Frail Barrier

by Edward Sklepowich

  Half an hour later, after seeing the gondola and examining the felze with a great deal of interest, this being the first time he had seen the small, detachable cabin outside of paintings and photographs, Hollander thanked Urbino and set out for the Gritti Palace on foot.

  ‘So tell me, caro, did Nick enjoy himself after I left the two of you together?’ the contessa asked Urbino over the telephone that evening from Asolo.

  ‘He seemed to.’

  Urbino described Hollander’s visit. When he finished, he asked her what she thought of Hollander.

  ‘I like him,’ she responded without any hesitation. ‘He’s intelligent and interesting, and he has a good sense of humor. He reminds me of a cultivated sea captain.’

  ‘I don’t quite see that.’

  ‘All that tanned skin and his bright blue eyes? And that bald head? All he needs are some side whiskers and a pipe. Well, maybe I got to know him better than you have so far. We had a nice talk over lunch. The more he told me about his stepfather the more I realized how unfortunate it is that we never had the opportunity to know him.’

  ‘Hollander does talk about him a lot.’

  ‘You somehow make that sound bad!’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes, you do. Don’t you like him?’

  Urbino decided to make a joke of it. ‘I like him a lot better than I thought I would when I heard that he’s Sebastian’s friend.’

  ‘Sebastian is a fine boy. That’s not very nice of you.’

  But Urbino could tell that the contessa was amused. She had her own criticisms of her young cousin.

  ‘By the way,’ Urbino said, ‘did you mention anything to him about Albina?’

  ‘Not a single word. I didn’t even come close to a slip the way I did about Benigni. So you told him about them and he didn’t know?’

  ‘He gave every appearance of not knowing.’

  ‘But you think he might have.’

  The contessa sounded a little irritated.

  ‘I have to keep an open mind, Barbara. Don’t forget that although we don’t know anything against him or anything that connects him to Albina, he inherited a veritable fortune. The apartment on the Grand Canal and everything in it, and from what he said, Zoll’s house in Munich with Zoll’s art collection.’

  ‘All that’s good reason for having killed Zoll. It has nothing to do with Albina.’ The contessa drew in her breath sharply. ‘But listen to me! Is this what you’ve brought me to? You—’

  The contessa broke off, as if hesitant about voicing her thoughts.

  ‘Listen, Barbara,’ Urbino said in a placating tone, ‘you might understand why I have to be open-minded and cautious – why we have to be cautious – after I tell you what I learned today before I joined the two of you for lunch.’

  He gave an account of his conversations with Clementina and Perla.

  ‘But I don’t understand exactly what all this has to do with Nick,’ the contessa said when he finished.

  ‘Maybe nothing, but maybe something. And maybe a lot, at that. Of course, we already knew that he had a connection with Benigni, but we didn’t know he had one, so to speak, with Albina.’

  ‘So to speak? What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that since Albina knew Zoll and Benigni, he could have known Albina – through them. But by saying that I get a little ahead of myself.’

  ‘You are too far ahead of me!’

  ‘Surely you see it, Barbara? When I said that I was suspicious about Albina’s death and when we agreed that three deaths so quickly together were unusual, we had no idea that there was any relationship between the three of them.’

  The contessa took this in without any immediate response. Then she said, ‘But why are you so focused only on Nick Hollander?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Because there’s the little cartaio,’ the contessa pointed out. ‘Benigni was her brother – her half-brother. And she knew Zoll and Albina.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Urbino paused. ‘And Perla. She knew all three. She was providing Zoll with herbs.’

  ‘And from Perla we can move to Romolo, I suppose?’

  Urbino seemed to detect a slight ironic tone in the contessa’s words.

  ‘Yes.’ He decided to take her words at face value. ‘Following a certain line of logic we can, and should. To get back to Hollander, there’s something I’d like you to do.’

  ‘I’m afraid to ask what it is.’

  ‘I’d like information on Hollander Tours. How they’re doing financially. What kind of reputation they have. Who might be involved with the firm besides Hollander and his mother. It wouldn’t be hard for your solicitor in London to find out information like that, would it? And if anyone knew he was looking for information, there would be no way to link it directly with you or me.’

  ‘I could do that. Is it important?’

  ‘It could be. We can neglect nothing that might bring us closer to the truth. And I think I’ll get Rebecca’s help with something else. She has contacts in Munich. She worked with a colleague on a project there. Several lawyers were involved. Maybe she can find out about Zoll’s will. And meanwhile there are other angles to look into. No, I’m not focusing only on Hollander, but at the moment he suggests some of the most obvious angles. Because of the money, though I’m not saying that Zoll was murdered.’

  ‘I’ll ring Bascomb tomorrow,’ the contessa said. ‘But we shouldn’t expect him to get back to me right away. It’s the end of August. Most of his office is on holiday. It might not be until after the regatta that we hear from him. In the meantime, why don’t you try to get these notions out of your head? Unless you think that there’s some reason for urgency?’

  ‘You know the answer to that. In situations like these, there always is. Or at least we must assume there is. Give my regards to Ausonio.’

