by Diana Cachey
He turned to tidy papers on his desk. He moved dishes from the table. He returned books to the shelves, all in a polite but obvious message that it was time for her to leave.
She responded appropriately, put on her coat and walked to the door.
“Go to Verde first,” he said.“Take the poem. Bring a trustworthy translator. Trustworthy,” he repeated. When he saw her mind working again he added,“Matteo cannot be trusted too often but, this time, he will have to do. Anyone else would be too risky.”
“Why isn’t Matteo risky,” asked Louisa,“you know he’s always drunk and crazy?” Of course she didn’t ask Roberto how he knew Matteo. They both had once lived on the same tiny island, Murano, a fishbowl even smaller than Venice. She didn’t ask how he knew that Matteo and herhad been an item. He’d surely witnessed their street dramas of the past.
“Because he already knows what you are up to,” replied Roberto. He seemed in a hurry for her to leave.
“He does? But h . . .,” she began.
“Don’t ask how Matteo knows,” Roberto interrupted,“it is so.”
He shuffled her out the door while adding,“Do not go back to Burano until you talk to the Verdenese. Investigate the clue exactly how the couple on Verde suggest.” This time, it seemed to Louisa, he emphasized every word.
He’d packaged the grappa in burgundy tissue paper and tied it with gold ribbon. Before she departed, he took the neatly packaged grappa back and kissed it good-bye.
Or had he kissed it good-luck?
Once outside the door, she leaned towards his cheek to offer the customary air kisses, but he pushed his hand in front of her, refusing the gesture. He glanced around the calle, as if the neighbors watched their every move in the arched doorway of his home. They probably did.
He spoke softly,“Do not come back here. I am sorry.”
“Can I. . .”
“No. No communication again. Ever,” he pleaded.
For some reason, she knew exactly what he was trying to say next, without his saying a word. I’m sorry to leave you in the hands of Matteo, but he is your only hope. His apologetic face with furrowed brows and resolute frown, expressed a sad assuredness for her. He closed the door and Louisa heard a long series of clicks.
He’d locked, chained and double-bolted the door behind her.
**
First, Louisa had to find the Jewish woman from Murano who knew about the Nazis. Louisa had learned that the strange woman grew up in Venice during the war and currently lived in Paris. The woman not only believed in ghosts but had clairvoyant powers of her own.
Louisa would meet with Matteo for the trip to Verde Island later. He’d know how to find“the little couple with the canteen.” The trip to Verde might also invite another sexual spark between her and Matteo, but Verde and Matteo would have to wait.
For now, Paris was calling.
Nove (9) Tiffany Is Not Murano
“Paris is calling,” the operator said to Barbara.
It was Louisa, calling collect. Not from Venice, thought Barbara.
During a beautiful breakfast at the Danieli, her tranquil fantasies of two Venetian admirers, Gianni-architetto and cafe owner-Seba, all screeched to a halt. They were replaced by an image of Louisa standing amongst gothic cathedrals with massive stain glass rose windows, surrounded by busy chocolate shops, long crunchy loaves of bread, outdoor cafes filled with scores of hyper, smoking people and an imposing Tour Eiffel looming over the bustling metropolis.
This shift in Louisa’s center of activity jolted Barbara like a loud train whistle nearing its stop just as a morning commuter was about to enjoy a satisfying drag of a cigarette. The commuter is forced to stomp out the cigarette and Barbara stomped out the fantasy of her Venetian holiday with two men. She got on a mental train for her Parisienride through Louisa’s eyes.
How had Louisa materialized like magic in the City of Light? What was her crazy sister doing there? Louisa had said nothing of an intentto rush off to“gay Paree” within the next twenty-four hours.
Barbara wasn’t surprised. Impetuous actions unfortunately were the norm for Louisa. Growing up near an Ohio steel town, the sisters slept in the same bed together for years and were more like twins than three years apart. Louisa -- her best friend, her only sibling, trusted servant and confident -- Barbara knew her well. She felt more like Louisa’s mom, having to protect and defend the more impetuous one. Barbara covered up her misdeeds or fixed her dilemmas.
