The Veils of Venice (24 page)

Encouraged by the thought of how she might be able to help him and the contessa, Urbino quickened his step past the warehouses and workshops, with seabirds wheeling and mewing above him, to reach the other end of the narrow island.

The austerity of the Borelli apartment, so at odds with Oriana's flamboyant appearance and manner, was something that Urbino had never become accustomed to. There was only one item in the whole room that had no utilitarian purpose – a Barovier-Toso vase filled with dried brown flowers. But the view from the living room's wide, ceiling-high windows of the distant Riva degli Schiavoni, the Doges' Palace, the Campanile, and the domes of the Basilica was more than compensation for the room's drawbacks.

Urbino took in the scene for a few minutes after entering the apartment. This was by preference and by Oriana's request.

‘Keep looking at the view, Urbino dear, not at me, if you don't mind – not until I've sat down,' she said in English in her cigarette-hoarse voice. ‘I don't want you to see me hobble.'

Oriana had answered the door on crutches. Her leg, broken on the slopes of Cortina d'Ampezzo, was in a cast. An attractive woman in her fifties, she was dressed in a crimson silk kimono with a pattern of cranes and flowers. A pair of over-sized sunglasses, which she wore both inside and outside and in all kinds of weather, concealed a third of her face.

Urbino did as he was told. When he turned from the windows, Oriana was installed on the neo-Biedemeier sofa. He seated himself, with some difficulty, in a chair shaped like a slingshot.

‘And don't stare at my cast!'

‘How's Filippo?'

‘Hale, hearty, and happy. No broken legs or other members. Coffee while it's still warm?' Without waiting for an answer, she poured each of them a cup from the coffee maker on the glass table. Urbino was happy to see that there was also an open bottle of red wine. ‘I told him there was no need for him to come back with me. He is having too good a time. And so was I before this happened.'

The Borellis had an unconventional marriage, characterized by mutual infidelity, tolerance, an apparent lack of jealousy, and – in some strange way – devotion to each other. Her accident had interrupted an affair Oriana had been having up in Cortina, but neither of them saw the need to have it interrupt the one Filippo was enjoying.

Oriana fixed a cigarette in her holder and leaned forward for Urbino to light it. She blew the smoke away from him in the direction of one of the skeletal halogen lamps.

‘So how can we help our dear Barbara? She's in a terrible state, but she's probably revealed more about how she feels to me. Woman to woman. If you can't get to the bottom of this whole sordid affair, I am afraid for her. And I do not mean sordid because of Mina's relationship with Olimpia. I hope you know me better than that! It is dirty and ugly because Mina is in danger of being sacrificed by someone in that house. Barbara filled me in. I was sceptical at first but she convinced me, just as you did her. You see what an influence you have.'

‘And I've come here to have you exert
your
influence. I'm hoping that you might be able to fill in some gaps to help us. Barbara's told me what she knows, but there's a lot that she doesn't.'

‘Of course there would be. She isn't Venetian, not even Italian, any more than you are. Information about people here is not going to come her way as easily as it does to me. And she doesn't make much of an effort of gathering it as I do, even when I think there might not be any need for it. She should have a healthier attitude to gossip.' Oriana inhaled on her cigarette. ‘And there's something else. She's related to the Pindars. People are not going to tell her things about them for that reason, too. And when she might notice that something is off, she might put the best interpretation on it.'

Oriana had a good assessment of the situation.

‘So shall we begin with the dead?' she asked. ‘Olimpia and Apollonia?'

‘And Achille, too.' Urbino drained his coffee. ‘Do you mind?' he asked, picking up the bottle of wine.

‘Pour me a glass, too.' She took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly. ‘I didn't know Olimpia well. I had her make some dresses for me a few years ago. She did a good job. I still wear one of them. I was going to have her make another dress for me when I returned from Cortina. It was more to give her the business than anything else, but as I said, she did very good work.'

‘She had financial problems?'

