He paused to take a sip of his Campari soda before going on. The Contessa’s hand was hovering over the three remaining cakes, as she tried to decide which would be the next to go the way of the others.
“Who knows? Maybe Giorgio smelled some money in the situation. It doesn’t seem as if Giorgio denied being his son, not at first. It was only when Salvatore told him how far he had gone so that they could all be a family again that things started to really go wrong for Salvatore. Giorgio played something of a balancing act, or at least that’s the way I make it out. If he denied that he was Gino, he knew he’d be in danger. But he seems to have started making the kind of noises that Salvatore interpreted as blackmail. Surely no son of his would be doing that to him, or would he? He needed to find out for sure.”
“So Giorgio was tempted by the profit to be made out of what he knew. Like Nina.”
“Except that she didn’t die because of something she knew. Giorgio did.”
“Was there any one thing that finally made the scales fall from your eyes?” the Contessa asked, showing a persistency in pursuing her earlier line of attack. It was a persistency she matched by selecting the little cake covered with pale yellow frosting.
“The condition of Giorgio’s clothes when he was found. Of course, I never believed that it could be anything that Habib had done. But how to explain it? Then I remembered something about Gino. His appendicitis.”
“And the scar from the operation afterward.”
“If Giorgio didn’t have a scar, then he wasn’t Gino. And he didn’t. And so he was murdered.”
“And if Giorgio did have a scar? What then?”
“That would have been a different story, but only up to a point. It might have bought Giorgio more time, but he was doomed as soon as Salvatore revealed that he had murdered Nina.”
“To murder one’s own mother.” The Contessa sighed and shook her head. “All that mother’s milk.”
“And the daily bread. Almost fifty years of it across the same table. How he must have hated it.”
The Contessa’s shoulders gave a quick movement that seemed like a voluntary shiver to rid herself of the vision conjured up. When she spoke, it was to pick up a less frightful thread.
“I’m still not completely clear on how the Geminiano Cozzi vase fits into it all.”
“Salvatore put two and two together. When Evelina’s vase went missing, he figured out that Nina had sold it to Polidoro. Habib saw Marino and Nina together on Burano. It’s probable Salvatore did as well and knew what she was up to. Somehow Evelina had come by an exquisite little piece, something handed down through the years. Salvatore was determined to get it back. He broke into Polidoro’s shop. Polidoro heard someone and came in. He just had time to notice that the Cozzi vase wasn’t in its accustomed spot on the table, when someone hit him hard from behind. I saw the vase with some others on the same table when I was at the shop, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. Not at the time. I hadn’t even spoken with Carolina Bruni yet.”
“And how did it end up in Giorgio’s apartment?”
“Remember that Salvatore attacked Polidoro the night before he murdered Giorgio. Everything was falling apart for him. He went to Giorgio’s, intent on settling once and for all the question of his identity. He showed him the vase, desperately hoping it would spark some recognition in him. Then there was the struggle about the scar. Salvatore must have been in a frenzy. He found the strength somehow, even against a younger man as fit as Giorgio and he smashed Giorgio’s head with a brick. Salvatore left the vase behind but he took the brick and tossed it into the Cannaregio canal as he ran away. It will count against him, of course. He premeditated his mother’s murder, and he made every attempt to cover up Giorgio’s, even if he wasn’t thinking rationally at other times. And he also was clearheaded enough not to take the vaporetto on the two occasions he had to do his dirty business in Venice. Like many Buranelli he has a boat with an outboard motor at his disposal.”
The Contessa took this in.
“And don’t forget,” she said, “that he was all too willing to let Habib be punished for what he had done.”
“I’m far from forgetting that. There was a good chance of his getting away with it. Let’s face it, Barbara. Habib wasn’t going to get much of a fair chance because of what he looks like and who he is. And especially not in times like these. Salvatore was trying to save his own neck. At least he had that excuse, but what about the others?”
The Contessa didn’t respond right away. When she did, it was in a small, quiet voice.
“I hope you don’t put me in that category.”
His response might have come quicker than it did, and have taken a different form, at least from the Contessa’s point of view.
“I never doubted that you had my own good in mind.”
She regarded him for a few moments, or she seemed to do so. From this angle, the lenses of her glasses were an opaque, dark green, reminiscent of the Grand Canal in a certain light.
“Yes, I was worried about you. Very worried.” She hesitated. “But I’ve never been so happy to be proven wrong.”
Urbino looked at her sharply.
“I don’t mean that I ever thought Habib could have killed Giorgio or Nina,” she added. “It was just that I was afraid that—that he might have been involved in ways that could hurt you. If you were going to help him, to save him,” she corrected, “you needed to keep some objectivity, some clear-sightedness. Call me a reluctant devil’s advocate. Don’t forget that I can be perverse and improbable, just like you!”
“Just like Venice, is more like it! After all these years, I’m still not used to it in either of you, and pray that I’ll never be!” He gave her a soft look. “We’ve been through a lot. It’s behind us now.”
“But what’s in front of Habib?”
“A bright future, if I have anything to do with it.”
