Urbino had to pass by the broad stairway to get to the other wing of bedrooms where the Contessa’s suite was. Here were the rooms of the Borellis, Gemma, Mamma Zeno, and Bambina. All were dark except Bambina’s, near the head of the stairway.
No sooner did he give a muffled knock on the Contessa’s door than she opened it and practically pulled him into the room. She wore a blue dressing gown and patterned Moroccan slippers.
“It’s gone! My peacock brooch!”
“Gone? What do you mean?”
“Gone! Taken! Stolen! Please keep your voice down!” she said loudly. In fact she had been almost shouting ever since he came into the room. “Look.”
She brought him over to the jewel cabinet. The drawer held a glittering assortment of jewelry and little boxes. The peacock brooch wasn’t among them.
“It was with the other pieces. I took it out of its box before dinner. I was going to wear it and then remembered the bad blood between the Da Capo-Zendrini and Zeno families about it. No point in flaunting it, so I put it back. But not in its box,” she added, anticipating his question. “I just laid it on the top of the other things. It was taken sometime between when I came down for drinks and when I returned after the bridge game.”
“Why didn’t you lock the cabinet?”
“This isn’t a hotel!” she shot back at him. “I never imagined there was a thief in the house!”
“But who?”
“I refuse to speculate! And I don’t want anything said about this. It’s embarrassing.”
“But don’t you want to retrieve it, if possible?”
“How? By calling in the police? By locking everyone in the library and frisking them? Isn’t that what it’s called? And then we can search their rooms. No, let it be! At any rate, it’s insured,” she said, but he knew it was more for his benefit than because she was concerned about the monetary aspect.
“But whoever took the brooch might take something else. Shouldn’t we warn the others?”
“I absolutely forbid it! Everyone would probably assume that it’s one of the staff, and then how would that make me look?”
“I assume you’ve ruled that out? Don’t forget that there are some new staff here for the weekend.”
“And each one comes highly recommended. No, it was one of the guests, but farther than that I can’t—I won’t!—go.”
Urbino looked down at the jewelry, some of the items worth a great deal more than the peacock brooch.
“Was anything else taken?”
“No.” She seemed to wait for him to say something, then went on: “That’s why I don’t think that we need to be afraid that anyone else will—will lose anything. The person grabbed the peacock brooch because it was lying right on top. If he or she wanted anything more, it was all here for the taking. Probably whoever it was thought the brooch might not even be missed.” She looked with a wry smile at her jewels. “There are a great many.”
She had said several things that Urbino didn’t agree with, but he kept quiet. This was her house party and he would let her conduct it the way she wanted to. To be honest, he didn’t relish the idea of having everyone accused of theft tomorrow at the breakfast table.
“As you wish, Barbara.”
She looked drawn.
“Now just try to get a restful night’s sleep. I’ll have Lucia bring you some chamomile tea.”
He was closing the Contessa’s door behind him and had walked only a few steps down the hall when he saw a figure standing near the stair landing. It was Viola.
“I was afraid I’d find only Dr. Vasco creeping around making night calls,” she said when he reached her. “I believe that’s Barbara’s room?”
An exaggerated, sweeping glance took in his robe and slippers.
“She had a problem she needed your services for?”
“Making a night call yourself?” he countered.
“Turn about is fair play—and, in this case, a good way of evading a difficult question. It so happens that I wasn’t able to sleep and was on my way to the library to find something to dull my mind.”
“Ah, yes, that so very un-dull-witted mind of yours.” He now made as exaggerated a point of taking in her attire as she just had his. She was still wearing what she had on earlier in the evening. “Do you always go to sleep—or try to go to sleep—in your clothes?”
“Only in strange houses. It’s very compromising to be seen in your nightclothes by complete strangers, even if my nightclothes are far less outre than others you see these days. Good night.”
She returned along the corridor to her room, having either forgotten about seeking out a book or now gauging herself sufficiently fatigued to have a good night’s sleep. Urbino went downstairs to help assure the Contessa’s own restful night by seeing Lucia about the chamomile tea.
As he was returning to his room, he noticed that the light was still on under the door of the Caravaggio Room. All the other rooms were now dark.
9
Urbino, who shared with Viola a mind unwilling to be laid to rest, read Doge and Dogaressa for a while. The story of Doge Marin Falier’s treachery against the state and his eventual beheading was, however, so overwrought that it excited rather than wearied him. He put it aside and instead listened to the storm assaulting the city.
This was an equally poor soporific. In fact it proved much more excitable to his imagination than the Hoffman tale.
He went to the window. Although he could see very little, the night was full of noises. Sirens wailed, thunder crashed, rain and broken branches beat against the windows. Trees creaked in the Contessa’s garden, and tiles slid from the roof and shattered on the ground.
He had experienced storms in Venice, but none had come close to this one.
Disturbing sounds came from the direction of the Grand Canal. Not human or animal sounds, for surely every soul had long ago sought shelter, but the keening of the wind and the mad rushing of water taking possession of the Grand Canal and turning that usually placid boulevard into a raging gorge between frescoed marble walls.
