Farewell to the Flesh (36 page)

Excited as a child, she gave Vico a kiss on the nose. He didn't seem anywhere near as excited as she was.

“Oh, I wish we could stay here all evening! Don't tell Barbara I said that, Urbino. Of course we'll be there for her ball but all this is so overwhelming!”

As the evening progressed the throng would get thicker and more frenzied, the air more charged with abandon. Even if the snowstorm got worse, it would probably only animate the crowd even more. Yet at midnight the madness would come to an end, ushering in a period of silence, ashes, and repentance—or, its contemporary equivalent, recuperation.

Hazel brushed snow from the front of her coat.

“Why don't we have the drinks we didn't have at Harry's?” she asked Urbino. “We could go to Florian's.”

“I have to get to the hospital. I'll cut across the Piazza. I'll see you later at Barbara's—unless you feel you can't pull yourselves away from all of this.”

“Oh, we'll be there, won't we, Tonio?”

Urbino was about to leave them when he was elbowed violently by someone passing him from behind. A figure dressed in a dark jacket and slacks and wearing a knit cap and yellow plastic mask streaked past. Urbino thought he was hurrying to join the end of the long line of men and women now snaking back in the opposite direction. Instead he went straight for Tonio Vico, knocking aside Hazel, who almost fell to the pavement. His hands closed tightly around Vico's throat, and Vico put his hands up to rip away the throttling grasp. Hazel screamed.

The person in the mask shouted a muffled curse in Italian but Urbino couldn't tell if it was a man's voice or a woman's. He hurried forward to come to Vico's aid but once again he was elbowed aside, this time by a man with a swarthy face. Hazel was still screaming as the other man went up to Vico and his attacker and withdrew something from inside his coat. It was a truncheon. He raised it and clubbed Vico's attacker on the back of the head. Vico was free, and his attacker fell to the snowy pavement. The mask had fallen off. It was Ignazio Rigoletti, a crazed, derisive look on his hawklike face.

14

Everyone else in the
salone da ballo
of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini probably thought that the Contessa's main emotions this evening were relief and excitement—relieved, as they all were, that Ignazio Rigoletti had been caught before he could do any real harm to Tonio Vico or anyone else and excited that her
ballo in maschera
was going so well.

Urbino, however, could detect the apprehension in his friend's face. Even if Rigoletti was now in police custody and her ball was going smoothly, there was still an hour and a half until midnight and something could still go wrong. It would all be on Urbino's head if it did since he had, as she kept reminding him, “instigated” the whole thing. The Contessa had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to ensure that nothing could be laid at her door.

Conviviality had been building during the last hour and, in the true spirit of
Carnevale
, the Contessa's diverse friends and acquaintances—old aristocrats and shopkeepers, dress designers and clerics, artisans and councilmen, journalists and businessmen—mingled freely and without any apparent reservation. A small orchestra was playing tasteful music—“no Piazza San Marco show tunes or popular songs,” she had made clear to the conductor—on a platform by the wall with the sixteenth-century tapestry of Susanna and the Elders. Soon a tenor, soprano, and baritone would sing some arias and duets from
Un Ballo in Maschera
. When the orchestra wasn't playing, music from the opera came over the speakers.

A buffet table offered its savories in front of the closed doors of the loggia overlooking the Grand Canal where a flesh-cutting snow, more ice now than anything else, was still falling. At strategic points in the large room were baskets of fresh flowers, large pots of scented herbs, and bronze chafing dishes burning incense. The Contessa had decided against any streamers, but Urbino suspected that many of the guests had brought them, along with confetti, to toss at the appropriate time.

Urbino, conforming to the theme of the ball, was dressed as Renato, the Creole secretary to Riccardo the Governor. His blue coat with scarlet sash tied in a knot on the left was the costume of the conspirators who planned the assassination of the Governor. There were other conspirators at the ball, most of them wearing large plumed hats and fancy masks. Urbino wore a matte-black half mask that the Contessa had given him. Alvise had worn it to a memorable
ballo in maschera
the first year of their marriage.

