Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  He paused and licked his lower lip again. Urbino gave him another ten thousand lire.

  “He was like you,” the boy said with an air of triumph.

  “Like me? What do you mean?”

  “He was an American. He spoke Italian with an American accent. His Italian wasn’t good, not like yours, but he was an American just like you.”

  He went back up the calle to the restaurant.

  10

  A few minutes later, in front of Harry’s Bar, Urbino was confronted with the sight of Xenia Campi thrusting flyers into the hands of the people pouring off the vaporetti.

  “Turn around, go back to where you came from!” she shouted in Italian. “Venice isn’t your playground. I’m speaking to you Italians as well as to you foreigners. Venice won’t take it anymore. Venice can’t take it anymore. You’re all murderers! Cities and civilizations can die just like people.”

  She pushed a flyer at Urbino before she recognized him.

  “Oh, it’s you, Signor Macintyre. Are you going or coming?”

  “Going.”

  “Good for you! Go back to the Palazzo Uccello and stay there until Wednesday!” She gave him a sharp look, pausing in her distribution of the flyers. “You were at the scene of the crime.”

  Xenia Campi said it without qualification or tentativeness. She looked away from him to thrust flyers into the hands of a group of people who didn’t even glance at them but crumpled them up and dropped them to the pavement. Did Xenia Campi realize that she was contributing to the very problem she was decrying?

  “How is Ignazio? I know you saw him! To think that he was the one who found the photographer’s body! Now he has something else to talk about besides his old rowing days!”

  Urbino detected a slight wistfulness underneath her criticism of her husband. He thought of the picture of the three of them—her, Ignazio, and their dead son, Marco.

  “You know the boy Giuseppe staying at the Casa Crispina?”

  A wary but somewhat sad look came into her eyes. She nodded.

  “From Naples.”

  “Did you ever see him or the two other boys talking with Gibbon?”

  “He’s a good boy! He’s being led astray. If he was talking with the photographer it was only hello and good-bye. He keeps to himself. The other two are looking for trouble. I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought the photographer had a lot of money and followed him to the Calle Santa Scolastica that night. The Neapolitans always carry knives! But not Giuseppe. He’s different.”

  “There’s a young woman who paints faces in the Piazza. Do you know her?”

  “There are a lot of girls who do that.”

  “When I saw her she had her face painted red. She has short dark hair.”

  Xenia Campi narrowed her eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “Someone said that she had been seen with Gibbon.”

  No one had told him this, of course, but he wanted more information about the girl from Xenia Campi and he wanted to get it without mentioning Giuseppe again.

  “That’s impossible!” she said. “I know who you mean. She’s a good girl. She would never have had anything to do with a man like that.”

  “Are you sure she isn’t someone you might have seen with Gibbon yourself in the Piazza? You told me that he was always being friendly to young women.”

  “I meant only Signorina Spaak!”

  She thrust a flyer at a couple who had just left a motorboat.

  “Do you think that Porfirio’s death has something to do with Gibbon’s murder?” Urbino asked, taking a different tack.

  When she answered, she did it through the mask of Xenia Campi, clairvoyante and seer.

  “I saw flames around Gibbon, an aura that promised no good. And around Porfirio Buffone the flames were even brighter, like the flames of the inferno! He was fated for a fall. He was trying to climb too high. I told him in the Piazza but he just laughed like the fool he was! A fall, I told him! The wheel would turn as it does for us all!”

  Was it Urbino’s imagination or was there something peeping out from behind the crazed glitter of Xenia Campi’s eyes? He had often wondered how intentionally histrionic and controlled the woman was when she let herself go this way. He had never considered it a reason to take her less seriously, however. In fact, it seemed all the more reason to pay close attention, for it suggested a cool, calm, almost chilling lucidity behind what might be the camouflage of her rantings and ravings.

  She had just given him, without being asked, a good explanation for what Firpo had overheard in the Piazza. Urbino was inclined to believe her, but he couldn’t be 100 percent sure.

  She was now vilifying photographers.

  “They’re all ghouls,” she said, “ghouls feasting on other people’s flesh and blood!”

  Handing Urbino a flyer, Xenia Campi turned away to address a newly disembarked group. As Urbino walked out to the landing platform to wait for the boat, he looked at the flyer. It was the same one Xenia Campi had been handing out in the Piazza the afternoon of Gibbon’s murder. He read the first few lines and then threw it in the overflowing metal basket on the wake-washed, rocking pontile.

  11

  The Contessa had an enigmatic smile when Urbino went into the salotto. If it didn’t say as much—or was it as little?—as the smile da Vinci had painted on the lips of his Gioconda, it was nonetheless just as intriguing. The almost imperceptible curve on one side seemed to tease him with a knowledge that was hers alone.

  The Contessa, however, wasn’t frozen in time in a marble chair among rocks and a winding river but was a woman of flesh and blood whose main reason for having a secret was being able to impart it to the privileged in her own good time. Urbino knew he would just have to wait and let his friend indulge the pleasure of keeping her secret until she was ready to give herself the equally, if not even more, intense pleasure of revealing it.

