Death in a Serene City (2 page)

Two in the morning might not be a good time for contortions but it was certainly a good hour for sentimental reflections. These she indulged in for half an hour, sipping her grappa. Although warmed and soothed, she knew she would still have trouble sleeping. She would have to give herself another half hour and probably another half glass.

She was about to get up for the bottle when there was a flickering in front of her eyes. The next second she wasn't sure she had seen it. Then it came again.

“Is this how it's to be?” she thought. “A flicker of light, then darkness, and they'll find me dressed like a fright in front of an open bottle of grappa!”

But the flicker came again and she could tell it was coming from outside. She bent closer to the window and then, this time not for sentiment but for a clear view that might settle the question once and for all, she twisted her head to look in the direction of Lodovico's glass factory.

There the flicker was brighter. Even with her poor sight she could see the flames. She got up from the chair and hurried as fast as she could to wake her nephew.

But the wail of the fireboats was piercing the air before she reached his room.

Twenty years later

Part One

T
HE SLIPPER ON THE GRAVE

1

URBINO Macintyre was sure about one thing. The poor woman had wanted to die.

He gazed up at the ceiling of the Church of San Gabriele. It was in almost as poor condition as the rest of the church, an old Gothic building dating to the early fifteenth century and flaking now from age, dampness, and the cancerous exhalations from the mainland industries. No thoughts of the ceiling's deterioration preoccupied him this morning, however. Nor was he scrutinizing its cherubs and blessed souls, its angels and clouds, its hovering Virgin and Child, for some indisputable evidence of Tiepolo's fresh hand.

Instead, all he could think of was the painful contrast between its airy, floating images and those last desperate moments of the poor woman's life.

Yes, she must have wanted to die.

Why else choose two in the morning in a quarter where almost everyone but insomniacs had been asleep for hours? In a city where a cry, echoing from stone and water, had more chance of sending help in the opposite direction than of leading it to the right place?

That is, he reminded himself, if a cry had even been uttered.

No one seemed to have heard anything. And neither did anyone know if in her leap from the bedroom window at the Casa Silviano, she had hoped to die by drowning in the canal below or by cracking open her skull on the prow of the gondola, breaking off the
ferro
, just the way she had.

These thoughts about the recent death of the American writer Margaret Quinton were not motivated by personal curiosity. He had barely known the woman, having met her only once at an exhibit at the Glass Museum and a few times at the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini's.

What he had was a professional interest, however, the professional interest of someone who spent a great deal of time reconstructing the lives—and the deaths—of those who had gone before.

He pulled his gaze away from the ceiling—Tiepolo or otherwise—and rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes wandered around the dim interior for a few moments before they fixed on the glass casket of Santa Teodora. It was hard to avoid. The diminutive martyr, dressed in faded white like a bride of long ago and recumbent beneath crystal, dominated the church almost as much as the high altar with its Vivarini of the Archangel announcing the news to the Virgin Mary.

Now there you had a figure he wouldn't dare touch for his
Vanetian Lives
series. It wasn't only because he was perhaps unsuited for hagiography—hadn't one reviewer detected what she called an “iconoclastic strain” in his lives of Goldoni and Canaletto?—but also because the saint was encrusted with so many legends that the truth could never be known.

Having put aside his thoughts of Margaret Quinton's last moments, he slipped from the pew and went up to the casket that sat on a small platform in a side chapel. When he bent down over the glass, for a few confusing seconds it was his own face—gaunt and sharp-featured—he saw instead of the silver-masked one of the saint. He peered down at the tarnished mask, yellowed gown, and crimson gloves and slippers. The card placed alongside the coffin above desiccated bridal wreaths told the story of the little saint in simple Italian, most of it probably fiction except for the description of how her body had been taken from Syracuse in the fourteenth century and brought to Venice. The card managed to glorify the raid by calling it a. “
sacro furto
”—a sacred theft—a fine distinction that amused Urbino.

“
Buon giorno
, Signor Macintyre. If you will permit me.”

