The Thief of Venice (25 page)

These reliquaries in the Treasury of the Basilica of
Saint Mark enclose the arm bones of saints.
 

*54*

"Mrs. Kelly," said Ursula, smiling at Mary, "I want to show you."

"Show me?" said Mary, allowing herself to be tugged along. "Show me what?"

"You'll see." Ursula took Mary into her bedroom. Mary had been there before. They had sat together on Ursula's bed, snipping scraps of velvet and gold braid, making dresses for Ursula's doll.

But this had nothing to do with the doll. Ursula went to the bed, felt under the mattress, took out a small key, and unlocked the door of the narrow cupboard between the windows that overlooked the street. With a dramatic sweep of her arm, she threw open the cupboard doors and said,
"Ecco!"

Mary stared. She was speechless. Ursula had created an altar inside the cupboard. She had covered the shelves with white napkins for the display of a collection of shiny ceramic images. They were holy figures, small and crudely painted. Proudly Ursula named them—the Virgin Mary, Saint Anne, Saint Mark, Saint Clare, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Joseph, Saint Francis, Saint Martin, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Anthony Abbot.

"Ursula, they're lovely. It's like a real church. Do you pray to them?"

Ursula nodded, beaming, and then she whispered, "Wait, there's something else."

She took Mary's hand again and led her upstairs to her father's bedroom. "Look," she said, going to Sam's bed, "they're right here." She patted the pillow and turned to Mary with a triumphant smile.

"I don't understand."

The little girl pulled off the white pillowcase and pointed to the side seam of the pillow.

At once Mary recognized the child's clumsy stitches. "You made it?" she said, bewildered. "You made a pillow for your father?"

Ursula shook her head. Smiling, she picked at the threads and pulled at a loose end. The seam parted and something fell out. Ursula picked it up and showed it to Mary. It was a small piece of wood. Groping inside the pillow her fingers found another.

"But what are they?" said Mary. And then she guessed. "Oh, Ursula, they're not—?"

"Yes," said Ursula, "they're pieces of the True Cross. Wait." She groped in the pillow again, and brought out a small bone. "It's from a saint," she said, holding it up for Mary to see.

They were the missing relics. Mary was stunned. Sam had not carelessly mislaid them, nor had his blaspheming, image-smashing, pope-burning mother-in-law stolen them. The thief was his own pious little daughter. "But why, Ursula dear," said Mary faintly, "why?"

"They made him better," said Ursula simply. "The doctor said he was going to die. But now he's perfectly all right. They were in his pillow. They saved him."

"Your father was ill?"
Of course, of course, he had been ill. She should have guessed, she should have known it all the time. She had been blind.

"It was a secret," said Ursula. "I heard the doctor on the phone."

"So you took the relics and sewed them into his pillow, is that it?"

Ursula nodded proudly. "And the saints. They helped too."

"The saints? You mean the ones in the cupboard?"

Reverently Ursula recited their names. "Saint Catherine of Alexandria who was tortured on the wheel, Saint Catherine of Siena who had nail holes in her feet, Saint Francis whose brother and sister were the sun and moon."

"Of course." Mary looked at the little girl's small fists, still tightly closed around the pieces of the True Cross and the saintly bone. Perhaps the child was right. Perhaps it was really true that they had saved her father from a profound kind of trouble. It was certainly true that they could save him from another. "Ursula, your father is well now. You don't need them anymore. Won't you give them back?"

Ursula handed them over without a word.

*55*

Accompanied by Homer Kelly and a guard from the carabinieri, Sam took the relics back at once to Father Urbano in San Marco. The reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista looked as whole and entire and beautiful as it appeared in the paintings of its miracles in the Accademia. The relic of the cross showed clearly through the sparkling new pieces of crystal.

Father Urbano rejoiced to see everything back safe and sound, especially the reliquary. "You're well within the month they allowed you. I'll send it over to the
scuola
right away." He grinned and heaved a sigh of relief. "I gather there was a certain amount of controversy over there after I talked them into letting it go."

Sam smiled. He did not explain how thoroughly the controversy had been justified.

"And this is the lost piece of
sacro legno
from the treasury?" said Father Urbano. "Come on. We'll put it back."

From the sacristy they walked across the basilica in a rain of gold, under the Ascension dome, where Christ Pantocrator ruled heaven and earth, under the four rivers of paradise, and under the four evangelists working busily on their Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

As they moved through one sacred precinct after another, Father Urbano unhooked a succession of velvet ropes and hooked them again with care. In the Treasury he swept Homer and Sam into the room on the left, where the bones of saints were enshrined in glass and in reliquaries made of brass.

They watched as he unlocked a display case, removed an empty goblet, and dropped into it the last little piece of the True Cross.
"Eccolo!"
said Father Urbano, his smile stretching from ear to ear. The truth was, the poor priest had been lying awake at night, imagining the storm of terrible consequences that would follow if every one of the missing relics should not be returned—consequences to the cardinal patriarch himself, to the Basilica of San Marco, and of course to a humble priest whose name was Niccolo Urbano.

Homer and Sam made noises of gratification.

"And now," said the priest, looking earnestly at Sam, "you must tell me what you found out. I'm eager to know how our relics fared under your examination. Do you think any of them are genuine?"

