Liquid Desires

by Edward Sklepowich

  Urbino felt a surge of love and admiration for the Contessa. He suspected that she was stronger than he was. He hadn’t acted at all as well when he discovered Evangeline’s infidelity. But Urbino reminded himself that the Contessa and he still didn’t know for sure about Alvise and Regina. Would they ever? He hoped for the Contessa’s sake that they would. She would be able to take anything except having to live the rest of her life with doubt.

  He took the scrapbook from his satchel and showed the Contessa Alvise’s signature. She nodded her head slowly in assent, saying quietly, “Yes, it’s his.”

  Urbino now told the Contessa about Flavia’s visits to the Guggenheim to see the Dalí painting and about his conversations with Novembrini, with Violetta and her neighbors, with Nicolina Ricci’s father, and—just a short time ago—with Madge Lennox. He finished with Tina Zuin and her apparent relationship with Novembrini.

  The Contessa shook her head slowly. It was a lot to take in. She sat there thinking for several minutes. Urbino didn’t interrupt her.

  “But Flavia’s death could have absolutely nothing to do with my Alvise, even if he was her father,” the Contessa said eventually. “Regina Brollo killed herself. Flavia was obviously troubled, and her friend Nicolina Ricci was viciously raped and murdered—there’s enough to explain the poor girl being driven to suicide.”

  She stopped speaking suddenly and shook her head.

  “Oh, it’s no use, Urbino! Even if I am right, I’m not going to feel any better unless I know I am—about Alvise or about Flavia. Which just brings us back to the beginning, doesn’t it? I’m afraid that our hands aren’t on all the ropes, not yet, if ever! Listen, Urbino. It might be more convenient if you just borrowed the Cinquecento so that you can use it to go back and forth between here and Venice. You can put it in the garage at the Piazzale Roma. I hardly ever use it. That way you can pick up and come here whenever you want.”

  “I’ll think about it, Barbara, but you know I’m not fond of driving.”

  Footsteps along the pebble path revealed themselves to be those of the maid, Rosa, who appeared around the corner of a Japanese boxwood hedge. The Contessa had a phone call.

  The Contessa excused herself. While Urbino was waiting for her to return, he went a few turnings into the maze. Many minutes passed as he thought about Occhipinti and how far the man might go to protect Alvise and the Contessa. He had already lied and concealed information, and Urbino was convinced that this wasn’t the end of it.

  Urbino wondered, however, if what he was learning about Flavia’s family and Alvise’s probable relationship to it was bringing him closer to an understanding of how and why Flavia had been murdered, as he still believed she had been. Was it possible, as the Contessa had just said, that Flavia’s death didn’t have anything to do with Alvise, even if he was her father? Not very long ago Urbino had assumed that, in trying to find out whether Alvise had actually been Flavia’s father, he would be led to the reason why Flavia had been killed. He wasn’t so sure of this anymore.

  The Venetians like to say that “there’s no north or south in Venice.” Urbino was beginning to feel the same way about this case, which was very much like the labyrinth of the city or, for that matter, the Contessa’s maze that he didn’t want to venture too far into this evening. As Urbino stopped at a junction, another Venetian saying came to mind: “sempre diritto.” “Straight ahead” was what you were often told when you asked for directions to your destination. The irony, of course, was that there was no “straight ahead” or direct route to your destination in the twists and turns of Venice. There didn’t seem to be in this case either, and all Urbino could do was continue to seek a solution in the Venetian way of “sempre diritto.”

  “Urbino, where are you?” the Contessa called, pulling him out of his thoughts. Her voice held a rasp of excitement. “Are you going to come out from hiding or are you afraid to hear what I’ve just learned?”

  Urbino emerged from the maze. The Contessa was smiling, and Urbino knew that Occhipinti was dead wrong. The Contessa wouldn’t break.

  The call had been from Corrado Scarpa.

  “I called him again yesterday to see if he could get some more information for us.”

