“I only say it because”—Andrew sifted through the documents on the table until he found the Rossetti Letter—“because this letter doesn’t seem as if it were written in haste. Certainly not like something written by someone who was planning to leave Venice the same day.”
Claire remembered thinking something similar, when she’d read it. Her thoughts whirled: Alessandra, Antonio Perez, Bedmar, Ossuna, Silvia, the letter. She reached for the large, morocco-bound Great Council Minutes, March 1618 and turned to the entry for March 6: Alessandra Rossetti, bocca di leone Palazzo Ducale. Something clicked.
“Andrew, isn’t there another bocca di leone in the Doge’s Palace? Besides the one in the courtyard, I mean.”
“I think there’s one in the Sala della Bussola, the compass room.”
“Isn’t that right next to the Sala de Trei Capi?”
“Yes.”
Claire sat back in her chair, silent and thoughtful. She didn’t like what she suspected, or how this last piece of the puzzle changed the picture. As she told her version of events to Andrew Kent, she watched his expression become increasingly solemn.
“Yes, I see,” he said, when at last she was finished. “So you’re saying we were both wrong.”
“And both right, too,” she added.
Outside Caffè Quadri, a classical octet played American standards as Claire and Andrew slowly walked through the Piazza, heading for the Baldessaris’. Claire was going to pick up Gwen; Andrew hadn’t said precisely, but she suspected that he was meeting Gabriella there.
Along with the music, the air buzzed with the constant murmur of conversation from the crowded tables outside Caffè Quadri and Caffè Florian. The Basilica was ablaze with light, its jumble of spires and domes haloed against the night sky. Directly above them, small, sharp stars glittered.
This is my last night here, Claire thought. I can’t believe it’s almost over. “I’ve seen so little,” she said.
“Pardon?”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. She felt her face flush. “Just sorry that I have to leave tomorrow.”
“Me, too. It is amazing, isn’t it?” With a slight movement of his head he managed to indicate the Piazza and, by extension, all of Venice. “Although ‘amazing’ doesn’t really do it justice. Whenever I try to describe Venice, I always end up speaking in clichés.”
“Before I left Harriott, I’d read that Venice was ‘magical’ or ‘like a fairy tale’ so often that I had begun to believe that the Venetian Tourist Board had discovered a way to brainwash people on their way out. And then I arrived here and found myself thinking, ‘It’s magical—like a fairy tale.’”
“Perhaps they brainwash people on the way in.”
“So much for originality, anyway. But what strikes me most is how intense and alive it is—and how sad it would be if it were turned into a museum-city, as some people have suggested.”
“I agree, that would be a shame.”
They continued walking toward the west end of the square and soon left behind the light and sound of the Piazza for the small, shadowed streets of San Marco. They’d been walking along in companionable silence when Andrew suddenly said, “I believe I owe you an apology.”
Claire looked up at him, surprised. “For what?”
“The day we met at the airport. I think I may have been rather…ah…rude.”
“I hardly noticed,” she lied.
“Now you’re not only goading me, you’re lying. You were just as bad in return—all that blather about the Italian police. Hah.” Andrew sounded miffed, but he wore a crooked smile.
“Would I really have been taken away by the militia for trying to go through the EU line?” Claire asked.
“I haven’t any idea. I’ve never seen an American try to sneak through it before.”
“Oooh! And you said!”
“That’s why I’m apologizing. I know I behaved badly, but there were extenuating circumstances.”
“Such as?”
“I’d just spent two days in Amsterdam, where I was giving a seminar. When I arrived, I discovered that my luggage had gone to Athens instead, and later I found out that my hotel room was in the midst of an entire wing of vacationing Bulgarians, who apparently slept all day, since they spent the entire night crashing beer steins together and singing. Then, on the plane here, the fellow next to me broke my glasses.”
“On purpose?”
“I don’t know how it happened exactly. He must’ve got up, I fell asleep, took them off and put them on his seat without even knowing it, then he came back, and—”
“He sat on them?”
“I’m afraid so. By the time I arrived here, I’d had almost no sleep, I’d been wearing the same clothes for three days, I couldn’t see very well, and I was about to give a lecture based on a book I was writing except that I hadn’t written it because I couldn’t figure out how. So…I am sorry, but I hope you’ll understand.”
“I do understand. My trip here wasn’t all that pleasant, either.”
“I should have realized.”
“It’s okay. Your apology is accepted, as long as you’ll accept mine for that ‘horse’s ass’ remark.”
“Of course. But I must say, no one’s ever insulted me in Latin before. It was rather intriguing. Tell me, do you only curse in a dead language?”
“No, I can swear like a sailor in Greek, as well.”
“So you’re fluent in the classic languages?”
Claire shook her head. “I only know the expletives.”
“Really? How does one learn just that? Is there a book, or a CD or something?”
“No, there’s no book,” said Claire, laughing. “But it’s easy, really. Just marry a classics scholar and you can learn only those words and phrases you find truly indispensable.”
Andrew looked perplexed. “So, your…husband?…is a…?”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected him. “He’s an assistant professor of ancient history at Columbia.” And his girlfriend has an office down the hall.
