Deadly to the Sight

by Edward Sklepowich

  16

  Early the next morning Urbino went out to the shops to buy a few items to loosen one of the tongues on Burano. When he returned to the Palazzo Uccello to meet Giorgio with the boat, he found him talking with Habib.

  “Would you like Giorgio to take you to the school before we go to Burano?”

  “No, thank you, sidi. I will walk. Good-bye.”

  Giorgio maneuvered the motorboat out of the canals and headed it across the lagoon, where fog was creeping over its flat, steely-blue expanse. They made their way between the wooden poles that marked the channel through the shallow waters.

  Soon Burano appeared with its cubes of colorful houses and leaning campanile. No longer could the island beckon Urbino with its colorful stage set of apparent normality. Now it was all too real, and bristling with troubling questions whose answers threatened to disturb the surface calm of both the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini and his own Palazzo Uccello.

  He needed to proceed delicately, but he also needed to do it with an open mind and open eyes. Otherwise, his efforts might do more damage to the Contessa, himself, and, yes, perhaps even Habib, than might be done if he just left things alone.

  Giorgio brought the boat to the main landing area on the Fondamenta Squeri. He seemed more cool and professional than usual. When he touched his white cap as Urbino got out, Urbino had a sense of confusion. Had there been a touch of irony in the act, or only the man’s customary deference? He couldn’t decide.

  Urbino arranged a time to meet Giorgio at the same spot.

  “You will not need me until then?”

  “No.”

  “Very well.”

  Giorgio remained standing on the deck of the motorboat. He didn’t leave for all the time that Urbino kept him in sight, unobtrusively, he hoped, as he made a point of examining the lace goods in some of the stalls.

  17

  “You’ve brought some temptations from Marchini,” Carolina Bruni said from the sunken comfort of her sofa. On her lap slept a fluffy white cat. “‘Love me with a little love, a childlike love!’” she screeched. “Turn down the volume. Put all the goodies out. I don’t want to disturb Mimi, do I, little one?”

  She shouted some more of Ciò Ciò San’s lines from the love duet of Madama Butterfly down at the cat. Mimi stirred, then buried her head more deeply into the folds of her mistress’s bright yellow dress.

  Carolina was Natalia’s cousin. Ten years ago Urbino had helped her sort out a problem that had threatened to deprive her of her house on Burano.

  Even without Mimi on her lap, Carolina would have been reluctant to get up. This was not because of her age—for she was barely sixty and in fairly good health—but her size. She reminded Urbino of nothing so much as a Buddha, a resemblance increased by the vague oriental cast to her face and her preference for robes of rich design.

  The fact that she seldom left her house didn’t prevent her, however, from doing as good a job about gathering information as the spies of the notorious state inquisitors had once done in the sixteenth century.

  The parlor was furnished with very few pieces and was unadorned with any knickknacks, except for signed photographs of Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto, displayed on a table beside the record player. What was most striking by its absence was lace of any kind. Carolina might just as well have lived on a remote desert island in the south Pacific for any sign that her house displayed of Burano’s feminine art.

  Urbino seated himself in an armchair across from the imposing woman, who gave him a broad smile as she stroked Mimi. She was attractive, despite her size, and would have been even more attractive if she didn’t exaggerate her features, already obvious enough, by the generous application of makeup and an ink-black hair dye.

  “And my favorite drink to wash them all down with!” she exclaimed as she held up her cup of Prosecco Rose. “But there’s no need for such kindness. You swept me off my feet a long time ago. That is not so easy to do!”

  She delivered her excruciating version of an operatic laugh.

  “I’m glad you brought the bigger ones.” She dipped a pastry in her cup. “The little ones aren’t worth anything. You can hardly taste them.”

  Urbino sipped his wine. To please her, he, too, was drinking it from a cup. She held out hers for more. The rim was smudged with her lipstick.

  “No need to pretend with me! It’s about Nina Crivelli that you’ve come.”

  “It’s on the Contessa’s behalf. She’d like to do something in memory of Signora Crivelli.” He had planned to use this pretext, even though Carolina would know it for what it was. “She thought of a Mass card, and offered one to Salvatore, but—”

  “I heard all about it from Gabriela and Lidia. I’m sure Salvatore ripped it up and threw it in the trash.” She waved a pastry in the air. “Shhh! Listen!”

  It was “Un bel di vedremo.” She didn’t follow her own advice, but joined in for several moments that seemed unusually long to Urbino and apparently to Mimi, who stirred uneasily.

  “He’s not a pious man?” Urbino asked when she had finished.

  She raised her big brown eyes to the ceiling.

  “Pious! Like mother, like son! But even if she had been Santa Maria Goretti, he would have torn it to shreds after what she made him suffer through. She might have thought she loved him, but she made his life a misery just the same, even if no one ever heard him complain. Not even when he got something for himself and she destroyed it. His wife and son, I mean. She won in the end. But I’m sure the Contessa told you everything Lidia and Gabriela told her.”

  She gave him an amused look.

  “I smell something more than the Marchini pastries! But why you should be snooping around about Nina Crivelli, I don’t know! Let the dead alone, especially miserable ones like her! But she suffered for the misery she caused. Always swallowing pills. A terrible way to live, or die! I told Dottore Rubbini—he was Nina’s doctor too—that if I ever have to eat pills instead of food, he’ll have to put me out of my misery. Give me these any time!”

  The pastries were rapidly disappearing.

  “Pills, pills, and more pills. For her heart and God knows what else! Thank God for Regina Bella, or she wouldn’t have known what she was taking, or when she had to take what!”

  “Regina Bella was in charge of her medication?”

  “Did I say that?” she responded with something like anger. “She reminded her from time to time. Did you take this pill, did you take that one? Salvatore didn’t care one way or another. But Regina wasn’t always around, skipping off the way she does to Milan, Rome, God knows where. Always thinking she’s a queen, just like her name. Regina Bella. But she isn’t a queen and she isn’t beautiful, but you can’t tell her that. Always wearing the latest fashion. All the profits from that place are on her back. There’s a man behind it all, someone she slips off to see. Call it a woman’s intuition.”

  “She was kind to look after Nina when she could.”

  Carolina shrugged her big shoulders.

  “Maybe kind, maybe something else. Nobody can tell why people do half the things they do. You should know that! Years back, a woman went to her husband’s grave on San Michele every day. Most people thought she was praying for his soul, but she went to laugh and curse.”

  Carolina attacked another pastry. Urbino decided to change the direction of her information, or rather return to a topic she had mentioned earlier.

  “Salvatore couldn’t help being angry if his mother broke up his marriage.”

  “She was a wicked woman, God rest her soul. Always scheming, putting her nose in other people’s business.”

  She emitted another operatic laugh.

  “I don’t mean like you, Signor Urbino, even if you spent a fortune on Marchini pastries and Prosecco to get me to babble about Nina Crivelli! No, I see from your sweet face that you’re about to apologize. I won’t have it. How can I so easily forget your kindness which, wretched slave to my problem that I was, I welcomed in rapture
like a ray of the sun?”

  This sounded vaguely familiar to Urbino. Was it from La Traviata? Aida? Because it might herald another burst of song, judging from the deep breath the woman was now taking, he asked if she might tell him something about Salvatore and his wife.

  A wounded look came over Carolina’s face.

  “After all this time in Venice, you’re still in a rush like all the other Americans! As you wish! Listen carefully!”

  Carolina then hurried through the story of how Salvatore had met Evelina when she came to Venice from the mountains near Udine on vacation with her family. It had been an immediate attraction between the blond, German-looking Evelina and the handsome young Salvatore.

  “But she should have looked further than his face. She had no idea what life would be like on Burano, isolated, everything either lace or fish, fish or lace. And with Nina in the same house! Evelina nagged Salvatore to leave Burano, but he’s never been able to defy his mother.” She took a sip of Prosecco, smacked her lips, and added, “Well, he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore, does he?”

  “What about the son?”

  “Gino. Such a darling boy! Even when he was eight, you could tell he’d grow up to be a fine specimen of a man, even with his problem. Twenty years it’s been.”

  She sighed heavily, with a big heave of her bosom, and shook her head.

  “What do you mean about Gino’s problem?”

  “A clubfoot. Nina blamed it on Evelina’s side of the family.”

  “I agree that something like that doesn’t have to be a handicap.” He paused, wanting to choose his words carefully. “Take Giorgio, the Contessa’s new chauffeur. He has some problem, but it hasn’t held him back in his profession.”

  “He has a clubfoot?” Carolina asked.

  “I don’t know if that’s what it is. He does have a limp. Have you ever seen him?”

  “No, but I’ve been told he’s very handsome.”

  “Getting back to Evelina, what brought her to run off?”

  “No handsome man like this Giorgio, if that’s what you’re thinking! She just couldn’t take it any longer. Gino almost died one winter from appendicitis. As soon as he recovered, she took him away with just one suitcase between them. Salvatore and Nina were out. Nina threw all their things in the street afterward. All Salvatore could save was a little vase. Evelina had treasured it. It was a family heirloom, she said, but she probably picked it up in some junk shop. Salvatore kept a fresh flower in it all the time, maybe he still does. You wouldn’t think he was sentimental, but there you are. For the first year he heard from her every month or so. She never said much, and what little she said was public knowledge. It was all spelled out on postcards.”

  “Postcards?”

  “Yes! Can you imagine! She didn’t even have the decency to write a letter. Probably thought she was tempting him with pictures of Germany. And the cards all said the same thing. That Gino was well and Salvatore shouldn’t worry. Eventually they stopped. Oh, I could see the strain on him, but he hardly ever raised his voice to Nina. He went away for a few months a year after she left.”

  “Went away?”

  “Nina said he was helping some cousin in Naples but it was the first and the last time we heard a breath about any cousin down there or anywhere. My guess is that he went to some clinic to get his nerves back. Nina must have managed the whole thing.”

  “Was he better when he came back?”

  “Who knows? He’s sly. You don’t know half of what he’s thinking or feeling. He can keep a secret to the death. Nina probably thought he had forgotten about Evelina and Gino, but as far as he’s concerned, he’s as married as the day she left. He probably still expects her to return. Nina would have croaked if that had ever happened when she was alive!” Her eyes twinkled with malicious amusement. “And the thought of Gino must be a knife in the heart. I hope he’ll be happier now, but Nina’s death isn’t enough. He’d need Evelina and Gino, but that won’t happen, not in this life.”

  Urbino needed one more piece of information.

  “In what way did Nina poke her nose into other people’s business?”

  “Enjoyed hurting people by revealing their secrets. Sometimes she tried to make money from it. My friend Bettina gave her a sack of it to keep her from ruining her daughter’s reputation. About something that happened all the way in Bologna! I would have told her to scream it from the top of the church tower and then jump off!”

  “She needed money so badly?”

  “Wanted it! And wanted to make people suffer one way or another, either by forking it over or being tortured and shamed. Probably thought she was going to live forever on pure meanness and a good bank account. I figure she was storing up a pile to buy out Regina Bella.”

  “Does Regina plan to sell the restaurant?”

  “She’ll have to, the way she spends money! Nina wanted to be padrona and lord it over everyone. And it would have been security for Salvatore. No matter what he thought about her and how nasty she was, she loved him. He was the only thing she had.”

  “When did Signor Crivelli die?”

  “A long time ago. Kidney disease.”

  Urbino got up to turn the record over. As the orchestral interlude started, he asked her why there wasn’t any lace in her apartment.

  “I could never learn one stitch! It’s better not to be reminded of one’s failures.”

  They listened to the interlude. Carolina closed her eyes and hummed along in excruciating accompaniment with the chorus, stroking Mimi. When the music imitated the sound of birds, the cat’s ears perked up, but she remained sleeping.

  “Poor Butterfly!” Carolina said. “Soon she’ll be dead—all over again!”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you to face the sad occasion on your own.”

  “Will you see the German woman? She brought something for me the other day. Took me by surprise. In and out in a few minutes. I don’t want it in the house!”

  She indicated a cassette box of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde on the mantelpiece.

  “But it isn’t too much different from Madama Butterfly, is it?” Urbino asked with a smile. “Love and death.”

  Carolina didn’t look convinced.

  He slipped the cassette box into his jacket pocket.

  “One thing more,” Carolina called out when he reached the door. “Tell the Contessa that no one on Burano would have believed Nina if she had said anything against her.”

  Her brightly painted lips curved in a smile.

  “But did she?”

  “I never heard anything, and as you know, Signor Urbino, I hear everything, one way or another!”

  18

  Urbino approached the door of the Casa Verde. Before he had a chance to ring it, the Contessa’s tenant from the purple building next door called out a greeting. She was shaking out a rug from an upstairs window. She informed him that “the foreign lady” had gone out an hour before and hadn’t returned yet.

  He slowly made his way in the direction of the central square. The fog had grown thicker and was invading the scene around him. It was seeping through the drying nets and swirling around the upturned boats.

  He mulled over what he had learned from Carolina Bruni. She had been a rich source of information, especially about Salvatore’s marriage, Nina’s role in its breakup, and Salvatore’s behavior afterward. Urbino saw no reason to question most of what she had told him, at least up to a certain point. One of the tricks of both his sleuthing and his writing was figuring out what that point might be. Going beyond it could be disastrous. A whole biography, or large parts of it, could be tainted.

  As for these investigations that he had become more and more involved in over the years, the stakes were nothing less than life and death.

  Nina Crivelli was already dead. Salvatore’s wife and son had disappeared twenty years ago, and had never returned to Burano, or so it seemed. If one or both of them had died, surely some word would have reached Burano. T
he content of every postcard Evelina had sent Salvatore had been common knowledge. Yet Salvatore had his secretive side, according to Carolina. His mother’s eyes and those of Burano were ever vigilant, but they could have been deceived.

  What would Salvatore do to get his wife and child back? What might he already have done? That he might have harmed his own mother was a possibility that Urbino needed to confront, disturbing though it was to his sensibilities. But he couldn’t allow himself to be hampered by this blind spot anymore than by others he knew he had to guard himself against. Salvatore’s life with his mother, from all reports, had been a torment. If he had done something as monstrous as kill Nina, what had brought him to do it? To say that he might have snapped after all these years wasn’t enough for Urbino. There would have to have been something outside the small confines of their apartment that had triggered it.

  That there had been a trigger, Urbino was fairly certain, but Salvatore was far from being the only one it could have set off.

  By this time Urbino had reached the Piazza Galuppi. A mother and her little girl smiled at him as they walked past. Both of them had the delicate faces and masses of bright hair that Burano has long been famous for. A few moments later, the sight of two handsome men lounging against one of the buildings reminded him that the island had once had a reputation for something in addition to feminine beauty, lace, and fishing. Men, both Venetians and foreigners, had often sought their illicit assignations here. The Baron Corvo, buried on San Michele, had spent many languorous hours with his gondolier of the moment, as Frieda had drawn attention to on the night of her party.

  Urbino stepped into the Oratorio Santa Barbara. As he contemplated the huge Crucifixion scene by the young Tiepolo, he considered, with almost a sense of relief, something unrelated to his previous line of thought.