Frail Barrier

by Edward Sklepowich

  Urbino wished the moment could last forever.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series

  One

  Despite a gray astrakhan hat, a Moroccan blanket with geometrical designs, and a heavy black wool cape, Urbino was feeling the cold in every part of his body as he sat inside the felze of his gondola. Yet he loved every minute of it.

  His heart went out to Gildo, however. The young gondolier, who had added only one layer to his usual outfit, was exposed to the buffets of the icy wind as he guided the craft down the small, quiet canal in Santa Croce.

  Yesterday’s snowfall decorated the tarpaulins of the moored boats, the edges and steps of the canal, the window ledges and eaves, and the bare branches of a tree that overhung a garden wall. Urbino was glad that the snow was lingering. He hoped that the city would see at least one more snowfall, bigger than this one, before the winter was over. When it snowed, the child came out in him, bringing memories of winter visits to his mother’s cousins in Vermont.

  On their way across the Grand Canal from the Cannaregio, he had noted with pleasure the relative absence of tourists. Urbino hated crowds, and the crowds he hated the most were the ones that flooded the city during the summer, armed with cameras, knapsacks, and plastic bottles of mineral water. He felt a kinship with the few tourists he saw today. He liked to think of them as travelers rather than tourists. They stood on the bridges and at the rails of the waterbuses, gazing around them with what seemed a pure sense of appreciation.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Gildo?’ he called up to the gondolier, the vapor of his breath making a cloud in the small shuttered cabin.

  Gildo’s laughter floated down to him from the poop.

  ‘I am more than all right, Signor Urbino.’ Gildo’s English had greatly improved during the past two years. He always insisted that Urbino speak English with him. ‘I am warm, not cold. Remember that I was the one to ask to take out the gondola today. And you know that it is my sport.’

  Last September Gildo had participated in the Historical Regatta on the Grand Canal. He and his teammate had come in fifth, just missing the green ribbon. It had been an amazing victory for two rowers competing for the first time in the event.

  Urbino never felt really at ease when he was out in his gondola, and not only because of Gildo’s labor. The contessa’s gift, given on the twentieth anniversary of their friendship, drew too much attention to him. In fact, this morning, shortly after the gondola had slipped out of the Grand Canal and into Santa Croce, a Venetian woman had called out from the parapet of the bridge, ‘L’americano!’

  It was a familiar cry. Although the woman could not see him inside the cabin, she knew who it was. Urbino’s gondola was the last private one in the city, and his was even more conspicuous because of the felze. Gondolas no longer attached them in inclement weather or in any kind of weather at all. They had become a thing of the past. And by now, the handsome, vigorous Gildo with his curly, reddish blond hair was well known as the eccentric American’s gondolier.

  What pleased Urbino about the gondola, however, even though he disliked the scrutiny and jokes, was the mood it invariably induced. Reflective, calm, and, yes, he had to admit it – with another twinge of conscience to accompany his guilt about exposing Gildo to the weather – privileged. He especially enjoyed the gondola when he was in the felze and could observe without being observed. He was particularly grateful for this advantage as the gondola approached a building that loured above him.

  ‘Stop here a few moments, Gildo.’

  It was the Palazzo Pindar. Since yesterday at Florian’s when the contessa had told him about Gaby Pindar’s fears for her life, the building had taken on a different dimension. Urbino still had no doubt that the Palazzo Pindar was a house of whimsy and eccentricity, but could it be one of danger as well? In his two lines of work, Urbino had been in many strange buildings and households in the city, but the Palazzo Pindar was certainly one of the strangest. And now it was about to be a place of work in both his lines.

  He had visited the Pindars with the contessa, and on a few occasions he had made solitary tours of its little museum. He had also accompanied the contessa’s maid Mina when she went to collect dresses from Olimpia Pindar, Gaby’s older sister, who had a dressmaking atelier in the attic.