  Corrado had said that Flavia, not surprisingly, hadn’t made a will, and whatever she had would go to Lorenzo Brollo. Corrado had also looked into Ladislao Mirko’s affairs. As Urbino already knew and had told the Contessa, Mirko’s father had been a drug addict and had been killed in an explosion while freebasing cocaine in his apartment in the Castello quarter. This hadn’t discouraged Mirko from his own drug taking or—it was suspected—from occasionally dealing in drugs to supplement his income. It seemed that Mirko was often pressed for money and had come close to losing the pensione several times.

  “I couldn’t agree with Lorenzo Brollo more,” the Contessa said as they made their way back to the house. “Mirko’s a bad lot. He was accused of attacking some girl in Verona several years ago. She was high on drugs at the time and no one believed her. You yourself have said that he acts suspiciously, and I know you didn’t like that scratch on his cheek. How convenient for him that he has a cat! You can’t believe a word he says.”

  “But it would be a mistake to assume that Mirko isn’t telling the truth about some things. Don’t forget that Graziella Gnocato backs him up on what Regina Brollo told Flavia,” Urbino reminded her.

  “As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on all that, caro.”

  For a few minutes Urbino and the Contessa walked in silence along the path with its rose bushes, oleanders, and edges of lavender.

  “And about Regina Brollo’s death,” the Contessa went on with what Scarpa had told her, breaking off a sprig of oleander. “There’s absolutely no question that she killed herself. Thirteen years ago the poor thing filled the pockets of her skirt with stones, took the steamer out into the lake, and jumped off. None of her family was with her. Before anyone could get to her she was gone. She had a history of emotional illness, as Graziella Gnocato told you. Corrado thinks Flavia wanted to get money out of me and that we’re wasting our time trying to find out if there’s any truth to her story. He says to let it go, but how can we? Especially when we think Flavia was murdered. Let me continue to do what I can, Urbino. I’ll contact the clinic outside Milan that Graziella Gnocato mentioned. We’re going straight ahead with all this, and I tell you from the bottom of my heart and soul that I don’t care where it leads.”

  She gripped his arm, dropping the oleander blossoms.

  “I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!”

  PART FOUR

  Open My Heart and You Will See

  1

  Back at the Palazzo Uccello later that night Urbino called Bruno Novembrini.

  “I thought you might contact me, Macintyre—but Tina isn’t here.”

  “You’re right. I would like to talk with her.”

  “Well, Tina doesn’t live at home with Massimo any longer and I’m not about to give you her address or phone number. I’ll tell her you’d like to talk with her.”

  Novembrini hung up before Urbino could ask him anything else.

  Urbino went down to his workshop on the piano terreno to work on the Bartolomeo Veneto portrait of a lady. He had finished her corkscrew curl and was now working on her drop pearl earring. The work soothed him after his busy day, and part of his mind was free to try to get a clearer, truer picture of the other young woman who had also once been flesh and blood.

  He ran through what he was coming to think of as something not unlike his own special portrait gallery. There was Lorenzo Brollo, the man who swore he was Flavia’s father and professed a devotion to his dead wife. Violetta Volpi didn’t disagree with any of this. In fact, Regina’s husband and Flavia’s aunt were very much together in their stories. The two of them seemed to be closing ranks, understandable enough when it came to a controversial death in the family. Urbino wondered what had taken place when Violetta visited the Palazzo Brollo on the
night Flavia died—and when Flavia had come to see her at the Ca’ Volpi earlier.

  Violetta’s husband, Bernardo, might be able to tell him a great deal. Carlo Ricci said that Bernardo had cared a lot about Flavia, but had Bernardo felt this way up until the end—an end that Urbino believed had possibly taken place in the garden of the Ca’ Volpi where someone struck Flavia over the head and pushed her into the Grand Canal?

  “Up until the end.” Urbino repeated it to himself as he continued to work on the drop pearl earring. Had Ladislao Mirko been Flavia’s faithful friend—the brother she had never had—up until that end? Novembrini had sarcastically called Flavia and Mirko “Beauty and the Beast,” but Flavia’s relationship with the homely little man could very well have been the closest and most important of her life. After all, she had confided things in him that she hadn’t told Novembrini, hadn’t she? And Mirko, abandoned by his mother and completely misguided by his father, might have found in Flavia the one true friend in whom he could confide all his own secrets and insecurities. The Contessa might suspect, perhaps with good reason, that Mirko was lying, but Graziella Gnocato, like Mirko, said that Regina had named Alvise as Flavia’s father.

