There was a cough behind me—a severe cough.
I turned. Signora Sambon, as I presumed her to be, was a tall lady of about sixty. She looked unbending if not actually unbendable. She was wearing a tight blue dress that proclaimed how well she’d kept her figure and, subtly but still quite loudly, how rich she was. Her shoes, necklace, bracelet, and expression also passed on the second message.
“Buongiorno, signora,” I began, wondering how a simple cough had managed to make me feel like a trapped sneak thief. “It was most kind of you to receive me at such short notice.”
“Not at all. I consider it part of our duty. We are custodians of these treasures, but they are to be shared as well.”
I looked up at the frescoes. “His late period,” I said. That was one hard fact I’d picked up.
“I believe so.”
I walked up and down the room squinting and gazing upward. There was at least no risk of tripping over the furniture. I occasionally uttered comments on the color harmonies and tonal values and the influence of Tiepolo, and she nodded as if she’d always thought so. I needn’t have been so scrupulous in mugging up on Guarana, I realized. “Are there only these frescoes?” I asked when I felt I’d stared enough—my neck was getting stiff.
“There are no other frescoes in the palazzo.”
“Ah.” I would really have to get on to a few more personal questions; but it was difficult to start.
“I understand there are some fine Guardi paintings here,” I said.
“They are being cleaned.”
The answer came like a pistol shot, as if I’d asked to stand on one of the chairs to get a better view. I was quite startled: had the Guardis been so dirty as to be a public scandal? I said, “That’s a pity.”
“Who told you about them?”
“I, er, I read about them.”
She relapsed into silence. The temperature had dropped several degrees. “In fact,” I added, “I first heard about these frescoes from a Toni Sambon in London. Would that be your son?”
Again there was no doubting that I’d asked the wrong question. She glared, then spoke. “I know nobody of that name,” she said with firm conclusiveness—and then, after a careful dramatic pause, added, “No longer.”
“Er, sorry?” I said.
“I know nobody of that name now,” she said. She was obviously enjoying the effect of her cryptic remarks.
“Oh, I see.” I paused. “No longer.”
“No longer.”
Well, this could go on for ages. I said, with an air of innocent academic bumbling, “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve quite understood.”
“Antonio Sambon was my son. He is no longer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—”
“He is not dead, if that is what you wish to ask. At least, not so far as I know. He is simply no longer a son of mine.”
I heard a door open at the far end of the room: when I looked at it, it had already closed again. Somebody had heard what the contessa was saying and knew better than to interrupt.
“Ah, I see. Sorry I—”
“That is all right. Well, I imagine you must have seen all you wish to see now.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” So I was getting turfed out. As Toni had been, I suppose.
The maid appeared as if summoned by telepathy. She escorted me back down the stairs, across the courtyard, and didn’t quite slam the door behind me. I set off briskly down the alley. I wanted to get into the sun.
I heard footsteps behind me and a female voice said, “Scusi.” I turned and saw a slight girl in her mid twenties, with long dark hair framing a rather serious-looking face.
“Sì?” I said.
“Were you asking my mother about Toni?” she said in the careful English of one who has studied the language rather than spoken it.
“Yes, that’s right, but—”
“I know, I know,” she said, “my mother doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“But you do.”
“Yes, I do,” she said with simple gravity. “Shall we go to a place where we can talk?”
“Take me somewhere sunny,” I said.
“Let’s go to Campo San Polo,” she said. She walked quickly ahead of me, with a firm decisiveness that I guessed she’d inherited from her mother. She was physically quite unlike her, being small—at least a head shorter than myself—and pretty, but she had some of her mother’s bearing, and this meant you soon forgot about her size. She walked with her hands in her sheepskin-coat pockets and her head up, her hair bouncing to her steps. Maybe it was this bounce that made her attractive rather than Valkyrien like her mother, or maybe she was just attractive and her mother wasn’t. She led me through the quiet twisting alleys and over a couple of bridges until we came out unexpectedly into the bright expanse of Campo San Polo.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “There is a bar here.”
“Yes, fine,” I said.
She led me into a bar on one corner of the square. I ordered a prosecco and she a fruit juice. We took our drinks over to a table. She sipped hers and looked at me with her dark, serious eyes for a second or two as if appraising me. Then she said, “I’m Francesca.”
“Oh, ah, yes. I’m Martin.”
“I heard you talking to my mother. I listened when I heard you say Toni’s name.”
“Oh, that’s all right. There was no secret—”
“I wasn’t apologizing.” She said this very simply. “But have you news of him?”
“Well, not really. I met him in London and—”
“What was he doing? Where was he staying?”
“He was in a bedsit or something in Earls Court—do you know London?”
“Yes. But was he all right? Has he money?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t look starving. Look, maybe I’d better explain. I don’t really know your brother at all well, and I’m afraid I can’t give you any news of him. In fact I came here hoping the family might be able to give me some news of him.”
