Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  He hadn’t felt so nimble for ages. Like a boy skipping school Sam galloped down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Ospedale Civile did not look like a hospital. The famous facade on the square was not at all like the entrance to a place for the practice of modern medicine.

  It had once been the headquarters of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, one of the ancient charitable confraternities of the city of Venice. Every pious and ambitious male citizen had belonged to one confraternity or another, helping to make its rules and choose its charities and lavish splendor on its great halls. But in 1797 that Antichrist Napoleon had wiped out all that was venerable and holy in the city, and since then there were no longer any processions of the dignified members of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. There were no public spectacles of Scuola members in monkish robes flagellating themselves, no guardian grande in a crimson toga marching across the bridge over the Rio dei Mendicanti in the company of his fellow cittadini and nobili in their robes of red and black.

  Now instead of the music of the choristers of the old scuola there was only the murmur of tourists in the square, the soft flapping of pigeon wings, and the sirens of the ambulanze whizzing along the canal with flashing blue lights.

  Out of sight behind the splendid old facade the hospital complex spread east and north in the direction of the lagoon. The modern offices and operating rooms and patient wards were scattered around five ancient cloisters. On the side facing the rio there were separate entries for the staff and an emergency entrance where patients could be hurried into the hospital. Some walked in on their own feet, some were carried on stretchers, some sat upright in rolling chairs like wheelbarrows.

  Scuola di San Marco, Ospedale Civile

  The hospital was Doctor Richard Henchard’s place of work. This afternoon he had come in great haste, half an hour late for his three o’clock appointment, addled by the confusion of settling Giovanna into the apartment on the Rio della Sensa. He would have neglected the appointment altogether if the man with the pancreatic carcinoma did not happen to be his most distinguished patient.

  In spite of the rising water and the rain, Henchard was perspiring as he hurried past examining rooms and nurses’ stations and toilets and crowded waiting rooms and the double doors of the chamber where he and his colleagues plied their sharp-edged trade. His nerves were at the breaking point. He had taken frantic action to protect his treasure, but the two women who knew it existed were still out there somewhere.

  In his haste he was brought up short by his own office nurse, who looked at him with astonishment. “Oh, Doctor, there you are. We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Didn’t you hear the intercom? Your patient is waiting. We have his X rays, and the CAT scans and ultrasound have just come in.”

  Henchard whirled into his office and charged into the examining room.

  “Buonasera,” he said gruffly, snatching the envelope of X rays from the nurse.

  His patient nodded politely, showing no sign of irritation after his long wait.

  The man was a sad case. With his tumor it was surprising how long he had managed to stay ambulatory, but it couldn’t last much longer. He had been given the option of enduring the hopeless eviscerating surgery of the Whipple procedure, but he had wisely declined.

  Henchard withdrew an X ray from its envelope and smacked it up on the light screen. Under the quiet gaze of his patient, he looked at it for a while, then slapped up the ultrasound films and the CAT scan.

  Swiftly he ran his eye over the eleven CAT cross sections and the ultrasound streaks and blobs, and then said curtly, “Take off your shirt and lie down.”

  Sam obliged. It didn’t matter what the doctor was about to say. The news would be worse than last time, he knew that, but he smiled at Doctor Henchard as he laid aside his shirt, which slipped off the examining table and fell to the floor.

  The doctor put his hands on the place where the mass had once been so evident, and grunted with satisfaction. He put his stethoscope on Sam’s chest and listened. Then he stood back and said, “Put on your shirt.”

  Sam reached down to pick it up, and prepared himself for a final sentence of death. But Doctor Henchard seemed reluctant to speak. Sam buttoned his shirt and looked up at him serenely, to show that it was all right, that he was ready for the truth.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Doctor Henchard. “It’s a case in a thousand. Your liver and spleen and pancreas are all normal, the rales have cleared from your lungs, your X ray shows no sign of pneumonia. Your tumor is gone.”

  Sam stared at him, and murmured, “This is no time for a joke.”

