The Last Gondola (40 page)

It might be a small portion of the whole Venetian scene but it was representative. A
calle
led into a small open area where bright sunshine cut oblongs into the dark shade.

A covered wellhead with its worn relief of cherubs and garlands, which had belonged to the Palazzo Uccello in the seventeenth century, stood in the middle of the little square. A brindled cat sat on the well, soaking up the sunshine.

A bridge raised its humpback over a narrow canal on the other side of the square where a low-lying
sandolo
, recently repainted bright blue for the upcoming regatta, rocked in the wake of a passing delivery boat. Steps, green with moss, led from the side of the bridge down to the water.

The surrounding buildings were rose-colored and in that state of dilapidation that is graced by being called picturesque.

One of the buildings had an inverted bell chimney emerging from its tiles and curved, wrought-iron balconies with rows of flowers and ivy. On the roof of another building perched a wooden terrace, an
altana
, where in former years Venetian women would sit to bleach their hair, aided by a concoction of powdered Damascus soap and burned lead. Now the structures, like the one on the roof of the Palazzo Uccello, were used for far different purposes, such as drying laundry and airing clothes and blankets, although Urbino's own
altana
was also a welcome retreat made almost pastoral with its abundance of plants.

As he remained at the window, shouts and laughter echoed against all the stones, magnified somehow by the water. They could have come from a few feet away or from a greater distance, so unusual are the acoustics of the city. A few seconds later two children raced down the
calle
and over the bridge with a soccer ball, followed at a more sedate pace by their mother pushing a baby carriage. Walking backward when she reached the bridge, she pulled the carriage up the steps as she was obliged to do dozens of times a day as she went about her errands. An elderly man coming from the opposite direction helped her negotiate the steps down the other side.

Two women emerged from the
calle
. Their dark gray dresses and scarves identified them as nuns from the nearby Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina. They leaned down to admire the baby and chatted with the mother before continuing over the bridge.

Neighborhood figures drifted into the square, stopping to exchange greetings and gossip. Two tourists half carried, half dragged suitcases from the
calle
beneath Urbino's window. Bewildered and exhausted, they accosted a white-haired woman, a vendor at one of the kiosks along the Lista di Spagna. After they showed her a piece of paper, she pointed in the direction from which they had just come.

Urbino could spend hours looking out of the library window or, in fact, any of the windows in the house. The contessa had once joked that one of his next presents would be a very modest one. It would be nothing more than a little pillow, though nicely embroidered, she promised, the kind that elderly women leaned on from their windows as they watched and gossiped and dozed.

He was about to turn back into the room when a thin woman in a green dress and a gondolier's hat, from which wisps of metallic-looking red hair escaped, emerged from the
calle
on the other side of the canal. She was struggling with a bag over her shoulder, a pack on her back, and a case in her hand. She was the woman on the Dorsoduro bridge whom he had observed earlier from the shelter of his
felze
, the painter who had been so good-natured with the man who had accidentally knocked down her easel.

That she was now in the Cannaregio district was not unusual. One of the delights of Venice was its smallness, hardly bigger than Central Park in New York City, and you were always meeting people you knew or strangers who soon became familiar figures.

The woman paused in the middle of Urbino's bridge – for so he thought of it – and looked along the length of the canal, first in one direction, then in another. She proceeded down the steps into the little square, and started to divest herself of her burdens. When they were all on the ground around her, she stroked the cat.

She surveyed the buildings that enclosed the square, giving a few moments of attention to each in turn, until her gaze fell upon the Palazzo Uccello. Urbino drew back from the window so as not to be seen, but not so far that he could not continue to see.

The woman stared at the building. Urbino had become accustomed to the attention that the Palazzo Uccello, with its stilted arches, marble facings, and pointed extradoses, received. Its seventeenth-century imitation of the Veneto-Byzantine style was often pointed out by tour guides and sketched by architecture students. He had once heard one of the tour guides explaining to a small group gathered on the bridge that not only had the building been built by an eccentric, reclusive bachelor in the seventeenth century but it also was now owned by one.

