“Byron has something to do with it,” Urbino said, but the conviction ebbed from his voice when he added, “unless that is also a camouflage of some kind.”
“Don’t you mean a lure?”
“That, too.”
Gildo was steering the gondola out of the Basin of San Marco and into the Castello district. If Venice is shaped like a fish, as any map immediately shows, the Castello is its tail. The gondola passed beneath the Ca’ di Dio with its many chimney stacks and moved slowly toward the Arsenale.
In the closed cabin of the felze, so suited to the two friends when they were together and Urbino when he was alone, each of them dropped into a reflective silence. When the Contessa turned to Urbino a minute or two later, she said with a slight repentant air, “But forgive me, caro, I’ve forgotten about Elvira’s son. We’ve forgotten it,” she emphasized. “Maybe Possle wants you to look into his death. It can’t be pleasant for him to have Elvira shouting like a madwoman outside the Ca’ Pozza about Benedetta Razzi having killed her son.”
“Possle is a man who’s concerned only about what directly touches himself—and Armando,” Urbino replied.
The Contessa recognized the ambiguity in his statement and looked at him without saying anything for a few moments.
“But surely you don’t think that Razzi is capable of murder. The only killing on her conscience is of someone else’s pocketbook. It shows how detached from reality Elvira is to be accusing her. Look at her animosity against the Ca’ Pozza, the way she was trying to keep you from going in.”
“I wonder, though,” Urbino said. “Elvira’s lucid enough at other times.”
“Benedetta Razzi a murderer! Creeping around in her false eyelashes and a little dagger from her doll collection! Well, if I’ve learned anything from your—our—sleuthing, it’s that nothing is what it seems.”
“Exactly, or close enough to it.”
“Patience.” The Contessa took the Mann book from his lap and put it on the carpeted floor where Urbino couldn’t easily get it. “Let’s wait and see what the next ploy of our thief of San Polo turns out to be. Fortunately, I have my conversazioni to distract me.” Her next one was on Saturday, the day after tomorrow. “As for you, don’t forget your noble quest of my missing clothes.”
43
Why don’t we walk from the Arsenale?” Urbino said. He made an effort to shake off the feeling of inertia that had dropped over him as they had discussed Possle and the Ca’ Pozza.
The white crenellated walls of the Arsenale rose against the blue, cloud-filled sky. These days the old dockyards, formerly synonymous with the economic and military power of the Venetian Republic, were mainly a ship anchorage. Once a secret area where galleys and weapons were constructed, the Arsenale now was open to the gaze and the cameras of anyone who took the waterbus that passed through its cavernous space twice a day.
“You can pull up here,” Urbino called up to Gildo.
Their destination was not the Arsenale, however, but the Naval Museum overlooking the Basin of San Marco a short distance away. When Urbino had picked up the Contessa, she had informed him, rather mysteriously, that Gildo should row them there. “I have my reasons,” she had said.
Gildo brought the boat to the landing with more of a kiss than a tap against the stones. Urbino helped the Contessa onto the quay. After arranging with Gildo for a time that they would return to the gondola, Urbino and the Contessa walked across the quiet square. Nearby were the rope works where Habib would be showing his paintings.
As they crossed the bridge to the fondamenta opposite, they paused to look up at the Arsenale, with its lion-guarded gateway. No less a figure than Dante had been among those who had mused over the grim ironies of this factory producing floating engines of war for a republic proudly calling itself serene. At the land entrance were a bust of Dante and a plaque inscribed with verses from one of the cantos of The Inferno, which found an apt image of the punishments of hell in all the noise, activity, and boiling pitch of the Arsenale.
They proceeded slowly along the long fondamenta toward the Naval Museum. A young woman rowing a boat filled with bolts of fabric kept pace with them for a while until her efforts carried her beyond them.
