The Last Gondola (33 page)

Urbino stopped in at Florian's. As he had a drink at the bar, he tried to put together the pieces of the puzzle that were Samuel Possle, Mechitar Dilsizian, and Lord Byron. He didn't have much success. He then telephoned Corrado Scarpa. There was no help from him either. He had not yet been able to locate the boating accident report. If and when he did, he would have it delivered to Urbino immediately.

74

“Why, thank you, Signor Urbino,” Benedetta Razzi said at ten-fifteen the next morning. She took the tiny fan of marbleized pink paper. “It's even nicer than the one you brought last time. My little ones will love it.”

“You said that they didn't have many fans. When I passed the shop, I knew what I had to do.”

Razzi continued to examine the fan.

“I'll put it right by my
senorita,”
she said. “Senoritas love fans.”

“They do. But perhaps it would be more suitable with this other doll.”

He indicated the refined figure in an embroidered pink dress displayed on one of the tables. When he had been here before it had been beside her on the love seat. A pillbox hat draped by a white veil gave it an exotic look.

“Of course,” Razzi agreed. “The colors of the fan and the dress go together perfectly.” She placed the fan next to the doll. “There!”

As she eased herself into the sagging love seat, she gave him an amused look from beneath her false eyelashes. She was wearing the same black dress with black sequins, but today she had added a necklace of pearls.

“I think you have a soft spot in your heart for that little lady. I'm jealous. You brought the fan especially for her.”

Urbino seated himself in the armchair across from her. “You've discovered my secret, signora. I must admit that I find that doll intriguing. Her costume, I mean. It's Armenian, isn't it?”

“How clever! Armenian, yes. I had to look up the country on a map. I had never heard of it before. It's near Turkey.”

He waited.

“A gentleman gave it to me, a kind gentleman just like yourself. He came from Armenia.”

“Really? How interesting.”

“He was my tenant in the San Polo building. Oh, that was many years ago. He had a strange name. I can't remember it. Ah, but his face, Signor Urbino! His face! I'll never forget it. And even if I did, I have a photograph.”

“You do?”

“Bring me that album from the table over in the corner.”

Urbino fetched the large, worn book.

Razzi started to turn the pages slowly. She alternately smiled and frowned as she looked at the photographs. After a minute or two, she stabbed at one photograph with her finger. “Here he is, and here's me, too, all those years ago.”

She sighed and handed him the album.

A color photograph, poor in quality, of three people, was on the page.

Razzi, who appeared to be in her forties, was dressed in a brown fur coat and matching fur hat. She was recognizable for her large, expressive eyes. Next to her was a tall and sharp-featured man in a moustache and pointed beard.

On the other side of Mechitar Dilsizian was an attractive young woman in a gray dress and small black apron. She was almost as tall as the Armenian. On her head was a gray cap. She looked vaguely familiar.

“You see how hard his face was, but he had a kind heart. He gave me the doll a few days after this picture was taken. He moved away and went to Switzerland or Austria or someplace like that. I don't know what happened to him.”

Urbino was tempted to tell her about Dilsizian's fate, but if he did, it would reveal his deception to the woman. Instead he asked who had taken the photograph.

“His son. He was sweet, too. The face of an angel!”

“You've always been elegant, signora. Who is the girl with you?”

Razzi took the album back and closed it. “That's crazy Elvira. She wasn't crazy then. She wasn't even married.”

“She seems to be dressed in a uniform of some kind.”

“In those days she was a maid—for Signor Possle and some other people. Maybe she took the apartment after her husband died to be close to him. She seemed to have a crush on him, so much older though he was.”

Urbino absorbed this in silence. Then he asked her what Elvira's relationship with Dilsizian had been.

“Who knows? I wouldn't put anything past her, then or now. She's a schemer. She managed to get into
my
building, didn't she? And she'll be there for life—
her
life, I mean—unless I can get her out some other way!”

75

“A gentleman left this for you, Signor Urbino,” Natalia said, when he returned to the Palazzo Uccello after speaking with Razzi.

