Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  At the east end of the thronged square the Basilica of Saint Mark loomed out of a gray fog like a dream of oriental splendor. In the mist the brilliant colors of the mosaics and the marble columns seemed a little washed out, as though every tourist snapshot had stolen here a blush of rose, there a glitter of gold. On the balustrade above the central portal the bronze horses pawed at the mist, two with the left hoof, two with the right.

  There were small pools of water here and there in the square, and a slender stream had seeped into the north aisle of the basilica. Wasn’t it early in the year? Lucia splashed through it with her rubber-soled shoes and met Father Urbano in the sacristy.

  He was a small round bald-headed priest. When he had been the parish priest of a little village in Umbria he had resembled the Franciscan monks of old, because the shape of his baldness was just like a tonsure.

  Father Urbano was not altogether comfortable in the great basilica. Its magnificence sometimes overwhelmed him. In its staring mosaics and golden volumes there was a quality that troubled him, an otherness, as if its builders were not connected to him by blood and bone. They had tossed up over the round vaults their bulbous domes and designed the great mosaics and attached the tesserae in dazzling clusters, and the mosaics were the wonder of the world, he knew that. And yet their staring eyes disturbed him.

  They were indifferent to daily life, to the getting of bread, the raising of children, the doing of laundry. The shimmering figures existed only in eternity, where a peculiar kind of freezing wind had stiffened their limbs and wrinkled their gowns in tortured folds. Their dark brows frowned, their eyes sent long rods of accusation crisscrossing the upper air. It was a web of mighty gazing, never intersecting the upward glances of the tourists shuffling below.

  And one of the huge segmented volumes within the basilica aroused in Father Urbano a superstitious dread—for no reason! It was completely absurd! And yet there was something primitive and a little frightening about the hollow cavelike space above the north aisle, as though a shriveled hermit might be squatting in the farthest corner, crouching in a litter of bones, existing on crumbs flown in by pigeons.

  Father Urbano had tried to escape his duty. “I don’t know, Your Excellency. Perhaps I can be of more service here among my parishioners. Perhaps I’m not abbastanza sofisticato for priestly duties in such a famous basilica.”

  The cardinal patriarch had smiled indulgently. “I disagree, Father. Oh, I know it’s beneath your dignity in some ways, keeping track of sinkages and the growth of fungus and the control of crowds and the sale of souvenir booklets. But”—he paused, and Father Urbano knew his cause was lost—“you never can tell when another saint might thrust his arm from a column, and surprise us all.” This was a half-irreverent joke, a reminder of the miraculous reappearance of the lost remains of Saint Mark, which had suddenly emerged from a pillar.

  But of course there were satisfactions, too, in Father Urbano’s unwanted elevation. He had a true vocation for attending to the muttered confessions of every sort of human sin, and a profound and solemn loss of self in the conducting of the mass. And here in Venice he took pleasure in scholarly friendships, enjoying warm exchanges from time to time with the learned scholar Samuele Bell, and with the new procurator of San Marco, Dottoressa Lucia Costanza, who had been a childhood friend.

  Today he was amused rather than shocked by her request. “Andiamo,” he said, “let’s take a look.”

  A line of tourists was waiting to be admitted to the Treasury of Saint Mark. They looked curiously at the small round priest and the tall woman and murmured resentfully in German, Japanese, and Czech as the ticket seller waved them through. Four of the tourists were from the British Isles. They complained to each other loudly, not caring whether or not they were overheard.

  “What right has she got to go to the head of the queue?” said the wife of the bishop of Seven Oaks, far back in the line, craning her neck to stare at Lucia.

  “Well, obviously,” said the bishop, “that fat little priest likes attractive women.”

  “Oh, do you think she’s attractive?” said his wife, looking at him severely. “Louise, do you think that woman is attractive?”

  Louise was the wife of the member of Parliament from the Channel Isles. “Not at all,” she said briskly. “Tertius, what do you think? Is that woman attractive?”

