Liquid Desires (38 page)

“You're trying to mess up my head, Macintyre! Flavia and I were true to each other. Let her rest in peace!” He turned from the window and looked at Urbino with a cold gleam in his eye. “Don't you think I've thought over and over that I should have told someone about what Lorenzo did to her? Maybe then she wouldn't have killed herself! That's what I have to live with!”

“And there were the pills, too. You feel guilty about them, too, don't you?”

“The—the pills? But I had nothing to do with them!”

“Don't worry, Mirko. I have no intention of turning you over to the police because of drugs of any kind. You gave Flavia those pills.”

Something seemed to collapse in the homely little man. He nodded his head.

“You're right. She came to me and gave me the name of these pills she had heard about. She thought they would help her with her depression over Lorenzo. It was getting so bad right before she killed herself. I told her to go to a doctor but she didn't want to, so I—I got them for her.”

“Where?”

“I have my contacts, but please, Macintyre, don't say anything to the police!”

“As I've said, I'm not interested in getting you into trouble about your dealings in drugs.”

“‘Dealings'! I—”

“At any rate,” Urbino interrupted, “no traces of the drug were found in Flavia's system.”

“They weren't? But I know she was taking them.”

“You do? But you said that you never saw her take any.”

“I didn't! But I noticed that some of the pills were missing from the bottle.”

“When did you notice that?”

Mirko didn't answer right away.

“I don't remember.”

When Urbino left a few minutes later, he was convinced that Mirko was already running for his syringe or his powder or his pills—whatever made him feel better for a time. Soon he might be drifting into a world that resembled the Tanguy landscapes he said he liked so much.

As he walked to the nearest café to use the phone, Urbino quickly reviewed the last hours of Flavia's life. Her visit to Graziella Gnocato to get the old nurse to speak on the tape recorder, her visit to Mirko at the Casa Trieste, then to Violetta Volpi and to Lorenzo Brollo. Flavia had been desperately driven that night to confront some of the most important relationships in her life. But where had she gone after leaving Lorenzo? Annabella said that Flavia had left the Palazzo Brollo and Violetta said that Flavia hadn't been there when she herself arrived. Could the two women be lying to protect Lorenzo? Maybe Flavia had stayed at the Palazzo Brollo—or maybe Brollo had followed her. How far would he have gone to protect his deep, dark secret?

From the café Urbino called the Questura, but Gemelli was out. He gave his name and said he would call again in an hour, asking the officer to tell the Commissario that it was very important.

16

After calling the questura, Urbino went to the Zattere embankment and sat down at the outdoor terrace of Da Gianni where he and Eugene had lunched on the latter's first day in Venice. Dark, menacing clouds were piling up from the northwest in the direction of Asolo. Urbino ordered a quarter liter of white wine and watched several boats of the Bucintoro rowing club hurrying back to their quarters. Gazing absently off at the Island of Giudecca, he began to consider the pieces of the puzzle.

Urbino kept coming back to Flavia's visits the last night of her life. Had she sought out anyone in addition to the people he already knew about? Or had she returned to see someone she visited earlier? Not the nurse Graziella, but Brollo, Violetta, or Mirko? If she had, that person could be her murderer—or could know or suspect who her murderer was. Lies were being told about that night, lies about what had actually happened and when it had happened. Perhaps more than one person knew how and why Flavia had been attacked and then thrown or pushed into the stormy waters of the Grand Canal.

Urbino went over the various possibilities and combinations several times, not sure if he was getting a clearer or a more distorted perspective on things. He left the café and struck out along the Zattere toward the Punta della Dogana da Mar at the mouth of the Grand Canal. Venetians, who had a seaman's sense of changing weather, had long ago started to secure their kiosks, outdoor tables, shutters, and boats. An artist was chasing one of the aquatints that had blown out of the kit he was folding up. It blew into the canal and was lost.

Usually this was one of Urbino's favorite walks—past the Church of Santo Spirito, the Magazzini del Sale, or salt warehouses, where Biennale exhibitions were mounted, and the villas of Milanese industrialists and foreigners—but this afternoon it was little more than an accompaniment for his thoughts which were as turbulent as the gusts of wind.

