Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  One evening after having been to see the Klimt she was sitting in her room and felt a sudden chill, followed a few minutes later by a burning sensation in her face and a buzzing in her ears. She opened the window for some air despite the chill outside. As she stood at the open window, she looked down into the calle and saw a man, perhaps forty, perhaps older. He was leaning against the closed shutters of the pharmacy. Wasn’t he the man she had noticed several days before at San Rocco? Wasn’t he the one who had lingered for a long time today in front of the Klimt?

  When she went out for dinner several hours later, he was still in the calle.

  What would be the greater mistake? To acknowledge his presence or pretend she didn’t notice? She hurried past him, her eyes averted. She was relieved that he didn’t follow her but then she saw him again in the Campo Santa Margherita, looking through a café window with a cigarette in his hand and a smile on his face. He must have come from a different direction.

  She turned around and hurried back to her room.

  The next day, and for days afterward, the papers seemed to be filled with news of death and destruction. Floods and earthquakes, fires and famines, murders and suicides. She read all the articles and then, not satisfied, all the obituary notices. She sought out the death announcements posted in the parishes, scrutinizing the photographs and wondering about the lives of the dead.

  She started to go to funeral Masses in the early morning, sometimes hiring a boat to take her in the cortege to the cemetery island.

  After a week of not seeing the man anywhere she found herself standing next to him in the back of the Church of the Carmini during a Requiem Mass. He touched her sleeve.

  “Ah, you too are interested in the city’s dead,” he said in English with only the faint trace of an accent.

  Lillian rushed from the church. She found a working-class bar by the maritime station where she drank several glasses of wine, trying to understand why she felt not just frightened and threatened but also strangely exhilarated.

  The next day she went to the cemetery island again, not as part of a cortege but on her own late in the afternoon.

  She didn’t see the man at the grave of Pound or the Baron Corvo or Stravinsky but there he was at the tomb of Diaghilev. She noticed him from the far end of the Orthodox section and realized she had known he would be there.

  As she approached him, he smiled and picked something up from the top of Diaghilev’s tomb. She looked at it, squinting in exaggerated fashion—not in order to see better but because she wanted him to realize she was making an effort to understand, even if it was only this one small detail. She wanted him to see the effort and strain on her face.

  “A slipper,” he whispered.

  Not a glass slipper, but a ballet shoe, moldy and faded, with withered flowers nestling in it as if it were their coffin.

  Like the Middle Eastern music mentioned at the beginning, there was no resolution to the story. It just ended.

  All that remained was the index card. On it were two numbers and not even a dozen words:

  The Death of Domenica—title??

  Secondo Fabriani, La Storia di Murano, 137, 192

  A few minutes later he phoned the Contessa.

  “‘The Death of Domenica’? What does it mean?” she asked.

  “Your copy of Fabriani might tell us.”

  “I’m afraid it will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m having an early dinner with Stefano and Angela, then we’re joining Sister Veronica for the chamber music concert at La Fenice. We would have asked you to come except that I know how much you dislike Haydn.”

  “Cancel, Barbara.”

  “Cancel? At the last minute? I couldn’t possibly.”

  He didn’t say anything, knowing that silence, not insistence, was usually the best tactic with her. It shouldn’t take her more than a few minutes to realize how important it was that they resolve this new development as soon as possible.

  After a few moments she sighed.

  “Well, all right, if you really think it can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  “It could, but if it did, I doubt if I’d get any sleep. I’d keep wondering about those pages. Are you familiar with the book?”

  “It’s one of the ones she borrowed. I read it years ago. I’m afraid I skimmed a lot of it. It’s quite a tome.”

  “Fortunately, Quinton left behind specific page references. I’ll be there in half an hour. That should give you time to make your apologies and have the book ready and waiting. Let’s hope we can learn something.”

  4

  THE Contessa put the ceramic elephant down on the table with the other animals and asked Urbino to read the passage out loud again.

  “There’s an engraving by Visentini on the bottom of the page.” He held the book up so she could see it. “The only passage she could have been referring to is the one I already read.” He started to read it again, this time translating it into English as if this might reveal a facet that hadn’t been apparent a few moments before:

  The art of glassmaking was most jealously guarded in the Venetian state for the glassblowers knew secrets coveted by other cities and nations. So valued was the art of the glassmakers that they were sometimes given amnesty for serious crimes so that they could continue their precious, secret art. On the other hand, if any of them left the Venetian state, he was put under immediate sentence of death and was often sought out and made to suffer this ultimate penalty.

  When he finished, the Contessa shook her head.

  “Not much there. What about the other reference?”

  Urbino turned to the other page Quinton had listed on the card and skimmed several detailed paragraphs on the glass maestri. He was beginning to think that this reference was also without interest when he reached the last paragraph. He drew in his breath.

  “What is it?”

  Without answering, he went over the whole page again, this time more slowly in case he had missed something, but this second reading only confirmed the first. The last paragraph was the only one of importance for them—and had been, he would think, for Maria Galuppi as well.

  “Well, what is it, Urbino?”

  Instead of saying anything he read to her in a quiet, unhurried voice: “‘One of the earliest glassmakers whose name is known to us is Domenica, an otherwise obscure man alluded to in a fourteenth-century manuscript.’”

  In the moments afterward they could hear the siren of a fireboat farther down the Grand Canal. As it faded, the Contessa stood up quickly, her lap rug falling to the floor.

  “Domenica,” she said in almost a whisper. “But Beatrice’s Domenica was a woman! We’re looking for a woman!”

  “Are we?” Urbino closed the book and got up. “What we know is that Maria was looking for a woman, a woman named Domenica. The last time we know she was asking about a woman was on her annual visit to Murano during the first week of November. Maybe Maria and Margaret Quinton became friendly sometime after the first week of November—friendly enough, that is, to learn something about each other.”

  He walked back and forth in front of the sofa, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets.

  “Their friendship grew,” he went on, “they had many conversations—this we know from Voyd—and somehow during one of those conversations the name Domenica came up. Once it did, especially in reference to Murano, wasn’t it only natural for Quinton to tell Maria what she knew about a glassblower from old Murano named Domenica—a Domenica who was a man? The result was that Maria ended up learning a valuable piece of information—after having been misled just as we’ve been.” He looked at the Contessa, his eyes shining. “It’s all so neat and logical.”

  “Perhaps too much so,” she said as she settled herself on the sofa again. “This Domenica lived hundreds of years ago. Why does there have to be a link to Beatrice?”

  “Remember, the dove was made of glass. If it had been made of anything else, we could consider all this just an oddity, a coincidence.”
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br />   “In either case, made of glass or not, everyone would assume Domenica was a woman when they heard the name.”

  A puzzled look came over the Contessa’s face, as if she had forgotten exactly what position it was she was arguing.

  “Everyone except someone like Beatrice herself. Remember what Rodolfo Tasso said about how much she seemed to know about things Venetian.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, she might have picked up this obscure little detail from her Domenica, whoever he was.” Before she might correct him he added, “Or whoever he is if he’s still alive.”

  “I don’t know. It could still be a woman.” She seemed to be finding it hard to relinquish what had been almost impossible for her to accept before. “Quinton’s notebook might easily prove you wrong.”

  “More likely than not it would confirm all this. Or Voyd might have remembered. He said Quinton mentioned Maria in her letters but even those are lost to us.”

  He quickly explained what Kobke had told him earlier about Voyd’s burning all his correspondence in December back in London.

  “But what about letters that might have come afterward?”

  “I’ll ask Kobke. Some letters might still be around—maybe in London or in Gemelli’s hands. Those letters—if they exist—could establish some crucial dates. On her last November visit Maria was asking about a woman. Sometime between then and when she was murdered she might have learned she had been going in the wrong direction, asking the wrong questions. It may have been enough to put her right after all those years. And in finally discovering who Domenica was—a man who might have been someone close to her own age, even a trusted friend, who knows?—she might very well have brought about her own death. This person could have every reason to want to remain unknown. Arsenic is more usually a means of murder, not suicide.”

  The Contessa stared at him in surprise, then looked down at her lap rug.

  “Was there anything in the rest of what you read of her writing that might be of help?”

  “It doesn’t seem so, although everything was about Venice in one way or another. There was an unfinished story and some random observations and comments—most of it rather melancholy and self-absorbed. It’s not hard to see she was suicidal.” He paused in his pacing. “There was one thing, though, that might be of importance. She mentioned a conversation she had with Maria. She didn’t say what it was about—maybe she put that in the notebook—but she did say there might be a story in it.”

  The Contessa raised her head and looked up at him.

  “Do you think it was about Beatrice? Or this—this Domenica?”

  “Perhaps, but in the next sentence she said that a better idea for a story might be a lost Tintoretto on the theft of the body of Santa Teodora from Sicily. Of course, no such Tintoretto exists as far as we know.”

  She nodded woodenly.

  “Could whatever it was that Maria told her and this idea of an unknown Tintoretto have been related in some way?”

  “It’s possible. And then there’s the coincidence of Santa Teodora.” He shook his head slowly. “You know, reading only those scraps has made me realize even more why someone might have been willing to kill for the notebook.”

  5

  LATER that night, back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino devoted himself to the two books he had brought back from the Contessa’s: Fabriani’s history of Murano and Martino de Martini’s massive study of the art of glassmaking.

  After rereading the passage on Domenica he skimmed through the rest of the Fabriani. He indulged himself for a while by first seeking out the chapters that highlighted the intrigue, jealousy, and violence that had glass at their heart, then the sections—this a much gentler tale—of aristocratic dalliance and grand passion played out in the gardens of Murano far from the watchful eyes of Venice. He ended by searching for a familiar name or association among the old Murano glass maestri—Barovier, Toso, Ferro, Salviati, Fuga, Seguso.

