Death in the Palazzo

by Edward Sklepowich

  Bambina came to a quick halt in her movements around the room and, with an embarrassed look at Urbino, she retreated with almost comical rapidity.

  Mamma Zeno waited until the door had closed behind Bambina before she said to Urbino with an unmistakable valedictory air:

  “My family’s affairs are private, signore, even if you are Barbara’s intimate friend. And remember that she herself isn’t a Da Capo-Zendrini, certainly not a Zeno! I am a Zeno not only by marriage but by blood! By blood! It would be much better for you to devote your time to figuring out ways for Barbara to make this drafty building safe for a person to walk and sleep in. She and she alone is responsible for what has happened under this roof!”

  9

  Immediately after leaving Mamma Zeno, Urbino went to see the Contessa in her boudoir.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You’re not even dressed for dinner yet.”

  She, however, was—in a silk dress printed with designs inspired by San Marco’s mosaics.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” he said. “I just stopped by to be sure that you weren’t having any second thoughts.”

  “Second and third and fourth! I hope you know what you’re doing! What you’re asking!”

  He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead.

  “You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” As he said it, all he could think of was what she was going to have to go through before everything was all over. He looked down into her frightened gray eyes.

  “I take full responsibility—for you and everyone else,” he reassured her. “Just remember that I don’t want you to sit down at the table until I already have. Everyone will be there, as we agreed, won’t they?”

  “Yes.” She disengaged herself from his arms and looked at herself in a mirror. She trifled uneasily and unnecessarily with her hair. “Even Oriana, although much help she’ll be! All she keeps moaning about now is that the ‘curse of the Ca’ da Capo’ must have followed Filippo. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  She turned to Urbino with a worried, quizzical look.

  The only comfort he could give her—and a cold one at that—was “Ridiculous, yes. No one has left the Ca’ da Capo but Filippo himself.”

  10

  His hair still damp from a quick, cold shower, Urbino slipped into his accustomed seat at the end of the dinner table as the last gong sounded. Everyone was down except for the Contessa.

  Urbino’s entrance had made no interruption in the rhythm of Sebastian’s patter. Sebastian had either sobered up considerably or was in that transitional stage before the total oblivion of inebriation descended on him. For the time being, however, he was functioning very well, except for less than precise pronunciation and more violent gestures than were called for.

  The other guests, with varying degrees of bored or irritated expressions—or, in the case of Bambina and Angelica, uneasy ones—seemed content to let him run on as long as they weren’t expected to join in.

  “… and so I said to the fellow, if you really believe this is a Raphael, then it’s time for you to close your shop and take up another trade. It made me wonder what other fakes he had all over the place, and I was going to help him out by poking around and telling him, but Viola dragged me out. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was in another shop, this one in New Bond Street, and I took one look at a painting that everyone was ooh-ing and aah-ing over—a Rubens, they all thought—”

  He broke off as the Contessa swept into the room, murmuring apologies. The peacock brooch was pinned to the front of her dress, its gold work and colored stones a perfect complement to the tones and shapes of the mosaic-print of her dress.

  If her smile was a bit tight and her voice strained, no one needed any more explanation than the ones already at hand. One guest was lying dead upstairs, another was unconscious, and a third was somewhere out in the storm, possibly incapacitated.

  Only Urbino and the Contessa knew that she was feeling like an actress whose imminent performance risked more than just jeers and scathing reviews. But what Urbino hadn’t told her was that, in order to get as true a performance as possible from her, he had been obliged to keep her in the dark about some essential points.

  The Contessa seated herself, not risking a look at Urbino. Mamma Zeno, on Urbino’s immediate left, gave a gasp as she noticed the brooch.

  Bambina’s and Vasco’s attention was also riveted on it. Bambina pulled her eyes away to stare at her mother, and suppressed what sounded like a nervous giggle.

  “It’s the brooch from some of the portraits in the gallery!” Viola said. She was sitting to Urbino’s immediate right next to Bambina, and had most of her hair artfully wrapped in a piece of Fortuny fabric. “Where have you been hiding it?”

