The Last Gondola (15 page)

He took in the scene with a quick glance. The domed ceiling, the shuttered windows, the dark draperies, the rococo mirror, the candles, the pots of exotic flowers, the silver cage with its dead cricket, the orange walls with their portraits and still-life paintings, the improbable gondola under its canopy, and, in it, Possle's reclining figure, dressed in red satins and purple silks.

“An interesting piece of music, don't you think, Mr. Macintyre? Please sit down.”

Urbino seated himself in the high-backed armchair close to the gondola, where he had sat on the previous occasion.

“But I'm sure that you found it too loud,” Possle went on, after giving a little tug at the purple silk that swathed his head. “You must forgive me, but I refuse to wear a hearing aid.”

Considering the man's old-fashioned, if not antiquated air, however, Urbino wouldn't have been surprised if Possle had a hearing trumpet concealed among the orange cushions.

“Armando will bring us our Amontillado.”

Armando, who had been hovering in the doorway, nodded and withdrew.

“You know the song?” Possle asked.

His small, dark eyes behind his large, black glasses bore into Urbino.

“It's one of Byron's poems set to music. The refrain comes from an old Scottish song. My grandfather used to sing it to me.”

“Indeed? What a coincidence. ‘And the soul wears out the breast,'” Possle recited in his tremulous voice. He made no attempt to sing the words. “Byron was barely twenty-nine when he wrote those words. I'm almost three times that.”

“Melancholy was in his nature,” Urbino observed. “The poem expresses his repentant mood after
carnevale
, I believe,” Urbino went on, feeling a little pedantic. Possle was staring at him. “Even the young are susceptible to that,” he went on. “Last time you asked me if I liked Byron. It appears that you like him a great deal yourself. Perhaps more than I do.”

“Is that what you think? Or
know?”

Possle's emphasis puzzled Urbino, who remained silent. Possle looked narrowly at him from his recumbent position.

“But you might have a professional interest, Mr. Macintyre.” Possle's eyes again searched Urbino's face. “I'm referring to the biography on Byron that you might write one of these days.”

He made a longish pause and seemed irritated when Urbino didn't respond.

“And here we both are, you and me,” Possle continued, “two lovers of Byron in the middle of Venice, ‘the pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.'”

“You're fond of quoting Byron,” Urbino ventured.

“But that's an easy one to recognize. Almost everyone knows it.”

He fussed around with the cushions for a few moments.

“Your Scottish grandfather, you say? The ancient Celtic clan of Macintyre. ‘Son of a Carpenter,' it means, rather a plebeian association for someone like yourself.
Through Difficulties
is your clan's motto. Your crest, a right hand holding aloft a dagger. I believe your ancestor chopped off his own thumb to plug up a hole in the sinking galley of a chieftain. This old head of mine is filled with the most amazing nonsense, Mr. Macintyre.”

Possle had obviously done research on him, or Armando had. The question was why.

“I suppose you'd like to be the greatest biographer since Boswell?” Possle now said.

“Hardly.”

“More in the line of Lytton Strachey, then? Attacking a life from an unusual angle? Is that what you would like to do with me?”

Possle withdrew the crystal vaporizer from among the cushions and squeezed the bulb once, twice. The aroma of his special potpourri quickly spread through the warm air. Urbino could only distinguish the scent of tuberose and orange blossom but none of the other essences Possle had named.

“You'd be an interesting subject,” Urbino said.

“Who knows, Mr. Macintyre? I might be of use to you but perhaps not in the way that you're thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm aware that I'm more of an oddity, an anomaly, call it, than anything else. Some people might think the same of you,” Possle added, with a little cough that could have been embarrassment or a cover for amusement.

Urbino had to agree with this, but he did so silently. Despite the theatricality and eccentricity of Possle's gondola, Urbino's negotiation of the canals in his own gondola was certainly not less so in its way. One might even argue that at least Possle was confined to the privacy of the Ca' Pozza, whereas Urbino was very much in the public eye.

