The Last Gondola

by Edward Sklepowich

  He looked back across the wide square. No one emerged from the alley he had just deserted. He continued to look in its direction for several minutes.

  Even this far away from the Ca’ Pozza, he felt it exerting its influence. Nothing was what it seemed in the old building. Of this he was sure.

  Urbino was a rational person. Any explanation, if he ever found one, would surely be logical and it would probably be rooted in the past. Whatever bleeding portraits there might be in the Ca’ Pozza, figuratively speaking of course, would be explained as reasonably as the mystery of the severed head and the disembodied laughter and cries.

  Encouraged by these thoughts and by the clipping that he had just discovered of the Contessa in her Fortuny dress, disturbing though it was in its implications, Urbino quit the square and started for home, alert for any unusual sound.

  68

  Half an hour later, when Urbino was crossing the bridge in front of the Palazzo Uccello, a shadow detached itself from the building near the water steps. Urbino was brought up short. But then he recognized that it was Gildo, capless and dressed in dark clothing, and he advanced.

  Gildo’s face, covered with a thin film of sweat, gleamed under the bulb affixed to the side of the Palazzo Uccello. He was breathing heavily. He ran a hand through his hair.

  “Is something the matter, Gildo?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I couldn’t either.”

  Gildo made a nervous gesture of looking at his wristwatch.

  “Are you going for a walk?” Urbino asked. “Or perhaps you just came back from one. I took one myself.”

  Gildo stared at Urbino with an appeal in his green eyes. “Be careful, signore,” he said. “It isn’t safe to walk around in the city in the middle of the night.”

  “I try to be careful. I know the city well, just as well as you do.”

  “Perhaps, signore, but you shouldn’t even go near that bad house. Not at night. It’s dangerous.”

  “How do you know I’ve been to San Polo?”

  Gildo looked away. “I guessed.”

  “Where you there tonight?”

  “No!” His denial echoed across the narrow canal.

  “Are you on your way in or out?” Urbino asked.

  “I’m going in now, signore. I—I just came out for a few minutes, but now I think it’s best to try to get to sleep. Good night.”

  He returned to his apartment through his separate entrance by the water steps before Urbino might ask him anything else.

  69

  The Contessa, all liquid fingers and rapt expression, was giving Urbino just what he needed the next week in the concert room of the conservatory.

  Under the spell of her grace and spontaneity, he felt bathed in order and harmony as she approached the end of the allegro assai of Mozart’s F major sonata. The fatigue and headache after his almost sleepless night receded.

  Today the Contessa was allowing her talent at the piano to speak for her, and her only words were the briefest of introductions before each piece. Whereas Urbino’s presence at her lectures would have risked tying her tongue, it now was only freedom and inspiration for her fingers.

  Hardly had the final cadences of the movement started to fade away than the applause broke out. Urbino and Rebecca, who was sitting next to him, joined in with the others. They were a small group, though more obviously select than embarrassingly spare.

  Lino Cipri, but not his wife, was there. Urbino hoped that she had recovered from the shock of his visit. Before the Contessa began her next piece, Urbino caught Cipri looking at him and Rebecca. Urbino returned a smile and gave his attention to the Contessa, who was beginning to say a few words about the Chopin ballade she was about to play.

  It was one of Urbino’s favorite pieces, and he often asked the Contessa to play it for him when they were alone together. He closed his eyes now as he listened to it, feeling himself healing with almost every note. He was disappointed on her behalf when the audience received it warmly but less enthusiastically than the Mozart.

  The final piece on the program was I Quattro Rusteghi by Wolf-Ferrari. It was a particularly appropriate piece, not only since Wolf-Ferrari had once been the conservatory director, but also for more personal reasons.

  The barcarolle intermezzo, which captures in its notes the movement of a gondola, had drawn the Conte’s attention to her when he had heard her practicing it at the conservatory many years ago. It had been the beginning of their long and happy relationship.

  Before playing the piece, she related this anecdote in a shy and touching manner and dedicated her rendition to the Conte. It had a sympathetic effect on the audience. Cipri had a pleasant smile on his smooth, pink face.

  Urbino had heard the Contessa play I Quattro Rusteghi many times, and always with passion and sensitivity, but this afternoon she outdid herself. Her interpretation was pure genius. The audience was spellbound.

  When she came to the end to thunderous applause, the Contessa exchanged a quick, brilliant glance with Urbino. He smiled back and cried out “Brava!” It was soon echoed around him.

  The Contessa got a standing ovation.

  After embracing the Contessa with two kisses on each cheek, Urbino left her to enjoy the praise of the group gathered around her. He would wait for her outside for their celebratory circuit of the city in the gondola. Rebecca had to dash off to an appointment.

  As Urbino left the concert room, he looked around for Cipri. He had already left. Urbino went out to the courtyard to the statue of the veiled lady. Cipri was nowhere in sight.

  Standing by the statue of the Veiled Lady, the euphoria induced by the Contessa’s performance started to ebb as the statue inevitably reminded him of the figure in his dream of fire.

