Liquid Desires (28 page)

Carlo Ricci was a brawny, good-looking man in his forties with gray-flecked black hair and dark eyes that turned down at the corners. He was dressed in a blue jumpsuit with “Volpi” embroidered over the breast pocket.

“My wife told me about your visit yesterday, signore,” Ricci said when they had sat down on a sofa against the wall. “She said you were a friend of Flavia.”

“Yes, Signor Ricci. First of all, let me extend my condolences over the death of your daughter.”

“
Murder
, signore! A slaughter! I have forbidden even my wife to call it only a ‘death.'”

Ricci's raised voice drew the attention of the receptionist.

“I understand, Signor Ricci. I'm not here to upset you any more than you have already been, believe me. I'm here about Flavia. A close friend and I who came to know Flavia near the end of her life are concerned about exactly how she died. We're trying to settle things in our own minds. You know how important that is—to know what happened to someone you care about and to find out who might be responsible.”

“You're right, but what help can I be? I hardly knew Flavia. She was my daughter's friend. At first I thought Nicolina shouldn't hang around with someone ten years older, but I soon saw I was wrong. Flavia was good for her.”

“In what way?”

“She encouraged her in her studies—told her how important it was to do something with herself. Nicolina wanted to design clothes. She used to sew gifts for us for our birthdays and Christmas.”

“She was obviously a good girl, Signor Ricci.”

“The best. She missed having a sister. She has an older brother, and he always looked out for her, but it wasn't the same. My wife is very understanding, but sometimes mothers and daughters find it difficult to talk with each other, especially at the age that Nicolina was. Not that we ever had any trouble with Nicolina—never! But there are problems young girls have in growing up. Flavia was there to help her. My wife told you about the funeral garland Flavia sent my daughter, didn't she?”

“She did. She also told me that the funeral was the last time she saw Flavia. What about you?”

“That's the last I saw her, too.”

“Your son Guido says that he saw her about a week later.”

“On the vaporetto, yes. She told him she felt guilty about Nicolina's murder—that if she had been there, it wouldn't have happened. Flavia never seemed to take to that bastard, Pasquale Zennaro. He ate at our table like one of the family! I noticed he would look Flavia up and down whenever he saw her.”

Ricci stood up abruptly.

“But you'll have to excuse me, signore. I have to get back to work. Volpi's the best boss a worker can have and I wouldn't want to take advantage of him just because he's too sick to keep his eye on the business.”

“You know that Flavia was Volpi's niece, don't you?”

“By marriage.”

“Did Flavia ever say anything about him?”

“Lots of times. Only good things. He was very generous with her, she said, always giving her money. It's hard for a man not to have any children of his own. He treated her like his own daughter from the time he got back from a business trip and married Signora Volpi. Oh, he's a good man! Always asking after my Nicolina and Luigi. He would have made a good father if he had been blessed. If there's any other way I can help you, signore, please stop by our apartment on Sant'Elena. Guido and I are usually home by seven.”

On the train to Bassano del Grappa, Urbino studied the reproduction of
The Birth of Liquid Desires
. As Violetta Volpi had said, Dalí was just the kind of artist to appeal to an adolescent mind.

But why had Flavia ripped the page from the catalog? Had she ripped it out and then put it in her scrapbook? If so, then she had taken it out at a later date—or someone else had removed it.

Urbino took one last look at the Dalí, at the naked man with one sock bending over a pool of water, at the woman in the background with her face averted pouring some kind of liquid from a jug, at the ambiguous embrace between the woman with flowers for hair and the older man with a woman's breasts, an erection, and one foot in a bowl of water.

Urbino shook his head in exasperation and shoved the postcard back in his pocket. “Avida Dollars,” he said under his breath, repeating André Breton's anagram. Urbino had never had much patience with Dalí under the best of circumstances, and that minimal patience was being strained to the limit now.

The train was pulling into Bassano del Grappa. Urbino hurried off the train, hoping he would have time for a drink before the bus left for Asolo. He needed one.

