Zouzou was sniffing around in a corner. The contessa seldom went into this room, although it was no longer locked as it had been for many decades. Unlocking it several years ago, hard though it had been for her to do, had been the key to solving a murder that had taken place in the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini back in the thirties – but not before another murder had taken place in it.
Urbino had solved the deadly mysteries associated with the Caravaggio Room. Surely it must be on his mind these days because of the locked blue rooms at the Palazzo Pindar. She hoped he would consider her suggestion that he enlist Eugene’s help.
‘Come, Zouzou. Let’s go upstairs to Mina’s room.’
The cocker spaniel gave a few last sniffs. The contessa closed the door on the Caravaggio portrait.
She took the back staircase up to the staff’s quarters. Giovanna, who had been with her for almost three decades, greeted her from the entrance to the staff hall. She did not ask if the contessa wanted anything. Giovanna clearly must know that she was upstairs to go into Mina’s room. It had become her habit since Mina had been arrested.
Zouzou jumped on Mina’s bed, her white fur standing out against the turquoise blue of the chenille spread. The faint scent of Mina’s perfume hung in the air.
Mina’s room looked over the garden and was similar to the other bedrooms on the floor. In addition to the bed, it had a large chest of drawers, a small sink, an armoire, a table and a chair, a small sofa, several area rugs, and velvet drapes. The walls were painted terracotta red.
When she had married the conte, all the staff bedrooms – as well as their dining hall and parlor and the housekeeper’s parlor – had been repainted and refurnished, making them much more comfortable and far less severe than they had been. The contessa had given the rooms many of the good pieces of furniture from the storeroom. Over the years she had made additional improvements and had had them repainted several times.
After Mina had arrived, the contessa had been tempted to add a few special touches to her chamber, but she had limited herself only to hanging one of her Pietro Longhi paintings on the wall beside the window. It was a delicate little scene of a mother and a child playing with a terrier. The mother, with her small, round face and dark expressive eyes, resembled Mina. The fact that Mina’s last name was Longo made the choice of the Longhi even more appropriate in the contessa’s mind.
The contessa looked around the room to be sure that everything was the way it had been when Mina had left it. She would keep the room waiting for her, and it would be hers to use even if she left the contessa’s employ. She filled a ceramic pitcher with water at the sink and poured it on the lush fern in the corner of the room.
The contessa knew that she should not be doing it, but she was already planning the future for Mina. She would encourage her to continue her education. The girl had many interests, many abilities.
The contessa was about to leave when she noticed a photograph lying on the bedside table next to the lamp. She had seen it before. It showed a smiling Olimpia and Mina with the Bridge of Sighs behind them. It was the classic memento for lovers. She was tempted to ask Giorgio Lanzani to take it to Mina, but the photograph might create problems for her at the prison. She would have to give it more consideration.
With Zouzou in her arms, the contessa descended the staircase to the exhibition room. She spent several minutes looking at Apollonia’s silk gown.
Efigenia’s gown. Apollonia’s gown. Both women gone, and the dress had survived them. Now, it was most likely Eufrosina’s. But the contessa cautioned herself. It was possible that Apollonia, for whatever reason, might have arranged for it to go to someone other than her daughter, just as Olimpia had bypassed her sister and willed the contessa the ocelot coat.
Perhaps the gown would soon grace the figure of May-Foy Hennepin, thousands of miles away in a different world, a woman who belonged to a different family. Although the contessa was a fervent believer in tradition and continuity, she hoped the gown would make the journey and that it would get a new life in America.
It was not healthy to cling too much to things of the past. The Pindar family needed to make some changes. They had to break free. For them the past was not only unhealthy, it even might be deadly.
Eufrosina and Alessandro had been freed by their mother’s death from her demands and vigilance.