  “How fortunate that no one has ever discovered her identity,” the Contessa had said to him here in the courtyard before her first conversazione. “Don’t you ever try to unveil her! Give your efforts to your Samuel Possle and my disappearing wardrobe.”

  It had seemed to make good sense at the time, before he had learned what he had since then. Now, as he waited for the Contessa by the mysterious statue, he wasn’t so sure.

  Different worlds and separate problems were starting to converge, or they seemed to be in his still confused perceptions. At his elbow was the ghost of Adriana Abdon, singing her heart out beside this same statue as the Contessa took her lessons in one of the rooms above.

  Ghosts here at the conservatory and ghosts, in one form or another, behind the walls of the Ca’ Pozza.

  And even the dream of the fire, in the light of day, now seemed to be the ghost of something that had already happened or a premonition of what was about to.

  70

  For the first fifteen minutes of their gondola ride, as the black barque slipped down the Grand Canal and then into the labyrinth of smaller waterways, it was as if Urbino and the Contessa were floating to their own private barcarolle. The air was warm, and the light, that had been rosy in the morning, was now turning the stones golden and burnishing the metal work of the gondola. Companionable and pregnant silence was their only conversation as they drifted between the sea and sky in the closed cabin, sipping the Prosecco that Gildo had kept chilled for them. The Contessa had a relaxed expression on her attractive face as she absently contemplated the scene.

  For his part, Urbino was pursuing the train of thought that had begun as he had waited for the Contessa by the statue of the veiled lady.

  The gondola was now passing behind the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where the Tintorettos kept all their glory and mystery.

  The Contessa turned away from the external scene and looked at Urbino. “You’re obviously holding yourself back, caro,” she said. “It’s been in your face, your voice, your every gesture.”

  Urbino nodded. Between his illness and her preparations for the last conversazione, he hadn’t told her anything that had happened since the morning of his trip to San Lazzaro degli Armeni more than a week a
go.

  His next rendezvous with Possle was in four days, on Monday. He would be expecting an answer to his offer. If the Contessa didn’t come with Urbino, it would probably be his last visit.

  “I’m all yours again, and I’m all ears,” the Contessa prompted.

  As they drank the Prosecco, Urbino told her in a lowered voice everything that she didn’t already know, everything, that is, except about his second violation of the Ca’ Pozza and what he had found in Armando’s little room. He would save these for a little later.

  The cabin, closed like a confessional, and the slow movement and cradlelike rocking of the gondola were conducive to his detailed account.

  The Contessa allowed him to give it without any interruption, although he was in little doubt of her reactions throughout from her facial expressions and the pressure, sometimes firm, sometimes gentle, with which she held his hand or touched his arm.

  When he finished, he looked through the shutters as the gondola passed under first one bridge, then another. The Contessa broke her silence with considerable force.

  “If your fellow American thinks I’m going to give him a lira or a pence for something that he stole and might even have murdered for, he can go right back where he came from!”

  “My fellow American? It sounds as if you’re blaming me.”

  “Not blaming you, but you have encouraged him. If you had given your attentions only to my poor lost clothes! You should get these Byron poems out of your mind completely, at least insofar as they might have anything to do with me! And don’t give me that little boy wounded look, either, because you had another look on your face a few seconds ago. It was disappointment!”

  The Contessa was right. Although Urbino didn’t want her to get involved in what was undoubtedly a suspicious and perhaps even dangerous situation, his heart sank at the prospect of losing the poems completely. Perhaps there was some other way. Perhaps she—

  “Forget about the poems, I tell you,” she interrupted his reverie. “I know how important they’d be to you, especially now that you’ve been adrift in your work for a while. But stay away from them, with or without my help! Be content with your usual rewards. There’s a mystery here of some kind. Solve it and walk away with no spoils except the intellectual ones!”

  “Good advice, Barbara. But there might be a way to get the poems without paying any price,” he added, “after we figure out whatever has been going on at the Ca’ Pozza, and still might be.”

  “You’re determined, aren’t you?” She shook her head in concern and disapproval. “You mean Elvira, because of her fear of the building?”

  “Elvira, yes, and maybe Hilda Cipri, too.”

  “What you’re saying is that you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Didn’t I tell you when we were standing by the veiled lady and thinking about her mystery, that it was impossible? If you solve her mystery, you’ll lose a perpetual source of fascination. And if and when you solve the mystery of the dark and brooding Ca’ Pozza, you’ll surely lose the poems forever.”

  “You think so?”

  “And so do you! I can tell from the tone of your voice, not to mention the look on your face that you yourself can’t see! You’ll find out that those poems have blood on them in one way or another; and even if they don’t, they’re most probably not Possle’s free and clear. If I buy anything, even for you, I need to be sure that the seller really owns it to begin with. And what would it mean if you became associated with something like that? Is that what you want? A form of fame that’s not much different from notoriety? You’ll bear some moral burden, and don’t think you won’t.”

  Urbino made no response. In any case, the Contessa was far from finished.

  “So find some way to put back the key you stole—yes, stole!” she went on, doing all she could to keep her voice down. “Find some way to put it back where it belongs and throw the copy into the Canalazzo. I’ll do it for you. What do they call it? Incriminating evidence?”

