The Last Gondola Read online

He focused his attention on the silent and secretive Ca’ Pozza to dispel the wave of anxiety coursing through him.

  The building with its crumbling broad front, eroded stone loggia, and rows of curtained windows frowned down at him from above the small canal as if it disapproved of his intrusive gaze.

  Urbino had always found the San Polo district, choked by a loop of the Grand Canal, to be filled with more of a sense of death and decay than anywhere else in Venice. Since his preoccupation with Samuel Possle and his dilapidated palazzo, this feeling had deepened and darkened.

  If the bridges and alleys seemed more twisted, the covered walkways danker, and the Rialto farther away, it was because of the baleful influence cast by the Ca’ Pozza. Even the nearby Fondamenta delle Tette, where women once bared their breasts to entice customers away from homosexual prostitutes, somehow thickened with more sensual associations.

  Whether penetrating the Ca’ Pozza’s secrets would dispel the building’s peculiar influence or increase it, Urbino had no way of knowing; but he wouldn’t be at peace until he gained access. Since Possle never came out, Urbino would have to get in. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.

  How far he was prepared to go to achieve this end seemed ominously foreshadowed by the urgency of the phrase he kept repeating to himself in an almost audible voice. “I must get in. I must get in.”

  He was unable to pull his gaze away from the building. He let his imagination wander through rooms he had never seen, seeking out the old man as he might be sleeping and dreaming of days gone by or sitting with a pile of yellowed letters.

  Urbino knew as much or as little about Samuel Possle as everyone else seemed to know or had been allowed to. His background was wealthy but otherwise undistinguished. His family had made a fortune in the shrimp industry in South Carolina. Since he was an only child, it had all come into his hands with the sudden deaths of his parents in the forties. The larger world beyond Venice had heard of him, not for anything he had accomplished, but rather for his former glittering entourage and for what he had always seemed to promise. Time was running out on the promise as he approached his ninetieth year.

  Possle, a frequent guest of the rich and famous, and the indefatigable host of sensational gatherings at the Ca’ Pozza, appeared briefly, but memorably, in the memoirs and biographies of many people now long dead. His marriage to a German poet had ended in divorce decades ago, and he had never remarried. After all his years of high society, he had gone into seclusion.

  He was supposedly working on a book he had once made the mistake of saying was a “meditation on time and the human emotions” intentionally evoking Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. However, his version, he had said, would be more sensational and even longer.

  Suddenly the Ca’ Pozza jolted Urbino out of these thoughts. With an almost blinding flash, the tall loggia doors on the piano nobile were illuminated from within. A few moments later a silhouette appeared behind the curtains of one of the unshuttered doors that was closest to Urbino. The figure seemed to be staring out, although positioned as it was behind the curtains and standing in a lighted room, it was doubtful whether it could see anything.

  Urbino assumed the figure was a man because the hair seemed closely cropped. It stood motionless behind the panes of the door, almost as if it were posing, and then turned slowly and presented itself in full profile.

  The sex of the figure didn’t become clarified, but as Urbino stared one detail drew all his attention. The figure held up to its face an object that gave every appearance of being a severed head. The nose of the head was sharp and the chin prominent; its skull was remarkably smooth, and Urbino assumed it must be completely bald.

  The figure remained at the door as if to give Urbino time to take in the disturbing scene and then moved to the side and out of sight. The light was extinguished a few moments later.

  Yet Urbino waited, standing on the bridge as motionless as the figure had stood at the door earlier. It was as if Urbino knew that something else would happen tonight on this visit to the Ca’ Pozza. He was not proved wrong.

  Suddenly shrill, high-pitched laughter assaulted his ears. Distorted though it was, it sounded more like a woman’s laughter than a man’s. It continued for a few moments, subsided into sobs, and then silence.

