Black Bridge

by Edward Sklepowich

  “My fault? Perhaps we can make some good use of our meeting here tonight if you’re completely honest and tell me why you want to minimize the threats.”

  “Barbara—”

  “Don’t bring her into it! I’ll begin to think you’re using her as an excuse. It makes no sense not to be more concerned about yourself given the circumstances. I think you’re very concerned. You know—or suspect—what or who is behind the threats, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do not! They’re a prank, and that’s the extent of them!”

  “At Florian’s today you seemed uneasy when I mentioned the man the guard saw lingering at the Doges’ Palace,” Urbino persisted.

  “If I was acting ‘uneasy,’ it could only have been for Barbara’s sake. She’s more vulnerable than you believe. She might show you only her strong side—perhaps in response to something in you.”

  Urbino, who had no doubts about either the Contessa’s vulnerability or her strength, returned to the point the Barone seemed intent on deflecting him from.

  “You said that you had no idea who the man might be. He was about your age, tall, well dressed, and wore a brown fedora. Barbara said that you have a brown fedora.”

  “And so must hundreds—maybe thousands!—of men in this city. So you think I’ve been threatening myself! Barbara will thank you for that—if either of us is so stupid as to mention it to her.” The Barone stood up abruptly. “I have an early rehearsal. I hope we understand each other. I’d appreciate it if you ended your inquiries. All this nosing around is just what the prankster probably wants. The drinks are on my account. Good evening.”

  The Barone strode into the hotel.

  Urbino finished his drink as he looked out at the Grand Canal and thought about the Barone’s desire for him to stop looking into the threats. Urbino had promised him nothing, but he would put things on hold until after the Barone’s performance tomorrow evening. Of one thing he was absolutely certain, though. The Barone was afraid of something coming to light. Whether it was because he himself had made the threats or because something incriminating was behind them Urbino was determined to discover.

  7

  The next morning the Barone, without his brown fedora, went to the Doges’ Palace. The young guard was sitting in the canvas chair next to the entrance of the Sala della Bussola. He immediately recognized the Barone.

  The Barone spoke quietly with the guard for a few moments, then, with a glance around to confirm that no one could see them, the Barone took out a money clip and counted out several lira notes of a high denomination. The guard took them smoothly, slipped them into his pocket, and got up to make a circuit.

  The Barone felt satisfied at a difficult transaction pulled off smoothly. He was about to retrace his steps to the entrance when he saw the Contessa’s secretary, Harriet Kolb, coming down from the armory.

  “Harriet! What a pleasant surprise. I never would have suspected that you had an interest in lances and crossbows!”

  “Oh, I—I wasn’t looking at those things,” Harriet said. “I’m afraid I got lost. I—”

  “Could you have been looking for the bocca di leone? It’s right here.”

  “The bocca di leone?” Harriet looked confused. “I was looking for the Veroneses in the Sala del Collegio.”

  “You are lost, my dear! However do you find your way in the labyrinth of Venice? But you must have gone through the Sala del Collegio on your way in.”

  He gave her directions to the room she said she was seeking and then said: “Harriet, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to the Contessa about seeing me here.” He put a hand on her wrist. “You know how concerned she is about the threats. One of them was left in the bocca here, as you know. I wouldn’t want her to think I was worried.” He gave a dry little laugh that was more like a cough. “She’d be on pins and needles all during my performances, thinking I was abstracted. We wouldn’t want her disturbed, would we?”

  “Of course not, Barone,” Kolb said, keeping her eyes averted.

  “And please, my dear. Don’t stand on ceremony. Just call me Bobo.”

  He gave her wrist a slight pressure and released her with a smile. Harriet hurried away, passing through the Sala della Bussola without even a glance at either the bocca di leone or the guard.

  Out in Piazza San Marco the Barone decided against a coffee at Florian’s. It would make him late for his rehearsal. Livia, his director, was one of the people he least wanted to provoke, having had ample evidence of the power of her wrath. He walked briskly through the Piazza toward the Teatro del Ridotto. From a window table at Caffè Quadri someone watched his progress with a cold satisfied smile.

