33

The bone-chilling damp of the Ca’ Pozza, more intense than it was outdoors and considerably colder than could be expected of even an old Venetian palazzo, settled down over Urbino again as soon as he stepped over the threshold. His awareness that he was in large part a victim of his own superstition didn’t lessen the feeling anymore than it had on his first visit but, instead, seemed to increase it. Reluctantly, he took off his cloak and placed it over one of the gargoyles on the clothes stand.

The grim Armando, giving off his unwashed odor, conducted him across the lower hall, past the closed door of what Possle had called one of the mute’s nooks and crannies in the silent house. The high staircase rose at its slightly tilted angle, or so it seemed once again to Urbino.

As they ascended through its heavy shadows, with Armando a few steps above him, the strains of music and a male voice suddenly shattered the silence.

“ ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be ne’er as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.’”

When they reached the long, dark sala, Urbino stopped to listen to the rest of the song. It came from the gondola room, whose door was thrown open wide.

“‘For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.’”

Armando, who had continued across the sala, stopped at the door of the gondola room and waited for Urbino. His arms, with their scarred hands, were close against his sides. Under his scrutiny, Urbino crossed the sala and entered the hot, inert air of the strange chamber.

He took in the scene with a quick glance. The domed ceiling, the shuttered windows, the dark draperies, the rococo mirror, the candles, the pots of exotic flowers, the silver cage with its dead cricket, the orange walls with their portraits and still-life paintings, the improbable gondola under its canopy, and, in it, Possle’s reclining figure, dressed in red satins and purple silks.

“An interesting piece of music, don’t you think, Mr. Macintyre? Please sit down.”

Urbino seated himself in the high-backed armchair close to the gondola, where he had sat on the previous occasion.

“But I’m sure that you found it too loud,” Possle went on, after giving a little tug at the purple silk that swathed his head. “You must forgive me, but I refuse to wear a hearing aid.”

Considering the man’s old-fashioned, if not antiquated air, however, Urbino wouldn’t have been surprised if Possle had a hearing trumpet concealed among the orange cushions.

“Armando will bring us our Amontillado.”

Armando, who had been hovering in the doorway, nodded and withdrew.

“You know the song?” Possle asked.

His small, dark eyes behind his large, black glasses bore into Urbino.

“It’s one of Byron’s poems set to music. The refrain comes from an old Scottish song. My grandfather used to sing it to me.”

“Indeed? What a coincidence. ‘And the soul wears out the breast,’” Possle recited in his tremulous voice. He made no attempt to sing the words. “Byron was barely twenty-nine when he wrote those words. I’m almost three times that.”

“Melancholy was in his nature,” Urbino observed. “The poem expresses his repentant mood after carnevale, I believe,” Urbino went on, feeling a little pedantic. Possle was staring at him. “Even the young are susceptible to that,” he went on. “Last time you asked me if I liked Byron. It appears that you like him a great deal yourself. Perhaps more than I do.”

“Is that what you think? Or know?”

Possle’s emphasis puzzled Urbino, who remained silent. Possle looked narrowly at him from his recumbent position.

“But you might have a professional interest, Mr. Macintyre.” Possle’s eyes again searched Urbino’s face. “I’m referring to the biography on Byron that you might write one of these days.”

He made a longish pause and seemed irritated when Urbino didn’t respond.

“And here we both are, you and me,” Possle continued, “two lovers of Byron in the middle of Venice, ‘the pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.’”

“You’re fond of quoting Byron,” Urbino ventured.

“But that’s an easy one to recognize. Almost everyone knows it.”

He fussed around with the cushions for a few moments.

“Your Scottish grandfather, you say? The ancient Celtic clan of Macintyre. ‘Son of a Carpenter,’ it means, rather a plebeian association for someone like yourself. Through Difficulties is your clan’s motto. Your crest, a right hand holding aloft a dagger. I believe your ancestor chopped off his own thumb to plug up a hole in the sinking galley of a chieftain. This old head of mine is filled with the most amazing nonsense, Mr. Macintyre.”