  Because these disturbing sounds broke the stillness so soon after the mysterious figure at the door, the Ca’ Pozza was their likely source. But as they faded, leaving behind an even more deathly silence, he realized that they could have come from the building next door that shared a wall with the Ca’ Pozza and whose entrance was up the dark, narrow alley that wound its way from the bridge.

  All alone in the night and with a nature that had recently become slightly superstitious under the influence of the fatalistic Habib, Urbino couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been drawn here tonight to see the figure and to hear the laughter.

  He drew his cloak around him against the chill and began to pick his way over the slick, uneven stones of the alley. After a few oblique turns, it would take him to the next bridge. He cast a quick glance up at the building next to the Ca’ Pozza from where the laughter and sobs might have come. Not one window was lit.

  He broke into a regular rhythm of walking. If he were lucky, he should now be able to get to sleep when he returned to the Palazzo Uccello. If he did, he hoped that it would be without having the dream that had been brushing its dark wings against him for so many nights and that had even cast its shadows over his rendezvous at Florian’s with the Contessa.

  He had not gone far when a pool of water blocked his passage. After a moment’s hesitation as he considered retracing his steps, he waded through it. Water seeped over the tops of his rain shoes.

  Clouds obscured the moon again, and a damp, penetrating wind from the direction of the lagoon, funneled by the narrow alleys, whined in his ears. More rain would fall before the night was over.

  The calle ended at a canal bordered by a portico and crossed by a crooked, stone bridge. Boats moored by the mossy water steps were covered with tarpaulin and plastic. On a bright sunny day this spot was full of charm. Tourists would often congratulate themselves on having discovered the area all on their own, but at this hour of the night they would have been less enthusiastic. There were too many places for someone to be hiding, too many slippery stones that could have you falling into the canal, and too little reassurance that anyone was inside the closed old houses to come to your aid.

  He entered the portico. Most of the buildings were in a poor condition and were vacant. Stucco facing had fallen off to reveal the bricks beneath. Doors and windows were boarded over, with CHIUSO painted in red letters on the doors. Narrow openings between the buildings led into a labyrinth of alleys.

  As Urbino went along the passageway, being careful to watch his step in the darkness, Possle and the Ca’ Pozza crept back into his mind. They had tormented him all evening at the Palazzo Uccello until, at midnight, he had ventured through the rain to San Polo.

  These almost compulsive visits were his substitute for passing through the front door of the so-far impregnable building. He had done his best to keep his obsession a secret from the Contessa even though it had been a strain. He had told himself that this was only because of his concern for her peace of mind as she prepared for her upcoming conversazioni, but the truth was that he was both jealous of his fascination with Possle and embarrassed by it.

  Ever since having taken her into his confidence, he had had to endure the kind of well-meaning banter that he had gotten a good sample of this afternoon. He felt comforted that he had her golden promise to help him in his pocket. She could very well be his last chance.

  All his own attempts had failed. He had sent letters, which had been promptly returned. On one occasion he had tried a gift of flowers, on the assumption that since Possle had bought a palazzo with a garden, he must have a fondness for them. But the urn of flowers, accompanied by a note, that Urbino left at the entrance one morn
ing, after no one had acknowledged the bell, had remained there, apparently untouched, for two subsequent days. Urbino and his gondolier had removed it.

  The Contessa’s efforts might not prove to be so abortive. Not only did she have contacts that she could marshal on his behalf, but she also had enjoyed a brief acquaintance with Possle. She might be able to exploit it if she were willing. After her arrival in Venice to study at the conservatory, her path had crossed with Possle’s, although never at the Ca’ Pozza. The Conte Alvise had put an end to the acquaintance when they became engaged. By then Possle had already made a reputation for himself as one of the city’s glamorous, but morally questionable, figures, along with his friends Peggy Guggenheim and a well-known composer who had murdered his family and then killed himself. The Conte had once—

  Urbino’s thoughts broke off. He was not alone. Someone had been stealthily approaching the covered passageway. Part of his mind had registered a scrape against the stones of one of the alleys to his left. It sounded like a fumbled footstep and was followed by the clank, albeit muted, of something metallic.

