Deadly to the Sight (33 page)

“I don't see it anywhere,” the Contessa said. “Oh, what's this?”

She picked something up and brought it over to Urbino.

“It's a palette knife,” he said, examining it. “It must be Habib's.”

It was new and clean. He put it down on a small table and turned his attention to the sofa. Half a dozen cushions were all thrown together. He started to remove them. Beneath one of them he found a maroon necktie.

“The police probably thought you were crying wolf,” the Contessa said. “Maybe it's just as well. We do look a sight scavenging through all this stuff.”

Urbino's eye was caught by something against the wall, shrouded with a frayed, faded blanket. He went over and removed the blanket. Beneath it were four paintings, oil on canvas, thirty-by-twenty-five inches. Three of them were of bright-colored doors. The fourth was a kaleidoscope of different-colored geometrical shapes that Urbino immediately recognized as the designs painted on the building he had shown Habib their first day on Burano.

“Habib's paintings,” he said in a low voice.

But in the silence and in the small room it was loud enough for the Contessa to hear.

She was kneeling beside a small wooden chest that stood to one side of the open door.

“I didn't see them when I was here.”

She lifted the chest lid and started to look through it as Urbino went to a cluttered table.

“Nothing in here except moldy old maps and guidebooks,” the Contessa said after a few minutes. “I think I'll look in the kitchen. Maybe it's among all the dishes and cups like the letter in that Edgar Allan Poe—”

“Here we go!”

Urbino held up a small, rose-colored vase.

“Is this one of your things?” he asked.

“I never saw it before in my life.”

“You can be sure it's the one that Evelina forgot when she ran away.” He turned it over. There was the anchor in red, the mark of the Cozzi factory. “Nina sold it to Polidoro and—watch out, Barbara!”

But it was too late for her to get out of the way. A figure came barreling from the darkness and through the door, its head down. As it went past the Contessa, it pushed her. She fell and struck her head against the chest.

It was Salvatore. Enraged, he pounced on Urbino. The vase flew through the air and broke into pieces against the wall. He grabbed Urbino by the throat. The smell of alcohol fumes assaulted Urbino's face.

The inebriated Salvatore was at a disadvantage. His grip on Urbino's throat loosened enough for Urbino to pull his hands away. He threw him off balance. Salvatore fell backward over the sofa.

Urbino scrambled across the floor and grabbed one of Giorgio's shoes. Salvatore jumped to his feet and charged at Urbino.

With all his strength Urbino slammed the shoe against the side of Salvatore's head.

Salvatore dropped to the floor, unconscious.

Urbino rushed to the Contessa.

EPILOGUE

Woman of Venice

“Blind! Blind! Blind!” the Contessa exclaimed, but not quite loud enough for the other patrons in the Chinese salon to hear.

If they had, they would have turned their eyes away in embarrassment, for they would have assumed she was speaking about herself. Her large sunglasses, worn inside her favored chamber at Caffè Florian as if it were suffused with summer sunshine on this February afternoon, were proof of her damaged vision, weren't they?

But Urbino knew better. The Contessa's exclamation was directed against him. In case he might have any doubt, she went on to clarify.

“You should have seen! You should have known! If you had, I wouldn't have this to deal with,” she reprimanded with a mischievous air of self-mocking petulance.

With a hand temporarily free of a petit four, she made a vague motion toward her sunglasses and what they rather flamboyantly concealed. Urbino hadn't seen her black eye, but her descriptions and complaints had painted a vivid picture.

“Actually, Barbara, you look rather striking in those sunglasses,” Urbino said, playing along with her. “I'm sure Oriana would be green with envy if she could see you.” Oriana and Filippo were in Paris in the throes of yet another reconciliation. “You've given yourself even more of a mystique.”

The Contessa did have a special aura today. Her dress was in liquid tones of blue and green. From her neck cascaded a necklace of silver ovals that Urbino had brought her from Morocco. And her lips were touched with that faint, shimmering, airy pink that was the shade of Venice.

