Death in the Palazzo (30 page)

“In the middle of all that wind and rain?”

“To throw away the gloves. I was looking out my window and thought I was seeing things. It looked like a white hand riding on the wind. It shook me up at the time. You know I don't believe in such things,” he said with more insistence than was warranted if he actually didn't have a touch of superstition. “It must have been one of the gloves. And the next morning I found one of her ribbons on the loggia, as you already know.”

“I see.”

“And I have a feeling that if anyone had seen Bambina walking around that night—down to the conservatory, in the conservatory itself, back up to her room, back and forth from Molly's room, and out on the loggia—she would have claimed she was walking in her sleep. Although how she would have explained the plastic gloves is something else! But she was very quick to admit to being a sleepwalker when I spoke with her in the conservatory the afternoon after Molly's death.”

“So clever in her madness, and so perfectly mad in her cleverness,” the Contessa said.

“I'm afraid so,” Urbino agreed. “She just left Molly's body where it had fallen near the doors to the loggia. The storm must have forced open both the glass doors and the louvered doors. Somehow Molly's head was in a position to receive the blow of the glass door and to be pushed through it. That's the way she was found. It was only logical at first to assume it had been an accident, but the blood—”

“Yes, yes, I know all about that. You needn't go into any more detail.” The hand holding her teacup was shaking slightly. “Maybe we'll all be stronger because of what we've gone through. Just like the city.”

She glanced out into the Piazza, where “the finest drawing room in Europe” was, this afternoon, remarkably empty of tourists or anyone who remotely resembled one. Instead Venetians went to and fro with parcels, or gathered in dry spots for conversation, or stood alone gazing about them, thankful that the old stones had survived the recent terrible onslaught. Several couples, one of whom Urbino recognized as the middleaged brother and sister who owned a nearby bookshop, started to dance when the orchestra finished Vivaldi and began Rodgers and Hammerstein. Oblivious to the puddles, they swept across the stones and among the pigeons.

“Oh my, look who's coming,” the Contessa said.

It was Sebastian. He made his way around the edge of the dancers and stepped under the arcades. His arms were full of books and brochures. He grinned broadly at Urbino and the Contessa and continued walking toward the entrance.

“I wonder what the boy is burdened down with?” the Contessa said with a mischievous gleam in her eye.

Urbino took a sip of his drink as a prelude to telling her, but before he could say anything the Contessa went on.

“If I were forced to guess—just off the top of my head, of course—I'd say that he's staggering under the weight of the realm of Morocco! So when are you two off?”

“The day before Christmas,” Urbino admitted a bit sheepishly.

Sebastian now stood in the doorway of the Chinese salon, trying to get a better grasp on the books and brochures before proceeding to their table.

“Until when?” the Contessa asked.

“We're not sure.”

“Well, Sebastian's a good boy, despite everything. He just needs a bit of direction.”

Urbino gave the Contessa a smile of gratitude. He hadn't needed to tell her anything. She had known all along.

But the Contessa, being the Contessa, had something more to say:

“Just don't forget to go Dutch,
caro!
”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series

1

It had begun from their first moments together in Venice three weeks earlier.

The train had just pulled in from Rome. Urbino and his young companion, Habib Laroussi, stepped down from their carriage. Habib was of medium height, with close-cropped black hair and dark olive skin. But his most striking feature was his expressive dark eyes, which had been hungrily devouring everything since they had arrived from Morocco.

“Go out to the steps and see,” Urbino said.

“But our bags,” the young man halfheartedly protested.

“I'll find someone. Go.”

Ten minutes later Urbino, followed by a porter and their extravagance of bags, joined Habib. The young man was standing motionless, looking at the scene. Urbino hadn't seen it for eighteen months. He drank it in himself: the bridges and domes, the sparkling water and the dancing light, the boats of various kinds and even the dampness that in winter, against all logic, somehow registered not only as a smell but also as the color gray.

“It's beautiful,” Habib said. “It's better than you said.”

“I was afraid you'd be disappointed.”

Habib gave a radiant smile.

“You are a foolish man! And now we must take one of those old-style boats.”

Habib pointed toward a moored gondola, rocking in the Grand Canal from the wake of the water traffic.

“My friend said she'd have her own boat waiting.”

“
La comtesse
? She has an old-style boat?”

“A new-style one,” Urbino said with a smile. “That's it.”

He indicated the Contessa's sleek
motoscafo
a short distance away. An unfamiliar man, dressed in a white cap and dark blue suit and tie, descended from the boat and walked toward them. He limped slightly on his left leg.

“But please,
sidi
!” Habib said, using the term of respect with playful urgency. “Let us ride in an old-style one.”

The man in the white cap approached them.

“Signor Macintyre? I am Giorgio, the Contessa da CapoZendrini's boatman,” he said in Italian. He was much younger and seemed more fit than Milo.

“We've decided to take a gondola.”

“A gondola, signore? As you wish. And your baggage?”

“You can take it to the Palazzo Uccello. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes.” He hesitated for a brief moment. “The Contessa is expecting you.”

“Please tell her we'll see her in an hour. No,” he corrected himself, “an hour and a half.”

Several minutes later Urbino and Habib glided out into the Grand Canal. At first the young man was silent as they passed beneath the stone bridge of the Scalzi and made their way between the palaces and churches on either side of the waterway.

