The Veils of Venice (8 page)

‘Someone always remembers Sonia,' the contessa said. ‘And many of the other dead, too.' She indicated the ones that had fresh flowers and were well tended.

They passed into the main area of the cemetery.

‘Cemeteries used to depress me,' the contessa said. ‘Now what soothes me is seeing how so many of the dead are still alive in the hearts of those they've left behind. Even those who have been dead for a century seem to have someone who remembers them.'

Urbino did not point out that many graves in the compound and elsewhere were abandoned and neglected.

Urbino and the contessa fell into a silence until the contessa came to an abrupt halt as they were crossing the cloister. ‘Save Mina! Make it possible for her to weep on Olimpia's grave. You have to do it before you leave for America!'

‘I'll do my best.'

Urbino could make no stronger promise than this. It would be difficult to establish Mina's innocence between now and his unavoidable trip back to America. He had a solemn but hopefully not impossible charge.

That evening, as Urbino was having his coffee in his library, he re-read the article in
Il Gazzettino
about Olimpia's murder.

MURDER IN SANTA CROCE

Art Collection Unharmed

‘I loved her. I killed her.'

These are the words of Mina Longo, 25, formerly of Palermo, who is being held for the murder of Olimpia Pindar, 54.

According to Professor Alberto Lago, the medical examiner, Signorina Pindar, a dressmaker in the Santa Croce area, died in her workshop as a result of trauma to the chest by a pair of scissors.

Longo, a close friend of the murdered woman, was seen entering the residence of the murdered woman in an evidently distressed state half an hour before she was found beside the body of Signorina Pindar.

Longo worked as a maid at the Venice residence of the Contessa Barbara da Capo-Zendrini, the British widow of the deceased Conte Alvise da Capo-Zendrini. It was the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini who summoned the police to the murder scene.

Pindar is survived by a brother Ercule Pindar and a sister Gabriella Pindar, who live in the building where the murder took place. The Palazzo Pindar houses a collection of art objects and curiosities that were acquired over the years by the Pindar family, who were among the most prominent import-exporters of the city from the eighteenth century to the nineteen thirties. No damage was done to the art collection insofar as has been determined up to this point.

The police are making every effort to reconstruct the series of events that led to the tragic event.

The details were simple, stark, and incriminating. Fortunately, the article did not mention that Olimpia was the contessa's cousin, although the police were well aware of the fact.

After finishing his coffee, Urbino went for one of his long walks. It was eight o'clock. It was a clear, chilly night. A cold, damp wind was blowing from the lagoon.

He went to the Piazza San Marco, approaching it through empty squares and alleys. The only sounds were his own solitary footsteps, the lapping of water against stone, muted voices from behind shuttered windows, and at one point, faint and far off, someone whistling a phrase from an aria of Verdi.

He wandered into Florian's, but stayed only long enough for a quickly drained glass of wine before setting out for the Riva degli Schiavoni. He had vaguely in mind the Public Gardens at the eastern end of the city, where he often went, even later at night, to sit on a bench and think as he looked out across the lagoon.

The Danieli, where Eugene would be staying, spilled light on the pavement from a golden but decidedly deserted interior. The staff members had the air of elegant and slightly bored caretakers.

He was about to break into his stride along the wide Riva when, on an impulse, he hurried to the
circolare
that was about to depart from the San Zaccaria landing.

He went out to the unoccupied stern and seated himself beside the door.

Soon, the Basilica, the Doges' Palace, and the broad sweep of the Riva seemed to be floating, brightly illuminated, between the dark waters and the night sky.

For the next hour and a half, as the boat made its circuit through the Giudecca Canal and into the lagoon past the cemetery island to Murano, then back to Venice, Urbino indulged in speculations about Olimpia's murder in which the dynamics of the Palazzo Pindar – or what he knew of them so far – and Gaby's fears played prominent roles.

