Murder in Venice

by Maria Luisa Minarelli

  They ordered some food and then Marco broached the subject. ‘I don’t need to remind you that the matter we are talking about is of the utmost secrecy.’

  Vannucci nodded vigorously.

  Marco continued, ‘I know that the two young patricians who were murdered recently – I’m referring to Piero Corner and Marino Barbaro – were frequent companions until a year or so back. I want you to tell me everything you’ve heard about their group and what they got up to. Did they run up debts or offend anyone?’

  ‘Yes, Your Excellency. Yesterday your servant hinted at the reason for our meeting, which does me great honour—’

  ‘Let’s get straight to the point,’ Marco interrupted.

  Vannucci set all ceremony aside, knowing it was wasted on Avogadore Pisani, and he stopped to gather his thoughts for a moment. Then he spoke in a low but clear voice, carefully weighing his words.

  ‘I had heard some talk,’ he admitted, ‘but in the past few hours I’ve been able to put together a clearer picture. Before Corner married, there were four young men in the group. There was Corner, and you know about him. His pockets were well lined – too well lined – because his mother let him have a free rein and, as head of the family, she made sure that he lacked for nothing. He gambled every evening at the Ridotto and in other casinos reserved for the nobility. Moreover, he was frequently seen in courtesans’ salons, and not only those of the first rank, since he would often be found in Calle delle Tette with the common prostitutes. I’ve even heard rumours – although I couldn’t vouch for them – that he seduced a young maid in his own household and got her pregnant. He and the group would go drinking in the lowest drinking dens and the others would often have to hold him upright as he staggered home. It’s a miracle that he wasn’t drowned in a canal, but the others never left him alone: he held the purse strings, so they had a vested interest in looking after him.’

  ‘Do you think it was an enemy taking revenge for something?’

  ‘Apparently not, because one way or another, the Corner family’s money always smoothed things out.’

  ‘But then he changed.’

  ‘After he married. His mother couldn’t bear to let him continue such a dissolute way of life so chose a bride and forced him to marry her. By some miracle, as soon as the two young people met, they fell madly in love and he became a reformed man.’

  The boy arrived just then with their food and for a while they fell silent.

  ‘And what about the others?’ Marco continued, savouring the polenta, which was accompanied by a stew of small birds. The jug of cold white wine was also very pleasant.

  Baldo was on his best behaviour, eating small mouthfuls. He was rather in awe of his table companion, as it was not every day that he ate with an avogadore. He wanted to be as thorough as possible. He knew that Pisani would remember him if his information was accurate, and being on good terms with such a high-ranking individual would undoubtedly serve him well, especially in a profession like his.

  ‘I believe you already know everything about Barbaro,’ Baldo continued. ‘A good-for-nothing who was a disgrace to his honourable family name. He made a living from petty deals, often bordering on fraud, and he amused himself at the expense of the Corner family. It was Barbaro who encouraged Corner to drink and gamble, and I’ve been told that Barbaro would get a kickback from the various locales. He used to flatter Corner by saying he was the cleverest, that the rules didn’t apply to people like him, and so on. The third one in the group was Paolo Labia.’

  The information that Zanetta had given Nani was right, Marco thought, but Vannucci was filling in the details.

  ‘Labia,’ the other man added, ‘was the most innocuous of the group. No one ever saw him take the initiative in a prank, but he eagerly followed the others. He also enjoyed himself, drinking and gambling. But no women, because he seems not to like them . . . but some of the prostitutes tell me that he didn’t turn down an opportunity to stay and watch. The Labia are a very rich family, too, but Paolo was kept on short rations, so the Corner purse paid for him as well.’

  Marco wondered what dark corners of the city he had scoured to obtain such detailed information, and in the course of just one day. ‘And the fourth member?’ he prompted.

  ‘The fourth was Biagio, Biagio Domenici, a shady sort if ever there was one. He used to come to me occasionally to sell stolen goods . . .’ Vannucci stopped, frightened that he had said too much. A worried look came into his sharp eyes.

