Deadly to the Sight

by Edward Sklepowich

  “That’s also what Habib said. She had the evil eye,” she reminded him.

  9

  That afternoon Urbino and Habib went into the Basilica San Marco. Habib had arranged to meet two friends to examine the bronze horses.

  The Basilica had quickly become one of Habib’s favorite buildings, as soon as Urbino had assured him that there weren’t any bodies of saints displayed for public view. Urbino thought it had something to do with the vaguely mosque-like quality of the building, despite all of its gems, gold leaf, and brightly colored mosaics representing the human figure. In fact, Habib loved the mosaics, and he had a special preference for the animals and fish. He enjoyed walking up in the stone balconies for a closer look.

  “I’ll wait until your friends arrive,” Urbino said on this occasion. They were in the portico of the church. “Then I’ll go to Florian’s. When you’re finished, you can all come over, and we can have something to eat. How’s that?”

  “Okay,” Habib said.

  “Maybe they’re inside,” Urbino said after a few minutes.

  They went into the large domed and niched space of the church and started to walk slowly around. There were only a few other people.

  “I don’t see them anywhere,” Habib said. After a few minutes, however, he stopped searching for his friends and began to examine the mosaics.

  Urbino seated himself in one of the chairs. He would let Habib make a circuit on his own. Urbino sometimes found it difficult not to give in to the temptation of an informative, but intrusive commentary.

  The Basilica invariably put Urbino in a meditative frame of mind, and this afternoon was no exception. He stared up at the dome above him, and started to think about Nina Crivelli.

  He hadn’t proceeded far when his thoughts were broken into by raised voices coming from the direction of the Pala D’Oro. One of the voices was Habib’s. Urbino rushed over. A well dressed, elderly man with a walking stick was berating Habib.

  “A disgrace!” he said. “Begging in a Catholic church. The Basilica no less! Go to your own kind of church! And go back to your own country! The Cardinal is right!”

  He was referring to the conservative archbishop of Bologna, who had singled out Muslim immigrants as a distinct threat to Italy. He began to spout some of the Cardinal’s racist ideas in an outraged tone.

  Fortunately, all of this was in Italian, and Habib couldn’t understand most of it. But the man’s venom didn’t need to be translated. It was all too evident.

  “What’s going on?” Urbino said to Habib.

  “This man is barking at me, sidi. I don’t know why. I was praying, minding my own affairs. Can’t a Muslim pray in your church?”

  Urbino immediately understood. Habib had been offering his prayers with his palms upturned, in the Muslim manner.

  The man now addressed Urbino.

  “You know this person?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  The man gave a look that swept Urbino from head to toe, then back again.

  “Indeed! Then take your friend out of here. It is disgraceful.”

  “It is you, sir, who are disgraceful. We leave you to your own prayers.”

  He put his arm around Habib’s shoulder, and they walked away.

  “Let’s look for your friends.”

  “They are too late,” Habib said in a low voice. “Let’s go home.”

  10

  As midnight neared, Urbino stood in sole possession of the Accademia Bridge.

  He had left a morose Habib at the Palazzo Uccello. The episode in the Basilica that afternoon had depressed Habib, and then something Urbino had said that evening had somehow precipitated an even darker mood.

  They had been reminiscing about a trip to Tangier, when Urbino had tried to get Habib to go swimming, and had started to pull him into the sea. Habib, who had once said that he knew how to swim, had fought back furiously. He hadn’t spoken to Urbino for the rest of the day. Urbino had attributed it to Habib’s remarkably strong will, which seldom asserted itself, but when it did, it did so with a surprising power.

  When Urbino mentioned the episode tonight, Habib had started to tremble, with what might have been either fear or anger. Urbino had dropped the topic.

  Urbino breathed in the cold air. It was a clear night. Stars, scattered above him all the way down the Grand Canal, seemed to find companions in the lights sparkling from the windows in the palazzi.

