Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  15

  HE had no such luck.

  “It’s just us scheming women,” the Contessa said when he went to her usual table in front of the window in the Chinese salon. “We’ll allow you to stay for a little while, won’t we, my dears?”—she shared a quick smile with Angela Bellorini and Adele Carstairs—“but then I’m afraid we’ll ask you to catch up Stefano and Mr. Kobke over at the Correr if you want some company. I’m sure you’ll find them staring at Carpaccio’s courtesans.”

  “So you haven’t left for Vienna yet,” he said to Quinton’s niece after declining their invitation to sit down.

  “We go tomorrow afternoon. I’ve just been trying to convince the Contessa and Angela to join us in our compartment before the train leaves.”

  “How many times have I told you to call me Barbara?”

  The girl looked flustered as she went on, “It’s not the Orient Express, of course, but Christian and I are having champagne and some food sent in from Do Forni’s. Do join us, Mr. Macintyre.”

  “Come now, Adele, just look at the poor man. His hair needs combing and it doesn’t look as if he’s shaved this morning. Doesn’t that tell you he doesn’t have a moment to spare?”

  “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

  The Contessa laughed.

  “You’re here, yes, but why are you here? Tell him why we think he’s here Angela dear.”

  Angela seemed embarrassed and colored slightly beneath her sallow cheeks.

  “Go on, cara, tell him. Oh, never mind, I’ll do it myself. You want to know if Adele here has anything stuffed up her elegant sleeves, something from her dear zia whom we all miss so much, don’t you?”

  Angela spoke now, lightly, quietly, “It was Benedetta Razzi. Didn’t I tell you last week that she knows everyone’s business? She also tells everyone’s business, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes, she called Adele and said you were looking for wills or love letters or deeds—oh, she seems to have been wild in her imaginings. But tell him, Adele.”

  Quinton’s niece was less reluctant than Angela had been to respond to the Contessa’s prompting.

  “There’s nothing left, Mr. Macintyre, absolutely, positively nothing.”

  “How sad you look, Urbino dear.” He was sure he looked nothing of the sort but he allowed the Contessa her playfulness if this was what it was. “Adele told us over lunch last week how elated you were to get the Venetian notebook.”

  She said this as if she had had no contact with him since then. All he could assume was that his friend, as she so often did, was playing a role with Angela and Adele and was pursuing it as far as it would take her, hoping he would understand that she was just having a bit of harmless entertainment.

  “The truth of the matter, Barbara—and you other ladies—is that I came here merely to have a coffee which I haven’t even had a chance to order yet.” He quickly remedied the situation and brought another chair over to the table. “So Mr. Kobke and Stefano are off together?”

  “Yes, they are off together. And to answer the implied question, they are also enjoying each other’s company, I’m sure. They have a great deal in common—the artistic temperament, you know. But of course one needn’t be an artist to have the temperament.”

  “They do like each other,” Angela offered as the waiter put down Urbino’s espresso, “now that they’ve got to know each other, thanks to Barbara. They just didn’t get off to a good start.”

  Urbino remembered the afternoon several weeks before when they had seemed to be having words right here at Florian’s.

  “They’ve worked through whatever silly little problems they might have had,” the Contessa said.

  “Misunderstandings,” Angela clarified. “Stefano says it was his fault. He collided with Mr. Kobke in the foyer here and they had a few words. Everything is fine now.”

  “Christian is very understanding,” Adele said as if the Dane had had to excuse the grossest of behaviors.

  Angela raised her chin slightly but had nothing more to add.

  “Harmony, that’s what I like,” the Contessa said.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more.” Urbino finished his espresso in one swallow. He stood up and had them all staring at him when he added, “I’m in search of it myself. You’ll have to excuse me, ladies.”

  16

  AS Urbino spoke Gemelli fiddled with a paperweight, loosened his collar with a finger, and near the end got up and leaned on the file cabinet to gaze out the window at the canal below. When Urbino finished, Gemelli looked over at him with a smile.

