Deadly to the Sight (20 page)

A few minutes later, when Salvatore was outside, Urbino walked toward the back of the room, feeling slightly disoriented by the mirrors. He entered the kitchen.

It was small and cluttered, and filled with a pleasant mixture of food aromas. A back door led into a courtyard, which was connected to the Via Galuppi by a narrow
calle
.

Nella, a small, rounded woman in her forties, was spooning tomato sauce into the middle of a plate of rigatoni. He introduced himself and thanked her for the meal.

“But you didn't eat much, signore.”

“It's still a little early for lunch for me. I'll save the tiramisu for the next time.”

“I've already wrapped you up some. Salvatore was going to bring it to you.”

She reached for a bag tied with red ribbon on the counter by the courtyard door. Next to the bag was a stiff-brimmed white cap.

“You can return the bowl the next time.”

“How kind to wrap it so nicely when you're busy like this. You must miss Nina Crivelli's help. There's a lot to be done, with just you and Salvatore.”

“Don't forget Signorina Regina. We manage.”

Footsteps approached the door. It was Salvatore. A distinct scowl marred his good-looking, but haggard face. His eyes fixed on the cap for a few seconds, then looked away.

“Here.” Nella handed him the plate of pasta. “I gave the signore his tiramisu. Enjoy it, Signor Macintyre. If you'll excuse me, I have to prepare the risotto.”

Urbino was now eager to return to the motorboat. Salvatore, however, took a long time to bring him his bill and return his change. When he was about to leave, he was further delayed by one of the French tourists from the back of the restaurant, who called him over to their table. She excused herself and said that she recognized him from the photograph on his biography of Proust. She had it with her. He signed it and chatted with them for a few minutes, hoping he didn't show his impatience to leave.

By the time he reached the motorboat, Giorgio was standing at attention in his white cap and dark blue jacket. A slightly mocking smile seemed to curve his well-formed lips.

19

The next day was bright and sunny, and Urbino and Habib made an outing to Murano, where Habib wanted to do some sketching. Urbino left him at the Ponte Vivarini, while he wandered around the island, stopping in the Glass Museum and the Basilica of San Donato, which held vivid memories of his first case. For most of the time he kept thinking about what he had learned on Burano yesterday. It had been a great deal, and he was trying to sort it out.

For the last hour of his ruminations, he sat at a cafe near the Ponte Vivarini and idly watched Habib go about his sketching. Habib was so caught up in his work that he didn't even notice. When Urbino rejoined him, he proudly showed his sketches of the bridge and the Palazzo da Mula a short distance away. They were quite good.

Before they went for lunch at Urbino's favorite trattoria on the island, they stopped by Bartolomeo Pignatti's glass factory on the Fondamenta dei Vetrai.

Ten minutes later Habib was watching Pignatti with childlike wonder as he went about his art. The glassmaker was like some muscular priest officiating before a tabernacle of fire and making all the ritualistic gestures that would help him fashion a precious offering. Even his occasional grunts and mumbled words and phrases suggested scraps of mysterious prayers and supplications. Urbino followed the man's movements with his own fascination as the iridescent lump of molten glass at the end of a long tube began to swell from the force of Pignatti's lungs.

Eventually, with the application of pincers, spatula, and the artistry of the maestro, a shape emerged. Urbino, who had spoken a few quick words to Pignatti after they had discussed the Palazzo Uccello's damaged chandelier, was able to recognize it before Habib.

“A squirrel!” Habib said.

Squirrels, along with cats, were his favorite animals.

Pignatti placed the little glass animal in an oven to cool.

“He's making you a whole family. We'll pick them up when we finish lunch.”

20

Urbino was finishing dinner that evening when the telephone rang. It was the Contessa. He was alone in the Palazzo Uccello and looking forward to an evening of quiet reflection. Habib had gone off to see Jerome shortly after they had returned from Burano and had said that he wouldn't be back until late.

“I had success with Corrado,” the Contessa said with a thrill of excitement in her voice.

