Death in the Palazzo

by Edward Sklepowich

  “We could be hours from any help at all,” Vasco said. “I don’t see why I have to leave her. If—when she regains consciousness she should have someone familiar by her side.”

  Urbino, remembering how Gemma had shrunk away from Vasco on one or two occasions yesterday, wasn’t so sure that she would necessarily appreciate Vasco’s “familiar” face bending over her.

  “When you look at her, Macintyre,” the doctor was going on, “you see a woman in her sixties. I still see the child she was—and it doesn’t seem all that long ago. Not at all.”

  A melancholy expression passed over his face. He released Gemma’s hand and stood up.

  “I’ll speak with Barbara to see that everything is done properly. I don’t intend to be pushed aside when Gemma needs me.”

  “Of course not. You have done a lot of good for her under other circumstances as well, Dottore. I’m thinking, of course, about the period after her mother’s death when I’m sure you were indispensable. I assure you that Barbara has no intention of pushing you aside. She just wants you to get some rest. You’ll have a better chance of continuing to help Gemma that way. You’ll be called immediately if she regains consciousness or if there’s any change.”

  Although Vasco didn’t seem satisfied, he made no more protest. His footsteps receded down the hall.

  Urbino didn’t know how much time he had to do what he needed to do. He had told the Contessa not to send Lucia in to sit with Gemma for another half hour, but anyone might come in.

  He took the gloves from his pocket and put them on. He started to go through the room. Once again the uncomfortable feeling he had had in the Caravaggio Room came over him, even more strongly this time.

  He began with the bathroom. The tub, soap, and towels were dry. The blue Murano crystal water tumbler, replaced neatly on the cabinet beside the sink, held some droplets, however. Also on the cabinet were an array of cosmetics and a half-filled plastic bottle containing tablets that, from the name on the label, he recognized as a potent painkiller. The tablets had been bought in London and bore the name of the physician.

  He then unstoppered an elaborate crystal bottle of Shalimar perfume and sniffed. It was definitely the scent surrounding Molly’s body, but once again it seemed to evoke another association that eluded him.

  He returned to the bedroom and went through the clothes in the armoire and checked the pockets. Unlike Molly, Gemma had some expensive items, but, with one or two exceptions—an evening dress and a Missoni skirt—they were not new, but well cared for. He found nothing of possible importance. He had no idea what he was looking for, but neither had he when he had gone through Molly’s things.

  He approached Gemma herself. She was still wearing the nightdress and robe she had been found in. Vasco had dressed the injury to her head. A blanket was pulled up around her so that she wouldn’t lose body heat.

  Making a silent apology, he went through the pockets of the robe and nightdress. He felt a strong sense of violation, and kept telling himself he was obliged to do this for Gemma’s own sake. He could find something that might answer some questions, perhaps about Gemma’s fall, or even Molly’s death, perhaps—

  He broke off speculating as his hand touched a small, cold, hard object in the pocket of her robe. He took it out. A peacock of gold, lapis lazuli, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds. It was the Contessa’s brooch.

  He put it in his pocket. That Gemma could have taken it seemed inconsistent with the impression he had formed of her. Yet he had long ago, because of his work as a biographer and an amateur detective—not to mention because of his general observation of others—given up being surprised by people’s inconsistencies, or being hard on himself when he was mistaken.

  The evidence of the brooch made it less likely that Gemma had been on her way to see him when she had “fallen”—unless she had slipped it into her pocket for safekeeping, not caring to leave it in her room. Perhaps, once having taken it, she thought it best to have it on her person at all times.

  Gemma could conceivably have found the brooch and been on her way to tell him, and had been pushed down the stairs by the thief, who wanted to avoid detection at all costs.

  Or someone might have wanted to make Gemma look like the thief and planted the brooch on her after her fall. But if this were the case, had the brooch been taken to implicate Gemma? Or had the thief originally stolen it to keep, but then disposed of it in this way to protect himself or herself? Had events made it more valuable as a means of incriminating Gemma?

