Frail Barrier (4 page)

‘That's very kind of him. By the way, do you know what café Albina works in in addition to Florian's? I'd like to stop by tonight and see what her working conditions are. I might be able to find her a full-time position somewhere.'

‘That would be wonderful. Her boss at the café keeps asking her to do more and more work. You'll see with your own eyes what she has to put up with. She cleans up at Da Valdo. She starts around ten thirty.'

The café was in the Campo Sant'Angelo not far from the Fortuny Museum. It would make a pleasant walk this evening. Urbino thanked Natalia and left her to her work.

A few minutes later Urbino called the Gritti Palace and asked for Nick Hollander. He was connected with him in the bar.

‘Yes? This is Nick Hollander.'

It was a precise British voice.

‘Hello, Mr. Hollander. This is Urbino Macintyre. I'm a friend of the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini, Sebastian's cousin.'

If it hadn't been for the murmur of voices, the tinkling of glasses, and the light music in the background, Urbino might have thought they had been cut off.

‘Ah, yes, Mr. Macintyre. Sebastian speaks of you often.'

‘How is he doing?'

‘Very well. He's in Scotland for the summer with Viola.' Viola was Sebastian's twin sister. ‘They so much would like to be here for the contessa's party.'

‘It's unfortunate they can't make it. Barbara would love to see them. It's been almost four years.'

That had been on the occasion of another of the contessa's parties, during which there had been a murder at the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. Sebastian was sure to have mentioned this to Hollander.

‘I hope I can compensate a little for their absence,' Hollander said after a few moments. ‘I'll tell her what they've been doing these days.' He gave a strained chuckle. ‘Well, not quite everything. You know Sebastian and Viola.'

‘Not as well as I'd like to.'

This was far less than truthful, for the Neville twins hadn't particularly impressed him, least of all Sebastian. But if Urbino knew one thing, it was that our world would crash down around our heads if we didn't lie half the time. Social lies. Little white lies – whatever you called them, they were necessary. But if they made his social life easier, they made his biographies and his sleuthing much harder. He had to spend many long hours sorting out the white lies from the much darker ones.

‘How is the contessa? I look forward to meeting her.'

‘She's well. She's looking forward to meeting you, too.'

Urbino was about to mention the contessa's invitation to Asolo when embarrassment rushed through him. He hadn't mentioned the death of Hollander's ex-stepfather! It should have been one of the first things he said. He rectified his oversight immediately.

‘But forgive me for going on like this about relatively trivial things, Mr. Hollander. I meant to give my condolences on the death of Konrad Zoll as soon as I got you on the line.' It seemed best to refer to Zoll by name rather than by his former relationship to Hollander. ‘It was thoughtless of me.'

‘Not at all. Thank you. Did you and the contessa know my stepfather?'

Urbino, grateful to Hollander for having settled the issue of how to refer to Zoll, wondered whether his dropping of the ‘ex' indicated the closeness of their relationship.

‘We never had that pleasure. We only recently learned that a man we saw walking past Florian's in July was your stepfather. He was with a young man who was very attentive.'

Urbino waited for Hollander to identify his stepfather's companion, but there was silence.

‘He made a deep impression on us,' Urbino continued, ‘especially on the contessa. He looked so ill. We admired him for being out, considering his condition.'

‘Leukemia. He was diagnosed only six months ago.'

Urbino, whose greatest fear was illness, contemplated what it must have been like for Zoll.

‘This might not be appropriate, Mr. Hollander, considering your recent loss,' he said, ‘but perhaps we can meet for a drink tomorrow or another day – at your convenience, of course.'

Hollander assured him that there would be no problem. They arranged to meet the day after tomorrow at five in the afternoon on the terrace of the Gritti Palace.

After lunch, a tenor voice singing one of Mozart's
lieder
filled Urbino's library as he lay on the sofa. Serena, the cat he had rescued from the Public Gardens several years ago, was nestled between his legs and giving a low, deep purr.

