“Artists come from many countries. Germany? Holland? Where?”
“Don’t waste your time,” the bearded man said in Italian. “She’s a crazy Albanian.”
The woman started to cry, then she ran over to the quayside.
“Sidi, she will jump in!” Habib cried out as he and Jerome gaped at the unfolding scene. “She will drown!”
But the woman took off her shoes and started to dip them in the waters of the canal. She rubbed at them vigorously with her hand.
“Why are you doing that, signora?” the older officer asked. “Stop.”
She put her shoes back on, and then scooped up water to splash against her pants.
“Why are you doing that?” the carabiniere repeated.
“Don’t ask her,” Urbino said, surprised at the sharpness of his tone. More softly he added, “There’s no explanation. Can’t you see that she’s ill?”
The hostile climate against refugees and immigrants had become worse during the period Urbino had been out of the country. The newspapers were full of reports of how smuggling gangs were victimizing them and how many ended up dead or, at the least, discarded on Italy’s shores and borders like human refuse. Perhaps this was part of this unfortunate woman’s story.
“Look. She was very beautiful,” the younger officer said. He held out a sheet of proofs to Urbino. “It was in her purse.” All of the photographs were of the woman when she had been younger. She had indeed been beautiful. The officer pointed to one of the photographs. “Look. Pazza!”
In this photograph the Albanian woman held a pistol, with the barrel between her lips. There were other photographs of her with the pistol in various positions against her face.
“You have to take her to the hospital,” Urbino said. “And call the Albanian embassy.”
“Bah! The Albanian embassy,” the older officer said in disgust. “They never help.”
“You must.”
During the past few moments Giorgio had approached to see what the commotion was about. When she saw his handsome face peering at her, she got up and started to come in his direction.
“He will to help me!” she screamed. “Yes! Yes!”
Giorgio looked startled and went back to the boat. The younger officer restrained the woman.
“We’ll take her back to our post,” he said to Urbino.
“Yes, and she’ll be treated like a princess by the government,” someone in the crowd said. “Just put her in a rowboat and push it off into the lagoon. Let her find her own way back.”
“Sidi, you must help the poor woman!”
Although Urbino didn’t think that Habib had understood everything that had been said so quickly in Italian, he was sure that he had caught its essence.
“She probably gave all her money to get here,” Habib added.
His voice seemed full of the wisdom and sympathy of someone who could all too easily imagine himself in the Albanian woman’s position.
Habib’s response was an additional spur to Urbino’s own solicitude.
“Don’t worry, Habib. They’ll help her,” Urbino said, with more conviction than he felt. He knelt down by the woman. “Do you have any money?”
As soon as he asked it, he knew it was a silly question. He took out his wallet, and gave her most of what was in it. He wished he had more. She snatched the notes from his hand.
As Urbino was getting up, he caught the expression of disappointment clouding Habib’s face before he averted it.
In the motorboat, no one was in the mood to indulge in light conversation, and the cabin fell into silence. As the Contessa was walking toward them from the direction of the Pinacoteca Manfrediana, Urbino said to the two younger men, “There was nothing more that I could do.”
Jerome nodded. Habib didn’t disagree, but an aggrieved look was planted on his face for the rest of the day.
14
Frieda Hensel was the kind of hostess who seemed determined that her guests were going to enjoy any party she gave, even if it killed them. And the Contessa was her prime victim this evening.
The Contessa, whose troubled mind had received no alleviation since the other evening, had a dazed expression as she received the blows of the German woman’s hospitality. Nonetheless, she managed to stand unbowed next to a large terrestrial globe, elegant in her silver-green dress.
“I could never repay you, Barbara,” Frieda said.
Her protruding, half-closed eyes gave her face a meditative look that softened the effect of her blunt haircut. Tonight she had foresworn one of her trademark colorful scarves, but had compensated with an orange tunic over a vivid blue blouse.
