Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  “Actually I lived on just two floors, but mainly on this one. The attic had guest rooms and I would go up there only to get to the altana, the wooden terrace on the roof. The ground floor is still empty. I might turn it over to the city for municipal offices.”

  “Porfirio is surprised that you don’t care to live in the whole building. He made your palazzo sound much smaller than it actually is.”

  “But it is small, Miss Reeve, more like a little house than anything else. That’s why I like it.”

  “You inherited it through your mother’s side of the family, right?”

  Urbino nodded but he didn’t go into more detail. Despite his interest in other people’s lives, he wasn’t comfortable giving out personal information about himself.

  Hazel Reeve took a sip of her brandy and closed her eyes as she waited for it to warm her. For a moment her face lost much of its tenseness. Then she looked around the room, crowded with some of Urbino’s favorite pieces with little regard for what might go well together. On the wall behind the sofa was a Bronzino of a pearled-and-brocaded Florentine lady that the Contessa had given him. When Hazel Reeve turned around to look at it, Urbino wondered if she could see beyond the angularity that she and the Florentine lady didn’t share to the tenseness that they did.

  “I envy you,” she said, turning back to Urbino. Then as if to consolidate the implied compliment, “Please call me Hazel.”

  “Only if you call me Urbino.”

  “It’s an unusual name.”

  “Not to me, of course. My great-grandmother was born not far from the city and my mother loved Raphael.”

  “Why didn’t she name you after him instead of his city?”

  “She did. Raphael is my baptismal name but I’ve never used it. My mother and father called me by my middle name since I was born.”

  “Maybe it’s just the power of association but you look a little like a Raphael.”

  “Not even my mother went that far,” he said, thinking of how ironic her comment was in light of what he had just been thinking of the Bronzino. From the puzzled look on Hazel’s face he could tell that she wasn’t quite sure of what to make of his response. “I meant that a mother is inclined to see her child in an ideal light. I hope you didn’t think I took what you said as anything but a compliment.”

  “A compliment?” Hazel frowned. “I suppose it is, but I was merely being descriptive. I was thinking of a specific Raphael—the portrait of a young cardinal at the Prado. Do you know it?”

  Urbino nodded, having studied the painting in college and seen it three summers ago in Madrid. But he could see little resemblance between himself and the confident-looking cardinal in his watered-silk, scarlet mozzetta and matching hat.

  “There is a resemblance,” Hazel insisted, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Your face is sharper and more attractive, but you both have the same controlled look and,” she added with a little smile, “very intelligent eyes.”

  She took another sip of her brandy. Urbino was prepared for further embarrassment when Hazel went on, but what she said had nothing to do with the Raphael.

  “They’re dead, your parents.”

  “A car accident almost fifteen years ago.”

  “Such a violent death must surely—” She stopped and shook her head slowly. “You must find me frightfully rude—rude and rather unfeeling. What I mean is that I’m here jabbering away when poor Val is lying dead—murdered.”

  Not knowing as much about her as she obviously did about him, Urbino didn’t know exactly how to respond.

  Hazel looked up at him with wet eyes.

  “You’re being very patient, Urbino. There I was in the square waiting to pounce on you when you probably wanted nothing better than a nice quiet walk back here. The least I can do is to tell you about Val and me.” She said this as if it hadn’t been her intention all along. “Did you know him?”

  “I met him only a few times.”

  “I suppose I need tell you only that Val and I were in love,” Hazel began with a deep breath and nervous smile. “That should be enough explanation and perhaps all that you even want to know—but there was more to it than that. Love affairs are never simple, are they?—and I’m not thinking only of Proust, believe me.”

  She reached down and picked up the volume of Remembrance of Things Past. When she opened it to the bookmark and saw that it was Man Ray’s photograph of the dead Proust, she turned white and quickly closed the book and put it down.

  “In any case, Proust is a rather poor example when talking about love, don’t you think?” Urbino said. “For him love was more an illness than anything else. Maladie d’amour.”

  Hazel nodded abstractedly.

  “Here we’ve known each other only a few hours, counting last evening, and I’m talking about something personal. Not your usual English reticence, is it? It’s just that I’m at wits’ end. I need to talk, and quite frankly I feel I can say things to you without your thinking ill of me. I need that tonight. Believe it or not, you’re the person I feel I know best in Venice, now that Val is—is gone.”

  “What about Porfirio?”

  After he said this he realized she might take it as a rebuff, as a not-too-subtle suggestion that she burden the Venetian photographer with her story instead of him.

  “Oh, Porfirio! He would be the last person I would confide in about Val.”

  “Don’t you find him sympathetic?”

  “I’m afraid he would be too sympathetic.”

  “Do you mean he’s interested in you?”

  She laughed but it was a laugh almost empty of humor.

  “Interested in me? I’ve never thought of that. What I meant was that he didn’t like Val, not personally or professionally. Whatever sympathy he might have to give would have more to do with that than any possible interest in me—which I doubt.”

  The implication behind what she was saying was that Gibbon’s behavior to her might be open to an unfavorable interpretation. Otherwise there would be no reason for her to be sure of Porfirio’s sympathy precisely because he hadn’t liked Gibbon. Urbino sensed that she was trying to prepare him for something negative about the photographer.