  Pisani signalled to the padrona for another wine jug. ‘Go on, I’m not interested in your affairs,’ he encouraged Vannucci as he filled both their cups.

  ‘Well, Domenici seems to have been Barbaro’s gondolier until four years ago. Then Barbaro couldn’t afford to pay him any longer and Corner took him on, in order to keep the group together.’

  ‘And he was fired exactly a year ago, when Corner married,’ concluded Pisani.

  ‘That’s right. But I’ve discovered something odd: Biagio’s mother had a small drinking house close to the Fondaco dei Turchi, a dingy place that barely gave her enough to live off. Then last summer, six months before her son was given the sack, she bought a large, well-furnished tavern in the same neighbourhood, and no one can tell me how she paid for it.’

  ‘And where is Biagio now?’

  Vannucci drank his wine. He was relaxed now, almost smiling. ‘Apparently he lives there with his mother and spends most of the time gambling. The place attracts shady types – Turks, Albanians, passing sailors – but Biagio has certainly found his niche because, given its location, the place is always full, even if it’s not very clean.’

  Here was the Turkish lead again, Marco thought as he sat in the gondola on his way to the Arsenale. There was still time to pay a visit to Alvise Cappello before he was due to meet Chiara; perhaps his friend might have discovered something about the papers they had found at the barnabotto’s place.

  As for Lucietta Segati, the maidservant who had been seduced and – if the rumours were true – had had a child, the only way to find out what had happened to her was to go and look for her on the mainland, in her home village.

  CHAPTER 11

  Alvise Cappello was waiting for Marco in his office at the shipyard. He stood up as the avogadore walked in and went towards him. The two friends embraced.

  ‘You gave me a challenging set of riddles to solve, you know,’ Alvise laughed. His small, piercing eyes twinkled in amusement above his long nose. Laid out on the table were the documents that Pisani had found in Barbaro’s apartment.

  ‘What’s worse,’ Marco affirmed, as he took off his cloak and walked over to the desk, ‘is that we now have two corpses. You’ll have heard about Piero Corner, who was strangled with a length of the same kind of rope found around Barbaro’s neck.’

  ‘Yes, of course I’ve heard about Corner, but not about the rope.’

  ‘The other day, while we were talking here in your office, I sent my gondolier, Nani, to the ropeworks. It seems it might be a Portuguese rope, or a Turkish one.’

  ‘Who identified it?’ Alvise asked, a note of curiosity in his voice.

  ‘A man they call the Levantino, who’s worked in the East . . .’

  ‘Of course. That’s Menico. A fine man. Now that his daughter’s departed, he sometimes sleeps here in the Arsenale so as not to go home to an empty house, poor man. But he’s extremely reliable. Tell me,’ Alvise came back to the point, ‘if this really is espionage, was Corner involved in it too? Although, presumably, he didn’t need the money.’

  ‘Who knows?’ sighed Marco. ‘But let’s see what you’ve found out. What are they?’ he asked, pointing at the drawings.

  ‘They’re nothing of importance, mostly,’ explained Alvise, putting on his glasses. ‘The anchor, the sails and the cannon barrels are models well known throughout the Mediterranean, and the drawing of a galley dates from a century ago. If your Barbaro thought he could sell this stuff to a foreign state, then he would have been disapp
ointed. Anyone with a smattering of nautical know-how would have realised that it was a fraud. I believe he obtained the papers from the Naval School, where drawings like these are used in lessons.’

  ‘Well, well. So he thought he could outwit a foreign spy. And what about the furnaces?’

  ‘The same thing. These are old casting furnaces which are going to be dismantled because they’re out of date. However, what we have here’ – he pointed to the sketch of the dredger, and his tone became much more serious – ‘is quite a different matter. I made discreet enquiries and, as I thought, this is a copy of a secret project which our architects are developing, based on an ancient design by Leonardo. As you’ll have noted, the vessel has twin hulls, which gives it greater stability, and a cogwheel mechanism winds the mooring line around an axle, allowing the machine to be pulled forward. What’s more, the shovels at the ends of the rotating arms tip the detritus into this small barge, and that means they don’t need to be cleaned all the time.’

