5 - Her Deadly Mischief (10 page)

My heart started beating a little faster as I spied a slender, well-dressed woman masked in black velvet. She sat at a table in the corner, fiddling with a small cup; her demeanor made her stand out from the common citizens that filled this none-too-clean establishment. She obviously recognized me, because she removed her mask, sat up very straight, and watched warily as I wove my way through the café. Emilio must possess charms utterly unapparent to me; this poor girl had waited a full hour after the appointed time for their rendezvous.

Maria Albergati wore a black
zendale
that had fallen onto her slender shoulders and stood out against the bright blue of her gown. Her hair was done up in complicated curls too mature for her years, and a few pockmarks that could have been easily concealed by powder and paint marred her cheeks. Her
moretta
lay on the table, forgotten among the china and utensils.

“May I sit, Signorina?” I asked with a small bow.

“Oh, yes, Signor Amato. Please.” She pushed her coffee aside and leaned over the stained white tablecloth. “Did Emilio send you? Has something happened? I’ve been so worried.”

Dodging her questions, I asked several of my own. “Surely you’re not here all by yourself? Where is your chaperone?”

She ducked her head. “I’m alone for now.”

“How is this? A young woman of your age and station roaming San Barnaba without a companion.” It wasn’t hard to sound severe. In this neighborhood, no halfway pretty woman was safe, especially in these back alleys.

“Giovanetta has a sister who has been ill for weeks and weeks. Mama gives her only two hours on Sunday afternoon to visit, so we made a bargain.” She smiled nervously and pitched her voice in a whisper. “I see Emilio while Giovanetta visits her sister who lives nearby. No one is the wiser, no suspicions are raised, and we both spend a few precious hours with the person we love best in the world.”

I sighed, uncomprehending. This daughter of nobility had fallen in love with Emilio? The old adage was true: there was simply no accounting for tastes. “Giovanetta must be the woman who carried your note backstage,” I observed dryly.

“Yes. She’s my old nurse. But I don’t understand why you are here. Where is Emilio?”

A waiter appeared at my elbow. I ordered chocolate. And pastries. “You look as if you could use something more than coffee,” I told the pale girl across the table.

She didn’t answer but darted looks around the café while biting her lip. I regained her attention by tossing her love note on the tablecloth and announcing, “Emilio isn’t coming. He never received this.”

She made a grab for the folded paper with the broken seal and gave a tiny squeak—a mouse caught in a cat’s paws. She would have bolted if I hadn’t grabbed both of her hands in mine.

“Smile,” I ordered softly. “Smile and nod as if you were having a pleasant conversation with Emilio.”

Her dark eyes were wide with panic, but she obeyed. Cocking her head, she bent her thin lips into a smile that would fool anyone who happened to take an interest in our little tableau.

“How did you get my note?” she whispered fiercely.

“Your Giovanetta made a mistake. She delivered it to my manservant who naturally brought it to me. Do you have any idea how displeased your family would be if they knew you were meeting a castrato from the opera?”

“Displeased? That’s hardly the word, Signore. My father would have Emilio beaten within an inch of his life, and I wouldn’t be allowed to go to the opera for the rest of mine.” She tugged her hands free and dug frantically in her small drawstring bag. What was the girl up to?

Ah, she shoved a small handful of
soldi
and two silver ducats across the table. Less than I’d given Luigi for rowing me here in good time.

Jutting out her rather underslung chin, Maria asked hoarsely, “Will this buy your silence, at least for now? I’ll soon have more. My name day is coming up.”

It was my turn to duck my head in shame. Was the information I might obtain worth scaring the wits out of this artless creature? Despite her womanly dress and coiffure, she was little more than a child. An image of Tamerlano, a cruel tyrant I had once played on stage, flashed into my mind.

Pushing the coins back across the table, I took a more solicitous tone. “Put your money away. I need to talk with you, and this misdirected message simply provided an opportunity.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “You’re not going to tell Papa about Emilio and me?”

