17
“I’m beginning to think you should confine your sleuthing to things like this,” the Contessa said to Urbino the next morning on the cemetery island where they had come to see if all the preparations were in place for the bridge of boats at midnight.
The Contessa indicated the moldering ballet slipper on Diaghilev’s tomb lying next to a bouquet of irises and a scrap of paper left in memory of Nureyev.
“Always a new—or rather an old one. You could crouch by the gate and find out who leaves them! Our curiosity would be satisfied, and there’d be no danger, no disturbing revelations.” She glanced down at the irises. “Such a shame. Irises die so quickly.” She shivered and drew her coat more tightly against her throat. She held a bouquet in white chrysanthemums. “Let’s go to the mausoleum.”
They walked along the leaf-strewn path. Around them were graves whose Russian names, the large majority women and some of them “princesses,” evoked the pages of a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky novel. Urbino often imagined melodramatic lives and deaths for them, but suspected that the most extraordinary thing about them might be only that they had died in Venice. The Contessa stared at all the monuments of mortality and sighed with weariness. Her gait was much slower than usual, her shoulders drooped.
“My bridge of boats has a cloud over it, doesn’t it?
It was starting to get overcast again. But somber weather would in many ways suit the ceremony. It was a cloud of another kind she meant.
They passed through a gate. Above their heads on both sides rose loculi or burial niches. The walls with their pictures of the dead bloomed with flowers. As they turned in the direction of the Da Capo-Zendrini mausoleum, the Contessa said: “If Alvise were alive, he would want me to stick by Bobo, no matter what!”
It was a comment Urbino knew he shouldn’t touch, bristling as it was with inconsistencies that revealed just how confused the Contessa was.
“Is that what you’re comforting yourself with? From what I know about Alvise he was nobody’s fool.”
“And so he wasn’t, but he knew what loyalty meant. Bobo’s told me everything and I believe him!
“Everything?”
Yesterday when Urbino and Bobo had finished their talk, Bobo had said he would speak with the Contessa before going to the Questura. Urbino had left him to his overdue task and gone back to the Palazzo Uccello to think things through.
“Yes, tutto! All about his argument with Moss in Campo San Luca, the blackmail note, his—his relationship with that poor woman. And if he didn’t tell me about her when we were on Torcello—” She caught herself and emphasized: “Yes, everything!”
“I don’t think you’re a good judge when it comes to Bobo.”
“And who are you? Justice blind? Look to the beam in your own eye!”
“But don’t you see what it all means? You told him about Helen Creel on Torcello. Not only wasn’t he frank with you when he should have been—then, and even much earlier—but he had all that time to consider exactly what to tell us, based on what we knew!”
In strained silence they approached the mausoleum with its statues of weeping angels, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Nicholas of Bari. The statue of St. Nicholas was more weather-eroded than the others and stood less firmly on its base. Nearby was a field of graves in the grim process of being exhumed.
The Contessa took a key from her pocket. Her hand was trembling from a combination of anger and fear. She went up to the iron doors. Lately she had been making an effort to overcome her superstitious dread of the mausoleum, where her name and birthdate had been inscribed during the Conte’s lifetime and were waiting for the unknown date.
As she now unlocked the doors and entered the violet interior, she did so with a little frisson and a feeling of claustrophobia. One of her recurring nightmares was being locked behind the stout doors of the mausoleum.
She handed Urbino an empty urn, and he filled it with water from a spigot beside the path. He brought it back to her. She put the chrysanthemums in it, then lit a votive candle and placed it next to the urn on the mauve marble of the altar. She said a prayer, relocked the doors, and came back to Urbino, who was waiting on the path. There was a look of relief on her face, as if she had narrowly escaped an appalling fate.
She glanced at the gaping holes of the graves being exhumed in the near distance, with their piles of dirt, broken pieces of concrete, scattered plastic flowers, and splintered wooden crosses. Without any warning she cried: “They’re past caring and past being cared for. But you, caro—and us!”
