Frail Barrier (35 page)

The contessa and Urbino exchanged a quick glance.

‘Please have her join us.'

The contessa had last seen Olimpia the month before at her atelier in the Palazzo Pindar, when Olimpia had put one of her prized possessions – a Fortuny purse – directly into her hands. It had belonged to her grandmother, the contessa's relative, Isabel. On that occasion, Olimpia had seemed buoyant and filled with quiet assurance. She had recently received a commission from a theater group in Venice to design costumes for a Goldoni production.

This morning, however, the older Pindar sister's face was tense and drawn although her face lit up, it seemed, when she saw Urbino. Her eyes, which were a deeper blue than those of her cousins Eufrosina and Alessandro, had dark smudges beneath them.

She was an attractive, vivacious woman in her early fifties with a narrow face, a large mouth, and the impressive height of almost all the Pindar women. Her chin-length reddish blond hair, showing few traces of gray, was in disarray. She was wearing black trousers and a long, ocelot coat.

Vitale must have asked her if she wanted to take off her coat and she had obviously declined.

‘What a pleasant surprise, Olimpia. You don't stop by at all as much as I would like you to. Please sit down.'

‘No, thank you. I'll only be staying a few minutes. I'm happy to see you both together. I won't beat around the bush.' Her English, like that of all the Pindars, showed no trace of an accent and every facility in the negotiation of idioms. ‘I know that Mina told you what Gaby said to her, Barbara. And I know' – she turned to Urbino – ‘that Barbara told you.'

Because Olimpia was so sure and so correct, the contessa did not attempt to protest.

‘Mina promised that she wouldn't say anything to you, Barbara, but it came over me as I was making a sketch an hour ago that she had.'

‘Mina is –'

Olimpia broke her off. ‘I know,' she said. ‘Mina is kind. Considerate. A gentle soul. She has a sensitive heart. That is how I realized that she had said something. She wouldn't be Mina if she hadn't.'

‘Exactly,' the contessa agreed. She glanced at Urbino, who was still standing and was looking at the two of them with an unreadable expression on his face.

As Olimpia continued, she paced the room, putting the contessa, understandably influenced by the ocelot coat, in mind of a large cat.

‘Gaby likes to get attention. I love her, but it isn't a good idea to humor her. She has to face reality. I worry about her. Ercule does, too.' There seemed to be true concern in Olimpia's voice. ‘Poor Gaby is in no danger from anyone but herself. No, I don't mean she'd do anything to harm herself, but the way she's afraid of everything and doesn't try to change no matter what I say to her – no matter what anyone says to her – it's self-destructive, isn't it?'

‘From what I understand,' Urbino said, following Olimpia with his eyes as she moved around the room, ‘Gaby has an emotional condition that –'

‘I realize that, and I sympathize with her.' Olimpia came to a stop in front of a collection of watercolors. ‘She's my little sister, don't forget! I wish we could have the old Gaby back. But we know her better than anyone else does. And I know her better than Ercule. It would do more harm to her to take seriously this – this nonsense she is spreading around. If we all just ignore it, it will go away and some other strange idea will take its place. No one means her any harm. She knows that. Gaby doesn't have an enemy in the world. You won't help her, either of you' – she swept them both with her eyes – ‘if you give any credence to what she said.'

The contessa wondered if Gaby had been saying things to anyone else in addition to Mina. Olimpia had just said that Gaby was ‘spreading around' her fears of being in danger.

‘What you say could be true, Olimpia, but it's all the more reason why you should try to get her some professional help.'

‘Ercule and I know that, and you've tried yourself. You see how resistant she is. Ercule and I have hopes that we will eventually be able to persuade her. But we are not about to cart her off against her will. We know our sister well. So when you come to our house, Urbino, please don't think that you have to put on your stalker's cap.'

She gave a laugh that was more like a whinny, in which the contessa heard the release of a great deal of tension. But Olimpia's face remained as tense as before, and the smile that spread across it now drew even more attention to her agitated state.