Like a parent with a child out in the storm, he thought of the Palazzo Uccello. When he tried to call Natalia again, hardly heeding the lateness of the hour, he was dismayed to find that the phone was dead.
He could imagine only too well, from reports of the great flood of sixty-six, what was happening to the besieged city. Buoys were rocking madly all around. Water was seeping up into the ground floors of palazzi and working its way through all the cracks and spaces.
Steps down to the sea must now be drowned and inaccessible. So high had the waters risen that, if you were looking from a window above the broad sweep of the Riva degli Schiavoni, it would seem as if the sea had finally invaded the entire city, with no boats floating upon it except those wrenched from their moorings.
And there was the fog, swallowing with frightful silence Romanesque capitals and Baroque cupolas, Byzantine friezes and loggias, classical balconies and pediments.
Yes, Urbino’s vision of chaos and destruction was most vivid and complete, but not, he feared, in any way exaggerated.
Suddenly, as if conjured from his imagination, a white hand, with its fingers splayed, flew past his window, driven by the wind. He shuddered, thinking of the old woman whom the gondolieri had murdered and then cut into pieces and thrown into a sack.
The hand disappeared. A few moments later his fringed lamp and those lights still burning in the windows of the palazzi suddenly died out, then came back to life. This was followed by a terrible stillness at the end of which the storm returned with greater force and a newfound malevolence.
With an effort he tried to separate the sounds of the storm from the sounds of the embattled house. The walls themselves seemed to groan, and somewhere glass shattered. He thought he could almost hear the trickle of the water seeping persistently under the door from the loggia and forming a puddle. He rolled back the carpet a foot and wondered if he should push some of the pieces of furniture off so that
he could roll it farther from danger.
Thank God the Contessa had replaced the rotten pilings of the Ca’ da Capo two years ago. One of his constant worries about his own palazzo was that its pilings weren’t strong enough to weather a severe assault like this one.
He tried the telephone once more. Still dead. The lights flickered off and on again, then went off and didn’t come back on.
He sat in the dark, surrounded by all the sounds he could hear and those he thought he did. Earlier he had felt like a parent worried about an endangered child. Now he felt like the child itself.
He thought of the Contessa and hoped that, exhausted after today’s events, she was sleeping through all this.
But he doubted it. Only the dead could sleep through a storm like this.
PART FOUR
The Shrouded Port
1
The strained, weary looks at the breakfast table next morning revealed what Urbino had suspected during the night: that he hadn’t been the only one kept up. In fact, it looked as if there had been an entire houseful of insomniacs, for even the staff were walking around like zombies.
Except for Bambina. If she had been up all night, it had apparently done nothing but energize her. She was full of her quick movements, and the bows in her hair seemed almost charged with static electricity.
The Contessa looked around the table as if making an account of those who were still absent: Gemma, Angelica, Filippo, and Molly. “Lollygaggers,” she would have considered them under other circumstances, but this morning the storm could excuse just about anything.
For those who had the energy, the general topic of conversation was, predictably, the storm still battering the city.
“All that whining and banging!” Oriana complained as she rubbed her temples. “I must look a fright.”
When no one denied it, she said angrily, “I don’t know how I’m going to stand it much longer!”
“The way the rest of us will have to,” the Contessa said. “And try to remember that this storm is more than just a personal discomfort! Think of what’s happening out there!”
“You both have the wrong idea,” Sebastian said as he refilled his coffee cup. “We have gallery seats on the ark!”
In an oversized periwinkle cashmere sweater, loose wool trousers, and black velvet slippers, he seemed more than ready for hours of snug and casual viewing.
“Don’t be an ass,” his sister said. “Barbara’s right. This storm is serious.” She looked at Urbino. “Isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s not at all a good sign that the electricity has been off since the middle of the night.”
“And the telephone is still out,” said Oriana. “Filippo is sitting in our room upstairs dialing our number over and over again. I told him to come down here with the rest of us and act in a civilized way. But I see he’s not the only one keeping to himself. Gemma, Angelica, and Molly aren’t down yet either.”
Robert informed them that Angelica wasn’t feeling well and had decided to keep to her room. As for his mother, he had thought it best not to disturb her. He wanted her to sleep as long as possible.
“Such a good boy to his mother,” Bambina said with an attempt at an affectionate smile at her grandnephew. Lipstick marred one of her yellowed front teeth. “I’m sure you were, too, Signor Urbino. By the way, I got caught up in the pages of one of your books after our game of charades. There it was, right on the bookshelf waiting for me. It was my companion for much of the night.”
“Which of his scandalous tomes was it?” Sebastian asked.
“His life of Vivaldi. I cried at the end. To think he died a pauper! Such beautiful music.” She hummed some bars of Autumn. “You have a gift, Signor Urbino.”
“Equal to Molly’s, doubtlessly,” Sebastian said. “By the way, where is the old girl? We’re all dying to find out how she passed her night!”
“No better or worse than the rest of us, I’m sure,” the Contessa said. “Perhaps this is she,” she added hopefully as footsteps sounded in the hall outside.