  Ausonio was the conte’s nephew from Capri.

  After his conversation with the contessa, Urbino called Rebecca Mondador. It didn’t prove hard to enlist her help, and he didn’t have to tell her more than he wanted or needed to. She was happy enough that her suspicions about his involvement in another case were confirmed and that she could be of assistance again.

  That night Urbino took another corpse tour of the city, but this one was different from the one he had indulged in last week.

  All the corpses on this night’s tour were recent.

  The rain had come to an abrupt stop before midnight, but now, as Urbino walked to Dorsoduro, there were dark, rolling clouds overhead. The city was the way he liked it. Empty, silent, serene. Urbino and the few other lone souls were like night guards making their rounds of the corridors of a vast museum after the crowds had departed. A sense of camaraderie passed between them as they met each other in the night.

  Some of the calli were flooded, but tonight, so as not to impede him on his walk, Urbino had put on a pair of high boots he had bought last winter on a visit to relatives in Inveraray. And in his pocket was a flashlight.

  His first stop on his tour was a dank sottoportico between the Grand Canal and the Campo Santa Margherita. The odor of decaying garbage and cat urine was faint but unmistakable. Pools of water were like black glass.

  He played his flashlight over the uneven stones. A cigarette butt was wedged against one wall of the sottoportico where the pavement was slightly higher. There was no way of knowing whether it had escaped the cleaning that Giulietta had given the area yesterday or had been deposited afterward. The cigarette had not completely disintegrated, and still revealed traces of blood-red lipstick.

  This was where Albina had died. Since she hadn’t collected her keys from Da Valdo, she must have died on her way to the café – unless she had decided to return before getting there or been forced to do so by the storm or something else – or someone.

  Information about the physical disposition of the body on the stones might have helped him to determine whether Albina had been on her way to her apartment or from it when she had died. This wa
s the kind of information only the police would have. On some of his previous cases, Urbino had established contact with the Questura, and received the begrudging help of the commissario. But he didn’t think that the circumstances of this case would encourage Commissario Gemelli to open an investigation or give Urbino any information. And his relationship with the man had always been strained, at best, even when Urbino had helped him solve crimes for which Gemelli took most of the credit.

  Urbino stared down at the stones. Had Albina been rushing? She had been tired that night, so he doubted that her pace had been any quicker alone than it had been with him. No one seemed to have seen her. But Urbino believed that she had encountered at least one person, and in far less pleasant circumstances than Urbino had been encountering people tonight.

  Some person, either a stranger or an acquaintance, possibly even a friend, had been responsible for her death.

  Urbino had an instinct about these things, and something wasn’t right. The fact that someone had broken into the Gonella apartment only reinforced his suspicions. Some person, for some reason, had been after Albina, and had caused her death, had benefited from it. This person was now happy she was dead, but not just happy. Surely also anxious and worried about being exposed.

  Albina might very well have died from a heart attack – although he wasn’t convinced of even this – but a heart attack could be provoked, either intentionally or not. Fright, a struggle, a fatigued woman trying to run away from danger – any of these could have brought about a crisis in a person who had a heart condition. And he shouldn’t forget about the possibility that some substance, under the guise of a medication or, unbeknownst to her, put in her food or drink, could have caused the attack.

  With one last look at where Albina had spent her last moments, Urbino left the sottoportico.

  He walked down the dark, silent calli and through the deserted Campo Santa Margherita and the Campo Barnabà to another spot in Dorsoduro. It was at the far end of the quarter, in the area between the Palazzo Guggenheim and the Salute. He walked down half its length until he stood beneath a building that was in the process of being renovated. The lower windows were boarded over. A temporary metal door had been installed at the entrance. All the shutters had been removed. No construction scrim had been placed around the building.

  He leaned back and looked up toward the roof. He could make out an empty space about three feet wide in a corner of the top story. The sky was visible through it. Transferring his gaze to the pavement, he saw a small pile of bricks placed neatly on the ground and against the side of the building.

  This was the calle that Clementina Foppa had mentioned, the one where her half-brother had been killed. Surely the storm would not have been able to do any damage to Benigni if the parapet stone had been secured properly. He examined the pavement again but couldn’t see any evidence of the stone, which must have broken into pieces. The fragments must have been cleared away.

  The young man’s family would be entitled to compensation if there had been any neglect and it could be proved. Once again Urbino regretted that he didn’t have access to information that was in the possession of the police. They surely would have looked into the matter because of the circumstances and its implications for compensation to the victim’s relatives.

  Who would get the money if money were forthcoming? Clementina? Their mother? Benigni’s father? Were Benigni’s mother and father still alive? Urbino knew little about Benigni and nothing about his family.

  But no money would be forthcoming – no money should be forthcoming – if Benigni hadn’t died as the result of an accident. What this could mean, of course, was that the person or persons who would benefit might not be happy if his death was determined not to have been caused by negligence.

  That Urbino was entertaining this latter possibility was not because he was a person who found it difficult to accept fateful accidents. Not at all. He had often been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, his parents had died in an automobile accident precisely because of that. An unexpected visit had delayed their departure from the house. Yes, accidents did happen, and sometimes they were the most bizarre ones imaginable like what they said had happened to Luca Benigni.

  But Urbino found it difficult to accept that two people who knew each other, albeit not well, had died within such a short time of each other in the manner in which everyone seemed to believe they had.

  Albina Gonella because her weak heart had failed her at that particular moment on that particular night.

  And Luca Benigni because a large falling building stone had smashed his head.

  These two deaths in themselves would have provoked his curiosity. But it was the third death – or rather the first one – that was making him look beyond appearances for some kind of criminal cause.

  It was this first death that brought him to the final stop on his corpse tour this evening. It was a building a mere five minutes’ walk from the one where Benigni had met his death.

  It was on the main calle that continued toward the Salute. One of the palaces along its length had a little gated courtyard verdant with plants. But he passed the courtyard, turned off the calle, and walked down the much narrower passageway to the Grand Canal and stood on the wooden traghetto landing. On the other side of the water was the Gritti Palace Hotel.

  There, alone, beside the dark mirror of water, Urbino surprised himself by breaking out in his untrained tenor:

  Tantum ergo sacramentum

  Veneremur cernui

  Et antiquum documentum

  Novo cedat ritui

  Praestet fides supplementum

  Sensuum defectui

  These Latin words from a Vesper hymn that were part of the Roman Catholic ritual of Benediction, with their simple, haunting melody, would spring unbidden to Urbino’s lips during odd moments, especially when he was lonely, nervous, or preoccupied.

  With the notes fading around him, Urbino turned to look up at the second story of the building to his left. This was Zoll’s apartment – or now Nick Hollander’s apartment. Beyond its dark windows the first death had taken place. Urbino and the contessa had seen the German a short time before he died, and he had looked gravely ill. There was no question of that. If he had died the next day, neither of them would have been surprised. Death had been planted in his gaunt, bloodless face.

  But Urbino told himself that he should be consistent in his logic – or was it his illogic? If it was possible that a woman could die because of the weakness of her heart but could also be, in some sense, the victim of foul play, it was equally possible for a man to be murdered even if he had only a few days, hours, or minutes of natural life left – especially a man who had a disease and was taking medication. Zoll had been dying of leukemia, but this didn’t mean that he had died from leukemia.

  Urbino needed to consider this possibility and look into it, if only to eliminate it. As he had said to the contessa, they should not neglect anything that would bring them closer to the truth.

  Urbino’s eyes moved away from Zoll’s apartment to the Gritti Palace across the water. Lights were showing from two of the windows on the second floor. Hollander had said his suite looked out on the Grand Canal. Perhaps he was standing behind one of the lit windows at this moment, gazing toward the apartment he was determined to sell. The possibility made Urbino move backward into the shadows as he had drawn away from the library window when Maisie Croy had examined the Palazzo Uccello.

  Hollander was the most obvious link between Zoll and Luca Benigni. And he apparently had been a major beneficiary of his stepfather’s will. Urbino hoped that Rebecca would be able to clarify this area more.

  But what might Hollander’s link to Albina Gonella be? For Urbino could not shake the conviction that Albina’s death was connected to Luca’s.

  As he was considering this, standing there next to the Grand Canal and near the building Zoll had died in, some other names surfaced. Among them were Clementina Foppa and Perla Beato. Bot
h had known all three of the recently dead.

  Yes, there was a great deal to consider.

  Urbino walked out of the calle and turned in the direction of the Salute. He would take the vaporetto back to Cannaregio from there. He was afraid that he wasn’t going to be able to do what the contessa wanted him to do. There seemed to be no way he could get what she had called his ‘notions’ about Albina out of his head.

  In fact, his head was now filled with many more notions of a similar nature that were both directly and indirectly related to the original one.

  He entertained them for the trip up the Grand Canal, sitting in his preferred place in the stern of the boat. He watched the scene unroll on both sides as his notions unfolded themselves darkly in his mind.

  Part Four

  Benevolent Deceptions

  Eight

  Three pieces of a puzzle. Albina Gonella, Luca Benigni, and Konrad Zoll. How did they fit? Might they fit at all? Could the puzzle be one he was imagining? Was he seeing things he wanted to see and not what was actually there?

  These were some of the questions that were Urbino’s almost constant companions in the hours and days subsequent to his corpse tour.

  For a few days he confined himself to the Palazzo Uccello, turning over the pieces of the puzzle and examining them.

  He spent a lot of time up on the altana. After the rainy days sunny weather had returned but without the debilitating humidity and storms that had cursed the city earlier in the month. He always brought his Goethe with him, but despite the wisdom and the beauty of the German’s impressions, he couldn’t remain focused on them for long without drifting off into his own impressions and speculations. He would stare out across the roofs and chimneys at the stretch of the lagoon in one direction or the deep gash in the buildings that was the Grand Canal in the other direction. Natalia came up to the altana, not to put out the laundry or to water the plants, but to try to coax Urbino down into the more sociable quarters of the house. But he assured her he was fine where he was. She left each time, shaking her head at the strangeness of the American.