“About twenty-five thousand dollars,” Anna told her, almost laughing. The amount was pitifully small compared to the sums in Sergio’s bank accounts.
“What a penny pincher,” Angela said. “Did she even love him?”
“Who knows,” Margo said.
Angela touched her stomach. “I’m not feelin’ very well.”
“Is it the baby?” Margo turned to look at her.
“I can’t believe it. How life can be wiped out so quickly.” Angela rose and steadied herself against the couch.
“Do you need help?” Margo asked.
“What I need is to go to bed.” Without another word, Angela waddled out of the room and turned down the hall.
“She seems pretty devastated,” Anna observed. “What’s up with that?”
“Her hormones are raging,” Margo said with a drawn face. “You saw her with that song. I worry about her even though she’s young and strong.”
“Well, we’d better search Alessandro’s library while we have the chance,” Anna said, snatching up the newspaper.
Sitting on an aquamarine divan, Margo and Anna hunched over the wooden drawer sprawled across their laps. Anna basked in a cocoon of warm lamplight. Around them were musty volumes of Favier family history, lining the far shelves, like a small army ready to do battle, to defend the family honor, even after death. A carved screen gaped open nearby.
“Now that we’re here, I’m having second thoughts,” Anna said. “We’re invading the count’s privacy. Do you really think poking around in his private papers is going to get us anywhere?”
Margo jerked her head up. “Not again! Save your moralizing. I’m not the one who decided to lie to the police and got into this mess. I have no idea if we’ll succeed, but I do know that you have no chance of finding out much on your own. You’ll find financial transactions all right, but with no context for analyzing them. I mean, is the murderer really going to jump out at you from the middle of some money transfers or whatever else you’re seeking? I’m just trying to help you—even if it means lying to my own cousin.”
“I hear you. Sorry.”
“Any of Sergio’s old acquaintances could be linked to his murder,” Margo mused. “We might as well start decades ago.”
“Someone could have wanted to settle a really old grudge, then.”
“Exactly. Or a new one.”
“And we’re looking for?”
“Hard to say.” Margo scratched her forehead. “Something curious. A hint of jealousy, infidelity, betrayal, some kind of cover-up.”
“Sounds right up your alley.”
“Just as I thought,” Margo exulted as she pulled some papers from the drawer, the sleeve of her persimmon-colored blouse quivering. “It’s filled with love letters.” She extracted a piece of paper as if it were a raffle prize, her eyes gleaming. “Here’s a letter from Gabriella, the dead wife, to Alessandro, just after they got married. I think you’ll be able to make it out.”
10 settembre 1950
Caro Alessandro,
Oggi era un giorno grigio. Non ho potuto scappare dal ritmo costante della pioggia. Esco e mi picchia ripetutamente sulla testa, sulla faccia, in un diluvio di goccie senza pietà. Cerca di farmi diventare un corpo pallido, bagnato, senza nome.
Immagino un letto bianco, con la tua presenza calda, che mi sta aspettando.
Tua moglie, Gabriella
“Did you get it?
“Most of it. Sounds like they were in love.”
“Certainly they were in lust. Let me read it.”
September 10, 1950
Dear Alessandro,
Today was a gray day. I could not escape the constant rhythm of the rain. I left and it pelted my head, my face, in a deluge of merciless drops. It tried to turn me into a pallid, wet body without a name. I imagine a white bed, with your warm presence, waiting for me.
Your wife, Gabriella
“I never receive love letters like this,” Margo complained.
“Maybe because you’re the first one to leave lately. You don’t have relationships that last long enough, or with the right people. So what happened between the time of this love note and the one from that ‘A’ person?”
“That’s the big question.”
“Anyway, won’t we just see a family tragedy play out in these letters with no clues about Sergio?”
“Can’t say.”
“Why don’t I keep this drawer and you check those others out?” Anna gestured toward the bottom row of the nearest cabinet. “If Alessandro organized the collection chronologically, that area should have things from several years later.”
“All right.”
