12

After leaving the Calle Santa Scolastica, Urbino wandered for a while through the nearby working-class quarter of the Castello. Very few of the people in this area wore costumes and those who did had simple affairs that bore the look of altered bridal gowns and military uniforms, of hastily sewn sheeting material and remnants.

One figure stood out from the rest, however. Urbino saw it on the other side of one of the squares. It was vaguely familiar, with its green and blue embroidered robe and high headdress with silver baubles, Oriental mask, and feathered fan. It was surrounded by a group of young children who were tugging at the skirt and making gesticulations. Urbino couldn’t hear what they were saying. A woman shouted something down from a window and the children ran off, but not before one of them had scurried back to try to pull a feather from the fan.

As the figure continued across the square in the general direction of San Marco, Urbino recognized it. It was Giovanni Firpo, whom he had last seen in the Piazza taunting Xenia Campi as she handed out her pamphlets decrying Carnival. Firpo, who lived in the Castello, probably had spent close to a month’s wages from his job at the hospital on this year’s costume. It was the same every year.

When Urbino reached the Public Gardens where the Biennale art festival was held every other summer, he sat down on one of the benches by the water. The odor of cat urine engulfed him. In a large fenced-in area behind him, hundreds of cats made their home in the dead leaves and under the bushes and trees. It was the fate he had rescued his own Serena from when he had found her shivering under a bush by the statue of Wagner on a wet day in November.

A girls’ gymnastics class was jogging along the path that bordered the lagoon. Several of the girls jumped up on the stone wall and walked along it fearlessly.

Urbino sat thinking of what he had learned from the guests so far. No one seemed to have noticed anything unusual the night of Gibbon’s death. Perhaps the most unusual fact had been that Lubonski had got up from his sickbed to leave the Casa Crispina and then had called Urbino. The only other person who Urbino knew for sure had been out that night was Nicholas Spaak, who had gone for a walk and had a drink at a bar. This didn’t mean, of course, that no one else had gone out. It was ironic, but it might have been easier tracking the comings and goings of guests at one of the big hotels than at the Casa Crispina, where the guests had individual keys that they kept with them at all times. He would have to ask Xenia Campi a few more questions, since she had been sitting in the lounge that evening and would have been able to see whoever might have gone in or out. And he supposed there was a possibility that Sister Agata had seen or heard something even after nine-thirty although, from what he had heard, she was usually fast asleep by then.

Urbino was less clear now about what kind of person Gibbon had been than before he talked with the guests. Was there any consistency in their different views of Gibbon? The men—Lubonski and Nicholas Spaak—hadn’t cared for him, whereas Dora Spaak and her mother seemed to have more benevolent opinions. But Xenia Campi hadn’t liked him and the boys from Naples hadn’t had anything bad to say about him. No, there wasn’t much consistency in this direction, he said to himself as he got up and started back toward the Piazza.