  “It’s not a joke, it’s true. Last time the mass seemed smaller, but I thought I was imagining things. I wasn’t. The malignancy has disappeared. I would call it a miracle if it didn’t happen once in a great while, a complete remission.” Henchard reached down automatically and picked up something that had dropped out of the patient’s shirt pocket, and glanced at it as he handed it over.

  It was a photograph of a woman. He recognized her. He snatched it back, and exclaimed, “Who’s this? What’s this?”

  Sam was poised between the doomed serenity of a moment ago and tumultuous relief. Dreamily he reached for the picture of Lucia and said, “It’s a friend. It’s all right. I’m going to her. I’m going there right now.”

  The nurse spread the amazing news. Soon throughout the corridors of the hospital there was an excited buzz of talk. Some praised the doctor, some praised God, some attributed the miracle to the intervention of a newly discovered holy relic.

  “What holy relic?” said one of the receptionists, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  “Haven’t you heard?” said Henchard’s nurse, taking all the credit. “Don’t you know about the Veil of the Virgin? It’s in Santo Spirito, my own parish. I pray to the Virgin’s Veil for all Dottor ’Enciard’s worst cases.”

  Before long everyone in the hospital knew about the recovery of Dottor Samuele Bell from pancreatic cancer, and about the precious veil of the Mother of God.

  CHAPTER 42

  There was a noise in the street, children’s voices singing, loud rhythmical banging. Ursula ran to the window and looked down.

  The children were clumping along in boots, walking in procession from one corner of the square to the other. They were banging on pots and pans and singing, “San Martino! San Martino!”

  “Oh,” cried Ursula. “It’s Saint Martin’s Day!” She ran to the kitchen.

  “Ursula,” said Mrs. Wellesley, “what are you doing?”

  Crash, crash! Ursula came out of the kitchen with a great smile on her face, clashing two pot lids together. She told her grandmother, “I’m going too!”

  “Never! Ursula, I forbid you. You are not to do anything so foolish.” Mrs. Wellesley snatched the pot lids out of Ursula’s hands. “The cult of saints, it’s so ridiculous. Encouraging children to believe in such things, it’s criminal.”

  “Oh, please.” Ursula’s small face crumpled as she began to cry.

  “Certainly not. And besides, it’s high water everywhere, the worst in years. Of course you can’t go.” Mrs. Wellesley herded her granddaughter into her bedroom and thrust a doll into her hands. It wasn’t the one Ursula loved, the Barbie doll in the pale blue dress, the dress she had made herself with the help of Mrs. Kelly. It was the exquisite doll Mrs. Wellesley had bought at great price in a shop in San Polo. “Where’s your sewing box, Ursula dear? Why don’t you make her a new dress?”

  Dorothea Wellesley was trying hard, but as usual she failed. Ursula handed back the doll and said primly, “No, thank you.”

  “Well, I give up.” Mrs. Wellesley rolled her eyes and lifted her hands in bewilderment. Then she walked firmly across the room to Ursula’s wardrobe and threw open the doors. The child had a secret stored away somewhere, but of course it was not here among her coats and play clothes and school uniforms. The birthday dress hung among the others as a rebuke and a disgrace, but everythin
g else was just as usual.

  She walked out, only casting an inquisitive glance at the dresser and the cupboard. Ursula’s childish secret was surely behind those locked cupboard doors. Sooner or later her grandmother would find the key.

  Her granddaughter had worn her out. Mrs. Wellesley yawned. She usually took a nap at about this time, but Ursula’s school had been canceled because of high water. The child couldn’t be trusted to behave herself alone without a pair of sharp eyes keeping track of her every move.

  But Dorothea’s eyes kept closing. She was a little tipsy with the wine she had indulged in at lunch. “Listen to me, Ursula,” she said sleepily, “I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute. You may watch TV if you want, but I’m going to lock the outer door. I don’t want you running around outside while I’m asleep.”

  Ursula looked down at her shoes and said nothing. But she was as crafty as her grandmother in purloining household keys.