Urbino turned around. It was Monsignor Marcantonio Bo, the pastor of San Gabriele, a thin, wizened man in his mid-seventies with a narrow fringe of white hair and thick round glasses behind which he blinked haplessly at the changed world around him. He was dressed in a black cassock and held a small bottle of green liquid and a white cloth.

“
Buon giorno
, Don Marcantonio.”

Urbino moved aside to let the priest clean the glass coffin. He made it a special point to do it himself every day, a duty only slightly less important than wiping the paten and chalice at the end of every Mass. It wasn't that he didn't trust Carlo, the sexton, or one of the sisters from the Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina to do a good job. It was that this attention made him feel that the relic was actually his and his alone. He had been doing it almost every day for more than fifty years.

Quite simply, the body of Santa Teodora was his most prized possession. Not even his well-thumbed copy of the flagellant Jacopone da Todi's
Laude
, which he had had since his first year in the novitiate and had shown so proudly to Urbino, could come close.

Urbino left Don Marcantonio to his work and sat down again. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after seven. He still had some time before he needed to be off.

Don Marcantonio rubbed hard with his cloth at a persistent smudge above the masked face. He frowned with what might have been concentration or disapproval. Did he resent all the fervent lips pressed against the glass or was he grateful for them for giving him the opportunity to display his own devotion to the saint? He rubbed away with the energy of someone at least twenty years younger.

Don Marcantonio believed the saint knew how well he cared for her and gave him what he needed to go on, day after day, year after year. He had once given Urbino one of his favorite examples of the saint's protection. Hadn't he been blessed with an upsurge of energy the day after his last battle with the Vatican official who had come to press for new measurements?

“But we must know if she is shrinking,” the official had said. “After all, Venice is still sinking,
a poco a poco,
” he had added, referring to one of the many legends of the saint—that she was shrinking in direct proportion to the sinking of her adoptive city.

But Don Marcantonio had given his usual reply:

“The Church of San Gabriele has nothing to do with centimeters!”

As the priest continued to rub the glass casket, Urbino imagined him saying over and over to himself as if it were a litany to the Virgin or the Most Precious Blood, “Nothing to do with centimeters, nothing to do with centimeters!”

Several years ago Angela Bellorini, who did charity work in the quarter—mainly bringing meals to the infirm and recently widowed—had suggested to Don Marcantonio that a better-known Santa Teodora was sure to mean more money in the collection boxes. Urbino could still remember the look on the priest's face when he had told the story—eyes wide, upper lip trembling.

“No centimeters!” the old priest had shouted. “Never! They can say she will be as popular as Sant'Antonio in Padua or San Gennaro and his blood down in Naples! Never!”

Urbino could easily imagine Don Marcantonio cursing against centimeters on his deathbed. And how far away could that be for a man his age? The Vatican and its officials would be forever, and Padre Marcantonio would not always be able to shelter his little saint from what he saw as impious violations. Urbino supposed it was even possible that some day Santa Teodora might be removed from the Church of San Gabriele for the malodorous corpse many had been saying she was since Vatican Two. Like Santa Filomena she might even end up struck from the roster of saints.

Don Marcantonio's labors were interrupted by the sound of one of the front doors opening and closing. He paused to turn around and watch Tommaso, the florist, come slowly down the nave with two urns of flowers, nodding to Urbino as he passed.

“Aren't you early?” Don Marcantonio scowled at the florist.

“Just a little, Don Marcantonio.” Tommaso put down the urns, breathing heavily. He was an overweight man in his late forties. “I still have to deliver some flowers for Roberto's funeral on Murano. There's no one to help me.”

The priest didn't seem to hear him. He was looking down at the urns.

“Roses in January! White roses! What will the Contessa think of next!” His voice had no admiration or approval but only irritation, which, along with piety, was one of his two dominant moods. “Santa Teodora makes no distinction between roses and—and weeds!”

