Farewell to the Flesh (28 page)

“She's seen him. She went to the Splendide-Suisse this afternoon.”

“That's why I couldn't see you then, Urbino.” This explained the note the Contessa had received when he had come earlier, the note that had quickly banished her enigmatic smile. “He found out that I was here from his stepmother—Barbara told her—and he phoned me. I went to see him as quickly as I could. He was very upset.”

“He's not arrested then.”

“Of course he's not arrested, Urbino,” the Contessa said. “How could he be? Just on Rigoletti's identification? Just because he might have been in the Calle Santa Scolastica that night? It doesn't mean he killed Gibbon.”

“But he wasn't there that night—or any night!” Hazel leaned forward, gripping her glass tightly. “I know he wasn't! This man is mistaken.”

“Or he's lying,” the Contessa said. “He might have his own reasons for lying. And it was night. How could Rigoletti be sure of who he saw?”

“Mrs. Pillow swears he wasn't out that night. They were in the whole evening!” Hazel said in a choked voice.

“If Berenice says so, it must be true,” the Contessa affirmed. “She wouldn't lie about a thing like this.”

“Not even when it came to her stepson?” Urbino said. He had no doubt that Mrs. Pillow or almost any mother trying to protect her son would lie. He was sure Mrs. Spaak was capable of it. It made Mrs. Pillow no better or worse than anyone else, and it certainly didn't make her a villain. Some might even say that it made her something very much different.

Hazel looked at him coolly.

“Believe me, Urbino, she wasn't lying. I've known her for several years and she was telling the truth. She's seldom passionate about anything, but when she is, you know it's because she believes in what she's saying or doing. I wish I had reason to doubt that.”

The Contessa nodded in agreement with Hazel's assessment of her old friend.

“Was she unpleasant to you this afternoon, Hazel?” the Contessa asked.

“Not at all. She was actually quite nice. She knew I was there only to try to help Tonio.”

“But what can you possibly do for him, Hazel dear? You mentioned before Urbino came that you hadn't seen him before tonight. It would be fine if you could provide him with an alibi, yet—”

“He doesn't need an alibi! He didn't do anything, I tell you!”

She put her glass down on the table and buried her face in her hands. The Contessa slid over to her and put a consoling arm around her shoulder.

“I'm sorry Hazel. I didn't mean to upset you but you have to be open-eyed. Tonio is in love with you and it's quite obvious you still have feelings for him”—her gray eyes slid quickly in Urbino's direction—“but you can't tear yourself apart like this. It's not going to do either of you any good. Urbino will help Tonio, won't you,
caro?
He's already been helping him. He went to the Questura with him this morning, didn't he?”

Hazel lifted her hands from her face to look at Urbino. Tears glistened on her cheeks.

“You can help?”

Her words were less questioning than imploring.

“Of course I'll do whatever I can,” Urbino said, keeping his promise vague.

Before coming to the Contessa's tonight, he had believed that Vico hadn't been in the Calle Santa Scolastica the night Gibbon was murdered, but now that Rigoletti appeared to have identified him, he wasn't so sure. He supposed it was more than possible that Berenice Pillow, to protect her stepson, had lied and said that he was in the suite all that night. Yet he hadn't detected anything in Mrs. Pillow's words, tone, or manner that might have indicated she was wrongly if understandably giving a mother's protection. If anything, what had come through clearly was her own certitude about what she was saying.

Nonetheless, Urbino wanted to be careful of what he promised Hazel. He didn't want to mislead her. To do that would have seemed too much like getting caught up himself in the web of lies and deceptions that was seriously impeding his progress toward a solution.

“I'll speak with Commissario Gemelli. I'll see Tonio tomorrow,” he said, still keeping his promises within reasonable bounds.

The Contessa, who had taken her arm away from Hazel's shoulder, looked at him expressionlessly. Hazel's response was more easy to gauge. She was now smiling. She took out a lace handkerchief and wiped her tears.

“You won't have to wait until then, Urbino,” she said. “Tonio and Mrs. Pillow are coming over in a little while. Oh, I hope you don't mind my inviting them, Barbara. I knew Urbino was going to be here and I wanted to be able to explain poor Tonio's situation before they came.” She looked at her thin gold watch. “They should be arriving in about five or ten minutes. You really don't mind, do you?”

