Gildo and Giovanni moved the craft along with slow strokes of the oars through intricate, winding ways. Occasionally the young men cried out a warning “Oy!” or produced shrill whistles. The languid movement of the gondola through the gray-green waters increased the enjoyment of Eugene and the Chins, who could more easily survey the scene as it was being transformed by the snow. Here, the snow was accumulating quickly, already caking the windows. It seemed to possess a light of its own. The prow of the gondola soon acquired a white mantle, as did the shoulders of Eugene and the two young men.
‘First a flood, now a blizzard! Well, a snowstorm, anyway,’ Eugene said, brushing the snow from the shoulders of his trench coat. ‘If you throw in the boilin’ heat of the summer, I guess I’ve seen Venice in all kinds of weather.’
The gondola continued through Dorsoduro and regained the Grand Canal by the Ca’ Rezzonico, the eighteenth-century palace where Robert Browning had died. Urbino drew his companions’ attention to the Browning quotation on the plaque by the land entrance to the building:
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy”.
Eugene chuckled. ‘Suits you to a “T”, old boy!’
From the Ca’ Rezzonico the two young men rowed the gondola swiftly with the tide up the Grand Canal. For a while, the small group was seeing the same scene they had earlier, but now under the spell of the snow. By the time they passed under the Rialto Bridge, Eugene and the Chins fell, as they had earlier, into a contemplative and appreciative silence.
Urbino’s thoughts, however, were far away from the scene around him. He was thinking about the letter he had turned over to the Questura, about where it might have come from, about who ‘A’ and ‘E’ might be, and what the letter might have to do with Olimpia’s murder. It would appear that it had a great deal to do with it, but Urbino was cautious by nature, having regretted not often but nonetheless very keenly when he had leapt to an incorrect conclusion. Yesterday afternoon he had told the contessa about his ‘big assumption’ about the letter’s importance, but today he was withdrawing somewhat from that position. He did not want to run the risk of having the letter prevent him from looking for and seeing what he needed to.
In any case, whether the letter was of major importance or not, he had to have more information. He hoped he might get some before the morning was over.
He was charged with anticipation as Gildo and Giovanni moved the gondola out of the Grand Canal into the Santa Croce district.
‘Where are we going now, Urbino?’ Betty asked, not unlike a child who wondered what new delight her parent had in store for her.
‘I thought you might like to see an unusual art collection that few tourists manage to get to.’
‘That sounds nice. Oh, look at that building, Frank! The roof. It has one of those terraces Urbino was talking about. It’s all covered with snow. How absolutely lovely.’
While the Chins were preoccupied as they did their best to get a good view of the altana, Eugene leaned forward from his chair toward the felze and said, in a low voice, ‘Do you want me to ask Miss Gaby today?’
Urbino had followed the contessa’s suggestion and asked Eugene to bring up the topic of the blue rooms. Tomorrow was Apollonia’s wake, when all the Pindars would be gathered together. Today might not be the best time to make this visit to the Palazzo Pindar but it was Urbino’s only opportunity.
‘Yes. Don’t make it too obvious.’
‘Oh, you can trust me for that!’
If Urbino had been worried that they might be imposing on Gaby because of the wake tomorrow, his worry would have immediately been dispelled by the reception she gave his little group.
Her long face adorned itself with a smile and her blue eyes glinted with pleasure.
‘My, my,’ she said, noticing the snow on their clothes. ‘It’s snowing outside.’
Her voice had a gentle, wistful note.
‘I hope we’re not keeping you in,’ Betty said, her eye moving from Gaby’s red cap down the length of her ocelot coat, then up again. ‘It seems as if you’re on your way out.’
‘I’m neither coming nor going.’ Gaby gave a strained laugh and pressed a slightly trembling hand against her throat. ‘I’m here at your service.’
She collected their entrance fees, which she put into a pocket of the coat.
‘Play your game, Miss Gaby,’ Eugene urged her. ‘The one with names. “Chin”. What can you make of that one?’
‘What is this about a game?’ Betty asked, looking from Eugene to Gaby.
‘This interestin’ lady here can make new words out of a bunch of letters in any old word. She’s very economical. Hardly wastes anything. “Chin,” Miss Gaby. “C,” “h,” “i,” “n.” That’s what you got to work with. Chin’s a word and a name!’
‘Eugene, you’re embarrassing me. Only four letters and only one vowel. That does not give me much. But it is a – a lovely name.’ She gave the Chins a quick smile. ‘Let me see. There’s “in” and “inch” and “hi”. That seems to be the limit. I’m sorry.’
Her delivery had been far from as spirited as on other occasions.
‘No need to be sorry about anything, Miss Gaby. I tell you what. Let’s throw in “Betty”.’
‘To be honest, Eugene, I’m not in the mood for it now.’
‘Why of course you’re not, Miss Gaby! I wasn’t thinkin’ properly. How could you be in the mood? Not with your relative dyin’ just the other day.’
‘Oh, my.’ Lines of concern crossed Betty’s face. ‘We are so sorry to hear of your loss.’
‘Please accept our condolences,’ Frank said.
‘You are very kind. My aunt wasn’t young, but it is still hard, especially on her son. My heart breaks for the boy.’ Tears welled in her eyes. She gave a quick, almost imperceptible glance up the staircase. It was possible that Apollonia’s body was already laid out upstairs, waiting for the wake. ‘And we had another death in the house recently, my sister,’ Gaby added, the tears now falling on her cheeks. Urbino wondered whether the tears had been hastened by the memory of Olimpia’s death or whether they were still only for Alessandro and conveniently fell now as if for her sister.
‘My, my!’ Betty exclaimed softly. She gave Urbino an almost imperceptible frown as if she were displeased with him for having put her and her husband in an embarrassing situation. ‘We can come back another day. Can’t we, Frank?’
‘Of course.’
‘No, I insist.’ Gaby wiped under each eye with the sleeve of her coat. ‘Follow me. There are many things waiting for you to see them. They need to be admired, or else they will be dead, too. If you understand what I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Betty agreed hesitantly. ‘I suppose I do.’
She and Frank followed Gaby, with Urbino and Eugene in the rear.
Gaby stopped before one item after another, giving detailed descriptions in a voice that became stronger as she spoke. Like a bazaar shopkeeper who notices his customers’ glances of interest at specific articles among his wares, Gaby shifted her focus from one object to another, depending on whether Betty’s or Frank’s eyes strayed in its direction. She also extolled items that they ignored, for she could not bear to have any of her beloved children neglected.
The Chins lost some of their uneasiness and started to examine the items with close attention. Betty praised the Turkish tiles and a gilt settee whose seat and back were covered in needlework. Frank said their culinary teachers would find the old cooking utensils very interesting. They would tell them about the museum.
‘You are so kind!’ Gaby said. ‘Word of mouth is the best form of advertisement. And we have no other kind for our treasures.’
Urbino joined Frank, who was now bent over a small display of shells and fossils. Frank was reading the card with the description of the objects. It was in English and Italian in a spidery handwriting. Urbino noted that it did not bear any resemblance to the handwriting on the letter. Urbino was thinkin
g of some way to ask Gaby about the cards when Eugene did the job for him.
‘Don’t you think some spankin’ new cards, maybe in bright colors, would help spruce things up here, Miss Gaby? Did you write these out?’
‘Oh, no. It was my cousin, Alessandro. The one whose mother just died. He was kind enough to do it for me. He has such a fine hand, don’t you think?’
‘I reckon he does, but printin’ would make it easier on the eye.’
Gaby brought the group over to the large portrait of her seventeenth-century ancestor, the severe-looking Creonte Pindar. It was apparent that the Chins did not warm to it, although Betty commented on his blue eyes and said they must run in the family. ‘But yours are much warmer,’ she added.
Eugene had a bored expression on his face, but he remained quiet until Gaby had come to the end of her description of Creonte’s accomplishments.
‘I tell you what, Miss Gaby. Why don’t you show us the theater now? It’s a fine piece.’
At first, the Chins showed only a polite interest in the carved wooden figures, looking at them from a distance. Eugene handed them the one of the contessa.
