Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  Death in a Serene City

  The Mysteries of Venice, Book One

  Edward Sklepowich

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To my mother

  Madeline Cacchillo Sklepowich

  Mamma, solo per te la mia canzone

  … the refuge of endless strange secrets,

  broken fortunes, and wounded hearts.

  —HENRY JAMES on Venice

  ON one of those days when you feel you’ve seen just about all there is to see in Venice—have paid homage to every important canvas and stone, have taken in every recommended view from every recommended campanile and cafe, and have even allowed yourself the luxury of being lost, knowing salvation is only a few turnings ahead—you may consider the Church of San Gabriele in a remote corner of the Cannaregio quarter. There you may find a few others who have strayed from the nearby Ghetto in search of a boat stop or have mistaken San Gabriele for the Madonna dell’Orto and are wondering why they can’t find the Tintoretto they’ve read so much about. A few of them, armed with thick, frayed guidebooks from secondhand shops, may even have purposely sought out this fifteenth-century church with its later lamentable additions to peer wearily at its disputed Tiepolo ceiling and the indifferent Cima on the left wall of the chancel.

  You can be sure, however, that someone in the group you find yourself among is here to view a corpse—for the body of an obscure saint reigns supreme in the Church of San Gabriele. Put to the sword eleven centuries ago in her native Sicily, Santa Teodora is now enshrined in a crystal coffin in a chapel in the east transept, one more piece of booty seized by the Venetian Republic from the shores of the Mediterranean in the days when relics had a price beyond ducats. According to legend, however, this particular relic has a profane value as well because of prize jewels wound up with its cerements after the virgin saint was so rudely taken from Syracuse in 1309.

  The dwindling faithful swear to the incorruptible state of the little saint even though not an inch of her supposedly inviolate body is now visible to the vulgar eye. The hands that clasp a flaking leather prayer book so demurely are gloved in faded crimson material, the body swathed in a tattered white gown from beneath which peep the tips of tiny scarlet slippers. Over her face is a silver mask fashioned in the nineteenth century by a craftsman from Florence after a competition among Venetians threatened to end in violence. All in all, from the top of this tarnished mask to the tips of her little slippers Santa Teodora measures barely five feet one inch as determined in 1932 by the last official Vatican examination by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

  As you survey this holy plunder that survived the burning of the church originally built to honor it, you will notice small clusters of bouquets on the ledge of the catafalque, left in homage to the virgin saint by brides after their marriage ceremonies. You will be fortunate, however, to find any fresh bouquets among these offerings for the parishioners of San Gabriele are today, indeed, an elderly and dying lot.

  Before you leave, gaze down at the silver mask again. Serenity, even for the dead, doesn’t last forever.

  Prologue

  ACQUA ALTA

  1

  HE was shaking and crying like a little boy although he was a man. The woman took him in her arms and looked into his tear-stained face. He broke away from her and ran across the uneven stones.

  He went into the confessional at the front of the church and pulled the curtain across, closing out the dim light. He sat in darkness and silence, his head bowed. If there had been a priest, he would have confessed himself. He might even have cursed the woman and then done penance.

  Outside the city was still in chaos.

  2

  LAPO Grossi, the gravedigger on San Michele, had seen many things during his fifty-odd years of service, but nothing like this. Entire parts of the cemetery island were under water. Sludge was almost a meter high in some places. Hundreds of tombstones had been leveled.

  But worst of all was his special domain, the field of the common graves, where the disinterred bones of the poor and forgotten were dumped after a brief twelve years in their plots on other parts of the island. It was here that he saw his own fate, although the odds were against a flood like the one this November coming again during the twelve years of his own bones’ rest.

  In front of him all was a mad and pathetic jumble of skulls, ribs, thighbones, and indistinguishable shards that only an expert might identify. The scene looked like pictures he had seen after the war, pictures of those camps up in Poland. It reminded him of the Isle of Bones far out in the lagoon past Torcello.

  The cemetery island was almost completely deserted. People were tending to the problems of the living today, trying to salvage what they could of their belongings, shoveling and sweeping and washing and picking through all the debris. Last night they had carried torches through the dark alleys of the city, trusting in God and their sense of direction to deliver them safely to their homes or to their parish churches where they could say their prayers of thanks for not having suffered even more.

  Grossi was awakened from his reverie by a curt buon giomo. It was the priest from San Gabriele.

  “What brings you here this morning, Don Marcantonio? No deaths, I hope.”

  “No, just this.” The priest indicated the campo littered with its bones and mud. “Here you see the end of many of my parishioners.” Bowing his head, he started to say a prayer but stopped and looked at the gravedigger.

  The priest’s gaze was so intense that Grossi lowered his eyes and after a few moments returned to his work. From across the lagoon the church bells of the city started to toll.

  3

  THE glassblower shook his head. “I know no one by that name. How many times must I tell you? I never heard of her.”

  The woman shivered.

  “Can we go in by the furnace?”

  “As you wish, but the answer will be the same there. I never heard of a woman with that name.”