The Contessa had slipped during the past several moments into her inscrutable mode. What she was thinking or how she was feeling were mysteries that her fine smooth manner did nothing to reveal. And when she spoke, her words gave nothing away except their surface meaning.

“Berenice is one of my oldest friends, Hazel. She and Tonio are welcome here whenever they wish to come.”

This was what she said. What she meant, however, could have been something else entirely. The extent to which she was in control was clear when she looked at Urbino with no expression on her face at all.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said, starting to get up from the sofa. “I would like to tell Lucia and Mauro that we'll be expecting. Berenice and Tonio in a few minutes.”

“I've already mentioned it to Lucia, Barbara,” Hazel said, putting her handkerchief back in the pocket of her dress.

“How kind of you, Hazel.”

The Contessa settled back against the Tunisian cushions, still managing the feat of an expressionless face. Urbino couldn't help noticing, however, that this time she didn't look in his direction.

There was one topic that Urbino wanted to bring up with Hazel but he wasn't sure this was the best time or place. It had to do with Gibbon's presence in the Calle Santa Scolastica. If they were alone, it would be easier. Now with her staying at the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini, he wondered how often he would be able to see her without the Contessa around. Could the Contessa's consideration in taking Hazel away from Porfirio's have been complicated by an additional motive? He remembered the enigmatic smile on her lips. Had it been pure anticipatory amusement or the smile of someone who had made a countermove soon to be revealed? Knowing the Contessa for as long and as well as he did, he had to admit that it was probably a little of both.

The silence that had come over the three of them made it seem as if they had nothing to say to each other until the arrival of Berenice Pillow and Tonio Vico. Urbino decided to risk asking his question.

“Do you have any idea why Gibbon happened to be in the Calle Santa Scolastica the night he was murdered?”

“I didn't know he was going there. I didn't know he ever went there.”

It wasn't really an answer to the question he had asked, but before he could ask it again, without seeming rude or importunate, Hazel said,

“I know what you're getting at. Commissario Gemelli, of course, has asked me the same thing in about five different ways, but I told him that I have no idea what Val was doing there that night. Commissario Gemelli made it clear what kind of reputation that area has, but my answer was the same after he told me as it was before. I thought Val might have been there to take pictures until I saw that there were none of that area among Val's photographs—and not anything that might help us find Val's murderer either, from what I could see.”

“I'm surprised at you, Urbino,” the Contessa said. “Poor Hazel here was engaged to Val Gibbon. Whatever are you implying by such a question?”

“Oh, it doesn't matter, Barbara, really it doesn't. We all live in the modern world.” Hazel smiled weakly. “Although maybe I'm mistaken about Venice. It's not quite right to call it part of the modern world, is it?”

“And why not, my dear, if it's filled with at least some enlightened people who think in modern ways?”

The Contessa had abandoned her inscrutability. Now she was all passionate defense of her adopted city and, it would seem, her own enlightened self.

“Commissario Gemelli isn't one of them, though,” Hazel said. “He's more than a little benighted. ‘Are you sure your fiancé didn't like men, Signorina Reeve? Are you sure he wasn't having an assignation in the Calle Santa Scolastica? Have you any reason to believe that he might have been homosexual? Have you noticed anything unusual along these lines during the time you've known him?”

The Contessa seemed uncomfortable as Hazel made her recitation.

“If he could have proof of any of that, he would probably be happy to write off Val's murder as a meeting between an all-too-willing victim and a pathetic murderer of whom you couldn't expect much less,” Hazel continued. She shook her head in exasperation. “I told him I had no reason to think any of those things, and he just smiled at me. Then I told him that it wouldn't have made any difference to me anyway. That took the smile off his face! And I meant it, too! I judged and loved Val by the way he treated me, what he was like with me. I believe he was faithful. I wanted him to be, and I certainly don't like the idea of his sneaking around in dark alleys looking—looking for someone, something. Val was a very attractive man. He was an artist. I know what the world is like. I know—”

She didn't finish her sentence but burst into tears again. This time they flowed more copiously. Before she reapplied the hastily drawn handkerchief to her eyes and before the Contessa once again reached over to comfort her, for one brief, somewhat unsettling moment she looked at Urbino through her tears. It didn't strike him as a look soliciting sympathy but one assessing his reaction.