  He came to a dead halt and listened. The wind moaned. Water lapped against stone. But the other sounds weren’t repeated. If they had been, he would have been less wary, but he had the impression that someone was trying not to make any further noise.

  It was completely possible, given the disorienting acoustics of the city, that the sounds had come from a distance, even from over the roofs of the buildings.

  Urbino, however, saw no reason not to be cautious. He was all alone at an hour of the night when his cry for help, echoing from stone and water, would have more chance of sending someone in the opposite direction than of leading him to where Urbino was in distress.

  He therefore didn’t remain rooted to where he was under the dark, damp passageway but strode at a brisk pace toward the bridge. He paused on the parapet, watched, and listened. He saw and heard nothing that settled his mind one way or another.

  If he didn’t get inside the Ca’ Pozza soon, he feared he would have little relief from his own overactive imagination and his growing sense of inadequacy. Once he was inside, logic and reason would surely prevail.

  With this reassuring thought, Urbino broke into an even stride that soon had him crossing the Rialto Bridge.

  2

  Back at the Palazzo Uccello half an hour later, Urbino sat in the library with his cat, Serena, on his lap, and read a passage in a late nineteenth-century guidebook that he had practically memorized:

  Upon emerging from the sottoportico we turn left along the fondamenta until we reach the Ponte Cammello. On the other side of the bridge is the Ca’ Pozza (XVII cent.), built by one of the followers of Longhena and once the home of the Sanguinetti family and the Bombicci family. It possesses one of the most ample and magnificent gardens of Venice, which, on occasion, used to be open to the public. The Ca’ Pozza has a broad front dominated by a heavily pilastered and arched balcony on the piano nobile. One explanation for its name is that the Ca’ Pozza is built on the site of a pool, or pozza, of miraculous fresh water that flowed from the marshes when Venice was founded.

  Urbino closed the book and stroked Serena as he reflected about the passage.

  Despite his search through not only his own library but also the Biblioteca Marciana and the State Archives, he hadn’t found anything that added much more than this to the description and history of the Ca’ Pozza, at least not anything that would be of much use to him.

  In any case, it was not its distant past he was interested in uncovering, but the period since the 1950s when Possle had acquired it. Urbino believed in the close, almost uncanny similarity that could develop between a house and its owner. If this belief had been formed in childhood when he had read Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, it had been reinforced by his experience over the past twenty years with his own Palazzo Uccello and the Contessa’s Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.

  In fact, the Palazzo Uccello had its secrets along these lines. The Contessa had touched on one of them at Florian’s when she had chided him about the character of the decadent duke he admired so much from the French novel. The story of the neurotic aristocrat who retires to his mansion outside of Paris to lead a self-contained, eccentric life of the mind and senses had influenced Urbino at a young age.

  When he inherited the Palazzo Uccello, he realized that to live in a palazzo in this museum city would be to go the character of Des Esseintes one better. Behind its walls he was far above the crowds yet close enough to the flow of life to make him feel snug in his solitude.

  Things had changed since Habib had moved to the Palazzo Uccello, but he still felt that he inhabited a delightful ark within the greater one of Venice, and he remained indebted to the book.

  He had even devoted part of his library to various editions of the novel and to critical and biographical studies of its notorious author. His eyes moved to the far corner where the books gleamed behind their glass case. On the wall next to the shelves were several illustrations of scenes from the book. One of them was a watercolor Urbino had executed himself many years ago.

  Yes, he said to himself, to know more about the Ca’ Pozza would be to know more about Possle, just as the same could be said about the Palazzo Uccello and himself. To gain access to the old building would be to become privy to the very personality and character of the man.

  Trying not to disturb Serena, who had fallen asleep, Urbino reached for several pages of a magazine article. He had clipped them from an old magazine he had found at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. It was typical of a few other articles written about Possle over thirty years ago.

