Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  “Thank you for that.”

  “I preferred to ask Cavatorta despite the risk involved. I didn’t want to upset you. I knew that if I raised the subject I would have to tell you more than was good for you.”

  The smile she gave him now was part appreciation and part, he assumed, the Veuve Cicquot she had drunk so quickly. He was glad she didn’t point out to him that he had been somewhat neglectful of her good when he had gone to Bellorini’s studio with his plan.

  “Thank you, caro, and forgive me for being so stupid. When I was a schoolgirl at St. Brigid’s, I always got the top grades in memorization: Tennyson, Hopkins, even half an essay by Cardinal Newman. But lately—” She sighed and reached for her glass only to And it almost empty. Urbino refilled it. “But you have to understand that I’m not sure I even knew to begin with so how could I have forgotten?”

  It was one final apology and excuse.

  “Where is the Wedding Cup now?”

  “Probably crammed into that room on the top floor with a thousand other bits and pieces. Alvise used to say that that room was like the section of the Vatican Museum with all the gifts to the Popes. I haven’t been in it for years and years. Well have to poke around in there one of these days. I’ve been afraid of stirring up memories but maybe it’s time. It might even be fun.”

  They both looked out into the Piazza. Two figures dressed as traditional nuns, in black robes and veils and white coifs and wimples, passed under the arcade in front of their window, arm in arm and kissing. Whether they were two men, two women, or a man and a woman was impossible to know, but any of these combinations was unacceptable to the Contessa as long as they were dressed the way they were. She shook her head slowly.

  “Thank God the reconsecration ceremony at San Gabriele is scheduled after all this insanity. I assume you’ll be given a place of honor.”

  “I’ll be right next to you, Barbara, if that’s what you mean although I’d prefer not to be there at all. You can be sure it’ll be mobbed because of all the publicity.”

  “There’s that, yes, but there should be a lot of people there for better reasons than curiosity. After all, there’s a great deal to celebrate. Santa Teodora’s body is in remarkable condition after twenty years on Sant’Ariano.”

  “Not all that good really. It’s more a matter of only the head. As in the case of Beatrice, there isn’t much left to the rest of the body. That old gown seems to have covered a lot of secrets over the years.”

  “As I was saying,” the Contessa continued with a slight frown, “there’s talk that what we have is yet one more miracle of our little saint from Syracuse.”

  “Either that or we don’t know the real circumstances of her death. Who knows? She could have died from arsenic poisoning,” he said, barely suppressing a smile. “Maybe that’s why her body was so well-preserved to begin with.” Before she could reprimand him, he added, “I know—not in the best taste.”

  “Not in any taste at all.” She looked at him severely, then her face softened. “You did an amazing job, you know. You’ve got your harmony back. You’ve restored it to us all.”

  “Not for long, I’m afraid.”

  He nodded toward the carnevale crowd getting thicker out in the Piazza.

  “We’ll just have to suffer through it all for the next week, my dear Urbino. This is the last time I’ll be anywhere near the Piazza until the madness is over.”

  She looked toward the door where the waiter was standing and caught his eye.

  “Tell me, caro, do you intend to turn this into an avocation? It might not be incompatible with your Venetian Lives, you know.”

  “Turn what into an avocation?”

  “Your sleuthing, of course. You’ve had such success with your first case.”

  “Venice, I’m afraid, is too quiet a town to make that a real possibility.”

  “A quiet kind of town!” She almost shouted it as the waiter stopped at the table. “How can you say such a thing after what we’ve all been through?”

  “Cosa desidera, Contessa?” the waiter asked.

  “First you can tell my young friend here that it’s perfectly conceivable that a murder might take place right here at Florian’s!”

  “Come, Contessa?”

  Urbino laughed. The Contessa, as usual when it came to things Venetian, was probably right.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series

  1

  Just the other night, only a few hours after Carnival officially began at midnight, one more aged sister died at the Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina.