“That’s a rather marginal skill, though, isn’t it, knowing how to swear in Greek and Latin?” Andrew said. “Although I suppose it could be quite useful if you’re ever in Athens—”
“Or in ancient Rome,” Claire pointed out.
“Indeed.” He paused. “What are you planning to do once you get your degree?”
“I’d like to teach. Ideally—in my wildest fantasy, I suppose—I would be a professor at Harvard.”
“Any chance of an offer?”
“Oh, no. It’s almost impossible to get a job there. It’s just that my ex was hired at Columbia, and it’s a big deal, really, very prestigious…”
“And you wanted to show him up.”
“Yes. Silly, isn’t it? I’ll probably end up at some little college in the Midwest.”
“I don’t think it’s silly at all. I’m sure you’ll be an excellent teacher. You certainly got through to your—is she your niece?—with that story about Casanova.”
“Thanks. Gwen isn’t my niece. I’m her chaperone.” Claire could see that a clarification was necessary. “Gwen’s parents needed someone to bring her to Europe for a week, and I wanted to attend this conference but couldn’t afford it, so we struck a deal.”
“Do you act as a chaperone often?”
“Isn’t it obvious that this is my first time?”
“On the contrary, you seem to be doing fine. Well, apart from allowing her to become inebriated on the plane.”
“I didn’t allow it! I fell asleep, and she wandered off.”
“Trouble, is she?”
“She’s a teenager. I think trouble is considered ‘age appropriate.’”
“I have a nine-year-old boy who’s already more than I can handle. Please don’t tell me it’s going to get worse.”
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but things get pretty complicated when adolescence hits.”
“In my experience, they’re complicated ri
ght from the start.”
“So you wouldn’t describe your son as sweet, shy, and perfectly normal?”
“Stewart? I can honestly say that he’s completely and absolutely none of those things.”
“What do you do with Stewart when you travel?” As soon as she asked the question, she realized that Andrew would know she’d been talking to Hoddy about him. How else could she know that he was a widower?
Thankfully, Andrew simply gave her a brief, inscrutable look and ignored the slight faux pas. “He stays with my parents.”
“Do you worry about him?”
“I do worry…but not about Stewart so much as about everything within a five-mile radius of him. At the moment, I’m worried about my parents…their house…their car…their dog. To quote one of his tutors, Stewart has a great capacity for mayhem.”
“Mayhem?”
“The staff at Stewart’s former school voted him ‘Most Likely to Build a Nuclear Bomb in His Own Basement.’ Of course I told them that I was careful to keep the plutonium in a very high cupboard, well out of his reach, but they suggested that we find another situation for him.”
“Your son was kicked out of elementary school?”
“Not kicked out exactly, but it was agreed that it would be better for Stewart, and for everyone else, if he were in a different learning environment. And it’s true, he’s much happier now. He’s at the university.”
“Cambridge has a school for children?”
“No, actually, he’s attending the university—Trinity College, my alma mater.”
“I thought you said he was nine.”
“He is.”
“And he’s attending Cambridge?”
“With tutors, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Well, you see, he’s, ahh, well, he’s considered advanced for his age.”
“He’s a genius.”
“Apparently so.”
“You must be very proud.”
“Yes, although since he became passionately interested in rocket science, it’s difficult to distinguish between pride and fear for one’s life.” Andrew stopped at a wrought-iron gate. “Here we are.” He opened the gate to the Baldessaris’ courtyard; they walked through it to the front door and knocked.
Andrew turned to her. “You know, what you said that night in the restaurant meant a lot to me.”
“What did I say?”
“How even the smallest stories were important, if they provided some insight into humanity.”
“You mean I wasn’t making a fool of myself?”
“Not at all. I’d been so discouraged with this book, and with my work, and I’d begun to feel that it was meaningless. You were so passionate, you reminded me of how I felt when I first started.”
“I did?”
Andrew moved closer. “I was thinking…are you going to be at my lecture tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
Just as Andrew opened his mouth to speak again, the door opened. Gabriella stood in the doorway. Her thousand-watt smile dimmed noticeably when she saw Claire. It gave her an odd feeling, as if Gabriella had interrupted an intimate moment, even though they’d been doing nothing more than standing there talking. Gabriella had that same sort of radar that Renata did, and at the moment it was set on full power and trying to detect any sign of closeness between the two of them. Of course there was nothing to detect, but Claire had a feeling that it wouldn’t matter. She knew at once that she’d managed to ensure Gabriella’s lifelong enmity, just by showing up on the doorstep with her boyfriend.
“Darling!” Gabriella said to Andrew, taking his arm as they stepped inside. “And, Carrie, what a surprise.”
“We were both at the library all day,” said Andrew, by way of explaining their combined presence at the Baldessaris’, “and Claire needed to come over to pick up her—charge—so…”
Good lord, Claire thought, he’s just making it worse. He actually sounds guilty. Maybe he could sense that radar, too, although in Claire’s experience men never seemed to notice when a woman was metaphorically hanging a big “Hands Off” sign around their necks.
