It therefore wasn’t until eleven that he phoned the Questura. The woman put him through immediately as Gemelli had said she would.
“Commissario Gemelli? Urbino Macintyre speaking.”
“Yes, Signor Macintyre, good morning.”
He sounded weary.
“I’m a little surprised to find you in.”
“Then why did you call?”
Urbino could imagine the little smile on Gemelli’s face.
“You said to let you know if I saw Carlo Galuppi. I have.”
“You have?” There was a strange note in Gemelli’s voice that he couldn’t identify. “When was that?”
Urbino braced himself. Perhaps he had broken some Italian law about cooperation with the police.
“Last night about midnight.”
He gave the details.
Instead of berating him for having waited almost twelve hours, Gemelli said in a quiet, even voice, “Fortunately for you, Signor Macintyre, we’ve had a later sighting of Galuppi than that. I’ve just seen him myself.” Urbino felt relieved until Gemelli added, “In the morgue. A workman on San Michele found him early this morning. He must have been desperate to kill himself. Slit his throat and then threw himself into a partly dug grave with about six inches of water in it. Kind of a joke in a city with so much of the damn stuff but there was enough to drown him, I suppose. The medical examiner is still trying to figure out if he died from drowning or loss of blood. A mere technicality as far as I’m concerned. There’s no indication it was anything but suicide.”
Gemelli gave him the opportunity to say something. When he didn’t Gemelli went on: “In other circumstances your failure to call us as soon as Galuppi came there could have had unpleasant consequences but all we’ll bother you about is another statement so that we can proceed with the closing of the case.”
“But what about the ransom note?”
Although Urbino hadn’t changed his opinion about it, he brought it up to give Gemelli’s self-satisfaction some check. Also, still shocked over the news of Carlo’s death on San Michele, he didn’t know what else to say.
“Surely you don’t take that note seriously? Quite honestly we’re more than a little surprised that there weren’t any other letters, just as ridiculous, from every religious and political pazzo who can write and has the price of a stamp. We’ve seen all this before,” he said, trying to give the impression that this case was in no way unique.
“But why are you so sure that Carlo Galuppi killed himself?”
Gemelli laughed in a rather unpleasant way.
“There’s no doubt about that, believe me. We found a razor near the grave, the only prints on it were his. Really, Signor Macintyre, don’t be too hard on yourself. Who knows? Maybe Galuppi would still have managed to kill himself even if you had called us right away. Until tomorrow morning, then.”
17
EARLY Monday morning along the Fondamenta Nuove across from the cemetery island, Matteo picked up the dustbin near the Bridge of the Mendicanti and put it in his trolley. After he had rolled it over to the garbage barge moored along the quay, he stopped and took out a flask of anisette from his coat pocket. It was cold and he needed another swig. After he put the flask back, he removed the lid of the dustbin and looked inside.
On the top was a sack made of what looked like good, though soiled cloth. Partly filled as it was with something whose contours were obscured by the rich folds of the material, it fired his expectations.
It was amazing what people threw out. His apartment on the Giudecca was furnished with some of the things he had found over the past ten years, even down to prints on the walls and dishes on the table. The clothes on his back as well as the shoes on his feet had once been the proud possessions of rich old eccentrics. Matteo never entertained the possibility that the things he had found over the years could have once belonged to people who had as little or even less than he had. Instead he considered all these things as so much ballast cast off by the rich to keep their palazzi from sinking.
He picked up the sack, disappointed not to find it heavier. He looked around nervously, not because it was against the law to take what no one else wanted but because his pride was almost as strong as his inability to resist temptation. To avoid any prying eyes from the buildings along the quay, he brought the sack into a deserted calle and emptied it on to the damp stones.
At first he thought he was looking at a costume for carnevale. In the center of the pile was a full face mask that he assumed had been made to look old. There were red slippers and a torn, yellowed garment.
And then he saw the head—or rather the skull—covered with long black hair whose thickness and luster only made the sight more appalling.
A grin was frozen on its face as if to say, Now you’ve really found something, you old fool!
18
BECAUSE the body of Santa Teodora had been found across from San Michele shortly after Carlo Galuppi’s suicide there and since no ransom request other than the Gramsci one had surfaced, the hunchback’s culpability was clinched for the Questura and most of the public. What more proof was needed?
The press treated the murder as the bizarre act of an unstable son whose resentment against his mother had smoldered over the years. Il Gazzettino even found an old man now living up in Trento near the Austrian border who claimed to have seen Maria Galuppi slap her son on several occasions many years before when he was a resident of the Cannaregio. He had said nothing earlier because he had feared for his own life.
Now that Carlo was dead many people from the Cannaregio had stories to tell about harsh words between the mother and son or unusual forms of punishment, such as forcing him to sit quietly in a pew or to kneel in front of the coffin of Santa Teodora for two or three hours at a time. But none of these people could say for sure that such things had actually happened or, if they had, that they had occurred recently enough to have been a reasonable motive for matricide.
