‘It’s sad. But sick mothers – even desperately ill ones – often outlive their children,’ Urbino observed. ‘Or even die before their disease gets them. If you had asked me who, of everyone in the Palazzo Pindar, might end up murdered I wouldn’t have said Olimpia or even Gaby – at least not before we learned she’s afraid of something bad happening to her. I would have said Apollonia. It is a terrible thing to say when she is so ill, but I keep thinking of that. She’s a sacred terror. I wouldn’t want to be on her bad side.’
Urbino’s glass seemed almost empty again, but perhaps she was mistaken. The contessa suspected that her vision was going the way of her concentration.
What Urbino had been saying for the past few minutes floated in her mind, where it was bumped, jostled, and nudged by almost everything else he had been saying this evening.
She did her best to keep her attention anchored.
Urbino was moving on to Eufrosina and her behavior in the Fortuny exhibition room. He found this situation most interesting, he said, and asked her to tell him again what items she had been photographing.
‘Yes, quite interesting,’ she heard, and ‘doing her best to impress you’ and ‘desperate for the money’ and ‘speak with your staff tomorrow’ and other things that drifted past her about Giorgio Lanzani.
Then, Urbino said gently, ‘It’s time for us to go, Barbara.’
She understood this well enough and was relieved to hear it.
The cold night air and the wind blowing from the lagoon revived her. As they went past the Basilica, gleaming darkly and silently above them, she clung to Urbino’s arm, more in affection than for support. City workers were cleaning the front steps and the pavement in front of the Basilica with a hose and brooms. Fog, like billows of a bridal veil, was slowly advancing from the water, brushing the wedding cake of the Doges’ Palace and curling around the twin pillars. Above them gulls were flying mysteriously in and out of the fog.
They did not speak about Mina or Olimpia or anything related to the murder at the Palazzo Pindar. Urbino mentioned that Eugene would be arriving tomorrow.
‘He should be a diversion for you,’ she said.
‘And for you. You’re not going to escape him, Barbara dear.’
‘I don’t want to. I find him charming. And he brings a welcome air of spontaneity with him – as fresh as this air.’
‘If by that you mean he usually doesn’t think before he speaks, you’re absolutely right.’
‘You’re just afraid he’s going to keep revealing secrets about you. You’ve managed to keep quite a few corners dark.’
‘That’s because my house has many, many rooms.’ He gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze. He looked up at the sky above the Bacino. ‘I hope we get some more snow while Eugene is here. It would be nice for him to see Venice in the snow.’
‘And I hear the child in you speaking, too.’
No denial came from her friend, but instead a boyish smile as he guided her across the stones of the Molo, which were slippery from the water washed in from the Bacino.
They made their way to where the contessa’s motorboat was moored, rocking from the passage of the boats in the Bacino.
At most other times when the contessa and Urbino went out together in the motorboat, they would part after she got into the boat and he would walk back to the Palazzo Uccello. But tonight her gentlemanly escort rode all the way home with her and delivered her safely into the hands of Vitale.
Within less than an hour of being home, the contessa was lying in her drowsy bed with Zouzou pressed against her side. A long bath had soothed her and dispersed some of the wine fumes smoking through her head.
When she was lying in her bed at night, she felt cloistered, protected. The closed, double-paned windows, reinforced by heavy shutters, kept out all sounds, even at the height of the summer season. No boat’s horn, peals of laughter, or barking dogs penetrated her boudoir tonight or on any night.
She had lit candles and placed them on the nightstand next to the silver-framed photograph of the conte. The candles were a nighttime votive to her dead husband, extinguished before she fell asleep. They were also the light by which she liked to read in bed.
She gazed at Alvise’s sharp-featured, good-looking face. The photograph had been taken a few years after their marriage. Other photographs of him were placed throughout the room. She let her eye run over them. She found it strange that Apollonia seldom, if ever, mentioned her dead husband, and from what the contessa could tell, there were no photographs of him in her salotto. Maybe she kept them for more private viewing, in her bedroom, like these photographs of Alvise, although the contessa had others scattered through the house.
For that matter, neither did Eufrosina ever mention her dead husband. The contessa had known both men. They had been kind, generous souls, and Apollonia had wielded a strong influence over both of them – husband and son-in-law.
The contessa picked up da Ponte’s memoirs, but she closed it after a few minutes. She would rather think of the future before she fell asleep than immerse herself in someone’s past, no matter how fascinating it was.
She picked up another book from the nightstand. A gift from Urbino, it was about treasure hunts that had been organized in country houses and gardens in England and Europe. Someday soon, God willing, the contessa planned to organize a treasure hunt at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini or the Villa La Muta in Asolo.
As she leafed through the book and looked at the illustrations, with her fingers caressing Zouzou, she allowed her mind to drift to that future happy time.
And to another future happy time, when Mina would be free.
She patted Zouzou’s head, and then bent down to whisper in her ear, ‘Don’t worry. Mina will soon be back with us.’
The contessa reached out and extinguished the candles. Every night Mina would come into her bedroom to be sure the contessa had extinguished them. Soon she would be doing it again. Yes, soon.