Marlene Dietrich’s throaty voice infiltrated the small room from a player in the corner. Out of consideration for the different nationalities represented in the room, Frieda had chosen one of Dietrich’s recordings in German, English, and French.
“Another sausage, Barbara?” Frieda urged as Dietrich started to sing “Blumen Sin.” In her eagerness to cater to the Contessa, she had almost pulled the tray away from Silvia, who was helping out this evening. “I made them for you, special. What a happy day when we met in Gstaad! From the snow-covered Palace Hotel to this indescribably delightful doll’s house!”
And indescribably crowded, Urbino thought, as he looked around the tiny parlor with all its furniture. Everyone was positioned like statues, including Silvia, who, instead of circulating with her tray, was standing in the middle of the room and extending it in different directions with mechanical movements. The only exception to the rigidly posed guests was Oriana, who had sunk regally into the depths of a sofa.
As new guests arrived, they obliged the others to move more deeply into the room. Conversation was sometimes carried on across a sofa or chair back, through the fringes of a lampshade, or above the petals and fronds of the flowers overwhelming their vases.
Habib, to his distress, had become separated from Urbino almost as soon as they had arrived. He was pushed up in an opposite corner against a large armoire that Urbino recognized as having once graced the entrance hall of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. Beside him was the gnome-like Marino Polidoro, an art-gallery owner. Habib kept throwing pleading glances from his expressive dark eyes in Urbino’s direction. Urbino could see no way to liberate him, short of climbing over the furniture and squeezing around the other guests. At any rate, Polidoro was a good person for the young artist to be stranded with on their small island of worn carpet.
“Yes, I owe so much to our Barbara!” Frieda was saying yet again as she thrust the plate in front of Urbino. “I would never have known you, Urbino, and not your charming Palazzo Uccello. What happy hours there! So happy! I wished many, many times that you wouldn’t come back. Don’t misunderstand me, Barbara. I love your little green house. Now it is mine! Mein klein grünhaus! It has made me a hausfrau for the first time. Every morning I scrub off my stoop, on my hands and knees, yes!”
“You must not overdo it, Frieda dear,” sang out Oriana. “The Buranelli are very sensitive. Your neighbors might think you’re making fun of them with all your Teutonic energy. They don’t care for outsiders. Isn’t that true, Regina?”
“Everyone loves Frieda,” Regina Bella said.
Her face was somewhat drawn tonight. The green shade of her well-cut dress made her look sallow even while it did the best for her full figure.
“But if anything is stolen, you can be sure she’ll be the first to be blamed,” Oriana said.
She drank down the rest of her champagne as if it were water and dangled her hand over the back of the sofa.
“We have very little crime on Burano,” Bella said. She snuffed out her cigarette in the Murano ashtray with more force than was necessary. “Where would someone run away to?” She gave a nervous little laugh. “From time to time a rape, but they catch the person right away.”
“I remember a murder and suicide some years ago,” Oriana prodded.
Bella glared at her.
“A sad affair. A wo
man killed her mother over some dispute about a granddaughter. Then she killed herself. But she was part Sardinian.”
“Yes!” Oriana exclaimed, pushing her oblong glasses further up her nose. “You see how Regina tells us that the murderer was not a Buranella! Probably the murderer’s great-great-greatgrandfather came from Sardinia back in the days of Garibaldi, and no one ever forgot it.”
“Excuse me,” Bella said. “I’d like to speak with Marino Polidoro.”
“Hold your breath, my dear, and squeeze through,” Oriana said.
Bella frowned as she moved away.
“Was this local murder one of your detective affairs, Urbino?” Frieda asked. “Barbara told me about your brave adventures.”
“Bravery has very little to do with them.”
“Urbino is driven by curiosity and goodwill,” the Contessa clarified.
“But many times it is brave to be curious, yes? And good will can be the exact opposite for the criminal. You had something to do with the Sardinian woman?”
“Not at all. As Regina said, it was a sad affair that was only too obvious in its tragedy.”