  Surrounded by a group of equally ancient nuns, Sister Clara sat up straight in bed and said with a blind, unblinking gaze,

  “I see her clearly, so clearly, my dear ones. Her face is as young as ours when we took the veil.” She smiled and opened her thin arms wide. “Welcome, Sister Death.”

  Promptly, without any anticlimax, she fell back on the pillows and died.

  The sisters started to do what had to be done. Two prepared to wash the body, two prayed, and two argued over whether the smile on Sister Clara’s face should be toned down a bit. And no doubt at least one of them was wondering who would be left behind to tend to her own temple of the Holy Ghost when her time came.

  Even if you had no other evidence than the smooth, efficient way the sisters went about their business in Sister Clara’s cell, as if they were performing the ordinary tasks of housekeeping, you would nonetheless know that death was far from a stranger to this building that housed the convent and its attendant pensione.

  Yet death, though familiar, wasn’t any more welcome here than elsewhere. It didn’t always come so benevolently or wear such a fresh face as it had for Sister Clara, who seemed happy to be delivered into the hands of her Heavenly Bridegroom.

  Far from it. Dying sisters at Santa Crispina have been known to scream and even curse when they finally saw the face that death was wearing for them.

  Such reluctance on the part of some sisters to leave their building for the bosom of Abraham might lead you to think it was a snug ark whose considerable comforts mocked the order’s vow of poverty. You would be wrong, however, as you would immediately have known when you saw the building’s leprous stones and chipped statuary, its damp-warped shutters and listing staircases, its buckling floors and crumbling plaster. The furniture was heavy, dark, and minimal, and the paintings scattered throughout the four stories were mainly grim memento mori and martyrdoms. Never did divine motherhood look as consumptive as it did in some of the Madonnas holding their beloved sons in their arms. As for the Last Supper and the Crucifixion that hung in the guests’ dining room, you would have been hard pressed to say which of the two was less appetizing.

  And yet, despite the dismal quarters, there were several reasons why you might consider staying at the pensione run by the Sisters of the Charity of Santa Crispina.

  For one thing, you might be zealously inclined to purify your spirit in the Casa Crispina’s austere surroundings, reminiscent of some dark medieval inn where you were frozen in winter and baked in summer. The good sisters saw no need to make you any more comfortable than they were themselves, the charity of their ancient order obliging them not to deny you any of the pleasures to be gained from the mortification of the flesh.

  The Casa Crispina provided a clean, sparsely furnished room, three plain meals a day, and the sound of bells from matins all the way through vespers to compline. You were free to ignore these summonses as you wished but the sisters believed that even the mere sound, falling on your ear in sleep or in sloth, had some beneficial effect. To make things as easy as possible, they had placed a prie-dieu and inspirational lithograph in each of the ten rooms so that you could not invoke the excuse of the inconvenience of a long walk to the chapel.

  Another, much more obvious reason why you might be attracted to the Casa Crispina was purely a matter of lire since it was one of the cheapest places to stay in all of Venice—unless, t
hat is, you reckoned in the cost of throat and chest medications in winter and all those aranciate and ices you were likely to consume in summer.

  If these considerations of austerity and cost did not sway you, however, perhaps the retiring nature of the Casa Crispina could, for it was in a remote part of the Cannaregio into which tourists only occasionally strayed from the Ghetto or the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, the parish church of Tintoretto. Thus you might indulge here the fantasy that almost every tourist has—that he is anything but what he is.

  The shopkeeper, the children playing by the covered wellhead, the mask maker arranging his display, the two old women in black shaking their heads over the death notice on the bakery-shop window—you could convince yourself that all these residents of the quarter that you saw in only the first few moments of leaving the Casa Crispina couldn’t possibly know you for what you really were.

