She found photographs of Gabriella’s funeral, the service at the church of Santa Maria del Giglio, the watery procession out to San Michele. A profusion of white roses, lilies of the valley, and a flower resembling a starfish draped over her casket. Someone had decorated the gondola with angels.
Then she spotted an article dated June 10, written by Fanfarone, with blaring headlines: “Count’s Wife Murdered. Autopsy Ordered.” Its odd perspective made Gabriella sound like an appendage of Alessandro. But most of the article, all the photographs, and several side pieces had been ripped out—by whom? A few syllables on either side made Anna wish that she had brought her dictionary to unscramble the remnants. The remaining bits mentioned Gabriella’s faithful gondolier, Piero Tota, and his twin, Armando, also in the business. Fanfarone must have been attempting to smooth over gossip raging at the time.
When the church bells tolled noon, Anna felt she needed at least another hour of scouring for scraps of information. Surely Dobermans wouldn’t be patrolling the Gazzettino’s halls. What did they have to protect, yesterday’s news?
Her thoughts were scattered by the door banging against the wall.
“Chiuso,” announced a uniformed janitor, bursting into the archive room followed by a red-faced Fanfarone.
“So this was your appointment?” he asked.
“I know it looks bad, but I’m only trying to—”
“Save your excuses. You took advantage of my good nature. We are closed.”
“Please, Signor Fanfarone, I’m not harming anything, just looking at old newspapers. Isn’t the Gazzettino supposed to inform and serve the public, even a tourist, like me? You have a very important mission, focusing on your city, portraying its culture. So many people are in your debt. The other papers have regional biases and hardly cover anything here except the last flood or scandal.”
“Certo, we provide an invaluable service to all of Venice. But you should not be here.”
“I’m in a terrible spot. I desperately need to find something out. Please help me. I would really appreciate it.”
She sensed him wavering.
“Allora, Silvio, non c’è problema se la signora rimane. Lei può tornare dopo e accompagnarla fuori.” He told Silvio, the janitor, that it wouldn’t be a problem for her to remain and he should accompany her outside when she was done.
“Va beh,” the janitor said, expressing agreement.
“How much time you need?” Fanfarone asked.
“Only another hour.”
He fell silent, weighing her request. “What do you look for?” He stared at the torn-out pages in the open newspaper. In an instant, his languid gaze became furious, smoting her.
“You thief,” Fanfarone yelled, pointing to the door. “Out of here!”
The Dark Yacana
Friday, early evening
She had taken a chance, hoping that Fanfarone would come to her aid. Now Anna worried he’d report her as a snoop and liar looking into Gabriella’s death to God only knew. Maybe to anyone who would listen.
Walking off her frustration and embarrassment despite having proclaimed she was not to blame, Anna meandered to St. Mark’s and found herself in front of the Doge’s Palace, its filigreed beauty belying the strong-arm secrecy of the old republic. She recalled that in the eyes of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, the building, with its delicate pink geometry and airy design, represented the best of what had gone before, a consummation of the three greatest architectural styles: the Classical, the Islamic, and the Gothic. Did every culture’s beauty also mask dark secrets? Anna wondered.
She ducked into Calle Fiubera and wandered its byways, the little stores offering glass paperweights, brass ornaments, jeweled trinkets. Ambling toward Bacino Orseolo, she spotted Pablo browsing through an outdoor cart at Passaggio dei Libri, a quaint bookstore, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Glad you found me,” he said. “Let’s get some cicchetti. I know just the place, a bacaro around the corner.”
She welcomed the chance to quiz him at length about Sergio, hoping he wouldn’t start recounting the horrors of the Conquest as they dined.
In the dusky bar, a few wide boards were stacked against the stucco wall near the entrance, ready to be set inside the doorjamb as soon as the sirens wailed, with the hope of blocking the gushes of water topping the canal, at least for a while. Anna had seen pictures of hardy Venetians in their high boots during acqua alta, standing at bars, holding their drinks, making wakes in the water covering the tile floors as they moved about their sinking world.
Today, thankfully, the floor was dry.
“Try this,” Pablo said, handing Anna an aromatic Sagrantino from Montefalco before bringing several plates of appetizers to their petite window table. She savored the enticing sautéed scallops with grilled radicchio as Pablo deftly cut a morsel of marinated anchovy.
“You know,” he said gently, “when we first met, I saw pain in your eyes. Is it more than your husband?”
She wondered what he had heard. “I’m . . . I’m . . . just trying to get over a few things.”
“And how is your ankle?”
“Much better, thanks.”
“Dudley was concerned. Yolanda and I visit Burano tomorrow with him. Perhaps you like to come along?”
A wave of gratitude washed over her. “Thank you, but no.”
“What can be more important than seeing how others live and what they create? The farther we travel, the more we learn about ourselves.”
“I have some work to do.” The words had slipped out.
“Work? From here? What do you do from here?”
“A few phone calls back to my office today to, uh, complete a project tomorrow.” If only that were the case.
“You must visit Burano before you leave. I am intrigued by the lovely lace they make there by hand. How can something so delicate be durable? Yolanda would like a fine lace mantilla. It is much money, but I will buy her one.”