  Urbino considered Novembrini and Tina Zuin, wondering if Flavia’s slashing of Nude in a Funeral Gondola had been provoked by the artist’s betrayal of her. Novembrini had seemed to be afraid of Flavia when he and Urbino had had their first talk beside the Grand Canal, but perhaps it was she who should have been afraid of Novembrini.

  As for Massimo Zuin, what might he have done if he had suspected that his most lucrative client’s career was being endangered by Flavia?

  That left Madge Lennox and Alvise’s old friend Occhipinti, both back in Asolo and both, Urbino had no doubt, hiding something.

  Was there anyone else? Urbino asked himself as he began to work on another of the earring’s pearls.

  Yes, there was. Annabella Brollo, who had struck Urbino very much like a wraith in the way she had appeared silently in the Brollo sala, in how she had slipped past him into the Casa Trieste on his own first visit there, looking at him from the corners of her pale blue, bloodshot eyes and leaving behind the odor of anisette. Had Lorenzo’s sister seen or heard anything of the encounters between Brollo and Flavia and Brollo and Violetta on the night Flavia was murdered? She impressed him as the kind of person who frequently listened from the other side of a closed door, who might appear on the scene when you least expected her. And Mirko said that she had been coming up the stairs of the villa in Lago di Garda during the argument.

  The doorbell sounded. It was almost eleven o’clock. Looking through the peephole and seeing Novembrini’s handsome, insolent face, Urbino opened the door. Tina Zuin was standing nervously next to Novembrini.

  2

  “As soon as Bruno told me you wanted to talk with me, I realized I should come right away. I know it’s late but I wanted to get it over with, Signor Macintyre,” Tina said in her wisp of a voice when they were all seated with cool drinks in the parlor. “I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about me—or about Bruno. I had nothing to do with Flavia and Bruno’s problems.”

  “Flavia was your friend,” Urbino said.

  The dark-haired young woman nodded. Tears formed in her round brown eyes.

  “I never thought she would end up just like her mother.”

  “You knew Flavia’s mother?”

  “Oh, yes. Flavia and I were very close until her mother died. I spent a lot of time at her house. My own mother had died a couple of years before. Signora Brollo was beautiful, and she loved Flavia so much. She would cling to Flavia, as if she were life and health themselves. I suppose it had a lot to do with her illness, and with her miscarriage before Flavia was born. She was a lot of fun for young girls to be around, always telling romantic stories, reading us poems, acting out characters with us. That’s when she was well. At other times I wouldn’t see her for months.”

  As Tina talked quietly, Novembrini looked around the room, paying particular attention to the Bronzino of a Florentine lady that the Contessa had given Urbino. He reached into the breast pocket of his sport jacket and took out a packet of cigarettes.

  “Did Regina Brollo ever mention the Conte Alvise da CapoZendrini? Or a man named Silvestro Occhipinti?”

  “Never,” Tina said without any hesitation. “And she never said that Lorenzo Brollo wasn’t her father. Yes, Bruno told me.” She looked at Novembrini, who was searching for a place to put his spent match. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be smoking. I don’t see any ashtrays around.”

  She gave Urbino an embarrassed smile.

  Novembrini shrugged and dropped his cigarette and match into his glass. Tina turned red.

  “I didn’t say anything about Tina, Macintyre, because I didn’t want to get her involved. I didn’t think she should come here tonight or even see you at all.”

  “But I told Bruno that you would think the worst of us both after seeing us together this afternoon. Bruno has told you about his relationship with Flavia. It had a lot of ups and downs, but not because of me. I admit that I’ve always been half in love with him,” Tina said with a blush coloring her cheeks, “but I would never have done anything to come between Flavia and him. Maybe Flavia and I hadn’t been close in the last ten years but I still cared about her, and I knew how vulnerable she was. But now, with her gone, it’s—it’s different. Bruno and I have gotten to know each other better.”

