The Last Gondola

by Edward Sklepowich

  Emo still showed evidence of his recent attack in San Polo in the form of a fading bruise on his cheek.

  “Where did it happen?” Urbino asked.

  “Not near the Ca’ Pozza, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Emo snapped back. “Two boys pushed me from behind and grabbed my case. All they got was a lot of keys. I gave a description to the police. Is that enough for you, Sherlock Macintyre? We’re not eating down here. That’s not part of the deal. Should I take this with me?”

  He held up his Bellini, but before Urbino could say anything he downed it in one gulp.

  The dining room was full. The maitre d’ led them to one of the round tables and removed the RISERVATO sign. Urbino and Emo seated themselves. The boats, the churches, the expanse of the inner lagoon, and the mouth of the Grand Canal were like a stage set beyond their window.

  But Emo seemed uninterested in contemplating the scene. He immediately gave all his attention to the menu after ordering a whiskey sour. Urbino, sipping his Martini, sat back while Emo commanded an entire banquet for himself. In a surprisingly short time he ploughed through one dish after another, beginning with the Carpaccio, the tuna tartare, and dried salt cod from Vicenza, and then moved on to the minestrone, pasta with wild mushrooms, chicken risotto, and scampi. He finished, without any evidence of flagging appetite, with Zabaglione and flambéed crepes. All of this was washed down with glass after glass of Dom Perignon. Urbino did all he could to stretch out his caviar and ravioli with artichokes.

  Emo, who didn’t seem to see the sense of mixing eating with talking, rebuffed Urbino’s attempts to ask him anything about Armando and Adriana. Urbino was afraid that when the locksmith finished his second dessert, he would stand up and bid Urbino a hearty and somewhat tipsy buona sera.

  But as it turned out the former priest had a sense of fairness, if he didn’t have one of moderation. While he sipped from a generous portion of Benedictine, he started to sing for his already consumed supper.

  “So you want to know about Armando and Adriana Abdon,” he said in his low voice. “You say that it’s for some book you’re writing. I’ll believe that if you’ll believe that I have no reason for telling you anything but the truth.” He laughed and took out a small cigar. He eyed Urbino, who made no protest. But Emo put the cigar back in his pocket. “The three of us grew up together, more or less.”

  Urbino made a quick calculation. Yes, Emo and Armando must be about the same age, somewhere in their early sixties.

  “In the Ghetto. Their father and mine were both delivery-men. Armando and Adriana were the only twins I knew even existed in those days.”

  “They were twins?”

  “Not that they looked like each other. Not the way two twin brothers or sisters can. But they couldn’t have concealed it if they had tried. It was as if they were the same person. They hardly left the house without each other. They liked to play tricks on people. Sometimes girls would get telephone calls and think it was Adriana, and say personal things, but it was Armando. He could speak in those days, and he was a good mimic.”

  “When did Armando lose his voice?” Urbino asked.

  “It was after the fire,” Emo replied, with a little smile. “I’ll get to it.”

  He sipped his Benedictine and regarded Urbino with his small, shrewd eyes.

  “It was when we were fifteen. Armando and Adriana were wild. Their mother and father couldn’t control them. And when they locked them in the house, they’d always find a way to get out. They were clever, those two. I admired them, the way kids will. They’d slip into houses when no one was home, rearrange the furniture, take something and put it in another apartment. Adriana urged Armando on, as if he was under her control. One day she dared him to jump into the Canalazzo. He did. He almost drowned, until she jumped in and saved him.”

  “Armando almost drowned?”

  “You mean because Adriana drowned years later. So you know more about them than you’ve let on. But do you know that Adriana was a sick girl? And I don’t mean in her body. She was beautiful and as healthy as a horse. It was her head.” Emo tapped his own massive one. “She’d fly into rages, then be walking around like a zombie. She’d laugh one minute and cry the next.”

  “I understand she had a lovely voice.”

  “Yes, she had a gift. But I still haven’t told you about the fire,” Emo said, with an awareness of his story despite his inebriation. “It broke out one night in December. Their father seems to have fallen asleep with a cigarette. The bedroom went up like a tinderbox. Armando and Adriana escaped. He never spoke again after the fire. His hands were burned, but there wasn’t a mark on Adriana.”

  The vision of Armando’s scarred hands swam before Urbino’s eyes.

  “There was some talk that Adriana had started it, maybe the two of them together, to kill their mother and father. Who knows? My parents made me keep my distance after that, and soon I went into the seminary. Well, we both see how that turned out for me.”

  Emo shook his head slowly and drank down the rest of his Benedictine. Once again, as Urbino frequently did, he wondered what Emo’s personal life was like now that he was out of the priesthood. Whereas the rumors about his sexual exploits with parishioners had been thick in the air during his years at San Gabriele, now it was almost as if he were a celibate, if one were to judge by the silence that surrounded him. Urbino recalled the morning he had stopped by Emo’s apartment. Although Emo had said he was ill, Urbino had had the impression that he was expecting someone, perhaps a neighbor’s wife or daughter. Strange as it might seem, maybe he needed to be more cautious now that he wasn’t a priest.

