Frail Barrier Read online

  On a bench in the Campo Santa Margherita, a thin, pale woman watches her son licking a cone of mulberry gelato and wonders whether she’ll be alive next year to see the dark fruit ripen in her courtyard and stain her windowsills.

  An old man is being pushed in his wheelchair along the Zattere beneath rose brick walls and cascades of honeysuckle. A sleek white liner, sparkling in the sunshine, makes its way down the Giudecca Canal toward the Adriatic. The man twists his head for a tear-blurred view of the island of the Giudecca where he fell in love for the first time. By the next low tide, when the city’s rats emerge, he’ll be dead.

  In a darkened room near Ca’ Foscari a woman who visited the Accademia Gallery once every week for thirty-five years is about to stop breathing. Her life is now reduced to memories, becoming dimmer and dimmer. The last vision before her eyes isn’t the face of her granddaughter by her side. It’s Giorgione’s La Vecchia.

  How far away she had thought this day would be when she had first seen the painting of the old woman. How little she had understood the warning on the scrap of paper in the woman’s hands: Col Tempo. With time.

  In a small, stuffy apartment not far from the splendors of the Ca’ Rezzonico where Robert Browning died, a father kisses the still warm – the too warm – cheeks of his infant son.

  In a bedroom of a palazzo on the Grand Canal across from the Gritti Palace Hotel, a white-faced man lies in an eighteenth-century bed with St. Ursula painted on the tester. Another man, wearing a peacock blue sweater, sits beside the bed. A third man, bald and dressed in a cream-colored suit, paces the Turkish carpet.

  ‘He’s dead,’ says the man at the bedside.

  The other man stops his pacing, stares at the body.

  It’s what they’ve been waiting for, but not in the same way.

  And before too long, they too will be dead this summer, and Urbino and the contessa’s serene world will be shaken up once again.

  A week later the city was attacked by its most violent storm of the summer.

  Until three in the afternoon the sky over the city and the lagoon was bright blue. Then, within moments and as the Moors were striking the hour in the Piazza San Marco, the blue turned deep purple with swirls of bright red. It was a canvas worthy of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Tourists marveled at the beauty of the sky. But the Venetians knew that chaos was on the way.

  Jagged shards of lightning split the sky over the narrow strand of the Lido. A gale-force wind turned the glassy waters of the lagoon into high peaks. Sheets of rain slashed against everything and everyone exposed to the sudden onslaught. Boats were forced to take different routes, avoiding vulnerable stops where the landings rocked violently or were flooded.

  The sirens warning of acqua alta sounded, barely audible above the clamor of the storm. The Piazza San Marco, with its orchestra platforms and chairs, looked like the abandoned deck of a sinking ship.

  The storm lashing Venice was the kind that threatened its frail existence more than barbarian hordes, rival empires, or Napoleon’s troops ever had. The strongest defenses that the city could construct would be too fragile if storms like these became more frequent than they already were.

  And on this day in early August the storm was devilishly twinned.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, lightning illuminated the campi and bridges like stage sets under the fiercest day-for-night lamps. The thunder was so deafening that when windows broke from the force of the wind, it was as if the thunder had done it.

  It all ended around midnight, abruptly. The malicious hand that had been testing the limits and the bulwarks of the lagoon city, built on marshes and mudflats, released its prey. And in its quick release it showed its power more than it had during all the previous hours of rage.

  Three days afterward, in the late morning, the black coffin-like craft that was Urbino’s gondola glided down a small canal in the Dorsoduro district.

  It was a bright, sunny day, but traces of the recent storm marked the scene.

  An occasional piece of rubbish, swept into the canal by the wind and rain and still not carried off by the tides, brushed the sides of the gondola and sometimes clung to Gildo’s oar. The offensive odor of backed-up drains lingered in the air. The ferro of a gondola had been snapped off, and a fragment of the decorative prow floated in several inches of water in the boat.

