Death in the Palazzo (20 page)

There very likely could be some evidence of this, some clue, among Gemma's personal things, which Robert had removed to his own room. Robert might be aware of a connection between his mother and Molly that he preferred to keep hidden, perhaps for his mother's sake or for his own. Urbino would try to persuade Robert to let him look through Gemma's things.

He was convinced that Molly—the apparent stranger at the feast, the thirteenth guest—had been murdered because of something she knew about the immediate or the distant past. Urbino had become conditioned to think of murder as seldom a random act, even though he knew that in the world at large it usually was.

Everything indicated that the situation was the same now. Molly's gift for the past, which, if he was to judge from her notes, had only appeared to be extemporaneous and inspired. Her death in the Caravaggio Room, the scene of so much tragedy for the Da Capo-Zendrini and Zeno families. The disappearance of the peacock brooch, also with its associations with the histories of the two families, and the brooch turning up in Gemma's pocket. The scent of perfume surrounding both deaths—a scent that the Conte had referred to in his memoir as the “odor of sanctity.” The gathering of six people all related directly or indirectly to the mysterious death of Renata Zeno Bellini in the Caravaggio Room: Mamma Zeno, Bambina, Dr. Vasco, Gemma, Robert, and Angelica.

There were also the Neville twins, the extent of whose relationship to Molly was still very much in question. Exactly what had Molly paid Sebastian for? Only to get her into the palazzo? Could Sebastian be working with Gemma in some way? And what role might Viola be playing? Urbino had to confess to himself that the twins disconcerted him enough to make him dubious of his own responses.

Those who remained were Oriana and Filippo, who were friends of Barbara, unconnected to her family, and whom he didn't even remotely suspect.

Whenever Urbino hit a snag in his writing or his cases, he would put it out of his mind and take one of what the Contessa liked to call his “long vague walks.” Very often this activity would result in his seeing things more clearly. But he didn't have the opportunity for a rambling walk in the storm-ravaged city, and if he had, he certainly didn't have the luxury of time. He needed to get to the bottom of things as soon as possible. The air of the Ca' da Capo was charged with menace.

His eye wandered to the velvet-shrouded easel holding Gemma's portrait of the Contessa. It was to have been unveiled that evening. Bambina, provoking Vasco's anger, had suggested at lunch that it still should be. Urbino got up and walked over to it. He suddenly realized that he had not been giving sufficient attention in his thinking to one detail. The portrait itself. It had been the Contessa's commissioning Gemma to paint the portrait that had set the present house party in motion. She had intended to use it as an occasion to “heal old wounds” between the two families. He remembered what the Contessa had said at Florian's a month ago. Some wounds never heal.

The velvet draping was slightly askew. He started to rearrange it, wondering if, after all, Bambina might be right. Perhaps it would be a good idea to unveil the portrait this evening. Consumed with a desire to see the portrait, he drew away the draping.

He was appalled. A vicious slash angled down to the left-hand corner from the Contessa's face.

He heard footsteps approaching the door and tried desperately to cover the portrait, but the door opened before he could.

The Contessa stood motionless, looking at her mutilated portrait. A strangled sound came from her throat. Urbino hurried to her side and guided her to the sofa.

“Someone wants me dead.”

She said it without any emphasis but with as much conviction as if she had herself just been stabbed.

18

After calming the Contessa, Urbino convinced her to say nothing about the slashed portrait to anyone. They spoke with Mauro, Lucia, and some of the other staff. No one had seen anyone going in or out of the
salotto
when the Contessa or Urbino weren't in it themselves.

“I don't know exactly what to think, Barbara,” Urbino said when they were alone again. “It could have been done by someone with a hatred for you. Someone who wants you to know that he—or she—is out there and is prepared to strike at you personally. Or it could be a warning for you to turn a blind eye to things.”

“Turn a blind eye to what things? To what's going on under my own roof? Even if I wanted to pretend to be deaf, dumb, and blind, there's Molly's dead body lying up there in the Caravaggio Room—and maybe we'll have another death in the house soon if Gemma doesn't recover. I have no intention of being intimidated!” she cried, her voice quavering.

