Black Bridge

by Edward Sklepowich

  The Contessa was trying to recall something. Her brow was slightly furrowed.

  “I think I know what happened to the will and the address book. Livia and Bobo burned them in the fireplace of the salotto blu the day after Orlando died. I noticed there had been a fire.”

  “So did I that same day. When I was in the salotto, Harriet came in and looked in the fireplace, too. She might have known the two of them were burning something. It probably only served to feed her fear of Bobo.”

  “What might Orlando have learned about Livia?”

  “If a private detective was involved and we can locate him, we’ll have a definite answer. My guess is that it had something to do with Rosa. The money was originally willed to Livia because of her kindness to Rosa. Orlando conducted much of his life based on his feelings for his sister. Yes, it must have had something to do with Rosa.”

  He tried to gauge whether the Contessa suspected the drift of his comments. He could read nothing in her face.

  “Livia was in Taormina when Rosa died,” he went on. “Rosa died ten years ago on the twenty-ninth of October. She had an attack, she was alone, she had run out of medicine for her inhaler. Orlando, Livia, and Bobo were all out having dinner at the Granduca. They—”

  “Stop right there! I won’t hear another syllable!”

  Several customers looked over at her.

  “I don’t care if Livia and Bobo hear me in the next room! I won’t have you insinuate such things. You’re determined to make Bobo guilty of even more than he is! I won’t have it!” Her face crumpled and she started to cry. “How much more can one person bear! I regret nothing, I tell you. I felt something. Is there anything to be ashamed of in that? Is there?”

  He reached out and held her hand.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “You did! You’re trying to plant it in my mind that Rosa’s death wasn’t all that it appeared to be. And I won’t take as an excuse that you feel I must face the truth, whatever that means! Haven’t I had to contort myself like somebody made out of india rubber to save you from knowing the truth at times? Excuse me. I’m going to the lounge.”

  She picked up her purse and left the salon. Urbino had more than ten minutes to consider her words and his own intentions. Perhaps he should have kept his suspicions about Rosa’s death to himself. The Contessa, as she had told him, had already “sent Bobo packing.” What had he hoped to accomplish by telling her what he had? Had she been right? Was he paying her back for showing him, through her feeling for Bobo, that something was missing from his own life? Or had he been discouraging any future contacts with Bobo, once her hurt had dulled and she might begin to rationalize his behavior? Whatever it was, he wasn’t pleased with himself. Of one thing he was sure: He hadn’t always acted well with the most important person in his life. He made a firm purpose of amendment about himself and his relationship with the Contessa.

  He was thus in a penitent mood when she returned, looking surprisingly composed. She gave him a tremulous smile as she slipped into the banquette.

  “I’ve just had the indescribable pleasure of sharing a mirror with Livia—or perhaps I should describe it as having my reflection crowded out by hers! Chattering on about her and Bobo’s plans for the New Year! She’s putting a brave face on it after having lost her slice of Orlando’s money.”

  “From what Gemelli said I don’t think she knows yet.”

  “Doesn’t know yet! Then Bobo doesn’t either! How marvelous!”

  She looked at him with much of her old vivacity. The moments they had just been apart had not only made him more penitent but her more forgiving, as she now made clear when she said: “I know that you always have my best interests at heart, caro. I trust you. I just wish sometimes that you would trust yourself more.”

  He was trying to decipher this somewhat cryptic comment when she quickly went on: “Maybe you think I’ve been a fool. But I never felt that way and I still don’t! I’d rather misplace my affections a hundred times instead of not taking a chance. Oh, passion comes in strange forms, caro. It has nothing to do with what we expect. I’ve seen a bit more of life than you. You’re still young. It isn’t too late! It’s never too late!”

  He almost expected her to reach out and grasp his arm in her urgency, but instead she took a petit four crowned with a hazelnut and bit into it. They sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts, until the Contessa said: “By the way, have you felt any twinges lately?”

  For a moment he didn’t know what she meant.

  “Oh, my toe. It’s been fine. I’d forgotten about it.”

  “All you needed was something to take you out of yourself. But just listen to me! We certainly don’t want any more murders, do we? Besides, you have me again.”

  “As we were?”

  “I certainly hope not! A woman needs more than that!”

