The Last Gondola (31 page)

He looked down the length of the dark, covered passageway. It was possible that, given the city's deceptive tricks of stone and water, the footsteps had come from ahead of him, from a
calle
on the other side of the canal or one of the alleys opening into the covered passageway.

But Urbino couldn't easily shake the feeling that someone was pursuing him and had halted when he had.

To test this, he started to walk farther into the passageway. The footsteps sounded again. He was almost at exactly the same spot he had been a month ago on the night he had also heard footsteps and the laughter and sobs.

His nerves were on edge because of his second violation of the Ca' Pozza's secrets. Could Armando have been on the staircase and be pursuing him now? Or perhaps it was the person or persons who had attacked Demetrio Emo. In either case, he didn't want to be a victim.

He had to make a quick decision. Should he continue through the passageway and over the crooked bridge or turn around and take the other bridge? He decided on the latter. Even though he would be moving in the direction that the footsteps seemed to be coming from, he might confuse the person and gain an advantage. And he would more quickly reach a large open space where there was a fair chance of there being other people.

Urbino turned around abruptly and rushed across the slick stones to the beginning of the passageway. His own rapid steps echoing in the
sottoportico
made it impossible for him to hear any other sounds. He slid once and felt himself losing his balance. He steadied himself by grabbing the crumbling stone of a building. He barely prevented himself from tumbling into the canal.

Urbino threw a quick look up the
calle
that led to the Ca' Pozza and Elvira's building. A tall figure stood pressed against the wall of a building about twenty feet away.

Urbino dashed over the bridge and into the
calle
on its opposite side. It was better lit than the area he had just abandoned. He rushed to the end of the
calle
and turned right over another bridge. In a few moments he was in the Campo San Polo. He went to the church on the other side and was greeted by some men who slowly walked by.

He looked back across the wide square. No one emerged from the alley he had just deserted. He continued to look in its direction for several minutes.

Even this far away from the Ca' Pozza, he felt it exerting its influence. Nothing was what it seemed in the old building. Of this he was sure.

Urbino was a rational person. Any explanation, if he ever found one, would surely be logical and it would probably be rooted in the past. Whatever bleeding portraits there might be in the Ca' Pozza, figuratively speaking of course, would be explained as reasonably as the mystery of the severed head and the disembodied laughter and cries.

Encouraged by these thoughts and by the clipping that he had just discovered of the Contessa in her Fortuny dress, disturbing though it was in its implications, Urbino quit the square and started for home, alert for any unusual sound.

68

Half an hour later, when Urbino was crossing the bridge in front of the Palazzo Uccello, a shadow detached itself from the building near the water steps. Urbino was brought up short. But then he recognized that it was Gildo, capless and dressed in dark clothing, and he advanced.

Gildo's face, covered with a thin film of sweat, gleamed under the bulb affixed to the side of the Palazzo Uccello. He was breathing heavily. He ran a hand through his hair.

“Is something the matter, Gildo?”

“I couldn't sleep.”

“I couldn't either.”

Gildo made a nervous gesture of looking at his wristwatch.

“Are you going for a walk?” Urbino asked. “Or perhaps you just came back from one. I took one myself.”

Gildo stared at Urbino with an appeal in his green eyes. “Be careful, signore,” he said. “It isn't safe to walk around in the city in the middle of the night.”

“I try to be careful. I know the city well, just as well as you do.”

“Perhaps, signore, but you shouldn't even go near that bad house. Not at night. It's dangerous.”

“How do you know I've been to San Polo?”

Gildo looked away. “I guessed.”

“Where you there tonight?”

“No!” His denial echoed across the narrow canal.

“Are you on your way in or out?” Urbino asked.

“I'm going in now, signore. I—I just came out for a few minutes, but now I think it's best to try to get to sleep. Good night.”

He returned to his apartment through his separate entrance by the water steps before Urbino might ask him anything else.

69

The Contessa, all liquid fingers and rapt expression, was giving Urbino just what he needed the next week in the concert room of the conservatory.

Under the spell of her grace and spontaneity, he felt bathed in order and harmony as she approached the end of the
allegro assai
of Mozart's F major sonata. The fatigue and headache after his almost sleepless night receded.

Today the Contessa was allowing her talent at the piano to speak for her, and her only words were the briefest of introductions before each piece. Whereas Urbino's presence at her lectures would have risked tying her tongue, it now was only freedom and inspiration for her fingers.

Hardly had the final cadences of the movement started to fade away than the applause broke out. Urbino and Rebecca, who was sitting next to him, joined in with the others. They were a small group, though more obviously select than embarrassingly spare.

Lino Cipri, but not his wife, was there. Urbino hoped that she had recovered from the shock of his visit. Before the Contessa began her next piece, Urbino caught Cipri looking at him and Rebecca. Urbino returned a smile and gave his attention to the Contessa, who was beginning to say a few words about the Chopin
ballade
she was about to play.

It was one of Urbino's favorite pieces, and he often asked the Contessa to play it for him when they were alone together. He closed his eyes now as he listened to it, feeling himself healing with almost every note. He was disappointed on her behalf when the audience received it warmly but less enthusiastically than the Mozart.

The final piece on the program was
I Quattro Rusteghi
by Wolf-Ferrari. It was a particularly appropriate piece, not only since Wolf-Ferrari had once been the conservatory director, but also for more personal reasons.

The barcarolle intermezzo, which captures in its notes the movement of a gondola, had drawn the Conte's attention to her when he had heard her practicing it at the conservatory many years ago. It had been the beginning of their long and happy relationship.

Before playing the piece, she related this anecdote in a shy and touching manner and dedicated her rendition to the Conte. It had a sympathetic effect on the audience. Cipri had a pleasant smile on his smooth, pink face.

