Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  A look of fear came back into the Pole’s face.

  “But I had nothing to do with Gibbon’s murder. I don’t know anything about it! But you said that someone went up on the scaffold.”

  “Porfirio Buffone. He’s dead, Josef. He fell from the scaffolding. Paolo, the sexton, found his body this morning.”

  Lubonski stared unblinkingly at him for what seemed an impossibly long time.

  “You booby-trapped the scaffold, didn’t you, Josef? But why?”

  A quizzical look came over the Pole’s face,

  “I mean that you did something to the scaffold. You fixed it so that it would collapse, didn’t you? That’s why you made me promise not to go anywhere near the fresco.”

  Looking down at the dark-green blanket, Lubonski nodded.

  “I didn’t want anything to happen to you, Urbino, please believe me. I called you to warn you after I—I booby-trapped the scaffold. I didn’t want anything to happen to anyone.”

  “Except Val Gibbon?”

  “Yes!” Urbino was startled by the force behind Lubonski’s affirmative. “I wanted to hurt him, I wanted to scare him, but I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want anyone to die.”

  “Josef, I think you should tell me about Val Gibbon. I know you didn’t like him.”

  “I hated him!” Lubonski almost shouted. “He was a terrible man, the worst I’ve ever known. I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead. Many people will be happy, I think. But I am sorry for the other photographer. Do the police know?”

  “About Porfirio’s death, yes. The Commissario said he wanted to ask me about the restoration work. The police will obviously want to know exactly how Porfirio fell to his death. Maybe they’ve figured it out already.”

  Lubonski averted his eyes.

  “It was my fault, God forgive me. I will tell them the truth. I will tell them you had nothing to do with it.”

  “But why, Josef?”

  “Why? Because he was making my life miserable. He didn’t do it only for the money but because he enjoyed it. When people aren’t happy, they want to make other people miserable too.”

  “Money? What money?”

  “Two thousand pounds that I don’t have—not anymore.”

  The amount found on Gibbon’s body was more than this.

  “Why did he want you to give him two thousand pounds?”

  Lubonski looked at him with an appeal in his eyes. Having admitted to rigging the scaffold, what was there that he was still afraid of?

  “It was what you call—what is the word?—when someone wants money from you or they will do something to you? Chantage,” he said, using the French word.

  “Blackmail? Did he have photographs that you didn’t want him to have?”

  “Nothing to do with photographs, no. Something else.”

  From the way Lubonski settled back against the pillows and looked straight ahead at the wall, Urbino knew that he was about to give him an explanation. He sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed and waited.

  “Gibbon I met nine years ago in London, may the day be damned! It was two years after I got there. I went to England the summer before martial law started in Poland. I went to make money, mainly for my mother. She has only me and my younger brother but my brother and his family don’t have anything. I didn’t have a work permit but I found little jobs. Once I got a permit I had more work, mainly construction, and that’s how I got involved with Gibbon.” Lubonski frowned and shook his head weakly. “But that’s not right. I knew him before then. I was studying English at a school in London. He was teaching there—not English but art or photography or something. He took an interest in me.” He reached for a tissue from the box on the night table next to his bed, giving Urbino a quick glance.

  “Did he have a job for you?”

  Lubonski gave a feeble laugh.

  “He was always looking for ways to make money himself. Not that I am too much different, but he had only himself and I had to worry about my mother back in Cracow and I wanted to get married. My girlfriend—an English girl, but we never got married—didn’t like me to send so much money to my mother. We had fights.”

  Urbino listened patiently to his story, sensing it was being told not only to inform but also to provide an excuse or justification for what was to come. When Lubonski paused, Urbino reminded him that he hadn’t said why Gibbon had taken an interest in him. The Pole looked down at his tissue.

  “It wasn’t because of anything I said or did,” he said. “I never even noticed him until he came up to me after classes one night, asked me my name. He wanted to have a drink or a coffee. I could tell what he wanted.”

  Urbino thought that he did too but he waited for Lubonski to tell him.

  “I was a good-looking man back then.” He looked at Urbino almost belligerently. “I know it wasn’t so long ago but you can change very fast. One day you’re not much more than a boy, and then—then you’re something else.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “When I told him I wasn’t interested in such things, he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I knew I was right. I saw him talking to some of the young men in my English class. He became very friendly with one of them, an Asian. He didn’t bother me again in that way but sometimes I saw him looking at me. He left the school a little while after that. His friend in my class said that he was teaching in a hospital. I don’t understand how you can teach art in a hospital, but that’s what he said he was doing.”

  “What way was it that he did bother you. You mentioned blackmail.”

  “Yes, chantage. A few weeks ago, here in Venice.”

  “You hadn’t seen him in nine years and then he tried to blackmail you? But why?”

  “I didn’t say that I didn’t see him after the school, did I? I saw him many times but not in the way that you think. It was business. Maybe not business but money was involved.” Lubonski sighed. “I know that I have to tell you all this and that I will have to tell the police, too, but I want you to understand and to tell the Contessa that I am a good man, despite what I might have done. Will you tell her that?”

