Black Bridge

by Edward Sklepowich

  The Barone Casarotto-Re is also the author of I See the Sun, a play based on the love affair between D’Annunzio and the actress Eleonora Duse. The Barone will sign copies of his plays at the Libreria Sangiorgio at four o’clock on 23 October.

  Urbino had just finished the piece when someone came up behind his stool. It was Oriana Borelli.

  “It is you, Urbino! Come over here. There’s someone who would like to meet you.”

  Oriana dragged him over to a table under the windows where three people were sitting. One of them was John Flint, Oriana’s latest distraction—or, as the Contessa saw it, the man she was in love with. He was a tall man in his mid-thirties with short blond hair, bright blue eyes, full lips, and an expression that didn’t vary much between sullenness and insolence. He was perhaps the epitome of one type of masculine beauty and always seemed to be aware of it. Across from him were a dark woman and a thin young man with untidy hair. Urbino pulled over another chair and sat at the end of the table.

  “Well, Urbino, I hope you’ll give this young couple a few minutes of your time even if you haven’t condescended to give any to poor John yet! This is Marie Quimper and Hugh Moss. John and I met them at the Palazzo Grassi exhibit. They’ve been eager to meet you.”

  Moss seemed far from eager about anything except the martini that he lifted to his lips. But then Urbino noticed his eyes. They were particularly sharp and assessing.

  “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Monsieur Macintyre,” the small, dark-haired woman said timidly. She was what the French call a belle-laide, an ugly but somehow also attractive woman. Moss said nothing, but only nodded his head curtly.

  “I like your book on Proust very much.”

  A bit nervously, she reached into her large leather pocketbook and took out Urbino’s biography of Proust.

  “Would you mind signing it? ‘To Marie.’”

  When he opened the book to sign it, a small slip of white paper fluttered to the floor. It was a cash register receipt. Urbino picked it up. The book had been bought that day at the Libreria Sangiorgio behind San Marco, Urbino’s favorite bookstore in Venice, and where the Barone would be signing copies of his books. Hugh Moss glared at his companion, who had turned pale. Urbino put the receipt back in the book, signed it with his fountain pen, and handed it back to Quimper. Quimper, somewhat breathlessly and almost with an air of recitation, started to tell Urbino some of the things she liked about his book when Moss interrupted in a chilly, controlled voice: “Is your friend the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini here?”

  “You dedicated the book to her,” Marie Quimper said quickly, looking uneasily at Moss.

  “No, Hugh dear,” Oriana said, “Barbara isn’t lurking around here somewhere! I believe she’s in the company of a certain barone at the moment.” She glanced playfully at Urbino. “But you’ll get to meet her and her Barone, who’s giving the show at the Teatro del Ridotto. Don’t forget you’re both coming to the performance and the Contessa’s reception afterward—as my guests. You know, Urbino dear,” she said, turning her Laura Biagiotti sunglasses back in Urbino’s direction, “with Barbara so occupied these days you have even less excuse to avoid John. And to think you both come from the ‘heart of Dixie’! Isn’t that what you called it, John?”

  Flint was from Mississippi.

  “Oriana, you know how it is,” Flint said in a Southern drawl. “The last thing people abroad want to see is someone from back home.”

  “But Urbino isn’t abroad, my sweet little boy! He lives here. And so do you! But we’ll excuse him if he mends his ways. After all, the poor man has been ill enough to seek out the muds of Abano!”

  Hugh Moss gave a slight start.

  “Abano?” he repeated.

  “Yes! Mud therapy with all those Germans! But don’t try to use your indisposition as an excuse. You simply must take John under your wing. He has so many marvelous ideas.” Flint was a former Milan fashion model, now an art consultant seeking wealthy clients. “Barbara has been helping him, and I’m sure Bobo will, too.”

  Flint had enough good sense not to look too self-satisfied.

  “I hear that the Barone Casarotto-Re’s show is all about someone named D’Annunzio,” he said. “I’m sure you know a lot about him. Maybe you could tell us a few things so that we’ll be able to follow the play better.”

  “D’Annunzio, darling? I thought you knew all about him,” Oriana jumped in. “A writer, of course. Stories and poems about love and passion, written in a voluptuous style. If only you knew Italian well enough to appreciate it! Homely as sin, but women found him irresistible. He had affairs with a clutch of contessas, one of them went stark raving mad, and one of them was even named Barbara! There was an affair with a marchesa—the Medusa of the Great Hotels, she was called!—who lived on the Grand Canal in the Unfinished Palazzo before the Guggenheim woman bought it up. She threw mad parties with ocelots and naked boys painted gold! D’Annunzio lived in the sweet little house across the way. The Casetta Rossa. Then there was his marvelous affair with Sarah Bernhardt’s rival, Eleonora Duse. She was much older than he was.” She looked at Flint to be sure this point wasn’t lost on him. “Hmmm, let me think. He also had affairs with rich American painters and Jewish dancers, had acid poured on his head and went bald, fought during the First World War, flew planes, bombed places—or torpedoed them, I forget which—went blind in one eye, fell from a window, or maybe he was pushed or tried to kill himself, I don’t remember. He was a bit of a fascista, too. Mussolini made him the Prince of the Peak or the Snowy Mountain or something like that. In his twilight years he had orgies in a Wagnerian house on Lago di Garda.”

  She seemed to have finished but then added: “Oh, and he slept with boys and died on his way to dinner.”

  Oriana gave them all a bright smile, not even breathing heavily or seeming the slightest bit exhausted. Quimper looked shocked and glanced at Moss, who had a bored expression. Flint had struck a pose somewhere between bemusement and admiration.

  “You’ve said it all, Oriana,” Urbino said. “It certainly will be interesting to see how the Barone will be able to transform himself into a short, ugly, bald man!”

  There was an unpleasant little twist to Moss’s thin lips, quickly erased.

  “No problem there, Urbino dear. We all want to be deceived! And Bobo is such a master that he gives his performance with hardly any makeup! I was completely carried away in Milan, and so was every other woman in the audience.”

  A few minutes later Oriana and her entourage got up and left. Urbino ordered another drink and sat thinking about the man who had shown an interest in the ceiling of the Sala della Bussola.

  The guard’s description was general enough to be any number of sixty-year-old men, yet specific enough to call to mind the Barone. But if he had been at the Doges’ Palace, why hadn’t he mentioned it last night? The most obvious answer was that he had slipped the threat into the bocca himself. He had been reluctant to have Urbino investigate and had agreed only when the Contessa had been so insistent. Was this whole business just the Barone’s attempt to draw attention to his production? The threat sent to the Gazzettino made this seem even more probable. But if he had been trying to get publicity, he would have been more eager for it all to come out, not reluctant to have the situation looked into—as long as an investigation didn’t reveal that he had made the threats himself.

  What kind of game might the Barone be playing? Surely the man was being devious. Urbino was going to have to be wary—not only of the Barone but of his own responses as well.

  Urbino called the Contessa and asked her and the Barone to be at Caffè Florian at five that afternoon.

  5

  A cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the Contessa’s head and dipped toward the tray of petits fours on the mahogany serving table in the Chinese salon. The Barone Bobo held a Gauloise between his long fingers. The Contessa’s eyelids were slightly closed against the smoke, giving them an oriental look that went with the sal
on.

  “Here’s our sleuth,” the Barone said with a show of impressive teeth as Urbino came over to their table. “You look far less rumpled than your compatriots of the same profession, I must say.”

  “It’s not his profession, Bobo dear. Like all amateurs he does it for the pure love of it. It’s an inclination.”

  “That’s not quite true either. I don’t usually seek cases out.”

  “They seek you! Ha, ha! Then it’s not an avocation at all, Barbara, but a true vocation in the religious sense. Our Urbino hasn’t chosen a life of sleuthing, but has been called to it by a higher power—in this particular case, by you and your gentle insistence.”

  “Urbino never needs any insistence to do the right thing,” the Contessa said with a smile that tried to take in both her male companions.

  “So what do you have to tell us?” the Barone asked when they were settled with their drinks—a gin-and-tonic for Urbino and a fresh pot of tea for the Contessa and the Barone Bobo. The Barone Bobo didn’t impress Urbino as a tea-drinking man but he seemed willing enough to imbibe for the sake of the Contessa. He didn’t refrain from smoking, however, which showed less consideration—or was it less design? Could it be possible that she hadn’t made her dislike known?

  After Urbino told them what he had learned at the Doges’ Palace and the Gazzettino, there was a momentary silence. Then the Contessa, with a worried look, said: “Well, I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. You didn’t learn much, did you?”

  “But I didn’t think he would,” the Barone said, not without a note of satisfaction. “Don’t misunderstand me, Urbino. It has nothing to do with your sleuthing abilities but with the fact that there’s nothing to be learned from delving into this silly business. I knew that from the start. I suggest that we simply forget it.”

  “I wouldn’t say that we didn’t learn much,” Urbino said. “For one thing, we know that the threat sent to the Gazzettino was postmarked at the main post office here. It means that whoever sent it was here or had someone mail it from here. We also have the description of the man in a fedora who spent such an unusual amount of time in the Sala della Bussola. Do you have any idea who he might be?”

  “Absolutely none,” the Barone said without any hesitation. “Unless it was Orlando!” he added with a laugh.

  “He means his brother-in-law, Orlando Gava,” the Contessa explained. “Orlando is Rosa’s brother. But why would gentle Orlando do something like that, Bobo?”

  “I was just trying to show how preposterous this whole thing is.”

  “You said the man was wearing a brown fedora,” the Contessa said, reaching for a petit four. She took a bite. “You have a brown fedora, Bobo. You know what that means, don’t you, Urbino? Someone is trying to impersonate him! The good clothes, the handmade shoes, the brown fedora. It’s obvious! It goes along with the threats.”

  “It’s possible,” Urbino admitted.

  “Don’t be so enthusiastic!” the Contessa said. She reached for another petit four but pulled her hand back into her lap and sighed. “I’m sorry, Urbino. My nerves are frazzled. And I’m a bit knackered. I had too much Cabernet at the Graspo de Ua,” she said, naming one of her and Urbino’s favorite restaurants. “You know how quickly even a little wine goes to my head.”

  “To your sweet head,” the Barone corrected, touching her hand. “I can see that you’ll be in dreamland early tonight, leaving me to my own lonely devices. But I have a thought, Urbino!” he exclaimed with an attempt at spontaneity. “Why don’t the two of us have a nightcap at the Gritti Palace about ten?”

  “That would be lovely!” the Contessa answered for Urbino. “You can make it, can’t you?”

  Urbino said he would be there and left. Out in Piazza San Marco he tried to shake his annoyance with the Barone. He barely knew him. Although he trusted his instincts and believed in first impressions, he often made mistakes by being too sensitive, and this autumn his illness, minor though it was, had drained a lot of his reserves. He couldn’t concentrate as he usually did and had a vague feeling of sadness. He had hoped the Contessa would be a big help to him but she had other claims on her attention. He looked back briefly into the Chinese salon where the Contessa was laughing at something the Barone Bobo had just said.

  He was about to cross the Piazza when he noticed two other people observing the Contessa and the Barone. The dark Frenchwoman Marie Quimper gave a little start when she saw Urbino looking at her and her companion. Hugh Moss seemed unruffled.

  “Mr. Macintyre, what a pleasant surprise!” Quimper said. She had a familiar volume under her arm.

  “Isn’t that Baedeker’s Northern Italy?” Urbino asked. “The 1913 edition?”

  Quimper gripped the book more tightly and exchanged a glance with Moss.

  “Yes,” Moss said, “the 1913 edition. It cost an arm and a leg.”

  “Well, it’s worth it,” Urbino said. “How long are you in Venice for?”

  “Another week. I absolutely love Venice!” Quimper said with a quaver in her voice.

  “Is this your first trip here?”

  “We—”

  “Our first and probably our last, considering the prices!” Moss interrupted gruffly. Without saying good-bye, he took Quimper’s arm and almost dragged her toward the Molo.

