The Last Gondola (21 page)

“I understand.”

Gildo gave him a look of gratitude. “Maybe you'll find out the truth. But if you do, everyone will know that Marco did some bad things. Maybe it's better to forget about it.”

They sat in silence. The clock in the hall started to strike ten times. When it finished, Urbino asked him if he knew Benedetta Razzi. He gave a description of the woman.

“No,” the gondolier responded. “Do you think Marco took things from her?”

“I don't know. Did he ever show any interest in the Contessa or the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini?”

“No! Is that why you were asking me about Silvia? And he never mentioned this place either. He was a good boy, I tell you!”

Gildo snatched his cap from the sofa and got to his feet.

“Listen, Gildo, I'll make you a promise.” Urbino rose. He reached out to touch Gildo's arm. “If I learn anything about Marco and the Ca' Pozza, or any other place, I'll try to protect his memory. I would never want to hurt either you or Signora Carelli if I can help it.”

“But sometimes things can't be helped.”

The truth of this stood with them there in the parlor until Urbino broke the silence and said, “I admire your loyalty to your friend. If you remember anything more about him and the Ca' Pozza, no matter what it might be, would you tell me? I can be trusted.”

For the third time Gildo gave him the same searching look. “I must go and look after the gondola,” he finally said, turning away.

When Urbino was alone, he opened the envelope. Possle was expecting him that afternoon at the usual time.

47

Before going to the Ca' Pozza, Urbino indulged in a long lunch at a restaurant on a quiet canal in the Dorsoduro district. He had asked the Contessa if she would like to join him, but she had regretfully declined, saying that she wanted to stay close to the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini in preparation for her
conversazione
tomorrow.

The
padrona
, in deference to Urbino, who was a regular customer, had set up a table for him in the back beneath the grape arbor, even though this section wouldn't be opened for several weeks yet. His table was dappled with sunshine. The air carried the pleasant scent of orange blossoms from a tree, which, sheltered in a sunny spot in a corner of the garden, had bloomed early.

He took out Byron's
Don Juan
from his pocket, but read only a few stanzas of the first canto. He gave himself up to thinking, or to what the Contessa liked to call brooding. But however you might describe it, it didn't produce anything conclusive about Possle and the Ca' Pozza or the dead Marco and his mother, except for a firmer conviction that his compatriot had a particular interest in Byron, which he was trying to signal to him.

The immediate fruit of this conviction was to direct his steps after lunch to the former home of another American, now a museum. This was the Palazzo Peggy Guggenheim, a low, rambling building on the Grand Canal that had belonged to the wealthy art collector who had died twenty years ago. Venetians referred to it as the Unfinished Palace—the Palazzo Non Finito—because, according to one explanation, its original owners had run out of money after the first story had been constructed. If it had been completed, it would have been the largest palace on the Canalazzo.

It was now a museum that displayed Guggenheim's farsighted personal collection of modern art.

Once inside the building, however, Urbino made only a quick turn around the rooms with paintings by Picasso, Braque, Dalí, Pollack, and Max Ernst, who had been Guggenheim's husband. It wasn't that Urbino didn't have an appreciation for them, unlike Possle, but he wanted to give his attention to something else at the moment.

This was the bed in Peggy Guggenheim's bedroom in a corner room that looked out on the Grand Canal. The bed wasn't on view because of the woman's well-chronicled love life but because of the silver bedhead. It had been designed and fashioned by Alexander Calder. Urbino stood admiring the whimsical creation with several tourists. Its delicate lines flowed into fishes, a dragonfly, aquatic plants, and other shapes that could only encourage pleasant dreams as the mind slipped into sleep beneath it.

Urbino, who had endured his dream of the fire again last night, was envious of all the untroubled nights Peggy Guggenheim must have spent under its influence. Could any of these nights have been shared with Possle, he wondered? Possle had hinted at a turbulent friendship with her. Had it been intimate as well? This was one more question he wished he could get the answer to. Guggenheim would have been about fifteen years older than Possle. The age discrepancy wouldn't have deterred her anymore than it would have Possle, if he had been so inclined. Byron, whom he so admired, had had an affair with a sixty-year-old Venetian countess when he was barely thirty.