From his concealed position, Urbino smiled as the memory crossed his mind. The woman seemed to be absorbing the details of his building with an intense expression on her face that bordered on a frown. Could she be going to make the Palazzo Uccello the subject of one of her paintings?

But if she was, it wouldn't be today, for she slowly and a bit wearily gathered together her paraphernalia and went down the
calle
beneath Urbino's window.

Two

At nine that evening, soon after Urbino went over the humpbacked bridge and down the
calle
toward the Grand Canal, he regretted it.

Not that he regretted his ultimate destination – the café in the Campo Sant' Angelo where Albina Gonella worked – but instead the route he had set out upon to get there.

It had him almost immediately encountering rowdy groups that were merely the eddies of the strong current of people he would soon be fighting against. At this hour the tidal flow of the summer crowd moved away from the Piazza San Marco in the direction of the train station and the car park at the opposite end of the Grand Canal.

Lightning flashes sharpened the night sky with knives of light, but no thunder rumbled. When he approached the Rio Terrà San Leonardo, a sudden gust of hot, damp wind blew drops of rain against his face.

He became caught in a group of Spanish tourists who were passing around a bottle of wine. When he pulled close beneath a shuttered shop to let another group pass, he took advantage of his knowledge of the city – the mixed blessing that never allowed him to lose himself anymore – and went off the main route.

He first backtracked in the direction of the Palazzo Uccello, skirting the Ghetto. The crowd started to thin. By the time he reached the neighborhood of the Church of the Madonna dell' Orto, and in fact long before, he was meeting tourists who had lost the main route or who, like him, were wisely seeking out the indirect way to their destinations.

He plunged deeper into the quieter reaches of the Cannaregio, where it approached the lagoon and gave views of the cemetery island and the causeway to Mestre and the mainland.

After several minutes he entered a small
campo
where local residents sat on benches and children played beneath a stunted tree whose lower trunk was imprisoned in a rusted iron cage. A tall building dominated the square not so much despite its state of dilapidation but somehow because of it. The shadow it cast seemed darker than any others in the open area.

It was the Church of San Gabriele, flaking from age, dampness, and the poisonous exhalations from petrochemical plants in nearby Marghera. It wasn't its early fifteenth-century Gothic pedigree that made Urbino pause to contemplate it. He was interested in its more recent history and for the role it had played in his life.

For the Church of San Gabriele was the site of a murder that had set him on his course of sleuthing.

Lying in one of the church's chapels was a glass coffin containing the preserved body of a female saint. It wore a white gown, crimson gloves and slippers, and its face was concealed beneath a silver Florentine mask. Snatched from Sicily by so-called sacred thieves of the Venetian Republic, the diminutive corpse had been at the center of his most macabre case.

Urbino shifted his gaze to the other side of the square where another building, with damp-warped shutters and chipped, leprous statuary and stones, seemed aloof despite its lighted windows and open doorway. This was the Convent of the Charity of Santa Crispina. During one carnival the mother superior had asked Urbino to use his discreet detecting skills to clear her house of suspicion following the murder of a guest of the convent's pensione. The frenzied festival, where nothing was what it seemed, had provided Urbino with a series of clues that led to the unmasking of the murderer at the contessa's ball only a few minutes before the clocks had started to chime the end of carnival.

He resumed his walk, pondering these two investigations that had followed each other in quick succession. He moved down the narrow streets, over the bridges, through the squares, and under the covered passageways of Cannaregio. He didn't have to give much attention to where he was going, so familiar was he with the route. And yet details registered with great vividness – a flower-bedecked street shrine to the Virgin lit by a votive candle; a woman applying gold leaf to a harlequin mask behind the window of a closed shop; diners in the garden of a small restaurant; a brightly lighted window displaying eighteenth-century gowns, jackets, purses, boots, and trunks; and a death notice, affixed to a weather-beaten door.