“No, it will be our secret.”

“Will you swear?”

I made the sign of the cross. “By the Blessed Mother and her Holy Son, I give my word.” Maria visibly relaxed, and I found myself smiling at her upturned countenance without shame. Her affair with my fellow castrato was her business. While Emilio might break her heart, his attentions could never lead to the humiliation of an out-of-wedlock child. If she was determined to have a forbidden lover, she could do much worse.

“What is it you want, then?”

“I’ve come to ask about your
fiancé
, Alessio Pino, and I don’t have much time.”

“Ah, yes. Signor Pino is no longer my
fiancé,
but w
hat about him? Giovanetta says that he has been arrested for pushing that woman out of the box. It makes me feel so sad. I can’t believe he’s guilty, not for a moment.”

The waiter returned with a pot of chocolate for me and fresh coffee for Maria. From under heavy-lidded eyes, he gave me a curious assessment as he set a plate of glistening fruit tarts between us and poured steaming liquid into our cups. Finally he shrugged his shoulders, muttered his
prego
, and backed away. The interruption gave me time to study my companion’s expression. Candor and muted concern beamed from Maria’s large brown eyes. Guile or subterfuge? No.

I blew on my chocolate. “Were you in love with Alessio?”

From the way she touched a golden locket at the small of her throat, visibly swelling with all the excitement of fresh, dewy love, I knew she was going to assure me that she loved Emilio and no one else. After we’d dispensed with that and I’d admired Emilio’s miniature portrait concealed behind one of her patron saint, I tried again.

“What did you think of Alessio?” I asked. “Most ladies find him quite handsome, the perfect gentleman as it were.”

“Alessio does have a pleasing appearance.” She reached for a tart and looked about as old as Titolino as she spoke between greedy bites. “But being engaged was not nearly as exciting as I imagined. Alessio and I were never left alone, you see, not for one minute. I sat next to him at dinners with a great number of other people. And the few times he called, he perched on the sofa as if it were made of nails while he asked me what books I read and if I’d had nice friends at the convent. He never mentioned love and never once told me I was beautiful. If Mother Caterina had not given me the lecture she reserves for boarders who leave San Lorenzo to marry, I would never have believed that I was going to be a bride.”

“How can you be sure that Alessio didn’t mu…um…cause the woman’s death?”

She licked raspberry off her lip with a pink, pointed tongue. “Alessio was just so amiable and obliging. Beyond his good manners, there was a certain…gentleness. I can’t imagine him hurting anyone. And,” she broke off to flutter her eyelashes sweetly, “you don’t have to speak of ‘that woman.’ I knew who Zulietta Giardino was.”

“Did you, now?”

“Mama and Papa discussed her, of course. They thought they were keeping me in the dark, but I have eyes and ears and know how to use them. So does Giovanetta.”

“Did your parents break off the engagement once they found out about Zulietta?”

“No,” she explained as she reached for a second tart. “I’m sure they didn’t. It wasn’t what they wanted at all. Mama has a carrying voice, you see. One night they were getting ready for bed and…I just happened to be in the corridor….”

A mental image of Maria in a nightdress with her ear pressed to her parents’ door brought a smile to my lips. I drowned it with a sip of chocolate.

“Anyway…I heard Mama tell Papa that if Alessio would just put Zulietta away until after the marriage, everything would be all right. It was Alessio who broke it off.”

“Did you overhear that, too?”

She shook her head. “Alessio told me first. He pulled me aside at one of Mama’s musical evenings. In an alcove where we couldn’t be overheard, he explained it all quite kindly. He loved another. Together, they had important work to do. He was very sorry, and I wasn’t to feel the slightest embarrassment, no matter what people might say. The broken engagement really had nothing to do with me. His words were”—she seemed to struggle for an adequate word—“genuine. It was the only real, true conversation Alessio and I ever had.”

