Murder in Venice

by Maria Luisa Minarelli

  ‘Look,’ said Marco, lighting the passageway with his lantern. ‘The murderer, the real one, could easily have waited for Barbaro out of sight, here.’

  ‘He would have been safe: no one comes this way in the middle of the night,’ agreed Zen, looking around. ‘The courtyard where the body was found isn’t even lit by the light from the shrine, and it was too early for people to be leaving their houses on their way to work.’

  ‘Whoever it was meant to kill him. This was no attempted robbery,’ concluded Marco. ‘The rope went around his neck and he was dragged in here before he could even defend himself properly. But there was a struggle: we know that because of the traces of blood on his dagger. The murderer must have been wounded, even if only slightly. Now, let’s go and have a look at the body.’

  Barbaro’s house was not far, on Fondamenta Rezzonico, facing Campo San Barnaba. It was a strange building, topped by a large dormer window. On the ground floor, the façade contained a second-hand clothes shop and four doorways that led to the upper storeys; a further two doorways on the side also led upstairs. In short, the building was designed so that each of the tiny apartments on the first floor had its own entrance. It was the best the Serenissima could do to preserve the dignity of the ruined nobles who lived there.

  One of the doors was half open, and through another came the monotonous sound of a woman lamenting. Marco and Daniele climbed up the dimly lit staircase, trying not to breathe in the stench of damp mixed with unpleasant smells from the kitchen. From the landing they walked into a room where the peeling walls reflected the dancing flames from a fireplace flanked by two rickety benches. A table, which was still half set for a meal, and a few chairs were the only other furnishings.

  Beyond an archway, beside a cold stove, a dishevelled old woman huddled on a mattress. Seeing the new arrivals, she stood up and dried her eyes with her apron. She was bent over with age and her face was thickly lined. ‘It’s a tragedy!’ she moaned, moving towards them. ‘And now where am I supposed to go? Were you gentlemen friends of my master? Can you do anything for an old woman like me?’

  Marco felt instinctive distaste for anyone who felt sorry for themselves and he was about to lose patience, when Zen spoke. ‘We are magistrates of the Republic here to see the body.’

  ‘It’s an honour!’ The old woman curtseyed awkwardly. ‘My master was poor, but he must truly have been important if such distinguished persons have gone out of their way on his behalf.’ Marco rolled his eyes. ‘Come, follow me.’

  They walked into the bedroom, where the shutters were tightly shut. On the bed, Marino Barbaro, his hands crossed on his chest, lay on a stained cover, lit by a single candle. His face had stiffened in a terrified grimace. He was young, not yet thirty, and very thin, almost consumptive; even in death, there was something repellent about him and this was compounded by his shoddy clothing. Immediately visible around his neck was the purple line of the rope that had throttled him.

  ‘Where’s the rope?’ Pisani asked.

  The woman threw a questioning look at him, adjusting a lock of grey hair.

  ‘The rope he was killed with,’ explained Zen. ‘The guards said that they brought it here with the body.’

  ‘Ah, that rope,’ the woman said, remembering. ‘It must be here somewhere.’ She started to fumble through the clothing that covered the only chair. ‘Here it is,’ she cried, opening a box.

  ‘How strange,’ reflected Pisani. ‘It’s rough and frayed. Perhaps it holds some clues.’ He folded it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Curses on the man who did this to him!’ The maid swore and managed to shed a couple of tears. ‘They say that the murderer has been arrested already,’ she went on in a plaintive tone. ‘But where will I end up? Who’ll take me into service at my age? My master hardly ever paid me, but at least I had a roof over my head and something to eat. Now, the only place for me is the hospice . . .’

  Ignoring her, Pisani left the room, and waited for the others to follow. Then he shut the door and turned to the old woman. ‘Now, let’s talk.’

  Daniele Zen found himself thinking that his friend would have made a magnificent Messer Grando, or head of police. That is, if he’d not been born a Pisani. One thing was certain: he was the only avogadore who didn’t think twice about going into the filthiest hovels to question witnesses.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Marco, while Zen took notes in a pocketbook.