  “What woman?” said the member of Parliament, who was all at sea.

  There were two chambers in the Treasury. One displayed magnificent chalices of blood-red sardonyx from Constantinople, alabaster patens, and amphoras of rock crystal. Lucia had seen these things before. Now she looked at them silently, feeling the solemnity of their antiquity, the aura of their sacred transforming power.

  “But this room is beside the point,” said Father Urbano. “It’s the other one that matters in this case. Come on.” They passed the waiting tourists again and walked into the second chamber of treasures. It was filled with reliquaries.

  They were new to Lucia. “Tell me about them.”

  Father Urbano explained. There was no ironic emphasis in his voice as he led her from one to another. He merely named them quietly, the reliquaries that were like brass sleeves with hands, containing the arm bones of various saints, the bronze chest holding the leg bones of Saint Peter, the small statuettes of brutish men throwing stones at a statuette of Christ.

  “Just a minute, Father,” said Lucia, staring at the little figures. “That rock on the top—it’s real. Is it supposed to be an actual stone from the Flagellation?”

  “That’s right,” said Father Urbano dryly. They moved on and looked at a tooth supported by a cherub. This time he shook his head. “I don’t know whose that is.”

  They stood before a case filled with glass goblets, each with its relic—a small bone or a piece of the True Cross. One held two small needlelike objects. Lucia looked at Father Urbano in disbelief. “They’re not—?”

  “Yes,” said Father Urbano mildly, “they are. Thorns from the Crown of Thorns.”

  “Thank you, Father,” murmured Lucia as they left the Treasury. He unhooked a velvet rope and they sat down in a row of chairs. Lucia found it impossible to hold her tongue. She looked up at the glittering mosaic images above her and said softly, “It would be so easy, so easy.”

  “I know.” Father Urbano sighed. “So easy to pick up a stone and tell a lie, or take a couple of thorns off a bush and tell another lie.”

  “Or dig up a bone,” said Lucia dreamily, “and claim it was something wonderful, when it wasn’t at all.” She glanced at the procession moving slowly along beside them, waiting to see another wonder, the precious altarpiece called the Pala d’Oro. Then she looked straight ahead at a tall marble column. Was it the one from which the arm of Saint Mark had suddenly appeared, so long ago? “I understand Samuele Bell is a friend of yours. You know, Father, I suppose his examination of the relics might show that some are false, but it might also show”— she turned to him with a direct look—“that some are actually genuine.”

  Father Urbano smiled and nodded. Lucia suspected that his mind was already made up.

  It was. He took her back across the undulating floor of the basilica and led the way into the sacristy. “I’ll speak to the cardinal patriarch. He may not agree. But if he does, you understand that there will be requirements, certain restrictions.”

  “Of course.” Lucia thanked him and shook his hand. “If you’ll send me the list of requirements, I’ll write to Doctor Bell.”

  The two British couples had “done” San Marco. They had found it a little disappointing, and Tertius Alderney, Conservative member of Parliament for the Channel Isles, was rather alarmed by the puddles in the square.

  “I thought you said we didn’t have to worry about what’s-its-name, high water,” he said to Arthur Cluff-Luffter, bishop of Seven Oaks.

  “We don’t,” said the bishop. “This isn’t high water. It must have rained in the night, that’s all.”

  “A
rthur, it didn’t rain,” said his wife Elizabeth. “I was awake all night, and there wasn’t a drop.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Louise Alderney, “why didn’t somebody tell me to bring my wellies?”

  CHAPTER 7

  When the list came to her office ina formal letter of permission from the cardinal patriarch, Lucia was sitting at her desk composing another letter.

  It was a painful letter, one she had been rehearsing in her mind for months. The time had come at last. The insults were too grievous. It wasn’t just other women, although that was tiresome enough. It was her husband’s pathetic posturing, his refusal to take a job unworthy of his sensitive nature, his bitter explosions of childish rage because she was so good a provider. Even so, it took three drafts before Lucia could control her anger and write something clear and sensible.