  Perspiration beaded Urbino’s forehead. The air inside the felze was damp and heavy. The occasional breeze that entered the small, closed cabin with its shutters was not quite fetid, but certainly far from the fresh and invigorating air the contessa was enjoying in Asolo. Despite these discomforts, however, Urbino preferred the covering of the felze to being in plain view, and it did provide shelter from the sun. In fact, he seldom had Gildo remove the structure, even though sitting inside it only increased curiosity since gondolas had long since dispensed with the felze.

  But Urbino couldn’t bear all those eyes on him – nor, if the truth were told, being mistaken for a tourist who insisted on being floated by his gondolier beneath the Bridge of Sighs during his allotted minutes on the water.

  It might seem strange that although shy about being seen, he indulged in such an ostentatious form of transport. But Urbino had long since stopped worrying about his inconsistencies or even being aware of many of them. As for good friends like the contessa, who had given him the gondola to mark the twentieth anniversary of their relationship, they regarded them as perpetual sources of amusement.

  Although he was an energetic walker and loved roaming the city on foot, the craft’s suggestion of invalidism and indolence suited another part of his temperament, as the contessa well knew. Rowed by the young, vigorous Gildo, Urbino could reduce all effort to lifting his finger to turn the page of a book, moving his head to gaze through the shutters, and rearranging his cushions.

  Nor was Urbino unaffected by the gondola’s old-fashioned associations. When he was drifting along, concealed in the felze, it was as if the clock had been moved back to some late Victorian year and he was on his way to have his portrait painted by Sargent.

  Perhaps an even stronger appeal in the craft than these, however, was the marvelous way that it provided a floating post from which he could observe the world outside while not being observed himself.

  There could be no better example of this latter advantage than what he was experiencing now. For something in the scene outside drew his attention. He put his volume of Goethe down in his lap, marking his place with a postcard reproduction of Tischbein’s portrait of the writer.

  The gondola was approaching one of those bridges typical of Venice; small, stone, single-span, and with a low parapet. Water steps, slick with green, descended to the water on either side. Prominent on the bridge against the brilliant blue sky was the figure of a woman in late middle age. She wore a green dress. Around her pale, thin face was a fiery crown of red hair, obviously the result of art and not nature. She stood beside an easel with a paintbrush in her hand.

  Urbino immediately identified her as a distinct type. She was one of the amateur painters – almost always either English or German – who descended on the city with their easels, water-colors, and collapsible stools to render the Venetian scene with varying degrees of skill.

  On the surface of the canvas Urbino could vaguely discern the form of a campanile. It resembled the one rising above the tiled rooftops beyond the bridge in the direction of the Campo Santa Margherita.

  Two nuns were examining the woman’s work from a respectful distance. Standing closer and engaged in spirited conversation with her was a short, stout man. He pointed at the canvas and the campanile in the distance, and nodded with approval. The woman clapped a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon on her head and smiled.

  The gondola passed beneath the bridge. When Urbino regained his view of the figures on the bridge through the slats of the shutters, the scene had drastically altered.

  The stout gentleman appeared to have accidentally knocked down the easel in one of
his lively gestures. He was all red-faced and apologetic as he helped the woman reposition the easel. The woman minimized any damage or inconvenience with a warm smile and a touch on his shoulder. Her soft laughter drifted down the canal to Urbino.

  For Urbino it was all a pleasant little scenario. There was order and calm one moment, then their interruption, and then a return to order and calm. It was like Venice after the terrible storm. It was like so many other things in his life.

  But order and calm could not always be restored. As the gondola moved away from the bridge, the contessa’s words at Florian’s, about how easy it was to lose precious things, echoed through his mind.

  Urbino reopened his Goethe. He examined the Tischbein portrait of the writer. Goethe was in semi-profile. Dressed in a flowing white traveler’s cloak and a dark hat with a round, wide brim, he was reclining on a bench, looking intelligent and meditative. The antique, ivy-adorned ruins around him contributed to his noble air. In the distance the hills of the Campania unrolled beneath a cloud-filled sky.

