Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  3

  The Commissario’s question sounded in Urbino’s ears as he listened to Mrs. Pillow in the crowded wine bar.

  Did Tonio Vico know how lucky he was? Urbino didn’t doubt that Vico loved his stepmother. But was he aware of the depth of her own feeling? If he could have heard how passionately she was defending him now, he would have considered himself very lucky indeed.

  “Tony was in the whole night, Mr. Macintyre. Neither of us is a gadabout. I know people have traveled hundreds, thousands of miles to be here during Carnevale, but we’ve been content to stay in most nights, reading or watching television. When we’ve gone out to eat, we’ve usually made it a point to go in the opposite direction from the Piazza. We’ve found some quiet little restaurants that I’m sure you know all about.”

  She cast her eye quickly over the noisy, smoke-filled room. Many people were in costume but only a few wore masks since they made eating and drinking almost impossible. Those who were indulging in the wines and little snacks of the enoteca with masks on were wearing either half masks or three-quarter ones designed so that the mouth, although concealed by a long beaklike protrusion, was free to take drink and nourishment.

  “Tonio prefers to be away from the madding crowd,” Mrs. Pillow went on, looking away from the exuberant diners and drinkers, “and so do I. He’s a quiet boy. Sometimes I think he would have made a wonderful priest or monk although I would have been devastated to lose him that way.”

  Urbino didn’t see any point in disagreeing, in telling her that having a son in the religious life was sometimes the very way of never losing him—at least not to another woman. He couldn’t help but be reminded of Stella Maris Spaak’s comment. But although Mrs. Pillow, according to Hazel and Mrs. Pillow’s own admission, didn’t care for Hazel, Urbino didn’t think she was the kind of mother to stand in the way of her son’s true happiness.

  “Maybe I should have gone with Tony and Hazel.” She gave a laugh that had less humor in it than self-deprecation. “Not as a chaperone. I mean for my sake. San Giorgio Maggiore and the Giudecca might be only a few minutes away but they’re worlds apart from this madness.”

  Once again she took in the noise and confusion of the wine bar and the festive crowd outside. A couple with their faces painted half white and half black and wearing red fright wigs had their faces pressed against one of the windows and were grimacing. Mrs. Pillow turned away with a moue of distaste. Urbino wondered why she had put herself in the middle of Carnevale when she seemed to dislike it so much, although it was completely possible that her patience with it had been worn thin because of the serious problem her stepson now had.

  “Yes,” she went on, “all the cleanness and logic—the sanity, you could say—of the Palladian churches would have been restorative today. But Tony and Hazel need it more than I do, although the young can bounce back so much more easily.”

  A look of tired sadness passed over her sharp features. It was hard to believe that she was the Contessa’s contemporary, or even only a year older. Her skin had a grayish pallor that she made no attempt to conceal with cosmetics, and the lines in her face didn’t give it character so much as a worn, weary look. Her graying red hair, however, looked as if it would be thick, rich, even lustrous when it was unbound. If the immediate impression of Mrs. Pillow was one of fatigue and austerity, a considered one couldn’t fail to register the slightly mischievous young girl looking out from her blue eyes. When searching for the long-ago girl from St. Brigid’s in the mature Mrs. Pillow, it must be these eyes that the Contessa focused on. These eyes were turned now on Urbino.

  “Tony didn’t see the paper this morning, Mr. Macintyre.”

  “I assume you did.”

  “Yes, after you called but not before Tony went to Barbara’s. It was a shock to see Tony’s face—or almost Tony’s face—looking out at me. Surely it’s some grotesque mistake!”

  “You’ll have to prepare yourself for more—and he’s going to find out soon enough. He probably knows by now.”

  “What do you mean that I should prepare myself for more?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if other people say they saw someone who looked like the picture.”

  He didn’t mention this had already happened. If possible, he wanted to be the one to tell Tonio Vico.

  She nodded her head slowly.

  “I had thought of it myself but I was too afraid to admit it. It could make Tony look very bad.”

  Urbino asked her if Tonio had ever been to San Gabriele.

