Was Gaby’s admiration for Alessandro as transparent as it seemed? What had triggered her condition? Had it been the deaths of her parents and Achille? Had the death of one of them hit her harder than any of the others?
And what was behind Eufrosina’s nervousness? Was it only something professional, because she feared the contessa would cancel the contract? Had there been some reason for removing the Fortuny items from their display cases other than, as she had told the contessa, the greater facility of photographing them?
How much had Evelina Cardinale’s rejection wounded Olimpia? Had she got over it so easily? Had Nedda had an ulterior motive for facilitating their breakup?
What was at the heart of Apollonia’s aversion to having any of her clothes deposited in the blue rooms? Why had Gaby abandoned using the name ‘Ella’? Had her refusal to sell her share of the Palazzo Pindar played a role in her sister’s death?
And what contribution might the blue rooms have made to Olimpia’s murder?
Yes, so many puzzling questions – questions unanswered, questions unanswerable. And many of them he had been asking too long without reaching any even provisional answers.
During the past two weeks, Urbino had become dubious about some things that seemed perfectly normal and had been tempted to explain away the most unusual of eccentricities. Usually in his cases, he looked for peculiar, inexplicable behavior, but this time it seemed to be present almost everywhere among the Pindars. He had started to think that it was their normal behavior that might be the most suspicious – normal behavior that had nothing peculiar about it unless it was its normality.
Yes, it was a strange case, rich in ambiguities, and one that stimulated, provoked, and perplexed him from almost every angle. Everything looked so different if you just put one piece in the background or completely out of sight. It was as if he were tilting a kaleidoscope and finding new patterns in the chips of colored glass.
He read the letter over and over again, hoping he would see it in an altered light and that it would yield up some meaning he had missed on his other readings.
He did his best to gather the pieces, the names, the possibilities into some semblance of order, but more often than not, he came up with a jumble not unlike the ones in the two blue rooms.
And just as the Pindar family had discarded very few of their garments but had stuffed them into the two rooms, so was Urbino careful not to discard or ignore anything – even the smallest, most apparently inconsequential detail – that might prove to be useful to clothe his theories. He never lost sight of the possibility that Olimpia’s murderer might be neither the ‘A’ nor the ‘E’ of the letter, but someone who had been set into deadly motion because of it.
Sometimes he felt as if he were trying to force a suspect into an ill-fitting garment or into one usually worn by the opposite sex.
And all the while he was doing this, echoing through his mind like a refrain were Nedda Bari’s words: Change the past and you will change the future.
Except that Urbino tailored her words to fit his own search for the truth, posing the question, What in the past had brought about Olimpia’s murder and was still affecting the residents of the Palazzo Pindar?
He paused to drink in the melodies of the third movement of Shostakovich’s violin concerto, and then, after filling his snifter with more brandy, returned to work on his list, scratching out names and combinations, adding others, and all the while trying not to violate either the established facts or his strong impressions.
After a long process of judicious elimination, he ended up with one combination, one scenario, one train of events that he felt had most plausibly led to Olimpia’s murder.
He went over it again. He could come up with nothing else that satisfied him, nothing else that gave him that pleasurable chill that signaled he had come upon the truth. It was the feeling he had had as a child, when he had picked up a piece in a complicated jigsaw puzzle, turned it around in his hands and examined it, and realized that it would not only fit a crucial part of the puzzle but would also make all the other pieces easier to put into place.
He sat at the table thinking, stroking Serena, and listening to the final movement of the concerto.
When the movement had rushed madly toward its conclusion, he got up, placed Serena back on the cushions of the confessional, and went to his study to get the copy of the letter.
Very carefully, with a pair of scissors, he cut it down to the dimensions of the original letter – which he was now certain had been found in one of the blue rooms – and then he did his best to give it a worn look.
He took out a wooden box in which he kept his photographs and looked through them for ones of Apollonia. He took out six. They were of Apollonia alone and with Eufrosina and Alessandro, with Gaby and Ercule, with Olimpia, and with the contessa. He put the doctored copy of the letter with them.