One particular song got Urbino's attention because of his interest in Goethe. It was Mozart's musical version of Goethe's poem ‘Das Veilchen,' the story of a violet that fell in love with a shepherdess only to be trampled beneath her feet. It was a delightful piece, beautifully put to music and nicely interpreted by the tenor.

When the Mozart ended, he went to the dark-wood ambry in the corner. The small, enclosed cupboard contained neither alms nor chalices, however, although one of the latter stood on a nearby table, draped with a seventeenth-century lace cover. The ambry had a secular function these days that nonetheless bore a similarity to its original ecclesiastical purpose since it served as his liquor cabinet. He withdrew a wine glass and poured himself some chilled Prosecco.

When he stretched out on the sofa again, Serena promptly found her previous spot. He opened his Goethe to where Tischbein marked his place. He reread Goethe's initial impressions of Venice during his negotiations of the labyrinth of the city. Like Urbino, the German writer had enjoyed finding his way in and out of the maze by himself, believing that his manner of experiencing things personally was the best. After a while, Urbino put the book down on his chest.

One of Goethe's ideas lingered in his mind as he lay on the sofa.

Goethe, whose vision had been renewed during his weeks in Venice, believed that the eyes are educated by the objects it is accustomed to look at from childhood onwards. According to Goethe, Venetian painters had enjoyed the great good fortune, because of the glories that their eyes had been formed on since childhood, to see the world as a brighter and happier place than most people did.

As for his own eye, Urbino thought, hadn't it been formed – or rather re-formed, reconfigured – since moving to Venice?

He arose from the sofa and went to one of the windows from where he was accustomed to refresh his eye with the Venetian scene. He leaned on the broad marble sill, being careful not to disturb the pots of red geraniums.

It might be a small portion of the whole Venetian scene but it was representative. A
calle
led into a small open area where bright sunshine cut oblongs into the dark shade.

A covered wellhead with its worn relief of cherubs and garlands, which had belonged to the Palazzo Uccello in the seventeenth century, stood in the middle of the little square. A brindled cat sat on the well, soaking up the sunshine.

A bridge raised its humpback over a narrow canal on the other side of the square where a low-lying
sandolo
, recently repainted bright blue for the upcoming regatta, rocked in the wake of a passing delivery boat. Steps, green with moss, led from the side of the bridge down to the water.

The surrounding buildings were rose-colored and in that state of dilapidation that is graced by being called picturesque.

One of the buildings had an inverted bell chimney emerging from its tiles and curved, wrought-iron balconies with rows of flowers and ivy. On the roof of another building perched a wooden terrace, an
altana
, where in former years Venetian women would sit to bleach their hair, aided by a concoction of powdered Damascus soap and burned lead. Now the structures, like the one on the roof of the Palazzo Uccello, were used for far different purposes, such as drying laundry and airing clothes and blankets, although Urbino's own
altana
was also a welcome retreat made almost pastoral with its abundance of plants.

As he remained at the window, shouts and laughter echoed against all the stones, magnified somehow by the water. They could have come from a few feet away or from a greater distance, so unusual are the acoustics of the city. A few seconds later two children raced down the
calle
and over the bridge with a soccer ball, followed at a more sedate pace by their mother pushing a baby carriage. Walking backward when she reached the bridge, she pulled the carriage up the steps as she was obliged to do dozens of times a day as she went about her errands. An elderly man coming from the opposite direction helped her negotiate the steps down the other side.

Two women emerged from the
calle
. Their dark gray dresses and scarves identified them as nuns from the nearby Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina. They leaned down to admire the baby and chatted with the mother before continuing over the bridge.

Neighborhood figures drifted into the square, stopping to exchange greetings and gossip. Two tourists half carried, half dragged suitcases from the
calle
beneath Urbino's window. Bewildered and exhausted, they accosted a white-haired woman, a vendor at one of the kiosks along the Lista di Spagna. After they showed her a piece of paper, she pointed in the direction from which they had just come.

