Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  And he was helping! Sam had drafted Homer to fetch and carry. He was permitted to enter the sacred storage vault and extract one priceless volume after another and carry it up through a private passage into the magnificent reading room, the Sala della Libreria.

  This reading room was not like the workaday one downstairs, marvelous as that chamber might be. It was a masterpiece of the Venetian High Renaissance, every inch of it decorated by Venetian artists and craftsmen. Here, surrounded by glory upon glory, Homer Kelly and Sam’s other assistants unwrapped the beautiful volumes from the bubble envelopes that protected them against woodworm.

  With reverent hands Homer helped place them upright in the display cases. Then Sam Bell himself walked up and down, choosing the pages to be held open with satin ribbons.

  When the work was done, Homer spent an hour ogling the elegant pages, trying to read the Latin names. He could guess at Sallust’s Catiline, which was adorned with floating cherubs, but Sam had to help him with the Greek titles, Ptolemy’s Geography and the Epistles of Paul.

  “How many books did Cardinal Bessarion have altogether?” said Homer, gazing at the foliated initials of a Latin Livy.

  “Oh, thousands. That’s why the library had to be built to house them.” Sam took Homer’s arm and led him to a case across the aisle. Leaning over it, he breathed a reverent mist on the glass. “Of course you’re aware, Homer, that the printing press of Aldus Manutius was one of the first in Venice. This is his masterpiece, The Dream of Poliphilius. I think it’s the most beautiful book ever printed.”

  Homer was six feet six inches tall, his beard was gray and bushy, and he was fifty years old, but he wanted to weep like a child. His wife Mary sometimes complained about the way he was forever being hooked by some new obsession. The man was incapable of being bored by anything human, nor by any branch of learning, no matter how feeble his understanding. Now he was overwhelmed with sentimental awe, and he made a gulping sound in his throat.

  Sam clapped him on the back. “Come on. Facciamo uno spuntino. I’ve got a bottle of Prosecco in my office. I’ll just make sure there aren’t any dignitaries with hurt feelings swarming around downstairs.”

  They walked through the glorious vestibule, where Homer craned his neck to admire Titian’s allegorical figure of Wisdom on the ceiling—obviously a library enthusiast herself because she was consulting both a book and a scroll. Then they descended Sansovino’s stupendous staircase, negotiated the open-air arcade, and walked up another set of stairs. As they climbed the second long flight very slowly—Sam was tired and Homer was out of shape—Sam told himself once again that nothing mattered anymore. He could do whatever he wanted.

  He could abandon everything, the whole damn thing, the exhibition and the conference and all his duties as caretaker of some of the most valuable books in the Western world. He could flee from all of that and embark in a little boat with Dottoressa Lucia Costanza, and its pink sail would be blown by a gentle wind, carrying them to the island of Cythera. It would be so easy, so simple. All he had to do was entice her away from the eminence of her procuratorship, burst her marriage chains, and make love to her at last in some flowery bower.

  “What did you say, Homer? Oh, of course, here we are. Come right in.”

  The telephone was ringing in the outer office. Sam’s secretary held up the phone and murmured, “ll sindaco.”

  “The mayor,” said Sam apologetically, waving Homer on into the big room with its view of the lagoon. When he hurried in a few minutes later, he explained that the mayor was organizing a council to deal with acqua alta. “You know, consisting of everybody around the piazza.”

  “Acqua alta?” said Homer. “Oh, you mean high water. Right. Well, it’s here already. It’s not so bad.”

  Sam looked at him in disbelief. “Just wait, Homer,” he said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Nothin’,” said Homer, correcting Sam’s English. “I ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Sam looked puzzled. “But isn’t that bad grammar?”

  “You betcha,” said Homer, grinning at him.

  “Ah, a colloquial expression,” said Sam. He poured bubbly wine into Homer’s glass, lifted his own, and then, to show that he too was acquainted with American slang, he said, “Well, here’s dirt in your eye.”

  Homer let it pass, and went back to the subject of the great cardinal. “Tell me, Sam, has the library got every single one of Bessarion’s books?”

  “Oh, no. A great many are missing. The library didn’t exist until long after he gave them to the city. So they were stored in crates here and there, and borrowed like library books, so some fell by the wayside. And then that blundering idiot Napoleon Bonaparte decided to found an Italian library, so a lot of Bessarion books sat around in Padua, waiting for it, only it never happened, and they began to disappear. That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “But what about the printed books? Are there any more of that divine Dream of Poliphilius still kicking around somewhere?”

  “Oh, yes, a few. They’re outrageously valuable.”

  Homer leaned back in his chair and looked at the row of portraits on the wall over Sam Bell’s head. “Who are all those people? Your predecessors, I’ll bet. Will your picture be up there someday, the distinguished conservatore dei libri ran, Dottor Samuele Bell?”

  Sam winced. He glanced up at the painted series of scholar-professors. He had known some of them in person. Not one of those dignified people, so far as he knew, had ever dreamed of abandoning his duties and embarking with a lady love for the fanciful island of Cythera, that blessed place sacred to Venus, where lovemaking lasted into eternity, and where there was no death.