When he finished, he telephoned the contessa. He gave her the benefit of his thoughts, working it all out for her.
‘It makes sense, caro. But are you sure that it makes more sense than any of the other possibilities?’
‘I am.’ He then told her what he planned for the next day.
‘At Apollonia’s wake?’ The shocked note in her voice was sharp and clear.
‘When it’s a case of murder, I don’t think we should consider what is appropriate or not. Only what is likely to get results. It’s our opportunity. We can’t miss it.’
After remaining silent for a few moments, the contessa said, ‘I’ll support you in whatever you do.’
‘It’s not only your support I’ll need. There are a few things you can do – and not do.’ He told her what these were in detail.
‘Shouldn’t the police be involved?’
‘I’ll ask them to have some men outside the Palazzo Pindar – if I can convince Gemelli it’s worth his trouble. I’m going to contact him now.’
Sixteen
Urbino kept stealing glances at Apollonia’s face against the white lace-covered pillow of the casket. It looked less stern in death than it had in life – that is, her more recent life, not her younger days of indulgence. Her dead lips had a slight smile.
Would she approve of what he was doing and what he hoped was about to happen?
The fact that he had such thoughts was a sign of his uneasiness. Although he had tried to brush off the contessa’s misgivings last night, he was troubled that he planned to take advantage of Apollonia’s wake to pursue – and hopefully to end – his investigation.
Apollonia’s face was as unreadable in death as it had often been in her later days. But this did not prevent Urbino, any more than it has millions of others when confronted by a script, from interpreting it for his own convenience.
He read approval in it. He read the call for justice, stern and implacable.
Apollonia wore a simple black dress. Eufrosina had found it in the back of her mother’s closet, enclosed in clear plastic, with a note that indicated she wanted to be buried in it. The dead woman’s hands, ungloved for the first time in many years as far as Urbino could remember, clasped a worn Latin missal that had belonged to her mother. Her head was wrapped in a piece of black lace, as usual, but the covering looked new and fresh.
The wake was being held in the Pindar grand portego. The large space, with its high-backed chairs, broken chandelier, and flaking plaster, no longer had the somber air of neglect, of having long since passed the time of its utility. Quite the contrary. This evening it seemed to have come into its own.
Alessandro, after great thought and effort, and with the help of the funeral director, had organized a wake that he considered befitting a woman of his mother’s reputation and interests as well as a wake that bore his particular, peculiar stamp.
He had engaged three of the funeral director’s employees to admit mourners before they made even one indecorous push of the bell and to usher them up to the portego. A large armoire had been moved down from Apollonia’s apartment and placed on the st
aircase outside the portego entrance for outer garments – although many of the mourners had preferred to keep them on because of the frigid temperature in the large room.
The casket, which stood at the far end in front of the windows, had been placed on a bier about four feet high that had been constructed for the purpose. Alessandro had spared no expense for his mother’s last appearance before the world. The bier was draped in rich dull black satin. Through some inner arrangement of the casket which was concealed from even the most observant eye, Apollonia’s body had been raised above the sides of the casket so that she could more easily be viewed in profile.
At either end of the casket, on high dark wood pedestals, were majolica turquoise urns that must have been pulled from some dark corner of the Palazzo Pindar. They were filled with lilies that rose above Apollonia’s head and feet. A brass incense burner stood between the casket and the windows behind it, snaking the smoky scent of amber into the room. On either side of the incense burner, long candles in large silver candlesticks flickered their cold light on Apollonia’s face. Rows of dark wood chairs, arranged in a gentle curve rather than a straight line, had been set up in front of the catafalque to accommodate the mourners.
