The Last Gondola (23 page)

Urbino trailed off. Possle's eyes were closed. To Urbino's irritation, he had apparently dropped off to sleep again, and at such a crucial moment. But his breathing seemed less deep and regular than usual, and his eyelids were not quite closed.

Urbino decided to behave as if he were in fact asleep. He had already risked a great deal because of his curiosity today, but surely he would be expected now to take a closer look at some of the objects in the room. To do otherwise would be to reveal too much of his own suspicions about the man.

Urbino picked up one of the small candles ranged on the floor and brought it over to the copy of Moreau's
The Apparition
, with its severed head of John the Baptist. Having seen the original painting at the Louvre, Urbino was impressed by the copyist's success. There was no signature. He wondered whether the same painter had made the copies of the other Moreau in the gondola room and of the St. Sebastian detail in the bedroom.

He looked for a signature on the less impressive copy of Moreau's
Dance of Salome
next to
The Apparition
. There was none.

Possle was still asleep, or giving a fairly good semblance of it. Urbino went over to the portrait of the light-haired young woman. He brought the candle nearer. The woman looked out at him with her refined features, her blue eyes mirroring the celestial blue of the ceiling's oval. She was beautiful and elegant in her low-cut black dress and totally unfamiliar to Urbino.

In the lower right-hand corner of the painting, written in black, was the painter's name: Lino Cipri.

“‘That's my last Duchess painted on the wall'” came Possle's voice.

‘“Looking as if she were alive'?” Urbino completed the quotation from Robert Browning.

“The last I heard, she was very much so. Do you like Browning?”

Urbino replaced the candle on the floor. “I do,” he replied, dropping back into the armchair.

“And the painting? You think it's good?”

“Very good. And the copies as well.”

Urbino was tempted to bring up Lino Cipri, but he would wait. There was something more important he wanted to talk about now.

“But it's Byron I'm interested in.”

Possle nodded. “So now we've come to it,” he said. “I salute you.”

“You've enticed me here—”

“A peculiar choice of words,” Possle broke in. “You've been practically besieging the battlements of this rather dilapidated castle, as you said yourself.”

“Fair enough,” Urbino conceded. “Let me say then that you've been kind enough to invite me here because of something to do with Byron. I've become as certain of it as I could possibly be without confirmation from you.”

“Intuition, a professional hunch?”

“So what is it that you have?” Urbino went on. “Letters? The memoir of some Venetian woman who saw him swim from the Lido to the Canalazzo?”

Possle smiled.

“Nothing as pedestrian as that. Something much better. Something that might even interest the Contessa.”

Possle gave a longish pause. It could only have been for the sake of suspense. “I have poems. Unpublished poems. Seven of them, in Byron's own handwriting, and in excellent condition.”

Urbino tried to conceal his excitement. “Are you sure they're Byron's?”

“I always speak from a position of strength, despite this,” and Possle glanced down at his body against the orange cushions.

“How do you come to have them?”

Provenance was the crucial issue after authenticity. And about this latter point, Urbino wasn't prepared to accept Possle's flat assurance.

“All in good time. You've been racing ahead like your Contessa's motorboat. I prefer the more sedate pace of a gondola. All things considered, we've accomplished a great deal this afternoon. I think it would be better if we put off any further discussion until the next time.”

Urbino, surprised at this abrupt dismissal, especially on this occasion, wondered what might be behind it. Did Possle want to gain time? If so, for what? Or did he want to keep Urbino off balance? Perhaps even punish him, in some way, for having been the one to broach the topic of Byron?

Whatever it was, Urbino would have to comply. This was Possle's domain, and he had to play by his rules, but yet he'd do his best to subvert them. Despite Possle's air of unconcern, Urbino had disturbed him, and this gave Urbino some satisfaction.

“To show you my good will, Mr. Macintyre,” Possle was now saying, “I'm not going to keep you wondering this time when we'll have the pleasure of seeing each other again. Shall we make it for Thursday at our accustomed hour?” That was six days away, longer than Urbino expected. “And now if we can get Armando to show you out.”

