Farewell to the Flesh (10 page)

Urbino thought she was finished, but just before she opened the door she answered a question that he hadn't had a chance to ask yet.

“And if you want to know where I was yesterday evening, I was right here in the Casa Crispina. I was in the lounge reading Madame Blavatsky and had a chat with Sister Agata before she dropped off to sleep at the desk. Then I went to bed. As I'm going to do now. Good evening, Signor Macintyre.”

6

Dora Spaak, dressed in tweed slacks and a heavy sweater, was dwarfed by the high-backed chair. She couldn't have been more of a contrast to Saint Catherine, pale and thin on the wall behind her. Dora Spaak was rosy and rounded, from her short haircut with bangs above surprised-looking brown eyes to her feet in pink angora slippers that barely touched the floor. Even her voice was full of rounded tones that would have been even more rounded if she had spoken with less breathlessness.

She held a crumpled tissue in her hand.

“Poor Mr. Gibbon. Whatever could have happened? He was such a nice man. It must have been an accident.”

An accident? Urbino repeated to himself. Could she possibly mean that being stabbed in the heart qualified as an accident? The next moment, the tissue at her snub nose, she added, “It was dark. Maybe they thought he was someone else. Mistaken identity, you know.”

“I'm sure the police are considering that possibility.”

“Except you don't think it was an accident, do you?” She looked at him accusingly with her round eyes. “You think someone hated him and killed him, but it's not true! Everyone here liked him, except for that crackpot Signora Campi. Even my brother, Nicholas—”

She stopped.

“What about your brother, Miss Spaak?”

She blew her nose before answering. When she did answer, there was a more cautious note in her voice.

“Nothing. Just that Nicholas liked Val, too, even if he didn't always show it. Signora Campi probably wants to put us all in the same group with her! She was always so unkind in the things she said. She almost always said them to me and it made me feel awful. Most of the time Val was there and he heard. I hope he didn't think I believed what she was saying. He couldn't do anything right as far as she was concerned! She said being a photographer was nothing at all. It wasn't work and it wasn't art. She said he fed off other people. She criticized him for not having all his meals with us here even though he had to pay for them. I think she resented that he had the money to do that. She didn't have two nickels to rub together—or whatever they call them here. And another thing,” Dora added almost eagerly, the sodden tissue clutched in her chubby hand. “She was always saying he had a fire around his head that wouldn't bring him or anyone else any good. She sends chills down my spine when she talks like that! No wonder she frightens the boys from Naples if she can frighten a grown woman like me. I wouldn't be surprised if—”

Once again she broke off.

“If what, Miss Spaak?”

“Nothing. It's just that she frightens me so much.”

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Gibbon?”

She wiped her nose.

“Last night after dinner,” she said softly. “You see, I wasn't feeling too well. I caught a chill early in the day and my shoes and stockings got soaked in all the high water when I was looking for a post office. By the time I got back here I was sneezing. Later, sometime after nine, I was in the dining room having a cup of tea that the woman made for me before she left for the night. Val came down the backstairs. He was on his way out with his camera case. I figured he was going to join the fun in the big square. But he had on only a scarf and a light flannel shirt and I told him it didn't took as if he was going to be warm enough. He sat down and we had a chat.” She applied a fresh tissue to her eyes. “He was so kind. He said he would go to the kitchen and get me some biscuits. It would be an adventure, he said, there would probably be a sign over the pantry door, something about abandoning hope or whatever if you went in, but he said he would do it anyway.”

Hearing these garbled words from Dante had Urbino wondering if Val Gibbon had picked up Hazel Reeve's habit of quoting the Italian poet.

“He said that if I happened to know where it was, I could be his Be—Be—I forget what he said, some strange name.”

“Beatrice,” Urbino offered, pronouncing it in the Italian way with four syllables.

“That was it.” Dora Spaak looked at him suspiciously. “I said I had no idea. I told him not to bother, that I was fine. All I needed was my tea. He said he would join me and started to take off his scarf. He would stay in and devote himself to making me feel a little better. Of course I insisted that he continue with his original plans. It was very kind and sweet of him, I said, but I was just fine. Yes, I—I told him to go. If I hadn't sent him away, he would be alive—and—and no one would have had to kill him!”