  The resumption of his night walks was the best proof he could give himself that he was well. Although he had walked briskly, he was not out of breath, nor did he feel weak. When Habib had protested that he shouldn’t go out tonight, he had assured him that he was up to it.

  He looked out at the quiet scene. Hardly a building was without an association for him, whether it was historical, personal, or professional—or amateur, he reminded himself, since one or two of them had been related to his sleuthing.

  He had gone to several receptions with the Contessa at the Palazzo Barbaro on the left. Browning, Sargent, and James had all been either guests or residents at the Gothic building. James had not only written a Venetian tale of greed and loneliness within its sumptuously decorated walls, but had also used it as a setting for a haunting chronicle of betrayal and undying love.

  Beyond the Palazzo Barbaro, and standing in slight retirement from the edge of the Grand Canal, was a much smaller and far more humble structure, the Casetta delle Rose. The controversial poet, Gabriele d’Annunzio, had lived there. It carried Urbino back to an autumn when he had done a bit of delicate sleuthing that involved two brutal murders on the Rialto and an aristocrat under the spell of d’Annunzio. This had been when the Contessa had scrambled for her life into the family tomb, as he had recalled that morning.

  On the opposite side of the canal was the imposing Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, whose landing stage was being washed by the wake of a vaporetto making its way to Santa Lucia. He had spent many hours gazing at its Renaissance facade while writing his biography of Proust, who had been a guest of the Polignacs.

  Further down was the eighteenth-century Palazzo Venier dai Leoni, known to Venetians as the Palazzo Incompiuto, or the unfinished palace, because nothing beyond a ground floor had ever been completed, giving it a decidedly odd look. Peggy Guggenheim had bought it after the Second World War to house her pioneering collection of modern art.

  For Urbino, however, the palazzo was indelibly associated with the murder of a beautiful young artist’s model, whose drowned body had been washed up on its steps while he was visiting the collection. Only after considerable effort had he been able to sort out the dark secrets that had led her to that end.

  As he leaned on the wooden parapet of the bridge, he allowed his mind to play over some of the aspects of this case, which had touched upon the Contessa as his present one was doing.

  The death of the young model had seemed to be a suicide, but Urbino’s sleuthing had exposed it as a murder. Now he was face to face with the apparently natural death of an old woman, and all of his intuition cried out that this too was murder.

  A chill wind gusted up the Grand Canal. He gathered his cape more securely around him and walked down the steps of the bridge into Dorsoduro.

  He struck out with renewed vigor through the funereally silent Campo Carità and around the edge of the Accademia Gallery. He then entered the network of alleys and bridges that would eventually bring him to the Church of Santa Maria della Salute.

  The only sounds were the lapping of water against stone and the hulls of moored boats and an occasional cry of a cat or muted laughter from one of the apartments above him. He went beneath the dark windows of the Palazzo Cini with its neglected collection of Tuscan paintings, across the Campo San Vio, and down a calle to a quay beside a small, picturesque canal.

  On the other side of the canal was Polidoro’s shuttered gallery. He reminded himself that he needed to visit the art dealer and pursue the topic of Habib’s paintings.

  He didn’t slow down until
he reached the corner of the bent calle where the Palazzo Venier dai Leoni had its entrance. The gate was closed, but its graceful wrought-ironwork with embedded, colored stones, hinted at Peggy Guggenheim’s taste that was more flamboyantly displayed within.

  He was about to resume his way when a sudden realization struck him. He had been wrong about the relative silence of the night. Footsteps had been sounding behind him; quiet, cautious, but persistent. They had stopped when he had paused at the gate.

  It wasn’t an unusual occurrence. On other occasions footsteps would sound behind him as if they were following him and keeping pace with him. It was one of the deceptive tricks of the stone and water of Venice that the footsteps could turn out to be your own, or those of someone unseen walking ahead of you, or down a parallel or intersecting calle. And yet Urbino was sure that this wasn’t one of those occasions.

  He lingered in front of the gate. Should he retrace his steps or continue to the Salute?

  The decision was made for him when someone turned the corner from the canal embankment. Dimly illuminated was a tall figure. Urbino stood without moving as the figure came closer and resolved itself into a man in a wool cap. He was walking unsteadily. At one point he leaned against the wall of the palazzo garden.

  Urbino waited. The man approached. He lurched toward Urbino, who moved away. The sour smell of wine struck his nostrils. The man gave Urbino a quick, sidelong glance as he passed. He weaved down the narrow calle toward a bridge that crossed to the Campiello Barbaro.

  Urbino made his way slowly in the same direction, keeping his ears sharp for any unusual sound. The air was colder as it blew toward him from the canal ahead.

  When he reached the other side of the bridge, the drunken man was nowhere in sight. The darkness, however, could have concealed him in any number of places.

  Urbino hurried past the garden wall of the little square, down another bridge, and plunged beneath a dark, damp sottoportego.

  It was here that footsteps sounded behind him again, but whether they were the same ones as before, he couldn’t tell. They sounded the same—soft, slightly hesitant, but persistent. He quickened his gait through the enclosed passageway. Although the sottoporteghi scattered throughout the city were picturesque and rather unusual features that he enjoyed seeking out, they weren’t the safest places on dark, lonely nights like this, especially when someone might be stalking you.

  As soon as this thought registered on Urbino’s consciousness, his momentary fear gave way to a vague feeling of embarrassment. He nonetheless hurried past the de-sanctified Benedictine church and monastery, went down another small bridge, and finally gained the Campo della Salute. The white dome and scrolls of the church rose dimly above him, conveying a sense of peculiar comfort.

  The vaporetto was pulling away from the Salute landing on its slow trip to the Cannaregio. Urbino strained to hear beyond the sounds generated by the boat, but heard nothing other than its comforting throb and the wash of its wake. When these had subsided, he was once again surrounded by the melancholy, brimming silence that was nighttime Venice.

  His mind wandered back to the thoughts of murder, Nina Crivelli, and the Contessa that had absorbed him on the Accademia Bridge.

  Was it possible, he asked himself as he listened for any unusual or unexpected sound, that the Contessa was in fact indirectly responsible for Crivelli’s death—for her murder, he quickly corrected himself? He needed to keep his mind focused on this probability. Nina Crivelli had been murdered.

  Could the Contessa’s two visits to Burano have set into motion a desperate attempt to discourage further questions about the lace maker and her death? Urbino, as her closest friend, with a well-known reputation for sleuthing, could also have become a target. And even Habib could be in some kind of danger, if the murderer thought he was snooping around Burano on Urbino’s behalf. Beatrix had said she had seen Habib on Burano, but Habib had neither confirmed nor denied it. It was possible he had been there on many occasions. But if he had, why wouldn’t he have told Urbino about it? It didn’t make sense. On the other hand, what reason might Beatrix have had for saying she had seen Habib there when she hadn’t? Was there any way that she might profit by such a lie?

  The immediate fruit of all these thoughts was Urbino’s decision not to seek out the Punta della Dogana on the other side of the church as he had originally planned. The area, with its serene view of the Basin of San Marco and the Giudecca Canal, was never so isolated as at this time of night.

  The Santa Maria del Giglio traghetto had stopped ferrying passengers hours ago. The vaporetto would take him the short distance across the Grand Canal. From there he would make his long walk back to the Palazzo Uccello.

  He seated himself on a bench with his back to the Grand Canal. It gave him a view of the looming mass of the Salute and its campo. He was reminded of the episode with the emotionally disturbed woman, which had upset Habib so much.

  Occasionally his eye strayed to the bridge, obscured by shadows, which led to the former Benedictine monastery. In all the time he sat watching until the boat arrived, he saw nothing but a scene as still as a photograph.

  11

  The part of the Dorsoduro quarter that Urbino had walked through late the night before looked different in the light of day. The dark theater set was now illuminated beneath a bright mid-morning sun in a blue sky, and alive with residents and a scattering of tourists, who went about their respective affairs with a sense of purpose.

  After having tramezzini sandwiches and a coffee near the Accademia, he made his way to Marino Polidoro’s art gallery. Last night it had been all shuttered and closed in on itself. Now its sign was clearly visible, as were the carefully selected items behind its large windows.

  It had an ideal location near the intersection of two canals behind the Guggenheim Museum. The front room was crammed with art, furniture, and various objects from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Urbino had no reason to doubt the authenticity of any of them. The provenance of whatever he and the Contessa had bought from Polidoro had been well documented and beyond any question.

  And yet rumors circulated about his unscrupulousness in getting his hands on something that he wanted. Urbino had discounted much of the gossip as either the expected backbiting of his profession or an unsympathetic reaction to the man’s appearance. For there was no doubt that Polidoro was not just ugly, but grotesquely so because of his small, misshapen body.

  “I thought I’d drop by since I’m in the area,” Urbino said.

  “Very good! I have something special that has come my way. It’s been waiting for your appreciation.”

  And my money, Urbino said silently to himself, for although he believed Polidoro was maligned, no one had ever exaggerated his love for money.

  Polidoro handed Urbino a miniature pastel portrait of a lightly powdered old woman with a fan. The color and the expression were delicate.

  “Rosalba Carriera?” Urbino asked.

  “It’s been attributed to her. What do you think?”

  “It’s possible. How much?”

  Polidoro named a sum that Urbino wasn’t prepared to pay. He looked at it for a few more moments, then handed it back.

  “It would help inspire your book. Carriera is included, you say.”

  Urbino nodded.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He moved around the large front room, then the smaller one that opened off it, admiring Polidoro’s newer acquisitions and flirting with ones he had seen before. There was a room in the back that Polidoro used for his art exhibits, but it was empty at the moment. Urbino glanced at a corner table with an assortment of cups and saucers, scent bottles, a Saxony coffee service, delicate vases of pink and blue, and—somewhat incongruously placed amongst all the china—a commedia dell’arte marionette similar to those in the collection at the Ca’ Rezzonico.

  After examining an eighteenth-century commode with marquetry of different woods, he brought up one of the topics that were
on his mind.

  “I’d like you to take a look at Habib’s work.” Then, remembering Polidoro’s dismissive comments when Rebecca Mondador had mentioned the similarity between what Habib was doing and the Burano school, he added, “It’s very original.”

  “I’m sure it is, if both you and Rebecca recommend it.” Nonetheless, there was hesitancy in his agreement. “Have him bring over some of his work. Better yet, why don’t I stop by the Palazzo Uccello? It’s been too long since I’ve reacquainted myself with the things you practically stole from me.”

  Polidoro’s suggestion suited Urbino, but he added that it might be better to wait until some of Habib’s other work arrived from Morocco.

  “We have a Spanish friend in Tangier who runs a gallery. He’s been successful in selling Habib’s work and has sent off some smaller paintings he’s been holding for us. They should be arriving soon.”

  “Very good. I’d like to help the boy, if I can.”

  And if he could make a good profit at the same time, Urbino thought.

  “So you’re the boy’s benefactor?” the dealer asked with a twisted smile.

  “And perhaps you can be too. There’s only so much I can do for him.”

  “I’m sure you’ve done a great deal already. Let me think.” The dealer screwed up his face into an even more grotesque shape. “This isn’t a Biennale year, so perhaps I could show some of his work in the back room in July. That is, if it’s half as good as what you and Rebecca have been saying!”

  “Thank you, Marino. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.”

  “I hope not. Good day. And if anyone shows an interest in the Rosalba Carriera, I’ll let you know. Perhaps we can come to an understanding.”

  12

  Urbino didn’t find Habib at the Palazzo Uccello when he returned. He had left shortly after Urbino had, Natalia informed him, taking his painting case.

  “I’d like to clean his studio, Signor Urbino, but he insists I stay out.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Natalia.”