As to why he had also taken the body of Santa Teodora, most thought it was one final blow against his mother. A few others with a facile knowledge of psychology said that he was striking out at yet another symbol of female authority and that it was surprising he hadn’t also mutilated the statue of the Blessed Virgin and the painting of the Madonna and Child.
Because no jewels were retrieved with the body, the legend about them was debated in the paper and in bars and cafés. Eventually almost everyone came to the conclusion that there had never been any jewels, valuable or otherwise. Even Don Marcantonio was quoted in Il Gazzettino as saying, “Santa Teodora always was and always will remain the only prize a true believer needs. It is almost sacrilegious to consider the need or existence of any other.”
The case of the Relic Murder was closed. No one was more relieved than the Questura and the city officials and merchants who pointed out that carnevale was only a short three weeks away.
The city, especially the Cannaregio, rested more easily although there was some regret at the loss of an interesting topic. The Patriarch and the Monsignor from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints made plans for the reconsecration of the body of Santa Teodora.
19
A week after Carlo’s suicide, Urbino decided to try to get at some answers.
It was about two in the morning and he went to the library for something to read. He had gone to bed at eleven and slept soundly for two hours only to awaken refreshed and unable to get back to sleep.
Although he wasn’t deeply superstitious, he put the George Sand novel back on the shelf, thinking it had already proved to be a peculiar kind of bad luck. No sense in testing the adage that things come in threes.
He settled down in a corner of the bedroom with a book that never disappointed him. He couldn’t imagine better company during these dead hours than that of a man who wrote about Venice in sentences that resembled nothing so much as “those fast-gaining waves that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice,” to use Ruskin’s own words.
He soon put aside the book, however, as thoughts of Maria’s murder intruded.
The day after her murder he had realized at Florian’s that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had a satisfying answer to the woman’s death—and by a satisfying answer he hadn’t meant one that named Carlo as the murderer. It went against everything he felt about the man and about the man’s relationship with his mother. Carlo’s own death and the closing of the case only intensified this feeling.
Commissario Gemelli might pride himself on being a student of human nature but in his own small way so did Urbino. Work on Venetian Lives had developed his ability to detect the truth—or the truths—behind appearances. This didn’t mean that he always dismissed appearances as lies. He had too much respect for the truth to do that.
He opened The Stones of Venice again, sitting beside Ruskin as their gondola approached the city and walking with him through the Basilica as his guide convinced him, once again, that all the incrustation of the brick with precious materials only seemed insincere, that there was no intention to deceive, to be treacherous. Then, troubled thoughts of Maria receding into the background, he read what Ruskin had to say about San Zanipolo, die church of the Doges not far from where Santa Teodora’s body had been found. When he finished, he put the book in his lap and mused on the image of Ruskin climbing a ladder in San Zanipolo to discover what he strongly suspected—that the profile of the sculpted Doge placed for all to see was faceless on the other side.
But what had been the point? Who cared? Why go to the trouble of climbing his ladder and risk breaking his neck?
And then the answer came not in a flash but, quite appropriately, like a gentle wave: To know, to know, as if knowledge, happy or sad, uplifting or disillusioning, was and should be reason and consolation enough for just about anything.
Ruskin hadn’t hesitated to climb his ladder for the sake of the truth, even though it might not have turned out to be the truth that he expected and wanted.
The relevance of this to what he was going through himself struck him forcefully. And so, with the help and example of dear old Ruskin on this early morning in mid-January almost two weeks after Maria’s murder, Urbino reached a point he wouldn’t turn back from, no matter what.
Part Three
REMEMBERING HER DEAD
1
MARIA and Carlo Galuppi had lived in a narrow, dilapidated, four-story building that brooded along the Rio della Sensa not far from the house of Tintoretto.
In that same building four women now huddled in a room on the third floor to conserve heat and pass the dull afternoon hours. They might have been figures in a medieval or Renaissance painting about the ravages of age. The old woman talking reminded Urbino of the toothless hag in Giorgione’s painting at the Accademia, except that Nina wasn’t pointing to a scroll with the message COL TEMPO. Instead she warned what would happen to us all with only her face and body, but they were enough.
In some kind of ironic compensation, however, her voice was that of a young woman. She had just finished telling him, interrupted periodically by the other women, what he already knew about Maria: that she had been a hard worker, a devout woman, and a true daughter of the Cannaregio, having been born, married, and widowed there. “And murdered too,” one of the women farthest from the stove cackled. She had snow-white hair but the blackest and bushiest eyebrows Urbino had ever seen. Nina shot her a glance and the woman looked away. It was evident that Nina, perhaps because it was her apartment, exerted an influence over the others. They had deferred to her earlier when Urbino had asked about Maria.
“Don’t be disrespectful, Eleonora. Death will come to us all, even you, my dear.”
“We all have to die but we won’t all be murdered,” another of them said. She had a black lace cap pulled down over her head and a rather pronounced moustache.
“It’s bad luck to say such things,” a refined-looking woman replied. She had an abstracted air, as if she wondered what she was doing in the midst of these vulgar old women. She was sitting closest to the fire and took an occasional sip from what looked like a small medicine bottle she kept in the pocket of her robe. She didn’t do it furtively, but rather with hauteur, and when she did, the faint odor of anisette wafted to Urbino.
