The Last Gondola (6 page)

“Oh, it's Lino Cipri,” Rebecca said.

Cipri was a painter who spent most of his time and made most of his money copying the work of other painters. He was excellent at it, and it was all very legal as long as he signed his own name to the canvas.

“Cipri's overdue on a painting for one of my clients,” Rebecca said, as she stood up. “It's all your fault, your fault and Eugene's, that is.”

During a visit at Christmas, Urbino's former brother-in-law, Eugene Hennepin, had commissioned Cipri to make a large number of copies of paintings in the Accademia Gallery and the Ca' Rezzonico. He was still working on them. Urbino was the middleman.

“I think I'll walk with him and see what's going on, if you don't mind being left alone. I'm afraid that all he can think about these days is Eugene's money. I need to impress him with his other responsibilities.”

Rebecca pulled on her coat.

“By the way,” she said, “how is Habib doing? I thought he would send me a postcard.”

She and Habib had become close during the past year and a half.

“Give him a chance! He's fine, but busy. He'll be back in early April.”

“Good. Plenty of time before the installation.”

Habib was exhibiting at the Aperto, devoted to up-and-coming artists. It was mounted every Biennale at the old naval rope works near the Arsenale.

“Habib at the Biennale! Who would have thought it!” Rebecca enthused. “Give him one of these for me as soon as you see him.”

She bent down and kissed him on each cheek. As she straightened up, she put her hand under his chin and lifted his face.

“You look tired, Urbino dear. Burning the midnight oil at the Palazzo Uccello?”

“Something like that,” he said. Urbino had been suffering from the same dream for the past two nights.

Rebecca dashed across the square toward Lino Cipri. The painter had caught sight of her and was waiting for her to join him.

12

At three o'clock the next morning, Urbino made an attempt to loosen Possle's grip on him. Even sleep provided no relief because of his troubling dream. He had awakened from it a few minutes ago, and the faces of Possle and the Contessa were still swimming toward him, encircled by bright flames. He would not be able to get back to sleep easily. He needed to chase Possle away.

Fortified with a glass of the bourbon he saved for special occasions, he went to the library. He put Elgar's Symphony Number One on the player and sank into an old leather armchair that had once stood in his New Orleans house. Serena settled herself in his lap a few moments later.

Encouraged by the noble theme introduced in Elgar's first movement, he devoted himself to considering the Contessa's problem. He reviewed what he had learned from her staff and from the Contessa herself. The more he went over the details, few as they were, the more he realized that he needed to know several essential things before he could even hope to make any progress.

He put a time frame around the Contessa's loss of her items. She had worn the mauve-and-blue tea dress on the afternoon they had gone to the film festival on the Lido. If he remembered correctly, she had also had her slouch hat with her. It was a bit battered, but it was a personal favorite of hers. The film festival had been in early September. She had decided on the silver cascade necklace for the Feast of the Salute. That had been on November 21.

She had noticed the necklace missing in the middle of January, and in quick succession she had discovered that the other items were gone. There seemed to be a period of four and a half months. Anytime during that period her things could have been taken. He now had a rough framework to work with. In one way or another, the previous autumn was the crucial period.

As the
allegro molto
movement of the symphony began, Urbino reviewed the Contessa's schedule the past autumn. From what he could remember, she had been at the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini all that time, except for day trips to Florence and Milan, three days in Rome in late October, and a week in Geneva in early December for her medical tests. Whenever she was away for extended periods of time, Vitale gave extra vigilance to the house, or he was supposed to. Urbino had no doubt that the majordomo would emphatically inform him that he had done just that.

Urbino tried to recall the Contessa's houseguests during this period. Two young English cousins had spent several days at the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini at the time of the Regata Storica. That had been in September after the film festival. Between Christmas and New Year's the Conte's grandniece and grandnephew had stayed with her.

All these visits had fallen during the period when the objects had disappeared. He didn't think that any of the Contessa's guests had taken them, but their presence in the house would have meant less attention to security with their comings and goings.