  ‘Lucia Piumazzo, at your service, Your Excellence, and I wasn’t always as you see me now.’ A hint of pride crept into her voice as she stood up to light an oil lamp with an old flint lighter. ‘When I was young, I was in service in well-to-do households. I even worked as maid to the Mocenigo family. But you know what servants are like; the others were jealous and started to spread a rumour that I drank on the quiet, then they planted the odd piece of silver cutlery in my room, and eventually the major-domo fired me.’

  ‘I can well imagine . . .’ Pisani replied with a touch of sarcasm. He had already formed an opinion of this old woman. ‘And how did you end up with Barbaro?’

  ‘It must have been five years ago. I was sleeping on the streets, and one day I was waiting in line for a bowl of soup from the parish of San Polo when a gentleman stopped beside me. He asked me who I was and why I was begging for food . . . he must have understood that I wasn’t like the other beggars. When he heard that I’d been a maid and that I’d had the misfortune of being sacked on account of the malice of my fellow servants, he started to laugh. “Well, you’ll find nothing to steal from me,” he said, “and nothing to drink either. I need a servant and you’ll have a straw mattress in the kitchen and regular meals.” So I went with him. But now where will I go?’

  ‘We’ll talk about that later. Who was Marino Barbaro? Does he have any surviving relatives?’

  ‘No, he was completely alone. He’d been unlucky in life, just like me.’ She started to cry again. ‘Every now and again, he’d tell me that his grandparents owned land and a villa somewhere near Padua, but they lived in Venice and their factor lined his own pockets with their money. His parents died while he was still a minor, and he was brought up by the Accademia dei Nobili on the Giudecca, at the state’s expense. When he was eighteen, he left their care and they gave him this apartment.’

  A story like many others he’d heard, thought Pisani. ‘Where did his money come from?’ he enquired.

  ‘I swear before Our Lord’ – Lucia put her hands up to touch the wooden crucifix hanging around her neck – ‘that I never really knew. I think he dealt in antiques on the side: with his name, he could get himself invited into important households.’

  ‘And he pocketed the silver.’

  ‘No, I don’t know about that. What happened, I think, was that when some young friend of his wanted to sell something, a painting maybe, or a piece of china, he was the one who took it to an antiquarian. And he often worked at the Casin dei Nobili close by . . . You know the sort of thing, he was responsible for keeping the table busy.’

  ‘Was he a gambler?’ insisted Marco.

  ‘He enjoyed playing, yes, also for himself; every now and then he’d come back with a few ducats in his purse, but more often he’d be in despair, without a penny. He used to worry about having to dress well, otherwise he’d not have been allowed into the meetings of the Great Council.’

  Marco forced back a smile as he thought of the patched garments lying around in the adjacent room. ‘Did he have any women?’

  ‘Only Signora Lucrezia, who was fond of him, I think. I never heard of anyone else.’

  The old woman answered readily, and it was clear that she wanted to cooperate and gain the support of these influential visitors.

  ‘Who were his friends?’

  ‘I never saw any of them, and he certainly never brought them here.’

  ‘They were high-ranking people, then?’ Zen interjected.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. He never told me about things like that.’

  Mar
co caught Daniele’s eye. Old Lucia, just like Lucrezia, clammed up like an oyster when asked about Barbaro’s friends. There was no point going on for the moment. Pisani already had an idea about how he could get the information he needed.

  ‘Did you ever overhear an argument, perhaps down in the street, or hear gossip? Did you see anyone skulking around here? If someone killed him, they must have had a good reason.’ Pisani was trying a different tack.

  ‘Yes, once, but it was a long time ago.’ The woman screwed up her eyes in an effort to remember. ‘A man came here and asked for him. He looked like a peasant . . . he mentioned his daughter and then started shouting in the middle of the street. I shut myself in the house and he went away.’

  ‘And more recently?’

