The leaden clanging of buoys and the bleat of a solitary foghorn were carried on the sharp wind blowing in from the lagoon and assaulting the weather vane statue of Fortune on the Customhouse Building. He pulled his cape more securely around him.
He gazed out at the stretch of dark water, punctuated here and there by boat and buoy lights and gave himself up to his thoughts.
He no longer had any doubt that Nina Crivelli had been murdered, and that it had been done in a way that had blinded the authorities. The circumstance of the pills was a confusing—but crucial—element in the picture. Regina Bella had taken it upon herself to see that Nina was supplied with them. But Nina hadn’t been in Regina’s company all, or even most of the time. Certainly far less than Salvatore. He should have been the one to look after his mother, but it appeared that he had neither the desire, considering his resentment, nor the ability, given his frequent bouts of drunkenness.
By answering some questions about the pills, Urbino might be closer to knowing what had happened to Nina, and who had killed her. They were one of the many holes that he needed to incorporate into his design.
Why were none found on her body? Had she taken any before the attack? When had Regina most recently checked on Nina’s supply of pills? And who else knew about them, other than Regina and Salvatore and Dottore Rubbini?
Carolina Bruni knew, he reminded himself. And this probably meant that it must have been common knowledge among Nina’s acquaintances.
Urbino also considered the lace handkerchief in relationship to the pills. The handkerchief had been pressed against her mouth when the Contessa had discovered her body. Could Nina have kept a supply of pills tied up in her handkerchief, as Urbino remembered one of the nuns in his high school used to do?
From the pills, Urbino passed on to Salvatore and his wife and child. After suffering from his mother’s emotional abuse over the years, Salvatore had lost what he treasured most because of her. And then he had gone on living in the same house with her, day after day, obliged to listen to her complaints, gossip, and protestations of a love that must have become hateful to him.
It wasn’t a pleasant thing to contemplate, let alone endure.
Casting one last look out at the dark waters of the lagoon, Urbino abandoned the Punta della Dogana for the Zattere embankment with its aloof villas and the former salt warehouses, where art exhibitions were mounted during Biennale years.
Through the mist he tried to make out the lights of the Ca’ Borelli on the Giudecca across the way. He had no reason to accuse Oriana Borelli of anything more than having had her head turned by Giorgio’s handsome looks. But he did suspect Giorgio, more and more now. It was possible that he had cleverly contrived to meet Oriana down in Capri because of her closeness to the Contessa.
And what had his cap been doing in Il Piccolo Nettuno’s kitchen? That it might not have been Giorgio’s cap would be too much of a coincidence.
Had he stopped by to see Regina or Salvatore? If so, had it been an amiable visit? What business might he have with them? The possibility that he might have wanted to see Nella was a bit far-fetched, unless he had become accustomed to getting a quick meal in the kitchen whenever he took the Contessa to Burano.
Then there was also Giorgio’s barely perceptible limp to consider. It endowed him with a romantic aura, especially because he was otherwise so obviously healthy. It also made him more difficult to confuse with a man of similar appearance. Was this the reason he seemed to try to conceal it, or was it vanity?
Urbino kept pulling and drawing on his thread, snipping it here and there. It was slow, patient work, but he had done it many times before with success. His thread was fine, and it was white, as white as the background he was working it into, as white as the fog on the night Nina Crivelli had been murdered.
Urbino entered the Fondamenta Ca’ Bala, and continued in the direction of the Grand Canal to the Campiello de Ca’ Barbaro, which he had crossed the other night. Here he encountered one of the few other people he had seen so far on his walk. The young man was walking a muzzled cocker spaniel, and greeted Urbino with a nod as he passed.
Urbino made a detour that had him going back toward the Salute, until he took a turning that brought him down a narrow calle to the edge of the Grand Canal. Above him were the windows of the palazzo where a friend of Henry James had thrown herself to her death over a hundred years ago, perhaps in unrequited love for the cool Master.
Whenever he was in this part of Dorsoduro, he usually came here out of a mild compulsion. He liked to stand where the woman had met her death, partly as a reminder of a tragic event with such reverberations in the life and work of a favorite writer and partly for reasons he had never tried to figure out, and didn’t want to.
He looked across the Grand Canal to the illuminated Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, with its pointed arches and Gothic balconies. Like the building he was standing beside, this palazzo had its own associations with love and death, for legend had sentimentally identified it as the House of Desdemona.
Inevitably, Urbino started thinking about dark-skinned Moors, jealousy, and handkerchiefs. Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, he responded most emotionally to Othello. It touched something close to his own fears and insecurities. Nobility in the grips of the powerful, demeaning green-eyed monster was a terrible thing to witness, and certainly a more terrible thing to experience.
He turned away from the Grand Canal. In a few minutes he came to the canal where Polidoro had his shop and residence. When Urbino noted that, unlike the other night, a second-story window was unshuttered and lit, he had a sudden desire to speak with the art dealer. The shop was closed.
He rang the brass bell. When there was no answer, he rang again. He wouldn’t have been so persistent at this hour if the light weren’t on. When there was still no answer, he backed a few feet away and looked up at the window.
