Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  Every day the high water was worse. The meteorologist reporting for the local TV station in the Palazzo Labia talked excitedly about the dire results of bureaucratic delay in dealing with acqua aha. “One!”—he held up his left hand and raised his fingers one at a time—“the delay in raising the level of the pavement in Piazza San Marco. Two! the delay in constructing mobile barriers and reinforcing the jetties at the three entrances to the lagoon. Three! the delay in completing the dredging of silt from the canals to speed up the flushing of high water. Four! the delay in preventing pollution from the passage of tankers within the island barrier. Five! the delay in preventing the discharge of pollutants from the mainland.” The meteorologist gave up on his fingers as a large map appeared behind him. It was alive with arrows running northward in the Adriatic, pointing directly at the city of Venice. The arrows were the violent winds resulting from a steep drop in atmospheric pressure.

  The wind was real. Homer, Mary, and Sam were blown sideways as they splashed to the San Zaccaria stop on the Riva through a retreating slop of water, and took the next vaporetto up the Grand Canal. At Ca’ Rezzonico there was a famous restaurant with a garden. They sat under a leafy trellis and ordered what Sam recommended, malfatti alia panna and scampi fritti. Sam himself ordered a plate of squid cooked in its own black ink.

  While they were waiting, Mary took out her photographs. “Oh, Sam, forgive me, these are just typical tourist pictures, but perhaps you can identify the ones I can’t remember. This one, for instance.” She shoved a photograph of an imposing doorway under his nose.

  Sam gave it a glance while the waiter set down their plates, and then he snatched it up and looked at it again. “What’s this?”

  “I don’t know.” Mary took it from him and showed it to Homer. “That’s why I’m asking you. It’s a church somewhere, but I don’t know which one. Do you know, Homer?”

  “God, how should I know?” said Homer, who was still steeped in ignorance, except of course about the Aldine Dream of Poliphilius and the illuminated Vitruvius of Cardinal Bessarion, and other ancient works.

  Sam took the picture back and said softly, “It’s Lucia. I swear it’s Lucia.”

  “Lucia?”

  “This woman walking in front of the church. It’s Lucia Costanza. The new procurator of San Marco. You remember, Homer. I told you about her.”

  “Oh, right,” said Homer, taking an interest at once. “I read about her in the New York Times before we came. She’s the one who’s supposed to have killed her husband, only you swear she didn’t.”

  “Because she disappeared,” exclaimed Mary, putting two and two together. “Isn’t she the woman the carabinieri are looking for? The one who vanished when her husband was murdered?”

  Sam gazed at Mary’s picture. “She’s alive, she’s here. She’s somewhere here in Venice.” He threw back his napkin and stood up. “When was this? When did you take this picture? Where were you?”

  “Oh, Sam, I’m terribly sorry. I haven’t the faintest idea where I was.”

  Sam pawed at the back of his chair and pulled on his coat. “I’ll look for it. I’ll look until I find it.”

  Mary groped under the table for her bag. “Books, Sam, we can look for it in books. I’ve got a really good guidebook. It’s chock-full of churches.”

  “You mean we’re leaving?” Homer looked with dismay at his dinner, for which he was about to pay forty thousand lire.

  In a far corner of the same restaurant Doctor Richard Henchard was having dinner. Turning his head, he saw Mary Kelly in the company of two men. One was familiar to him. At once he shifted his chair behind the trunk of a climbing vine. Turning up the collar of his jacket, he shivered and said to his dinner partner, “Ho freddo. E lei? Non trova che faccia un po’ freddo?”

  The pretty nurse with whom he was dining was new in his surgery, a clumsy girl with a habit of dropping instruments into abdominal cavities. In answer to his question she shook her head and went on with her story about the Virgin’s veil.

  “Haven’t you heard? It’s so exciting. They’ve found a piece of the blue veil of the Virgin Mary. It’s on display in the Church of Santo Spirito. Of course”—the nurse didn’t want to seem old-fashioned, because, after all, Riccardo was a scientist—“one doesn’t know whether to believe it or not, but they say it’s already cured a crippled child.” The nurse gazed at Henchard worshipfully. “What do you think, Riccardo?” Oh, God, he had such magnificent eyes, with the most adorable little wrinkles at the corners. In addressing her he was still using the formal “lei.” The pretty nurse hoped for an impassioned “tu” before the evening was over.

