Black Bridge (6 page)

“—and after taking the bicarbonate the
other
doctor prescribed, my stomach swelled up like someone was blowing up a balloon. The flesh in the area was tender and my ribs felt on fire. But then this new doctor rolled me like a piece of dough and something popped. I started to feel better right away. Two years before—”

Urbino was trying to find some way of escape when Oriana sailed out to the loggia with John Flint, Hugh Moss, and Marie Quimper in tow.

“So this is where you've been hiding,” Oriana said, looking strident in her Versace outfit. “Barbara is cross with you. You haven't met Bobo's brother-in-law or Livia.” Livia Festa was Bobo's director. “Be careful of Livia, though. She's got her fingers out for money to make a film of
Pomegranate.
”

“Ridiculous!” Moss said. His untidy hair seemed to crackle with emotion and his thin lips were twisted into a scar. “A movie! The Barone would be revealed for just what he is. A caricature!”

There were a few moments of silence, broken first by Oriana's operatic laugh. Then Quimper gave a little cry that seemed to be fright but soon revealed itself to be her version of enthusiasm: “Oh, my! The purple sky and the golden lights of the palaces! Just like the Contessa's color scheme. You should try to paint it, Hugh. Oh, it's really a dream! How could anyone help being in love here?”

Moss didn't seem to hear her. His eyes were searching the crowded ballroom until they lighted on the Barone, now in close conversation with the manager of the Teatro del Ridotto. They seemed to be exchanging sharp words. Moss's stare was hard.

Agreement with Quimper came from a somewhat unlikely quarter.

“Oh yes,” Harriet said, “so many people say that Venice and death go together, but it's really Venice and love.”

“Maybe it's Venice, love,
and
death,” Flint drawled. “I just read that Wagner wrote the ‘Liebestod' of
Tristan und Isolde
in his palazzo on the Grand Canal. Love-death, death-in-love, love's-death, and all that.”

Harriet looked wounded. Flint, with a self-conscious shrug that showed off the lines of his Comme-des-Garçons suit to finer advantage, said: “Speaking of palazzos, I had my nose pressed up against the gate of yours this afternoon, Urbino.”

“And speaking of
noses
,” Oriana said, “your sweet little one is dripping.” She took out a handkerchief and handed it to him. “Just like the boy you are! If you don't get rid of that cold soon, we're going straight to Marco's spa for a month.”

Flint dabbed at his nose with Oriana's handkerchief, which had sent an expensive scent drifting through the air.

“Quite a jewel, your palazzo,” Flint went on. “Too bad it isn't on the Grand Canal. Veneto-Byzantine, isn't it?”

“But don't you remember, John?” Oriana said. “I told you—and Hugh and Marie—all about it. It was built by some crackpot—no relation to Urbino!—back in the seventeenth century, long after the days of the Byzantine.”

“But that lacy marble fretwork looks just like the Doges' Palace,” Flint persisted, “and the big window on the second story must once have had polylobate piercings. And what about …”

Flint quickly demonstrated, in considerable detail and with a self-important air, that he knew exactly what he was talking about.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you have a mysterious room like the one here.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“A mysterious room?” Marie Quimper said.

“Yes, dear,” Oriana said. “The Caravaggio Room.”

“Tell us about it, Monsieur Macintyre!”

“The room is named after a Caravaggio that has hung in it since the twenties,” he began. He then described how people sleeping in the room had met mysterious or unusual deaths, all of them members of the Da Capo-Zendrini family by birth or marriage. The last death—this one of a beautiful young woman—took place in the late thirties during the course of a house party. The Contessa refused to use the room.

“It's only a few doors away from mine,” Kolb said with a quaver in her voice. “I feel a strange aura coming from it sometimes when I pass. And my psychic told me to beware of locked doors!”

“Don't be absurd, Harriet!” scoffed Oriana, who found everyone's superstitions but her own ludicrous. “It's a room like any other and one of these days Barbara will see how silly she's being. We have to convince her, Urbino.”

“If anyone could convince the Contessa,” Quimper said, “it would be someone like yourself, Monsieur Macintyre. You're the kind of person one instinctively trusts. I felt it as soon as I saw your photograph on the jacket of the Proust book. You looked—”

“Don't make a fool of yourself, Marie!” Moss broke in, grabbing her elbow more roughly than was necessary.

“Beware the monster jealousy, Hugh,” Oriana chided. “Remember, this is the city of Othello. I thought you'd bite off poor Marie's head when she asked John for a picture from his modeling days. It will drive sweet little Marie away—or much worse! You can give us a sad example, Marco. What about that poor woman slaughtered in one of your treatment rooms?”

It would be difficult to say who was more upset by her words—Moss, who looked as if he wanted to slap her, or Zeoli, whose sallow face had paled. The assistant medical director mumbled something about the impeccable reputation of his spa and excused himself.

10

When Urbino finally met Orlando Gava and Livia Festa half an hour later, Urbino recognized Gava as the “Roman senator” from the Abano pool. Gava gave no indication that he remembered Urbino, however. With his moon-shaped, unhealthily flushed face, pendulous lower lip, and drooping eyes, he was as homely as the Barone was handsome. He wore a black crepe armband. Sadness seemed to emanate from him in dark, powerful waves.

In contrast to Gava, Livia Festa radiated health and good spirits. She had a plumpness suggestive of an odalisque pampered in a sultan's harem. Dyed-red hair sprang from beneath a black lacy snood, and a dark green silk robe, with a cabalistic design across the top, bestowed the look of a priestess. A cape had been thrown over an armchair to accommodate a small white dog.

“I leave the renegade to you both,” the Contessa said, stunning in a gold silk bias-cut Vionnet, “but I warn you, Livia dear: Don't try to squeeze any money out of the poor boy. He lives far beyond his means. I have to go off to convince those men over there that having their boats diverted by my bridge of boats isn't the same as sending them around the Cape of Good Hope!”

When the Contessa had left, Festa said in a smoke-hoarse voice: “This is my little baby. His name is Peppino.”

She took a treat for Peppino from her purse. He gave it a few unenthusiastic nibbles.

“You write biographies,” said Gava dolefully, as if this must be the saddest endeavor imaginable. “Barbara says you're good at it—and at solving crimes, too. You're looking into the threats against Bobo.”

“Bobo told us the other night at dinner,” Festa quickly explained. “He joked about them but I'm sure he's upset.”

“Oh, he's upset,” Gava said. “I knew it as soon as he said he wasn't. Actors! You always have to assume they mean the opposite of what they say.”

“Spoken just like a man of business! Orlando has some factories in Torino that make him a bundle of money!” Festa explained for Urbino's benefit. “I think I'm a better judge of actors, Orlando dear. They're more like children than anything else.”

Suddenly, over the music and the other voices, came Bobo's magisterial voice: “
Dama Venezia
is a beautiful corpse, giving off the flush of the grave. Camille of the waves, the consumptive heroine of the sea, the painted lady of—”

They looked in Bobo's direction. He was the center of a group of admiring women.

“Well, he acted the spoiled child often enough with my poor sister, may God rest her soul! She never complained, not even at the very end, as you remember.”

Gava touched his armband and tears welled in his eyes. Festa considered him with an inscrutable look that might have been irritation or uneasiness, then started to chatter about D'Annunzio and the Barone's miraculous reincarnation of him.

“D'Annunzio!” Gava almost spat it out. “Rosa couldn't bear to hear his name mentioned! An immoral man!”

Gava's raised voice drew a long stare from Bobo.

“D'Annunzio was mentioned in the threats,” Urbino said when Bobo returned his attention to the women with evident reluctance. “Do you have any idea who might be responsible for them?”

“Not me, if that's what you're thinking,” Gava said.

“Orlando!” Festa remonstrated. “That wasn't what he was thinking at all. If he suspects anyone it's me!”

“You? But you like D'Annunzio, too, and—and you like Bobo. You were going to marry him!”

“What I meant,” Festa said, “is that it's great publicity—or
would
be if it got into the papers.”