  “Una ragazza,” she said as they passed into the other room where an assistant was holding a long thin pipe in the mouth of the glowing furnace, “una ragazza, she was once a girl.”

  He shook his head and bent down to pick up a pair of shears lying on the floor.

  “Girl, woman, non c’è una bella differenza.” He put the shears on a table cluttered with other tools. “All women were once girls, isn’t it so?”

  The woman looked at him with dark eyes that reflected the glow of the furnace.

  “Si, but not all girls become women.”

  He was sure she must be thinking of her own dead daughter. More gently than before he said, “Perhaps that is your answer, Signora Galuppi. This girl you speak of, this Domenica, maybe she never became a woman.”

  Something like the beginning of a smile gathered at the corners of the woman’s lips but never got any farther, certainly not to those dark eyes.

  “Alive or dead, I must know.”

  She turned away, gathering her long black coat around her, and went out to the fondamenta where a chill wind was blowing. Bent over against it, she went along the canalside street past the Glass Museum until she reached the Church of San Donato.

  Inside she knelt by the marble sarcophagus holding the bones of San Donate. If he hadn’t slain a dragon, she would probably never have prayed to him. When she did, she sometimes confused him with that other, more famous slayer of dragons, San Giorgio. But this one, too, was one of God’s chosen and although he could never hold the place in her heart that San Giorgio did—or, of course, Santa Teodora—she prayed to him from time to time.

  As she knelt there in the gloom, however, she didn’t pray to San Donato but to a saint she knew almost as little about: Santa Domenica. She had borr
owed Don Marcantonio’s book on the saints and read about the girl from the Campania named after the Sabbath who had been martyred in some faraway place she didn’t remember.

  On these visits to the island it seemed particularly appropriate to direct her special prayer to this saint who, according to the priest’s book, was one of doubtful authenticity.

  On this November afternoon her prayer was the same as always.

  “Santa Domenica, carissima Santa, have pity on an ignorant woman who asks you to bring to light what is hidden, to reveal what has long been in darkness, to cleanse your own blessed name of a dark stain. Let her be known, this evil woman whose life is a dark shadow of yours, a woman who corrupts and destroys. Listen to a humble woman who asks for only the truth. Listen to her and grant her prayer. Nel nome del Padre, del Figliuolo, e dello Spirito Santo. Amen.”

  Before she left the church for the cemetery island, she went behind the high altar where the bones of the dragon slain by San Donato were hung. She spent several moments contemplating them. These bones always gave her hope when she remembered that the saint, they said, had killed the monster by spitting at it.

  4

  TWO friars and several weary-looking women passed her an hour later as she went through the cloister to the cemetery. An old man stood staring at the notice of disinterment posted on the office window. No one paid any attention to her. She was just one more among hundreds of the bereaved who visited their dead and tended the graves. Today there were more than usual. The flood after the Day of All Souls had destroyed so much.

  She went to a burial field in a far corner where graves weren’t bought in perpetuity. She stood by a bulldozer listing in the soft soil and surveyed the litter around her—caskets, crosses, urns, bones. She bent down to touch the soil and raised her hand to her forehead, leaving a smudge. It looked like the ashes she was given each year at San Gabriele but Ash Wednesday was still more than three months away.

  5

  ZIA Caterina couldn’t sleep.

  She went to the cabinet and took out the bottle of grappa she kept for such occasions. For a woman of seventy-three the occasions were getting more and more frequent. She poured some into a glass, being careful to be quiet although she knew her nephew and his wife would wake only if they heard the chink of coins or the rustle of lira notes.

  Dio mio! Hadn’t they almost slept through the storm and sirens the night of the flood?

  She took her glass and went over to her chair by the window. After a life of traveling as far away as Siena to visit the home of her patron saint, it seemed that, as with so many of the old people she knew, her life had been reduced to the view from a window, day and night, night and day.

  And what could she see, even during the busiest hours, even with the little mirror her nephew had attached to the outside wall? Not much. Only the calle and the small campo beyond it with its covered wellhead, only Cecilia’s windows across the way and Antonia’s above them. If she contorted herself slightly, she could also get a glimpse of one lone window of Lodovico’s glass factory. Despite her arthritis she frequently made the effort, not so much for curiosity as for the sake of sentiment. There had been a time after the first war when she and Lodovico had come close to marrying.

  Two in the morning might not be a good time for contortions but it was certainly a good hour for sentimental reflections. These she indulged in for half an hour, sipping her grappa. Although warmed and soothed, she knew she would still have trouble sleeping. She would have to give herself another half hour and probably another half glass.

  She was about to get up for the bottle when there was a flickering in front of her eyes. The next second she wasn’t sure she had seen it. Then it came again.

  “Is this how it’s to be?” she thought. “A flicker of light, then darkness, and they’ll find me dressed like a fright in front of an open bottle of grappa!”

  But the flicker came again and she could tell it was coming from outside. She bent closer to the window and then, this time not for sentiment but for a clear view that might settle the question once and for all, she twisted her head to look in the direction of Lodovico’s glass factory.