Only a few days ago Gaby had been the focus of his and the contessa's concern, and she still was, perhaps even more so now that her sister had fallen victim to the fate she seemed to have feared for herself. Whether she was actually in mortal danger or only imagined she was, was something that he needed to find out.

Now it was Mina who needed their immediate help, and in helping her, they might be able to help Gaby – or at least get to the source of her fears. As the contessa said, Mina had to be saved – saved from many years in prison, and he had only a relatively short time to do it in. So much was against the girl. She had been discovered next to Olimpia's dead body by no less a witness than the contessa herself, she had been grasping the murder weapon, and she had initially insisted that she had killed Olimpia.

No, it did not look good for Mina, who also had the history of her emotional disturbance against her.

Another fact, almost as damning as the others, was certain to be exploited. Mina and Olimpia had been involved in what the clever Jesuits had warned Urbino against at boarding school. A particular friendship.

Had Olimpia had any particular friendships before she met Mina? Urbino had little doubt that she had. It was logical to assume that Olimpia – unlike Mina, who was hardly more than a girl – had had an earlier relationship, and even more than one.

A former particular friend might have been seething with jealousy about Mina. It was not hard to imagine those feelings leading to the fatal attack. Nor was it hard to imagine what Apollonia, the upholder of rigid moral values, had thought about her niece. The Palazzo Pindar must have crackled with the tension between the two women. And Apollonia's disapproval would have extended from Olimpia to Mina and to anyone else she had been involved with.

Urbino needed to know more about Olimpia's past. Vital clues to the murderer usually lay in the victim's past, in his relationships with others.

At least this had been Urbino's experience. Although murder could come to those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or who had been selected randomly, this wasn't the world that Urbino's sleuthing carried him into. His passion for order, a passion that left him unsatisfied until things were set right, was exercised on a smaller, more intimate, but no less dangerous stage.

Urbino warned himself, however. It was premature to be making any assumptions about the murder and the Palazzo Pindar. Yet he had made a huge one.

The answer to Olimpia's murder lay under the roof of the Palazzo Pindar and among its occupants – or, at the very most, not much further afield in some person or persons closely connected to the house and them, some friend or business contact of Olimpia or of another family member.

As Urbino gazed out at the slowly changing scene, he ran through the classic motives for murder, one by one, as a mental exercise, trying to imagine scenarios for each of them, and trying to connect them with the House of Pindar. Motivation was what interested him the most in his investigations. His interest in it was related to his biography writing, where so much was interpretation and where truth was not always directly related to cold facts.

He speculated about each possible motive as far as he could, but there were great gaps that were related to the gaps in his knowledge about Olimpia and the other members of the household.

The motives that seemed to make the most sense, at least at this early stage, were greed, jealousy, and revenge.

Could Olimpia have fallen victim to someone's greed? With her out of the picture, the murderer might have money from an inheritance or an insurance policy.

All three siblings had owned the Palazzo Pindar and its collection, and now, according to what the contessa had told him about the agreement among them, it belonged to Gaby and Ercule. Olimpia's business had not been very lucrative, from what Urbino knew. He needed to put it into the equation. She had recently signed a contract to design costumes for the Goldoni production. Had anyone else been competing for the commission?

As for jealousy, someone could have been furious about her preference for Mina; so jealous that the person had been driven to murder. It was even possible that someone had seen her as a prisoner who had to be freed from what was believed to be Olimpia's malign influence.

The unstoppable flood of questions and speculations continued to surge through Urbino's mind as the boat throbbed past the cemetery island where the cypresses twisted in the wind, and entered the canals of Murano with their deserted embankments and closed glass factories.

Urbino pursued a different tack. Had Olimpia been in possession of a dangerous piece of knowledge, something she could never have imagined would lead to her death? Had her exploitation of someone's dark secret driven her victim to murder?

Or might someone have been blackmailing her? Had all the money scattered on the floor of the atelier been Olimpia's payment to her blackmailer – or someone's payment to her – in a transaction that had gone deadly wrong?