‘Whatever time I spend in your house,' Urbino said, ‘is going to be spent reading the letters Fortuny wrote to your great aunt Efigenia.'

Once again, Urbino's command of the relationships in the Pindar family impressed the contessa.

‘And I assure you,' the contessa said, ‘that I only have Gaby's best interests at heart. We are all cousins, aren't we? And you can consider Urbino family, too. We have all adopted him, haven't we, just as he's adopted Venice? Everyone means well, and that is what is important. Mina cares a great deal about you, and because she cares about you, she cares about Gaby. That is why she told me. You shouldn't be upset with her.'

‘Did I say that I was upset with her? I think I said the opposite. I understand her very well. Better than anyone. I don't fault the dear girl in any way.'

‘Most interesting,' the contessa said after Olimpia left. ‘Needless to say, she's quickened your interest.'

‘Definitely. And I'm not so sure that that wasn't exactly her intention.'

Three

‘You can take them downstairs to the museum,' Apollonia Ballarin said to Urbino the next morning in her
salotto
in the Palazzo Pindar. She and her two children lived on the second floor, with Eufrosina and Alessandro, below Olimpia's attic atelier and above the Pindar
piano nobile
. ‘There's no place for you to read them here. You'd be in the way.'

Unlike the Pindar siblings, Apollonia Ballarin made a point of speaking in quick Italian with everyone who had any knowledge of it. As she spoke, she looked at him directly and held herself straight and stiff as she always did, conveying a sense of imperial authority.

The once beautiful woman was dressed completely in black and had a black lace veil draped over her shoulders, as if she kept it ready to draw over her head and face at any required moment. Her customary piece of black lace wrapped her head, showing not one strand of her white hair. Gloves of black kid sheathed her hands. They were certainly warranted by the cold of the room, which had only a small space heater. But perhaps they were one of the woman's last vanities, intended to conceal her age-spotted, wrinkled hands.

Apollonia was tall and thin to the point of emaciation, and today she looked more gaunt than usual, probably the result of her bronchitis. Urbino sometimes thought that she took most of her nourishment from her daily morning communion. If it were not a sin to have communion twice in one day, she would surely have indulged herself.

But the elderly Apollonia, whose skin was as white and dry as parchment, would be unlikely to deviate from the straight and narrow path that she believed was bringing her to her heavenly home – even if someone had held a pistol to her head. She would have considered dying as a martyr a wonderful end to a life that had been one of great excess until her donning the equivalent of sackcloth and ashes fifteen years ago.

A faint ammoniac odor hung on the air of the large room. Faded frescoes adorned the walls, and it was over-furnished, even cluttered, with a preponderance of religious objects – small wooden statues and portraits of saints, rosary beads, prayer books, and missals. Two corners were devoted to plants – pots of twisted cacti, sickly looking aspidistra, sharp-leaved mother-in-law tongue, and, high on the wall, a huge spider plant whose browned tips dangled and groped a few feet above the floor.

Apollonia's lawyer, Italo Bianchi, was standing across from his client, who occupied a sofa upholstered in. heavy damask fabric with a pattern of
fleur-de-lis
. Did Bianchi's presence mean that Apollonia was going to ask Urbino to sign a statement that he had the letters in his possession for a few hours? A briefcase, unclasped, lay on the floor beside the sofa. Bianchi, as short and round and pink a contrast to his client as there could possibly be, was also the lawyer for the Pindar siblings and the contessa.

Apollonia did not ask Urbino to sit down. When she gave a curt nod to Bianchi, he went over to an armoire and removed a white lace covering from a little shagreen box. He handed the box to Urbino.

‘I'll take good care of them,' Urbino assured Apollonia. ‘This isn't the first time I've dealt with valuable documents.' Even more valuable than these, he didn't add.

‘But it is the first time you are dealing with Signora Ballarin's documents,' Bianchi said in the excruciatingly slow Italian he affected whenever he spoke to someone who was not native to the language. ‘They are as precious as relics.'

‘Don't be sacrilegious!' Apollonia's voice was firm and disapproving. There was cold fire in her blue eyes. ‘Mariano Fortuny was no saint. I would have burned the letters if my aunt had not cherished them. I'm letting him look at them in her memory.'

