The Last Gondola (25 page)

“Considering her reputation as a poet,” Urbino said, “she might like to have her say in anything I write about him. I'd respect whatever privacy either of you might ask.”

“My wife will have to decide for herself. I'll mention it to her when she's feeling better.” Cipri glanced at the bedroom door, then leaned back in his chair. “As for me, I don't have much to tell. I only went to the Ca' Pozza for Hilda's sittings and the unveiling and to discuss business. I haven't seen Possle in over thirty years. He was kind and generous in his dealings with me.”

Urbino was puzzled as to how he should take Cipri's praise. Kindness and generosity didn't seem to be among Possle's strongest traits, but as Cipri said, he was speaking of the Possle of three decades ago. One would expect someone in Cipri's position, married as he was to Possle's ex-wife, to have less good to say about the man. In fact, any information, positive or negative, needed to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the animosity that might exist between them.

“Possle never remarried,” Urbino prompted.

“Marriage doesn't suit some men. Not that it's their fault,” he added, perhaps because of Urbino's own bachelorhood. “Or the fault of women like Hilda either. He never had any cause to complain about her.”

“I'm sure he didn't,” responded Urbino, somewhat mystified but immensely interested.

He decided to approach things from a different angle.

“I'd like to interview his former gondolier, Armando Abdon. He's still with him, but it could prove to be difficult with his handicap.”

“There's no reason he couldn't write things down, but I'm not sure how much he'd be willing to tell you. He was devoted to Possle in those days, very devoted, according to Hilda.”

He held Urbino's eye for several beats, then looked away.

“He still is,” Urbino said.

“That doesn't surprise me. But let me give you some advice. Go carefully with him. He's easily offended. He never did anything to Hilda or me, you understand, but I know as well as I know my copying that he's not someone you want to have angry with you.”

Cipri's words reawakened Urbino's uneasiness about the man and the advantage that he might have over him since the last visit.

“I'll keep that in mind. Did you know his sister, Adriana?”

“Slightly. She used to hang around the Ca' Pozza. She had a crush on Possle, Hilda said. Maybe she had hoped to marry him before Hilda did.”

“When did Hilda marry Possle?”

“In the late fifties. But it seems that Adriana was sticking close to Possle five or six years before then.”

This places the time close to when the Contessa was briefly acquainted with Possle
, Urbino thought.

“Adriana was lovely,” Cipri continued, “and with a beautiful voice, but she flew into rages over nothing. You wouldn't want to cross her anymore than her brother.” Cipri appeared to have more to say about Adriana than he had implied a few minutes before. “She seemed emotionally unbalanced, but maybe I'm not the best judge. I'm not one of your wild, raging artists. I've always liked to do my work with a tranquil mind and heart.”

“Did Hilda have any problems with her? Because of Adriana's feelings for Possle, I mean?”

“We've never talked about her. I was probably wrong about the crush,” Cipri retreated.

He looked at the bedroom door. It seemed now to be open a crack.

“Do you know how she died?”

“She drowned,” Cipri said, in an even lower voice than he had been speaking in so far. “Right here off the Lido when she went out sailing with Possle and her brother. Maybe there was someone else with them. I don't know.”

Urbino finished his anisette and got up.

“I'll tell Hilda that you'd like to speak with her,” Cipri said, as he accompanied Urbino out of the parlor and into the foyer.

They stopped by a table. Its surface was littered with sheets torn out of a sketch pad, an Italian-German dictionary, keys, an old palette knife, and an assortment of pens and pencils.

Urbino indicated the sheets. “May I?” he asked Cipri.

Cipri nodded.

Urbino picked them up. Each contained an ink portrait of a woman. Because of the portrait in the gondola room, he recognized her as Hilda, but a Hilda much younger and healthier, with a beatific smile. Clouds of hair framed her face.

“They're lovely. When did you do them?”

“A few weeks ago.”

Urbino looked up at Cipri.

“It's the way she sees herself,” the artist said, “and the way I see her.”

Urbino replaced the portraits on the table.