Urbino restrained himself, not without difficulty, from quoting Dante’s vivid words about boiling pitch which were written on the plaque. His criticism of the specter of the thief of San Polo, to use the Contessa’s epithet for Possle, were too present to him at the moment to indulge in quotations and allusions himself. Yet it angered him to hold back in this way. It revealed how much he felt a victim of Possle’s thefts.
Yes, he thought, as they paused at the water bus stop near the Naval Museum, Possle had taken something from him, and certainly more than Urbino had yet taken from the elderly man. The more he considered Possle’s effect on him, the more he felt peculiarly violated, appropriated. Urbino held his own secrets close and seldom shared them. This commerce and contact with Possle was an unequal exchange. He wasn’t accustomed to it, and it put him on edge as much as it did on guard.
In front of them were the waters of the Basin of San Marco, a deep blue except where the boats frothed them into creamy white. The long line of the Lido stretched in the distance.
“Here we are, caro,” the Contessa said as they approached an unassuming building with two anchors flanking its doors, “the temple of the Maritime Republic. Have you guessed why we’re here?”
“I’m at a loss.”
“And you a man of such intelligence and imagination! Come on.”
A boisterous group of teenagers were exiting through the glass doors. Inside, Urbino bought their admission tickets, and they passed into a large space where tall windows looked out on the water.
“They’re worth the price of admission in themselves,” the Contessa said with a mischievous smile. “We can both agree on that.”
He followed her gaze to two young men dressed in crisp white naval uniforms with white caps banded with blue. They were the museum attendants and stood with their hands clasped behind their back.
“But let’s not linger,” the Contessa said. “There are some other exhibits I want us to admire.”
They climbed up to the next floor to a large glass case. Resplendent inside was a scale model of a carved and gilded ship decorated with flags and statues of men, women, angels, and lions. It was the Doge’s ceremonial barge in which he conducted the city’s annual marriage to the sea.
“The last bucintoro of Venice,” the Contessa pronounced. “I want you to contemplate last things this afternoon. You still don’t know why we’ve come?” she asked slyly. “Up to the top floor then.”
Ignoring the other rooms, she guided him to one devoted to gondolas. She walked a little in advance of him with an unmistakable eagerness. They stopped in front of one particular exhibit.
It bore the label, O GONDOLA DA FRESCO, much less romantic in its English translation printed below of SHADOW COOL TYPE.
The extravagant concoction of carved armchairs, a heart-shaped seat, and gilded lions and tridents shone blackly as if it had a life of its own.
Urbino didn’t need any more clues from the Contessa to identify it as Peggy Guggenheim’s personal gondola. During her controversial years in Venice, it had conveyed her back and forth from her palazzo on the Grand Canal.
As Urbino and the Contessa looked at the gondola, he ran a sobering declension through his mind. Guggenheim’s splendid gondola, Possle’s fixed one at the Ca’ Pozza, and his own. Guggenheim’s was the most magnificent of them all by far, but now it was just a reminder of a rich life that had once been lived in the grand style.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” the Contessa said, showing how uncannily she was in tune with his own thoughts. “That’s something we all need to remember. This one, caro, is the last of the gondolas. The personal gondolas. Not Samuel Possle’s. As for yours, let’s call it a pale imitation of an original. Yes, my gift is a sad forgery, I’m afraid.” She looked in
to his eyes. “As you said, it’s all been done before. It’s quite useless to pretend otherwise. You’re not an original, and neither am I. The best we can hope for, my dear Urbino, is to be eccentric, but eccentric in as original a way as possible!”
Urbino smiled. “You mean like Samuel Possle?”
“Oh, don’t compare me to Possle, if you don’t mind! Save that for yourself!”
44
At seven-thirty the next morning, Friday, March 15, Urbino was in the reception area of the Casa Crispina, the pensione run by the Sisters of the Charity of Santa Crispina. It provided a good view of the Church of San Gabriele across the campo.
He had come to speak with the church secretary who had signed Armando’s receipt for the commemorative mass of the dead, but unfortunately the nun had gone to a convent of the same order in Umbria for several weeks. The nun at the reception desk had no information to give him.
