The Veils of Venice (31 page)

A sour, musty odor engulfed the group as soon as both doors were pulled open. It was composed of dead air, mold, and perspiration, overlaid by traces of perfume.

The interiors of the rooms were dim, their only illumination coming from the vestibule. All the clothing items crammed inside blocked the windows.

Piles upon piles of outer clothing crowded the first room, reaching within a few feet of the ceiling. The second room was like a slagheap of footgear, purses, neckwear, belts, hosiery, gloves, hats, head coverings, and other items that Urbino's eye either could not take in or easily identify.

Perhaps a principle of order and organization had reigned once upon a time, but it had long since been abandoned. It was as if all the Pindars from all the previous centuries had been forced to take off every last scrap of cherished garment in the cold vestibule for the waiting maws of the silent rooms. Urbino was able to make out, affixed to the walls, the edges of cupboards and the dull gleam of hooks, but they had long ago reached their limits, requiring that all future items of the dead had to be piled on top of each other.

Modern styles were, in most instances, in the front of the rooms, with older items behind and beneath them. But the pile gave evidence of having been disrupted, as if something had burrowed outward from within or dug into it from outside. And if the intention had been to preserve the objects by placing them in the dark secrecy of the rooms, it appeared, from the look of many of them, and from their accumulated offensive odor, that they were in the process of disintegrating.

The eye picked out a Renaissance girdle, all beribboned, on top of a broad-ribbed turtleneck sweater, a mate-less embroidered glove lying beside a balaclava, and high-platformed Venetian
chopines
keeping company with tennis shoes and high-button shoes. An embroidered lace bridal veil was snagged in the buttons of a waistcoat. The mouth of more than one purse was gaping.

The odor became stronger and more offensive as the moments passed, as if the rooms were taking a much too long delayed opportunity to exhale.

Betty took a step backward into the vestibule. It may have been only because of the odor, but Urbino sensed that it might also have been because of the disturbing associations generated by the sight, associations that were all too keen to him – not of people already dead but still living and stripped of their clothes before they went to another place to meet their death.

Ercule and Gaby seemed unaffected by the sight and the smell.

‘Hardly any room left,' Gaby said. ‘We still haven't put my sister Olimpia's things in.'

‘Do – do you mean you put everything here?' Betty asked.

‘Not everything!' Gaby shot her a twisted little smile. ‘I didn't put this coat in, did I? And my aunt Apollonia – the one who died the other day – she hated the rooms. She made her son and daughter promise that none of her things would be put in them. They had to put them to use, give them to the poor, or burn them.'

Ercule had his arms folded across his chest. ‘But we don't only put things into the rooms. Our sister Olimpia used to take things out. She had a professional interest. She was a dressmaker and when she died she was designing costumes for a play. I even think Alessandro took out some things, though I'm sure Apollonia never knew.'

Urbino remembered Alessandro's belted tweed coat that had given off a musty odor in the Chinese Salon. The coat was most likely one of the things that Alessandro had taken from the blue rooms.

The Chins were not able to take their eyes off the rooms. The odor had not yet dissipated.

‘The rooms must have been a real treasure trove for her,' Urbino said.

He thought of the black broadcloth coat in eighteenth-century style, its collar detached, up in Olimpia's atelier. It must have been something she had raided from the blue rooms. He had not noticed any other old articles of clothing, but he had not given the atelier as thorough a search as he would have liked. And now that he knew that the blue rooms held not only clothes from the distant past but recent ones as well, he realized that some of the newer clothes that he had seen might very well have come from the blue rooms.

‘Eufrosina might find it interesting to photograph some of these things,' Urbino added.

‘Eufrosina? She hates the rooms. She calls them graveyards.'

The door to the embankment opened and Eufrosina, as if conjured up by their references to her, entered the vestibule with a whirl of snow. She looked very pale. Wisps of damp hair straggled from beneath her knit hat. Far from being dressed in mourning, she was wearing a bright red coat, although her leather gloves were black and looked like the ones Apollonia had been accustomed to wearing. She was carrying her satchel.