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

  1

  Sebastian Neville, dressed in loose mauve trousers and a russet cashmere sweater, was the first to alight from the Orient Express and step on the fabled ground of Venice—or, more accurately, on the red carpet spread on the pavement of the Venice railway station for the privileged travelers. He turned to help down a lady, not young and certainly not his twin sister, Viola. It was a woman in her fifties, whose dwarflike, deformed body and features and emaciated condition were perfect illustrations of an obscure congenital disease. She gave her clawlike hand to Sebastian and peered around the station from behind thick spectacles that grotesquely magnified her eyes. They gleamed with something more than intelligence.

  “A dead girl named Lucy, kidnapped ever so rudely from her sweet, much-needed rest and most secretly and darkly conveyed to this very spot from a long way off. Then her little body snatched again and brought—and brought—” She shook her birdlike head and said, “And brought somewhere near here. Yes, a body of a lovely young Italian girl.”

  “Oh, hush, Molly, you’ve been reading your Baedeker again. Don’t try to impress us with your hocus-pocus.”

  The speaker of these words was a young woman whose height and angularity, auburn hair, and green eyes were such a match for those of the young man that she could only have been his twin. Twins of different sex seldom showed such an unsettling resemblance, and these two seemed to constitute almost a race apart, although they might have claimed kinship, if they wished, with the androgynous figures in Burne-Jones’s paintings.

  “Viola, don’t be a skeptic. There are more things in heaven and earth, et cetera and so forth. And don’t forget that Molly told you about that terrible fall you had when you were a child.”

  “Every child has had a terrible fall, although I’ll admit that you’re not the usual psychic, Molly. You don’t jabber on about what’s going to happen to a person and hit the mark one time out of ten just by the law of chances.”

  “No, dearie, I don’t, and I’ll tell you why,” said Molly, whose surname was Wybrow. “The future is as black as a coal bin! Only the past does the trick for me.”

  “Oh, the past is more than enough,” Sebastian said. “At least you’re not condemned to repeat it.”

  Molly gave him a puzzled look.

  “I see my reference has gone above your head. Oh, I didn’t mean it in that way,” he said, suppressing a laugh as he looked down at her.

  He directed a porter to have their baggage follow them. The three proceeded along the red carpet and then onto the plebeian stones of the station floor to the top of the broad flight of stairs outside. There they stopped.

  Without any warning Venice materialized in all her trickery, a stage set of domes and bridges, windows and balconies mirrored in the waters. It was an improbable scene. It shouldn’t have been but it was, and had been for centuries, and just might last awhile longer.

  “Now that we’ve seen it, I suppose we can go back,” Sebastian said, impressed but in no way about to show it. “Only more of the same farther down
the Grand Canal. But it’s a bit chilly, isn’t it? And it’s been raining.”

  He indicated the pools of water at the bottom of the steps.

  “And from the look of the sky I’d say that we’re going to be seeing more of Venice’s favorite element.”

  “Blood everywhere,” Molly intoned. “More blood than water.”

  “Better watch our step, then,” Sebastian said. “Blood’s a slimy, slippery thing.” He took Molly’s stick of an arm and helped her down the stairs. “Speaking of blood and consanguinity, what do you think dear old Countess Barbara is going to think about her uninvited guest?”

  “Oh, if you think your auntie—”

  “Our cousin, actually, but old enough to be our grand-mère,” Sebastian clarified. “No need to worry. You’re a small package. Any nook or cranny will do. And Cousin Barbara loves games. She’s planned charades or a treasure hunt or something like that for the weekend. You’ll be our little contribution.”

  Viola took the woman’s other arm.

  “Sebastian’s right. Barbara will be delighted. Oh, look, the gondolas! Barbara said her boat would be waiting for us, but let’s not take it. Only a gondola will do!”

  In her enthusiasm she came close to dragging poor Molly toward the rocking, coffinlike boats.

  2

  Unlike the Nevilles and Molly Wybrow, the Signora Marialuisa Zeno was far from eager to set out for the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.

  At the very moment when the three travelers from the Orient Express were making their way to the gondolas, the Signora Zeno was sitting as stiff as a mosaic of Byzantine royalty in a modest pension on the other side of the Grand Canal. One thin hand grasped a black cane with a gold ferrule around its slender wooden shaft. So lost and overwhelmed was she in the dark folds of her dress and the lace wrapping of her head that she gave every appearance of not being able to move at all.

  She and her daughter, the Signorina Bambina, had arrived with their physician, Luigi Vasco, the previous day from Rome in their ancient car, driven by a tenant of their palazzo in return for finally fixing his toilet.

