Death in a Serene City (17 page)

5

URBINO was about to leave when the outside bell rang. “That's Stefano, or at least I assume it is.”

Urbino looked at his watch.

“So late? It's past ten.”

“My, my, aren't you spoiled! Why can't I entertain other gentlemen at whatever hour I please? But don't sulk, it's the frames, simply business. He wants to look at the photographs again. Why, I'm not sure.”

She got up as footsteps approached in the hall. It was Bellorini.

“I hope I'm not intruding, Barbara. I know it's later than I said it would be. Good evening, Urbino. I suppose I could have waited until tomorrow but…” He shrugged.

“We understand: the impatience of the artist. But you're not interrupting us. As a matter of fact you've come at an opportune time. Would you like something to drink? Help yourself.” She indicated the table in the corner set up with decanters, glasses, and a pitcher of water.

As Bellorini went over and poured himself a whiskey, he asked, “Why do you say opportune?”

“Because we both need a break from too much thinking. Let me get the photographs.” She went to the same drawer she had gotten the sheet of paper from and took out a marbleized envelope. She brought it back to her chair and produced three photographs of different sizes in black-and-white—of her husband, her mother, and her maternal grandmother. Urbino had seen them many times before but he looked at them attentively again before passing them on to Bellorini.

Bellorini handled them with almost as much reverence as the Contessa. After looking at each individually, he laid them in a neat row in front of him on a small table.

“Call it superstition or eccentricity, but they almost seem to have an influence over me when I go back to work on the frames. I wouldn't have to make these trips here in the middle of the night, though, if you had let them be reproduced.” He picked one up again—the Contessa's grandmother—and looked at it closely, turning it to the lamplight. “But probably it wouldn't be the same at all. No, I don't think it would.”

The Contessa was pleased. A flush crept into her cheeks as if he had flirted with her and had paid her a compliment that had gone straight to her heart.

“I'll leave you two to discuss matters artistic,” Urbino said, getting up.

To his surprise the Contessa didn't urge him to stay.

6

AFTER leaving the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini Urbino went for a walk that took him across both the Rialto Bridge and the Accademia Bridge before he stopped at Harry's. The bar was crowded and smoke-filled and he left after only one drink, striking out in the direction of the Riva degli Schiavoni.

He paused as he usually did to take in the view of the Salute and San Giorgio Maggiore but his thoughts weren't his usual ones. Instead they were of Maria Galuppi and her love for her daughter. They said that a parent never really recovered from the death of a child, and to have had a child die by her own hand must surely have added to the pain in ways he couldn't even imagine. Maria had been a woman of simple faith. How much consolation had it given her? What kind of prayers had she offered up to Santa Teodora? And to think she had met her death in the presence of the little saint, perhaps even in its defense. The scenario wasn't difficult to imagine: an old woman of few pleasures enjoying some quiet moments in church at the end of her day, filled with thoughts and prayers for a dead daughter and a living son, and then being intruded upon and killed.

But why?

And where had Carlo been? When he had come to the Palazzo Uccello the second time, he had mentioned a confessional. Could he have been in the confessional when everything happened? Had he covertly watched his mother praying and wondered if she was thinking of Beatrice? The old women on the Rio della Sensa had said that although Maria had loved her son, she had loved her daughter more. Had he been aware of it? Had he resented his sister and her memory? Had he in fact had a motive for matricide?

Such suspicions started making Urbino uncomfortable, and he pulled himself back. As he made his way along the Riva degli Schiavoni, the lagoon stretching out on his right to the Lido, he turned his mind instead to his conversation with the Contessa. She was so sure that Maria hadn't been killed because of the relic, but what other than her refusal to believe in a disorderly universe of chance and accident was behind her conviction? He knew that there was no sense in pointing out that chance seemed so only from the limited human point of view, that from the larger perspective—the one she so fervently believed in—all was a fine and intricate pattern, all a providential design.

