1

“I must get in,” Urbino said to himself at two o’clock in the morning. He stood on a narrow, humpbacked bridge in a remote corner of the San Polo district.

The full moon broke through the clouds and splayed a solemn brightness over the scene.

The Ca’ Pozza was wrapped in silence, and completely dark behind its windows. Urbino felt a thrill of fear and a wave of melancholy. Even if he had not known who was within its walls, hidden from public view all these years and filled with so many memories that time would soon snatch away, the building would have stirred in him the same mixture of feelings.

Urbino closed his umbrella. Surrounded by puddles of water and the reek of moldering stone and vegetation, he was far removed from the civilized comforts of Florian’s, where he had sat with the Contessa yesterday afternoon.

He peered down at the black waters of the canal. Scraps of vegetables drifted in the direction of the Grand Canal. Mesmerized by their slow motion, he watched them until they passed from view under the bridge. He was now staring at the faint, masklike reflection of his face.

Vaguely uneasy, he jerked his head up. His unexpected image in any reflecting surface invariably disconcerted him as it had at Florian’s. It always left him feeling, for many confusing moments afterward, that he wasn’t the person he thought he was but someone else who only looked the same.

He focused his attention on the silent and secretive Ca’ Pozza to dispel the wave of anxiety coursing through him.

The building with its crumbling broad front, eroded stone loggia, and rows of curtained windows frowned down at him from above the small canal as if it disapproved of his intrusive gaze.

Urbino had always found the San Polo district, choked by a loop of the Grand Canal, to be filled with more of a sense of death and decay than anywhere else in Venice. Since his preoccupation with Samuel Possle and his dilapidated palazzo, this feeling had deepened and darkened.

If the bridges and alleys seemed more twisted, the covered walkways danker, and the Rialto farther away, it was because of the baleful influence cast by the Ca’ Pozza. Even the nearby Fondamenta delle Tette, where women once bared their breasts to entice customers away from homosexual prostitutes, somehow thickened with more sensual associations.

Whether penetrating the Ca’ Pozza’s secrets would dispel the building’s peculiar influence or increase it, Urbino had no way of knowing; but he wouldn’t be at peace until he gained access. Since Possle never came out, Urbino would have to get in. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.

How far he was prepared to go to achieve this end seemed ominously foreshadowed by the urgency of the phrase he kept repeating to himself in an almost audible voice. “I must get in. I must get in.”

He was unable to pull his gaze away from the building. He let his imagination wander through rooms he had never seen, seeking out the old man as he might be sleeping and dreaming of days gone by or sitting with a pile of yellowed letters.

Urbino knew as much or as little about Samuel Possle as everyone else seemed to know or had been allowed to. His background was wealthy but otherwise undistinguished. His family had made a fortune in the shrimp industry in South Carolina. Since he was an only child, it had all come into his hands with the sudden deaths of his parents in the forties. The larger world beyond Venice had heard of him, not for anything he had accomplished, but rather for his former glittering entourage and for what he had always seemed to promise. Time was running out on the promise as he approached his ninetieth year.

Possle, a frequent guest of the rich and famous, and the indefatigable host of sensational gatherings at the Ca’ Pozza, appeared briefly, but memorably, in the memoirs and biographies of many people now long dead. His marriage to a German poet had ended in divorce decades ago, and he had never remarried. After all his years of high society, he had gone into seclusion.

He was supposedly working on a book he had once made the mistake of saying was a “meditation on time and the human emotions” intentionally evoking Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. However, his version, he had said, would be more sensational and even longer.

Suddenly the Ca’ Pozza jolted Urbino out of these thoughts. With an almost blinding flash, the tall loggia doors on the piano nobile were illuminated from within. A few moments later a silhouette appeared behind the curtains of one of the unshuttered doors that was closest to Urbino. The figure seemed to be staring out, although positioned as it was behind the curtains and standing in a lighted room, it was doubtful whether it could see anything.

Urbino assumed the figure was a man because the hair seemed closely cropped. It stood motionless behind the panes of the door, almost as if it were posing, and then turned slowly and presented itself in full profile.

The sex of the figure didn’t become clarified, but as Urbino stared one detail drew all his attention. The figure held up to its face an object that gave every appearance of being a severed head. The nose of the head was sharp and the chin prominent; its skull was remarkably smooth, and Urbino assumed it must be completely bald.

The figure remained at the door as if to give Urbino time to take in the disturbing scene and then moved to the side and out of sight. The light was extinguished a few moments later.

Yet Urbino waited, standing on the bridge as motionless as the figure had stood at the door earlier. It was as if Urbino knew that something else would happen tonight on this visit to the Ca’ Pozza. He was not proved wrong.

Suddenly shrill, high-pitched laughter assaulted his ears. Distorted though it was, it sounded more like a woman’s laughter than a man’s. It continued for a few moments, subsided into sobs, and then silence.