  There the flicker was brighter. Even with her poor sight she could see the flames. She got up from the chair and hurried as fast as she could to wake her nephew.

  But the wail of the fireboats was piercing the air before she reached his room.

  Twenty years later

  Part One

  THE SLIPPER ON THE GRAVE

  1

  URBINO Macintyre was sure about one thing. The poor woman had wanted to die.

  He gazed up at the ceiling of the Church of San Gabriele. It was in almost as poor condition as the rest of the church, an old Gothic building dating to the early fifteenth century and flaking now from age, dampness, and the cancerous exhalations from the mainland industries. No thoughts of the ceiling’s deterioration preoccupied him this morning, however. Nor was he scrutinizing its cherubs and blessed souls, its angels and clouds, its hovering Virgin and Child, for some indisputable evidence of Tiepolo’s fresh hand.

  Instead, all he could think of was the painful contrast between its airy, floating images and those last desperate moments of the poor woman’s life.

  Yes, she must have wanted to die.

  Why else choose two in the morning in a quarter where almost everyone but insomniacs had been asleep for hours? In a city where a cry, echoing from stone and water, had more chance of sending help in the opposite direction than of leading it to the right place?

  That is, he reminded himself, if a cry had even been uttered.

  No one seemed to have heard anything. And neither did anyone know if in her leap from the bedroom window at the Casa Silviano, she had hoped to die by drowning in the canal below or by cracking open her skull on the prow of the gondola, breaking off the ferro, just the way she had.

  These thoughts about the recent death of the American writer Margaret Quinton were not motivated by personal curiosity. He had barely known the woman, having met her only once at an exhibit at the Glass Museum and a few times at the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini’s.

  What he had was a professional interest, however, the professional interest of someone who spent a great deal of time reconstructing the lives—and the deaths—of those who had gone before.

  He pulled his gaze away from the ceiling—Tiepolo or otherwise—and rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes wandered around the dim interior for a few moments before they fixed on the glass casket of Santa Teodora. It was hard to avoid. The diminutive martyr, dressed in faded white like a bride of long ago and recumbent beneath crystal, dominated the church almost as much as the high altar with its Vivarini of the Archangel announcing the news to the Virgin Mary.

  Now there you had a figure he wouldn’t dare touch for his Vanetian Lives series. It wasn’t only because he was perhaps unsuited for hagiography—hadn’t one reviewer detected what she called an “iconoclastic strain” in his lives of Goldoni and Canaletto?—but also because the saint was encrusted with so many legends that the truth could never be known.

  Having put aside his thoughts of Margaret Quinton’s last moments, he slipped from the pew and went up to the casket that sat on a small platform in a side chapel. When he bent down over the glass, for a few confusing seconds it was his own face—gaunt and sharp-featured—he saw instead of the silver-masked one of the saint. He peered down at the tarnished mask, yellowed gown, and crimson gloves and slippers. The card placed alongside the coffin above desiccated bridal wreaths told the story of the little saint in simple Italian, most of it probably fiction except for the description of how her body had been taken from Syracuse in the fourteenth century and brought to Venice. The card managed to glorify the raid by calling it a. “sacro furto”—a sacred theft—a fine distinction that amused Urbino.

  “Buon giorno, Signor Macintyre. If you will permit me.”

  Urbino turned around. It was Monsignor Marcantonio Bo, the pastor of San Gabriel
e, a thin, wizened man in his mid-seventies with a narrow fringe of white hair and thick round glasses behind which he blinked haplessly at the changed world around him. He was dressed in a black cassock and held a small bottle of green liquid and a white cloth.

  “Buon giorno, Don Marcantonio.”

  Urbino moved aside to let the priest clean the glass coffin. He made it a special point to do it himself every day, a duty only slightly less important than wiping the paten and chalice at the end of every Mass. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Carlo, the sexton, or one of the sisters from the Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina to do a good job. It was that this attention made him feel that the relic was actually his and his alone. He had been doing it almost every day for more than fifty years.

  Quite simply, the body of Santa Teodora was his most prized possession. Not even his well-thumbed copy of the flagellant Jacopone da Todi’s Laude, which he had had since his first year in the novitiate and had shown so proudly to Urbino, could come close.

  Urbino left Don Marcantonio to his work and sat down again. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after seven. He still had some time before he needed to be off.

  Don Marcantonio rubbed hard with his cloth at a persistent smudge above the masked face. He frowned with what might have been concentration or disapproval. Did he resent all the fervent lips pressed against the glass or was he grateful for them for giving him the opportunity to display his own devotion to the saint? He rubbed away with the energy of someone at least twenty years younger.

  Don Marcantonio believed the saint knew how well he cared for her and gave him what he needed to go on, day after day, year after year. He had once given Urbino one of his favorite examples of the saint’s protection. Hadn’t he been blessed with an upsurge of energy the day after his last battle with the Vatican official who had come to press for new measurements?