  CHAPTER 10

  The phone was ringing. Ursula picked it up and said a timid “Pronto?”

  A strong male voice asked for Dottor Samuele Bell, but at once her father picked up the phone in his study.

  Instead of hanging up, Ursula listened.

  When they were finished she went silently into her room and closed the door. After a while she came out again and checked to see if her grandmother had come home from shopping.

  No, she hadn’t. Ursula hurried straight into her grandmother’s bedroom and opened the drawer where Mrs. Wellesley kept pills, bottles of perfume, violet and green eye shadow, black mascara, false eyelashes, wrinkle-control creams, and a messy jewel box spilling over with bracelets, brooches, button earrings, old pairs of bifocals, and strings of cultured pearls.

  There was an envelope under the jewel box. Ursula extracted it and helped herself to a five-thousand-lire note. Then she tucked the envelope back where it belonged, closed the drawer gently, and slipped out of the room.

  Next day after school, she stopped in the shop.

  “Buonasera, piccola,” said the man behind the counter. “Un altro, oggi? You must have quite a collection by now. Which one would you like today?”

  “That one, please,” said Ursula.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mary had been having a good time too. She had been going out every day to explore the city, not minding that the camera around her neck made her look like a tourist. After all, she was a tourist, an eager inquisitive tourist who consulted her guidebook at every street corner and struggled to unfold and fold her map while the wind blew its creases the wrong way.

  Before leaving Massachusetts she had bought ten rolls of film at a discount pharmacy. Now she had begun using them freely. Her camera was always at the ready. When in doubt, push the button. She didn’t care how trite her subjects were, or how many other tourists were taking the same pictures. She envisioned the mills of Kodak grinding out enormous batches of identical shots of the same famous places. She didn’t care.

  At first Mary had a plan. She would explore one part of the city at a time and keep a list of every picture she took. On the first day she had been scrupulous about recording every shot:

  1. Riva degli Schiavoni, statue of Vittorio Emanuele

  2. View of the lagoon w
ith San Giorgio Maggiore

  3. Another view of the lagoon

  4. Gondolas carrying Japanese tourists under the Bridge of Sighs

  Tour groups from Japan were everywhere. Mary imagined a travel agent in Tokyo offering dirt-cheap package tours. In Venice the Japanese were polite and interested, but they had come in such numbers that they sometimes blocked her way. Courteously they squeezed together as they stopped to take pictures. They were obviously as eager as she was to record the fabulous city and keep it forever. She couldn’t avoid capturing them in the foreground of her pictures of Santa Maria della Salute and the Rialto Bridge. And of course many of their multitudinous shots would show one Mary Kelly as a miscellaneous object in front of the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, a woman striding past the Campanile or moving among the pigeons in the square.

  Whether they wanted to or not, they were capturing each other’s faces. Next month in Tokyo the tall solid figure of an American woman would appear on screens in a hundred darkened rooms. She would be an anonymous part of the background behind beaming rows of family members. And her own Venetian scrapbook would show flocks of Japanese visitors feeding the pigeons, admiring the four bronze horses over the portals of San Marco, or sitting at the little tables in front of Florian’s.

  Today the two British couples were in everybody’s pictures too, having lunch at Florian’s, sitting under the arcade eating fish soup and drinking white wine while the man at the piano played Broadway show tunes.

  “There’s a striking-looking woman,” said the bishop, taking off his reading glasses and staring across the square at Mary Kelly.

  “Where?” said his wife, turning her head through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees.

  The wife of the member of Parliament glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. “American, I think.”

  “Porto ora il secondo piatto?” said the waiter. “If you please, the second course?”

  “Mi piace spaghetti alle vongole,” said the bishop at once, showing off, getting the reflexive pronoun right, forgetting that spaghetti was a plural noun.

  His wife ordered fegato alla veneziana, then let the rest of them in on a secret. She was beginning a novel set in Venice, full of rotting palaces, crumbling bridges, stinking canals, and leering gondoliers. “Honestly, it’s all in my head. All I have to do is put pen to paper, so to speak.”

  The piano player ran his finger up the keyboard and splashed into “Younger Than Springtime,” and Mary Kelly moved out of sight into the Piazzetta and took a picture of the Ducal Palace.

  When in doubt push the button. More is better. Push the button, push the button, change the film, push the button.

  CHAPTER 12

  Doctor Richard Henchard wandered around the room for a few minutes, thinking quickly, his eyes darting here and there. Then to quiet his beating heart he sat down in a comfortable chair beside the body of Lorenzo Costanza, and read once again the letter from Costanza’s wife that he had found on the table—

  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

  Henchard couldn’t help grinning. You know why. Well, of course the poor sciocco knew why. Henchard knew why too. The man had a wandering eye. He’d rented that place on Rio della Sensa, or tried to rent it, for the same reason Henchard himself had taken it, for a girlfriend. The man who now lay dead on the floor had wanted a place for the handsome woman Henchard had met coming out of the apartment.

