Liquid Desires (33 page)

“I'm surprised that you didn't tell me about it when I was looking at the catalog.”

“Don't try to make anything of it, Macintyre!” Mirko slapped the page down on the cluttered desk. “I didn't even think about it at the time.”

“That's hard to believe.”

“Hard to believe or not, it's the truth!”

It was completely possible, Urbino supposed, that a mind clouded by drugs could have forgotten about the missing page. What had Brollo said? That Mirko had probably not made a clear-minded decision in decades?

“Do you still have the catalog?”

“I told you that Brollo took just about everything.”

Mirko gave Urbino a resentful glare, furtive and sullen.

“Is there anything else you haven't told me?” Urbino asked. “It's in your best interests to tell me everything you know.”

“What the hell do you mean by that? I've got nothing to hide! I've been up-front with you. My God! Brollo comes here like he owns the place and throws all this money at me. I took it. I'm no fool. Brollo says the money's for Flavia, but I could tell he wanted me to keep my mouth shut. Even if I hadn't already told you what I know, I would tell you everything now no matter if Brollo likes it or not! Listen, Macintyre. All this hasn't been easy on me, you know. I cared for Flavia. I loved her.”

Tears seldom make a person more attractive and Mirko, homely to begin with, was no exception. He took out a handkerchief.

“She was the only person who really cared for me. The only one! Do you know what that means to someone like me?”

Mirko wiped his face. He shrugged and gave an embarrassed smile.

“I know what I look like, Macintyre. And I know what people think of me. When you're not attractive, they treat you differently. It's as if you're living on a separate planet. But Flavia made me feel special. Now all I have is this.”

He threw out his thin arms, indicating the walls of his pensione. His face clouded, and he lowered his arms. What schemes had Mirko been involved in to keep his pensione solvent and to keep himself supplied with drugs? Urbino thought of Flavia and the money she had got from Massimo Zuin.

“Is Annabella Brollo a frequent visitor here?” Urbino asked suddenly.

“Annabella Brollo? Why should she come here? Flavia never got along with her.”

“Not to see Flavia. To see you. She was slipping into the pensione when I was leaving the first time I came here.”

“Well, maybe she did come that day, but it was the first and only time.”

“I don't think so. I think she comes very often. She just told me that she overheard an argument between Flavia and Massimo Zuin at the door of the pensione. Do you know anything about it?”

Mirko seemed genuinely puzzled, screwing up his thin, ugly face. He dabbed at the end of his nose with the handkerchief.

“The only argument I ever overheard that had to do with Flavia was the one at Lago di Garda, and I've already told you about it. If Flavia and Massimo Zuin had some words together, I never heard them. Maybe I was at the Questura with the registration slips. Flavia never mentioned it to me.”

“Why does Annabella Brollo come here?”

“She—she wants things from me. Something to help her sleep. She has insomnia. I give her some of my sleeping pills. Don't get me in trouble, please,” the man pleaded. “It's nothing more than that.”

“I'm not interested in what pills you might have given Annabella Brollo. But speaking of pills, what about the ones the police found here among Flavia's things?”

“What about them? I've already told you that I don't know where she got them.”

“Didn't she get them from you?”

“From me? You're crazy! It must have been some doctor.”

“Perhaps. Did you ever see her take any of those pills?”

“See her?” Mirko looked confused. “People don't always take their medication in front of other people.”

“True enough.”

In the silence that followed, Mirko seemed pensive, as if he were weighing various possibilities.

“You're trying to get me into trouble,” Mirko eventually said with a sniffle. “Even the suspicion that I could have had anything to do with those pills Flavia was taking could make things rough for me. I can't get into any trouble about drugs. You understand that, don't you?”

“I would think that you'd be more careful, Signor Mirko, especially after what happened to your father. Yes, I know how he died. Drugs can be dangerous.”

The fear in Mirko's face seemed more genuine now than it had a few moments before. Urbino stared at him. Gradually, the fear was replaced by a lopsided smile, exposing his yellowed teeth. Despite the smile, however, there was still a guarded look to Mirko's face.

“I'm as careful as I can be, Signor Macintyre. We all have our little vices, no?”