But as he reached for the bell rope, a shadow fell into the room.

“Always anticipating my needs, aren't you, Armando?” Possle said in his precise Italian. “It's time for our guest to bid us good-bye. Shall we shake hands on our parting this time, Mr. Macintyre?”

Urbino, feeling Armando's eyes boring into his back, went over to the gondola. He reached out to take Possle's hand. He was surprised at the strength with which it grasped his, and with its coldness. It was more like the hand of a dead than a living man. It felt even colder than it had been when it had groped his skull.

Before Urbino reached the door, he stopped. “Your last Duchess, as you called her,” he said. He indicated the portrait. “She's by Lino Cipri.”

“You know him?”

“A friend of mine commissioned some work from him. Copies. Do you know him well?”

“Not these days, if I ever did.” Possle gave a hollow laugh. “There's no one I seem to know these days. You're in very select company.”

“Did Cipri make the copies of the Moreau paintings?”

“Such interest in Lino Cipri! Yes, he did. I'm sure he's got as much money from your friend as he could. He doesn't believe in art for art's sake. And in the case of the portrait here, he got the original.”

Urbino looked at the beautiful woman and then back at Possle.

“Just my little joke, Mr. Macintyre. By the way, I would suggest that you get more rest. You're looking a bit haggard. Until the next time.”

Armando conducted Urbino across the
sala
and down the staircase. He stood in the hall without any expression on his hard-featured face, watching Urbino put on his cloak. But as he was closing the heavy door on Urbino, he did it with a smile full of malignancy and satisfaction.

On his walk back to the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino couldn't quite shake the chill that he always had when he was in the Ca' Pozza. The chill on this occasion had been intensified by the touch of Possle's hand and Armando's smile of farewell. Once again he felt the fatigue settling in that he now came to expect after these encounters at the Ca' Pozza.

As soon as he got back home, he compared the key he had taken from Possle's bedroom with the key to the front door of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

He didn't know if he was disappointed or relieved to find that the two didn't match. He realized now how much he had expected them to.

He spent a long time thinking about what he had seen in Possle's rooms and even more of his experience on the back staircase. It was inevitable that he associate the belt with the Contessa's lost items, although she hadn't said anything about missing a belt. It might only be a coincidence. He wasn't even sure if the belt was a man's or a woman's.

A key, a belt, and Possle's revelations about Byron.

In one way or another, Urbino had come away from the Ca' Pozza today with each of these things. He couldn't assume that they were connected or that they weren't. Each of them might be nothing more than what the detective novels called a red herring. But on the other hand, one or all of them might lead him to some of the answers he was seeking inside Possle's dark house and the world outside it.

50

Urbino spent most of Saturday morning, while the Contessa was giving her second
conversazione
, arranging for Cipri's copies of the Longhis to be shipped to Eugene in New Orleans. It was a time-consuming affair, and he occupied himself during all the waiting by pondering over the copyist's former relationship with Possle.

When his task was finished, he had lunch at a favorite restaurant on the San Marco side of the Rialto Bridge that was bustling at this time of the day. He ate at the bar, hoping that all the conversation and activity around him would help draw him out of his thoughts about Possle and the Ca' Pozza, about the key he had taken, the belt he had seen on the staircase, and the recluse's provocative remarks about Byron. But he only ended up feeling more solitary.

As soon as he stepped into the
calle
after lunch, he decided to seek out some of the locales associated with Byron as a way of concretizing some of his thoughts. The poet had spent several years in the city where, according to his own estimate, he had been the lover of two hundred women as well as a few men.

The possible existence of unpublished Byron poems, perhaps written during his notorious residency in the city, was even affecting Urbino's dream now. Last night a new element had entered. As the Contessa approached the thronelike chairs, the young Possle slipped a hand beneath the veil of the woman wearing the Contessa's silver cascade, withdrew a sheaf of papers, and waved them in the air. They were covered with florid handwriting in purple ink. When the Contessa reached Possle, the fire broke out as he knew it would, but instead of the drapes catching fire, the papers did.