He soon reached the isolated Punta della Dogana, where the Giudecca Canal, the Grand Canal, and the lagoon met. He sat on a bench. A cold, damp wind blew across the waters, whirling around the weathervane statue of Fortune positioned atop the golden globe on the Customhouse Building. On a nearby bench a young couple was embracing, completely oblivious to Urbino or the changing weather. Urbino was reminded of how the Contessa, inspired by Yeats, had disdained the lovers out in the Piazza on the afternoon they saw Flavia at Florian's—“the young in one another's arms,” she had said. But even more vivid to Urbino than these words was the embrace between the naked older man and the young woman with flowers for hair in Dalí's
The Birth of Liquid Desires
.

Urbino gazed out at the broad expanse of gray water beneath the lowering sky, with the Doge's Palace and the Piazzetta on the left and San Giorgio Maggiore on the right. Here, with the wind whipping in his face, it was easy to imagine that he was at the prow of a ship, sailing into Venice. Unbidden, the last scene from
Queen Christina
came into his mind—Greta Garbo standing at the prow of the ship carrying her away from her homeland, the ship that was also carrying the body of her murdered lover. Garbo's expression was unforgettable—a mask, completely blank and vacant, into which everything and nothing could be read. It was very much Madge Lennox's face.

Urbino tried to concentrate his thoughts and considered Lorenzo Brollo's abominable guilt and the intimacy of grief he had observed between him and Violetta at the cemetery that morning, and what he believed it revealed. Brollo's abuse of Flavia and the scene at San Michele were proving to be the most intractable pieces of the puzzle. Although he thought he knew how they fit into the puzzle that was Alvise and Regina, he still didn't know how they fit into the greater puzzle of Flavia's death. Brollo's pride and desire for control could easily have led him to commit murder—or to have found someone willing, for whatever reason, to do his bidding.

Urbino, however, kept coming back to Ladislao Mirko and his father and the rest of the money that Flavia had gotten from Zuin. He felt himself being pulled away from what he originally believed was the crucial question of Flavia's paternity—the question which, if answered, he had thought would lead to her murderer.

While Urbino sensed that he was close to seeing the pattern that he knew was there hiding behind so much, something still eluded him.

Urbino believed in benevolent deception—the kind of lies, tacit or spoken, that protected others as well as oneself from painful truths. As a biographer he often had to bring these lies to light, but when it came to his other line of work, he often left the lies where he found them. What had Occhipinti said last week in Asolo, quoting as usual from Browning, “Let who lied be left lie”? Good advice for many situations, certainly, but not for murder.

Abandoning the bench and the enamored couple, Urbino walked along the Grand Canal, past the Customhouse Building and beneath the snowy cupolas and towers of the Baroque Church of the Salute. He crossed a wood-and-stone bridge and passed the studios where many of Venice's paintings were restored, wondering when he would be able to return with an unclouded mind to his own work on the Cremonese lady waiting for him at the Palazzo Uccello.

Urbino's brisk pace soon found him standing in front of the welded-iron-and-Murano-glass gates of the Palazzo Guggenheim. The museum hadn't closed yet and Urbino was tempted to take another look at the Dalí painting that had played such an apparently changeable role in the life and death of Flavia.

But he decided against it and continued on to the Accademia Bridge, his own thoughts much more real to him than the frantic activity in the alleys and canals. He climbed the wooden steps of the bridge and stopped for a few moments in the middle, looking down at the sweep of the Grand Canal. The upper decks of a ship were visible behind the buildings on the right as the ship made its slow way through the Giudecca Canal to the Maritime Station.

Urbino took a detour and entered the Palazzo Pisani, where the young and hopeful Contessa had studied music more than thirty years ago. He went into the courtyard and stood by the covered wellhead. Above him was an increasingly darkening sky and around him a myriad of sounds—sea gulls, a piano, a trumpet, a flute, a soprano, several overlapping conversations, laughter. Urbino, reminded by all these sounds of the confusing facts and speculations surrounding Flavia, succeeded in picking out some of the individual harmonies underlying the cacophony before leaving the courtyard.