  So naturally he had never told his wife about it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you told your wife. Costanza’s wife was probably another fat bitch just like Vittoria, his own wife. She wasn’t in on her husband’s little secrets. She knew nothing about the apartment and its contents. She guessed that he was two-timing her, that was all. Wives, they always knew.

  Well, the poor bastard had lost his wife and his life on the same day. But he had also, thank God, lost the treasure that lay behind the closet wall in the house on Rio della Sensa.

  The letter looked useful somehow. What could he do with it? Lovingly Henchard fingered the check, but he couldn’t possibly cash it. That would be madness.

  Getting up, he began exploring the rest of the house. It was a handsome place, tastefully furnished with country cupboards and Biedermeier chairs. In Signora Costanza’s bedroom he rummaged in the bureau drawers. And there, to his flabbergasted delight, he found among the underwear—eccolo!—a handgun of precisely the same make and model as his own. “Un modello molto popolare,” the dealer in the Milanese gunshop had told him. “Anche io, ho la stessa pistola.” The dealer had the same gun himself!

  It lay there like a miracle among the brassieres and panties. Surely the woman had handled it—her prints must be all over it. Reverently he picked it up with a pair of the silken panties and wondered how to make use of this stroke of luck. What if he were to make this man’s death look like a suicide? It was wonderful what you could learn from television—you just squeezed the dead fingers around the grip of the gun, and there you were.

  But did he actually want a suicide? What if he made it look as if the man’s own wife had killed him?

  The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The gun already bore the wife’s fingerprints. He would take away his own identical piece, the one that had actually done the deed, and leave hers in its place, a weapon of the same caliber using the same cartridges, covered all over with her own prints. What’s more—Henchard laughed out loud—she had run away! It would look highly suspicious. And what about her bank account! She had withdrawn all the money from her bank account! Better and better!

  Carrying the signora’s gun still safely wrapped in her panties, Henchard went back downstairs. Stepping over the body of Lorenzo Costanza, he went to the window and peered out, looking for a place to deposit the weapon. It had to be just right. It mustn’t be so well hidden that it would not be found immediately, but on the other hand it mustn’t seem planted on purpose. It should look as though the woman in her emotional distress and in a fever of guilty remorse had tossed it away and fled.

  All the houses along this pleasant street in the sestiere of San Polo had little front gardens. This one was just right. Henchard opened the window softly and dropped the woman’s weapon into the ground cover below.

  Closing the window, he wondered what else he could do to incriminate the lady. Her departure must look like a hasty retreat. He went upstairs again to her bedroom and examined the wardrobe. It was nearly empty. Obviously she had already taken away most of her clothes.

  Artfully Henchard took a few pieces of her leftover underwear from the drawer in which he had found the weapon, threw them on the bed, and scattered more on the floor.

  He was almost ready to go. There was only one thing more.

  In the kitchen he found a box of matches. Henchard scratched a match against the side of the box and held the flame under the envelope that contained the certified check and Lucia’s farewell note. It flared up. When it was nearly consumed, he dropped it in the sink, blew on his scorched fingers, and washed the ashes down the drain.

  Before leaving the house he went back to the room where the body lay. In his surgical practice Henchard had seen many anesthetized men and women, and all of them had shown this same helpless look. They had been transformed from lively, upright, intelligent beings into logs of wood. If they were Henchard’s patients they woke up and resumed their active selves, at least for a while—obviously some were doomed. But this log of wood was stone dead. It would never rise again.

  In the city of Plymouth, where Henchard had been raised, his mother had been a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and always there had been a heavy emphasis on the necessity to separate oneself from evil, to avoid every possible contact with sin. Of course young Ricky had paid no attention to his mother, but he couldn’t help remembering some of her sour maxims and guilt-inducing platitudes�
��This have I done for thee. What hast thou done for me?

  Later on, at the time of his marriage in Venice, he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, and another weight of moral reproof had landed on his shoulders.

  Both of these influences had been feeble, and he had shrugged them off. Yet now as he looked at the dead man they peered around the corner of his conscience.

  Today in the operating room of the Ospedale with a gastric carcinoma under his knife, something else had affected him. Poised over the tumor he had seen a sharp vision of the anguished face of the dying spazzino, and it had given him a turn. “Separate thyself from evil,” cautioned his mother. “Repent and thy sins will be forgiven,” promised the Holy Father.

  As Henchard made his escape from the house of Lucia and Lorenzo Costanza, he added another item to his list of the things to be done next day. Between a colon resection and a lumpectomy he would stop off in San Marco and make a proper papist confession. He would whisper to the priest behind the curtain, Father, I have sinned, and the priest would tell him to go in peace and say a hundred Hail Marys. Or should he confess to a mortal sin? Father, I have committed a mortal sin. Henchard’s wife was always talking about mortal sin. Adultery, she said, was a mortal sin.

  It didn’t matter, one way or the other. He would make his confession to that famous priest in San Marco, and then there would be no more painful visions.

  CHAPTER 13

  The official letter to Samuele Bell from Lucia Costanza arrived only three days after Sam’s visit to her office. On that day he had come away besotted, but of course there were overwhelming reasons why he could not pursue the matter, namely—