Possle had obviously done research on him, or Armando had. The question was why.

“I suppose you’d like to be the greatest biographer since Boswell?” Possle now said.

“Hardly.”

“More in the line of Lytton Strachey, then? Attacking a life from an unusual angle? Is that what you would like to do with me?”

Possle withdrew the crystal vaporizer from among the cushions and squeezed the bulb once, twice. The aroma of his special potpourri quickly spread through the warm air. Urbino could only distinguish the scent of tuberose and orange blossom but none of the other essences Possle had named.

“You’d be an interesting subject,” Urbino said.

“Who knows, Mr. Macintyre? I might be of use to you but perhaps not in the way that you’re thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m aware that I’m more of an oddity, an anomaly, call it, than anything else. Some people might think the same of you,” Possle added, with a little cough that could have been embarrassment or a cover for amusement.

Urbino had to agree with this, but he did so silently. Despite the theatricality and eccentricity of Possle’s gondola, Urbino’s negotiation of the canals in his own gondola was certainly not less so in its way. One might even argue that at least Possle was confined to the privacy of the Ca’ Pozza, whereas Urbino was very much in the public eye.

“I’m not Byron.” Possle said this with an air of amused regret. “I’m not Peggy Guggenheim. But what I am, Mr. Macintyre, is a source of information about the people who have passed through the Ca’ Pozza in its heyday. In their heyday. In mine,” he added, his thin voice dropping lower. “I could be your mirror. Oh, don’t look so surprised. I don’t mean that you would see yourself in me, but who knows?” he said, with a lifting of his sparse brows. “What I mean is that I could be your filter. The good and the bad, the rich and the famous, the talented and the failures”—his voice grew a little more forceful—“all seen through the eyes of someone who can barely see now, or hear.”

At this point Armando entered and deposited the tray next to the carafe of water and the goblets on the small, inlaid table. He poured the pale wine into two porcelain cups. He handed one cup to Possle. This time, the other cup was left for Urbino to reach for.

Armando gave an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.

Urbino had hardly registered the man’s coming and going. Possle had just come close to saying that he would be willing to work with Urbino. Could the mystery of why Possle had summoned him be as simple—as wonderfully and unexpectedly simple—as that? Yet even if this were the case, it didn’t explain why he had chosen Urbino.

“Is that why you’ve asked me to come here?” Urbino began, after considering his words carefully. “May I assume that you’re making an overture?”

Possle took a sip of the wine.

“An overture, yes, but an overture of what kind?” his host replied. “Perhaps I’ve been too precipitate in getting your hopes up. I’m a man who likes to proceed slowly and logically, not unlike yourself, but one who will also make a quick leap sometimes to even my own surprise. That’s like you, too, I have a feeling.”

He scrutinized Urbino with his small, quick eyes, his tongue darting out to moisten his lips in his habitual gesture. If he had reminded Urbino of a preserved saint on the previous occasion, this afternoon there was something almost reptilian about him—frail, yes, but sinuous and with a distinct sense that he might leap and strike.

They sipped their wine in silence. A distant rumble of thunder penetrated the gondola room from beyond the drawn drapes and closed shutters.

Possle kept his cup propped on his stomach. Pressed against his silk shirtfront hung the large, strangely shaped metal talisman on its gold chain, one of whose details was a crescent. Urbino was reminded of the symbol affixed to the inside of the Ca’ Pozza’s front door. He stared at the talisman, and once he began it became difficult to take his eyes away from it.

When he did, transferring his attention to its owner, Possle’s head had dropped on his chest. His eyes were closed. The cup looked as if it might slip from his grasp.

Urbino was about to get up and take it when his eye became caught by something white on the carpet near his feet. It was a piece of paper, the size of a postcard. It appeared to have writing on it. Without thinking, he leaned over and picked it up. He didn’t examine it, but thrust it into his pocket, surprising himself with the force of his own impulse.