Margo sat down in front of a drawer labeled “G” in scrolling handwriting. “I’ll see what this yields.” Her sturdy fingers flew through the contents as she gathered papers and summarized them aloud. “Repairs on the family gondola at San Trovaso, buying a new felze, receipts for rug cleaning, new dishes, a vase from Venini.” She raised her brows. “So far, fascinating. Good thing I’m a speed reader. Here’s some more, Murano glass tiles for the bath. A gilded nine-piece mirror specially made at Salviati. One kilo of sardines.” She sighed. “This collection goes on forever. I can’t believe that Alessandro saved all this crap.”
“You’re sure it’s all his?” Anna asked, pushing a stray wisp of hair from her face.
“It’s his library. But you know,” Margo brought one receipt closer and squinted, “it sure looks like the signature is Gaetano’s, and on the others, too. That would make sense given the label on this drawer.” She tapped the page down.
“And Gaetano’s almost part of the family,” Anna said.
“But what could he collect that would interest us?” Margo gazed at the beamed ceiling. “Does he even talk? Since I’ve been here, maybe he’s said ten words to me, all in Italian, most of which have been either caffè, or risotto.”
“Let’s settle down and keep looking—for some letters, some notes, some clues, some goddamn something.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Anna drew her hand over the edges of a batch of pages that felt like bristles on a soft brush. Thick cream-colored invitations to balls, holiday-party invites on marbled paper, marriage announcements interspersed with black-framed death notices marked the passage of time as clearly as rings on a tree. She rubbed her finger along an engraved paper with a sketch of the opera house. In gold lettering, it proclaimed that Count Alessandro Favier’s wife, Gabriella, was giving a recital on September 20, 1953.
“Was Alessandro’s wife a singer?” Anna asked.
“Amateur, I think.”
“Apparently good enough to rate a performance at La Fenice.”
Margo shuffled through the papers she had randomly pulled from the cabinet drawers before exchanging them for others. “Wait,” she said, sounding surprised. “Here’s something for you. Looks like a copy of a money transfer.” She laughed and passed it to Anna.
Anna held the faint carbon copy up to the light. She could just make out the cable’s destination: Dar es Salaam. “This shows that the equivalent of roughly fifty thousand US dollars was sent to Sergio Corrin, and the sender was Alessandro Favier.”
“What’s the year?”
“1985. What was Sergio doing in Tanzania?”
“You got me,” Margo said. “We know he traveled a lot. Charity work . . . then all that art.”
“Sergio was rich enough to cover his own expenses. Why was Alessandro paying him? I doubt he ever bought anything from Sergio’s gallery. It isn’t his taste. You’ve got to find out from Alessandro if he ever went on a trip with Sergio. Was he investing in something? Was Sergio? We need to know more about this.”
“I’ll see if I can figure out how to approach him. Check these out, too.” Margo placed a set of oversized legal documents on the divan.
Digging into the back of the crammed drawer, Anna pulled out a velvet book adorned with depictions of butterflies. “I found a treasure,” she said with
excitement, touching the embossed name on the front as she opened it. “Gabriella’s diary.” Graceful handwriting interspersed with black-and-white drawings of Venetian palazzos filled the pages.
“Well, then,” Margo said, rubbing her hands together, “where do we start?”
“Near the end of their marriage, I think. Wouldn’t you say that would be around 1954?”
“Yeah, and the beginning of 1955. Do you need my help?”
“It’d be faster.”
Margo sat down next to Anna and quietly read an entry.
November 1, 1954
When I am in his arms, I forget that time passes. Piero showers me with all the warmth, the adoration, that Alessandro, in his aloofness, withholds. Very quickly it seems, it is time to take up my heavy burden and trudge back to our cold home.
Monica’s little wriggling toes, her smile, remind me that I am alive. I was starting to think I had fallen asleep.
His mother, his business deals, and even his tennis game mean more to him than I do. At dinner, once the servants have returned to the kitchen, he is busy reading La Gazetta, scowling if his soccer team has lost. He doesn’t notice me as he once did. I have become a couch, a convenient and familiar object he has taken for granted.