“When was this?”

“Two weeks and three days ago.”

“That’s very precise. How can you be so sure?”

“Emilio had been invited to sing for Mama’s guests that night—I was so proud of him—he sang like an angel and is such a fine figure of a gentleman even if he is a stage performer. Anyway, Mama was watching Alessio like a hawk, especially after she saw him maneuver me into the alcove. But she saw no need to watch Emilio. So I managed to slip a note between his music sheets. After his songs, I retired to my room with a headache. He followed and I discovered that his hands are as skilled as his voice…” She paused, blushing to the roots of her hair.

I broke in quickly. Some things I didn’t wish to hear. “When did Alessio inform your father of his intentions?”

“Not right away. It was a week or so later. Papa was furious. He’d been counting on the match, you see.”

“That’s something I don’t understand. Why was your father marrying you to a husband with a glassmaker’s pedigree? Surely the Golden Book holds enough eligible young men to choose from.”

She shrugged and said baldly, “Alessio’s father has a great deal of money, and Papa speaks of almost nothing but the expenditures demanded by his position on the Council—that and the failing fortunes of our estate on the mainland.” She spread her hands. “I suppose we are poor, Signore. Papa actually seems rather desperate—I heard him tell Mama that he wasn’t going to let Alessio slip through his fingers.”

Of course, money. Doesn’t almost everything that drives this old world come down to money in the end? I stared into my cooling chocolate. Signor Albergati must have harbored notions of reversing Alessio’s decision to end the engagement. What better way to nudge the boy back into the fold than to remove his current paramour. I pictured the interior of the theater. The Albergati box was on the fourth tier, almost directly across from the Pino box. If Maria’s father had been waiting for an opportunity, if he somehow knew that Zulietta was in the curtained box with only a helpless dwarf to protect her…

I looked up. “Maria, I want you to think very carefully. On the night that Signorina Giardino was killed, who was watching the opera from your box?”

She responded without hesitation. “Just as always—Mama, Papa, Umberto, Claudio, and me.”

“Umberto and Claudio are your brothers?”

She nodded.

“Servants?”

“We take Giovanetta and several footmen with us.”

“All right. Do you remember me singing? Just before Signorina Giardino tumbled out of the box?”

“Oh, yes. I was enjoying your aria very much. You sound so very like Emilio.”

I had to take a deep breath before continuing. “Were any of the servants out of the box during my aria?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about Umberto or Claudio?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then after a moment of apparent bewilderment, she narrowed her gaze to a glare. A transformation occurred across the shabby table. Maria straightened her back and crossed the ends of her
zendale
over her bosom. Suddenly I could believe her family had been among Venice’s elite for a span of eight centuries. Her voice could have frozen cream. “You must forgive me, Signor Amato, but I must ask you to leave. Mother Caterina always told me I talked too much, and I regret that I’ve proved her right.”

In vain, I tried to cajole the friendly, guileless girl I’d been taking chocolate with out of this new, proud creature. It was not to be. Despite her attraction to Emilio, Maria’s loyalty to her family was rock solid. The only hint I had to go on was the look of alarm that had passed over her features when I’d asked about her brothers.

Chapter Nine

Luigi delivered me to Murano shortly after midday. The island was a smaller edition of Venice, a compact cluster of airy bell-towers and brick-and-plaster edifices that seemed to float on the surface of the lagoon. It had its own Grand Canal lined with magnificent houses, and on its outskirts, drifts of glossy ivy emblazoned walls that protected courtyards and fruit orchards, as well as the inevitable glass factories. Their smoke-belching kilns contributed to the island’s very solid prosperity by producing that most delicate of all luxuries—glass.