  She hoped in vain. Henchard had another conquest in mind. Not tonight, but soon, very soon.

  CHAPTER 32

  They couldn’t find it, the place where Lucia Costanza was striding so purposefully across Mary’s photograph from right to left. The church facade in the background refused to be identified.

  Mary looked for it in her guidebooks. Sam ransacked his shelves for textbooks on Venetian architecture. He borrowed Dorothea’s big coffee-table book, Venice, City of Enchantment, which was packed with huge color photographs of the Ducal Palace, San Marco, the crowds in the piazza, gondolas against the sunset, the masked revelers of carnival time, the costumed rowers of the Regata Storica. The church they were looking for was not to be found.

  Next day Sam fell ill. He set out early in the morning two hours before his first appointment in the Marciana to look at obscure churches in the unvisited neighborhood north of the public gardens. It was one of the many places where Mary had lost her way.

  “I took pictures just the same,” she told Sam, “even when I didn’t know where I was. I wandered all over the place in Sant’ Elena beyond the Giardini, and I was really mixed up between the Zattere and the Rio Nuovo.”

  The sestiere called Sant’ Elena was one of the higher regions of the city. There was little evidence of high water, but before Sam had been out of the house five minutes on his way along the Riva to the Giardini, he felt so faint he had to turn around and go back.

  He locked himself in his study, dropped heavily on the bed, and turned his face away from the sight of the vandalized reliquary on the table.

  At once the usual scene began to play in his head. A courtyard with statuary, a staircase, a woman on the stairs, an office, a window overlooking another courtyard, the woman walking quickly in front of him and sitting down, his own hands on her desk, his voice and her laughter. Where was she?

  She was not far away. Dottoressa Lucia Costanza had not fled to the mainland to conceal herself somewhere in the Veneto. It had never occurred to Lucia to lose herself in some crowded metropolis like New York or London or even in the city of Rome. She was serenely convinced that the crime of her husband’s murder would sooner or later be solved, and then she could come out of hiding and reorganize her life and resume her interrupted career.

  Her attempt at renting an apartment, that simple little place near the Casa del Tintoretto, had been cut short by the man who had turned up on the doorstep claiming to have an earlier lease.

  The apartment hadn’t been worth fighting for anyway. It was dingy, and serious repairs would have been required to fix the closet wall. Lucia had given up at once, deciding to take a chance on the loan of a place in Cannaregio belonging to an old school friend, now working in America. She had nearly forgotten the key the friend had thrust upon her, but now she extracted it gratefully from her bag and settled in.

  She had begun to recover from the fearful shock of learning from newspaper headlines that her poor unhappy husband had been killed and that she herself was under suspicion. At first she couldn’t believe it. Leaving Lorenzo Costanza had been such an ordinary thing, painful but ordinary, the long-overdue act of a perfectly ordinary aggrieved wife. And it hadn’t been easy. It had taken courage to abandon her home and begin a new life. It had been like amputating a diseased part of her body in order to save the rest. She had felt lopped
and chopped.

  That had been bad enough, but the rest was a nightmare. Poor Lorenzo was dead! Of course she had long since lost all respect for her husband, but she would not have wished his life to be so violently cut short. And she couldn’t get used to the fact that she was now the object of’una cacda all’ uomo, a manhunt. It sickened Lucia to read the details of the lurid case against her. “The old, old story! SHE was ambitious, HE was a man with a poetic nature.” If the revelations in the paper hadn’t been so persuasive and threatening, she would have laughed.

  She was grateful that the only picture they had found was a snapshot of a solemn thirteen-year-old with braces on her teeth, taken long ago at the school of the Suore Canossiane in Murano. It had been taken under duress—

  “Ma, cara Lucia, tutti devono avere una fotografia!”

