Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  He nodded and continued to look at the page, then turned it and began at the top of the next. Hoping his face was reflecting increasing interest and amazement, he said, “She was very friendly with Maria. Not exactly a meeting of equal minds but she seems to have found something interesting in the old woman. I suppose she was always on the lookout for material, as Voyd said.”

  “What is it?” the Contessa asked impatiently. “It’s not polite to be reading and not telling us anything, is it, Stefano?”

  Even if she had expected an answer, it didn’t seem as if she would get one from Bellorini. He sat looking down into his Strega.

  “Wait then. Let me go back a bit.” Urbino ran his eye back up the page and began to read again haltingly, having the ostensible excuse of Quinton’s handwriting. “‘I—I don’t see why I can’t treat the—the whole topic of the glassblower from old Murano in a brief form, maybe a short story or novella. It could end with the—with the death of Domenica.’”

  After pausing to clear his throat he continued: “‘It’s a worthwhile idea but it might be difficult to bring off because of all the period detail. I wonder if the dear Contessa would be kind enough to lend me more of her collection. It would be so much better than being—than being alternately fried and frozen at the B.M.’ That must be the Biblioteca Marciana, don’t you think?”

  He gave them a quick glance.

  “Right after that she mentions Maria for the first time. ‘It might be less trouble to turn my attention to old Maria’s story. But there are two problems with that.’” He made a point of turning the page to the light before going on. “’There’s—there’s what she told me that I can’t perhaps use, and then there are all those huge—huge hells.’”

  “‘Hells’?” The Contessa frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, ‘hells’—no, wait a minute, ‘holes,’ yes, ‘holes.’ She seemed particularly fascinated with what Maria had to tell her. She goes into more detail.” He stared at the page, then moved his eyes down to the bottom. “Oh my God, I—”

  Looking up quickly to see what reaction he was getting, he saw barely a flicker on either face. He hoped Gemelli had got his message or the Questura had acted on it. He even wished now that Adele Carstairs and Kobke were there with them. Angela, however, was a different matter entirely. He remembered enough about his study of mathematics many years ago with the Jesuits to know that every equation had at least one unknown.

  He felt he had no choice but to go on. He bent down over the notebook again for the coup de grâce, this time forgetting to pretend to puzzle out Quinton’s handwriting.

  “‘Maria was very excited this afternoon and at first I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I asked her to speak more slowly. I still don’t understand exactly what she meant by some man named Giovanni Fabbri but she said that this Fabbri and the mysterious Domenica she’s always talking about were actually—’”

  He turned the page and was about to continue when a voice sounded from the door.

  “That will be enough!”

  Urbino turned around, and the Contessa twisted her body to look over the back of the sofa. Angela Bellorini was standing in front of the closed door. She must have come in while he was reading, noticed by no one but her husband, who now got up from his chair and walked toward her. On the woman’s face was a sneer, which did nothing for her already unattractive features. But it was the pistol in her hand that looked most unattractive.

  “It would have been so much better if you didn’t have such a long nose, Urbino—better for you and for poor, dear Barbara.”

  Angela Bellorini made the mistake of gesturing abruptly with the pistol at the Contessa.

  What happened next happened quickly. There was a loud scream—it was the Contessa’s. There was a cry—it was Angela’s as she rushed toward the Contessa. There was a crash—it was the door being pushed open, revealing three grim faces behind it, one of them Commissario Gemelli’s.

  Epilogue

  MURDER AT FLORIAN’S

  “SO I was right,” the Contessa said to Urbino at their customary table in the Chinese salon at Florian’s. “A woman was involved—but did it have to be Angela?”

  It was late afternoon of the kind of pearly gray day that Sargent captured so well in Venise par temps gris, their first meeting since the Contessa had decided to forgive him for what she called his “cool deception” of her at Bellorini’s studio.

  The shock of learning that her friends were the source of the villainy—and learning it in the way she had—had kept her indisposed at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini for almost a week while Urbino had met with Gemelli, the Substitute Prosecutor, and other officials at the Questura. The Commissario, though harshly critical of how he had gone about things, was nonetheless grudgingly appreciative and had shown it by passing on much of what had been learned from the Bellorinis. Urbino had been doing the same with his friend for the past half hour.

  The Contessa was looking at him and nodding her head slowly.

  “A woman was involved,” she emphasized, as if his silence indicated that he had somehow forgotten or disagreed.

  He sipped his Campari soda. Why point out to her that at the beginning, when they had thought there was a particular friendship between Beatrice Galuppi and a mysterious woman named Domenica, she had shied away from the possibility of a woman being involved? This afternoon, however, the Contessa was seeing things the way she wanted to. She thought she was entitled to because of all she had lost a week ago at Bellorini’s studio. He hadn’t told her of his own eleventh hour suspicions that a woman might somehow be implicated, the most logical woman being the wife of the man to whom the evidence pointed. The Contessa might have accused him of taking undue advantage of hindsight—something that she was now showing was hers alone to do.

  “And then there was the poison,” she added after a few more moments with a touch of exasperation in her voice. “It’s a woman’s way.”

