Black Bridge (17 page)

“I believe Hugh Moss was Helen Creel's son.”

6

Urbino walked to the boat landing in the rain. Some areas were flooded and the planking hadn't been put up yet, so he had to retrace his steps. He regretted not having brought an umbrella until he saw all the twisted remnants littering his route, victims of the wind that whistled through the narrow alleys with diabolical malevolence.

Once in the boat that rocked on the heaving waters of the Grand Canal, he considered what he had learned from Kolb and Zeoli. Both were nervous and both were lying: Zeoli about the murder of Helen Creel, Harriet about her walk back from Zeoli's the night of the murders.

One of the hardest problems in his investigations was sorting out the lies. There were always so many, but very few had to do with the crime. Most were benign or self-protective or sadly habitual. Before he could identify the deadly ones that concealed villainy of the darkest kind, he had to consider—and discard—all the others, which were often the murder's greatest camouflage.

What might he be missing? What wrong assumptions could he be making? Was his dislike of Bobo leading him into one error of judgment after another? Had it exposed Gava to danger and eventual death?

Urbino tortured himself with these questions as the boat made its way up the Grand Canal through the heavy rain.

As a biographer he was accustomed to search a person's life for the meaning behind its outward show, to delve into his past for the essential clues. He often thought of this past as a bridge, sometimes light and airy, more often ponderous, occasionally dark and funereal, that had to be crossed, one difficult step at a time, before he had any chance of understanding his subject.

If the taunt behind the Abano postcard wasn't just a devilish prank, Moss's and Bobo's pasts had the same somber shadow, the murder of Helen Creel. What other links—call them steps on the bridge—did the two men have in common? Or was this one enough to have led to the violence on the Rialto?

By the time he reached the Palazzo Uccello, soaked to the skin, his mind was a hornet's nest of different versions of how, given what he already knew and suspected, Moss and Quimper had met their bloody deaths.

And no matter what version it was, Bobo was always standing there ominously in his field of vision.

7

If the Contessa had been in a different frame of mind, she might have found it unusual that two rooms just happened to be available at the Locanda Cipriani on Torcello. But she was too preoccupied with the storm to reflect on what powers of persuasion or planning Bobo, whose storm eye had been honed by years of idling along the Mediterranean coast, might have used.

“We can't possibly go back tonight, Barbara,” Bobo said over dessert in the Cipriani dining room. Outside, the storm howled furiously.

Unbidden, to the Contessa's mind came Ruskin's words: “Mother and daughter—you behold them, both in their widowhood—Torcello and Venice.” She shivered and took a sip of her coffee.

“Everything's been taken care of. Milo found a room in one of the farmhouses. Consider it fate,” he said, covering his hand with her own.

“So this is where Hemingway wrote that dreadful book about Venice,” the Contessa said later, up in her room. “All bird shooting and drinking at Harry's.”

“‘Dreadful'? The good old colonel who ‘kisses true.'”

She gave him a tentative smile.

“You look lovely tonight. If I'd known how fear makes you blossom, I'd have seen to it that you got a pleasant little fright from time to time.”

He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders.

“You've been abstracted all day, Barbara dear. Since last night in fact. It's Orlando, isn't it? But there's nothing to be done there.”

“To die all alone like that, and just like Rosa,” she said, echoing Festa's words yesterday. “But it's not just Orlando.”

“What is it, then? You're not ill, are you?”

“Not ill, no. But I do have a headache.”

Bobo kissed her forehead, then poured himself some champagne. He sipped it with a reflective look. “It doesn't have to do with your trip with Urbino yesterday, does it,
cara
? Where did you go?”

“Abano.”

As soon as she said it, the Contessa felt a peculiar and paradoxical sense of release and fear. She looked at Bobo. His face was mildly curious. She realized where she was heading but she couldn't hold herself back.

“Oh, Bobo! We had the most frightful time. We heard a story that I just can't get out of my mind.”

She rubbed her forehead as if she were indeed trying to erase the memory of Stella Rossi's account. After pouring himself more champagne, Bobo pulled a chair next to her and took her hand.