For a few brief seconds Mirko looked like a mischievous urchin. Tina Zuin had said that Mirko could be charming in his own way, and perhaps he had been ten years ago when she had dated him.

When Urbino asked Mirko if he knew that Tina Zuin and Bruno Novembrini were having a relationship, Mirko seemed relieved at the change of topic.

“Sure,” Mirko said. “It just goes to show you what a bastard that Novembrini is. They were probably even carrying on when Flavia and Novembrini were together.”

“Did you give Flavia advice about her relationships?”

Again Mirko gave his crooked smile.

“Like brotherly advice? I suppose I couldn't help it.”

Urbino tried to detect something other than fraternal affection in Mirko's face before Mirko took his handkerchief from the pocket of Flavia's robe again and wiped his nose.

5

After leaving the Casa Trieste, Urbino set out for the Danieli Hotel. He had promised to help Eugene move to the seclusion of the Cipriani Hotel on the Island of Giudecca for the last few days of his stay.

On his walk through the thronged
calli
, Urbino thought about Ladislao Mirko, Occhipinti, and the Lago di Garda argument.

Mirko's fear could almost be smelled like the rancid odor the man threw off, but was it fear of getting into trouble with the police because of drugs? If that happened, he could lose the Casa Trieste. Who knew? Maybe his drug habit had already seriously endangered his pensione and he was hanging on by only his dirty fingernails. Brollo had said that Flavia had given Mirko money. Could Mirko be feeling the pinch more now that Flavia was dead—and, with her, her generosity? There was still the question of the money that Zuin had given Flavia. Had Flavia given it all to Tina and the Riccis? Brollo had given Mirko a large sum, ostensibly for Flavia's expenses, but Mirko said he had been trying to buy his silence. If Brollo had, were there other things Mirko could tell him about Brollo that he hadn't told him yet?

Then there was Silvestro Occhipinti. He wasn't a complete innocent in this matter of Flavia's murder. Urbino now knew one of the things Alvise's old friend was hiding—a visit to the Casa Trieste after Flavia's death. Agata had described a man who was either Occhipinti or someone who looked and acted very much like him.

Had Occhipinti taken the clippings of himself and Alvise from Flavia's scrapbook? Perhaps he had gone to the pensione more than once. Occhipinti had been in Venice at the time of Flavia's death and, considering his cold, he might very well have been out in the storm on the last night she had been seen alive.

It would be a double blow to the Contessa to have to face both Occhipinti's villainy, no matter what the motive, and Alvise's betrayal. Although the argument at Lago di Garda and Graziella Gnocato's revelation of what Regina Brollo had told Flavia about Alvise in no way came close to proving that the Conte was Flavia's father, they didn't disprove it either. How far would Occhipinti go in protecting Barbara and Alvise's reputation?

As Urbino waited for Eugene in the Danieli bar with its smell of leather and its air of expensive comfort, he went over the argument that Mirko said he and Flavia had overheard at Lago di Garda: Violetta's challenge to Brollo to face reality and admit that Flavia wasn't his daughter. The mention of Alvise's name. Regina's cry of despair. Brollo's rejection of Violetta. The slap.

Yes, the slap. But who had slapped whom? Mirko had assumed that Brollo slapped Violetta, but perhaps Regina had slapped her, or one of the women had slapped Brollo. Or Brollo had slapped his wife. Mirko could be telling the truth but only the truth as he had
heard
it, not as he had seen it. There could be a big difference.

Not long after the Lago di Garda argument, Regina had killed herself. More than ten years later her daughter was murdered.

It made sense that Regina would have confided in her sister about Alvise, especially since Violetta had once gone out with him. Regina might even have taunted her sister with it, making Violetta furious enough to reveal everything to Lorenzo. According to Graziella Gnocato, Violetta often used to rave against the Contessa. Now, however, Violetta was keeping her silence. Perhaps her desire to have revenge upon the Contessa was weaker than her fear of Lorenzo.

Urbino could understand fearing Brollo. The man was in control, yes, but once he let himself go, it could be violent. “Fathers often use too much force,” Urbino repeated to himself.

