The Veils of Venice (28 page)

‘Obviously Olimpia saw no need to seal it,' Urbino said. ‘We should be a little careful handling the envelope and what's inside. It might be important to know whose fingerprints are on it if it comes to that.'

‘You take it.'

The contessa handed the envelope to Urbino, who took it between two widespread fingers of one hand. With the other hand, he lifted out the flap and extracted a folded sheet of white notepaper, which was only slightly yellowed around the edges. He placed the envelope down on the table and, careful to touch only the edges of the notepaper, he unfolded it.

The contessa, who realized that she had been holding her breath, moved closer to Urbino, but all she could see without her reading glasses was a blur of light blue handwriting that covered only a small part of the paper.

Urbino was frowning.

‘What does it say?'

‘It's not much more than a note. And it's in English.'

Urbino read it aloud in a low, deliberate voice:

My one and only A,

Because we shouldn't, it is all the more delicious. Don't you agree?

I love you for all the reasons against it and for a thousand and one more. I always will.

I hope you like my gift. I looked for a long time before I found one in exactly the same shade as your eyes. It is a very special shade that is only yours.

Forever,

E

Ten minutes later the contessa and Urbino were in the
salotto blu
. The contessa needed the comfort of the small room that she spent so much of her time in, and much of it with Urbino. Since leaving the house this morning, she had felt whirled around, and now the letter had made things even worse. It had immediately set in motion a series of disturbing thoughts.

‘Thank you,' she said to Urbino as he handed her a glass of sherry. Urbino settled on the sofa beside her, with Zouzou between them, asleep. The letter lay unfolded on the coffee table.

‘I don't recognize the handwriting,' the contessa said, after she had read it with her reading glasses on.

‘Neither do I. But I haven't seen any of the Pindars' handwriting. Have you?'

The contessa thought for a moment. ‘I've got a note here and there during the years, mainly from Apollonia and Regina. I don't have them anymore. I don't remember what their handwriting was like. But why are you assuming that one of them wrote this?'

‘I know it's a big assumption, but everything so far has come back to the family – or almost everything, it seems. I would even go so far as to say that we need to consider that both the writer and the recipient come from the family. The fact that we have the initials “A” and “E” alerts me, too. Think of how common those initials are in the Pindar family.'

The contessa did her best to absorb the implications of what he had said. ‘But – but that would be horrid. It
is
a love letter!'

‘So it seems. But it's also completely possible we're not dealing with something like that,' Urbino said, clearly in an attempt to reassure her. ‘I have no doubt that either “A” or “E” is – or
was
– a Pindar. The fact that blue eyes are mentioned points us in that direction, too. “A” has blue eyes – or had them. As far as I know, all the Pindars do.' He paused. ‘Something the letter says makes me think of one of your Pindar relatives in particular.'

The contessa ran her eye over the letter again. She did not understand what he meant.

‘The reference to a thousand and one more reasons,' Urbino said. ‘
The Arabian Nights
. Ercule has two volumes of Burton's translation.'

‘But it's a common enough thing to say, don't you think? I've said it many times.'

The contessa, surprised at the feeling of annoyance that had suddenly come over her, silently chastised herself. Her nerves were on edge. She forced herself to calm down as best she could. Mina was at stake in all this. Although the contessa doubted – or was it that she feared? – the implications of the love letter being exclusively a Pindar affair, she knew she had to face it directly. Yes, Urbino was right. They did have to consider the worst, and she would do whatever she could to help him arrive at what she could only think of as horrid conclusions.

‘And besides,' she said, continuing her thought out loud, ‘by trying to establish the worst, we could end up eliminating it.'

‘Yes.' Urbino scrutinized the note. ‘I can't even tell if it's a feminine script or a masculine one, if there are such things. A graphologist might be able to tell, but I think I read somewhere that there is no way of being definitive about it. What we need to do now is to give our efforts to what we can do. We have to put our heads together. “A”? “E”? Who might they be?'

‘There's no “O” for Olimpia. Or “M” for Mina. That's some consolation. And the envelope and letter are old.'

‘They seem to be. But they could have been made to
look
old.'

‘Is that what you think? Why would someone have done that?'

‘We need to keep all possibilities open. And that, dear Barbara, presents a great problem. Just about any letters other than “A” or “E” would have kept the possibilities down. Now we have many to consider. The Pindars and their penchant for names beginning with “A” and “E”!' Urbino's tone was exasperated. ‘We have Alessandro, Ercule, and Eufrosina. And there is Apollonia even though she's dead. And Apollonia isn't the only dead person we have to consider.'

He stared at her as if urging to think.

‘There's Achille,' she said.

‘Anyone else?' Again, Urbino waited.

‘Yes. Efigenia, Apollonia's and Platone's aunt,' the contessa said. ‘How many does that make?'

‘Six. Three “A”s and three “E”s.'

‘How far back do we have to go with the Pindar names? There has been an Elettra and a Euridice, an Antigone. I think there was a Euripide. I am sure there must be others that I have never known or have forgotten. It's an entire cast from a Greek tragedy.' The contessa gave a nervous little laugh.

‘Let's limit ourselves to the relatively recent past, to Pindars who had some kind of direct contact with those who are alive today and with people outside the illustrious, eccentric family!'

For the next ten minutes they arranged the names in various combinations of the “A” and “E” of the letter. The contessa's head was spinning. Then she remembered something that might help.

‘I have Eufrosina's signature on the contract! The letter is signed with an “E.”' She went to the study to get her copy of the contract, proud that she was able to contribute something right away to proving or disproving Urbino's theory.

They carefully compared the signature and the handwriting, keeping the note on the table and not handling it. After a few minutes of scrutinizing the two, however, they realized that there was no way of determining from the signature whether Eufrosina had written the note. Her signature was distinctive, but hardly more than an indecipherable scrawl.