9

As soon as Urbino got to Asolo, he went to Villa Pippa to ask Madge Lennox about the scrapbook. She might be able to help him piece things together. As he listened to her and watched her practiced features, however, he couldn't help but hear the Contessa's warning that the actress was “brittle with artifice.”

“I remember perfectly well, Urbino,” Madge Lennox said with a nervous little laugh in the front parlor of La Pippa. She was wearing a vermilion turban and harem pants in a lighter shade of red. “I have an excellent memory. I can still remember lines from characters I played a long time ago. Would you like some more ice?”

Urbino declined. She went to the liquor cabinet, poured more gin into her glass, and added another ice cube.

“There's no reason to change my story from what I told you on Sunday,” she went on in her low, controlled voice. “If I hadn't wanted you to know about the clippings, I wouldn't have said anything then.”

She turned a bright smile on Urbino, looking at him unfalteringly with her bold, dark eyes. Once again Urbino found himself wondering how many artless gestures she had. Was this ingenuous smile one of them, or was it something that had proved its usefulness under the lights and for audiences larger than just one?

“Why is it that you remember those particular clippings?”

“It's not that I remember
only
them. I remember some other things in the scrapbook—even if I had only a quick glimpse. The clippings with the photographs caught my attention because I recognized Signor Occhipinti and the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini.”

“And the Conte?”

“I didn't
recognize
him, no. How could I?” she asked with a little smile. “I never met him, but he
was
one of the men in the pictures. It said so.”

Madge Lennox seemed to have had more than just a brief glimpse of the scrapbook.

“And you recognized no one else?”

“No one.”

“Did you tell anyone else about the scrapbook?”

“Yes. Signor Occhipinti. I told him he hadn't changed in what must be more than ten years. The clippings had to be at least that old since the Conte da Capo-Zendrini has been dead for longer than that.”

“When did you tell Occhipinti about the clippings?”

“A few weeks ago, not long after I saw the scrapbook. I said it belonged to a young woman I knew. I didn't mention her name,” Madge Lennox said, anticipating his next question. “Did I do something wrong? I have nothing to do with the missing clippings, believe me. What business were they of mine?”

Urbino handed her the Tanguy postcard.

“Do you recognize this?”

She looked at it a few moments, then turned it over to read the back. She returned it with a shake of her head.

“What about this?” Urbino asked, giving her the Dalí card.

“It looks like a Dalí painting. I don't like Dalí.”

She handed the card back to Urbino with distaste.

“They're part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice,” Urbino explained. “A page with reproductions of both paintings was torn from Flavia's copy of the Guggenheim catalog. Did you notice if it was in the scrapbook?”

“You mean the page? No.”

Madge Lennox was staring down at the Dalf postcard in Urbino's hand. A strange, nervous unease seemed to possess her. She went to the window, moving aside the curtain and gazing out at the front yard for a few moments. When she turned around, a hand was at her throat and her head was slightly to one side. She looked bewildered and on the point of saying something. She searched Urbino's face as if for some sign that she should—could—go on. When she did, however, it was to say, with an inappropriateness that at first puzzled Urbino, “‘Carnivorous flower.'” She smiled weakly. “That's what someone called Dalf. ‘The carnivorous flower of the Surrealist sun.' I forgot who it was.
Carnivorous Flower
was the title of an experimental play in New York in the sixties. I played Gala.”

Madge Lennox began to reminisce about the play, growing more animated as she moved farther and farther from the topic Urbino had come to Villa Pippa to ask her about. He sensed that she was stalling for time, trying to absorb something he had said, just as she had done in the cemetery when he mentioned murder.

Urbino let her go on with her reminiscence. He was certain that Madge Lennox knew something important about Flavia that she wasn't telling him. She might be an actress—and might be doing the best she could to conceal her thoughts and feelings—but he felt that she was uncertain, off balance, even afraid—and it had something to do with Dalf's
The Birth of Liquid Desires
.