Because these disturbing sounds broke the stillness so soon after the mysterious figure at the door, the Ca’ Pozza was their likely source. But as they faded, leaving behind an even more deathly silence, he realized that they could have come from the building next door that shared a wall with the Ca’ Pozza and whose entrance was up the dark, narrow alley that wound its way from the bridge.

All alone in the night and with a nature that had recently become slightly superstitious under the influence of the fatalistic Habib, Urbino couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been drawn here tonight to see the figure and to hear the laughter.

He drew his cloak around him against the chill and began to pick his way over the slick, uneven stones of the alley. After a few oblique turns, it would take him to the next bridge. He cast a quick glance up at the building next to the Ca’ Pozza from where the laughter and sobs might have come. Not one window was lit.

He broke into a regular rhythm of walking. If he were lucky, he should now be able to get to sleep when he returned to the Palazzo Uccello. If he did, he hoped that it would be without having the dream that had been brushing its dark wings against him for so many nights and that had even cast its shadows over his rendezvous at Florian’s with the Contessa.

He had not gone far when a pool of water blocked his passage. After a moment’s hesitation as he considered retracing his steps, he waded through it. Water seeped over the tops of his rain shoes.

Clouds obscured the moon again, and a damp, penetrating wind from the direction of the lagoon, funneled by the narrow alleys, whined in his ears. More rain would fall before the night was over.

The calle ended at a canal bordered by a portico and crossed by a crooked, stone bridge. Boats moored by the mossy water steps were covered with tarpaulin and plastic. On a bright sunny day this spot was full of charm. Tourists would often congratulate themselves on having discovered the area all on their own, but at this hour of the night they would have been less enthusiastic. There were too many places for someone to be hiding, too many slippery stones that could have you falling into the canal, and too little reassurance that anyone was inside the closed old houses to come to your aid.

He entered the portico. Most of the buildings were in a poor condition and were vacant. Stucco facing had fallen off to reveal the bricks beneath. Doors and windows were boarded over, with CHIUSO painted in red letters on the doors. Narrow openings between the buildings led into a labyrinth of alleys.

As Urbino went along the passageway, being careful to watch his step in the darkness, Possle and the Ca’ Pozza crept back into his mind. They had tormented him all evening at the Palazzo Uccello until, at midnight, he had ventured through the rain to San Polo.

These almost compulsive visits were his substitute for passing through the front door of the so-far impregnable building. He had done his best to keep his obsession a secret from the Contessa even though it had been a strain. He had told himself that this was only because of his concern for her peace of mind as she prepared for her upcoming conversazioni, but the truth was that he was both jealous of his fascination with Possle and embarrassed by it.

Ever since having taken her into his confidence, he had had to endure the kind of well-meaning banter that he had gotten a good sample of this afternoon. He felt comforted that he had her golden promise to help him in his pocket. She could very well be his last chance.

All his own attempts had failed. He had sent letters, which had been promptly returned. On one occasion he had tried a gift of flowers, on the assumption that since Possle had bought a palazzo with a garden, he must have a fondness for them. But the urn of flowers, accompanied by a note, that Urbino left at the entrance one morning, after no one had acknowledged the bell, had remained there, apparently untouched, for two subsequent days. Urbino and his gondolier had removed it.

The Contessa’s efforts might not prove to be so abortive. Not only did she have contacts that she could marshal on his behalf, but she also had enjoyed a brief acquaintance with Possle. She might be able to exploit it if she were willing. After her arrival in Venice to study at the conservatory, her path had crossed with Possle’s, although never at the Ca’ Pozza. The Conte Alvise had put an end to the acquaintance when they became engaged. By then Possle had already made a reputation for himself as one of the city’s glamorous, but morally questionable, figures, along with his friends Peggy Guggenheim and a well-known composer who had murdered his family and then killed himself. The Conte had once—

Urbino’s thoughts broke off. He was not alone. Someone had been stealthily approaching the covered passageway. Part of his mind had registered a scrape against the stones of one of the alleys to his left. It sounded like a fumbled footstep and was followed by the clank, albeit muted, of something metallic.

He came to a dead halt and listened. The wind moaned. Water lapped against stone. But the other sounds weren’t repeated. If they had been, he would have been less wary, but he had the impression that someone was trying not to make any further noise.

It was completely possible, given the disorienting acoustics of the city, that the sounds had come from a distance, even from over the roofs of the buildings.

Urbino, however, saw no reason not to be cautious. He was all alone at an hour of the night when his cry for help, echoing from stone and water, would have more chance of sending someone in the opposite direction than of leading him to where Urbino was in distress.

He therefore didn’t remain rooted to where he was under the dark, damp passageway but strode at a brisk pace toward the bridge. He paused on the parapet, watched, and listened. He saw and heard nothing that settled his mind one way or another.

If he didn’t get inside the Ca’ Pozza soon, he feared he would have little relief from his own overactive imagination and his growing sense of inadequacy. Once he was inside, logic and reason would surely prevail.

With this reassuring thought, Urbino broke into an even stride that soon had him crossing the Rialto Bridge.