Deadly to the Sight (32 page)

The Contessa's theory that Regina, or Giorgio, had murdered Nina, and then Regina had murdered Giorgio, was certainly plausible. But whether she did or she didn't, the police weren't asking her, or anyone else, it seemed, the right questions, the ones that could free Habib. Urbino intended to.

He would see Polidoro again in a few days when he regained more of his strength. It might be all he needed.

His steps took him behind the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi where Wagner had died on a cold February day like this one. The Palazzo was now the winter quarters of the Casino. The building's associations with Frieda's favorite composer invariably led him to think of her and her possible role in the violent and deadly events. Her German origins could be seen as a link between her and the Crivellis, since Evelina had not only looked German, according to Carolina Bruni, but also appeared to have run off to Germany.

He remembered, however, that Gabriella and Lidia had disputed whether it was actually Germany, or instead Switzerland, that Evelina had run off to. Beatrix Bauma was from Austria, which was close to both. She had seemed very nervous last week in her apartment, and even a little frightened of what Marie might tell him. At more than one point, the Austrian woman had stood silently, staring at him and at Marie as if—

His thoughts took an abrupt shift as an image flashed before his eyes. The mask of the plague doctor! With its long beak of a nose! Could Polidoro have been referring to the mask?

Urbino's initial excitement started to ebb as he asked himself why Polidoro would have referred to a detail of the mask instead of the mask itself. Of course, the man had been in a confused state of mind, and could barely speak.

Before going down the bridge over the Rio della Maddelena, Urbino paused to look at the little
campo
to his right. It was one of his favorite spots in the city. Even though the dark and the fog obscured most of the details, he re-created them in his mind's eye. The old houses. The tall chimney pots. The Renaissance wellhead. Habib had been looking forward to the spring to take advantage of the picturesque scene.

The sight of the wellhead sent his thoughts back to what Polidoro had whispered to them. If Urbino remembered correctly, there was a covered well in the courtyard behind Il Piccolo Nettuno. Could he possibly have been referring to that?

Anything and everything seemed a possibility at the moment, except, of course, that Habib was involved in any way but the most innocent and peripheral. If this were his blind spot, he would cling to it as if it were his most precious possession.

He went past Santa Fosca, then down the bridge where the Renaissance monk Paolo Sarpi had been stabbed. He was soon standing on the bridge that gave a view of the Palazzo Uccello, dark except for the two lamps by the entrance.

It was then that he had the sense that he was being followed. The feeling swept over him as it had that night in Dorsoduro. Then he had heard footsteps approaching, stopping, and retreating behind him. Habib had been following him then, he had said, fearful that he might come to harm. But Habib was in no position to be looking out for him now.

Tonight there were no footsteps. It was nothing more than an instinct, but he had learned to trust them. He looked behind him but saw and heard no one.

He crossed the short distance to the entrance of the Palazzo Uccello and let himself in, and locked the door behind him with relief, his heart pounding.

22

In the parlor, Urbino unlatched the window. The damp night air rushed in. The silence seemed suddenly and unnaturally profound.

He peered down into the
calle
where fog was starting to drift in from the nearby lagoon. A cat crouched by the bridge. Almost any of the dark shadows could have concealed a figure. Salvatore, Frieda, Beatrix, or Marie. The thought of the milliner lurking outside his house in one of her hats brought a smile to his lips, but then he thought, why not Marie? Hadn't he perceived a harder edge in the little woman recently? He couldn't discount her, any more than he could the others.

He stood staring out for a full five more minutes, but the scene became even emptier when the cat slipped into one of the shadows.

He put Britten's
Billy Budd
on the player to accompany his musings and sat on the sofa. He hoped that the opera would act as a kind of perverse exorcism of his deepest fears, but instead it reinforced them, as he should have realized it would.

The anguish of the fatherly Captain Vere, the openhearted nature of Billy, his violent confrontation of his accuser, and his punishment by death despite the absence of any murderous intention—they all rolled out with a frightening and familiar inevitability. He shut it off.