Sam looked around the small room at all the holy relics—the rock thrown at Christ, the thorns from his crown, the sleeve-shaped reliquaries for the arm bones of saints, the great reliquary chest containing the leg bones of Saint Peter.

"I'm sorry, Father," said Sam. "I don't know. I decided not to try."

Father Urbano's mouth opened in astonishment. "You mean you didn't examine them at all?"

"Hardly at all. I stopped. I gave up."

"You gave up!" Father Urbano grinned. "Well, I confess I'm glad."

They left him at the sacristy door and made their way out of the basilica into the sunlit square. The high-water platforms were still there, but now they were benches for tired tourists from Morocco, basking in the sunshine, and a Chinese family eating sandwiches from a bag, and a couple of perspiring fashion models in fur coats posing for a photographer. The bell in the Campanile began to ring for noon.

Sam said, "Listen, Homer, there's one more thing. There's something I want to show you. It's not far away."

"Well, certainly. What is it?"

"You'll see." Sam took Homer on a ten-minute peregrination along narrow lanes and over bridges, and halted at last before a church that was unfamiliar to Homer.

He was mystified. "What's this?"

"Let's go inside," muttered Sam. "The thing I want to show you, it's inside."

He pushed open a heavy outside door and an inner door, and at once they found themselves in a typical Venetian church with chapels and pedimented altarpieces and a painted ceiling. Homer looked up at the saints frolicking on their painted clouds. It was a riot of tumbling pink bodies with outstretched arms and naked legs dangling earthward in three-point perspective. Homer whispered to Sam, "They had more arms and legs in those days."

Sam pulled nervously at Homer's arm. "This way. It's back here." He hurried ahead of Homer toward the east end of the church, where a pair of huge paintings flanked the altar. Sam nodded at them and murmured, "Tintoretto."

"Very nice," said Homer politely, wondering what on earth was the matter with his distinguished friend, the curator of rare books in the Biblioteca Marciana.

"Here we are," whispered Sam. He stopped and folded his arms.

Homer stopped too. Three women were kneeling before a railing, their hands clasped in prayer. Before them rose a tall pedestal supporting a gold frame. Within the frame, behind a sheet of glass, hung a square of blue cloth.

"Il Velo della Vergine,"
said Sam softly.

"Of course, I've heard of it. The Virgin's Veil."

Homer looked at it, and the more he looked, the more strangely familiar it became. Hadn't he seen that same
gauzy
pale blue fabric quite recently, in fact just the other day, right there in Sam's house on Salizada del Pignater?

"Sam," he began, but his friend held a finger to his lips and took his arm. As they turned away, Homer saw one of the praying women rise, kiss her fingers, and touch the frame around the sacred veil.

In the middle of Campo Santo Spirito, Sam let go of Homer's arm and looked him in the eye and made his confession. "It's a fake."

"A fake? The Veil of the Virgin is a fake?"

"I made it myself. Ursula was making doll dresses out of one of her old frocks, so I cut a piece out of the dress myself. Then I cobbled up a frame and put the whole thing inside the door of the church with an anonymous note explaining what it was and how it had survived for two thousand years."

Homer held up an inspired hand. "Aha, I know! The First Crusade! Captured from the infidel! Carried away by sea! The ship sank! The veil was caught in a fisherman's net!"

Sam laughed ruefully. "Exactly. It was just like that. And the dear innocent priests fell for it. They were thrilled to have their very own relic. So it was just as I hoped. I wanted to exploit the gullibility of people who are so eager to believe anything, anything at all, and then I wanted to show it up as a fake."

"Hmm," said Homer, "didn't I hear that your fake is performing miracles of healing?"

"Oh, yes, and at first I was delighted about that. I thought it would be all the more crushing when I told the truth. I thought I'd be abolishing superstition with one blow. But now—God, Homer, I just don't know."

Homer laid a hand on Sam's arm. "Don't do it."

"Yes, that's what I've been thinking. I should just let it go. That's what Lucia thinks."

"She's right."

"But that means"—Sam shook his head in bewildered embarrassment—"it means it will be believed in for years. People might go on taking it seriously forever."

"Well, what's so bad about that?"

Sam looked befuddled. "Well, nothing, I guess. Not really."
 

*56*

Mrs. Wellesley couldn't stand it. Sam's overflowing happiness was an affront to her moral dominance in the household as the mother of his late wife. It was also an insult to Henrietta in her grave.

Abandoning the field, she went to live with her sister in Milan, after packing up every one of her fiery works of art and claiming as family heirlooms all the silver flatware.

But Lucia had plenty of knives and forks. Sam and Ursula shifted their belongings to her house on the street of gardens in San Polo, near the Ponte dei Scalzi.

"You're coming with us, of course," said Lucia firmly to Mary and Homer.

"Assolutamente,"
agreed Sam.

"But we're about to leave for Boston," protested Homer.

"And we'd surely be in the way," said Mary.

"No, no," said Lucia. Taking Mary aside, she pleaded with her. "Oh, please come. I need you to teach me how to talk to Sam's little girl. I don't know anything about children."

"But I don't have any children myself." Then Mary groaned, thinking of her long and grueling experience as the aunt of an aggravating young genius named Bennie, and his older brother John, the arachnologist, and their harum-scarum sister Annie, who had driven them so crazy last year. "Well, it's true, I do have nieces and nephews."