One of the curtains darkened as if someone had approached it. The shadow went away. A few moments later the light was extinguished.
Urbino didn’t ring again. Several minutes later he jumped on a departing vaporetto headed toward the Cannaregio.
It was almost midnight when he got back to the Palazzo Uccello. Habib hadn’t returned yet.
22
“How does this sound to you?” Urbino asked the Contessa the next morning before his rendezvous with Frieda. They were in the sun-washed morning room of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
“I’m afraid to hear it.” The Contessa lifted her cup of caffèlatte. She was seated across from him in a matching armchair covered in Fortuny fabric. “The expression on your face is so intense, and I must say you look a bit knackered.”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep too well last night.”
Habib hadn’t returned until one-thirty. He had gone to his studio where Urbino had heard him puttering around. Urbino had eventually fallen asleep half an hour later. When he had awakened later than usual, Habib had already left.
“Are you all right, caro? Not a relapse, I hope?”
“No, I’m all right.”
“Is there anything the matter with Habib?”
“Why do you ask?”
She shrugged and took a sip of coffee.
“I’m just concerned. So what is it you’re so eager to pour into my ears before I’m barely awake?”
“It’s about Giorgio.”
“Indeed? What exactly?”
“Just listen. Don’t say anything until I’m finished.”
He told her about Salvatore’s son Gino, who had been born with a slight clubfoot and who would be twenty-eight years old now. Giorgio, he pointed out, was about that age and had an obvious limp no matter how he tried to conceal it. He also had the kind of good looks that the child Gino might have grown up to possess. Giorgio had joined the Contessa’s staff in a rather suspicious manner. It was possible that Oriana’s infatuation had played into his hands in some way. Urbino also expressed his doubts about Giorgio’s former employer, Signor Mazza, who h
ad been so helpful and forthcoming in Capri. Now, no trace of him could be found, it seemed.
“Not long after Giorgio appears on the scene,” he continued, avoiding looking at the Contessa, “things start to become strange. Nina Crivelli begins to follow you around. She accosts you in Santa Maria Formosa. She tries to get money out of you. Is it blackmail, extortion, or some clever swindle that takes advantage of your love for Alvise and your concern for his reputation? Or is it something else that we haven’t even thought of? She also tries to enlist my help once I return. Then, on the night of Frieda’s party, she ends up dead. According to the medical examiner, it’s from natural causes, but it could be from something very different. There’s all that business about the pills. And there are ways that a death can appear to be natural, but be very much the opposite. Sometimes even an autopsy doesn’t get at the truth, and of course there was none done here.”
He took a sip of mineral water before going on.
“Then, on that same night of Nina’s death, Habib and Frieda can’t find Giorgio. They come across a motorboat they think is yours but Giorgio is nowhere to be seen. A little while later he suddenly appears, and my rescue is under way. Could Giorgio have been the figure I saw in the fog, who approached me and then turned away?”
“You yourself have said you’re not even sure if you saw anything! And Giorgio is not required to be with the boat every single moment. And it’s the dead of winter!”
He didn’t allow any of these comments to deflect him.
“Then, when I’m on Burano yesterday, I see what must be his cap lying on the counter of the restaurant kitchen. By the time I get back to the boat, his cap is on his head. And there’s a smile on his face that seems to be more of a smirk.
“He had enough time to retrieve the cap and return to the boat before I got there. I had no clear view of the Via Galuppi from where I was in the restaurant, and no view at all of the calle that runs to the courtyard. He could have slipped into the kitchen by the back door, gone down the calle to the street, and then to the boat. Why is he hanging around the restaurant? Could Giorgio be Gino, come back for no good reason? For a very bad one, in fact? To punish his grandmother Nina Crivelli, who was responsible for all the troubles his mother and father suffered? Nina somehow recognized him after all these years and was going to tell you, if you gave her enough money. Then something goes very wrong, and he kills her!”
Having spelled it all out for the Contessa, he had to admit to himself that it sounded far-fetched. Yet his experience with other cases had shown him how bizarre human behavior could be, and how an almost incredible combination of chance and design could deliver a victim into the hands of a murderer.
“All the blind lace makers in Burano couldn’t have stitched together a sorrier piece of material!” the Contessa burst out.
“Full of holes but no design?” he asked, mocking his thoughts of the night before.
“What? Well, yes, exactly! Maybe we should ask Oriana if she’s ever been intimate enough with him to see an appendicitis scar! And as if his having one or not would prove anything either! I can think of a dozen inconsistencies. Why is he still hanging around the restaurant if he killed Nina? Don’t give me any nonsense about a criminal revisiting the scene of his crime! And where is Salvatore in all this? Did he recognize Giorgio too?”
“Salvatore might very well have played a twisted and malicious role either alone, or in collusion with Giorgio. He—”
“And there’s something else,” she broke in. “Why would it have been worth a pretty penny to me to have Nina reveal that Giorgio was Gino?”
“Not worth anything to know that an employee in close contact with you, one with a great responsibility, had secured his job under false pretenses? That you were harboring an impostor here at the Ca’ da Capo?”