Hundreds of years ago, Venice’s city fathers had moved the glassmakers from the big island to the smaller one. The official reason was to prevent fire from escaping the furnaces and destroying the city, but the move had the bonus of confining the master glassmakers and their secrets to one easily guarded location. Back then, Venetian artisans were the only Europeans capable of producing a decent mirror. They had also refined techniques of making vividly colored enameled glassware, glass shot with threads of gold, glass made of multicolored strands cut to resemble tiny flowers, and imitation gems that rivaled the brilliance of real stones. To protect this supremely valuable asset, the Senate forbade the masters and their skilled assistants to leave the Republic and made the transmission of trade secrets a treasonable offense.

But when had government edict ever stopped ideas and designs whose time had arrived? The entire civilized world wanted to drink from Venice’s elegant goblets and view their images in silvery mirrors of matchless clarity. Inevitably, Venetian techniques migrated to other European glassmaking centers, especially France, our traditional rival in crafting all things beautiful and luxurious. Despite those ravages, Murano’s glassmakers still harbored some secrets, and the Doge’s
confidenti
, who reported on everything from salacious books to false religions, still kept a sharp eye on their activities. Punishment, or even the threat of it, was a serious matter.

As my gondola sliced through the cloudy green waters of the Canale Serenella, I wondered if Messer Grande would be furious over my delay. To each side, trees hung over the water and lazy ribbons of gray smoke unfurled over clay rooftops. A peaceful scene—but I wasn’t anticipating a peaceful interview.

Pushing on his oar, Luigi paused at a smaller canal that branched off to the left. Murano offered no more signs to guide the bewildered visitor than Venice, but I thought this was the way. I nodded to Luigi, and we soon tied up at a stout wooden jetty where several work boats and gondolas were already moored. A pair of stone pylons flanked a dirt path that led to a complex of buildings plastered in soft, peeling shades of blue and ochre. Each pylon carried a blocky
P
that had been worked in tessellated squares of multihued glass.
P
for Pino: we had reached the right place. After ordering Luigi to stay with the boat, I started reluctantly up the path.

Messer Grande was waiting in a gravel courtyard filled with conical piles of sand and wooden barrows holding other raw materials of the glassmaking trade. Supporting his backside against a rick of wood sheltered by a tattered awning, he was taking snuff as leisurely as if he had been sunning himself at a café on the Piazza. Several constables hovered in the background.

“Ah, Signor Amato.” Messer Grande hailed me with a smile, but his voice was chilly. “I was wondering where you’d got to. Finished your business in the ghetto, did you?”

“For now.”

“Did you find the widow Grazziano talkative?”

“Fairly so. I certainly learned more about Zulietta and her family than I knew before.” I spoke carefully, preferring to digest my morning’s activities in the ghetto and the San Barnaba café before I shared them with Messer Grande.

The chief constable didn’t press me. “We’ll save the good widow for later,” he said. “I’m anxious to introduce you to Cesare Pino. I have several witnesses who place him at the theater around the time of Zulietta’s murder. Cesare doesn’t deny he was there. He does, of course, deny stabbing his son’s mistress and pushing her over the box railing. You will tell me if he could have been the man.”

“But Cesare rarely attends the opera,” I answered as Messer Grande steered me across the courtyard toward a low building made top-heavy by a massive stone chimney. The constables trailed in our wake, keeping a respectful distance. I continued, “What brought him to the Teatro San Marco that night?”

“A messenger delivered an anonymous note warning of Alessio’s intention to display his paramour before the opening night crowd. Cesare had put months of effort into arranging his son’s marriage to Maria Albergati, so he was determined to stop this ridiculous folly. But Alessio had already taken off in the cockle boat—we found that, by the way—just where Alessio said it would be.”

“So Cesare set off after his son. Fit to be tied, I’d wager.”

“Exactly. He rowed himself over in another work boat and made his way to the theater intent on preventing Alessio and Zulietta from humiliating Maria Albergati and her family.”

“By any means possible?”

My companion shrugged within the red robe of office draped over his black suit and severely folded neckcloth. For this visit, Messer Grande was looking every inch the state official. As he paused and directed his penetrating gaze inward, I again had the sensation of a mind that could call up any number of details at will.

