The Thief of Venice (23 page)

Coraggio, Lucia.
She put her ear against the bathroom door and listened, her eyes filling with tears. Her ridiculous momentary happiness was about to come to an end. It had been too good to be true.

But for Richard Henchard, Lucia Costanza's life or death was of no interest any longer. He failed even to notice that she was no longer lying on the floor. He had lost interest in everything reasonable and sane, he had forgotten every sensible concern with cause and effect. His mind was empty of everything but the passion of possession—
these things are mine.

He was not the first man to lose his sanity to a dream of fabulous riches, a vision of gold coins glistening in wobbling patterns under the sea, the sound of a shovel thunking against the buried lid of a strongbox. The difference between Henchard and all the other madmen pursuing fantastic dreams of unimaginable wealth was that his own treasure had
been found
, he
possessed
it, it was right here under his hand.

Lucia could hear him cursing. He had left his trophies securely wrapped, and now they had been taken out of their wrappings and exposed. It was another mark against his prisoner. Once again she braced her whole weight against the door.

But nothing happened. There was no howl of accusation, no violent smashing of the cracked panels of the bathroom door. There was only the sound of heavy breathing, the scraping of objects across the floor, a loud clanging as something was dropped, and for a moment a discordant jangling of the bells on the Torah scrolls. She could hear his grunts and curses, and again and again the thump of his feet on the stairs, going rapidly down and slowly up, down and up, and finally down for good.

Was he gone? Lucia held her breath. She waited for ten minutes before softly unlocking the bathroom door and looking out. She was alone. Quietly she walked into the next room and gazed at the floor where the treasure had lain.

It was gone, it was all gone but for a few yellowed pieces of paper blowing across the floor. Turning, she saw that the breeze came from the staircase. The door of her prison stood wide open.
 

*50*

Like a mother tucking a baby into a perambulator, adjusting the pillow and arranging the blankets just so, Henchard bowed over the objects in the cart and shifted them this way and that.

First he tried putting the painting on the bottom. Then he leaned it upright against the side. The gold plates went in flat, with the book resting on top of them. The Torah scrolls were too long for the cart, so he had to set them in at an angle, and then the tarpaulin kept slipping off the jeweled crowns on the ends of the long handles. The bells jingled and jangled.

It had stopped raining. The tide was going down. The high water that had drenched his trousers during his frantic pursuit of the goddamn American woman was now only a few puddles here and there, but the legs of his pants were still wet. They stuck unpleasantly to Henchard's shins as he began racing the cart along Calle de la Madonna. Luckily it was getting dark.
Right turn coming up, left on Calle Varisco, then straight across Campiello Stella.

So far, so good. It was all backstreets, not broad avenues like the Strada Nuova. But the hospital was not yet in sight, and there would soon be busy places like Campiello Widman to get across.

As a hiding place for his jingling Torah scrolls and his golden plates and his beautiful old manuscripts and his precious Titian painting, the hospital was a desperate temporary fallback, but if he could get the cart across Rio de la Panada and Rio dei Mendicanti and take it in by the tradesmen's entrance to a certain very capacious closet, then everything would be okay—Henchard remembered the closet particularly because he had once been cornered inside it by an aggressive little nurse's aide.

Campiello Widman was full of people going and coming in the dusk of evening, women on their way to the brightly righted shops on the Strada Nuova, a man tramping along with a ladder on his shoulder, children playing in the street, a pair of lost Americans gazing at a map, holding it up to the remains of the daylight.

Henchard drove his cart through the middle of the little square at top speed. The Americans stared, the man with the ladder turned his head, the children elbowed each other and snickered, the women stopped to watch the man in the drenched business suit pushing a
carretto
in such a hurry with such a wild tintinnabulation of bells.

To Henchard they were merely obstructions in his way. He stopped in sudden jerks to let them pass, then pushed ahead, then slowed down again to make a succession of quick turns. At the Rio di Ca' Widman a short length of the canal was blocked off with heavy plates of rusty corrugated iron. Henchard glanced down with pitying scorn at the wretched men working in the slimy ooze of the bottom, shoveling mud into wheelbarrows, carrying on the perpetual job of clearing Venetian waterways of silt because their ruthless foreman, the engineer from the Ministry of Public Works, had ordered them back to work.