  It was much harder to maintain the fiction of your true identity, however, within the somber walls of the Casa Crispina itself where the sisters’ domain was clearly separate from that of their guests. You might conceal other things but never that you were anything more than a mere guest, someone initiated into less arcane mysteries than those the good sisters shared.

  The pensione, except for its dining area, was confined to the story above the ground level, while the nuns were semicloistered on the next two floors. The two groups mingled only in the chapel and the reception area—both on the ground floor—and on the front staircase that connected all four floors. The sisters, however, usually used their own private entrance and staircase.

  The refectory at the rear of the ground floor was divided by a flimsy partition with a door. Large stained-glass windows, which looked out on a narrow canal, were usually shuttered. The guests were served in their own area not by the sisters themselves but by two middle-aged women from nearby Mestre who wore perpetually disgruntled expressions.

  As Dora Spaak sat down at the empty table in her usual place, she glanced as she always did at the partly opened door into the sisters’ refectory. Although the sisters ate earlier, Dora occasionally thought she could see the flutter of dark-gray cloth through the opening. One time when she had come to the dining room earlier than usual, she had heard a voice droning something indistinguishable. A prayer? a homily? the life of a martyred saint? There had been no way for her to tell but it had given her an uneasy feeling.

  No, Dora didn’t feel at all comfortable staying at the Casa Crispina. She hated it when some of the sisters referred to it by its old-fashioned name, the Hospice, because even though she knew this was supposed to evoke memories of the religious lodgings for the weary in the Holy Land of long ago, all a nurse like her could think of was pain and the end of life.

  So much seemed peculiar here. For example, even though it would have been easier for the women from Mestre to bring the food directly from the kitchen to the guests’ dining room through the nuns’ refectory, they instead made circuitous trips down a corridor even though the nuns had long finished dinner.

  As Dora was trying to figure out once again why the door between the two areas was always partly open if no one went through it during meals—was it to tease them all with fleeting glimpses of a better life or to allow the sisters to keep an eye on their guests?—she heard someone approaching. It could be her brother, Nicholas. He had been seeing to their mother in her room, making sure that she really didn’t want to come out to dinner, that she didn’t want to be coaxed into joining them. Nicholas had more patience with their mother than she did. Dora was already dreading returning to Pittsburgh alone with her.

  When she looked away from the door, it wasn’t Nicholas standing there but the handsome photographer who had been so nice to her since she arrived.

  “Thinking of joining the sisters? They could use some young blood.”

  He had a soothing, well-modulated voice, one she could have listened to for hours. It was the kind of voice she associated with the best bred of Englishmen.

  Dora felt herself blushing. She looked down at her napkin, stained from the meals of previous days.

  “You should be careful. The sisters might hear you, Mr. Gibbon.”

  “Just Val, remember?”

  “Val—that’s short for…?”

  He gave her a dazzling smile. His eyes were as dark as any Italian’s but his skin was whiter than hers.

  “Guess.”

  “I couldn’t—unless—”

  “Yes?”

  “Could it be Valentine?”

  His quick laugh made her feel foolish. She dared not look up right away but busied herself with her napkin. When she felt strong enough to encounter his dark eyes again, however, she saw that they were no longer alone. Xenia Campi, the Italian woman who lived at the pensione and claimed to be able to see into the future, was standing next to Val, a frown on her heavily made-up face.

  “Excuse me, sir.” Stout, black-haired, and in her mid-forties, the Italian woman spoke deliberately in heavily accented English. She put her hand on the top of the chair behind which Val Gibbon was standing. “This is my seat.”

  “Excuse me, signora! Everything in order here in the convent. What would happen if it wasn’t, even during Carnival—or should I say especially during Carnival!”

  Val Gibbon moved aside so that the woman, wearing a plum-colored, robelike dress with voluminous sleeves, could take her accustomed place next to Dora. Before he went to the other side of the table, the photographer bent down close to Dora’s ear and whispered, “Nothing as romantic as that, I’m afraid, but thank you for thinking so. It shows you have a tender imagination.”

