Deadly to the Sight

Deadly to the Sight

The Mysteries of Venice, Book Six

Edward Sklepowich

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

For my Tunisian and Moroccan friends, colleagues, and students, especially Anwar Amara, Henda Ammar, Sihem Arfaoui, Asma Ben Yahia, Riadh Boujnah, and Amel Guizani, and with particularly warm
shukrans
and
mercis
for Monia Bayar and Nessim Effassi

This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so, it will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you here.

—
JEANETTE WINTERSON
,
The Passion

PROLOGUE

Return to Florian's

The best time at Caffè Florian's is five o'clock on a winter afternoon. The best room is the Chinese salon. And the best company, as far as Urbino Macintyre was concerned, was his good friend, Barbara, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini.

Out in the Piazza San Marco, the chill January air schemed with a sudden burst of rain to send the blessedly few tourists scurrying for shelter. But all was warmth in the intimate room, with its dark wood and old-fashioned radiators, Urbino's sherry, and the Contessa's first-flush jasmine tea and, most of all, their long-looked-for and too-long-delayed reunion.

Together again, Urbino said to himself, taking in the sight of the Contessa as she leaned gracefully back against the maroon banquette. What more could he ask for? The Contessa and Florian's, the magical, winter-haunted city beyond the glass, and everything else that had recently come his way.

He was falling in love all over again.

These were his comfortable and somewhat sentimental thoughts as he bathed the Contessa in a look that could express only a part of what he felt for her and all the rest.

“I like to think of this as the still point of our wheel,” she said, abandoning in mid-flow her account of mutual friends to show how in tune they were. “Not only at this time of the year,
caro
, but even in the midst of high season. It's our own special place.”

“Ours, yes, but only because it's first of all yours.”

His words were nothing less than the truth, for the Contessa possessed the scene like a gem in its proper setting.

Around her, mirrors reflected her attractiveness, which hadn't diminished over the years, at least in his eyes. Bronze
amorino
lamps on the walls enhanced the tender glow of her skin.

How much art? How much nature? It was something that still kept him wondering after all these years.

She seemed to have stepped down from one of the elegant portraits, framed in dark wood and sheathed in glass, that graced the walls. The intricately patterned ceiling and the burnished parquet floor were, for the moment, the only imaginable canopy and anchor for her charms.

The reigning quiet at this serene time of the year, both within the Chinese salon and beyond its windows, seemed an extension of her soft, well-modulated voice. On this afternoon, and during the past weeks he had heard it, recounting some of the thousand and one details of what had transpired since he had left Venice for Morocco almost two years ago. Her letters and phone calls, and one golden weeklong cruise of the Mediterranean on
La Barbara
had communicated only a small portion of them.

Urbino momentarily shifted his glance out into the Piazza San Marco where the rain had temporarily abated. He marveled all over again at how the square's gleaming stones and strutting pigeons, its colorful clock tower and brightly-restored Basilica, its graceful arcades and crimson-and-gold banners—how, in fact, everything conspired to let him pass back into the picture so comfortably.

Even mundane details took their necessary places: a short, fat woman in a knit cap pushing a souvenir cart out of the arcade, the wooden planks providing dry passage over deep puddles in front of the Basilica, and an unmuzzled dog dashing ahead of its master toward the pigeons.

And then came the church bells to wash the square with their liquid tones. The sounds of Venice were dear to him, whether they were the cooing of pigeons and the plaint of cats, the lapping of water and the shouting of boatmen, the groan of mooring rope and the mourn of foghorns, or the cries in the Rialto market. But the sound of its church bells was one of the dearest. They now brought not only music but also, somehow, splashes of color to the scene that a few moments before had been pearly gray and reminiscent of Sargent's palette for
Venice par temps gris
.

His attention returned to the Contessa. She was an attractive woman approaching sixty, as best he could figure out, if she hadn't already passed it. She looked at least ten years younger. Stylish in a subdued manner, she wore this afternoon her multicolored Fortuny dress that had belonged to the actress Eleonora Duse. Her choice of the dress vaguely disturbed him, however. It was a sign that she was either especially weary or depressed, since she believed there was some talismanic quality in the garment that dispersed clouds and lifted fatigue.

She selected a petit four—a slim oblong of yellow with lime-green icing—and examined it as if she were admiring its perfection of color and shape. She prepared to take a bite.

“And it seems,
caro
,” she said, “as if Oriana and Filippo are finally, after all they've gone through and put
me
through, ringing down the curtain on their strange and long-playing performance.”

