Frail Barrier (10 page)

For the man in the photograph was the one who had been so solicitous of the ailing Konrad Zoll as the two men had walked under the arcade.

Four

Urbino's scrutiny of the death notice had not gone unobserved by the
cartaio
.

‘Did you know Luca?' she asked in Italian. She looked at him sharply as if she were accessing him just as he had been doing with the death notice. ‘Are you one of his university professors?'

‘No, I didn't know him. But his face is familiar. I saw him recently in the Piazza San Marco. You have my condolences, signorina. Was he a relative?'

‘My half-brother.' Her face relaxed. ‘We had different fathers.'

She looked at the photograph. Her eyes filled with tears.

‘Your brother was young. And he seemed to be kind.'

‘I thought you said you didn't know him?'

‘I didn't, but I saw him helping a sick man that day. Right after the Feast of the Redeemer.'

‘A German man. Luca's friend.' She lowered her gaze and picked up one of the pillboxes that were on display. She absently removed and replaced the lid. ‘He's dead, too. He died about a week before Luca.'

‘Yes, I've heard about that. May I ask how your brother died?'

‘An accident. A parapet stone hit him. It hadn't been properly secured and became loosened from a building under renovation. In Dorsoduro.' She named the
calle
. It was between Zoll's apartment and the Zattere. ‘During the storm, the first one.'

The assistant handed Urbino his package. After giving Clementina Foppa his condolences again, he left.

As Urbino walked to the Rialto vaporetto station, he couldn't help but reflect on the unusual circumstance of the deaths of Konrad Zoll and Luca Benigni within such a short time of each other. One by natural causes, the other by a freak accident. But Urbino had long ago become accustomed to the unusual and had discovered that coincidence played a much larger role in life than one would like to acknowledge.

His experience as a biographer and a sleuth had taught him that it was the apparently normal that more often needed an explanation.

By the time Urbino reached the Rialto everything he had purchased was beginning to feel twice as heavy. A quick look in the direction of Ca' Foscari indicated that his boat was not yet in sight. He sat down on the landing platform and put the two bags on the empty seat beside him. He extracted one of the Goethe books.

He was immersed in a poem when a woman's voice said in English with a British accent, ‘Are those packages yours? I must sit down.'

‘Excuse me.'

Embarrassed, Urbino removed them. The woman dropped heavily into the seat. She took off a straw gondolier's hat with a red ribbon and fanned herself with it. The hat was slightly battered and was starting to unravel on the brim. It also appeared to be damp. She put it back on her head. Urbino recognized her as the tall, thin woman with red hair who painted watercolor scenes of the city. She had her black leather case and her backpack with her. Her pale face was shining with perspiration. She was wearing the same green dress.

‘Are you all right?' he asked. ‘Would you like some water?'

‘I'd love some. Oh, no, please, don't trouble yourself,' she added when he got up. ‘I thought you had a bottle with you.'

‘It's no problem. Just watch my packages.'

Urbino went to the nearby kiosk and bought a large bottle of chilled mineral water.

A few minutes later, after the mineral water and the shade of the landing stage had had their beneficial effects, the woman was looking better, although she was breathing shallowly.

‘I love this city,' she said, ‘but the heat and the crowds! Not to mention the smells! I should have come when the weather is milder. Nice English weather, if they ever have it.'

‘It doesn't help having to carry things around. I've been having a hard enough time with what I have.'

‘And you're much younger than I am. By the way, my name is Maisie Croy.'

‘Pleased to meet you. I'm Urbino Macintyre.'

The woman extended a cold, damp hand.

‘As I was saying, this is a marvelous city, but I'm feeling all the heat and humidity today. And up and down the steps of the bridges! There's no end to them, is there?'

‘They do get fatiguing.' Urbino looked down at her case and backpack. ‘You paint.'

‘Watercolors. Mainly for my own pleasure, though I sell one now and again, even here.' She was breathing more normally now. ‘I thought that I might be able to give one to my hotel as payment but they looked at me as if I were dotty. I remember reading somewhere that they do that in Venice.'

‘I don't think they do it much anymore. It was a nice custom.'

‘You know Venice?'

‘I live here,' he explained.

‘How nice! I just met a group of Americans in the Piazza San Marco but they were on a tour. Since you know Venice so well, maybe you can help me. I'm looking for an inexpensive hotel. I've been going from one to another and they're either full up or too expensive.'

‘Where are you staying?'

She named a hotel in Dorsoduro not far from the Accademia Gallery. ‘I'm on my way there now,' she said.

‘How much longer do you plan to stay in Venice?'

‘Another three weeks, if possible. I've already been here for two weeks. There's so much to paint! There's something about Venice that makes you want to stay here forever once you get here. I guess you know what I mean by that!'

Urbino smiled. ‘Yes, I do.'

‘But I'll have to leave soon if I can't find a cheaper place to stay.'

Urbino asked her how much she was paying at her hotel. She didn't name an exorbitant amount, but he knew there were far less expensive hotels in town.

‘Maybe I can do something,' he said. ‘I can't promise, but I know some places that might have more reasonable rates, though they're not as well located as Dorsoduro. I can contact you at your hotel?'

‘Until the middle of next week. That will probably be my limit.'

‘I'm going out of town for a few days, but I'll try to find something more suitable for you as soon as I get back.'

‘Are you always a good Samaritan?'

Urbino laughed. ‘Far from it. But I've noticed you a few times in different places in the city. I feel as if I know you a little. Venice can have that effect. One time you were good-natured when a man knocked down your canvas.'

‘I remember that. No damage done.'

‘And another time you even walked past my building. I was looking out of the window. I live near the Ghetto.'

‘What a coincidence! Right past your house!'

She shifted uncomfortably in the seat.

‘Here's my card.' Urbino handed it to her. He stood up and picked up his package. ‘My vaporetto is coming. Yours will be arriving from the opposite direction.' He pointed toward the Rialto Bridge.

‘I'll let you know if I change my hotel before you contact me, Mr. Macintyre. Thank you very much.'

As the vaporetto was or its way to the San Marcuola stop, Urbino realized that he now had two favors to do: find an estate agent for Nick Hollander and an inexpensive room for Maisie Croy. He started to run various possibilities through his head.

On the train to Bassano del Grappo, where the contessa's car would meet him to take him up to Asolo, Urbino tried to concentrate on his Goethe, but thoughts about Konrad Zoll and Luca Benigni distracted him. The deaths in rapid succession of the two men, so different in age, health, and other circumstances, made him feel vulnerable with their reminders of what could happen to anyone at any time.

He forced his mind to think about the contessa and the Villa La Muta. He always enjoyed being with her in Asolo. One of these years he would stay with her for an extended period of time instead of these brief visits.

One of these years, he repeated silently to himself. One so easily assumed that there would be other occasions, other opportunities to do the things one had always wanted to do.

Konrad Zoll, with his fortune and his liberty, had been able to do whatever large or small things he desired, but disease had come along to smash everything. Now he was dead, reduced to ashes in an urn in a lavish apartment on the Grand Canal. And the younger Luca Benigni, who must have pitied the fact that his wealthy friend was nearing the end of his life, was dead, too.

These thoughts fed Urbino's melancholy temperament. He usually told himself that he enjoyed his melancholy and wouldn't want to be any different. But other times he suspected that he had only become accustomed to it and was afraid, for reasons he couldn't understand, of being bereft of it.

When he got off at Bassano del Grappa and went to the waiting Bentley, he was disappointed to learn that the contessa had decided not to come with the car. He was eager to see her and had hoped they might indulge themselves in a grappa at the Nardini distillery on the timber Alpine Bridge in Bassano. On the drive to Asolo, he decided he would spend a few weeks at La Muta with the contessa in September after the regatta. The days would be beautiful then.