  “San Gabriele? Where’s that?”

  “In a quiet part of the Cannaregio quarter. Not too far from the Ghetto.”

  “Don’t try to trick me, Mr. Macintyre. It’s where the Casa Crispina is, isn’t it? Where Mr. Gibbon was staying? What good would it be for me to say that Tony hadn’t been there? The truth is that there’s no way for me to know, is there, the way there is about that night at the hotel? But ask him yourself. He’ll tell you the truth.”

  She looked for her purse.

  “Do you think we could leave? It’s getting a little close in here.”

  She got up and waited for him outside. She seemed even taller as she drew up against the window, disdaining any close contact with the crowd that surged past her and fixing her gaze on the upper story of the building opposite.

  4

  On the way back to her hotel, Mrs. Pillow commented occasionally on the passing scene, asking Urbino to identify a particular costume or to give her the name of a building, but she was obviously preoccupied with her thoughts.

  She didn’t show much real interest until three figures appeared suddenly around the corner ten meters ahead. They wore black tunics of oilcloth, wide-brimmed black hats covering their ears and hair, large black-framed glasses, black gloves, and golden masks with a long pointed beak over the nose and the mouth. These masks made them look almost ducklike, but the effect was far from comical. The slow, silent way they moved through the crowd added to their ominous quality. Each was carrying a wooden stick. One of them raised his and touched Mrs. Pillow gently on the shoulder. She shrank back. The figures passed by and silently turned a corner.

  “Who are they?” she asked in an unsteady voice.

  “Plague doctors. It’s used as a costume now but it was how doctors caring for plague victims dressed hundreds of years ago. They put a piece of cloth soaked with some kind of medicine in the cone of the nose. Its fumes were supposed to protect them from the plague. Every opening of the body was protected.”

  “And the stick?”

  “They used them to examine the victim’s sores at a safe distance.”

  Mrs. Pillow shivered.

  “Some doctors today don’t act much different,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of illness in those I love, Mr. Macintyre.”

  Her face was touched with genuine sorrow. He wondered if she herself could be ill. It might explain why she looked so much older than the Contessa. He felt a surge of sympathy for her.

  After they parted at the Splendide-Suisse with a few words about the Contessa’s ballo in maschera tomorrow evening, Urbino started off for the Piazza.

  The faint glimmers of something were starting to form in his mind. Sometimes his own research and his understanding of his biographical subjects proceeded from hunches and intuitions that led him in the right direction. When he was wrong in these cases, all he had wasted was time and energy, and he could make up for his unprofitable detour. In the case of murder, however, it was much different. He didn’t have much time to indulge himself. Ash Wednesday was only the day after tomorrow.

  The narrow alleys were clogged with revelers. Urbino pitied the relatively few people who were trying to make their way from the Piazza against the surge of people. There were full minutes when Urbino moved barely a foot as he waited for the bottleneck ahead to clear up. The individual costumes and masks were almost indistinguishable, so packed together was everyone. Only occasionally could he concentrate on a detail—an astronaut’s helm
et, an odalisque’s veils and scarfs, an astrologer’s cone-hat with crescents.

  As he was held up for several minutes in front of a souvenir shop where two men—one dressed as Fu Manchu, the other as an American Indian—stood arguing, he went over everything that Dora Spaak had told him about meeting Gibbon in the dining room the night of his death, about her visits to see how her mother was doing, about her assurance that Nicholas had been in all night, about her response to the artist’s drawing in the newspaper. He thought of Berenice Pillow’s impassioned denial that her stepson had been out on the fateful night and reviewed what Rigoletti had said about the men he had seen, especially the one he had identified yesterday as Vico. Urbino kept coming back to what Dora Spaak actually knew and might not be telling him.

  Urbino would also have to ask Nicholas Spaak and Tonio Vico some more questions. He checked his watch. Hazel and Vico wouldn’t be back for a while yet, but lunch must have just finished at the Casa Crispina. He might be able to catch Spaak there if he had returned.