He had hardly withdrawn his hand from his pocket when Possle’s voice gave him a start.

“Tell me, Mr. Macintyre, are you involved in one of your investigations at the moment?”

Possle wasn’t looking at Urbino but off in the direction of the rococo mirror on the other side of the room. The cracks of thunder became more pronounced and followed each other at shorter and shorter intervals. Possle, with his weak hearing, seemed to be oblivious to the approaching storm.

“My other line of work, as you called it last time?” Urbino could hear the nervousness in his voice at almost having been discovered. “It’s not something I look out for, not like a new subject for one of my books. If something special comes my way, something that touches me personally or someone I know and care about, then I turn my hand to it.”

“Your mind, you mean.”

Urbino speculated whether Possle could have sought him out, not for his writing skills as he had seemed to hint a little while ago, but for his detecting ones. Possle’s next comment gave added weight to this possibility.

“And you’re the soul of discretion in your sleuthing.”

“I try to be.”

“It’s in your nature, as you say melancholy was in Byron’s.”

“And in the nature of what I choose to look into.”

“Or what chooses you.”

Because of the truth in Possle’s emendation and Urbino’s sense that it might be a prelude to an offer, he kept silent.

He wasn’t disappointed when Possle went on to say, “I suppose you find the Ca’ Pozza and myself—along with Armando—something worth looking into. As an intellectual exercise, of course. There’s no dead body in the library, and no crime anywhere in sight, except one of taste.” Possle made a strangled sound from somewhere in his chest that must have been a chuckle. “I mean this room. Is it to your liking?”

The abrupt shift disoriented and disappointed Urbino. Possle had appeared to be close to making an appeal. But he had seemed to be on the brink of it before with his comments about Urbino’s biographies, only to drop the topic. He was doing the same thing again.

Two days ago Urbino had suspected that Possle was toying with him. Now he had less doubt.

The effect of all this was to surprise a response out of Urbino. “You’re trying to keep me off balance, Mr. Possle. With what end in mind, I don’t know. But to answer your question, let me say that I find your room more than a little strange, as I’m sure you know most people would. And yet it seems familiar to me.”

This last comment was drawn out of him almost against his will. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until he did. He was about to add that he also found some of the things Possle said familiar, but he let just the one observation serve, at least for the moment.

Possle’s half-smile puckered his face. “And well it might look familiar, Mr. Macintyre,” he said. “You’ve been here before.”

“I beg your pardon? The first time I entered this room—the first time I even set foot in the Ca’ Pozza—was three days ago.”

“Nonetheless, you have been here before—in your fashion.”

Urbino, more and more confused, took refuge again in silence. His recurring dream flashed across his eyes. The room in the dream was similar to this one, with its drapes and formal, angular chairs, but surely Possle couldn’t know that.

“Perhaps my room looks too much like a wager,” Possle said in an insinuating tone, “and you’re afraid of being duped by taking it too seriously.”

“Whatever game you’re playing—” Urbino began with exasperation.

“Or perhaps,” Possle interrupted him with his tremulous voice, “you think my room is as monstrous as an orchid. Perhaps you’re afraid you’ll find me dead in my gondola, shot through the head by my own hand, or dressed in a monk’s habit and praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Is that what’s left for me after all this?” He waved his hand weakly to indicate the room with its unusual details of color, design, and furnishing. “The muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross?”

Only then did Urbino, with a sudden rush, understand Possle’s puzzling comments.

“Huysmans’s Against Nature,” Urbino said. “Des Esseintes.”

Possle nodded, as if a recalcitrant pupil had finally learned his lesson. He drank down the remainder of his Amontillado.

The shock of surprise kept Urbino from saying anything more for a few moments. He leaned back in his chair and let his eye roam around the room. He was now seeing it in a completely different light.