  “O, Suora, non io, per favore!”

  But of course they had insisted. After that, she had always resisted and refused and ducked her head and turned her back, and destroyed any pictures that turned up, because in photographs she always looked so ugly. Her nose looked even bigger than it was, and her neck too long and thin.

  So the image of the gawky pigtailed kid with braces on her teeth was the only one left. It looked ridiculous next to the story about some terrible woman who had killed her husband and run away. But it wasn’t funny, not really. The hideously incriminating account had appeared not only in the local papers but in the national dailies, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. It meant walking away from her splendid new position as a procurator of San Marco, it meant unpinning her thick, too-curly hair and letting it fall around her face, it meant hiding herself away in this small square and becoming a person known as Signora Sofia Alberti.

  But it was all right. Lucia liked the neighbors and she liked the square. Every day she shopped in the alimentari of young Stefano, who teased her—“Signora Sofia Alberti? No, no! Sofia Loren!” For fresh fruits and vegetables there was a little negozio presided over by a kindly old woman. “Questa, cara mia?” she would say, picking out the finest head of lettuce, chattering about her grandchildren as she twisted the corners of the wrapping paper. In the square Lucia admired the fat babies and chatted with their mothers. She knew the names of all the little boys riding tricycles and bouncing footballs against the trees in the middle of the square.

  Sometimes she held one end of a skipping rope while a grandmother held the other for two little girls who jumped and tangled their feet and hopped happily up and down. She showed them how to skip in a dancing step, right foot forward, left foot back.

  She taught them to make paper boats like cocked hats, and drop them from one side of the bridge over the Rio de la Misericordia. “You see? It’s like a race. They float under the bridge and come out on the other side, so if every boat has a name, you’ll know who wins.”

  They were overjoyed. They scribbled their names with crayon. “Yes, yes,.” cried Guido, “look at mine!”

  “Anna, mine’s Anna!”

  “Look, look, mine’s Regina!”

  “Oh, signora, write your name too! Your boat will be Sofia!”

  But it wasn’t. When she wrote LUCIA on the side of her paper boat, they were puzzled for a minute, but then at once they began fighting over Guido’s boat, which had won unfairly because he sank Regina’s with a stone.

  She would be patient. Lucia was an optimist. The world had not come to an end. Eventually things would straighten themselves out.

  In the meantime, while she waited for something to happen, there was nothing to do. There was a tedious sameness to every day. With her wraparound dark glasses and loose hair, she felt disguised enough to walk as far as the Strada Nuova for a newspaper, careful to choose times of day when the rising water was not a problem.

  She didn’t dare go farther. She didn’t dare show herself in public places where she might run into people she knew.

  Longingly Lucia read the notice in Il Gazzettino about a concert in the great monastic Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. A chorus and soloists from the Conservatory of Padua were to be accompanied by the local Orchestra di Venezia, musicians decked out in eighteenth-century costume.

  She wished she could go. She wanted to hear arias and choruses from one of Monteverdi’s Venetian operas and from oratorios by Handel and Hayden. There would even be a sumptuous chorus from Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion.

  On the night of the concert Lucia went to bed early. As soon as she closed her eyes a fragmentary vision from last month came back without her bidding, the day when that crazy man had walked into her office with his two ridiculous proposals. Like a constantly rewound piece of tape, the vision appeared and reappeared.

  He would walk in and put his hands on her desk and say that insane thing, and then a moment later, after the tape had rewound itself, he would walk in just as gallantly and say it again. And then again.

  CHAPTER 33

  Homer Kelly had nothing against music. In fact he liked music, on the whole. And he had heard some of this music before.

  How could he ever forget the performance of Handel’s Messiah in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, with its wild interruption? Of course it had been Bach’s Saint John Passion, not the Saint Matthew, that he had heard with Mary in the Church of the Commonwealth in Boston, but that event had been insane too, because the entire audience had narrowly escaped being crushed to death by a collapsing vault. In Homer’s experience exalted music was often accompanied by staggering climaxes of catastrophe or joy.