But when the door opened it was Gemma. As white as wax, she gave no greeting but went over to the Contessa and bent down to whisper something urgently in her ear. Her scalp, vulnerable and shockingly exposed, gleamed through her hair. For a brief moment it wasn’t Gemma’s head Urbino was looking at but a skull almost ready to give up its camouflage. How she seemed to have changed since the previous evening!
“Mother!” Robert cried, starting to get up from his seat. “What’s the matter?”
Gemma looked at him blankly. The Contessa stood up and took her arm.
“She’s fine, Robert,” the Contessa said in a strangled voice. “Will you all excuse us?”
Bambina’s hand—the one holding her coffee cup—stopped halfway to her mouth. When she put the cup down, she raised her napkin to her mouth to conceal the beginning of a smile that, judging by the slight heaving of her bosom, was accompanied by a giggle.
The Contessa and Gemma left hurriedly. Dr. Vasco only barely seemed to hold himself back from getting up and pursuing them. His face was tense and strained.
“I wonder what that’s all about?” Viola said to Urbino in a low voice, but not low enough that her brother, who seemed to have his ears especially pricked when she spoke to Urbino, said:
“Maybe it has something to do with the portrait. Oh, not the Caravaggio,” he clarified with a smile that hinted he had been intentionally ambiguous. “The portrait of Barbara. Today’s the great unveiling. They must be as nervous as hell. Gemma certainly looks it.”
Mamma Zeno sat silently, lost in her sea of material, looking at no one.
Long moments of silence reigned at the table. It was as if Gemma’s entrance and her hasty departure with the Contessa had thrown them into their own private thoughts.
Only Bambina and Oriana appeared immune to the somber, reflective spirit that had overtaken the others. Bambina somehow managed to combine an air of nonchalance with coy looks at Urbino. As for Oriana, she introduced one topic after another with no result until, with a sigh of exasperation, she stared moodily out the window as if she had been personally affronted.
They were still drifting through the doldrums of conversation when Mauro entered. He came over to Urbino and said in a low voice that the Contessa wanted to see him upstairs immediately.
Sebastian, who had been unsuccessfully straining to catch Mauro’s message, said, “Summoned to put your finger in the Ca’ da Capo’s dike like the little Dutch boy?”
Urbino excused himself and left the breakfast room. He hurried up the broad staircase ahead of Mauro to the next story, where he found the Contessa collapsed against the red-and-gold upholstery of a divan outside Gemma’s bedroom, drained of all color. He knelt down beside her.
“What is it, Barbara? Are you all right?”
“It’s Molly,” she said in a strangled voice.
He got up and went to the other wing to the Caravaggio Room. The room was closed but not locked. He opened it slowly, somehow expecting to find Gemma within.
But the only person in the room, partly kneeling, partly sprawling near an overturned low table and an armchair, was Molly. She was still dressed in her nightclothes and her feet were bare. Her thick spectacles were on the carpet, one of the bows bent.
Her head was thrust through one of the open doors to the loggia, fixed by jagged pieces of glass still lodged in the frame. Blood stained the door beneath her head and formed a pool diluted by rainwater. The louvered doors were also open. The soaked carpet and the floor of the loggia were littered with shards of glass.
Dead, just like little Flora and Renata before her, ran through Urbino’s mind.
The thought was followed by an awareness of a slight scent, driven by the air blowing from the loggia. A woman’s perfume or a man’s cologne, vaguely familiar.
When he looked up at the Caravaggio, it seemed as if the epicene boy was smiling at him with the same living malevolence supposedly bestowed on th
e young Conte so many years ago in the presence of another dead woman.
2
Urbino closed the door of the Caravaggio Room behind him and crossed to the other wing, where Mauro was standing beside the Contessa, still sitting on the divan. She exchanged a brief look with him filled with sorrow and fear.
In response to Urbino’s quick questions Mauro told him that Gemma had been helped to her room and that, no, the telephone was still not working.
“And the motorboat?”
“Milo secured it yesterday but something—a barrel or a piece of timber driven by the storm—staved the side in. But even if it were in good order, Signor Urbino, with this storm—” He broke off and shook his head.
“Is something the matter?”
The voice, weak and wispy, belonged to Angelica, whose head appeared farther down the hall at her door.
“No, Angelica, it’s just the storm,” the Contessa said with much more calmness than veracity. Urbino wondered if she were in shock or just trying to put off the inevitable.
Angelica pulled her head back into her room and closed the door quickly, as if afraid of learning any more.
“We should get Vasco up here,” Urbino said.
“Why?” the Contessa said sharply. Urbino feared that she had no idea of what was happening until she said, “That poor woman is dead! It doesn’t take a doctor to figure that out!”
“Things have to be done properly. There’s been a death in the house,” he went on. “It appears to be an accident—”
“Appears to be!”
“And the body in any case must be examined. We’re fortunate in having a physician here, cut off as we are for the time being. It makes everything official.”
Weariness replaced the Contessa’s defiance.
“Do what has to be done, then. We’ll both do what has to be done. That poor little woman.”
Tears filled her eyes. Urbino sat down on the divan next to her and put his arm around her.
“I know, Barbara,” he said consolingly. “It’s a terrible thing. I found her endearing, in her way. I admired her honesty.”
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