  Urbino slowly made his way across the swarming Piazza to Florian’s. The family of white-costumed acrobats was in front of the Campanile forming a human pyramid. The one balancing at the top was pelted with an egg by a rabbit-eared mattaccino, as Urbino had been a few days ago.

  A line of people, most of them in elegant costumes, were waiting in the foyer for a table. Urbino went up the stairs to the telephone and called the Casa Crispina. The sister who answered said that Spaak was in and she would see if he was free. His mother was very ill.

  Urbino waited for what seemed a long time. Finally, Nicholas Spaak’s voice, sounding strained, came over the line.

  “It’s Urbino Macintyre. I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this. I hope your mother isn’t too ill.”

  “Dora says she’ll have to be put in the hospital but Mother’s afraid of going to a foreign one, and she seems even more afraid of being brought there in a boat. What do you want? I don’t have time to tell you what happened with the police but as you can see I wasn’t arrested.”

  “I just want to know one thing about your trip to the Questura. Did Commissario Gemelli ask you to look at any pictures?”

  “Why do you ask me questions that you know the answer to? Yes, I did look at a drawing—one of the ones that’s in the paper today. The one that’s supposed to be me is ridiculous. It could be almost anyone as far as I can see.”

  “And the other one?”

  In a weary voice, Spaak said, “Yes, it was the tall man I saw in that alley. Now you all can see that I’m telling the truth. Good-bye, Mr. Macintyre.”

  5

  Half an hour later Urbino was glad to see that Giovanni Firpo was on duty at the hospital pharmacy.

  Firpo had a worried, puzzled look on his face that didn’t clear up when Urbino mentioned the afternoon when he had seen Firpo in the Piazza San Marco taunting Xenia Campi—the last afternoon Gibbon was alive.

  Firpo had just time to give him the address of the person who had, unknowingly, contributed to Xenia Campi’s anger that afternoon when a doctor required Firpo’s attention.

  Urbino walked from the hospital toward the Calle Santa Scolastica. The shops were starting to open again after the midday break. People were waiting to get in and creating even more confusion in the narrow passageways. In the middle of a bridge a group was gathered around a Cleopatra with a boa constrictor around her shoulders—or rather his shoulders, because beneath the kohl-rimmed eyes and other heavy makeup, it was obviously a man. A Pharaoh standing next to her was playing a reed flute. As she gently cradled the head of the snake, Cleopatra recited in Italian-accented English:

  “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

  That sucks the nurse asleep?”

  As Urbino left the scene behind, he heard a man make a lewd comment. The crowd laughed loudly, drowning out the sound of the flute.

  The mask shop Urbino was looking for was already open. The proprietor, Matteo, a genial, broad-faced man in his mid-thirties, was explaining commedia dell’arte masks to two young women. He smiled in greeting.

  The relatively recent revival of Carnevale in Venice had brought with it a renewed interest in masks and the art of mask making, and every quarter of the city had its mask shops and artisans.

  Matteo had pulled out a large well-worn book from under his counter to illustrate his little lecture.

  “Arlecchino—perhaps you know him as Harlequin—is the servant of the miser Pantalone,” Matteo said. “Arlecchino loves love and loves his polenta. You see his costume is made of red, orange, and green patches that remind us of his poverty. This is his mask.” He held up a small dark-brown mask with a misshapen nose jutting out above a bushy moustache. “Columbine, the woman he pursues, who doesn’t have sense enough to resist him, usually doesn’t wear a mask, but you see from this picture how lavishly she is dressed in her bright-colored skirts. Sometimes she wears an apron, too, since she’s a servant like Arlecchino. And then, completing the eternal triangle, is sad-faced Pierrot with his black skullcap and floppy white suit. He seldom wears a mask either, but why does he need one, ladies? His face is itself a mask.” He pointed to the face of Pierrot in the book. “It is painted white, sometimes with one tear to show his sorrow at losing his beloved Columbine to the more crafty and sensual Arlecchino. Let me show you one of my Pierrot masks.” He went to the wall and took down a simple white-faced mask with a large black tear on its cheek.

