The Last Gondola Read online

  The Last Gondola

  The Mysteries of Venice, Book Seven

  Edward Sklepowich

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To Nancy Lendved,

  with love, admiration, and gratitude

  for all she’s done

  for me and mine

  I will go out this evening in my cloak and gondola—there are two good Mrs. Radcliffe words for you.

  —LORD BYRON

  PROLOGUE

  Urbino Obsessed

  On this February afternoon the Caffè Florian whispered a history of plots and intrigues into Urbino Macintyre’s receptive ear as he sat across from the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini.

  The maroon banquettes, the elegant portraits, the painted mirror, the wood wainscots, the decorated arched vaults, and the parquet floor—all of them surely had a tale to tell, each from its own point of view.

  “Murder, theft, betrayal, adultery, treason, revolution,” Urbino recited. “All hatched here in the Chinese salon. From the eighteenth century to this very minute, you can be sure.”

  His gaze swept the room for a likely culprit, but the three Germans who had been sitting at a nearby table had left without his noticing it.

  “No one here but the two of us, caro,” the Contessa said. “And the only thing I’ve been contemplating in this den of duplicity is shaking you violently by the shoulders. You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Brooding about that dreadful man in his palazzo in San Polo, Samuel Possle.”

  The Contessa was right. Dominating his thoughts this afternoon, as so often lately, was the person she had named. Urbino could think of little else these days but an elderly American whom he had never seen in the flesh. The recluse had rejected all of his overtures. The success or failure of his next biography—in fact its very existence—depended on gaining access to the man.

  “Obsession is a terrible thing,” the Contessa observed. “Lost in your own world and not seeing the real one in front of you.”

  Urbino felt properly chastised. He smiled at his good friend. “But if you mean not seeing you, you’re wrong. You look lovely.”

  Indeed, she did. With her stylishly coifed honey blonde hair and slanted gray eyes, she was in the full prime of her middle years and carried it with grace and elegance. Her deep purple dress of simple lines and her onyx necklace bestowed a subdued, even penitential air, that suited this time of the year after the festivities of carnevale. But yet, as his closer scrutiny now detected, beneath the surface of her repose ran a current of uneasiness.

  And then in a rush, like birds coming home to roost, overlooked clues that had been accumulating this afternoon descended on him. Her almost imperceptible sighs, her fleeting frowns, and perhaps, most telling of all, the untouched petits fours. No mood of any kind had ever interfered with her enjoyment of them. He refrained from articulating any of these perceptions, however, knowing that the Contessa, like himself, liked to play a game of hide-and-seek with her own emotions.

  “Samuel Possle would be a real feather in my cap,” he said, succumbing to the gravitational pull of his own problems as he waited for the appropriate time to bring up hers. “Venice’s oldest expatriate. Think of it.”

  “Its most ancient reprobate,” the Contessa corrected with a barely discernible edge to her voice. “Isolated in that house of his like that disreputable marquis you’re so fond of.”

  “Good old Des Esseintes. He’s a duke,” Urbino said with a smile. “You haven’t brought him up in a long time.”

  “Because I don’t want to contribute to your confusion between art and life—if you can call that decadent book art, that is.”

  The Contessa was referring to Huysmans’s Against Nature, a French novel about a reclusive bachelor. Urbino, purging the book of its many excesses, had patterned his own secluded life in Venice after it. It had been a bone of contention between them ever since they had first met twenty years ago at a reception for the Biennale.

  “Well,” the Contessa said, with an air of resignation, “you’ve always had an obsessive personality as long as I’ve known you. I should have taken warning from the way you would always talk about the mad duke as if he were a living, breathing person instead of some outdated character in a novel.”

  “But Samuel Possle is living and breathing,” Urbino pointed out, “at least at the moment. You’ll have to admit that my obsession is more justified in his case.”

  “I’ll admit nothing,” the Contessa replied.

  Urbino took a consolatory sip of sherry and looked out into the square.

  What Napoleon had called the finest drawing room of Europe looked more suited to aquatic engagements than social ones. Deep pools of water mirrored a leaden sky, a slice of gold-and-blue clock tower, and jagged ribbons of narrow arches and rounded windows. Elevated planks marched past the Basilica to provide dry passage. The Piazza was almost empty, and the people strolling beneath the arcades and looking in the shop windows were mainly Venetians. This was one of the blessedly dead times of the year for the city. Mardi Gras had brought carnevale to its wild end two weeks ago. Tourists and student groups wouldn’t begin to descend for another month.

  “These gray days are seeping into my soul,” the Contessa lamented. “And it’s still only February!”

  She gave a little shiver despite the overheated room and glanced down at the petits fours. “You’ve noticed that I haven’t eaten one,” she said.

  She might just as well have said that she had no patience with their tacit game of concealment.

  “I’ve noticed more than I’ve let on, Barbara. Either you’re going to tell me what’s troubling you or I’ll have to resort to some form of torture,” Urbino replied.

  “As if you’ve been so eager to know! And speaking of torture, hasn’t it been just that to listen to you go on and on about Samuel Possle? You’ve barely given me a chance to say anything. Before you bring up his name again, let me just tell you in no uncertain terms that I may be losing my mind. There!”