‘Maybe a graphologist could help us with this, too. But her signature is almost like an abstract design. Let me keep the contract and the letter, though. I'll try to find someone to look at them.'

Urbino read the letter again. The contessa stared down at it but could not focus on it. It sounded as if Urbino was mumbling something under his breath.

‘I've forgotten my high school mathematics,' he said clearly and distinctly now. ‘If I could remember the formula, I could tell you how many permutations there are.'

‘Permutations!' the contessa said in a raised voice. Zouzou stirred in her sleep. ‘I feel we're playing a version of Gaby's game.' She turned to Urbino. ‘A game! Could someone want us to be playing a game?'

‘Who? Olimpia? Mina? I don't think so. I think the person who wrote the letter wanted to conceal identities – because it was important to them, or at least to the writer, to do it.'

‘But if the person really wanted to conceal their identities, then why didn't he – or she – not use any initials at all?'

‘Ah, Barbara, if only people would be consistent, then this line of work I've taken up – that
we've
taken up – would be much easier. The initials might refer not to names but to something else, like affectionate names, terms of endearment. But Olimpia apparently knew who corresponded to the initials, and she was afraid it would cost her her life. If it did, she wanted to have a hand in revealing the identity of her murderer. And you must realize what we have to consider seriously. You don't like to think of Olimpia as a victimizer because of Mina's relationship with her. But she could have been blackmailing whoever wrote or whoever received the letter. One would think, though, that she would have had more sympathy, given her own situation.'

‘The desire for money blinds and deadens people,' the contessa pointed out. ‘But blackmail makes no sense if the person being blackmailed doesn't have a lot of money. And the only one in that house who has – who
had
– a lot of money was Apollonia.'

She was about to tell him what she had learned from Bianchi about Apollonia's will when Urbino said, ‘But does a blackmailer have to be out for money all the time?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The blackmailer could want something other than money – or something that might be converted into money, one way or another.'

The contessa took some solace in a sip of sherry. ‘We have to figure that letter out!' She felt a sense of urgency not untouched with fear. “A” and “E”. “A” and “E”,' she repeated, as if just saying the two initials out loud would yield up their meaning.

‘Sometimes these things have a way of revealing themselves when you don't try too hard.'

‘But why didn't Olimpia add some explanation? Why didn't she tell us what she knew?'

Urbino carefully folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope.

‘Olimpia might have thought that she'd be putting herself in greater danger by being explicit. Of course, if it is true that she was blackmailing someone, she had already put herself in grave danger, but, as I said, people aren't consistent. What she should have done was write down what she knew and told the person that she had given the information to someone who was instructed to open it in case anything happened to her. But all we have is this.'

He indicated the envelope.

‘If we're dealing with blackmail, and I emphasize
if,'
he went on, ‘you can be sure that someone is desperately looking for this note and would do anything to get it – even murder again.'

He put the letter, along with Eufrosina's contract, into his pocket, and then started to pace around the room as he liked to do to calm himself and stimulate his thinking.

‘If that letter is going to mean anything to us eventually – if it's going to point to a murderer – it will have to take its place in the other things we know, and that we're still learning,' he said. ‘Just finding one more piece of information could make everything as clear as crystal. Or maybe all it would take is to pay more attention to something we already know, individually or together. Let me tell you what I've been doing since we saw each other yesterday.'

As Urbino continued his pacing, the contessa listened to an account of conversations he had had with Oriana, Olimpia's two seamstresses, and a woodcarver. When he finished, he knelt in front of the fireplace and poked at it with the bar, then returned to the sofa and picked up his sherry.

‘At least one “E” on our list isn't a Pindar,' the contessa said. ‘Evelina. But from what Olimpia's seamstress said – was it Rosa? – it seems that Olimpia was the injured party there, as she was with Alessandro. And I wonder what Olimpia and Nedda were arguing about? Olimpia seems to have had more than her share of disputes in the past six or seven months.'

‘Oriana said it was very heated. And the day I was in the gondola in front of the Palazzo Pindar, Olimpia didn't acknowledge Nedda's greeting. It may have something to do with Evelina.'

Urbino asked her if there was anything that Oriana had said that she disagreed with.

‘I wasn't aware that Nedda was running after Achille,' the contessa replied. ‘As far as I could see, he was devoted to her. I saw no sign that he was thinking of breaking off the engagement. But,
caro
, aren't we losing sight of something? Of Gaby? This whole terrible situation goes back to her fears. Gaby was the person we were giving most of our thoughts to. Shouldn't we still be doing that?'

‘We should continue to keep her in the picture, yes. She is very much on my mind. And so are the blue rooms that she's in charge of.'

The contessa ran her fingers through Zouzou's white fur.

‘By the way,
caro
, I played the actress with Italo Bianchi again this morning before I went to the Giudecca.'

‘You did? Good for you, Barbara.'

‘Nora,' she gently insisted. ‘Apollonia left almost everything to Alessandro.'

Urbino stared, complete surprise on his face. ‘I wonder why?'

‘Maybe the will has a version of “For reasons of which she is well aware”. But considering the way Apollonia had become, maybe there are no reasons, except distorted ones that she had in her head. And you know how Alessandro was always making himself indispensable. The perfect devoted son. He could do no wrong. Poor Eufrosina! I've seen the change that came over Apollonia, almost as if she became a different person. Eufrosina and Alessandro both deserve a reward for what they had to go through after her great conversion, but only Alessandro is actually getting one.'

Urbino stood up. ‘I have to be going. I'm meeting Eugene.'

‘Ah, Eugene. The glimpses he gives of the Urbino who used to be are delightful. Although what he tells me sometimes makes me realize you haven't changed much at all.'