  “After the fire their aunt moved in,” Emo continued. “She had no success with them either. She died six years later when she hit her head in a fall. No one saw much of Adriana after that. Armando took care of everything. That’s when he started working as a gondolier for the Ca’ Pozza. Rumor had it that Adriana was interested in marrying the man who owned the building and that Armando encouraged it, but it came to nothing. He married someone else.”

  He waved in the air to attract the attention of the waiter.

  “From what I heard from my family and some friends I kept in touch with,” he went on, as the waiter made his way to their table, “Adriana still lived in the Ghetto, but she used to hang around the Ca’ Pozza. When the American divorced, she thought she had one last chance to marry him, I guess, and when it didn’t work out…” Emo shrugged his big shoulders. “That’s when Armando had to hide her away in some clinic outside of Florence. Not permanently, but for three or four months at a time. We all lost track of what was going on. She could have been locked up longer than that. And no one knew where he got the money. The last time she was out of the clinic, she drowned, but you know that part.”

  The waiter came over. Emo ordered another Benedictine.

  “Do you know the name of the clinic?”

  “The Villa Serena. Not hard to remember here in the serene city. And Gildo tells me you have a cat named Serena.”

  So far Emo had provided a great deal of information, perhaps suspiciously so. Urbino warned himself that he shouldn’t be too quick to believe everything.

  The waiter brought Emo’s Benedictine.

  “Did either Armando or Adriana ever show an interest in the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini?”

  “None of us even knew who she was back then.”

  He drank half the Benedictine.

  “What about the commemorative masses for Adriana? You said that Armando’s been doing it for a long time.”

  “That’s right. From the first anniversary of Adriana’s death, seventeen years ago. I was at San Gabriele by then. Didn’t get very far, did I? I took care of it for him, for old time’s sake, but he acted like a stranger. He came every year until I left. I guess he still goes. He’d have the information written on a piece of paper.”

  “Do you ever see him these days?”

  “I come across him every once in a while. Actually I’
ve been seeing him around more often than usual. I say hello, but it’s as if he’s never seen me before. He looks depressed, maybe anxious, like something’s on his mind. I’ve known him for a long time. I’d notice the difference.”

  Urbino reached into his pocket and took out the key from Possle’s bedroom. Not the copy the other locksmith had made, but the original.

  “By the way I found this key among a lot of other ones,” Urbino said, silently thanking the Jesuit fathers who had taught him how to lie while also telling the truth.

  “That’s an abrupt change of topic.”

  Emo took the key, squinted at it, and held it up to the light. He raised his fat hand with the key in his palm as if he was weighing it.

  “Does it belong to my old lock? The one on the front door?” Urbino asked. “There are so many locks for the different doors of the house, most of which I never use. I’ve never really sorted through them all.”

  “It doesn’t belong to that old lock.” Demetrio handed the key back to Urbino. “And not to any of the other doors in your place, not even the water entrance, I’d say. But it’s an old key, as you can see. It might be for the front door lock before the one that Natalia just broke.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  Urbino put the key back in his pocket.

  “By the way,” he said, “did you ever make any keys for Gildo’s friend Marco?”

  Emo finished his Benedictine.

  “All this sudden interest in keys! Why do you ask that?”

  “I’m worried about his mother. Something could happen to her while she’s in one of her states. If you cut a key for Marco, maybe it was their house key. You might have an extra copy. The Contessa, you see, would like to give the key to one of Elvira Carelli’s neighbors, someone she knows is extremely trustworthy.”

  Urbino was going into the kind of detail that always alerted him that someone was lying. Emo stared back at him with his flat, dark eyes.

  “You should ask whoever owns the building. They might have a key. As for the boy, he never asked me to cut a key of any kind for him. By the way, since you don’t need that key, why not give it to me? I collect old ones.”

  “I’d rather keep it. It might fit one of my doors after all.”

  “You never know. Or someone else’s door.”

  Emo stood up. “I’ll be outside,” he said. “Be sure you leave a good tip. We want the waiter to remember us when we come back next time.”

  67

  A few hours later Urbino threw on his clothes and his cloak and slipped his pencil flashlight into his pocket along with the copy of the key he had taken from Possle’s bedroom. Within minutes he was crossing the bridge in front of the Palazzo Uccello. The night dropped down silently around him.

  He had awakened from his dream of Possle and the veiled woman and the Contessa in a room that blazed into flames. The dream and Demetrio Emo’s words about the key and someone else’s door had driven him out into the cold, damp night.

  The silence was at first comforting, but by the time he reached the other side of the Rialto Bridge, it had become oppressive. It made him feel as if he couldn’t breathe. He stopped on a deserted quay. Almost out of desperation he strained his ears to catch the lap of water against stone or the unmistakable scratch and splash of one of the city’s legions of water rats.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t the hour for bells. Even if it had been, he feared that they would be swallowed by this strange night as profoundly as his own footsteps. Where the city usually played its deceptive game of echoes and ventriloquism, tonight it seemed determined to be withdrawing from him and leaving him to his own devices, watching and listening to him.

