“May he?” she asked, bending down to confer with the little señorita. The answer must have been affirmative for she raised her head and smiled, flashing close to every one of her false teeth.
“Did you ever hear her—or her mother—mention the name Domenica?”
She fussed with the doll’s dress as she shook her head.
“Did Beatrice have a pet bird, a cocorita?”
“I have no idea, I assure you! If she did she never brought it when she was working for me, thank God!”
“I’ll be going then, Signora Razzi. Thank you for your time.”
“I would rather be thanked for my good company.”
“For that too. Don’t get up. I can show myself out.”
“I’m not an old lady, young man.” She got up from the love seat and walked with him to the door. “But aren’t you going to ask me anything about the American signorina? The one who jumped from the window? When I opened the door and saw you standing there, that’s what I said to myself. He’s here to ask me about her, I said.”
“Signorina Quinton?”
“She always insisted on the ‘Signorina,’ made quite a point of it the first few times. She rented two floors of the Casa Silviano off the Rio della Sensa.”
Urbino was familiar with the building from the outside. A few years ago a piece of its facade had broken off and damaged a tricycle that a child had left out in the calle during the night.
“She was a big, boring woman, God rest her soul, probably slept the whole night through, but she was no trouble at all, gave me what I asked right from the first, all in crisp new notes and in advance. I love renting to you forestieri. If you have any American friends looking for a place, Signor Macintyre, send them to me. We can work something out as soon as that apartment is put back in order. Now don’t forget.”
10
ABOUT five that afternoon Urbino was sitting in one of the pews of San Gabriele as Sister Veronica, who kept giving him uneasy glances, explained to her small group of hospice guests the story of Santa Teodora. She said nothing about the theft and the murder, perhaps at the order of the Mother Superior or even the Vatican, but she did mention the recent reconsecration. Her guests—an elderly couple with weary looks on their faces and an obese woman in a natty fur coat—didn’t seem particularly interested in any more details, however.
When she finished she told them they could stay in the church for the six o’clock Mass or return to the hospice. She would see them tomorrow at nine for the tour of Murano.
Urbino went over to her.
“It’s good to have Santa Teodora back,” he said.
She nodded but there was a worried look in her dark brown eyes. With her finely chiseled face and expressive eyes Sister Veronica was an attractive woman. Though over fifty she looked ten years younger, the way religious often do. She must have been beautiful as a young woman.
“It certainly is but I keep expecting someone to ask about Maria. When they do, I don’t know what to say. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“But they’re probably so filled with wrong ideas they could use a dose of the truth.”
“The truth! I know less of it than anyone else, less than you do, I’m sure.” It seemed almost a criticism.
“But you don’t think Carlo killed his mother, do you?”
Although it was barely a second before she responded, it seemed much longer. In fact it seemed as if she didn’t want to answer the question at all. But when she did it was with a fervent denial.
“Of course not. I had many opportunities to observe Carlo. Kill his mother? No, Carlo didn’t kill her.”
“What about the sister, Beatrice? Did you know her?”
Sister Veronica’s expressive eyes had lost their worried look. In its place was something close to disapproval.
“No, I never knew her.”
She turned to look at the fat woman in the fur coat who was bending over the glass case to peer into the masked face of the saint. When she looked back at Urbino, she stared at him without adding anything in clarification. It might well have been that, being from Murano and roughly the same age as Beatrice, she had heard rumors about the girl’s behavior. Perhaps it had been indecorous of him to suggest they had known each other.
“But you did see some of her art work.” Then, as if to give more authority to his questioning, he added, “Don Marcantonio mentioned it.”
“Yes, but not until many years after her death. Since I was giving the tours here, even back then around the time of the flood, Maria trusted my opinion on art. She also knew I had an interest in Tintoretto just as her daughter had had and wanted to impress me with her talent. I don’t think she doubted for a moment that there was some.”
“Wasn’t there?”
“Oh, there was but it needed to be developed much more. She was an amateur without any formal training, from what I know. Who’s to say what she might have done if she had lived and applied herself? There was something there.”
Having delivered this lukewarm praise, she cast her eye back over her little group.
“What about the Tintoretto?”
“There were two Tintorettos: The Transport of the Body of Saint Mark at the Accademia and The Presentation of the Virgin at the Madonna dell’Orto. Only details, not the whole pictures, Just the men carrying Saint Mark’s body with the camel behind them and Saint Anne with her arm around the Virgin. Maria was pleased with them because of the religious themes. It made her feel better about her daughter.”
She avoided his eyes.
“You saw only the two Tintorettos?”
“Oh, no,” she said, looking up at him and smiling now. “She was determined to show me everything. There were some sketchbooks with nothing of much interest, also a capriccio derivative of Piranesi, drawings of buildings, bridges, and piazzas. The best of the lot were copies of several scenes from the Barovier Wedding Cup at the Glass Museum. I say they were the best even though she didn’t copy some of the scenes exactly as they were. She made some changes. And it might not have been such a good idea to try to capture the scenes in oils.”
“All that might be why they were the best. She showed some originality.”