  What the senior Zeno lacked in movement, her daughter Bambina more than made up for by so much walking back and forth and tossing of her head that her pink ribbons were in danger of being shaken loose. Bambina was a portly woman in her mid-seventies whose pride was her small feet, always shod in the most delicate and expensive of shoes. Her hair, hennaed and tightly curled, framed a face as pink and chubby as that of one of the cherubs floating across the peeling wallpaper.

  “I don’t understand, Mamma. I’m sorry, but I don’t!” She stopped briefly to stamp her tiny foot. “Why couldn’t we go yesterday or this morning?”

  “We must make the proper entrance. Not like dusty gypsies. It will be plenty of time in a few hours.”

  A close scrutiny of the Signora Zeno would have left the scrutinizer hard-pressed to detect much movement of her mouth. Now almost a hundred years old, she had long ago given up making any more effort than was necessary. This didn’t mean, however, that she was an invalid, but only that she knew the virtue of saving her energies for the important assaults of life, which had become fewer but much more crucial at her age. Like the ruin of a once noble building, her face and form encouraged the eye of the observer to trace the beauty and grace that still remained despite the ravages of time. Her hair might be gray and sparse, her bones sharp and brittle, her whole body peculiarly shrunken like some waxen effigy left out in the Roman sun, but her eyes, dark and eerily undimmed, looked at the world with almost all the hunger and curiosity they had had during the First Great War.

  “There’s the whole weekend for what we have to do,” she said. “And I don’t mean make peace with that English witch, Barbara!” She raised her cane slightly for emphasis. “She’s a fool if she thinks that’s what brings us all the way to a monstrous place like this!”

  She sniffed disdainfully. If she was speaking of the pension’s room, there was some justice in her comment. Mold arabesqued one wall, and an offensive odor snaked its way from the drains of the sink and the bidet. But as if to compensate for these discomforts—as characteristic of the city, after all, as the span of the Bridge of Sighs or the sweep of the Grand Canal—there was the view from the window: an impressionistic scene of faded brick and tile, obelisk chimneys, and wooden roof terraces, but beauties unfortunately lost on the mother and daughter.

  “Can I look at the photograph again?” Bambina asked like an importunate little girl. “Please?”

  Bambina grabbed her mother’s purse, opened it, and withdrew a piece of folded newspaper. She almost ripped it as she unfolded it. It showed an attractive but uncomfortable-looking man of about forty dressed in a tuxedo. Next to him was a handsome older woman.

  “Don’t forget what we’ve come here for! You must leave the man alone! I forbid you!” Signora Zeno said with a force that belied the minimal movement of the thin lips.

  Fire flashed in Bambina’s dark eyes. Almost sixty years ago her mother had said almost the same words to her. The pain was as sharp now as it had been then.

  Bambina nodded her head of curls.

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  But the fire was still in her eyes and she had to put a chubby hand to her face to hide the smile that was starting to crawl across her bright red lips.

  3

  Everywhere Dr. Luigi Vasco went, the past spoke to him, but it was absent of doges and Titian and Marco Polo. It was his own personal past, and not his whole past—a formidable contemplation, since he was eighty-seven—only that part which had unrolled in the serene city.

  The memories assaulted him. Yes, they were everywhere. At the Bridge of Sighs, which he had drifted beneath in a gondola sixty years ago. At La Fenice, whose mirrored corridors had reflected the passage of two people caught up in something as operatic as anything taking place on the stage. At the parapet of the Rialto Bridge, where he had waited in a pelting rain, not unlike the one yesterday, for someone to keep a rendezvous.

  Vasco could have provided a personal commentary of love and loss on almost every major sight in the guidebooks, ticking them off one after another.

  His steps inevitably took him to one building, however, that wasn’t mentioned in many of the guidebooks. Yet it was a place filled with even more associations than any of the others.

  Vasco first contemplated the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini from the opposite side of the Grand Canal, taking in its classical facade of Istrian stone with a frieze of lions, its veranda, its garden wall covered with Virginia creeper. He took the traghetto to the other side and spent several minutes contemplating the humble back of the building. Almost sixty years before he had passed through the first of the iron doors into the small, formal garden and then through the doors of the palazzo itself.

  Back then there had been a different contessa—an Italian one. Her house party had ended in death. Love and loss all those years ago, and now he was returning.

  A face appeared at one of the windows. For a fleeting moment it was Renata’s proud, beautiful face. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The window was empty. He turned away and walked wearily down the calle.

  Why had he agreed to come back?

  Buy Death in the Palazzo Now!

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Edward Sklepowich

  Cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0132-8

  This 2015 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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