  Even the stones beneath his feet seemed to give him only the minimal resistance to allow him to turn down the next alley, go over two bridges, slip beneath a covered passageway, and gain Elvira Carelli’s building. No light illuminated it. Above, a sprinkling of stars was visible before the clouds covered them again.

  He withdrew the key from his pocket. He unwrapped it from the chamois cloth. It was slick with the olive oil he had rubbed over it before leaving the Palazzo Uccello. He put it to the eye of the old lock and tried to slide it in. It wouldn’t fit.

  Closing his hand protectively over the key, he walked farther down the calle, his footsteps still eerily silent. The bridge, where he had so often paused to contemplate the Ca’ Pozza, was a black hump among the shadows. He gazed up at the old building. Its dark frown reproached him. He was the enemy. He hadn’t come with good intentions.

  His heart was beating against his chest as he went up to the door. A perverse urge grabbed him to reach out and push the bell. Instead he raised the key to the lock and slowly, carefully he slid it in. He hoped that Possle was as lax about security as the Contessa was. If he wasn’t, an alarm could start sounding at any second. But there was only silence, except for the sounds he was making himself, which were magnified in his ears.

  The key went all the way in with barely a sound, but what sound there was screamed through Urbino’s head. He twisted the key and felt the tumblers starting to turn. Then the door clicked open with the loudest possible sound. It echoed from the buildings opposite and, surely, all the way up the inner stone staircase.

  After peering into the dark hallway, he slipped in, leaving the door open. The familiar and peculiar cold of the building invaded his body. The house rose silently around him. He took his pencil flashlight from his pocket and moved toward the closed door beside the stairway. The iron knob felt as if it was made of ice. He turned it and the door opened inward. He stepped inside.

  Urbino was going on the assumption that Armando didn’t spend his nights in the room, but on one of the upper floors. A quick survey proved him correct.

  He switched on his flashlight and played it around the room. It was small, but furnished with the essentials. A worn divan stood against the opposite wall. A large pillow and blanket thrown on it indicated that it served as a bed on occasion. A pitcher and a wash basin were evidence of whatever ablutions Armando might indulge in during the time he spent in the room.

  A low table in front of the divan held a messy scattering of magazines. Most of them seemed to be women’s magazines. On the top of the pile was an oblong of paper not much larger than a postcard. It seemed to be a color photograph of someone.

  Urbino picked it up.

  It was a clipping from a magazine. The flashlight revealed the Contessa in her Fortuny dress. From the background Urbino recognized the occasion. It had been taken when the two of them had attended a chamber concert at the Palazzo Labia in January. In the original photograph Urbino had stood next to her but someone had scissored his image out and had circled the Contessa’s dress in red ink.

  Despite the bone-chilling cold, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  He returned the clipping to the pile. If he looked through it, he believed he might find more clippings of the Contessa, perhaps even one of her wearing a snakeskin belt. But he couldn’t stay any longer. He shut off the flashlight and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  He threw an apprehensive glance in the direction of the staircase. Its dark shadows were impenetrable.

  He went back out into the night, carefully pulling the heavy door closed behind him, and relocking it. He slid out the key and thrust it into his pocket. He retreated up the alley past Elvira Carelli’s building. Every step he took, one after another, resounded as if to compensate for their former stillness and to accuse him. It was time to return home. He had learned enough for one night. And he had risked far too much.

  When he entered the sottoportico that ran alongside the narrow canal with the two bridges, footsteps sounded behind him. They were quiet and cautious, but persistent. They stopped when he did.

  He looked down the length of the dark, covered passageway. It was possible that, given the city’s deceptive tricks of stone and water, the footsteps had come from ahead of him, from a calle on the other si
de of the canal or one of the alleys opening into the covered passageway.

  But Urbino couldn’t easily shake the feeling that someone was pursuing him and had halted when he had.

  To test this, he started to walk farther into the passageway. The footsteps sounded again. He was almost at exactly the same spot he had been a month ago on the night he had also heard footsteps and the laughter and sobs.

  His nerves were on edge because of his second violation of the Ca’ Pozza’s secrets. Could Armando have been on the staircase and be pursuing him now? Or perhaps it was the person or persons who had attacked Demetrio Emo. In either case, he didn’t want to be a victim.

  He had to make a quick decision. Should he continue through the passageway and over the crooked bridge or turn around and take the other bridge? He decided on the latter. Even though he would be moving in the direction that the footsteps seemed to be coming from, he might confuse the person and gain an advantage. And he would more quickly reach a large open space where there was a fair chance of there being other people.

  Urbino turned around abruptly and rushed across the slick stones to the beginning of the passageway. His own rapid steps echoing in the sottoportico made it impossible for him to hear any other sounds. He slid once and felt himself losing his balance. He steadied himself by grabbing the crumbling stone of a building. He barely prevented himself from tumbling into the canal.

  Urbino threw a quick look up the calle that led to the Ca’ Pozza and Elvira’s building. A tall figure stood pressed against the wall of a building about twenty feet away.

  Urbino dashed over the bridge and into the calle on its opposite side. It was better lit than the area he had just abandoned. He rushed to the end of the calle and turned right over another bridge. In a few moments he was in the Campo San Polo. He went to the church on the other side and was greeted by some men who slowly walked by.