  Melodrama was one of the notes that the Contessa often liked to strike, but this afternoon there was more appeal than provocation in her words. Her eyes seemed suddenly glazed with fatigue.

  “Didn’t I say the gondola was madness?” Urbino teased in the hope of dispelling her mood. The Contessa had recently given him nothing less extravagant than a gondola in commemoration of their friendship.

  “I wish that were the extent of it,” she responded, with a rueful smile. “I’m all too serious. We need to talk. You keep hinting that you need my help with Possle. Well, caro, I need yours with something much more serious. But I’d like a fresh pot of tea before I say anything more.”

  After this was supplied, along with a sherry for Urbino, she began to explain.

  “I have to go back to about three weeks before the beginning of carnevale. You and Habib were so involved in getting the Palazzo Uccello ready for the celebration that I kept quiet.”

  Habib was Habib Laroussi, a young Moroccan artist who was living at the Palazzo Uccello with Urbino. He had left for Morocco a few days after carnevale to arrange for the shipment of his work to be exhibited at the Biennale in June.

  “It all began with the silver cascade you gave me. You haven’t seen me wear it recently, have you?”

  Urbino gave an involuntary start when she mentioned the necklace of beaten silver ovals from Marrakech. The necklace, as well as the Contessa herself, had a connection to a recurring dream that had been disturbing his sleep during the past few weeks. The dream also involved Samuel Possle, the object of his desires. More and more often he was sleeping through the seven o’clock and seven-thirty bells that pealed over the city every morning. The Contessa had become aware of his cha
nged routine, but not the disquieting reason behind it, for he had been accustomed to calling her at an early hour, but seldom did so these days.

  “No,” he said, averting his eyes, “but I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Well, you should have! I’m sorry,” she apologized, although Urbino had hardly registered her vehemence; he had been too concerned that she might notice his own reaction of surprise. At the moment he did not want to explain why her reference to the necklace had disconcerted him.

  “You know how much I love that necklace. I wanted to wear it for the reception at the Casa Goldoni. But it wasn’t in my jewelry box. I put it there after I wore it at the Feast of the Salute in November—or I think I did. And now it can’t be found. We’ve turned the house upside down.”

  “Surely you’ve mislaid it.”

  “If it were that simple! It’s so confusing. I don’t know what’s going on. There have been other things.”

  “Other things? Other pieces of jewelry?”

  “No. Items of clothing. One of my favorite dresses, for one thing. The mauve-and-blue tea dress. I don’t think I’ve seen it since we went to the film festival. And my Regency scarf is gone, too! And of all things, my old slouch hat with the flowers.” She stared blankly at him. “And it was so strange, caro. As soon as I missed the silver cascade, I noticed that I was missing these other things. I went through my whole wardrobe to see if anything else was gone, but how could I tell? What I put Silvia through! She was mumbling under her breath for days afterward.” Silvia was her personal maid. “I just know that I’m going to miss something else, probably a lot more, any one of these days.”

  “I hate to say it, Barbara, but someone in the house must have taken them. But why that particular necklace? You have so many other pieces of jewelry that are obviously much more valuable. It’s a bit of a puzzle. And why take your used clothes, exquisite though they are? Strange, but we know all too well the kind of things that can happen, even at the Ca’ da Capo.”

  This was Urbino’s way of reminding her of the violence associated with a member of her staff, which had been his most personally troubling case to date.

  She shook her head.

  “Not this time. I almost wish that were the case. If it were only the necklace or some other piece of jewelry, I could accept the possibility that someone had stolen them, even someone in the house. But as you say, why would anyone in his right mind take used clothing? Don’t you see what this means? I’m sailing into the darkness! I’m losing my mind!”

  “I would say, my dear friend,” Urbino replied, restraining an involuntary smile at her exaggeration, “that you’re losing items of your clothing and one piece of jewelry. If they haven’t been stolen, it could be a hoax of some kind, a peculiar one, I admit. I’d advise you to reconsider what I said about your staff.”

  “But how do I know that I haven’t taken these things myself and—and put them somewhere?” she asked, ignoring the thrust of his comment.

  “Mislaid them. But of course.”

  “Not mislaid them, no! Taken them, I said, and put them somewhere or tossed them away, deliberately but—but unconsciously,” she finished more feebly than she had begun. “My mind has been getting a little clouded lately. I forgot an appointment with my dressmaker last month, and Vitale tells me that I never asked him to see that the door knocker was repaired, and I was so sure that I had.”

  “You’re reading too much into everything. We’re all absentminded from time to time, and as far as your clothes are concerned—”

  “And sometimes,” she interrupted, “I’m afraid I’m going to forget somebody’s name, someone I know as well as myself. On top of everything I have these conversazioni beginning next week.”

  Urbino now understood why his friend had become needlessly fixated on her memory. She was delivering three informal talks at the Venice music conservatory where she had studied before marrying the late Conte. At the Contessa’s request, however, Urbino would be attending only the last one, when she would give a musical concert. It would distract her, she said, to have him in the audience for the other occasions. Her fear that her memory was weakening was surely just one more example of her anxiety about her ability to perform.