Ercule wanted to break free, and the contessa hoped that he would have the chance. Maybe he had been the one to break off the secret engagement with Nedda – in order to keep himself available for what he really wanted to do. The contessa could not imagine him having any place in Nedda’s life of social service, although if they had married, Nedda would have been leading a different life than the one she was leading now. As Nedda had said to Urbino, if you change the past, you change the future. Achille’s death and the end of her engagement to Ercule, as well as her husband’s death, had freed her to have the life she now did. Ercule, during the twenty-five years since Achille’s death and his ruptured engagement, had been waiting, preparing to be free.
Gaby’s situation was a much darker one. The contessa had less hope for her unless she got the professional attention she needed.
But a cloud was over them all – Eufrosina, Alessandro, Ercule, and Gaby – and even over Nedda because of her links to the extended Pindar family. Until Olimpia’s murderer was exposed – a murderer who was hiding among them, of this Urbino had sadly convinced her – the cloud over the others would remain and they could not be truly free. In fact, some of them might be in danger.
A great deal was at stake. A great deal depended on Urbino – and on her, for whatever help she could continue to give him. It was a grim business, and poor Mina was right in the middle of it all, bravely enduring her long days on the Giudecca.
Following this disturbing train of thought, the contessa said aloud a few minutes later, ‘Nick and Nora did it for the fun of it. I wish we were.’
One of the advantages of having a dog or a cat near you at moments like these was that people could think you were speaking to it when you were talking to yourself.
To reinforce her deception of the darkening shadows in the room and any unseen, unknown ears, the contessa added, ‘Do you know what I mean, Zouzou?’
The cocker spaniel waved her white plume of a tail as if she had understood and were giving her mistress a comforting agreement, and not just responding to her name, spoken so lovingly.
Half an hour later, as the contessa was unsuccessfully trying to calm her thoughts with da Ponte’s memoirs so that she could have a nap before teatime, the telephone rang.
It was Corrado Scarpa. She could not have been less prepared for what he had to say, although she had been hoping to hear the words during every waking hour since Mina’s arrest.
‘It’s all arranged, contessa. You can see Mina Longo tomorrow morning.’
Eleven
As Urbino walked along the embankment of the Giudecca after parting from the contessa that afternoon, the bora buffeted him. It made him feel good to think of the wind blowing all the way from the steppes of Russia and St Petersburg, or so he imagined it. And there would be another snowstorm soon. He could feel it coming.
He was tempted to take a short detour and walk past the Women’s Penitentiary. But it was a dismal building on even the sunniest of days, and there was no chance he could visit Mina. He did not need to see the building to feel it lowering over him and the contessa, with its reminder of how he had to set Mina free within – what was it? – little more than a week.
Urbino was hoping that Oriana Borelli could play her role. In every social set, there is usually one person who is the repository, if not also the conscientious collector, of personal information about other members of the group. Oriana not only fit into this category but also embraced it. Over the years she had provided pieces of information that had been invaluable to Urbino in solving his cases. For this reason, he was now appealing to her.
Encouraged by the thought of how s
he might be able to help him and the contessa, Urbino quickened his step past the warehouses and workshops, with seabirds wheeling and mewing above him, to reach the other end of the narrow island.
The austerity of the Borelli apartment, so at odds with Oriana’s flamboyant appearance and manner, was something that Urbino had never become accustomed to. There was only one item in the whole room that had no utilitarian purpose – a Barovier-Toso vase filled with dried brown flowers. But the view from the living room’s wide, ceiling-high windows of the distant Riva degli Schiavoni, the Doges’ Palace, the Campanile, and the domes of the Basilica was more than compensation for the room’s drawbacks.
Urbino took in the scene for a few minutes after entering the apartment. This was by preference and by Oriana’s request.
‘Keep looking at the view, Urbino dear, not at me, if you don’t mind – not until I’ve sat down,’ she said in English in her cigarette-hoarse voice. ‘I don’t want you to see me hobble.’