The lyrical
adagio
movement began. Urbino leaned back and closed his eyes, stroking Serena. It was the most perfect thing Elgar had ever done, and Urbino found encouragement in the fact that he had done it in his middle years.

When the movement was over, Urbino returned his thoughts to the Contessa's items and ran through the tentative time scheme that he had put together. There would have been many opportunities for an enterprising and lucky thief to have got into the less-than-secure Ca' da Capo-Zendrini and taken the dress, scarf, hat, and necklace. But there was some comfort in having established some points of reference that could prove to be useful as he continued to look into the matter.

After awaking Serena, he got up and straightened the scattered books as the fourth movement played. Then he searched through some old newspapers and magazines. After a few minutes he found what he was looking for. They were photographs of the Contessa that had appeared that fall. They had both joked about how she had been getting a lot of positive media exposure during a relatively short period of time.

He examined the color photograph of the Contessa with some friends from Nice. It had been taken on the afternoon she had gone to the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. She looked fresh and pretty in her mauve-and-blue tea dress. She was carrying her slouch hat with the flowers. Another photograph, this one in black and white, caught her at Santa Maria del Giglio. The snowy domes of the Salute were in the background on the other side of the Grand Canal. Around her neck was the silver cascade necklace. She somehow made it look appropriate for the celebration of health and good fortune. In a third photograph, in color, she wore her pashmina and silk Regency scarf on the loggia of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. It had been taken the Sunday of the Regata Storica. Urbino and Habib were standing beside her.

All the photographs had appeared in the local newspaper and supplements.

13

“
Eccolo!
” came a woman's voice as the long, black body and bright steel beak of Urbino's gondola slid past the embankment the next morning.
“L'americano!”

If Urbino had been regarded as an eccentric in all the years he had been living in Venice, to his own secret amusement he had become even more of one recently because of his gondola. The only people who rode in style in gondolas these days were tourists for their requisite forty-five minutes and a photograph by the Bridge of Sighs. Even wealthy residents had long since abandoned their private ones. Collective gondolas might ferry Venetians across the Grand Canal at strategic points, but such hurried, utilitarian passage hardly counted as a gondola ride, not in the old-fashioned sense.

And it was precisely its old-fashioned associations that had inspired the Contessa to make her gift.

“You'll seem like someone from another world,” she had said, during the gondola's maiden voyage. “Gliding out into the canals like a spirit from the past, just the way you entered my life.
Where has this young man come from?
I thought. And here we are now. Two lovers of Venice, and one gondola between us. But beware,
caro,”
she had said, touching his arm beneath the cloak. “The gondola is yours and so will be most of the talk. No matter how often I go out with you, people will know you for what you are. But you'll find it all delightful.”

It hadn't been delightful at first, not for someone as temperamentally shy as Urbino. He had only gradually become accustomed to the smiles, stares, and comments like the one the woman had just made. Even so, he knew he would never feel completely at ease. For if riding around in a gondola was romantic and graceful, it was also more than a little proud and self-indulgent, especially when the gondola was your own and you had the services of your private gondolier.

The only thing that might have made it worse was if the gondola was any color but the customary dead black and if Gildo, like the gondoliers in a Carpaccio painting, wore a red jacket, checkered tights, and a plumed cap, and broke out into spontaneous song.

But despite the unwelcome attention and jokes, Urbino had taken to this new, or rather old, mode of transport. Although it could never take the place in his heart of his rambling walks, its vague air of invalidism suited that part of him that was not so much passive as receptive and observant. His mind, which by its nature was always seeking connections and making metaphors, often imaged the craft as a kind of drifting palanquin, with a lone gondolier instead of two bearers and with a
forcola
and an oar instead of poles. Yet on other days, even ones less dark and gloomy than this one, Lord Byron's description of “a coffin clapt in a canoe” seemed much more apt although much less consoling.

