The Last Gondola (7 page)

So much of his life was lived in the mind, in his imagination, that it sometimes colored even the barest of realities. He was all too frequently in a state of mild disappointment or fleeting confusion. So far he had always eventually returned to the proper balance, but he feared that someday the necessary efforts on his part would become much more strenuous than they had been so far and less capable of producing the desired results.

These thoughts, in their way, were not all that different from the Contessa's fears, unfounded in his opinion, about what the disappearance of her items might mean for her.

Urbino cast a last glance up at the Ca' Pozza as the gondola resumed its usual rhythm.

Suddenly a woman's cry broke the silence. It was like a howl of pain. A middle-aged woman in a tattered blue housedress stood on the embankment. She shook her fist and shouted in Italian. Only a word here and there could be made out, but no sense came through. She appeared to be venting her fury against the gondola and toward the poop where Gildo was making the required balleticlike movements as he maneuvered the vessel.

Or perhaps Urbino was deceived by his less than clear view of the woman, for the next moment it seemed indisputable that the Ca' Pozza was the object of her rage. She glowered up at the silent building. Curses faded in and out of coherence on the morning air, succeeded by deep sobs. This was surely the same voice that had broken out the other night into shrill laughter and sobs.

Who was the woman? What was her relationship to the Ca' Pozza? And why was she filled with such anger and sorrow?

These were the questions Urbino posed to himself as the gondola quit the area of the Ca' Pozza, moving more quickly, it seemed, than usual.

14

“I'm sure of one thing,” Urbino told the Contessa the next afternoon in the
salotto blu
, “Silvia and Vitale don't hold a candle to their predecessors.”

The Contessa stared back.

“Did I need you to put on your stalker's hat and polish your magnifying glass to find that out? I'm well aware that most things are in decline here.”

“Your body, mind, and spirit, you mean. I don't believe it for a minute and neither do you. Vitale, however, is insufferably smug, and your Silvia is flighty and evasive.”

“Now you're telling me that my staff are like characters from a Goldoni play! Before we know it, you'll be referring to them as servants.”

“If they
are
like Goldoni characters, Barbara dear, don't forget that Goldoni shocked most people by showing that the serving class could have story lines and intrigues of their own.”

“So now the fruit of all your investigation is to tell me that Vitale and Silvia have a life away from the house and from me? What a shock!”

She was aiming for levity, but the faint smile on her face soon faded. “But we've had our experience with the secret lives of my staff, haven't we?” she asked, alluding to the tragedy last year surrounding her previous boatman.

“We can't count it out,” Urbino said. “It's not that I mistrust any of your staff, but we need to keep all possibilities open.”

“You haven't mentioned Pasquale.”

“The best of the lot, perhaps. I'll get to him. As for Vitale, he said that you didn't ask him to repair the door knocker, as far as he can remember,” he added, although the majordomo had expressed no apparent doubt. “He doesn't seem the type to admit to a mistake easily. And he's adamant that no one got into the house. Not on his watch. And I advise you again, Barbara, you should install some kind of security system. As a first step why not at least have Demetrio Emo—”

A quiet knock on the door interrupted him. Silvia, with a nervous smile on her pretty face, entered with the steaming kettle.

Breaking into Italian, the Contessa said, “I've noticed, Urbino, that your sweet Gildo has been looking sad these days. Is he cross with you for some reason?”

She threw a glance at Silvia as the young woman placed the kettle above the silver lamp on the table. The maid lingered, making unnecessary adjustments to the kettle and the teacups.

“He's been abstracted,” Urbino responded in Italian, wondering what little game the Contessa might be playing. “But he's as competent as ever. A friend of his died recently; someone in apprenticeship to be a
remero.”

“Poor boy. Yet it's given him a melancholy air that suits his profession, considering how handsome he is.”

Silvia closed the door behind her.

“What was that all about?” Urbino asked.

“Silvia has the biggest crush on Gildo. An example of the private lives of my staff.”

“And so you want to torture the poor girl?”

“You know I like playing Cupid, although I may have a difficult job of it with Gildo. And besides,
caro
, since we were discussing my staff, Silvia included, we didn't need to have her blabbing it all over the house.” She sliced into a trim loaf of cake on the table. “If you haven't noticed, I've made some Madeira cake.”

They were the only cakes Urbino had ever known her to make, and she did them to perfection. But she never turned them out unless she was in an agitated state, and then she was likely to bake enough to furnish a small
pasticceria
.

“In that case,” Urbino said, getting up, “I'll have some of your Madeira instead of tea.”

He poured himself some of the wine, a dry variety, and reseated himself. The Contessa handed him a generous slice of cake.

“There's no need for Demetrio Emo or anyone from that security company you use,” she said, deftly picking up where they had left off before Silvia had come in. “There are locks on all the doors. Stout ones. The camera at the land entrance is enough. Do I want electronic beams in every corner setting off lights and alarms? Men rushing to my rescue when all I'm trying to do is get a glass of milk in the middle of the night?”

“It works well at my place, and I don't have a tenth of what you have to worry about. Just look at what you have in this room alone.”

He made a wide gesture. Almost every painting, print, bibelot, and piece of furniture crowded into the room came with a story—and, in most cases, a high price tag. He took a bite of the cake.

“But you have yourself to worry about,” the Contessa countered. “Your sleuthing has made you unpopular with quite a few people.”

It was true enough, and it was one of the main reasons he had installed his security system. But the Contessa, as his closest friend and confidant, was herself vulnerable from that direction.

“Is this a version of the lady or the tiger,
caro?
Do I have to choose between losing my mind or having had someone break into the house?”