  Later that afternoon another parade of children marched down the street, clashing their pots and singing “San Martino! San Martino!” At the end of the procession marched Ursula Bell, singing the nonsense song with the rest—

  “San Martino xe anda in sofita,

  a trovar ea so novisa,

  so novisa no ghe gera

  San Martin col cueo par tera!”

  CHAPTER 43

  “It’s still leaking,” said the hydraulic engineer from the Dipartimento Civile. “Look at that.”

  The exhausted idraulici could see it perfectly well, the narrow streams of water gushing around the edges of the iron barrier below the bridge over the Rio dei Miracoli. The rain had made a soup of the mud at the bottom of the drained canal. The tide was rising and the goddamn moon was at the full. In a couple of hours acqua alia would be at its peak. One of the men mopped his muddy face with his sleeve and shook his head in disgust. “It’s only a fucking drop or two.”

  “No, no, it’s too much. It’s got to be absolutely watertight. You’ll have to attach more barriere at both ends.”

  “What we really need is a miracle,” suggested one of the men, snickering. “How about that new Veil of the Virgin? Why don’t we pray to that?”

  The response was a weary shuffling back to the task of heaving up another set of rusty metal plates and ramming them down with heavy sledgehammer blows to make the corrugations lap tightly together.

  The engineer shook his head as they stepped back. Wordlessly he pointed to a thin trickle still streaming at the other end of the barrier. One of the men gave the offending plate a sharp kick. The trickle stopped.

  “Ecco!” said the engineer, and they all laughed.

  The bishop’s map of the distribution of high water clearly showed that part of the sestiere of Cannaregio would be perfectly dry. But, descending into a gondola at the Rialto Bridge with their stout British umbrellas, the two couples soon ran into another sort of problem.

  One of the gondoliers was a tenor with a certificate from a conservatory in Verona. He was very expensive. While his colleague propelled the pretty craft along the Rio Fontego and the Rio dei Miracoli, he produced for their delectation ecstasies of vibrato and operatic sobs. Suddenly he broke off in the middle of a trill, said, “Mamma mia,” and lifted his pole from the water.

  “Whatever is the matter?” said Louise Alderney, wife of the member of Parliament.

  “Què pasa?” said the bishop, adroitly producing an appropriate phrase.

  His wife looked at him with contempt. “That’s not Italian, Arthur, it’s Spanish.” She looked up sweetly at the gondolier, “Perfavore, signore, andiamo!”

  The gondolier tried to clarify the situation with excited gestures. Then he made a powerful sucking noise with his lips.

  They looked at him with blank faces. The bishop stood up boldly and said, “I’ll handle this.” With a daring leap he landed on terra firma and ran up the steps of the little bridge over the blocked canal.

  Below him four men with muddy boots looked up in surprise, unused to being addressed by red-faced members of the British clergy. The bishop spoke with heavy irony. “I must confess,” he began, “that your fabled city is not quite living up to our expectations. How, may I ask, is our gondola to proceed?”

  The gondolier had followed the bishop. Standing behind him he raised his eyebrows to the roots of his hair and shrugged his shoulders hugely. There followed a rapid exchange with the four muddy men in the drained canal. Soon they were all roaring with laughter.

  “Oh, jolly good,” said Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter, as her husband climbed clumsily back into the gondola.

  “Three cheers, my lord,” said Tertius Alderney, grinning.

  “Hosanna in the highest!” warbled his wife Louise, who was an accomplished mezzo-soprano.

  CHAPTER 44

  He found her. Or rather they found each other.

  Lucia’s borrowed rooms in the Ghetto Nuovo looked out on the trees in the middle of the square, and on the great wellhead from which the women of the ghetto had once drawn water. Today she sat at the window with her embroidery in her lap, alternately pulling her needle through the fabric and watching the comings and goings below.