  “She knows that already, Josef. She got you the work at San Gabriele because she knew you were a good man, that you had done good work for her friend in London before he died.”

  Lubonski’s face clouded. He was looking weaker. Urbino wondered how much longer it would be reasonable to expect him to go on. Any minute now one of the nurses might come in to interrupt them.

  “That’s it,” he said so quietly that Urbino almost couldn’t hear him. “I didn’t do a good job—at least not an honest job.”

  “Her friend was pleased.”

  “He never knew. Rich people—rich old people who have so much—sometimes they don’t notice things. I don’t think he ever did, thank God.”

  “Notice what, Josef?”

  “That I stole some things from his house!” Lubonski was breathless after saying it and started to cough. “Little things,” the Pole amended as if their size ameliorated his culpability. “Little things, but they were worth a lot of money. I wasn’t sure, but Gibbon, he knew they were. He got money for them. I didn’t know what to do with them after I took them and then I met Gibbon in Bloomsbury, being all smiling and considerate, maybe because he was with his aunt and he wanted to show her what a nice boy he was. I thought he could help me. When I told him about the little things a few days later, he came over to look at them and said he would be able to help me. He did. It was a big mistake.”

  For whom? Urbino asked himself as Lubonski paused. For them both? In what ways?

  “What were these little things?”

  “Gibbon knew what they were. He gave them names but I didn’t know what the names meant.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “One was ivory and the other one was jade,” he said almost proudly. “The ivory one was shaped like a seahorse and the jade one was oval, like a very small bowl.”

  Urbino would need more details
than these to know exactly what these objets de vertu were.

  “You’re sure the man never knew they were missing?”

  It seemed improbable yet not impossible. How long would it take the Contessa to notice that one or two of her ceramic animals were missing or something from one of her other collections either at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini or the villa in Asolo? The Contessa had never mentioned anything about a theft in her friend’s townhouse. Surely he would have told her, especially if he had discovered the theft after the renovation work.

  “Sure? No, I’m not sure, but he never said anything. I never heard anything. My supervisor never mentioned it, and the Contessa didn’t either.”

  “So Gibbon sold the objects and gave you some of the money.”

  “Half of it—or I think it was half,” he added ruefully. “But I was happy to get it. It was more than two thousand pounds. I sent most of it to my mother.”

  “Did you sell”—he thought it a better word than ‘steal’ if he wanted to keep Lubonski talking—“any other things?”

  “That was all. Gibbon said I should try to take one or two more but I refused. I could never have done it again. It was an impulse. Anyway, the job there was soon over.”

  But obviously things hadn’t been over with Gibbon.

  “Gibbon wanted you to take more things and when you didn’t he started to blackmail you.”

  Lubonski nodded his head sadly.

  “Chantage, yes, but not at first. At first he tried to get me to take other things, but then here in Venice he started with la chantage. Imagine my surprise when I saw him at breakfast two weeks ago! I thought he had forgotten all about me, but he found out I was going to be with the sisters when I was doing the work. He wanted the money back.”

  “All of it?”

  “Most of it. He said he needed it, and if I didn’t give it to him he would tell the police in London.”

  “Tell the police? But Josef, he was involved too. If he told the police, he would implicate himself.”

  “That’s what I told myself. That’s what I said to him but he just laughed. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I had been the one to take the things, that I was a foreigner even after all these years, and that when they found out that I had—back in Poland—”

  Lubonski broke off and looked at Urbino with imploring eyes.

  “What about Poland?”

  “I took many zlotys from the man I worked for. He never paid any of us enough and had so much.”

  “Were you arrested?”

  “No, he didn’t know for sure who it was. I don’t think the man wanted the police to poke around in his business. Everything wasn’t as it should be. I was lucky. I couldn’t take a chance. If the English police learned about the money in Poland or if they sent me back there the way Gibbon said they would, I would be lost—and so would my poor mother. Even though things have changed in Poland, this man could have me arrested. He’s a big man now.”

  Instead of asking any more direct questions, Urbino sat and waited for Lubonski to continue, which he did after taking a sip of water.

  “I didn’t know what to do when Gibbon asked me for more money. My mother has used up all the money and I must send her more. He said that I could always get some from the Contessa, that she seemed to like me and would continue to like me as long as she didn’t find out what I had done to her friend. I was in a very bad position. But I only wanted to frighten him. Men like him, men who want to get money through chantage, they are cowards who only want to frighten someone else. So I thought I would frighten him instead.”

  “By fixing the scaffold so that it would fall down? I could have gone up there, Josef!”

  “But I told you not to, and you promised. No one else went on the scaffold but you, me, and Gibbon. Paolo was afraid to climb the ladder.”

  It was a feeble attempt at justification. Anyone might have climbed the ladder out of curiosity despite the sign forbidding it. But Lubonski, ill and desperate, couldn’t have been thinking clearly the night of Gibbon’s murder when he had gone to San Gabriele. What he had done to the scaffold hadn’t killed Gibbon, but it had killed Porfirio several days later—or had it?

