The Last Gondola

by Edward Sklepowich

  “Touché! But this time around, it’s only some clothes and one lovely necklace that I’ve enlisted your help over. No blood will be shed over them, surely. Not unless belts prove to be snakes after all.”

  A pensive look came over her face. Urbino didn’t interrupt her thoughts.

  “You aren’t even sure if the belt was a man’s or a woman’s,” she said after a few moments. “I do have several snakeskin belts, but as far as I know, none of them is missing. I’ll check. But should I hope to find one missing or not? That’s the difficult question for me at the moment. I just can’t conceive of how a belt of mine, or anything else, might end up on the back stairs of Possle’s house!”

  “Neither can I. And as you just reminded me, it might have been a man’s belt.”

  “Exactly. You may be seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you should.”

  “That’s always a possibility.”

  “In any case, as I said a little while ago, there’s no blood on the scene anywhere,” the Contessa emphasized. “We’re lucky for that.”

  “There’s Marco Carelli.”

  “A boy who fell to his death when he was on drugs?”

  “There could be more to that situation than meets the eye.”

  “That’s what you think of everything!”

  “Don’t forget the Byron connection.”

  “So what are you suggesting? That Possle is like a spider enticing the fly—or maybe I should say the flies—and that he’s using these Byron poems as bait?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer if, in fact, she expected one. She went to the steps of the mausoleum and moved an urn of fresh white chrysanthemums a fraction of an inch to one side and then back again.

  “At any rate,” she continued, “I’m glad you’re being more aggressive with Possle. You need to find out more about these Byron poems he claims to have; but whatever you do, don’t go stalking around the house anymore. Wait a minute!” she said, straightening up and looking at him. “You’re not thinking that this Marco broke in to get the Byron poems, are you?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  The Contessa, framed in the closed doorway of the mausoleum, shot Urbino an accusing look.

  “There are more possibilities and speculations about the Ca’ Pozza than there are graves on San Michele, it seems. And I wish the man wouldn’t keep mentioning me. Why should I find the Byron poems of particular interest?”

  Urbino remained silent.

  The Contessa took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and started to rub the door handle with an air of industry.

  “I’m well aware that you’re not telling me everything. And I know that my clothes aren’t your top priority, especially not now that you’re salivating over the prospect of laying your hands on these Byron poems, if they exist. But I hope you haven’t forgotten about me completely.”

  “As a matter of fact, you and your clothes have been very much on my mind.”

  The Contessa gave one more unnecessary swipe at the door handle, then returned the handkerchief to her pocket. She bowed her head for a few moments in silent prayer.

  “And now, caro, let’s get the rest of this visit over with.”

  56

  The Contessa gave Urbino her arm, and they walked slowly along the path toward fields planted with rows of small wooden crosses.

  When they had arrived on the island, Urbino had inquired at the cemetery office about two particular graves, one recent and the other almost two decades old. The friar had been able to locate only one. Now, with a map, Urbino and the Contessa sought it out.

  But first they had to traverse an area of graves that were being exhumed to make way for the newly dead. The requisite twelve years of the former tenants had passed, and the remains from these graves would be deposited in a common grave or in an ossuary.

  The Contessa averted her eyes from the piles of dirt, shattered pieces of concrete, plastic flowers, and broken wooden crosses. This sight was particularly disturbing to Urbino as well. He preferred his graves to be romantically unkempt or well tended, with the bereaved making their pilgrimages and leaving their tokens.

  This was why he was moved by the otherwise stony and vicious-looking Armando’s devotion for seventeen years to the memory of his dead sister. Urbino firmly believed that people could be most contradictory and inconsistent.

  His impression of Possle, for example, didn’t mesh with either Razzi’s or Cipri’s opinions. In their way, they had both praised him. Could Razzi and Cipri have some reason for misleading him about their true feelings?

  They both apparently disliked Armando, however, and they had felt as uncomfortable around him in the past as Urbino did now. Yet Armando was capable of at least the one good act of remembering his dead. It redeemed a great deal.

  And hadn’t Marco been inconsistent as well, if he were to believe Gildo? Elvira’s son might have hung around with a rough crowd and broken into houses, but his motivations hadn’t been the worst.

  “I wonder where Adriana is buried?” Urbino asked, when they had almost reached the last of the disinterred graves.

  The cemetery office had no record of any grave for Adriana on San Michele.

  “It could have been in one of these areas,” the Contessa observed, still averting her eyes. “It’s been much more than twelve years.”

  “But the friar searched the records all the way back to the year she died. He found nothing that indicated she had been disinterred.”

  “You’ve lived here for all these years, and you’re putting your faith in the Italian bureaucracy? Even if it’s the version the good friars have here? And you saw how slow and confused the man was, not to mention the thickness of his glasses. Adriana Abdon’s name could have been written in capital letters and in red ink and he would have had trouble making it out.”

  “But a man who puts obituary notices in the paper,” he pointed out, “and who has commemorative masses said every year, isn’t the kind to have allowed his sister’s body to be dug up.”

  “Perpetual care costs perpetual money. But surely it’s the living Adriana who interests you, isn’t it?” The Contessa waited. “Well, aren’t you going to answer me?”