Oriana had answered the door on crutches. Her leg, broken on the slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo, was in a cast. An attractive woman in her fifties, she was dressed in a crimson silk kimono with a pattern of cranes and flowers. A pair of over-sized sunglasses, which she wore both inside and outside and in all kinds of weather, concealed a third of her face.
Urbino did as he was told. When he turned from the windows, Oriana was installed on the neo-Biedemeier sofa. He seated himself, with some difficulty, in a chair shaped like a slingshot.
‘And don’t stare at my cast!’
‘How’s Filippo?’
‘Hale, hearty, and happy. No broken legs or other members. Coffee while it’s still warm?’ Without waiting for an answer, she poured each of them a cup from the coffee maker on the glass table. Urbino was happy to see that there was also an open bottle of red wine. ‘I told him there was no need for him to come back with me. He is having too good a time. And so was I before this happened.’
The Borellis had an unconventional marriage, characterized by mutual infidelity, tolerance, an apparent lack of jealousy, and – in some strange way – devotion to each other. Her accident had interrupted an affair Oriana had been having up in Cortina, but neither of them saw the need to have it interrupt the one Filippo was enjoying.
Oriana fixed a cigarette in her holder and leaned forward for Urbino to light it. She blew the smoke away from him in the direction of one of the skeletal halogen lamps.
‘So how can we help our dear Barbara? She’s in a terrible state, but she’s probably revealed more about how she feels to me. Woman to woman. If you can’t get to the bottom of this whole sordid affair, I am afraid for her. And I do not mean sordid because of Mina’s relationship with Olimpia. I hope you know me better than that! It is dirty and ugly because Mina is in danger of being sacrificed by someone in that house. Barbara filled me in. I was sceptical at first but she convinced me, just as you did her. You see what an influence you have.’
‘And I’ve come here to have you exert your influence. I’m hoping that you might be able to fill in some gaps to help us. Barbara’s told me what she knows, but there’s a lot that she doesn’t.’
‘Of course there would be. She isn’t Venetian, not even Italian, any more than you are. Information about people here is not going to come her way as easily as it does to me. And she doesn’t make much of an effort of gathering it as I do, even when I think there might not be any need for it. She should have a healthier attitude to gossip.’ Oriana inhaled on her cigarette. ‘And there’s something else. She’s related to the Pindars. People are not going to tell her things about them for that reason, too. And when she might notice that something is off, she might put the best interpretation on it.’
Oriana had a good assessment of the situation.
‘So shall we begin with the dead?’ she asked. ‘Olimpia and Apollonia?’
‘And Achille, too.’ Urbino drained his coffee. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, picking up the bottle of wine.
‘Pour me a glass, too.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly. ‘I didn’t know Olimpia well. I had her make some dresses for me a few years ago. She did a good job. I still wear one of them. I was going to have her make another dress for me when I returned from Cortina. It was more to give her the business than anything else, but as I said, she did very good work.’
‘She had financial problems?’
‘My neighbor knows a woman who worked for her, Teresa Sorbi. Olimpia couldn’t give her all of her November salary, or the other worker either. It was the first time it had happened.’
‘She could have been short on money because someone was blackmailing her.’
They discussed the possibility that her sexual orientation had been the target of blackmail but they dismissed it, as had Urbino and the contessa, for the same reasons. Olimpia had been open about it.
‘Maybe she stole someone’s designs and passed them off as her own,’ Oriana said with a smile to show that she did not take the possibility too seriously.
‘Not all that far-fetched. I can understand why someone could have been blackmailing her for that, but why kill her? Blackmailers are the ones who end up dead. Which brings us to the question, was she blackmailing someone? It makes more sense. She discovered someone’s secret and charged a high price for keeping it. Barbara and I have gone through it. We haven’t come to any conclusions. But Bianchi said that Olimpia had come into some money over the past few months.’
‘Barbara mentioned Olimpia’s commission from the theater company. The money could be from that.’