One night, while in their teens, Louisa climbed out the bedroom window to meet her boyfriend minutes before their stern father peeked in to check on his girls. According to plan, Barbara piled clothes under the covers of Louisa’s side of the bed, waved to dad and whispered“She’s out,” implying Louisa was sleeping. If he checked under the covers, she could say,“I meant she’s outside,” but he never checked because her father trusted Barbara, the good sister. The good sister didn’t lie, or so he thought.
Despite inner rebelliousness, both Louisa and Barbara resisted urges to break out of these roles. They stayed in the boxes the world assigned. Growing up working class and eager to make a life for themselves, leaving small town middle America became their primary concern--the fastest way out of the box. Thus, Louisa studied law and Barbara studied medicine and went to nursing school. Louisa had said,“I guess we both love a challenge.”
And Paris, thought Barbara, and glass.
Louisa discovered her heightened passion for glass as a young adult, in the same place she felt heightened passion for so many other things -- aromatic wines, strong cheeses, coffee with steamed milk sipped while standing, vintage couture fashion and mind-boggling modern art. She found it all when she was in the pinnacle of passion -- where else? -- in Paris.
The first time Louisa gazed up, mesmerized by the moon reflected in the new addition to the Louvre, a pyramid of glass cleverly designed by Ming Pei, she knew she wanted to create things with glass. That was the thing about Louisa,she didn’t just“visit” places. She immersed herself in every detail, like she did with Paris and the Louvre. Louisa studied the language and the art of Paris. She moved there for school, she lived it. She yearned for it.
To her, the Louvre glass pyramid was -- as she described it --“perfect because it is perfectly wrong.” Barbara understood what Louisa meant. Being the Louvre’s self-reflecting sister, the glass pyramid remained unattached, a geometrical contrast to the exquisite lines of the Louvre Palace, a neoclassic jewel. So much was wrong with the pyramid’s exacting straight steel that framed glass sheets and formed its point in the middle of a grand, elaborately decorated Parisen courtyard. The pyramid, as a stand alone, was loud not beautiful. Nonetheless it captured the beauty that surrounded with its modern window panes, their transparency and complexity made to reflect exquisite patterns off of the adjacent fountain and pool.
Both sisters marveled at how perfect in its contrasts was the Louvre’s pyramid to its Palace. Such was the duality of this controversial glass structure, that even through Louisa’s glazed, drunken eyes, the first time she saw it, she knew something had changed in her that very night. It happened immediately when she set foot in the City of Light. The Eiffel Tower twinkled, lovely lighted trees illuminated the Champs Elysee and the Louvre itself could be enjoyed by her all at once, so perfect was the placing of the pyramid.
If Louisa’s true love of glass was first piqued by the glass pyramid then it was solidified at the Museum of Art Nouveau with the stained-glass objects created by Louise Confort Tiffany. What is it about this work that penetrates my soul? She caught her breath whenever she viewed Tiffany glass lamps, windows, statues.
This strong affinity with the artist changed Louisa’s life completely after her encounter with his work in Paris such that she wondered if the ghost of Louis Tiffany dwelt within her. Why were her senses stirred by his graceful, useful objects of colorful and intricately pieced together glass? Was Louisa alive, in another form, in another life, during the art nouveau movement? Co
uld that be why it all touched her deeply in the present? Perhaps she was a tailor in one of the fashion houses that adopted the Tiffany style. Perhaps she helped orchestrate the architectural renaissance of the form in New York, Chicago or Paris itself.
Here in Paris, she saw pieces in the artistic style that grew as a reaction to the harsh and rigid, geometric squares and rectangles of the industrial age (which oddly the Louvre Pyramid emulated) and her love of glass freely bloomed. The delicate lines, curvy plant stems and flower petals worked into glass, captivated her like no other works of art in the city, a city that not only exploded with all modes of art but also exploded with glass art, like that in the windows of the great cathedral of Saint Chappell.
