6

Dora Spaak, dressed in tweed slacks and a heavy sweater, was dwarfed by the high-backed chair. She couldn’t have been more of a contrast to Saint Catherine, pale and thin on the wall behind her. Dora Spaak was rosy and rounded, from her short haircut with bangs above surprised-looking brown eyes to her feet in pink angora slippers that barely touched the floor. Even her voice was full of rounded tones that would have been even more rounded if she had spoken with less breathlessness.

She held a crumpled tissue in her hand.

“Poor Mr. Gibbon. Whatever could have happened? He was such a nice man. It must have been an accident.”

An accident? Urbino repeated to himself. Could she possibly mean that being stabbed in the heart qualified as an accident? The next moment, the tissue at her snub nose, she added, “It was dark. Maybe they thought he was someone else. Mistaken identity, you know.”

“I’m sure the police are considering that possibility.”

“Except you don’t think it was an accident, do you?” She looked at him accusingly with her round eyes. “You think someone hated him and killed him, but it’s not true! Everyone here liked him, except for that crackpot Signora Campi. Even my brother, Nicholas—”

She stopped.

“What about your brother, Miss Spaak?”

She blew her nose before answering. When she did answer, there was a more cautious note in her voice.

“Nothing. Just that Nicholas liked Val, too, even if he didn’t always show it. Signora Campi probably wants to put us all in the same group with her! She was always so unkind in the things she said. She almost always said them to me and it made me feel awful. Most of the time Val was there and he heard. I hope he didn’t think I believed what she was saying. He couldn’t do anything right as far as she was concerned! She said being a photographer was nothing at all. It wasn’t work and it wasn’t art. She said he fed off other people. She criticized him for not having all his meals with us here even though he had to pay for them. I think she resented that he had the money to do that. She didn’t have two nickels to rub together—or whatever they call them here. And another thing,” Dora added almost eagerly, the sodden tissue clutched in her chubby hand. “She was always saying he had a fire around his head that wouldn’t bring him or anyone else any good. She sends chills down my spine when she talks like that! No wonder she frightens the boys from Naples if she can frighten a grown woman like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

Once again she broke off.

“If what, Miss Spaak?”

“Nothing. It’s just that she frightens me so much.”

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Gibbon?”

She wiped her nose.

“Last night after dinner,” she said softly. “You see, I wasn’t feeling too well. I caught a chill early in the day and my shoes and stockings got soaked in all the high water when I was looking for a post office. By the time I got back here I was sneezing. Later, sometime after nine, I was in the dining room having a cup of tea that the woman made for me before she left for the night. Val came down the backstairs. He was on his way out with his camera case. I figured he was going to join the fun in the big square. But he had on only a scarf and a light flannel shirt and I told him it didn’t took as if he was going to be warm enough. He sat down and we had a chat.” She applied a fresh tissue to her eyes. “He was so kind. He said he would go to the kitchen and get me some biscuits. It would be an adventure, he said, there would probably be a sign over the pantry door, something about abandoning hope or whatever if you went in, but he said he would do it anyway.”

Hearing these garbled words from Dante had Urbino wondering if Val Gibbon had picked up Hazel Reeve’s habit of quoting the Italian poet.

“He said that if I happened to know where it was, I could be his Be—Be—I forget what he said, some strange name.”

“Beatrice,” Urbino offered, pronouncing it in the Italian way with four syllables.

“That was it.” Dora Spaak looked at him suspiciously. “I said I had no idea. I told him not to bother, that I was fine. All I needed was my tea. He said he would join me and started to take off his scarf. He would stay in and devote himself to making me feel a little better. Of course I insisted that he continue with his original plans. It was very kind and sweet of him, I said, but I was just fine. Yes, I—I told him to go. If I hadn’t sent him away, he would be alive—and—and no one would have had to kill him!”

It was now that Urbino remembered what Xenia Campi had said about looking deep into Dora Spaak’s eyes. What he saw when he did, however, wasn’t the “ghost of death,” as Xenia Campi had called it, but fear.

“He stayed a few minutes longer and left,” Dora Spaak said, averting her eyes. “He said he liked my slippers.”

She looked down at the slippers and started to cry as she considered the poignancy of his last words to her.