“Nina Crivelli was probably a disturbed woman who was trying to take advantage of you because of your prominence and your money. And she had a heart attack and died.”
Even as he said it, he hoped it was as simple as that.
Scheherazade came to an end. In the sudden silence she heard Habib’s laugh and Giorgio’s voice coming down from the kitchen.
“They seem to get along quite well,” the Contessa said.
Urbino made no response.
The bell of the Madonna dell’ Orto tolled across the roofs of the Cannaregio. The Contessa’s eyes wandered around the familiar room where she and Urbino had spent many enjoyable hours. Suddenly, her eyes stopped at a table beside the door.
“Where is that Faenza dish that used to be there?” she asked.
Her distress was not so much for the lovely blue majolica ware they had found together in Florence as it was a reflection of her own free-floating anxiety about things being confused and out of place.
“Oh, I hope those brutish Americans didn’t break it! Forgive me, but they were! Or maybe you’ve moved it?”
“I’m afraid it was broken when Habib was playing with Serena.”
“Beyond repair?”
“Not quite that, but it will never be the same, not,” he added, “for those who know and can see.”
As if to refresh her vision and her spirit, the Contessa stared at the Bartolomeo Veneto engagement portrait of a young lady, which Urbino had done such a good job of restoring several summers ago. This evidence of one of his talents encouraged her, all the more so because he had done the restoration while investigating something of great personal importance to her.
“You must help me,” she brought out in a determined voice. “Humor me. Condescend to me. Be impatient, even angry with me, but help me.”
“Help you how?”
“In the way you’ve done for me and for others before. Ask some questions. Get some answers. Settle this one way or another.”
“As you see, Barbara, I’m not quite up to poking around at the moment.”
“Oh, you will be soon, with such good care,” she added as the sound of footsteps approached the door.
Habib appeared with a tray with three steaming cups. He went over to the Contessa first.
“Please, take one. It is not just for sick people. You must not be left out.”
“How sweet of you. It does smell good.”
“And for you, sidi.”
He put the tray down on a low brass table beside an ottoman, neither of which the Contessa had ever noticed before. He went over to the fireplace.
“Tell me, Habib,” the Contessa asked, “what does sidi mean?”
“It is a title of respect.” He extracted something from his sweater pocket, knelt down, and opened his hand to Serena. She nibbled the treat and resumed her nap. “An Arabic word,” Habib continued, “but like El Cid in the Spanish story. It is what I call my older brother, sometimes my father.”
He seated himself on an ottoman, balancing the cup on his knee.
“I see.”
Her eyes grazed Urbino’s, and he looked away. She took a sip of the tisane.
“Very good. Did you get the herbs here in Venice? Maybe at that little shop in Dorsoduro? You know it, Urbino. By the Montin?”
“Oh, no!” Habib said with his engaging smile. “I brought them from Morocco.”
“Smuggled them in, did you?” she asked.
Habib’s smile faded. He looked at Urbino for help. When Urbino had explained, Habib turned back to the Contessa with an alarmed look.
“Contraband? I never did a thing like that! I never would go against the law!”
“Barbara was only joking.”
Habib retreated into silence and his own cup of herb tea.
As she waited for conversation to pick up again, the Contessa glanced around the room. This time it was the absence of an eighteenth-century carved wood fire screen with an embroidered panel, one of her many gifts. However, she made no comment as she had before about the Faenza dish.
Urbino drew Habib out by asking about his progress in Italian at the language school. He spoke enthusiastically about his teachers and the new friends he was making. When Habib finished with a description of an itinerary of trips the school was planning for its students as far away as Rome, he got up and collected the empty cups.
“You must not stay up too late, sidi. The tisane steams your body much better when you are resting or asleep. Good night,” he added with a slightly strained smile at the Contessa.
He departed with the tray, Serena trotting five feet behind him.
The Contessa stood up.
“It’s good to see that he’s adjusting so well.”
“Yes. I’m pleased that he’s making friends and feeling more comfortable here. I was afraid that he’d be isolated. I worry about him, of course—perhaps too much—but I am responsible for him.”
“Indeed. I’m sure you’ll find the proper balance between giving him his independence and looking after him. It’s your way.”
She looked at him warmly.
“I promise to ask a few questions here and there. I admit it might be a good idea to learn something about Nina Crivelli. Then your mind can be at ease.”
“You’re a dear! Let’s hope for the best.” She sighed. “Take care of yourself or, should I say, let yourself be taken care of. I see that there’s no need for me to come running over with chicken soup.”
She had aimed for a light, humorous note, but she wondered if the trace of regret in her voice were as evident to Urbino as to her.
“Bring it over whenever you want,” Urbino said with a little smile. “It will be much appreciated. It’s not in Habib’s repertoire.”
She paused at the door.
“He’s an interesting boy,” she said, almost before she knew she was going to.
“Even more so when you get to know him better. But he’s not a boy.”
“To me he is—and to you.”
A plaintive female voice, accompanied by violins and flutes, drifted down the hallway from behind one of the closed doors.
“You know, caro, the Veneto portrait somehow looks more appropriate since you returned.”
The young woman had a vague Oriental air in her large padded green turban.