Anna knew the cost would be several thousands of dollars. How could he afford the gift on a diplomatic salary? She sipped her wine, then asked him about places to visit in Peru.
He recommended sites along the sea, in the Andes, the Amazon, and the Sacred Valley. When he was done, he gave her a dreamy look. “My people made beautiful fabrics. From the fine wool of the vicuña and, of course, the alpaca. The llama is, how you say, the poor relation—the work horse, the pack animal, the source of the coarser wool for blankets and coats. But so important was the llama that the ancients in Peru observed it in the heavens. They called her the Yacana. As a boy in Cusco, I used to gaze at her. She walks along the bright road.” He pointed upward with his elbow.
It took a moment for Anna to realize he was referring to the Milky Way.
Pablo grinned. “Ya ves, the Yacana’s bright eyes are stars. You have heard of one of them, I know. You call it Alpha Centauri.”
Anna knew Alpha Centauri almost verbatim from her old textbooks. Twenty-five trillion miles, or 4.3 light years, from Earth; the second closest star, a double star; in the constellation of Centaurus, named after the mythical Chiron, half-man, half-horse, a wise and great teacher. Pointing toward the Southern Cross constellation in the southern hemisphere, Alpha and Beta Centauri help to distinguish it from the false cross.
“She stands next to her dark suckling calf. But the calf, the little cría—to see that one is a challenge.” He must be speaking about the cloudy nebula nearby, Anna thought. “You need both: the light and the dark. One can’t live without the other. Many say—”
“Pablo, all of this is mythology,” Anna said, discounting the tale of the two llamas before recognizing her hypocrisy. Why should the Greek and Roman myths of Orion, Perseus, Cassiopeia, and countless others, forever framed as constellations in the “Western” night sky, be superior to the lowly Yacana? The human urge to name and categorize, to make the foreign, faraway stars more familiar—to people the heavens—must be a common way of trying to feel less alone in t
he infinite universe.
“Mythology and life are bound together.” Pablo put his glass down. “Margo tells me you are forty.” Anna wondered what else Margo had shared with him. “Forty is the number of wholeness,” Pablo went on, sounding like a mystical Dr. Zampone. “There are forty seques from the Temple of the Sun in all directions, forty chieftains representing all the people of the Inca Empire, forty dances at the time of Inti Raymi, our June solstice.”
“You don’t really think—”
“You know,” he tapped her arm, “for centuries we honored the sacredness of Pachamama. But now the earth is dying. How will we ride on the broad back of the black dog that will carry us across the river to our forefathers?” He studied her frown. “Sorry. One day Pablo must laugh more and change the world less. That is my challenge, to not live up to my name.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Pachacuti. My nickname. It means ‘over-turner’ of the earth. Someone who disrupts the old order and starts a new way.”
“So you lead revolts?” A smile crept across her face.
“Not enough,” he said quietly.
“I understand you have a son,” said Anna.
“Stefano,” he said, his voice brightening. “He is grown now, with his own family.”
“You must be proud. How old is he?”
“Thirty-nine and living in Manu.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the Amazon, at an outpost. He is a warrior protecting the wild—dangerous work. We couldn’t get him back.”
“Back?”
“To study medicine in Lima, later to practice in Cusco. That was my dream for him.”
Anna asked herself a question she’d never know the answer to: What hopes did my parents have for me?
“But he is a doctor in a way,” Pablo said. “He tries to heal the forest. The world is spinning like a top, out of balance and getting wobbly. Soon it will crash down on us.”
Anna knew he meant what she dreaded: the trickle that would build into a flood, submerging Venice and the low coasts everywhere, turning the wet, oxygen-giving Amazon rainforest into dry savanna. From heaven to hell in one short century. What would life be like then?
“It’s too awful to think about; let’s change the subject. Pablo, what kind of man was Sergio? I’m helping Margo research her story.”
“Why write about him?” Pablo gazed out at the alleyway as people threaded by. “He was evil. He tried to ruin me.”
“I saw a picture of you and Yolanda with him in Alessandro’s library. Yolanda was carrying a baby.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“And on my way to the bathroom during Dudley’s party,” she hesitated, “I got lost, and I . . . spotted a photo of you both in, I think, the rainforest. You were holding your son’s hand. You know the one?”
He took a sip of wine. “That, too, was a lifetime ago.” Pablo’s eyes burned. “He was dead to me long before he was murdered.”
“Do you mind my asking what happened?”
“In the seventies, I traveled with Sergio into a corner of the Amazon. I showed him all the sacred, hidden places.” Pablo touched his heart. “Where the macaws nest, where the jaguar drinks from the river at dawn, where the harpy eagle flies. The next morning, Sergio woke me, saying, ‘Come quickly.’ He brought me to the riverbank where the jaguar lay, shot by him—with the gun we had brought for our own protection—for ‘sport.’ He wanted me to help him cut off the head so he could mount it on his wall back in Venice. Instead of being seized by wonder, he was seized by the need to exterminate. I can see the animal still, the long, white whiskers twitching, the brown-and-tan coat splattered with red, the dying light in his emerald eyes, meeting mine. Some suck the earth dry, not seeing their own future mirrored in the death of what they have destroyed. Sergio boasted about how brave he had been in pulling the trigger. I was so furious, I could have strangled him. Perhaps I should have.
