Frail Barrier (14 page)

She mentioned an estate agent in San Polo and wrote her name on a sheet of headed stationery.

‘She's very good,' Rebecca said, ‘and she speaks pretty good English. That should be a plus.'

As he was leaving, Rebecca mentioned Albina's death.

‘I regret I couldn't be at the funeral. I had an important meeting in Milan. Sad way for her to go, all alone like that in the middle of the storm. Heart attack, wasn't it?'

‘That's what they say.'

A quizzical look came over Rebecca's small, pointed face. She knew Urbino's reputation as a sleuth. In fact, she had helped him in some small but vital ways. Before she might ask him any questions, he thanked her and left.

At this early point he wasn't ready to confide his speculations to anyone other than the contessa, nor would it be wise.

Urbino had less immediate luck with his second errand.

He stopped in several small hotels in San Polo and Santa Croce to see if he could find a reasonably priced room for Maisie Croy, the watercolorist, but all the places were booked solid into mid-September.

As he stood outside a pensione near the Piazzale Roma, he decided that he would try some places in Castello, even though this meant that he would have to go to the farther end of the city. The Castello – or at least the working-class quarter of it, rather distant from the Piazza San Marco – was usually the last to fill up.

If there hadn't been some urgency in Croy's need for a room, he would have put off going until the next day. But after refreshing himself with a
granita di caffè
, he took the vaporetto, this one even more crowded than the one before, to the Arsenale.

From there he walked along the broad embankment along the lagoon to the Via Garibaldi, the broadest street in the city, lined with shops, cafés, and restaurants. Moving slowly from the Bacino in the direction of San Pietro di Castello on its own little island, he was turned away at one establishment after another. He was tempted to seek out a shaded bench in the nearby public gardens but kept pressing on.

When he was walking through the street market below the Canal of Sant'Anna he was becoming discouraged. He reminded himself again that this was the height of the summer season. But then he remembered a small pensione in an alley to the left of the canal. It was unlikely to be fully occupied, given its remote location. Few tourists ventured this far up the Via Garibaldi and access from the other direction was blocked by the mass of the Arsenale. Two elderly sisters owned it. In fact, it was called Le Due Sorelle. But the last time Urbino had had any contact with the pensione had been more than ten years ago. He had no idea if the place or the sisters were still in existence.

He was therefore pleased for himself, Maisie Croy, and, of course, the sisters themselves when he found the two women in the restaurant attached to their pensione, looking vigorous and not much older. One of them was preparing a lunch of tripe. The smell, particularly on a day like this and given the way that Urbino had been feeling, was far from appetizing. The other sister was sorting through napkins at one of the tables. She recognized him and responded to his enquiry enthusiastically.

‘But of course, signore!' she said, standing up. ‘We have a room, our best, for as long as your friend needs it. Breakfast is included, and as you see, we have a restaurant with home-cooked meals for a very reasonable price. Come.'

She collected a key from the desk in the entrance behind the dining room and led him up a dark, rickety staircase to the end of the hallway. She had some difficulty unlocking the door of one of the rooms, and the door needed to be pushed slightly to open. The room held a double bed with a lithograph of St. Rita over the headboard, a chest of drawers, a small table and chair, a chipped sink, and a bidet. It was all rather drab and uninspiring, and certainly not what Croy was accustomed to in her room in Dorsoduro. The smell of the tripe had seeped into the room where it joined forces with a strong odor of mildew.

The woman, sensing Urbino's reaction, went over to the window, pulled aside the heavy drapes, and threw open the wooden shutters.

Light bathed the room. The effect was somehow not to reveal more of the room's drawbacks but to make it much more desirable.

The window provided a view of a narrow canal, a stone bridge, and an iron-railed balcony from which a profusion of flowers cascaded. An artist's eye would be unable to resist the charm of the scene.

When the woman quoted a price that was a fourth of what Croy was paying in Dorsoduro, he said that he would reserve it on behalf of his friend, starting with the next day. The woman insisted that he also engage it for that night since her chances of finding someone to take it for only one night would be slim. Urbino didn't argue. He left a deposit to cover three days. After getting his receipt and thanking the two sisters, he took a water taxi from the Riva dei Sette Martiri to Croy's hotel in Dorsoduro.