  8

  Urbino, sitting next to the Contessa, was actually enjoying Bobo’s performance. The Contessa need have no fear that he would “dry up.” Quite the contrary. He was very impressively flowing along. In fact, his performance was so operatic that a more appropriate venue might have been the Teatro La Fenice instead of the intimate Teatro del Ridotto. Bobo’s Pomegranate, like D’Annunzio himself, as Oriana’s account at Harry’s Bar had made clear, was pure Verdi.

  What Urbino wasn’t enjoying, however, was the rapt look on the Contessa’s face and the smile she occasionally turned in his direction, as if to say, Isn’t he marvelous! What more could we ask for?

  They could ask for very little more, Urbino had to admit. Somehow Bobo managed, with the aid of only minimal makeup, to transform himself into the gnomelike D’Annunzio as he moved from one episode of the writer’s melodramatic life to another. What had Oriana said? We want to be deceived? Well, Bobo was doing an excellent job of it.

  It was during the scenes describing Venice and the aging beauty of La Foscarina—the character based on the actress Eleonora Duse—that the Contessa seemed most entranced. She stared at the stage as if she could see the two lovers gliding in a gondola down the Grand Canal in the full glory of autumn.

  “The Palace of the Cornaro and the Palace of the Pesaro passed them, like two opaque giants blackened by time as by the smoke of a conflagration,” said Bobo in his sonorous stage voice, which was a perfect vehicle for D’Annunzio’s words. “The Ca’ d’Oro passed them like a divine play of stone and air; then the Rialto showed its ample back already noisy with popular life, laden with its encumbered shops, filled with the odor of fish and vegetables, like an enormous cornucopia pouring on the shore all round it an abundance of the fruits of the earth and sea with which to feed the dominant city.

  “Do not all fragile souls come here as to a place of refuge, those who hide some secret wound, those who have accomplished some final renunciation, those whom a morbid love has emasculated, and those who only seek silence the better to hear themselves perish? Perhaps Venice is in their eyes a clement city of death, embraced by a sleep-giving pool.

  “Does it not strike you that we seem to be following the princely retinue of dead Summer? There she lies in her funeral boat, all dressed in gold like the wife of a Doge. And the procession is taking her to the Island of Murano, where some masterly Lord of Fire will make her a crystal coffin. And the walls of the coffin shall be of opal, so that once submerged in the Laguna, she may at least see the languid play of the seaweed through her transparent eyelids, and while awaiting the hour of resurrection give herself the illusion of having still about her person the constant undulation of her voluptuous hair.”

  Then more intimately: “Of all your loving person I love the delicate lines that go from your eyes to your temples, and the little dark veins that make violets of your eyelids, and the undulation of your cheek, and your weary chin, and all that in you seems touched by the disease of Autumn and all that is shadow on your passionate face.”

  The Contessa gave a silent but nonetheless perceptible sigh and whispered to Urbino, her face slightly flushed: “Ah! Bobo is D’Annunzio.”

  And with this praise—rather dubious, considering D’Annunzio’s scandalous reputation—the Contessa returned her attention to the Bar
one Bobo.

  9

  The salone da ballo at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini had been transformed by draperies of gold and purple—the Barone Bobo’s favorite colors—by standing candelabra and hanging torches in bronze baskets that caught the melting wax, and by what the Contessa called the “Pomegranate Centerpiece” on the buffet table.

  This was the head of a woman, fashioned from autumn vegetables and fruits in the manner of Archimboldo. It represented Persephone, banished forever to the underworld after eating a few seeds of the pomegranate. This fruit—which D’Annunzio’s hero in Fire assumed as his mysterious emblem—predominated in the centerpiece and on the buffet table: firm orbs of them, sliced halves and wedges that exposed their crimson flesh, goblets of Murano crystal overflowing with their fatal seeds and dripping their juice that stained the cloth.

  Waiters in black tuxedos passed drinks and canapés while a chamber orchestra, on a platform beneath the sixteenth-century tapestry of Susanna and the Elders, played Vivaldi and Debussy. The crisp scent of the autumn night came through the open doors of the loggia overlooking the Grand Canal and mingled with the aromas of myrrh, musk, and amber burning in bronze chafing dishes.

