Death in a Serene City (14 page)

He looked up at Urbino, his face streaming with sweat, and held out the empty glass. Urbino refilled it.

After waiting for Carlo to gulp this one down, too, he put his hand on his shoulder. His earlier, momentary fear was forgotten. It seemed ridiculous in the presence of this so obviously shattered man whose ugliness only made his vulnerability more touching.

“Carlo, listen to me, you must go to the Questura,” he said with exaggerated slowness, foolishly assuming the man might be as confused by his proper Italian as he had been by Carlo's dialect. The words sounded hollow to his own ears but what choice was there? Then, to convince himself as much as Carlo, he added, “You have no choice. They'll help you. I'll see that they help you.”

Carlo stood up abruptly, dropping the glass. Just missing the rug, it shattered on the marble floor.

“No!” It was a clear negation shot through with fear. “I can't!”

He went into the hall and hurried toward the staircase. Urbino followed for a few feet, then stopped. What could he do? Carlo had stopped, too, and turned around. They looked at each other in silence. Urbino forced himself not to stare at the man's left eyelid that drooped so disturbingly, almost completely obscuring the eye.

“A favor, Signor Macintyre, not the Questura.”

So mesmerized was Urbino by the power of the emotion behind Carlo's words that he said nothing. Carlo seemed to take his silence for assent.

“Call the Questura tomorrow if you have to.”

He gave a grim semblance of a smile and went down the stairs. Urbino went to the staircase and looked down to see Carlo going not through the front door but through the one leading to the unused water entrance. So that was how he had got in. Had he come in a boat of some kind, an old
sandolo
he had cut loose from its moorings on a back canal? Getting around Venice that way would be a little less risky than using the alleys and bridges. Urbino silently wished him luck but exactly what this might mean for a man in Carlo's situation he didn't know. All he knew was that Carlo had come to him for help and that he had failed him.

16

AGAINST his better judgment Urbino didn't call the police that night. If someone had asked him exactly why, he might not have been able to give a definite answer. It had something to do, he knew, with Gemelli's attitude, his cocksureness about Carlo.

But beyond this was the feeling that he should be true to the assumption Carlo had left with. The man had seemed so desperate, had looked at him with such appeal, that to call the Questura would have been tantamount to betrayal, and Urbino was a man who believed betrayal was close behind murder as the most unpardonable of sins.

Carlo had come to him for help and this might be the most help he could give him.

The next day being Sunday, Urbino delayed longer than he had intended the night before. Surely not even the most diligent of Italian police officers would be at the Questura early on a Sunday morning, and he didn't want to talk with anyone but Gemelli.

It therefore wasn't until eleven that he phoned the Questura. The woman put him through immediately as Gemelli had said she would.

“Commissario Gemelli? Urbino Macintyre speaking.”

“Yes, Signor Macintyre, good morning.”

He sounded weary.

“I'm a little surprised to find you in.”

“Then why did you call?”

Urbino could imagine the little smile on Gemelli's face.

“You said to let you know if I saw Carlo Galuppi. I have.”

“You have?” There was a strange note in Gemelli's voice that he couldn't identify. “When was that?”

Urbino braced himself. Perhaps he had broken some Italian law about cooperation with the police.

“Last night about midnight.”

He gave the details.

Instead of berating him for having waited almost twelve hours, Gemelli said in a quiet, even voice, “Fortunately for you, Signor Macintyre, we've had a later sighting of Galuppi than that. I've just seen him myself.” Urbino felt relieved until Gemelli added, “In the morgue. A workman on San Michele found him early this morning. He must have been desperate to kill himself. Slit his throat and then threw himself into a partly dug grave with about six inches of water in it. Kind of a joke in a city with so much of the damn stuff but there was enough to drown him, I suppose. The medical examiner is still trying to figure out if he died from drowning or loss of blood. A mere technicality as far as I'm concerned. There's no indication it was anything but suicide.”