Croy wasn't there. He left her a note about the pensione, telling her that she could take occupancy at any time today and giving her the address and explicit directions to reach it. He enclosed the receipt in the envelope along with the note. The woman at the desk assured him that Croy would get it as soon as she returned.

As soon as he got back to the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino called the Gritti Palace Hotel. Hollander wasn't in his room. Urbino left a message, with the necessary information about the estate agent.

After lunch, which was served by the morose Natalia, Urbino went down to Gildo's apartment. Natalia had told him that Claudio was with the gondolier. Urbino took two copies of
Regate e Regatanti
with him.

Claudio sat on the sofa watching Gildo repair an umbrella for Natalia at the table. Claudio's face looked more drawn today than it had yesterday.

‘I thought I'd check and see how you two were doing. And give you these.' He handed them each a copy of the book. ‘I think you'll find it interesting.'

The two men thanked Urbino. Gildo put aside the umbrella, dropped into the chair by the canal-side window, and soon became absorbed by the list of champions of the
gondolini
competitions. Claudio looked at the cover, which had a photograph of two stripe-shirted rowers in the
disdotona
race, and then opened the book at random to a photograph of the 1881 regatta. He stared at it for a few moments before putting the book down on the sofa.

‘How are you feeling, Claudio?' Urbino asked.

‘I'm fine. You don't have to worry.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Yes, you are,' Claudio stood up. ‘You're worried about me because of Albina. But I'll tell you something. I have more energy than I did before she died. More energy to row in the race. Maybe even win it. Do you know what she told me before she died?'

‘What?'

‘She had a dream that Gildo and I were far ahead in the race. She was watching from the contessa's palazzo. She got so excited that she fell into the Canalazzo. We stopped rowing and went to help her and pulled her into the
gondolino
. But she was angry in the dream, she said. She wanted us to stay in the race.'

‘You understand the dream, don't you, Signor Urbino?' Gildo asked, looking up from the book. ‘Albina knew she was sick. She felt she was going to die. She was telling him to go on. She was telling us both to go on.'

Gildo put
Regate e Regatanti
down on a little table that held a large blue glass gondola. He went over to Claudio and threw his arm companionably around his shoulder.

‘And we're going to do even better now, because of Albina, aren't we!' Gildo said.

Claudio gave his friend a weak smile.

Yet again that day Urbino felt the irrational pull of superstition. Albina's dream appeared to be both a veiled prediction of disaster and an encouragement to see beyond some calamity, depending on how you interpreted it.

‘When did she tell you about the dream?'

‘Three days before she died.' Claudio paused. ‘The last time I saw her alive.'

‘She was a good woman,' Urbino said. ‘Everyone seems to have liked her.'

‘Everyone
did
like her,' Claudio corrected him sharply. ‘I never heard one bad word about her. Not from anyone. Everyone loved her at Florian's, the staff and every single customer.'

‘Yes, she was good-tempered and kind. And generous. She didn't provoke anyone, and wasn't the type to complain, even if she might have had reason to.'

Claudio's face tensed.

‘What do you mean?' he asked.

‘Just that things may have been difficult from time to time with her sister and her other job at Da Valdo. And with problems that we might not have been aware of. Life doesn't always go smoothly for the good.'

Claudio seemed to consider this before saying, ‘You're right that she never complained. Not to me, anyway. And as you see from her dream, she had no fears for herself, but only for other people.'

Six

The next morning, after a long sleep, Urbino felt restored. He had been worried that he would fall sick. Illness was something that preoccupied him even though he enjoyed remarkably good health, except for the embarrassment of his gout.

He was in the habit of going up to the
altana
some mornings with his coffee, a book, and his thoughts, and he had hoped to spend some time doing that today with his Goethe, but a light, misty rain was falling. There had been thunderstorms overnight and prolonged periods of rain that had awakened him intermittently for a few seconds, until he had drifted back into a dreamless sleep.