“Perhaps if you tell me,
cara
, you'll feel better.”

With Urbino's warning not to tell anyone sounding only faintly in her ears, the Contessa began.

8

Urbino called the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini at ten o'clock that night and learned that the Contessa and Bobo still hadn't returned.

He chose a book, this time one less unsettling than the James of the other night. He got into bed, Serena snuggling by his side, and gazed down at the book without reading it. Instead he began to ponder the case.

Given what he had learned, if the murders were an elaborate, diabolical attempt to frame Bobo, the murderer was not only someone emotionally disturbed, and hiding it well, but also someone intimately familiar with Bobo's past. Perhaps this person even now had—or had had before—an intimate relationship with him.

But Bobo as a victim on this scale? Yet all Urbino had to call to mind were Bobo's haughtiness, his egotism, his insolence, his deceptiveness—oh, Urbino could go on and on!—and it was plausible. Bobo was the kind of man to incite hate and resentment as well as, apparently, love.

Urbino next considered possible motives other than this one of intense, personal hatred for Bobo. There was financial gain, since Moss's and Quimper's knowledge could have tempted someone to turn this knowledge into gold. And the Contessa had recently made a large cash withdrawal from her bank. Urbino had little doubt that she had given this money to Bobo and that he had turned it over to someone else.

Another motive was self-protection. Although Moss and Quimper—and Gava, if he, too, had been murdered—had probably endangered no one's life but their own, they very well could have threatened something even less bearable for a certain kind of person: loss of reputation.

And then there was a motive of twisted benevolence: to protect not the murderer but Bobo or someone else the murderer cared about very deeply.

Urbino started to try to line up the likely candidates in each of these disturbing categories, but eventually, despite an exercise as unlike sheep counting as an exercise could be, he drifted off into a haunted sleep.

The Contessa was drowning in the lagoon as Urbino struggled to reach her. An excruciating pain in his foot, monstrously swollen, made almost all his efforts futile. She kept moving farther beyond his reach, flailing, crying out for help. Suddenly Bobo emerged from beneath the waves like Neptune, his handsome head cascading water. He ignored the Contessa's desperate pleas and swam forcefully, purposefully, toward Urbino, who let himself drift down to the bottom of the lagoon.

There, amid the mud and weeds, lay a crystal coffin. Reclining inside was Harriet Kolb, whose short brown hair had turned gray and was now voluptuously long. In her hands was a burst pomegranate, its fatal, crimson seeds staining the front of her white dress. As she turned her head and began to scream, Urbino woke up. He was sweating and his heart was racing.

Three-fifteen. He wanted to call the Ca' da Capo, but restrained himself. Instead he took two sleeping pills and read until he drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

He was awakened by the phone at eight-thirty the next morning. As he reached for the receiver, he could tell by the quality of the light through the shutters that the storm had cleared the weather.

“Barbara!” he said.

“Sorry to disappoint you. It's Gemelli. Thought I'd give you the latest developments. Gava's will. A copy was found in that box of loose photographs. We somehow hadn't noticed it before. Made out nine years ago. We're trying to locate his lawyer in Rome. Guess who benefits?”

“The Barone?”

“Not a lira! The bulk goes to the medical school in Bologna in memory of his sister. There are small bequests to his sister's nurse and some servants.” When Gemelli paused, Urbino knew the important part was coming. “And then there's Signora Livia Festa: she comes in for triple my annual salary. ‘To Livia Festa, for her love and regard for my sister.' She said she knew nothing about it.”

“Livia Festa!” Urbino was now fully awake.

“Maybe Gava was trying to say something to Casarotto-Re by giving the money to Livia and not him.”

Or something
about
him, Urbino said to himself.

“Item number two,” Gemelli said. “We got a phone call from London. Moss's uncle. He's flying in tomorrow with his lawyer. It seems this isn't the first time someone in his family has been murdered in Italy. His sister, twelve years ago. And you'll never guess who she was.”

“Helen Creel, Hugh Moss's mother.”