“It’s the funniest thing,” he went on, “Claire happens to be working on the Spanish Conspiracy, too…”
No, he hadn’t noticed at all. Gabriella’s eyes gleamed with proprietary fervor and a smoldering animosity. Thanks very much, Andrew, Claire thought. Good thing she was leaving tomorrow and wouldn’t see either of them again; she suspected that the receiving end of Gabriella’s wrath was a very dangerous place to be.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I DON’T SEE why you’re so worried,” said Gwen as she and Claire hurried across the Piazza.
“A few years in prison is a pretty good reason to be worried.” A flock of pigeons turned in the air above them, and a flurry of argent wings glinted in the sunlight. They’d gotten a late start this morning, and the Piazza was already filling with tourists. They had only about five minutes in which to switch the diaries at the Marciana, if they were going to get to Ca’ Foscari in time for Andrew Kent’s lecture.
“Why didn’t you come over to Stefania’s yesterday and get it?”
“By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. The library was already closed—officially, anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to put it back.”
“I think a judge would understand that it was just a funny accident.”
“What did you do yesterday, study for the bar? I hate to contradict you, but I don’t think judges are swayed by ‘funny.’ Although,” Claire said, smiling slyly, “it occurs to me that if you took the fall for me, I could probably beat the rap.”
“Huh?”
“You’re a minor, so they couldn’t put you in prison. They’d probably just garnish your allowance for the next twenty or thirty years. You’d do that for me, right?”
Gwen snorted. “I beg to differ.”
Claire grabbed the handle to the Marciana’s front door and pulled, but it didn’t budge. It was locked, she discovered after a few more unsuccessful tugs. For the first time, Claire noticed a gold plaque on the wall near the door, with an engraved list of the library’s hours on it: it didn’t open until eleven on Saturdays. Claire stifled an urge to speak loudly in Greek and Latin.
“We’re going to have to come back later,” she said.
“But my diary!” Gwen protested.
“No one is going to read it,” Claire assured her. “No one is even going to touch it. But we can’t wait here for the library to open or I’ll miss the entire lecture.”
Ca’ Foscari’s grand salon was packed; every seat had been taken by the time Claire and Gwen arrived, and people stood around the periphery of the room. They found a space near the front, to the right of the stage. Not far away, Maurizio, Gabriella, and Andrew Kent stood closely together, conferring in low voices. He’d looked at Claire only once, when she’d first walked up to the front and settled against the wall, but hadn’t smiled or acknowledged her. It was probably just as well, she thought, with Gabriella standing right there. She wondered if he’d had time to pull his notes together and write his lecture, or perhaps he was confident enough to speak extemporaneously. Would he use what they’d discovered yesterday, or would he stick to the research he’d done before? She realized that she felt a bit nervous for him; there were an awful lot of people here. That the lecture was starting late only added to the general feeling of anticipation.
Claire occupied herself by looking around for Giancarlo. They’d spoken by phone the night before, after she and Gwen had gotten back to the hotel. As soon as Claire had left the Baldessaris’, she’d known that she wasn’t up for another evening out. Happily, Giancarlo had understood her desire for a quick dinner, a leisurely bath, and a long night of sleep. They had agreed to meet here, at Ca’ Foscari. She and Gwen didn’t have to leave for the airport until five, so there was plenty of time for lunch and sightseeing. She was wondering how she would explain a quick but necessary trip to t
he Marciana as Maurizio Baldessari walked onto the stage.
“Welcome everyone to Andrew Kent’s second lecture on the Spanish Conspiracy against Venice,” he said, “or, after Tuesday’s lecture, what might hereafter be known as the Venetian Conspiracy against the Spanish.” Gentle laughter rose from the audience. “He has quite a bit of material to cover, so he tells me, and has asked me in the interest of brevity to dispense with the formal introduction. So without further ado, Andrew Kent.”
Andrew stepped up to the podium and thanked the applauding audience. “On Tuesday I finished my lecture with a quote from Shaw: ‘History, sir, will tell lies, as usual,’” he began. “But of course it’s not history per se that tells lies, it’s people who tell lies. When we try to piece together the truth of an event such as the Spanish Conspiracy from four hundred years on, it’s helpful to remember that the patina of time does not make the written word any more reliable. Even more so than usually, we must not take everything we read at face value.
“Reading between the lines, finding the motivations and reasons behind the bits of printed matter we have left to us requires skills we don’t often think about as research skills, precisely, although we use them all the time to a greater or lesser degree: hunch, intuition, even imagination.
“Researching the Spanish Conspiracy has put these skills to the test, but only in the past week have they been rewarded. These latest discoveries are going to upset a few apple carts, one of which is my own. Was it a Spanish conspiracy or a Venetian conspiracy? The answer to that question is more complicated than I had thought. But as it turns out, I’m not the person most qualified to explain it.”
Andrew turned away from the microphone and looked at Claire. Along with everyone else, she waited for Andrew to continue speaking; instead, he beckoned for her to come up on stage.
Claire shook her head vigorously. Andrew looked at her quizzically, and summoned her on stage once more. The people in the audience, curious and restless, murmured and craned their necks to peer in Claire’s direction. Everyone was beginning to realize that something strange was going on. Wasn’t Andrew Kent giving this lecture?
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