Death in the Floating City

by Tasha Alexander

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “As you may remember, I was working at the table in such a position that my back was to the door. I became aware of a figure behind me. It must have been the signore or the signora. Before I could turn around to look, whoever it was whacked me on the head with something. This, I think.” He motioned to the fire poker tossed on the floor across the room. “Everything went black and I don’t recall anything else.”

  “Please, sir, think very hard,” I said. “Can you recall any detail about the figure?”

  He did not answer at first, taking seriously my admonition that he ponder the question. “I cannot be certain, but I think he was dressed in black. I can see an image of black fabric, flowing black fabric, but I do not know if it is real. My impression was that he was very tall.”

  The plague doctor in his long black cloak.

  Had it been Paolo all along?

  “How often did the conte leave your company when you were in Padua?” I asked.

  “We were together infrequently, signora,” Brother Giovanni said. “He thought that the safest approach. He left me to my work while he did whatever it was that he did.”

  “Have you any idea what he was doing?”

  “He only said he was following every avenue to seek information about whatever his father claimed to have learned.”

  “The partial lines you had uncovered. Could they have hurt Paolo?” I asked.

  “No, signora. I saw the name Besina Barozzi and a mention of beauty but could not yet read anything else.”

  I heard the door in the next room open and then Colin’s voice.

  “What the devil?”

  “A mess, isn’t it?” I asked, joining him. Our papers and books had been strewn all over the floor. Cushions had been tossed from the settee and chairs. Every drawer in the desk was open, and our clothes had been torn from their hangers in the wardrobe. I quickly briefed him on what had transpired.

  Colin nodded and took me by the hand. After giving firm instructions to the guard outside the door to let no one in or out, he took me downstairs. Within moments, we were back at Ca’ Barozzi.

  “My theory was completely wrong,” I said, as we alighted from the gondola. “Thank heavens I hadn’t yet acted upon it.”

  No servant greeted us at the Barozzis’ water entrance. We mounted the stairs and climbed to the portego. There was no one there. Colin started in one direction, keeping his footsteps quiet, ready to search the house. Automatically, I did the same but took the opposite way.

  “No,’ he said, shaking his head. “Too dangerous. Stay with me.”

  We moved through every room on the first floor and saw no one. By the time we’d finished with the second and third, we’d stopped worrying about being quiet. By the time we were confident there was not a single living soul in the unlocked house save a motley handful of servants who seemed utterly unconcerned about their duties, we sank onto the marble steps near the canal, frustrated.

  “They could have gone anywhere,” Colin said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would Paolo have stopped Brother Giovanni’s work? If the hidden text contains Nicolò Vendelino’s codicil, he stands to make enormous gains.”

  “Unless that’s not what the text will reveal.”

  “If he knew that, he would have never let the monk start in the first place.”

  “Perhaps Emma learned something,” Colin said. “Their argument could have been a ruse.”

  “Or perhaps we’re on the wrong track entirely,” I said, “and playing right into the hands of a murderous wretch. We need to find Caterina Brexiano.”

  * * *

  Caterina was not at the bordello. One of her colleagues told us she’d gone to mass. Would we care to leave a message? I didn’t believe the woman. I shoved past her, dragging Colin by the hand to the narrow back staircase that led to Caterina’s room. She didn’t answer when we knocked, and her door was locked. Colin pulled a slim lock pick from the inside pocket of his jacket and within seconds had it open.

  The room was empty. We set to searching it at once, knowing our time was limited. Someone would be up to stop us soon, of that we had no doubt. Caterina’s possessions painted a clear picture of her. Her gowns were beautiful and fashionable, and all had been purchased before her fall from grace. She had an ivory rosary and a pair of garnet earrings set in heavy gold in a style popular probably when her mother was young. She must have wanted to save them when she sold the rest of her jewelry. In her dresser drawers there were only two things of interest: a copy of the memoir given to guests at Hotel Vitturi and a deck of tarot cards.

  “I don’t really believe in her claim of being a medium,” I said, “but let’s suppose it’s true. What if, through her communication with spirits, she determined that Paolo was not, in fact, to inherit anything. That he had no claim on the Vendelino fortune. He wouldn’t like to hear that, would he?”

  “No more than his father liked what Caterina had told him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which means?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It doesn’t impact the motive she already had to kill Barozzi, but it could have made her wish Paolo would disappear.”

  “I’m more inclined to say it must be Paolo who did it,” Colin said, his usually smooth brow marred by deep creases. “I don’t want to believe it any more than you, Emily, but it’s time we faced facts. He fled after the murder. He’s selling off family possessions. He’s stolen some of those possessions. Now he’s got Emma. The only question is whether she’s in on it or his prisoner.”

  “He could have Caterina as well.”

  “True,” he said, “and I do allow for the possibility that it’s Caterina who has both of them.”

  “So how do we find them?” I asked. “They could be anywhere.”

  “I’ve got the police stopping trains and searching them. Their descriptions will be circulated throughout the country.”

  “What about ships?” I asked. “That’s the easiest way to leave Venice.”