  Lorenzo,

  I’m leaving you. You know why. I’m taking an apartment. I’ve withdrawn all my savings from the bank. Enclosed is a certified check for half the entire sum.

  L

  As soon as she had inserted the check and the letter in an envelope, sealed the envelope, addressed it to her husband, stamped it with a thump of her fist, and dropped it on the pile of outgoing mail, Lucia wrote the next letter with more pleasure.

  Of course she could have run downstairs and hurried around the corner and entered the library and related her good news in person, but in a controversial matter of this kind she must preserve all the dry ceremony of official business.

  Her second letter was addressed to—

  Dottor Samuele Bell

  Biblioteca Marciana

  San Marco 7

  30124 Venezia

  CHAPTER 8

  The place wasn’t very good, but it would be all right for now. It could probably be fixed up. The kitchen needed new appliances and a coat of paint. Of course the hole in the wall of the closet would have to be repaired right away. It was amazing how flimsy these old places were. The connecting wall was disintegrating, falling apart at a touch.

  The space on the other side surely belonged to the people next door. It must be part of their house, not this one. It looked like a storage room for their castoffs—beautiful castoffs, really remarkable—but they were no business of this tenant. Perhaps Signorina Pastora at the agency would speak to the other people about repairing the wall.

  Doctor Richard Henchard sat again in the client’s chair in the office of the realtor from whom he had rented the dingy apartment on the Rio della Sensa. “I’ll take it for another six weeks,” he said grandly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, but it’s been rented to someone else for a year.” Signorina Pastora frowned. “You said you wanted it for only a week.”

  “What?” Henchard stared at her in horror. “You mean you showed it to someone else while I was out?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I didn’t.” She was on the defensive. “I loaned this person a key and said take a look for yourself, only knock first, so the client went over there and decided to take it and came back and signed a lease and gave me a month’s rent.”

  Henchard stood up from his chair and leaned over her desk. “I’ll take it for a year. I’ll give you a year’s rent. Now, right now.”

  Signorina Pastora was surprised into telling the truth. “But why? The place isn’t worth it.”

  Henchard slapped his checkbook down on the desk and looked at her.

  “Oh well, all right.” She shook her head as if reluctant. “I’ll have to tell the other party that I got the papers mixed up, and you already had a lease. But—” She laughed, and watched him scribble the check. God, he was attractive.

  Thrusting it at her, he said, “Who was it? Tell me. What’s his name?”

  The phone rang. “Excuse me.” Signorina Pastora talked and listened and talked, radiating charm. “Oh, yes, signor, there are many delightful properties, but of course they’re all very expensive. Yes, of course I’ll be happy to show you one or two. Yes, certainly, I’m free this afternoon. I’ll meet you by the monument to Goldoni at two. Oh, don’t you know it? Let me explain.” It was another two minutes before she put down the phone, while Henchard controlled his rage. At last she looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry, what was your question?”

  “His name! What is the name of the person who wanted to rent that apartment for a year?”

  “Oh, I can’t tell you that. These things are strictly confidential.” The phone rang again. “I’m sorry, excuse me.”

  The call was apparently intimate. She swung around in her revolving chair and faced away from Henchard and whispered into the phone.

  Delicately he reached for the papers on her desk and fingered them silently until he found the name he wanted, complete with the address. The handwriting was strong and distinctive, the hand of somebody of importance like himself. Probably he too wanted a place for his girlfriend.

  When Signorina Pastora swung around again to face Henchard, the papers were back where they belonged.

  “Anything else?”

  Then he remembered that Giovanna still needed an apartment. The idiot kept whimpering and complaining, insisting that if she didn’t have something better than the cathouse she’d move in with his wife. “Yes,” said Henchard, “as a matter of fact, there is. I need another apartment. Cheap, really cheap.”