“By the way,” the Contessa went on, “is your own charming cap something you affect only in the depths of domesticity? I don’t believe I’ve seen you in it before.”
“I’ve worn it out on occasion,” Urbino responded with what she was gratified to see was a touch of embarrassment. “Habib says that it’s advantageous to wear it when I sleep—to keep my head warm during my convalescence.”
“I see. To maximize the benefits of his delicious tea. Well, caro, you obviously won’t have to spend very much time thinking of your costume for the ball. A few more well-chosen items should complete it! Good night.”
2
After the Contessa left, Urbino went to the darkwood ambry. The small, enclosed cupboard contained neither alms nor chalices, although one of the latter stood on a nearby table, draped with a seventeenth-century lace cover. Like the confessional, the ambry served a very secular function although, in the case of the cupboard, there was some faint likeness to its original ecclesiastical purpose. He withdrew a glass and a decanter of Benedictine, and somewhat guiltily poured a generous amount into the glass. He needed something more conducive to meditation than Habib’s tisane.
He sat on the sofa and arranged the Berber blanket around him. The dampness of the Palazzo Uccello, which all its radiators and insulation couldn’t keep out, seldom bothered him, but his recent illness was making him feel the chill even more.
His thoughts turned to Nina Crivelli. Although the sudden death of a woman in her late seventies was nothing unusual, disturbing circumstances surrounded it.
From what the Contessa had told him and from what he had observed himself, Nina Crivelli struck him as a cunning woman. Ther
e was no question that she had acted as if she had a dark secret to impart to the Contessa for a good price. Whether it had been a secret worth paying for, or any secret at all, was more dubious.
She had managed, however, to throw the Contessa into fear and confusion. It was a power that, even in death, she still had.
Despite what he had said to the Contessa about unanswered questions, Crivelli’s death had left too many for his satisfaction. It was not his nature—call it curiosity or nosiness or perhaps pride—to accept either provisional answers, or someone else’s answers, to troubling questions. He needed to find out for himself.
He considered himself a student of human nature. His Venetian Lives as well as his sleuthing had developed his ability to detect the truth—or the truths—behind appearances. This didn’t mean that he cavalierly dismissed appearances as lies. He had too much respect, and desire, for the truth to do anything close to that.
Urbino reviewed the events on the night of Nina Crivelli’s death.
After Habib had left to seek help, Urbino had waited for what seemed an eternity. He felt all the oppressive weight of the deserted, fog-shrouded alleys as he sat on the overturned bucket, leaning against the building and hoping someone would come by. Increasingly weak, almost in a daze, he was hardly able to raise his head and certainly not his voice, at least not loudly enough to get the attention of any of the residents who were behind their shutters and in front of their televisions.
He lost all sense of time. At one point, a figure that resembled some spectral form in the early days of cinema approached him, all dark gray and indistinguishable as to sex or age. It seemed as if the figure was headed in his direction, but then, by some trick of the fog or Urbino’s own distraught condition, it disappeared. Whether the person—for so he assumed it was, not sharing Habib’s superstitions—had slipped noiselessly into one of the nearby houses or down an alley, or had turned around and retreated just as soundlessly as he or she had come, Urbino could in no way determine.
His next clear memory was of Habib calling his name anxiously, of footsteps, of Habib and Giorgio’s faces, of strong arms lifting him and carrying him to the nearby motoscafo. Running through his mind as the craft made its way back to Venice and the Palazzo Uccello was the question of where the Contessa might be. She would have made her presence known by her comforting words.
Not until late the next morning, after he had been visited by a doctor and had regained some of his strength and mental concentration, did he learn her story.
She told it to him while the two of them were closeted alone in his bedroom. About five minutes after Urbino and Habib had gone out, Oriana had left, agreeing to drop Rebecca and Polidoro off with her motorboat that was moored nearby. Quick on their heels had been Regina Bella, who said she was expecting a telephone call. Beatrix and Marie then started to say their good-byes, politely refusing the Contessa’s offer of Giorgio’s services when Urbino and Habib would return. The two women said they would take the vaporetto, and made what seemed to her a rather hasty departure.
Only the Contessa, Frieda, and Silvia remained.
“Ten minutes after Beatrix and Marie had gone, I told Frieda I wanted to try to find you. It was a lie, but I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to see Nina, and have it all out, once and for all. Frieda said she couldn’t let me go alone, but I insisted she stay. As I was leaving, she was helping Silvia clean up.”
The Contessa made her slow way through the fog to the area where Nina and Salvatore lived. She needed the guidance of a middle-aged man who was inserting a key into his door as he returned for the night. He pointed out the second floor of a building indistinguishable from the others. Light glittered behind the closed shutters. She rang the bell, waited for a few minutes, and rang again. No one answered.
She then rang one of the other bells and had a conversation with the woman who came down to the outer door. She said that she couldn’t possibly let the Contessa in at this hour. Both the Crivellis were surely asleep. She should come back tomorrow.
The Contessa then went to Il Piccolo Nettuno, on the remote chance that the lace maker would be there. Once again the fog slowed her down. As best she could estimate, it had been about twenty-five minutes since she had left the Casa Verde.