The Contessa, at the moment consoling and congratulating Berenice Pillow for what must have been the fifth time that evening, was dressed as the veiled Amelia in a simple Fortuny silk gown that had belonged to Alvise's mother—soft blue with a mother-of-pearl sheen. Her blue veil, pulled away from her face, was of delicate Burano lace, supposedly of the same design as the one that Philip II ordered for his bride, Mary Stuart.

Only about a third of the guests were in elaborate costume, the predominant one being the eighteenth-century disguise of the domino with wig, black tricorn hat, black cape, and stern
bautta
mask. Most of the guests wore black tuxedos and evening gowns topped with feathered or jeweled masks. The only exception to these two categories was Sister Teresa, who wore a simple gray suit in lieu of her religious habit, which would have looked too much like a costume. In fact, several people had come dressed as nuns and cardinals.

Dora Spaak, with whom Urbino was talking now, was wearing an oversized Laura Ashley party dress in a summery floral pattern. Urbino didn't know if it was meant to be a costume or not.

“I stopped in to see your mother earlier this evening.”

“How kind of you. I was with her for most of the day.”

“She was doing fine,” he said. So fine, he didn't add, that she had once again urged him to help her son but to do it so that Nicky wouldn't realize that she knew anything he didn't want her to know. Urbino had assured her he would do his best, but that he doubted her son needed his help, mentioning Rigoletti's arrest an hour before in the Piazza. As he had hoped, this had satisfied her and she hadn't asked any more questions that he wouldn't have wanted to answer, although he had asked some questions of his own.

“She said that she hoped you would have a good time this evening and not to worry about her. Your brother will look in on her. You see, she knows that your brother sometimes goes for walks here and that you cover for him, so to speak. The night of Gibbon's murder, for instance. She told me again that you stopped in her room twice, shortly after your brother put her to bed and several hours later. She wasn't sure of the time but she said she thinks it was about midnight. She remembers the church bells. She wasn't asleep either time, it seems. So you see, she's aware of your concern for her, Miss Spaak, and she wants you to have a good time tonight.”

It seemed as if a great many things were going through Dora Spaak's head but none of them were verbalized. She was as pale as a corpse.

When Urbino asked her to dance, she shook her head. “I'd rather not, if you don't mind. I'm feeling a little warm. It must be all this excitement. It's like a fairy tale—a masked ball at the palace of a countess!”

He went to get them something to drink. As he was moving through the crowd it seemed as if the main topic of conversation wasn't the costume ball or
Carnevale
but Ignazio Rigoletti. By the time he reached the bar and was working his way back to Dora Spaak, he had heard several convincing theories as to why Rigoletti had murdered Gibbon and then tried to kill the “handsome young man” whose likeness had been in the newspaper. Though ingenious, however, none of them was correct or could ever hope to be, and Urbino, with his own knowledge, felt like a real conspirator among them instead of only someone dressed as one.

When he got back to where he had left Dora Spaak, she was gone. The Contessa was standing where she had been.

“Don't look so disappointed,
caro
. I asked Filippo to ask Miss Spaak to dance and told him that no one would mind if he monopolized her for a while. I didn't add that the last person who would object was Oriana since it would give her a chance for a tête-à-tête with her latest admirer.”

She took the mineral water he had brought for Dora.

“I was sure Miss Spaak was the type to drink only champagne and to be thrilled to have a headache and soda water the morning after.”

“Everything is going well, Barbara,” Urbino said, telling himself that he wasn't being hypocritical, that things
had
been going well so far. “Aren't you glad you allowed yourself to be persuaded?”

“If I am, I'll never admit it. And don't forget that the evening is far from over yet.”

She gave him a slightly questioning look, the kind of look a sophisticated child might give to a magician she suspected of having something up his sleeve that had been secretly put there hours before. The Contessa would forgive him almost anything except an intentional unkindness to her, and of this he knew he was—and hoped he would always be—innocent.