As the boat started its return journey across the dark lagoon, Urbino hoped that he could reestablish himself at the Palazzo Pindar as soon as possible. He also needed to speak with the contessa's staff.

Urbino had no sooner returned to the Palazzo Uccello than the telephone rang. His ex-brother-in-law Eugene's voice boomed over the line from Rome.

‘I've been tryin' to get hold of you all this mornin' and ever since eight-thirty tonight. Thought you had slipped out of town to escape me.'

‘I'm waiting with open arms.'

‘That's what I like to hear. Don't want to think you've lost your Southern hospitality. You've lost plenty else. I have every intention of gettin' you back into Southern shape when you come back with me.'

Anxiety stabbed Urbino when Eugene mentioned their departure. Would he be able to do what he needed to do?

‘Everything's on schedule. I'm almost ready for Venice,' Eugene was saying. ‘Seen the Vatican, poked around the ruins, and thrown enough coins in the fountains. Nothing much has changed from ten years ago. Guess that's why they call it the Eternal City. Eternally the same! Now it's see Venice and die. Isn't that what they say?'

‘See Naples and die.'

‘Seems they should say it about Venice. It's a dead old city. That's why you like it, I know that. Say hello to Countess Barbara. Tell her I'm lookin' forward to seein' her again.'

Six

What impressed itself upon Urbino two days later was how normally the Pindars were behaving despite the fact that Olimpia – sister, niece, and cousin – had been brutally murdered the previous week. Of course, what was normal for the Pindar clan was most peculiar for almost anyone else.

Urbino had rung the palazzo bell to announce he was there, half thinking that a buzzer system might have been installed since Olimpia's murder. But Gaby's cry, much fainter than usual, came from within for him to enter. The large door was on the latch. As he passed into the dour building, he had the feeling he usually did. It was as if he were entering a place of strange, impoverished privilege where eccentricity reigned.

This was the first time Urbino had seen Gaby since her sister's death. Her pallor was unrelieved today by any rouge, and her red cap was set on her head at an angle, as if done hurriedly. Her blue eyes had a glazed, feverish look. He offered his condolences.

She received them with a quiet nod and a bowed head. ‘It isn't easy to lose a sister – or a brother. It is harder than losing a parent. And Olimpia was taken away so suddenly from us, from everything.' She looked in the direction of the museum and, for one fleeting second, the closed blue doors of the rooms opposite the museum. ‘What would happen to my things if something happened to me, if I was taken away from them without any warning? They are my children – even the poor little cat mummy all wrapped away from the world. Mothers never want to leave their children.'

As she had been speaking, she had started to breathe harshly. She seemed on the point of tears. She took deep breaths. When she continued to speak, her voice was weaker. ‘Please tell Barbara that I don't have any bad feeling toward her. I mean because Mina took away our sister.'

‘I'll tell her. And when you see her, you can tell her yourself.' Urbino wondered what the contessa's response would be. To accept assurances of this kind from Gaby, without qualifying them, would be like acknowledging that she believed in Mina's guilt. ‘I understand how you feel about your things, how you feel about leaving behind something you care about.' He paused. Gaby had mentioned only her fear of being parted from the collection, but Urbino thought it appropriate to add, ‘And people you care about. Whenever someone close to us dies, we feel insecure. But you shouldn't worry, Gaby. What happened to Olimpia was something' – he searched for the right way to express it – ‘something unusual.'

Wasn't he risking dangerously misleading the woman by stilling her fears in an attempt to draw her out? He felt caught in a bind that he knew he was going to be caught in repeatedly in this case. The bind came from the need to pretend to believe that Mina had murdered Olimpia and that there was no danger to anyone else now. If he gave any strong impression that he believed the murderer was still at large and that Gaby, and the others, needed to be on their guard, he would be alerting the murderer, assuming as he did that the murderer was under the roof of the Palazzo Pindar or closely connected to it.