  Was the person who had stolen the brooch—Gemma or someone else—also the one who had murdered Molly? If so, how was it all related?

  He put these questions aside for future consideration as he turned his attention to the rest of the room, now even more fearful of a sudden interruption.

  He went through a trousseau chest, in which he found only items of clothing, neatly folded, then opened all the drawers and compartments of an escritoire. Nothing. Near the escritoire was a bookshelf with uniform leather-bound volumes of classical European literature in English and Italian translation. He flipped the pages of two or three of the books but found only some pressed wildflowers in an edition of Maupassant’s short stories.

  He found no passport, no wallet, no purse, no letters—in fact, not even a scrap of paper with writing on it. It wasn’t just the contrast with what he had found among Molly’s things that surprised him, but the contrast with what one would expect to find in anyone’s room.

  He picked up a book on the bedside table. A well-worn copy of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in Italian. There was nothing between its pages, not even a bookmark.

  He was reaching for Gemma’s paintbox when he heard footsteps approaching the door. He quickly pulled off the gloves and thrust them into his pocket.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  It was Robert. His voice, though quiet, was cold and exact.

  “When Vasco told me you were with Mother, this is just what I expected you came for. To put your nose where you shouldn’t.” He looked over at his mother and lowered his voice even more. “What the hell gives you the right!”

  “I understand your anger. Hard though it might be to believe, I’m only trying to help your mother.” Urbino then thought about the brooch in his pocket. “You might feel a little different if I tell you that someone seems to have taken away your mother’s documents and money—and whatever personal things she might have had. The clothes in the chest over there seem to be all thrown about. Does your mother have much cash with her?”

  “What my mother does or does not have is no business of yours, Macintyre—or of anyone else in this place. That’s why I took away what you’ve called her ‘personal things.’ Vasco was kind enough to leave me alone with her for a few minutes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to sit with her.”

  13

  On his way downstairs Urbino met no one in the hall or on the staircase. In the library he found Sebastian, sunk deep in the generous cushions of an easy chair. A copy of Lamansky’s Secrets d’Etat de Venise, printed in St. Petersburg near the end of the nineteenth century, lay splayed open on his cashmere sweater. A glass of brandy was within easy reach, and the odor of cigarette smoke hung in the air.

  Urbino coughed, none too quietly. Sebastian opened his eyes and stared at him, blankly at first.

  “Oh, if it isn’t the charming Urbino. Is it a book you stopped by for?” His speech was even more slurred than earlier. “Yes, my friend, a book I’m sure it is. For those odd moments when you’re not playing Sherlock Holmes. Here you go. Take this one.”

  He started to hand Urbino the Lamansky, but he lost his grip on it, and it dropped to the floor.

  “Excuse me. Hope I didn’t split the binding. Don’t want to send Barbara to the pauper house. Such an interesting book, even if I did take a snooze in the middle of a chapter! Ah, the intrigues of the Doges! How boring Venice is nowadays. Just another theme park.”

  He grabbe
d for his brandy, almost upsetting the glass. He eyed the glass critically.

  “Amazing how fast it disappears. Just evaporates. Drink?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve had more than enough already.”

  This was certainly true—and he had mixed his drinks abominably—but he also hoped, by saying it, that Sebastian would take it as a hint. He didn’t, however. He got up and made his way unsteadily to the liquor cabinet, where he filled his glass.

  “Dear Barbara does have all the little—and big—accoutrements, don’t you find? Sometimes I feel as if I’m in The Old Curiosity Shop—très, très chic, though very much New Bond Street, icons and Fabergé eggs and Brustolon and Hepplewhite and objets d’ of all shapes and sizes!” He made his way back to his armchair and almost collapsed into it. Urbino remained standing. “But I ask you? What is a library without a humidor? Not that I smoke cigars, but it’s almost a sine qua non. And not an ashtray in sight, so I’m obliged to use this charming champagne glass. Murano?” He blew a stream of smoke into the air. “The faint smell of smoke will be my contribution to the improvement of the room. In my humble opinion, Urbino, you have one major flaw that gives me pause. You don’t smoke, and probably never have. How can you find a permanent place in my heart unless you do?”

