The death of a mother, Urbino thought. Does a child ever recover completely? He doubted it, if the ache he felt so many years after the death of his own was any good example. He still found it difficult to entertain even good memories. It filled him with guilt, because it made her seem all the more dead.
And what about Nina and Salvatore? Here was a mother not just dead, but both dead and murdered. If Habib’s guilt, at any level, was something that he found impossible to face, Salvatore’s villainy, though far from as personally tormenting, nonetheless violated a sentiment close to sacred to him.
The Contessa had touched on it several weeks ago when she had said that he often let his filial feeling get in the way of seeing things as they really were. She had been referring to his skepticism, at the time, about Nina Crivelli’s deviousness.
She had been right. It had taken him perhaps more time than it should have to acknowledge the old woman’s malevolence. Habib had registered it immediately.
And now there was the question of the son. He realized that he kept pushing away the idea that Salvatore, a son, could have killed his own mother, even such a mother as Nina Crivelli had been. Hatred and resentment could have festered over the years, only to erupt that particular night, with the proper trigger.
Even the best of sons of the best of mothers, a situation Urbino considered his own, could feel flashes of anger, even dislike, which were quickly and guiltily suppressed. But the feelings could surface all the more powerfully later, under any number of unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances.
Is this what had happened to Salvatore? If it was, then surely the circumstances were in some way linked to the murdered Giorgio and, if his intuition was correct, with the attack on Polidoro in his shop.
Giorgio’s clothes had been in disarray. His trousers had been pulled down, by Giorgio himself or someone else. Yet there had been no signs of any recent sexual contact of any kind.
What did it mean? Could this detail be related back to Salvatore? Or possibly to Gino? Although Urbino no longer believed that Giorgio had been Gino, he couldn’t completely relinquish the idea, at least some ways of looking at it.
And so Urbino returned for a few moments to fathers and sons. He reviewed what he knew about Gino. He reconsidered Salvatore’s breakdown after having lost him, his years of drinking, his meaningless life of waiting and looking, as he lived in the same house, day after day, with the cause of all his sorrows.
Urbino brought Frieda and Beatrix back into the picture, both separately and together. He kept returning to Frieda’s unsettling story, the mask of the plague doctor, and the German and Austrian nationality of the two women. He tried to work out family relationships involving Evelina Crivelli, Frieda, Beatrix, and even Giorgio, until it began to sound like the game he played with Habib about the son of someone’s mother’s niece.
He shook his head slowly. Once again, he was getting nowhere. Holes, but which kind were they?
Thoughts of the game with Habib reminded him of what the Contessa had said tonight about the game that children play. The telephone game. What came out at the end was a garbled version or even the opposite of what had been said at the beginning.
He repeated what he thought he had heard from Polidoro. Naso, nose. Cozzi, fights or conflicts. Pozzi, wells. He went back and forth through the alphabet, substituting different initial letters. Polidoro had been too weak to enunciate clearly. There were numerous possibilities, but they still made no sense.
He lifted the sleeping Serena and put her against the cushions of an armchair. He went to the library and took out a piece of paper. He wrote out the various combinations, as in yet another game.
After fifteen minutes of this, he stared at two juxtapositions: vaso and cozzi. Something clicked in his mind, and Beatrix Bauma’s face seemed to leap out at him from the shadows of the room.
He positioned the ladder against the wall where he shelved his art books. He climbed the ladder and found the one he was looking for.
It was his copy of the book on Venetian china that Beatrix had accidentally knocked to the floor of her apartment.
He brought it to the refectory table, opened it, and ran his finger down a page of the index. His finger stopped when it came to Cozzi Geminiano. He then turned to the relevant pages where he read quickly through the description of the Venetian artisan’s creations, many of which could be found in the eighteenth-century museum of the Ca’ Rezzonico on the Grand Canal.
Vases were among them.
Urbino first called the Questura. The duty officer wouldn’t put him through to Gemelli’s home number. After Urbino explained what might be at stake and where he was going, the officer assured him, in indulgent tones, that two men would be dispatched.