Eight
The next morning, when Urbino went to the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, he wasn’t surprised that the contessa had only a vague remembrance of what he had said last night about speaking with her staff. She looked a little weary and said she had a headache. For all the time he had known her, she had never overindulged in any kind of alcohol, and he couldn’t even imagine applying the word ‘drunk’ to her, even if, to a less loving and sympathetic eye, she might technically have been so.
Last night she had been in a celebratory mood because of what she had accomplished that day. Urbino was pleased with what she had learned and not surprised by the ingenuity of his Nora, although unlike her namesake she did not have a high tolerance for alcohol. And her stress over Mina had made her even more susceptible to it than usual.
‘You can speak with them in the salotto blu.’
Fifteen minutes later, after the contessa had informed her staff that Urbino wanted to ask them a few questions about Mina, he spoke with them one by one. With each of them he made it clear at once that the point of speaking with them was to try to help Mina. He doubted if there was any contact between the contessa’s staff and the residents of the Palazzo Pindar, except for Eufrosina’s visits, and she had said she wouldn’t be back at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini until a few weeks had gone by.
But even if the Pindars learned that he was on a mission to try to clear Mina, it would probably only confirm what they already suspected and it could work to his advantage. They might start behaving differently with him, and he would be quick to detect it.
Urbino hoped that none of the staff would let their loyalty to the contessa prevent them from revealing something about Mina that might not look, on the surface at least, helpful to her situation. He was pleased, therefore, when some of them made little effort to conceal their resentment and envy for a favored colleague. Luisa, the cook, even referred to Mina as the contessa’s cocco, her pet, but did it with a twinkle in her eye and added, ‘It’s only what the sweet girl deserves.’ Vitale, more care
ful in his words, said that in his opinion Mina had never done anything to indicate that she did not deserve ‘the contessa’s kind preference.’ Giovanna, the contessa’s former housekeeper and now semi-retired in the comfort of her own suite of rooms in the staff quarters, expressed a great deal of affection for Mina but said she wished the girl had not kept quite as much to herself.
However, no one – and he spoke, in addition to Vitale, Luisa and Giovanna, with the present housekeeper, the maids, the kitchen staff, the gardener, and Pasquale – no one had anything negative to say about Mina. Neither did any of them say they had noticed any strange behavior by Mina, except for Vitale who mentioned how upset the girl had been when she had learned that Olimpia had been to visit the contessa, and had rushed out of the house.
No one claimed to have seen her in the company of any member of the Pindar family except Olimpia, and that had been on very few occasions, since Mina and Olimpia had tended to meet at the Palazzo Pindar and seldom had gone out together in public. As far as any of them knew, she had never received a visitor.
He also asked Vitale and the housekeeper, since they were the most vigilant members of the staff, whether they had ever noticed Eufrosina anywhere near Mina’s room or in any part of the staff’s quarters. They had not.
The overall picture was of a hard-working, dedicated – if somewhat indulged – girl who was, in the words of almost everyone, ‘molto simpatica.’
‘Mina is unimpeachable in their eyes as she is in ours,’ Urbino said to the contessa afterward. ‘You can be relieved that none of them is likely to pass on anything negative about her.’
‘Because there is nothing negative.’
‘Yes. And she appears to have kept very much to herself. Her life centered on the Ca’ da Capo and the Palazzo Pindar. It only strengthens my belief even more that the solution to this case lies in the Palazzo Pindar or its collection.’
Rain, heavy at times, descended on the city that afternoon, scourging the windowpanes of the Palazzo Uccello. Urbino put on his Inverness cape and boots and grabbed a large umbrella before he set out to meet Eugene at the train station.
Ten minutes after leaving the house, he stepped inside the fifteenth-century Church of San Gabriele. Cold, rainy January days like these always seemed to guide his steps to the church. It had been at this time of the year that San Gabriele had played a big role in his first case of sleuthing. He had been set down his unexpected path by the church’s relic of a Sicilian martyr, Santa Teodora.
He peered down into a crystal coffin that enshrined the body of the little saint, miraculously preserved according to the Vatican and popular belief. Her face was covered in a silver mask, her feet shod in tiny scarlet slippers. Because of his efforts, the saint had been restored to her proper place – that is, if you could say that the public display of a centuries-old dead body was a proper place.
As he took one last lingering look at the masked Santa Teodora, Urbino vowed to himself that he would restore Mina to her proper place as well. But the next moment, the irony of his fervent promise struck him, and despite the Gothic atmosphere of the chapel and the seriousness of his newest case, he smiled.
Restore Mina to her proper place indeed! By this, he had meant, quite simply, service to the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini. What had become of him!
Urbino cut through the Ghetto. As he walked over the iron bridge and into the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo on its own island, his mood darkened. The Ghetto, with its five synagogues and tall buildings, had this effect on him even on the brightest and balmiest of days. There was no way of escaping it or escaping the sense that the ghosts of the men, women and children who used to be confined within its small area at night surrounded him. The ghosts were no less sad and bleak because they wore the colorful hats that marked them out from the other Venetians.