  The Palazzo Pindar was located in the part of the Santa Croce district embraced by a long curve of the Grand Canal. The baroque building had an almost abandoned air. Thick chains secured two large rusted metal doors in front of the broad water steps. The shutters on the windows had long since passed the time when they needed to be repaired or – in most cases – replaced. Patches of stucco had detached themselves, exposing the bricks beneath. The glass in one of the bull’s-eye windows was cracked. The buildings on either side of the huge tumbledown palazzo were in good condition and only served to make their neighbor look more dilapidated.

  But the Palazzo Pindar was magnificent in its neglect, and its shimmering reflection in the greenish-gray waters of the small canal deceptively restored much of its former beauty.

  A tall woman emerged from the mouth of the sottoportico beside which the gondola had come to a halt, and walked briskly along the embankment toward the palazzo. At first Urbino thought that it was Eufrosina, because of the figure’s height. But it was Olimpia, her cousin. She was wearing a knee-length ocelot coat and a red-and-black cloche hat.

  She had her eyes cast down. When she reached the small wooden door that the Palazzo Pindar now used as its entrance, a voice called out her name loudly from the direction of the bridge at the other end of the canal. A middle-aged woman in an alpaca poncho with purple and lilac stripes stood on the parapet of the bridge. Urbino recognized Nedda Bari, who did local charity work.

  Olimpia had started slightly at the sound of her name, but she didn’t acknowledge the greeting. She went inside the building, without having to ring or use a key, for the door, as was the custom of the Palazzo Pindar, wasn’t locked.

  With an irritated expression on her face, Nedda Bari stared at the building for a few moments before leaving the bridge and disappearing from view down a nearby calle.

  ‘All right, Gildo,’ Urbino said. ‘The Danieli.’

  Before seeing the contessa at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini as they had agreed, Urbino needed to make arrangements at the Hotel Danieli for a visitor. It was his ex-brother-in-law, Eugene Hennepin, with whom he would leave for America next month. Eugene preferred to stay in a hotel and wanted to return to the Danieli, which he had been pleased with during his first visit to Venice ten years ago.

  Gildo started to manoeuvre the boat in the direction that would take them back into the Grand Canal.

  Two

  The contessa checked the clock on the mantle of the morning room. Urbino should be coming in less than an hour. A strong fire crackled in the fireplace with wood from Asolo where the contessa had a villa.

  ‘Tell me again, Mina,’ the contessa insisted. ‘Exactly what did Signorina Gaby say to you?’

  The contessa wanted to be sure of what Mina had told her. Urbino would want every detail.

  A look of impatience, touched with irritation, passed over the pretty features of the contessa’s personal maid, but they were quickly banished. Mina, slim and dark-haired, with delicate, porcelain features, had just celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. The contessa always tried to be careful of Mina’s feelings, knowing how high-strung she was. The palazzo staff thought that she favored Mina. She supposed she did. It was a weakness she usually succumbed to with her personal maid, whoever she was. In the case of Mina, the habit was more pronounced. The girl was as endearing as she was efficient, and she had a quick intelligence and a light sense of humor, although none of the latter was in evidence on this occasion or, for that matter, the contessa realized, had been for the past few months.

  ‘She said that someone was trying to kill her.’ Mina, whose Italian was marked by a Sicilian accent, lowered her voice
when she said ‘kill’. She stared at a small table with a collection of ceramic animals as if she were studying them. ‘I didn’t believe her. But she seemed frightened.’

  So did Mina. When she turned her eyes to the contessa, they were wide and unblinking.

  ‘When did she tell you this?’

  ‘Last week when I brought Signorina Olimpia the dress material from you.’

  Whenever Mina spoke with the contessa about Olimpia Pindar she was always formal even though the relationship between the two women was intimate. The contessa pretended she did not know the particular nature of the relationship even though Olimpia had confided in her and even though it was evident to most people who had even limited contact with the two of them. It had begun about seven months ago. The contessa feigned ignorance for Mina’s sake, and not because she disapproved of the relationship although, in her mind and in conversations with Urbino, she called it a ‘romantic friendship’. Mina had never given the slightest indication that it was something she would like to have directly acknowledged.

