Liquid Desires

by Edward Sklepowich

  Madge stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another.

  “What changed your mind?” Urbino asked gently.

  “Seeing that horrible Dalí painting! It made me realize how it must have affected her. It was like a distorted mirror of what she had gone through. It must have haunted her. She must have seen Lorenzo’s face on that naked older man’s. Who knows? Maybe she even associated her poor mother with the woman whose face is turned away! I felt her pain all over again when you showed me the painting. And the whole idea of murder kept going around and around in my mind. If Lorenzo had done such a beastly thing to her—and I never had any doubt that she was telling the truth—then what might he have done to keep her quiet once she started talking about it? What might he do to me? Or you? Would it be better to tell you or to keep quiet? I was afraid. I still am.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “But I couldn’t keep my secret any longer. I knew I had to tell you. But it doesn’t mean I’m any less afraid.”

  Madge shivered involuntarily, snuffing out the cigarette that had never touched her lips.

  “Do you know someone named Ladislao Mirko?” Urbino asked her.

  Madge appeared to think for a few moments.

  “The name is vaguely familiar. Should I know who it is?”

  “He was a friend of Flavia’s—short, thin, not particularly attractive.”

  “Very unattractive, right? Yes, I saw him with her once. They came to Asolo together one day about a month ago. I’m afraid I got her upset by what I said about him.”

  “What was that?”

  Madge seemed embarrassed.

  “It was stupid, really. I said that he looked like her D’Annunzio. I meant Gabriele D’Annunzio, you know, the homely writer who was Eleonora Duse’s lover. You remember how I told you in the Sant’Anna cemetery that Duse was Flavia’s heroine.”

  “What was Flavia’s reaction?”

  “She became very upset, as I said. I felt terrible. She said that this man was only her friend, nothing else, and that she wished people would stop thinking anything else and would also stop saying that he was ugly. What difference should that make? she asked. Needless to say, I never brought the topic up again. I shouldn’t have in the first place.”

  Madge Lennox looked at her watch and got up.

  “I should be getting back to Asolo. I don’t want to spend a night in this city. I’m going to be nervous until I get on that train.”

  Helping her with her light jacket, Urbino said that he would see her to the train station. She was clearly relieved.

  “Poor Flavia,” she said, understandably not able to let the topic go now that she had finally told Urbino the story. “She carried around a photograph of herself as a young girl. She used to take it out, look at it, and show it to me from time to time. It reminded her of when her life used to be different—before Lorenzo started to bother her.”

  Flavia had shown the photograph to Urbino and the Contessa in the salotto verde of La Muta. He remembered how sadness had permeated her voice when she had explained that the photograph had been taken a long time ago.

  “I’ll say whatever you want me to—and to whomever you want—as long as it’s the truth. Be careful! And please give my apologies to the Contessa—my apologies for not having spoken when I should have and, now, for having such a sad story to tell about her husband’s daughter.”

  13

  The telephone was ringing when Urbino returned from escorting the fearful Madge Lennox to the train station. It was the Contessa.

  “I’m at sixes and sevens, caro! Silvestro confesses.”

  “Confesses?”

  “Not to killing Flavia, you silly boy, if that’s what you’re thinking, but to taking the clippings from the scrapbook! Oh, he’s such a dear man. How you could ever think he would harm anyone even in his thoughts! He said he wanted to help me. I held his hand most of the time and Pompilia was getting so upset. You know she hardly ever makes any noise and there she was yapping away and—”

  “Barbara,” Urbino interrupted, “are you trying to avoid telling me what he said?”

  “Of course not! I’ve already told you, haven’t I? Silvestro took those things on Tuesday just as you thought, but don’t be upset with the poor little man, Urbino. I told him I forgave him. It’s to his credit that he didn’t try to conceal it.”

  But he did, Urbino thought, up until now—and what else was he still hiding? Occhipinti had given very little information to either Urbino or the Contessa without being pressed.

