A Deadly Paradise (15 page)

He waited five full minutes after he rang and was beginning to fear that she had left the city before his arrival. The woman he had spoken to two days earlier when he telephoned to make an appointment had indicated that
la
contessa
would only see him if she were up to it, and if she wanted to. No lights or movement were evident behind the
loggia
of the
piano nobile.
He was considering leaving, when he saw a very old woman shuffling toward the gate. Despite the rain, to which they were both exposed, she refused to admit him until she scrutinized his identification. Finally she unlocked the gate, and, as he stepped inside the front garden, she remarked that he was a day late. The countess, who valued punctuality, might not see him. Cenni reflected that the countess had no choice in the matter, but he had no wish to argue with a servant and he nodded.

The servant escorted him into the entrance hall and then up the main stairway to the principal salon, where she left him while she went to inquire if
la contessa
were up to a visit by the police. Cenni noted the stained walls of the long hallway that ran from back to front, but the room’s former opulence was still apparent in the row of sixteen matching carved chairs that lined the right side of the room and a series of portraits that hung on the left. He walked slowly down the room, stopping at each briefly to examine the signature of the artist and the name of the sitter. Only one interested him, that of Grazia, the Spanish bride. Her late age at marriage and her choice, or her father’s, of a half-wit suitor ten years younger suggested to Cenni, unfairly as it turned out, that she would resemble the Spanish royal family that Vélazquez had painted.

She had black hair, bound in tight curls pulled to the back of her head, and her skin was liquid gold. Her dress was modestly cut, displaying just a hint of cleavage, but elaborate in design, of jade-green velvet with a sheer cape of tulle covering her magnificent shoulders. She wore a single strand of pearls around her neck. It was, however, the beauty of the face and figure that captured his attention. He was sure the painter had added to it with a few deft touches, but the woman behind the painter’s artifice shone through. Her pencil-thin eyebrows emphasized large intelligent brown eyes that looked straight out at the viewer. She had a full, generous mouth, and her figure was ample, which would have appealed in the seventeenth century. Yet behind the brush strokes of the portrait painter, he detected a woman of steel. Perhaps he was imputing a personality to Grazia that hadn’t existed, but surely a woman, blind and close to death, who’d hired and supervised the most famous artist of the day in the decoration of her ceilings, had something of the tartar in her.

“It’s painted by Sebastiano Bombelli. The pearls around her neck are magnificent.”

Cenni turned to find a tall black woman standing behind him. She was the woman Orlando had described as the German’s lover. She was quite tall, his height, and, as Orlando had said, a beauty.

She held out her hand. “My name is Juliet Mudarikwa. I look for you yesterday. I am wrong?” she asked. Charming accent, Cenni thought, and asked if she spoke English or German.

“Police business detained me,” he said, after they had settled on English.

She invited him to sit on one of the very uncomfortable wooden chairs that lined the side of the room, while she explained about
la contessa.

“She’s dying of lung cancer, and her doctor thinks she has a few weeks left, perhaps not even that. Talking exhausts her, so you should keep your questions short.” And then, she added, “You know, of course, that I met her through Jarvinia Baudler. We were in Venice on a visit and ran into Marcella at the Caffè Inglese. You’ll probably want to talk to me when you finish with her.”

Very collected, Cenni thought, and very rehearsed.

The countess had agreed to receive him in her bedroom, the America room, Juliet said, assuming that Cenni knew what that meant. Cenni wasn’t sure what Marcella Molin would look like, but he had pictured an older version of Grazia, her Spanish ancestor. She was propped up, on oversized pillows, with legal papers, folders, a wooden casket, and some large leather-bound books, taking up most of the space along the sides of the canopied bed, its immense size dwarfing its inhabitant. He guessed that she was not above five feet in height and probably weighed less than a hundred pounds. Age and disease had been unkind, but Cenni doubted that she had ever been anything but homely. Her nose resembled a bird’s beak, her skin was sallow, and her dark eyes were small and exophthalmic; she reminded him of a sparrow. She was wearing a bouffant wig in a brownish color that was far too large for her small head, and it was askew. Underneath it, she was bald. Juliet walked over to her immediately and righted the wig on her head, and, when she’d finished, said “there, now” and kissed the bedridden woman on the forehead.

