Death in a Serene City (31 page)

He went over it all until he became as muddled as before. Then for a few brief, even more disturbing moments everything seemed probable—every connection, every hypothesis, every “theory,” to use the Contessa's word. His mind began to reel. Where meaning had been eluding him before, it now mocked him by seeming to be everywhere, one thing canceling out another. He even began to question that Domenica was a man. Almost everything pointed in this direction and yet, inexplicably, a vestige of his former assumption about Beatrice's friend trailed itself across his weary mind. It bad nothing to do with plausibility and yet he couldn't shake it.

Then, in the deadest time of the night, he remembered what had been teasing him earlier in Don Marcantonio's comments, and from this he passed so quickly to what seemed the answer that he was afraid to go over it again more methodically. When he did, however, the answer still seemed as clear and irrefutable as when it had first come to him.

When he finally got to sleep, he had troubled dreams. Floating before him were the faces of Carlo, Maria, and Beatrice, and an indistinct one that seemed sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. Santa Teodora's face with its prominent nose and receding chin kept dissolving into these others.

He awoke exhausted but excited. When he called the Contessa at nine, she had already gone out and Lucia said she wouldn't be back until about midafternoon. She had gone for a dress fitting and then was meeting a group of friends at Florian's about ten.

After he hung up, he took a quick shower, wrote a note to Natalia, and left the Palazzo Uccello. If he stopped by Florian's on the way to the Questura, he might be able to see the Contessa alone before the others arrived.

15

HE had no such luck.

“It's just us scheming women,” the Contessa said when he went to her usual table in front of the window in the Chinese salon. “We'll allow you to stay for a little while, won't we, my dears?”—she shared a quick smile with Angela Bellorini and Adele Carstairs—“but then I'm afraid we'll ask you to catch up Stefano and Mr. Kobke over at the Correr if you want some company. I'm sure you'll find them staring at Carpaccio's courtesans.”

“So you haven't left for Vienna yet,” he said to Quinton's niece after declining their invitation to sit down.

“We go tomorrow afternoon. I've just been trying to convince the Contessa and Angela to join us in our compartment before the train leaves.”

“How many times have I told you to call me Barbara?”

The girl looked flustered as she went on, “It's not the Orient Express, of course, but Christian and I are having champagne and some food sent in from Do Forni's. Do join us, Mr. Macintyre.”

“Come now, Adele, just look at the poor man. His hair needs combing and it doesn't look as if he's shaved this morning. Doesn't that tell you he doesn't have a moment to spare?”

“I'm here now, aren't I?”

The Contessa laughed.

“You're here, yes, but why are you here? Tell him why we think he's here Angela dear.”

Angela seemed embarrassed and colored slightly beneath her sallow cheeks.

“Go on,
cara
, tell him. Oh, never mind, I'll do it myself. You want to know if Adele here has anything stuffed up her elegant sleeves, something from her dear
zia
whom we all miss so much, don't you?”

Angela spoke now, lightly, quietly, “It was Benedetta Razzi. Didn't I tell you last week that she knows everyone's business? She also tells everyone's business, I'm afraid.”

“Yes, she called Adele and said you were looking for wills or love letters or deeds—oh, she seems to have been wild in her imaginings. But tell him, Adele.”

Quinton's niece was less reluctant than Angela had been to respond to the Contessa's prompting.

“There's nothing left, Mr. Macintyre, absolutely, positively nothing.”

“How sad you look, Urbino dear.” He was sure he looked nothing of the sort but he allowed the Contessa her playfulness if this was what it was. “Adele told us over lunch last week how elated you were to get the Venetian notebook.”

She said this as if she had had no contact with him since then. All he could assume was that his friend, as she so often did, was playing a role with Angela and Adele and was pursuing it as far as it would take her, hoping he would understand that she was just having a bit of harmless entertainment.

“The truth of the matter, Barbara—and you other ladies—is that I came here merely to have a coffee which I haven't even had a chance to order yet.” He quickly remedied the situation and brought another chair over to the table. “So Mr. Kobke and Stefano are off together?”