They surveyed the guests mingling and dancing. As Urbino had noticed before, there were several veiled ladies, but none veiled and gowned as strikingly as the Contessa. There were numerous fortune-tellers, the character of Ulrica being the most colorful one in the opera. Vico, who had arrived only a short time ago from the Questura, was wearing a red half mask and a well-cut black suit with a black cloak. The cloak, made of a heavy material, was obviously meant for outerwear and was probably a part of Vico's regular wardrobe. Inside the Contessa's
salone
, however, it made the handsome young man sweat as he danced with Hazel in her geometric-print silk dress and half mask with red and white lozenges.

“I was afraid,” the Contessa said as she deposited her half-finished mineral water on a passing waiter's tray, “that the attack on Tonio and Rigoletti's arrest might be sobering for everyone here tonight but it seems to have had the opposite effect. It's our
coup de théâtre!
It's more of a theme than Verdi! And I have you to thank for that.”

The Contessa's praise made him uncomfortable.

“I had little enough to do with it. It all happened so fast. Fortunately, Gemelli's man hadn't lost Vico in the crowd or else your lovely ball would have been completely ruined.”

“‘Completely'?” Her brow furrowed as she tried to understand what he might mean. “I'm sure you have a lot of explaining to do, the kind that makes me feel like a
cretina
, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Ash Wednesday is the time for reflection and remembrance of things past, for plans for a better future. I don't insist that you explain anything now,
caro
. How did you find Josef?”

She seemed eager to change the subject.

“He was looking very well, much better than when I saw him last. I think your visit did him good.”

“I'm glad to hear that. I was afraid it might have been somewhat of a setback at first.”

“We talked about that. He explained what the problem was. He was glad to be able to see you alone. His mind is more at ease now.”

Once again she gave him her questioning look but he stared back at her, with, he hoped, as little expression as possible.

“I also spoke with Dora Spaak's mother. She was worried about her son but I tried to put her mind at rest.”

“Doesn't poor little Dora get worried about? I'm happy she came tonight. How much of
Carnevale
can she have seen? Although I saw her last week in the Piazza with Gibbon, she probably has been keeping close to the Casa Crispina.”

“Not quite. Mrs. Spaak says that she thinks she has slipped out one or two nights to see what was going on.”

“‘Slipped out'? At her age she shouldn't have to ‘slip out.'”

“Mrs. Spaak would agree with you. She found it rather amusing when Dora came in the night Gibbon was murdered and borrowed the mask her son had bought for her a few days before.”

“But I thought she said she had stayed in that night—that she wasn't feeling well?”

Urbino nodded but didn't go into more detail. The Contessa stared at him quizzically and turned away to look out on the dance floor, at the president of the district assembly dancing with the young wife of a senator, at Oriana Borelli in the arms of her latest admirer, at the architect Rebecca Mondador with a journalist from
Il
Gazzettino
, at Filippo Borelli with Dora Spaak, and at many other couples Urbino himself couldn't recognize because of their costumes.

Urbino wished there had been some way he could have convinced Commissario Gemelli to provide a police officer for the ball. But Gemelli would have said, with good reason, that Vico didn't need any more protection or observation, did he? And before his trip to the hospital to see Lubonski and Stella Maris Spaak, Urbino hadn't been in much of a position to give Gemelli the kind of reason that would have inclined—or compelled—the Commissario to comply. Gemelli was confident that Rigoletti would now tell the truth about what had happened in the Calle Santa Scolastica.

“It's time for our little concert,” the Contessa said as the orchestra finished their number. “Excuse me.”

She went on the platform and introduced the tenor, soprano, and baritone from Milan.

“They will be singing three arias and a duet from
Un Ballo in Maschera
. The first is Signor Massimo Carlini as Renato singing ‘Alla vita.'”

Urbino was less than impressed with Carlini but Annamaria Terisio, who sang “Morrò,” moved him. For several minutes he forgot everything and was caught up in the soprano's rendition of Amelia's impassioned gallows request to her husband not to kill her until she can see her only son once again. Amelia, along with Bellini's Norma and Puccini's Suor Angelica and Madame Butterfly, was one of the memorable mothers of opera. As she sang, Urbino saw that Filippo Borelli was translating for Dora Spaak: