Death in the Palazzo Read online

  “Can I look at the photograph again?” Bambina asked like an importunate little girl. “Please?”

  Bambina grabbed her mother’s purse, opened it, and withdrew a piece of folded newspaper. She almost ripped it as she unfolded it. It showed an attractive but uncomfortable-looking man of about forty dressed in a tuxedo. Next to him was a handsome older woman.

  “Don’t forget what we’ve come here for! You must leave the man alone! I forbid you!” Signora Zeno said with a force that belied the minimal movement of the thin lips.

  Fire flashed in Bambina’s dark eyes. Almost sixty years ago her mother had said almost the same words to her. The pain was as sharp now as it had been then.

  Bambina nodded her head of curls.

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  But the fire was still in her eyes and she had to put a chubby hand to her face to hide the smile that was starting to crawl across her bright red lips.

  3

  Everywhere Dr. Luigi Vasco went, the past spoke to him, but it was absent of doges and Titian and Marco Polo. It was his own personal past, and not his whole past—a formidable contemplation, since he was eighty-seven—only that part which had unrolled in the serene city.

  The memories assaulted him. Yes, they were everywhere. At the Bridge of Sighs, which he had drifted beneath in a gondola sixty years ago. At La Fenice, whose mirrored corridors had reflected the passage of two people caught up in something as operatic as anything taking place on the stage. At the parapet of the Rialto Bridge, where he had waited in a pelting rain, not unlike the one yesterday, for someone to keep a rendezvous.

  Vasco could have provided a personal commentary of love and loss on almost every major sight in the guidebooks, ticking them off one after another.

  His steps inevitably took him to one building, however, that wasn’t mentioned in many of the guidebooks. Yet it was a place filled with even more associations than any of the others.

  Vasco first contemplated the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini from the opposite side of the Grand Canal, taking in its classical facade of Istrian stone with a frieze of lions, its veranda, its garden wall covered with Virginia creeper. He took the traghetto to the other side and spent several minutes contemplating the humble back of the building. Almost sixty years before he had passed through the first of the iron doors into the small, formal garden and then through the doors of the palazzo itself.

  Back then there had been a different contessa—an Italian one. Her house party had ended in death. Love and loss all those years ago, and now he was returning.

  A face appeared at one of the windows. For a fleeting moment it was Renata’s proud, beautiful face. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The window was empty. He turned away and walked wearily down the calle.

  Why had he agreed to come back?

  4

  A water taxi was speeding in a narrow channel marked out by old wooden stakes. Ominous clouds were reflected in the green waters of the lagoon.

  “I think I’m going to be sick. Can’t we go back to the airport?” said a thin young woman sitting in the stern. So muffled and constricted was she in a cape, two scarves, a knit cap, gloves, and leg warmers that it was possible to assume her indisposition could be immediately cured by a merciful loosening of some of the wraps.

  Robert Bellini-Rhys, a good-looking, olive-skinned man with short-cropped black hair and penetrating eyes of an unexpected blue, looked at his fiancée, Angelica Lydgate, with an indulgent expression.

  “We can, Angelica dear, but then you’ll just be bounced in a bus or squeezed into an overheated vaporetto.”

  “I’ll have to endure it, then,” she said. She was a plain woman whose heart-shaped face seemed too small for her large brown eyes.

  To distract her, Robert pointed out Burano.

  “The island where they make lace.”

  She nodded without interest. In the past few moments she had turned an unpleasant shade of green. Robert had developed the habit of humoring her, but this might be the real thing. He looked nervously at the pilot, who showed no interest in what might be about to happen to the upholstery of his cabin. Instead he was looking at the dark sky and mumbling something in Venetian dialect that sounded foreboding.

  Robert, just as much to calm his own nerves as to soothe Angelica, commented on the scene.