After ringing off, he dialed the Contessa’s number.
“I’m coming over for the keys to Giorgio’s apartment.”
“It’s past eleven! Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“I need to find something out tonight. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Not just for the keys. For me too. I’m going with you.”
23
Giorgio’s ground-floor apartment was shuttered. The apartments above were vacant and dark.
The police hadn’t yet arrived. Urbino pushed away the thought that they might not be coming at all. He realized that he wasn’t acting in a prudent way, especially considering that the Contessa was with him. His desire to know was stronger than everything else at the moment.
He unlocked the grating and slid it back, then fumbled the key into the door and opened it. A musty odor exhaled from the apartment.
“Perhaps the police have taken it,” the Contessa said.
Urbino had filled her in during their trip from the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
“They don’t have the slightest idea of its importance. It’s connected to Nina Crivelli, not Giorgio. Where’s the light switch?”
“On the left.”
“The police would have assumed it was one of your knickknacks. All I told the duty officer was that there might be something here that could settle some questions about Giorgio’s murder.”
He pressed the button. A feeble light illuminated the room. Beyond it were a small kitchen and bathroom.
Urbino placed a stool against the door to keep it open and provide more light. They surveyed the small room.
“It’s little more than a storeroom,” the Contessa said apologetically. “I was reluctant to have Giorgio use it. Well, let’s start looking, but as I told you, I didn’t see anything like it when I was here with the police.”
“Sometimes you can’t see something unless you know you’re looking for it.”
“There’s a fallacy somewhere in that philosophy.”
“I’m surprised the police didn’t ask you to go through everything to determine what was Giorgio’s. But it seems they’re being even more lax than usual with this case.”
He looked through the open door out into the night. The alley was empty for as far as he could see into it. He turned his attention back to the room.
“It’s a mess in here. Look at all these cardboard boxes. You’d think he would have thrown them out when he moved in. And the shoes!”
He pointed to a dozen pairs of brightly shined, stylish shoes, all lined up neatly.
He went over to a bookshelf. It held only a few books. Popular magazines, dirty cups, a large radio and cassette player, and a pile of cassettes took up most of the space. On the top shelf was Giorgio’s white chauffeur’s cap, protected in a transparent plastic bag. Hanging from the shelf, and also protected in plastic, was a uniform.
“I don’t see it anywhere,” the Contessa said. “Oh, what’s this?”
She picked something up and brought it over to Urbino.
“It’s a palette knife,” he said, examining it. “It must be Habib’s.”
It was new and clean. He put it down on a small table and turned his attention to the sofa. Half a dozen cushions were al
l thrown together. He started to remove them. Beneath one of them he found a maroon necktie.
“The police probably thought you were crying wolf,” the Contessa said. “Maybe it’s just as well. We do look a sight scavenging through all this stuff.”
Urbino’s eye was caught by something against the wall, shrouded with a frayed, faded blanket. He went over and removed the blanket. Beneath it were four paintings, oil on canvas, thirty-by-twenty-five inches. Three of them were of bright-colored doors. The fourth was a kaleidoscope of different-colored geometrical shapes that Urbino immediately recognized as the designs painted on the building he had shown Habib their first day on Burano.
“Habib’s paintings,” he said in a low voice.
But in the silence and in the small room it was loud enough for the Contessa to hear.
She was kneeling beside a small wooden chest that stood to one side of the open door.
“I didn’t see them when I was here.”
She lifted the chest lid and started to look through it as Urbino went to a cluttered table.
“Nothing in here except moldy old maps and guidebooks,” the Contessa said after a few minutes. “I think I’ll look in the kitchen. Maybe it’s among all the dishes and cups like the letter in that Edgar Allan Poe—”
“Here we go!”
Urbino held up a small, rose-colored vase.
“Is this one of your things?” he asked.
“I never saw it before in my life.”