Corrado Scarpa, the Contessa's friend, had a connection with some of the police officials at the Venice Questura. Over the years Urbino had benefited from information he had passed on. Yesterday afternoon, after returning to the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino had asked the Contessa to look into a few details. He hadn't filled her in yet, however, on all he had learned.

“I told him I needed to settle some questions in my own mind since I was the one who found Nina Crivelli's body. I said that I keep telling myself that if only I had got there earlier, I might have saved her. I doubt if he believed me, but he agreed to read the reports and talk to Dr. Rubbini. There's no doubt she had a massive heart attack. No evidence of anything else, except a bruise on the back of her head, caused by her fall. She died almost instantly. From what can be estimated, less than an hour before I found her. A local couple left the restaurant with Salvatore and the cook at nine-thirty. He locked up. Nina must have arrived shortly after to clean.”

“What about the lace handkerchief?”

“The medical examiner's report mentioned it only to say that it couldn't have been in any way the cause of death and that she probably had a coughing fit before the attack that killed her.”

“But it doesn't quite make sense. The handkerchief was part-way in her mouth.”

“But not stuffed into it. Horrible idea!”

“Maybe it had been, but it had come out somehow.”

“Or because of someone.”

“Was any medication found on her?”

“No, but it seems it wouldn't have saved her anyway because of the severity of the attack.”

“And there was no autopsy,” Urbino reminded her as well as himself, “so no one would know if there were traces of any medication in her body.”

“But Dr. Rubbini confirms that she had a long-standing heart problem, and that she was taking medication for it.”

“And Regina Bella?”

“Rubbini praised her. She often accompanied Nina on her visits. Salvatore couldn't be depended on. Carolina Bruni was right. Regina tried to make sure that Nina had her pills with her all the time. She even went to the pharmacy to get them.”

“Did Nina take her condition seriously?”

“It appears she did. She was determined to do everything and anything to keep herself alive and well as long as possible. Rubbini said it was for Salvatore's sake.”

21

Because of his investigation into the Nina Crivelli affair, Urbino had put aside his
Women of Venice
project. After his conversation with the Contessa, he went to the library and started to sort through his notes on the book. He often found that by keeping one part of his mind at work on something unrelated to a troubling problem, another part was freed to attack it.

He read through some material on the Contessa Isabella Teotochi, who had kept a literary salon at the Palazzo Albrizzi in the San Polo quarter. Teotochi, whom Lord Byron had called the De Staël of Venice, was one of his and the Contessa's favorite figures, but this evening he couldn't concentrate on her or any other aspect of his project. His thoughts kept returning to the lace maker.

He took down his books on lace making and Venetian lace, and started to page through them. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, but he felt that the information and illustrations might put him in a receptive frame of mind. Accounts about mermaid's lace and the collar made for Louis XIV out of white human hair and Cencia Scarpaiola, who had once been the only person alive to know the secret of
punto in aria
, amused and informed him. It wasn't until he came across a definition of lace in one of the books, however, that he felt he had found something of relevance:
Lace, a slender fabric, made of thread, incorporating holes as an intentional part of the design
. The fact that it was the definition by a woman named Earnshaw made it all the more interesting, because of the name's association with passion, death, and betrayal. Emily Bronte's tragic heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, was one of Urbino's favorite characters.

Urbino smiled to himself. It didn't take too much of a stretch of his imagination to realize that this definition uncannily described his own method of sleuthing. The fabric he was threading was indeed slender, even delicate, and there was no question it was full of holes. Whether he could make these holes a part of the design remained to be seen. More likely, the holes, this time around, would make no design possible, and would only contribute to the disintegration of what he was working so hard to achieve.

He checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes before ten. Habib was out with some friends from the language school. He decided to take a walk.

Before he left, he telephoned Frieda and mentioned that he had something that was hers.

“That's strange. However did you find it?” she said in a puzzled tone.

“Find it? Carolina Bruni gave it to me.”