“But if our Contessa ever saw weeds in her urns—
Dio mio!
—we would never hear the end of it, would we?”

“You certainly wouldn't—and she might find her way over to Liberato at the Madonna dell'Orto and there would go your big bundle every year!” He bent down and reached for one of the urns from yesterday filled with bright purple flowers. “And you can tell the Contessa that these purple ones would have been more fitting for Septuagesima. She's almost a month ahead of herself.”

“Allow me, Don Marcantonio, they are much heavier than they look.” Tommaso moved the urns away from the glass casket. “The Contessa doesn't choose all the flowers for the little saint herself, you know. These were my choice.” He touched one of the purple blooms gently. Then, almost to himself: “Still so lovely. They could last several more days.”

“And so they will if you can arrange it! But hurry. We don't have all the morning for this business.”

“
Sì, sì
, Padre, but remember it's all for the little saint.”

“All for the little saint! That's what the Contessa wants everyone to believe but some of us think differently.”

Tommaso looked nervously at Urbino, then placed the urns of white roses in front of the casket. He walked a few paces away to look at his arrangement. He moved the urn on the right a fraction, then contemplated it all again.

“
Bellissimo!
”

“
Sì, sì, bellissimo!
Now just get these out of here so I can finish. Mass is in less than half an hour.”

Tommaso picked up one urn, then the other, and bade good day to the priest. He nodded to Urbino again as he shuffled past beneath his burden. He seemed to want to get out as fast as he could but, perhaps knowing Don Marcantonio was watching, he put down the urns to bless himself at the stoup.

The priest shook his head, a gesture that seemed to say that the man, like his flowers, was all for effect, and returned to his work with renewed energy.

2

IN one of the chapels on the other side of the church the misshapen figure of a man had been watching the early morning activity. Carlo Galuppi preferred this chapel to the others not because of its
Madonna and Child
in the manner of Gentile Bellini but because of its deeper darkness. If Don Marcantonio saw him, he would be angry. He should be in the vestiary waiting for the boys and preparing everything for Mass. Sacristans had their many duties and a pastor like Don Marcantonio made sure that his performed each and every one.

Carlo was known as the Quasimodo of San Gabriele. Through one of those situations that could be taken as proof of either the startling symmetry of accident or the considered plan of Providence, Carlo was perfectly suited to Don Marcantonio's crumbling old church. His ugliness was surely far less excessive than that of the Parisian bellringer and his hump was at times almost unnoticeable, depending on the clothes he wore and the way he carried himself. But then wasn't this all as it should be since the Church of San Gabriele wasn't anywhere near as impressively Gothic as Notre Dame? The one lonely bell that Carlo rang several times a day had none of the thunder of those in the great cathedral's tower and the only chance of his becoming deaf from its sound was if he were to use his own huge head as a clapper—and there were some people in the parish who said he was stupid enough to do just that one of these days, and the sooner he did it the better.

Now, as Carlo watched from the chapel of the Madonna, the dark shadows there mercifully smoothed out and concealed his irregularities. You might not even have noticed his large nose, slightly protruding teeth, and the brown, hairy wen on his brow. You might have thought, seeing him indistinctly as you went by, that he was only a large-boned, unattractive man who knew how to keep as still as a cat watching a bird.

Surely, you might think, there was something more to be admired than feared in someone so large keeping so silent.

3

ALTHOUGH Urbino had noticed Carlo in the Chapel of the Madonna, he gave no indication. Why upset the man by showing him that his idleness had been observed? Carlo, almost as much as Don Marcantonio, was as sensitive about his duties at San Gabriele as he was dedicated to them. Only last month he had had an anxiety attack at Jesurum's where he had asked the Contessa and Urbino to help him pick out a birthday gift for his mother. The large store with its vaulted ceilings had been crowded and it had taken them a long time even to get the attention of a clerk. Carlo had ended up rushing down the staircase into the late afternoon gloom and leaving them behind so that he could be back at San Gabriele to see if everything was in order for Sister Veronica and her tour group.