Death in the Palazzo (2 page)

“A dead girl named Lucy, kidnapped ever so rudely from her sweet, much-needed rest and most secretly and darkly conveyed to this very spot from a long way off. Then her little body snatched again and brought—and brought—” She shook her birdlike head and said, “And brought somewhere near here. Yes, a body of a lovely young Italian girl.”

“Oh, hush, Molly, you've been reading your Baedeker again. Don't try to impress us with your hocus-pocus.”

The speaker of these words was a young woman whose height and angularity, auburn hair, and green eyes were such a match for those of the young man that she could only have been his twin. Twins of different sex seldom showed such an unsettling resemblance, and these two seemed to constitute almost a race apart, although they might have claimed kinship, if they wished, with the androgynous figures in Burne-Jones's paintings.

“Viola, don't be a skeptic. There are more things in heaven and earth, et cetera and so forth. And don't forget that Molly told you about that terrible fall you had when you were a child.”

“Every child has had a terrible fall, although I'll admit that you're not the usual psychic, Molly. You don't jabber on about what's going to happen to a person and hit the mark one time out of ten just by the law of chances.”

“No, dearie, I don't, and I'll tell you why,” said Molly, whose surname was Wybrow. “The future is as black as a coal bin! Only the past does the trick for me.”

“Oh, the past is more than enough,” Sebastian said. “At least you're not condemned to repeat it.”

Molly gave him a puzzled look.

“I see my reference has gone above your head. Oh, I didn't mean it in that way,” he said, suppressing a laugh as he looked down at her.

He directed a porter to have their baggage follow them. The three proceeded along the red carpet and then onto the plebeian stones of the station floor to the top of the broad flight of stairs outside. There they stopped.

Without any warning Venice materialized in all her trickery, a stage set of domes and bridges, windows and balconies mirrored in the waters. It was an improbable scene. It shouldn't have been but it was, and had been for centuries, and just might last awhile longer.

“Now that we've seen it, I suppose we can go back,” Sebastian said, impressed but in no way about to show it. “Only more of the same farther down the Grand Canal. But it's a bit chilly, isn't it? And it's been raining.”

He indicated the pools of water at the bottom of the steps.

“And from the look of the sky I'd say that we're going to be seeing more of Venice's favorite element.”

“Blood everywhere,” Molly intoned. “More blood than water.”

“Better watch our step, then,” Sebastian said. “Blood's a slimy, slippery thing.” He took Molly's stick of an arm and helped her down the stairs. “Speaking of blood and consanguinity, what do you think dear old Countess Barbara is going to think about her uninvited guest?”

“Oh, if you think your auntie—”

“Our cousin, actually, but old enough to be our
grand-mère
,” Sebastian clarified. “No need to worry. You're a small package. Any nook or cranny will do. And Cousin Barbara loves games. She's planned charades or a treasure hunt or something like that for the weekend. You'll be our little contribution.”

Viola took the woman's other arm.

“Sebastian's right. Barbara will be delighted. Oh, look, the gondolas! Barbara said her boat would be waiting for us, but let's not take it. Only a gondola will do!”

In her enthusiasm she came close to dragging poor Molly toward the rocking, coffinlike boats.

2

Unlike the Nevilles and Molly Wybrow, the Signora Marialuisa Zeno was far from eager to set out for the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

At the very moment when the three travelers from the
Orient Express
were making their way to the gondolas, the Signora Zeno was sitting as stiff as a mosaic of Byzantine royalty in a modest pension on the other side of the Grand Canal. One thin hand grasped a black cane with a gold ferrule around its slender wooden shaft. So lost and overwhelmed was she in the dark folds of her dress and the lace wrapping of her head that she gave every appearance of not being able to move at all.

She and her daughter, the Signorina Bambina, had arrived with their physician, Luigi Vasco, the previous day from Rome in their ancient car, driven by a tenant of their palazzo in return for finally fixing his toilet.

