Authors: Grace Brophy
“And even more interesting—” Elena continued in her drum-roll voice.
“Yes?” Cenni said, masking his irritation.
“She told Gianluca she’s planning to drop her suit against the carabinieri for breaking her periwinkle dishes.”
They both laughed “It gets better. The doctor came to town to pick her up, and everyone in the square was outside to say good-bye. Enzo says she was dressed in pink from head to toe and she looked smashing!”
Cenni asked if there was any other news.
“Guess who’s adopted Tommaso and Princess.”
He hated guessing games, but he was in a good mood and played along.
“Who?”
“Signora Cecchetti. She told Enzo it’s her Christian duty to take them in.”
“I knew the signora had hidden depths,” Cenni responded. “I think I’ll send her a box of chocolates— or, even better, a huge bag of kitty litter.”
THE BOATS WERE lined up against the quay outside the Chiesa degli Scalzi, waiting for a party of some sort to emerge from the church. It has to be someone high up in the Church or in the government, was Cenni’s first thought, judging from the number of boats in the flotilla and the traffic that was being diverted to the other side of the canal. He counted ten boats painted velvet black, all of them with huge blankets of white chrysanthemums draped across their bows. The lead boat was a monstrosity of blue and glossy green with a golden fire dragon some eight feet high dominating the prow. The Pope? he wondered. He’d just missed the direct boat to Murano, where he was meeting Serge Cattelan, and had walked across the Scalzi Bridge to his bank to withdraw money, and like any other tourist he’d stopped in the middle of the bridge to get a better look.
“A saint’s day celebration?” he said to an old man who was standing next to him.
“Not yet,” the old man responded. “Not until she performs some miracles.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“It’s a funeral,” the old man answered. “
La Contessa
Molin, the richest woman in Venice, some say in all Italy.”
She finally died, he thought, and crossed himself out of habit. Long overdue, according to the predictions of her doctors, but she was tough. He wondered, though, why she had fought on for so long. She had no family other than Count Volpe, and apparently no friends. The last time he’d seen her, she could barely sit up and every breath had been an effort.
“It’s a big funeral,” he remarked to the old man. “The people of Venice must have loved her.”
“People were mostly afraid of her during her life, but it’s different now. She went and left all her money and her palazzo to Venice: some kind of foundation, they say, to save the city from sinking into the lagoon. She even left some money to the boatmen of Venice. I’m a boatman,” he said grinning proudly. “And a million euros to an old nanny of hers, a woman in her nineties. Anna says she’s atoning for her sins. Anna’s my wife,” he added in explanation. “She’s in bed with the rheumatism, so I promised to come and tell her all about it. Women love this sort of thing.”
“Plenty of men here too,” Cenni observed.
“You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you, by any chance,” the old man asked, eyeing his companion up and down for the signs of a smoker. “My wife cut me off, says I smoke too much.”
“Women are like that, aren’t they,” Cenni responded sympathetically. He had purchased a pack of Players at the station, and it was still unopened. “Take the whole pack. I shouldn’t be smoking anyway.”
The old man gave him a wide toothless grin in thanks and stuck the unopened pack into his side pocket. “I’m eighty-seven next month, so I don’t see why I should stop smoking. Anna says it’s for my health, but I know it’s because she hates the smell.”
“I’ll be getting along now,” Cenni said, thinking he might pay his respects at the church. He had come to like Marcella Molin, although he’d be hard-pressed to say why.
The old man grabbed him tightly by the arm before he could walk away.
“I was there, you know, the night the Germans came for her father. Four of them, two of them in uniform. They went into the palazzo and brought him out. He walked between them straight and proud, as only a Venetian can. Two doges in the family! I wonder if he knew it was a death boat? Some people are now saying he was a Nazi sympathizer, but I don’t believe it. He once helped me lift a crate onto the dock.”
The old man’s eyes glittered with malice as he continued his story.
“It was that girl, I told my wife. She did it!”
“What girl?” Cenni asked, caught now by the old man’s story.
“A fräulein, not more than fourteen or fifteen, with blonde braids and a gimpy leg. She stood in the cold rain waiting for them to bring him out, and when the launch pulled away, she walked to the edge of the quay and bowed. The devil’s child, I told Anna, but she scoffed.” He held tightly to Cenni’s arm. “I know evil when I see it.”
As Cenni descended the steps of the bridge, he thought about what had just passed. The old man had answered his last remaining question,
Who had betrayed Count Molin?
He’d probably never know why. Perhaps there is no why, he reflected, as he turned in the direction of the church. A moment of doubt overtook him. What if he never found Chiara? But then he remembered how that old man had appeared out of nowhere.
“I’ll find her,” he said to no one in particular, and he crossed himself and entered the church.
Acknowledgments
Enormous thanks go to my editor, Laura Hruska, for her great patience and goodwill in editing my manuscript. I am indebted to Kris Peterson for sharing her knowledge of Venice and Murano and for responding immediately to each of my E-mails with the subject line, “Just one more question.”
Mille Grazie
to Signor Carlo Cattelan, Kris’s neighbor in Murano, for his stories of
La Resistenza
. I owe another debt to Dr. Fraser Charlton, Consultant Pathologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle Upon Tyne, for instructing me on blood groups and for reviewing my manuscript for errors in forensic science. Thank you to Marco Cioccoloni, Stephanie Ninaud, and Kaitlin Mignella for hunting down misspelled words in English and Italian. And, finally and foremost, I am blessed in having the love and support of my husband, Miguel Per-aza, who read each and every chapter, many times, and never once complained.
As an American writing a novel set in Italy, there will be unintentional errors; for these, I have no one but myself to blame.
New York, New York