“She still writes poetry, you say. Is there a copy of one of her books that she might let me borrow? I have a passable understanding of German.”

“Let me see.”

Cipri bent down by a nearby bookshelf and after a few moments extracted a slim paperbound book. He handed it to Urbino. “It's one of her old collections,” he said. “You can have it.”

“Thank you, and thank your wife for me.”

On the book's gray cover in black German Gothic script was printed
“Byronic Inspirations
by Hilda Krippe, privately printed in Munich, 1967.”

“Lord Byron,” Urbino said.

“Hilda has always loved Byron ever since she was a young woman. Before I met her, the only thing I knew about Byron was the Byron Cup,” he said with a little laugh. He was referring to the annual boat race along the length of the Lido in memory of the poet.

Urbino thanked Cipri and slipped the book into his pocket.

“Did Possle share Hilda's love of Byron?” he asked Possle.

“It was one of the things they had in common. He had a foreign friend who loved Byron, too. A tall man with a beard. He would sometimes read Hilda a Byron poem when she was sitting for me.”

“Do you remember what the man's name was?”

“A strange name, but I can't remember it. He was Armenian. Like the fathers on San Lazzaro degli Armeni.”

53

Urbino didn't return directly to the boat landing. Instead he walked down to the beach to the shuttered Grand Hotel des Bains, closed until April. He seated himself on the stone steps of the verandah.

Ghostlike ships drifted slowly along the horizon. A small plane droned over the water toward the low line of the Euganean Hills in the far distance. Bicycles and tandems passed in the road, and a mother posed behind a stroller while her husband took a picture of her and the baby. Two young couples were walking hand in hand on the hotel's private strip of beach.

Usually when he came to the Grand Hotel des Bains, his thoughts were full of Thomas Mann, for it was here that Aschenbach had fallen desperately in love with his Polish boy and had died in the snare of his obsession. But today Byron dominated his thoughts, Byron who had ridden along this same stretch of beach long before it became a bathing resort. Byron who may have written unpublished poems that were in Possle's possession. And the same Byron who fascinated Hilda.

He riffled through Hilda's volume of poetry. The pages had already been cut. Ten poems, most no longer than twenty lines, haunted the pages in their Gothic script. He began to read. The German didn't give him too much difficulty, although some words and phrases were unfamiliar.

Not only did Byron inspire all of them, as the title said, but they also had a Venetian theme, taking as their subject some place or activity associated with Byron's Venice years. The Bridge of Sighs figured prominently, as did his swim from the Lido up the Grand Canal and his love affair with La Fornarina.

Hilda's talent had the ability to create vivid, if derivative, word pictures, clouded by rich, suggestive allusions that made Urbino feel as if he were looking through a smoky glass into a more vital and meaningful past. A current of emotion, albeit muted and therefore all the more powerful in his opinion, ran from one poem to another.

He sat there reading them, part of his mind searching for some connection between Hilda, the poems, and the strange events at the Ca' Pozza, another part caught up in their spell regardless of their relevance to his present case.

54

Back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino called his friend Corrado Scarpa, who was a contact at the Venice Questura. He needed a copy of a report about a Lido boat accident that had ended in the death of someone named Adriana Abdon. He gave the approximate date. Scarpa would do his best and get back to him.

Urbino then gave Rebecca a call and invited her to stop by that evening.

“I'll break out a bottle of the Henri Jayer,” he promised. “Consider it belated payment for the help you've given me about Possle.”

“And a retainer for future help?”

“Perhaps.”

But once Rebecca had come and was seated in the parlor across from him, Urbino didn't ply her with any more questions about the former renovations of the Ca' Pozza. Instead he told her that Possle had invited him back for two more visits.

“Good for you. So tell me, did I put you onto a good thing? Do you think it's haunted?”

She smiled at him over the rim of her wineglass.

“Not in the way that's usually meant perhaps, but there are plenty of ghosts that need to be laid to rest.”