The door to the Contessa's
salotto
opened. Mauro announced the arrival of Berenice Pillow and Tonio Vico. The two of them started to enter the room but stopped abruptly when they saw Hazel weeping in the arms of the Contessa as Urbino looked on.

15

What happened in the first few moments of the arrival of Mrs. Pillow and Vico determined the direction of the rest of the evening.

Tonio hurried over to Hazel and took her hand. The Contessa gave her seat to the young man and went up to her friend Berenice, guiding her to one of two chairs near her collection of eighteenth-century ceramic animals. After Urbino had fixed the drinks—a Corvo for Berenice Pillow, a Courvoisier for Vico, and another bourbon and water for himself—he went back to his own chair, feeling very much alone and very much the spectator.

This feeling of exclusion, however, lasted only as long as it took Berenice Pillow to exchange greetings with the Contessa and turn to him.

“We've come here tonight because of you, Mr. Macintyre. I don't mean it in a rude sense, Barbara dear, but Tony and I are very frightened by this latest development. Who wouldn't be? Can you believe that someone would say that they saw him in that terrible place the night Mr. Gibbon was murdered?”

“What happened, Tonio?” Urbino asked the young man who now had both his hands around one of Hazel's.

“After you went in to talk with Commissario Gemelli, I went to another part of the Questura to wait for my statement to be typed up. It took forever and then I read it more than once. I kept thinking that what I had said had become all scrambled up and meant something completely different. When I finally finished and was walking along the
fondamenta
past the pharmacy, a man—I later found out it was this Ignazio Rigoletti—was walking in the opposite direction, toward the Questura. He stared at me in the strangest way. When I passed him, he stopped and turned around, then started to shout after me. I stopped too. Before I knew it I was back in the Questura. Unfortunately you had already left.”

“How long did they keep you?”

“For another hour. This Rigoletti swore up and down that he recognized me from the Calle Santa Scolastica, that he wasn't mistaken. I told them it was impossible, that I never left the hotel that night. I wish to God there was some way we could prove that we were in that night, but the simple fact is we can't, and I won't pretend anything else. I took a shower about ten o'clock and my mother was already in her room on the other side of the foyer. She knows I didn't go anywhere. If I had, she would have heard me. She's a very light sleeper.”

“I wasn't even asleep yet,” Mrs. Pillow said. “I have my little rituals before bedtime.”

“I told the Commissario to ask if anyone saw me leaving the hotel that night, that no one possibly could have because I didn't! He said he had already spoken with the hotel personnel on duty that night and with some of the guests. He didn't say what they told him, but he did say that it was
Carnevale
and everything was in a state of confusion, that unfortunately the Splendide-Suisse wasn't set up in such a way that anyone could be sure if someone came in or out. He's right, of course, if you know the hotel. There are two entrances, but is that my fault? Does that make me guilty?” Vico sighed. “Fortunately it was my word against Rigoletti's, and I was eventually told I could leave. But I could tell that the Commissario didn't believe a word I was saying. As it was, he hadn't believed me when I told him that I didn't even know that Gibbon had been in Venice—let alone that he had been murdered—until I read it in the paper yesterday.”

Berenice Pillow's face was mottled with anger.

“I wanted to go right to the Questura and tell the Commissario what I thought of his tactics. Tony didn't tell you some of the terrible things he accused him of.”

It seemed a somewhat inappropriate comment. What after all could be more terrible than the suspicion of having murdered someone? But Urbino could understand why Commissario Gemelli's insinuating questions about the Calle Santa Scolastica could rile Berenice Pillow and throw things somewhat out of perspective. The poor woman was visibly agitated. He sensed something in her that he both admired and feared: a righteous anger. Her son—it made no difference that technically he was her stepson—had been accused of terrible things, things that he couldn't possibly have done from her point of view, and she was seething.