The Last Gondola (13 page)

Turning his back on the Grand Canal, he made his way through the shoppers and tourists, burdened with his sacks. The stone steps of the Rialto Bridge rose up on his left with their souvenir and trinket stalls. More stalls lined the street from the foot of the bridge. Beyond them stretched an arcade of jewelry shops.

He joined the flow of people moving deeper into the San Polo district, directing his steps to one of the wine bars in a nearby square. Every once in a while he looked about him for Elvira and a dark figure who resembled Armando, but found only unfamiliar faces. And yet he had a vague feeling that someone, somewhere, was watching him.

Even at this hour the small bar was crowded with fishermen, merchants, local residents, and one lone French tourist with a guidebook. Urbino put his sacks down in a corner where other patrons had deposited bags and cartons. He managed to find an opening at the counter and ordered a glass of white wine.

As he drank his wine and ate some of the
cicchetti
snacks, he kept stretching his head above the crowd to check on his bags.

At first he didn't pay attention to the drift of conversation around him until a boatman started to complain about vandalism on the Rialto and in other parts of San Polo. When he mentioned a forced entry in his neighborhood, Urbino realized that he was referring to an area close to the Ca' Pozza.

“Didn't a young man fall to his death near there?” Urbino asked.

“A thief, he was, signore,” the burly boatman responded. “We're better off with one less hoodlum. The streets aren't what they used to be. My wife doesn't like to go out alone in the evening. I pray to God they'll all end up killing themselves one way or another, and as soon as possible!”

His companions nodded and tossed down the rest of their wine.

Urbino consulted his wristwatch. He had just enough time to make his way back to the landing to meet Gildo. He bid the men good day and went to retrieve his sacks.

A white envelope lay on top of one of them among the tomatoes.

His eyes searched the crowded room, then out into the square. Armando was nowhere in sight.

He picked up the envelope. Written on it in purple ink was Raphael Urbino Macintyre. Inside Possle had scrawled, beneath today's date, that he was expected at the Ca' Pozza tomorrow afternoon at four-thirty.

27

A few hours later, after some reflection, Urbino sought out Gildo by the water entrance of the Palazzo Uccello. The young man was industriously but glumly scraping an oar with shards of glass broken from discarded wine bottles. The purpose was to whiten the oar but on this occasion Gildo seemed to have another purpose behind this one, for the oar was already white enough, having recently been scraped, and he was using more energy than usual.

“Excuse me, Gildo.”

The gondolier lay down the oar. He turned his frank, handsome face up to Urbino. It was clouded.

“I don't mean to intrude, but I've noticed that you've been sad lately. The Contessa has commented on it, too. Even Silvia is concerned, she thinks.”

Gildo showed no reaction to any of this.

“It takes a long time to get over the death of someone you care about. One never does, really,” Urbino forged on, wondering what comfort all this might be to the young man. “If you'd like some time off, it would be fine with me. Not that there's anything wrong with your work at all.”

“Thank you, Signor Urbino, but it's better for me to continue to work. The water soothes me. It makes me feel close to my friend.” Gildo looked away, then added in a more cheerful voice, “I enjoy it even more than you do, even if I'm the one doing all the work.” A feeble smile began on his full lips but quickly faded away.

“And you do an excellent job of it, Gildo. As you wish, then, but you can change your mind at any time.”

It would have been appropriate at this point to depart and leave Gildo to his work and his musing, but Urbino lingered. He rearranged some of the cloths that Gildo used for polishing and cleaning.

“You say that it makes you feel close to your friend to be on the water. I hope that you're not suggesting that he drowned in a boating accident. In that case, it might not be a good idea to be so eager to return to rowing the gondola.”

“No, he didn't drown, Signor Urbino. I just meant because of the
forcola
and because he loved gondolas, too. But I must be strong. It's been three months.”

“There are many ways to be strong, Gildo. Give yourself time. If there's anytime that you want to talk about it, I don't want you to hesitate.”