“I don’t think you ladies need fear any bad luck of that kind. The Questura is satisfied that Carlo killed his mother.”
He threw it out to get their reaction. They hadn’t said anything yet about Carlo except that he had lived with his mother on the top floor in the back.
“The Questura is satisfied with very little,” Nina said with a sniff. “We knew Carlo since he was a little boy. He could never have done such a terrible thing, never.”
“He was ugly is all, un gobbo like that statue on the other side of the Ponte di Rialto—if it’s still there. I haven’t left this house in years.” Eleonora shook her head regretfully.
“He loved his mother,” the woman with the medicine bottle said in a dreamy voice as if she were thinking of loves from her own past.
“And she loved him, don’t forget that, Marietta,” the woman in the lace cap said.
“Yes, Dorotea, she loved him,” Nina agreed, “but she loved her daughter more.”
“You can’t compare love, it can’t even be measured,” Marietta said in her dreamy voice, looking off into a far corner of the room. “It’s not someone’s fault if they love you more, or less, or if they can’t love you at all. In my time there were three men all courting me, as different as could be, one of them was from Verona, the home of Romeo—”
“I don’t think the signore americano is interested in the story of your life, Marietta,” Nina interrupted. “He came here about Maria. We don’t want him to leave with the impression that old women wander from one topic to another.”
“Her daughter’s name, I believe, was Beatrice,” Urbino prompted.
“Beatrice, like Dante’s love,” said Marietta.
“Yes, her name was Beatrice,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “I doubt, however, if her name had anything to do with Dante. I think it was Maria’s mother’s name.”
“Perhaps her mother was named after Dante’s heroine,” suggested Dorotea with a little smile at Marietta. Marietta ignored her and took a sip from her medicine bottle.
“Whoever she was named after,” Eleonora of the eyebrows said, “she was her mother’s shining light. Maria would have followed her anywhere.” Urbino wondered if Eleonora’s image was merely fortuitous or if she actually knew who Dante’s Beatrice was. She left the question no longer in doubt when she added, “Unfortunately her Beatrice led her down to an inferno, not up to Paradise.”
“You exaggerate as usual,” Nina said. “Beatrice loved her mother.”
“But she loved someone else much more, I think,” said Marietta, who by now held the bottle openly on her knee.
Nina looked at Urbino steadily and said in her little girl voice, “Marietta is right. Beatrice was most certainly in love. Oh, she was a beautiful young girl, fair, fair skin and bright blue eyes. Her hair was a marvelous black, like ebony. She was as different from her brother as you could imagine two children could be, not just in her beauty and slimness but in her quickness of mind. She was bright, very bright. She could have married well. That’s what Maria hoped, that’s what all mothers hope.”
“What happened?” All he knew about the daughter was the little the Contessa had told him when he had hired Maria: that she had died very young, that she had been in love, nothing much more than that. Maria had never told her anything more, it seemed, nor had anyone else.
“What happened?” Marietta echoed him. “She fell in love.”
“Love frequently leads to marriage. Did she marry the man?”
“Love sometimes leads to marriage,” Marietta corrected with the air of someone who should know, taking a sip of her anisette.
“In the case of Beatrice, this love could never have led to marriage, I’m sure.” It was Dorotea. She pulled
her lace cap down more snugly and looked at Nina. “Am I not right, Nina?” She seemed to want to pacify the woman.
Nina nodded with a frown, then turned to Urbino and sighed. “My dear Signor Macintyre, please don’t think ill of a group of old women. Maybe it’s wrong to talk as we’ve been doing but it’s one of our few pastimes and we mean no harm. It’s only the truth we’re telling. Haven’t you noticed how the old usually tell the truth, no matter what? Yes, we tell the truth as we understand it. That’s what we’re trying to do, all of us, even Dorotea here.”
“But what did she mean, Signora? Was the man married?”
She shrugged.
“We spoke of love, Signor Macintyre, but did we speak of love for a man who could or would marry her?”
“Who was he?”
She shrugged again.
“We never knew. Seventeen-year-old girls can keep a secret. I don’t think her own mother knew. Beatrice took the man’s name to her grave.”
“Did Maria confide in you?”
“She never said a word about it, either before or after her daughter died, but we knew.”
“I was the first to know,” Marietta said. “I told the others.”
“We would have heard too if we had been home at the time,” Nina said. “Come here, Signor Macintyre.” She got up and led him across to the window. It was covered with transparent plastic taped messily to the frame. “Do you see that?”
He looked out the window. All he saw was a small courtyard and the backs of three other buildings. Before he could answer Nina continued, “When all the windows are open we can hear almost everything because of the way the buildings come together, even if there’s no shouting. But that afternoon more than thirty years ago there was a great deal of shouting.”
“Yes,” Marietta said, “and I heard it. You always talk as if you were the one to be home that afternoon.”
Death in a Serene City Page 11