And for a generous sum, Urbino said to himself. He was not in the habit of paying for access to important papers but Apollonia had refused to share them with him unless he agreed to a non-negotiable fee. She might have put her soul on the path to heaven but she hadn't taken her eye off her bank account.

‘And don't take them from the building and have them photocopied,' Apollonia warned.

‘I have no intention of doing either. I'll treat them with all due respect.' Urbino got up. ‘Let me get started. Excuse me.'

Urbino descended the marble staircase to the ground floor, which had once been a warehouse for the Pindar shipping company. The walls of the vestibule exuded an atmosphere of damp. Gaby was at the far end of the room by the heavily secured entrance to a small, rear courtyard. The Pindars were just as diligent about keeping the courtyard entrance barred as they were lax about keeping the front door open. Gaby's back was turned, and she was sweeping the floor with brisk, energetic movements. She had greeted him when he had arrived, but she did not raise her head now from her work.

Two connecting rooms to the right of the embankment entrance were given over to the Pindar collection, which was accessible only through one door. The other door had been plastered over.

Two other rooms were directly across from the collection on the other side of the vestibule. Their doors had been painted blue once upon a time, but the color had long since faded. The contessa had told him that, as far as she knew, the rooms were usually locked.

Urbino entered the first room of the museum and came to a halt a few feet from the door.

The room, like the one beyond it, was crammed. The museum had a motley collection of objects. Among them were old carved chests with gilt ornamentation, heavy wooden armchairs, Turkish tiles, shells and fossils, carnival masks, a Doge's baton, antique cooking utensils, an array of pens that the Pindar family had used to sign various business agreements, ledgers, musical instruments including an exquisite mandolin, a large seventeenth-century globe, a lamp from one of the ships of the Pindar line, small daggers, navigation charts, a small tapestry, a suit of armor, an Egyptian cat mummy partly wrapped in its winding cloth, and two oil paintings.

One of the paintings hung on the left-hand side of the door into the second room. It was a large portrait, by a Bolognese painter of no renown, of the ancestor who had started the family on its upward climb in the seventeenth century, Creonte Pindar. His severe, pinched ascetic look and the sharp blue eyes staring at the viewer in a superior manner, along with a monkish fringe of black hair, gave him more the appearance of a member of the clergy than a merchant.

The other painting, which occupied most of the space on the right side of the door, was a Gabriele Bella. It depicted a procession in the Piazza San Marco following the election of a Doge. It was similar to one at the Querini-Stampalia Gallery near the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. It was probably the most valuable item in the collection.

In no way had the Pindar family been astute collectors, and a large number of the objects were the gifts of business partners and clients in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Many of the objects were little more than curiosities.

The collection was displayed in cases and cabinets, affixed to the walls or propped against them, hanging from the ceiling, and standing on the floor. The arrangement was haphazard. Descriptions for the objects were written on small slips of white paper in a spidery hand. The black ink had become gray and the description was often indecipherable.

Urbino passed through the first room into the second, where a large carved wooden table with four chairs was set up in a corner. He placed the box of letters on the table and seated himself in one of the uncomfortable chairs. The room was chilly, as was the other one. The lack of proper heating in the winter and of air-conditioning in the hot weather must be slowly doing its damage to the objects.

Against one wall was a carved and gilded chaise longue, upholstered in a worn and faded pink floral pattern, which looked like something Marie Antoinette or the Marquise de Pompadour might have reclined in. A red woollen blanket was rumpled at one end of the sofa. Gaby took her naps in the chaise longue during the long and many hours of silence when no one rang the museum bell. He also suspected that she often slept in it at night, finding comfort surrounded by all her treasured things.

Urbino took out a pencil, a sharpener, and a pile of white blank note cards from his satchel and laid them in front of him on the table. He opened the box. The letters, all on the same white paper, now faded, were neatly folded and stacked on top of each other. The envelopes were no longer with them. Had they been lost? Destroyed?