  Urbino was struggling through Goethe’s Italian Journey in the original German. His German was far from as free and as fluent as his Italian and French.

  At the beginning of the summer he had embarked on a new writing project. It was an addition to his ‘Venetian Lives’, a series that combined his interest in biography and his love for his adopted city. Goethe and Venice would focus on the role that the city had played in the writer’s life and art, concentrating on his visit to the lagoon city in the autumn of 1786. It would have reproductions of paintings and photographs of Venetian scenes that had been important to Goethe during his stay.

  Goethe’s sentiments about Venice struck strong responsive chords in Urbino. He had been reading his Goethe for the past weeks with almost as much interest in finding parallels to his own experience as in gathering material. When Goethe had come to the crowded city, he had observed that he could now enjoy his cherished solitude even more since nowhere was more conducive to being alone than a large crowd. This was exactly how Urbino had felt when he had made Venice his home. It also gratified him that Goethe could be as contradictory as he was, and praise the city’s incomparable light and gleaming palaces one moment, and the next moment recoil from the refuse dumped in its canals and the sludge underfoot after rainstorms. Goethe seemed to be the kind of person, like Urbino himself, who could appreciate beauty even more by acknowledging all the faults not only surrounding it but also, in some strange way, contributing to it.

  But Urbino warned himself now, as he did so often, about the dangers of identifying too closely with his subject. He preferred to think that his tastes and temperament, his likes and dislikes, seldom complicated his biographical portraits or his sleuthing, one of his other passions. In truth, they very often did. In the pages of one of his books, the potential damage was only professional. But in the conduct of one of his cases it could be a matter of life and death – his own or someone else’s.

  For the moment no case occupied his attention. They were not something he sought out, but something that, for reasons different with each one, he could not ignore with a clear conscience.

  It was much better to devote his time these days to Goethe, who after a long and productive life, had died, quite naturally and peacefully, in a corner of his big armchair in Weimar.

  With this consoling thought, Urbino lost all sense of time and exterior scene, except when he became momentarily distracted whenever Gildo cried out a warning ‘Hoi!’ as he turned from one canal in to another.

  He buried himself in the volume for the rest of the ride home, carried on the wings of Goethe’s words back to the days of a former century when the city had been, nonetheless, very much the same as it was now. Whenever he looked out of the felze at the canals and the buildings and the bright blue sky, appreciation and satisfaction surged through him, made more intense by the fact that Goethe, centuries ago, had felt the same things Urbino was feeling today.

  When the gondola came to a gentle bump at the water entrance of the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino closed the book and refreshed his eyes with the sight of the worn stones of his Venetian home, his only home.

  He would often remember this feeling of contentment as, in the coming weeks of high season, death entered his perfect little world again and asked him to make some sense of it.

  Everything, in fact, was set in motion a few minutes later when the contessa called from Asolo.

  ‘I have distressing news, caro.’

  The contessa must have been out in the gardens of the Villa Muta. The repeated ‘Ciao!’ of her brilliantly plumed parrot that she kept in a brass cage on the pergola was a counterpoint to the serious tone of her words.

  ‘What is it, Barbara?’

  ‘It’s that poor man we saw under the arcade outside Florian’s, the one who looked so ghastly, the one with the bloody handkerchief. He’s dead!’

  Urbino was somewhat taken aback. It was indeed disturbing that the man had died, whoever he was, but as far as he was aware, the contessa hadn’t known him. Neither had he.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Barbara.’ He paused. ‘But you didn’t say that you knew him.’

  ‘I do now. I mean I know who he is – or was!’ A trace of exasperation rasped her voice. ‘I know because of Sebastian. I was going to call you about it today but then – then I found out he died, Konrad Zoll.’

  She wasn’t making much sense.

  ‘Is that his name, the man we saw?’