  “It is. I’ve asked that a general alert be issued to vessels in the area. We can hope the captains will take the threat seriously and look closely at all their passengers. Extra police will be sent to the docks, so if they’ve not boarded yet, they should be stopped.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “We wait.”

  * * *

  I was not convinced. Either that we should wait or that Paolo was guilty. Colin was adamant, however, that it was the most reasonable conclusion before us. They had fled, after all. I did not accept this conclusion and was returning to my earlier theory. I was convinced there was something to it. We went back to the hotel. I was sullen. Colin was resigned.

  Brother Giovanni shouted a greeting as soon as we’d opened the door to the suite and called for us to come at once. The pages weren’t all gone. His attacker had taken all of the still-bound books, and most of the sheets he’d unbound, but when he’d started to clean up the mess, he found a stack of them still remaining, including the first page on which he’d begun to work. He’d set it on top of a dressing table to let it dry a bit before he continued.

  “Don’t touch it, as the page is still quite damp,” he said. “At least it’s a start.”

  “An excellent start,” I said, bending close to the table so I could read.

  Besina Barozzi always knew she was not among the fortunate—or unfortunate, depending on one’s perspective—who could rely on beauty.

  A tear escaped my pooling eyes. I brushed it away before it could fall on the vellum and cause harm.

  “I’ve a sense now of what combination of milk and oat works best,” Brother Giovanni said. “The work will begin to go more quickly.”

  “That’s excellent,” I said. “Let’s hope that we’ll be able to recover the rest of the missing pages.”

  “It’s possible we won’t even need them,” he said. “The document you seek could be considerabl
y shorter than The Divine Comedy.”

  “We can only hope.” I left him to it, not wanting to cause any distraction, and went into the sitting room, where my husband had already started to make his way through the mess, starting at the desk. “There’s something not right in all this. I’m certain of it.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.” He looked me squarely in the eyes and listened to everything I had to say. When I had finished he stood up and paced for a few minutes before speaking. “I agree there is nothing tidy about this case. We need more evidence. Let’s finish going through our rooms, just in case this man who appears to come and go unseen has, in his haste, left any clues to his identity. Then we can think further about what to do next.”

  I focused my attention on our bedroom, but there was very little to find there. The linens had been stripped from the bed, but there was nothing under it. The drawers were pulled out of the two bedside tables and from the small writing desk that sat facing the window. Nothing had been in any of these drawers save hotel stationery, which was now scattered through the room.

  I moved into my dressing room. This was a mess and would require my poor maid to spend a great deal of time pressing gowns that had been left in a tall heap on the bottom of the wardrobe. I started to pick them up, one at a time, shaking each out before draping it over the back of a chair. As I worked my way through them, something struck me as not being right. The stack of gowns had been too high. I hadn’t packed that many dresses.

  I lifted the rest of them out with no regard to care, dropping them on the floor behind me. When the last was gone, revealing the wide cedar bottom of the armoire, I gasped.

  There lay Emma, unconscious, a gag in her mouth, her arms tied behind her back, her feet bound.

  Un Libro d’Amore

  xxii

  When her brother came to see her, Besina met him in a small room that had been designed for hosting visitors to the convent. She did not want him to see her own bare cell. She did not want to take him to the garden.

  “Why have you come, Lorenzo?” she asked.

  Besina had never been beautiful, but Lorenzo was shocked to see her now. Her face was drawn and thin, with harsh lines already etched on her brow. She looked far older than her years. He wondered if her hair was already streaked with silver. He could not see it beneath her veil.

  “To beg your forgiveness.” Lorenzo looked at the hard stone floor. “I should not have abandoned you to this.”

  “My daily life here is far more pleasant than it was in Uberto’s house. Except for Tomaso.”

  “It is not right what has been done,” he said. “I only wish—”

  “You wish that I had never loved Nicolò Vendelino,” she said. “You would rather that I had known no happiness than to have chosen so inappropriate a source for it.”

  “He wasn’t your only happiness. You have a child.”

  “His child, Lorenzo. Uberto was correct in his deductions. No child of that man’s could survive infancy. There is something evil in him that he passes to them. It keeps them from living.”

  Lorenzo winced. He had not really believed Rosso’s accusations. He had not believed his sister would betray the man to whom she was bound by God. But he also remembered the condition she’d been in when she arrived at Ca’ Barozzi in Rosso’s boat. Her broken arm. Her bloody jaw. He cursed himself for judging her actions.

  “My greatest sin was to love a man my family required me to hate because of some feud about which no one can recall the details. So instead of living with him and raising children, I was beaten, humiliated, and sent here,” Besina said. “Now I no longer care about anything.”

  “That is a lie,” Lorenzo said. “You still love him, and you love Tomaso.”

  “I cannot cry about them any longer. I have no more tears.”

  “I will help you, Besina. Somehow, I will help you.”

  Lorenzo was true to his word. He came back the next week, bringing with him a copy of The Divine Comedy. Besina accepted it with quiet thanks and a small smile.