  But there were no astonishing interruptions this evening in the enormous spaces of the monastic Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari during the performance of selections from the sacred music of Hayden and Handel, Monteverdi and Bach. The lofty vaults stayed put. No long-dead ghost appeared beyond the rood screen to bring the entire audience to its feet, to topple the bass viols and entangle the music stands of the second violins. Tonight the several parts of the program followed one another serenely.

  Sam Bell sat with Mary and Homer on folding chairs between the old choir stalls, listening, staring up at the same time at the painting over the altar, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. Buoyed up on clouds and supported by the thrust of the springy bellies of her attendant cherubs, she seemed to be lifting her hands in wonder at the chorus from the Saint Matthew Passion.

  It was the wild mob scene near the end, with all the citizens of Jerusalem shouting at Pilate, “Lass ihn kreuzigen, lass ibn kreuzigen.”

  Homer stuck his elbow into Sam’s side, and muttered, “What the hell are they saying?”

  “Ssshhh, Homer,” whispered Mary.

  Sam gave Homer a bitter sidelong glance and translated softly, “Let him be crucified.”

  “Oh,” said Homer, and for a moment he kept still, but when the chorus shouted something else, “Sein Blut komme über uns und unsere Kinder,” he nudged Sam again. “Blood, what’s that they’re singing about blood?”

  Sam muttered it under his breath, “His blood be on us and on our children. Shut up, Homer.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Please!” Someone was leaning forward from the row of seats behind them, hissing in Homer’s ear, “Would you kindly pipe down? Some of us are trying to hear the music.”

  It was the bishop of Seven Oaks, acting as spokesman for his delegation of music lovers from the British Isles.

  Homer squirmed around and saw the four glowering British faces, and perceived at once that he had been a boor. “Oh, sorry, sorry.” He hunched his head apologetically down into his shoulders and turned back to the chorus.

  But the shouting had stopped. For a moment the high vaults rang with the echo—Kinder, Kinder—and then the fiddlers and flutists lowered their instruments and mopped their brows and the singers filed out. It was all over.

  Gasping, emotionally frazzled, Mary and Homer staggered out of their seats and wandered around the huge church, while Sam guided them to more masterpieces of Venetian painting. They could hardly take them in. They wer
e suffering from something they had experienced in Florence, aesthetic overload.

  Rising against one wall were reliquaries like the ones in the Treasury of Saint Mark, containing miscellaneous holy bits of bone. Sam gave them a contemptuous wave of his arm, and they headed for home.

  It was true that there had been no collapse of the high brick vaulting, no astonishing apparition disrupting the music. And yet something alarming and climactic had happened, although Homer was not yet aware of it. A crack had appeared in his mind. Later on it would produce a mighty fall of rock.

  CHAPTER 34

  Once again it was raining. In the Hotel Danieli a lavish morning tea was spread before the bishop of Seven Oaks and his lady and the member of Parliament for the Channel Islands and his wife. There were sofas and tapestried chairs, silver teapots and damask napkins, tea wagons with cakes and scones and raspberry jam.

  Everything within the hotel was perfectly satisfactory. Outside, it was not. Water slopped over the edge of the lagoon and slipped across the pavement to the very door of the hotel.

  The bishop, Arthur Cluff-Luffter, was accustomed to speaking with authority. “You know, we don’t have to stay here. There are other hotels in this city.”

  “But won’t the management be angry?” said Louise Alderney, wife of Tertius Aldemey, the member of Parliament. “Aren’t we committed here to a full week?”

  “Oh, we may have to pay an extra day in apology, but it’s not like a contract in law.”

  Then the bishop leaned forward, waving a cupcake. “I know an excellent alternative, the Hotel Flora. Everybody recommends the Flora.”

  “But is it on higher ground?” said his wife shrewdly. “That’s the important thing. It’s all that really matters.”

  The bishop popped the cupcake into his mouth and whipped out a map showing the distribution of high water. He consulted it gravely, changing one pair of spectacles for another. Then he folded the map and shook his head. “Sorry, chaps, it won’t do. It’s an island surrounded by water.”