  ‘Yes, Konrad Zoll. A German. He had been living in Venice for a year. Strange that our paths only crossed that one time at Florian’s. Last week I got a letter from Sebastian with an article about him. It had his photograph. That’s how I identified him, although the poor man changed so! He was an art collector.’

  ‘But why did Sebastian send the article?’

  ‘Because of Nick Hollander. Since Sebastian asked me to invite Hollander to the regatta party, he thought it might be nice if I invited Zoll, too. Hollander is Zoll’s stepson – rather he was his stepson. No, not because Zoll is dead,’ she said before he could ask for clarification. ‘Hollander’s mother and Zoll divorced five years ago.’

  ‘His ex-stepson, then.’

  ‘Yes. The way you have an ex-brother-in-law from your divorce. And I assume they must have been close the way you and Eugene are. Sebastian would never have suggested that I bring them together if they hadn’t been.’

  Urbino, who knew the contessa’s young cousin was capable of this and more, remained silent. He had traveled through Morocco a few years before with Sebastian. The trip had turned out to be disastrous. They had parted company in Fes.

  ‘But I still don’t know how you found out that this Zoll is dead.’

  ‘Sebastian called this morning. Hollander told him. And that’s where you get involved.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘By going to see Hollander and offering our condolences. He’s staying at the Gritti Palace. I would do it myself if I weren’t up here.’

  ‘He didn’t leave after Zoll died?’

  ‘Not according to Sebastian.’

  ‘I guess the dark young man with Zoll was Hollander.’

  ‘Apparently not. He’s not dark and he has hardly a hair on his head, according to Sebastian. Try to see him later today or tomorrow. Perhaps he can come up to Asolo this weekend. The both of you. I’ll ring him. He could use a change of scene. Venice in August isn’t the best place to be when you’re grieving. He’ll be welcome here.’ Once again, this time as if on cue, the parrot uttered its remarkably human-sounding ‘Ciao!’ in an even more welcoming tone. ‘And even if he doesn’t come, I’d like you to come. I’ll show you the article Sebastian sent.’ The contessa sighed. ‘Poor man. He was so vigorous-looking such a short time ago.’

  Urbino was reviewing his conversation with the contessa when a knock sounded on the library door. It was Natalia, his housekeeper and cook.

  ‘Gildo would like to speak with you, Signor Urbino.’
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br />   The smile on Natalia’s round face was not for Urbino, although she liked him well enough. It was for Gildo, who was her pet. Ever since the young man had started to work as Urbino’s gondolier a year before, she had taken him under her wing. She delighted in bringing meals to his self-contained apartment by the water entrance and looking after him in every other way she could.

  The young man stood behind her. He was slim but muscular from his exertions at the gondola oar. His good-looking face, glowing with health, was open and ingenuous.

  The plump Natalia reached up to tousle his reddish-blond curls before she returned to the kitchen.

  ‘I was wondering if you will need me for the rest of the day, Signor Urbino.’

  ‘You know that I didn’t even want to go out in the gondola this morning.’

  Urbino spoke in Italian, as he did in most of his dealings with Italians. He seldom ventured for long into the Venetian dialect, however. He hadn’t mastered it as well as the contessa.

  ‘Yes, but, as I told you,’ Gildo said, ‘it was good exercise, with the qualifying competition coming up tomorrow.’

  The next day, in the waters off Malamocco on the Lido, the gondolino rowers who had applied to the municipality would be having the last of the rigorous competitions that would determine which teams would participate in the regatta.

  ‘Nonetheless, Gildo, after tomorrow I want you to give all your attention and energies to practicing for the regatta itself.’

  ‘We must take one thing at a time, Signor Urbino!’

  ‘Well, whatever happens tomorrow, Natalia and I – and the contessa – are already proud of you and Claudio. You tell him that for us.’

  ‘You can tell him yourself. He’s downstairs. He wants to see you about something anyway.’

  Claudio was sitting by the window that opened on to the canal, looking through a boating magazine.