She came to a momentary halt as she saw the group standing in front of the blue rooms. It seemed to startle her to see the rooms open, but she regained her composure enough to give them all a cursory, collective greeting before going up the staircase.

‘You see,' Gaby said in a low voice. ‘She doesn't even like to look at the rooms. Like mother, like daughter.'

Fifteen minutes later, the snow was still coming down thickly when Urbino emerged from the Palazzo Pindar with Eugene and the Chins. It helped to dispel some of the gloom that the blue rooms had cast on him – and, as was quite evident to him, on the Chins. Only Eugene seemed unaffected.

Over his companions' protests, Urbino insisted that he was putting Gildo and Giovanni at their service for the next few hours.

‘I have to see to some business matters. The gondola can be your floating sleigh. And you won't be out in the cold this time, Eugene.'

Before leaving them in the hands of the two gondoliers who were waiting with the gondola in front of the Palazzo Pindar, he arranged to see them when they returned in a few days from Parma and Bologna, where they were going on a restaurant tour sponsored by the cooking school.

Fifteen

After calling the contessa from the Palazzo Uccello and telling her about the blue rooms and the disturbing impression they had made on him and the others, he sat in the library, with a glass of sherry, and let his mind run freely and almost randomly over what he had learned about the Pindars and their relationships with each other during the past two weeks. Unlike any of his other cases, his investigation hadn't taken him far afield from the immediate circumstances of the murder, largely because of the strong gravitational pull of the family and his assumption that the murder had been a family affair. Although there were so many odd pieces to try to put together, almost each one was directly related to the Palazzo Pindar and the family.

He feared he might have been neglecting two pieces that had a tangential relationship to the Pindars.

One involved Nedda Bari, whose connections with the Pindars included both branches of the family living at the Palazzo Pindar and went back more than twenty-five years. The other was Evelina, who appeared to have had a particular friendship with Olimpia before Mina came on the scene and who was now part of Nedda's entourage. And Evelina's name began with ‘E'.

After fifteen more minutes of pondering, Urbino was on his way to Nedda's house. The snow had completed its magical transformation of the city, softening sharp angles, accenting curves and arches, and providing a powdery frosting to the parapets of the bridges. A greater silence had fallen on the city. Urbino's boots squeaked in the snow, and he enjoyed the sharp pure sting of the air in his nostrils. He was brought back to his childhood visits to Vermont, when he used to wake up on snowy mornings and rush out into the yard, expecting the snow to have turned into sugar.

His reverie ended when he entered the Campiello Widman, where two costumed figures rushed over to him from the other side of the square and started to dance around him, gesturing in the air with their arms but without uttering a word. One was dressed in a voluminous black cloak, lace cape, three-cornered hat, and black oval mask. The other wore the costume of Columbine, with a white half-mask. They raced away toward the Grand Canal, sliding in the snow and being chased by a little boy blowing a squeaker.

Drifts of snow had collected under the
sottoportico
of Nedda's building, blown in from the canal side. The moored boats, covered with tarpaulins, seemed like soft waiting beds with clean white sheets.

Maria answered the bell. She hesitated when Urbino asked if Nedda was at home.

‘Who is that, Maria?' came Nedda's voice from the front parlor.

‘Signor Macintyre.'

‘Show him in.'

Urbino took off his cape and did his best to stamp the snow from his boots before going into the parlor.

Nedda, who was sitting on her sofa, had a small glass of clear liquid in her hand. A half-empty bottle of anisette stood on the table in front of her. Nedda's large, attractive face was flushed and had a slack look.

The room, which had been a hub of activity on his previous visit, was silent and filled with shadows. The rest of the house was quiet.

‘Sit down and have a drink.' Nedda's voice was slurred. ‘Maria, bring another glass for Signor Macintyre.'

Maria complied and then left them alone.

Nedda poured anisette into Urbino's glass and more into her own.