  “You’re exactly right,” he conceded.

  “Thank God for that. I was beginning to think you had some theory that she didn’t die accidentally.” She continued to look at him for a few moments and then said, “Maybe I’ll play my cards close to my chest, too, when it comes to this Adriana.”

  It was Urbino’s turn to give her a sharp, inquisitive look. “What do you mean?”

  “My conversazioni have stirred my memory. And when you mentioned something that Cipri said about Adriana, I got an extra nudge. Her voice. A girl about five years younger than me used to hang around the conservatory. Beautiful, with coal black hair and pale skin. But it’s her voice I remember best. She would sing her heart out in the courtyard by the veiled lady until they chased her away. She had no money to study there. We’re probably talking about the same girl. It’s not just the voice, of course. It’s the name, too. Remember how I thought it was familiar? I think that’s why. I must have heard someone call her that.”

  Urbino took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “It’s her. It’s Adriana,” she said, gazing down at it. “But how—oh, but of course, it’s the obituary photograph Armando put in the newspaper.”

  He nodded.

  “Did you ever see her in Possle’s entourage?”

  “No, but my contacts with him were limited.” She handed the clipping back to Urbino.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you yet,” he said. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

  “It’s about my clothes!” she cried jubilantly.

  “As a matter of fact it is.”

  He explained about the photograph he had found in Elvira Carelli’s apartment, the one of the Contessa taken at the film festival.

  “But why would Elvira Care
lli have a photograph of me?”

  Urbino didn’t respond. He wanted her to think it out on her own. She gripped his arm and they came to a halt.

  “My tea dress! My hat!”

  He nodded.

  “You see the implications,” he said.

  “Marco broke into the house somehow. Nothing has been taken since he died.” The friar at the cemetery office had given the date of Marco’s burial as three days before Christmas. It confirmed what the woman at the Rialto market had told Urbino.

  “But there’s still a three-week period between when he died and when you realized everything was missing,” he pointed out.

  She shook her head.

  “He took them. For her. What was it that Gildo said? Marco only took things from the rich and gave them to the poor? But why would she want my clothes?”

  “I just don’t know. We can’t even be sure that’s what happened.”

  “I just don’t understand,” the Contessa said in a dispirited tone.

  They resumed walking. Urbino was about to consult the map when he realized he didn’t need it anymore. All they had to do was direct their steps to the tall, bareheaded woman standing in one of the long rows of small crosses in the burial field ahead. She was singing a song that floated through the air.

  “It’s Elvira Carelli,” Urbino said.

  “Speak of the devil!”

  Dressed in her brown coat and yellow scarf, she was oblivious to their approach. Urbino and the Contessa stopped a short distance from her.

  She was singing an Italian lullaby. Her voice was full of feeling. As she sang, she stared down at one of the crosses, the sunlight making the gray in her hair gleam.

  The lullaby came to an end.

  “She has a lovely voice,” the Contessa said. “Untrained, but lovely.”

  “Like Adriana’s.”

  The Contessa looked at Urbino questioningly, as if she expected him to say something more, but he turned away and started to approach Elvira.

  The woman looked up. Her eyes widened. “You!” she shouted.

  “Excuse me, Signora Carelli,” Urbino said, “we didn’t mean to—”

  “You!” she repeated, interrupting him.

  But it wasn’t Urbino she was staring at, it was the Contessa.

  “You killed my son! You killed my Marco! How dare you come here! You with all your fancy clothes!”

  “Excuse me, signora,” the Contessa began, but she didn’t have a chance to say anything else.

  Elvira rushed up and snatched the muff from the Contessa’s hands. She waved it in her startled face, then raced across the field with it and down the path toward the cemetery exit.

  57

  “Another mystery solved,” the Contessa said as the two friends sat in the closed cabin of the gondola fifteen minutes later. The island of the dead was receding behind them, thanks to Gildo’s strong, smooth movements of the oar. The young man had a more abstracted air than he had had when he had rowed them out. Urbino wondered whether he had had an encounter the Elvira.

  “Another?”

  “Have you forgotten? The severed head. No decapitations at the Ca’ Pozza, and next door perhaps a closetful of my clothes, including a newly acquired muff.”

  “You’re taking this lightly.”

  “But don’t you see? No one in the house is involved, and I’m not going out of my mind. Not that I ever really thought I was, of course,” she quickly added. “Elvira had her son take my things. Now we have to get them back, but without making trouble for the poor woman, of course. I’m counting on you for that. Then you’ll be free and clear to give all your attention to the dark mysteries of the Ca’ Pozza. And you can forget all this nonsense about one of my belts poised to bite you on its back staircase.”

  The Contessa looked over at Urbino as he gazed off toward the Fondamenta Nuove where Benedetta Razzi lived with all her dolls.

  “You’re not saying much,” she said. “Thinking?”

  “Always thinking. You know me.”

  They spoke in lowered voices although, with the noise of the water traffic in the lagoon, Gildo had little chance of hearing them from the poop behind the cabin.

  Urbino turned to the Contessa. “Why do you think she says you killed Marco?” he asked her.