Gemelli gave him the opportunity to say something. When he didn't Gemelli went on: “In other circumstances your failure to call us as soon as Galuppi came there could have had unpleasant consequences but all we'll bother you about is another statement so that we can proceed with the closing of the case.”

“But what about the ransom note?”

Although Urbino hadn't changed his opinion about it, he brought it up to give Gemelli's self-satisfaction some check. Also, still shocked over the news of Carlo's death on San Michele, he didn't know what else to say.

“Surely you don't take that note seriously? Quite honestly we're more than a little surprised that there weren't any other letters, just as ridiculous, from every religious and political
pazzo
who can write and has the price of a stamp. We've seen all this before,” he said, trying to give the impression that this case was in no way unique.

“But why are you so sure that Carlo Galuppi killed himself?”

Gemelli laughed in a rather unpleasant way.

“There's no doubt about that, believe me. We found a razor near the grave, the only prints on it were his. Really, Signor Macintyre, don't be too hard on yourself. Who knows? Maybe Galuppi would still have managed to kill himself even if you had called us right away. Until tomorrow morning, then.”

17

EARLY Monday morning along the Fondamenta Nuove across from the cemetery island, Matteo picked up the dustbin near the Bridge of the Mendicanti and put it in his trolley. After he had rolled it over to the garbage barge moored along the quay, he stopped and took out a flask of anisette from his coat pocket. It was cold and he needed another swig. After he put the flask back, he removed the lid of the dustbin and looked inside.

On the top was a sack made of what looked like good, though soiled cloth. Partly filled as it was with something whose contours were obscured by the rich folds of the material, it fired his expectations.

It was amazing what people threw out. His apartment on the Giudecca was furnished with some of the things he had found over the past ten years, even down to prints on the walls and dishes on the table. The clothes on his back as well as the shoes on his feet had once been the proud possessions of rich old eccentrics. Matteo never entertained the possibility that the things he had found over the years could have once belonged to people who had as little or even less than he had. Instead he considered all these things as so much ballast cast off by the rich to keep their palazzi from sinking.

He picked up the sack, disappointed not to find it heavier. He looked around nervously, not because it was against the law to take what no one else wanted but because his pride was almost as strong as his inability to resist temptation. To avoid any prying eyes from the buildings along the quay, he brought the sack into a deserted
calle
and emptied it on to the damp stones.

At first he thought he was looking at a costume for
carnevale
. In the center of the pile was a full face mask that he assumed had been made to look old. There were red slippers and a torn, yellowed garment.

And then he saw the head—or rather the skull—covered with long black hair whose thickness and luster only made the sight more appalling.

A grin was frozen on its face as if to say, Now you've really found something, you old fool!

18

BECAUSE the body of Santa Teodora had been found across from San Michele shortly after Carlo Galuppi's suicide there and since no ransom request other than the Gramsci one had surfaced, the hunchback's culpability was clinched for the Questura and most of the public. What more proof was needed?

The press treated the murder as the bizarre act of an unstable son whose resentment against his mother had smoldered over the years.
Il Gazzettino
even found an old man now living up in Trento near the Austrian border who claimed to have seen Maria Galuppi slap her son on several occasions many years before when he was a resident of the Cannaregio. He had said nothing earlier because he had feared for his own life.

Now that Carlo was dead many people from the Cannaregio had stories to tell about harsh words between the mother and son or unusual forms of punishment, such as forcing him to sit quietly in a pew or to kneel in front of the coffin of Santa Teodora for two or three hours at a time. But none of these people could say for sure that such things had actually happened or, if they had, that they had occurred recently enough to have been a reasonable motive for matricide.

As to why he had also taken the body of Santa Teodora, most thought it was one final blow against his mother. A few others with a facile knowledge of psychology said that he was striking out at yet another symbol of female authority and that it was surprising he hadn't also mutilated the statue of the Blessed Virgin and the painting of the Madonna and Child.