“It could also be a way of trying to get me to stop poking around.”

“I absolutely forbid that! I might be afraid, but fear is not going to dominate my actions—or yours! We may be close to some real answers now. That's probably why this—this maniac slashed my portrait. I spoke with Oriana. She's still a bundle of nerves, lying in bed under the covers with ear stoppers. The whole place could fall down now and she wouldn't know it! But listen to this! She did tell Gemma about your parents the first week Gemma was here.”

“Unsolicited?”

“Let's say that Oriana was maneuvered into it. They were at the Guggenheim. Gemma brought up your inheriting the Palazzo Uccello through your mother. She knew that from me. She asked Oriana if she had ever known your mother. Oriana took it from there. Oriana tried to use her fears of the storm and worries about Filippo as a cover, but I could tell that she probably said even more than that. Probably about your marriage and divorce from Evangeline, and most definitely quite a lot about
me
. So it's obvious. Oriana told Gemma, and Gemma told Molly. There must have been some relationship between the two of them long before Gemma came to paint my portrait.”

“Gemma might have told someone else what she knew, and that person could have filled Molly in.”

“You're thinking of Robert. Because he wouldn't let you go through Gemma's things.”

Urbino was also thinking of Sebastian, but he was reluctant to mention this suspicion. Instead he said, “Robert might be only protecting his mother's privacy. I'd do the same in his position, but—” He broke off and shook his head slowly. “A distasteful business, when I have to do things that I don't like to do, that I'd criticize someone else for doing.”

“This is not a time for scruples,” the Contessa said, more than a little uncharacteristically since she was the most scrupulous person Urbino knew.

“And rather late in the game, too, I'd say,” Urbino added wryly.

“You know, there's another aspect to the slashing. The person who did it might be trying to implicate someone else.”

“The way the same person might have tried to implicate Gemma by putting the brooch in her pocket?”

“Yes, and perhaps Gemma is once again the target.”

“How do you figure that? It's her creation!”

She looked over at the easel, now reshrouded in velvet, and shivered as if it held a monstrous creation.

“Artists are considered temperamental, subject to sudden and violent tantrums. People always remember Van Gogh, not painters like Sargent or Renoir. But artists sometimes
have
been known to destroy their own creations. And if the brooch was put in Gemma's pocket, the person who did it—probably the same one who stole it, who murdered Molly, who pushed Gemma down the stairs, who slashed your portrait—wanted it to be taken as a sign of Gemma's dislike and resentment of you.”

“Dislike and resentment of me for what?”

“For the past. For what happened here back in the thirties—”

“But I had nothing to do with that house party! I was in England! Just a young girl myself, like Gemma. Even younger!”

“The person doesn't have to be thinking rationally, Barbara. In fact, I believe we're dealing with someone who is very irrational at times. Not just in the way that we can say all murderers are, but beyond that.” He thought for a few moments, then added: “And I have little doubt that this has to do in some way with the past.”

“If Gemma isn't the one who's having the finger pointed at her through the slashed portrait, then who?”

“We'd be better able to answer that question if we knew exactly when the painting was slashed. Remember that Bambina mentioned at lunch that you should unveil it despite, perhaps even because, of what happened to Gemma.”

“So you think it could have been Bambina?”

“Bambina would appear to be the most likely—but it could have been anyone else at the table who heard what she said. He or she might have got the idea to slash it, hoping you would unveil it tonight and then we'd all think of Bambina's suggestion.”

“But would Bambina have wanted the painting unveiled if she had slashed it?”

“She—or someone else—could have wanted just that. Sitting there, knowing the painting was slashed and waiting for the moment the draping was taken off. I rather find it consistent with the kind of person who would slash it in the first place.”

“But then we're limited to Bambina, Vasco, and Angelica,” the Contessa said. She had an almost disappointed expression, which, however, quickened into something more like unease as she added, “I assume you in no way intend to include Sebastian and Viola!”