He stood in front of a plaque commemorating the Holocaust in grim but inspiring words, focusing on the last line: ‘Our memories are your only grave.’
The phrase kept echoing through his mind as he made his way out of the Ghetto.
‘Our memories are your only grave …’
Because his thoughts were filled with the Pindars, the words, with some revision, became detached from their inexpungable historical context and associated with the more mundane tragedy across the Grand Canal in the Palazzo Pindar. In some of Urbino’s darker moments, when the religion that had been drilled into him as a child faltered and came close to failing, he believed that the only immortality was in the memories of those one left behind.
Olimpia would only have twelve years’ rest on San Michele – unless Gaby and Ercule paid for a perpetual resting place or the contessa intervened. But surely Mina, if she could be proven innocent and could inherit what Olimpia had willed her, would do it. She would keep Olimpia’s memory alive.
But after a succession of many deaths, the memories died, too.
The Pindar line seemed on the point of extinction, unless Gaby, Ercule, or Alessandro married and had a child. The only member of the younger generation who had married was Eufrosina, but she had no children.
Urbino had to know more about Achille and Nedda. They were two of the ‘holes’ that the contessa and he had mentioned in the morning room when she was telling him what she knew about the Pindars.
When he reached the steps of the Ponte delle Puglie over the Cannaregio Canal, he checked his watch. He still had plenty of time to get to Santa Lucia to meet Eugene’s train. He went into a nearby café and ordered an espresso ‘corrected’ with anisette, tossing it down quickly at the counter as he had become accustomed to doing after his years in Italy.
When he left the café, the rain had let up slightly. Small companies of tourists, far fewer than the stream that would pour through the city in a few weeks for carnival, were walking down the Lista di Spagna, for this was the main route to the Piazza San Marco.
Urbino’s heart sank when he saw, at the foot of the Ponte dei Scalzi, a young man in a red-and-black harlequin hat with neon lights that flashed on and off. From his shouts at the passers-by, Urbino could tell that he was not even a tourist but a Venetian.
Carnevale, unfortunately, had already arrived, in a fashion. Urbino couldn’t escape it completely.
‘There you are, Urbino boy!’ came a loud voice as Urbino was hurrying through the concourse toward the trains.
His ex-brother-in-law was striding toward him. Behind him, a porter was pushing a trolley laden with suitcases.
Eugene Hennepin was a stout man in his mid-fifties who had made millions of dollars in sugar cane by the time he was thirty. Five years ago his father, the so-called ‘Sugar Cane King’, had died, tripling his fortune and making him and his sister Evangeline – Urbino’s ex-wife – even richer than they had been before.
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, taking in Urbino’s cape, ‘where’s the trombone? You look like you’ve run away from a marchin’ band!’ He was dressed in a tan trench coat and held a Borsalino hat in his hand.
A middle-aged couple – a man with Asian features and a blond, blue-eyed woman – came to a halt beside Eugene with their less burdened trolley.
‘This here is Frank and Betty Chin. Met ’em on the train. Americans – even Frank. Born there like you and me, Frank was, even his father. They’re goin’ to a cookin’ school in Venice. This is Urbino, my brother-in-law that used to be. I told you all about him.’
Urbino welcomed the Chins.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Macintyre,’ Frank Chin said. ‘It’s an interesting coincidence. Before coming here I read your book on Proust and Venice. I teach French literature at Bayside University in San Francisco. I enjoyed it very much.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I told Frank and Betty that you could help them find their hotel. It’s near that big bridge with the shops.’
‘I’d be pleased.’
‘Do you have the Countess Barbara’s motorboat or are we goin’ in your gondola? Can’t wait to take a ride in it. The one I bought here g
ot tossed around on those rocks in the lake behind the house. No one’s been able to repair it like it should be. I may have to pack it up and ship it back here.’
‘We’ll take a water taxi,’ Urbino said. ‘We’ll go out in the gondola one of these days, and you’ll be most welcome, too,’ he said to the Chins.
‘That would be nice,’ Betty said with a sweet smile.
Urbino guided everyone out to the stairs that led down to the water, offering the Chins the umbrella, for the rain had started to come down again heavily. Betty oohed and aahed at the sight of the Grand Canal and the buildings across the way. Frank observed that it looked just like a Canaletto. Urbino told him that there was, in fact, a Canaletto at the National Gallery in London that showed part of the same scene but from a different angle.
The four of them were soon proceeding down the Grand Canal in a water taxi through the driving rain. Frank unfolded a map of the city. Urbino indicated on the map where they were and where the Rialto Bridge was, as well as the Piazza San Marco, to help the newly arrived couple with their bearings. Then he drew his companions’ attention to the peculiar shape of the city. ‘Like two fish biting each other or two lobster claws.’ Keeping up the culinary comparison, since the Chins were taking the cooking course, he added, ‘Boris Pasternak said that it looks like a swollen croissant.’
Urbino left it to Frank to explain to Eugene who Pasternak was.
Urbino pointed out some of the buildings. The scene was particularly lovely this afternoon because of the weather. The façades of the palaces glistened with the wet, and the rain-splashed windows muted and blended the colors. It was like a series of watery, misty impressionist paintings.
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