The Veils of Venice (32 page)

‘Nedda said you'd like to talk with me.' Her voice was soft. She dropped her eyes before his gaze. ‘About Olimpia.'

‘Yes. I've been asking Signora Bari some things about her, too.'

‘You don't think Mina Longo killed Olimpia, Nedda said.'

‘No, I don't.'

‘I don't want to believe it, but it seems to be true. To think of Olimpia being murdered by someone she cared about. It is too horrible.'

Her lips started to quiver. She went to the window and looked out at the
sottoportico
and the canal.

‘I have only good things to say about Olimpia and Mina Longo,' she went on in a strained voice, her back turned to Urbino. ‘They seemed to be good for each other, better than Olimpia and I were. I don't like to have any bad feelings toward anyone. I am glad Olimpia and I made peace between us before she was killed. And I'm glad I forgave her aunt Apollonia in my heart long before she died.'

‘What do you mean about Apollonia Ballarin?'

Evelina turned around. She had a calm, composed expression on her face now.

‘She cursed me sometimes when I was going up to Olimpia's workshop. Olimpia told me to ignore her. Her mind had been twisted by religion, she said. But I could tell it bothered Olimpia – bothered her for my sake and her own. She had to put up with a lot with Apollonia living in the same house. I am not religious, Signor Macintyre. But I believe in forgiveness. That's why I'm going to Apollonia's wake and funeral. Nedda and I will go together. And I forgive Mina Longo, too.'

Although Urbino believed in forgiveness, Evelina's quickness to reveal her forgiving spirit put him on his guard, as he had been earlier when Nedda had been so apparently open and honest with him.

‘Did Olimpia ever mention the blue rooms?'

‘The blue rooms?'

Urbino explained.

‘Oh, those rooms. I asked her what was inside them once. She said they were storerooms for clothes and other things.'

‘Were the rooms ever open when you went to see her?'

‘No. Never.'

Urbino did not go directly back to the Palazzo Uccello, but he wandered through the snow-filled city to savor the rare atmosphere and to stimulate his thinking – or rather to try to sort out its various elements, for it was thick with theories and speculations.

In his abstracted state, he found his way to the Piazza San Marco, which was relatively empty. A few people stood in the white expanse as if they were in the middle of a country field, looking at the pigeons wheeling above them and pecking in the snow.

He turned into Florian's for a glass of wine. Like the other patrons, he sat at a table next to one of the windows to enjoy the scene outside. Soon, the municipality would be setting up the stage for
carnevale
across from the Basilica, and something far less serene than the snowfall would be transforming the city. But Urbino would be in America by then, escaping the madness. He was far from able to appreciate this thought since it only brought even closer to the surface the anxiety he felt over Mina and his imminent departure with Eugene.

After leaving Florian's, Urbino retraced some of his steps to the Fondamenta Nuove to stand on the bridge near the Church of the Gesuiti.

He looked across the dark gray waters of the lagoon to the cemetery island, whose brick walls and cypresses were cloaked with snow. Olimpia lay there, and soon Apollonia would – one the victim of the foulest of play, the other dead, it would seem, in the sad natural order of things.

Was it possible that a fatal connection existed between them – a connection other than the family one – that had led either directly or indirectly to Olimpia's murder? Something that had to do with the morally righteous Apollonia's animosity toward Olimpia and the forgiving Evelina – and, he assumed, toward Mina as well, who had taken Evelina's place?

He had begun his investigation into the mysteries of the Palazzo Pindar with the fear that Gaby might be about to become a victim for some unknown reason, but now she was squarely within the small company of suspects for her sister's murder. Her reluctance to open the blue rooms could mean there might be something in them that could connect her, through the past, with her sister's brutal murder.

Gaby's fears, Olimpia's murder, and now Apollonia's death. The sequence continued to intrigue him, and even more so because he could not be sure that the death of the eldest member of the Pindar clan had been natural. If it had been the result of foul play, so much of what he and the contessa had been considering – the results of all their poking and peering and peeping about – needed to be re-fashioned.

Pulling himself out of these thoughts, Urbino noticed that the waterbus was approaching the nearby dock. He hurried to catch it. He needed to get home as soon as possible now.

Back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino put on his smoking jacket of dull red brocade in which he had never smoked a single cigarette, cigar, or pipe. In the library, after pouring himself a snifter of brandy, he selected Smetana's
Moldau
and Shostakovich's
Symphony Number Five
and
Violin Concerto Number One
to listen to. They seldom failed to encourage his meditative moods.

He sat down at the long priory refectory table. Serena abandoned one of the maroon velvet seats of the mahogany confessional, and, after kneading for a minute, settled in his lap.

He drew a vertical line down the center of a blank sheet of paper, making two columns.

At the top of one column he wrote ‘A' and at the top of the other ‘E'. Beneath each letter he listed every relevant ‘A' and ‘E' in the case.

Three in the group – Achille, Apollonia, and Efigenia – were family members who had died over the course of more than twenty-five years. Also on the list was someone who was outside the family but linked to it through Olimpia. This was Evelina, whom Urbino considered the wild card of the group. She brought with her Nedda, who, although not on the list, had to be considered as a player in the game, because of her relationships with Achille, Ercule, Apollonia and Olimpia.

He worked out various combinations of the two names, scribbling them on another piece of paper. He enjoyed playing with the combinations, seeing what he could come up with.

Sometimes the combinations were bizarre, even shocking. Other times his imagination ran away with him, but he let it run as far as it would go, even though he ended up with what seemed to be the most unlikely of scenarios.

Through it all, he assigned different values to his wild card Evelina, further complicating the picture. And he reminded himself that he needed to see beyond the initials, which risked misleading him by not encouraging him to look in other areas – for example, mainly Nedda Bari, but even Italo Bianchi.