“Yes, they are off together. And to answer the implied question, they are also enjoying each other's company, I'm sure. They have a great deal in common—the artistic temperament, you know. But of course one needn't be an artist to have the temperament.”

“They do like each other,” Angela offered as the waiter put down Urbino's espresso, “now that they've got to know each other, thanks to Barbara. They just didn't get off to a good start.”

Urbino remembered the afternoon several weeks before when they had seemed to be having words right here at Florian's.

“They've worked through whatever silly little problems they might have had,” the Contessa said.

“Misunderstandings,” Angela clarified. “Stefano says it was his fault. He collided with Mr. Kobke in the foyer here and they had a few words. Everything is fine now.”

“Christian is very understanding,” Adele said as if the Dane had had to excuse the grossest of behaviors.

Angela raised her chin slightly but had nothing more to add.

“Harmony, that's what I like,” the Contessa said.

“I couldn't agree with you more.” Urbino finished his espresso in one swallow. He stood up and had them all staring at him when he added, “I'm in search of it myself. You'll have to excuse me, ladies.”

16

AS Urbino spoke Gemelli fiddled with a paperweight, loosened his collar with a finger, and near the end got up and leaned on the file cabinet to gaze out the window at the canal below. When Urbino finished, Gemelli looked over at him with a smile.

“And so you want me to go over there and make an arrest for the murders of Beatrice Galuppi, Maria Galuppi, and the
Americano
. What about the Signorina Quinton? We have orderly procedure even here in Italy, Signor Macintyre. Have you ever heard of
prova indiziaria?
Circumstantial evidence it's called in English. Everything you've told me, including all this business with a lovebird and a wedding bell—”

“A wedding cup, Commissario.”

“It's all very interesting and a credit to your ingenuity but exactly what can I do with it?”

“Isn't it enough to reopen the case?”

“Reopen the case! You can't imagine what we'd have to go through! Your puzzle fits together nicely but it doesn't constitute proof.”

Urbino decided to take a different tack. He sensed that Gemelli, despite his protestations, was not completely rejecting his theory. Could he have learned something on his own? Had he begun to doubt Carlo's guilt? The Contessa had said that the files of Beatrice and Maria had been in the tray together as if someone had been reviewing them. Whatever it was, Gemelli seemed to want to be convinced but he was a man with a lot of personal and professional pride who would have to account to those above him.

“How difficult would it be, Commissario, to examine the body of Santa Teodora?”

“Examine it? What do you mean?”

“Have tests done by scientists and doctors, something like an autopsy.”

“An autopsy on a thousand-year-old body! Don't be ridiculous!”

“But how difficult would it be?” Urbino persisted.

“It wouldn't be difficult, it would be impossible! Surely you realize it wouldn't be only a police matter. The Vatican would be involved, and you know what that means.”

“I understand how difficult it would be but suppose we had something incontrovertible, something substantial, something the Vatican or any other authority couldn't ignore?”

“What would that be?”

“The
real
body of Santa Teodora.”

17

IT seemed to take them forever to get from San Michele to Sant'Ariano. The police boat made it quickly enough to Torcello but although the Isle of Bones wasn't far away—and in fact was in sight for the remainder of the trip—they had had to zigzag through the narrow channels among the mud flats for more than half an hour. The Venetian lagoon was very shallow in most areas, especially this one, and boats had to be careful not to stray outside the markers.

This long approach to Sant'Ariano, Urbino thought, was not unlike a dream or more exactly a nightmare: the self immobilized, making only paralyzed progress toward a goal or away from a danger.

They passed islets that either showed no signs of human life or had only small, ramshackle wooden structures used by duck hunters for shelter, the kind that Don Marcantonio must have huddled in during the early morning hours when he was a young man. With the tide going out, there was a great deal of mud visible and the reeds and the wooden poles marking the channels stood high. Urbino kept glancing at the pilot, a mere boy who couldn't have had much experience in these waters, for fear he might run the boat aground. The best craft for these shallows were the light flat-bottomed
sandoli
they encountered occasionally, their passengers looking curiously at the police launch.

