Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  “It’s unfortunate I had to rush off. I was hoping I might learn a few secrets about you.”

  “I’m sure you were, but after you left we made a pact that we would reminisce mainly with each other, especially since she’ll be meeting many of my friends. We agreed that I would say nothing to Tonio—nothing possibly embarrassing, that is—and she would do the same for me. All memories will be in a golden bath. You can see how well we keep to our pact tomorrow evening at dinner.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, caro, tomorrow. Is there a problem with that?”

  “I already have a dinner engagement for tomorrow, Barbara.”

  In the brief silence he knew that she knew.

  “With the Reeve woman. She sounds like someone out of Thomas Hardy. You surprise me, Urbino. You work faster than I thought. Unless it was her suggestion.”

  “No, mine.” Then, as if it would make a difference to be more specific, he added, “The Montin.”

  “The Montin! That’s where we’re going! Please don’t think we’ll squeeze your Miss Reeve in at our table. A forward girl like she seems to be is certain to dominate the entire conversation.”

  Before Urbino had time to respond, the Contessa had said good night and hung up.

  10

  “You are about forty-five minutes later than I thought you would be, Macintyre,” Gemelli said the next morning when Urbino called the Questura. “I was sure you would be the first call that came through today.”

  Urbino had rehearsed what he would say to Gemelli but now it all slipped away from him. If he was going to make any sense of things, he needed some specific information. Being only an alien resident of Italy and considered somewhat of a meddler made whatever information he could get from Gemelli a function of the man’s whim, craft, or weariness.

  “I’d like to know roughly when Gibbon was murdered,” Urbino said, deciding to be as direct as possible.

  “‘Roughly,’ you say. Privileged information nonetheless, as you well know.”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “Consider looking in today’s Il Gazzettino, Macintyre. We released the time Gibbon’s body was found. I’m sure you have a good idea when he was last seen at the Casa Crispina. Put the two together and you get the rough idea you’ve asked for.” Gemelli paused. Urbino could hear him exhaling smoke from a cigarette. “But that’s not all you want to know, is it, Macintyre? You have a few more questions. I don’t know why you like getting involved in these things. All this is a job, a profession, some say it is even a kind of art—but one thing it isn’t is a hobby.”

  “I didn’t go looking for this, Commissario.”

  “No, Mother Mariangela came looking for you with a string of rosary beads in one hand and her precious guests’ ledger in the other. I know. But I don’t see you moving in the other direction.”

  “Should I?”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  “From the point of view of danger?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that—but yes, that’s something always to be taken into consideration. I was thinking more of myself, though—or, to be more exact, more about the Questura and the success of this case. Having you involved, in whatever capacity, could throw everything out of balance.”

  “I’ve been of help before.”

  “It might have worked out differently. We might have lived to regret it—or maybe even worse.”

  “What harm could there be in telling me something more? If you’re afraid I might ‘throw everything out of balance,’ as you just said, wouldn’t I be more likely to do it because of what I didn’t know than what I did?”

  Gemelli laughed.

  “If I tell you anything more, Macintyre, don’t think it has anything to do with your powers of persuasion. I’ll satisfy your curiosity up to a certain point because otherwise I’ll probably get calls from both Mother Mariangela and the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini. And if those calls don’t get you an answer, we both know what will happen next. Corruption of a public official—or something close to it. One of you—most likely the Contessa with all her wonderful connections—would manage to get to Brilli”—Franco Brilli was the medical examiner—“and get information out of him. And just think how guilty that will make poor old Brilli feel after being so circumspect all these years and so close to retirement! So to avoid the waste of any more of my time, the corruption of a public official, and the disturbance of poor old Brilli, I’ll tell you that Gibbon died sometime between ten o’clock and eleven-thirty, when Ignazio Rigoletti discovered his body. He was stabbed once in the chest and seems to have died instantly. The attack and death occurred where the body was found—near the water steps in the Calle Santa Scolastica. We assume the perpetrator escaped on foot back along the Calle Santa Scolastica and then went either down to the Riva degli Schiavoni or up to the Campo Filippo e Giacomo. There’s also the possibility, of course, that the perpetrator used a boat of some kind—a motorboat, a sandolo, maybe even a gondola. We haven’t found anything yet that might have been the murder weapon.”