‘I guess the crown means she’s Italian royalty,’ he said. ‘Hope you get to meet her. There’s not too much stuffy about her at all.’
The Chins’ interest quickened when Eugene, under Gaby’s sharp observation, picked up the one representing Urbino and handed it to Betty. The Chins looked back and forth with amusement between the figure and its flesh-and-blood version.
‘He captured you quite well,’ Frank said.
‘My cousin Alessandro made all of them,’ Gaby said. ‘The same one who wrote the cards.’
‘A very talented fellow,’ Frank said.
‘Thank you,’ Gaby responded, as if Frank had paid her, not Alessandro, the compliment.
Betty was smiling. ‘And you’re wearing the same black cape! But you must have done that on purpose because you knew you were taking us here!’
‘I hadn’t thought of that at all.’
Betty was staring at the figure more closely now. She then gave Urbino’s nose a quick glance.
‘It’s all so clever,’ she said. ‘The stage, the figures, the bouquet of white roses.’
Gaby took the Urbino figure from Betty and returned it to its place beside the contessa, both of them turned toward the stage where the other figures were lined up facing them. Patiently, Gaby took each of the small figures off the stage, one by one, and told them its name and its relationship to the other figures – and to her.
Urbino’s eye ran over each of the figures: Ercule in his long white robe, with his round figure and exaggerated spectacles, Gaby in her small red cap and scarf, Eufrosina holding large ungloved hands palm outward, Apollonia all in black and holding purple rosary beads, Alessandro with his carving knife, and Olimpia in her cartoonishly rendered ocelot coat.
Urbino wondered how Olimpia had found out about the other carved image of her. Perhaps Alessandro had placed it in the theater at first instead of the one that was there now. Gaby, with her indulgence of Alessandro, probably would not have protested and might even have enjoyed her sister’s humiliation until Olimpia had insisted it be removed.
‘My dead sister, Olimpia,’ Gaby was saying. ‘My ocelot coat used to belong to her.’
‘It looks like the coats the old movie stars used to wear,’ Betty said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone wearing one myself.’
‘You’re riskin’ it if you do these days, as I told you, Miss Gaby, especially back home.’
‘I only wear it in the house. But my mother and Olimpia always wore it outside and they never had any problem.’
‘Your family has such interesting names,’ Frank said. ‘I believe there’s a Greek influence somewhere?’
‘Yes. Our family has Greek ancestors, and our family shipping company had a lot of business with Greece.’
‘And Turkey,’ came a man’s voice from behind them.
Ercule had quietly come into the room. He was decked out in his kid leather slippers and two embroidered kaftans, a short-sleeved dark green one over a bright orange one. The Chins, who would have been forgiven if they thought they had gone to the other side of the looking glass since entering the Palazzo Pindar, stared at him.
Introductions were made.
‘You look like someone out of The Arabian Nights,’ Frank said.
‘You haven’t seen the whole costume,’ Eugene said. ‘The other time I saw him he had on a little white hat with earflaps, didn’t you?’
The portly Ercule gave him a weak, strained smile.
Before the Chins might have had a chance to ask Ercule some questions about his outfit, Gaby led them over to the antique globe and started to praise its virtues. She pointed to all the places where the Pindar company used to have offices.
Eugene edged closer to Urbino and bent close to his ear. ‘I’ll do it now.’ He straightened up and cleared his throat. ‘You know, Miss Gaby,’ he said in a loud voice that reverberated among the objects in the room. ‘I couldn’t help noticin’ those two blue doors in the big room.’ Eugene threw Urbino an altogether much too conspiratorial look. ‘I’d like to take a gander at what’s inside, if you don’t mind.’
‘The locked rooms?’ Gaby said in a high uneven voice. She looked at Ercule.
‘It can’t do any harm, Gaby. Why not?’
‘But there’s nothing in the blue rooms that compares with the collection, Eugene.’ Her reluctance to give them even visual access to the rooms couldn’t have been more clear.
‘The blue rooms?’ Betty said.