  Marco looked thoughtful. ‘It’s a brilliant design,’ he remarked, ‘one that would be very useful to many foreign states. They all need to keep their harbours clean, especially where there are rivers that tend to make the ports silt up. But how did it get into Barbaro’s hands?’

  ‘Undoubtedly through one of the offices here in the Arsenale.’

  ‘Do you mean that Barbaro sneaked in here?’

  Cappello laughed. ‘Not necessarily. So many people come and go. Suppliers and their assistants, sailors staying in the dormitories, even the wives of some of the workers living here on Rio Tana. Someone must have found these drawings, put a few in their pocket and hastily copied the others. Then they thought they could make a bit of cash by selling them to some fine fool, or in this instance to Barbaro. And perhaps they didn’t even realise that, among the other rubbish, there was something of value.’

  ‘Or maybe it was Barbaro himself who came in unobserved and snatched what he could lay his hands on . . .’

  Alvise nodded. ‘It’s quite possible. As I told you, our workers are on guard, but there are so many ways in and out, and at night, darkness makes it easier still.’

  ‘So we’ll never know how Barbaro managed to get hold of these documents, and perhaps we’ll never even know if he realised how important the dredger project is . . . But I do hope to discover whether he got in touch with any foreign spies, and whether any of them had been shown these papers recently. Perhaps the assassin was spying for the Ottomans or for the Portuguese, and then, for some reason, he feared he’d been betrayed. Something of the kind might have happened if they’d disagreed on the price, for instance.’

  ‘Your guess is as good as anyone’s.’ Cappello walked over to the window and looked out at the old dock flanked by its covered dry docks and, further to the east, the drawbridge that opened into the galley dock. There was not much movement and the docks were almost empty. ‘I would rule out the Portuguese,’ he went on. ‘Now that the bulk of maritime trade is focused on the western routes and on the Atlantic, stretching up to the North Sea, Holland, Germany, England and Portugal have all produced innovations in ship design. It’s only the Turks who are interested in ours.’

  ‘I keep coming up against the Turks in this affair,’ Marco commented.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking: it’s not easy to question them. The Ottomans have no diplomatic representative in Venice, although Matteo Vitali is the merchant who’s officially appointed to look after their interests.’

  Marco was only half listening, absorbed by his own thoughts. He joined Alvise at the window to look at the Arsenale basins. ‘Perhaps there is a way of finding out who Barbaro was in touch with,’ he murmured, not expecting an answer. ‘If he was a customer at his friend Biagio’s tavern, there are plenty of Turks who go there, and he might have made contact with one of them. If so, someone could have seen him . . . That’s something else to ask Biagio when I pay him a visit.’ There was a moment’s silence. Then Marco continued, ‘That list of ships’ names, what’s it got to do with all this?’

  The pair came back to the desk and Alvise opened the document in question. ‘Another example of swindling,’ he began. ‘As you understood, it’s just a list of the sailing dates of commercial and passenger ships. But where the arrival date is noted, then it means that the voyage has been completed. I matched up the list with our records and it seems that the dates all refer to last year. It’s perfectly useless, and anyone who tried to sell it would make themselves a laughing stock.’

  ‘That means Barbaro was not only a cheat but he wasn’t very clever either. From what you say, it seems he misjudged the importance of the material. What he was best at was tapping his friend Corner for money. But what’s Corner got to do with spying? Why has he been killed too? It’s common knowledge that the family is extremely wealthy, and the two brothers seem to have squandered money left, right and centre.’

  The Patrono was silent for a moment as an idea started to form in his mind. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘you know that the younger brother, Dario, nearly ruined the family last year? It’s a story that we patricians here at the Arsenale know well, but we kept it quiet out of respect for the family.’

  Marco looked surprised and pulled up a chair to sit by the desk as he prepared to listen. Cappello poured out two glasses of Cyprian wine and did the same.

