Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  “Our big mistake was the decision to come in November,” said the MP, frowning at the bishop, who had been at fault.

  “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” said Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter generously, throwing herself back in her chair. “I can write my novel anywhere. It’s all in my head.”

  “But, Elizabeth,” said Louise Alderney, “they say the water is rising every day. It’s going to get worse and worse. Perhaps we should all go home.”

  “Nonsense, Louise,” said Elizabeth. “Where’s your fighting spirit? Don’t be so timid.” She raised her fist in a gallant gesture. “Let us splash on.”

  “Oh, if only I’d brought my wellies,” said Louise.

  The Piazza Council was not as accepting of the current state of acqua alta in the city of Venice as was Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter. At their second urgent meeting in the Hall of the Council of Ten, three more members of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova showed up. They sat together at one end of the table and complained loudly about their bad press, when of course everyone knew perfectly well that the delay in the construction of the mobile barriers in the lagoon was not their fault at all, it was the fault of the City Council.

  Angry looks were directed at the other end of the table, where the mayor sat between Sam Bell and Acting Procurator Tommaso Bernardi. Behind the mayor a door opened on the staircase where wretched citizens accused by the Council of Ten had once been led away to prison cells. Obviously the Consorzio Venezia Nuova would have liked to enjoy the same condemnatory power.

  They glowered at the mayor and one of them spoke his mind. “It is the City Council which has prevented the construction of the floodgates at the ports of Lido, Malamocco, and Chioggia. Our hydraulic model at Voltabarozzo has been proven to work. When can we expect the permission and the funding to begin in earnest?”

  “Unfortunately,” growled the mayor, “your hydraulic model does not take into account all the complexities of the situation.”

  It was a typical long-standing argument. Sam broke in to plead for practical temporary measures to protect the piazza right now, because, after all, it was no joke. When the worst of the high water came rushing into the square, there would be injury to the foundations of their grand historic buildings and flooding of their ground floors, accompanied by all the bad effects of moisture on walls and ceilings and precious works of art, including the rare old books in the Biblioteca Marciana.

  “At least we can be grateful that there are fewer tourists at this time of year,” said Father Urbano, thinking of his summertime nightmare, the endless lines of people shuttling through the basilica. “It’s amazing that these latecomers are willing to walk on the platforms and wait their turn to come in, even in heavy rain.”

  “Well, you can’t blame them,” said the superintendent of Venetian fine arts and history. “They’ve flown halfway around the world, and by God they’re going to see everything they’ve been promised.”

  “And of course everything they’ve been promised,” said Sam sarcastically, “is in our part of the city. Which just happens to be at one of the lowest points in Venice. Why don’t the tourist agencies tell them about other attractions—the Scuola di San Rocco, for instance, and the Naval Museum?”

  Another official body was represented at the meeting, L’Ufficio Idrografico del Magistrato alle Acque. “We will of course,” promised their spokesman, “send our usual daily faxes forecasting the heights and times of acqua alta.”

  Gloom prevailed. On the way into the building they had all experienced the results of the rising water. They had threaded their way into the meeting through masses of tourists mincing along the duckboards into San Marco and the Ducal Palace, and through the throngs crowding the arcades of the Procuratie Vecchie, the Procuratie Nuove, the Museo Correr, and the Libreria di Sansovino.

  “One finds it so difficult to get into one’s office,” complained Signor Bernardi, the delegate from the headquarters of the procurators of San Marco.

  One’s office, thought Sam angrily. It wasn’t one’s office, it was. Lucia’s office.

  “Well, anyway,” said the dejected mayor, “does anyone have a suggestion for dealing with the coming disaster?”

  “I do,” said Signor Bernardi, raising a soft white hand. “I suggest we set up blockades at all the entrances to the piazza and allow only a certain number of people in at a time.”

  Sam was stunned. How fascinating! He had already admitted Bernardi into his private Society of Bastards, but simple admission was surely not enough. Sam stopped listening to the experts and began thinking up hierarchies of honor—Bastards Simple and Complex, Evil and Malevolent, Filthy and Abominable. Which one was right for Bernardi?