The countess smiled in thanks. She has one nice feature, Cenni thought. The smile she had given Juliet exuded genuine warmth.

“Sit down, dottore,” she said in a rasping voice, pointing to a chair that had been pulled up alongside the bed. “Or, if you wish, you can sit on the bed, the better to see you, my dear,” she added with a wolfish grin. Cenni sat on the chair.

“So, dottore
.
You’re looking into the death of my old friend Jarvinia. Murdered! Not surprising, considering the things she got up to. Jarvinia never played it safe, more power to her. Am I one of your suspects?”

Before Cenni had time to answer, she continued, “Before you have time to swear out a warrant, I’ll be dead. I don’t mind the notoriety. It’s the evil that lives after us; the good is always interred with our bones,” she said—and laughed, which set off a paroxysm of coughing.

JULIET PULLED THE drapes across the floor-to-ceiling windows in the America room, lighted the candles in the five candelabra that were placed strategically around the room, and sat on the edge of the bed after moving the wooden casket out of the way. “Take that horrid thing off,” she said, removing the countess’s wig. A few longish strands of gray hair, the lone survivors of ten rounds of chemotherapy, were sticking up, and Juliet smoothed them down and put her arm around the dying woman’s shoulders.

“Are you hungry? Would you like a coffee, or a tea? English breakfast tea with milk and a nice soft cream puff? Or some beef bouillon?”

The countess patted Juliet’s hand. “I’m not hungry, not even for a cream puff.”

“Do you think he believed us?” Juliet asked anxiously.

“It doesn’t matter! I’ve written out a statement just in case. My lawyer knows the combination of the safe, so it won’t be necessary for you to hand it to the police. Better that way. But there’s no reason for them to come after you. You didn’t need Jarvinia, or her promises of a passport or residency, not after I got your residency approved in Venice. You had no motive for killing her, and neither did I. Let me alone now. We’ll talk in the morning. But before you go, put some wood on the fire and blow out those candles. There’s no point in burning the house down at this stage of my life. And turn on the lamp. I want to do some reading before I sleep.”

Marcella watched Juliet as she moved noiselessly around the room, blowing out the candles. She was six feet tall without shoes, yet she moved with the grace of a cat. “Hand me the wooden casket,” she said, observing Juliet as she turned on the lamp. “And stay for a minute; I have something for you.” She felt for the long chain around her neck and found the delicate gold key that opened the box. “Here,” she said, and pulled out the string of pearls that Juliet had so often admired. “It’s the strand of pearls that Grazia wore in her wedding portrait. I reported it stolen, for the insurance, fifteen years ago. I want you to have it, but don’t sell it in Italy, and not until I’ve been dead at least six months. It’s worth two hundred thousand, probably a good bit more. Don’t sell it for less than a hundred.” Juliet gasped in delight. “I’ll never sell it,” she said, holding the strand against her copper-colored skin and turning to admire herself in the mirror. “Look, Marcella! Isn’t it beautiful?”

“You’ll sell it. You’ll need something to live on after I die. I’m not leaving you anything else; it’s all tied up in my foundation. And if I did, my cousin would make sure you never saw a penny. Now take them away and hide them from that old crone downstairs. And bring me my coffee in the morning. I’m tired of listening to Nannetta’s complaints.”

5

THERE’S AT LEAST one positive about death: no more bifocals. Someone had moved them again. She’d been reading Jarvinia’s letters right before the policeman arrived. She should have refused to see him, arriving a day late like that. There’s no courtesy any more. He hadn’t once addressed her as
contessa.
They must be with the letters, she decided, opening the casket she’d just closed. Most of the letters, the early ones, were written on the thin tissue paper that they’d used right after the war. Postage had cost a fortune back then, probably Jarvinia’s excuse for writing so seldom. She had filed them in chronological order, earliest to latest, an expression of what her father had once called her accountant’s soul. She pulled out the first. The writing was tiny and her lenses needed to be changed, but she could recite most of it off by heart:

SEPTEMBER 14, 1945
—
Darling dearest Queenie,
You’re an angel for sending the biscotti. I finished the entire box myself, not a single crumb for the peasants! Please, please send more or your darling Jarvinia will starve to death. I keep it under my mattress and eat one every day before presenting myself abjectly before the oatmeal that everyone here calls breakfast. I nibble around the edges and belch when the nuns fuss that I don’t eat enough. It’s darkish brown in color with lumps the size of sea urchins, without the sticky things on the end. And the coffee is worse than the oatmeal. Jarvinia, you bad thing, don’t exaggerate! Nothing is worse than the oatmeal. I survive by imagining us back at the Caffè Inglese, feeding each other those wonderful pastries. Do you remember the morning we ordered three each, all of them with cream inside! Your father called us little pigs—well, not so little, after eating three.

