Death in the Palazzo (10 page)

It was only to be expected that this would be her first concern. Urbino felt uncomfortable as he remembered how Sebastian had joked about the Conte having “done in” the beautiful Renata.

“Well, the damage is done already,” the Contessa said with a resigned air. “I'll tell them to be as discreet as someone their age can be. All we need is for them to put ideas into Molly's head when she's already buzzing with them!
And
sleeping in the Caravaggio Room! You saw how Gemma takes it as a personal affront! And Marialuisa Zeno and Bambina can't be too happy, either. Who knows what Molly said to them? Remember! You're the unofficial host this weekend. You should have been seeing that things were running smoothly instead of telling tales out of school and having tête-à-têtes with Viola. You were alone with her when Sebastian came up to the Caravaggio Room!”

He ignored the implications of this and said, “Maybe it wasn't Molly who upset Gemma, it could have been Mamma Zeno or Bambina. Those three don't exactly make an ideal grouping. Rather—rather odd, wouldn't you say?”

“And would you call it even odder when you throw Robert, Angelica, and Dr. Vasco in, and then—just for good measure—
me
?”

“Viola called it a cozy group,” Urbino risked saying. “She even described it as incestuous.”

“Filled with the wrong kind of imagination, that girl, and don't forget it! Well, whatever you want to call our little group, there are too many balls in the air for me to juggle. I'd retire to my room for the weekend if the idea of three ailing women under one roof wasn't too absurd.”

“Three?”

“Me, Gemma, and Robert's pale and wan Angelica. Speaking of her, I wonder where she and Robert disappeared to? Gemma won't take it too lightly that her precious son was off with Angelica somewhere when she needed him.”

“Doesn't she like Angelica?”

“Let's just say that she doesn't approve of the family connection, despite all the money. She would have been happier if he had foraged more distant fields. And I think she's nervous about the precedent.”

“The precedent?”

The Contessa had temporarily lost him.

“The death of a future bride, her mother, so many years ago. In this house, and in the very room that our little Molly is even now making her own. We're in for quite a weekend! And this weather won't make things any better. We'll be thrown even more on each other's company. No chance for Torcello.”

She cast an apprehensive glance toward the window, against which the wind and rain beat with increased force.

A few minutes later Urbino watched the storm with alarm from the window of his room. The water level in the side canal had risen considerably. The pavement across the way was awash with water not only collecting from the rain but seeping from beneath as well—a very bad sign.

When he called his housekeeper to double-check the security of the Palazzo Uccello, he had difficulty getting through. First there was no signal on the line, then it crackled several times and almost went dead.

“Everything is fine, Signor Urbino,” Natalia said when he reached her, but there was an undercurrent of worry in her voice.

He hung up the receiver and continued to stare, broodingly, out the window at the gray sheets of rain.

5

“Aren't you a sly one, Countess Barbara! Trying to test me like that,” Molly said when she joined the rest of the party in the library for drinks. Her grin twisted her face all to one side.

“Testing you? Whatever do you mean, Molly dear?” the Contessa said, unnecessarily rearranging her Grecian-drape Grès dress, then shooting a look at Urbino. He was standing next to Dr. Vasco, Sebastian, and the Borellis.

“To find out if I'm a charlatan or not! I don't blame you! There are plenty around. But I'm the real, honest-to-God thing.” She seated herself in a green lacquer chair. “If someone will favor me with a gin, I'll tell you what I mean about testing old Molly.”

Urbino poured her a generous portion.

“Thank you, dearie. I hope you don't hold anything against me.” She took a sip of the gin and fixed the Contessa with her magnified eyes. “There's blood all over that room, Countess Barbara, and don't try to tell me no! Someone has been clawing at the walls. And a crumpled body of a woman was lying on the floor by the foot of the bed! Eyes of an innocent doe, staring up at the blessed orb of the world she'll never see again.”