  Leaving the meeting, Sam was surprised to find that his appetite had come back. He was actually hungry for lunch.

  CHAPTER 35

  The siren went off very early, five blasts ten seconds apart. High water today, hooted the siren. Put on your boots!

  Mary had no boots, but she didn’t care. She had a date with Richard very early. It was as though they could no longer bear to be apart.

  “What’s that noise?” said Homer drowsily, lifting his head from the pillow.

  “It means high water today,” murmured Mary, heading for the shower. Homer went back to sleep.

  Before creeping out of the apartment Mary left him a note—Out all day. love, M.

  He wouldn’t like it, but at least he wouldn’t call the police.

  Henchard had prepared the way. The apartment on the Rio della Sensa was grubby, but he couldn’t very well take Mary Kelly to his own house, and he certainly couldn’t use Giovanna’s place on Calle de la Madonna, because Vittoria and Giovanna were squatting in them like toads.

  He met Mary at the San Marcuola vaporetto stop, welcoming her with a passionate embrace. Then he took her hand and propelled her along the zigzagging streets of Cannaregio, through Campo Santa Fosca, where there was a statue, but Mary didn’t ask whose it was, because they were not talking, only walking very quickly, making a left turn, crossing a bridge, a second bridge, a third, a fourth.

  Tintoretto’s house, thought Mary, stepping off the last bridge into two inches of water. Together they splashed along the fondamenta beside the Rio della Sensa. It was no longer a muddy gulf but a full and brimming canal. Richard did not slow down as they passed the house with the sign on the wall—

  JAC. ROBUSTIQUI TINTORETTO

  DOMUM VETUSTAM

  He stopped five or six doors away.

  It was where she had first seen him. She had been taking pictures and he had been standing there and she had asked him if Tintoretto’s house was open to visitors and he had said no. That was the beginning.

  She watched as he fumbled with his key and opened the door. Willingly she followed him up the stairs. They were both overwhelmed.

  She saw the room in a haze. Except for a sleeping bag on the floor it was empty. It was an old room with sooty plaster walls. On one side two dirty windows looked out on the canal, on another a bathroom door stood open, and beside it was another door, tightly shut. The second door had no handle, only a dangling padlock.

  They fell on their knees on the sleeping bag, and Richard caressed her and undressed her and made love to her tenderly, and then they fell sweetly asleep.

  Henchard had netted his fish.

  CHAPTER 36

  When she woke up, Richard was no longer beside her. Mary could hear the sound of the shower behind the bathroom door. Then as she looked sleepily at the wall, something like a dream began to happen. The other door drifted silently ajar, and the narrow space beyond it was full of gold.

  She sat up, awestruck. Gold-handled scrolls leaned upright in the closet. They were bedecked with golden bells. Gold plates and goblets and candlesticks lay on the floor. There were packages wrapped in newspaper and tied with rotting string. A large painting in a gold frame was propped against the curtain on the back wall of the closet. In her visionary state Mary could see every detail. It was a por
trait of a beautiful young man with a fur cloak slung over his shoulder. He had a smiling face and dark eyes that gazed directly into hers. I see you. I have always seen you. I have known you since time began.

  What were all these things? How had they come here?

  She jumped up and pulled on her slip. The shower was still running. She went to the open door of the closet, aware of a faint tinkling sound as her bare feet crossed the floor. Something was weirdly wrong.

  Back home in Concord Mary had once cleared out the attic of an ancient cousin, and it had been a strange experience. The boxes of papers and books, the burst trunks, the heaps of memorabilia, all had been covered with a peculiar sort of dirt—gray sawdust from the insect-ridden beams overhead, crumbled plaster and powdery black specks, as though the passing years themselves had been pounded into moldering fragments and dropped from the sky. The things in this closet on the Rio della Sensa in the city of Venice were like that. The gold gleamed through a coating of dust that was old, very old.