After spending an hour in his library, he lost concentration on what the German writer had called his irresistible need to set out on his long, solitary journey to Italy. The death of Albina Gonella had given Urbino his own irresistible need and, in its own way, it was a journey just as solitary as Goethe's. He hoped that it would be just as fruitful.

He abandoned the Palazzo Uccello and set out at a brisk stride to San Marco. Deep puddles along his route, where no wooden planks were set up, made it necessary to backtrack. He soon found himself among two sorts of tourists, the lost and the adventurous. The former he directed to the main streets or the nearest boat landing. As for the latter, he gave them what he hoped they realized were encouraging smiles, for he admired their spirit and imagination, and vicariously enjoyed their discovery of odd corners of the city, something that his long residency had deprived him of.

By the time he neared the Grand Canal, or more precisely the Bacino of San Marco, his pace was slackened by the
corso di gente
which he had been obliged to rejoin. Eventually, he reached the Riva degli Schiavoni and stood beside the Danieli Hotel.

The lagoon stretched before him beneath a sky not so much gray as opalescent. Vaporetti, motorboats, yachts, and barges crisscrossed the lagoon and moved in and out of the channels of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca. A tanker flying the Lebanese flag plied its way toward Marghera and passed a car ferry moving in the opposite direction toward the Lido.

At the mouth of the Grand Canal, the Dogana da Mare resembled the prow of a ship with the baroque whiteness of the Salute gleaming wetly behind it in the rain. Farther in the distance the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its classical brick façade and bell tower, was in serene possession of its own little island, and the Church of the Redeemer rose chaste and dignified from the buildings clustered around it on the Giudecca Island.

Despite all the noise and activity on the water and the Riva in front of him, Urbino felt a few moments of peace as he always did in contemplating this panorama. He hardly even heard the raucous song of a group of Turkish sailors dancing a few feet away from him. The balance and harmony of the two Palladian churches and the extravagance of the Salute to created a marvelously unified composition. It encouraged him in the hope that the two different sides of his nature could be just as compatible.

A few minutes later, on the Riva degli Schiavoni, without much trouble, he found the person he was looking for. Giulietta had identified him for Urbino among the mourners at the Carmini. Maurizio, Albina's young neighbor who had sometimes walked her home from Da Valdo, was tending one of the souvenir kiosks close to the Ponte della Paglia. Tourists encumbered the bridge, gazing at the Bridge of Sighs and taking photographs.

Like the other kiosks, Maurizio's was bursting with guide books, T-shirts, fans, masks, prints of Venice, glass and plastic Rialto bridges and gondolas, postcards, straw hats, key chains, and other trinkets and souvenirs.

Maurizio was about nineteen, with short dark hair styled in spikes, an angular face, and clear blue eyes.

‘Yes, I helped Signorina Albina get home many times,' he said in a low, quiet voice when he had finished with a customer. They stood under the plastic tenting of the kiosk. ‘If I was passing that way, I'd stop by, sometimes help her with her work. She was a nice lady.' He looked away toward San Giorgio for a moment. ‘We were together during the bad storm before the one she died in. We had fun laughing and being pushed by the wind. She was like a little girl.'

‘She told me about that night. She said you were a good boy.' Urbino turned the wheel of postcards idly, being treated to a kaleidoscope of the Bridge of Sighs, the Piazza San Marco, the Basilica, the Salute, the Rialto Bridge, the leaning campanile of Santo Stefano, and the Grand Canal. ‘Do you know that her apartment was broken into on the day of her funeral?'

‘My mother told me.'

Three French women approached the kiosk. Maurizio unfolded some T-shirts for them. He wished them good day when they left without buying anything.

‘Albina's sister is very disturbed about the break-in,' Urbino said as Maurizio refolded the T-shirts. ‘As I'm sure everyone in the area is. She's afraid that someone might have been angry with Albina and broke into the apartment because of that.' This wasn't exactly what Giulietta had indicated but it might serve Urbino's purpose to say it. ‘Did Albina ever complain about anyone bothering her? Any of the customers?'