  Before Urbino could ask what kind of weapon they were looking for, Gemelli said he had to hang up. Another call was waiting.

  Urbino was left not only feeling pleased that he had got as much information as he had from Gemelli but also wondering why Gemelli had passed it on. Something else must be behind it other than the reasons he had given.

  11

  Urbino went out to the nearest news kiosk and got a copy of Il Gazzettino. He stopped in a café and ordered an espresso at the bar. Urbino hadn’t read yesterday’s paper so he didn’t know how much of today’s article about Gibbon’s murder was a repetition, if any. Gibbon’s murder might not have made the morning paper except for a brief piece.

  Urbino noticed that most of the other people in the café, including a man dressed as a matador, were engrossed in the account. After changing his order of a simple espresso to one “corrected” by a dollop of anisette, he read the article.

  ENGLISH PHOTOGRAPHER MURDERED

  NEAR BRIDGE OF SIGHS

  Signor Val Gibbon, 38, of London was found stabbed in the Calle Santa Scolastica on Wednesday evening. Ignazio Rigoletti, a resident of the area, discovered the body at approximately 11:30 P.M. when returning to his apartment in the Corte Santa Scolastica. Mr. Gibbon was pronounced dead on the scene at 11:57 by Dr. Franco Brilli, the medical examiner.

  Mr. Gibbon had been in the city for two weeks and was staying at the Casa Crispina of the Charity of Santa Crispina in the Cannaregio. He was in Venice to photograph Carnival for a forthcoming book.

  Commissario Gemelli of the Venice Questura did not wish to comment on the investigation except to say that the Questura is following various leads it expects will soon prove successful.

  Urbino sensed that although the story was on the first page of the Venice news, there was an attempt to deemphasize it. He had seen other examples of this in the city, several of them around Carnevale or another of the crowd and revenue-gathering festivals like the Regatta in September or the Feast of the Redeemer in July.

  More than the other festivals, however, Carnevale brought Venice considerable national and international publicity, precious during a time when the media often emphasized the ecological plight of the city. Opinions—pro and con—ran high about this holiday that had been revived in 1980. Urbino thought of Xenia Campi and how she had been handing out the flyers in the Piazza on the afternoon before Gibbon’s murder. Many Venetians felt the way she did, even if they might find her methods strange. Yet there was a sizable group of Venetians in the municipal government and the tourist business, not to mention people like Giovanni Firpo, the man who had mocked Xenia Campi in the Piazza, who were strongly opposed to anything and anyone that might undermine the success of Carnevale.

  Urbino read the article again. There was nothing in it he didn’t already know. He finished his coffee and headed for the Piazza San Marco. Wanting to think and not to be distracted, he chose his route carefull
y. He saw relatively few people and only one in costume, a young woman dressed as a butterfly hurrying off to join her friends.

  As he walked down the chill back alleys, he reviewed the little he knew but it yielded nothing more than questions. If it was true that anyone could be driven to murder, what might have driven the Cassandra-like Xenia Campi, obsessed with the fate of Venice and still not recovered, as no parent could ever be, from the death of her child? Was Dora telling the truth about her last encounter with Gibbon in the dining room of the Casa Crispina? She had insisted that her brother liked Gibbon, whereas Nicholas himself had made it more than clear that he hadn’t. Could Nicholas not be completely aware of how he had felt about the photographer? And what role might have been played by Mrs. Spaak or Lubonski, both of whom were supposed to have been restricted in their movements the night of the murder because of illness?

  Then there were the questions about Hazel Reeve, perhaps the most disturbing of all. Why had she waited for him outside the Casa Crispina last night? Why had she chosen him to be the recipient of her confidences? He was afraid of being misled by either his vanity or his suspicion.