  Her blush deepened. It was obvious that Tina was in love with Novembrini and felt especially guilty about their relationship, now that Flavia was dead. But Urbino wanted to know more about Flavia’s childhood and adolescence.

  “How did Flavia feel about Lorenzo Brollo?” he asked.

  “She adored him, at least when we were kids. She tried so hard to please him, but he was cold to her, never giving her a kiss—completely different from the way my father was with me. After Flavia’s mother died, her feelings for her father seemed to change completely. It was as if she made all her love turn to hate. We were drifting apart by then, and she kept to herself a lot. She didn’t have many friends, mainly me and Ladislao Mirko. I know Ladislao has a bad reputation, but he was always good to her.”

  “Did you ever meet his father?”

  “Oh, no, he kept his father far away from Flavia and me. He was ashamed of him. Mirko used to have black eyes and bruises a lot, and I figured it must be his father, but he would just say that he had a fight with someone. I always thought that Flavia knew what was happening between Mirko and his father, but if she did she never told me. She was a faithful friend. There were things I told her and asked her to swear she’d never tell, and she never did.” A wistful look came over Tina’s gamin face. “When we were kids, Flavia and me, we used to play the ‘secret sharing’ game. I would tell her something she didn’t know about me and she would tell me something about herself. We used to have a lot of fun with it. Sometimes Mirko played with us.”

  “Did Flavia ever tell you any secrets about Lorenzo or Mirko, or her mother or any of her aunts?”

  Tina shook her head.

  “We just exchanged silly little secrets. We were only kids. Really, Signor Macintyre, I don’t know anything that could help you and your friend the Contessa.”

  “How did she feel about her aunt Annabella?”

  Tina screwed up her face.

  “She didn’t like her. Neither did I. Her father would make her go to visit Annabella. This was before her mother died. Flavia always wanted me to come with her. Her aunt Annabella’s apartment was spooky. It was filled with plants and flowers and was always dirty. We used to joke that her aunt was a witch and made poisons from her flowers. When Annabella wasn’t looking, we would pour the drinks she gave us into the plants. She gave us the creeps. She was completely different from the other aunt. We would love to visit her.”

  “And Ladislao Mirko? Did you like him, Tina?”

  The question seemed to take her by surprise.

  “Like him
?” She looked quickly at Novembrini and then away. “Why I—I never disliked him. I suppose I felt sorry for him, considering the hard life he had. He’s trying to turn over a new leaf now with his pensione. He has a good side. I went out with him for a while when I was sixteen. It was so strange. It made Flavia jealous even though she didn’t want him as a boyfriend.”

  “I can’t imagine you going out with that creep,” Novembrini interjected, an edge to his smooth voice.

  “Well, I did,” Tina responded almost defiantly. “He’s not attractive, that’s for sure, but he could be charming in his own way, and he was an older guy and all. But he tried to pressure me to go too fast. I wasn’t ready. In any case I wouldn’t have wanted anything to come between me and Flavia. Even though we weren’t as close as before, she still considered me as her best girlfriend. Why, just a few weeks before she died, right before she got some crazy idea and slashed Bruno’s painting, she gave me a whole lot of money. I decided to move into a place of my own. My father was against it, and I needed money. Flavia gave me two million lire,” Tina said, naming a sum close to two thousand dollars. “She said it was mine, and she laughed in such a strange way that it frightened me. I didn’t want to take it but she said she had more from where it came from.”

  This was the first Urbino had heard about Flavia having had a lot of money. What became of it? Was it possible that he was dealing with a case of a mugging gone wrong? Could she have left the money somewhere for safekeeping?

  “Tina, would you tell him about the Dalí painting so we can leave? I need a cigarette.”

  “Oh, yes, the Dalí. Flavia loved that painting. Her aunt Violetta introduced her to it. We used to go to the Guggenheim every couple of weeks. I’m afraid we were silly, running around giggling at the crazy paintings, especially the ones with nude men and women. We got a big charge out of the nude man on the horse on the terrace next to the Grand Canal and—”