  “In some deep coffer,” Sebastian immediately jumped in to say. “Ha, ha! She probably has so many bijous she has to rotate them like the V & A. She won’t get around to this particular bauble again until the next millennium.”

  Angelica, who had been staring at the brooch with unusually keen interest, said, “Is it art nouveau?”

  “Can’t you tell, my dear?” Oriana said. “It’s older than that.”

  “A lot older,” said Bambina. “It’s from ancient Constantinople.”

  “Ancient Constantinople?” Sebastian repeated with a grin. “‘Hammered gold and gold enamelling’ done by Grecian goldsmiths to keep a drowsy emperor awake? Ah yes, ‘an aged man is but a paltry thing,’” he went on, quoting Yeats but completely mystifying Bambina and most of the others. “Set there on the golden bough of Barbara’s bosom”—here he hiccuped—“singing to us lords and ladies of Venice of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

  He rewarded himself after this effusion by draining his wineglass and reaching for the carafe to refill it. He almost upset one of the candelabra.

  “Yes, it belonged to an emperor!” Bambina burst out with almost evident relief, apparently seizing on the one thing she had understood in what Sebastian had said. All it earned her, however, was a glare from her mother.

  “I have an idea,” Sebastian said. “Let’s chase away our fears and blues and have Barbara tell us the story of the brooch!”

  “The Conte’s memoir!” Viola said softly. “Someone told a story about a brooch back then.”

  No one but Urbino seemed to hear her. Sebastian was hitting his water glass with a spoon.

  “Here, here, Barbara! The story. We insist.”

  “I—I’d rather not,” the Contessa said. She looked at Urbino, then away, as if she wasn’t quite sure this was what she should have said.

  “Oh, let me!” piped up Bambina as she pushed her dish of shrimp away. Her mother stared at her silently but nonetheless thunderously from her beady eyes. “It’s really a Zeno story as much as a Da Capo-Zendrini one. Excuse me, Barbara, but you’re not really a Da Capo-Zendrini—not a blood relation—even though you have the brooch.”

  The Contessa paled. The immobile Mamma Zeno looked angry, and Vasco monumentally disapproving. Oriana, who didn’t seem to be registering what Bambina was saying and who, like Urbino, had in any event heard the story of the brooch before, ate her shrimp with an abstracted air. Angelica was smiling expectantly, until she noticed that Robert’s brow was creased with worry. The expression on her heart-shaped face then more closely approximated his. Sebastian was looking very hard at Bambina.

  Viola said softly, “The Conte’s memoirs! Bambina told the story of the brooch then, too, didn’t she?”

  The question was addressed to Urbino, who said nothing. He wasn’t going to intervene unless it would advance his own scheme, but he took everything—and everyone—in. He had a habit that had grown over the years of holding himself aloof and watching, even when he himself was most actively in the middle of the fray. It had left him open to the charge of coldness and restraint, but without it he would be far less able to navigate the troubled emotional waters he so often found himself in.

  And so he waited now and watched in his characteristic
fashion. It was to his credit that so few people at the table were aware of the power behind his withdrawal. The Contessa, who knew him so well, was one of them. The only other was Viola.

  Bambina interpreted his silence and smile as nothing less—or more—than anticipation of her soon to be revealed charms as a Scheherazade. But eager though she appeared to be to begin, she waited until the course of risottino verde was set on the table. Then, in a hushed tone and with a faraway look in her eyes, she began the story she had told at the same table almost sixty years before.

  11

  “A long time ago a Venetian ship on its way to Constantinople was sunk by a cannonball by the evil Turks, who were taking over that part of the world. The captain was cut up into little pieces and all the other men on the ship had their heads chopped off. All of them,” she said with a satisfied little smile, “but Alvise da Capo-Zendrini, a very, very distant relative of the Conte Alvise and me! With the help of a Turkish woman who fell in love with him, he made his way, after many adventures, to the court of the Byzantine emperor.”

  “Constantine. The emperor’s name was Constantine,” Sebastian interjected. He shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and washed it down with some wine, then looked around the table with self-satisfaction.