Urbino chatted with her, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on the front doors of the church.
Armando, dressed in his usual black—a color that on this occasion seemed to be particularly appropriate—soon emerged and paused on the top step. An old woman, also dressed in black, appeared behind him. She eased herself down the steps and across the square in the direction of the Calle dell’ Arcanzolo. Another woman emerged, older than the first one, and using a cane. She hobbled away from the church.
Armando looked toward the Casa Crispina and seemed to be staring right at Urbino, who drew back from the curtain. Armando abandoned the church steps and walked slowly and, it seemed to Urbino, sadly, across the campo and down the Calle dell’Arcanzolo, his arms close to his sides as was his habit.
As soon as the nun finished her account of two elderly Frenchwomen who had been locked out of the Casa Crispina last night, Urbino bid her a quick farewell.
He walked up the steps of the fifteenth-century Gothic church, many of its stones leprous from damp, age, and chemical corrosion from the mainland. He entered and gazed toward the chapel in the east transept, where a glass coffin stirred up dark memories. The coffin displayed the body of a virgin saint in a white gown, crimson gloves and slippers, and a silver Florentine mask. Venetian merchants had snatched her from her native Sicily hundreds of years ago during one of the serene republic’s so-called sacred thefts. Her body had been at the dead center of one of Urbino’s most puzzling cases.
The church was deserted. The monsignor and the altar boys must have left by the side exit. The sexton was nowhere in sight.
Urbino left the church and went down the Calle dell’ Arcanzolo to a tobacco kiosk where he bought a copy of the day’s local newspaper. He moved out of the way of passersby and opened the newspaper to the obituary and commemorative notices. Black-and-white photographs, almost all of elderly men and women, stared back at him. One of them was of a young woman with large, liquid eyes. Beneath the photograph he read:
In beloved memory of my sister Adriana Maria Abdon
Who departed this life seventeen years ago on this day
Eternal Love
From her brother Armando
Urbino studied the photograph. Adriana must have been in her early twenties when it was taken. He could trace some of her brother’s features in her face like an angelic version of the grotesque.
45
Half an hour later Urbino was brought up short by a sign on the door of THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS: CHIUSO. The woman tending the newsstand next door called out to say that Emo had been taken sick and gone home. She gave him his address.
Emo’s ground-floor apartment was at the end of a narrow alley near the Casa di Tintoretto. The alley stank of cat urine and garbage.
Emo answered Urbino’s ring almost immediately.
“It’s you,” he said. “Another emergency?” The small slice of door that Emo held open revealed that he was wearing something that might have been a bathrobe. Its violet color and vaguely ceremonial cut made it reminiscent of Possle’s attire. “Or maybe you’re back for more stories about haunted buildings in Venice, is that it?”
“Excuse me for disturbing you, but I need some information about a man named Armando Abdon. You might know him through San Gabriele. He works for Samuel Possle, the owner of the Ca’ Pozza.”
The locksmith’s eyes searched the alley. “Armando, the mute,” he said.
“Yes. He has masses said at San Gabriele in memory of someone named Adriana Abdon. He might have started doing it when you were there.”
“He did.” A gleam came into Emo’s small eyes. “You want information on Armando and Adriana, is that it? For the book you’re writing about this man who lives in the Ca’ Pozza? Well, it’s going to cost you.”
“Let me come in and we can talk about it.”
“I need to take my medicine and lie down for a while. But there’s no reason we can’t talk over dinner as long as it’s at Harry’s Bar. It’s way beyond my budget. Is it worth it to you?”
The request didn’t strike Urbino as being unreasonable or particularly unusual, if one assumed that Emo’s size was a result of his love of good food. Urbino had often ended up paying much more, in one way or another, for information.
“But how do I know that you have anything to tell me?”