For he really is two people. One laughing, a wonderful host, friend, joking at parties. The other is a bore who would rather spend time cataloging his family papers. He calls me “Butterfly,” but no longer is it a term of endearment. He thinks I just flit from party to party, buying jewels and fancy dresses.
Soon this butterfly will be flying away.
Mamma and Pappa told me Monica and I can live with them. Pappa never liked Alessandro, thought him a mamma’s boy who could not achieve anything on his own.
But leave Venice, leave Piero, my gondolier? I am afraid I would die.
“Well, this explains Alessandro’s reaction today to the gondoliers,” Anna said.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you about that.”
“Gabriella sounds as if she lost all hope. But seeking happiness in the arms of a gondolier when you’re a countess?” Anna frowned.
“She paid for it dearly.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were all murdered—Gabriella, Piero, and Monica, the little girl. All intentionally drowned.”
Anna gasped. “God, no wonder he can’t get over it, poor man.” She brought her hands to her lips. Alessandro had lost his family in water. She had lost hers in fire. “How did they know it wasn’t an accident?”
“There must have been marks or other trauma on the bodies that didn’t fit. No one will give me the details. I can’t ask Alessandro, of course—he’s ready to jump out of the palazzo window if someone even mentions Gabriella’s name. And it was so long ago, back in June of 1955, I’ve never wanted to turn over all the rocks and hurt him to fulfill my curiosity.”
“Were the murders solved?” Anna asked.
“No.”
“So those murders and Sergio’s could be linked.”
“After all these years?”
“It’s a slim chance, but one we can’t ignore. Sergio could have been behind the three murders. The count only found out recently, and he decided to get even.”
“Alessandro isn’t a killer.”
“You saw him explode at lunch. It’s like he has a shard of glass sticking out of his chest. He can’t hear the gondoliers sing without thinking of her, hating them all for what one did and hating each day he spends without her. If he found the person who took her away forever, I’ll bet he could kill him in a minute with his bare hands.”
“But why would Sergio murder Gabriella and the others? He was Alessandro’s friend. They still were making investments together last week. It doesn’t add up.”
Anna shook her head.
Margo unfolded a large paper and peered at it. “What did I just say? As these financial documents show.”
“Okay, I have another thought,” Anna said, “Alessandro murdered Gabriella and Piero, accidentally drowning his daughter, too. Sergio found out, blackmailed Alessandro for years until finally he got tired and stopped paying. Then Sergio threatened to expose him.”
“Equally hard to believe.”
“In those years, you couldn’t get a divorce in Italy. So you murder your cheating wife.”
“He still mourns her.”
“Maybe he mourns what he had before she started carrying on with Piero.”
“Let’s see what we can find beyond pure speculation.”
“True, but we need to keep our minds open to every possibility until proven impossible.”
“Listen, I need to check on Angela. I’ll tell you more about Alessandro when we have time. Why don’t you take these papers and the diary? There’s no way we can read it all here. There must be more than a hundred pages in the diary alone.”
“I’m not sure if I should do that, Margo.”
“Do you think we can come back any time we want? Alessandro would never allow us to root around. Everyone happened to go out tonight, or go to sleep early; this may be the last access we ever get. And he has so much stuffed away here he won’t even notice the diary’s missing for several days, maybe longer. If he looks, he’ll think he misplaced it. You have a dictionary back at the pensione, right?”
Anna nodded, still unsure.
“I found a ledger for you to look over, too.” Margo slid a tiny bound book onto Anna’s lap.
“Don’t forget, tomorrow we’ll attend Dudley and Agatha Filbert’s garden party; we can quiz the guests. Oh, and Liliana has agreed to talk to me the day after. Better to keep you out of that conversation. And one more thing.” Margo handed Anna a card. “Meet me here tomorrow morning at eleven. Even if you don’t want to buy a sumptuous dress for the party, which you should, we can look. This place has beautiful stuff.”
“How can you think of clothes when I could be arrested for murder tomorrow?” Anna said, tucking the card, the diary, and other material into her backpack. “I’ll return everything as quickly as I can.” She couldn’t help feeling like a thief, though she told herself she was only borrowing.