Festa described publicity stunts she was familiar with from her years at Cinecittà. Urbino let his eye wander around the room. The orchestra was now playing popular tunes and guests swept across the floor. Flint executed perfect steps with Oriana only a few feet away from Filippo, her husband, who was less smoothly but no less enthusiastically dancing with an American divorcée. Groups formed and dispersed according to the laws and whims that regulate such gatherings. The people lounging on sofas and chairs set against the walls seemed reluctant, either from comfort or inertia, to get up, and eyed those who were dancing or standing with the air of bored royalty.

Festa was finishing her reminiscences when the Contessa came up and, with a barely audible apology, led Urbino away.

“More trouble,” she said when they were out of earshot of anyone. “Another threat against Bobo. The manager from the Teatro del Ridotto just told me. Bobo wanted it kept a secret. The box office attendant found one of those sheets in the lobby before the performance. You must try harder to get to the bottom of this.”

“I don't know what Bobo has told you, but he made it very clear to me that he doesn't want me snooping around.”

“He doesn't know what he's saying! He needs you. We both do. See into his heart. There you'll find his
real
feelings about this whole thing! Bobo—”

“Is something the matter, Barbara?”

It was Harriet, who had come upon them unnoticed. A slick film of moisture coated her forehead.

“Nothing at all, my dear. Excuse me.”

The Contessa hurried off to join the Barone, who was now talking to the theater manager again. A short distance away Festa was making flamboyant gestures at a Milanese industrialist while Gava stared straight ahead gloomily as if he were at his beloved sister's funeral. Even from this distance the melancholy surrounding the Barone's brother-in-law was a thick, dark curtain.

Harriet pulled a small handkerchief from her sleeve and gently wiped her forehead.

“How close it is in here! All this incense is cutting off my oxygen and the burning wax is making my eyes burn. I'll have to go up to my room and put in some eyedrops.”

Before she left, Urbino asked her for one of Bobo's publicity photographs.

11

A few minutes later, when Bobo, with less composure than usual, began to recite D'Annunzio's prayer-prologue for Debussy's
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian
to a musical accompaniment, Urbino went down to the garden.

He walked through a courtyard of Venetian brick and past statues of chained Turks in Istrian stone up to the higher level. A pebbled path lined with clipped boxwood, laurel hedges, and stone mythological figures took him toward a pergola. The pergola, sheltering a Roman bath and covered with Virginia creeper and English ivy, was the Contessa's and Urbino's favorite place in the garden.

Raised, angry voices coming from the pergola stopped him short. They were those of a man and a woman, but he couldn't make out who they were. Ironically, he might have been better able to hear if he had been farther away from the pergola. The garden had unusual acoustics, which it shared with Venice itself where sound traveled erratically and mysteriously.

Afraid that whoever it was might abruptly leave the shelter of the pergola to find him eavesdropping, he returned along the pebbled path to the lower level and sat in a wicker chair. After five minutes Quimper and Moss appeared. Quimper was the first to see Urbino.

“Monsieur Macintyre! I wish we knew you were here! You could have given us a tour.” She touched one of the stone Turks. “Gardens come as such a pleasant surprise in Venice. Do you have one? If it's anything like this one, you're very fortunate. I have only a little patch of ground off my kitchen in London but back in Paris I had a lovely garden.”

She seemed about to continue, if only because she didn't know how to stop, when Moss, his face still in the shadows, reminded her that they had to be on their way.

When Urbino came through the doors of the
salone
, a low buzz of concerned voices had replaced the music, and the musicians and guests were staring at the far end of the room. There, a knot of people had formed. Among them was the Contessa, looking very distressed. Urbino hurried over. Gava lay prostrate on the floor near a broken water goblet, his eyes closed and his face colorless. An elderly physician from Padua, one of the Contessa's guests, was kneeling by Gava's side. Peppino looked down at the scene from a chair covered with his mistress's reversed cape.

“I—I just gave him a drink of water and he collapsed,” Festa said.

“He has asthma and emphysema, just like his sister had,” Bobo said.

The physician loosened Gava's tie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. He waved away a glass of water brought by Flint.

“Oh, I hope he didn't eat any of the shrimp or drink red wine, Signora Festa!” said Harriet, almost as white as Gava. “People with his condition are usually severely allergic to them, aren't they, Doctor? Iodine and sulfites.”