“Here’s how it is with Cesare Pino,” he said. “His roots reach deep into Murano soil. The Pino glassworks was one of the first moved to this island, and it’s been churning out masterpieces ever since.
While others concentrated on mirrors or chandeliers festooned with flowers and fruit, Cesare’s ancestors made goblets and other vessels that graced the banquet tables of Versailles and princely houses throughout Germany and Austria. Cesare has always tended his fires with an almost monastic fervor, even before he was widowed some years ago. His wife died in childbirth, and the infant that would have been Alessio’s brother along with her. Cesare never remarried. If anything, his wife’s death sharpened his focus and made him more of a recluse. He runs his factory with an iron hand and expects Alessio to bow to his will in all things.”

“As it seems Alessio did until Zulietta came along,” I observed.

Messer Grande grinned. “She must have been a bewitching thing, don’t you think? To have induced the devoted son to rebel in such a public manner?”

“Did you ever see Zulietta? Before she lay dead on the opera house floor, I mean.”

“Only from afar. She was not to my taste—I enjoy women with more padding—but she did have a very fetching way about her. And many admirers obviously.”

I nodded as another thought occurred to me. “Have you considered that the killer could have been one of them? One of those…admirers. Hot with jealousy or feeling the stab of humiliation over her romance with Alessio?”

“I’ve had a word with all four men who shared previous arrangements with Zulietta,” he explained with a grimace. “Unofficial talks wherever I could corner them—I spoke to one at the Ridotto in between faro turns. Strange what a man will submit to in order not to ruin a night of gambling. But that’s neither here nor there—” He waved an airy hand as his attention flitted to a boy bearing a bucket toward a well in the center of the courtyard. Apparently finding this errand of no interest, Messer Grande turned back to me and continued, “They have all transferred their affections elsewhere and harbor nothing but pleasant memories of their dalliance with Zulietta. Apparently, she gave them their congé around the same time—Ascension Day.”

I stopped short, my boots scraping on gravel. “But that was six months ago! Pamarino said Zulietta and La Samsona made their wager over Alessio’s affections no later than early September.”

Messer Grande slanted an eyebrow. “Interesting, is it not? We have a beautiful courtesan without a protector for a space of months. A long time when you consider the expenses of her establishment.”

“Perhaps the dwarf was mistaken.”

“Not at all. I’ve had confirmation of the date from La Samsona. The wager was sealed on the first of September. Since the stakes were so high, she marked it down in her little notebook most particularly.”

We started to walk again, more slowly. So Messer Grande had interviewed the former strongwoman. I wondered how he had taken to her charms; she was as well padded as any Venetian beauty could hope to be. Shaking the memory of her burly arms and shoulders from my head, I asked, “Did Zulietta’s rival tell you she had sent her best jewels to the bank vault?”

He nodded with a chuckle. “La Samsona was leaving nothing to chance, but it’s my impression that losing even her second-best baubles would have wounded her. There’s nothing that great whore loves better than diamonds…” He cocked his head like a dog hearing a distant whistle. “Unless it’s pearls.”

Messer Grande seemed to know La Samsona better than one interview would allow. I longed to continue our conversation, but we were nearly at the steps of the factory and a sizeable man had come to fill its doorway. He was outfitted in work clothes, including a leather bib apron that covered him from neck to knees. His rigid stance proclaimed his annoyance at anyone, perhaps most especially the law, meddling in his affairs.

“You again,” he observed with a scowl aimed at Messer Grande.

Ignoring the man’s lack of social grace, the chief constable answered, “Good afternoon, Signor Pino. I’ve brought the man I told you about—Tito Amato, the singer from the theater.”

