Frail Barrier

by Edward Sklepowich

  ‘Bingo!’

  ‘How long has it been going on?’

  ‘Two, three months. Perla is absolutely infatuated, and what woman wouldn’t be? He’s a fine specimen and very uncomplicated.’

  ‘You implied that Romolo suspects something.’

  ‘I’m not sure if he knows and what he knows. The two of them don’t have the kind of relationship that Filippo and I do.’

  She said this as if the Borelli arrangement of mutual infidelity and tolerance were the ideal. It seemed to work well enough for Oriana and Filippo, although they had had their share of separations and near divorces. But there was something more honest in their way of handling their affairs, however, than sneaking behind a partner’s back as Perla was doing.

  ‘If I had to bet money,’ Urbino said, ‘I’d say that Romolo suspects, maybe more than only suspects, to judge by one or two of the things he’s said. How do you think he’d react if he found out that Perla was having an affair?’

  ‘It certainly wouldn’t be the way Filippo does, and I’ve told Perla just as much. Even aside from the kind of relationship that we have, Filippo is more easy-going.’

  ‘I’m sure you noticed the bruise on her face.’

  ‘A basket of herbs fell on her when she was moving it at the shop, or so she said. I didn’t pursue the topic. Romolo has a temper, a pretty bad one, although he seems as cool as anything. I don’t know what he’d do if he found out about Rocco, though half his male students are gay. One time he practically bit Perla’s head off when she said that he should give in and get glasses, that she was tired of him squinting.’

  ‘Romolo has bad eyesight?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it bad, but he has a hard time making out some things at a distance, and even things up close.’

  ‘How does Claudio feel about Perla?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I can guess. And there’s what Perla tells me. He enjoys being with an experienced, attractive woman who doesn’t expect much in return but his attentions. He’s not looking for marriage, he’s not looking for children – he’s not even looking for Missoni sweaters and Ferragamo shoes. But don’t get me wrong. I’m sure a little extra money from the erboristeria and maybe even Romolo’s property finds its way into his hands. But the boy isn’t mercenary.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  Oriana stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘I have a sixth sense for these things. I have to.’

  Urbino drained his espresso. He took out the photograph of Zoll, Luca Benigni, and the waiter from Florian’s.

  ‘Look at this photograph. Do you recognize anyone in it?’

  She got up and took the photograph to the large window. She examined it without removing her sunglasses.

  ‘It was taken in Florian’s,’ she said. ‘That’s one of the waiters. I’ve never seen the older man before. Who is he?’

  Urbino explained.

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised he died. He looks very ill. I’ve seen the man he’s sitting with a few times, though. And now that I think of it, he was with an older man once. He’s good-looking. And it’s funny. One time when I saw him across the piazza I thought he was Claudio. You can see the resemblance a little in this photo, don’t you think?’

  After leaving Oriana, Urbino decided to stretch his legs and stimulate his thinking by walking down the long Giudecca embankment.

  Before beginning his ramble, he looked across the Bacino to where the Doges’ Palace, the columns of the piazzetta, and the domes of the Basilica shimmered. After the storms and the rains, the intense heat and humidity, the city was being blessed with cool, gentle breezes and billowy clouds. The sound of all the boats between him and the Molo, as it drifted across to him, blended together into its own kind of water music. And what would have been, up close, an animated mass of people in varying degrees of exhaustion and appreciation, was only a slowly moving impressionistic blur along the Molo and the Riva degli Schiavoni.

  Reluctantly, Urbino abandoned the view. Soon, he was passing the large dome and squat bell towers of the Church of Santa Maria della Presentazione, also known as Le Zitelle, the Spinsters. It was almost inevitable, given his preoccupation these days with Albina’s death, that his thoughts would drift not to the pious, unmarried women who had given the church its nickname, but to the two spinsters on the other side of the Giudecca Canal in Dorsoduro – Albina and her sister. Had either of them ever had any marriage proposals? Had they had their share of broken hearts? Or was he guilty of trying to impose a familiar, conventional pattern on their spinsterhood? Giulietta’s account had been absent of any references to men, except for their father. The bond between the two sisters must have deepened as the years had gone by and neither would, or could, have abandoned the other, even if the opportunity had come.

