Deadly to the Sight (26 page)

“Someone appeared out of nowhere and pushed me down. It was in a deserted
calle
. I became disoriented and wandered around until I found somewhere familiar. Thanks.” She tossed down the grappa. “I need another.”

“Did you see who it was?”

“It happened so fast. Someone in dark pants and a jacket. With a dark wool hat pulled down over the ears. It could have been a man or a woman. I got scraped, as you see.”

She rubbed her knee.

“Here.” He handed her the grappa. “It's good that you held on to your purse.”

“There isn't much of value in it, not even my identity papers. I fell on top of it. It would have been hard to get me off. But it is something else that was taken. It is what I was bringing to show you.”

Her slightly protruding eyes went to the manila envelope on the little table.

“An envelope like that one.”

“What was in it?” he asked, ignoring her implicit question.

“Photographs. I wanted you to see them. I thought that they could have something to do with the death of the old lace maker.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Oh, I do not know. I am living on Burano. We are friends. And there's this old lace maker. You don't think she died naturally, do you? We writers have imagination. After we spoke at Quadri's I thought about her and Barbara's visits to her son and the two women. And you are the Sherlock Holmes in residence. It is a simple conclusion.”

Perhaps not as simple as she made out, Urbino thought to himself.

“What kind of photographs?” he asked.

“Photographs of men. Like on an identity card or a passport. Young faces. No more than thirty years old. There were photographs of four different young men. There were three copies of each one.”

She watched him closely as she parceled out these pieces of information.

“Did you recognize any of them?”

“One.” She took a sip of the grappa. “A young man I have seen Habib with. He has dark, dark skin and very blue eyes. Very handsome. All photographs of young men like him, but not of Habib.”

Urbino hoped his face betrayed none of the nervousness he was feeling.

“Where did you find the envelope?”

“Where did you find mine? It is mine, is it not?”

“I came across it this morning among Habib's things in his studio.”

“Habib had it? How?”

“That's what I'd like to know. I thought you'd be able to tell me.”

“I misplaced it. It is what I have been looking for. Haven't you asked Habib?”

“I will tomorrow when I see him. He was arrested two days ago.”

“Arrested? For what?”

Either she really didn't know or she was putting on a good show.

“On suspicion of murder. Giorgio, Barbara's boatman.”

Frieda gave him an astonished look.

“Murdered? Horrible! I did not hear a word about it. I have been too busy to read the newspaper. Beatrix and Marie do not know either. They would have told me.”

Urbino explained the situation.

“It must be some terrible mistake,” she said. “The poor boy! He's too shy and gentle to hurt anyone, and I am sure you would never be sponsoring him if you had any doubts of his good character.”

She looked at the manila envelope, then gulped down the rest of her grappa.

“No more, thank you,” she said with a wave of her hand. “You must be very disturbed by my story, under the circumstances.”

“Even without them I would be.”

“Do not be angry. I am not a prophetess! It is just a story, and it is not completely original. No! It is one of my transformations. My reincarnations! Seeing you and Habib together pulled the idea from the back of my mind. It was stored there for the right moment. You understand, yes? It is a metamorphosis from
The Arabian Nights
. The book inspired our Barbara for her masquerade ball, and I have stolen from it. Yes! It is from there that I stole, and I—I made the theft my own. Ha!”

Her forehead was beaded with perspiration.

“At your party you said that you were writing something that I'd be interested in even more than a story about Burano. You were referring to this story.”

“Yes.”

“But I hadn't yet told you anything about how Habib and I met in Morocco.”

“And don't we writers have imaginations? Do we always have to be told things in detail and with words? No, of course not!”

“That night I said that your stories made me realize how much you hate lies.”

“And I said that you do not hate them.”

“These days I do very much.”

“I am not lying in any way. You are suspicious of me for some reason, yes? All those questions you asked me about the old lace maker. I told you the truth then, and now I am telling you the truth again!”

He stared at her for a few moments.

“You still haven't told me where you found the photographs.”

“At II Piccolo Nettuno. I went there in a desperation. I was looking everywhere. Nella said there was an envelope in the kitchen. I took it home. Inside, I found the photographs and not my story.”

“You didn't notice before then?”

“I know it seems strange, but no. The envelope, it—it looked and felt the same. I went right home.”

“Who else was at the restaurant besides Nella?”

“Salvatore, and some tourists.”

“Did he see Nella give you the envelope?”

“I don't think so.”

“Regina Bella wasn't there?”

“I told you it was only Nella and Salvatore. So many questions! Do not forget all the fairy tales about the danger of knowledge. Pandora's box, and Bluebeard's wife, and—and many others,” she finished lamely, seeing that he wasn't amused.

“I'll risk putting myself in more danger with your help. Tell me something. When you and Habib went out to get Giorgio's help on the night of your party when I fell ill, you found a motorboat, but Giorgio was nowhere around. Think carefully. Was it Barbara's motorboat or not?”

“It looked like it, but there was the fog, and we were confused. All motorboats look more or less the same to me. But what does it signify if it was her boat or not? We found Giorgio, and he knew where the boat was! And so you were saved!”

She got up.

“I must go back to Beatrix and Marie. They do not like to stay up late.”

He handed her the envelope.

“I'll walk you back. You might have been a random victim or you could have been attacked for the photographs themselves, but maybe it is the story someone wants. He—or she—now sees the mistake, and will not want to make a second one.”

“Why would someone want my story?”

Urbino could give her no answer to this. Neither would he have been able to explain the collection of photographs.

On the way to the Fondamenta Nuove they walked through silent, empty streets. The night was damp and chilly. They tried to find the spot where Frieda said she had been attacked, but, in the end, she couldn't be certain.

“I don't know Venice as well as you do,” she explained. “Everywhere looks the same now. It—it could have been any of the places we've looked at. Or none of them.”