Urbino could spend hours looking out of the library window or, in fact, any of the windows in the house. The contessa had once joked that one of his next presents would be a very modest one. It would be nothing more than a little pillow, though nicely embroidered, she promised, the kind that elderly women leaned on from their windows as they watched and gossiped and dozed.

He was about to turn back into the room when a thin woman in a green dress and a gondolier's hat, from which wisps of metallic-looking red hair escaped, emerged from the
calle
on the other side of the canal. She was struggling with a bag over her shoulder, a pack on her back, and a case in her hand. She was the woman on the Dorsoduro bridge whom he had observed earlier from the shelter of his
felze
, the painter who had been so good-natured with the man who had accidentally knocked down her easel.

That she was now in the Cannaregio district was not unusual. One of the delights of Venice was its smallness, hardly bigger than Central Park in New York City, and you were always meeting people you knew or strangers who soon became familiar figures.

The woman paused in the middle of Urbino's bridge – for so he thought of it – and looked along the length of the canal, first in one direction, then in another. She proceeded down the steps into the little square, and started to divest herself of her burdens. When they were all on the ground around her, she stroked the cat.

She surveyed the buildings that enclosed the square, giving a few moments of attention to each in turn, until her gaze fell upon the Palazzo Uccello. Urbino drew back from the window so as not to be seen, but not so far that he could not continue to see.

The woman stared at the building. Urbino had become accustomed to the attention that the Palazzo Uccello, with its stilted arches, marble facings, and pointed extradoses, received. Its seventeenth-century imitation of the Veneto-Byzantine style was often pointed out by tour guides and sketched by architecture students. He had once heard one of the tour guides explaining to a small group gathered on the bridge that not only had the building been built by an eccentric, reclusive bachelor in the seventeenth century but it also was now owned by one.

From his concealed position, Urbino smiled as the memory crossed his mind. The woman seemed to be absorbing the details of his building with an intense expression on her face that bordered on a frown. Could she be going to make the Palazzo Uccello the subject of one of her paintings?

But if she was, it wouldn't be today, for she slowly and a bit wearily gathered together her paraphernalia and went down the
calle
beneath Urbino's window.

Two

At nine that evening, soon after Urbino went over the humpbacked bridge and down the
calle
toward the Grand Canal, he regretted it.

Not that he regretted his ultimate destination – the café in the Campo Sant' Angelo where Albina Gonella worked – but instead the route he had set out upon to get there.

It had him almost immediately encountering rowdy groups that were merely the eddies of the strong current of people he would soon be fighting against. At this hour the tidal flow of the summer crowd moved away from the Piazza San Marco in the direction of the train station and the car park at the opposite end of the Grand Canal.

Lightning flashes sharpened the night sky with knives of light, but no thunder rumbled. When he approached the Rio Terrà San Leonardo, a sudden gust of hot, damp wind blew drops of rain against his face.

He became caught in a group of Spanish tourists who were passing around a bottle of wine. When he pulled close beneath a shuttered shop to let another group pass, he took advantage of his knowledge of the city – the mixed blessing that never allowed him to lose himself anymore – and went off the main route.

He first backtracked in the direction of the Palazzo Uccello, skirting the Ghetto. The crowd started to thin. By the time he reached the neighborhood of the Church of the Madonna dell' Orto, and in fact long before, he was meeting tourists who had lost the main route or who, like him, were wisely seeking out the indirect way to their destinations.

He plunged deeper into the quieter reaches of the Cannaregio, where it approached the lagoon and gave views of the cemetery island and the causeway to Mestre and the mainland.

After several minutes he entered a small
campo
where local residents sat on benches and children played beneath a stunted tree whose lower trunk was imprisoned in a rusted iron cage. A tall building dominated the square not so much despite its state of dilapidation but somehow because of it. The shadow it cast seemed darker than any others in the open area.