It was now that Urbino remembered what Xenia Campi had said about looking deep into Dora Spaak's eyes. What he saw when he did, however, wasn't the “ghost of death,” as Xenia Campi had called it, but fear.

“He stayed a few minutes longer and left,” Dora Spaak said, averting her eyes. “He said he liked my slippers.”

She looked down at the slippers and started to cry as she considered the poignancy of his last words to her.

7

A slim blond man in his late twenties, with dark blue eyes and less than firm features, was standing outside the door when Urbino opened it to let Dora Spaak out after their interview.

“I'm Nicholas Spaak,” the blond man said, frowning at Dora who said a quick good-bye and shuffled down the hall, the tissue pressed against her nose. “My mother needs to be asleep by nine. Dora insisted on seeing you first. If you wouldn't mind talking with my mother in her own room, we would appreciate it. She's more comfortable when she has all her things around her.”

What Spaak meant by all his mother's things became apparent as soon as Urbino entered the room on the floor below. In addition to the bed, night table, prie-dieu, religious lithograph, and washbasin found in all the rooms, there was also a large electric heater making the room almost unbearable. It was about five feet from the bed in which Spaak's mother was lying, not beneath the regulation dark-brown blanket but beneath a brightly colored quilt. On the night table squatted a plastic object about the size of a small portable television. A cord ran from it to a socket in the wall and there was a hoselike apparatus from the other end that terminated in a plastic covering for the nose and mouth. Various American magazines—
Time, Redbook, Reader's Digest
, and
Health
—were scattered on the floor, and on the bed was a messy pile of clippings held in place by a pair of scissors. Several boxes of cookies were next to the machine on the bedside table, all of them opened, and a full yellow plastic mask was hanging from the knob of the table drawer.

“Mr. Macintyre, my mother, Stella Maris Spaak.”

Stella Maris Spaak was a small woman in her early sixties who resembled her daughter much more than her son. Her form under the bedclothes hardly extended half the length of the bed. She was propped up with several pillows and showed a sweet, open face framed by short light-brown hair in need of a touch-up. Around her neck was a gold chain holding a little pendant embossed with what seemed to be the crossed keys of the Vatican coat of arms.

“I'm sorry to inconvenience you so late, Mrs. Spaak, but it won't be for long.”

“It's all right, Mr. Macintyre. I'm sure my Nicky has been warning you not to trouble me but I'm not as bad as he thinks. I've held up very well during our three weeks in Italy, haven't I, Nicky?”

She smiled at her son, who was sitting on the bed. Urbino was in the room's only chair.

“We've already talked with the police, Mr. Macintyre,” Nicholas Spaak said.

“Don't be upset, Nicky dear. He's really upset for me, Mr. Macintyre, but I'm fine. As you know, Nicky, Mother Mariangela said we should be nice to Mr. Macintyre. And you do seem like a very nice man, just as she said you were.”

“Can't we get on with this, Mr. Macintyre?” Nicholas Spaak said in an irritated tone that drew a disapproving glance from his mother.

“Of course. All I wanted to know was if you noticed anything unusual here last night.”

“Nothing whatsoever,” Spaak answered, “and I think that at a place like this—a convent, I mean—where everything is so usual, you would be bound to notice anything that was otherwise, wouldn't you say?”

Urbino had to agree, although the Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina did tend to have its unconventional aspects, one of which was the somewhat loose way it ran its pensione. Most establishments attached to convents and monasteries had much stricter rules about coming and going and the mixing of the sexes.

“Nicky is right. I'm afraid we can't be of much help to you or to poor Mr. Gibbon, God rest his soul. Every evening here is the same. We have dinner with the others at seven. Last night we finished about eight as we always do. Mr. Gibbon was looking very healthy and happy. I went to the chapel for half an hour. When I got back here, Nicky got me all set up for the night. I was in bed by nine.”

“That's right, Mr. Macintyre. We keep to a schedule, my mother and I. It's best for her.”

“Now, Nicky, don't give him the wrong impression. You like it, too. Ever since he was a baby, Mr. Macintyre, my Nicky has been like a clock.”

Nicholas Spaak blushed.