  ‘Did you mention it to her?’

  Mina did not respond right away. When she did, it was in a rush of words.

  ‘I told her the same day. She wasn’t surprised. She said that I shouldn’t worry about it, that her sister was strange, and that she imagined things. Signorina Gaby is strange, contessa. She never leaves the house. I don’t think she even looks out the window. And she sometimes just stands at the door of the museum with a sad expression on her face, staring at nothing. She frightens me.’

  ‘Many unfortunate people have her kind of problem. There’s no harm in it to you or to anyone else. But why did you decide to tell me what she said?’

  ‘Because I’m afraid that Signorina Olimpia is wrong! Sometimes when we are close to someone, even living in the same house day after day, we can’t see what other people can see. Do you understand?’

  The contessa did, and she knew why Mina said this. From what the contessa had learned about her from the young woman’s cousin in Venice, she had suffered from emotional problems when she was an adolescent, and her large family in Palermo had neglected her. The cousin, now dead, had agreed to take Mina in nine years ago.

  ‘She is very upset,’ Mina went on. ‘I felt it even before she said anything to me.’

  Mina touched the region of her heart. In the year that she had been working at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, she had given the contessa several examples of her sensitivity to the feelings of others. She could easily identify delicate shades in the contessa’s moods and would respond accordingly.

  ‘Has she spoken to you again?’

  ‘No, but when I see her she looks at me in a pitiful way, as if she wants me to help her. I don’t know why she told me! I’m afraid she will give me the evil eye. You are relatives, contessa. Relatives must help each other. You are a kind lady. Maybe you can do something. But please do not tell Signorina Olimpia that I told you. She might be upset with me.’

  ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t be, Mina. She would understand that you’ve told me because you’re worried for her sister. But I won’t say anything to her.’

  The contessa considered this to be promise enough. It did not include Urbino. Mina showed a reluctance to pursue the topic and asked to leave shortly afterward. She said that she would take Zouzou out for a walk although she had walked the cocker earlier that morning.

  When the contessa was alone, she sat on the sofa staring at the painting on the opposite wall, going over what Mina had just told her. In substance, it was exactly what Mina had told her before. The contessa went over to a lacquered cabinet. She took out an old photograph album that was piled with others on the bottom shelf. She returned to the sofa and paged through the album until she reached a section devoted to the Pindar family.

  She looked at a photograph of Gaby. It was one of the few photographs of her cousin in the album, and it had been taken more than twenty-five years ago. It showed a pretty, bright-eyed young woman standing in front of the Basilica arm in arm with her older brother Ercule. She seemed so happy, but this had been before her illness descended on her. She had little joy in life these days. But beneath all her fears and confusions must lie the Gaby that used to be. If only she could be released from the prison of her dark thoughts and emotions.

  ‘You obviously don’t want to believe she’s in danger,’ Urbino said half an hour later as he stood in front of the fireplace warming himself. ‘And I know why.’

  ‘Why?’

  But the contessa did not need to ask. She knew what he was going to say but dreaded hearing it put into words.

  She cast her eyes down at one arm of her chair, as if she were intent on examining the spot where Zouzou had ripped the Fortuny fabric.

  ‘Because if there’s any basis to Gaby’s fears,’ Urbino responded, ‘it means that the danger will come while she’s in the house. She hasn’t left it in years, and she’s unlikely to do it now, not unless she seeks help. If she’s afraid, she’s afraid of someone in the house. And that means,’ he emphasized as he seated himself in the armchair across from the contessa, ‘that she’s in danger from someone in her own family, someone in your family.’

  The contessa was caught out. Urbino had quickly seized upon the main reason for her reluctance to believe Gaby was in danger. The probability was that harm would come to her from someone in the family. And it had become clear to the contessa, after many years of Urbino’s sleuthing, that people were most often in danger from those closest to them.

  ‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘My family.’

  The contessa felt a sharp, familiar ache as she said the word. She and the conte had not been able to have any children, something they both had greatly hoped for. It made her value what family she did have, even family as remotely related – and uncongenial as they sometimes could be – as the Pindars.

  ‘But there’s a big flaw in your reasoning, caro.’ She turned to him with an air of triumph. She had been caught and now she was catching him out, and enjoying it. ‘You know how ridiculous they are in that house – or should I say how foolish – the way they leave the front door unlocked during the day. They are so infuriating, so perverse! She could be afraid of someone from outside harming her. It would be all too easy to get inside, at least during the day.’

  The contessa had little patience with the Pindar custom. It went back to one of the earliest Pindars who had been a monk and insisted that the building be kept open for anyone who needed food or shelter. However did Gaby put up with the arrangement? But perhaps she was out-voted by her sister and brother.

  Urbino nodded. ‘True. But logic may be of little help in trying to figure Gaby out – or any others among your distant relatives. And without logic I’m almost at a loss. Actually, I have never been able to fix the Pindars clearly in my mind – their history, I mean. I suppose I’ve had no need to before now. I know things in bits and pieces, and I certainly have my impressions, but it would be helpful to have the whole picture, or as much of it as you can give.’ He played a few random notes on the fin de siècle Viennese piano. ‘Why not tell me what you know and not leave anything out because you assume I know it? Even with that, there will be holes that we’ll probably have to fill in later, but we don’t know what those holes are now or where they are.’

  ‘That’s the problem with holes much of the time, isn’t it? You don’t know where they are until you fall into them. Oriana might be able to help us with some of them.’ She was referring to her friend Oriana Borelli, who seemed to know more about the private lives of others than anyone else in the contessa’s or Urbino’s circle. Oriana’s knowledge, in which romantic and sexual intrigues played a prominent role, had come to their aid before. ‘But she won’t be back from Cortina for about two weeks.’

  ‘Is she there with Filippo?’

  The contessa smiled. Oriana had a well-earned reputation – as did her husband Filippo – for an ongoing series of affairs that did not weaken their marriage but somehow
strengthened it. ‘Let’s say that the two of them went there together. Whether they went their separate ways once they got there, I have no idea.’

  Urbino reseated himself. ‘So what do you know from your own chaste perspective?’

  ‘There is a lot of territory between the chaste and Oriana,’ the contessa observed. ‘I can speak to the family relationships involved. They are always important when you want to understand people. It’s a longish story. Well, as you know, the Pindars and I are related through my mother’s side of the family. Her mother – my grandmother – had a sister named Isabel. She came to visit American friends who had rented a palazzo by the Accademia Bridge. Like you and me, Isabel never left. She met Federico Pindar, the only son of a family that had made a fortune from shipping in the eighteenth century. They had their own shipping company, Pindar Lines. It doesn’t exist anymore. Like much of what the Pindar family had back then, it’s disappeared. Federico swept her off her feet. He was almost twenty years older than she was, and everyone thought he was never going to marry. When I met Alvise, my mother said that I was following in the footsteps of her aunt, since Alvise was twenty years older than I was. Alvise –’ The contessa broke off. Her mood, which had been vivid and gay with the story she was telling, darkened. Tears welled in her eyes. ‘Listen to me! This is not about Alvise, but the Pindars.’

  ‘I understand. Your wedding anniversary is coming up. He’s on your mind.’

  ‘I wish you had known him, caro.’

  Alvise had died three years before she had met Urbino.

  ‘I feel as if I know him well. Through you. And everyone who speaks of him has a high regard for him and his memory.’

  She gave Urbino a smile of gratitude. ‘Alvise knew the Pindars before we married. He called them the “merchant family with the soul of poets.” Because of their name. The family has always claimed they are related to the Greek poet, but I doubt that. Their name used to be Pindaro but the “o” got lost somewhere back in the eighteenth century.’