  “And he did it for me and Alvise, just as I thought. After Flavia died he found out where she had been staying and went there to see if he could find out anything about her. He said he thought he might be able to learn something and help you in your sleuthing. He went into Ladislao Mirko’s pensione, found the scrapbook, saw the clippings with the pictures of him, Alvise, and me, and pulled them from the scrapbook. The cleaning woman interrupted him and he left. He thought he was doing the right thing.”

  Much of Occhipinti’s story didn’t add up. How had he known where Flavia was staying and where to find the scrapbook? And although Occhipinti had told the Contessa that he had just wanted to see what he could learn about Flavia so he could pass it on to Urbino, he had done just the opposite: removed potentially important information and concealed it until now. Had he been to the Casa Trieste on another occasion, perhaps when Flavia was alive? He had been in Venice on the Thursday Flavia was killed. No, Urbino said to himself, there was more to Occhipinti’s story than this, and the Contessa was too sharp a woman not to realize it herself.

  As if to illustrate this very thing, she said, “I failed, didn’t I, caro? I let him get away with something. Oh, I realized it at the time, but I couldn’t press him. He looked so ravaged.”

  Urbino allowed the Contessa to ring off without telling her what he had learned from Madge Lennox. His reason, he convinced himself, was that he wanted to wait until he could present her with a more neatly wrapped package. He had her peace of mind at stake.

  After the Contessa’s call Urbino considered the major suspects.

  Lorenzo Brollo would seem to have had the strongest motive to murder the woman who might have been his daughter. With Flavia out of the way he no longer had to live in fear that she would reveal his sexual abuse. His world would remain closed, private, and inviolable. His sister Annabella, who had lived in the Palazzo Brollo from the time of Regina’s death, might have desired the same end and done what she could to bring it about—or she might have been driven by jealousy and resentment.

  As for Violetta Volpi, what motive might she have had to murder her niece? How much had she known about Flavia’s life behind the walls of the Palazzo Brollo? If she had discovered the truth, however, she wouldn’t have struck out against Flavia, would she, but against her brother-in-law? But the emotional life of the Brollos and of Violetta and her sister Regina was far from conventional. Urbino realized that little, if anything, about them could end up surprising him.

  Urbino’s mind now turned to Silvestro Occhipinti and to Ladislao Mirko, both of whose love and loyalty might have ended up being as twisted as that of the others. Urbino believed that a person’s virtues, whatever they were, had their shadow sides, which could be even more powerful. How dark and destructive were the shadows of Occhipinti’s devotion to Alvise and the Contessa, and of Mirko’s devotion to Flavia? And what would happen if self-interest was thrown into the picture?

  Lorenzo Brollo, Annabella Brollo, Violetta Volpi, Silvestro Occhipinti, and Ladislao Mirko—a rogues’ gallery unlike any Urbino had come across before. During the hours he tossed and turned in bed that night, he couldn’t shake the feeling that whichever one of these had murdered Flavia, the others were also, in their own dark fashion, responsible.

  Madge Lennox’s masklike face then gleamed in front of Urbino’s closed eyes as it had earlier tonight in the fog. Despite whatever truths she had told him, he couldn’t yet exclude her from his
gallery. Perhaps it was this realization, carrying with it as it did the Contessa’s benediction, that finally helped him drift off to sleep.

  14

  Early the next morning Urbino went to the cemetery island of San Michele. The new day was already stifling and the sky was as gray as it had been yesterday, but from the wind blowing damply across the water Urbino could tell that a change would come soon.

  He had little trouble finding Nicolina Ricci’s grave, with its bouquet of fresh flowers and a porcelain photograph of the dead girl. It was like a wound in the stretch of green grass at the eastern end of the cemetery island. Salamanders darted across it.

  Not far from Nicolina’s grave was a field in the process of disinterment. The requisite twelve years had passed, and the dead were now being interrupted from their brief rest to be brought to a common grave or to one of the ossuaries in the cemetery walls. Space for the dead was limited on San Michele.

  After leaving Nicolina’s grave, Urbino wandered into the Russian Orthodox section. Yet another ballet slipper was on Diaghilev’s memorial stone. Farther along the wall a bouquet of fresh red roses rested in the arms of the stone effigy of a woman named Sonia. There was no last name. Dead at twenty-two, not much younger than Flavia and—if one could judge by the recumbent statue—just as beautiful.