“I'm not Byron.” Possle said this with an air of amused regret. “I'm not Peggy Guggenheim. But what I am, Mr. Macintyre, is a source of information about the people who have passed through the Ca' Pozza in its heyday. In
their
heyday. In
mine,”
he added, his thin voice dropping lower. “I could be your mirror. Oh, don't look so surprised. I don't mean that you would see yourself in me, but who knows?” he said, with a lifting of his sparse brows. “What I mean is that I could be your filter. The good and the bad, the rich and the famous, the talented and the failures”—his voice grew a little more forceful—“all seen through the eyes of someone who can barely see now, or hear.”

At this point Armando entered and deposited the tray next to the carafe of water and the goblets on the small, inlaid table. He poured the pale wine into two porcelain cups. He handed one cup to Possle. This time, the other cup was left for Urbino to reach for.

Armando gave an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.

Urbino had hardly registered the man's coming and going. Possle had just come close to saying that he would be willing to work with Urbino. Could the mystery of why Possle had summoned him be as simple—as wonderfully and unexpectedly simple—as that? Yet even if this were the case, it didn't explain why he had chosen Urbino.

“Is that why you've asked me to come here?” Urbino began, after considering his words carefully. “May I assume that you're making an overture?”

Possle took a sip of the wine.

“An overture, yes, but an overture of what kind?” his host replied. “Perhaps I've been too precipitate in getting your hopes up. I'm a man who likes to proceed slowly and logically, not unlike yourself, but one who will also make a quick leap sometimes to even my own surprise. That's like you, too, I have a feeling.”

He scrutinized Urbino with his small, quick eyes, his tongue darting out to moisten his lips in his habitual gesture. If he had reminded Urbino of a preserved saint on the previous occasion, this afternoon there was something almost reptilian about him—frail, yes, but sinuous and with a distinct sense that he might leap and strike.

They sipped their wine in silence. A distant rumble of thunder penetrated the gondola room from beyond the drawn drapes and closed shutters.

Possle kept his cup propped on his stomach. Pressed against his silk shirtfront hung the large, strangely shaped metal talisman on its gold chain, one of whose details was a crescent. Urbino was reminded of the symbol affixed to the inside of the Ca' Pozza's front door. He stared at the talisman, and once he began it became difficult to take his eyes away from it.

When he did, transferring his attention to its owner, Possle's head had dropped on his chest. His eyes were closed. The cup looked as if it might slip from his grasp.

Urbino was about to get up and take it when his eye became caught by something white on the carpet near his feet. It was a piece of paper, the size of a postcard. It appeared to have writing on it. Without thinking, he leaned over and picked it up. He didn't examine it, but thrust it into his pocket, surprising himself with the force of his own impulse.

He had hardly withdrawn his hand from his pocket when Possle's voice gave him a start.

“Tell me, Mr. Macintyre, are you involved in one of your investigations at the moment?”

Possle wasn't looking at Urbino but off in the direction of the rococo mirror on the other side of the room. The cracks of thunder became more pronounced and followed each other at shorter and shorter intervals. Possle, with his weak hearing, seemed to be oblivious to the approaching storm.

“My other line of work, as you called it last time?” Urbino could hear the nervousness in his voice at almost having been discovered. “It's not something I look out for, not like a new subject for one of my books. If something special comes my way, something that touches me personally or someone I know and care about, then I turn my hand to it.”

“Your mind, you mean.”

Urbino speculated whether Possle could have sought him out, not for his writing skills as he had seemed to hint a little while ago, but for his detecting ones. Possle's next comment gave added weight to this possibility.

“And you're the soul of discretion in your sleuthing.”

“I try to be.”

“It's in your nature, as you say melancholy was in Byron's.”

“And in the nature of what I choose to look into.”

“Or what chooses you.”

Because of the truth in Possle's emendation and Urbino's sense that it might be a prelude to an offer, he kept silent.

