The Thief of Venice (13 page)

It was two days before Sam had time to go far across the city to the Department of Physics and Chemistry. It was not in the famous palace housing the rest of the university, the Ca' Foscari on the Grand Canal. Instead he had to take Vaporetto #52 all the way around Dorsoduro past the Zattere to the stop at Santa Marta, and then walk a long way to the neighborhood of the Church of San Niccolo. Fortunately both ends of the journey were in parts of the city a few inches higher than the lowest places. Salizada del Pignater was just south of a deeper area around Campo Sant' Antonin, and the Quartiere Santa Marta was entirely in the clear. Sam walked to his destination dry-shod.

"State of the art," said the biochemist proudly, showing off his microscope, instructing Sam in the subtleties of its use. "It's a reflecting microscope, you see, Sam. You'll have a working distance of a good inch, not just a millimeter." Packing it into its case he said, "
Questa maledetta cosa e molto pesante.
It weighs a ton. Too bad you can't bring your object here."

Sam looked doubtfully at the big case and explained, "I wish I could, but I've promised to keep it locked up in my house until it goes back under guard."

"Well, for Christ's sake be careful. I mean, Jesus, Sam, this thing's worth a king's ransom."

"Oh, I will, I promise I will." Sam picked up the case, then set it down again.

"Can you manage it?" said the biochemist, opening the door.

"Naturalmente."
Sam picked up the case again with a show of ease.
"Ciao, Carlo. Grazie tante."

"Prego."

But the microscope in its thick protective case was almost more than he could manage. Sam grasped the handle with both hands and shuffled out of the building, leaning backward. What kind of superman was Carlo anyway? Had he ever tried to carry it himself?

In the Campo San Niccolo he hailed a student and paid him to lug the microscope to the vaporetto stop at San Basilic. There he was able to take a water taxi to the Riva and up a little rio all the way to Salizada Pignater.
Molto costoso
, but he had no choice.

Home at last, Sam hoisted his burden up two flights of stairs, thumping it down on every step. At last he was able to slide it across the floor to his study door. Gasping, he unlocked the door, dragged the case inside, and cried out.

The beautiful six-hundred-year-old reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista lay flat on the table. The small crystal chamber had been shattered. The fragment of the True Cross was gone.
 

*27*

The most striking thing about Doctor Richard Henchard was not the fact that he was a capable surgeon, educated at the University of London and the Collegio Medico at Bologna. The dominating thing about him was his appearance. If women didn't exactly faint in his presence, they found him irresistible. Sensible grandmothers lost their dignity, middle-aged women made fools of themselves, young women fell all over him.

The poor man couldn't help having an endless series of extramarital affairs. It could hardly be called his fault. What could a man do if women perpetually surrounded him in billowing clouds, with the fatty muscles clothing their femurs exposed to the great trochanter, their chubby glutei maximi swaying, their globular mammary glands brushing his chest?

Actually Henchard wasn't especially interested in women except as a sort of useful subspecies. You could hardly call them human. Of course he was married to Vittoria, because everybody had a wife, and now he was stuck with that
stupida ragazza
Giovanna, because he couldn't get rid of her, she was always threatening to tell Vittoria. The new place he had found for Giovanna was far too expensive for a mere slut, but naturally he couldn't let her move into the first one on the Rio della Sensa because of the fortune hidden in the closet.

No, women were a bore. What truly engaged Henchard's interest was his medical practice. The patients who came to his office in the Ospedale Civile suffered from fascinating melanomas and other malignancies, and occasionally he ran across a truly remarkable metastatic sarcoma. How could a mere female compare?

And yet the American woman was different. Henchard was captivated by her majestic attractiveness, her clear-eyed calm. He had never known a woman like Mary Kelly. At first he had thought of her as a promising fish, one to be caught with only the most delicate tugs on the line, but now he was letting the line run free. He could see only a day ahead. The quest was thrilling, but it called for patience, for a sedate and old-fashioned kind of wooing. This woman was not about to be fucked against a wall.