  “Caro, you came, and it’s not even five yet,” she said with a languid glance at the ormulu clock on the mantel. She leaned back against the Tunisian cushions she had brought back from her autumn cruise of the Mediterranean with Oriana and Filippo Borelli.

  “I doubt if you want tea any more this afternoon than you usually do.” She looked down at the table in front of the sofa. Usually during their tête-à-têtes there was only the one china cup for herself. Today there was her cup—filled with tea—and an empty, waiting one. “Fix yourself an aperitivo. I think Mauro put in a new bottle of Campari yesterday.”

  Urbino went over to the bar and fixed himself not a Campari soda but a Cynar. It was his way of letting the Contessa know that she wasn’t as much in control as she liked to think she was. She wrinkled her nose when she saw the brown liquid in his glass.

  “I don’t know how you can drink something made out of artichokes! Alvise used to say it was swill fit only for pigs.”

  For answer he sipped the Cynar and sat in his accustomed Louis Quinze chair with its view not only of the Contessa but also of the Veronese behind her, the one that had disturbed her friend Berenice Pillow so much.

  “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “Like what, Barbara?”

  “Such coyness, caro, would be no crime, if we had but world enough and time,” she said, twisting the poet’s words. “But instead we have poor Porfirio dead.” This was said as if the departed photographer were lying in state right there in the salotto.

  “I wasn’t aware you had such feelings for Porfirio Buffone,” he said disingenuously.

  “Urbino! How can you! I didn’t care for the man but I certainly didn’t wish him dead.”

  “I’ve finally succeeded in provoking a straightforward response!”

  “I’m the most straightforward person I know,” she said with a devious inflection, the smile back in place. “You’re playing with me, caro,” she informed him in a bold attempt at projection. “Don’t I look famished for information? You promised you would tell me everything.”

  He began
with his and Tonio’s visit to the Questura. This time he held back nothing that Hazel had confided in him last night about her relationship with Vico and Gibbon and then went on to tell the Contessa about Lubonski, Firpo, Mrs. Spaak, Rigoletti, the two young men from the restaurant, and Xenia Campi. Throughout his long explanation the Contessa looked less like a woman whose appetite was being appeased than someone thinking about a meal she was planning.

  But when he finished, her comments indicated that she had been paying attention after all. Understandably, it was Lubonski’s admission that she first focused on.

  “I feel responsible! I got him the commission. To think that he took those things from Sir Rupert’s. I’ve misplaced my trust abominably!”

  “Josef isn’t a bad person, Barbara. He was concerned that you not think he was.”

  “Does that make him better? There was enough talk when we didn’t get an Italian for the restoration work, and now with a Venetian dead, probably because of Lubonski, it’s going to be that much worse.” She settled back and sighed. “Oh, well, I’ll go to see him tomorrow. Would you come? You don’t think the police will arrest him and take him out of the hospital, do you?”

  “He isn’t well enough yet to be moved even to another medical facility. Gemelli will probably post a policeman outside his room.”

  “His poor mother. They’re so devoted to each other. You don’t think she’ll have to give back the money, do you? That would be terrible!”

  The Contessa was probably considering how she might be of help to Mrs. Lubonski back in Cracow.

  “It’s logical, isn’t it,” she said after a few moments, “that if Gibbon was trying to blackmail Josef, he was doing the same to others? Maybe he was doing it through photographs, even though you say there isn’t anything incriminating in the ones you’ve seen.”

  “But I could easily have been missing something. The only thing that struck me was how few photographs of Carnevale there actually were. I wonder if there are any other rolls of film around somewhere. Gemelli is checking some of the shops but a professional photographer like Gibbon wouldn’t be likely to send most of his film out to be developed. He’d do it himself when he got back—unless he needed the photographs right away.”

  “What do you think of Gemelli’s idea that Gibbon was murdered by a frequenter of the Calle Santa Scolastica?”

  “In a fit of passion someone might have done it—or after the passion.”

  “Does that mean he was that way himself?”

  “Who knows?” Gemelli’s comment on the mystery of sexuality came into Urbino’s mind. “I didn’t care for him although I didn’t know him that well. If I had, I might have a different opinion of him, as you pointed out. Maybe he had to pretend to be something he wasn’t and that was what made him as irritating as he could be.”

  “But he was engaged. He flirted with women. Women were attracted to him.”

  She delivered these declarations as if they were indisputable proof of the dead man’s heterosexuality.

  “It’s also possible,” Urbino said, “that he just happened to be in the Calle Santa Scolastica without knowing what it was like, was approached, and was a bit too contemptuous in his refusal.”

  “Then there’s Xenia Campi and Rigoletti. I understand now why you wanted to know more about her, but she couldn’t have had anything to do with Porfirio’s death, could she?”

  Urbino told her what he had been considering earlier—that Josef’s booby trap might have provided someone with a convenient cover-up for murder.