  “And so you want me to go over there and make an arrest for the murders of Beatrice Galuppi, Maria Galuppi, and the Americano. What about the Signorina Quinton? We have orderly procedure even here in Italy, Signor Macintyre. Have you ever heard of prova indiziaria? Circumstantial evidence it’s called in English. Everything you’ve told me, including all this business with a lovebird and a wedding bell—”

  “A wedding cup, Commissario.”

  “It’s all very interesting and a credit to your ingenuity but exactly what can I do with it?”

  “Isn’t it enough to reopen the case?”

  “Reopen the case! You can’t imagine what we’d have to go through! Your puzzle fits together nicely but it doesn’t constitute proof.”

  Urbino decided to take a different tack. He sensed that Gemelli, despite his protestations, was not completely rejecting his theory. Could he have learned something on his own? Had he begun to doubt Carlo’s guilt? The Contessa had said that the files of Beatrice and Maria had been in the tray together as if someone had been reviewing them. Whatever it was, Gemelli seemed to want to be convinced but he was a man with a lot of personal and professional pride who would have to account to those above him.

  “How difficult would it be, Commissario, to examine the body of Santa Teodora?”

  “Examine it? What do you mean?”

  “Have tests done by scientists and doctors, something like an autopsy.”

  “An autopsy on a thousand-year-old body! Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “But how difficult would it be?” Urbino persisted.

  “It wouldn’t be difficult, it would be impossible! Surely you realize it wouldn’t be only a police matter. The Vatican would be involved, and you know what that means.”

  “I understand how difficult it would be but suppose we had something incontrovertible, something substantial, something the Vatican or any other authority couldn’t ignore?”

  “What would that be?”

  “The real body of Santa Teodora.”

  17

  IT seemed to take them forever to get from San Michele to Sant’Ariano. The police boat made it quickly enough to Torcello but although the Isle of Bones wasn’t far away—and in fact was in sight for the remainder of the trip—they had had to zigzag through the narrow channels among the mud flats for more than half an hour. The Venetian lagoon was very shallow in most areas, especially this one, and boats had to be careful not to stray outside the markers.

  This long approach to Sant’Ariano, Urbino thought, was not unlike a dream or more exactly a nightmare: the self immobilized, making only paralyzed progress toward a goal or away from a danger.

  They passed islets that either showed no signs of human life or had only small, ramshackle wooden structures used by duck hunters for shelter, the kind that Don Marcantonio must have huddled in during the early morning hours when he was a young man. With the tide going out, there was a great deal of mud visible and the reeds and the wooden poles marking the channels stood high. Urbino kept glancing at the pilot, a mere boy who couldn’t have had much experience in these waters, for fear he might run the boat aground. The best craft for these shallows were the light flat-bottomed sandoli they encountered occasionally, their passengers looking curiously at the police launch.

  They were in one of the remotest sections of the lagoon. An analogy might be drawn between this northernmost area of the lagoon and the parish of San
Gabriele in the Cannaregio, so seldom traversed by anyone except those who lived and worked there.

  Gemelli, Grossi, and Urbino had been silent for most of the trip, long before they had even come in sight of the Isle of Bones. The old gravedigger still didn’t seem to have recovered from his shock at seeing Urbino walk across the campo santo with the Commissario an hour before. He had looked as if he expected to be taken into immediate custody and thrown into one of the old dank cells in the Ducal Palace.

  Gemelli’s silence was like a professional decorum or pose although Urbino suspected he was using these moments in late morning as the boat made its tortuous way to consider the advisability of having gone off on what might turn out to be a wild-goose chase.

  At first Urbino had tried to engage them in conversation but soon left them to their own thoughts, filled as he was with his own anxious reflections.

  And so, in silence, the police launch continued its slow approach to the Isle of Bones two weeks before Ash Wednesday.

  18

  THE boat emerged from between the wooden poles and docked at a low wooden wharf.