Possle had woven his hints about the room out of comments that Oscar Wilde and others had made about the novel that had played such an important role in Urbino’s life. The familiar elements in Possle’s room—with the grand exception of the gondola—twinned the décor and architecture of the isolated house where the reclusive character had pursued his eccentricities. This fact would have been unusual in itself.

But the connection to Urbino made it even more peculiar. Here was Possle, an expatriate American like himself, secluded in his palazzo, who had also been influenced by the same decadent French model. And he was also aware of Urbino’s own fascination, something not many people knew about.

“I don’t mind that you know a great deal about me, Mr. Possle,” Urbino said, with more vehemence than sincerity. “What I do mind is the way that you’re going about it. If you want to have a meeting of minds, there are much better ways of doing it. Whatever advantage you have over me in this way—or you think you have—is worth nothing if you want my cooperation. And have no doubt, Mr. Possle, it’s as clear as anything can be that you do want exactly that.” Urbino took a deep sip of his Amontillado, waiting for Possle’s response.

But this outburst, which made Urbino feel so much better for having indulged in it, was lost on Possle. The man had dropped off to sleep again.

Light flashed behind the drapes, admitted by the chinks in the closed shutters. Almost immediately afterward a loud crack of thunder broke the silence. Wind rattled the shutters. Possle didn’t stir.

Possle’s frail chest rose and fell slowly, almost imperceptibly. For the moment, with his purple headscarf, he looked like some aged, dandyish pirate stealing a few moments of rest before going out again on the deck of his ship.

Taking advantage of being left to his own devices for however long or however short Possle’s narcoleptic spell lasted, without getting up from his chair Urbino examined the small, squat pots of plants and flowers closest to him. He was careful to avoid the candles. He reached down and touched a petal of one of the exotic flowers. The flower was artificial. So were the dewdrops beading it. A pot next to this flower held the yellowish, artificial-looking plant streaked with gray that evoked a piece of stovepipe. He touched the plant. It was real. These, too, were details from Huysmans. Artificial plants that looked real and real ones that looked artificial.

He also now took the opportunity, still from his seated position, to look more closely at the paintings ranged on the wall across from the gondola. Some were also lifted from the pages of the book. Two of them remarkably resembled ones that Huysmans had described. One was Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod. The other was Moreau’s The Apparition, with its severed head of St. John the Baptist rising from a platter. Urbino had seen it at the Louvre. The Salome was in a gallery in the States. The two paintings were copies.

Beside the Salome was a portrait of a light-haired young woman in the manner of Sargent. Dressed in a low-cut black dress with a large, pale yellow flower at her bosom, she was seated on a sofa with high, curved sides. Urbino didn’t recognize any original for the painting and assumed that it wasn’t a copy.

A movement from the gondola caught his attention. Possle was staring at him. “I was off again,” he said. “My sessions are becoming more frequent. I hope you were able to entertain yourself.”

Urbino sensed that Possle, despite his spell, knew what he had been doing during it and that he was aware of Urbino’s little outburst.

“About my own interest in Monsieur Huysmans,” Possle continued, showing that he could pick up where he had left off, “be assured on a few points. I don’t corrupt street urchins and get them habituated to brothels, and there’s no jewel-encrusted tortoise hiding away in a corner of the room.”

These were further details from the book, and Possle threw them out with an amused, casual air.

“And even that cage with the cricket, Mr. Macintyre. You probably think now that it’s because, like our mutual hero, I want to express my loathing for my childhood by being reminded of the song that accompanied so many of my sad summers, but you are wrong. I like, instead, to be reminded of the old legend of the sibyl who forgot to ask for eternal youth when she was awarded eternal life. She was reduced in her ancient years to hanging in a cage and croaking out, ‘I want to die.’ You noticed that my cricket is dead.”

His small eyes strayed toward the silver cage and back to Urbino’s face.

“So you see, I don’t go as far as I can with my imitations from the yellow book so cherished by Dorian Gray. And as for you, Mr. Macintyre, you haven’t gone anywhere near as far as I have. Your Palazzo Uccello has nothing to compare with this, I’m sure. Just the book itself, perhaps different editions, maybe an illustration or two.”