  After exchanging greetings with two elderly women sitting on benches and becoming caught up in a crowd of young people in front of the Ostello di Venezia, he crossed a bridge and reached the Church of the Redeemer.

  Five weeks ago the church had been at the center of the Feast of the Redeemer. In commemoration of the deliverance of the city from the plague in the sixteenth century, a temporary floating bridge was built over the Giudecca Canal between the Zattere and where Urbino was now standing, to provide access to the church for the Patriarch of Venice, civil and ecclesiastical figures, and crowds of merrymakers. The feast was filled with traditions of mulberries and mandarin oranges, displays of fireworks, and bathing in the Adriatic at sunrise.

  Like the regatta and carnival, the feast drew the attention of many foreigners. Urbino and the contessa had seen Zoll and Benigni in the piazza only a few days after the celebration. Hollander had said how enthusiastic his stepfather had been about all things Venetian. But perhaps he had avoided this particular celebration since it would have reminded him that he was not going to be delivered from his own form of the plague.

  Urbino spent several minutes in the church’s cool, chaste interior. As he had told Clementina Foppa, his visits to the Giudecca were not as frequent as he would have liked, but his mind was too preoccupied this morning to properly appreciate the church and its exquisite Veronese. He accepted the offer of a Franciscan friar, however, to see the monks’ pharmacy. There, the aromas of herbs in the garden and the exhibit of old alchemical instruments encouraged thoughts about Perla’s erboristeria, and from these he passed on to ones about her affair with Claudio. In another age in Venice someone like Perla, with her esoteric knowledge of herbs and potions, might have risked being accused of witchcraft and Claudio cited as one of the victims of her malevolent charms.

  After leaving the monks’ pharmacy, Urbino turned off the embankment to explore the calli and cul-de-sacs of the working-class neighborhood behind the church. This was where Clementina lived. He kept his eye out for any of Luca’s death notices.

  He stopped a few residents, and mentioned the young man. They praised him and his sister, and expressed regret at his death. They confirmed Urbino’s suspicions about the death notices. They had been blown away by the last big storm.

  Back on the main embankment Urbino soon came to an iron bridge that spanned the island’s widest canal. Wooden, flower-bedecked terraces, fishing boats – mainly burchielli – and nets drying in the sunshine made a pretty picture, one that Maisie Croy would surely be tempted to render.

  As he proceeded farther along, the view of San Marco and the Molo became gradually lost to view behind him. What took its place across the Giudecca Canal was the broad Zattere, the dome of the Salute, and a tower that leaned prominently against the blue sky with its cushions of clouds. The tower kept forcing itself on his attention. It was the campanile of the Church of Santo Stefano, near Caffè Da Valdo.

  Urbino stopped for a Campari soda and stared at the campanile. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was signaling something to him about itself or, more likely, about Da Valdo, where Albina had spent the last hours of her life.

  After walking along the emban
kment for several more minutes, he sat on a bench on the grassy verge of the Fondamenta San Biagio. A sleek, white cruise ship was moored at the Maritime Station across the water. Small palm trees, close to the ground, rustled in the warm, gentle wind. Behind him were modern brick buildings. Mainly residential, they had long ago displaced the villas and gardens for which the island, especially this part, had been famous since the time of Michelangelo, who had come to the island in search of solitude.

  A great deal had changed over the centuries on the Giudecca, more than in most of the rest of Venice.

  You had to exercise your imagination to reconstruct it all. This was an activity that Urbino excelled at. As he sat on the bench, however, he didn’t exercise his imagination on the Giudecca that once had been – or, in fact, on the Giudecca at all.

  Instead, he tried to imagine scenes from less than a month ago. These included Albina’s movements during the last hour of her life, the dark, flooded sottoportico where she had died, and Luca Benigni’s murder in another part of Dorsoduro.

  For Urbino was even more certain than before that Luca and Albina had died from foul play. In the one case, Luca’s, it had appeared to be an accident – had been arranged to seem like one. In the other, a woman’s weak heart would seem to have played into the dark plans of someone who not only hadn’t cared whether she lived or died, but had wanted her dead. Needed her dead. And in both deaths the storms had played a major role. They had helped conceal the crimes, had provided violent distractions, and had even seemed, in the case of Luca Benigni, to be the cause of death.

  Albina’s fate and Luca’s fate had been linked. And filaments, like those of a spider’s web, connected them with some of the same people, who were themselves, in turn, connected with each other. Konrad Zoll, Claudio Balbi, Nick Hollander, Clementina Foppa, Giulietta Gonella, and Romolo and Perla Beato. And to this group, ever since his visit to Zoll’s apartment yesterday morning, Urbino had to add the name of Maisie Croy.

  Urbino left the Fondamenta San Biagio and went back in the direction he had come from, stopping at the Sant’ Euphemia boat landing. The vaporetto was approaching. In a few minutes he would be on the Zattere, where Claudio had said he was taking a walk on the night of Albina’s death. Urbino now believed that he had not gone to the Zattere but had arranged to be with Perla at the Beato residence, while they believed themselves to be safe with Romolo in Padua.

  Urbino doubted if Claudio was the first of Perla’s affairs. And he also had little doubt that his days as her lover were numbered.

  And what might Romolo do if he found out about Claudio before the affair was over? What might he already have done? Oriana had emphasized that he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Filippo. Romolo’s vision wasn’t the best, and Luca had resembled his wife’s lover even to the keen-sighted.

  Two passengers got off when the vaporetto docked, and only Urbino boarded. From his position in the stern, he gazed back at the Giudecca, where so many questions had formed themselves as he had taken his walk. And now another one emerged.

  Could someone, capitalizing on the resemblance between Claudio and Luca, have eliminated Zoll’s companion, somehow sealing Albina’s fate?

  And what about Zoll himself? Even with his mortal disease, he could have been murdered. This was something Urbino had considered before, and it now returned with more force. The most likely suspect was Hollander, who had inherited a great deal of money and property. But if he were going to inherit it anyway, why risk everything by killing Zoll when he was going to die soon? And where did Luca Benigni and Albina fit into this particular scenario?

  And if Zoll had been killed, who had been in the best position, other than Hollander, to do it? Benigni, certainly.

  And what about Maisie Croy? What had her relationship been to Zoll? Had she told Urbino the truth when she had said the scratches on her arm had been caused by a cat? How had her watercolor of the Ponte dei Pugni come into Zoll’s possession?

  And if Zoll had been killed, how had it been done? An overdose of medication, a withholding of medication, the gradual or sudden administration of a poison of some kind?

  Urbino got almost as much satisfaction from figuring out the why and the how of things as he did in ultimately identifying the perpetrator of a crime. There had been some occasions when he had been certain of the guilt of someone, but it had meant nothing to him until he had been able to reconstruct the sequence of events that had brought the person to commit the inevitable, murderous act.

  With most of the questions he was asking himself, he could go only a short distance, as would have happened if he had left the Giudecca embankment and gone down some of the narrow island’s alleys that dead-ended on the lagoon. He would have been obliged to retrace his steps as he often had to do when he became lost in the contessa’s garden maze.

  With all his questions about the deaths of Luca Benigni, Albina, and Zoll, he found himself blocked as he tried to move forward. But he believed he would eventually find a free and clear direction forward. He just hoped it would be soon.

  In the hours after Urbino’s walk on the Giudecca several things transpired which seemed to answer some questions but only at the expense of posing other more troubling ones.

  Urbino dropped by the legatoria near San Marco that he usually patronized. After buying a collection of pencils covered in marbled paper, he asked the cartaio, a heavy-set, whiskered man, a few well-considered questions about the marbling process.