  One of his weaknesses was being attracted to people in distress and encouraging their confidences. He considered it a weakness because it had led in the past to relationships doomed from the start. The burden of responsibility for the other’s problems had often proved too heavy and he himself had eventually started to suffer under their weight. He sometimes thought of it as a kind of emotional vampirism in which he willingly offered himself up to be fed upon, only to be weakened and resentful in the end. What amazed but never amused him was the way that he hardly ever had to seek these people out. They somehow managed to find him and, once found, he was often, at least for a time, lost.

  The most disastrous of these relationships had been his short marriage back in New Orleans to Evangeline Hennepin, the daughter of wealthy, manipulative parents. Who had ended up failing whom in the marriage was still difficult for Urbino to sort out but he took a lot of the blame himself. Even after all this time, however, he was still wary when he found himself attracted to someone in distress.

  Urbino put aside these troubling thoughts when he eventually was forced to join the stream of people moving toward the Piazza.

  As soon as he entered the crowded Piazza, he was surrounded by a group of gnaghe, young men in plain dresses and the black oval moretta masks customarily worn by women. It was a traditional costume that went back to the early days of Carnevale when it had created a lot of controversy because of its association with sodomy. These boys around Urbino mimicked the voices of women and made the catlike sounds that gave them their name. They plucked at his cape and made kissing noises before running off in a flock to another man.

  Urbino crossed over to Florian’s. On the steps going up to the arcade a young woman was painting the face of a teenage boy while a group watched and waited for their turn. Her own face was painted a bright red.

  “Your name is Macintyre, isn’t it?”

  Urbino looked up at a tall thin boy of sixteen or seventeen standing at the edge of the group. He was wearing a checkered Arab headdress. Next to him was a boy with his face painted as a clown. They wore jeans, sneakers, and short woolen jackets.

  “My name’s Leo, this is Fabio. We’re staying at the convent, the one where the murdered Englishman was staying.”

  Leo spoke with a rough Neapolitan accent.

  “You want to talk to us,” Fabio said in smoother Italian.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions. It wouldn’t take long. I thought there were three of you.”

  “There are. Giuseppe!” Leo shouted and whistled over to a chubby boy leaning against a column. Giuseppe came over with a scowl on his round face. He wore a cowboy hat and a holster with a beat-up flask in it. “The girl painting faces told us who you were.”

  Urbino looked at her again. He didn’t recognize her although he might have if she hadn’t been wearing makeup and had shown him her face more fully.

  “We can’t talk here, can we?” said Leo, who seemed to be the leader of the group. “Why don’t we go inside?” He nodded toward Florian’s. “You buy us some coffee and sandwiches and we’ll tell you what we know. Fair exchange? The only way we’re going to get into a place like that is with someone like you. How about it?”

  “Fine,” Urbino said.

  Florian’s was filled with merrymakers but they found a table in the back away from the windows. The room was thick with smoke. The boys stared at the furnishings—at the marble tables and velvet banquettes, the little round mahogany serving tables, the putti lamps, the mirrors, the frescoes under glass, the ornate ceiling. After joking over the menu cards, they ordered their coffees and the small crustless sandwiches called tramezzini but surprised Urbino by eating and drinking carefully and slowly. He smiled to himself. What had he expected? A ravenous pack of dogs?

  “Nice place,” Leo said, “nothing like old Crispina!”

  “Why are you boys staying there?”

  “Our folks thought we’d be safer there than a youth hostel. Can you believe it? Look what happened to the photographer!”

  Leo and Fabio laughed but Giuseppe kept a grim face, looking at Urbino sullenly.

  “Were you boys at the Casa Crispina the night of the murder?”

  “Just for dinner. We try to stay there as little as possible,” Fabio said. “Just to eat and sleep. Our folks already paid for the rooms and the meals. Otherwise we’d use the money in a better way.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual that night—or any other night? Something that you think might be important now that you know that the English photographer was murdered?”