  ‘This Dario,’ he continued, sipping the wine while his eyes twinkled, ‘thought he could get the same sort of return on his capital as patricians did in the past when they engaged in seaborne trade.’

  ‘Well, he must have known something about it, so where exactly did he go wrong?’

  ‘A little over a year ago he acquired a major shareholding in a ship leaving for Constantinople with a cargo of valuable goods – gold damasks and silks, you know the sort of thing. They go crazy for our Venetian fabrics. Only he didn’t have enough ducats for the whole venture and so he decided to cut corners by relying on good weather rather than drawing up the usual insurance policies. Fortune was against him. In the middle of the Adriatic the ship ran into a storm and, since it was laden to the gunnels, it sank. The crew managed to survive thanks to the pilot boats, but the cargo ended at the bottom of the sea, and Dario Corner lost his entire investment, down to the last soldo. Since it came from his own share of the family wealth, he was practically ruined.’

  ‘I can see why the family wanted it hushed up. They must have done everything to protect the family name and their standing,’ Marco acknowledged. ‘Lucky for him that he’s now inherited . . . Indeed, that’s interesting; he stood to inherit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Marco hesitated for a moment, then he pulled himself together and drained his glass. ‘No, nothing. I saw him this morning when I visited the palace to pay my respects. He seemed shattered by the news.’

  As Pisani crossed Saint Mark’s Basin, heading for home, the winter sun was just setting. The sky behind the basilica was streaked with pink, as it often was on clear days, and the last golden rays bathed the domes and the bell tower.

  What a marvellous city, he thought. He had lowered the gondola cover so that he could admire the scene. As he looked, he was aware that the twilight also represented the city’s decline, yet it remained heartachingly beautiful. Its ancient palaces with their lace-like marble carvings, the peeling plaster, the sinking foundations and flooded atriums . . . how much longer could they survive? Inside the apartments, Marco knew that many of the window hangings were literally disintegrating, the wall coverings fading, and a steady stream of masterpieces were being shipped north to England. The situation was even worse in the churches. Here, the artistic treasures were neglected, the gilded plasterwork flaking and the silverware tarnished. At night, the streets were full of scurrying sewer rats. Nothing seemed to stop them flourishing.

  It seemed a thousand years ago since Venice had been a great power, but in fact only a century had passed. Now that Austria ruled the Adriatic and the new trade routes w
ere dominated by England, Holland and the Baltic countries, the Venetian ships were forced to undertake long, dangerous voyages. Commerce was at an all-time low and industry was stagnating. Venice still retained the lead in glass and silk, but for how long?

  The city still had its rich families, like the Pisanis, but they all owned land and farms on the mainland. Venice seemed to have lost its drive. How many of the young patricians were good-for-nothings like the Corner brothers? How many impoverished nobles only scraped a living, like Barbaro?

  One of the many things that concerned Marco about the decline of Venice was the fashion for private gambling dens, those small casinos, often in rented apartments, where the young – and not so young – met to play cards, dance and flirt. There must be around a hundred and twenty in the city now! By using rented premises for these receptions many nobles deluded themselves that their poverty would be disguised. They dressed in lace and silks, spending the last of their wealth and hoping to fob off the creditors, turning a blind eye to disaster while they partied their lives away.

  Those in power had run out of ideas for economic recovery and there were no signs of a rally in international trade. In a continuing spiral of gloomy thoughts, Pisani reflected that among the three hundred or so patricians in the Senate, barely twenty had a grasp of the issues debated at meetings. Having to sit through these sessions was often little more than torture.

  All the vitality and entrepreneurship in the city now came from the tradespeople, the workers and the small retailers. They profited from the luxurious tastes of the patricians and, increasingly, from the demands of foreigners who flocked all year round to the city’s festivities. What was more, there were thriving pockets of the economy in the Republic’s provincial cities on the mainland, driven by shopkeepers, professionals of various kinds and the factors who managed the large agricultural estates. On this slightly more upbeat note, Marco smiled to himself as he thought of the evening ahead and of Chiara, who was waiting for him.