Most of the times he had ventured out in the gondola so far, it had been with the
felze
attached, as it was on this gray day on the first of March. Although the small, covered cabin was designed as a protection against bad weather, it had additional attractions for Urbino. It encouraged his musings. From behind its shutters, he had the luxury of seeing without being seen.

It was not hard for Urbino to feel, for long delicious moments afloat in his gondola, like a pasha reclining against plump Oriental cushions. He would fantasize about being rowed to some secluded unfamiliar canal unmarked on any maps or to somewhere far away in the lagoon where he could reconstruct the absent city in his imagination.

Urbino straightened up against the dark blue cushions. He peered through the slats to try to glimpse the woman who had drawn attention to his passage, but all he saw was a piece of crumbling wall, mossy water steps, a tarpaulin-covered row-boat, and the low-hanging branches of a tree, all slowly and dreamily sliding by.

Ever since he had taken to the water in this fashion, Venice had become wrapped again in the same delicious confusion as it had been for him once. Familiarity had stolen some of the city's mystery, and now he was regaining it through the Contessa's unpredictable and extravagant gift.

Pasquale's comment about the different view from the water came back to him as Gildo gave a sharp, warning cry and brought the gondola around the corner of a canal. Weathered, rose-colored brick moved past. Exactly where they were, he didn't know, except that they were
di là del Canale
, on the other side, as the Venetians referred to the one that didn't include San Marco.

As he continued to watch the scene, or what the narrow apertures of his womblike space permitted him to see, he fell into a languorous mood. He was soon almost asleep, fatigued as he was by his recurring dream of Possle and the veiled woman and the Contessa in a room that blazed into flames.

His mind now inevitably drifted toward Possle and all the things that he might learn if the doors of the Ca' Pozza were ever opened to him.

The shouts of children playing football in a square startled Urbino into fuller awareness. He stared through the cabin opening to the gondola's prow where the steel
ferro
, with its curved blade and seven blunt prongs, sliced through the morning air. In an exercise that entertained him from time to time, he idly speculated about the possible meaning of its unusual shape. But whether the baroque-looking
ferro
was merely a counterweight to the gondolier on the poop, a device to measure the height of bridges, or, more exotically, a vestige of Egyptian funeral barques was fortunately unresolvable. Although Urbino's mind was one that preferred answers, this little mystery of the
ferro
didn't trouble him. Even if he were able to reach an answer, it would not be a disturbing one. And nothing was at stake. If only the mystery of the Contessa's lost items were the same, he thought as he rearranged a cushion behind his back.

He had not yet given her the details of what he had learned from her staff. The Contessa, absorbed in her preparations for her first
conversazione
the coming Friday, a week from today, hadn't pressed him. But he was determined to speak with her tomorrow.

He was ashamed to admit it, but he was grateful for the Contessa's problem. It gave his mind something to exercise itself on other than Possle. For months now, almost everything he did, everything he picked up to read, every painting he saw, every walk he took, had seemed to lead him in some way to the Ca' Pozza and its occupant. Yes, he said to himself in the dark little cabin, it was a welcome tonic to be involved in at least one thing that didn't relate to the old recluse.

A few seconds later, however, a glance through the shutters revealed how little he could escape his obsession. Looming up from the canal's edge and doubled in its waters were the crumbling walls of the Ca' Pozza.

When he had pulled away from the Palazzo Uccello, he had given Gildo no destination. Yet here they were, gliding past the coveted building. On previous occasions when he had directed Gildo to take them through San Polo, he had asked the gondolier to slow down as they approached the Ca' Pozza. Gildo, perhaps to please him, was slowing the gondola now. It rocked gently from side to side.

Urbino angled the shutters so that he could see the upper stories of Possle's building. The attic frustrated his scrutiny; it displayed a row of darkly curtained squares. The windows of the
piano nobile
were hardly more cooperative, but at least they were larger, arched, and draped, with one exception, in lighter material. He searched the row of tall doors of the stone loggia above the canal. At one of them the figure had appeared the other night, the figure that had seemed to be holding a severed head. It had been a ridiculous notion, he now reassured himself.