“You are not interested in the obvious?”
“What happened needed no further explanation, even if I had been so inclined.”
“And of course you need to give your main efforts to your books. I understand that.”
“You are a writer like Frieda?” asked a plain woman in her late fifties. From Urbino’s angle it seemed as if her head, with its round face and green hat, was held aloft by a mass of white roses bursting from a brass vase.
“We are in good company,” said her companion. She was about ten years younger and of considerably more height, so that she barely had to lift her noble-looking head to be seen—and to see—above a small, carved screen.
They were Marie Celine and Beatrix Bauma, who lived in Vienna and were wintering in Venice. Beatrix was an unemployed art teacher, and Marie was a milliner.
Urbino explained that, unlike Frieda, he wasn’t a fiction writer. A little smile curved the thin lips of the German woman.
“He writes the most beautiful and inspiring biographies,” Rebecca Mondador, an architect, said. She was an attractive woman with large eyes in a pale pointed face. “About Venezia, la serenissima!”
“I adore biographies,” little Marie said. “I just finished one about Colette.”
“Oh, our Urbino doesn’t write biographies like that.” Oriana’s voice rose up from the sofa. In her hand was a replenished glass of champagne. “No sex and sensation. His are much more cerebral.”
“All the more credit to him!” Marino Polidoro called out from his corner. “He leaves sex for the others.”
Urbino was becoming increasingly embarrassed. The Contessa was still standing rather stiffly and silently beside the globe like an overdressed schoolmistress who had forgotten her geography lesson. No, there would be no help from her quarter, flashed through Urbino’s mind. She was too abstracted by her own problems.
He took a sip of his champagne. Although it was of excellent quality, it didn’t agree with him this evening. He put his glass down on a small table.
“Biographies of Venice?” Beatrix asked with a puzzled expression on her strong, haughty face. “What does that mean?”
“Yes, what are they?” chimed in Marie. “My English is better than hers—you know it is, Beatrix!—and I don’t understand you.”
“I write biographies about people associated with Venice.”
“Associated with Venice for good or for bad?” asked Marie. “You must be clear, especially for Beatrix.”
“For both good and bad, and sometimes at the same time!” Frieda said. “I read all your books when I was at the Palazzo Uccello. Wagner and Mann are my favorites!”
“That isn’t surprising,” Marie said with a little sniff. “And what are you writing now? Perhaps something about Venice and the French?”
“It’s about Venice and women. There will be a chapter on George Sand.”
“Oh! I hope you are writing about Rosalba Carriera,” Beatrix said.
“I am.”
“She is a very charming painter! And it would be interesting to write about Burano in your book, do you not think? It is like a woman, very feminine, with all the lace.”
She glanced at the Contessa as if to acknowledge the striking example of femininity she made this evening in her shimmering dress.
“Feminine, Beatrix, yes, but also masculine with the fishermen,” put in Frieda, with the plate of sausages still in her hand. “We cannot forget the men. Very traditional. One sex, one work, yes. No female fishermen, and no male lace makers!”
“Not yet,” Beatrix said. “But perhaps someday.”
“When everyone has forgotten how to make lace and there are no more fish in the sea!” Polidoro said with a laugh.
“But what about the history of Burano, Marino?” Frieda said, putting down the plate. “History repeats itself. I’ve been reading about Burano in one of the books I bought at a shop in Dorsoduro. It wasn’t always so strict and conventional. Men came here from Venice for their—their”—she searched for the word—“their affairs with both of the two sexes! Far from the eyes of Venice.”
“You’re thinking about the Barone Corvo and his gondoliers,” Polidoro said with evident distaste. “But you are correct. Burano had that reputation in the old days.”
“Are you planning to write something about Burano?” Urbino asked Frieda. “It must be a great temptation. I would be interested in reading it.”
“Someday, perhaps. But now I’m working on something that will interest you even more.”
Her eyes flickered in the direction of Habib, who still stood beside Polidoro.
Urbino had read two of her books out of curiosity when the Contessa had written him about his new tenant. One, Der Zauberkünstler, had been in the original German, and the other, Open Sesame, in English. Both were collections of stories, many of them only a few pages long and one of them barely of novella length.
His less than perfect German had been able to provide him with an adequate enough sense of the untranslated volume whose tales did seem the work of a conjurer, as the title stated. Also, if he could judge by these two works—Frieda had written five others—she retold folktales and legends from a satiric—at times, even sadistic—perspective.
The blurb on Open Sesame had said, “Hensel is a necromancer who transforms the familiar into the fearful, and creates a lot of fun in the process.”
Although Urbino found the familiar often fearful enough, he had enjoyed most of the tales, especially the more cynical ones.
“What I’m struck by in your stories,” he said to Frieda, “is how much they show your hatred of lies.”
She gave him a surprised look.
“Do you disapprove? Although I don’t know you well, your own books tell me that you yourself don’t hate lies.”
“My, my!” cried out Polidoro. “Urbino is very honest and sincere. Does he not unmask the liars and unveil the complete truth? In his books and in his inspections?”
“Please, Marino”—and Frieda held up her hand as if to fend off any further defenses of Urbino on the part of the gallery owner—“you misunderstand. That is not what I meant.”
Before she might explain exactly what it was that she did mean, the Contessa roused herself from her abstraction to try to set things straight.
“Urbino believes that some lies are benevolent. Without them, so much, too much,” she corrected herself, “would come crashing down.” She looked a bit sadly and even fearfully around the room as if to assess the damage that might be done in its small, crowded perimeters by some unthinking truth telling. “There can be a high brutality in good intentions. I wish the thought was original to me, but I read it somewhere a long time ago. That’s the way Urbino feels about stripping away some of the lies we all need.” She gave him a weak smile. “But he can defend himself.”
There was a silence. The Conte
ssa’s little speech seemed to have impressed itself on the gathering all the more because of her relative muteness since her arrival.
When conversation started up again, it did so suddenly and with an almost desperate air, as if everyone was making an effort to seem at ease. Words, phrases, and sentences were tossed through the heavy air from different corners of the parlor, negotiating their way above and around all the objects much more easily than the furniture-locked speakers.
“What a pleasant evening,” Rebecca said.
“Your champagne, Urbino!” Frieda said. “Drink it all down in celebration of health and good company! My little party is not as grand as Barbara’s ball will be, but we must do our best, yes!”
“I wonder if the fog has lifted,” was Beatrix’s offering as she looked in the direction of one of the closed windows.
“Just a little more,” entreated Oriana to no one in particular as she held out her empty glass.
“Is there a draft?” Marie asked.
“A current of air carries to the grave,” Polidoro intoned.
“I hope no one minds my cigarette,” Regina Bella said from her cramped position between a little table and Silvia’s elbow.
All the while, Dietrich sang, “Falling in love again what am I to do can’t help it,” as Oriana, her eyes closed now, moved her head slowly back and forth to the words.
15
“Are you all right, Urbino?” Rebecca Mondador asked. “You look flushed.”
“I’m all right, I think.” Urbino had been feeling rather warm, and even a little dizzy, during the past ten minutes. “How can I tell? It’s hot in here, don’t you think? The Casa Verde wasn’t made for so many people. Not in one room, anyway. And I can’t say that I appreciate the cigarette smoke.”
He turned his head in Regina Bella’s direction. She was puffing away at another cigarette near the door. Their eyes caught briefly, and she looked away.
Rebecca gave Urbino a concerned look but didn’t press him on the point. Instead she asked about the repairs on the Palazzo Uccello. He brought her up to date. Rebecca had been the first professional he had consulted about the damages when he had returned. Their friendship went back to the time of the Palazzo Uccello’s original renovations when she had been starting her career.
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