But somehow, and sooner rather than later, he would net his fish.

On the day the golden reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista arrived under guard at Sam Bell's house in the
sestiere
of Castello, Richard Henchard walked out of his own house on Campo San Salvador near Piazza San Marco with a rolled-up sleeping bag under his arm.

Of course Vittoria was as sharp-eyed as ever. "Riccardo, what are you going to do with that thing? "

"One of the interns is going camping," said Henchard smoothly. He patted her backside and kissed her.
"Ciao, cara."

She leaned against the doorway, watching him go, helplessly enamored in spite of their furious verbal battles. That strong cleft chin of his, those little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes!
 

In the apartment where his treasure lay, Henchard put the bedroll down in the corner and undid the padlock on the closet door. He wanted to ogle his treasure.

Thank Christ he had come along in time to witness the foolish thievery of that young
spazzino
. Thank God he had seen him standing there with his head through the hole and a gold platter in his hand. The poor
ragazzo
wouldn't have known what to do with it. He would have told his mother and his girlfriend. He might even have gone straight to the editorial offices of
Il Gazzettino
. And then what would have happened? Everybody would have put in their nose.

That bitch in the agenzia, Signorina Pastora, she would have fought for the stuff like a cat. The absentee landlord in Milan didn't need the money, but by God he'd put in a powerful claim. And in the end who would get it all, every single thing, every precious piece of Henchard's wonderful discovery? The city of Venice would purloin it as part of its glorious historic heritage. So the wretched
spazzino
would have got nothing. He didn't count.

Nor did Signorina Pastora's client Lorenzo Costanza, Henchard's competitor for possession of the treasure, the fool who had wanted the apartment for his elegant girlfriend. He didn't count either, not anymore. He had been taken care of, and the blame had fallen on his wife. It had been a stroke of luck, the discovery of the weapon in the drawer with her underwear, the little nine-millimeter handgun that was so exactly like his own.

Signora Costanza had run away. Her husband was gone. The
spazzino
was gone. Henchard's treasure was safe.

He knelt within the open door of the closet and looked at the magnificent painting and the gold plates and candlesticks and the odd little castles with their tiny doors. Very carefully he unrolled one of the scrolls. The parchment was covered with handwritten words in another language. What was it? Greek? Hebrew?

Hebrew, that was it. Henchard remembered now. The scrolls were Torah scrolls, inscribed with the first five books of the Bible.

At last, tired of squatting on his knees, he stood up and felt for the padlock, his attention diverted by a new question—

What Jew had put them there?

There was a commotion on the
fondamenta
below. Quickly Henchard strode across the room, slammed the door to the stairway, and threw the bolt across. Only then did he look out the window.

It was only the same crew of men who had been shoveling mud out of the canal for weeks. They were yanking out the corrugated iron barriers at both ends. There were shrieks of metal on metal, shouts and curses. One of the men hopped up and down and flapped his hand. Blood flew. Henchard watched until the man stopped hopping and guffawed and wiped his hand on his shirt. He was all right.

The others kept jerking on the barriers. Water began flowing into the drained canal, rushing faster and faster through the gaps in seething waterfalls. At last one of the men pulled out the last of the metal plates and lifted it over his head with a triumphant shout.

Amused, Henchard left the apartment, forgetting to snap the hasp of the padlock into the staple on the frame of the closet door.
 

*28*

Sam had been telling himself once again that it didn't matter what happened to him anymore. Why didn't he say farewell to all care and just walk away from the library? Why didn't he abandon his unhappy little daughter and his impossible mother-in-law and fly off to Monte Carlo, or Madrid, or Buenos Aires, or the South Pole? Or perhaps the North Pole? Was the North Pole more congenial than the South Pole? Or why didn't he race across to the mainland and hire a cab and tell the driver to set off at once and find Dottoressa Lucia Costanza?
Subito! Immediatamente!