“That's your job, isn't it? Or I should say, it's part of both your jobs. Don't worry, I'm not going to pump you. I know when you're pulling down the shutters.”

“Not all the way.” Urbino gave her an affectionate smile. Then, far less lightly, he told her that the boy who had fallen to his death had been Gildo's friend.

Rebecca absorbed this in silence for several moments.

“That brings everything closer to home, doesn't it?” was her eventual response.

“I suppose it does. But I don't know quite what to make of it yet. Do you know if there've been any recent break-ins in San Polo?”

“Things seemed to have calmed down.”

Rebecca's attractive face was full of questions.

“You know how I like to speculate and turn things over in my mind,” Urbino said, as she continued to scrutinize him.

“Do I ever!”

“And you also know that I'm grateful for all you've done for Habib and me,” he said, in an abrupt, but tactical shift. “That's why I've decided to have your portrait done. For you to have, not me. And no, not by Habib, but Lino Cipri.”

It was Urbino's way of making his lie to Cipri true.

“A portrait? By Cipri? You've got something up your sleeve, my dear, but once again I'm not asking. The ego of even a thoroughly modern woman like me can take only so many rebuffs, and I've had more than enough from you over the years.”

55

“It's irises today,” the Contessa said.

It was Monday morning, March 18, and the two friends were on San Michele, the island of the dead in the lagoon.

A small bouquet of violet irises stood on the austere grave of Serge Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes. Next to the bouquet was one of the worn, moldy ballet slippers that always seemed to adorn the tombstone.

The Contessa gave a shiver that the chill in the air couldn't completely account for.

“Irises die so quickly,” she said. “These will be gone by tomorrow. Let's go.”

Under the gray sky, they turned down a path toward the main part of the cemetery. Graves with Russian names, most of them women and some of them princesses, conjured up the ghosts of characters out of Tolstoy. The Contessa, dressed against the weather in a thick, gray wool coat, faux fur hat, and matching muff, looked very much in the Slavic spirit of the place.

“Since one must be buried somewhere,” Urbino said, as they passed through the gate and left the Orthodox section, “Venice is as good a place for it as any, don't you think?”

“And what about Possle?” the Contessa asked. “I would guess that the two of you are of the same mind as far as that's concerned.”

“It's not something that I care to ask him.”

“You've been rather timid about asking him anything, it seems to me.”

“You wouldn't say that if you knew about our last meeting.”

Except for an account of his visit to the Cipris and his conversation with Gildo about Marco, Urbino hadn't yet filled her in about other things. During most of the time Gildo rowed them across to San Michele, snug in the cabin beneath their blankets, she had described her
conversazione
on Saturday in more detail than she had done over the telephone.

Now, as they entered an area with tiers of burial niches for the ashes of the dead, he began to tell her about his last visit to the Ca' Pozza. He described his search through Possle's rooms, but he didn't tell her about taking the key. He was embarrassed, and he also wanted to figure out first what he might do with the key and with the copy he had made, or so he told himself. He did tell her, however, about the serpentine belt on the back staircase and about everything that Possle had revealed about the poems by Byron.

He was coming to the end of his account as they drew near the Da Capo-Zendrini mausoleum with its statues of weeping angels. They halted.

“I'm glad that Alvise isn't here to see all the intrigues you've pulled me into over the years,” the Contessa said.

“Or the ones you've pulled
me
into.”

It was a particularly pointed reference, since one of Urbino's cases directly involving the Contessa had come to a violent conclusion in front of the mausoleum a few years ago.

“
Touché!
But this time around, it's only some clothes and one lovely necklace that I've enlisted your help over. No blood will be shed over them, surely. Not unless belts prove to be snakes after all.”

A pensive look came over her face. Urbino didn't interrupt her thoughts.

“You aren't even sure if the belt was a man's or a woman's,” she said after a few moments. “I do have several snakeskin belts, but as far as I know, none of them is missing. I'll check. But should I hope to find one missing or not? That's the difficult question for me at the moment. I just can't conceive of how a belt of mine, or anything else, might end up on the back stairs of Possle's house!”