Louisa Mangottimight’ve trained to be an attorney but she was an artist at heart. Gifted at birth with a talent for both, she struggled between extremes. Half Italian by descent from both her father’s parents and German filling in the rest, Louisa’s life and heritage contrasted itself like the modern and old buildings of the Louvre. It was strange, indeed perfectly wrong, that she chose Paris as her first European city to visit, instead of Venice, Rome, Florence or Capri, as her ancestry might otherwise demand. Yet, like many things in her bountiful life, Louisa’s love of Paris began fortuitously, with a travel newsletter that alerted her to a last minute airfare sale. Her road to Tiffany and Paris was not filled with dreams of French food, or glass, or sidewalk cafes. Nor did history or nationality lead her there. Nor was love of art the catalyst.
What led her the first time to Tiffany wascheap airfare and an asterisk in a friend’s guidebook.
**
Many years and adventures later, Louisa began to tell Barbara an odd tale, one that most would have found ridiculous. Having Louisa for a sibling, Barbara ceased to be surprised long ago by Louisa’s stories. Dismayed, yes, but infrequently shocked.
While her Danieliwaiters brought numerous double cappuccinos to Barbara, today she was both captivated and concerned during her phone call with Louisa and with what she heard about her sister’s meeting with the Parisien courtesan.
It was already dark when Louisa woke late in the afternoon after an all-nighter in a Parisien cabaret and her evening of taking pictures of the monuments. Staying up all night suited not only Louisa but Paris, a city where illuminated tours abounded and restaurants didn’t fill for dinner until eleven o’clock. Museums, including the Louvre, were brilliant at night in their stillness and lack of tourists. Late museum hours allowed Louisa to make her first museum-marathon years ago, some fifteen museums in three days.
Over the phone, Louisa explained to Barbara that a clerk at the Murano municipality had suggested she meet a woman in Paris who’d lived in Venice during the war. This Parisian woman, now known as Madame de Carlo, grew up near a haunted Murano house, or so Louisa had been told. De Carlo’s current home, appropriately located on the Rue la belle Dame, sat on the left bank of the Seine River. From all accounts, De Carlo was a stunner as a young Jewish girl who used her beauty to her advantage and saved her own life posing as a Venetian during German occupation.
Louisa didn’t know much about the woman when she arrived in Paris--just that she might possess information about the old home on Murano island, near the factory where the dead glassmakers had worked. In particular, she was said to be familiar with its ghosts, perhaps of the Nazis rumored to have lived there.
In her seventies, the woman, remained strikingly beautiful such that her anti-aging secret had kept her in tactfor the business she plied since the war.“A high paid occupation” was all the Muranese ghost expert, Roberto, and the man at the municipality would say.
Madame had insisted they meet at a famously expensive restaurant and a waiter guided Louisa to a quiet secluded area. There sat the most intriguing creature, who’d outlined her striking, almost orange-colored eyes in what would have been too much liner on any less of a beauty. She’d painted her lips vibrant pink and wore gold dust upon batting lashes. Rose gold chandelier earrings swung to her shoulders and peeked from under thick, magenta-streaked black braids, which fronted a full head of hair and framed both breasts. Her bosom was propped up with a burgundy lace bra, which was revealed, not inappropriately but sultry, through a sheer white body hugging shawl. The only evidence Louisa could see of a blouse under the shawl were its embroidered sleeves and cuffs that hung too far (yet not too far) over delicate fingers. A different ring graced each finger, including her thumbs, one covered with a ruby and the other, a canary diamond. A very large diamond at that.
Louisa shook the woman’s hand and noted interesting quirks. One eye twitched, her chin quivered, as though she were itching it or wanted to, and the enchanting Jewish-woman-turned-Venetian-now-French-courtesan was foaming at the brim with anxiety. Surrounded by gilded, framed paintings, in a dark booth piled with lush fabric pillows and enclosed in rich crushed velvet drapes, Madame De Carlo raised her eyes and her hand-blown glass flute, which held what looked like a KirRoyal cocktail, or Champagne with Chambord, before Louisa could squeeze in next to her. She pointed the glass at Louisa and said,“He never understood, never could, never tried, she was loose, or she was frigid, maybe too harsh to him.” Then she raised her glass a bit more and winked at Louisa. Her eyes then fell to a paper and pen on the table beckoning Louisa to write it all down. Louisa picked them both up and started to write.