  The woman seemed to rifle through her memories, scrunching up her apron in her hands as she did so. ‘The only thing that comes to mind . . . but it’s really nothing at all,’ she said, ‘is that in the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed a large man, a Turk wearing a turban, going along Fondamenta two or three times. I only noticed him because the Fondaco dei Turchi is a long way from here, and you don’t see many of his kind around here. I even mentioned it to my master, but he didn’t seem to care.’

  ‘And now, Daniele, you know what we need to do,’ sighed Marco, getting up and pulling on his gloves.

  His friend did the same. The woman looked at them with surprise, her eyes narrowed and her chin poking forward.

  The two men went back into the dead man’s room. They opened the window on to the icy evening and started to search through his personal belongings with evident disgust. A few coins in the pockets, used handkerchiefs, grubby underclothes. The unpleasant odour now mingled with the undoubted stench emanating from the corpse. On an old table that must have served as a desk, Daniele found some papers in a box that piqued his interest.

  ‘Look, Marco. What do these notes remind you of?’

  Marco read them aloud. ‘Dogaressa, 12 April–24 September; Airone, 15 May–28 October; Sirenella, 28 March–15 October . . . And there are others. They seem to be the arrival and departure dates of sailing ships. Why did these matter to Barbaro? And how did he get hold of them?’

  At the bottom of the box, another sheaf of papers attracted their attention. One showed the cross-section of a galley, another a grappling iron or small anchor; others were sketches of different types of sail and the outline of what might have been the carriage for a cannon. There was also a sketch that was titled Old Furnaces. The last drawing seemed to have been copied in haste by an inexpert hand. It depicted a strange vessel, made up of two parallel hulls held together by a cylinder which ended in two cogs. Four rotating arms protruded from the cylinder, with drag buckets attached to the ends, while a small raft between the two hulls was clearly designed to collect whatever fell out of the buckets. The two men looked at each other.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ remarked Marco. ‘For certain, it must be some sort of dredger, but it’s different from the usual ones.’ Dredgers in Venice were used to clear waste out of the canals and to remove the sludge from the shipping channels in the port.

  ‘This is clearly espionage,’ commented Zen in a whisper. ‘The wretch . . .’ He turned quickly to glance at the body. ‘The wretch was about to sell these documents from the Arsenale to some foreign power.’

  ‘That’s certainly what it looks like. Barbaro was obviously involved in something suspicious. Perhaps we should warn the inquisitors.’

  ‘Wait,’ advised Daniele. ‘First, let’s find out how valuable this information is. We could ask at the Arsenale.’

  With the documents safely under his arm, Marco said goodbye to the old woman.

  ‘And what will become of me, Your Excellency?’ She started to cry. ‘You’re high up. You could find me a place, perhaps in a convent. At my age, who’s going to give me any work?’

  ‘We’ll think about it,’ Pisani reassured her. ‘Now close the door, and don’t let anyone in. Have you got some money for food?’ And without waiting for a reply, he placed a few coins in the woman’s hand.

  ‘May God bless you.’ Lucia curtseyed. And she tried to kiss the hand that Marco hurriedly shoved in a pocket.

  Her laments followed them down the stairs, but finally Marco and Daniele found themselves back in the clean air on the street by the canal.

  They walked for a while in silence, holding their lanterns. ‘I didn’t think of it,’ said Daniele suddenly, ‘but I could have taken my gondola.’

  ‘A little exercise doesn’t do any harm,’ replied Marco. ‘What did you make of her?’

  ‘Well, she’s not exactly a pleasant sort, but she certainly doesn’t know anything. The only thing that worries her is her own future.’

  ‘Disagreeable, yes,’ Pisani agreed. ‘But she, too, is entitled to a living. I’ll have a word with my mother, who’s involved in all sorts of charitable works, and she’ll be able to fix her up in a convent.’ They stopped on a small bridge and looked down at the dark water. ‘To be frank with you,’ he went on, ‘I find this case disturbing. The abject poverty, the dirt . . . even rats wouldn’t live there. How can a city that was once a world leader in terms of civilisation and wealth allow its citizens to be reduced to such conditions?’ He held his hand up before Daniele could reply. ‘I know what you’re going to say: there are beggars everywhere, that the dregs are marginalised in every society. But two centuries ago we didn’t have any, at least not of aristocratic birth. This is Venice, the Serenissima. Why have so many of our noble families been ruined? Why do so many old women end up in Lucia’s position? It’s like a cancer eating away at us, at the walls of the palaces, the banks of the canals. Aren’t you afraid our world is coming to an end?’