“Don't try to placate me.”

He could tell she was pleased, however, from the characteristic way she ducked her head slightly and tried to suppress a smile.

“If the police had listened to me—”

“
Caro, caro
!” she interrupted. “If you had
made
them listen to you. Or better yet, if we hadn't gone to Giorgio's apartment at all.”

“Who knows what might have happened then? Habib could still be in prison.”

After Salvatore confessed to the murders of his mother and Giorgio, Habib had been released.

“All's well that ends well,” the Contessa pronounced. “Except for a mutilation here and there.”

She delicately massaged her temple with two wellmanicured fingers.

“It's so wonderful to have a free mind after all this time!” She reached out for another petit four. It had pink frosting and was crowned with a hazelnut. “I don't know how I was able to eat through it all.”

The Contessa had almost as many excuses for her appetite for petit fours as Florian's had petit fours to supply her with. In January, when Nina had lurked outside the Chinese salon, it had been worry. Today it was relief. Tomorrow it might be embarrassment and the day after joy. Never, however, would she admit that it was simply that she loved petit fours.

“If only my eye would clear up, I'd be completely content.”

“Don't worry. It's already the time of masks. Look.”

He directed her attention to the arcade where a figure in a yellow raincoat stood. On its face was a brightly colored Harlequin mask. It was holding a stick used for stirring the character's preferred dish, polenta.

“I get no sympathy from you these days, and after all I've lavished on you.”

The figure in the Harlequin mask remained stationary as it stared into the Chinese salon at the two friends. It raised the stick in an obscene gesture and strode off, throwing confetti through the air.

“These days most of my sympathy goes in a different direction,” Urbino said, gazing out into the Piazza.

Pools of water had seeped up through the paving stones from the intense rains of the past few days. Raised planks provided dry passage over the deeper water in front of the Basilica.

“But I thought Habib was doing fine.”

Habib was up in Asolo at the Contessa's summer villa. She had opened La Muta and provided just enough staff to have it run smoothly. She and Urbino had decided that what Habib needed was some fresh air away from Venice for awhile.

“He is.” Urbino brought his eyes back to the Contessa. “I'll be going up there for a few days but we'll be back in good time for Carnevale. I'll do some work on
Women of Venice
and we'll start making plans for his mother and sister. No, it's not Habib I'm thinking of, but Salvatore. Despite everything, I feel sorry for him.”

“
Il
poverino.
”

Salvatore's story was indeed a sad one, which Urbino had been recounting to the Contessa on this gray afternoon. Much of it was pieced together from what he had learned from Corrado Scarpa, who had stopped by the Palazzo Uccello last night.

Salvatore had broken down after only an hour of interrogation. Urbino's original—but discarded—theory that Giorgio was Gino had become Salvatore's truth and obsession. It seemed to have been provoked by Giorgio's age, his good looks, and his limp that Salvatore was convinced was the vestige of Gino's childhood clubfoot. Giorgio's sudden and mysterious appearance on the scene and his apparent haunting of Burano had also probably played their key roles.

His fantasy of being reunited with his wife and his son took desperate hold of him. If Gino had returned, then so would Evelina. She might even have come back already. What stood in his way was not logic. It was the mother who had made his whole life a misery.

He was determined the past wouldn't repeat itself.

He had confronted Nina with the news that Gino had returned and soon Evelina would as well. It wasn't clear whether or not he told her that it was Giorgio he was talking about. Nina's reaction, however, had been what he expected. After all those years he knew her well.

Curses and warnings, and then the shortness of breath that made her grab for her lace handkerchief to push some pills into her mouth.

Except that Salvatore had removed them from the handkerchief earlier in the day.

He had watched her die, the mother who had loved him in her destructive way.

The position of the handkerchief by her mouth had not been the murderer's sign that the gossip and blackmailer was now silenced forever. Instead, she had pushed it there in her own desperation.