“You might say. But don’t forget that the scenes on the Wedding Cup are much simpler than the Tintorettos.”
There was no disagreeing with this—and even if there were, Urbino would have avoided challenging Sister Veronica on a painter she knew and loved so well. At any rate, he had no opportunity for she had barely finished when the woman in the fur coat asked her about the murder, in an unnecessarily loud voice.
“There was a theft, you know,” she said for the benefit of the elderly couple who had gone over to inspect the Cima more closely.
Sister Veronica sighed and excused herself. It didn’t seem as if today was going to be one of the days she escaped without giving more details than she wanted to.
11
THIS time Cavatorta didn’t ask him in. He looked as if he had just awakened, his hair more mussed than before and his thin face puffy.
“This morning you said that you saw three of Beatrice Galuppi’s paintings—two scenes of Venice and a Tintoretto. Is that right?”
The mask maker crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.
“Your memory isn’t quite as good as you’d like to think, I’m afraid. It was only a detail from a Tintoretto. But now that you’ve been reassured, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Where did you see them?”
“At the Galuppi apartment on the Rio della Sensa. You don’t think Carlo and Maria carted them all the way here, do you?”
“Were there any other paintings around?”
“Would a lithograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a calendar with a picture of the Matterhorn qualify?”
“You didn’t see a detail from Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin that’s at the Madonna dell’Orto or—”
“Listen, Signor Macintyre. If you think you’re going to pin
the theft of any of Beatrice’s paintings on me, don’t even try. Those things were taken while I was hearing confessions at San Gabriele. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Good afternoon.”
Urbino was left standing in front of the closed door, listening to Cavatorta’s footsteps receding down his hallway, presumably back to a bed as rumpled as he was.
12
“I never heard of any theft, no,” the Contessa said later that evening on the phone, “but I didn’t know anything about her paintings to begin with either, you might recall.” Obviously it still hurt that Maria hadn’t confided in her. “When was the theft?”
“Around the time of the flood, sometime between then and whenever Cavatorta left the priesthood.”
“For my own peace of mind I’d like to know exactly when it was. Maybe there’s a good reason why I don’t know anything about it. Alvise and I were up in Geneva at the clinic right after the flood—in fact, Sister Veronica came up with us for several days, which might also explain why she didn’t say anything about a theft. I’ll try to find out. You’ve been asking enough questions these last few days. For a foreigner to have asked even half as many in the days of the Council of Ten would have got him thrown straight into the Piombi!”
“You don’t mind asking around?”
“It’s not my intention to ‘ask around,’ as you put it. As for minding, I might even enjoy conducting a discreet little inquiry of my own—sounds so much better put that way, doesn’t it? And who knows, caro? Maybe I’ll find out why there are so many things everyone else seems to know that I don’t have the vaguest notion of!”
“One thing I’m sure you do know about is Sister Veronica. Could you refresh my mind on her circumstances?”
“Her circumstances? She’s a sister of the Charity of Santa Crispina.”
“I mean her history.”
“You mean her secular history, I assume, before la vita nuova? But she renounced all that when she took the veil.”
In light of the changes in the Church over the last two decades and the freedom enjoyed by Sister Veronica, the Contessa’s expression had more than a whiff of Victorianism.
“I know her father was a glassblower,” Urbino said, “but not much else.”
“There isn’t much else, caro. When her mother died she went to live with an aunt in Naples for five or six years until she was eighteen, then she helped out in her father’s shop for a while. After he died she sold the factory to his apprentice and entered the convent.”
“And has been living happily ever since as a nun?”
“It would seem so.”
“Why did she wait until her father died to enter the convent?”
“He disapproved.”
“And she disapproved of him.”
“So you do remember something else after all! Down in Naples she used to fantasize that her family was descended from the Doges. Her aunt did everything to encourage it. She didn’t have much fondness for her brother-in-law. Sister Veronica grew up disliking everything to do with glass and glassmaking but she was only an impressionable young girl then.”
“An impressionable young girl who eventually found her way to the convent.”
“Nothing like a Saint Augustine turnabout, if that’s what you’re thinking. She didn’t have much of a distance to go. She’s less inclined to talk about her good points than her faults, but I’m sure that however impressionable and confused she might have been, she was also devout. But why are you so interested in Sister Veronica?”
“No particular reason except that she didn’t seem comfortable with the topic of Beatrice Galuppi.”
“And should she have been? Despite all the changes since Vatican Two, most of which we both lament, don’t forget that Sister Veronica remains a nun—something that Beatrice Galuppi never was!”
Rather than ask her any more questions, this time about Cavatorta, and risk getting her even more riled, Urbino mentioned Bellorini’s frames and soothed her with his admiration for them.
13
FORTIFIED the next afternoon by a substantial lunch and half a liter of wine at the Montin, Urbino went to the Europa e Regina.
He approved of Voyd’s choice. The hotel, in two adjacent baroque palazzi across from the Salute, was one of those places in the city probably closest to most people’s image of Venice of the Grand Canal. It was where he himself had stayed during his early visits and when he had needed a change from his bare pensione room near the train station while the work was being done on the Palazzo Uccello. He approached the hotel’s little campo through the narrow alley angling off toward the Grand Canal from the main route to the Piazza. The only sounds were the muffled ones of his own footsteps and the water traffic on the Grand Canal.