Because no jewels were retrieved with the body, the legend about them was debated in the paper and in bars and cafés. Eventually almost everyone came to the conclusion that there had never been any jewels, valuable or otherwise. Even Don Marcantonio was quoted in
Il Gazzettino
as saying, “Santa Teodora always was and always will remain the only prize a true believer needs. It is almost sacrilegious to consider the need or existence of any other.”

The case of the Relic Murder was closed. No one was more relieved than the Questura and the city officials and merchants who pointed out that
carnevale
was only a short three weeks away.

The city, especially the Cannaregio, rested more easily although there was some regret at the loss of an interesting topic. The Patriarch and the Monsignor from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints made plans for the reconsecration of the body of Santa Teodora.

19

A week after Carlo's suicide, Urbino decided to try to get at some answers.

It was about two in the morning and he went to the library for something to read. He had gone to bed at eleven and slept soundly for two hours only to awaken refreshed and unable to get back to sleep.

Although he wasn't deeply superstitious, he put the George Sand novel back on the shelf, thinking it had already proved to be a peculiar kind of bad luck. No sense in testing the adage that things come in threes.

He settled down in a corner of the bedroom with a book that never disappointed him. He couldn't imagine better company during these dead hours than that of a man who wrote about Venice in sentences that resembled nothing so much as “those fast-gaining waves that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice,” to use Ruskin's own words.

He soon put aside the book, however, as thoughts of Maria's murder intruded.

The day after her murder he had realized at Florian's that he wouldn't be able to rest until he had a satisfying answer to the woman's death—and by a satisfying answer he hadn't meant one that named Carlo as the murderer. It went against everything he felt about the man and about the man's relationship with his mother. Carlo's own death and the closing of the case only intensified this feeling.

Commissario Gemelli might pride himself on being a student of human nature but in his own small way so did Urbino. Work on
Venetian Lives
had developed his ability to detect the truth—or the truths—behind appearances. This didn't mean that he always dismissed appearances as lies. He had too much respect for the truth to do that.

He opened
The Stones of Venice
again, sitting beside Ruskin as their gondola approached the city and walking with him through the Basilica as his guide convinced him, once again, that all the incrustation of the brick with precious materials only
seemed
insincere, that there was no intention to deceive, to be treacherous. Then, troubled thoughts of Maria receding into the background, he read what Ruskin had to say about San Zanipolo, die church of the Doges not far from where Santa Teodora's body had been found. When he finished, he put the book in his lap and mused on the image of Ruskin climbing a ladder in San Zanipolo to discover what he strongly suspected—that the profile of the sculpted Doge placed for all to see was faceless on the other side.

But what had been the point? Who cared? Why go to the trouble of climbing his ladder and risk breaking his neck?

And then the answer came not in a flash but, quite appropriately, like a gentle wave: To know, to know, as if knowledge, happy or sad, uplifting or disillusioning, was and should be reason and consolation enough for just about anything.

Ruskin hadn't hesitated to climb his ladder for the sake of the truth, even though it might not have turned out to be the truth that he expected and wanted.

The relevance of this to what he was going through himself struck him forcefully. And so, with the help and example of dear old Ruskin on this early morning in mid-January almost two weeks after Maria's murder, Urbino reached a point he wouldn't turn back from, no matter what.

Part Three

REMEMBERING HER DEAD

1

MARIA and Carlo Galuppi had lived in a narrow, dilapidated, four-story building that brooded along the Rio della Sensa not far from the house of Tintoretto.

In that same building four women now huddled in a room on the third floor to conserve heat and pass the dull afternoon hours. They might have been figures in a medieval or Renaissance painting about the ravages of age. The old woman talking reminded Urbino of the toothless hag in Giorgione's painting at the Accademia, except that Nina wasn't pointing to a scroll with the message COL
TEMPO
. Instead she warned what would happen to us all with only her face and body, but they were enough.