“I must have aged five years during those minutes in the restaurant. The noises in the kitchen and the cat darting past me would have been enough. But practically to stumble over Nina’s body! What a dreadful sight! There she was on the floor, her eyes staring up at me and with the lace handkerchief against her mouth. And all those mirrors. I’ll remember it for as long as I live!”
She had rushed out into the deserted Via Galuppi. A few frantic and stumbling minutes took her first to the carabiniere quarters beside the Church of San Martino. It was closed. Fortunately, she found a policeman keeping his lonely vigil in the station next to the Lace School.
An hour and a half later a carabiniere officer escorted her to Frieda’s where she found the German woman and Silvia having a nightcap.
After the shock of learning about Nina’s death, Frieda set the Contessa’s mind at ease about Urbino. He was safely back at the Palazzo Uccello, she said.
She described Habib’s hysterical arrival at the Casa Verde. To judge from his incoherent recollections, he had almost fallen into a canal and appeared to have crossed the causeway to the neighboring island of Mazzorbo. There, he realized his mistake, and he made his way back to Burano, where he eventually came upon two young men returning from the boat landing. They led him to “la casa della tedesca.” It seemed that Habib had remembered enough Italian at the critical moment.
Frieda and Habib had gone in search of Giorgio and the motorboat. They found a moored motorboat that looked like the Contessa’s, but assumed they were mistaken since Giorgio was nowhere around. They became lost in the fog, and were afraid they might be retracing their steps, when Giorgio suddenly appeared. He had heard their voices, he said. Thanks to his coolheadedness and sense of direction, they found the semiconscious Urbino. Frieda returned to the Casa Verde to wait for the Contessa’s return while Habib and Giorgio took Urbino to the Palazzo Uccello.
“A sad and busy night on quiet little Burano,” the Contessa had said in a troubled voice. “Thank God, you didn’t have to wait longer to be rescued, or things might have turned out even worse. Have you no idea who that person in the fog was?”
“I can’t even be absolutely sure if there was anyone at all. I was in such a state. And then there was the fog. It was conspiring against us all that night.”
“Not all of us. It was a friend of the murderer, and murder it was!”
She had given him a sage look and nodded her head.
Urbino turned off the lights and left the library.
He would do what he could to set the Contessa’s mind at ease, and also his own. A few discreet questions here and there, coming from a concerned citizen of the serene city, might generate the needed answers.
Suddenly, music blasted down the hall. It was a male voice singing of love and fate, of a woman’s eyes and death, of travels and loneliness. It was a familiar song from his time in Morocco, one he had heard in cafes and long-distance taxis. Habib had told him that the words, which he had translated for him, were from a famous Arabic poem. It was one of Habib’s favorites. He often played it, and usually at high volume.
Urbino smiled to himself. The Contessa had said that Habib was a mere boy, and Urbino had disagreed, but in situations like these, with music blasting so late into the night, he was inclined to agree with her.
3
The wake of the Contessa’s motorboat frothed the steely gray lagoon as it made its way toward Burano.
Although the Contessa had complete faith in Urbino’s ability to deal with the Nina Crivelli affair, she was impatient. She wasn’t the kind of woman to be content to sit back and leave things to others, even if the other was someone as trusted and competent as Urbino.
During this period after the la
ce maker’s death, his illness would make it impossible for him to do little more than think and plan from the confines of the Palazzo Uccello. What she needed now was some action.
She had decided, after hours of contemplation in her salotto blu and an almost sleepless night following her talk with Urbino, to do a little sleuthing around herself.
It would begin with a visit of charity.
As soon as Giorgio left her at the landing, the Contessa found herself face to face with the ghost of Nina Crivelli. Death notices of a bespectacled, but much younger Nina lined her route to the center of town.
The funeral had been a hasty affair. Services at the Church of San Martino yesterday morning had been followed with burial in a cemetery on the mainland. If Urbino had been well enough to accompany her, she would have gone, but she hadn’t felt up to doing it alone.
Of course, she thought to herself as she approached Il Piccolo Nettuno, here she was striking out on her own bit of sleuthing with Urbino nowhere in sight. She was being inconsistent, she knew, but her vigil at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini had impressed upon her that precious time couldn’t be wasted.
On the door of the restaurant, beneath another death notice of Nina Crivelli, a sign informed her that the restaurant would be closed until tomorrow in memory of the lace maker.
The Crivelli apartment was in a rundown building near the Church of San Martino. In the light of day, she could see that it hadn’t been enlivened with a coat of bright paint in a long time, or with any paint or whitewash at all. The only sound she heard was a television behind the ground-floor door.
The front door was open today. On the chipped and peeling wall in the entrance was a crude, faded drawing of a hammer and sickle.
Next to it was another obituary notice. Beneath the picture someone had scrawled Strega! in large red letters.
Strega, witch.
It was what Habib had called the old woman.
The first door on the second floor bore the faded name Crivelli on a piece of cardboard. The Contessa picked up the knocker and rapped it against the door, first softly, then more loudly when she received no response. It was not quite noon. Perhaps Salvatore was out on errands.
Deadly to the Sight Page 9
