the bell tower caught her attention. Its flat nose, grotesquely misshapen mouth, and protruding teeth transfixed her. It had on other occasions seemed almost like a cartoon figure, something designed to frighten children and the pathetically credulous. Now, after her encounter with Nina Crivelli, its leer was distinctly disturbing and strictly—all too strictly—personal.

  An icy fear twisted around her heart. She couldn’t shake it off in the privileged snug atmosphere of her sleek motorboat as it made its way back to the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, nor later in the comfort of the salotto blu, where she hid herself away for the remainder of the day.

  12

  After her account, during which Urbino had not interrupted her to ask or say anything, the Contessa arose from the sofa with a sigh. Telling her story had taken its toll on her. She looked even wearier than she had before.

  She went over to a small table, this one burdened with paperweights, and picked up a mille fiori ball. As she gazed into its crystal depths, she said in a resigned manner, “So you see, caro, it’s a matter of blackmail.”

  She put the paperweight down and looked at him with an aggrieved expression.

  “I definitely need a drink,” Urbino said. “Or should I say we?” He went to the drink cabinet. “Sherry?”

  “I give in. Yes, sherry.”

  The Contessa rang for the removal of the tea table, as if she wanted to clear the stage of a prop that had proved less useful than she had hoped.

  After he poured out their drinks, they once again seated themselves. The Contessa took a sip of sherry. Urbino waited, but she remained silent and stared at him.

  “My immediate reaction,” he prompted, “is that Nina Crivelli doesn’t seem the type to resort to blackmail.”

  “You speak of ‘types’! You of all people! Hasn’t your sleuthing shown you how little faith can be given to appearances when we’re dealing with—with”—she struggled to find the right word—“the criminous!” she finished, somewhat lamely.

  “Nonetheless, appearances do count for something.”

  Yet he admitted to himself that there had been a hard edge to the woman in the way she behaved toward her son, so different from her almost sycophantic speech to the Contessa and himself.

  “You don’t know her. I do!”

  He might have used this as an opening to give her his own direct impressions of the lace maker, if she hadn’t rushed on in a torrent of impassioned words.

  “I saw deep into her soul, I tell you! It was dark, dark, dark! Don’t I have the ability to see things for what they really are? You’re the one with your head in the clouds! You’re the one who can be as blind as a bat, whatever good your intelligence gets you. And your—your lotus days have done you not one iota of good, my friend, not one iota!”

  Urbino was not surprised to have become the recipient of the Contessa’s vitriol. It wasn’t that he felt he deserved it, but that she believed he did. He took a sip of his sherry and waited.

  “Tell me, caro,” she said after a few moments, with all trace of irascibility now gone, “do you have any plans for dinner?”

  It was less a question than an appeal, and even less of an appeal than an olive branch.

  “No plans that I can’t break for you.”

  “I do feel encouraged! I hope I’m not twisting your arm.”

  “You have my blind devotion, bat-like or otherwise.”

  “You’re the prince of smirkers. Don’t try to humor me. It won’t work this time. The state of my nerves—”

  The Contessa broke off when Vitale and Silvia came into the room in answer to her bell. She made strained, innocuous conversation in the ensuing minutes, while the table was tended to.

  “The state of my nerves,” the Contessa smoothly resumed as soon as Vitale had closed the door behind them, “is far beyond either your delightful humor or this sherry.”

  She nonetheless took a sip of the rich golden liquid before continuing.

  “Nina Crivelli knows something about Alvise that she believes is damaging enough for me to want to pay her a large sum. She’s making very obvious insinuations! It couldn’t be more simple and more devastating!”

  “But she didn’t even mention Alvise’s name.”

  “Ah, caro, even old women from Burano,” she said with a cool air, as if a vast gulf of age and distance divided her from the lace maker, “even they have their subtlety! Do you think she’d breathe anything against Alvise? Do you think she’d give me any reason to accuse her of such a vile thing? Sometimes I think when you see a woman of a certain age—of a very advanced certain age, I should add—your filial instincts overcome you. Stop seeing the mother in them or, if you absolutely must, then admit that even mothers can—can”—she searched for the damning word: “blackmail!” She finished with obvious satisfaction.

  The Contessa’s reference to mothers reminded Urbino of what Nina Crivelli had said to him on the motoscafo yesterday about his devotion to his.

  He got up. He needed what the Contessa called one of his meditative turns around the room as the two of them looked as squarely as they could at Crivelli’s behavior in Santa Maria Formosa and as he silently ran through his mind his conversation with her.