  “You’ll be splendid,” Urbino reassured her. “You’ll remember things about those days that most people want to forget. There’s nothing to worry about. I would have noticed something long before you.”

  “In usual circumstances, yes, that’s what they say; but the way that you’ve been so engrossed with Samuel Possle, as if there’s nothing else under the sun? Samuel Possle this and Samuel Possle that? Probably creeping around outside the Ca’ Pozza at night with your elegant pencil flashlight and haunting it in the daytime as well? No, don’t be so sure that you would have noticed anything.”

  Urbino retreated into a sip of his sherry. Fortunately, the Contessa didn’t realize that, in a fashion, Possle was a ghost sitting next to them even here in Florian’s. Urbino felt he could almost reach out and touch the old expatriate.

  He raised his eyes and saw his own reflection in the mirror opposite.

  “And don’t forget,” he said, turning his attention back to the Contessa, who had been staring at him with expectation, “that your doctors in Geneva gave you a clean bill of health. That was right before Christmas.”

  “A clean bill of physical health,” she emphasized. “These things creep up on you. Then—then they leap! And don’t tell me I’m too young,” she added, raising her voice. “I’m not!”

  She looked bewildered, caught as she was between her vanity and her need for sympathy. “I don’t mean that I’m old, you understand. What I mean is—is—” She broke off.

  “That it can begin at a relatively young age” was Urbino’s offering. “Yes, even as young or as old as mine.”

  The Contessa had always shrouded the actual, incriminating number of her age in mystery, but according to Urbino’s computations, it was almost two decades more than his own. If she had already reached sixty, as he strongly suspected, she had carried it off without any obvious celebration or depression.

  “Ah, you give and you take away, but, yes, you’re right. You understand how I feel then, and why you have to help me. You have to find out what’s happening!”

  “I’ll help in whatever way I can, but it won’t be a challenge to my detecting abilities, I’m sure. Whatever answer we find will have nothing to do with this nonsense about your memory. Let it be. Your conversazioni are going to be a great success, I tell you.”

  A tentative smile brightened her face. “And you’re going to get your interviews with Samuel Possle,” she matched him. “I’ll think of something. I’ll take down that Turkish scimitar in the gallery, the one handed down in Alvise’s family, and cut through the Gordian knot for you. Just you see!”

  “A scissors might be all you need! Or a few strings pulled here and there.”

  “If they haven’t disintegrated after all these years.” She punctuated this with a nervous laugh. “You’ll help me, and I’ll help you. Isn’t that what we’ve always done? What we’ll always do? One for all and all for one!”

  “You make a most attractive Musketeer.”

  “But we’re not three, are we? Habib isn’t here. Are you going to be all right with him gone for a while? I’m afraid you might sink deeper into the waters of your own obsession without him around.”

  “But I have the mystery of your disappearing wardrobe to exercise my mind. My thread of sanity,” he joked. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.” He raised his sherry glass. “And with or without Habib, we’re inseparable. Never doubt that.”

  It was what the Contessa wanted to hear.

  “Like Venice and water!” she threw out.

  “Like masks and carnevale!” Urbino countered.

  “Like gondolas and—and—”

  The Contessa faltered. The almost inevitable word “death” washed over Urbino.

  “And gondoliers,” she offered.<
br />
  “Like gondoliers and ‘O Sole Mio’!”

  A smile of satisfaction and relief lit the Contessa’s face. Urbino took her hand. Quietly he sang in his uneven tenor, “‘Che bella cosa najurnata è sole, n’aria serena dopo na tempesta!’“

  The two friends looked out into the square.

  But the scene seemed about to betray the optimistic words of the song. If they were to judge from the dark, menacing clouds being driven in from the lagoon, another storm would soon batter their frail, serene city.

  PART ONE

  IN HIS CLOAK AND GONDOLA

  1

  “I must get in,” Urbino said to himself at two o’clock in the morning. He stood on a narrow, humpbacked bridge in a remote corner of the San Polo district.

  The full moon broke through the clouds and splayed a solemn brightness over the scene.

  The Ca’ Pozza was wrapped in silence, and completely dark behind its windows. Urbino felt a thrill of fear and a wave of melancholy. Even if he had not known who was within its walls, hidden from public view all these years and filled with so many memories that time would soon snatch away, the building would have stirred in him the same mixture of feelings.

  Urbino closed his umbrella. Surrounded by puddles of water and the reek of moldering stone and vegetation, he was far removed from the civilized comforts of Florian’s, where he had sat with the Contessa yesterday afternoon.

  He peered down at the black waters of the canal. Scraps of vegetables drifted in the direction of the Grand Canal. Mesmerized by their slow motion, he watched them until they passed from view under the bridge. He was now staring at the faint, masklike reflection of his face.

  Vaguely uneasy, he jerked his head up. His unexpected image in any reflecting surface invariably disconcerted him as it had at Florian’s. It always left him feeling, for many confusing moments afterward, that he wasn’t the person he thought he was but someone else who only looked the same.