“You can be sure it’s the one that Evelina forgot when she ran away.” He turned it over. There was the anchor in red, the mark of the Cozzi factory. “Nina sold it to Polidoro and—watch out, Barbara!”
But it was too late for her to get out of the way. A figure came barreling from the darkness and through the door, its head down. As it went past the Contessa, it pushed her. She fell and struck her head against the chest.
It was Salvatore. Enraged, he pounced on Urbino. The vase flew through the air and broke into pieces against the wall. He grabbed Urbino by the throat. The smell of alcohol fumes assaulted Urbino’s face.
The inebriated Salvatore was at a disadvantage. His grip on Urbino’s throat loosened enough for Urbino to pull his hands away. He threw him off balance. Salvatore fell backward over the sofa.
Urbino scrambled across the floor and grabbed one of Giorgio’s shoes. Salvatore jumped to his feet and charged at Urbino.
With all his strength Urbino slammed the shoe against the side of Salvatore’s head.
Salvatore dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Urbino rushed to the Contessa.
EPILOGUE
Woman of Venice
“Blind! Blind! Blind!” the Contessa exclaimed, but not quite loud enough for the other patrons in the Chinese salon to hear.
If they had, they would have turned their eyes away in embarrassment, for they would have assumed she was speaking about herself. Her large sunglasses, worn inside her favored chamber at Caffè Florian as if it were suffused with summer sunshine on this February afternoon, were proof of her damaged vision, weren’t they?
But Urbino knew better. The Contessa’s exclamation was directed against him. In case he might have any doubt, she went on to clarify.
“You should have seen! You should have known! If you had, I wouldn’t have this to deal with,” she reprimanded with a mischievous air of self-mocking petulance.
With a hand temporarily free of a petit four, she made a vague motion toward her sunglasses and what they rather flamboyantly concealed. Urbino hadn’t seen her black eye, but her descriptions and complaints had painted a vivid picture.
“Actually, Barbara, you look rather striking in those sunglasses,” Urbino said, playing along with her. “I’m sure Oriana would be green with envy if she could see you.” Oriana and Filippo were in Paris in the throes of yet another reconciliation. “You’ve given yourself even more of a mystique.”
The Contessa did have a special aura today. Her dress was in liquid tones of blue and green. From her neck cascaded a necklace of silver ovals that Urbino had brought her from Morocco. And her lips were touched with that faint, shimmering, airy pink that was the shade of Venice.
“Don’t try to placate me.”
He could tell she was pleased, however, from the characteristic way she ducked her head slightly and tried to suppress a smile.
“If the police had listened to me—”
“Caro, caro!” she interrupted. “If you had made them listen to you. Or better yet, if we hadn’t gone to Giorgio’s apartment at all.”
“Who knows what might have happened then? Habib could still be in prison.”
After Salvatore confessed to the murders of his mother and Giorgio, Habib had been released.
“All’s well that ends well,” the Contessa pronounced. “Except for a mutilation here and there.”
She delicately massaged her temple with two wellmanicured fingers.
“It’s so wonderful to have a free mind after all this time!” She reached out for another petit four. It had pink frosting and was crowned with a hazelnut. “I don’t know how I was able to eat through it all.”
The Contessa had almost as many excuses for her appetite for petit fours as Florian’s had petit fours to supply her with. In January, when Nina had lurked outside the Chinese salon, it had been worry. Today it was relief. Tomorrow it might be embarrassment and the day after joy. Never, however, would she admit that it was simply that she loved petit fours.
“If only my eye would clear up, I’d be completely content.”
“Don’t worry. It’s already the time of masks. Look.”
He directed her attention to the arcade where a figure in a yellow raincoat stood. On its face was a brightly colored Harlequin mask. It was holding a stick used for stirring the character’s preferred dish, polenta.
“I get no sympathy from you these days, and after all I’ve lavished on you.”
The figure in the Harlequin mask remained stationary as it stared into the Chinese salon at the two friends. It raised the stick in an obscene gesture and strode off, throwing confetti through the air.