  Mary stooped and brushed the debris from the newspaper wrapping on one of the packages that lay on the floor. The yellowed sheet was disintegrating at the edges, but the printed name of the newspaper was clear and black—

  GAZZETTA DIVENEZIA

  DOMENICA 5 DICEMBRE 1943

  December 1943! The newspaper was more than half a century old! Mary bent lower and read a fragment of a heading—

  PRIMO RASTRELLAMENTO …

  EBREIA VENEZIA. IDEPORTATI …

  Ebrei meant Jews. She didn’t know the meaning of the word rastrellamento but it had an ugly sound. Deportati could mean only one thing.

  She stood up and backed away. Something grim and terrible had saturated all the objects in the closet. It permeated everything—the painting, the candlesticks, the gold plates, the tall scrolls with their dangling bells. It struck her in the face like a foul smell.

  The sound of the shower stopped. Mary moved back to the sleeping bag and lay down, thinking hard. When Richard came out of the bathroom he knelt beside her, then gave a great start and sprang up, whispering a furious “Shit.” Plunging across the room he slammed the door of the closet and rattled the padlock, snapping it shut. Then he came back and stood over Mary, staring down at her, breathing hard.

  It was all wrong. Everything had changed. Without a word Mary got to her feet.

  Henchard said nothing as she reached for her clothes and carried them into the bathroom. When she came out, fully dressed, he was still standing there, still looking at her, still silent. Mary gathered up her bag. She didn’t know how to say good-bye.

  Their silence was not like the wordlessness of their earlier panting progress through the streets of Cannaregio, nor like the silence of their rush up the stairs. It was a menacing exchange of unsaid questions and answers—

  What are those things in the closet?

  I can’t say.

  Where did they come from?

  I can’t tell you.

  When she was gone, clumping down the stairs in her boots, Henchard cursed his own carelessness. How the bloody hell could he have left the padlock unhooked? She had seen it! She had seen everything, because every goddamn thing was right there in full view.

  Angrily he stood at the window and watched her walk away, wading slowly through the rising water of the tide that was threatening to be the highest yet. As usual, the goddamn woman was interested in everything. God, look at her! She was exchanging greetings with a couple of grinning muratori who were wading toward her with picks and shovels. He watched her mount the steps of the bridge and stride across it, glancing back once at his window, her face clear and composed.

  Oh, Christ, he shouldn’t have let her go! He should have soothed her, he should have overpowered her once again with his ardor, he should have made love to her. And then it would have been so easy to make up a lie about the closet. Almost anything would have been good enough. Instead he had stood there tongue-tied like a fool.

  One thing was certain. The things would have to be moved. She might come back tomorrow, or even today, along with her husband, that big important university professor, and a bunch of goddamn police or carabinieri with handfuls of official documents. Jesus Christ, they’d have a search warrant, un mandato di perquisizione. No, no, it mustn’t happen. The stuff had to go. It had to go right now.

  CHAPTER 37

  To Richard Henchard, watching her cross the bridge over the Rio della Sensa, Mary Kelly looked serenely untroubled. She was not.

  Following her nose in the direction of the wide shopping strada beyond Campo Santa Fosca, she thought about her affair with the man who called himself Richard Visconti. On her part there had been no personal will involved, no choice, no moral pondering. It had been like going over Niagara in a barrel. She did not feel guilty, at least not yet.

  But a heavy burden of guilt might have been better than this. If she were merely feeling guilty, she could have preened herself on being like some of her trendy friends, women who carried on extramarital affairs in a wild roller coaster of guilt and excitement.

  What was unbearable was the knowledge that she, Mary Morgan Kelly, author of seven scholarly books, tenured professor at a famous university, had been such an idiot.

  She had to dodge sideways on the Fondamenta della Misericordia to find another bridge. Beyond it two men hoisted bags of trash into a boat. No gondolas were in sight. Mary guessed that Cannaregio was out of the tourist loop. It was a neighborhood for Italians. The election posters were not for tourists—Per VENEZIA, per MESTRE, per il VENETO, con MASSIMO BARBATO, con MARIO RUSSO.