But it wasn't working, this cavalier way of thinking. He didn't want to gamble for high stakes in a casino at Monte Carlo. Nor did he want to do any other crazy thing. And there was no omniscient limousine driver in the world who could say,
"Si, signore,"
and rev up his engine and take off in the right direction to find the missing dottoressa.

No, there was nothing to do but go on with what he was doing, handling the problems that came up in the library, which were sometimes grievous—since the exhibition some of the Aldine incunabula were suffering from a new infestation of woodworm—and examining the relics loaned to him through the good offices of Father Urbano.

But now, staring at the smashed remains of the vandalized reliquary, Sam felt the last vestiges of his happy-go-lucky unconcern fall away. This disaster could not be shrugged off. There'd be hell to pay for sure.

Despairing, he pulled up a chair to the desk where the reliquary lay and sank his head in his hands. It didn't matter any longer what happened to him, but it did matter what happened to the kindly priest who had entrusted him with all these holy objects. Father Urbano's career as a rising man in the church would come to a crashing halt. He'd never be a monsignor or a cardinal patriarch, he'd never ascend to whatever pinnacle of ambition a healthy middle-aged priest might aspire.

But Sam had four weeks' grace. The reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista had been loaned to him for a month. Not that it mattered. What good would it do to postpone his awful revelation? The shock and the horrified accusations would be the same.
 

At Mrs. Wellesley's firm request, Sam always called his mother-in-law by her first name. Ursula too was supposed to call her grandmother Dorothea, but she never did. She never called her anything.

"The word
grandmother
is so old-fashioned," explained Mrs. Wellesley. But it wasn't really a matter of language, it was simply that she couldn't bear to be thought of as an old lady. Certainly not as
una nonna
, an
Italian
grandmother. If Ursula were to call her
Grandma
, people might think she was no longer a young and vibrant woman.

Dorothea didn't tell herself this in so many words. To Sam her lack of an honest connection with her own brain was the whole trouble. The most boring thing about his exquisitely boring mother-in-law was her everlasting unconscious untruthfulness.

Could it have been Dorothea who had entered his study and committed this vile atrocity? After all, she was even more of an iconoclast than he was himself. She might very well have thought it a cleansing act to destroy this remnant of barbarous superstition. Sam cursed his mother-in-law under his breath, wondering how a woman of such extreme respectability could be so violent.

He knocked on her door and confronted her just as she was picking up her alligator bag to go out. "Dorothea," he said sternly, "have you been in my study?"

She looked at him slyly. There was a slight pause, and then she said, "Of course not. How could I? The door is locked."

He jumped at the truth. "You have a key, don't you? You have a key to that room."

"Well, of course I don't have a key. How can you accuse me of such a thing, your own mother-in-law?"

"Because
somebody
opened that door." Sam was so angry he didn't care what he said. "How do I know it wasn't you?"

It was no use. Dorothea Wellesley had an ace in the hole, and it was better than the ace of clubs, the ace of diamonds, the ace of hearts, or the ace of spaces. It trumped every other card in the deck. It was the ace of gold. She simply had a fit.

Sam had seen her fits before. The scene—Dorothea Wellesley having a fit—was familiar and deadly dull. He watched as she threw herself on her bed and gasped between sobs, "How can you say a thing like that to me,
me
, the mother of your own dead wife,
whom you drove into the grave
?"

Frustrated, Sam waited. At last he said loudly over the noisy gulping floods of tears, "Well, have there been any strangers in the house? Could someone else have broken in?"

The tears stopped at once. His mother-in-law sat up, sniffling, and said craftily, "Yes. A plumber. There was a plumber here, fixing the sink."

"Which sink?"

"The kitchen sink. It was plugged up."

Oh, of course, thought Sam, it would be a plumber. There was always a plumber. "You called him? What company was it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I didn't pay much attention. He was in the phone book."

Without a word Sam turned away to find the
Pagine Gialle
and brought it back into her room. He stood over her, flipping the pages, and asked a clever question. "What did you look under? How did you find the list of plumbers in the phone book?"