  It was filled with photographs of Possle and his friends and acquaintances socializing in various places in Venice and at the Ca’ Pozza. Most of the revelers were now dead from either suicide or natural causes or, in one much publicized case, murder when thieves broke into her apartment by the Park Monceau in Paris.

  One photograph showed a smiling Possle, surrounded by friends, walking across the bridge of boats that connected the Zattere Embankment and the island of the Giudecca every July in celebration of the Feast of the Redeemer.

  Another showed a house party at the Ca’ Pozza. Men and women were ranged on two sofas in a room hung with paintings and tapestries. A young woman, whom Urbino recognized as an Italian actress who had enjoyed a brief fame many decades ago, stood facing one of the groups with her face contorted and her arms thrown in the air. The photograph was captioned “Possle’s Apostles Play Charades at the Ca’ Pozza.”

  Urbino’s favorite, however, captured Possle and Peggy Guggenheim on the terrace of Guggenheim’s palazzo on the Canalazzo, as the Venetians referred to the Grand Canal. Possle had his hand resting on Marino Marini’s tumescent bronze horseman while Guggenheim looked at him, laughing, her eyes hidden by her Max Ernst sunglasses.

  The magazine was a slick one, and the article itself was a mere accompaniment to the photographs. It provided no insight, but like all the other things Urbino had been able to find out about Possle, it whetted his appetite.

  He was in sore need of a project. The ones he had recently turned his hand to had collapsed or evaporated after a month or two. He had been drifting while Habib, fortunately, had been making advances in his career and establishing a reputation for himself. Urbino had started to question his own ability to make the right choices. And then Possle, who had been there all along, right there under his nose, had captured his imagination with his possibilities one evening when Urbino was considering his own life as an expatriate in Venice. Possle would give him a chance to paint a picture of one expatriate’s life so different from his own and yet with points of similarity.

  It would be a departure for him. His previous biographies had been, for the most part, about well-known figures who had accomplished something with their lives. They had made a degree of difference in the world. Possle, instead, was important only for the people he had known and for the lifestyle he had led. He was, in a strange way, bo
th trivial and significant. Urbino was determined to see what he could make of him. Anything else he might do with his time and energies paled in comparison.

  He would need to fill in the gaps, to sort out fact from fiction, to reconstruct the man from all the fragments, from ruins where mainly ghosts walked. And what he might learn, from Possle or anyone else, would only be a version of the truth. Urbino would have to add his own to it.

  It would be a challenge, and he needed to start with the man himself.

  Somehow Possle had managed, in an age of high publicity, to remain enigmatic and elusive, and therefore all the more intriguing to Urbino.

  Most of Urbino’s other work had been excavations of the distant past, but with this project he would be visiting a much more recent and palpable one. The man and the house; the house and the man. Urbino wanted entry to both.

  In a few days he would see someone who should be able to tell him more current things about the Ca’ Pozza. As for the man himself, Urbino was putting a lot of faith in the Contessa. If she could set things in motion, his own form of boldness, often underestimated by others, and his mastery of the diplomatic arts, if not duplicity itself, would gain him the prize.

  And he would do his best to find out what had happened to the Contessa’s items. The more he thought about it, the more it puzzled him that clothing was missing. Someone might have coveted the cascade necklace on the mistaken assumption that it would bring him a lot of money, but why would anyone have gone to the risk of stealing used clothing, even if it did include a Regency scarf?

  Yes, there was a bit of a mystery here, but Urbino had no doubt that the Contessa’s mind was not the problem. It was as sharp as ever.

  3

  When Urbino went to bed, it was not to have a restful night. He suffered his dream again.

  He was in a room whose proportions were irregular, a room crowded with furniture, books, and tapestries. On angular chairs sat two figures, immobile like royalty in a Byzantine mosaic and dressed in flowing white clothes. One was a small man with the features of Samuel Possle in his prime. The other was veiled. Urbino assumed it was a woman because the Contessa’s silver cascade was unmistakable against her chest.