‘
Salute
!' She raised her glass and downed most of the anisette in one gulp. She gave him a quick look, in which there was a great deal of sharp awareness despite her inebriated state. ‘Let's not play games. I am not the type for that. There is no need for either of us to pretend this time. You're investigating Olimpia's murder. I knew it the other day but I didn't say anything because of the others. You've come at a good time. We are alone now, and anisette always puts me in a truthful mood. I have nothing to hide.'

Urbino, who was always alerted and sceptical when anyone said this, took a sip of anisette.

‘From what I read in the newspaper and what I heard,' Nedda went on, ‘Mina Longo killed Olimpia.'

‘Heard from whom? Ercule?'

‘So you know? It must have been Natalia. But that was a long time ago. Yes, he told me how he saw Mina with the scissors and how she was screaming that she had killed Olimpia. It couldn't have been more obvious. Ercule and I bump into each other from time to time. No reason not to be civil. And he helped me rent Apollonia's building. It was good for him and good for me. He and his sisters got money from Apollonia for the apartment and I got this building. And I have no intention of leaving!'

‘I'm sure something can be worked out with Alessandro and Eufrosina.'

‘Let them try to get me out! They will see a different side to me, especially that Eufrosina. She's had it coming for a long time.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean that I won't restrain myself any longer from slapping her face, and that's all I'm going to say about it!'

Nedda was making even less of an effort this afternoon to conceal her dislike for Eufrosina.

‘Maybe Ercule will help you with Alessandro and Eufrosina,' Urbino suggested as a way of staying in the same general area of her relationship with Eufrosina.

‘If it's to his financial benefit. Only money is going to get him his dreams. That was one reason why it never worked out between us. Even back then he had his wild dreams, and was always looking for money.' She drank down the remaining anisette in her glass. ‘It would have been ridiculous, me and Ercule. What a mismatch! It was only my grief that brought us together for a while. He was Achille's brother, and he was devastated by his death. I'll say that for him.' Nedda's face clouded. ‘But that was a long time ago.'

She poured herself more anisette.

‘If you think the anisette is going to get me to talk about my relation-ship with Achille, you're wrong. That's a sacred topic. But you've also come about Evelina – Evelina Cardinale, right?'

There was no point in pretending otherwise. ‘Yes. She was Olimpia's friend.'

‘
More
than her friend. But it was all over a year ago.'

‘How do you know her?'

‘She's the daughter of one of the women I help. She started to ask for advice about her relationship with Olimpia. Olimpia was too possessive, she said. Evelina is an assistant at a veterinary clinic in Dorsoduro. Olimpia was always giving her money, telling her she should quit her job. I encouraged Evelina to break away. It wasn't that I had anything against Olimpia. I am a very accepting woman. I could not do the kind of work I do if I weren't. So I gave Evelina a place to stay. Olimpia had been paying for an apartment near the clinic. She's still living here. She's upstairs now. But don't think she had any animosity toward Olimpia. She wished her well.'

‘Did helping her cause any problems between you and Olimpia?'

‘It certainly did! But then Mina Longo came along. Olimpia became friendlier to me after that. We got together once in a while.'

Nedda's description of a reconciliation with Olimpia did not match what he had seen in front of the Palazzo Pindar.

‘She seemed happier than she had been when she was with Evelina,' Nedda said. ‘I guess everything –' She broke off. ‘Can you believe I was going to say that everything worked out for the best in the end? But Longo ended up killing her.' She leaned back, not quite suppressing a sigh. ‘The past. Change one thing in it and you change the future.'

The philosophy was very much on her mind these days.

She stood up, swaying slightly. ‘Excuse me, but I think I'll go upstairs and lie down.'

Maria appeared from the hallway and steadied her with a firm hand under Nedda's elbow. From the way Maria did it, Urbino suspected it was something she often did for Nedda.

‘If you want to speak with Evelina,' Nedda said, turning around, ‘I'll see if she can come down. Neither of us has anything to hide.'

Ten minutes later, Evelina came down the staircase. On closer inspection, Urbino found that she was indeed pretty, as Rosa Custodi had said, in a delicate manner similar to Mina, with light brown eyes. But her pale face was drawn and her blond hair needed a careful application of a comb or a brush.