When Salvatore had been asked about the Contessa, he made it clear that both he and his mother resented her wealth and privilege. Urbino, it appeared, wasn't far behind the Contessa in having been a recipient of their bad feeling. However, Salvatore claimed to have no knowledge of his mother's attempts to get money from the Contessa or, for that matter, from anyone else.

A great deal still remained unexplained, which had provoked Urbino and the Contessa into frequent speculation during the past few days.

The authorities had obtained copies of Salvatore's medical records from the clinic in Naples where he had gone after Evelina ran away with Gino. He was undergoing psychiatric evaluation now. Urbino believed that in the end, however, Salvatore would be found fully responsible for his calculated deed to free himself.

“But still so many questions,” the Contessa was now saying. “You were close to making some sense of it that day with your talk about Giorgio being Gino! What did I call it? A house of cards? But when did Giorgio know about Salvatore's wild idea? Was it before or after Nina's death? And what did he make of her death?”

“If we can believe Salvatore's confusion about the time sequence, he didn't tell Giorgio until more than a week after he killed her—or, to look at it from Giorgio's point of view, until after she died. There was no reason for Giorgio to suspect that Nina had died anything but a natural death, that is, not until Salvatore started to act more and more irrationally. Giorgio probably humored him at first. According to Regina Bella, Salvatore never gave any sign that there was any kind of familiarity between him and Giorgio. She said that they seemed to avoid each other. When he needed to, Giorgio would slip into the kitchen when Salvatore wasn't there. As for Giorgio, he never said anything to Regina about it all.”

He paused to take a sip of his Campari soda before going on. The Contessa's hand was hovering over the three remaining cakes, as she tried to decide which would be the next to go the way of the others.

“Who knows? Maybe Giorgio smelled some money in the situation. It doesn't seem as if Giorgio denied being his son, not at first. It was only when Salvatore told him how far he had gone so that they could all be a family again that things started to really go wrong for Salvatore. Giorgio played something of a balancing act, or at least that's the way I make it out. If he denied that he was Gino, he knew he'd be in danger. But he seems to have started making the kind of noises that Salvatore interpreted as blackmail. Surely no son of his would be doing that to him, or would he? He needed to find out for sure.”

“So Giorgio was tempted by the profit to be made out of what he knew. Like Nina.”

“Except that she didn't die because of something she knew. Giorgio did.”

“Was there any one thing that finally made the scales fall from your eyes?” the Contessa asked, showing a persistency in pursuing her earlier line of attack. It was a persistency she matched by selecting the little cake covered with pale yellow frosting.

“The condition of Giorgio's clothes when he was found. Of course, I never believed that it could be anything that Habib had done. But how to explain it? Then I remembered something about Gino. His appendicitis.”

“And the scar from the operation afterward.”

“If Giorgio didn't have a scar, then he wasn't Gino. And he didn't. And so he was murdered.”

“And if Giorgio did have a scar? What then?”

“That would have been a different story, but only up to a point. It might have bought Giorgio more time, but he was doomed as soon as Salvatore revealed that he had murdered Nina.”

“To murder one's own mother.” The Contessa sighed and shook her head. “All that mother's milk.”

“And the daily bread. Almost fifty years of it across the same table. How he must have hated it.”

The Contessa's shoulders gave a quick movement that seemed like a voluntary shiver to rid herself of the vision conjured up. When she spoke, it was to pick up a less frightful thread.

“I'm still not completely clear on how the Geminiano Cozzi vase fits into it all.”

“Salvatore put two and two together. When Evelina's vase went missing, he figured out that Nina had sold it to Polidoro. Habib saw Marino and Nina together on Burano. It's probable Salvatore did as well and knew what she was up to. Somehow Evelina had come by an exquisite little piece, something handed down through the years. Salvatore was determined to get it back. He broke into Polidoro's shop. Polidoro heard someone and came in. He just had time to notice that the Cozzi vase wasn't in its accustomed spot on the table, when someone hit him hard from behind. I saw the vase with some others on the same table when I was at the shop, but I didn't pay any attention to it. Not at the time. I hadn't even spoken with Carolina Bruni yet.”