  “You will see many people in the Carnevale crowd dressed like Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot, sometimes in groups of three, sometimes just two of them, sometimes one alone. But there are also the Harlequins, Columbines, and Pierrots who wear no costume, ladies, for remember that the commedia dell’arte characters are ones we see around us every day. I myself am the brokenhearted Pierrot who sees all you lovely ladies come into my life only to leave a few minutes later.”

  The two young women giggled, thanked him, and said they might come back to buy a mask before they left Venice. Matteo went out into the calle to direct them to the Piazza San Marco although his parting words—“Just follow the crowd”—were the best directions he could give them.

  “How can I help you, signor?”

  When Urbino mentioned Giovanni Firpo and one of the masks he had worn that afternoon last week in the Piazza, Matteo nodded. “Yes, I make all of Vanni’s masks for him. He’s even more of a perfectionist than I am! Of course I remember that particular one. I had a lot of fun doing it.” He laughed as he remembered. “A man who spoke Italian with an English accent—or maybe it was an American accent—asked me to make one of them for him, too. Maybe Vanni Firpo recommended me, but this man wanted it in a hurry and I couldn’t do it. I suggested he see Pierina. She just got started as a mask maker and is looking for business. She has a very good eye and steady hand.”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “She doesn’t have her own shop yet. She shares a space near Santa Maria Formosa with a cousin in the secondhand-clothing business, but until the end of Carnevale she has a booth in the Campo San Maurizio. She’s there almost all the time when she isn’t strolling around the Piazza, trying to do business there.”

  Urbino thanked him and set off for the Campo San Maurizio. It was slow going as he moved against the current of the crowd, but he soon entered the maze of back alleys where there were only a few masqueraders and local residents going about their business. As he neared the Campo San Maurizio, however, he was once again in the thick of things.

  The square not far from the Accademia Bridge had rows of canopied booths selling masks, hats, and costumes as well as books, calendars, and posters of the Venetian Carnival. A couple dressed as Beauty and the Beast were performing a pantomime in one of the aisles. Laughing tourists were trying on bizarre and fanciful cloaks, robes, pants, dresses, and headgear; others were carefully considering between two or three masks as if the one they chose would make the difference between a completely successful Carnevale experience or a fiasco.
Three Gypsy children ran up and down the aisles, distracting the proprietors and their clients.

  Urbino had to ask at several booths before someone pointed out Pierina’s booth.

  It wasn’t until he was only a few feet away that he recognized Pierina. She was the young woman who had been painting faces in the Piazza on the day he had spoken with the boys from Naples. He was also fairly certain that it was the same girl who had been in the restaurant in the Calle degli Albanesi when he had spoken with Lupo. Without her face paint, he saw that she was a little older than he had first thought, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six. She was small and birdlike, with short dark hair feathering around her face and dark expressive eyes. Her face was very pale and she looked like a porcelain doll—a slightly damaged doll, however, for a small scar marred her right cheek.

  She was just finishing a sale of one of the many masks that glared, grimaced, and laughed from the counter and the support beams.

  Pierina’s eyes widened when she saw him.

  He didn’t indicate that he recognized her. Before he asked her any questions, he examined some of the masks and bought a black velvet oval moretta. He would give it to the Contessa.

  While Pierina was wrapping it in pages from Il Gazzettino, she looked at Urbino warily. He said that Matteo near the Campo San Filippo e Giacomo had told him where he could find her. He asked her about the man Matteo had mentioned.

  She busied herself with a piece of cellophane tape before answering.

  “I remember him. He came to the shop I share with my cousin. He paid me a lot but it wasn’t easy. You have to go from something flat to something three-dimensional. I saw many flaws in it myself but he was pleased.”

  She handed him the package. He had the impression she wanted to end their conversation. She looked over his shoulder at the shoppers milling around.

  “Was he American or English?” Urbino persisted.

  “He wasn’t French or German. I could tell that. As for the other man, he was very handsome, but I don’t know what nationality he was, of course.”