He stroked Serena as his mind wandered. Vague thoughts about fathers and sons, provoked by the opera, soon crystallized into specific ones about Salvatore and his lost son Gino. To have lost him in the way that he had, and to be searching for him, to be hoping that someday he would come back might be worse than knowing that he was gone forever, and perhaps even dead.

Were there indeed some things far worse than death? Than your own death or the one of someone you loved? He had no doubt that there were.

He had once speculated with the Contessa that Nina might have died because, after so many years, she had recognized Gino grown into Giorgio. Carolina Bruni had put it bluntly when she had said that if Evelina and Gino had ever returned, Nina would have dropped dead from the shock.

Although he no longer saw any reason to believe that Giorgio had been anyone but himself, he considered various possibilities of both true and mistaken identity involving Salvatore, his real or presumed son, and Giorgio.

They didn't lead anywhere as far as he could see, but something lingered in his mind like one of the wisps of fog outside. He would have to return to it at another time, when he had a few more pieces in his possession.

There were still holes in the fabric of his thinking. Were they the kind that made things fall apart or the kind that contributed to a meaningful design? He felt he was nearing the end, in one way or another, an end of either success or failure. He needed patience, but he also needed time, something he was afraid he didn't have, in order to give the necessary extra twists to the thread.

From his meditation on fathers and sons he passed on to mothers and sons—but not Evelina and Gino—but Nina Crivelli and Salvatore.

The death of a mother, Urbino thought. Does a child ever recover completely? He doubted it, if the ache he felt so many years after the death of his own was any good example. He still found it difficult to entertain even good memories. It filled him with guilt, because it made her seem all the more dead.

And what about Nina and Salvatore? Here was a mother not just dead, but both dead and murdered. If Habib's guilt, at any level, was something that he found impossible to face, Salvatore's villainy, though far from as personally tormenting, nonetheless violated a sentiment close to sacred to him.

The Contessa had touched on it several weeks ago when she had said that he often let his filial feeling get in the way of seeing things as they really were. She had been referring to his skepticism, at the time, about Nina Crivelli's deviousness.

She had been right. It had taken him perhaps more time than it should have to acknowledge the old woman's malevolence. Habib had registered it immediately.

And now there was the question of the son. He realized that he kept pushing away the idea that Salvatore, a son, could have killed his own mother, even such a mother as Nina Crivelli had been. Hatred and resentment could have festered over the years, only to erupt that particular night, with the proper trigger.

Even the best of sons of the best of mothers, a situation Urbino considered his own, could feel flashes of anger, even dislike, which were quickly and guiltily suppressed. But the feelings could surface all the more powerfully later, under any number of unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances.

Is this what had happened to Salvatore? If it was, then surely the circumstances were in some way linked to the murdered Giorgio and, if his intuition was correct, with the attack on Polidoro in his shop.

Giorgio's clothes had been in disarray. His trousers had been pulled down, by Giorgio himself or someone else. Yet there had been no signs of any recent sexual contact of any kind.

What did it mean? Could this detail be related back to Salvatore? Or possibly to Gino? Although Urbino no longer believed that Giorgio had been Gino, he couldn't completely relinquish the idea, at least some ways of looking at it.

And so Urbino returned for a few moments to fathers and sons. He reviewed what he knew about Gino. He reconsidered Salvatore's breakdown after having lost him, his years of drinking, his meaningless life of waiting and looking, as he lived in the same house, day after day, with the cause of all his sorrows.

Urbino brought Frieda and Beatrix back into the picture, both separately and together. He kept returning to Frieda's unsettling story, the mask of the plague doctor, and the German and Austrian nationality of the two women. He tried to work out family relationships involving Evelina Crivelli, Frieda, Beatrix, and even Giorgio, until it began to sound like the game he played with Habib about the son of someone's mother's niece.