“You already knew, Macintyre? I thought we were supposed to be cooperating!”

“Why wasn't Hugh Moss's last name Creel?”

“His uncle raised him after Creel murdered Moss's sister and killed himself. Had his name legally changed.”

“Does he know who the Barone is?”

“Never heard of him. Said there was absolutely no reason for Creel to be jealous, but you know brothers. It doesn't take too much to figure out that Casarotto-Re was having an affair with the Creel woman and that her husband found out. And the son inherited his father's jealous streak. Exactly how all this led to what happened in the Rialto green market is the big question. Casarotto-Re has even more to explain now. There's something else. Casarotto-Re had an argument with Moss a short time after leaving Festa at the Flora. In Campo San Luca.” Campo San Luca was not far from the Rialto Bridge. “Two men resembling Casarotto-Re and Moss exchanged blows in the presence of a woman. By the way, we've been trying to contact Casarotto-Re since last night. Neither he nor the Contessa has returned our calls.”

Knowing what Gemelli's reaction was bound to be, Urbino said quickly: “They went out together yesterday afternoon in the Contessa's boat and weren't back by ten.”

“And they probably aren't back yet! Why the hell didn't you call us? Who knows what's happened to them—or to
her
, is more like it! We're going to start looking for them right away.”

After Gemelli hung up. Urbino called the Ca' da Capo. The Contessa and Bobo weren't back yet.

An hour later at the Flora he learned that Festa was walking Peppino in the Giardini Reali. Before he went in search of her, he spoke with the maid who had seen Festa coming out of Gava's room.

“Gloves, Signor?” she said. “She definitely wasn't wearing gloves. I saw her rings flashing as bright as fire.”

9

In the Giardini Reali Peppino pulled at his leash, his mouth covered by a fashionable leather muzzle. Festa, dressed in her characteristic robe and turban, chided him affectionately as she explained to Urbino that she had never laid eyes on Flint before Bobo's opening night.

“Not at Cinecittà and not in Milan. And I don't recall seeing him in
Uomo Vogue
or any other fashion magazine either, although I suppose I must have if he was as successful as you say. But good-looking men are a dime a dozen in my world. For me to notice them—to remember them—they need something more than a pretty face.”

“He hung around Cinecittà,” Urbino persisted.

“Has he said he knows me?”

“No, I—”

“There you are then.”

They walked under the cast-iron arcade, avoiding the puddles that reflected a blue, cloudless sky. Mothers with youngsters were chatting with each other on the benches. A woman, dressed in a Missoni sweater and carrying a Bottega Veneta bag, was distributing fresh fish to a passel of cats. Beyond the gates of the gardens and the quayside kiosks selling souvenirs, the lagoon sparkled.

When they reached a little fountain, Festa said: “Let me tell you something about Flint. If I knew Oriana better I might say something to her. When we women are in love, we make fools of ourselves. Barbara—”

But she interrupted herself and quickly went on: “The other day I was in a water taxi. When we were going down a back canal near the Rialto, I saw Flint in a deserted
calle
. With another man—swarthy, beefy-faced, a perfect typecast for a thug. Flint was showing the man a bracelet. Thank God, he didn't see me. Maybe you should ask Oriana if she's missing a diamond bracelet. It looked like a Bulgari I've seen her wear.”

Telling Urbino this story had given Festa evident satisfaction. A smile spread across her broad face. Could she be trying to even a score? Urbino was reminded of her account of Moss and Quimper in the Florence glove shop. What had Gava said about her? That she prided herself on knowing things about people? Sometimes knowledge of a certain kind could be dangerous for the knower.

Festa's story about the bracelet and the swarthy man rang true. The Contessa's friend had mentioned Flint's need for money and his association with an unsavory crowd. Then there was his strange reaction to the phone call in his apartment.

Urbino felt, however, that Festa was trying to divert his attention. Did she suspect what else was on his mind?

When they sat down on a bench, he said: “You know about Orlando Gava's will, don't you?”

“Since talking with the police I do. I had no idea. Orlando was reticent when it came to things like that.”