Dr. Vasco gave Molly a glare of resentment. Gemma started and seemed about to repeat her collapse earlier in the conservatory. She had come down a few minutes before with Robert and Angelica, assuring everyone that she felt much better. Angelica sat on a nearby walnut divan, a quilt arranged around her. She appeared unmoved by Molly's comments—if she had indeed heard them, for she had her heart-shaped face nearly buried in a novel by Miss Braddon. Robert, however, who stood between his ailing mother and fiancée, asked his mother if she was all right. Gemma was now staring at her aunt Bambina, whose eyes were turned down in what seemed to be admiration of her small, patent-leather shoes.

“I—I'm fine, Robert.”

Robert then turned to Molly, his olive skin becoming a shade darker.

“You should watch your tongue! Stupid woman!”

Molly flushed.

“Molly doesn't mean to upset anyone,” Gemma said. “She—she's just doing what comes naturally.”

The woman in question beamed.

“I don't know what your game is, Mrs. Wybrow,” Robert said, “but I don't like it. My mother is too polite to tell you what she really thinks—and so is everyone else!”

His sharp blue eyes swept the room, pausing briefly but pointedly on Sebastian.

“Oh my,” Sebastian said, standing up straighter and adjusting his purple cravat. “I may be in for it. And Viola, too. We brought the ghost to the feast!”

Viola, now dressed in a plum-colored robe with deep sleeves, gave Urbino a questioning look. It was as eloquent as any words could be, asking if it might not be time to give the help she had offered earlier. Thus reminded of the help he himself should be giving, he stepped forward.

“Let me freshen your drink, Robert. Then I'd like to show you a book I'm sure will interest you.”

“My drink's fine,” he said with less than good grace.

“It's something the Conte found in Cairo about the theft of St. Mark's body,” Urbino went on, hoping to distract Robert by appealing to his medieval side, so often at odds with his up-to-date skepticism. “Privately published by a Coptic priest. In Coptic, but the Conte had a monk from San Lazzaro degli Armeni do a translation into the Italian. Both versions were bound in the same volume by the printing press there.”

Since another monk from this lagoon island had been the one to clean and authenticate the Caravaggio, Urbino wondered how much he was doing to smooth things over. But Robert didn't give any indication that he associated the island with the Caravaggio Room.

He said, somewhat begrudgingly, “I hope the translation can be trusted,” and opened the book at random.

He seemed on the point of temporarily losing himself in the account of the miraculous transport of the corpse of St. Mark to Venice, when Molly said to the group at large, “A young lady's body, I said, but—but actually there were two. The bodies of two most sweet and lovely ladies, both young, but one in the true beginnings of her verdant spring. It was almost as if—as if they were competing for my attention. Sometimes the impressions come so thick and fast they're like a whirligig!”

Almost regretfully Robert pulled his attention away from the book and closed it.

“There are too many distractions at the moment,” he said. “I'll read it up in my room, if you don't mind.”

He rejoined Angelica, who was grasping her own choice of reading material with tense fingers and gave him a tremulous smile.

“Venice is called a serene city, Countess Barbara,” Molly was now saying, “but it's very violent from what I feel and see.”

“Or
read
about in a guidebook,” Sebastian said.

“I was looking down at the two faces switching back and forth,” Molly said, “and then I saw pieces of another woman's body, a woman not young at all. In a sack and lying in the lagoon.”

“The murder near the Casino degli Spiriti,” Filippo said. “The two
gondolieri
who murdered the old woman and stole her money.”

Molly peered at him blankly through her thick lenses and said, “I could see from the shape of the woman's head that she was generous and trusting, probably prone to walking in her sleep.”

Dr. Vasco, who had been looking at Molly with a combination of bewilderment and uneasiness, now said in a strained voice, “You're interested in phrenology, signora?”

“Oh yes, Dottore. And also somnambulism, mesmerism, and—and all the untapped powers of our minds.”

“I've studied them for decades myself.”

“A
marriage made in heaven, it seems,” Sebastian said not too quietly.

“The young don't understand these things, Dottore,” Molly said. “Don't let it bother you.”

“It doesn't, I assure you, signora. Shall we go over there,” he indicated a corner dominated by a papier-mache Buddha, “and talk over what we have in common?”