Urbino waited until Madge Lennox finished.

“Flavia didn't commit suicide,” he said. “I have hopes that the police will realize it, too. They're not quite ready yet.”

“You know so much more than they do?”

Madge Lennox seemed to intend the question as a joke, but it came off with an edge of sarcasm. She was smiling but she didn't seem amused. She seemed a little afraid.

“The Commissario told me yesterday that no traces of a medication that they believed Flavia was taking were found in her system,” Urbino said. “The drug's been linked to suicidal tendencies. And there were the wounds on her head which haven't been conclusively established to have occurred after she fell in the Grand Canal.”

“But surely poor Flavia didn't need to be influenced by a drug of some kind to kill herself. Many people do it with quite clear minds.”

“I don't think suicide rings true for Flavia.”

“On the contrary! I'm afraid it rings only too true!”

Fear, rather than anger, was the unmistakable thread in her voice.

“If there's anything that you know—or even vaguely suspect—I need to know it too.”

“Flavia couldn't have been murdered.”

She looked down at the Dalí postcard that Urbino still held in his hand.

“Flavia seems to have cared for you, Madge.”

It was the first time Urbino had used the actress's first name. She smiled at him. There were tears in her eyes.

“She trusted you,” Urbino added. “And you said she felt safe and secure with you.”

“Yes,” Madge said quietly. “She did.”

“If there's anything that you remember, Madge—anything that you want to tell me—don't hesitate. It could be very important.”

“A matter of life and death, you mean?”

Madge Lennox tried to toss this off lightly, but her voice had a dark thread of fear in it.

“Yes.”

Urbino gave her his card and told her she could call him at any time.

Walking up the hill from Villa Pippa into Asolo itself, Urbino considered what Lennox had told him. Before Flavia's death the actress had seen clippings of the Conte, the Contessa, and Silvestro Occhipinti in Flavia's scrapbook, but the clippings weren't in the scrapbook now. Lennox had told Occhipinti about them—Occhipinti, a man who Urbino believed would want to protect the Contessa and his old friend however he could.

As Urbino followed the road through the wall of the city, passing Eleonora Duse's house, he asked himself what it was about the Dalí painting that disturbed Madge Lennox so much. She had appeared to be on the point of saying something after looking at the postcard a second time.

Did Madge Lennox have something to hide—not for Flavia's sake, perhaps, but for her own? If she did, then Urbino was afraid that she would remain an actress until the very end, just as the Contessa said she would.

Urbino had to talk with Occhipinti again. He quickened his stride in the direction of the Via Browning.

10

Occhipinti, with Pompilia on a leash, was just coming out of the door of his apartment building under the arcade. The little man, without his jaunty straw hat this afternoon, was blowing his nose vigorously. He still hadn't shaken his summer cold. Urbino remembered how quick Occhipinti had been to say that he must have caught it from a neighbor, yet he might just as easily have caught it by getting soaked and chilled during the thunderstorm in Venice the night Flavia had died. As the Contessa had mentioned to Urbino, he had been in Venice for some business at the Ca' Rezzonico.

“Why not join us on our walk, Signor Macintyre?” Occhipinti said brightly in his high-pitched voice. “So lovely out. Nothing like what it must be back in Venice. I'm happy I've been able to stay cool up here in Asolo.”

Occhipinti had made his point and Urbino let it pass without any comment. The man had already denied being in Venice two days ago. This latest comment made Urbino even more certain that it had been Occhipinti he had seen crossing the bridge in the San Polo quarter.

Urbino and Occhipinti walked under the arcades toward the main square. Occhipinti's brisk pace slackened when Urbino mentioned the scrapbook. Urbino was carrying it in a small satchel, but he had no intention of showing it to Occhipinti unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Yes, Signora Lennox said she saw my picture in that girl's book. I don't deny it. ‘Truth ever, truth only the excellent!' I guess I didn't think it was important.”

“Did you see the young woman's scrapbook yourself?”