Deadly to the Sight (5 page)

Not until they had passed Murano and were approaching the cemetery island of San Michele did Nina break her silence.

“It is not a good thing for a young man to like cemeteries.”

Urbino was startled. San Michele was one of his favorite spots, for reasons that he didn't think were morbid. He wanted to show Habib some of its well-known graves, but he had so far made no inroads against the Moroccan's superstition of cemeteries.

He looked at Nina. She was peering out the window at the brick-walled island with its cypresses, which was slowly sliding by in the dusk on their left. A grim expression darkened her worn face.

“Please tell Signor Giorgio to leave me on the Fondamenta Nuove.”

He opened the door and told Giorgio.

A few minutes later as Urbino was helping Nina out of the boat, she turned to Habib.

“That tablecloth, young man. It is bad work. Every stitch will bring a tear of sadness.”

Habib, uncomprehending, nonetheless drew back. Nina gave an unpleasant laugh.

As Giorgio pulled the boat away from the quayside, where the old lace maker stood gazing after them, Habib asked Urbino what Nina had said. Urbino reluctantly translated it.

“That lady is a witch,
sidi
! She has the evil eye! I must not give such a gift to my dear mother! It is bad luck!”

“You are being superstitious.”

“Forgive me for saying it,
sidi
, but you are wrong! She is a bad woman. You will have a spell put on you and you will be deceived!”

He added something in his native tongue. Fear, naked and vivid, glittered in his dark eyes.

7

The next afternoon Urbino stepped out of the Palazzo Uccello into a rain that was being driven against the city by a wind from the lagoon.

The Contessa expected him at the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini in an hour. He needed to do some thinking first, and he preferred to do it in motion and on foot. He often joked that if he had been a Greek, and one of a much more distant time, he would have been a philosopher of the peripatetic school. The magical connection between walking and reflecting had been his secret resource since his solitary years as an only child.

Since settling in Venice the old habit, or call it the ever-new compulsion, had been intensified by the geography of the labyrinthine city. Despite his familiarity with it after all these years, it could still give him, if only momentarily, the sense that he was lost. This suited the usually meandering rhythm of his own thoughts, especially when he was trying to puzzle out a problem in one of his biographies or investigations.

And the rain only made things better, not least of all because it encouraged his peculiar little fantasy that the city was closer to being his alone.

For on days like these, he could imagine himself a prince of some rain-country making the circuit of his small, but sumptuous realm where his subjects kept themselves at a respectful—though not fearful—distance. Rainy days in January were best, for then that scarce breed of tourist who came in winter sought out cozy spots to protect their Baedekers and enthusiasm. Even Venetians understood the good sense of keeping their feet dry in their apartments or neighborhood café.

This latter thought inevitably reminded him of what had provoked his wanderings this afternoon. Nina Crivelli, with her plastic trash bags on her feet.

And, according to Habib, with her evil eye.

The incongruity of these two images might have been humorous in other circumstances but not this afternoon. In spite of his attempt to soothe Habib yesterday, he did sense something vaguely sinister and threatening in the old lace maker.

He turned his umbrella to the rain gusting along the Fondamenta della Misericordia. Small moored boats, most of them covered with plastic or tarpaulin beaded and pooled with water, rocked in the canal. The buildings on the embankment seemed closed in on themselves.

He soon was in the narrow Campo dei Mori where he cast a familiar glance at the statue of Sior Antonio Rioba, the damaged nose protected by a metal guard. Habib had made sketches of the statue along with several impressions of the facade of the nearby Palazzo Mastelli, with its bas-relief of a turbaned man leading a camel.

Urbino stopped his pace to take in, as best he could pummeled as he was by wind and rain, the dilapidated Gothic building where Tintoretto had lived and died. It seemed slightly menacing in the gray light, as if painted with Tintoretto's dark palette.