‘Yes,’ Ercule said. ‘The two rooms with blue doors across from the museum. Maybe you noticed them when you came in. When our relatives die, we put their clothes inside. It’s a family tradition.’ He stared pointedly at Gaby. A look of mulish withdrawal had come over her long, narrow face. ‘I think Urbino would like to see what’s inside, too.’
‘Very well.’ Gaby’s face had set into a stern, disapproving expression. Obviously, her eagerness to show off the possessions of the family collection did not extend to the contents of the rooms. Did she feel it would be a violation of some kind? Was it a matter of care and protectiveness? Or something much more personal? It was only to be expected that Urbino briefly thought about Oriana’s joke about Gaby hiding a dead body somewhere in the Palazzo Pindar.
Everyone followed Gaby across the vestibule. She walked and stood waiting at the doors until Ercule joined her. Their slow, quiet movements contributed to an air of ceremony. From her coat pocket, Gaby withdrew a metal ring with two large keys. She applied a key to the lock of each blue door, then nodded at Ercule. As Ercule started to pull open the first door, which gave a doleful groan, Urbino was seized with a brief, inexplicable flicker of fear that was just as intense as his fascination.
A sour, musty odor engulfed the group as soon as both doors were pulled open. It was composed of dead air, mold, and perspiration, overlaid by traces of perfume.
The interiors of the rooms were dim, their only illumination coming from the vestibule. All the clothing items crammed inside blocked the windows.
Piles upon piles of outer clothing crowded the first room, reaching within a few feet of the ceiling. The second room was like a slagheap of footgear, purses, neckwear, belts, hosiery, gloves, hats, head coverings, and other items that Urbino’s eye either could not take in or easily identify.
Perhaps a principle of order and organization had reigned once upon a time, but it had long since been abandoned. It was as if all the Pindars from all the previous centuries had been forced to take off every last scrap of cherished garment in the cold vestibule for the waiting maws of the silent rooms. Urbino was able to make out, affixed to the walls, the edges of cupboards and the dull gleam of hooks, but they had long ago reached their limits, requiring that all future items of the dead had to be piled on top of each other.
Modern styles were, in most instances, in the front of the rooms, with older items beh
ind and beneath them. But the pile gave evidence of having been disrupted, as if something had burrowed outward from within or dug into it from outside. And if the intention had been to preserve the objects by placing them in the dark secrecy of the rooms, it appeared, from the look of many of them, and from their accumulated offensive odor, that they were in the process of disintegrating.
The eye picked out a Renaissance girdle, all beribboned, on top of a broad-ribbed turtleneck sweater, a mate-less embroidered glove lying beside a balaclava, and high-platformed Venetian chopines keeping company with tennis shoes and high-button shoes. An embroidered lace bridal veil was snagged in the buttons of a waistcoat. The mouth of more than one purse was gaping.
The odor became stronger and more offensive as the moments passed, as if the rooms were taking a much too long delayed opportunity to exhale.
Betty took a step backward into the vestibule. It may have been only because of the odor, but Urbino sensed that it might also have been because of the disturbing associations generated by the sight, associations that were all too keen to him – not of people already dead but still living and stripped of their clothes before they went to another place to meet their death.
Ercule and Gaby seemed unaffected by the sight and the smell.
‘Hardly any room left,’ Gaby said. ‘We still haven’t put my sister Olimpia’s things in.’
‘Do – do you mean you put everything here?’ Betty asked.
‘Not everything!’ Gaby shot her a twisted little smile. ‘I didn’t put this coat in, did I? And my aunt Apollonia – the one who died the other day – she hated the rooms. She made her son and daughter promise that none of her things would be put in them. They had to put them to use, give them to the poor, or burn them.’
Ercule had his arms folded across his chest. ‘But we don’t only put things into the rooms. Our sister Olimpia used to take things out. She had a professional interest. She was a dressmaker and when she died she was designing costumes for a play. I even think Alessandro took out some things, though I’m sure Apollonia never knew.’
Urbino remembered Alessandro’s belted tweed coat that had given off a musty odor in the Chinese Salon. The coat was most likely one of the things that Alessandro had taken from the blue rooms.
The Veils of Venice Page 23