But all the while Urbino was carried along on the stream of his thoughts about the occupation that seemed to have chosen him rather than the other way around.

The contessa called him a nosy parker. It was true that without his curiosity, whose intrusiveness was peculiar, considering how much he cherished his own privacy, he would never have gone far in any of his investigations.

But even more than curiosity, his passions for justice and order drove him. He had a strong need for due rewards and punishments, and an impatience with unanswered questions and untied strings.

Still harboring these thoughts, Urbino reached the lagoon where a vaporetto was making its way to the lace island of Burano. Considering the drift of his reflections, it was understandable that the figure of a lacemaker now appeared before him, an old, half-blind woman whose death had started him along another one of his twisting paths, motivated once again by curiosity and his love for order.

He stopped for a drink at a small café on the Fondamenta della Sensa. As he sipped the chilled white wine and watched the men playing cards at a table set up beside the canal edge, he realized what he would do when he left the café. He wouldn't go directly to Da Valdo. There was still enough time to catch Albina there. He usually allowed himself the luxury of having more time than he needed to get from one point in Venice to another, for he knew how little he could ever resist the temptation of wandering.

And wander a bit more he would do this evening as he visited some more spots where the dead had quickened him into motion.

Urbino frequently got into these states. Like a ghost, he thought to himself, or like a criminal revisiting the scene of the crime – except, of course, that in his investigations he only had to think like a criminal, not be one. Sometimes the line between the two seemed much too thin for his comfort.

He often heard the words of childhood priests in New Orleans come back to him:
Thinking of something bad is the same as doing it. You have already sinned
.

He reentered the bustling areas, and soon found himself among the strong flow of people again. As before, he was moving against the current as he went down the wide Strada Nuova lined with shops, over the Ponte Santi Apostoli where diners were finishing their meals under the
sottoportico
, and past the large, square mass of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi that housed the central post office.

In the Campo San Bartolomeo Venetians, most of them well-dressed in the latest fashions and colors, milled about or stood in small groups, smoking, laughing, talking. For this was one of the main meeting places of the city, presided over by the statue of the playwright Carlo Goldoni, who cast a bronze eye and a bemused smile over just the kind of activity and Venetian types that he had satirized centuries ago.

Urbino exchanged a few words with friends who were on their way to a wine bar near La Fenice. He declined their invitation to join them.

A few minutes later he paused in the middle of the Rialto Bridge to take in the view of the Grand Canal as it swept toward the Ca' Foscari. Soon, the Ca' Foscari, because of its position at the great bend in the Canalazzo where the regatta had its finishing point, would be the most watched place in Venice.

The pavements and the landing stages were crowded. A raft of gondolas laden with tourists passed under the high arch of the bridge in the direction of Ca' Foscari.

Urbino descended the steps of the bridge and went past the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto to a broad, open area along the Grand Canal. Scraps of lettuce and crushed tomatoes littered the stones. He proceeded slowly and carefully. A group of young people were at the far end, drinking, laughing, and dancing. During the daytime this was the city's main vegetable market. Late one November night it had been the site of a bloody double murder that had directly affected both him and the contessa.

After contemplating the scene, he continued deeper into the San Polo district. He moved away from the shops, most of them closed now, and entered a nest of alleys until he reached a remote corner of the quarter. There, he stood on a small, stone bridge. The odor of moldering stone and decaying vegetation hung in the air. Further along the narrow canal a lantern on the stern of a gondola glowed and rocked as the boat moved in the direction of the Grand Canal. The two gondoliers were singing verses of
‘Torna a Surriento'
in turns, competing with each other in their powerful tenors as the song proceeded to the accompaniment of an accordion. The song became fainter as the gondola turned into another canal, and soon Urbino was surrounded by only the sound of water lapping against the stones of the bridge.