  Couldn’t Porfirio’s head have been crushed some other way? Porfirio might not have been up on the scaffold at all. Someone could have followed Lubonski to San Gabriele, understood that the trap being set up was meant for Gibbon, and taken advantage of it as a convenient cover-up for murder. Porfirio could have been killed to obscure the real motive for Gibbon’s murder, perhaps to implicate Lubonski.

  But it was unlikely that anyone would believe that the ill Lubonski had gone all the way to the Calle Santa Scolastica to kill Gibbon. As the Contessa had said in reference to Stella Maris Spaak, the other semi-invalid of the Casa Crispina, it was “impossible,” wasn’t it?

  4

  Giovanni Firpo was waiting for Urbino by the elevators when he came out of Lubonski’s room. There was a strained look on the little man’s face that hadn’t been there earlier.

  “Could I talk with you for a few minutes, Signor Macintyre?”

  He led Urbino to the end of the hall to a room with a few chairs, a sagging sofa, and a table littered with magazines. No one was in it. He closed the door behind them.

  “I just heard that Porfirio is dead. I think there’s something you should know. It’s about Xenia Campi. When you asked me about her yesterday, I didn’t think this was important. You wanted to know if I had seen her the night of the English photographer’s murder. As I told you, I didn’t, but I saw her yesterday in the Piazza with Porfirio. Just the two of them. They were in the corner by the bank. I couldn’t help overhearing as I was going by. They didn’t notice me. She was threatening him.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said he would have a fall and that she would be there to see it!”

  5

  From the café across from the hospital, Urbino first called Mother Mariangela and tried to allay her fears about how the death of Porfirio might affect the convent and the Casa Crispina. He didn’t think it wise to tell her about Lubonski’s role in Porfirio’s death. Before hanging up, Mother Mariangela said that Mrs. Spaak would like to see him.

  Next Urbino called the Contessa.

  “I have a lot to tell you, Barbara, but I don’t have the time now. I’d like some information from you though. Tell me about Xenia Campi.”

  “Because of her dislike for Porfirio? But Porfirio was killed accidentally, wasn’t he? Or have you come across something else?”

  “Later, Barbara. Just tell me about Xenia Campi now.”

  The Contessa sighed with impatience.

  “All right but I’ll expect a full accounting later. Xenia Campi and Ignazio Rigoletti were married for about twenty years before they divorced. She was a seamstress. They had only one child, a son. He was killed in a car crash on the autostrada on his way to Milan. There was fog, and a bus bringing tourists to Carnevale hit him. He was burned to death. The girl he was with was thrown from the car and survived. It was about ten years ago. There were some terrible pictures of it in the paper. You might have seen them.”

  Urbino hadn’t, but he had known about the crash. Were the particulars of her son’s death the reason why Xenia Campi seemed to see fiery auras around people and why she was so passionately against Carnevale? How had she reacted to the graphic photographs of the crash? And how did she feel about the girl who had survived, whoever she might be?

  “At about the same time, Porfirio was trying to get them and another family out of his building,” the Contessa went on. “They didn’t have the money or the energy to fight him and moved out six months later. They found a room in the Castello but their son’s death tore them apart. Eventually they got a divorce. She went back to her maiden name but insisted on the ‘Signora.’ That’s when she started to say she had visions, could see the future, although always a bad one. You must have noticed her around the Piazza then.”

  �
��I saw her for the first time at a Biennale. She was handing out flyers by the boat landing.”

  “As I’ve said before, she has some sense. Much of what she says about Venice and the Biennale is true, as far as I’m concerned. If she were less extreme, people would pay more attention to her.”

  “How does she support herself?”

  “The sisters take hardly anything. Rigoletti gives her a bit of money now and then.”

  “Did Porfirio feel any guilt over what he had done?”

  “Not that he ever showed. He was happy to have his thoroughly modern apartment and his photography.”

  Urbino thought the Contessa was about to give him more details about Porfirio, but after a moment’s pause, she asked, “Have you seen Miss Reeve yet today or is that one of the things you’re concealing from me?”

  “I haven’t seen her. I assume she’s at Porfirio’s.”

  “Are you still not suspicious, caro, that the young lady has been so eager to tell you things about her private life?”

  “I don’t think ‘eager’ is the word to describe what she is, Barbara.”

  “I’ve made you cross but it’s only for your own good. You need a woman’s point of view, and as a woman—as a woman who is also your dear friend—I tell you that you might be putting yourself in a position to be deceived. It could ruin any chance you have for getting to the bottom of this business. I’m curious about something, caro. Does your Miss Reeve expect reciprocity?”

  She drew out the syllables of the last word almost comically.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does she want to know about you, too? Have you told her things about yourself?”

  “Very little. She did ask me some things about my parents and about my life in New Orleans before I came here.”

  “And it was like pulling teeth for her, wasn’t it, the poor dear? I know just what she must have gone through! It was years before I got your whole story, and I’m still not sure I know all the important parts! I’d be absolutely furious if I found out that she knew even one tenth of the little I’ve been blessed with. Oh, she’s a crafty one, your Miss Reeve—and also Gibbon’s Miss Reeve and Tonio’s Miss Reeve! Maybe even Porfirio’s Miss Reeve! Very crafty! And only another woman can see the extent of it!”