The Money Trail
Tuesday, early morning
At one a.m., Anna still sat on her bed, puzzling over Gabriella’s diary. Tracking her words, immersed in her thoughts, Anna observed the secret world of this woman, almost within touching distance. The emotions that had flowed through Gabriella’s hand onto the page had hibernated for decades before seeping into Anna.
She would hardly have noticed one entry, in which Gabriella confided swatting away Dudley to avoid a slurpy kiss, before laughing, had she not been attending his party the next afternoon. Gabriella’s remarks about her consuming love for Alessandro, her astonishing singing debut, little Monica’s precocious behavior, picayune bickering with Alessandro’s mother and her own parents had yielded no clues.
Filled with florid details of the Favier marriage, family, and friendships, the pages had been frustratingly silent about involvements with Sergio save for dreary real-estate investments.
For some reason, Gabriella had disliked and didn’t approve of Alessandro’s investing or spending time with Sergio. He carried on, and she was powerless to stop it. One year during Carnival, Sergio and his friend Klaus, from Berlin, came dressed as big-game hunters to the Favier ball, and Gabriella had taken pleasure in kicking them out.
Growing desperation engulfed later entries as Gabriella suspected someone of lying to Alessandro, poisoning him against her. Unable to defend herself, she was fighting shadows, she wrote. The villain remained hidden as Alessandro pulled further away, until the marriage unraveled and Gabriella turned to Piero for affection. She wrote her last note in June 1955. On the other side of time’s barrier, Anna watched helplessly, knowing, as this woman could not, that she’d be murdered within the month.
As Anna stowed the diary inside her suitcase, she heard singing. “Poi la nave bianca, entra nel porto,” the soprano sang. Rather late for
an aria, Anna thought, but a welcome respite from the gloom of Gabriella’s crumbling life. “Romba il suo saluto. Vedi?” soared the voice, nearby. She knew the Madama Butterfly lyrics by heart. Anticipating “è venuto,” she shoved the creaking green shutters apart. There was no soprano, only silence as she scoured the balcony opposite.
In the morning, Anna fought to forget the phantom singing. Since last night’s research brought no new insights about the diary, her disquietude only deepened. Sometimes after concentrating all day on an insoluble work problem, the answer emerged unbidden during the wee hours, if she was alert enough to grasp it. But today, she was seized by despair, unable to escape the mounting fear that a trove of incriminating evidence was being assembled by Biondi, painting an unflattering picture of her as Sergio’s spurned lover and handing the detective everything he needed to file charges. She pictured the clock in the interrogation room, with its merciless ticks.
Just as Anna gave up on falling back asleep, a fax appeared under her door. Brian must have finished her project early, carelessly transmitting confidential information to the pensione instead of waiting for her call. Leaping onto the floor, she snatched papers out of her backpack and gathered up the fax. Thank God Brian hadn’t printed “Sergio Corrin” on it, though any local might know the connection between Sergio and Banco Saturno, the name printed in bold letters atop each page. Saturno’s accounts at the New York clearer, Granite Bank, and a Wall Street investment bank revealed balances bouncing between fifty and one hundred million dollars each month—thousands of transfers at a frenzied pace. Including Liliana’s name had yielded benefits. Personal accounts, some exclusively hers, each held between five and ten million dollars.
Saturno’s geographic reach crisscrossed time zones and countries, connecting a staggering array of far-flung transactions beyond those she had already noted: Geneva, Frankfurt, Dar es Salaam, London, Palermo, Grand Cayman, Panama City, and even Lima, Peru. What did they have in common? Were Sergio’s clients actually his partners in illicit schemes?
Anna brought the faded ledger pages from the Favier library close. She guessed at the faint handwritten notes regarding large sums from the mid-1980s, the wire transfer from Alessandro to Sergio in Dar es Salaam among them. Other entries recorded lira payments to Sergio that continued until 1990. In all, the disbursements totaled three million dollars.
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