He went out to the terrace with its landing stage and gold-and-white-striped poles. A few people were leaning on the balustrade looking at the Grand Canal and sitting on the stone benches in the sunshine.

Marino Marini's bronze sculpture of a horse and rider commanded the scene. The rider's arms were thrown out as if in ecstasy. The horse's erect penis, which Possle had unscrewed on occasion at Guggenheim's request, was in its proper place.

48

Everything seemed to be as it had been on the two other occasions Urbino had come to the Ca' Pozza. Armando's immediate response to the bell and his silence that somehow went beyond muteness, the pall that dropped over Urbino, and the slow, deliberate procession up the deeply shadowed high staircase and across the
sala
to the waiting door of the gondola room—yes, everything was as it had been before.

Yet something was different. Urbino felt it in his bones.

The difference began to manifest itself when Armando didn't go into the gondola room with him. Instead, he returned to the staircase and descended it, leaving behind him his stale odor. At first Urbino thought he might be headed for his room in the entrance hall. But then the front door opened and closed. Urbino went to one of the loggia doors and looked out. Armando was crossing over the bridge.

Urbino entered the gondola room. Everything here was as it had been before, too. The curtains were drawn. The scent of flowers lay on the warm, heavy air. The candles were lit. A fire burned in the fireplace. Possle was lying in the gondola.

But he was asleep.

Urbino had to make a quick decision. Should he seat himself in his accustomed armchair and wait for Possle to awaken? Or should he make better use of whatever time alone he might have, with Armando out and Possle in one of his spells?

He could have no idea how long Armando would be away from the building or Possle would stay asleep. Hadn't he told Urbino that sometimes it could be as long as an hour? On the other hand, as Urbino had experienced last time, it could be as short as a minute or two.

Into his computations Urbino placed Armando's errand, brief though it might be. It might give him enough time to do what he now realized he wanted to do. He wanted to see more of the Ca' Pozza.

Casting one last glance at the sleeping Possle, he went into the
sala
and across the floor, aware that his footfall was far from as quiet and stealthy as Armando's. Even if he had only a few minutes, he might learn something. At the very least he could tell himself that he was, after all, taking an initiative of some kind, after having been so passive within the walls of the Ca' Pozza. He stifled the thought that he might be risking any possibility of writing Possle's biography, at least with the man's cooperation.

He opened the door on the other side of the large room through which Armando habitually passed. He closed it behind him. He found himself in a long, dark hall. At the far end a servants' staircase rose up to the next floor and beyond it, presumably, to the attic. To his left were heavily draped and shuttered windows.

Three closed doors ranged themselves on his right. After putting his ear to each door and hearing nothing, he tried the doorknobs in turn. The first two doors were locked. The third opened to his touch with hardly a sound. He went through the door and closed it behind him.

The room was darker than the hall and burdened with stale and slightly foul air. A large mahogany bed with a canopy, so different from Guggenheim's bed and vaguely reminiscent of Possle's gondola, dominated the space. This must be Possle's bedroom.

The room wasn't so much small as overcrowded with furniture, items of clothing, books, and—on a table beside the bed—what was close to a pharmacy of small bottles, pillboxes, packets, and tubes of various medications.

A window had its shutters open slightly behind the dark drapes, but not enough to rid the room of its unpleasant odor. The branches of the tree in the garden shuddered in the wind that had started gusting through the alleys during Urbino's walk from the Guggenheim Museum.

A copy of Byron's
Don Juan
was splayed open on the bed.

A commode was angled into a corner. Urbino had discovered the source of the unpleasant odor. The pot of the close-stool must not have been emptied and cleaned.