I’m something of a star here—nobody knows what to make of me. Fritz paid in advance for my keep—three years, so they can’t kick me out, but they’d like to. “That Nazi,” I heard Sister Ursula refer to me yesterday. Like she wasn’t one herself when the German army went marching across Europe. For sure the silly Schweizerin was beaming ear-to-ear when we entered Poland. Last month they discontinued German classes, and now when I speak German to Ursie, she replies in French. My French improves daily.

Have you seen anything of my mother? She wrote to me just the once since I arrived in May and then only to tell me “to remember.” Remember what, she didn’t say, but I’m sure she meant
keep your mouth
shut, you silly girl
.
She writes around the edges, like I eat my oatmeal. Hints here and there, but nothing in the open. She’s deathly afraid she’ll be rounded up with the Germans and sent to an internment camp, but even more terrified of
La Resistenza. La
Resistenza
would love to get hold of Fritz and those twenty-pound notes, and mutter is no Clara Petacci! She’d sell her first-born (oops, that’s me!) for a pair of silk hose, and Fritz for probably less. She’s applied for a Polish passport. Yes, indeed, she’s finally come clean. Pure-bred Aryan mutter is Polish—part, anyway—and me too, although how many parts is yet to be determined: one part German, one part Polish, and two parts bastard, and all belonging to you, Queenie. As soon as the passport comes, she plans to leave Venice, but no word of where she’ll go. Certainly not to Poland!

Fritz left, by the way, the same week as me, with no mention of where he was going, but I know he left her with plenty of lovely English pounds, which is how she pays the bills here. If they only knew, I’d be out on my ear. If that happens, can I come back to you, darling Queenie? Your mother would never notice, she wanders around in twilight land. We can rattle around in that grand old palazzo, drinking coffee and eating pastries all day, and sink licentiously into the mattresses in a different bedroom every night. Glorious sensual pleasures!

I’m writing this very small on both sides of the sheet—don’t go blind—as I have only one stamp. Annemarie, maid of all things—All Things!—has a huge crush and posts my letters from town. Ursie reads everything I write, so read between the lines if you receive a letter from me with the school’s name at the top.

Write, write, write, dearest Queenie. I’m desperate for news, and don’t forget the bonbons. Kiss yourself for me.

Jarvinia

DECEMBER 15, 1945
—
Dear Queenie,

A fine Venetian kettle of fish you’ve landed me in! Ursie reads all my letters, coming and going. Did you forget that my school is in the Confederazione Svizzera? Ursie speaks German, French—and Italian! First off, silly, leave your conscience alone, and it’ll leave you alone. The most important thing we learned in second term—
Thus conscience does make
cowards of us all.

I had a time of it explaining that remark about your father, but in the end I convinced Ursie of its innocence. I wasn’t so lucky over Annemarie, who’s been sent down to the scullery. Her replacement is too greedy—and ugly—to be bowled over by my charms or for me to exercise them. Her charge for posting a letter is outrageous, my pocket money for two weeks, so this may be the last letter for a while.

Jealous of Annemarie! Stupid! She’s a fling, not a replacement. Do some flinging yourself, I’ve got three more years here.

Ursie confiscated the biscotti in retaliation— gorging herself, and her
amore
, in the refectory. Don’t send any more, as it’s not my intention to feed the peasants on Venetian goodies. They wouldn’t appreciate them!

Thanks for visiting my mother. She wrote me last week that she’s off to South Africa. She didn’t mention Fritz, but that’s where he must be. Not a word of me going with her and escaping this prison. My cough is much better and the doctor says my lungs are healing nicely, so I could have joined them. He even said that the sun would be so, so good for me. I wrote mamma and quoted him, but she just ignored it. She’s a selfish pig, but why would I expect anything different! A daughter almost seventeen, with an ugly limp, won’t help her cachet. And who’d believe she’s twenty-nine when I tower over her?