  “Of course it was. The city was named after him,” Bambina said incorrectly. “Anyway, the Byzantine emperor gave Alvise all kinds of rewards for his bravery, and he was allowed to live in the palace—”

  “Topkapi,” Sebastian interrupted again.

  “No, Mr. Know-It-All,” Viola said. “Topkapi was the Turks’ palace after the fall of Constantinople.”

  “More’s the pity. I was settling in for an amusing caper. The first Alvise da Capo-Zed descending into the museum from the skylight to steal the jewel-encrusted brooch a la Peter Ustinov. Too bad.”

  He consoled himself with some wine.

  “Allora,” Bambina said, after taking a few dispirited pecks at her rice, “at this same time a Venetian merchant arrived in a galley with some supplies for the emperor. His name was Marco Zeno. Also a distant blood relative of mine and,” she added somewhat grudgingly, “of the Da Capo-Zendrini family, too, because of subsequent marriages. When he was at the palace he was surprised to see his old friend Alvise sitting next to the emperor. But they barely had time to renew their acquaintance when the Turks started battering against the walls. It was at this bloody and unfortunate time, when men were dying all around the two friends, who were so far away from their beloved Venezia, that the brooch—la bella spilla—entered their lives.”

  She gave a quick look at her mother, who was sitting motionlessly and showing no interest in the story or the meal.

  “The peacock brooch was a gift, you see,” she continued, tilting up her chubby chin an inch or two and narrowing her eyes as much as their roundness allowed. “The emperor gave it to Marco—yes, to Marco Zeno—because he bravely refused to seek his own safety and insisted on fighting alongside the emperor and his friend Alvise, his trusted friend Alvise,” she emphasized. “Not long afterward the poor emperor, who realized the end had come for his empire, threw himself against the Turks and was killed. Marco and Alvise escaped miraculously and swam out to a Venetian galley. Marco had pinned the brooch to his shirt. A strong southern wind blew the galley away from the city back toward Venezia and—”

  “Northern wind,” Sebastian said. “It would have to have been a northern wind, old girl, or they would have gone all the way up to the Black Sea.”

  “Really, Sebastian, does it matter?” Viola said.

  “I’d say it damn well does!” he almost shouted. “Who knows what other details she’s getting all upside down, and here we are hanging on her every word as if it’s gospel!”

  “Bambina is telling the story just as it was passed on down to Alvise,” the Contessa said calmly and with an air of evident relief. “Perhaps you should switch to mineral water.”

  “Give me sermons and soda water—the day after!”

  Bambina had a blank look on her face and waited to see if he had any more to add. When he didn’t, she finished up her story with nervous haste: “On the ship, Marco became feverish and delirious. Late one night, he and Alvise went up on deck for fresh air. Alvise said that Marco insisted on being left alone. Marco was never seen again. And—and that’s how the Da Capo-Zendrini family came to have the valuable peacock brooch. The same one that Barbara is wearing at this very moment.”

  The Contessa was stunned. The Da Capo-Zendrini version was that Marco Zeno, feeling near death, had given the brooch to Alvise, then wandered up to the deck and been washed overboard by the heavy sea.

  When disagreement came, however, it wasn’t from the Contessa, who was confused as to what reaction would be appropriate given Urbino’s instructions to her before dinner. It came, perhaps not so unpredictably, from Sebastian, who seemed determined to play the role of fractious chorus to the very end.

  “Oh, come now,” he said with a mixture of irritation and sarcasm. “Are you suggesting that the Conte’s great-grandfather to the hundredth power stole the brooch and tossed your own greatgrandfather to the hundredth power into the wine-dark sea?”

  Bambina was totally lost until Urbino, to the Contessa’s evident dissatisfaction, translated the gist of Sebastian’s comment. Bambina made a motion with her hand of zipping her lips together.

  “But surely this story didn’t come down from the original Alvise da Capo-Zed,” Sebastian said. “And this Zeno fellow was a feast for fish.”