“Anything worth the price of a meal at Harry’s Bar, you mean? You’ll have to find out. But just to whet your appetite, let me do a bit of a calculation. Let me think. Armando and his masses. I’d say he’s been having them said now for about sixteen or seventeen years. So is it on for Harry’s Bar?”
“Lunch tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow. Tuesday, if you don’t mind. And dinner, not lunch. Get the best table. And do I need to warn you that I have a big appetite? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get out of this draft. A current of air can carry you to your grave.”
46
Gildo, wearing a cap over his mop of Venetian reddish blond curls, was standing in the sunshine in front of the Palazzo Uccello when Urbino returned after speaking with Demetrio Emo.
“This is for you,” the young man said, with a subdued and deferential air before Urbino could say anything.
He handed him a small white envelope.
Urbino’s full name was written on it in violet ink and in the script that was now familiar to him.
“Where did you get this?” Urbino asked him.
Gildo’s handsome face, usually a clear mirror of his emotions, was closed.
“I found it in the gondola. On one of the seats.”
The boat was drawn up to the water steps where Gildo sometimes cleaned, swept, and polished it in the sunshine.
“I went into the house to get a cloth. When I came back, it was there.” Then he added in a rush of words, “The man from the Ca’ Pozza put it there. The mute. He was going over the bridge when I came out.”
“Do you know him?”
“No!” Gildo exclaimed.
Urbino put the envelope in his pocket. Gildo shifted uneasily from one foot to another. “Signor Urbino, are you investigating something in that building?”
“No, Gildo. Why do you ask?”
The gondolier looked away.
“It’s because of your friend, Marco,” Urbino answered his own question. “That’s his name, isn’t it?”
The gondolier nodded.
“Just because Marco died when he fell from the building next door wouldn’t be a reason to investigate anything about the Ca’ Pozza, would it?”
“But you think that something happened to Marco in the Ca’ Pozza,” Gildo said in a rush of words. “That’s why you go there all the time.” Unspoken pain was alive and glowing in his green eyes.
“I didn’t even know about your friend when I became interested in the Ca’ Pozza,” Urbino responded. “Let’s go inside. We can explain things to each other better there.”
The fact that explanations were necessary appeared to sober the young gondolier even more. He hung his head and followed Urbino into the house.
They went to the
parlor. Gildo removed his cap. Urbino left him looking around the room as if seeing it for the first time as he went to fix them coffees. When he returned with them, Gildo was sitting on the sofa and stroking Serena who had settled in his lap.
“The owner of the Ca’ Pozza could help me with a book I’d like to write,” Urbino began, when he seated himself across from Gildo. “That’s why I go there. But I’ve become interested in your friend Marco for your sake and for his and his mother’s. I’ve come to know her slightly recently. Would you mind telling me how you and Marco became friends?”
Gildo let out a sigh as he continued to stroke the cat. His open and ingenuous face was clouded. “What good will it do, Signor Urbino?”
“It’s always good to talk of the dead when they’ve been so close to us in life.”
Gildo’s eyes misted. “I guess you’re right.”
Serena left Gildo’s lap and walked out of the room. Gildo ran a hand through his hair. Urbino refrained from saying anything more as he waited. Taking a deep breath and with his liquid voice filled with melancholy, Gildo hurried through an account of how he had known Marco for three years and how Marco had attached himself to Gildo after they had met at the San Trovaso squero. They both used to hang around the boatyard watching the gondolas being constructed and running errands for the squeralioli.
“He was five years younger than me, signore. Like a kid brother. I don’t have any brothers and sisters, and—and he didn’t either.”
Urbino nodded with the sympathy of an only child himself.
“He was a good boy, no matter what people tell you about drugs or anything else. He had some friends who were bad, but Marco wasn’t like them. He would have been a top remero. You saw the forcola. You said it was good! His mother sacrificed a lot for him to be an apprentice. That’s what got him into trouble. I’m only telling you this, Signor Urbino, because I don’t want you to think he was bad. He just wanted to help his mother.”
The Last Gondola Page 15
