66

Still weak the next evening, Urbino took the vaporetto to Harry’s Bar for his rendezvous with Demetrio Emo. This time Emo, dressed in a sober black suit that might have been left over from his days as a priest, was waiting for Urbino at one of the tables against the wall on the ground floor. He had a Bellini in front of him. From the flushed look on his large face, Urbino could tell that it wasn’t his first.

Emo still showed evidence of his recent attack in San Polo in the form of a fading bruise on his cheek.

“Where did it happen?” Urbino asked.

“Not near the Ca’ Pozza, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Emo snapped back. “Two boys pushed me from behind and grabbed my case. All they got was a lot of keys. I gave a description to the police. Is that enough for you, Sherlock Macintyre? We’re not eating down here. That’s not part of the deal. Should I take this with me?”

He held up his Bellini, but before Urbino could say anything he downed it in one gulp.

The dining room was full. The maitre d’ led them to one of the round tables and removed the RISERVATO sign. Urbino and Emo seated themselves. The boats, the churches, the expanse of the inner lagoon, and the mouth of the Grand Canal were like a stage set beyond their window.

But Emo seemed uninterested in contemplating the scene. He immediately gave all his attention to the menu after ordering a whiskey sour. Urbino, sipping his Martini, sat back while Emo commanded an entire banquet for himself. In a surprisingly short time he ploughed through one dish after another, beginning with the Carpaccio, the tuna tartare, and dried salt cod from Vicenza, and then moved on to the minestrone, pasta with wild mushrooms, chicken risotto, and scampi. He finished, without any evidence of flagging appetite, with Zabaglione and flambéed crepes. All of this was washed down with glass after glass of Dom Perignon. Urbino did all he could to stretch out his caviar and ravioli with artichokes.

Emo, who didn’t seem to see the sense of mixing eating with talking, rebuffed Urbino’s attempts to ask him anything about Armando and Adriana. Urbino was afraid that when the locksmith finished his second dessert, he would stand up and bid Urbino a hearty and somewhat tipsy buona sera.

But as it turned out the former priest had a sense of fairness, if he didn’t have one of moderation. While he sipped from a generous portion of Benedictine, he started to sing for his already consumed supper.

“So you want to know about Armando and Adriana Abdon,” he said in his low voice. “You say that it’s for some book you’re writing. I’ll believe that if you’ll believe that I have no reason for telling you anything but the truth.” He laughed and took out a small cigar. He eyed Urbino, who made no protest. But Emo put the cigar back in his pocket. “The three of us grew up together, more or less.”

Urbino made a quick calculation. Yes, Emo and Armando must be about the same age, somewhere in their early sixties.

“In the Ghetto. Their father and mine were both delivery-men. Armando and Adriana were the only twins I knew even existed in those days.”

“They were twins?”

“Not that they looked like each other. Not the way two twin brothers or sisters can. But they couldn’t have concealed it if they had tried. It was as if they were the same person. They hardly left the house without each other. They liked to play tricks on people. Sometimes girls would get telephone calls and think it was Adriana, and say personal things, but it was Armando. He could speak in those days, and he was a good mimic.”

“When did Armando lose his voice?” Urbino asked.

“It was after the fire,” Emo replied, with a little smile. “I’ll get to it.”

He sipped his Benedictine and regarded Urbino with his small, shrewd eyes.

“It was when we were fifteen. Armando and Adriana were wild. Their mother and father couldn’t control them. And when they locked them in the house, they’d always find a way to get out. They were clever, those two. I admired them, the way kids will. They’d slip into houses when no one was home, rearrange the furniture, take something and put it in another apartment. Adriana urged Armando on, as if he was under her control. One day she dared him to jump into the Canalazzo. He did. He almost drowned, until she jumped in and saved him.”

“Armando almost drowned?”

“You mean because Adriana drowned years later. So you know more about them than you’ve let on. But do you know that Adriana was a sick girl? And I don’t mean in her body. She was beautiful and as healthy as a horse. It was her head.” Emo tapped his own massive one. “She’d fly into rages, then be walking around like a zombie. She’d laugh one minute and cry the next.”

“I understand she had a lovely voice.”

“Yes, she had a gift. But I still haven’t told you about the fire,” Emo said, with an awareness of his story despite his inebriation. “It broke out one night in December. Their father seems to have fallen asleep with a cigarette. The bedroom went up like a tinderbox. Armando and Adriana escaped. He never spoke again after the fire. His hands were burned, but there wasn’t a mark on Adriana.”

The vision of Armando’s scarred hands swam before Urbino’s eyes.