As always, Urbino had awakened when the flames started to engulf the room.

The dream was still very much on his mind as he walked in the general direction of the Piazza San Marco on this gray, overcast day. The sun kept trying to break through but succeeded for only a few scattered moments. Traces of fog curled above the waters of the Grand Canal and crept across the squares and alleys like something alive.

Packs of boisterous students interrupted Urbino's progress and reflections. Their easy camaraderie and enthusiasm could not have been more of a contrast to his meditative mood.

Urbino needed to be skeptical about Possle's possible possession of unpublished poems by Byron. It wasn't that such things didn't happen or that people like Urbino didn't unearth them. He was aware of several instances. In fact, he knew a woman who had stumbled on previously unknown letters by Henry James, which had shed light on his sexual identity.

But for every genuine discovery, a thousand hoaxes confounded the public; and if ever there was a person who would perpetrate such a hoax, that person was certainly Samuel Possle, the thief of San Polo, as Urbino was more and more coming to think of him. Everything about him, from his clothes and his Amontillado to his allusions and his choice of decor and music, was calculated, and nothing more so than his bizarre divan.

And yet Urbino couldn't discount the possibility that unpublished poems by Byron were hidden somewhere in the Ca' Pozza, waiting to be exposed to the light. If they were, how long had they been there, and how had they come into Possle's hands? Possle had said that there was no doubt of Byron's authorship. Did this mean that someone had authenticated them? All of them? And what were they about? Were they a sequence? Isolated poems? First draughts of poems that had already been published?

Urbino had a sinking feeling as he formulated this latter question. It made him realize how much he was already hoping, so soon after Possle had made his revelation, that he indeed did have authentic poems and ones that had never seen the light of day. They might not provide the answer to the riddle of the universe, but they would certainly shake the lesser world of Byron studies and help make the reputation of whoever found them. They were just what Urbino needed at this time. Much better than a biography of Possle would be.

The idea of the poems remained temptingly before his eyes as he plunged through the tortuous alleys. If Possle had them, Urbino would do whatever he could to get possession of them, do anything, that is, within reason. This amendment he almost voiced aloud as if to assure himself of an inviolable personal principle. It was also one that Possle had ironically drawn attention to yesterday.

Urbino threaded his way through the alleys until he reached a
calle
that led toward the Grand Canal. Fog from the waterway was brushing against the brick and stucco.

He came to a halt at a building on his right. It was the Palazzo Benzon, the first stop on what he had decided would be his contemplative little itinerary in honor of Byron. This wasn't the best way to view the building, for like most of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, it turned its back to the pedestrian world and showed its full splendor only by water.

But his imagination had little trouble investing it with some of its past glory when the Contessa Marina Querini-Benzon had conducted a literary salon in one of its sumptuous apartments. She was none other than the blonde woman named in the Venetian love song “La biondina in gondoleta” that gondoliers still serenaded their customers with. Byron, who had begun as a luminary of the sixty-year-old contessa's salon, had ended up her lover, as Urbino had been speculating about yesterday in the presence of Peggy Guggenheim's bed.

He retraced his steps down the
calle
and bent them toward the four Palazzi Mocenigo, which stood at the
volta
of the Canalazzo where it made its sharpest turn. The fog was thicker here. It obscured first one part of the scene, then another, as it stole along.

The Palazzo Mocenigo-Vecchio was the one that Demetrio Emo had described as being haunted by the ghost of the alchemist Giordano Bruno.

But Urbino was drawn to the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero, for it had been here that Byron, from 1818 to 1819, with a dog, monkey, fox, and wolf to keep him company, had created the romantic aura of his Venetian years. He had pursued his mistresses, swum the length of the Grand Canal, ridden horses on the Lido, and argued incessantly with his friend Shelley, who disapproved of Byron's sexual obsession that had gondoliers soliciting lovers for him on the streets and canals. And in its rooms he had carried on his notorious affair with a woman known as La Fornarina, the baker's wife, who had attacked him with a knife during a quarrel and then jumped into the Grand Canal from the balcony of his rooms.