  She kept going, squelching along in her rubber boots, passing a woman trailing a shopping cart, a cat making its way along a housetop, an old man sweeping the pavement, a young man with a cell phone clamped to his ear, a panetteria with fanciful cakes in the window.

  Mary stopped to look at the cakes, which were cut in the shape of horsemen and decorated with candies and swags of icing. The horsemen were figures of Saint Martin, because today was Saint Martin’s day. She walked on, thankful that this part of the city was dry. It was a relief not to be wading in shallow water.

  Here on the Strada Nuova every vestige of her infatuation was gone. She flicked off Richard Visconti like a horse shuddering its skin to get rid of a fly. Suddenly ravenous, she plunged into a bar and sat down solemnly to drink a cappuccino and eat a miniature sandwich, ready at last to think about the golden apparition behind Richard’s closet door.

  Half the tiny sandwich disappeared in one bite. Mary closed her eyes, trying to remember, making a list in her head. There had been the wonderful painting of the young man with a spotted fur over his shoulder, and on the floor the shapeless packages in their tragic wrappings, and leaning in the corner two or three tall scrolls with golden handles. There had also been a display of glittering cups and plates and tall golden candelabra, the kind with a lot of candles in a single row. How many candles? Seven? Eight? Nine?

  Of course, of course. They were Hebrew candlesticks. The scrolls were Torah scrolls. The plates and cups were vessels for the celebration of Passover. The assembled treasure was a kind of Hebrew holy grail. It must have been hidden in that shabby apartment on the Rio della Sensa in 1943, during a time of mortal danger for the Jews of Venice. What did Richard have to do with the fate of Venetian Jews during the Second World War? He had not even been born in 1943.

  Mary set down her coffee cup, snatched up her bag, and hurried out of the bar. Whatever it meant, it was infinitely more important than a feverish episode of mindless adultery. It meant something bad, something terrible. In the golden aura streaming out of Richard Visconti’s closet there had been something grotesque, something that had swept her out of the room and out of the house, something profoundly awful, something that implicated Richard and dashed him out of all caring—but something unspeakably larger than Richard Visconti.

  Outside the bar the street was full of shoppers, the sky was gray. Mary took out her map. It was an old-fashioned m
ap, elaborately folded. She had opened and closed it so many times that the creases were coming apart. Now she batted it open and put her eyes close to the printed network of street names and figured out where to go.

  She should follow the Strada to a biggish street called Rio Terrà Farsetti—Rio Terrà meant a filled-in canal—then turn left. Pretty soon there’d be a bridge, and on the other side she would find herself in the Ghetto Nuovo.

  The Strada was empty of water, but the streets northwest of it were wet. In boots it didn’t matter. She was used to wading. But when she crossed the bridge into the Ghetto Nuovo, she found it perfectly dry.

  Of course the square looked familiar. She had been here before, taking pictures. She remembered the sad bronze memorials on the wall, and the trees, and the old wellhead. Mary paused under a tree to empty the water out of her boots.

  Somewhere here there was a museum. Yes, there was the sign, MUSEO EBRAICO. Was it open at eleven o’clock in the morning? Yes, it was. She paid her way in.

  The exhibition space was on the upper floor. Mary climbed the stairs to a display of Torah scrolls and seven-branched candlesticks and splendid ritual dishes. She was reminded of the pewter communion plates in old New England churches, but these were more elaborate, and they were incised with Hebrew words. And everything was silver, not pewter, and certainly not gold.

  It occurred to her that gold, while much more expensive than silver, was more practical in one way. Over the course of years a silver vessel would tarnish and turn black, whereas gold would stay shining forever.

  She stood for a long time gazing at the bright silver cups and Passover plates and the little silver vessels with tiny doors for the dispensing of incense. Someone was keeping them diligently polished. Even so, they were less magnificent than Richard’s glorious golden vessels.