His interest in the building was because of his new project, a biography of women associated with Venice. Marietta Robusti, the daughter of Tintoretto, had lived there. She might not be one of the most famous of the women of Venice—in that category she was easily eclipsed by Desdemona, George Sand, or Peggy Guggenheim—but she was certainly among the most interesting. She was one of his and the Contessa's favorites, because of the unfortunate circumstances of her life. An excellent painter, who probably had contributed to her father's canvases, she had been confined by her husband to vanity portraits of his friends and associates.

“The poor Marietta ghost,” the Contessa had once said with a sigh, “roaming around the building and wondering what she might have been.”

As he resumed his walk in the direction of the Rialto Bridge, avoiding the Strada Nuova in a preference for the smaller passageways, he considered how the Contessa might react if she were to confront the ghost of the person she would have been without her own particular advantages. He was fairly certain that she wouldn't have been frightened—or have, in her turn, frightened the ghost—but she would have felt more than a little melancholy. At any rate, the ghost, even without her privileges, would never have taken anything resembling the form of Nina Crivelli.

In fact, the Contessa's almost legendary benevolence was related to his realization of this indisputable truth. There were fates in store for one, and fates avoided, but none of these encompassed, for the Contessa, the kind endured by Nina Crivelli and poor women like her.

Was this, then, the simple answer to the question of what the lace maker wanted of her? Urbino asked himself as he skirted a large puddle in the middle of a
calle
. Did Nina want her to bestow some of her largesse on her, as she was accustomed to doing, usually on women?

This solution to the little mystery was comforting, although it didn't account for the Contessa's uneasiness at Florian's.

He went over in his mind how she had reacted and what she had said on that occasion, and recalled his own encounter with the lace maker yesterday, as well as Habib's all-too-obvious aversion to her.

He had become so absorbed in these thoughts that he reached the foot of the Rialto Bridge before he realized that it was no longer raining. The Rialto, usually one of the busiest areas of Venice, and in centuries past its commercial heart, on this afternoon was almost deserted.

He shut his umbrella and walked up the steps of the bridge to the middle of the broad stone parapet. He looked out at the marble wall of Gothic and Renaissance palazzi on both sides of the Grand Canal. The three-branched iron lampposts were not yet lit, but some illumination from private residences, shops, and hotels spilled out into the scene.

His only companions were an elderly French couple and a woman swaddled in furs, with a muzzled cocker spaniel on a fashionable leash. They soon moved off, leaving him alone with the familiar but never stale perspective. He cast his eyes farther down the Grand Canal. From this side of the bridge, the Grand Canal was a long, straight sweep down to the Ca' Foscari, where there was a bend in the waterway. The impression of a flooded city, with the water lapping at the building foundations only a short distance from the lighted windows, was nowhere stronger than from his present position.

The palazzo was where the Doge Francesco Foscari had died of a broken heart. It was now the center of the University of Venice, but its associations with Verdi's opera were most vivid in Urbino's mind. He restrained himself from taking advantage of the solitude and breaking out in his weak, uneven tenor with some lines from “Ah, si, ch'io sento ancora.” This melancholy greeting to Venice by the exiled son of the Doge had long been one of his favorite arias. It was even more so now, with its words and sentiment eerily approximating his own situation after his long absence from the city.

Since his return, he had been reclaiming, day by day, what he had felt slipping away from him in distant Morocco. The resumption of his special relationship with the Contessa, despite some understandable strains, was having its tonic effect. To be with her was not only to be with someone he loved, but also with someone who shared his passion for Venice and even embodied part of its mysterious essence.

But, he thought to himself, he needed two more things before he could sink back into full possession. One was to become immersed in working on a new addition to his
Venetian Lives
. His plans for
Women of Venice
were helping to take care of that.

The other was a direct appeal to his enthusiasm for detection. The feeling was so attuned to the Venetian scene that it didn't function quite properly without it. And it appeared that he was provided with this stimulus in the figure of Nina Crivelli and her relationship to the Contessa. He had already formulated a tentative explanation. He hoped the Contessa would shed the necessary light this afternoon.