  And just as beautiful as Regina Brollo, whose beauty her daughter Flavia had eerily inherited. If only he could also see in the dead Flavia Alvise’s patrician nose, or Lorenzo’s musical talent, or—

  Urbino stopped himself. This was ridiculous. A person wasn’t a neat genetic pie to be sliced up. What did it really mean, for example, that he, Urbino, was half Italian, half Scotch-Irish? He looked a lot less like his own father than he did his great-uncle on his mother’s side, a man who had lived not far from Venice.

  Urbino made his way to a section of wall devoted to the Brollo dead. It wasn’t far from the crematorium, and the sickeningly sweet scent of its smoke hung on the heavy air.

  About twenty feet away he saw a man and a woman of late middle age, dressed in black and surrounded by sorrow. They were staring blankly up at the wall. The woman was sobbing, so passionate in her grief that Urbino could read into it a world of other passions, especially in her youth. The man had his arm around her waist. The woman took a black lace handkerchief from her dress and pressed it to her nose.

  The man was Lorenzo Brollo and the woman, Violetta Volpi. Brollo kept his arm around his sister-in-law as she wept unrestrainedly on his shoulder. They could let themselves go, since they didn’t think there was anyone around to see.

  Urbino halted, concealing himself behind the wall of a mausoleum, not wanting to intrude. He could have turned around and left them alone, but of course he didn’t.

  Uncomfortable but unable to look away, he observed the intimacy of their grief—an intimacy that seemed, in fact, more than that of grief. It went on for long, painful moments until the two of them withdrew as if under a dark cloud.

  Urbino stood there, still concealed behind the wall of the mausoleum. He remembered another scene, also not sought out but impossible to turn his eyes from. This was the scene behind the door he had opened during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, surprising Evangeline in the arms of her second cousin, Reid Delisle. When the shock and the pain had dimmed somewhat in the weeks that followed, what surfaced was the grim yet also sad appropriateness in Evangeline’s turning to her cousin. Reid was someone who she believed could understand her better—someone who already understood her and her family because he was the family, even if the Delisles were on her mother’s side. It had been far less a matter of sex than of the family bond. And here in Italy the family bond was even stronger. Flavia Brollo had devoted much of her short life to escaping from it—and might even have died because of it.

  Lorenzo and Violetta were now out of sight. Urbino went up to the wall of the Brollo tomb, where there were half a dozen loculi, or burial niches. A plaque, with a fresh red rose in a vase next to it, commemorated Regina Brollo. Beside it was another plaque with Flavia’s name and dates on it and a rose like the one left for Regina.

  Urbino, with the intuitive understanding that often visited him after periods of puzzlement and was usually triggered by some fortuitous contact or observation of others, was almost certain now, with no proof yet, that Mirko had been wrong about the argument at Lago di Garda. Yet he hadn’t lied about it either. Standing there in front of the Brollo tomb, after his observation of Lorenzo and Violetta during their unguarded moments of grief, Urbino went over the argument again, with the assumption this time that Flavia had been Lorenzo’s daughter and that Violetta knew it. This opened a whole new world of speculation for him.

  Lorenzo’s obviously unfeigned grief helped convince Urbino more than all Brollo’s affirmations ever could. Lorenzo was Flavia’s father, and Lorenzo had abused his own daughter. But had he also murdered her?

  If the presence of Lorenzo and Violetta at Flavia’s grave told Urbino so much, the absence of Annabella spoke its own silent volumes. Annabella wasn’t there because she didn’t want to be there. Annabella wasn’t there because she had hated Flavia just as she had hated Regina. Her hatred was like a black, smothering blanket that also covered Violetta, perhaps even Lorenzo, and probably even herself.

  Twenty minutes later from the church doorway, Urbino watched Lorenzo and Violetta get into a waiting motorboat. He then took the next vaporetto to the Fondamenta Nuove. From there he went by water taxi to the Palazzo Brollo. If he had some luck, Lorenzo and Violetta weren’t going directly back to the Palazzo Brollo.