  More than ever Sebastian seemed to be hiding behind a screen of persiflage. This, along with his less than sober state, made Urbino realize that it wasn’t a good time to bring up the checkbook stub. But perhaps he could lay the groundwork.

  “Tell me how you met Molly,” he said before Sebastian could go off again.

  Sebastian snuffed out his perfectly viable cigarette, deposited it with all the others, and lit another.

  “I already have. Is this one of those sobriety tests? If it is, you can stop wasting our time. I plead guilty, guilty, guilty!”

  “You and Viola met her for the first time on the Orient Express, you said.”

  “So we said and so we meant and so we did.”

  “Humor me. Tell me what the circumstances were.”

  “Only since you have that earnest quality that makes fools of a certain kind of woman—and man, I might add! Let me see. I met Molly shortly after we left Paris. Viola was in her compartment and I was at the bar. There I was, lifting my elbow, and there was Molly. She was babbling away about her so-called gift. I took to her right away, maybe it was the alcohol, but when Viola joined us, she found Molly as cute and as—as—amusing as I did.”

  “You said her ‘so-called gift.’ You never considered it a real one?”

  “What do you take me for? One of those fools who follows the sign to the ‘egress’ looking for some kind of bird?”

  He used his own joke as an occasion to go into a spasm of laughter. When he finished, Urbino said, “Did she say anything about you that made you wonder? I mean, made you wonder how she knew about it if she didn’t have a gift?”

  Sebastian’s green eyes, so disturbingly similar to his sister’s, stared at the Baroque ceiling as though he were deliberately weighing Urbino’s question. He pulled his gaze back and looked at his glass.

  “As a matter of fact, there were a few things that gave me pause. She said that Viola had fallen very hard once, and she did when we were eleven. Down from a tree we were climbing.” He smiled faintly. “But all children have falls. She also said that I had a problem with my tutor at Cambridge. What student worth his salt doesn’t? But what was strange was that I never told her I went to Cambridge.”

  “I see.”

  Urbino thought for a few moments and then asked him how he came to invite Molly to stay at the Ca’ da Capo.

  “You mean Viola and me. Oh, Molly was saying how she didn’t have a reservation and did we think she’d have a hard time finding a place and did we know of any hotels. It only seemed natural to invite her to join us. And it was Viola who did the asking.”

  “Did you have any reason to stop by to see Molly last night after we all went upstairs?”

  “You must be kidding! A midnight rendezvous with Molly? Entertaining though she was, hers would be the last door I’d tiptoe to for some divertissement. I have my own pleasures and my reputation to consider. Now I hope you’re finished because I find that Mother Nature is calling me most desperately to a fine and private place.”

  He got up. As he was walking past Urbino, he swayed slightly and seemed in danger of losing his balance. Urbino reached out and grabbed his elbow. For a brief moment Sebastian clung to him, standing closer than necessary, then disengaged himself. His smile made Urbino even more uneasy than the sudden physical contact between them.

  “Don’t worry!” Sebastian said as he continued to the door. “I won’t tell a soul what’s just happened between us. Especially not Viola!”

  14

  Urbino lingered in the library for a brief moment, trying to make some sense of his encounter with Sebastian. Among many other things, he wondered if he had made a tactical error in not having mentioned the check stub.

  He had reached no conclusions when he met Viola coming down the staircase to the dining room. He led her into the picture gallery through a large doorway above which was a marble coat of arms of the Da Capo-Zendrini family. He closed the door behind them.