Beside the empty canal the
fondamenta
was obstructed by wooden trestles. There was hardly room to get by, and the cart kept wobbling dangerously to one side.
 

Mary and Homer Kelly were crowded together in the small cabin of the powerboat of the Nucleo Natanti in the company of three men in the smart dark uniforms of the carabinieri. The brigadier capo was at the wheel, sending the little craft whizzing under the Rialto Bridge into the Rio del Fontego dei Tedeschi. The staring headlight illuminated the turn into Rio de San Lio, the engine slowed and speeded up again, sending bow waves slapping against the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The brigadiere was making a shortcut in the direction of Rio dei Gesuiti, where Mary's ringer had come down so firmly on the map.
Here
, she had said,
try here.

They never made it to Rio dei Gesuiti. "There," cried Mary, "there he is, look! The man with the cart!"

Henchard saw the glaring headlight, he heard the roar of the engine, he heard it suddenly cut, he saw the carabinieri leaping up onto the
fondamenta
, he saw Mary Kelly pointing and shouting. Panicking, he backed up and collided with one of the trestles. A gate beside the empty canal swung open.

Slowly, as in a dream, he blundered sideways and lost his balance. The cart with all its priceless treasures lurched and threatened to tip over. The tarpaulin slipped off and a magnificent volume of Caesar's
Commentaries
, adorned with the stemma of Cardinal Bessarion and illuminated with a splendid letter
I
(for
Iulius
), flew up in the air.

Homer, who sometimes didn't know his right hand from his left, reached out one long arm and caught it neatly as it came down, and the brigadiere capo snatched up the painting before it hit the ground, and the other carabinieri grasped the handles of the cart and heaved it upright, while Richard Henchard fell slowly headfirst into trie muddy bottom of the canal.
 

*51*

When the doorbell rang, only Mrs. Wellesley was at home. She came running downstairs to the street door, her alarm about Ursula turning to indignation, angry words boiling up in her head.

But it was not Ursula at the door, it was a bedraggled woman, a perfect stranger, a disheveled-looking gypsy with wild hair and a rag around her arm.
"Signora,"
said the woman in limpid Italian,
"mi chiamo Lucia Costanza. Per piacere, posso vedere il SignorBell?"
When Mrs. Wellesley only gaped at her, Lucia said it again in English, "My name is Lucia Constanza. Please, is Mr. Bell at home?"

If Dorothea Wellesley had been a reading woman, she might have seen this meeting as a scene right out of Dickens, like the fierce encounter in
A Tale of Two Cities
between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross.

Dorothea was not a reading woman, but she recognized the extraordinary apparition at the door as a dangerous enemy. The woman looked very much like a threat to everything Dorothea held dear. At once she vowed to protect her own.

"Mr. Bell is not home," she said coldly. Then, standing squarely in the middle of the doorway, she added, "Why do you wish to see him?" It was a rude thing to say, but outrage and curiosity overwhelmed her sense of propriety.

"Sono una collega,"
began Lucia, but then she faltered and started over in English. She gripped the rag on her arm, which was stained with blood. " I am a colleague of Doctor Bell's. I am a procurator of Saint Mark."
Or I was, before I ran away.

Dorothea stared at Lucia, taking in the handsome face, the curling mass of wet hair, the soaked and rumpled clothing. It was worse and worse. This dangerously attractive female was asserting a powerful claim on the husband of her own dead daughter. How was she to be defied?

The estimable Miss Pross had used physical violence to overcome Madame Defarge, but brutal muscular action was beyond the ken of Dorothea Wellesley, in spite of the passionate fury of her threats against priests and popes and the archbishop of Canterbury.

Reluctantly she introduced herself as Samuel Bell's mother-in-law and the grandmother of his little daughter (in other words, as a privileged person who had a right to her presence in this house, not like some). And then at last she stood back and asked Lucia to come in.

It was not a surrender. She was prepared for battle. She would bring all her forces into it, she would play all her cards—hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds, and even, if necessary, the ace of gold.

