Death in a Serene City (27 page)

“Adele hardly got any letters from her at all. In fact, they didn't see much of each other in the last five years. She was surprised to get everything—everything, that is, except the royalties on the books. Those went to Clifford. I don't know who they go to now.”

As Urbino walked across to the library, he wondered whether Kobke was in Voyd's will. Either way, Urbino was sure he wouldn't languish. Adele Carstairs was going to find it difficult to get rid of him—that is, assuming she wanted to.

As he went up the stairs to the main reading room, he reminded himself that he should find out exactly when the two of them were going up to Vienna. He didn't want them to leave before he had a chance to ask them more questions. At this point he didn't know what those questions might be.

The reading room was overheated and he had some difficulty focusing on the entries made in the card catalogue in ornate handwriting. He eventually found what he was looking for, however—an encyclopedia of poisons. He copied the necessary information on a slip of paper and gave it to the woman at the request counter. When the book finally arrived, after what seemed like an hour, he brought it back to his table and looked in the index under “arsenic.”

There was more than he expected.

He learned about the Austrian miners who ate arsenic for strength and about the use of the chemical in papermaking, taxidermy, and—he was relieved to find it confirmed here—glassmaking. He read about the Arab chemist who discovered arsenic in the eighth century and about the large quantities found in Napoleon's body in 1840 when it proved possible to make a second death mask as distinct as the first. He spent many minutes studying a chart of the most famous cases of arsenic poisoning since the seventeenth century and reading detailed accounts of some. His favorite was the nineteenth-century Maybrick case in which the young wife was found guilty of poisoning her husband even though he had been known to consume arsenic in the mistaken belief that it was an aphrodisiac. He familiarized himself with the symptoms of arsenic poisoning—nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, intense thirst, weight and hair loss. He was surprised to learn that arsenic had not only found its way into many cosmetics—women in southern Austria used to swear that it improved their complexions—but that it had also been an ingredient in medicinal tonics recommended by doctors and pharmacists.

Misused, it brought almost certain death, but in the proper hands and with no malevolent intent it was beneficial. If it did not exist people would have had to go without many things until a substitute was found. How many fewer preserved animals and how much less peeling, faded wallpaper in shades and patterns of green would have graced the rooms and offices of his New Orleans youth? Well, perhaps in these instances, he thought to himself with a little smile, it might not have been such a loss after all.

As he closed the book, he considered the implications of several things he had just learned. He needed a drink.

He went to Florian's and on this occasion was happy not to have the company of the Contessa although, as it was, his thoughts frequently carried him in her direction. As he gazed out at the Piazza, flooded by gende sunlight, his mind played over various pieces of information. It didn't take him long to realize that he had to go back to Murano. But first he had to talk to several people again.

He decided against another Campari soda and struck out for the Cannaregio, savoring the mild weather that they would be lucky to have for even a few more hours. Two gondolas, filled with laughing tourists, glided past each other beneath the Ponte Guerra as he was walking over it. He felt both euphoric and also peculiarly grim. It was a combination of expectation and fear.

He stopped beneath the church campanile in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Although he wanted to do what had to be done as quickly as possible, he nonetheless lingered for a few minutes to look at the monstrous leering head at the base of the bell tower, one of many that could be found throughout the city. As he gazed at its flat nose, grossly misshapen mouth, and protruding teeth, he didn't see it so much as Ruskin had—as an emblem of the evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the late Renaissance—but as a horribly exaggerated version of Carlo Galuppi.

This must be the way the poor man had looked to the children who had followed him down the alleys and across the squares, taunting and laughing and at times throwing things. Unless the man could be cleared of his mother's murder, this image of him as an ugly soulless monster would be remembered as yet one more grotesque in the already teeming Venetian menagerie of strange beasts.