“Oh.” She looked more serious. “I’m afraid not. Then it isn’t true that you are interested in Guarana?”
“Well, I—I’m an artist in fact. I like the Venetian settecento—”
“But you do not study Guarana?”
“No, I admit that was an excuse.” She wasn’t exactly browbeating me, but her direct, rather grave questions nonetheless made me feel a little embarrassed.
Then she said, “I think one would have to be very dull to study Guarana,” and a smile alighted on her face for a second and I felt pardoned. She had a most illuminating smile; it reminded me, in its effect, of the tremulous sunlight on the ceiling in the palazzo, giving life and light to what had seemed still and sober—though this was probably the prosecco on the ceiling of my brain talking.
She said, “Why do you want to know about Toni?”
“Well, really I want to find him.”
“Why?”
“It’s very complicated. But I think he might know something about a painting that interests me.”
She looked definitely troubled. “Not Guarana.”
“No.”
“But why do you come here? Isn’t he in London?”
“I think he’s come back to Venice.”
“But he mustn’t,” she said, “he mustn’t.” And now she was almost agitated.
“Why not?”
“It is dangerous for him. Oh, surely he knows the danger.”
“How is it dangerous?”
“You have heard of these murders, no?”
“Yes.” I felt a sinking feeling. “So your brother’s involved too?”
“You don’t know then—you don’t know who is he?”
“No. I don’t know anything.” I was beginning to feel this was almost literally true.
“Then you don’t know why my mother was—was hard with you.”
“No.” I didn’t like to suggest that it was probably because she was just hard.
“You must unde
rstand her. She has suffered much. Toni has been in prison. For five, six years. He was co-involved with terrorism.”
“Ah,” I said.
“You know the 1970s were a terrible period in Italy, gli anni di piombo, the years of lead, we call them. And my brother Toni was at university then and, well, he was co-involved in various bad things. But he was not bad really—not really. He made some bad choices. And he never killed anybody. Never. I am younger than him and I was too young then to know well what he was doing. But my mother did not want him at home when he left prison. So he went away, to England I think. And my father followed my mother. That is, he was agreed with her. So for a long time we hear nothing from Toni. I think he was lonely.”
“I see. And he was a pentito?”
“Yes. And he was really pentito. He really renounced his past, but really. He didn’t do it only to reduce his prison sentence.”
“I see. He helped the police then, did he?”
“He had to. He had to do what he could to stop the violence, no? Or his pentitismo would be nothing but words. And that meant of course he had to give information. It wasn’t an easy decision.”
Though perhaps the thought of a few years off his sentence had helped, I said to myself. But I certainly wasn’t going to condemn him for that. And anyway he was paying for it now.
“But why do you think he is coming back to Venice?” she asked.
“It’s a bit complicated,” I said.
“Never mind, go on.” Her dark eyes stayed steadily on me.
I said, “He told me about a painting he wanted to sell and I got the impression the painting was here in Venice.”
“He told you? When? You said you don’t really know him.”
“That’s the point. He only got talking to me at this party because he thought he’d never meet me again. At least that’s my guess. He met me at a private view in an art gallery and heard that I was an artist. So he wondered if I could give him advice about how to sell this painting.” I thought it best to simplify things a little.
“And did you advise him?”
“Well, no. I was a little suspicious actually. I mean, I know the laws about the sale of works of art across borders.”
“So why didn’t you go to the police?” She had a disconcerting knack of going straight to the point.
“I suppose because I didn’t know enough. And perhaps because I liked his looks.” Maybe this last was even true. He hadn’t struck me as an out-and-out rogue, just a rather helpless one.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “people generally like him. That has saved him perhaps more than once. And what was the work of art?”
“A Cima da Conegliano.”
“La Madonna del cigno,” she said. She wasn’t asking.
“That’s right. How do you know? Or rather, how does he come to have it?”
“In the 1970s he and his—his companions—stole three works of art from little churches in the Veneto. This was to help finance the group that he belonged to. They tried to obtain a—a riscatto?”
“Ransom.”
“Yes, a ransom. But nobody wanted to pay. So nothing more was heard. When Toni was arrested, they asked him what had happened to the paintings and he said he didn’t know but he thought they had been destructed. He was sorry but he wasn’t responsible.”
“I see,” I said, trying not to wince too noticeably as I thought of destructed paintings. “So maybe he was wrong and they were hidden away.”
“You mean maybe he was lying and he had hidden them away.” Her eyes were as unwavering as ever.
“Well, it looks like that, doesn’t it?”
She was silent for a second and then she said, “I suppose so.”
“And where would he have kept them hidden?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Not in your palazzo?”
“Are you joking?”
“Well, it just struck me as a big place. Lots of room.”
“Well, I can assure you they’re not there.” This was made as a statement of unarguable fact.
After a pause I said, “Er, how can you be so sure?”
She smiled. “I know the whole building very well. You see I have a shop—”
“A shop?”