Urbino hardly had time to consider the ambiguity of the Contessa’s final pronoun when she said even more portentously:
“Look somewhere else for your murderer! If you don’t, something frightful is going to happen! You’ve been led terribly astray and can’t even see it. Open your eyes!”
An admonition she herself might heed, Urbino said to himself.
Suddenly they were startled when a loudspeaker summoned the Contessa to the cemetery office for a telephone call. Urbino lingered behind to brood over the graves in the process of exhumation. It was a sight that never failed to depress him. Only the dead whose survivors had long memories and sufficient funds rested in perpetuity. All the others had their bones—or what remained of them—deposited after a meager twelve years’ rest in a common grave or in the cemetery’s ossuario.
He made his way slowly to the cemetery office where the Contessa was waiting.
“That was Corrado.” Corrado was a friend attached to the Questura. “I asked him to contact me as soon as he had news about Orlando’s autopsy. Mauro told him I was here. Orlando died a natural death! That should show you what a house of cards you’ve been building!”
Insofar as the Contessa could gloat under such circumstances and in such a place, she did so now. But her chin was tilted at too sharp an angle not to tell Urbino that she hoped to convince herself by first convincing him.
18
As they were about to get into the Contessa’s motoscafo, they saw Harriet. She was wearing a long dark green raincoat and a knit cap pulled low on her forehead. In her hand was a bouquet of flowers.
“Whatever is she doing here!” the Contessa said in an annoyed tone. “She called this morning and said she was still ill. And she has flowers! She doesn’t know anyone buried here.” She looked at Urbino and said: “Does she?”
“Not as far as I know. There are some things I want to talk to her about. Go on without me.”
As the Contessa’s motoscafo pulled away, she looked through the cabin window with mingled hurt and suspicion.
Harriet, who hadn’t noticed the Contessa and Urbino, started when he came up to her, drawing in her receding chin even further. Each time Urbino had seen Harriet in the past two weeks she had looked progressively more weary, even ill. In the sunlight now her face was unhealthily white. The area under her eyes, however, was so dark it looked bruised, but it was her eyes themselves which were most disturbing. They were haunted, frightened, and seemed to look everywhere except at Urbino’s own eyes.
“Paying your respects to the dead, Harriet?”
She looked down at her bouquet as if someone had placed it in her hands without her being aware of it.
“Why, yes I am.”
“Do you mind if I join you?”
Harriet hesitated for a few seconds, then said: “Of course not.”
They went through the gateway with its Gothic carving of St. Michael and the dragon into the cloister. As they walked past the office, Harriet slowed her pace as if she was going to stop, but then continued on through the main gates into the cemetery. Here, however, she stopped. She seemed undecided.
“Where is it that you’re going?”
“This way,” she said, turning to the left. They walked in silence until they came to a row of graves of infants and children.
“Yes, this is the place.”
She went along the walk and looked down at the graves. Most of them had statues and ang
els and ceramic photographs of the dead infants and children. She stopped in front of a grave with a black-and-white photograph of a little girl in a white bowler hat. The inscription on the cross said: “Mamma Pappa Ti Ricordano 1935–1938.”
Harriet propped the bouquet against the stone.
“Her parents are probably not alive anymore to remember her,” Harriet said.
This sentimentality was a previously unrevealed quality in Harriet and set Urbino to wondering what other facets she might have that he was unaware of. Of all the suspects, Harriet appeared to have the least motive for having wanted Moss, Quimper, and Gava dead.
She knelt silently for a few minutes until a salamander, one of the many on San Michele, darted in front of her. She jumped to her feet with a sharp cry.
They started to return on the same path they had just come along.
“There are a few things I’d like to ask you, Harriet,” Urbino began. “Bobo told me that he received a letter last week. You gave it to him. It didn’t go through the mails. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember!”