  By the time he had made an appointment to see another rental it was late. He was in a panic. What if the man to whom Signorina Pastora had loaned a key had opened the closet door of the apartment while inspecting the place? What if he had seen the opening at the back? What if he had looked through the gap and seen what was hidden behind it? Jesus Christ!

  Henchard plunged across the bridge over the Rio della Sensa, which was still a muddy crevasse, and turned right at the figure of the Moor on the corner of the Campo dei Mori. Swiftly he bounded past the Casa del Tintoretto and the three neighboring houses.

  Then he floundered to a stop. A woman was coming out of the apartment door. She was well dressed, and handsome in a statuesque kind of way.

  He gaped at her, and babbled, “Mi displace, signora, but this is my house.”

  She looked at him kindly. “You are mistaken.” She nodded at the next house. “Perhaps you have the wrong door.”

  Ah, of course, it was the girlfriend! Her distinguished boyfriend didn’t know yet about the realtor’s change of mind. “I’m sorry, signora, it’s the agency’s mistake. Signorina Pastora is a little”—Henchard twirled a finger at his forehead—“ muddled. She rented the place twice. I’m sorry to tell you this, but my lease is earlier than yours.” He pulled it out of the inner pocket of his jacket, passed it swiftly under the woman’s eyes, and put it back. “Tell your—ah—friend to call her. She will confirm what I say.”

  “My friend?” The woman looked puzzled.

  “May I have your key?”

  She looked bewildered for a moment, and then agreed. “Well, all right, never mind.” Fumbling in her bag, she produced a key and turned away.

  He gazed at her back. For a whore she was in a class by herself, not at all like simpleminded Giovanna. Henchard was enormously relieved that she wasn’t making a fuss, that she had handed him her key so willingly. It meant she didn’t know what she was giving up. But of course her boyfriend might know, the fool who thought he had rented the apartment.

  Gasping, Henchard ran up the stairs, unlocked the apartment door, and burst into the room.

  To his dismay he saw that the closet door was open a few inches, and when he flung it wide he saw to his horror that another board had fallen to the floor. The narrow slit between the remaining boards was now twelve inches wide. The fucking bastard had put his eye to the hole and seen Henchard’s priceless treasure. Shit!

  But now, Christ, he had to get back to the office. There were patients to see, a grim phone call to make.

  After that it was perfecdy plain what had to be done, and done without delay.

  CHAPTER 9

  The great conference had not yet be
gun, although a few scholars from here and there were already nosing around the Biblioteca Marciana, getting in the way, having to be rescued from the fierce clutches of the official dragon at the door with her insistence on some reason why they should be admitted, people of the exalted stature of the HerrDirektor of the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, two scholars from the Uffizi, two more from the Morgan Library in New York, and the curator of early printed books in Chicago’s Newberry Library.

  These august visitors kept turning up, much too soon, while preparations were still frantically in progress. There they would be, eminently important people cooling their heels in the entry of the Marciana under the dark suspicious gaze of the dragon until Sam could be summoned. And then he would have to come downstairs to apologize in person, and spend the rest of the day taking them to lunch and showing them around, and explaining about the water slipping over the stone banks of the canals at certain times of day.

  “Oh, no matter,” exclaimed the man from the Houghton Library at Harvard. “After all, I spend half my time in swamps, studying the flora and fauna.”

  “And surely this is nothing!” said the woman from the British Museum. “I was expecting Noah’s Flood!”

  “Should we start pairing off?” joked the director of the Fitzwilliam. “Two camels, two giraffes, two students of early printed books?” He winked at the woman from the British Museum, but she pursed her mouth.

  And therefore Sam was harried and worried, but Homer Kelly basked in happiness. He adored libraries, any library, from a closet full of books in a rural town hall to the vast collections of Widener Library in Harvard Yard. To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand. At least that was Homer’s opinion. This library too was holy ground.