He wasn't disappointed when Possle went on to say, “I suppose you find the Ca' Pozza and myself—along with Armando—something worth looking into. As an intellectual exercise, of course. There's no dead body in the library, and no crime anywhere in sight, except one of taste.” Possle made a strangled sound from somewhere in his chest that must have been a chuckle. “I mean this room. Is it to your liking?”

The abrupt shift disoriented and disappointed Urbino. Possle had appeared to be close to making an appeal. But he had seemed to be on the brink of it before with his comments about Urbino's biographies, only to drop the topic. He was doing the same thing again.

Two days ago Urbino had suspected that Possle was toying with him. Now he had less doubt.

The effect of all this was to surprise a response out of Urbino. “You're trying to keep me off balance, Mr. Possle. With what end in mind, I don't know. But to answer your question, let me say that I find your room more than a little strange, as I'm sure you know most people would. And yet it seems familiar to me.”

This last comment was drawn out of him almost against his will. He hadn't known he was going to say it until he did. He was about to add that he also found some of the things Possle said familiar, but he let just the one observation serve, at least for the moment.

Possle's half-smile puckered his face. “And well it might look familiar, Mr. Macintyre,” he said. “You've been here before.”

“I beg your pardon? The first time I entered this room—the first time I even set foot in the Ca' Pozza—was three days ago.”

“Nonetheless, you
have
been here before—in your fashion.”

Urbino, more and more confused, took refuge again in silence. His recurring dream flashed across his eyes. The room in the dream
was
similar to this one, with its drapes and formal, angular chairs, but surely Possle couldn't know that.

“Perhaps my room looks too much like a wager,” Possle said in an insinuating tone, “and you're afraid of being duped by taking it too seriously.”

“Whatever game you're playing—” Urbino began with exasperation.

“Or perhaps,” Possle interrupted him with his tremulous voice, “you think my room is as monstrous as an orchid. Perhaps you're afraid you'll find me dead in my gondola, shot through the head by my own hand, or dressed in a monk's habit and praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Is that what's left for me after all this?” He waved his hand weakly to indicate the room with its unusual details of color, design, and furnishing. “The muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross?”

Only then did Urbino, with a sudden rush, understand Possle's puzzling comments.

“Huysmans's
Against Nature,”
Urbino said. “Des Esseintes.”

Possle nodded, as if a recalcitrant pupil had finally learned his lesson. He drank down the remainder of his Amontillado.

The shock of surprise kept Urbino from saying anything more for a few moments. He leaned back in his chair and let his eye roam around the room. He was now seeing it in a completely different light.

Possle had woven his hints about the room out of comments that Oscar Wilde and others had made about the novel that had played such an important role in Urbino's life. The familiar elements in Possle's room—with the grand exception of the gondola—twinned the décor and architecture of the isolated house where the reclusive character had pursued his eccentricities. This fact would have been unusual in itself.

But the connection to Urbino made it even more peculiar. Here was Possle, an expatriate American like himself, secluded in his palazzo, who had also been influenced by the same decadent French model. And he was also aware of Urbino's own fascination, something not many people knew about.

“I don't mind that you know a great deal about me, Mr. Possle,” Urbino said, with more vehemence than sincerity. “What I do mind is the way that you're going about it. If you want to have a meeting of minds, there are much better ways of doing it. Whatever advantage you have over me in this way—or you
think
you have—is worth nothing if you want my cooperation. And have no doubt, Mr. Possle, it's as clear as anything can be that you do want exactly that.” Urbino took a deep sip of his Amontillado, waiting for Possle's response.

But this outburst, which made Urbino feel so much better for having indulged in it, was lost on Possle. The man had dropped off to sleep again.

Light flashed behind the drapes, admitted by the chinks in the closed shutters. Almost immediately afterward a loud crack of thunder broke the silence. Wind rattled the shutters. Possle didn't stir.

Possle's frail chest rose and fell slowly, almost imperceptibly. For the moment, with his purple headscarf, he looked like some aged, dandyish pirate stealing a few moments of rest before going out again on the deck of his ship.