  Urbino excused himself from a group the Barone was charming with his gallant conversation and slipped out to the loggia. He spent several restorative minutes looking out at the scene. The liquid boulevard of the Grand Canal reflected the sweep of illuminated palazzi on each bank down to the sharp bend of the Grand Canal, where, over the Rialto Bridge, a bright full moon seemed placed for maximum effect. A passing vaporetto sent ripples lapping against the palazzo’s garden wall and the blue-and-white-striped mooring poles of the water steps. The sound of laughter and a snatch of song floated up from a passing gondola.

  He was about to return to the salone when Marco Zeoli and Harriet Kolb came out. The assistant medical director, wearing a nondescript dark suit, looked as dour and unhealthy as usual, but the plain Harriet was dressed with care and attention in a long dust-colored dress in Indian cotton. This evening, glowing with something more than just the careful application of makeup, her receding chin and slightly protruding teeth were less evident. Could the object of her affections be not the Barone, but Zeoli? It seemed a more appropriate match.

  They spent a few moments chatting about the Barone’s performance, then Zeoli said that it was unfortunate that Urbino had had to cut short his therapy.

  “If he stopped eating foods with nightshade as I told him last week he might not need any therapy at all,” Harriet said. “But I don’t mean anything against the spa, Marco. After all, I’ll be coming there for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. That is, if I can save up enough money by then.”

  Harriet had an excellent salary but she always seemed strapped for money. The Contessa said she threw away a lot on palm readers, chiropractors, and long-distance calls to a card-reader cum nutritionist in London. She was now talking about her chiropractor in Dorsoduro.

  “And he kept putting this ugly indentation in my neck! You can still see it. Look, Marco.”

  She bent her head.

  “I don’t see anything, Harriet.”

  “Well, I feel it!” She rubbed her neck with a little frown. “And I don’t know why, but after every session my eyeballs were as dry as marbles. I promised Barbara I’d stay through the winter but I’m afraid the dampness is going to coax my lumbago right out in the open. And the bridges! Until you come here you don’t know that they’re really steps. It jars your whole system, day after day, day after day.”

  Urbino knew that the expression on his face couldn’t be as patient as the one on Zeoli’s. Zeoli had almost fifteen years’ experience with people like Harriet.

  “—and after taking the bicarbonate the other doctor prescribed, my stomach swelled up like someone was blowing up a balloon. The flesh in the area was tender and my ribs felt on fire. But then this new doctor rolled me like a piece of dough and something popped. I started to feel better right away. Two years before—”

  Urbino was trying to find some way of escape when Oriana sailed out to the loggia with John Flint, Hugh Moss, and Marie Quimper in tow.

  “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Oriana said, looking strident in her Versace outfit. “Barbara is cross with you. You haven’t met Bobo’s brother-in-law or Livia.” Livia Festa was Bobo’s director. “Be careful of Livia, though. She’s got her fingers out for money to make a film of Pomegranate.”

  “Ridiculous!” Moss said. His untidy hair seemed to crackle with emotion and his thin lips were twisted into a scar. “A movie! The Barone would be revealed for just what he is. A caricature!”

  There were a few moments of silence, broken first by Oriana’s operatic laugh. Then Quimper gave a little cry that seemed to be fright but soon revealed itself to be her version of enthusiasm: “Oh, my! The purple sky and the golden lights of the palaces! Just like the Contessa’s color scheme. You should try to paint it, Hugh. Oh, it’s really a dream! How could anyone help being in love here?”

  Moss didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes were searching the crowded ballroom until they lighted on the Barone, now in close conversation with the manager of the Teatro del Ridotto. They seemed to be exchanging sharp words. Moss’s stare was hard.

  Agreement with Quimper came from a somewhat unlikely quarter.

  “Oh yes,” Harriet said, “so many people say that Venice and death go together, but it’s really Venice and love.”

  “Maybe it’s Venice, love, and death,” Flint drawled. “I just read that Wagner wrote the ‘Liebestod’ of Tristan und Isolde in his palazzo on the Grand Canal. Love-death, death-in-love, love’s-death, and all that.”