As they approached the building where the two women lived, she said, “You will ask Habib where he found my story. It is puzzling.”

After he had seen that she got into the building safely, Urbino went to the water bus stop for Burano. He had to wait until shortly after midnight for the Burano boat to come in. The crew was the same one which had been working the night of the attack on Polidoro. No one resembling Frieda, Salvatore, or Regina had taken the boat that night.

Back at the Palazzo Uccello, he fixed himself one of Habib's
tisanes
to try to counteract all the alcohol he had consumed that day. He brought it to the library where, with Serena curled up on his lap, he skimmed through his English-language copy of
The Arabian Nights
, looking for the tale that Frieda said had inspired her own.

He couldn't find it.

He closed the book. His eye was caught by the seventeenth-century lace cover arranged over the chalice on a table near the ambry. He went over to examine it as closely as he had several years before when he had bought it from Polidoro, at a great profit to the man, as Rebecca had pointed out to him. It was an excellent example of Venetian
punto in aria
, which, according to one of the books he had been browsing through a few evenings before, was “the noblest and most Italian of all laces.” He was sure that the pale, delicate hands of a nun had crafted this fine specimen of patience and elegance. Now it was in his much coarser, and certainly secular hands. He looked at the fineness of the thread, white against the white background, and imagined the long-dead nun bent over her work, straining to see, going a little blinder with each difficult stitch she pulled and drew, and clipped. And in the manner of
punto in aria
, doing it without any foundation, without any canvas or parchment or other material to guide her.

Urbino felt both inspired and discouraged by this exquisite creation, and put it back in its place.

An hour later he drifted off to sleep in the unusual silence of the house.

7

It was going to be one of the hardest things Urbino had ever done. He would soon see Habib.

He set out from the Palazzo Uccello the next morning in plenty of time to get to the prison on foot for his appointment at eleven. He carried a small paper bag. Inside were
tramezzini
Natalia had made for Habib that morning.

He took the Lista di Spagna to the Ponte Scalzi beside the train station, where he crossed to the other side of the Grand Canal.

Everything around him reminded him of Habib's circumstances. The residents going about their errands, the children and dogs running across the squares, the pigeons and gulls wheeling in the air—they all spoke a language of freedom.

A gondola came into view, with two reclining tourists covered in blankets. It glided past the copper dome of the Church of San Simeone Piccolo just as Urbino and Habib's had done on their first day together in Venice. Habib had cried out that it was their magic carpet from
The Arabian Nights
. Marvelous words they had seemed at the time. Now they were coldly ironic, even prophetic. In the weeks since that day Habib had been carried, inexorably, it seemed, to the confines of the prison—and all under Urbino's unseeing eye.

Urbino passed the Giardino Papadopoli, where Habib enjoyed sitting and having lunch with Rebecca when she lectured at the nearby Faculty of Architecture.

He crossed over the Ponte Tre Ponti, which Habib had painted one bright day soon after they arrived. Urbino had sat at a cafe in the working-class quarter, reading and watching him.

A few minutes' walk brought him to the Rio Terrà dei Pensieri. At the end of the street was the prison. He remembered with a pang how he had translated the name of the street for Habib's benefit on one of their walks.

“The buried river of thoughts,” Urbino had said. “It's a romantic and melancholy name, isn't it?”

But today the street, which had once been a canal, had associations with only suffocation and immobility, darkness and death, for it led to the prison.

When he reached the prison walls a few minutes later, he walked around them to the entrance, guarded by the ubiquitous lions of St. Mark. Keeping their own kind of watch, but huddled to one side out of the wind, were several dispirited-looking women with baskets and shopping bags.

The building, once a monastery filled with silent devotions, had a palpable air of desperation and stood in the most dismal quarter of Venice. Across the oily canal squatted the gasworks, and beyond them stretched a double row of rusted railway tracks. Cranes lifted and carried indistinguishable objects within view of uniform rows of low tenements.

Taking a deep breath of the cold air with its faint odor of petrochemicals from the mainland, Urbino prepared to see Habib.

8

Habib jumped to his feet when Urbino came through the door of the small room. To Urbino's relief, he wasn't wearing handcuffs. A sallow young guard stood behind him.

“May God be thanked!”

His smile was only a ghost of its usual self.

He reseated himself when the guard made a movement in his direction.

“We are to be left alone at the request of Commissario Gemelli,” Urbino said to another guard, a stocky man who had conducted him silently down the long, dark corridor. He spoke in as firm a voice as he could command.

“And by order of the warden,” the guard added. “You have twenty minutes. If you need anything, just open the door. We will be outside.”

He looked meaningfully at Habib before he accompanied his colleague out to the corridor and closed the door behind them.

The only furniture in the room was two mismatching wooden chairs and a folding table. A small, barred window pierced the wall far above their heads and emitted feeble rays of the winter sunlight. A sharp carbolic odor permeated the air.

“I am too glad to see you,
sidi.
”

Urbino seated himself across from Habib, who was dressed in some of the clothes he had sent him yesterday. His face had a grayish pallor.

“What happened to your eye?”

Habib touched a bruise over his right eye.

“It—it is nothing grave.”

“Did a policeman hit you? Or one of the prisoners?”

“I fell down a step. This is a very dark place. It is worse than the street in Fez where you were obliged to use your hands. Remember how we laughed?”

“That was a good day,” Urbino agreed. He decided to drop the topic of the bruise. “This is for you.” He indicated the paper bag. “Natalia made you some fresh
tramezzini
this morning with all your favorite fillings. She says hello.”

“She is a kind lady. Please tell her thank you. How is Serena? Sometimes I dream that she is sewn to my lap as she likes to do. When I wake up, I feel sad.”