  “… more than thirty islands scattered all around Venice, but twenty don’t have a soul on them. Completely abandoned, like that one over there, see?” Angelica didn’t bother to raise her eyes, let alone her head. “The railway bridge to the mainland is what did it. A direct link with terra firma. Upset the balance and proportion of all the islands. Should have left things the way they were. This is the only way to approach Venice!”

  He said it grandly and threw his hand out toward the shining waters of the lagoon. He conveniently had forgotten that they had just stepped off a plane that had left London only two hours ago. But Robert Bellini-Rhys was full of inconsistencies like this. Otherwise why would such a thoroughly modern young man—and one with a great love for what money could buy—have become not only a medieval art historian but also a specialist in relics and the so-called “sacred thefts” of saints’ bodies?

  “‘Far as the eye can see, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray,’” he went on, warming to his topic and reciting Ruskin. “‘Lifeless, the color sackcloth, with the corrupted seawater soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels.’”

  Breaking the spell of Ruskin’s hypnotic prose, he said, “That’s Murano over there. Glass. The cathedral has the relics of San Donato, and behind the altar are bones. Oh, not of the saint. The bones of the dragon he was reputed to have killed. By spitting at it.”

  He found this immensely amusing and threw back his good-looking head and laughed.

  “Can you imagine that people used to believe such things? Poor souls! But speaking of bones,” he went on, “there are plenty of human ones in the other churches. For example …”

  As the boat went across the rest of the lagoon, he threw himself, with both reverence and condescension, into a description of some of the city’s saintly remains. By the time they passed the brick walls and cypresses of the cemetery island, he managed to make all the fabled monuments, mosaics, and altars seem little more than mere decoration for a vast boneyard.

  Perhaps according to some paradoxical law, Angelica’s bilious color subsided during this demonstration of her betrothed’s macabre expertise to something closer to its usual pallor. When the boat headed down a wide waterway toward the Grand Canal, she looked around her with more interest. A gentle smile made her face even softer.

  “Oh, it’s just like a picture.”

  Angelica was to be forgiven this platitude. It was, after all, her first trip to Venice, and she was a young woman most of whose impressions of life were secondhand. These had been formed, almost obstinately, her friends thought, from the pages of Victorian novels, the sepia-toned photographs of a stereopticon, and a group of painters who belonged to no particular school or period unless it was that of the sentimental.

  When the boat turned into the Grand Canal a few minutes later, her raptures weren’t therefore particularly surprising, but they were nonetheless sincere.

  “Oh my! Just look at it. A real dream! The water’s just like a mirror, and the buildings seem to be floating. And the colors! Straight from a painter’s palette. It’s exactly the way I knew it was going to be. I’m not disappointed in the slightest!”

  Robert, vaguely uneasy that she seemed to have forgotten some of the darker associations the city held for her—just as she had failed to notice the inauspicious clouds overhead and the strange quality of the light—patted her hand and said, “I’m glad you’re feeling better, my dear. It’s going to be a wonderful weekend.”

  5

  Gemma Bellini-Rhys looked at the finished portrait. It was one of her best. Also, probably her last. And from the way the Contessa had f
idgeted and complained, it would probably be her last, too.

  But the Contessa needn’t have been apprehensive that Gemma might exact some kind of vengeance through paint. In fact, Gemma was the closest the Contessa might have come to being “done” by Sargent, her favorite portrait painter.

  The Contessa was standing in her salotto blu, one hand placed on the lid of a waist-high ceramic Chinese urn, the other holding a morocco-bound volume. She was dressed in a pleated silk Fortuny dress weighted with corded pearls of Murano blown glass and with a pattern inspired by Carpaccio. She had been almost as concerned about how it “came off” as she had been about her face. This attribute, as old as the Fortuny, was equally impressive and for the same reasons. Good design and careful preservation.

  The Contessa’s face, tilted ever so slightly backward with its generous cheekbones, slanted gray eyes, and patrician air, had been rendered without either flattery or cruel, subtle caricature.

  The Contessa should be very pleased when she saw it for the first time this weekend during her house party.