“I left him and made my way to the village of the surrounding tribe; I told them he had killed their jaguar god. Sergio was lucky to escape by boat down the river. I was hoping he’d fall overboard and get eaten by a caiman. But he survived. After that, we had no more contact. Many years later, working in Peru, I made a terrible mistake, yet it was covered by the Italian newspapers as if it was a scandal happening in Rome. I know it was Sergio—Sergio using his influence to turn almost everyone I had known here against me.”
If true, yet another reminder of how despicable Sergio could be, Anna thought. The story of a falling out with a dear old friend was sounding familiar. Pablo knew his way around knives and scalpels, and, after years in the rainforest, how to handle a machete. But why would he kill Sergio now if the rupture with him was decades old? There had to be more.
“Did he get along with Yolanda?” Anna asked. “How many years ago did—”
“No más. I have said enough.”
Deflated, Anna felt like a failed reporter whose life depended on getting answers from people without revealing her desperation. After their goodbyes, she mulled over the message Pablo had for her: the brutality of man, the ruination of the earth, mysterious stories from an ancient, faraway world.
As the sun waned and the darkening world closed in, she wished she had time to explore the Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi, a native red-headed priest who wrote concertos, had taught violin back in the eighteenth century. Nonno had loved his music. But she hurried back to the pensione, anxious to return before sunset.
“Ecco,” the clerk said when Anna pulled open the lobby door, putting his paperback aside and handing her the room key. Anna recognized the name printed on the yellowing book: Il Prete Bugiardo. Dudley, it seems, had also written about lying priests.
In her room, a large glass vase, jammed with red roses, was balanced on the nightstand. Could they be from Roberto? She wasn’t sure if she hoped so or not. But, for some reason, Jack had sent them. Wasn’t she ever far enough away to be free of him?
Red Dawn
Saturday, morning
Anna awoke at six, unable to sleep, worrying about when Biondi would come for her again.
Margo wasn’t expecting her at the palazzo for several hours. If I’m going to prison for a crime I didn’t commit, she thought, I might as well enjoy my last hours of freedom. Resolving to capture Venice’s fragile beauty, to have some record of her time here, no matter how it ended, Anna bolted from bed, washed and dressed, and grabbed her camera. Once she dashed down the stairs, she tossed her heavy room key onto the empty counter before heading for the door.
Jogging past the vegetable barge, she recognized the two workmen she had met while searching for Gabriella’s diary. She inquired if they knew an old gondolier by the name of Armando Tota. A good friend, the senior one replied. Soon he would be starting work as usual, at the gondola station opposite the hotel and Harry’s Bar.
She crossed the Accademia Bridge to snap the palazzo-lined banks of the Grand Canal before catching the Number One vaporetto as it motored toward the bacino. The cherry orb of the sun shone onto Fortune’s globe atop the Dogana when she pressed the shutter. The patterns of the Doge’s Palace grew rosy in the gentle light. Anna disembarked and took shots of San Giorgio Maggiore, the basilica, and the campanile. In the deserted piazza, she could hear the shushing sound of a street sweeper’s broom, the coos of unseen pigeons, and faint voices rising and falling against the peaceful walls.
After walking along the Riva to the Arsenale, with its proud stone lions, Anna found an outdoor caffè, not far from the Metropole Hotel, where she pondered her next move. She puzzled over what she might gain from Tota about his dead brother. More than a cup of bitterness, she hoped.
Her mind was flooded with warring waves of determination and anxiety as she wondered why she was being followed and attacked. Had she witnessed something at the Belvedere that she did not understand or even recall? Or was it the killer’s response to her search for clues?
Servizio Gondole, with its
barbershop poles and green fencing, was just a few steps from Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal’s picturesque veranda. Blue-covered gondolas rocked in the waves as a young gondolier was tying up his boat. “Where can I find Armando Tota?” she asked in Italian.
“Who wants to know?”
She told him her name, and he disappeared into a shed. A wizened man with tanned, age-spotted skin warily emerged, leaned against the railing, and began speaking in Venetian dialect. When he realized his singsong words were unintelligible to her, he switched to Italian.
Anna said she was helping a friend write about the Gondola Murders for an American newspaper, and they wanted to find out the truth. What did he think was important for her to know?
“American?” His amber eyes lit up. “I have relatives—cousins—in San Francisco.”
“That’s where I’m from.”
“I tell you something then.” He clasped his hands together in supplication. “They tried to make him into a monster, and he was not.”
“Who?”
“Piero, my twin. We grew up in Burano. He’d look just like me now. Handsome, no?” He passed one calloused hand along the side of his head, ruffling a gray carpet of hair. “They claimed he was being paid off by the count to stay away from her—took lots of lire but didn’t leave her alone. Absolutely not. He loved Gabriella. He would have been with her even with no money. They tried to get him kicked out of La Categoria, the gondolier guild. But gondoliers stick together. If the count couldn’t have her, he made sure nobody could. So he had her killed.”
Venetian Blood Page 22