What she meant by her theatrical metaphor was the marriage of her friends, the Borellis. For as long as Urbino had known them, they had been in the midst of domestic disputes and extramarital intrigues that had not so much brought them to the brink of divorce as saved them from that ultimate step. But now Filippo had moved out of the Ca' Borelli on the Giudecca and taken an apartment in the Castello quarter.

“Dreary, dreary rooms, Urbino. Scarcely any better than the ducal dungeons and literally a few paces away. The whole situation depresses me. What if they never get back together?”

Where Oriana and Filippo thrived on the ups and downs of their opera buffa marriage, the Contessa despised change. Her decision not to go back to her native England after her husband's death was in large part because she felt sheltered from it here among the slow rhythms of the city, its self-contained, monastic air, and its immutable face that seemed to defy and outwit the passing years.

In truth, the Contessa's rather complicated, even perverse love for Venice was not much different from Urbino's. They were both willing victims.

He smiled at the thought.

“I'm afraid I don't find it as amusing as you do,” the Contessa said. He had no chance to explain before she went on: “I'm appealing to you. Perhaps you can help Oriana and Filippo.”

“I don't see what I can do.”

She finished off the petit four and seemed about to reach for another. He had seen her demolish an entire plate in no time at all if she happened to be in an agitated mood.

“You're a friend of fifteen years, but you're not emotionally involved. You can get inside a person's head and skin and—and understand him, can't you?” What she meant by this somewhat startling image was that he was a biographer. “And there's something else you can offer those two poor souls, the most important thing of all.”

She gave a longish pause, which had the effect of drawing his attention to her gray eyes. They had a peculiar, discomfiting sheen of purpose.

“What's that?” he prompted.

“Your own experience with these matters. You
were
married, you know, or have you managed to forget it?”

Exasperation sharpened her voice.

Not for the first time since his return did he hear a discordant note that seemed to indicate that not all was perfect with their reunion.

“And divorced shortly afterwards,” he pointed out.

“Precisely.”

The Contessa paused again, this time to survey him with a tender, almost commiserating look. He was put on his guard.

“Don't you see, Urbino dear,” she went on in a softer tone, “that advice from you would be precious? That is, coming from someone who once was in their position and—who knows?—might regret having divorced? It would mean much more than whatever I can offer. Alvise and I had an ideal marriage.”

There were so many ways to respond that he required a few moments of reflective silence. The Contessa spent the time eyeing the plate of petit fours.

“I don't regret divorcing Evangeline,” he began. “I regret having married the poor girl.” Then he added, “As you well know—or did, before I went off.”

“Ah, yes, before you went off.”

“And also,” Urbino said, ignoring the sigh that had followed her words, “happy marriages are all alike, as Tolstoy said, but an unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own particular way.”

“I believe he said
families
and not
marriages.
”

“Whatever limited and very particular experience I had with marriage—and divorce—couldn't be of much help to Oriana and Filippo. And they have to want my help.”

Knowing the couple as well as he did, he realized there was, fortunately, little chance of this. He had no intention of getting involved.

The Contessa touched the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

“How much you want to be wanted and needed! It's one of your most appealing qualities—and dare I say American as well? Just don't get carried away by it.”

A confused look came over her face as she realized that this last piece of advice was, on the surface, very much at odds with what she was trying to persuade him to do. But she refrained from making any clarification, knowing that he was more than capable of unraveling the various strands of what she said and what she meant.

His only response was to peer out into the Piazza.

“Are you expecting someone?” the Contessa asked.

She too looked into the large, open space as if searching for a familiar face or figure. She was about to return her attention to the Chinese salon and their discussion, when her eyes opened wider.

“Oh, my,” she said, with unmistakable distress. “Could she be coming here?”

Urbino followed the direction of her gaze.

He saw a small, old woman with a shock of white hair and thick glasses a few feet away from the window. He had never seen her before. Dressed in a long, black shawl, she stood against one of the columns in front of the Chinese salon. She wore black fingerless gloves, and she held her shoes. Her feet were wrapped in black trash bags to make easier passage through the
acqua alta
that had seeped and washed into the city during the night.

She was piercing the Contessa with eyes magnified behind the lenses of her glasses.

“Who is she?”

“Nina Crivelli. A lace maker from Burano. She may be here to see me.”

“Why?”

“She—she wants something from me,” the Contessa said.