  Gemma dropped the cloth over the portrait and went to the window. It looked on to the Grand Canal, but for a moment all she could see was her own reflection in the glass. So different from the Contessa’s face, although within only a few years of the same age. It had never possessed any of the beauty of her mother Renata’s face, and during the past year serious illness, which she had not revealed to any one, had begun to erode much of its prettiness.

  She looked past her own disturbing image down at the Grand Canal. Almost sixty years ago she had sat for hours gazing out of another window of this same palazzo with her doll, waving to figures in passing boats and on the opposite embankment. The view had hardly changed in all these years. This was one of the comforts and mockeries of Venice. No matter what different heart and face you brought it each time, it always was the same.

  Always the same, she repeated to herself. Someone coming for the weeknd was all too content to have things remain the same—the way they had been for almost sixty years. But Gemma was determined that this weekend she would strike out and put an end to it. Her hand grasped the drape more tightly as she thought of what she would do.

  As she looked down at the Grand Canal, a sleek white water taxi pulled into the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini landing. Mauro, the Contessa’s majordomo, appeared a few moments later and helped out Angelica. She was a little unsteady on her feet. Gemma hoped she wasn’t going to take to her room and stay there the whole time as she had at the country weekend last year in Sussex. Gemma sighed. She had the impatience of the truly ill in the presence of the hypochondriacal. What she wouldn’t give for one of the girl’s bad days!

  Robert emerged from the boat and squinted up at the building. Feeling not unlike the little girl of half a century ago, she waved at her son but he didn’t see her.

  6

  “And here at last is my dear friend, Urbino Macintyre,” the Contessa said as Urbino joined the small group in the salotto blu. “This is Angelica Lydgate and Robert Bellini-Rhys. They’ve only just arrived.”

  The young woman’s eyebrows rose in amazement. She could barely find her voice to say how pleased she was to meet him.

  “Are you all right, Angelica?” Robert said. “She got a bit queasy on the boat from the airport.”

  “Of course she’s all right,” Gemma said, a touch of irritation in her voice. She moved closer to the plain girl and squeezed her arm. “She just needs a chance to catch her breath. One minute you’re in the modern world, the next you’re in the time of the Doges.”

  Angelica managed to take her eyes off Urbino only by transferring them to her hands, covered in demi-gloves as if she didn’t quite trust the heating of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. Robert studied his fiancée’s bent head with a slight frown.

  “You and Urbino have something in common, Robert,” the Contessa said as she refilled Angelica’s teacup. “A morbid taste for the dead of Venice!”

  She took only momentary satisfaction in her own bon mot, however, for the disapproving look on Gemma’s face told her how unthinking it had been. The poor woman’s mother had died in Venice.

  “Urbino’s a biographer,” she quickly amended. “He insists that his subjects be dead and have some connection with the city.”

  “That could put you in a strange position,” Robert said. His tone was slightly jocular, but his blue eyes were humorless. “You must be waiting impatiently for some choice subjects to die. I doubt that we’re in much competition, though. I’m interested in relics of the early Church that found their way to Venice. Barbara said there’s the body of a female saint in a church near your palazzo. Santa Teodora. An obscure one. Even less documentary evidence on her than the others.”

  “There’s been quite a bit about her recently, I’m afraid,” Urbino said. “Evidence of a different kind.”

  “Now I remember! The theft of the body from the crystal casket. An old woman was murdered, too, isn’t that right?”

  “It certainly is!” the Contessa chimed in. “Urbino’s our resident amateur sleuth. His first case. Tell Robert the whole story while we women chat about less gruesome topics,” she said, apparently having forgotten she had been the one to introduce death into her salotto.

  She watched Urbino lead Robert over to the bar and pour them both something stronger than tea. When Urbino began his account, she turned to Angelica.