He had to talk with Annabella. She had been living in the Palazzo Brollo since Regina had killed herself. Surely she could tell him about Flavia's life behind those forbidding walls. Hadn't she already said, at the door of the Palazzo Brollo, that her brother was lying—that, in fact, he always lied? If he could unlock her lips, what could they tell him?

6

Eugene had said he would be satisfied with nothing less than a gondola to the Cipriani, so here they were being rowed across the stretch of water between the Doge's Palace and the Island of Giudecca. For part of the distance they were accompanied, almost stroke for stroke, by another gondola with a reclining couple being serenaded by a dark little man with a mandolin.

But for the rest of the trip their gondola was like a black swan among Leviathans as it made its way to the Cipriani at the tip of the Island of Giudecca. Eugene's face became tense whenever they were washed by the wake of a boat, but he said nothing and pretended to be enjoying every minute of it.

Urbino felt a little like a pasha against plump Oriental cushions and fantasized about being rowed to a remote part of the lagoon, far away from the madness of high-season Venice and the swirl of questions surrounding Flavia's life and death. Perhaps when this business about Flavia and Alvise was all over, in whatever way it might happen, he could redeem the summer in Asolo with the Contessa, who might need his companionship more than ever. They could take day trips throughout the Veneto in her Bentley, haunt the Caffè Centrale, and seclude themselves in her gardens for long, restorative afternoons.

“Summer afternoon,” “summer afternoon,” this phrase echoed in Urbino's mind as the gondola slid through the water toward the Cipriani. These were the words that Henry James had said were among the most lovely in the English language, and they floated Urbino back to the long, sultry summer afternoons of his life back in New Orleans when so much had seemed right with the world.

Evangeline and he had had some of their best days together during summer—outings to Lake Pontchartrain, a riverboat cruise up to St. Louis, languorous weeks at the plantation house of Evangeline's
marraine
, or godmother, in the hills near Baton Rouge. Yes, summers had been the happy times, all too soon replaced by the less than idyllic and much more protracted ones of the tug-of-war over whether Urbino would join the Hennepin family business. Evangeline wanted him to prove to her father that he wasn't the dilettante that the Sugar Cane King feared he was. He should leave his position as an editor at Louisiana State University Press. Emile could find a place for him in whatever part of the Hennepin business Urbino wanted to turn his hand to—perhaps public relations or personnel.

Urbino had known, however, that, whatever the position, it wouldn't have been the place he wanted for himself. Not only would he have been more bound to the Hennepins, but Evangeline would never have had a chance of separating herself from their somewhat baleful influence. Eugene had escaped it, or maybe it was more exact to say that he had comfortably adapted to it. But Evangeline, even if she hadn't quite realized it herself, needed a different life apart from them, and Urbino had hoped to provide it for them both.

But why think of the difficult times, he told himself now, as he sank more deeply into the gondola chair? Why not remember days very much like this one when problems had seemed far, far away even if they were only around the next turning?

Eugene broke into Urbino's thoughts with startling appropriateness.

“We haven't talked about Evangeline for a while, Urbino,” he said. “I hope you've been givin' her some thought. She's not a bad sort. She's kept a picture of you all these years and goes kind of soft in the face when she looks at it. I know you're in a fret about this dead woman but time is gettin' short. Evangeline and I will have to be movin' on. I was just talkin' to her in Florence and she said that she was dyin' to come to Venice but won't lay a foot in the city unless you give her the go-ahead.”

“She doesn't need my permission to come, Eugene.”

“Now you know very well what she meant, so don't go pretendin' you don't! She just wants to know that you welcome her. What's wrong with that, I ask you? She's said good-bye to bein' pushy. She's my own flesh-and-blood sister but I know how she used to be. She's a changed woman these days, Urbino. She looks as good as ever but she's got a changed heart. I'd like nothin' better than for you to see for yourself. I'm just tryin' to be an enablin' factor. So what do you say? Give old Evie the word and she'll be here lickety-split. Even Countess Barbara thinks you're bein' kind of mopey about the whole thing. Her advice was not to push you. I don't agree. From what I remember, half the time you would never have budged but for a little push. Do you remember the time up in Natchez when you, me, and Evie—” Eugene said, beginning a long reminiscence that took them the rest of the distance across the Basin of San Marco to the Cipriani landing.