Something other than professional pride at remembering details seemed to be behind her vehement response.
“Where did you find it?”
“Under the palazzo door.”
“But which one? There are two, not counting the water entrance.”
“The door of the palazzo, of course. No, no, what am I saying? Not that door. I mean the door from the calle.”
“It would have had to be, wouldn’t it, unless the person who left it had been first let through the outside door. Then he—or she—could have easily slipped it under the doors of the palazzo.”
Harriet looked confused and frightened. When they reached the cloister, Urbino stopped and put his hand on Harriet’s arm.
“You’re afraid of Bobo, aren’t you, Harriet? You moved out of the Ca’ da Capo because you didn’t want to be under the same roof with him, didn’t you?”
“You’re ridiculous! Afraid of him? Of course I’m not! I moved out to have a little privacy!”
“If you’re not afraid of Bobo, then who or what are you afraid of? Because you are afraid, very afraid. Is it Marco Zeoli?”
Her shrill, high-pitched laugh echoed around the walls of the cloister. Two black-clad women frowned at her. Harriet’s unattractive face was now even more pale and pinched. Suddenly she grabbed Urbino’s arm and for the first time looked directly into his eyes. There was fear in hers, but also an appeal. He sensed she was about to say something, to ask him for something. Her grip tightened, then weakened.
“Please leave me alone. I beg you!”
She hurried into the church as if seeking refuge.
Urbino went around to the far side of the church and stood on the water-washed steps until a boat had come and gone, then he went back into the cloister. He concealed himself. Harriet was at the cemetery office window. She took a map of the cemetery from a pile and slipped it into her purse.
19
On his walk back to the Palazzo Uccello from the quay across from the cemetery island, Urbino felt close to understanding the twisted sequence of events that had begun when the Contessa had called him back from Marco Zeoli’s spa—that had begun, to be more precise, twelve years ago in a therapy room in that same spa where Helen Creel, Hugh Moss’s mother, had been murdered. If he hadn’t yet been able to piece it all together, it was mainly because of the difficulty of sorting out the lies that were as thick, but far from as salubrious, as the Abano mud in which so many of them had been spawned.
He stared down from a bridge into a canal. Boats desperately in need of paint and repair were tied along the opposite bank. Laundry was strung across the front of a building, its bright colors and geometrical shapes making a contrast with the worn and faded stone. Ivy cascaded down a wall. The water, iridescent with oil, darkly mirrored the scene.
He peered down into its shallow depths. He could make out various forms lurking beneath the surface, teasing him with their distorted appearances. As he knew from low tides and the occasional draining of the canals, they were the most mundane of objects. Umbrellas, carriage wheels, dolls, delivery crates. But hidden as they were beneath the surface they often led to wild imaginings.
He kept looking into the water until he was startled to see his own reflection peering back at him.
Back at the Palazzo Uccello he learned that Gemelli had been trying to get in touch with him.
“It’s about Rosa Gava Casarotto-Re,” Gemelli said when Urbino called him. “We’ve talked with the carabinieri in Taormina. She died ten years ago the twenty-ninth of October. You were right. The same day Gava died. And complete respiratory failure just like Gava. Death by natural cause was the official verdict. But something puzzling to my way of thinking. Why did the woman run out of her medication? Her inhaler was empty and no bottles, empty or otherwise, were found. And no traces of the medication were in her system. Strange, isn’t it? And something else. It’s about Gava. Something happened to him later the same day.”
Before Gemelli told him what it was, Urbino knew. He now remembered something else about Taormina that had been at the back of his mind, something the Contessa had mentioned two weeks ago at Florian’s when she was praising Bobo’s vigor.
“He almost drowned in the sea,” Gemelli said. “Fortunately, Casarotto-Re was with him. Seems as if he’s not all bad. He saved Gava from certain death. But what the two men were doing swimming right after the woman’s death is beyond me.”
20
“Barbara isn’t here,” Bobo said to Urbino that afternoon from behind a cloud of smoke. Bobo, Festa, and Peppino were in possession of the salotto blu. Bobo, dressed in a stylishly cut tweed suit and looking as if he had recovered completely from his recent indisposition, reclined on the sofa. Festa was standing beneath the Veronese, smoking one of Bobo’s Gauloises in a long holder. Peppino dozed on one of the Louis Quinze chairs.
Urbino had the distinct impression that he had interrupted an important discussion.
“She’s at the Municipality with Harriet double-checking on the procession tonight,” Bobo further clarified, getting up. He looked at Festa. “Perhaps we should go into the garden now. Peppino has been getting a little restless.”
Peppino, hearing his name, lifted an eyelid and went back to sleep. Festa picked him up.
“I’m afraid it looks like rain,” Urbino said.
“We won’t melt!” Festa said coldly. “Let’s go, Bobo.”
“Rain!” Bobo said enthusiastically. “That will be marvelous for the procession. How atmospheric!” He recited an appropriate quotation from D’Annunzio about inclement weather, then said: “Indulge in whatever you like, Urbino.” He indicated the low table crowded with covered dishes, plates, two champagne glasses, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon. “There’s only a swallow of champagne left, I’m afraid, but just as well, I suppose, with that troublesome toe of yours. Barbara said she won’t be back until six. I don’t know if you want to hang around that long.”
When Bobo and Festa had gone, Urbino uncovered a few of the dishes, discovering some of the choicest morsels from the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini kitchen and larder. He spread some beluga caviar on a cracker and washed it down with the remnants of the Dom Pérignon.
He looked through the window of the salotto into the garden where he saw Bobo and Festa walking slowly past the stone lions. He slipped up to the next floor and went into Bobo’s room. Urbino, who had stayed in the room on numerous occasions himself, noticed a new addition on the wall: a portrait of the Contessa reclining against Tunisian cushions. It had formerly hung in the library.
What he hoped to find in Bobo’s room he didn’t know. Something. Anything. The police had already gone through the room, and in any case Bobo was too sly a man to leave anything incriminating around. He would either have it on his person or would have destroyed it.
A leather address book lay on the night table. It was of fine Florentine design, similar to the o
ne he had seen in Gava’s hotel suite. He looked through it. The police must have made a copy of its contents. The Moss and Creel names didn’t appear, nor was there an entry for Marco Zeoli or John Flint, although there was one for Oriana. The nib of a fountain pen had made a neat black line through Orlando’s name. Festa had obviously changed her address many times, for addresses were crossed out and new ones put in so often that Bobo had had to move to the back of the book. All the earlier entries had been under “L.” Harriet’s address in the ghetto was entered.
A footstep sounded in the hall. He put the address book down. He hadn’t thought through what he would do or say if Bobo caught him. But the footsteps passed. Most likely Mauro or Lucia. Urbino breathed more easily and continued his search.
There were numerous volumes of D’Annunzio’s and Bobo’s own books. A large envelope was stuffed with reviews of Bobo’s performances and books and publicity clippings, with photographs that showed how little he had changed over the past fifteen years. One clipping was of the demonstration in Milan several years ago that Bobo had mentioned: FEMINISTS DELAY D’ANNUNZIO PERFORMANCE. The account held nothing of significance.
Piled up beneath one of the ceramic palm trees were several video cassettes of Bobo’s performances, one of them of the opening night of Pomegranate at the Teatro del Ridotto. Urbino became increasingly nervous that Bobo and Festa would return from the garden and he started to hurry. Rings and cuff links sparkled at him from a small coffer, designer suits and jackets and shirts in the armoire wafted Bobo’s scent at Urbino, a combination of expensive cologne and cigarettes; socks, underwear, and shirts displayed their neat folds from the Florentine-papered drawers. Pairs upon pairs of shoes on trees were arranged in a row in a corner. The laundry hamper was empty.
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