“There was some talk that Adriana had started it, maybe the two of them together, to kill their mother and father. Who knows? My parents made me keep my distance after that, and soon I went into the seminary. Well, we both see how that turned out for me.”

Emo shook his head slowly and drank down the rest of his Benedictine. Once again, as Urbino frequently did, he wondered what Emo’s personal life was like now that he was out of the priesthood. Whereas the rumors about his sexual exploits with parishioners had been thick in the air during his years at San Gabriele, now it was almost as if he were a celibate, if one were to judge by the silence that surrounded him. Urbino recalled the morning he had stopped by Emo’s apartment. Although Emo had said he was ill, Urbino had had the impression that he was expecting someone, perhaps a neighbor’s wife or daughter. Strange as it might seem, maybe he needed to be more cautious now that he wasn’t a priest.

“After the fire their aunt moved in,” Emo continued. “She had no success with them either. She died six years later when she hit her head in a fall. No one saw much of Adriana after that. Armando took care of everything. That’s when he started working as a gondolier for the Ca’ Pozza. Rumor had it that Adriana was interested in marrying the man who owned the building and that Armando encouraged it, but it came to nothing. He married someone else.”

He waved in the air to attract the attention of the waiter.

“From what I heard from my family and some friends I kept in touch with,” he went on, as the waiter made his way to their table, “Adriana still lived in the Ghetto, but she used to hang around the Ca’ Pozza. When the American divorced, she thought she had one last chance to marry him, I guess, and when it didn’t work out…” Emo shrugged his big shoulders. “That’s when Armando had to hide her away in some clinic outside of Florence. Not permanently, but for three or four months at a time. We all lost track of what was going on. She could have been locked up longer than that. And no one knew where he got the money. The last time she was out of the clinic, she drowned, but you know that part.”

The waiter came over. Emo ordered another Benedictine.

“Do you know the name of the clinic?”

“The Villa Serena. Not hard to remember here in the serene city. And Gildo tells me you have a cat named Serena.”

So far Emo had provided a great deal of information, perhaps suspiciously so. Urbino warned himself that he shouldn’t be too quick to believe everything.

The waiter brought Emo’s Benedictine.

“Did either Armando or Adriana ever show an interest in the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini?”

“None of us even knew who she was back then.”

He drank half the Benedictine.

“What about the commemorative masses for Adriana? You said that Armando’s been doing it for a long time.”

“That’s right. From the first anniversary of Adriana’s death, seventeen years ago. I was at San Gabriele by then. Didn’t get very far, did I? I took care of it for him, for old time’s sake, but he acted like a stranger. He came every year until I left. I guess he still goes. He’d have the information written on a piece of paper.”

“Do you ever see him these days?”

“I come across him every once in a while. Actually I’ve been seeing him around more often than usual. I say hello, but it’s as if he’s never seen me before. He looks depressed, maybe anxious, like something’s on his mind. I’ve known him for a long time. I’d notice the difference.”

Urbino reached into his pocket and took out the key from Possle’s bedroom. Not the copy the other locksmith had made, but the original.

“By the way I found this key among a lot of other ones,” Urbino said, silently thanking the Jesuit fathers who had taught him how to lie while also telling the truth.

“That’s an abrupt change of topic.”

Emo took the key, squinted at it, and held it up to the light. He raised his fat hand with the key in his palm as if he was weighing it.

“Does it belong to my old lock? The one on the front door?” Urbino asked. “There are so many locks for the different doors of the house, most of which I never use. I’ve never really sorted through them all.”

“It doesn’t belong to that old lock.” Demetrio handed the key back to Urbino. “And not to any of the other doors in your place, not even the water entrance, I’d say. But it’s an old key, as you can see. It might be for the front door lock before the one that Natalia just broke.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

Urbino put the key back in his pocket.

“By the way,” he said, “did you ever make any keys for Gildo’s friend Marco?”

Emo finished his Benedictine.

“All this sudden interest in keys! Why do you ask that?”

“I’m worried about his mother. Something could happen to her while she’s in one of her states. If you cut a key for Marco, maybe it was their house key. You might have an extra copy. The Contessa, you see, would like to give the key to one of Elvira Carelli’s neighbors, someone she knows is extremely trustworthy.”

Urbino was going into the kind of detail that always alerted him that someone was lying. Emo stared back at him with his flat, dark eyes.

“You should ask whoever owns the building. They might have a key. As for the boy, he never asked me to cut a key of any kind for him. By the way, since you don’t need that key, why not give it to me? I collect old ones.”

“I’d rather keep it. It might fit one of my doors after all.”

“You never know. Or someone else’s door.”

Emo stood up. “I’ll be outside,” he said. “Be sure you leave a good tip. We want the waiter to remember us when we come back next time.”