‘My neighbor knows a woman who worked for her, Teresa Sorbi. Olimpia couldn't give her all of her November salary, or the other worker either. It was the first time it had happened.'

‘She could have been short on money because someone was blackmailing her.'

They discussed the possibility that her sexual orientation had been the target of blackmail but they dismissed it, as had Urbino and the contessa, for the same reasons. Olimpia had been open about it.

‘Maybe she stole someone's designs and passed them off as her own,' Oriana said with a smile to show that she did not take the possibility too seriously.

‘Not all that far-fetched. I can understand why someone could have been blackmailing her for that, but why kill her? Blackmailers are the ones who end up dead. Which brings us to the question, was
she
blackmailing someone? It makes more sense. She discovered someone's secret and charged a high price for keeping it. Barbara and I have gone through it. We haven't come to any conclusions. But Bianchi said that Olimpia had come into some money over the past few months.'

‘Barbara mentioned Olimpia's commission from the theater company. The money could be from that.'

‘All of it or maybe only some of it.' Urbino wished there were some way of finding out how much Olimpia had been given by the theater company, but he doubted if he could get that information. ‘And we could be dealing with two unrelated crimes. Olimpia could have been blackmailing someone – and not necessarily someone in the house. And someone could have murdered her for a completely different reason. But whenever I consider her murderer's identity I always see the face of someone in that house.'

Oriana stared at him in surprise. ‘You do? Which one of them?'

He saw the misunderstanding. ‘No. I don't mean I see
one
face. I mean the face of the murderer is the face of one of the Pindars. It could even be Apollonia's face.'

‘Apollonia!'

‘We can't put her out of the picture. By the way, do you think you could get Teresa Sorbi's phone number and address from your neighbor?'

Oriana nodded. There was an abstracted look on her face. She was thinking of what he had said about Apollonia. When Oriana broke the silence between them, however, it was not to mention Apollonia.

‘A few years ago, I saw Olimpia and Nedda Bari on the other side of the Campiello Widman.' This was near Bari's house. ‘They seemed to be arguing. Olimpia was shouting. I couldn't make out what it was about.' Oriana shrugged. ‘Nedda was calmer than Olimpia and kept shaking her head. It was obvious she was holding herself in. I continued on my way. I don't think they noticed me.'

Urbino poured more wine in their glasses. He turned Oriana's attention to Apollonia.

‘Our paths used to cross in the old days,' she said. ‘Until she put on black and withdrew into herself – or into religion. When she was younger, she was the life of the party, though it is hard for you to imagine it. By the time you met her, the change had already come. She had already started out-poping the Pope. I thought she would sign herself into a convent one of these days.'

‘What do you think was behind it?'

‘One thing I know for sure is that she started talking about some Savonarola at San Giacomo dell'Orio. An old eccentric who wanted to convert a few more souls before he died. It was after her husband died. Of a heart attack almost right in front of her eyes. Maybe it made her think more of mortality. It was as if a button had been pushed. She put away her Fortuny and her other stylish clothes and started draping herself in black dresses, veils, scarves, and gloves. That's the Apollonia you knew.'

Oriana paused to drink some wine before going on.

‘Once she went through her great conversion, there was hardly anything you could talk to her about unless it was related to religion or about how bad other people were. She herself was beyond reproach. She had repented. She didn't believe in anyone else's repentance.'

‘Were sexual affairs something that she repented?' If anyone would know the answer to this, it would be Oriana.

‘That's not something I think she was ever guilty of. If we can speak of guilt in such matters.' She gave a short laugh. ‘But maybe it's the ones you hear the least about who have the most to conceal. And if there
was
some deep dark secret and someone found it out, I don't think she would have been very happy about it. Some people like to talk about how bad they were before they found religion, but Apollonia was definitely not that type. She would have been devastated. Thank God, my life has always been an open book. No one would ever be able to have that power over me.'

‘The new Apollonia must have been hard on Eufrosina and Alessandro.'