  It was almost midnight before he opened the Martino de Martini book on glassmaking. Several initial chapters about the Saracens, Egyptians, and Romans almost put him to sleep. The chapter on the chemistry of glassmaking was even worse and he started to close the book when a word in a paragraph ahead hooked his eye.

  He knew there was now no possibility of his falling asleep soon as he read:

  In order to create that much prized emerald green glass in all of its purity and to avoid any undesirable yellowish tone, it is necessary to add tin oxide or arsenic.

  6

  URBINO left the Palazzo Uccello early the next morning for the Biblioteca Marciana. The sun was breaking through the clouds and it promised to be a nice day. The calli were crowded with housewives carrying string shopping bags and plastic baskets filled with groceries. Schoolchildren shouted at each other, deliverymen maneuvered wheelbarrows up and down the bridges, old women stepped carefully alongside their muzzled dogs, and groups of tourists made their way toward San Marco. Although carnevale was still more than two weeks away, he encountered several people in masks and was startled when a respectable-looking woman with a Gucci purse pelted him with confetti that fell soddenly to the pavement outside a pastry shop in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa.

  While having a coffee in the busy, smoke-filled café under the clock tower, he called Kobke at the Danieli. The Dane, who was about to go to Verona for the day with Adele Carstairs, was less supercilious than usual, his characteristic ironic tone replaced by something like reserve.

  “Well be leaving for the station in half an hour. We could arrange to meet you for a drink here this evening.”

  “Some other time, thank you. This will take only a few minutes. Yesterday you said that Voyd burned his correspondence in December. Did that include all of Quinton’s letters?”

  “As far as I know. Why?”

  Urbino didn’t think it was necessary to go into detail with Kobke. It might not even be prudent. “I wanted to see if she mentioned anything about a project about Murano. There was an entry about it in those sheets.”

  “Oh.” Kobke sounded relieved. “I don’t know anything about that. He said he burned everything but he might have held back a letter or two. He didn’t get any letters from Quinton after the burning, though. I picked up the mail every day.”

  “Do you know if Quinton wrote Adele Carstairs from Venice?”

  “Adele hardly got any letters from her at all. In fact, they didn’t see much of each other in the last five years. She was surprised to get everything—everything, that is, except the royalties on the books. Those went to Clifford. I don’t know who they go to now.”

  As Urbino walked across to the library, he wondered whether Kobke was in Voyd’s will. Either way, Urbino was sure he wouldn’t languish. Adele Carstairs was going to find it difficult to get rid of him—that is, assuming she wanted to.

  As he went up the stairs to the main reading room, he reminded himself that he should find out exactly when the two of them were going up to Vienna. He didn’t want them to leave before he had a chance to ask them more questions. At this point he didn’t know what those questions might be.

  The reading room was overheated and he had some difficulty focusing on the entries made in the card catalogue in ornate handwriting. He eventually found what he was looking for, however—an encyclopedia of poisons. He copied the necessary information on a slip of paper and gave it to the woman at the request counter. When the book finally arrived, after what seemed like an hour, he brought it back to his table and looked in the index under “arsenic.”

  There was more than he expected.

  He learned about the Austrian miners who ate arsenic for strength and about the use of the chemical in papermaking, taxidermy, and—he was relieved to find it confirmed here—glassmaking. He read about the Arab chemist who discovered arsenic in the eighth century and about the large quantities found in Napoleon’s body in 1840 when it proved possible to make a second death mask as distinct as the first. He spent many minutes studying a chart of the mos
t famous cases of arsenic poisoning since the seventeenth century and reading detailed accounts of some. His favorite was the nineteenth-century Maybrick case in which the young wife was found guilty of poisoning her husband even though he had been known to consume arsenic in the mistaken belief that it was an aphrodisiac. He familiarized himself with the symptoms of arsenic poisoning—nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, intense thirst, weight and hair loss. He was surprised to learn that arsenic had not only found its way into many cosmetics—women in southern Austria used to swear that it improved their complexions—but that it had also been an ingredient in medicinal tonics recommended by doctors and pharmacists.

  Misused, it brought almost certain death, but in the proper hands and with no malevolent intent it was beneficial. If it did not exist people would have had to go without many things until a substitute was found. How many fewer preserved animals and how much less peeling, faded wallpaper in shades and patterns of green would have graced the rooms and offices of his New Orleans youth? Well, perhaps in these instances, he thought to himself with a little smile, it might not have been such a loss after all.

  As he closed the book, he considered the implications of several things he had just learned. He needed a drink.

  He went to Florian’s and on this occasion was happy not to have the company of the Contessa although, as it was, his thoughts frequently carried him in her direction. As he gazed out at the Piazza, flooded by gende sunlight, his mind played over various pieces of information. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had to go back to Murano. But first he had to talk to several people again.

  He decided against another Campari soda and struck out for the Cannaregio, savoring the mild weather that they would be lucky to have for even a few more hours. Two gondolas, filled with laughing tourists, glided past each other beneath the Ponte Guerra as he was walking over it. He felt both euphoric and also peculiarly grim. It was a combination of expectation and fear.