“Carolina Bruni?” Frieda repeated. “But I don't—oh, of course,
Tristan und Isolde
. No, no, you don't have to bring them here. Tomorrow morning at eleven? Caffè Quadri? Bye-bye!”

Out in the damp night air, Urbino walked first as far as the Rialto Bridge, deserted of its shoppers, but not of tourists in the form of an elderly French couple. They were standing in the middle of the bridge where Urbino had stood a few weeks before. They too were looking out at the broad nighttime expanse of the Grand Canal, over which a mist was starting to thicken.

From the Rialto landing, he took the local
vaporetto
to the Salute stop. Only Urbino and an old woman got off. The Salute's snowy cupolas and towers loomed above him, but he didn't linger. He walked past the wide steps of the church and down the
fondamenta
on the Grand Canal side to the isolated Punta della Dogana.

He never tired of the view. It had been his destination the other night, when his walk, unlike now, had been haunted by the sense that he was being pursued. Tonight things were different. He felt that he had overreacted before.

The Punta della Dogana was where the Grand Canal, the lagoon, and the Giudecca Canal met. On his right floated the small island of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its Palladian church quietly gazing at the excesses of the Doges' Palace and the Basilica across the water.

The leaden clanging of buoys and the bleat of a solitary foghorn were carried on the sharp wind blowing in from the lagoon and assaulting the weather vane statue of Fortune on the Customhouse Building. He pulled his cape more securely around him.

He gazed out at the stretch of dark water, punctuated here and there by boat and buoy lights and gave himself up to his thoughts.

He no longer had any doubt that Nina Crivelli had been murdered, and that it had been done in a way that had blinded the authorities. The circumstance of the pills was a confusing—but crucial—element in the picture. Regina Bella had taken it upon herself to see that Nina was supplied with them. But Nina hadn't been in Regina's company all, or even most of the time. Certainly far less than Salvatore. He should have been the one to look after his mother, but it appeared that he had neither the desire, considering his resentment, nor the ability, given his frequent bouts of drunkenness.

By answering some questions about the pills, Urbino might be closer to knowing what had happened to Nina, and who had killed her. They were one of the many holes that he needed to incorporate into his design.

Why were none found on her body? Had she taken any before the attack? When had Regina most recently checked on Nina's supply of pills? And who else knew about them, other than Regina and Salvatore and Dottore Rubbini?

Carolina Bruni knew, he reminded himself. And this probably meant that it must have been common knowledge among Nina's acquaintances.

Urbino also considered the lace handkerchief in relationship to the pills. The handkerchief had been pressed against her mouth when the Contessa had discovered her body. Could Nina have kept a supply of pills tied up in her handkerchief, as Urbino remembered one of the nuns in his high school used to do?

From the pills, Urbino passed on to Salvatore and his wife and child. After suffering from his mother's emotional abuse over the years, Salvatore had lost what he treasured most because of her. And then he had gone on living in the same house with her, day after day, obliged to listen to her complaints, gossip, and protestations of a love that must have become hateful to him.

It wasn't a pleasant thing to contemplate, let alone endure.

Casting one last look out at the dark waters of the lagoon, Urbino abandoned the Punta della Dogana for the Zattere embankment with its aloof villas and the former salt warehouses, where art exhibitions were mounted during Biennale years.

Through the mist he tried to make out the lights of the Ca' Borelli on the Giudecca across the way. He had no reason to accuse Oriana Borelli of anything more than having had her head turned by Giorgio's handsome looks. But he did suspect Giorgio, more and more now. It was possible that he had cleverly contrived to meet Oriana down in Capri because of her closeness to the Contessa.

And what had his cap been doing in Il Piccolo Nettuno's kitchen? That it might not have been Giorgio's cap would be too much of a coincidence.

Had he stopped by to see Regina or Salvatore? If so, had it been an amiable visit? What business might he have with them? The possibility that he might have wanted to see Nella was a bit far-fetched, unless he had become accustomed to getting a quick meal in the kitchen whenever he took the Contessa to Burano.