  “You’re asking me? That’s for you to figure out, but we shouldn’t expect the poor woman to make much logical sense. Don’t forget that she originally said it was Benedetta Razzi.”

  “That’s what I thought she was saying at the time. You’re right. We can’t put too much faith in what she says.”

  “Obviously not, considering that she thinks I’m a murderess!”

  The gondola rocked and dipped. Gildo managed to restore it to a smoother course as it continued across the gray waters of the lagoon.

  “There’s another thing,” Urbino said. “One could understand, in a twisted way, why she would want your clothes if she believes that you were somehow responsible for Marco’s death, but why would she have wanted them before his death? He had to be alive to take them, unless we’re going to believe that Elvira’s the thief.”

  “I can’t see that.”

  “Neither can I.”

  But the Contessa was not now paying attention to him. “Look,” she said in a quiet voice, “you don’t see many of these anymore.”

  She was referring to a funeral cortège making its somber way across the gray waters toward San Michele. In advance was the funeral gondola, a bargelike vessel larger than a regular gondola, adorned with the figures of a grieving angel and a lion and with an ornate double garland around the hull, all the details carved and gilded. Near the stern, in the place of the felze on Urbino’s gondola, was the casket on a canopied and gilded platform with black curtains. A pair of black-clad rowers was positioned immediately before and behind the casket. Behind the funeral barque were three gondolas with fur-clad women and men in dark suits.

  Gildo slowed their gondola as the cortége passed.

  “It is unusual,” Urbino said. He had seen very few processions like these since he had been living in Venice. It wasn’t the way that even the well-to-do Venetians usually conveyed their dead to San Michele these days, let alone someone like Elvira or Armando.

  The sad and impressive sight drove the two friends into their own reflections as their gondola moved farther and farther away from the island of the dead.

  Gildo, possibly under the influence of the cortège, was still rowing them at a slower rate than usual, and it seemed to take a long time before they left the lagoon and entered the Misericordia Canal. On their right was the Casino degli Spiriti, one of the Venetian locales with a reputation for being haunted, as Demetrio Emo had reminded Urbino.

  Urbino contemplated it now, hoping to chase away the dark mood that had descended on him in the last few minutes. He thought about the legend of the madwoman associated with Possle’s building, a legend that could be said to have a contemporary equivalent in the person of Elvira, with her singing, laughter, and curses that seemed to come from within the walls of the Ca’ Pozza.

  Possle’s hearing was too weak to allow him to hear Elvira, but if he could have, he might have been reminded of Adriana and her voice. But would it have been a welcome reminder?

  The same could apply to Armando. Urbino assumed that he often did hear Elvira singing from next door, but it wouldn’t necessarily make him feel positively disposed toward her. Although his commemorative masses for Adriana indicated that he hadn’t forgotten her, it was logical that he would want to remember her on his own terms. Elvira’s voice, so close to him all the time, could even be a form of torment.

  Urbino had become so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that the Contessa had been staring at him. She had a distressed look on her face. “It’s not over yet, caro, is it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The Contessa drew the blanket more securely over her knees and shivered as she had on the island of the dead.

  PA
RT FOUR

  WE’LL GO NO MORE A–ROVING

  58

  At ten-thirty the next morning, Tuesday, March 19, Urbino was on San Lazzaro degli Armeni off the Lido. To his silent exasperation, the old bearded monk seemed determined to tell him everything about the island, including the specific dimensions of its onion-shaped cupola and the names of most of the fifty relics in the reliquary given to the Armenian fathers by the Patriarch of Venice.

  Under other circumstances Urbino would have been more fascinated, for when he had visited the monastery island in the past, he had been a member of the island’s guided tour. This morning Father Nazar was conducting him around privately and giving him access to areas and collections usually unavailable to the public.

  He owed this special treatment to the Contessa, who was a generous benefactor to the Armenian monks. She had made phone calls as soon as they had returned from San Michele after he had told her he needed to make a visit.

  Father Nazar was taking his mission seriously. He had already run through an entire history of the island from its days as a leper colony to the establishment of the monastery by the abbot Mechitar in 1715. And then he had described the events of all the years since then, not only in loving detail, but also in a bravado of five languages with hardly a breath between. The Mechitarist fathers were famous for their multilingualism and not a little proud of it, as Urbino’s enthusiastic guide could not quite conceal.

  Urbino dutifully read the plaque to Byron in the courtyard, admired the Tiepolo ceiling, viewed the illuminated manuscripts, Coptic Korans, and Armenian Bibles, commented on the nobility of Mechitar’s bust, and asked questions about scraps of medieval tapestries, carved wooden chairs, and Buddhist papyrus inscriptions. He poked into every nook and cranny of the Byron Room with its paintings and memorabilia, all under the proud eye of Father Nazar who kept up a running commentary on the poet’s habits and program of study.

  If all this wasn’t enough, he also peered at an Egyptian mummy in its sarcophagus and feigned curiosity about a collection of scientific instruments. Then he spent a good half hour examining the printing and typesetting hall. There he paged through a book on Armenian national costume, plate after plate of women with embroidered and ornamented dresses, silver belts, and headdresses.