  It was now that he told her how he had put the key to use late last night and how he had discovered the clipping of her in her Fortuny dress.

  The Contessa merely stared for a few moments, and then said, “But I don’t understand. What does it mean?”

  “It’s what I’ve been trying to sort out.”

  “Perhaps Elvira gave Armando that clipping and other ones,” the Contessa ventured. “Unless…”

  She trailed off.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless Armando was giving them to her. But why, caro? Why in either case?”

  “I don’t know. And we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that those are the only two possibilities. Have you checked to see if you’re missing one of your snakeskin belts?”

  “They all seem to be there. But I didn’t do as thorough a search as I could have. Now that I’m finished with my conversazioni, I’ll go through everything again very carefully, if only to know what we’ll have to get back from Elvira. You still do think she has everything, don’t you?”

  “Be sure that you have all your snakeskin belts. And what about your Fortuny dress?”

  “Of course I have my Fortuny! I just saw it in the closet this morning. But you’re not answering my question.”

  “Because I can’t answer it without having some doubt in my own mind, one way or another. Maybe with a few more pieces of information and after reconsidering what we already know, things will be different.”

  “I hope so. But really, caro! Whatever have you been thinking of with these late-night forays? Be careful! Someone was following you last night, you say. Well, maybe it was Gildo looking out for you,” she said, lowering her voice even more. “Maybe it was a mugger and maybe not! Maybe it was Armando, who wants to discourage your snooping! Maybe Possle himself. For all we know, Possle might be as spry as you are, and Armando could sing the role of Figaro without taking a breath!”

  Despite her exaggeration, much of what the Contessa was saying was true. And yet if she came to the Ca’ Pozza with him, she might be able to do something with Possle that he couldn’t. He feared that he was coming close to losing much of his treasured objectivity when it came to Possle. The Contessa might be able to prevail upon Possle to be more honest about the poems, to tell the whole story about them. It was a wild shot.

  “In case you have any doubts remaining,” the Contessa said, showing that she still hadn’t finished, “I have no intention of compromising either of us for those poems. And I’ll be pleased to tell your Samuel Possle the way I feel in person!”

  Urbino turned toward her.

  “So you’ll come? Not to make him an offer—”

  “But not to say that I won’t either, is that what you’re thinking?” she broke in, throwing him a defiant look before glancing out. “For a clever person you’re transparent. But our discussion might be moot, caro. Considering Possle’s seizure, or whatever it was, he might not be in a position to hear anything from you or me on April Fool’s Day or any other day. Yes, Possle could—”

  The Contessa stopped speaking. Her eyes were looking at an upward angle. He followed the direction of her gaze. Up above them was the Ca’ Pozza. The old building loomed against the dusky sky as they drifted past its unused water entrance. No light showed behind any of the windows. Most of them were shuttered, except for a small square one on the attic story.

  Urbino had not said anything to Gildo about avoiding the Ca’ Pozza. Given the gondolier’s warnings to Urbino, however, he wondered why the young man had taken a route that passed by it. But hadn’t Gildo also expressed, albeit indirectly, a wish that Urbino might get to the bottom of whatever role, if any, the Ca’ Pozza had played in Marco’s death? The young man might very well be as conflicted as Urbino was himself.

  “No sooner does one speak of the devil, or rather the devil’s house,” the Contessa amended, “than it appears. Gildo!” she called out. “Draw up by the embankment, please.”

  “What are you doing?” Urbino asked her in a hoarse
whisper.

  “I’m getting out and I’m going to ring the bell. What your Samuel Possle needs is a little bit of spontaneity!”

  Gildo had hardly brought the gondola to the water steps beside the bridge than the Contessa, with Urbino’s help and under Gildo’s silent, nervous stare, was stepping onto the embankment.

  She went up to the large grim door of the building and pushed the bell. She waited, then pushed it again. When there was still no response, she stepped away from the building and looked at its upper stories.

  Urbino did, too. The building looked back.

  “Did you see that?” she called down to Urbino.

  “See what?”

  “I can swear there was someone at the attic window. It was just a flash.”

  She came back to the gondola. She was shivering. When she had seated herself again in the felze, Urbino arranged a blanket around her shoulders, another around her knees. Her face was pale.

  “Are you all right, Barbara?”

  “Did you see anything?” she asked in a weak voice.

  “No. Did you?”

  “No,” she said after a few moments.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but I’d like to go home. I feel tired—tired and old.”

  As Gildo pushed and then rowed the gondola away from the Ca’ Pozza, the Contessa continued to look back at the building until it passed from view.

  71

  When they reached the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, Vitale informed the Contessa that the Conte’s cousin Clementina had suffered a relapse and that her daughter would appreciate it if the Contessa could come as soon as possible. She made arrangements for Pasquale to have the Bentley ready to take her to Bologna early the next morning.

  “I’m going upstairs,” she told Urbino. “I’ll just have Silvia bring me something to eat. But stay as long as you want. They can fix you dinner. I want to get a good night’s rest before I leave tomorrow.”

  She avoided his eyes and hurried upstairs.