Because the casket was raised high, the mourners who went up to the catafalque were almost on a level with Apollonia’s face. Those sitting in the chairs had to look upward. A black curtain of the same material as the draping further reinforced the effect of Apollonia being on a stage. It was attached by golden rings to a wheeled frame of metal piping, painted black, which Alessandro had also had specially constructed for the occasion. The curtain had been pulled as far as it would go to one side, to give an unobstructed view of the deceased.
It was now close to ten o’clock in the evening. A small number of Apollonia’s friends, most of them elderly women, had come earlier and left. Among them had been the two women from San Polo who had been Olimpia’s customers. The seamstresses Teresa Sorbi and Rosa Custodi, more out of curiosity than respect, had made a brief appearance.
Oriana had put herself through the effort, despite her crutches, for old time’s sake. She had been helped upstairs by the two employees of the funeral director and then down again an hour later.
Apollonia’s confessor from the Church of San Giacomo dell’Orio, gaunt and white-haired, had led them in what had seemed to be interminable prayers. He had left, followed soon afterward by Dr Santo and the funeral director, who would be back in the morning with a funeral gondola to take Apollonia first to the church, then to San Michele for the burial.
At Alessandro’s request, the mourners who had remained – Urbino, the contessa, Eufrosina, Gaby, Ercule, Bianchi, Nedda and Evelina – had retired to the first semi-circle of chairs in the middle of the room.
Alessandro sat beside his sister with Gaby and Ercule on his other side at one end of the row. Urbino and the contessa occupied the next two chairs. An empty chair stood between them and the next grouping of Nedda, Evelina, and Bianchi. The lawyer had been unusually silent since arriving, but his eyes had been taking in the scene and the other mourners with quick, bird-like movements.
Small tables had been placed among the chairs. On the tables were vases of white roses and framed photographs of Apollonia at different points in her life. They included childhood photographs of her playing in the sea on the Lido and eating a cone of gelato on the Zattere, a wedding photograph of her and her husband reclining in the twin seats of a gondola, and a recent one of her sitting stiffly on the sofa in her living room in the Palazzo Pindar.
Urbino and the others were passing the photos around, commenting on them, and exchanging reminiscences about the woman lying on display.
So far, everything was conspiring with Urbino’s plan, even this sentimental touch of the photographs that he considered one of the more thoughtful of Alessandro’s details.
Urbino reached for the wedding photograph again and gave the appearance of studying it more closely than he had before.
‘I may be mistaken,’ he said. ‘But isn’t her wedding veil the same one that’s in one of the blue rooms? I saw it yesterday. It’s very distinctive.’
‘Absolutely not,’ came Alessandro’s quick reply. He tugged at his blond moustache. ‘Mother never wanted anything of hers to be put in there and she never took anything out. I wouldn’t violate her wishes, may God rest her soul.’
‘And I wouldn’t either,’ Eufrosina made clear. ‘None of mother’s clothes will go anywhere near the blue rooms.’
‘As the one in charge of everything,’ Alessandro said, with a sharp glance at his sister, ‘that is my responsibility. It’s one of the promises I made to her the last time I saw her, just the two of us.’
Eufrosina glared at her brother. Dressed all in black but, like her mother, gloveless for the occasion, she looked weary, as if all her energy had been taken out of her. She was being forced to endure the wake and tomorrow’s funeral with the knowledge of her mother’s rejection. It could not be easy. Bianchi looked back and forth between Eufrosina and Alessandro, with a closed expression on his face.
Alessandro had been doing nothing to conceal an unmistakably superior air as the architect of the ceremonies and as his mother’s champion in death as, apparently, he had been in life. Bianchi’s revelations had obviously empowered Apollonia’s son in ways that went beyond a huge bank account. Gaby was fawning over him, almost clinging to him at times. She had lost no opportunity to praise the arrangements he had made for Apollonia’s wake.
‘Most of mother’s things,’ Alessandro went on, ‘will go to San Giacomo. They will be able to distribute them among the needy. Eufrosina is taking some of them and will use them in the way our mother wanted, won’t you, Eufrosina?’ It was not really a question and he did not wait for any response, but said, ‘I assure you our mother will have nothing to do with the blue rooms in death anymore than she did in life.’