This was a good description of what Urbino did have in the corner of his library dedicated to Huysmans. “As I said last time,” he responded, holding back his anger, “you seem to know a great deal about me.”

“More than you know about me, you mean? Is that what irritates you? Reflect, Mr. Macintyre. You may not have been as reticent as you think you’ve been over the years. Venice might be a secretive place, turned in on itself and shut off from the rest of the world, but it’s one big stage as well. And in any case, when one has a secret, it encourages others to search it out.”

Possle’s gaze fell upon the crown of Urbino’s head.

“Would you mind coming up the steps to the gondola for a moment?” he asked.

Curious as to what this was about, Urbino got up and approached Possle, with the expectation of being handed something that his host would withdraw from among the cushions or being asked to take the empty porcelain cup lying against them.

But instead, “Bend your head down please,” Possle said.

When Urbino leaned closer to him, Possle’s hands seized Urbino’s head. His fingers groped Urbino’s skull from front to back, side to side. Their touch was cold, very cold. Urbino wanted to draw back, but he endured it.

Rain was now beating against the windows of the gondola room, driven by the wind.

Possle held Urbino’s head a long time before releasing it. Urbino went back to his seat, meekly perhaps to Possle’s eye, but inwardly rebelling against the man’s touch and angry with himself for having allowed it, but equally mystified.

“Do you believe in phrenology?” Possle asked.

“No.”

“Perhaps you should. I wasn’t able to give your head a proper examination, but it reveals a great deal. You have some morbidly developed faculties and some deficient ones. You’re strong in philoprogenitiveness, for example, as is displayed in your fondness for your Moroccan friend and your gondolier.”

Possle’s voice was becoming weaker as he spoke. He took an audible breath and went on.

“If I could get my hands on the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini, I’m sure I’d find that her bump of benevolence is prodigiously developed. I’ve often wondered if the wealthy puzzle about what to do with all their money.”

“The Contessa is a very generous woman.”

“And you have been one of her main beneficiaries. But surely all her generosity is a mere pittance of what she has.”

Before Urbino might defend the Contessa, Possle forestalled him by saying, “How I would have loved to have a go at Byron’s head. He had a fine head on him.”

He spoke for two or three minutes about phrenology and Byron, growing increasingly fatigued, and all the while weaving in references—some familiar, some arcane—to the poet, and looking at Urbino covertly and with distinct expectation.

“Might you know if Byron ever had a phrenological reading?” he asked at the end of this monologue. “I suspect that you know more about him than I do.”

Urbino had listened to all of what Possle had said in patience, and when Possle finished, quietly took up with the subject that was of more interest to him. “You’re strange, Mr. Possle, but maybe not as strange as you want me to believe. You want my cooperation about something. What it is, I don’t know, but you’re going about it in the wrong way. There’s a mystery of some kind surrounding you and your house, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But whether it’s a real one or only one you’re trying to generate—or add to—I have no idea.”

“Or one that people have created themselves,” Possle supplied, as a further possibility. “Reality is a boring affair. We’ll always be outsiders here, Mr. Macintyre, even if I manage to live more years and you live to be as old as I am, which I heartily wish for you.”

This latter observation amused him, if Urbino could judge by the same strangled sound that he had made earlier. It came from deep in his chest and grew and grew until his face lost its yellow waxy look and became decidedly red. He was seized with a cough that persisted long enough for Urbino to become alarmed. He arose from his chair and approached the gondola. Possle was now gasping for breath.

“I’ll call Armando.”

But the mute was already in the room, seeming to have appeared from nowhere. He moved to Possle’s assistance, pushing Urbino aside with more force than was necessary. He leaned over Possle, whose eyes were closed as he continued to cough, and threw Urbino a look that said as loudly and severely as any words could that his visit had come to an end.