Gildo reached for the oar to continue his work. As Urbino was leaving, Gildo called out, “Oh, I forgot something.” He took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “It's a bill for the new lock. Do you want me to bring him the check?”

Urbino took the bill. “No, I'll take care of it. Thank you.”

Urbino went inside the house and telephoned Rebecca. He asked if he could stop by her offices in San Polo that afternoon.

28

Urbino had a deep affection for Rebecca and great respect for her professional expertise. But one thing he couldn't accept about her was her preference for the ultramodern anymore than she could accept his retro taste.

One of the things she often taunted him with was, “You can't build the Ca' d'Oro all over again today! Even your beloved Ruskin knew that,” poking fun at his undying love of the Gothic.

Rebecca's offices off the Campo San Tomà seemed designed to slap Urbino in the face with all of its laminated plastic, glass, and chrome. The rooms were punitively illuminated and scattered with hyperpatterned, bright-colored rugs and furniture. Their only redeeming feature, as far as Urbino was concerned, other than one of Habib's paintings in her private office, was that some of the pinnacles and cornices of the Gothic Church of the Frari and a generous slice of its rose window were visible from two of the windows of Rebecca's private office.

Rebecca lay aside a sheaf of papers.

“If you hadn't called me, I would have called you,” she said, with a bright smile on her attractive face. “You're here about the Ca' Pozza and Samuel Possle, aren't you?”

“Am I so transparent? How do you know that?”

Rebecca laughed. “I didn't, but I do now. Carla saw you ringing the bell a few days ago.” Carla was her assistant. “I put two and two together.”

Urbino seated himself on the sofa beneath a painting of Burano by Habib. He picked up a book from the glass table and riffled through it. It was a signed first edition of Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
in English. The story and the Hitchcock film of the novel had so impressed Rebecca's mother that she had named her after the haunting title character.

“Why were you going to call me?” Urbino asked, putting down the book.

“You go first. Coffee?”

She poured out two cups from the pot she always kept brewing in a corner of the room.

Urbino wasn't in the mood to go into a lot of detail. He gave Rebecca the essentials, leaving out most of his speculations. He devoted a lot of time, however, to describing what he had seen of the interior of the Ca' Pozza.

“What a strange man and a strange room,” Rebecca said when he had finished. “Right up your alley, in some ways, perhaps,” she added with a little smile. “Maybe if you become a regular, I can tag along with you some time.”

“Listen, Rebecca, you mentioned something about a boy who died in a fall from Benedetta Razzi's building. What else do you know about it?”

“Not much more than I've already told you. I don't know who he was. He seems to have hung around a group of other kids who have been making trouble in the area. As I said, drugs must be involved. There've been break-ins.”

“Was he trying to break into Razzi's building?”

“I don't know.”

Urbino told her about the woman named Elvira, whose son had fallen from a building to his death in front of her own eyes, it seemed.

“It must be the same kid,” she said. “Sad.”

“I stopped in one of the
bacari
in the Campo delle Beccarie. Some of the men were talking about the vandalism in San Polo.”

“It's become a big problem,” Rebecca said. “Fortunately nothing has happened in my neighborhood. But you know how we all console ourselves. Not my street, not my building, not my apartment. Well, not yet anyway.”

“Let's hope not.”

“As I said when we were in the Campo Santa Margherita, you should be careful yourself during these walks of yours. Someone might think you're carrying around bundles of American dollars. But I thought you wanted to dig up Possle's past. What does this kid have to do with that?”

“Probably nothing.”

“Just the old curiosity, eh?” Rebecca asked with a smile.

“Something like that. So what is it that you have to tell me?

“Don't think I haven't noticed how you've changed the subject. I know all your tricks. Just as I know that you're going to like my two juicy tidbits.”

“Why didn't you tell me before today?”

“Because I just found out, smart guy. I was having lunch with Luca”—Luca was a friend who worked for one of the banks—“he said that the Ca' Pozza is mortgaged up to the hilt and beyond, and your Possle's already missed a payment or two. He could be out on the street in no time flat along with his gondolier or his caretaker or whatever the man is to him. And don't think the fact that he's an American makes things easier for him. On the contrary.”