She handed him a large manila envelope. Urbino immediately knew what it was. Corrado Scarpa had found the accident report.

He took it to the library, where he poured a glass of wine, then seated himself in the old leather armchair.

The envelope contained several photocopied sheets covered with script and typewriting, signatures, and official stamps. He read through them once quickly, then a second time more carefully.

Possle, Armando, Adriana, and the Dilsizians had gone out in a sailboat they had rented in Burano. The sailboat was a
topo
, a type of vessel originally designed as a fishing boat but now used by the Buranelli, with a motor, as a cargo transport. Their
topo
, however, didn't have a motor but only a sail.

The unusually mild weather for mid-March must have encouraged the group. Mechitar had been in control of the boat.

When they were near Chioggia, a short distance from Venice, violent gusts had started blowing from the north. They had decided to head back to Burano.

But when they had been off the Lido and within sight of the Lungomare Marconi, the weather had turned even worse. Mechitar had lost control of the boat. According to Possle's and Armando's affidavits—the mute had written his own account in response to questioning—the whole party had been tossed into the sea. The only witness among the five about what happened from this point on was Armando. Possle was knocked unconscious when the boat hit him in the head. Armando managed to secure him to the capsized boat. Armando then looked for the others. Mechitar was trying to save his son as they thrashed around in the water. They both disappeared beneath the waves. Adriana was nowhere in sight. Armando swam a short distance from Possle and the boat in search of her. He didn't find her.

The report also contained the testimonies of a middle-aged couple who were on the Lido bird-watching. While the woman ran to call an emergency number, the man witnessed the drama through his binoculars. From what he could see, everything had unfolded just as Armando had described, except that he added one detail. He had seen Adriana slip beneath the waves as the capsized
topo
had passed over her.

The bodies of Mechitar and Zakariya had been found three hours later, washed up on the shore of the Lido.

Adriana's body had never been found.

It was time to make a trip to the Villa Serena in Florence. Urbino made some telephone calls and managed to get an appointment to meet the director the next afternoon.

76

After dinner Urbino telephoned the Contessa in Bologna to see how she was doing. She spoke in a calm and almost emotionless voice, and spent most of the time telling him about Clementina, who was fortunately out of danger. He told her that he hoped she was taking care of herself as well, and left it at that for now. Although he had no intention of keeping silent about her strange behavior after sounding the bell of the Ca' Pozza, as she had vehemently told him he should, he didn't want to speak about it over the telephone.

“I'll be back late tomorrow night,” she said, “but there's no need to call,
caro
. I'll be going straight to bed. We'll all be losing an hour of sleep.”

Tomorrow was March 31 when the clocks were turned ahead one hour for summertime.

“I won't bother you. Give Clementina my love, and have a safe return.” But he couldn't say good-bye without adding, “Possle is expecting us on Monday.”

“I haven't forgotten.”

77

At ten o'clock that night Urbino, wrapped in his cloak, took a walk, but he was determined to keep his steps away from the Ca' Pozza. He would rather contemplate it tonight in its absence. It would be more real and palpable this way and less able to exert its baleful influence.

Fog had made a stealthy invasion of the city during the past few hours. It transformed the few people he met into mysterious, faceless figures who reminded him of the silhouette he had seen against the window of the Ca' Pozza more than a month ago.

He crossed the iron bridge into the Ghetto and wandered beneath the tall buildings, his mood darkened by the sad associations of the place. Invariably it had this effect on him even on a warm, sunny day, let alone on a night like this. The stones seemed to bleed from the wrongs of the centuries, and he could easily imagine the generations obliged to wear their bright-colored but far from gay hats and confined behind walls and locked gates.

But tonight the story of the Abdons temporarily displaced this long, tragic history in Urbino's thoughts. He considered the series of premature, violent deaths that had begun with those of the mother and father in the fire and that might not yet have come to an end.