A painting hung beside the door. It depicted St. Sebastian in his customary loincloth and with the requisite arrows piercing his body. In this version of the young Roman martyr, though, the artist had shown remarkable restraint in the number of arrows, there being a mere two. Urbino had no trouble identifying the artist or rather the original artist, for this was a detail copied from Giovanni Bellini's
Sacra Conversazione
altar-piece at the Church of San Giobbe in the Cannaregio.

A bookcase against one wall was crammed with books. Many were in old bindings. Near the bookcase was a Vernis Martin writing desk. He went over to it. Its surface was littered with pens, pencils, rings, tie bars, keys, postcards, and several twisted nests of rubber bands.

He examined one of the postcards. It was a black-and-white photograph of a gondola floating in the lagoon. On the reverse there was no address and no stamp or postmark, but only the words in English in bright blue ink: “From my gondola to yours.
Tante grazie!
Peggy.” Urbino replaced the postcard.

More than a dozen keys were among the pile. One of them caught his eye. He picked it up. It looked remarkably like the key to the Contessa's main door. His own copy of her key was back at the Palazzo Uccello, making it impossible for him to compare the two of them here in Possle's bedroom.

Less impulsively than he had taken the receipt from the floor of the gondola room, but just as guiltily, he slipped the key into his pocket. For better or worse, this time was easier, and not only because no one was in the room with him. If he was lucky, neither Possle nor Armando would notice it missing among all the others. He might have a chance to return it at a later date. A flicker of apprehension, however, coursed through him, not enough to make him replace the key, but making him decide it might be a good idea to leave.

But then he saw a door on the opposite side of the room. He went over and tried the handle. The door opened inward. He stepped into another room, smaller than the bedroom. It seemed to have no particular function except as a lumber room of odds and ends, mostly small pieces of furniture, crates, and piles of newspapers and magazines. There was a door to his left. According to his calculations, it must be one of the doors he had tried a few minutes ago and thus must lead back into the hallway.

This realization made him look for another door on the assumption that he was in a suite of three rooms. There it was opposite him, partially blocked by an ornately carved dressing screen. Over it a red robe with embroidered stars and crescents in yellow had been thrown. He was reminded of the symbol on the inside of the entrance door, and on Emo's robe.

He slipped behind the screen and tried the door.

It opened into a small, empty room. Pale squares and rectangles on the walls were like ghosts of the paintings and furniture that had once been there. A damp draught blew against his flushed face from a single window with its shutters thrown open. Beyond the window on the other side of the garden Elvira Carelli's building looked back at him through the dying light.

Having reached this final room in the suite, Urbino was struck, not only with what he had seen so far, but also with what he hadn't. Nowhere was there a wheelchair. Not in the gondola room or the
sala
either, not today or the other times. Was one kept somewhere out of sight? Or did Possle have another means of getting around? But perhaps his assumption, however, that Possle couldn't get around easily on his own was all wrong.

Suddenly, low moaning floated through the open window, then turned into deep, convulsive sobs. His eyes moved to Elvira's building, searching out her windows. The sobs ended abruptly. He spent a few moments thinking about Elvira, with her grief and her view of the garden and Possle's private chambers.

With one last glance around the empty room, he returned through the storeroom to the bedroom. He closed the door behind him as he had the others.

Urbino turned. A dark-faced, bald-headed man stood against the far wall. It fetched Urbino up as if he had been punched over the heart. He took a few steps backward and knocked his shins against a stool.

The man, who was in profile and little more than five feet tall, didn't move an inch.

“Who are you?” Urbino exclaimed, immediately regretting the loudness of his words and their absurdity, considering that he was the intruder.

But the man didn't speak or move.

In a sudden flash of relief, followed by anger at himself, Urbino recognized his error. He had been victimized by his own nerves and distorted impressions. The ominous profile was nothing more than a wooden representation of a man's head that stood on a chest of drawers. It was a model used to illustrate phrenology.

But why he hadn't noticed it before was peculiar. Surely it had been there earlier. This seemed more probable and far less disturbing than that someone had placed the wooden head there while Urbino had been in the other rooms.