“These days most of my sympathy goes in a different direction,” Urbino said, gazing out into the Piazza.
Pools of water had seeped up through the paving stones from the intense rains of the past few days. Raised planks provided dry passage over the deeper water in front of the Basilica.
“But I thought Habib was doing fine.”
Habib was up in Asolo at the Contessa’s summer villa. She had opened La Muta and provided just enough staff to have it run smoothly. She and Urbino had decided that what Habib needed was some fresh air away from Venice for awhile.
“He is.” Urbino brought his eyes back to the Contessa. “I’ll be going up there for a few days but we’ll be back in good time for Carnevale. I’ll do some work on Women of Venice and we’ll start making plans for his mother and sister. No, it’s not Habib I’m thinking of, but Salvatore. Despite everything, I feel sorry for him.”
“Il poverino.”
Salvatore’s story was indeed a sad one, which Urbino had been recounting to the Contessa on this gray afternoon. Much of it was pieced together from what he had learned from Corrado Scarpa, who had stopped by the Palazzo Uccello last night.
Salvatore had broken down after only an hour of interrogation. Urbino’s original—but discarded—theory that Giorgio was Gino had become Salvatore’s truth and obsession. It seemed to have been provoked by Giorgio’s age, his good looks, and his limp that Salvatore was convinced was the vestige of Gino’s childhood clubfoot. Giorgio’s sudden and mysterious appearance on the scene and his apparent haunting of Burano had also probably played their key roles.
His fantasy of being reunited with his wife and his son took desperate hold of him. If Gino had returned, then so would Evelina. She might even have come back already. What stood in his way was not logic. It was the mother who had made his whole life a misery.
H
e was determined the past wouldn’t repeat itself.
He had confronted Nina with the news that Gino had returned and soon Evelina would as well. It wasn’t clear whether or not he told her that it was Giorgio he was talking about. Nina’s reaction, however, had been what he expected. After all those years he knew her well.
Curses and warnings, and then the shortness of breath that made her grab for her lace handkerchief to push some pills into her mouth.
Except that Salvatore had removed them from the handkerchief earlier in the day.
He had watched her die, the mother who had loved him in her destructive way.
The position of the handkerchief by her mouth had not been the murderer’s sign that the gossip and blackmailer was now silenced forever. Instead, she had pushed it there in her own desperation.
When Salvatore had been asked about the Contessa, he made it clear that both he and his mother resented her wealth and privilege. Urbino, it appeared, wasn’t far behind the Contessa in having been a recipient of their bad feeling. However, Salvatore claimed to have no knowledge of his mother’s attempts to get money from the Contessa or, for that matter, from anyone else.
A great deal still remained unexplained, which had provoked Urbino and the Contessa into frequent speculation during the past few days.
The authorities had obtained copies of Salvatore’s medical records from the clinic in Naples where he had gone after Evelina ran away with Gino. He was undergoing psychiatric evaluation now. Urbino believed that in the end, however, Salvatore would be found fully responsible for his calculated deed to free himself.
“But still so many questions,” the Contessa was now saying. “You were close to making some sense of it that day with your talk about Giorgio being Gino! What did I call it? A house of cards? But when did Giorgio know about Salvatore’s wild idea? Was it before or after Nina’s death? And what did he make of her death?”
“If we can believe Salvatore’s confusion about the time sequence, he didn’t tell Giorgio until more than a week after he killed her—or, to look at it from Giorgio’s point of view, until after she died. There was no reason for Giorgio to suspect that Nina had died anything but a natural death, that is, not until Salvatore started to act more and more irrationally. Giorgio probably humored him at first. According to Regina Bella, Salvatore never gave any sign that there was any kind of familiarity between him and Giorgio. She said that they seemed to avoid each other. When he needed to, Giorgio would slip into the kitchen when Salvatore wasn’t there. As for Giorgio, he never said anything to Regina about it all.”
Deadly to the Sight Page 25