  “Well, here we are at last,” Gemelli said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  They got out of the boat and walked from the wharf through mud and reeds until they reached a white gate with a grille that gave a view of a porch beyond it. When Urbino looked through the grille after Gemelli had stepped aside, he was startled to see an austere wooden Christ that looked like something done by a Flemish artist.

  Gemelli pointed to the padlock and chain on the gate.

  “Do you have a key?” he asked Grossi.

  The old gravedigger shook his head and started to say something but couldn’t find the words. Despite the chill wind blowing from the lagoon his forehead was slick with sweat.

  “Not a good idea to break the lock,” Gemelli said, “although it looks like it would be easy enough. Let’s go this way.” He pointed to a section of the white wall to the left of the gate. “You stay with the boat,” he called to the young man on the wharf.

  Urbino wondered if Gemelli could be afraid someone might appear and take the boat. From the look of neglect it didn’t seem as if anyone had been near Sant’Ariano in years. Urbino and Grossi followed Gemelli to the wall. It was about five feet high.

  “I’ll go first,” Gemelli said. He climbed to the top and turned to help Grossi. After several heavy-breathing moments, with Urbino giving support from below, the old man was up beside Gemelli. Urbino then negotiated the wall more easily than he expected and dropped down to the other side.

  There was very little on the low island but scrubby bushes and weeds and what at first looked like the whitest of sand. But only a few steps showed Urbino that he wasn’t walking on soft yielding sand but on bones. Skulls, vertebrae, clavicles, thighbones, ribs, and finger bones—these and all the other parts of the human skeleton were to be found in a mad jumble that only the trumpet at the Last Judgment might make any order of. Urbino was appalled, and the Commissario looked no less affected although he must have seen quite a few disturbing things in his job. Only Grossi seemed unruffled by the grim sight. He looked not at the vast expanse of bones beneath the weeds and bushes but fearfully at Gemelli, almost as if he expected to be held responsible for the scene.

  Urbino didn’t see how he would be able to bring himself to walk another step, not if it meant treading on bones the oldest of which must have dated back to at least the seventeenth century.

  Gemelli broke the silence.

  “Where did you bring the body?” He turned to Urbino and added under his breath, “It’s been more than twenty years. He’ll probably just take us to any old pile of bones. How would we know the difference?”

  Grossi was already several feet ahead, stepping unfastidiously but nimbly through the field of bones. There seemed no hesitation in his movements. Gemelli started to follow and, with a sigh, Urbino did the same.

  Any number of times he felt as if he were going to lose his balance. Sometimes it was because he was trying to avoid stepping on a skull or rib or God knew what else. At other times it was the treacherously uneven ground beneath him. At first he didn’t know if it would be best to keep his eyes averted or not. After a few minutes he decided there was little sense in looking at what he was treading on. He could do nothing but follow behind Grossi and Gemelli. What good would it do to examine every time whatever had been reduced to powder and shards beneath his feet?

  Grossi came to a stop by a cluster of spiky bushes against a slight rise in the ground. He stood there waiting for Gemelli and Urbino to catch up with him. Gemelli got there first and stood looking down at the ground. When Urbino got to the spot a few moments later he saw what Gemelli was looking at.

  Initially his eyes registered only the same scramble of bones that were Sant’Ariano’s distinctive blanket, the only difference being that these bones were piled a little higher than the others.

  But gradually he perceived there was something beneath the bones that they didn’t quite conceal. It wasn’t the true earth of Sant’Ariano but a mass of what looked like tattered clothing.

  Grossi, without any direction from Gemelli, bent over and started to handle the bones, picking them up and tossing them aside as if they were so many rocks and stones at a construction site. Urbino wondered at the years—probably several decades of service on Sant’Ariano before it stopped being the bone depository—that could be read in the dispassion with which Grossi did his work.

  Urbino watched the mass beneath the bones being exposed as small lizards darted away for cover. Finally Grossi’s labors subsided.

  On the ground against the hummock was a form about five feet long wrapped in a piece of cloth that was faded, threadbare, and rotted at many spots. It was obviously a body in an unconventional shroud.