Was it a toast? A riddle? To agree to this meeting, the woman had ordered Louisa to bring a piece of Tiffany glass to her, which she now carried in its trademarked light blue packaging. Her phone conversation with Rianna de Carlo, as this woman called herself in the twenty-first century, had been filled with propositions, odd conditions, as though she wanted something, hinting things at whim as she barked curt and short orders.
“You bring glass, I bring myself, you listen,” Rianna had directed Louisa on the phone.
After sipping some of her blush-colored cocktail from what Louisa presumed to be Tiffany crystal stemware, this strange and gorgeous woman continued her mock toast-poem with glass raisedhigh,“He felt spasmodic, nervous spasms at the knees. She was sexy,she was plain, perhaps nasty, to him.”
She winked, drank, slid across the burgundy leather seat and, with glass still in the air, patted next to her for Louisa to sit.
Louisa began to speak and the woman, without looking up from another Tiffany box that sat next to her on the small sofa, shushed her.
“Bring the glass, I bring myself, you listen, remember?” she said with eyes shifted now to the blue box beside Louisa.
When she did look up at Louisa, her head jerked back.
“Why did you bring him with you?” she said to Louisa who sat alone.“No, don’t answer” the woman corrected herself.“You don’t speak.” she said and gestured for the Tiffany box Louisa had brought with her.
“Excuse me but I don’t know why I am here or why I should give this to you?” Louisa said.
“Then leave,” replied the woman. She drank again. After the drink, she reminded Louisa of a promise she was now breaking,“Bring the glass, I bring myself, you listen.”
Holding her hand out again, sherepeated,“Bring. The. Glass.”
Louisa hesitated for a second, looked around her and froze. This was a scam. A Venetian scam. How? Why? Who? Ana? Roberto?
“Do you want me to get rid of your ghost?” Riannaasked with a lift of her head towards the air next to Louisa,“I’m not sure why he followed you here, this handsome American man.”
Louisa laughed and thought, Youdon’t know with whom you are messing?
“I’m not messing with you, Louisa, but your ghost is and he is very clever, led you to me. I suppose I must allow him to stay. I suppose,” she said and toasted the air next to Louisa.“Merci beaucoup,” she said to same spot, to a supposed invisible being.
“What does . . .” Louisa began but again the woman shushed her then slammed her fist onto the table, disrupting not only the silverware but several patrons nearby.
She curled her li
p in disgust at the Tiffany box Louisa had set on the table.
The woman continued, calm, with her unusual toast.“He liked to have them easy, sweet, quiet, cute, not loud nor aggressive, opinionated or brute.” She shook her head in approval of her toast and drank more of her Kir Royale.
“Okay, I will be nice,” she said to the air next to Louisa. That is, to her ghost, not to Louisa.
She moved her head closer as if speaking some important information of which only she and Louisa were to be privy.
“Sitting pretty and shy, he could man-handle it. Because he wanted to possess her, would not let her get away. Or get her way. He told her‘no commitment’ in every moment, every day.”
Pleased with herself, she raised the glass high above their heads, pulled it to her lips with dramatic flare, finished her drink and placed it on the table with equal drama. After nodding at the air next to Louisa, she arranged her champagne flute more perfectly in front of her and twisted her head sideways to face Louisa head-on,“Now you may speak.”
“Well, first, what was that about?”
“It was about the ghost.”
“What ghost?”
“The one in Murano,” she said with raised eyebrows to the air next to Louisa as if in agreement about something, something like“she really doesn’t get it does she?”
“Who is the Murano ghost?” asked Louisa.
This question annoyed the woman very much and she replied in a tone that implied she thought Louisa was as dumb as rocks.
“The Nazi,” the woman said, as if she would rather spit. As if she never wanted to ever have to say that word.
“What Nazi?” Louisa asked, almost apologetically.
This time, even more annoyed, Rianna replied slower, like she was speaking with a child, a very stupid one.
“It doesn’t matter what Nazi. It is a Nazi. Don’t go there.” Each time she said the word“Nazi” she said it while blinking her eyes as if she was pleading with Louisa to not make her say it again.