  ‘Yes, Signor Urbino,’ the man said. ‘Those of us who deal with the paper before it is marbled have to be careful. We use a solution of alum on the paper. It’s to allow color to be drawn into it. The alum is toxic. But many shops get the paper already treated. Many don’t even do their own marbling.’

  Urbino thanked the cartaio and left. On his way to the Marciana Library across from the Doges’ Palace, Urbino went over what Clementina had said during her demonstration of the marbling process. He didn’t recall her mentioning alum, but this didn’t mean that she didn’t have the chemical in her shop or didn’t have easy access to it.

  Could she have managed to administer alum to Zoll? Had her brother been involved? What would have been their motivation? The obvious one would seem to be financial gain, as it would have been for Hollander. One of the classic motives. Zoll’s death might have meant money for Luca, and money for Luca might have meant money for his half-sister, struggling with her newly established business. It was Hollander, however, who had inherited Zoll’s fortune.

  But it was certainly possible that Luca might have got something, too, depending on when the will had been made. He had known Zoll for over two years, and Zoll’s knowledge of his own imminent death could have resulted in his drawing up a new will. Even a small sum could have been a temptation for Luca. And perhaps money for Luca would have meant more money for Clementina when Luca died, although she had said that he hadn’t been a beneficiary in Zoll’s will.

  Urbino wondered when Zoll’s last will had been made out. Before or after he had met Luca? Urbino was counting on Rebecca to shed some light on this through her contacts in Munich.

  At the Marciana, however, where Urbino did some research in the large reading room, he was pulled in directions that had little if anything to do with Clementina. It was all because of watercolors. Very clearly spelled out in the books was a warning against cadmiums and cobalts, which, like alum, were toxic. Watercolorists were advised against wetting the brush with their mouth to avoid ingesting the poisonous substances.

  What would happen if one or both of the chemicals were administered in large doses?

  But what motivation would Maisie Cray have had? There was nothing linking her to Zoll, Luca, or Albina – nothing concrete except for her watercolor of the bridge that had somehow come into Zoll’s hands and on to the wall of his Grand Canal apartment.

  Two women, Foppa and Croy, and both of them with access to poisons through the normal line of their work.

  Poison, it was said, was a woma
n’s preferred method of murder. Urbino believed this to be true, but not because women were by nature more devious than men. Women, as food-preparers and caregivers, however, were in an excellent position to administer poisons.

  Yes, food-preparers and caregivers. Had Foppa or Croy been able to get close enough to Zoll to slip him some poison in his food or medicine? Or maybe Luca, who was perfectly placed to do it? And once Zoll had been poisoned, how and why had Luca and Albina been murdered?

  But there was another person, and also a woman, who was in an even better position to poison someone. And she too had access to poisons in the natural line of her work. Urbino was dead certain that Perla Beato’s erboristeria contained substances which, in large dosages or when combined together, could be lethal. And Perla had been a nurse – or rather, as she herself had said to Urbino when he had visited her erboristeria, she still was one.

  The evening brought further complications as well as clarifications.

  First the contessa called. She had received a preliminary report from Bascomb about Hollander Tours.

  ‘From what he’s learned, it’s in financial trouble. He said that on the surface everything looks to be flourishing; but they’re not too far from collapsing. I’m surprised.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be. Even an old established firm, one like Bascomb’s itself, can look prosperous but have a rotten foundation. Look at some of the palaces here. Their piles are rotten.’

  ‘Poor Nick. He’s putting on a brave front. I know what you’re thinking. He needed money and he killed his stepfather for it. But he was going to die anyway, and from what Bascomb says Hollander Tours could easily keep floating for at least another year without any capital. And Zoll had a natural death sentence.’

  ‘I agree with you. I don’t think Hollander killed Zoll.’

  Half an hour later Urbino got another piece of information that did nothing to shake his belief that Hollander hadn’t killed his stepfather even though it gave him one of the strongest of motives.

  Rebecca’s contacts in Munich had informed her that Konrad Zoll had drawn up a perfectly legal will six months earlier when he had learned that he had only a short time to live.