  “But how do you know she meant Alvise?” he brought out from the window with a view of the little bridge.

  “I know, I know, I know!”

  “It may be good enough for you, Barbara, but not for me. As I remember, and as I am sure you’re thinking, you’ve been through something like this before. We’ve been through it together.”

  “Thank you for the we. Yes, you’re right. I’m thinking of that summer.”

  “And it came to nothing.”

  They were referring to a difficult period of the Contessa’s life that Urbino had helped her through, when she
had had to confront the possibility that Alvise had cruelly deceived her.

  “Nothing, you say! What about a murder!”

  “I mean that it came to nothing insofar as Alvise was concerned, and my instincts tell me the same thing now.” He thought for a few moments. “What was Giorgio doing at Santa Maria Formosa?”

  “He said it was one of the churches he hadn’t yet been in. He had some time on his hands and decided to see it.”

  “I suppose it sounds plausible.”

  “Are you suggesting he had another reason for being there?”

  Actually Urbino wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “It’s just that Crivelli seemed to get nervous when she saw who he was.”

  “You’re ridiculous, Urbino. Giorgio didn’t even know Alvise. He—”

  “You’re assuming that Crivelli has something to tell you about Alvise,” he interrupted. “I believe you’re wrong, as I said. If everything happened exactly the way you described it, Crivelli gave you some details about her information—if you can call them details—only when Giorgio was a few feet away, and in a voice that was louder than usual.”

  “I don’t see how that involves Giorgio. She was determined to let me know that she had information of value to me. She practically named Alvise, as far as I am concerned.”

  “Perhaps.” Urbino said it without any enthusiasm. He went over the sequence of events in his mind from the time Crivelli had accosted the Contessa until she had left the church right after Giorgio had come up.

  The Contessa was giving him a sad, skeptical look.

  “I can’t help it, Urbino. I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop. I’ve been at my wit’s end. I’ve wanted to tell you about it from the moment you returned but I couldn’t. You were so caught up in being back and—and in other things, and I guess I kept hoping that I’d wake up one day to find that I’d been worrying about nothing. But the fear has only gotten stronger.”

  He took a sip of sherry. It was time to tell her about his meeting with Crivelli.

  “I had a talk with her yesterday,” he said abruptly.

  “A talk with her? You knew about this all the while I’ve been going on?”

  “What you’ve told me is completely new to me, but I met her on Burano. Habib and I went to Il Piccolo Nettuno. This is what happened.”

  As Urbino gave his account, without any embellishment or commentary, the Contessa was just as silent as he had been during hers.

  When he finished, the Contessa was pale.

  “I’m convinced now more than ever! She means me harm!”

  “But she said she only wanted to help you—and to be helped,” he added lamely.

  “Take some clues from your Habib! You’re always singing his praises until I’m deaf to anything else! He knows that she’s to be feared.”

  Urbino poured himself another generous portion of sherry. He wasn’t as sure about what he felt about Crivelli now as he had been a few moments ago.

  “All that business about mothers,” the Contessa went on, “and—and how much you like San Michele and cemeteries, even though you are such a young man,” she emphasized. “Can’t you see how crafty she is? How she was manipulating you? Did you ask yourself how she knew those things? She’s the kind of person who makes a point of getting information, I tell you, of using information! I can only guess what she might know about you that’s a deep dark secret even to me.”

  “Habib—”

  “Yes, let’s talk about Habib. Why is he so frightened of her?”

  “He says she has the evil eye. You know he’s superstitious.”

  “Yes, but why about Nina Crivelli?”

  “Just look at her! She’s frightening looking, as frightening as an evil fairy-tale character can be to a child. And Habib is in some ways a child, at least in his susceptibilities.”

  “Yes, yes, I realize all that. I’m not trying to cast any doubts on your young friend, believe me,” she said with an air of innocence that didn’t convince him, “but there may be more here than meets the eye. She could have approached Habib on some other occasion, and tried to get information from him. And information of a certain kind is power! It’s money!”

  Urbino resisted her implication that Habib might be lying to him, perhaps out of fear.

  “It might be a good idea for us to see her together,” he said. “No, I don’t mean when we go to Frieda’s, but perhaps we can get a message to her then. We might arrange to meet her at the Palazzo Uccello. A public place wouldn’t be suitable, and she’d get the wrong idea if you saw her here. She needs to be asked some direct questions. Depending on what she says, we’ll decide whether we need to go to the police.” The Contessa gave a start. “I doubt it will ever come to that, and you should get it out of your mind that she knows anything compromising about Alvise. There’s something else at work here. It’s probably something easily explained.”