Within this context his friend's schedule of Maria's last day, folded now in his vest pocket, took its place as a somewhat feeble but earnest attempt to find a pattern in it all, not to rest content with what time and eternity would unfold. Urbino was sure that the medieval theologians so admired by Des Esseintes had had much to say about this kind of behavior. They might even have considered it some kind of grievous sin, like doubt or hubris.

Well, he wouldn't trouble himself with that. Let them both be careful, however, not to impose a pattern where one didn't exist, for that would be much, much different from discovering one.

As he let himself in to the Palazzo Uccello, the phone started to ring. It continued as he hurried up the stairs.

“Where have you been?” the Contessa asked querulously when he finally picked up the phone in the library. “You left more than an hour ago. I was beginning to worry. I know, you were walking. You're lucky you live in Venice. Most other cities would have you regretting your habit at this hour.”

Urbino waited. He knew his friend didn't respond well to being rushed and he wasn't in the mood to coax her tonight. He didn't have to wait long.

“You know, Urbino, I've been thinking about our conversation ever since Stefano left and I can't seem to get one thing out of my mind. It's about Beatrice.” It sounded as if she took a deep breath before going on: “About her mysterious female friend. I hope you won't think I have a strange mind or that I would like to believe in such things but something occurred to me and I wanted to mention it to you right away so you could tell me I'm wrong. But I warn you, do it in a nice way.”

“Barbara, would you please just tell me what it is?”

“Well, that old woman on the Rio della Sensa said there were some sharp words between Maria and her daughter about this woman, something about a
cocorita
, a lovebird.”

“That's right.”

“I find that a little unusual, don't you? I could understand if her
other
friend had given her a lovebird”—the way she said it made it seem as if the poor dead girl had had only the two friends—“but why would some girl or some woman do it? I've been going over and over it, Urbino. The gift of a lovebird from one woman to another sounds rather—rather—”

“What?”

“Sapphic!” she almost shouted, “and shame on you for making me say it!”

“Why not? Beatrice was beautiful and might have had many admirers. It doesn't mean she encouraged them or returned their affections in the same way, but she might have enjoyed the thrill of it, a young girl like that, teasing her mother, acting superior, pretending to be sophisticated about it all.”

“My God, so you don't think I'm wrong. You think so tool”

“It's possible, but it's also possible that it was all very innocent.”

“I don't know what to think! I was hoping I wasn't able to see how silly my idea was but if you think it's possible—”

“We can't exclude it, but for tonight I suggest banishing it from your mind. Otherwise you'll get no sleep.”

“With my luck I'll probably drop right off to sleep and have a string of unmentionable nightmares.”

After they said good night, Urbino poured some brandy and settled down in the study before trying to woo sleep himself. He took out the Contessa's description of Maria's last day.

From the time she had left the apartment building at seven-thirty with Carlo to collect Urbino's laundry and that of a widower in the Calle dell'Arcanzolo, Maria had been well observed. The mother and son returned an hour later to the Rio delta Sensa, Carlo leaving from there to see to the rest of his duties at San Gabriele. Maria spent most of the morning in the laundry room of the building and went for her midday meal to the Tullio trattoria near the Madonna dell'Orto where she was joined by Carlo. They both then went back to the Rio della Sensa to get the laundry and from there had gone to the widower's. The mask maker Cavatorta said they had passed by his shop in the Calle dell'Arcanzolo shortly before five. After that no one saw Maria alive again except for Sister Veronica and her little group. They hadn't seen Carlo anywhere in the church.

7

URBINO decided to take advantage of the fact that Cavatorta closed his shop on Wednesdays to stop by his apartment in the Ghetto Nuovo early the next morning. It might be better if there were no customers to interrupt them.

There were names on only nine of the seventeen bells at the entrance of the tenement building in the Campo Ghetto Nuovo but Cavatorta's wasn't one of them. A woman coming out with a plastic shopping basket told him the mask maker lived on the seventh floor.