‘All of it or maybe only some of it.’ Urbino wished there were some way of finding out how much Olimpia had been given by the theater company, but he doubted if he could get that information. ‘And we could be dealing with two unrelated crimes. Olimpia could have been blackmailing someone – and not necessarily someone in the house. And someone could have murdered her for a completely different reason. But whenever I consider her murderer’s identity I always see the face of someone in that house.’
Oriana stared at him in surprise. ‘You do? Which one of them?’
He saw the misunderstanding. ‘No. I don’t mean I see one face. I mean the face of the murderer is the face of one of the Pindars. It could even be Apollonia’s face.’
‘Apollonia!’
‘We can’t put her out of the picture. By the way, do you think you could get Teresa Sorbi’s phone number and address from your neighbor?’
Oriana nodded. There was an abstracted look on her face. She was thinking of what he had said about Apollonia. When Oriana broke the silence between them, however, it was not to mention Apollonia.
‘A few years ago, I saw Olimpia and Nedda Bari on the other side of the Campiello Widman.’ This was near Bari’s house. ‘They seemed to be arguing. Olimpia was shouting. I couldn’t make out what it was about.’ Oriana shrugged. ‘Nedda was calmer than Olimpia and kept shaking her head. It was obvious she was holding herself in. I continued on my way. I don’t think they noticed me.’
Urbino poured more wine in their glasses. He turned Oriana’s attention to Apollonia.
‘Our paths used to cross in the old days,’ she said. ‘Until she put on black and withdrew into herself – or into religion. When she was younger, she was the life of the party, though it is hard for you to imagine it. By the time you met her, the change had already come. She had already started out-poping the Pope. I thought she would sign herself into a convent one of these days.’
‘What do you think was behind it?’
‘One thing I know for sure is that she started talking about some Savonarola at San Giacomo dell’Orio. An old eccentric who wanted to convert a few more souls before he died. It was after her husband died. Of a heart attack almost right in front of her eyes. Maybe it made her think more of mortality. It was as if a button had been pushed. She put away her Fortuny and her other stylish clothes and started draping herself in black dresses, veils, scarves, and gloves. That�
��s the Apollonia you knew.’
Oriana paused to drink some wine before going on.
‘Once she went through her great conversion, there was hardly anything you could talk to her about unless it was related to religion or about how bad other people were. She herself was beyond reproach. She had repented. She didn’t believe in anyone else’s repentance.’
‘Were sexual affairs something that she repented?’ If anyone would know the answer to this, it would be Oriana.
‘That’s not something I think she was ever guilty of. If we can speak of guilt in such matters.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘But maybe it’s the ones you hear the least about who have the most to conceal. And if there was some deep dark secret and someone found it out, I don’t think she would have been very happy about it. Some people like to talk about how bad they were before they found religion, but Apollonia was definitely not that type. She would have been devastated. Thank God, my life has always been an open book. No one would ever be able to have that power over me.’
‘The new Apollonia must have been hard on Eufrosina and Alessandro.’
‘Hard isn’t the word for it! But they toed the line – or made sure they covered their tracks well. They knew all that money was waiting for them. It has ruined Alessandro. He’s never made anything of himself, knowing that a lot of money was eventually going to come to him. We’ll see what he does with it now. And what Eufrosina does. They both have probably spent it all in their heads years ago. You know how it is.’
‘What kind of man was Eufrosina married to?’
‘A good man. He died of leukemia a few years after they married. Diagnosed in June, dead before the new year had come. Apollonia approved of him. But Eufrosina didn’t love him. It was obvious. I always felt that some other man had broken her heart, and she never recovered. That’s how I think of Gaby, too. She was going to escape into the night with her lover. She waited for him to come, with her bags packed, and he never did – and she’s never left the house since. Or maybe he did come,’ she amended, ‘and told her it was all over. She killed him on the spot and has him buried somewhere in that palazzo.’
The Veils of Venice Page 18