Urbino didn't reply immediately, and the Contessa said, nervously, “Well, there's also Robert and Mamma Zeno even if they weren't at the table!”

“I'm well aware of that.” He didn't develop this any further but instead asked, “Is it true that you've never looked at the portrait?”

“It certainly is! I promised Gemma. She insisted on it. Oh, I was tempted, just to see if she had made me into a fright, but I didn't. It wasn't all that hard. I'm not in the habit of gazing at my own face—whether it be in a mirror, a photograph, or a painting!”

Urbino smiled to himself at the obvious falsehood of this.

“But you should, Barbara. It's such a lovely face.” He couldn't resist adding: “And it always has been, even before Geneva.”

Evidently embarrassed and just as evidently pleased, she tried to cover both emotions by turning her face quickly in the direction of the shrouded easel again and asking, “So what are we to do with the portrait?”

“The same thing we're going to do with the brooch.”

“You don't mean—!”

She stopped and looked at him in disbelief.

“Exactly!” he said.

PART FIVE

The Curse of the Ca' da Capo

1

It was still more than four hours until dinner. Urbino returned to his room. There, he reread the Conte's memoir, which he had retrieved from a drawer in the
salotto
where he had placed it after reading it to the twins. He paid close attention to what the Conte said about Vasco, Mamma Zeno, Bambina, Andrew Lydgate and his fiancée, the doomed Renata, and her eight-year-old daughter, Gemma.

He took out a sheet of paper and a pen from the desk and made a list of Molly's provocative comments yesterday. He had an excellent memory and it served him well now.

When he had finished, he read it over several times. The large majority of Molly's comments had been about the Caravaggio Room and the death of Renata Zeno Bellini. She had even named the specific date of the house party. If the death of Renata had always struck Urbino as strange, it now, after his rereading of the Conte's memoir and his reconsideration of Molly's comments, became sinister. He had to face the very real possibility that someone had murdered Renata. It could be someone now under the roof of the Ca' da Capo. And the person who had murdered Molly could be either the same person or someone who was willing to go to extreme lengths to protect Renata's murderer.

He had no proof that Renata had been murdered, only the strongest of suspicions, but it seemed imperative that he not leave it out of the equation.

For the next few minutes he filled another sheet of paper with a diagram of the layout of the two bedroom wings of the Ca' da Capo. The only rooms beside the Caravaggio Room that had access to the wide loggia were those of the Contessa, Bambina, Angelica, Urbino, and Robert. It was perfectly conceivable that despite the storm, Molly's murderer had gained entry to the Caravaggio Room through the loggia itself. The storm would have been a perfect camouflage, for no one would have been inclined to take an airing as long as it had gone thundering along.

He fixed himself a drink and stood staring through the window and across the loggia at the foaming gray clouds, the lances of rain, the high, choppy waters of the Grand Canal.

He needed to know more. But in this case perhaps more than any of his others, because of the hothouse atmosphere and the storm still malevolent outside, to search for more information could be extremely dangerous.

Possibly two people—Renata and Molly—had already been murdered in the palazzo, and another was lying close to death.

All of them women. Two were mother and daughter, and the third, Molly, had surely been murdered because of what she knew—or seemed to know. She had penetrated the Ca' da Capo, she had ended up in the notorious room, she had not left it alive after her first night.

Could the person who had gone to so much trouble to put Molly in the house have been the one who had murdered her? Had she paid such a large sum of money to Sebastian not only, perhaps, to be admitted to the Ca' da Capo, but also to end up being murdered by his hand?

And how had she come to carry the scent of the perfume that both Gemma and Bambina used? Had one of them visited her during the night and murdered her? Had the scent been planted—the way the brooch might have been planted on Gemma? Or had Molly borrowed some of the perfume from one of the women in expectation of a special guest? If so, who had she had her assignation with? Dr. Vasco immediately came to mind, but perhaps Sebastian had stopped by to collect more money, this time in the form of cash. Or Robert, to warn her away from his mother. For that matter, why should Urbino assume that she had applied perfume for a man, and not for another woman?