As Urbino went slowly up the dark, damp stairway, he smelled cooking and heard loud voices, mainly those of women. The stairs got darker and mustier as he went past the fifth floor. When he reached the seventh, he was faced with two closed doors without any bells or name plates. He was about to knock on the one on the right when he heard an infant crying behind it. Cavatorta was unmarried. He went across to the other door and knocked.

He had to wait only a few seconds. It was as if he had been expected. There was neither surprise nor curiosity on the mask maker's thin face, only a slight raising of the eyebrows that Urbino found irksome.

“Couldn't you wait until tomorrow and come by the shop to ask your questions?”

Cavatorta had a reputation for knowing about something almost as soon as it happened in the Cannaregio. Perhaps one of the women in Maria's building had mentioned Urbino's visit. It couldn't have been Don Marcantonio. As far as Urbino knew, the two hadn't spoken since Cavatorta had left San Gabriele and become a mask maker, pursuing an interest that went back to a childhood fascination with the mask of Santa Teodora. His business had flourished since the revival of
carnevale
.

“You're here to ask some questions about Maria Galuppi and her long-dead daughter but I'm afraid I know nothing about the old woman except what everyone else does. I was unlucky enough to be one of the last people to see her alive. That was around five when she walked by the shop with Carlo. He was carrying some laundry, maybe yours. Don't tell me that your interest is because of some lost and soiled laundry.”

“Maria didn't stop in to say hello?”

“That would have been something to see. Maria and I didn't get along. It goes a long way back. All they did was walk by about five. They didn't say a word to each other. That's all there was to it.” He looked down the hall. “Would you mind stepping inside? I'd prefer that my neighbors remain convinced I have something to hide.”

He led the way through the small entrance area to a room with a table in a corner next to an unmade bed. On the table was a hot plate with a dirty espresso maker.

“I'd like to say make yourself at home, but since I'm not at home here myself after twenty years, it'd be hypocritical.” He sat on the edge of the bed, running a hand through his unkempt graying hair. Urbino sat in the chair by the table. “Did Bo send you?”

“Don Marcantonio? Not at all. I came on my own. I'm concerned with the way the Questura has handled the case.”

“You tread dangerous ground. It isn't wise for a
forestiero
to differ with the almighty Questura. Any one of those many pieces of paper you need might be found to be out of order.”

“I'm not taking an antagonistic approach. I just want to have some things settled to my own satisfaction. There can be no harm in that. Of course, you're in no way obligated to answer any questions I might ask but I was hoping you might help since you knew the Galuppis. Carlo—”

“Carlo was devoted to his mother,” Cavatorta interrupted. “He loved her despite everything. Isn't that what you want to hear?”

“Despite everything?”

Cavatorta nodded with satisfaction.

“Despite the way she tyrannized him as only a mother can, was so devoted to her daughter's memory that she had little time to give him even though he was the one who was still alive. I doubt if all her bustling around was only for her beloved son in whom she might not have been all that well pleased.” He made this last comment in such an arch way that Urbino pretended not to have caught his twisting of the words from Luke.

“Why didn't you get along with Maria?”

Cavatorta laughed but the dark eyes in his thin face didn't seem amused.

“I thought you would never ask. As I said, it goes back a long way. Maria never forgave me for ‘giving up the cloth,' ‘losing my faith,' ‘turning my back on Cod, San Gabriele, and the blessed remains.' She had quite a few ways of expressing it, you can be sure.”

“Did it go back even farther than that, to as far back as the fifties?”

It was a long shot but Cavatorta was about the right age.

“If you want to know something about Beatrice Galuppi, why don't you just ask me? Yes, it goes back to the fifties and yes, it had something—everything—to do with Beatrice.”

“You were in love with her?”

The mask maker shrugged.

“I suppose I was, one of a large group,” he said ruefully, “but I was about to enter the seminary. I didn't know exactly how I felt, it was a confusing time, but Maria must have known. She made it clear she wanted to save me for God and to save Beatrice for a match made in heaven—
her
idea of heaven.”