‘Hard isn't the word for it! But they toed the line – or made sure they covered their tracks well. They knew all that money was waiting for them. It has ruined Alessandro. He's never made anything of himself, knowing that a lot of money was eventually going to come to him. We'll see what he does with it now. And what Eufrosina does. They both have probably spent it all in their heads years ago. You know how it is.'

‘What kind of man was Eufrosina married to?'

‘A good man. He died of leukemia a few years after they married. Diagnosed in June, dead before the new year had come. Apollonia approved of him. But Eufrosina didn't love him. It was obvious. I always felt that some other man had broken her heart, and she never recovered. That's how I think of Gaby, too. She was going to escape into the night with her lover. She waited for him to come, with her bags packed, and he never did – and she's never left the house since. Or maybe he did come,' she amended, ‘and told her it was all over. She killed him on the spot and has him buried somewhere in that palazzo.'

This latter comment, though Oriana had thrown it out in so evidently a jocular manner, gave Urbino a brief pause, as his mind ran over again the question of what had triggered Gaby's agoraphobia. Had it been a delayed reaction to the death of her parents and her brother, who had left the house one day together, never to return, freezing her with fear of the world outside the Palazzo Pindar? Or had there been a hidden event in her life that she was still managing to conceal with the same kind of care she gave to the collection?

‘But you don't know of anyone either of them was interested in?' Urbino asked Oriana after a few moments.

‘Maybe it's a matter of the principle I mentioned. Those you hear least about …' she trailed off.

‘What about Ercule?'

‘For as long as I can remember the only romance he's ever had has been with his books and his dreams.'

Urbino got up and stood in front of the windows, taking in the scene across the stretch of water again, and then switching his attention to San Giorgio Maggiore on his right. As it always did, the island and the church made him feel calm. He told Oriana about the secret engagement between Ercule and Nedda after Achille's drowning. When he turned around, she was staring at him in disbelief.

‘Nedda and Ercule! Surely you're mistaken.'

‘Only if Nedda was deceiving Natalia, and I see no sense in that.'

‘Now you've told
me
something! Whatever was the attraction? They're oil and water.'

‘It's hard to know what attracts people. It's often a mystery.'

‘A mystery, yes, that's what Nedda and Ercule being engaged is. But you say it was right after Achille drowned. It could have been a way of dealing with the loss. And Ercule also lost his parents.'

‘Yes.' Urbino watched a car ferry making its way toward the Lido. ‘What did you think of Achille?'

‘Achille was exceptional. He could have been the savior of that whole family if he had lived. He had everything! Looks, intelligence, generosity, a great sense of humor. Don't look at me in that way! There was never anything between us. Nedda threw herself at him. But I don't think he was in love with her. I could sense it from the way he behaved when he was around her. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he had been planning to break off the engagement. Maybe because someone else was in the background. I have nothing specific to base it on. Just my instinct for these things.'

After leaving Oriana, Urbino went to the Basilica San Marco. On this late afternoon, the church's vast interior was dim. The rich amber light of the hanging lamps, similar to the one in Ercule's
salotto
but smaller, made all the gold and colored stones glow darkly. A small group of tourists was walking slowly around, most of them looking up at the mosaics that covered the vaulting and walls but only a few noting the ones underfoot. Three worshippers sat in the pews near the Madonna of Nicopeia in the left transept. Urbino went to the altar that held the tenth-century icon that was venerated because it was believed to bring victory. Like so much else in the church, it had been stolen from Constantinople.

He said a prayer, asking for a victory different than the ones that devotees used to beseech the Madonna for – not a victory of guns and swords against a martial enemy but one of wits and patience against someone who was doing everything to hide from confrontation. And a victory accomplished before not too much more time had slipped away.

Urbino spent several minutes gazing at the Pala d'Oro behind the high altar. Some of the cloisonné enamels of the golden screen, which was encrusted with precious gems, had been looted from Constantinople. The enamel of the Empress Irene, which was the one Urbino always seemed to be drawn to rather than the religious ones, communicated some of its serenity to him.