  She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket.

  “I feel so empty and violated after having spoken with the Commissario. And to think I have to go through it all over again tomorrow at the Questura.”

  She took a sip of the brandy.

  “I cared a lot for Val and he did for me—at least I thought he did,” she went on. “We had planned to marry but we had a few problems we had to work out I do think I might have made him see things differently.” She looked at Urbino with a little smile. “You know, you have the same expression on your face that the Commissario had. Almost as if you’re thinking bad thoughts of me. I’m sure he was. But I can’t be afraid of what people will think, can I? I have to tell the truth. Val is dead and I have to tell as much as I know, even if it’s private and doesn’t put me—or Val—in a good light. The dead have no privacy and neither do the people they knew, not when it’s a question of murder.”

  She let Urbino consider this for a few moments as she returned her handkerchief, unused, to her pocket. Then she stood up abruptly, surprising him by saying that she had to be going. Urbino had thought she had been about to plunge into a detailed account of her relationship with Gibbon but now, for some reason, she seemed eager to leave.

  As he was helping her on with her coat, she said, “Could you tell me how to get back to Porfirio’s? I wasn’t paying much attention as we came here from San Gabriele.”

  “I’ll go with you back to San Gabriele and give you directions from there. I have to go back to the Casa Crispina.”

  Hazel was quiet as they retraced their earlier walk. When they reached the Campo San Gabriele, Urbino gave her directions to Porfirio’s, but something more seemed to be called for and he found himself asking her to dinner tomorrow. He would come by Porfirio’s at eight the next evening.
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br />   As Urbino stood in front of the Casa Crispina and watched Hazel walking to the other side of the campo, he hoped he would learn more tomorrow about her relationship with Gibbon. She actually hadn’t told him much at all tonight, even though she seemed to have sought him out to do just that. Or was this the impression she had wanted him to have? Their conversation tomorrow during dinner might make things clearer.

  5

  “It would be a better use of your precious time, Signor Macintyre, if you were to do something about the people who are trying to kill Venice,” Xenia Campi said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, looking not at Urbino but at her lapis lazuli ring. “As for Gibbon, I didn’t like him and I wasn’t surprised when something happened to him.”

  She wore a large, loose dark-blue dress with green brocade, and an embroidered shawl was draped over her shoulders. A blue snood caught her black hair from behind. She was sitting in the high-backed chair under the Catherine of Siena lithograph in Mother Mariangela’s reception room.

  “And I said the same thing to Commissario Gemelli,” the heavyset woman added firmly, finally looking up at Urbino and pulling her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

  “Why did you think something was going to happen to Gibbon?”

  “An aura,” she said. “He was always surrounded by an aura, a violent red one. And I saw flames, bright orange-red flames tipped with yellow.”

  Her eyes lit up as if from a reflection of the flames she was describing. There was a faraway, almost sad look on her heavy face. Could she be thinking about her dead son? Her clairvoyance—or whatever gift she claimed to have—had been bestowed only after his death. How many times might she have thought that if she had only had the gift before his death, she might have seen an aura around him and warned him?

  “The aura told me that he was either going to be consumed or be the instrument of someone else’s fiery destruction. Fire burns the good but punishes the wicked.”

  “As you know, Signor Gibbon didn’t die in a fire.”

  She shook her head slowly and gave him a wry smile. Her heavy makeup barely showed a crease or fold.

  “Sometimes the flames are real, Signor Macintyre—they burn the flesh—and sometimes they are symbolic. But it isn’t finished yet, is it? Mother Mariangela is worried about the reputation of her Casa Crispina. She said I should be grateful for staying here and I am, but I told her she should be thankful things weren’t worse than they are. He could have been killed right here—hit over the head with a pitcher of wine during a meal, don’t think any different!”

  “Why was that?”

  “I’ll tell you why just as I told Commissario Gemelli. Because Signor Gibbon was insolent! He was the kind of person you wanted to slap or hit over the head. Believe me, you would have felt the same way.”

  “I knew him slightly. He did have a certain way about him but—”

  “‘But,’ nothing! Unless you were with him when there was a lady present, you couldn’t possibly know what I mean. He went after women, he did—the younger ones.”

  She rearranged her shawl.

  “Went after them?”

  “I saw what he was up to. I didn’t need my special powers to make it any clearer than it was to anyone else. Yes, he went after them! He played with their feelings, toyed with them. I saw it all. He flattered them to flatter himself. I warned the girls I saw him with and I warned him, too, but it didn’t seem to do much good.”

  “What young women did you see him with, Signora Campi?”

  Xenia Campi stood up. She wasn’t a tall woman. She was, in fact, on the short side, and her heaviness made her seem even shorter. But now, as she answered Urbino’s question, she seemed inches taller.

  “Signorina Spaak!”

  Amusement lightened her blunt features. She seemed pleased to be able to give him the American girl’s name.

  “You mentioned other young women. Who were they?”