  6

  Urbino and the Barone Bobo were hardly settled on the terrace of the Gritti Palace when the Barone said: “You don’t like me, do you?”

  Before Urbino could even consider his answer, the Barone added: “But what can a man of your refinement say? You would either have to lie or tell the bald, embarrassing truth. You’re not the kind of person to do either with an easy conscience. I’m seldom wrong about people, and I have a feeling that neither are you. This puts us both in a difficult position, doesn’t it?”

  The Barone sipped his whiskey and took a deep breath of the cool, crisp air.

  “But why quibble, especially here? Just look at this!” He threw out his hand at the waters of the Grand Canal, the creamy domes of the Salute, the Palazzo Dario leaning slightly to one side, the long white Guggenheim museum. The lights from the windows and boat landings shimmered in the water.

  “A night for love,” the Barone went on. “Perhaps you don’t know that unreciprocated love brought one of your compatriots to throw herself from a window of that palazzo there and kill herself.” He indicated a rose-colored building on the other side of the Grand Canal next to the traghetto station. “She loved one of your most famous writers, Henry James. But he was afraid of physical love. You can see it in what he wrote about D’Annunzio.”

  Urbino, who had more than a few things to say on the topic, remained silent. He hadn’t come here tonight to discuss Henry James.

  “Such a sad thing to be afraid of any manifestation of l’amore,” the Barone added with a sympathetic shake of his head for all such souls.

  A gondola with a man and woman glided past the Gritti Palace and approached the nearby landing. The man drew his companion’s attention to the Gritti deck. The couple was Hugh Moss and his belle-laide, Marie Quimper. Urbino waved. Quimper waved back with a smile and Moss nodded sternly. If this had been any city other than Venice, with its web of waterways and serpentine calles providing innumerable and unexpected points of contact, Urbino might have found three encounters with this same couple unusual in one day. But he was accustomed to seeing the same faces many times in the space of only a few hours at scattered parts of town and on passing watercraft.

  The Barone Bobo looked down at the couple as they got out of the gondola. He smiled.

  “Two young lovers, you see. So wise to come to Venice in the autumn—the best season for her, don’t you think? It suits her fading beauty.”

  “Autumn and Venice. A ‘nuptial alliance,’ D’Annunzio called it, didn’t he?” Urbino said, hoping to turn the conversation to the threats. “I’m rereading Fire.”

  “To renew your pleasure or your disapproval? But that’s unfair. I
’m sure you’re doing it for my sake. You want to be in the right mood for Pomegranate, yes? Unless you hope to catch me out in some misquoting!”

  The Barone took a sip of whiskey and lit a Gauloise.

  “I don’t see why you keep suggesting that I have something against you, Barone.”

  “Bobo! ‘Something against me’? An unusual way to put it. I said that I thought you don’t like me. But I understand how you feel. Barbara has been giving me a lot of her attention. But don’t forget we go back a long way, to when Alvise and my wife were alive. You shouldn’t waste your fine energies wishing I weren’t in Venice.”

  “Why did you want to see me tonight?” Urbino asked, with the air of someone trying his best to be patient.

  “Why can’t it just be to get to know you better, a good friend of Barbara’s the way you are?”

  “Because I think there’s something more than that and something more than just rhapsodizing about the scene.”

  “Which is?”

  “You tell me.”

  The Barone took a sip of his drink and looked directly into Urbino’s eyes.

  “It’s Barbara,” he said with a regretful air. “It’s upsetting to have her so disturbed, and all because of something to do with me. I—I wanted to take this opportunity tonight, man to man as it were, to impress on you that it would be best not to trouble her with every little thing you might turn up or every idea you might have. In fact, if you learn anything, I’d appreciate it if you told me first.”

  “But you insist that the threats are of no consequence. If you really believe that, then there should be nothing to be worried about,” Urbino observed with some satisfaction at pointing out the Barone’s inconsistency.

  “I’m not worried! Haven’t you understood what I’ve been saying? It’s Barbara I’m concerned about! You’re being obstinate. Very well. Do as you wish, but if it takes any toll on Barbara, it will be your fault.”