15

For five days after his talk with the Contessa, Urbino was busy, but none of his activities involved Possle or the Contessa’s lost items.

On a windy and rainy Monday morning he went with Rebecca to the Corderie dell’Arsenale to examine Habib’s installation space. They lunched afterward in a nearby trattoria to discuss the things that they needed to do for Habib before he returned. But all through the meal, part of him was far away. He could tell that Rebecca noticed, but she didn’t say anything.

The next day he took the train to Milan to see his translator. The hours spent with her, however, only served to increase his anxiety about Possle because she kept asking him what his next project might be.

When some friends came unexpectedly from Paris for a few days, he welcomed the diversion. He devoted himself to showing them around town and took them on an outing to Torcello in the gondola after Gildo had been able to arrange for an additional rower. It had been delightful, if rather chilly, but he had been unable to part company with Possle’s ghost, who seemed to be one more passenger, albeit insubstantial, for the two young men to row across the lagoon.

Urbino restrained himself from contacting the Contessa, who was preparing for her opening conversazione. He had no doubt that she was doing what she could for his benefit, and he wondered what had come of the plans she had hinted at. Her own silence, unusual in itself and dispiriting, indicated that she had nothing encouraging to tell him yet.

Whenever he went for a walk, he kept himself clear of the Ca’ Pozza, and Gildo didn’t, by design or accident, guide the gondola in that direction either. His avoidance of the Ca’ Pozza was perhaps harder than anything else Urbino had to endure during this period, for the old building seemed to be beckoning him from afar with what seemed a promise, at other times a threat.

To make matters worse, the dream of Possle and the fire haunted him with even greater intensity.

Urbino, who had tried whatever he could over the past month short of breaking into the Ca’ Pozza, waited, and while he waited, he put his trust in the Contessa—in her and in something he sometimes called fate.

Then, at eight-fifteen in the morning on Thursday, March 7, the day before the Contessa’s first conversazione, the doorbell of the Palazzo Uccello awoke Urbino from a fitful, troubled sleep and everything started to change.