He bestowed a quivering smile on her. Dr. Vasco, who had so obviously disapproved of Molly earlier, now appeared to exude only congeniality as far as she was concerned.

“Delightful, Luigi, if I may be so bold as to call you by your first name! But first a wee bit more Beefeater.”

With a brief detour to the liquor cabinet they went to the Buddha's corner, where they soon became involved in an enthusiastic but inaudible conversation.

Gemma and Bambina both watched the couple intently, as if they might be able to make out what they were saying if they only concentrated hard enough. Mamma Zeno showed an equal, although more covert, interest from the folds of her clothes.

The Contessa, Urbino noted with some discomfort, was looking at him with a frown. Surely she couldn't hold him responsible for Molly's disturbing comments to the group earlier and possibly now to Dr. Vasco? Short of removing the woman completely, perhaps locking her up in the Caravaggio Room, what could he do?

“Barbara dear,” Oriana said, “why are you frowning like that?”

“Oh, was I frowning?” the Contessa said and relaxed her face. “It must be this storm. Pounding and whining away like this.”

The storm had indeed not let up in any way, but if possible had become worse. At this moment something more substantial than the rain hit against one of the windows. Urbino suspected that it might be something dislodged from the garden beneath the windows. The same thought must have occurred to the Contessa, for she said:

“I'm afraid the garden is going to get all torn up. But I suppose that's the least of my—or anyone's worries. The Ca' da Capo was severely damaged back in sixty-six. It took years to make the repairs. I pray God we're not in for another bad time.”

“But this place seems solid,” Sebastian said. “Little chance it'll break off and float down the G.C.”

“We don't joke about floods in Venice. Solid, yes, but I have nightmares about the pilings. I see them slipping and sliding and breaking like matchsticks!”

She involuntarily shivered.

“Ah, yes, the
acqua alta
of sixty-six,” Oriana said with a little smile. “I spent it in a tiny apartment on the Riva degli Schiavoni with a wisp of an artist I thought would blow away. Filippo and I weren't engaged yet—or were we, dear?”

Filippo smiled at her indulgently.

“Who knows?” he said.

Angelica was looking with disapproval at Oriana as she continued her description of the charms of the
acqua alta
in sixty-six. Robert, now seated next to his fiancée on the divan, seemed lost in his own thoughts—rather unpleasant ones, to judge by the expression on his good-looking face.

Urbino, seeing a way to help divert attention away from Molly and her visions or flashbacks or whatever they were, decided to carry on in the manner started by Oriana. When she finished her anecdote of the storm, he began one of his own. It was secondhand, however, for he had moved to Venice more than fifteen years after the
acqua alta
, but he had heard it so many times from his housekeeper, Natalia, that he had come close to making it his own.

It was about an eccentric old woman who persisted in believing that her treasured Tintoretto had floated to safety from her decrepit palazzo in San Polo and not been stolen by thieves and later recovered in a storage room on the other side of the Grand Canal. For the rest of her life she lit votive candles in front of the painting, which despite its subject—a bare-breasted, fiery-haired Mary Magdalene—became known as “
The Miracle of the Flood.
”

When Urbino finished, it seemed that things would continue smoothly. Filippo next described his own impressions of the
acqua alta
, spent in the company of more than a dozen cats that had sought shelter with him in his palazzo and refused to leave afterward.

It soon became clear as one tale followed another that they were the group's way of exorcising their uneasiness over the growing intensity of the storm. Urbino was reminded of the diverting stories of the lords and ladies in Boccaccio, which in turn inevitably reminded him of the house party in the thirties that had ended in the mysterious death of Renata Bellini, four of whose blood relatives were now in the room.

It was therefore with some renewed nervousness that he pulled himself away from his own thoughts and looked around the room. Everyone showed varying degrees of interest or its absence, from the intense look on Molly's pinched face to the bored one on Angelica's pale one. Mamma Zeno now seemed half asleep, sunk into the cushions of her chair, and Dr. Vasco, with a fixed smile, kept nodding at what were all the inappropriate places.