What the senior Zeno lacked in movement, her daughter Bambina more than made up for by so much walking back and forth and tossing of her head that her pink ribbons were in danger of being shaken loose. Bambina was a portly woman in her mid-seventies whose pride was her small feet, always shod in the most delicate and expensive of shoes. Her hair, hennaed and tightly curled, framed a face as pink and chubby as that of one of the cherubs floating across the peeling wallpaper.

“I don't understand, Mamma. I'm sorry, but I don't!” She stopped briefly to stamp her tiny foot. “Why couldn't we go yesterday or this morning?”

“We must make the proper entrance. Not like dusty gypsies. It will be plenty of time in a few hours.”

A close scrutiny of the Signora Zeno would have left the scrutinizer hard-pressed to detect much movement of her mouth. Now almost a hundred years old, she had long ago given up making any more effort than was necessary. This didn't mean, however, that she was an invalid, but only that she knew the virtue of saving her energies for the important assaults of life, which had become fewer but much more crucial at her age. Like the ruin of a once noble building, her face and form encouraged the eye of the observer to trace the beauty and grace that still remained despite the ravages of time. Her hair might be gray and sparse, her bones sharp and brittle, her whole body peculiarly shrunken like some waxen effigy left out in the Roman sun, but her eyes, dark and eerily undimmed, looked at the world with almost all the hunger and curiosity they had had during the First Great War.

“There's the whole weekend for what we have to do,” she said. “And I don't mean make peace with that English witch, Barbara!” She raised her cane slightly for emphasis. “She's a fool if she thinks that's what brings us all the way to a monstrous place like this!”

She sniffed disdainfully. If she was speaking of the pension's room, there was some justice in her comment. Mold arabesqued one wall, and an offensive odor snaked its way from the drains of the sink and the bidet. But as if to compensate for these discomforts—as characteristic of the city, after all, as the span of the Bridge of Sighs or the sweep of the Grand Canal—there was the view from the window: an impressionistic scene of faded brick and tile, obelisk chimneys, and wooden roof terraces, but beauties unfortunately lost on the mother and daughter.

“Can I look at the photograph again?” Bambina asked like an importunate little girl. “Please?”

Bambina grabbed her mother's purse, opened it, and withdrew a piece of folded newspaper. She almost ripped it as she unfolded it. It showed an attractive but uncomfortable-looking man of about forty dressed in a tuxedo. Next to him was a handsome older woman.

“Don't forget what we've come here for! You must leave the man alone! I forbid you!” Signora Zeno said with a force that belied the minimal movement of the thin lips.

Fire flashed in Bambina's dark eyes. Almost sixty years ago her mother had said almost the same words to her. The pain was as sharp now as it had been then.

Bambina nodded her head of curls.

“Yes, Mamma.”

But the fire was still in her eyes and she had to put a chubby hand to her face to hide the smile that was starting to crawl across her bright red lips.

3

Everywhere Dr. Luigi Vasco went, the past spoke to him, but it was absent of doges and Titian and Marco Polo. It was his own personal past, and not his whole past—a formidable contemplation, since he was eighty-seven—only that part which had unrolled in the serene city.

The memories assaulted him. Yes, they were everywhere. At the Bridge of Sighs, which he had drifted beneath in a gondola sixty years ago. At La Fenice, whose mirrored corridors had reflected the passage of two people caught up in something as operatic as anything taking place on the stage. At the parapet of the Rialto Bridge, where he had waited in a pelting rain, not unlike the one yesterday, for someone to keep a rendezvous.

Vasco could have provided a personal commentary of love and loss on almost every major sight in the guidebooks, ticking them off one after another.

His steps inevitably took him to one building, however, that wasn't mentioned in many of the guidebooks. Yet it was a place filled with even more associations than any of the others.

Vasco first contemplated the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini from the opposite side of the Grand Canal, taking in its classical facade of Istrian stone with a frieze of lions, its veranda, its garden wall covered with Virginia creeper. He took the
traghetto
to the other side and spent several minutes contemplating the humble back of the building. Almost sixty years before he had passed through the first of the iron doors into the small, formal garden and then through the doors of the palazzo itself.