  Only three Venetian walnut divans and a gilt chest competed with the offerings of the room. The lacquered walls were covered with portraits of various sizes, although the full-length monumental predominated. There were several pastel portraits by Rosalba Carriera, mainly half-lengths of old women with fans and gentlemen in wigs. But their delicacy was more than a little overwhelmed by the more dramatic offerings of Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Van Dyck. Soon Gemma’s portrait of the Contessa would take its place among the portraits by the great and by those only slightly better known than their subjects.

  The different styles in dress and art could in no way disguise the characteristic Da Capo-Zendrini features—the aquiline noses, shrewd eyes, pale Venetian skin, and unmistakable air of unconsidered privilege. Even those who were Da Capo-Zendrini by marriage and not birth seemed to share these features, perhaps by that peculiar sympathy and transformation wrought between husbands and wives through the years.

  This couldn’t be said for the Contessa, however, whose portrait was soon to hang on these walls; exactly where, given their crowded condition, was far from clear.

  Urbino thought that he and Viola would retire to one of the divans, but the portraits were initially too much temptation for her. She preferred to walk around the room, examining them silently. Urbino wondered how much of them she was taking in, for she had the air of having just awakened. Her eyes were dreamy and slightly out of focus, and her angular face seemed as pale as the powdered face of the eighteenth-century woman she was now standing in front of.

  “Would you tell me again how you came to meet Molly?” he asked quietly, as if afraid of disturbing her train of thought.

  She said nothing at first but passed from the pastel to the dark, passionate Tintoretto of an elderly bearded man with the mien of a biblical patriarch.

  “So you think Molly’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  It was a statement, not a question. Before he could respond, she went on: “And you probably think that Gemma’s fall is related in some way to Molly’s death.”

  Her directness reminded Urbino of how different she was from her twin despite their unsettling physical similarities.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking myself, and I agree with you,” she went on, treating his silence as a tacit agreement. “The more we know about Molly, the better position we’ll be in.”

  Urbino didn’t fail to note the “we.”

  She walked over to the bright silks and brocades of a Veronese lady. On the bodice of her gown was pinned the peacock brooch. Viola bent closer to look at the way Veronese had rendered it. Still looking at the portrait, she described how she and Sebastian had met Molly on the train. It matched what Sebastian had already told him in every detail, even down
to how she had been the one to suggest that Molly join the Contessa’s house party.

  “It seemed the right thing to do,” she said, turning to Urbino. “Barbara has always said that Sebastian and I could come down with one or two of our friends. I didn’t think she’d mind—and I really don’t think she did, except for the number thirteen, that is, and because she had to use the Caravaggio Room.”

  “Did Molly give any indication that she had an ulterior motive in accepting?”

  “I’ve been going over all my conversations with her with just that in mind, but I can’t come up with anything. I’ve been thinking of something—Oh, it’s silly, but you know what it’s like when an idea gets lodged in your head!”

  “What is it?”

  She stared with a little frown at a nineteenth-century portrait of a woman with all the Da Capo-Zendrini features, displaying the peacock brooch on her black bombazine.

  “It’s just that I was wondering if—if she could have known who the other guests were? Other than Sebastian and me and—and you and Gemma, that is. You see, Sebastian and I mentioned you both. Don’t you see what it might mean if she knew ahead of time who was going to be here?” She gripped Urbino’s arm. “That all her spouting away about the past was arranged ahead of time! She seemed to know such a lot of strange things,” she continued with a touch of what sounded like wonder in her deep voice. “But why did she do it and what does it have to do with everything?”

  That Viola’s thinking so closely paralleled his own was only marginally less surprising to him than that she was so freely expressing it. Was she trying to gain some kind of advantage? For what purpose? Urbino still felt sufficiently disconcerted from his encounter with Sebastian in the library to be sure of his own responses. Something of what he was feeling must have communicated itself to her.

  When she looked at him, her eyes seemed wounded. It wasn’t just their usual melancholy cast, but something different, deeper darker.