Urbino vowed to do all he could to prevent this from happening. There was someone who, although not physically deformed, was a monster of a different kind, someone who had murdered Beatrice Galuppi, her mother, and Voyd, and had contributed to Carlo's suicide. Of this he no longer had any doubt. This person might even have played a role in the suicide of Margaret Quinton and might not yet be finished if threatened again with the possibility of exposure after many years of careful concealment.

As he walked across the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Urbino hoped he would be able to rip the benign mask from this person's face and reveal the monster beneath.

7

“IN my opinion it's a dying art,” Don Marcantonio said, “just like the priesthood.”

He looked at Urbino over the tops of his round, thick glasses to see if his little joke had been appreciated. They were in his austere parlor, where they had discussed Beatrice Galuppi a week ago. Perhaps not finding the appreciation he had hoped for in his visitor, Don Marcantonio looked behind Urbino at the lithograph of Saint Lawrence being grilled over the coals. It was a copy of the painting at the Gesuiti. Urbino's own gaze wavered between the old priest's face and the mallard hen and drake next to the candelabra on the darkwood sideboard.

“Young people aren't attracted to either calling anymore,” Don Marcantonio added.

“I'm not speaking of the young people today but of thirty years ago,” Urbino explained.

The priest shrugged his shoulders.

“When you are as old as I am, you make little distinction between the youth of today and three decades ago. The same applied then. I don't remember anyone from San Gabriele who studied glassmaking. I would have made it a point to know. We might have replaced a few glass items here and there. Sister Veronica hasn't been much use to us in that respect.”

“I've seen Luigi Cavatorta about Beatrice Galuppi's paintings.”

“Now there you have the opposite side of the coin to no vocations at all. Cavatorta should never have become a priest to begin with. His mother, God rest her soul, is to blame for that. She would get a privileged place in heaven having a son who was a priest. That's what she thought, don't think many of these mothers don't! Now look what's happened to him.
Una vergogna!
That's one mother who should have been more like some of the parents around here who can't decide if it's worse to have a son who's a priest, a glassblower, or a common laborer.”

He shook his head and sighed, getting up slowly. It was obvious he considered their conversation over. There wasn't going to be any brandy or tea offered on this occasion.

“I've meant to ask you about your lovely ducks before,” Urbino said as they were leaving the parlor. “Where did you have them done?”

“I did them myself a long, long time ago when I had the strength for such things and for traipsing around the lagoon at daybreak.”

He stared at Urbino but said nothing more although his eyes flicked in the direction of the sideboard. Perhaps he was aware of just how disquieting it might be for others that a man of the cloth could not only kill animals but also go to not a little trouble to preserve them as trophies. In fact, Urbino wasn't quite sure which of the two acts was more disturbing and—he had to admit—more intriguing.

When Urbino mentioned Sister Veronica as he was about to go through the outer door that Sister Giuseppina held open, Don Marcantonio frowned but there was an element of satisfaction in his voice when he said,

“She's certainly not at Santa Crispina. Our sisters seem to be everywhere but where they should be these days.” He looked down at the diminutive Sister Giuseppina. “Murano, isn't it, Sister? The Class Museum with her little group?”

Sister Giuseppina said nothing but she gave Don Marcantonio a look of disapproval that had the priest backing away from the door and almost forgetting to say good-bye to Urbino.

8

BENEDETTA Razzi's building was conveniently near the boat station for Murano. The woman, dressed in a faded, floral-print robe frayed along the hem, was holding her Tyrolean doll when she answered his ring.

“I wondered when you would be back, young man,” she said as she looked up at him flirtatiously through the bristles of her false eyelashes. “Come in, come in.”

She shuffled ahead in her worn slippers and eased herself into the love seat crowded with dolls.

“Does death or suicide bring you here this time?”

“Signorina Quinton.”

“You lost interest in Beatrice and the Galuppi family?”

“Not at all. What I have to ask might have some bearing on the deaths of
all
the Galuppis.”