  Daniele shook his head. ‘I’d be afraid,’ he reflected, ‘if our world was the best of all possible worlds. But it’s not, Marco, it’s not. We are too attached to the past, to traditions, to passions. We get too carried away by our feelings. You see, I believe that humankind is driven by the force of reason, which alone can point us to new paths, bringing the progress that will improve our way of life, and the economic principles that will bring well-being to all . . .’

  ‘You’re a man of the Enlightenment, Daniele,’ smiled Marco. ‘Yes, I’ve read the English and French philosophers, too. They have interesting ideas, but I do wonder whether, if the French were to come here one day to spread their ideas and put them into practice, the world would be a better place, one where people wouldn’t be poor any more, where there’d be no more injustice, and where reason – French reason – would triumph? I doubt it.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Rosetta had once been a maid in the Pisani household, and she adored the avogadore because she’d raised him since he was a baby. Now she ran his house and kitchen with a firm hand and was a force to be reckoned with. However, she had no influence whatsoever over her master’s way of life, or his work, for that matter, even if she always did what she could to interfere. She also had a soft spot for his friend the lawyer Daniele Zen, and so she had personally prepared something delicious for their evening meal.

  The dining room next to the central hall on the first floor was lit by a chandelier of Murano glass and the table sparkled with crystal and silver carefully laid out on a pure white cover of Flemish cloth.

  ‘Let’s go and freshen up,’ said the host, guiding his friend to the upper floor, where the bedrooms were. Marco’s bathroom was beside his bedroom and was the source of much speculation in Venice, mainly prompted by the servants’ gossip, because the avogadore never showed it to anyone.

  Gone were the days when amber and musk were used to mask the unpleasant odour of unwashed bodies. In Venice, and across Europe, a portable tub and handbasin, together with a small table and stool for shaving, were now commonplace in many households. But even by these new and improved standards, Pisani’s bathroom was rumoured to be unusually luxurious.

  Before accepting the office of avogadore, Pisani h
ad travelled to England and France, where he had come to appreciate the latest fashionable bathroom fixtures, and he had imported them to Venice for his own use without a second thought.

  The walls of his bathroom were clad with dark walnut skirting, above which were huge mirrors. The very latest sanitaryware came from Paris, including a ceramic handbasin painted with blue flowers and a copper bathtub with taps to provide running water, which was heated by a boiler in a nearby room. Aromatic soaps, also from France, rested on the surrounding shelves and gave off a delicate scent of violets. But the most unusual object was housed in an adjacent closet: it was a toilet, complete with a flush, which drained into a cesspit that was regularly emptied.

  ‘You really are quite a character.’ Daniele smiled as he washed his hands and face in the basin. ‘You dress like a bourgeois, only wear a wig when you absolutely have to, never give a reception, and then go and spend a fortune on a bathroom.’

  ‘I was blessed by fate and being born the second son – I can do what I like!’ his friend reminded him.

  Daniele knew that Marco did not envy his older brother, Giovanni, who lived in the family palace on the Grand Canal with its freezing salons, gilded stuccowork, and ancestors’ portraits on every wall. In short, magnificent but horribly uncomfortable. The bedrooms had draughts from every corner, and at dinner the dishes always arrived cold because the kitchens were so far away. Marco’s parents had retired to one wing of the palace, and his brother was now responsible for the estates, the accounts and for managing a household of some forty servants. A thankless task. Giovanni pretended to be horrified by his younger brother’s simple lifestyle, but at times he would have given a lot to be in his position.

  ‘In any case,’ Marco went on, ‘I’m certainly not a disgrace to the family name. My position as avogadore is one of the highest in the Republic, and at least I take my duties seriously.’