“Or considering that someone in the house might be mischievous,” he said, before taking a sip of Madeira.

“I like your choice of words. Anyone in particular?”

“The likely suspect would be your infatuated Silvia. She has immediate access to your personal objects. If only we could figure out if your things all went missing at the same time.”

“Why is that important?”

“Someone in the house would be inclined to take them one at a time. A person who broke in would probably take everything at once.”

“Yet a clever person attached to the house,” she responded, “might take everything at once, wouldn't he—or she? It would appear to be a robbery. But I have no idea if they disappeared all at once or one at a time. As I've told you, once I noticed that the silver cascade was missing, I got anxious about what else might be gone. That's when I discovered the other things—or
didn't
discover them. The middle of January.”

Urbino sketched out the time frame he had been considering the other night in the library.

“So let's go through this together,” he said. “No one could have taken the tea dress and the hat before the beginning of September. Do you remember seeing them anytime between then and the middle of January?”

“I'm not sure, but I think they were in the closet in the middle of November before the Feast of the Salute.”

“And the Regency scarf? You wore it at the regatta. Did you wear it after that?”

“In October when I went to Florence,” she said after thinking for a few moments. “A German woman on the Ponte Vecchio commented on it. And it was in my armoire right before the Feast of the Salute, too! I remember!”

She smiled as if she had pulled off a great feat.

“That means that your things went missing sometime after the middle of November to the middle of January. It narrows the picture quite a bit. And there's something else that might help us. Are you aware that you wore the dress, the hat, the scarf, and the necklace in photographs? They were in
II Gazzettino, La Nuova Venezia
, and
Marco Polo
from early September to the end of November.” He paused. “All local.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. We may be on the trail of something. It's just that I don't know what.”

He waited for her to take a sip of tea before he went on. He described how Pasquale had found the rowboat between its mooring and the water entrance of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

“I didn't notice it,” she said. “And he never mentioned it to me.”

“No reason why he should have, really. Not at the time. Anyway, someone could have taken the boat to your landing, and from there got into the house. The door from the water entrance opens into that seldom-used area with the large armoire. The person could have slipped inside and stayed until it was safe to come out.”

“And then have roamed through the house and taken my things.”

“All at the same time or at different times, as we've said, but my guess is that it would have been at the same time. It's unlikely anyone treated your house as his or her own personal orchard.”

“Him or her, you say, but it must be a woman. Remember what I'm missing.”

“I take nothing for granted. If someone came into the house that way or some other way, my guess is that it was when you were up in Geneva. Or when you had Alvise's relatives as houseguests at the end of the year.”

“But why then? You're not suggesting that they—”

“Not at all,” he interrupted her. “It's just that it was one of the two times when no one was on the usual schedule, especially not at the end of the year with people who don't live here coming and going.”

“But the staff know them very well!”

“True enough, but nonetheless there could have been opportunities for getting in that someone took good advantage of.”

“Bad advantage is more like it.”

“And there's an aspect of this whole thing that's stranger than anything else.”

“What's that?”

His gaze swept around the richly furnished room. He put his plate down on the table and went to one of the cabinets. He opened the glass door and withdrew an exquisite cameo. In slow motion he put it in his pocket.

“And there are a dozen more of them, not to mention your rose Pompadour and bleu celeste Sèvres pieces. Any one of them is worth more than what you're missing put together, and they would be extremely easy to carry off. And why would anyone want your used clothing? The necklace I can almost understand, although why that particular piece of jewelry? If someone came into the house, he—or she—was running a great risk. It's the used clothing that keeps puzzling me. The situation would be a lot easier to explain if some of your small valuable items were missing. Do you think they could be?

“I'm beginning to think that anything is possible. Your cures are as bitter as the disease. Maybe more so.”

“I'm administering no cures yet. But be on your guard. Why don't you hire a night watchman if you're not ready to install a security system? ‘We are vigilant,' Vitale kept saying, but he and whoever else he was referring to don't stay up all night or have eyes in the backs of their head.”

“I cringe at the thought of some man with a flashlight and stick patrolling the house, but I'll think about it.”

She remained silent, sipping her tea and gazing at the glass-fronted cabinets.

“Well,
caro
, you're keeping your end of our promise,” she said, after a few moments. “I wish I could say the same for myself. With the
conversazione
coming up on Friday, I haven't been doing a thing yet about your Samuel Possle. But I've got something planned for tomorrow. No, don't ask what it is. We might put a jinx on it. As soon as I have something to tell you, I will. Just go home and wait. And three Madeira cakes are all wrapped up for you to take with you. One each for you, Natalia, and Gildo.”

15

For five days after his talk with the Contessa, Urbino was busy, but none of his activities involved Possle or the Contessa's lost items.

On a windy and rainy Monday morning he went with Rebecca to the Corderie dell'Arsenale to examine Habib's installation space. They lunched afterward in a nearby
trattoria
to discuss the things that they needed to do for Habib before he returned. But all through the meal, part of him was far away. He could tell that Rebecca noticed, but she didn't say anything.

The next day he took the train to Milan to see his translator. The hours spent with her, however, only served to increase his anxiety about Possle because she kept asking him what his next project might be.

When some friends came unexpectedly from Paris for a few days, he welcomed the diversion. He devoted himself to showing them around town and took them on an outing to Torcello in the gondola after Gildo had been able to arrange for an additional rower. It had been delightful, if rather chilly, but he had been unable to part company with Possle's ghost, who seemed to be one more passenger, albeit insubstantial, for the two young men to row across the lagoon.