  “Oh, just girls in the Piazza,” she said vaguely. She moved to the door. “I know you have other questions to ask me, but not this evening, if you don’t mind. I’m not feeling well and I have to save my energies for the Piazza.” She leaned her head back and gazed up at Urbino. “Speaking of Signorina Spaak, look deep into her eyes when you see her, Signor Macintyre. Deep, deep into her eyes.” Xenia Campi’s own eyes seemed suddenly veiled. “You’ll see the ghost of death—of murder. It entered her through her eyes. But will it ever come out?”

  Urbino thought she was finished, but just before she opened the door she answered a question that he hadn’t had a chance to ask yet.

  “And if you want to know where I was yesterday evening, I was right here in the Casa Crispina. I was in the lounge reading Madame Blavatsky and had a chat with Sister Agata before she dropped off to sleep at the desk. Then I went to bed. As I’m going to do now. Good evening, Signor Macintyre.”

  6

  Dora Spaak, dressed in tweed slacks and a heavy sweater, was dwarfed by the high-backed chair. She couldn’t have been more of a contrast to Saint Catherine, pale and thin on the wall behind her. Dora Spaak was rosy and rounded, from her short haircut with bangs above surprised-looking brown eyes to her feet in pink angora slippers that barely touched the floor. Even her voice was full of rounded tones that would have been even more rounded if she had spoken with less breathlessness.

  She held a crumpled tissue in her hand.

  “Poor Mr. Gibbon. Whatever could have happened? He was such a nice man. It must have been an accident.”

  An accident? Urbino repeated to himself. Could she possibly mean that being stabbed in the heart qualified as an accident? The next moment, the tissue at her snub nose, she added, “It was dark. Maybe they thought he was someone else. Mistaken identity, you know.”

  “I’m sure the police are considering that possibility.”

  “Except you don’t think it was an accident, do you?” She looked at him accusingly with her round eyes. “You think someone hated him and killed him, but it’s not true! Everyone here liked him, except for that crackpot Signora Campi. Even my brother, Nicholas—”

  She stopped.

  “What about your brother, Miss Spaak?”

  She blew her nose before answering. When she did answer, there was a more cautious note in her voice.

  “Nothing. Just that Nicholas liked Val, too, even if he didn’t always show it. Signora Campi probably wants to put us all in the same group with her! She was always so unkind in the things she said. She almost always said them to me and it made me feel awful. Most of the time Val was there and he heard. I hope he didn’t think I believed what she was saying. He couldn’t do anything right as far as she was concerned! She said being a photographer was nothing at all. It wasn’t work and it wasn’t art. She said he fed off other people. She criticized him for not having all his meals with us here even though he had to pay for them. I think she resented that he had the money to do that. She didn’t have two nickels to rub together—or whatever they call them here. And another thing,” Dora added almost eagerly, the sodden tissue clutched in her chubby hand. “She was always saying he had a fire around his head that wouldn’t bring him or anyone else any good. She sends chills down my spine when she talks like that! No wonder she frightens the boys from Naples if she can frighten a grown woman like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

  Once again she broke off.

  “If what, Miss Spaak?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that she frightens me so much.”

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Gibbon?”

  She wiped her nose.

  “Last night after dinner,” she said softly. “You see, I wasn’t feeling too well. I caught a chill early in the day and my shoes and stockings got soaked in all the high water when I was looking for a post office. By the time I got back here I was sneezing. Later, sometime after nine, I was in the dining room having a cup of tea that the woman made for me before she left for the night. Val came down the backstairs. He was on his way out with
his camera case. I figured he was going to join the fun in the big square. But he had on only a scarf and a light flannel shirt and I told him it didn’t took as if he was going to be warm enough. He sat down and we had a chat.” She applied a fresh tissue to her eyes. “He was so kind. He said he would go to the kitchen and get me some biscuits. It would be an adventure, he said, there would probably be a sign over the pantry door, something about abandoning hope or whatever if you went in, but he said he would do it anyway.”

  Hearing these garbled words from Dante had Urbino wondering if Val Gibbon had picked up Hazel Reeve’s habit of quoting the Italian poet.

  “He said that if I happened to know where it was, I could be his Be—Be—I forget what he said, some strange name.”

  “Beatrice,” Urbino offered, pronouncing it in the Italian way with four syllables.

  “That was it.” Dora Spaak looked at him suspiciously. “I said I had no idea. I told him not to bother, that I was fine. All I needed was my tea. He said he would join me and started to take off his scarf. He would stay in and devote himself to making me feel a little better. Of course I insisted that he continue with his original plans. It was very kind and sweet of him, I said, but I was just fine. Yes, I—I told him to go. If I hadn’t sent him away, he would be alive—and—and no one would have had to kill him!”

  It was now that Urbino remembered what Xenia Campi had said about looking deep into Dora Spaak’s eyes. What he saw when he did, however, wasn’t the “ghost of death,” as Xenia Campi had called it, but fear.

  “He stayed a few minutes longer and left,” Dora Spaak said, averting her eyes. “He said he liked my slippers.”

  She looked down at the slippers and started to cry as she considered the poignancy of his last words to her.

  7

  A slim blond man in his late twenties, with dark blue eyes and less than firm features, was standing outside the door when Urbino opened it to let Dora Spaak out after their interview.