Back then there had been a different contessa—an Italian one. Her house party had ended in death. Love and loss all those years ago, and now he was returning.

A face appeared at one of the windows. For a fleeting moment it was Renata's proud, beautiful face. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The window was empty. He turned away and walked wearily down the
calle
.

Why had he agreed to come back?

4

A water taxi was speeding in a narrow channel marked out by old wooden stakes. Ominous clouds were reflected in the green waters of the lagoon.

“I think I'm going to be sick. Can't we go back to the airport?” said a thin young woman sitting in the stern. So muffled and constricted was she in a cape, two scarves, a knit cap, gloves, and leg warmers that it was possible to assume her indisposition could be immediately cured by a merciful loosening of some of the wraps.

Robert Bellini-Rhys, a good-looking, olive-skinned man with short-cropped black hair and penetrating eyes of an unexpected blue, looked at his fiancée, Angelica Lydgate, with an indulgent expression.

“We can, Angelica dear, but then you'll just be bounced in a bus or squeezed into an overheated
vaporetto
.”

“I'll have to endure it, then,” she said. She was a plain woman whose heart-shaped face seemed too small for her large brown eyes.

To distract her, Robert pointed out Burano.

“The island where they make lace.”

She nodded without interest. In the past few moments she had turned an unpleasant shade of green. Robert had developed the habit of humoring her, but this might be the real thing. He looked nervously at the pilot, who showed no interest in what might be about to happen to the upholstery of his cabin. Instead he was looking at the dark sky and mumbling something in Venetian dialect that sounded foreboding.

Robert, just as much to calm his own nerves as to soothe Angelica, commented on the scene.

“… more than thirty islands scattered all around Venice, but twenty don't have a soul on them. Completely abandoned, like that one over there, see?” Angelica didn't bother to raise her eyes, let alone her head. “The railway bridge to the mainland is what did it. A direct link with terra firma. Upset the balance and proportion of all the islands. Should have left things the way they were. This is the only way to approach Venice!”

He said it grandly and threw his hand out toward the shining waters of the lagoon. He conveniently had forgotten that they had just stepped off a plane that had left London only two hours ago. But Robert Bellini-Rhys was full of inconsistencies like this. Otherwise why would such a thoroughly modern young man—and one with a great love for what money could buy—have become not only a medieval art historian but also a specialist in relics and the so-called “sacred thefts” of saints' bodies?

“‘Far as the eye can see, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray,'” he went on, warming to his topic and reciting Ruskin. “‘Lifeless, the color sackcloth, with the corrupted seawater soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels.'”

Breaking the spell of Ruskin's hypnotic prose, he said, “That's Murano over there. Glass. The cathedral has the relics of San Donato, and behind the altar are bones. Oh, not of the saint. The bones of the dragon he was reputed to have killed. By spitting at it.”

He found this immensely amusing and threw back his good-looking head and laughed.

“Can you imagine that people used to believe such things? Poor souls! But speaking of bones,” he went on, “there are plenty of
human
ones in the other churches. For example …”

As the boat went across the rest of the lagoon, he threw himself, with both reverence and condescension, into a description of some of the city's saintly remains. By the time they passed the brick walls and cypresses of the cemetery island, he managed to make all the fabled monuments, mosaics, and altars seem little more than mere decoration for a vast boneyard.

Perhaps according to some paradoxical law, Angelica's bilious color subsided during this demonstration of her betrothed's macabre expertise to something closer to its usual pallor. When the boat headed down a wide waterway toward the Grand Canal, she looked around her with more interest. A gentle smile made her face even softer.

“Oh, it's just like a picture.”

Angelica was to be forgiven this platitude. It was, after all, her first trip to Venice, and she was a young woman most of whose impressions of life were secondhand. These had been formed, almost obstinately, her friends thought, from the pages of Victorian novels, the sepia-toned photographs of a stereopticon, and a group of painters who belonged to no particular school or period unless it was that of the sentimental.