The Last Gondola (2 page)

“Not mislaid them, no! Taken them, I said, and put them somewhere or tossed them away, deliberately but—but unconsciously,” she finished more feebly than she had begun. “My mind has been getting a little clouded lately. I forgot an appointment with my dressmaker last month, and Vitale tells me that I never asked him to see that the door knocker was repaired, and I was so sure that I had.”

“You're reading too much into everything. We're all absentminded from time to time, and as far as your clothes are concerned—”

“And sometimes,” she interrupted, “I'm afraid I'm going to forget somebody's name, someone I know as well as myself. On top of everything I have these
conversazioni
beginning next week.”

Urbino now understood why his friend had become needlessly fixated on her memory. She was delivering three informal talks at the Venice music conservatory where she had studied before marrying the late Conte. At the Contessa's request, however, Urbino would be attending only the last one, when she would give a musical concert. It would distract her, she said, to have him in the audience for the other occasions. Her fear that her memory was weakening was surely just one more example of her anxiety about her ability to perform.

“You'll be splendid,” Urbino reassured her. “You'll remember things about those days that most people want to forget. There's nothing to worry about. I would have noticed something long before you.”

“In usual circumstances, yes, that's what they say; but the way that you've been so engrossed with Samuel Possle, as if there's nothing else under the sun? Samuel Possle this and Samuel Possle that? Probably creeping around outside the Ca' Pozza at night with your elegant pencil flashlight and haunting it in the daytime as well? No, don't be so sure that you would have noticed anything.”

Urbino retreated into a sip of his sherry. Fortunately, the Contessa didn't realize that, in a fashion, Possle was a ghost sitting next to them even here in Florian's. Urbino felt he could almost reach out and touch the old expatriate.

He raised his eyes and saw his own reflection in the mirror opposite.

“And don't forget,” he said, turning his attention back to the Contessa, who had been staring at him with expectation, “that your doctors in Geneva gave you a clean bill of health. That was right before Christmas.”

“A clean bill of physical health,” she emphasized. “These things creep up on you. Then—then they leap! And don't tell me I'm too young,” she added, raising her voice. “I'm not!”

She looked bewildered, caught as she was between her vanity and her need for sympathy. “I don't mean that I'm old, you understand. What I mean is—is—” She broke off.

“That it can begin at a relatively young age” was Urbino's offering. “Yes, even as young or as old as mine.”

The Contessa had always shrouded the actual, incriminating number of her age in mystery, but according to Urbino's computations, it was almost two decades more than his own. If she had already reached sixty, as he strongly suspected, she had carried it off without any obvious celebration or depression.

“Ah, you give and you take away, but, yes, you're right. You understand how I feel then, and why you have to help me. You have to find out what's happening!”

“I'll help in whatever way I can, but it won't be a challenge to my detecting abilities, I'm sure. Whatever answer we find will have nothing to do with this nonsense about your memory. Let it be. Your
conversazioni
are going to be a great success, I tell you.”

A tentative smile brightened her face. “And you're going to get your interviews with Samuel Possle,” she matched him. “I'll think of something. I'll take down that Turkish scimitar in the gallery, the one handed down in Alvise's family, and cut through the Gordian knot for you. Just you see!”

“A scissors might be all you need! Or a few strings pulled here and there.”

“If they haven't disintegrated after all these years.” She punctuated this with a nervous laugh. “You'll help me, and I'll help you. Isn't that what we've always done? What we'll always do? One for all and all for one!”

“You make a most attractive Musketeer.”

“But we're not three, are we? Habib isn't here. Are you going to be all right with him gone for a while? I'm afraid you might sink deeper into the waters of your own obsession without him around.”

“But I have the mystery of your disappearing wardrobe to exercise my mind. My thread of sanity,” he joked. “I'll get to the bottom of it.” He raised his sherry glass. “And with or without Habib, we're inseparable. Never doubt that.”

It was what the Contessa wanted to hear.

“Like Venice and water!” she threw out.

“Like masks and
carnevale!
” Urbino countered.

“Like gondolas and—and—”

The Contessa faltered. The almost inevitable word “death” washed over Urbino.

“And gondoliers,” she offered.

“Like gondoliers and ‘
O Sole Mio'
!
”

A smile of satisfaction and relief lit the Contessa's face. Urbino took her hand. Quietly he sang in his uneven tenor, “‘
Che bella cosa najurnata è sole, n'aria serena dopo na tempesta!'“

The two friends looked out into the square.

But the scene seemed about to betray the optimistic words of the song. If they were to judge from the dark, menacing clouds being driven in from the lagoon, another storm would soon batter their frail, serene city.

PART ONE

IN HIS CLOAK AND GONDOLA

1

“I must get in,” Urbino said to himself at two o'clock in the morning. He stood on a narrow, humpbacked bridge in a remote corner of the San Polo district.

The full moon broke through the clouds and splayed a solemn brightness over the scene.

The Ca' Pozza was wrapped in silence, and completely dark behind its windows. Urbino felt a thrill of fear and a wave of melancholy. Even if he had not known who was within its walls, hidden from public view all these years and filled with so many memories that time would soon snatch away, the building would have stirred in him the same mixture of feelings.

Urbino closed his umbrella. Surrounded by puddles of water and the reek of moldering stone and vegetation, he was far removed from the civilized comforts of Florian's, where he had sat with the Contessa yesterday afternoon.

He peered down at the black waters of the canal. Scraps of vegetables drifted in the direction of the Grand Canal. Mesmerized by their slow motion, he watched them until they passed from view under the bridge. He was now staring at the faint, masklike reflection of his face.

Vaguely uneasy, he jerked his head up. His unexpected image in any reflecting surface invariably disconcerted him as it had at Florian's. It always left him feeling, for many confusing moments afterward, that he wasn't the person he thought he was but someone else who only looked the same.

He focused his attention on the silent and secretive Ca' Pozza to dispel the wave of anxiety coursing through him.

The building with its crumbling broad front, eroded stone loggia, and rows of curtained windows frowned down at him from above the small canal as if it disapproved of his intrusive gaze.

Urbino had always found the San Polo district, choked by a loop of the Grand Canal, to be filled with more of a sense of death and decay than anywhere else in Venice. Since his preoccupation with Samuel Possle and his dilapidated palazzo, this feeling had deepened and darkened.

If the bridges and alleys seemed more twisted, the covered walkways danker, and the Rialto farther away, it was because of the baleful influence cast by the Ca' Pozza. Even the nearby Fondamenta delle Tette, where women once bared their breasts to entice customers away from homosexual prostitutes, somehow thickened with more sensual associations.

Whether penetrating the Ca' Pozza's secrets would dispel the building's peculiar influence or increase it, Urbino had no way of knowing; but he wouldn't be at peace until he gained access. Since Possle never came out, Urbino would have to get in. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.

How far he was prepared to go to achieve this end seemed ominously foreshadowed by the urgency of the phrase he kept repeating to himself in an almost audible voice. “I must get in. I must get in.”

He was unable to pull his gaze away from the building. He let his imagination wander through rooms he had never seen, seeking out the old man as he might be sleeping and dreaming of days gone by or sitting with a pile of yellowed letters.

Urbino knew as much or as little about Samuel Possle as everyone else seemed to know or had been allowed to. His background was wealthy but otherwise undistinguished. His family had made a fortune in the shrimp industry in South Carolina. Since he was an only child, it had all come into his hands with the sudden deaths of his parents in the forties. The larger world beyond Venice had heard of him, not for anything he had accomplished, but rather for his former glittering entourage and for what he had always seemed to promise. Time was running out on the promise as he approached his ninetieth year.

Possle, a frequent guest of the rich and famous, and the indefatigable host of sensational gatherings at the Ca' Pozza, appeared briefly, but memorably, in the memoirs and biographies of many people now long dead. His marriage to a German poet had ended in divorce decades ago, and he had never remarried. After all his years of high society, he had gone into seclusion.

He was supposedly working on a book he had once made the mistake of saying was a “meditation on time and the human emotions” intentionally evoking Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
. However, his version, he had said, would be more sensational and even longer.

Suddenly the Ca' Pozza jolted Urbino out of these thoughts. With an almost blinding flash, the tall loggia doors on the
piano nobile
were illuminated from within. A few moments later a silhouette appeared behind the curtains of one of the unshuttered doors that was closest to Urbino. The figure seemed to be staring out, although positioned as it was behind the curtains and standing in a lighted room, it was doubtful whether it could see anything.

Urbino assumed the figure was a man because the hair seemed closely cropped. It stood motionless behind the panes of the door, almost as if it were posing, and then turned slowly and presented itself in full profile.

The sex of the figure didn't become clarified, but as Urbino stared one detail drew all his attention. The figure held up to its face an object that gave every appearance of being a severed head. The nose of the head was sharp and the chin prominent; its skull was remarkably smooth, and Urbino assumed it must be completely bald.

The figure remained at the door as if to give Urbino time to take in the disturbing scene and then moved to the side and out of sight. The light was extinguished a few moments later.

Yet Urbino waited, standing on the bridge as motionless as the figure had stood at the door earlier. It was as if Urbino knew that something else would happen tonight on this visit to the Ca' Pozza. He was not proved wrong.

Suddenly shrill, high-pitched laughter assaulted his ears. Distorted though it was, it sounded more like a woman's laughter than a man's. It continued for a few moments, subsided into sobs, and then silence.

Because these disturbing sounds broke the stillness so soon after the mysterious figure at the door, the Ca' Pozza was their likely source. But as they faded, leaving behind an even more deathly silence, he realized that they could have come from the building next door that shared a wall with the Ca' Pozza and whose entrance was up the dark, narrow alley that wound its way from the bridge.

All alone in the night and with a nature that had recently become slightly superstitious under the influence of the fatalistic Habib, Urbino couldn't shake the feeling that he had been drawn here tonight to see the figure and to hear the laughter.

He drew his cloak around him against the chill and began to pick his way over the slick, uneven stones of the alley. After a few oblique turns, it would take him to the next bridge. He cast a quick glance up at the building next to the Ca' Pozza from where the laughter and sobs might have come. Not one window was lit.

He broke into a regular rhythm of walking. If he were lucky, he should now be able to get to sleep when he returned to the Palazzo Uccello. If he did, he hoped that it would be without having the dream that had been brushing its dark wings against him for so many nights and that had even cast its shadows over his rendezvous at Florian's with the Contessa.

He had not gone far when a pool of water blocked his passage. After a moment's hesitation as he considered retracing his steps, he waded through it. Water seeped over the tops of his rain shoes.

Clouds obscured the moon again, and a damp, penetrating wind from the direction of the lagoon, funneled by the narrow alleys, whined in his ears. More rain would fall before the night was over.

The
calle
ended at a canal bordered by a portico and crossed by a crooked, stone bridge. Boats moored by the mossy water steps were covered with tarpaulin and plastic. On a bright sunny day this spot was full of charm. Tourists would often congratulate themselves on having discovered the area all on their own, but at this hour of the night they would have been less enthusiastic. There were too many places for someone to be hiding, too many slippery stones that could have you falling into the canal, and too little reassurance that anyone was inside the closed old houses to come to your aid.

He entered the portico. Most of the buildings were in a poor condition and were vacant. Stucco facing had fallen off to reveal the bricks beneath. Doors and windows were boarded over, with
CHIUSO
painted in red letters on the doors. Narrow openings between the buildings led into a labyrinth of alleys.