  With her embroidery she felt like an old Venetian grandmother, but her watchfulness was an anxious vigil. Lucia had no television in her small quarters, but the kindly old woman who sold lettuces and strawberries in the local shop had seen her face that morning on the screen. “Che bella faccia! L’ho vista alla TV”

  Therefore the old woman was aware that the name Lucia was known by in the neighborhood was false, but she was a tenderhearted old lady and she said she would not give Lucia away.

  “Let, non è ebrea?” asked Lucia.

  “No, sono cattolica,” said the old woman, and she promised to pray for Lucia.

  Well, it was terrible news. If she had been seen on television there might be other local people who would call the polizia. Lucia sat at the window and kept her eyes open for the approach of official-looking persons or men in uniform. Her bag was packed. She was ready to bolt by a back door.

  But she was not afraid of the children. On the day of extreme high water she saw them wading barefoot in the square. They were floating paper boats called Regina and Maria and Guido and Franco. Quickly Lucia made one of her own from a piece of scrap paper, then pulled off her shoes and ran down to join them.

  “From this tree,” commanded Maria, “to that tree.” Carefully they lined up their fragile craft. Lucia set hers down in the shallow water with the others. “Go!” cried Maria, and with excited screams the children released their boats and watched them rock gently forward. “Not fair!” screeched Maria, as Guido puffed out his cheeks and blew his boat ahead of the rest.

  Now they were all puffing and blowing. Lucia laughed, but she stopped laughing when she caught a glimpse of a tall stranger crossing the bridge. At once she ran splashing back to the safe haven of her own doorway and hurried upstairs.

  Sam had been wandering around the Ghetto Vecchio and the Ghetto Nuovo for half an hour, afraid to ask anyone the whereabouts of Lucia Costanza. After all, she was the object of a search by the police. By the time he saw the children he had almost given up. Disconsolate, he smiled at them, and he smiled at their paper boats, which were folded yellow sheets from the Pagine Gialle, or pink pages from La Gazzetta dello Sport. He smiled at the names scrawled on them—Regina, Franco, Guido, Maria, Lucia.

  He picked up the boat called Lucia. It was not yellow or pink. It was a folded piece of white paper on which he could make out part of a letterhead—di San Marco.

  “Dov’ è Lucia?” he asked quickly.

  One of the girls shook her head and laughed. “No, no. Non è Lucia! La donna si chiama Sofia.”

  “Ma allora, è una donna, non una ragazza?”

  “Sì, sì, è la Signora Sofia.”

  “Va bene. Dov’ è la Signora Sofia?”

  At once they all pointed, and Sam looked up to see a woman standing at an upstairs window, looking down at hi
m. With her dark hair flowing over her shoulders she looked younger than he remembered, but there was no mistaking the face that had so captivated him on the day he had walked into her office. Rapturously, cautiously, he called to her, “Signora Sofia?”

  Impulsively, without thinking, Lucia leaned out the window and called, “Dottor Bell?”

  For a moment they gazed at each other as though stunned, and then Lucia turned away, ran down the stairs, and opened the door.

  He was running toward her, splashing in his rubber boots. It had begun to rain. The children hurried away. As he stopped in front of her there was no one else in the square.

  She could think of nothing to say. Nor could he. At last he said huskily, “Are you all right, Dottoressa?”

  “Oh, yes. Are you?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said eagerly, saying it truthfully for the first time. “Yes, yes, I’m very much all right.”

  Lucia couldn’t help laughing. There was something so amusing about his face and voice. She remembered that he had made her laugh before. Now he said something else, but so softly that she missed it. “What did you say?”

  “I said, what if someone were to hold your hand?”

  Oh, how deliciously ridiculous! It was a continuation of the absurd moment in her office that day in October, the scene she had been playing and replaying so often in her head.

  She smiled and looked away from him at the wet iron lid of the wellhead and the dark wet trunks of the trees. “Well, of course, it would depend on who it was.”

  “Me. It would be me.”

  A wave of hilarity swept over Lucia, and she began to laugh again.

  He laughed too, and said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps we could try it just as an experiment.”

  At once he grasped her hand and lifted it to his lips, and murmured, “Is the experiment working?”