  “Excuse me, my dear,” she said in a lower voice than was usual with her, “but do you know Urbino from somewhere? He’s so mysterious about his past—sometimes even his present!—that I’m reduced at times to the most pathetic bits and pieces.”

  “Know him from somewhere? I don’t know what you mean!”

  “Oh, come now, Angelica! I’m not accusing you of anything. Ha, ha! I can see how much you and Robert are in love. But I couldn’t help noticing how you reacted when he came into the room. Almost as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  Gemma’s face hardened.

  “Really, Barbara, you say the most unusual things!” she said with a nervous laugh.

  “Do I, Gemma? To be honest, I thought that you looked at him the same way when you first met him. Oh, don’t keep me in the dark!”

  Gemma and Angelica exchanged a glance in which there was more than the Contessa could read.

  Before the Contessa could decide whether she should pursue the topic further, the door of the salotto was flung open and a man’s voice said, “Here we are, cuz! Fresh off the Orient Express!”

  “Sebastian! Viola!”

  The Contessa hurried over to them. Behind her angular cousins was a woman she didn’t recognize. She knew she could never possibly have seen her before because once seen, how could she have ever forgotten her? The woman was not much over four feet tall, with a twisted body and the thickest glasses imaginable.

  She peered into the room and said in a high-pitched voice: “There’s blood here, a whole scarlet bath of it.”

  She nodded her head with grim satisfaction and looked directly at Gemma.

  “Of course there is,” Viola said. “Meet our blood cousin, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini! And this, Barbara, is Mrs. Molly Wybrow. Sebastian and I have invited her for the house party. We knew you wouldn’t mind. By the way, you look marvelous! I’m absolutely not going to tell Mummy. You look so radiant and—and rested! She’d be pea-green with envy!”

  7

  The Contessa had a fixed smile, as if she were waiting for her photograph to be taken or posing for another portrait. Viola’s compliment didn’t seem to register. When her lips eventually moved, it wasn’t to thank Viola or to greet Molly but to utter the one word: “Thirteen.”

  Urbino, who had done his own quick computations and come up with the same ominous number, left Robert abruptly and hurried to the Contessa’s side. But once he got there all he seemed to be able to do was to look and feel foolish. Sebastian gave him a lopsided grin, and surveyed Urbino quickly from the top of his head down to his shoes, and then up again.


  “Come to kill one of us to even out the number? A bit too drastic, even in the service of a great lady like our Barbara. You must be the local celebrity Urbino Macintyre, who has found his way into our cousin’s heart! Maybe Viola and I can accommodate you, too!”

  The Contessa, slightly dazed, quickly made all the necessary introductions.

  “I tell you what, cuz,” Sebastian said. “Why don’t we just have one of your many staff mingle with us all? Be very democratic and keep off the old evil eye.”

  The alternatives the Contessa had been considering in the last few moments hadn’t included this, but the more logical if no less desperate one of “disinviting” her friends the Borellis or asking a fourteenth guest at the eleventh hour. However, her loyalty and propriety were stronger—at least at the moment—than her superstition. Also, if she had to be so benighted as to believe in portents and signs—which she did with all the fervency of a medieval peasant—she had little wish to appear to.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, what does it matter?” she said, deceiving no one. “We’re all thoroughly modern and enlightened.”

  This wasn’t exactly the most accurate thing to say, since the room contained a specialist in relics, a devotee of all things Victorian, and someone who had turned his back on modern, enlightened America and sequestered himself in a Venetian palazzo.

  This latter person—who was of course Urbino—was now introducing himself to Molly. The deformed woman stared at him through her thick glasses and said in a remote voice:

  “Unique child. Only child. And an orphan but not at a young age. Fire and sugar. Car crash.”

  Urbino paled.

  “Don’t mind her,” Viola said with a touch of embarrassment. “She’s been running on like one of the sibyls ever since we met her.”

  “Wrong, dearie! Those Greek ladies saw the future. Remember, the past’s my limit!”

  “Modesty in a seer! How interesting!” Robert said.