“Yes. A boutique, near the Fenice Theater. And when I first opened it, I hadn’t told my parents anything. It seemed best to—to wait. To let them see it as something accomplished, if you understand me. This meant that when I was getting ready to open it, there were many things I had to store in our house—in all the little corners—the attic and places like that. I tell you that there couldn’t be even one painting hidden anywhere that I don’t know about.”
“I see. What about the other Palazzo Sambon? Does that belong to the family?”
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t know about—” She stopped.
“What?”
“No, of course. You don’t know anything.”
Well, there was no need to rub it in. “Well, I, er—”
“I mean, you don’t know about Toni’s arrest, do you?”
“No.”
“When they realized he was—he was co-involved, he disappeared. They arrested some companions but he escaped. They thought he was perhaps out of the city, but in the end they found he was living secretly in the old palazzo. I think he was waiting for—for things to calm down so that he could leave the city without problems.”
“Presumably they searched the building after they’d arrested him.”
“Oh, yes. I think they found some guns or something. But nothing else. Nothing. It is completely empty now. It’s since the 1950s that nobody lives there, you know. We would like to restore it but we have not the money.” She looked at her watch. “They will ask themselves where am I. I should return for lunch.”
“Yes, of course. Thanks for talking to me. So you haven’t heard anything from Toni, I can conclude?”
“No.”
“Who might have? Do you know anybody he might have gone to? Anybody he was close to?”
“We always thought we were close,” she said. There was an awkward pause while I thought of and rejected various consoling remarks, and then she went on, “It’s difficult to realize how little you know someone who has always lived with you. So perhaps he was close to his—to his compagni.” She used the Italian word this time, with a note of contempt or rejection. The English equivalent would be “comrades.” “And now—now, I think he must be very lonely.”
“So nobody at all? Nobody at work—at the university?” I remembered that thesis he had claimed to be working on.
She smiled, but not the earlier transforming smile. A rather sad smile, bitter almost. “There was his great friend, his great compagno, Giulio Padoan. Now probably his great enemy.”
“No one who was completely uninvolved in the whole business?”
She thought. “I can only think of two friends, two colleagues who are now teaching at the university in Rome.” She mentioned two names and I made a mental but not very serious note of them.
I said, “Colleagues? He worked at the university?”
She looked puzzled. “Yes. Why, what did you think?”
“Oh, he mentioned research. I thought he was just studying.”
“No. He taught also. In the department of Scottish literature. And I think he taught well.”
“Good.” She was obviously on his side, if things could be put in such crude terms.
She said, “Well, I must go now.” She rose and took her purse out. I said, “No, no, it’s on me,” and she said, “Next time.”
I said, “Okay,” glad she was thinking of there being a next time. As we came out into the sunlight again I said, “Those people who were killed—”
“Yes?” Her voice was flat, toneless.
“Sorry, but they were connected with Toni? I mean, did he know them?”
“I think so. That is why he must stay away. Someone is—is taking revenge. If you find him, please tell him he
must leave, he must go away again.” She was standing close, looking straight up at me with such appeal in her eyes that I felt sure anybody looking would take me for a bounder deserting my pregnant girlfriend. And yet she was in fact the reverse of helpless: even her pleading was done decisively.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“And do you still think not to go to the police?”
“Yes,” I said.
Again that prosecco smile. “Thank you. You are right. Trust how Toni looks because deep down he is not bad.” She put her hand out and shook mine firmly. “And I think it would kill my mother.”
Privately I thought not even a ton of Guarana frescoes falling on her head would do that. But I nodded. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“Yes. But perhaps not through my house. Come to my shop.” She took a card from her pocket and gave it to me. It bore the simple name Francesca and had an address, phone number, and a tiny map showing the easiest route from St. Mark’s and from the nearest vaporetto stop. “I am usually there in shop hours.”
“Okay. Oh, one last question. Does the name Zennaro mean anything to you? Did Toni have any friends called that?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. It is a common name but I—I can’t think of anyone. Why?”
“Oh, I just heard this name. Apparently he’s a painter.”
“Toni wasn’t very interested in painting really. But if I think of any Zennaro, I will inform you.”
“Thanks. I’ll drop by at your shop.”
“And please inform me if you hear of Toni. Remember he is worth saving. You saw that when you met him, no?”
“Well, I—”
“And one must trust such instincts. It is thus that I trusted you. You look honest.”
“Thank you.”
“Because, after all, you could have been from the terrorists, looking for Toni to—to take revenge. But I decided, no. Goodbye again.” One last smile, slightly sad, which even so put the sunshine to shame, and then she walked briskly away, her hands in her coat pockets for warmth.
8
ABOUT half an hour later I was in a small square in Cannaregio not far from the Ghetto. A large Renaissance palazzo dominated one side of the square. It was flanked on its left by a rather despondent-looking pensione and on its right by a narrow alleyway that led toward a canal. The square was quiet, with just a cat sunning itself by the wellhead and keeping an eye on things.
Every Picture Tells a Story Page 10