  “Rigoletti and Xenia Campi—together or separately—might have killed Porfirio out of revenge for what he did in turning them out of their apartment right after their son’s death. Plenty of murderers have claimed to ‘discover’ the body as Rigoletti did. And even though I feel Xenia Campi was telling me the truth this afternoon about what Firpo overheard, I still have my doubts about her. Telling the truth about that and not lying about other things aren’t the same thing at all. Of course, if we knew why Porfirio was in San Gabriele to begin with, we would have a better chance of figuring out if his death and Gibbon’s are related in some way other than through Josef. Perhaps Hazel Reeve knows why Porfirio was in the church.”

  “Hazel Reeve?”

  Urbino couldn’t tell if it was satisfaction or surprise that he detected in her tone.

  “She’s a more logical connection between Gibbon and Porfirio than either Xenia Campi or Rigoletti.”

  Did the Contessa realize how difficult it was for him to admit this?

  “Do you have any theories?” the Contessa asked.

  Urbino shook his head.

  “I don’t believe you. You always have theories, and you almost always hug them too close for too long. Well, I can have theories of my own! I can have secrets of my own!”

  After this little outburst, the enigmatic smile was back in place.

  “When I spoke with you from the Casa Crispina, you said that you had a surprise for me.”

  “Did I say that? Maybe I was mistaken—or maybe you don’t deserve to have the pleasure of a surprise.”

  “Surprises aren’t always pleasurable, Barbara.”

  “Aren’t you the sly one! You might be right in this case. But pleased or not, don’t disappoint me by not being suitably amazed.”

  “So what is it?”

  She looked at the mantel clock again.

  “It shouldn’t be long. Keep your mind on other things,” she said, as if he didn’t have more than enough to occupy him. “It might be a good idea to talk about Hazel Reeve even though you don’t seem to want to. Actually, that’s the very reason why you should.” She hesitated as if considering what she should say next. “So what do you think of her?”

  The question was, he felt, intentionally ambiguous and meant to lead him astray. The Contessa took a sip of her tea and looked at him from across her cup and saucer, her eyes shining with what he found to be an inappropriate merriment.

  He got up and poured himself another portion of Cynar. He didn’t return to his seat but walked to the corner table with its collection of Byzantine and Russian icons and reliquaries of Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Nicholas of Bari. He picked up the wooden cross with a bone shard of Saint Nicholas encased under a delicate bubble of glass.

  “It was a lot easier knowing what you believed a thousand years ago,” he said. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would have been like to have lived back then? Things were much simpler.”

  “And also a lot more unbecoming, especially for us women. Are you going philosophical on me or just being evasive? If you don’t want to answer my question about Miss Hazel Reeve, just say so.”

  When Urbino put the reliquary down and turned to face her, her enigmatic smile was more irksome than it had been before.

  “Evasive, Barbara? Is it evasive not to answer a question when you’re not sure of the answer? And, I might also add, when you know what answer is expected?”

  “And what kind of answer is that, caro?”

  “That Hazel Reeve is Lucrezia Borgia!”

  He tried to carry it off as a joke but it somehow rang hollow. The Contessa was amused.

  “You’re such a boy, Urbino—such an innocent, sweet little mischievous boy!”

  What she said was unexpected enough but her clear, honest laughter made it even more so. Before she could add anything to it, there was a knock on the door. Lucia, the Contessa’s maid, entered tentatively. She went over to the sofa and handed the Contessa a folded slip of paper. The Contessa thanked her and opened it.

  She frowned, folded it again, and slipped it into her pocket.

  “Bad news, Barbara?”

  “Not bad news, but disappointing.” The frown gradually disappeared. “Disappointing, I should add, mainly for you. I can deal with it.”

  “Does this have something to do with your secret?”

  “It has everything to do with my secret, caro, but if I tell you anything more than that it won’t be a se
cret any longer, will it? Stay and have dinner. I promise that your curiosity—I can see it shining in your eyes!—will be sated before the end of the evening.”

  “I’m sorry, Barbara, but I’m meeting Nicholas Spaak at Harry’s at seven. I told you about my conversation with his mother. She thought it would be a good idea for us to meet at the Palazzo Uccello but I suggested Harry’s instead. Neutral ground, so to speak.”

  “To discourage any amorous notions in Mr. Spaak? You don’t think his sweet mother could have had such things in mind when she suggested the privacy of your quarters, do you? You’re a good catch, you know! Why Harry’s, though? You know what it’s like at this time of the year! But since you’re going there, you must promise me two things.”

  “What?”

  “That you will absolutely not order a Bellini and that you will do everything you can to be back here by nine—even if Mr. Spaak is pouring out his heart to you!”

  12

  An hour later at Harry’s, Urbino kept his first promise to the Contessa by ordering a glass of wine. And it seemed he would easily be able to keep his second one as well for Nicholas Spaak didn’t seem inclined to speak much at all, let alone pour out his heart to him.

  Harry’s was impossibly crowded with masqueraders, people in formal dress, and bewildered tourists in anoraks and jeans relegated to remote tables in the smoke-filled downstairs room. Urbino and Spaak were standing at the bar by the entrance. Every seat at the bar and at the tables was taken. Perhaps he should have followed Stella Maris Spaak’s suggestion and asked Spaak to meet him at the Palazzo Uccello. Harry’s wasn’t particularly conducive to the kind of conversation he hoped they would have.