  “We keep to ourselves,” Fabio said. “The other guests are old and weird. The photographer—he wasn’t a bad sort. Took our picture here in the Piazza. Said he would mail us a copy. Giuseppe gave him his address. Giuseppe is Leo’s cousin. We all come from Naples.”

  “Most of the people are strange there, starting with the nuns!” Leo said. “They give me the creeps. I never saw so many old women in one place at one time. I bet one of them killed him. Probably found out he was taking dirty pictures or something.”

  “The crazy woman,” Giuseppe said in a low voice. “She’s the one.”

  “Xenia Campi?” Urbino asked. “The woman who makes predictions?”

  “That’s the one,” Leo said. “Beppe hates her. She’s always coming after him. She’s always coming after all of us but she has it in for Beppe. I think she likes him!”

  Leo and Fabio laughed.

  “Why do you say she might like him?”

  Leo looked over at Giuseppe and was given a warning glance.

  “Oh, I don’t know. She says he’s such a nice boy, that he’s going in the wrong direction. I think she’s even trying to fix him up with a girl! She doesn’t seem to care about us so much. All she does is curse at us.”

  “She says I remind her of a dead boy,” Giuseppe said, looking down into his coffee cup.

  “I thought you didn’t want anyone to know!” Leo shouted.

  Giuseppe shrugged.

  “Maybe he should know. Maybe he doesn’t know how crazy she is, always talking about nice-looking dead boys. Maybe she thought the photographer was nice and killed him, too. She said I was nice but that she saw something bad around me, something around my head that meant death if I wasn’t good.”

  “Don’t be afraid of her if she says you’re nice,” Leo said. “Be afraid if a man says it!” He looked at Fabio who burst out laughing again. “We know what kind of place the photographer was found in. It’s where the finocchi go.”

  “Did the photographer ever bother you in that way?”

  “What do you think we are?” Fabio said angrily, no longer amused. “Nobody ever bothers us anywhere—not at old Crispina’s or anywhere else. We keep to ourselves.”

  “That’s right,” Leo said. “Whatever might have been going on at old Crispina’s had not
hing to do with us. Thanks for the coffee and sandwiches. Let’s go, ragazzi.”

  Grabbing some of the little sandwiches, the three boys hurried out into the Piazza.

  Urbino stayed a while longer, finishing his caffelatte and trying to give his attention to the other news in Il Gazzettino, but when he found himself rereading a piece on a ten-car pileup in the fog between Venice and Florence, he put the paper aside and asked for his check.

  He left Florian’s and walked around the arcade past the Campanile to the Molo where there were fewer people. Between the two columns a white-faced mime dressed in a black skullcap and a baggy white suit with large, white buttons was dramatizing the defeat of all his amorous hopes in front of a small but enthusiastic audience. Closer to the water three acrobats dressed as jesters in particolored suits were doing handstands and tumbles. One of them threw a dagger in the air as he cavorted beneath it. Another caught it by the handle and, with exaggerated stealth, stalked and stabbed their oblivious companion, whose death throes were marvelous feats of balance and contortion

  The sky above the lagoon was a pale blue and the air, blown south from the Dolomites, was clear and crisp. The last time it had rained was the day before Val Gibbon had been murdered. Beyond the moored gondolas and motorboats and aloof from all the revelry floated the monastery island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Vaporetti, motorcraft, and barges negotiated the broad stretch of lagoon, slipped in and out of the Grand Canal, and made their way through the Giudecca Canal. A car ferry overtook a freighter slowly moving toward its berth at the Maritime Station.

  Urbino went past the cream-colored filigree pillars of the Ducal Palace and up the steps of the bridge. Gondolas filled with merrymakers were floating up and down the canal. One of them had stopped so that the gondolier could take a picture of a young couple with the Bridge of Sighs in the background. The couple smiled, then kissed for the camera.