  Gemelli looked from the form to Urbino.

  “What are we supposed to do now?”

  It was a question that came more from annoyance than confusion.

  “We take it back. It should be examined for arsenic poisoning.”

  “After thirty years?”

  Urbino quickly explained how large quantities of arsenic had been discovered in Napoleon’s body twenty years after it was buried on St. Helena and brought to Les Invalides.

  “But what’s the point of looking for arsenic? It’s on record that Beatrice Galuppi died of arsenic poisoning, self-administered.”

  “But what if this body shows no traces of arsenic?”

  “Then well have to assume that Signor Grossi made a mistake. It’s quite likely after all these years.”

  “He could have but I don’t think so. But there’s no point in arguing something we can’t prove now one way or the other. Why don’t we take a closer look?”

  “And what will that prove?”

  “Possibly nothing but I think we should, don’t you?” He turned to Grossi. “Would you remove some of the material from around that end?” He gestured to what he assumed must be the head.

  The gravedigger looked at Gemelli, who nodded; then Grossi bent down and unwrapped the cloth as best he could. Some of it came apart in his hands. He stood up.

  They stared down at what looked like a heavily tanned face with a lot of black hair but no teeth. Beneath the head was once-white material, torn, soiled, rotting, but bearing a striking similarity to the yellowed gown covering the body in the Church of San Gabriele. Although they didn’t remove the shroud from the bottom of the figure, Urbino was sure the feet were shod in little scarlet slippers. But the telling details as far as he was concerned were the prominent nose and receding chin that had so recently haunted his dreams.

  Before Gemelli said anything, Urbino started talking. He had to convince the Commissario to take the body back to Venice.

  He pointed out that technically speaking the body had been illegally removed to Sant’Ariano, since the boat of bones that used to plow between San Michele and the island had not been in operation at the time. And there was no point i
n worrying about next of kin since both Maria and Carlo were dead and had left no relatives. Besides, by the nature of Sant’Ariano, the bones and remains of the dead were anonymous and actually belonged to no one unless it was the city of Venice itself. And since there was a possibility that an examination—

  “But papers, Macintyre,” Gemelli interrupted him impatiently. “Papers, papers, papers. You know how our system works. You know how your system-works. Things must be done in the proper way—special forms, signatures, stamps, seals, and then more signatures.”

  “You’ll just have to make the decision yourself and take the responsibility.”

  It might have been this appeal to his position and authority, or the prospect of taking a gamble that might pay off handsomely in a professional way, or the realization that it was somewhat ridiculous to consider either decorum or due process in the middle of a field of bones. Whatever it was, Urbino could tell from the way Gemelli sighed and put his hands on his hips that he had decided to take back the body.

  After covering the exposed face as best he could, the Commissario helped Grossi lift the shrouded figure and carry it back to the wall. Once again Urbino walked behind them.

  It was no easier going back. He only hoped that Grossi, who was in front, had the good sense to take the same route. That way Urbino could console himself with having disturbed and crushed the smallest number of bones possible.

  Once again they had little to say on the trip back to San Michele where they left Grossi off, Gemelli assuring him there was nothing to worry about.

  As the boat headed for the Fondamenta Nuove, Urbino pointed out that Gemelli would have to trouble the old gravedigger again after tests on the body showed no trace of arsenic.

  “There you go again, Macintyre. I’ve gone this far with you but I don’t intend to go much beyond that. I can’t. It will give me a great deal of satisfaction when that poor body is found to be riddled with arsenic. Maybe then you’ll be finished once and for all.” Urbino thought he had no more to say, but then he cleared his throat and added, “As I said back at the Questura, your theory proves nothing. Even if there’s no arsenic in this body, it wouldn’t prove anything.” He looked at Urbino with something close to an appeal in his eyes. “I would need proof, you see.” Then in a more official manner he said, “You’ve been snooping around a bit too much as it is. I’d suggest staying in your palazzo for a change.”