Cesare Pino stared at me for a long moment, then drew back just enough to allow us to pass into his workspace, a long room dominated by a hulking furnace in the far corner. I saw why Cesare was immediately recognizable. His right cheek was marked with the shiny, puckered pink of an old burn. The same fire had also damaged his right eye, rendering it lashless and sunken. Above it, his eyebrow had been scorched away. The rest of the glass master’s appearance was unremarkable, if severe: white hair cropped so short it resembled an ermine skull cap, high-bridged nose, firm jaw, muscular forearms emerging from rolled-up sleeves.

“Do you still have my boy?” he asked gruffly.

“For now,” said Messer Grande. “If Alessio weren’t so stubborn about what he did and where he went between leaving here and showing up at the opera house, I might see fit to release him. Someone needs to drum some sense into that young buck’s head.” He finished with a pointed look at the young buck’s father.

“Don’t expect me to go running over to Venice. The boy has closed his ears to me these many months. If he respected my counsel, he would never have taken up with that squalid, grasping Jew in the first place. Filthy
puttana
. Zulietta Giardino! Bah!” He spat on the sand-strewn floor as if her very name were poison. “She’s roasting in Hell with the rest of her deceitful race, and I can’t say I’m sorry.”

Stung by the force of his anger, I jumped in without leave or preamble. “Perhaps you’re the one who sent her there.”

“I might well have done—if I’d ever met her, Signor Capon.” He snorted and fixed a scowl on his lips. Whether he disliked eunuchs as much as Jews or was vexed to have missed the opportunity to dispatch his son’s mistress, I could not tell.

“You were at the theater the night she was murdered,” I observed through gritted teeth.

“So I was, but all I accomplished was pounding on the door to our box.”

“It was locked?”

“That’s right. I didn’t have the key. Alessio carries it. I called his name and banged repeatedly, but whoever was inside wasn’t opening up.”

“Did you hear any noise from the other side of the door?”

As Cesare shook his head, Messer Grande murmured, “How could he, with all the racket he was making?”

I showed the chief constable my palm, intent on completing my questions. “Was there anyone in the corridor?”

“Not a soul.”

“No small man? Or perhaps a man with a weathered complexion, completely unmasked?”

“Are your ears made of flannel? I told you no.”

“What did you do then?”

“I hurried away to make the lout who runs the box office find someone to get that door open. By the time I got to the bottom of the grand staircase, the whore had crashed into the pit. But I must say, Excellency,” he twisted his thick neck to face Messer Grande, “I’m surprised at you. Since when do you let a twittering nightingale from the opera conduct your investigation?”

A smile flitted across Messer Grande’s lips. “Tito is so diligent, I hate to stop him. But you are right. Questions are not the point of this visit.”

“You want to see if I’m lying—if your nightingale recognizes me as the man in the box with that jade of a Hebrew.”

Messer Grande nodded.

“I suppose he’s already taken a look at my son.”

Messer Grande nodded again.

“Whatever he must do, then, be quick about it. The
fritta
is almost ready for transfer.” Cesare cast his gaze toward the brick kiln that was shaped like an oversized beehive. Its maw glowed yellow-orange; the flames within roared and groaned. Through the bright, wavering haze, I could see pots baking in the searing heat. They must contain the sand and potash and other ingredients that made up the molten glass. My eyeballs burned after peering at them for only a moment, and a rivulet of perspiration ran down my nose.

Messer Grande was sweating, too. He wiped his face with a handkerchief that came away from his cheeks with a brown stain. Odd. I’d barely had time to wonder about that before the chief constable challenged Cesare in a voice that brooked no argument. “We’re here on the Doge’s business—you’ll give us as much time as we need.”

The glass master replied without flinching. “I understand that a crime has been committed, but even so, you must respect the needs of a man’s business. The
fritta
doesn’t wait. When it’s ready for the pipe, it’s ready.”

“Let your other masters tend the glass.” Messer Grande gestured toward several middle-aged men who were arranging wicked-looking pincers and grippers on a bench near the furnace.