  “Isn’t that rather sexist and narrow-minded, my dear?”

  “I suppose I am rather sexist and narrow-minded but I don’t think it’s done me—or others—much harm, has it? I’ve been looking into poisoning, you see. Most of the cases I’ve come across—especially arsenic for some reason—involved women. Let me see: There’s the black widow Florence Maybrick, Madeleine Smith, Marie Besnard, Marie Lafarge.” She counted them off on her well-manicured fingers, then waved her hand. “Oh, and many, many others.”

  “It reminds me of something Kobke said before they left for Vienna. By the way, you were very much missed at Adele’s little get-together.”

  “I can’t believe you went.”

  “I felt I had some explaining to do. I didn’t want Adele to think there had actually been another notebook if she heard what happened at Stefano’s. When I was about to leave, Kobke said that neither he nor Adele could imagine Angela as a criminal, as someone in the same league, so to speak, as the women you’ve mentioned. Neither would Voyd have been able to, he said. Voyd seems to have found her quite ordinary.”

  “That’s how much they know about it.” It was as if Angela had been insulted and needed someone to defend her reputation. He almost expected the Contessa to point out that the woman had a good heart. She had brought all those meals to the needy over the years and she had been a good friend, hadn’t she? But instead she said, a bit wearily, “Most of those women I mentioned were ordinary, quite ordinary. At any rate, Christian has forgotten something. Angela didn’t do it all by herself.”

  “But she did start things going thirty years ago. I think Kobke holds her just as responsible as Stefano for killing Voyd for the Venice notebook—which, from what Stefano says, had nothing incriminating in it.”

  “The point is that we were all so deceived by them both. Of course Angela was only a girl when it started. She had just married and learned not only that Stefano had had an affair before they were married but that it was still continuing—and with the worst girl imaginable, the bright and beautif
ul Beatrice Galuppi. To complicate matters, Beatrice believed she was pregnant and threatened to go to Stefano’s father. Angela had learned she could never have children. I always thought that was what brought them closer together, the way it did Alvise and me. I felt a bond with them because of it.”

  “You might say that Stefano’s flaw was his weakness. If he had been stronger, then maybe all the Galuppis would still be alive—and Voyd too of course.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” He took another sip of his Campari soda. “Stefano would have had the courage to tell his father he wanted to be a glassblower instead of a doctor or whatever dream his father had for him. He wouldn’t have had to go to Murano in secret when his father thought he was in Padua. Although his father was one of those parents Don Marcantonio mentioned—the ones who don’t know if it’s worse for their sons to be priests or glassblowers—he might have come around eventually. Who knows? If Stefano had been stronger, he might even have divorced Angela and married Beatrice if they were still so much in love.”

  The Contessa gave him an exaggeratedly disdainful look.

  “Divorce didn’t exist in Italy back then. And Stefano would have risked losing his father’s fortune if he didn’t come around. A lot of money was involved, more than enough for Stefano to go to art school after his father died several years after Beatrice—enough for that and for him to pursue a less than lucrative career. That’s what he and Angela have been living on.”

  “That’s one of the things I meant by his weakness. Part of it was to be so influenced by his father, to feel he had a need for the money to make his way. Why not try for an annulment since they couldn’t have children? Or go off with Beatrice and live outside of Italy?”

  “‘Ages ago these lovers fled away into die storm,’” she recited with a little smile. “How do you square such romantic notions with your interest in that decadent Des Esseintes? I’m sure, though, that Beatrice would probably have jumped at the chance of leaving everything behind her, but why assume she would have had Stefano without the money? From what he says Beatrice had no idea his father was so set on his marrying into Angela’s family—until she found him actually giving in. For almost a whole year afterward she seems to have hoped things would be resolved somehow in her favor. When you’re young and beautiful you think you’re going to have an easy time of life. She was her mother’s darling and the fantasy sweetheart of just about every man and boy in the Cannaregio, so why shouldn’t she win out in the end? Why couldn’t she have both Stefano and the old man’s money? She was in love and she was ambitious—a rather dangerous combination, wouldn’t you say? Who knows what plans she might have been making to get Angela out of the way? I don’t mean murder, of course, but perhaps persuading Stefano to get an annulment and settle things with his father. I’m afraid Stefano was caught between two scheming women. You know how I feel about Stefano’s talent—despite all these horrors, those frames are absolutely beautiful—but I never thought that he was particularly intelligent. You say things might have been different if he had been stronger. I say what the poor man needed was more intelligence.”

  “More intelligence—and a little less innocence.”

  “Less innocence! Don’t forget that although Angela began everything, Stefano was the one to go to San Gabriele to meet Maria and hit her with the candelabra. He went to the Europa e Regina.”

  “True, but what I meant was that a less innocent person—or call it a person with a more highly developed sense of suspicion at that time in his life—would have found it more than a little peculiar that his own injured wife would not only help him solve the problem of a pregnant girlfriend but give him the very things—the arsenic solution and the syringe—to do it with.”

  “You’re running away from me, caro. Remember that I’ve been almost on my letto di morte this past week. I’m in the dark, I’m groping even now.”