As he walked down the outer steps of the bridge, he almost came to an abrupt halt as a realization flashed over him. He would be disappointed if the mystery surrounding Nina Crivelli turned out to be just a banal story, easily explained away.

The implications of this troubled him as he made his way into the San Polo quarter in the direction of the
traghetto
that would ferry him back across the Grand Canal.

8

Usually Urbino enjoyed a
traghetto
ride across the Grand Canal. This afternoon, however, he found it a disquieting experience, especially because of the thick fog that had been creeping into the city since the rain had stopped.

Ferries, placed at strategic points along the Grand Canal, provided not only a convenient way to make the trip but an inexpensive, if all too short, gondola ride. Usually it was only Venetians who used them, standing up in no-nonsense fashion.

He had forgotten, however, that this particular
traghetto
between the Fondaco dei Turchi and San Marcuola stopped at two in the afternoon. It was only by chance that two men were there, and that one of them had a gondola. It had taken a great deal of convincing for them to agree to ferry him across at even ten times the usual rate, since they refused to believe he wasn't a tourist who wanted a cheap gondola ride.

He considered the money well spent. He would have given them even more, for he was already late for his rendezvous with the Contessa, and couldn't wait twenty minutes for the next
vaporetto
from either of the two nearby stops.

He was the only passenger. The oarsmen, muffled in scarves and speaking gruffly to each other in dialect, kept throwing him surly glances. To his susceptible mind, they evoked twin ghoulish Charons as they deftly maneuvered the boat through the fog and fading light and miraculously avoided a delivery boat loaded with crates of mineral water.

Midway, he became slightly dizzy, and sat down. Ever since his trip to Burano, he had been feeling a bit under the weather. The oarsmen looked down at him with an amused, disdainful air. In their eyes, he had been caught in a lie, for only a tourist or an elderly or infirm person would sit down during the crossing.

He was relieved when the boat nudged against the almost invisible landing. Here was something substantial. He got out with too much haste and had to be steadied, with unnecessary roughness, by one of the oarsmen. He felt chilled and walked briskly through the
campo
in front of San Marcuola.

Within a few minutes he reached the small bridge of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. As he was going up the steps, the iron door of the palazzo opened. Through it came a figure swathed in fur that the next moment, benefiting from the illumination from the intricately patterned globes on either side of the door, he recognized as Oriana.

“So you're finally here!” she called out in the English she preferred to use whenever she spoke with him. “No, no, stay right where you are. The two of us standing on the bridge will make a pretty picture if Barbara's watching from the window, which I'm sure she is. I could tell she wants to be alone with you,” she said when she had joined him. She gave him two quick kisses on each cheek. “She's getting very impatient.”

Oriana was an attractive middle-aged woman who always dressed in the extreme of fashion and sported apparently limitless pairs of oversized eyeglasses.

“If I didn't know you better—and I mean the
both
of you, Urbino dear—then I would begin to wonder! Ha, ha! But I have no such suspicions, and never had from the moment I saw you and Barbara together.” Her voice was perpetually throaty from all the cigarettes she smoked in her flamboyant holders. “I have my radar. No sense in going after unavailable men. Speaking of which, how is that good-looking young specimen you smuggled out of Morocco in your trunk, hmmm?” she rattled on.

In the air was not only the scent of her expensive perfume and gin, her preferred drink in all seasons, but also something very much like nervousness, almost desperation. Was it possible that she wasn't weathering her latest marital problem with her usual combination of nonchalance and arrogance?

“Habib is fine. Don't you have your boat?”

As soon as he asked the question, he regretted it. Perhaps she had lost the use of the boat as a consequence of her separation from Filippo. Oriana laughed.

“Not a subtle way to change the subject. My boat? I'm afraid you've caught me in a little deception, my dear. You see, I thought Barbara would have gorgeous Giorgio take me back to the Giudecca by the longest route, but she's overly protective of the boy. As if I'd do him any harm! Well, I must be off, Urbino dear. I hope you and your charming young friend are still planning to go to Frieda Hensel's. See you then.”