“You see how sensitive he is, Mr. Macintyre? Ever since he started to go to school, he wouldn't let me praise him one bit, and what greater pleasure is there for a mother than to talk about her children? He's one of the best young English teachers at the community college in Pittsburgh.”

Spaak's blush had deepened.

“What did you do after getting your mother ready for bed?”

“I went to my room next door. I read for a while, then fell asleep and slept until about seven this morning.”

“I didn't hear anything unusual either, Mr. Macintyre. Nicky looked in on me after nine, and Dora came in about half an hour after he did and once again later. I'm not a good sleeper, but I don't like my children to worry, so I sometimes pretend to be asleep.” She gave her son a nervous little glance. “It wasn't until the next morning at breakfast that we knew something was wrong.”

“And now you'll want to know what we thought about Gibbon,” Spaak said, “and whether we liked him or not.”

“Liked him or not! What a thing to say! Of course we liked him. You never should speak ill of the dead.”

“I'm sorry, Mother, but you know I didn't care for him. My mother has never been a person to say anything hurtful about anyone else.”

“Why didn't you like him, Mr. Spaak?” Urbino asked, thinking of how Dora had said that her brother had actually liked Gibbon but didn't show it.

“I found him insufferably snide. Sometimes I thought he needed a smack in the face.”

Xenia Campi had said very much the same thing.

“Nicky, that's not like you!”

Spaak got up and thrust his hands into the pockets of his corduroy trousers. His mother's eyes followed him with concern as he went to the door and turned around.

“You should understand, Mr. Macintyre, that I'm not the kind of person to dislike without good reason.” He shrugged, as if to say that this was the form his own charitableness took—to have at least a reason for speaking ill of the dead. “Gibbon had an insidious way about him. I didn't like the way he talked to Dora, being sweet and encouraging but really making a fool of her. And he would always try to take you unawares with one of his insinuating comments.”

“Nicky, you're still not letting what he said at dinner bother you, are you? If Dora thought there was anything bad in it, she never would have told me, you can be sure of that. You know how devoted she is to you. According to Dora, Mr. Macintyre, the other night at dinner when I wasn't there Mr. Gibbon was joking around. Nicky asked him how he decided what to take pictures of. Mr. Gibbon said something about wanting his pictures to show what people couldn't see on their own. But Nicky was upset because Mr. Gibbon said he wouldn't want to take
his
picture, that everyone could see what my Nicky was like, and that if I were in the picture with him it would be even more clear. I think that was a very nice thing to say, Mr. Macintyre, don't you? Dora thought so too. He was paying Nicky and me a compliment.”

Mrs. Spaak paused for a telling moment as she looked at her son, who was standing very still, avoiding her eyes.

“Of course, Nicky understands things Dora and I don't,” she went on. “It hurts me to see him upset. But Mr. Gibbon is dead now. If what he said wasn't nice in some way, it's not for us to judge him now. He's met his justice.”

She closed her thin lips firmly after the last word, a hard look coming into her eyes and taking away almost all the sweetness in her face.

8

Out in the hall Spaak asked Urbino to come into his room. Unlike his mother's room, Spaak's held only the regulation items, a carry-on valise, an Italian dictionary, and a paperback copy of D. H. Lawrence's
Twilight in Italy
.

“There's one thing I'd like to clarify, Mr. Macintyre. Just now with my mother I may have misled you.”

He made a long pause.

“Mr. Lubonski,” Spaak said slowly as if offering Urbino a generous hint. “I didn't stay in my room after I saw my mother last night. I went out about nine-thirty. Mr. Lubonski saw me as he was coming in. He looked as if he was in a daze. Didn't he tell you he saw me?”

“I haven't been to the hospital yet.”

“I wonder if the Commissario has. I didn't tell him I had been out last night. I didn't want to disturb Mother. I do it every once in a while, you see, after she goes to bed, but I don't like her to know. If I had told the Commissario, he might have asked her all sorts of questions and then she would have known. I'm sure you understand that sometimes I need to get away. And Dora was here. She's a nurse and is much more qualified to care for Mother. Each of us looks in on her once a night, both here and back home. Dora covers for me. She's devoted to me, as Mother said—a typical kid sister, I guess.”