The Thief of Venice (3 page)

Henchard looked at him soberly. "You have a nasty cough."

"It's just the plaster dust. And you should see all the stuff up there, it's covered with dust." The
spazzino
produced another dry cough.

"Look here," said Henchard, sounding concerned, "I'm a doctor. That cough sounds really serious. It's far down in your lungs. You should take something for it."

"I should? " The young man began coughing in earnest.

If at that moment some wise man had been sitting in a corner of the storage room for carts, looking on with his chin in his hand, some worldly philosopher like the figure of a donor in the painting of a grisly martyrdom, he might have observed that a surgeon's power over life and death could sometimes be too easy.

No philosopher was watching as Henchard opened his bag and took something out. "It just happens that I've got some good stuff right here. You'll have to drink it out of the bottle. It tastes nasty, I'm afraid, but it will do the trick."

It did it very well. The spasms began almost immediately. Henchard laid the boy down on the floor, and said kindly, " I'll call the
ambulanza
."

The key to the cart-storage space was still in the lock. Henchard went outside, shut the door on the boy's groans, turned the key and put it in his pocket. Then he began walking quickly in the direction of the hospital. It wasn't far, and like every other Venetian citizen he was used to walking.

And it gave him time to think. There was a great deal to be done, at once, without delay.

The problem of disposal was one he could handle. After all, he was a surgeon. He knew precisely how to find the point of separation between the patella and the femur. But perhaps there was no point in making careful separations at the joints. He could just go straight across. Of course it would be a messy business, but by the time he came back with his equipment, the blood would not be so apt to spurt all over the place.

And the whole thing could be done right there on the spot. The mess would be no problem. There were ways of dealing with it. And afterward the boy's own colleagues in the employ of the Nettezza Urbana would dispose of the remains. There would have to be a number of plastic bags, but all of the bundles would be quite small. He would simply tie them shut at the top and place them tenderly outside the doors along the
fondamenta
, and in the morning the good workers of the city would pick them up, along with everybody else's plastic bags, and cart them to the nearest canal.

One of the things that had charmed Henchard from his first days in the city was the smoothly working perfection of Venetian civic arrangements. All the problems of life in a watery metropolis had been solved long ago. Since there were no fields, no orchards, no cows or pigs or chickens in this city of stone, everything had to come from the mainland. And of course since there was no extra land anywhere for the disposal of rubbish, every scrap of refuse had to be removed by boat. Henchard had seen rubbish carts hoisted over the seagoing boats of the Netturbini on the edge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, he had seen their bottoms fall open and the debris tumble out. He had seen the fully laden boats chug away into the lagoon.

Out there somewhere, far from the city, they dropped their cargoes. And then, freed of their trash from yesterday—all their smelly garbage and used diapers and tin cans and empty bottles and occasional severed heads and arms and legs—the citizens of Venice could begin the day as fresh and spotless as newborn babes.

Of course the hole in the ceiling would still be a problem. It would call for heavy-gauge chicken wire, a trowel, and a bag or two of plaster of Paris.
Non c'e problema.
Nothing to it.
 

*5*

"We are renting the top floor," said Homer to the little girl, trudging after her up the stairs. "
Siamo qui
—wait a minute—
siamo qui per visitare Dottor Bell. Dov'e
—oh, sorry, hold it a sec." Homer ran over the possessive pronouns in his head.
"Dov' e il suo appartamento?"

The child seemed not to have heard. She clumped ahead of them, bent nearly double under her backpack. Homer and Mary followed, lugging their baggage up the steps. On the level surface of the pavement in the square, the little wheels had made it easy to drag the suitcases, but hoisting them up a flight of stairs was a different matter. Mary and Homer struggled and heaved.

At the first landing the little girl stopped and took out another key. Instantly the door was flung open. A woman stood in the doorway and began scolding the child in a torrent of Bostonian English. "Ursula, you are a very inconsiderate little girl. Did it occur to you that your grandmother might have something important to do? Where have you been?"

Silently the child edged past her. Only then did the grandmother notice the man and woman climbing the stairs half a flight down. She stared at them blankly and began to close the door.

"Oh, please, ma'am," said Homer loudly, "perhaps there's some mistake. I spoke to Doctor Bell on the phone yesterday from Concord, Massachusetts."

The woman glowered at them through a crack in the door.

"Oh, Homer," said Mary, embarrassed, "it must be the wrong address. Can you tell us, signora, if Doctor Samuele Bell lives here?"

At last the face of the grandmother lost its grumpy expression and wreathed itself in smiles. She opened the door all the way. A queenly graciousness replaced the chill. A plump hand was held out in a gesture of royal welcome. "Professor and Mrs. Kelly, of course. Do,
do
come in."

Homer dragged his bag up and up, wanting to say,
It's not Professor and Mrs. Kelly, it's Professor Kelly and Professor Kelly
, but he held his tongue.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dorothea Wellesley. I am an artist. Do come in." But she was still standing in the doorway, a plump elderly woman in a Laura Ashley dress.

Move out of the way, woman.
Mary and Homer bumped their bags up the last few steps to the landing and stood there, breathing heavily, two exhausted Americans who had just hoisted two hundred pounds of baggage skyward against the downward pull from the center of the earth.

At last Mrs. Wellesley—artist, grandmother, and obviously the mother-in-law of Samuele Bell—stepped aside and they were permitted to enter. At once there was another blockage.

"My art, you see, is here on the wall. This is a portrait of my beloved daughter."

A respectful mortuary pause was required. Mary and Homer supplied it, their book bags dragging from their shoulders, their fists gripping the handles of their suitcases.