“My! It must be a very difficult question then—or a difficult answer.” She looked down at the doll cradled in her arm and said into its face, “Can we manage it,
amore mio
? You see,” she said, turning back to Urbino, “last night was as bad as the others. My sweethearts and I spent most of the night with open eyes. So if it's a complicated question you have, we might not be up to it.” She set the doll down on her lap.

“I don't mean to be inquisitive, Signora Razzi, and I certainly don't want you to think I'm meddling in your business affairs, but I've learned that there was a locked room at the Casa Silviano.”

“Still is one, and always will be,” she said a bit defiantly. “That American writer told you.”

“Yes, Signor Voyd.”

She gave no indication that she had heard of Voyd's murder. If she knew and was pretending not to, he would let her continue with her little game. And if she didn't know, it might be best not to explain that yet another death was associated with the Galuppis and Margaret Quinton.

“What business is it of yours, this room? That was an agreement between the American signorina and me.”

Urbino hoped he looked properly chastened.

“Of course it's none of my affair, Signora Razzi, but it's important to know if Signorina Quinton left anything behind in the room.” He paused before adding: “Papers, letters, things of that nature.”

“She never went in the room! It was locked and it's locked now. Whatever she left behind her niece already has. Why are so many people interested in that dead woman's writing anyway? Was she Dante? D'Annunzio?” A blank look came over her face as she failed to think of a third writer or perhaps one whose name began with the same letter. She stood up, catching the doll before it tumbled to the floor. “It's not right of you to ask me all these questions when you didn't even bring a little something for my darlings this time. The first time I excused you but I was sure you would know better when you came back. I would have put it with their other things.” She nodded in the direction of a small tiered table covered with all kinds of tiny trinkets, most of them miniature versions of real objects—little cups and saucers, a menagerie of glass animals, tiny porcelain masks that would fit over a doll's face, miniature books, and even a delicate candelabra with candles no bigger than pencil leads.

“It's quite a collection. I hope you'll forgive me.”

He started to make movements to leave but not without feeling that there was still something of importance she might tell him.

“Next time I'll bring you something special.”

“Not for me, remember, but for my sweethearts,” she said as she led him to the door, the Tyrolean doll clutched in one hand.

9

THE weather had changed again and the lagoon was wreathed with fog that drifted over the water. Where everything had been golden and sunny only an hour ago, now the dominant color was pearly gray and the wake of the boat opalescent. It wasn't so foggy, however, that they needed someone to watch from the bow and once or twice Urbino was able to glimpse the dim outlines of another craft not far away. Never did the other craft turn out to be a black and gold funeral gondola making its way back from San Michele, but somehow this was what he kept expecting to see, even down to the drooping red chrysanthemums that would be on its bow.

The fog lifted suddenly, but briefly, and the island of glass came into view beyond the stretch of water that now showed as flat and silvery as a mirror. Murano neither smoked nor smoldered as Quinton had said it did in her imagination but for a few moments seemed to beckon him onward. It was soon lost again in a swirl of fog, however, and he was left feeling teased and even mocked.

It took him some time to find Sister Veronica and her group at the Glass Museum. He went up the main staircase to the suite of exhibition rooms, where he passed the showcases displaying the best and the worst of Venetian glass, most of it looking dusty. His own preference was for the crystal-clear items that Murano had prided itself on until seventeenth-century excess took over—cups, dishes, vases, goblets, chalices, ampules, all in simple, delicate designs. As for many of the other things—glass horses and mice, a menagerie of vases, drinking glasses with snake-entwined stems, liqueur bottles fashioned to look like pistols, ceremonial glass trumpets, pagoda-shaped, dolphin-encrusted chandeliers—at least they were better than the even more vulgar objects outside in the shops.

Sister Veronica was in the room with the masterpieces from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She stood with several elderly women and a middle-aged man in front of the glass bell that covered the Barovier Wedding Cup that Beatrice Galuppi had copied scenes from. It was a delicate goblet about nine inches tall with a smooth blue surface decorated with several enameled scenes and portraits: of the bride and groom, a bridal procession on horseback, and a fountain in which several naked young women bathed.