In Piazza San Marco Urbino found a swarm of tourists. The arcades were packed, and people were sitting on the steps or leaning against the columns, having already found spots to ride out the coming storm.

Florian's combined Babel and pandemonium, but it was good enough for a drink at the bar. As he perched on a stool drinking his Campari soda fortified with wine, Urbino considered his alternatives. He felt an urgent need for action.

Downing the remainder of his pleasantly bitter drink, he paid his bill and hurried out to the Molo for a water taxi, determined, first of all, to get Bernardo Volpi to tell him what he might know.

17

The storm broke when the water taxi entered the Grand Canal. Jagged pieces of lightning split the sky above the Lido. The gale-force wind peaked the waters of the lagoon and threw rain against the windows of the tossing water taxi. Urbino felt as if he had passed into Violetta Volpi's picture of the storm-tossed Grand Canal with dark-gowned, featureless women standing on the Accademia Bridge, their hands clapped over their ears.

In the interval between two blasts of thunder, the sound of breaking glass, followed by a woman's screams, drew Urbino's attention to the right bank. A woman was lying on the ground, her hand to her face. A man was bending over her. Pieces of shattered glass littered the ground around them. Urbino looked up at the top story of the building above the man and the woman. He thought he could make out a broken windowpane.

It wasn't a good time to be out in the open—or even in the closed cabin of a motorboat. Venice was in the grip of the kind of evil storm that threatened its fragile existence more than any barbarian horde or rival empire ever had.

Urbino told the driver to pull up to the Volpi water steps and to wait. Buffeted by the wind and rain, Urbino made his way carefully up the slippery steps. The iron gate hadn't been repaired yet. Opening it without any trouble, he was in the Volpi garden. The storm and the coming night made it difficult to see except when lightning seared the scene. The door to Violetta's studio was agape. Urbino approached the open door carefully, searching the pergola and the area along the walls for a sign of someone. He saw no one. The studio was dark except for a small lamp in a far corner. Urbino moved slowly into the room.

A heavy blow fell on his shoulder.

18

Urbino turned quickly. Violetta held a hammer. Fury contorted her coarse-featured face. She raised the hammer again to deliver another blow. Urbino grabbed her arm. She looked at him in surprise and dropped the hammer.

“It's you!” Violetta's voice was more throaty than usual. “I thought you were Annabella. She just attacked Bernardo.”

Violetta rushed to a dark corner where Bernardo lay on the floor, ashen and his eyes wide. Urbino touched his hand. It was cold and clammy. Vomit stained his shirt.

“Tell Signor Macintyre it was Annabella,” Violetta said. “It was Annabella, wasn't it, Bernardo?”

The man said nothing.

“He looks as if he's had a heart attack,” Urbino said. “Have you called for an ambulance?” Violetta nodded. “We should put something under his head.”

Violetta took a cushion from the sofa and placed it under Bernardo's head.

“Why do you think Annabella did something to him?” Urbino asked Violetta.

“Because she must have! She was here! I talked with her upstairs. She was vile! I told her to leave. I went to my bedroom for ten minutes to compose myself. When I came down here, I found Bernardo like this. It had to be Annabella!”

Violetta gripped his arm and brought him to the other side of the studio, away from Bernardo.

“I don't know what to do now. I try to be a strong woman but I'm at the end of my strength. I thought everything would be all right if you just left us alone! I saw you this morning on San Michele. Lorenzo didn't.”

“I wasn't spying on you and Brollo.”

“It doesn't matter anymore! What matters is that Annabella tried to kill Bernardo the way she killed Flavia! Why she did it, I don't know! It has to end.”

Violetta stared out through the door at the water gate and began to cry.

“Now I know why Flavia killed herself!”

“But you just said that Annabella killed her.”

“I don't know, I tell you! If it's not her fault, it's Lorenzo's—or both of them! Not mine! You've been asking a lot of questions. I don't know what answers you've been getting and what you've figured out. But Lorenzo hasn't told you the truth! He's been lying!” she screamed. “He's been lying to everyone! His whole life's a lie!”