  “An English sailor aboard informed the Zeno family when the ship reached Venice,” said Robert coldly.

  His comment served to unzip Bambina’s mouth.

  “You see how even Roberto, the youngest of our family, though perhaps not for long”—she smiled meaningfully at Angelica, who throughout the story had maintained an aloof air—“how Roberto knows the whole story. Our Gemma learned it from Renata. She used to think that her mother called her Gemma because of the brooch. Silly how children think, isn’t it? Anyway, little Gemma—our sweet and sparkling jewel—could tell the story of the brooch over and over again herself when she was only six or seven. Fascinated by it, she was.”

  “Not only with the story of the brooch,” Urbino ventured to say, “but surely with the brooch itself.”

  The Contessa drew in her breath, and Mamma Zeno and Vasco exchanged a quick glance.

  “Oh yes, you’re so right, Signor Urbino,” Bambina said eagerly. “And she—she still is. She just loves to look at it.”

  “I don’t see what you mean at all, Bambina,” the Contessa said. “I never showed Gemma the brooch in all the time she’s been here. You must be mistaken.”

  Urbino was proud of the Contessa. Uncoached and unprepared for this eventuality, she had nonetheless said just what he wanted her to say.

  Bambina’s confused look became overlaid with fear. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  “Aunt Bambina is speaking of the other time my mother was here at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, Barbara,” Robert said. “The Contessa—your predecessor—was wearing it. My mother remembers the brooch from then.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Gemma remembers it from back then. She always talks about it. She’d do anything to have one just like it.”

  “Bambina!”

  Mamma Zeno’s voice startled them not only because of its uncharacteristic loudness but because the old woman had been so silent for so long. Her watery eyes slid in the direction of the Contessa’s bodice, then back to her daughter, where they took on a harder look.

  “It’s Barbara’s. Just as it should be,” she added with a rictus of a smile.

  12

  The Contessa and her party had retired to the library for barely ten minutes, with coffee or drinks according to their preference, when there was a quiet knock at the door. It opened.

  Mauro guided in Milo and a young member of the Contessa’s staff. As the three men carried in the easel and t
he velvet-draped portrait, a silence struck the guests. Only a moment before they had been in strained and fitful conversation about the storm, which seemed to be giving signs of abating. At least the rains had ceased and the winds were considerably weakened. Sebastian, however, took obvious pleasure in insisting that the storm was just lying low for a final, treacherous assault.

  The two men carried the shrouded portrait reverently as if it were a corpse and placed it on the easel in front of the fireplace. Sebastian settled more deeply into his armchair and jiggled his slippered foot. A smirk crawled across his lips, which he attempted to conceal by taking a sip of brandy.

  The Contessa waited until Mauro and the two men had left. Then, in a voice whose tremors she hoped would be seen as signs of a nervous vanity and nothing else, she said, “My dear friends and—and family”—her gray eyes took in not only the twins but also Mamma Zeno, Bambina, and Robert—“a proud and yet a sad moment has come. We’re all going to see dear Gemma’s portrait of me. I’ve decided to do Gemma this—this honor, and to do it with all the prayers in my heart for a speedy and complete recovery. All of us, including myself, I might add, will be seeing the portrait for the first time. I respected Gemma’s wishes not to give so much as a quick glance at it while she was doing it—or, in fact, after.” Urbino, who feared she was about to gild the lily even more, was relieved when she quickly brought her comments to an end: “Gemma’s great talent will speak for itself. Surely she will go on to exercise it on subjects far better than I.”

  The Contessa started to untie the tasseled cord securing the velvet, her hands trembling. Urbino, who had positioned himself alone in a corner, looked at the guests. Everyone’s eyes but those of Sebastian were riveted on the shrouded portrait as the Contessa gradually unworked the knot and started to draw the velvet away.

  Sebastian was looking at the Contessa’s face.

  Urbino knew exactly the moment when the portrait was uncovered from the gasp that filled the library. It was as if one collective breath had been caught. Whatever reaction—or reactions—were feigned among the guests was completely lost in the sound.