He shook his head slowly. Once again, he was getting nowhere. Holes, but which kind were they?

Thoughts of the game with Habib reminded him of what the Contessa had said tonight about the game that children play. The telephone game. What came out at the end was a garbled version or even the opposite of what had been said at the beginning.

He repeated what he thought he had heard from Polidoro.
Naso
, nose.
Cozzi
, fights or conflicts.
Pozzi
, wells. He went back and forth through the alphabet, substituting different initial letters. Polidoro had been too weak to enunciate clearly. There were numerous possibilities, but they still made no sense.

He lifted the sleeping Serena and put her against the cushions of an armchair. He went to the library and took out a piece of paper. He wrote out the various combinations, as in yet another game.

After fifteen minutes of this, he stared at two juxtapositions:
vaso
and
cozzi
. Something clicked in his mind, and Beatrix Bauma's face seemed to leap out at him from the shadows of the room.

He positioned the ladder against the wall where he shelved his art books. He climbed the ladder and found the one he was looking for.

It was his copy of the book on Venetian china that Beatrix had accidentally knocked to the floor of her apartment.

He brought it to the refectory table, opened it, and ran his finger down a page of the index. His finger stopped when it came to
Cozzi Geminiano
. He then turned to the relevant pages where he read quickly through the description of the Venetian artisan's creations, many of which could be found in the eighteenth-century museum of the Ca' Rezzonico on the Grand Canal.

Vases were among them.

Urbino first called the Questura. The duty officer wouldn't put him through to Gemelli's home number. After Urbino explained what might be at stake and where he was going, the officer assured him, in indulgent tones, that two men would be dispatched.

After ringing off, he dialed the Contessa's number.

“I'm coming over for the keys to Giorgio's apartment.”

“It's past eleven! Can't it wait until tomorrow?”

“I need to find something out tonight. I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Not just for the keys. For me too. I'm going with you.”

23

Giorgio's ground-floor apartment was shuttered. The apartments above were vacant and dark.

The police hadn't yet arrived. Urbino pushed away the thought that they might not be coming at all. He realized that he wasn't acting in a prudent way, especially considering that the Contessa was with him. His desire to know was stronger than everything else at the moment.

He unlocked the grating and slid it back, then fumbled the key into the door and opened it. A musty odor exhaled from the apartment.

“Perhaps the police have taken it,” the Contessa said.

Urbino had filled her in during their trip from the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

“They don't have the slightest idea of its importance. It's connected to Nina Crivelli, not Giorgio. Where's the light switch?”

“On the left.”

“The police would have assumed it was one of your knickknacks. All I told the duty officer was that there might be something here that could settle some questions about Giorgio's murder.”

He pressed the button. A feeble light illuminated the room. Beyond it were a small kitchen and bathroom.

Urbino placed a stool against the door to keep it open and provide more light. They surveyed the small room.

“It's little more than a storeroom,” the Contessa said apologetically. “I was reluctant to have Giorgio use it. Well, let's start looking, but as I told you, I didn't see anything like it when I was here with the police.”

“Sometimes you can't see something unless you know you're looking for it.”

“There's a fallacy somewhere in that philosophy.”

“I'm surprised the police didn't ask you to go through everything to determine what was Giorgio's. But it seems they're being even more lax than usual with this case.”

He looked through the open door out into the night. The alley was empty for as far as he could see into it. He turned his attention back to the room.

“It's a mess in here. Look at all these cardboard boxes. You'd think he would have thrown them out when he moved in. And the shoes!”

He pointed to a dozen pairs of brightly shined, stylish shoes, all lined up neatly.

He went over to a bookshelf. It held only a few books. Popular magazines, dirty cups, a large radio and cassette player, and a pile of cassettes took up most of the space. On the top shelf was Giorgio's white chauffeur's cap, protected in a transparent plastic bag. Hanging from the shelf, and also protected in plastic, was a uniform.