  He went to sit down near the end of the table, his back to the partly open door. As he unfolded his napkin, he looked over at Dora.

  “A very tender imagination,” he added with a smile.

  Dora looked away. She had been surprised to see Val Gibbon in the dining room tonight, not because he had come upon her unawares and seemed to enjoy doing it, but because he hadn’t eaten at the Casa Crispina for several nights in a row now. She had missed him. No matter what the others might say, she could tell he was in every sense a gentleman. He was like one of those Englishmen who always ended up being especially nice to poor young girls in the books she used to read. They might have seemed strange and even gruff at first, hiding some disturbing secret, but they always made up for it before the end of the story.

  On the second evening of Val Gibbon’s absence, Xenia Campi had said, “I don’t foresee good things for a man who has money to throw away like that.”

  Whether this was an opinion or the fruit of the woman’s supposedly clairvoyant vision, Dora didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Dora was in almost constant fear that the woman would say something about her future. It wasn’t that she believed that Xenia Campi—or anyone—could see into the future, but she was superstitious. She was sure that the ill the woman might claim to see would come true, just because she had dared utter it. As for the good she might predict, that was sure to fly away as quickly as the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square whenever there was any sudden sound.

  Tonight Xenia Campi looked particularly humorless and depressed, and had an unnatural restraint that made Dora feel as if she might strike out at any moment at her or the photographer with some dire prediction or scathing indictment. Dora was relieved when Nicholas, without their mother, took his seat on her other side.

  He was soon followed, noisily, by the three teenage boys from Naples. Xenia Campi darted a quick glance at one of the boys, who avoided looking at her and started to talk nervously to his companions. The three boys usually kept very much to themselves, not saying more than a few words of greeting during their meals and never staying longer than was necessary. They were here for Carnival and obviously didn’t want to spend any time away from more exciting things in the big square.

  “And how are you feeling this evening, Signora Campi?” Nicholas asked.

  “Much better, thank you. My cold is almost gone.”


  “Mr. Lubonski isn’t as fortunate, I’m afraid.”

  The Pole who was restoring the fresco in the nearby church was confined to his room with the flu.

  “Signor Lubonski’s condition is much more serious than mine, I assure you.”

  Xenia Campi said this as if, from the privileged position of someone born with a caul, she saw things about the man’s lungs that even an X ray couldn’t.

  Nicholas turned somewhat hesitantly to Val Gibbon. Dora had noticed that her brother was frequently self-conscious with Gibbon and would hardly look him in the face when he spoke to him. She attributed this to his characteristic shyness around very outgoing people. It didn’t mean he didn’t like them. In fact, she had always thought it was very much the opposite.

  As her brother addressed Val Gibbon now, Dora was pleased to note the almost boyish enthusiasm behind his words.

  “You must be finding plenty of things to photograph in Venice during Carnival, Mr. Gibbon. It must be difficult to know what not to take a picture of when there’s so much to choose from.”

  Gibbon smiled at him.

  “Not at all, Mr. Spaak. That’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. Photography is one of the arts, you know. Like all artists, the true photographer is an initiate in mysteries unknown to others.”

  Xenia Campi, with no attempt to hold her voice down, said to Dora, “There’s no more art in taking a picture than there is in making a ragout!”

  Dora hoped Val Gibbon didn’t think ill of her for being the recipient of the remark. She would have frowned at the woman except for her fear that it might draw even more notice—or that the woman would turn her ill will on her. Her heart went out to the photographer. He might be good at pretending to be strong, but she sensed that he was almost as vulnerable as she was to an unkind word.

  “Ah, but Signora Campi,” Gibbon said as he turned to the woman, “surely you know that there are cooks and there are chefs, there are holiday picture takers and there are photographers—just as surely as there are Luna Park frauds and whatever might be the opposite in your own profession. You see that I am kind enough to call it a profession.”