  He had spoken with more conviction than he felt, but it seemed to soothe her.

  All the way back to the Palazzo Uccello, he kept turning over in his mind the strange sequence of events surrounding the old lace maker. It was a puzzling affair and he could understand the Contessa’s distress. She very well might be in a vulnerable position, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with the Conte—except, that is, for the great Da Capo-Zendrini fortune that was now hers.

  Back home, he found Habib in the library, playing with the cat Serena. He had been considering asking Habib some questions about Crivelli, but the sight of him sitting on the floor and being so indulgent with Serena made him decide against it. He didn’t want to spoil Habib’s mood, at least not tonight, by bringing up a topic he knew was disturbing to him.

  13

  “There she is,” Habib said to the dark-skinned young man by his side.

  It was the next day. Habib and Urbino had gone to the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute with one of Habib’s friends. He was Jerome, a Senegalese in his twenties who had come to Italy to study at Perugia and was now at Habib’s language school.

  Habib was indicating the Byzantine painting of the Madonna and child on the high altar. Jerome’s surprisingly blue eyes opened wide as he took it in.

  “She’s black,” he said in disbelief. “Darker than you, Habib. Just like me.”

  “Yes! And it is stolen!”

  “Stolen?”

  “It was stolen hundreds of years ago. The Italians pray to it all the time.”

  Urbino listened in amusement. Habib was right. The painting of the Black Madonna was one of Venice’s many holy thefts. The thief had been none other than the last of Venice’s Doges, Francesco Morosini, who had brought it back from Crete in 1672 to adorn the newly built church. The Baroque Salute had been commissioned in thanksgiving to the Virgin for delivering the city from a plague. The ill and the infirm still prayed to her as the Madonna of Good Health. Every November she was honored by the Festa della Salute when a bridge of boats spanned the Grand Canal from the boat landing at Santa Maria del Giglio to the Salute.

  “Will the church have to give it back?” Jerome asked.

  “Oh, no! Urbino says that there are too many stolen things in Venice to give back. The city would be empty!”

  “It is very strange.”

  “Yes. And there are also dead bodies that they stole away from churches and cemeteries. They put them in glass coffins and bury their bones in the walls of the churches. But there are none here.” He lowered his voice even more. “It is a strange religion, Jerome.”

  The Senegalese nodded in agreement.

  Before they left, Habib insisted that Jerome buy one of the small prayer cards at the sacristy, with a reproduction of the Black Madonna and a prayer for health in Italian on the back.

  “I have one. It will help you with your Italian,” Habib said. “And Urbino says it could help you if you get sick, God forbid it!”

  Outside on the broad steps of the church, Urbino looked for the Contessa. The four of them had come to the Dorsoduro qua
rter in her motorboat. The Contessa had joined one of Frieda Hensel’s friends at the nearby Pinacoteca Manfrediana after arranging for the collection to be opened for them.

  Urbino didn’t see the Contessa, but her boat, with Giorgio standing in front of it, was moored to the left of the church. A chill wind was blowing.

  As they made their way across the little square to take refuge in the cabin and wait for the Contessa, a small crowd and raised voices by the vaporetto landing diverted their attention. Sitting on the damp stones was a thin, blond woman in her forties dressed too lightly for the cold weather. Two carabiniere officers stood above her in their full regalia. The woman was rocking back and forth, and speaking loudly in a language Urbino didn’t recognize.

  He approached the edge of the crowd, with Habib and Jerome behind him.

  “Send her back where she came from!” shouted a tall man in Italian. He held a little girl of seven or eight by the hand.

  “How much more of this can we take?” an elderly woman with a muzzled cocker spaniel said. “They’re just thieves, all of them.”

  “You’re right,” a bearded man said. “My cousin had his new car stolen right in front of his apartment in Milan!”

  The blond woman raised her head and stared straight into Urbino’s face. She started to speak to him in German in a desperate way. He was so startled that he responded in English and said he was an American.

  She scrambled to her feet.

  “Please to help me, mister!” she shouted in English.

  She came up and touched the sleeve of his coat.

  “I am come here to help the Italians. They must to understand that Mussolini lives in a building in the Vaticano!”

  “What country are you from?” Urbino asked.

  The woman stared at him blankly.

  “I am artist! I make photographs!”