  Harriet looked wounded. Flint, with a self-conscious shrug that showed off the lines of his Comme-des-Garçons suit to finer advantage, said: “Speaking of palazzos, I had my nose pressed up against the gate of yours this afternoon, Urbino.”

  “And speaking of noses,” Oriana said, “your sweet little one is dripping.” She took out a handkerchief and handed it to him. “Just like the boy you are! If you don’t get rid of that cold soon, we’re going straight to Marco’s spa for a month.”

  Flint dabbed at his nose with Oriana’s handkerchief, which had sent an expensive scent drifting through the air.

  “Quite a jewel, your palazzo,” Flint went on. “Too bad it isn’t on the Grand Canal. Veneto-Byzantine, isn’t it?”

  “But don’t you remember, John?” Oriana said. “I told you—and Hugh and Marie—all about it. It was built by some crackpot—no relation to Urbino!—back in the seventeenth century, long after the days of the Byzantine.”

  “But that lacy marble fretwork looks just like the Doges’ Palace,” Flint persisted, “and the big window on the second story must once have had polylobate piercings. And what about …”

  Flint quickly demonstrated, in considerable detail and with a self-important air, that he knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you have a mysterious room like the one here.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “A mysterious room?” Marie Quimper said.

  “Yes, dear,” Oriana said. “The Caravaggio Room.”

  “Tell us about it, Monsieur Macintyre!”

  “The room is named after a Caravaggio that has hung in it since the twenties,” he began. He then described how people sleeping in the room had met mysterious or unusual deaths, all of them members of the Da Capo-Zendrini family by birth or marriage. The last death—this one of a beautiful young woman—took place in the late thirties during the course of a house party. The Contessa refused to use the room.

  “It’s only a few doors away from mine,” Kolb said with a quaver in her voice. “I feel a strange aura coming from it sometimes when I pass. And my psychic told me to beware of locked doors!”

  “Don’t be absurd, Harriet!” scoffed Oriana, who found everyone’s superstitions but her own ludicrous. “It’s a room like any other and
one of these days Barbara will see how silly she’s being. We have to convince her, Urbino.”

  “If anyone could convince the Contessa,” Quimper said, “it would be someone like yourself, Monsieur Macintyre. You’re the kind of person one instinctively trusts. I felt it as soon as I saw your photograph on the jacket of the Proust book. You looked—”

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Marie!” Moss broke in, grabbing her elbow more roughly than was necessary.

  “Beware the monster jealousy, Hugh,” Oriana chided. “Remember, this is the city of Othello. I thought you’d bite off poor Marie’s head when she asked John for a picture from his modeling days. It will drive sweet little Marie away—or much worse! You can give us a sad example, Marco. What about that poor woman slaughtered in one of your treatment rooms?”

  It would be difficult to say who was more upset by her words—Moss, who looked as if he wanted to slap her, or Zeoli, whose sallow face had paled. The assistant medical director mumbled something about the impeccable reputation of his spa and excused himself.

  10

  When Urbino finally met Orlando Gava and Livia Festa half an hour later, Urbino recognized Gava as the “Roman senator” from the Abano pool. Gava gave no indication that he remembered Urbino, however. With his moon-shaped, unhealthily flushed face, pendulous lower lip, and drooping eyes, he was as homely as the Barone was handsome. He wore a black crepe armband. Sadness seemed to emanate from him in dark, powerful waves.

  In contrast to Gava, Livia Festa radiated health and good spirits. She had a plumpness suggestive of an odalisque pampered in a sultan’s harem. Dyed-red hair sprang from beneath a black lacy snood, and a dark green silk robe, with a cabalistic design across the top, bestowed the look of a priestess. A cape had been thrown over an armchair to accommodate a small white dog.

  “I leave the renegade to you both,” the Contessa said, stunning in a gold silk bias-cut Vionnet, “but I warn you, Livia dear: Don’t try to squeeze any money out of the poor boy. He lives far beyond his means. I have to go off to convince those men over there that having their boats diverted by my bridge of boats isn’t the same as sending them around the Cape of Good Hope!”