  It was an opportunity to remind her that she had refused to talk to him even on the phone, but instead he asked her what it was that she didn’t know.

  “What do I know would be a better question. I’m groping, I tell you. Just because I’ve done my research on arsenic doesn’t mean I know what you’re talking about. Do you mean that Angela just made a little package with arsenic and a syringe and sent Stefano on his merry way to Beatrice? Who would have thought he was such a fool? Who would have thought she was such a cool one?”

  “Not quite that cool, not at first. It wasn’t as if she had planned to kill Beatrice from the beginning, from when she knew that they had had an affair and were continuing it. And at first her reasons for asking him to take some arsenic from the Pignatti glass factory were innocent enough—to deal with the rats in their Padua flat. Even when she learned right after they were married about his relationship with Beatrice, she only wanted to get her revenge in a malicious but not homicidal way—just enough arsenic, she decided, to destroy Beatrice’s good looks, to ruin her skin and have her lose her glorious mane. She had the perfect opportunity since she was bringing those meals over to Benedetta Razzi when Beatrice was working for her. It was easy enough to arrange, I suppose. As you pointed out, a little more intelligence might have saved everyone. Angela was intelligent enough to know some of the symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning but not the ones that led Beatrice to think she was pregnant—the nausea, the thirst, the change in her monthly cycle.”

  The Contessa nodded.

  “I see. Otherwise she would have realized Beatrice wasn’t pregnant. But I wonder what would have happened then? Would she have continued to give Beatrice the poison in small doses?”

  Urbino shrugged.

  “What we do know is that, believing her to be pregnant and having her threaten to reveal everything, Angela snapped. She loved Stefano despite his continued infidelity and there was also the prospect of the Bellorini money once Stefano’s father died. Love and money, both threatened by someone she had no fondness for to begin with. An overdose of arsenic would solve her problems—would solve their problems—but she couldn’t take Stefano into her confidence. He had to believe he was merely giving Beatrice the means to abort the baby. One wonders how much he had learned from his own brief medical studies to let Angela take the initiative like that and not even question it. As for Beatrice, she would have trusted anything he told her to do since he had, after all, been studying medicine, in his fashion, for a while. Despite her threats to go to his father, she had no desire to remain pregnant. I wonder how much of an effort was made at the time to find the syringe or whatever they thought had been used to administer the arsenic? And I keep coming back to why Stefano didn’t question Angela’s motives in giving him the solution and the syringe. The fact that he didn’t know arsenic was involved at that point makes little difference.”

  “Marriage is a mystery, believe me.”

  “I suppose you would say that what also falls into the category of a mystery is the way Stefano stuck by Angela when he realized what she had done.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Fear.”

  “Fear of Angela? But what she did was mainly for love of him. I don’t believe the money was all that important to her.”

  “If that was the case, then it was a love to be feared. But I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of his fear of being caught. After all, he was the one who gave Beatrice the means of her death—handed them over, albeit unwittingly. He was lucky to have Maria remove the evidence when she found her daughter in the toilet but I doubt if he would have been able to convince the police that he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “And that’s why he set fire to Pignatti’s showroom and stole the paintings and sketchbooks back in the November of the flood—this same feat?”

  “Exactly. That’s when Maria stepped up her inquiries about Beatrice’s death and started to ask all those questions about Domenica and the glass dove Stefano made for Beatrice. He was afraid of anything that might associate him
with Beatrice or glassmaking.”

  “Beatrice and Stefano were typical lovers, weren’t they? Using the name Domenica the way they did—it was a way to conceal their relationship, I know, but it’s the kind of thing lovers enjoy doing. A whole secret world of assignations, furtive looks, private words and associations. Yet lovers can also be so indiscreet. They make incriminating gifts, they write letters, they have pictures taken that will later come back to haunt them, they take unnecessary chances. I think they enjoy the risk.”

  If she was speaking from experience, she gave no indication other than the validity of what she said.

  “Didn’t one of those women in Maria’s building say that Beatrice used to tease her mother with the name Domenica?”

  “Yes. As you were just suggesting, it was their lovers’ secrecy and ingenuity that led to the uncovering of the crime against her.”

  “I can’t understand why Maria didn’t suspect Stefano to begin with.”

  “For one thing she didn’t know him as well back then as she came to know him later—and it was mainly through you that she did. Also, Beatrice and Stefano managed to keep their secret well. They had the lick of lovers in that respect. There was little enough to link them together. And don’t forget that they succeeded in convincing Maria for a long time—for many years after Beatrice’s death, in fact—that she was looking for a woman friend who had exerted a bad influence over her. It threw Maria off.”

  “But as it turns out, she was looking for a woman and so were we—a man and a woman, that is. We were misled ourselves but in a different way. But I can see that we would never have been led to Angela’s part in it unless we—excuse me, unless you—figured out that Stefano was Domenica. In this case, cherchez la femme—even if we had definitely known a woman was involved—wouldn’t have done much good.”

  Was this a mild reparation for her insistence earlier that she had known a woman had been involved? The beginning of a smile tipped the corners of her mouth.