  Urbino got out of the water taxi on the canal embankment behind the building and told the motoscafista he could go. He didn’t want Lorenzo and Violetta to come up in their own boat and find his waiting.

  Urbino went into the little square and looked up at the Brollo windows with their pots of flowers. The windows were shuttered as usual, but the house seemed less forbidding now that he knew some of its secrets. He pushed the bell. There was no answer. Footsteps approached in a calle, and Urbino waited apprehensively for someone to appear around the corner. The footsteps continued but no one appeared. A door opened and closed. Then there was silence.

  Urbino pushed the bell again. He thought he heard a click in the intercom above the brass bells.

  “Signorina Brollo? It’s Urbino Macintyre. I was wondering if I could speak with you.”

  Silence.

  Urbino rang again, but still there was no response. When a motorboat throbbed in the canal behind the Palazzo Brollo, Urbino hurried away, taking back alleys that would lead him circuitously out of the quarter.

  He called the Questura from a bar in Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, first telling Commissario Gemelli what he had learned from Madge Lennox about Lorenzo Brollo’s abuse of Flavia.

  “Even if it’s true, Macintyre, it doesn’t mean that he killed her. There’s no evidence to support that at all. In fact, there’s not even a scrap of evidence that there was foul play involved in Flavia Brollo’s death.”

  Urbino brought up again the wounds on Flavia’s head and the fact that no traces of the medication had been found in her system. He then mentioned the argument between Massimo Zuin and Flavia. Gemelli said that Zuin hadn’t come to the Questura yet with his story.

  “What about the money Zuin gave her?” Urbino asked. “She still had a lot left over even after what she gave to Tina Zuin and the Ricci family. Where is it now?”

  “Probably sweeping out to sea or washed up somewhere for some lucky people. It wasn’t in her room at the Casa Trieste.

  Urbino told him how Mirko had kept some of Flavia’s things for himself.

  “And maybe he kept the money, too?” Gemelli asked. “But we don’t know if there was any money left over. She could have given the rest of it away to some other people. She seemed to be in that kind of a mood. Spreading the wealth she no longer had any use for once she decided to kill herself. I’ll call Massimo Zuin in, though. I’ll even send someon
e up to Asolo to talk with the American actress again. But even if Lennox had told us about Brollo and his daughter the first time around, it would only have lent more weight to death by suicide. Surely you can see that, Macintyre.”

  Not inclined to concede anything, Urbino didn’t respond but instead told Gemelli about the death of Mirko’s father ten years ago and pointed out that it could be related to Flavia Brollo’s murder.

  “Flavia Brollo’s death,” Gemelli corrected him. “You seem to be riding quite a few hobbyhorses these days. The money Flavia Brollo got from Zuin, her possible sexual abuse by Brollo, and now this connection to Ladislao Mirko’s father. You’re doing more than your usual snooping and legwork, Macintyre. I’m almost inclined to be impressed—but only almost! Of course we looked into the business of Ladislao Mirko’s father! That all happened before I came here from Verona, but the police did a thorough job back then. Mirko’s father died while he was freebasing cocaine. What is it with you? Don’t go around trying to smell out a conspiracy everywhere, making connections to satisfy some perverse need for order! You’re so American, Macintyre.”

  And with this intended insult, Gemelli hung up. Urbino was left holding the phone, wondering if he should call Gemelli back and tell him about Silvestro Occhipinti’s visit to the Casa Trieste after Flavia’s death and possibly before. Loyalty to the Contessa, almost second nature to him, held him back.

  15

  Half an hour later Agata, Mirko’s cleaning woman, let Urbino into the Casa Trieste. Although it was past eleven, Mirko was still asleep. Urbino pushed aside the curtain behind the parlor and, to the right of the kitchen area, found Mirko’s small bedroom.

  It reminded Urbino of van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom at Arles. Mirko’s room contained a similar sturdy bed, washstand, and two chairs. There were several small framed pictures over the bed, one of them a color photograph of Mirko and Flavia at the wintertime Luna Park along the Riva degli Schiavoni and the other, a simple painting of the bay of Trieste, where Mirko had lived as a boy.