And then the questions began, coming as thick and fast as those of a child. What is that tower? Those striped poles? Is that a mosque,
sidi
? And why are there Moorish windows? What is that porch made of wood on the top of the palace? Look! There's another! Why do the chimneys have funny shapes?

“There's plenty of time to ask all the questions you want. Just lie back and look.”

Slowly, silently, first down the Grand Canal, then through a maze of small canals and beneath narrow stony spans, they were floated toward the Palazzo Uccello. Habib's dark glance moved in all directions as he fed his artist's eye with images.

“It is like
The Arabian Nights
!” he had cried out on that first day as they approached the landing of the Palazzo Uccello. “And this is our magic carpet!”

2

Urbino threw open the library shutters and looked straight into the silent night.

A short while before, as the church bells were ringing the second hour, he had awakened from a peculiar dream that still had him in its grip.

Actually, it had been less a dream than a persistent feeling that had wound itself through his thoughts that, even in sleep, seldom were completely still.

The Ca' da Capo-Zendrini was in danger.

It would have been more appropriate, given the damage done to the Palazzo Uccello, if he had been awakened by the urgency of its own, all-too-real problems.

Perhaps, he thought, this mild panic—for that was what it felt like—was simply a matter of displacement, for he had, in fact, been worrying about the Palazzo Uccello before dropping off to sleep.

And yet it was vivid, this sense that the Contessa's own home was threatened in some way. He remembered her uneasiness at Florian's the other afternoon.

He pulled on his clothes and threw his Austrian cape over his shoulders. He would take a walk. He would go to the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

He scribbled a brief note for Habib in case he awoke to find him gone, and then slipped out into the night.

Wisps of fog were brushing the bridge and drifting into the alley. He had a quick, sharp inward vision of the snowy domes of the Church of the Salute and the oriental cupolas of the Basilica floating above the mist as it performed its conjuring tricks of levitation and disappearance.

He breathed the air in gratefully. A realization, as strong as the concern that had set him in motion, struck him.

He would be turning his back to the Palazzo Uccello just as he was now, even if he hadn't been seized by this notion about the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

For Urbino's preference for the night had only increased since his return. While in the hot sun of Morocco, he had yearned for the damp, fog-filled nights of Venice when he could wander through the watery city as if he were its only occupant—or at least its only privileged one.

Nights in Morocco had been vibrant and spice-scented, filled with flutes and keening songs, and almost always crowded with people who had the gift of turning the most routine of experiences into an occasion for celebration.

To be alone the way he wanted to be, he had sought out the most remote spots beyond the cities, or, on two or three occasions, had sat musing on one of the flat medina roofs until the morning prayer. The desert had brought him solitude, and a restorative kind of peace that healed some wounds he didn't even know he had, but it was a solitude that was—paradoxically perhaps—too absolute. There had been no place in it for the Urbino who both loved and hated sociability.

His commitment to Venice, made almost twenty years ago upon inheriting the rundown building in the Cannaregio, had been largely because he could be splendidly alone, and alone on his own terms. Behind the walls of the Palazzo Uccello, which was like some stationary, elaborately appointed ark, he was far from the crowds and the distracting beauties of the museum city, and yet also in their midst.

He was well aware that he was considered an eccentric by many of the Venetians, and in fact by many of his own friends both here and back home. And there was no doubt that he struck an eccentric pose, but not intentionally so, during these late-night walks in his cape, negotiating the familiar city with an air of aimless purpose.

As he kept to his elastic stride in the direction of the Grand Canal through twisting alleys and across secluded squares, moving more slowly up and down the slick, slippery steps of bridges, he didn't meet another living soul. All he heard, other than his own echoing footsteps, was the slap of water against stone steps and wood hulls, and disembodied voices that sometimes rose up from the black waters and other times floated over the rooftops. It was like wandering through someone else's meticulously detailed dream of an impossible city where gravity was in abeyance, and reflections—even during the night hours—might be mistaken for the real thing if you stared too long.

But tonight Urbino didn't linger on bridges as he usually did, peering down into the dark mirrors of the canals over which wisps of mist were curling. He was soon on the small, graceful bridge that provided the only land access to the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini, whose large iron door was still, at this hour, illuminated by its ornately embossed lamps.

Like all the palazzi on the Grand Canal, the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini turned its aristocratic back on the plebeian activity of the alleys, squares, and bridges, and risked courting envy by presenting all its restrained beauty only on the side of the broad waterway. With its classical facade in Istrian stone and an elaborate attic frieze of lions set off by gentle pilasters, projecting balconies, small oval windows, blue-and-white mooring poles, and trim landing stage, the imposing building was a marriage of austerity with grace, of a simple formality with playfulness.

When the Contessa had married the Conte Alvise, the building had been denuded of its many decorations and severely damaged by the war and industrial pollution from the mainland. She had dedicated herself—in an obsessive way, said some jealous Venetians—to return it to its former glory. Before Urbino had met her, he had heard unkind stories about her hard line with architects and restorers, her search throughout Italy and Europe to find pieces to fill in the gaps in its furnishings, her physical and emotional exhaustion afterward, and her extended stay in a Swiss sanatorium.

Rather than forming a negative impression of her, as many of the gossips intended, he had become fascinated, recognizing in her passion for her adopted city an image of his own, although her passion had considerably more money to keep it afloat. When they had met seventeen years ago at a Biennale reception, they had formed an instant rapport. Ever since, they had been close friends and confidants, and, somehow, more than this.