Urbino absorbed this as he took a sip of coffee.

“And what's your other tidbit?”

“A bit more colorful. Luca also tells me that somebody believes that the Ca' Pozza is haunted.”

“Haunted? What are you talking about?”

Urbino immediately thought about the figure at the loggia door of the Ca' Pozza and the laughter and sobs. He had told no one about them yet, but when he might, he certainly wouldn't let anyone get the wrong impression. There was a rational reason that had nothing to do with the building being haunted.

“Ridiculous, isn't it?” Rebecca said. “But what else would you expect of Demetrio Emo?”

“Demetrio Emo the locksmith, Gildo's uncle?”

“Please don't tell me there're two of him! Not someone as big as that! It seems that at a bar near his shop Emo's been talking about the Ca' Pozza being haunted. Luca goes there from time to time. Maybe there's a grain of truth in the rumors about Emo and Black Masses.”

“Those are ones I haven't heard.”

“Don't take it so hard. Even sleuths are fallible. You owe me. The mortgages and the haunting of the Ca' Pozza. I'll expect at least a dinner.”

29

There was something fascinating in seeing so large a man involved with objects as small and slim and secretive as keys. In a corner of Demetrio Emo's shop near the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto an hour after talking with Rebecca, Urbino watched the locksmith cut and polish two keys for an elderly woman. He kept shooting quick glances at Urbino from his flat, dark eyes.

Emo did a thriving business despite his checkered past and his refusal to conceal it. The name of his shop, prominently displayed on a sign above the door and on a plaque behind the counter, was
THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS
in pointed reference to St. Peter, the keeper of the keys of the church.

When Emo was free, Urbino gave him the check for the new lock and keys.

“You didn't come to pay me,” Emo said, as he took the check. “Gildo could have brought it.”

His soft, but insistent voice must have been perfected over his years as a priest delivering sermons, giving punishment and counsel in the confessionals, and seducing his parishioners.

“You came about the Ca' Pozza,” he said.

When Rebecca had said almost the same thing earlier, Urbino had been amused. Now he was on his guard.

“You're right,” he said. “How do you know?”

“No big mystery, Signor Sherlock. Friends have seen you hanging around the building from time to time,” Emo explained vaguely.

Urbino wondered if he could be trying to protect Gildo. Perhaps, however, Urbino had been drawing attention in the neighborhood, especially these days when the residents were being more vigilant because of the break-ins.

“I do have an interest in the Ca' Pozza,” Urbino admitted, “a professional one. My biographies, I mean,” he added, as a smile broadened Emo's already immense face. “The owner of the Ca' Pozza is a connection to the past. He's known a lot of colorful and influential people over the years.”

“And his house is just as interesting as these people are, maybe more so.”

“Yes, well, someone overheard you talking about the building. You said that it's haunted.”

Emo emitted a loud laugh. “Is that what I said? Well, maybe it is. But that doesn't fit into your system of things, does it? Logic and all that?” Emo stared at him with all humor banished from his face now. “My priestly training makes me more susceptible than you. I could tell you stories that would freeze your blood.”

He seemed completely serious.

“About the Ca' Pozza?”

“No, not the Ca' Pozza. Not necessarily. Just to give you an idea of what we priests hear, one of our parishioners claimed to see the devil every single night. He had the monsignor convinced, and me, too, almost. But you know how the Church keeps its secrets.”

“But why do you say that the Ca' Pozza has a reputation for being haunted?” Urbino asked, returning to the main point.

Emo didn't respond right away. He appeared to be weighing what he was going to say.

“Something I read in one of the old books in the library at San Gabriele,” he eventually said in an almost offhand manner. San Gabriele was the parish church where Emo had been a priest. “You'd be surprised what they have there. A whole shelf of spells and incantations and exorcisms. Just my thing.”