“May our jeweler’s son thrive and flourish!” she exclaimed, referring to the character in Frieda Hensel’s story. But a shadow crossed her face. “Some things won’t be under your control, you know.”
Urbino, even more than the Contessa, felt the brush of the dark wings of the story.
“I just had a good example of that, didn’t I?” he said. “Whatever fate or mekhtoub, as Habib would call it, has in store, I intend to see that he’s in the best position to cope with it or enjoy its fruits. Fate isn’t always a bad thing, you know.”
“How can I think otherwise? Our relationship has always been under a special star.”
The two friends contemplated this for a few moments in silence.
“I have something to confess,” the Contessa said. “It’s about Habib.”
“Indeed?”
“There’s one thing in particular that’s always made me nervous, since I first set eyes on him.”
“What is it?”
“His looks. He’s not drop-dead gorgeous, is he? Not like Giorgio. I saw it as a danger. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. He’s quite attractive. Those eyes, and that smile! But if he had been like the young Omar Sharif or Rudolph Valentino, I would have breathed a little easier. It would pass, I would have said. But you saw something else. You see something else. Despite what I’ve said, you weren’t blinded at all.”
“I find all that a bit confusing, but I’ll take it as a compliment, for the both of us, for Habib and me.”
“That’s exactly how it was meant. I feel much better getting that off my conscience!” She rewarded herself by pouring out another cup of tea. “You know that you can count on me to help Habib, in whatever ways I can.”
“You already are. Opening up La Muta and inviting his mother and sister to stay at the Ca’ da Capo.”
“That’s nothing. I mean doing more than that.”
“You’ll have plenty of opportunities. Give Habib a month or two of dolce far niente. He needs it. Then we’ll put our heads together, maybe with Marino Polidoro when he’s recuperated, to see how we can best help him w
ith his career. All he needs is exposure, and he’ll soon be off. I’m confident about that. He has a special talent.”
The Contessa nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “we’ll all look after the boy.”
“And at least there’s a positive side to this whole ordeal. The authorities are smoothing his way a bit. Things have been made easier for his mother and sister to visit him on such short notice. It’s for the Questura’s own good, of course.”
There had been a spate of editorials and letters in Il Gazzettino criticizing the Questura. Although the Contessa had advised him against it, Urbino had sent an impassioned letter to the local newspaper himself, which had received a lot of attention when it had been published. It had spoken of racism and scapegoating, the right wing’s encouragement of immigration fears, the problem in human trafficking, and the lack of a coherent or humane policy to deal with the country’s growing number of immigrants and refugees.
“The Questura promises to issue the appropriate stamp and whatever else is necessary for the renewal of his residency permit. Gemelli’s not showing too much resentment against me. Maybe he’s saving it for another day. But I’ve had to fill out another declaration of responsibility, much more detailed this time. I’m hoping that once we can arrange a show for Habib, his situation will be even better.”
“And he’ll soon have his mother and sister with him for a while. How—”
The Contessa broke off, staring out into the arcade. Urbino followed her gaze.
Two tall figures, with a shorter one between them, were lined up by the window, looking in. One of the tall figures was none other than Richard Wagner or at least the mask was a very good semblance of the composer. The figure at the other end was the plague doctor with his large, cone-shaped beak. And in the middle, the small and squat form had the saucy face of Pulchinella, topped with a purple cloche decorated with red feathers.
“It’s Frieda, Beatrix, and Marie!” the Contessa cried out. She waved. The three women returned the greeting and started to file off in the direction of the entrance. “We’ll all have a great time at the ball!”
It was going to be the grand celebration she had originally planned—even grander, now that Habib was released and his mother and sister would be there.
“I’ve got the costumes all picked out for Habib’s mother and sister,” she enthused. “They can be altered to their proper sizes. Sultana and the first princess of the realm!”
“Splendid, but where does that leave you? Dressed up as a simple shepherdess like Marie Antoinette?”
“And we’ll all eat cake at midnight! But why do you assume I’ll be a woman, caro? It’s Carnevale, after all! I might well surprise you yet! I might be a sultan, or a vizier, or a sorcerer, maybe even Sinbad or Aladdin!”
“Not Aladdin. That’s Habib.”
“All the more reason. We’ll both wear masks, and you’ll have to choose between us.”
Frieda, Beatrix, and Marie were approaching, their masks still in place. Urbino and the Contessa had only a few more precious moments to be alone.
“No, no!” the Contessa said with a rich laugh when she saw the expression on his face. “To choose which of us is the more convincing! We women can play the man as well as you do yourselves. Maybe even better! You have no mysteries for us.” She paused and reflected a moment. “Only the ones we let you believe you have! And so, caro, who will you be?”
“If you have to ask, it means that you don’t know us men so well after all.”
“My dear Urbino, the marvel of life is in its exceptions.”
Once again, the Contessa had the last word.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series
1
“I must get in,” Urbino said to himself at two o’clock in the morning. He stood on a narrow, humpbacked bridge in a remote corner of the San Polo district.
The full moon broke through the clouds and splayed a solemn brightness over the scene.
The Ca’ Pozza was wrapped in silence, and completely dark behind its windows. Urbino felt a thrill of fear and a wave of melancholy. Even if he had not known who was within its walls, hidden from public view all these years and filled with so many memories that time would soon snatch away, the building would have stirred in him the same mixture of feelings.
Urbino closed his umbrella. Surrounded by puddles of water and the reek of moldering stone and vegetation, he was far removed from the civilized comforts of Florian’s, where he had sat with the Contessa yesterday afternoon.
He peered down at the black waters of the canal. Scraps of vegetables drifted in the direction of the Grand Canal. Mesmerized by their slow motion, he watched them until they passed from view under the bridge. He was now staring at the faint, masklike reflection of his face.
Vaguely uneasy, he jerked his head up. His unexpected image in any reflecting surface invariably disconcerted him as it had at Florian’s. It always left him feeling, for many confusing moments afterward, that he wasn’t the person he thought he was but someone else who only looked the same.
He focused his attention on the silent and secretive Ca’ Pozza to dispel the wave of anxiety coursing through him.
The building with its crumbling broad front, eroded stone loggia, and rows of curtained windows frowned down at him from above the small canal as if it disapproved of his intrusive gaze.
Urbino had always found the San Polo district, choked by a loop of the Grand Canal, to be filled with more of a sense of death and decay than anywhere else in Venice. Since his preoccupation with Samuel Possle and his dilapidated palazzo, this feeling had deepened and darkened.
If the bridges and alleys seemed more twisted, the covered walkways danker, and the Rialto farther away, it was because of the baleful influence cast by the Ca’ Pozza. Even the nearby Fondamenta delle Tette, where women once bared their breasts to entice customers away from homosexual prostitutes, somehow thickened with more sensual associations.
Whether penetrating the Ca’ Pozza’s secrets would dispel the building’s peculiar influence or increase it, Urbino had no way of knowing; but he wouldn’t be at peace until he gained access. Since Possle never came out, Urbino would have to get in. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.
How far he was prepared to go to achieve this end seemed ominously foreshadowed by the urgency of the phrase he kept repeating to himself in an almost audible voice. “I must get in. I must get in.”
He was unable to pull his gaze away from the building. He let his imagination wander through rooms he had never seen, seeking out the old man as he might be sleeping and dreaming of days gone by or sitting with a pile of yellowed letters.
Urbino knew as much or as little about Samuel Possle as everyone else seemed to know or had been allowed to. His background was wealthy but otherwise undistinguished. His family had made a fortune in the shrimp industry in South Carolina. Since he was an only child, it had all come into his hands with the sudden deaths of his parents in the forties. The larger world beyond Venice had heard of him, not for anything he had accomplished, but rather for his former glittering entourage and for what he had always seemed to promise. Time was running out on the promise as he approached his ninetieth year.
Possle, a frequent guest of the rich and famous, and the indefatigable host of sensational gatherings at the Ca’ Pozza, appeared briefly, but memorably, in the memoirs and biographies of many people now long dead. His marriage to a German poet had ended in divorce decades ago, and he had never remarried. After all his years of high society, he had gone into seclusion.
He was supposedly working on a book he had once made the mistake of saying was a “meditation on time and the human emotions” intentionally evoking Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. However, his version, he had said, would be more sensational and even longer.
Suddenly the Ca’ Pozza jolted Urbino out of these thoughts. With an almost blinding flash, the tall loggia doors on the piano nobile were illum
inated from within. A few moments later a silhouette appeared behind the curtains of one of the unshuttered doors that was closest to Urbino. The figure seemed to be staring out, although positioned as it was behind the curtains and standing in a lighted room, it was doubtful whether it could see anything.
Urbino assumed the figure was a man because the hair seemed closely cropped. It stood motionless behind the panes of the door, almost as if it were posing, and then turned slowly and presented itself in full profile.
The sex of the figure didn’t become clarified, but as Urbino stared one detail drew all his attention. The figure held up to its face an object that gave every appearance of being a severed head. The nose of the head was sharp and the chin prominent; its skull was remarkably smooth, and Urbino assumed it must be completely bald.
The figure remained at the door as if to give Urbino time to take in the disturbing scene and then moved to the side and out of sight. The light was extinguished a few moments later.
Yet Urbino waited, standing on the bridge as motionless as the figure had stood at the door earlier. It was as if Urbino knew that something else would happen tonight on this visit to the Ca’ Pozza. He was not proved wrong.
Suddenly shrill, high-pitched laughter assaulted his ears. Distorted though it was, it sounded more like a woman’s laughter than a man’s. It continued for a few moments, subsided into sobs, and then silence.
Because these disturbing sounds broke the stillness so soon after the mysterious figure at the door, the Ca’ Pozza was their likely source. But as they faded, leaving behind an even more deathly silence, he realized that they could have come from the building next door that shared a wall with the Ca’ Pozza and whose entrance was up the dark, narrow alley that wound its way from the bridge.
Deadly to the Sight Page 26