There were so many unanswered questions – even, quite probably, unanswerable ones.

Had there been anything in Apollonia's life before her embrace of her ‘
vita nuova
' that might clarify her relationships with her two children and her Pindar relatives? Something that might connect her in some way with Olimpia's murder? Why had she left Alessandro the lion's share of her assets and possessions?

Was Gaby's admiration for Alessandro as transparent as it seemed? What had triggered her condition? Had it been the deaths of her parents and Achille? Had the death of one of them hit her harder than any of the others?

And what was behind Eufrosina's nervousness? Was it only something professional, because she feared the contessa would cancel the contract? Had there been some reason for removing the Fortuny items from their display cases other than, as she had told the contessa, the greater facility of photographing them?

How much had Evelina Cardinale's rejection wounded Olimpia? Had she got over it so easily? Had Nedda had an ulterior motive for facilitating their breakup?

What was at the heart of Apollonia's aversion to having any of her clothes deposited in the blue rooms? Why had Gaby abandoned using the name ‘Ella'? Had her refusal to sell her share of the Palazzo Pindar played a role in her sister's death?

And what contribution might the blue rooms have made to Olimpia's murder?

Yes, so many puzzling questions – questions unanswered, questions unanswerable. And many of them he had been asking too long without reaching any even provisional answers.

During the past two weeks, Urbino had become dubious about some things that seemed perfectly normal and had been tempted to explain away the most unusual of eccentricities. Usually in his cases, he looked for peculiar, inexplicable behavior, but this time it seemed to be present almost everywhere among the Pindars. He had started to think that it was their normal behavior that might be the most suspicious – normal behavior that had nothing peculiar about it unless it was its normality.

Yes, it was a strange case, rich in ambiguities, and one that stimulated, provoked, and perplexed him from almost every angle. Everything looked so different if you just put one piece in the background or completely out of sight. It was as if he were tilting a kaleidoscope and finding new patterns in the chips of colored glass.

He read the letter over and over again, hoping he would see it in an altered light and that it would yield up some meaning he had missed on his other readings.

He did his best to gather the pieces, the names, the possibilities into some semblance of order, but more often than not, he came up with a jumble not unlike the ones in the two blue rooms.

And just as the Pindar family had discarded very few of their garments but had stuffed them into the two rooms, so was Urbino careful not to discard or ignore anything – even the smallest, most apparently inconsequential detail – that might prove to be useful to clothe his theories. He never lost sight of the possibility that Olimpia's murderer might be neither the ‘A' nor the ‘E' of the letter, but someone who had been set into deadly motion because of it.

Sometimes he felt as if he were trying to force a suspect into an ill-fitting garment or into one usually worn by the opposite sex.

And all the while he was doing this, echoing through his mind like a refrain were Nedda Bari's words: Change the past and you will change the future.

Except that Urbino tailored her words to fit his own search for the truth, posing the question, What in the past had brought about Olimpia's murder and was still affecting the residents of the Palazzo Pindar?

He paused to drink in the melodies of the third movement of Shostakovich's violin concerto, and then, after filling his snifter with more brandy, returned to work on his list, scratching out names and combinations, adding others, and all the while trying not to violate either the established facts or his strong impressions.

After a long process of judicious elimination, he ended up with one combination, one scenario, one train of events that he felt had most plausibly led to Olimpia's murder.

He went over it again. He could come up with nothing else that satisfied him, nothing else that gave him that pleasurable chill that signaled he had come upon the truth. It was the feeling he had had as a child, when he had picked up a piece in a complicated jigsaw puzzle, turned it around in his hands and examined it, and realized that it would not only fit a crucial part of the puzzle but would also make all the other pieces easier to put into place.

He sat at the table thinking, stroking Serena, and listening to the final movement of the concerto.

When the movement had rushed madly toward its conclusion, he got up, placed Serena back on the cushions of the confessional, and went to his study to get the copy of the letter.

Very carefully, with a pair of scissors, he cut it down to the dimensions of the original letter – which he was now certain had been found in one of the blue rooms – and then he did his best to give it a worn look.

He took out a wooden box in which he kept his photographs and looked through them for ones of Apollonia. He took out six. They were of Apollonia alone and with Eufrosina and Alessandro, with Gaby and Ercule, with Olimpia, and with the contessa. He put the doctored copy of the letter with them.

When he finished, he telephoned the contessa. He gave her the benefit of his thoughts, working it all out for her.

‘It makes sense,
caro
. But are you sure that it makes more sense than any of the other possibilities?'

‘I am.' He then told her what he planned for the next day.

‘At Apollonia's wake?' The shocked note in her voice was sharp and clear.

‘When it's a case of murder, I don't think we should consider what is appropriate or not. Only what is likely to get results. It's our opportunity. We can't miss it.'

After remaining silent for a few moments, the contessa said, ‘I'll support you in whatever you do.'

‘It's not only your support I'll need. There are a few things you can do – and
not
do.' He told her what these were in detail.

‘Shouldn't the police be involved?'

‘I'll ask them to have some men outside the Palazzo Pindar – if I can convince Gemelli it's worth his trouble. I'm going to contact him now.'

Sixteen

Urbino kept stealing glances at Apollonia's face against the white lace-covered pillow of the casket. It looked less stern in death than it had in life – that is, her more recent life, not her younger days of indulgence. Her dead lips had a slight smile.

Would she approve of what he was doing and what he hoped was about to happen?

The fact that he had such thoughts was a sign of his uneasiness. Although he had tried to brush off the contessa's misgivings last night, he was troubled that he planned to take advantage of Apollonia's wake to pursue – and hopefully to end – his investigation.