Urbino had heard the Contessa play
I
Quattro Rusteghi
many times, and always with passion and sensitivity, but this afternoon she outdid herself. Her interpretation was pure genius. The audience was spellbound.

When she came to the end to thunderous applause, the Contessa exchanged a quick, brilliant glance with Urbino. He smiled back and cried out
“Brava!”
It was soon echoed around him.

The Contessa got a standing ovation.

After embracing the Contessa with two kisses on each cheek, Urbino left her to enjoy the praise of the group gathered around her. He would wait for her outside for their celebratory circuit of the city in the gondola. Rebecca had to dash off to an appointment.

As Urbino left the concert room, he looked around for Cipri. He had already left. Urbino went out to the courtyard to the statue of the veiled lady. Cipri was nowhere in sight.

Standing by the statue of the Veiled Lady, the euphoria induced by the Contessa's performance started to ebb as the statue inevitably reminded him of the figure in his dream of fire.

“How fortunate that no one has ever discovered her identity,” the Contessa had said to him here in the courtyard before her first
conversazione
. “Don't you ever try to unveil her! Give your efforts to your Samuel Possle and my disappearing wardrobe.”

It had seemed to make good sense at the time, before he had learned what he had since then. Now, as he waited for the Contessa by the mysterious statue, he wasn't so sure.

Different worlds and separate problems were starting to converge, or they seemed to be in his still confused perceptions. At his elbow was the ghost of Adriana Abdon, singing her heart out beside this same statue as the Contessa took her lessons in one of the rooms above.

Ghosts here at the conservatory and ghosts, in one form or another, behind the walls of the Ca' Pozza.

And even the dream of the fire, in the light of day, now seemed to be the ghost of something that had already happened or a premonition of what was about to.

70

For the first fifteen minutes of their gondola ride, as the black barque slipped down the Grand Canal and then into the labyrinth of smaller waterways, it was as if Urbino and the Contessa were floating to their own private barcarolle. The air was warm, and the light, that had been rosy in the morning, was now turning the stones golden and burnishing the metal work of the gondola. Companionable and pregnant silence was their only conversation as they drifted between the sea and sky in the closed cabin, sipping the Prosecco that Gildo had kept chilled for them. The Contessa had a relaxed expression on her attractive face as she absently contemplated the scene.

For his part, Urbino was pursuing the train of thought that had begun as he had waited for the Contessa by the statue of the veiled lady.

The gondola was now passing behind the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where the Tintorettos kept all their glory and mystery.

The Contessa turned away from the external scene and looked at Urbino. “You're obviously holding yourself back,
caro,”
she said. “It's been in your face, your voice, your every gesture.”

Urbino nodded. Between his illness and her preparations for the last
conversazione
, he hadn't told her anything that had happened since the morning of his trip to San Lazzaro degli Armeni more than a week ago.

His next rendezvous with Possle was in four days, on Monday. He would be expecting an answer to his offer. If the Contessa didn't come with Urbino, it would probably be his last visit.

“I'm all yours again, and I'm all ears,” the Contessa prompted.

As they drank the Prosecco, Urbino told her in a lowered voice everything that she didn't already know, everything, that is, except about his second violation of the Ca' Pozza and what he had found in Armando's little room. He would save these for a little later.

The cabin, closed like a confessional, and the slow movement and cradlelike rocking of the gondola were conducive to his detailed account.

The Contessa allowed him to give it without any interruption, although he was in little doubt of her reactions throughout from her facial expressions and the pressure, sometimes firm, sometimes gentle, with which she held his hand or touched his arm.

When he finished, he looked through the shutters as the gondola passed under first one bridge, then another. The Contessa broke her silence with considerable force.

“If your fellow American thinks I'm going to give him a lira or a pence for something that he stole and might even have murdered for, he can go right back where he came from!”

“My fellow American? It sounds as if you're blaming me.”

“Not blaming you, but you
have
encouraged him. If you had given your attentions only to my poor lost clothes! You should get these Byron poems out of your mind completely, at least insofar as they might have anything to do with me! And don't give me that little boy wounded look, either, because you had another look on your face a few seconds ago. It was disappointment!”

The Contessa was right. Although Urbino didn't want her to get involved in what was undoubtedly a suspicious and perhaps even dangerous situation, his heart sank at the prospect of losing the poems completely. Perhaps there was some other way. Perhaps she—

“Forget about the poems, I tell you,” she interrupted his reverie. “I know how important they'd be to you, especially now that you've been adrift in your work for a while. But stay away from them, with or without my help! Be content with your usual rewards. There's a mystery here of some kind. Solve it and walk away with no spoils except the intellectual ones!”

“Good advice, Barbara. But there might be a way to get the poems without paying
any
price,” he added, “after we figure out whatever has been going on at the Ca' Pozza, and still might be.”

“You're determined, aren't you?” She shook her head in concern and disapproval. “You mean Elvira, because of her fear of the building?”

“Elvira, yes, and maybe Hilda Cipri, too.”

“What you're saying is that you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Didn't I tell you when we were standing by the veiled lady and thinking about
her
mystery, that it was impossible? If you solve her mystery, you'll lose a perpetual source of fascination. And if and when you solve the mystery of the dark and brooding Ca' Pozza, you'll surely lose the poems forever.”

“You think so?”

“And so do you! I can tell from the tone of your voice, not to mention the look on your face that you yourself can't see! You'll find out that those poems have blood on them in one way or another; and even if they don't, they're most probably not Possle's free and clear. If I buy anything, even for
you
, I need to be sure that the seller really owns it to begin with. And what would it mean if you became associated with something like that? Is that what you want? A form of fame that's not much different from notoriety?
You'll
bear some moral burden, and don't think you won't.”