  “Look inside,” Lorenzo said.

  Besina opened the book. It had been printed in Venice that year, and while not so beautiful as an illuminated manuscript, the type was clear and bright.

  “Further inside,” her brother urged.

  She flipped through the pages until she found it. A letter. Folded and sealed and far thicker than anything she or Nicolò could ever have hidden in Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Besina took it in her hands but did not open it. She would read it, back in her room, losing herself in the comfort of her lover’s words.

  “You will not be alone anymore,” Lorenzo said.

  23

  Emma did not move when I spoke to her, or when I touched her face or gently shook her shoulders. I called for Colin, who came to my side in a flash. He lifted Emma’s limp body from the wardrobe and carried her to the bed while I asked the guard outside our door to summon the doctor as quickly as possible. Brother Giovanni came into the room and, seeing the scene before him, fell to his knees and started to pray, quietly, in Latin.

  Colin removed first the gag, then the ropes that bound Emma. He leaned close to her face. “She is breathing. Only just. Emily, would you…” His voice trailed off. I stepped forward and started to loosen her corset. She was wearing only underclothes, not her dress.

  “Smelling salts,” I said, trying to keep my hands steady. “I should carry them. Why don’t I carry them? Just because I refuse to faint doesn’t mean those around me will adopt a similar policy. Emma? Can you hear me?”

  She did not respond.

  “Colin, look around for clothing,” I said. “Whoever did this might have left hers somewhere. She’s taken Emma’s.”

  A quick search yielded nothing. The doctor arrived and in a few minutes had revived Emma, who cringed and started to sit up the instant he wafted his smelling salts under her nose.

  “I’m never traveling without them again,” I said. I sat next to her on the edge of the bed and took her hand. “Who did this to you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, rubbing the back of her head. The doctor began to examine her scalp for abrasions.

  “She’ll make a full recovery,” he said, holding her eyes open wide and looking closely at them. “I strongly suggest she focus on less strenuous sorts of activity for the near future. She has a slight concussion and will suffer from headaches for a week or so, but there will be no lasting effects.”

  “Where is Paolo?” she asked, her voice rough.

  “We don’t know,” Colin said, stepping forward. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “We were arguing about … well, it doesn’t matter what about, does it? Not anymore.” She sniffed. “The door to the bedroom flung open and a hideous figure stood there, wearing one of those awful plague doctor carnival masks. She pulled a gun from the folds of her cloak and pointed it at me.”

  “It was a woman?” Colin asked. I had surmised as much the instant I saw Emma’s state of dress.

  “I didn’t think so at first,” she said. “The figure was so tall. Far taller than Paolo, and he towers above nearly everyone. Then she spoke, and there was no question as to her gender.”

  “Did you recognize her voice?” I asked.

  “No.” Emma shook her head, but the motion must have hurt. She cringed and lay back down on the pillows behind her. “She said she would kill me if we did not do what she told us to.”

  Brother Giovanni had finished his prayers and risen from his knees. Colin turned to him. “You heard none of this?”

  The monk lowered his eyes. “I am ashamed to say that I didn’t. I had made a point of ignoring their argument. I didn’t notice when the tenor changed.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Emma said. “Things were much more calm after she appeared. We weren’t arguing anymore.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “She wanted the books. Paolo said she could have them, but it was as if she didn’t believe him. Th
at’s when she came at me with the gun—but she didn’t shoot. She hit me on the head with it. That’s all I remember.”

  “She must have then come to you,” Colin said to Brother Giovanni, who nodded.

  “Then, keeping Paolo at gunpoint, somehow managed to get into Emma’s dress and hat,” I said. “Between her gun and the knowledge that she’d tied up his wife, Paolo would have been easily convinced to assist her and then to escort her from the room as if she were his wife. If she kept her face down, the guard wouldn’t have noticed the switch.”

  “How did she get in?” Brother Paolo asked.

  “Through the window,” Colin said. “Much in the same way she did the night she killed the conte.”

  This did not sit right with me. “That would be impossible without someone seeing her. How would she have done it?”

  Colin pushed farther the already open window. “All she would have need to do was affix a rope to the railing. It would be simple to get to the balcony and into the room.”

  “I still insist that someone would have seen her,” I said.

  “Someone probably did,” Emma said, “but this is Venice. If she were in a carnival costume and made a show out of the whole enterprise, everyone would have thought it was a good laugh.”

  “So blatant as to not be suspicious,” Colin said, frowning.

  “Whatever the details, we need to find Paolo,” I said. “As quickly as possible.”

  We did not wait for the police to reach the hotel. The staff and our guard would fill them in and give them whatever access they needed to protect Emma and Brother Giovanni. The trouble was that Colin and I did not agree on how to proceed. We each wanted to pursue a different avenue, and as we knew our suspect was armed, he would not allow me to set off on my own.

  Which was irritating, but understandable.

  “Do you think she will harm Paolo?” I asked.

  “Quite possibly. He knows who she is, so he’s a threat. She already faces one murder charge. Why not risk a second when it could mean you get away?”