The sight of the Villa La Muta, in the gently rolling hills beneath the arcaded town, lifted his spirits. When he got out of the car, he breathed in the fresh air gratefully and looked beyond the villa across the wide Trevisan plain to the Alpine foothills. This was a place where you could easily forget your cares for a while.

Giorgione had lingered with his lute in its rose gardens and the Queen of Cyprus had held fabled court in its lambent air. In fact, Urbino reminded himself, it had even bequeathed its name to an Italian verb of indolence. Pietro Bembo, a Renaissance satirist who had used Asolo as the setting for his dialogues on love, had coined the verb
asolare
to describe spending one's time in pleasurable, mindless inactivity and irresponsibility. Yes, the relatives of the contessa's husband had chosen their retreat well in the eighteenth century. Instead of following the custom of other Venetians who had made their summer
villeggiature
on the banks of the Brenta Canal, the Conte Paolo had gone to Asolo, twenty-five miles northwest of Venice, where he had taken over a villa designed by Palladio's follower Scamozzi.

The villa's name –
La Muta
, or ‘The Mute Woman' – originated from a seventeenth-century woman who had retired to the hill town after witnessing a bloody murder in Florence and who had never been known to speak again.

Understandably enough, the contessa – of a far less melancholy turn than Urbino – had been disturbed by this rather Gothic association. After some troubled thinking, she had ingeniously found a solution by commissioning a copy of Raphael's painting of a gentlewoman, known as
La Muta
.

In fact, Urbino was soon embracing the contessa below the painting itself on the stone staircase in the front hall.

‘Here,' he said, handing her the two gifts.

‘Thank you,
caro
. And I have something for you as well. A few days of blessed rest away from the madness of Venice.'

‘Sad,' the contessa said half an hour later as the two friends walked through the puzzle maze behind the villa. Urbino had just told her about the death of Luca Benigni.

It was dusk. The lights had come on a few minutes earlier. But the contessa didn't need light to find her way to the center of her maze. Urbino was convinced she could do it blindfolded.

As for him, although he had negotiated it a dozen times, he needed the contessa to guide him through its devious twists and turns and cul-de-sacs. It was either her guidance, that is, or the indignity of uncovering one of the signs that said ‘LIFT IF LOST.' He remembered one summer afternoon ten years ago when he had ventured into the maze on his own and become lost. He had been too proud to uncover any of the signs. Trying a trick he had read about, he had kept his left hand in constant contact with the hedge wall, but it had done no good. He had eventually found his way to the center by exhausting trial and error, and had waited sheepishly for the contessa to join him with a bottle of Prosecco.

‘It's the fine line,
caro
,' the contessa said when they stopped at a spiral junction.

‘The fine line?' Urbino repeated.

He waited for the contessa to take one of the paths, which she did without any hesitation. All he could see above the hedges were the upper stories of La Muta, the darkening sky, and the top of the viewing tower in the center.

‘It's a painful truth,' the contessa responded. ‘The fine line between life and death. Remember what happened to Gildo's friend last August? Out in the lagoon and hit by a bolt of lightning in the middle of his forehead. Dead, dead, dead. If it's not a storm of one kind or another that gets us, it's something that sneaks up on us until …' She trailed off.

Urbino, whose sentiments were similar to the contessa's, said nothing.

She sighed and patted his arm.

‘Ah, but here we are,
caro!
' she cried.

The contessa meant that they had reached, without the slightest confusion on her part, the center of the maze. The tower rose above them into the purple evening air.

But her words held another meaning for Urbino. Here they were, he said to himself, this moment now, together.

They seated themselves on the scrolled marble bench.

‘It's a good time to read this,' the contessa said.

She withdrew a piece of folded newsprint from the pocket of her dress and handed it to him.

‘There's still enough light. It's the article about Konrad Zoll that Sebastian sent. Read it while I climb the tower. No, I'll be fine. I like the exercise. I do it once a day.'

Urbino unfolded the article. It was clipped from an edition of the
International Herald Tribune
of two years ago. Urbino, who read the newspaper a few times a week, had no memory of having read the article.