"In Venice one can only walk in the footsteps of the masters." Mrs. Wellesley backed up slowly, delivering a lecture on every painting along the corridor. They were apocalyptic scenes in violent colors, the Virgin and child in flames, the crucified Christ in a bonfire, a conflagration of church steeples, a manger scene like a fiery furnace, a robed figure burning at the stake.

Mary inched her bag forward. " Is that the—uh—?"

"The pope? Of course."

Homer was desperate for a bed, a chair, a stretch-out on the floor. He peered past Mrs. Wellesley's livid watercolors at the room beyond the hall. It was a pleasant-looking chamber with cozy chairs and a sofa and delightful puffy pillows. There was a charming sideboard with splendid-looking bottles. Homer recognized one from afar, Old Fence Rail.

He groaned aloud. Mary stepped on his foot, and Homer said, "Ouch," just as the door burst open and Samuele Bell came hurrying in, gasping, shouting a glad greeting.

"I'm sorry to be late. I wanted to be here to welcome you."

Immediately another door opened and the little girl reappeared and ran to her father. He hoisted her with one arm and reached out with the other to shake hands.

"Now, Ursula," said her grandmother severely, "remember your manners."

But the atmosphere was warmer by a dozen degrees. "Sit down, sit down," cried Sam.

Mary and Homer sank into the cozy chairs. Mrs. Wellesley lowered herself daintily into a straight one. Sam plumped himself down on the sofa, bounced his daughter on his knee, and asked urgent questions about their flight from Boston and their state of weariness. Then he set Ursula down and stood up. "You must be perishing for a drink. Speak your poison." He looked around, laughing. "I hope that's right. It's what my father used to say. Something for you, Dorothea?"

"Oh, dear, nothing for me, Sam. Well, perhaps just a smidgen of whiskey."

Homer accepted his Old Fence Rail and laughed with relief, because now at last they had finished their journey. They were at home in this foreign land. He looked around the room, recognizing with pleasure a fellow scholar's quarters. The round table in the middle was littered with books. In the bookcase between the windows other books stood upright, leaned sideways, and lay flat. On the top of the bookcase a bust of Dante looked down at them severely. On the walls, instead of Mrs. Wellesley's frenzied watercolors, there were framed maps of the city of Venice. Originals, decided Homer, and very old. The sailing vessels had high poops, and the puffed cheeks of the four winds blew east, west, north, and south.

Mary jumped up to look at another picture on the wall beside her chair, a green-faced Madonna on a gold background. "Isn't this something pretty wonderful?"

"It's a Paolo Veneziano," said Sam. "There's a bigger one in the Accademia."

"Oh, Sam," said Mrs. Wellesley. "I wish you'd take it down. It's a thoroughly unsuitable subject for a household with a growing child." She tittered. "Worse than pornography, in my opinion."

"Dorothea, you need a drink." Her son-in-law filled her glass. He filled one for Mary too, and she laughed and thanked him, remembering how much she had enjoyed Doctor Bell's way of speaking English with a slight accent when he had been a visiting lecturer in Cambridge. She tried a toast in Italian, probably all wrong.
"Al suo salute!"

Sam seemed pleased. Mary watched as he pulled the tab on a soft-drink can for his daughter. Then, without making a drink for himself, he sat down again on the sofa and wrapped an arm around the little girl. "Mary and Homer," he said with mock formality, squeezing the child against him, "meet my daughter Ursula. Ursula dear, these two gigantic people are Mr. and Mrs. Kelly from the United States."

Ursula's stony little face opened up. She was beaming.
 

In the Treasury of the Basilica of Saint Mark there are many reliquaries. One contains spines from the Crown of Thorns.

*6*

On the day after the curator of rare books in the Biblioteca Marciana, Dottor Samuele Bell, came into the office of Lucia Costanza and made his outrageous request to examine a number of sacred relics—and an equally outrageous proposal of marriage (it was only a joke, of course)—Lucia descended the stairs from her office and crossed the piazza to consult Father Urbano.

At the east end of the thronged square the Basilica of Saint Mark loomed out of a gray fog like a dream of oriental splendor. In the mist the brilliant colors of the mosaics and the marble columns seemed a little washed out, as though every tourist snapshot had stolen here a blush of rose, there a glitter of gold. On the balustrade above the central portal the bronze horses pawed at the mist, two with the left hoof, two with the right.

There were small pools of water here and there in the square, and a slender stream had seeped into the north aisle of the basilica. Wasn't it early in the year? Lucia splashed through it with her rubber-soled shoes and met Father Urbano in the sacristy.

He was a small round bald-headed priest. When he had been the parish priest of a little village in Umbria he had resembled tne Franciscan monks of old, because the shape of his baldness was just like a tonsure.

Father Urbano was not altogether comfortable in the great basilica. Its magnificence sometimes overwhelmed him. In its staring mosaics and golden volumes there was a quality that troubled him, an otherness, as if its builders were not connected to him by blood and bone. They had tossed up over the round vaults their bulbous domes and designed the great mosaics and attached the tesserae in dazzling clusters, and the mosaics were the wonder of the world, he knew that. And yet their staring eyes disturbed him.

They were indifferent to daily life, to the getting of bread, the raising of children, the doing of laundry. The shimmering figures existed only in eternity, where a peculiar kind of freezing wind had stiffened their limbs and wrinkled their gowns in tortured folds. Their dark brows frowned, their eyes sent long rods of accusation crisscrossing the upper air. It was a web of mighty gazing, never intersecting the upward glances of the tourists shuffling below.