The contessa took this opportunity to say, ‘Urbino was telling me about the rooms. I wish I could see them, since they represent so much of the history of the family. Our family. Oh, not now,’ she added, as if someone had started to get up to bring her downstairs. ‘I mean no disrespect,’ she said to Alessandro and Eufrosina, lowering her head and her voice.
‘There must be so many interesting things in the rooms,’ she went on. ‘And valuable ones – though I understand why dear Apollonia’ – her eyes slid in the direction of the catafalque – ‘felt about them the way she did. All those clothes that once saw so much life and light are buried there.’
Eufrosina nodded.
‘They aren’t buried,’ Gaby said, with a petulant note in her voice. ‘They’re being preserved.’
‘Of course they are,’ the contessa agreed, steering a delicate course. ‘And when something can be retrieved after it’s been forgotten about for a long time, you could say that it’s redeemed. It can have a new life.’
This philosophy did the double service of soothing Gaby and being in the spirit of the solemn occasion. Once again the contessa, this time joined by most of the little group, looked at the catafalque. There, the dead, pious Apollonia, who had already embarked on her journey to a new life, served as an excellent example of what the contessa had said.
‘Olimpia once showed me some things she had retrieved from one of the blue rooms.’ The contessa was addressing Gaby, but her gray eyes included the other members of the group. ‘She said they belonged to her grandmother, her mother, and Achille.’
Urbino observed the other mourners as covertly as he could manage. The only one who showed any reaction was Nedda, who sat a bit straighter in her seat at the mention of Achille. When she had arrived, Urbino had noted a slight glaze in her eyes. And there was the unmistakable scent of anisette on her breath, too strong to have been left over from the previous evening.
‘I always told Olimpia I didn’t want her to go ripping the clothes up and sewing them into something else,’ Gaby said with exasperation. ‘They should stay the way they are.�
� She paused before adding, ‘And where they are.’
‘I don’t know what she was doing with them.’ The contessa’s voice was soft and calming. ‘Maybe she just used them for inspiration.’
‘Inspiration, hah!’ was Gaby’s response. Contrary to what one might expect of a person who had recently expressed her fear of something terrible happening to her, Gaby seemed to be energized by the wake. She gave no sign – actually quite the opposite – that she was disturbed by this inescapable evidence that death not only comes to us all but also can come directly into the house she was burying herself in. It had come to Apollonia. It had come to Olimpia. And neither had had to leave the house to find it.
‘Whatever Olimpia did, Gaby, I’m sure she did it with good intentions,’ the contessa said.
‘Apollonia had the right spirit about her things.’ Urbino threw in. ‘The way she wanted either the family to use them or have them donated to the needy.’
‘She also said that what was left over should be burned,’ Ercule pointed out, although Urbino sensed that his comment was not so much directed at him as at Alessandro. Ercule looked at his cousin, opening his blue eyes wide behind his spectacles.
Dressed in a simple dark gray suit and a plain maroon tie, Ercule appeared to be more in costume than he did when he was wearing his Turkish outfits, and he seemed to have lost a vital part of his identity.
‘Burning has always been a form of purification among many religions,’ Urbino observed.
‘For the sinful,’ Alessandro said. ‘My mother wasn’t sinful.’
Alessandro’s defense of his mother could not help but start a brief train of thought in Urbino – and possibly in others present – about Apollonia’s more profane life before her sacred conversion. Had she distributed the clothes from that epoch among the poor or had she burned them, assuming that she had indeed mentioned the virtues of consumption by fire to Ercule?
‘Of course she wasn’t sinful, Sandro dear.’ Gaby reached out to pat his hand. But this was not enough for her to show her concern. She also leaned over and pressed her lips to his cheek. Alessandro, screwing up his face like a child receiving an unwelcome kiss, seemed to endure her attention more than find consolation in it.
The Veils of Venice Page 25