They were in one of the remotest sections of the lagoon. An analogy might be drawn between this northernmost area of the lagoon and the parish of San Gabriele in the Cannaregio, so seldom traversed by anyone except those who lived and worked there.

Gemelli, Grossi, and Urbino had been silent for most of the trip, long before they had even come in sight of the Isle of Bones. The old gravedigger still didn't seem to have recovered from his shock at seeing Urbino walk across the
campo santo
with the Commissario an hour before. He had looked as if he expected to be taken into immediate custody and thrown into one of the old dank cells in the Ducal Palace.

Gemelli's silence was like a professional decorum or pose although Urbino suspected he was using these moments in late morning as the boat made its tortuous way to consider the advisability of having gone off on what might turn out to be a wild-goose chase.

At first Urbino had tried to engage them in conversation but soon left them to their own thoughts, filled as he was with his own anxious reflections.

And so, in silence, the police launch continued its slow approach to the Isle of Bones two weeks before Ash Wednesday.

18

THE boat emerged from between the wooden poles and docked at a low wooden wharf.

“Well, here we are at last,” Gemelli said. “Let's get this over with.”

They got out of the boat and walked from the wharf through mud and reeds until they reached a white gate with a grille that gave a view of a porch beyond it. When Urbino looked through the grille after Gemelli had stepped aside, he was startled to see an austere wooden Christ that looked like something done by a Flemish artist.

Gemelli pointed to the padlock and chain on the gate.

“Do you have a key?” he asked Grossi.

The old gravedigger shook his head and started to say something but couldn't find the words. Despite the chill wind blowing from the lagoon his forehead was slick with sweat.

“Not a good idea to break the lock,” Gemelli said, “although it looks like it would be easy enough. Let's go this way.” He pointed to a section of the white wall to the left of the gate. “You stay with the boat,” he called to the young man on the wharf.

Urbino wondered if Gemelli could be afraid someone might appear and take the boat. From the look of neglect it didn't seem as if anyone had been near Sant'Ariano in years. Urbino and Grossi followed Gemelli to the wall. It was about five feet high.

“I'll go first,” Gemelli said. He climbed to the top and turned to help Grossi. After several heavy-breathing moments, with Urbino giving support from below, the old man was up beside Gemelli. Urbino then negotiated the wall more easily than he expected and dropped down to the other side.

There was very little on the low island but scrubby bushes and weeds and what at first looked like the whitest of sand. But only a few steps showed Urbino that he wasn't walking on soft yielding sand but on bones. Skulls, vertebrae, clavicles, thighbones, ribs, and finger bones—these and all the other parts of the human skeleton were to be found in a mad jumble that only the trumpet at the Last Judgment might make any order of. Urbino was appalled, and the Commissario looked no less affected although he must have seen quite a few disturbing things in his job. Only Grossi seemed unruffled by the grim sight. He looked not at the vast expanse of bones beneath the weeds and bushes but fearfully at Gemelli, almost as if he expected to be held responsible for the scene.

Urbino didn't see how he would be able to bring himself to walk another step, not if it meant treading on bones the oldest of which must have dated back to at least the seventeenth century.

Gemelli broke the silence.

“Where did you bring the body?” He turned to Urbino and added under his breath, “It's been more than twenty years. He'll probably just take us to any old pile of bones. How would we know the difference?”

Grossi was already several feet ahead, stepping unfastidiously but nimbly through the field of bones. There seemed no hesitation in his movements. Gemelli started to follow and, with a sigh, Urbino did the same.

Any number of times he felt as if he were going to lose his balance. Sometimes it was because he was trying to avoid stepping on a skull or rib or God knew what else. At other times it was the treacherously uneven ground beneath him. At first he didn't know if it would be best to keep his eyes averted or not. After a few minutes he decided there was little sense in looking at what he was treading on. He could do nothing but follow behind Grossi and Gemelli. What good would it do to examine every time whatever had been reduced to powder and shards beneath his feet?