Lucia struggled after her up the stairs. She was so tired she could barely walk across the sitting-room floor. Half fainting, she sank into a chair.

Mrs. Wellesley glowered down at her. Was the bitch putting on an act? As someone who had put on many an act herself, she recognized the symptoms. By cheating, the gypsy had won the first round in this battle of Titans. She would not win the second.

There was no time for another move. To her chagrin Mrs. Wellesley heard Sam stumping slowly up the stairs. She didn't want to let him in. She opened the door and saw him standing on the top step with Ursula, who was holding the lid of a pot in each hand.

"You bad girl," snapped Dorothea, "where have you been?" Then she said dryly to Sam, "You have a visitor."

He murmured, "Oh, no," and stepped reluctantly into the hall. At once he saw Lucia in the room beyond. She was rising slowly from her chair, and he ran to her with a cry of joy.

Lucia laughed and allowed herself to be embraced, but then she said,
"Oh!"
and backed away, apologizing.

"Good God," said Sam, seeing the bloodstained rag. Putting his arm around her, he glanced at his mother-in-law for guidance in the household care of miscellaneous injuries, but Dorothea sniffed and turned away. It was none of
her
affair.

So Sam took Lucia into the kitchen and cared for the torn skin of her arm with warm water and disinfectant and layers of gauze bandage. "We must call a doctor," he whispered, kissing her gently.

"No, no," said Lucia. "Not yet." And together they returned to the sitting room, where Ursula beamed at them and banged her pot lids together with a crash.

For once Mrs. Wellesley failed to scold. She was in a state of shock. This was defeat, and she knew it. The battle was over before it had begun. Dorothea withdrew into the sanctuary of her bedroom. The gypsy woman's ace of hearts had trumped her ace of gold.

But Ursula was glad. She looked at the pretty lady with the curly hair and at her father, whom she had saved. Her miracle had worked. Her father was not going to die. He had told her so.
 

*52*

Slowly and haltingly, Sam and Lucia began putting together all their bits and pieces.

Sam Bell knew and loved Lucia, but he knew nothing about the treasure that had been discovered by his own physician, Doctor Richard Henchard, and seen thereafter by both Lucia and Mary Kelly.

He was also completely unaware of the turbulent history of the gold plates and candlesticks and scrolls, the painting and the five-hundred-year-old books, bundled so insanely by Doctor Henchard from one place to another and at last nearly flung into the slimy bottom of a drained canal.

Sam did not know why Lucia had disappeared from her house in the Ghetto Nuovo. He didn't yet know that Doctor Henchard had taken her away at gunpoint and imprisoned her and tried to murder her.

And of course neither Sam nor Lucia knew anything about Henchard's dangerous pursuit of Mary Kelly through high water and low, nor about his escape and recapture with the help of the Nucleo Natanti.

It wasn't until Mary and Homer knocked on the door and came hobbling in, exhilarated, worn out, and starving, that everything could be sorted out.

But first, of course, everyone had to be introduced to everyone else. Everyone, that is, but Dorothea, who had already begun packing in her bedroom, having seen the handwriting on the wall,

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN!
DOROTHEA WELLESLEY,
YOU'LL BE BETTER OFF ELSEWHERE.

Sam was in a state of solemn joy. Reasons One and Two had vanished, the logical arguments explaining why Lucia Costanza had been forbidden him from the beginning—Reason One, his illness, and Reason Two, the fact that she was married, and then the final appalling Reason Three, her disappearance. Now here she was, sitting warmly beside him while both of them struggled to maintain some sort of decorum, and Homer and Mary tried not to grin too broadly.

"Come on, Ursula, dear," said Mary, jumping up and grasping her hand. "Let's see what we can find to eat in the kitchen. And I've got some good things upstairs. Do you like pickles?"

Sam jumped up too and went to his mother-in-law's bedroom and called through the door, "Dorothea, please join us. This is a celebration."

But Mrs. Wellesley was still cowering from the dread words on her wall, YOU'LL BE BETTER OFF ELSEWHERE, and she stayed put.

They ate and drank and talked. Ursula fell asleep and Sam put her to bed. At last, when Lucia brought out her document, they were ready to listen.