As he said this, however, Urbino realized that it wasn’t at all quite good enough as an explanation.
“Not worth what she probably wanted!” the Contessa shot back.
“I’m not saying she was thinking clearly, not if she recognized Giorgio for who he really was,” he went on, with less and less conviction. “She would have known his return threatened her with the loss of what she needed most, Salvatore.”
“I still don’t see it. She would have dealt with him herself. Caro, caro, you’re building a house of cards.” She shook her head slowly. “It would make more sense if Giorgio had been killed, and you were arguing that Nina was the murderer! You have to rethink it. If you had told me everything you learned from Carolina Bruni right away instead of brooding over it the way you do over things, you wouldn’t have lost yourself in such a maze! Giorgio’s cap, for example! Maybe he did leave it there! So what? He might have become friendly with Nella during my visits to Burano and my meals at the restaurant. She probably had him dine royally for nothing while he was waiting for me. Or the cap could belong to any number of men. Giorgio’s not the only man in Venice to wear a white cap.”
Urbino started to pace around the room. He went to the fin de siècle Viennese piano and played a few notes at random. He knew the Contessa was right to be skeptical. So much in his scenario was incredible—mainly, of course, that Nina could have hoped to get money from the Contessa for revealing that Giorgio was Gino.
“I know you’re worried about me,” the Contessa said, breaking into his thoughts. “The way I’m so vulnerable here at the Ca’ da Capo. I suppose I bear some of the responsibility for planting these suspicions about Giorgio in your mind. No sooner had you returned than I was complaining about all the changes here. But, as you know, you can set your mind at ease about Giorgio stalking me through the building with a monkey wrench at odd hours of the night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?” She held his gaze for a few moments, and then looked away. “As of yesterday evening, he’s not living here anymore. He moved into that empty ground-floor apartment in my building in the Calle Convertite. I’m seeing that he gets a phone immediately so that he can be here quickly if I need him when he’s off duty. To be honest with you, I can’t blame him for wanting to be on his own. A good-looking young man like that needs more privacy than he was getting here, although I never interfered. I assumed Habib would have told you. He was here last night helping Giorgio move things to his new apartment. They did it quite late.”
The Contessa was now looking intently at him. His own eyes went to the mantel clock. To his surprise, he saw that it would be impossible to be in the Piazza San Marco at eleven unless he rushed.
“I have to be going. I’m meeting Frieda at Quadri’s.”
He threw on his cape.
“All I’m asking you to do,” he said, “is to think about what I’ve said.”
“And you, caro, should think about what I’ve said.”
23
Urbino arrived at Caffè Quadri at five minutes past eleven.
Frieda, in a suit of jade and plum, was seated at a table beneath a large oval mirror. Her blunt-cut hair, uncovered by one of her scarves, showed a lot of gray. Circles ringed her eyes.
“I was ready to leave.”
“Leave? I’m not worth waiting more than five minutes for?”
“Five minutes? You’re more than an hour late!”
“Didn’t you say eleven?”
“Ten.”
Urbino didn’t press the matter.
“I’m sorry. May I sit down? I won’t delay you much longer. Would you like something?”
“I’ve already had a coffee.”
Urbino ordered a Campari soda.
The room, with only two other tables occupied, was filled with light. Compared to Florian’s across the Piazza, Quadri’s had an open and airy feel with its trim little lamps, floral stucco patterns, cream and light-green walls, and blue-green tiled floor. It wasn’t as popular as Florian’s, and never had been. The Austrians, during their occupation of the city, had favored it, whereas the Venetians had shown their solidarity by frequenting
Florian’s.
Urbino handed Frieda the cassette box of Tristan und Isolde.
“I see that I failed to convert Burano’s resident diva.”
“You tried. It mustn’t be easy being a stranger on Burano.”
“I haven’t had many problems. Being Barbara’s friend is an advantage. There is much respect for her.”
“You’ve found that to be the case?”
She gave an amused smile.
“If you were not so devoted to her, I would think that you are surprised.”
She might have meant this to be playful but it struck his ear as a bit frosty.
“You are thinking about that poor lace maker,” she said, looking at him more intently. “She was an exception.”
“Did she ever say anything against Barbara?”
“To me, no. But I have heard talk. There has been more of it since Barbara visited the lace makers who live by the church.”
“You know them?”
“My neighbor Loretta does. I heard something about Barbara requesting prayers in church for the old woman, and about establishing a scholarship many years ago and trying to get the woman to return money. I am sure it is only gossip,” she added in a dismissive tone. “Barbara is a kind and generous soul, yes! She is like a sister I have never had. And what she means to you is very evident.”
“How well did you know the old lace maker?”
“I met her once, or maybe it was twice. She was very nice. I asked her about lace making. Oh, she had many stories to tell. The legend of lace, all about lost sailors and mermaids. You remember? It was the story I gave you all at my party. She told me about a Dogaressa’s dress made of lace, and someone she kept calling the ‘Michelangelo of the bobbins,’ and the difference between needle lace and bobbin lace. She described stitches and threads, filo tirato and reticello, and punto in aria and controtagliato. She was more intelligent than you might think from looking at her.”
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