He turned away from the sad, empty streets in the direction of the Grand Canal, where the fog was thicker. Walking past the closed shops and kiosks and beneath shuttered windows, Urbino unrolled Demetrio Emo's story about the Abdon family. He added what he had learned on his own. It was a tale of sudden death and madness—or if not madness, then certainly severe emotional disturbance.

Was there any apparent explanation for Adriana's condition as there was for Armando's muteness? Urbino could understand if she had suffered a breakdown after the deaths of her mother and father, but according to Emo it hadn't been that way. She had been ill before then. And yet Urbino believed that there was a close connection between her illness and the fire that had killed her mother and father, and had almost claimed the life of her brother and possibly hers as well.

Emotional imbalance was often a mystery. There wasn't always a convenient cause to make one feel more comfortable about it. Sometimes madness just dropped down over a person, it seemed. Perhaps this had been poor Adriana's fate, but, one way or another, Urbino didn't think he would ever know.

But other things he was sure he would know, and soon, to flesh out what he strongly suspected. When he went to the Ca' Pozza in a few days, with or without the Contessa, he would find out whether he was right or not.

In the long, narrow Campo Morosini he ducked into a bar for a quick glass of wine before heading across the square toward the Accademia Bridge. He stopped to look up at the music conservatory. He turned his thoughts to something that was at the heart of the dark mystery of the Ca' Pozza.

It was Armando's devotion to his sister that had begun in their childhood, that had extended into their adulthood, and that was still far from dead. His arrangements for her commitment to the Villa Serena, the mass celebrated every year in her memory, the obituary notice on the date of the boat accident—they all testified to his love and loyalty, or seemed to.

And what he had learned from Benedetta Razzi about Elvira Carelli complicated the picture even more. Elvira not only lived next door to the Ca' Pozza and considered it a blight on her life, but years ago she had also worked as Possle's maid and had been romantically attracted to him, if Razzi could be believed. Possle had indicated that he only knew her as a neighbor. What might he be concealing about his relationship with her?

And to implicate Elvira even more in the secrets of the palazzo, she had been acquainted with Dilsizian and his son. What the extent of this acquaintance might have been, especially with the father, was shrouded in the silence of the past. Razzi, not even with all her ill will for Elvira and her interest in gossip, had been able to lift one small edge of the veil.

Urbino was still staring up at the music conservatory. A lone window was illuminated. Perhaps a privileged young student like the Contessa so many years ago was practicing a Mozart sonata. Perhaps somewhere in the shadows where Urbino couldn't see her was a less privileged young woman who was looking up with envy and anger at the lighted window.

Urbino climbed the wooden steps of the fog-wreathed bridge and paused in the middle. The night air blew across his face like an astringent.

Slow, hesitant footsteps approached from the Dorsoduro side where the fog was thick. As he peered into the fog for someone to appear, the footsteps stopped suddenly. The fog revealed nothing. He waited for the footsteps to sound again. All he could hear was the
put-put
of a boat that soon faded away farther up the Grand Canal. Then, after what seemed a long time but which was probably scarcely more than ten or fifteen seconds, the footsteps broke the stillness of the night again.

Almost as soon as they did, two gray figures gradually became visible like prints in a photographic tray and climbed the last few steps of the bridge.

It was an elderly couple. The woman, muffled against the unseasonable cold in a fur coat similar to the one that Razzi wore in the photograph with Dilsizian and Elvira, held a muzzled cocker spaniel against her chest. They bid Urbino good evening in Italian, walked slowly down the opposite steps, and vanished in the fog.

Urbino gazed down at the Grand Canal. The fog crept over the surface of the waterway. It made some buildings disappear but isolated others as if they stood alone.

One of these latter was the Palazzo Guggenheim farther down the Grand Canal, the former home of a woman who had bestowed some of her glamour and notoriety on Possle's gatherings. From its water steps had floated what had surely been the last private gondola in Venice as such legendary matters were reckoned. It hadn't been Possle's and it certainly wasn't Urbino's.