He had a drink in the bar before going up to Voyd’s suite. A reserved Kobke led him through the foyer to the large sitting room where reflected light from the Grand Canal played over the ceiling, walls, and antique furniture. The Salute gleamed tantalizingly beyond the terrace doors as if within touching distance.
Kobke went through a door on the far side of the room without a word. Suddenly Urbino heard a light laugh and looked in its direction.
“Down here, Mr. Macintyre.”
The writer was reclining on a sofa placed to the right of the terrace doors. It was diagonal to Urbino, and Voyd’s body seemed misshapen because of the angle. It was as if the man’s head, impressive enough when its owner was erect, were gigantic, dwarfing the rest of his body. Beneath it were several cushions which contributed to the peculiar effect.
“I don’t blame you for preferring the Salute to this sad sight.” He gestured down at his reclining figure. “Before you make yourself comfortable, why don’t you pour us some sherry. Everything’s ready there on the sideboard. Then you can take this chair here. Just remove that notebook and all those papers.”
After getting their sherries, Urbino went to the uncomfortable-looking great armchair with a high back. It was covered with a morocco notebook and loose sheets of paper with spidery handwriting. He gathered the sheets and put them on top of the notebook, then looked for a convenient place to lay everything.
“Just put them down on the floor. Christian has been reading to me from Quinton’s material. A sad duty but an interesting one. Poor Quinton still had a lot ahead of her to judge by what I’ve been reading—or rather what I’m having read to me of late. Even holding a book is an effort, you see. It’s my back, an old bicycle accident that flares up from time to time. It’s made these indolent periods a regular part of my life. I sometimes think I should live like a latter-day pasha on low sofas with hundreds of little embroidered cushions around me.”
A woman’s laugh sounded from behind the door Kobke had gone through.
“That’s Adele, Quinton’s niece. She seems to keep finding scraps of her aunt’s writing and insists on bringing them over herself. I’m beginning to think it’s less for the sake of security than to see Christian. He’s quite a charming fellow.” He paused long enough to give Urbino the opportunity of saying something, then went on. “Let me be honest, Mr. Macintyre. I know why you’re here. Oh, I know you’re a polite young man and would have come eventually, sometime next week perhaps when you realized I was about to leave before the madness of carnival. But here you are now, still much later than I wished but earlier than you would otherwise have been.”
Voyd raised the sherry to his lips, careful not to spill any on the crisp white front of his shirt. Once again woman’s laughter was heard, followed by Kobke’s accented voice, the words indistinguishable.
“Don’t look so surprised, I’m not psychic. That’s one thing I haven’t been accused of although—who knows?—it might do my writing some good. It certainly had an effect on Yeats’s work. But no, I owe my information to none other than Benedetta Razzi, none other than that extraordinary woman. She might find her way into one of my stories although I’m afraid I might have to tone her down to make her credible. But I believe we had a conversation—a very
brief one—about such things that morning about two weeks ago in the Piazza San Marco.” He gave Urbino an amused smile. “Yesterday afternoon—before I threw my back out again on the Accademia Bridge—I visited the good woman. She has a key to a locked room at the Casa Silviano. It seems that keeping a locked room, ostensibly for the use of the owner of the apartment, is some way of circumventing the rent control laws here. One of the clerks downstairs explained it to me. I thought there might be something in the room for me, more manuscripts or whatever, but Signora Razzi assured me it was impossible. One of the conditions of Quinton’s rental was that she didn’t have the use of the room, didn’t even have access to it in an emergency. In the course of my visit with her—with her and her bambole, that is—she mentioned that you had been there earlier. I think she wanted to impress me with her full social life.”
“And she mentioned that I asked her some questions about Maria Galuppi. You see, Mr. Voyd, after Maria Galuppi was murdered, her son came to the Palazzo Uccello on two—”
The writer waved his hand.
“Don’t underestimate me, my friend. I don’t know you very well but I know you well enough. There’s no need to either apologize or explain. Your secure little domain, your refuge, your sanctuary—call it what you will—has been quite rudely invaded and you must have things back in order—or at least make a valiant attempt. It’s a most natural desire. Like Venice we all need to protect our frail barriers.”
Voyd took another careful sip before going on.
“So when you called this morning I got to thinking. There’s not much else I can do in this pathetic state. I remembered our last meeting at San Gabriele after the Patriarch’s service. I told you and the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini that Quinton had an interest in Maria Galuppi, that she had written me of it several times, and that I suspected that Quinton’s friendship wasn’t all that selfless. My poor dead friend, like all us other scribblers, was always on the lookout for material, for inspiration, for a germ that might become a story or—wonder of wonders!—even a novel. It seems I was right about that. Quinton wasn’t without an ulterior motive in befriending Maria Galuppi. We writers must often plead guilty to such things, even when it comes to those closest and dearest to us. Just think of all the material that vampire Scott sucked out of poor, tortured Zelda!”
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