77

At ten o’clock that night Urbino, wrapped in his cloak, took a walk, but he was determined to keep his steps away from the Ca’ Pozza. He would rather contemplate it tonight in its absence. It would be more real and palpable this way and less able to exert its baleful influence.

Fog had made a stealthy invasion of the city during the past few hours. It transformed the few people he met into mysterious, faceless figures who reminded him of the silhouette he had seen against the window of the Ca’ Pozza more than a month ago.

He crossed the iron bridge into the Ghetto and wandered beneath the tall buildings, his mood darkened by the sad associations of the place. Invariably it had this effect on him even on a warm, sunny day, let alone on a night like this. The stones seemed to bleed from the wrongs of the centuries, and he could easily imagine the generations obliged to wear their bright-colored but far from gay hats and confined behind walls and locked gates.

But tonight the story of the Abdons temporarily displaced this long, tragic history in Urbino’s thoughts. He considered the series of premature, violent deaths that had begun with those of the mother and father in the fire and that might not yet have come to an end.

He turned away from the sad, empty streets in the direction of the Grand Canal, where the fog was thicker. Walking past the closed shops and kiosks and beneath shuttered windows, Urbino unrolled Demetrio Emo’s story about the Abdon family. He added what he had learned on his own. It was a tale of sudden death and madness—or if not madness, then certainly severe emotional disturbance.

Was there any apparent explanation for Adriana’s condition as there was for Armando’s muteness? Urbino could understand if she had suffered a breakdown after the deaths of her mother and father, but according to Emo it hadn’t been that way. She had been ill before then. And yet Urbino believed that there was a close connection between her illness and the fire that had killed her mother and father, and had almost claimed the life of her brother and possibly hers as well.

Emotional imbalance was often a mystery. There wasn’t always a convenient cause to make one feel more comfortable about it. Sometimes madness just dropped down over a person, it seemed. Perhaps this had been poor Adriana’s fate, but, one way or another, Urbino didn’t think he would ever know.

But other things he was sure he would know, and soon, to flesh out what he strongly suspected. When he went to the Ca’ Pozza in a few days, with or without the Contessa, he would find out whether he was right or not.

In the long, narrow Campo Morosini he ducked into a bar for a quick glass of wine before heading across the square toward the Accademia Bridge. He stopped to look up at the music conservatory. He turned his thoughts to something that was at the heart of the dark mystery of the Ca’ Pozza.

It was Armando’s devotion to his sister that had begun in their childhood, that had extended into their adulthood, and that was still far from dead. His arrangements for her commitment to the Villa Serena, the mass celebrated every year in her memory, the obituary notice on the date of the boat accident—they all testified to his love and loyalty, or seemed to.

And what he had learned from Benedetta Razzi about Elvira Carelli complicated the picture even more. Elvira not only lived next door to the Ca’ Pozza and considered it a blight on her life, but years ago she had also worked as Possle’s maid and had been romantically attracted to him, if Razzi could be believed. Possle had indicated that he only knew her as a neighbor. What might he be concealing about his relationship with her?

And to implicate Elvira even more in the secrets of the palazzo, she had been acquainted with Dilsizian and his son. What the extent of this acquaintance might have been, especially with the father, was shrouded in the silence of the past. Razzi, not even with all her ill will for Elvira and her interest in gossip, had been able to lift one small edge of the veil.

Urbino was still staring up at the music conservatory. A lone window was illuminated. Perhaps a privileged young student like the Contessa so many years ago was practicing a Mozart sonata. Perhaps somewhere in the shadows where Urbino couldn’t see her was a less privileged young woman who was looking up with envy and anger at the lighted window.

Urbino climbed the wooden steps of the fog-wreathed bridge and paused in the middle. The night air blew across his face like an astringent.

Slow, hesitant footsteps approached from the Dorsoduro side where the fog was thick. As he peered into the fog for someone to appear, the footsteps stopped suddenly. The fog revealed nothing. He waited for the footsteps to sound again. All he could hear was the put-put of a boat that soon faded away farther up the Grand Canal. Then, after what seemed a long time but which was probably scarcely more than ten or fifteen seconds, the footsteps broke the stillness of the night again.

Almost as soon as they did, two gray figures gradually became visible like prints in a photographic tray and climbed the last few steps of the bridge.

It was an elderly couple. The woman, muffled against the unseasonable cold in a fur coat similar to the one that Razzi wore in the photograph with Dilsizian and Elvira, held a muzzled cocker spaniel against her chest. They bid Urbino good evening in Italian, walked slowly down the opposite steps, and vanished in the fog.

Urbino gazed down at the Grand Canal. The fog crept over the surface of the waterway. It made some buildings disappear but isolated others as if they stood alone.

One of these latter was the Palazzo Guggenheim farther down the Grand Canal, the former home of a woman who had bestowed some of her glamour and notoriety on Possle’s gatherings. From its water steps had floated what had surely been the last private gondola in Venice as such legendary matters were reckoned. It hadn’t been Possle’s and it certainly wasn’t Urbino’s.

Possle was a thief of one kind or another, and Guggenheim’s distinction of having had the last gondola was one of his appropriations. Maybe Urbino wasn’t too far behind him. Wasn’t he more than a little proud of his own gondola, proud of the figure he cut in it? And didn’t he sometimes fantasize, for long, self-indulgent moments, that he was one of the last of the passionate pilgrims who had descended on the city in the grip of what Henry James had called their palazzo madness?

But too much had been lost since those long-ago days. Nothing could bring them back.

Possle had dreamed that dream, and look what had become of him.

Casting a last glance down at the Canalazzo, this time in the opposite direction, toward the bend of the waterway where fog swirled around the Byron-haunted Palazzi Mocenigo, Urbino descended the bridge into the Dorsoduro. He searched out the square to catch any sign of another person in the shadows or the fog, but the area, with its shuttered kiosk and boat landing, was empty. The booth for boat tickets was closed.

Several minutes later Urbino found himself on a quay where fruit and vegetable barges were covered with tarpaulin for the night. To his right was a bridge on which a traditional bloody fistfight used to take place centuries ago between rival factions whose aim was to throw their opponents into the canal as violently as possible. Footprints, embedded in the bridge in white marble, gleamed in the dark and marked the spots where the rivals had confronted each other.

Urbino had always shied away from outward shows of aggression. Yet since moving to Venice he had become involved in devious and bloodstained forms of it. The mystery of the Ca’ Pozza might be yet another example of this, except that in this instance he was directly responsible for having put himself in the heart of it.

As he continued along the deserted quay, his thoughts turned to the Byron poems. Possle had won them in a card game with Dilsizian, he claimed. He had a document to prove it. And Dilsizian had drowned on a pleasure trip in the lagoon.

Possle didn’t seem to have ever been the type for fistfights any more than Urbino was, but appearances were nothing if they weren’t deceiving. The young Possle could have brutally struck out to get what he wanted or to keep what he already had, just as he still might do. His current infirm condition didn’t mean that he had been robbed of every power at his disposal. For there was the silent, cadaverous Armando, with his loyalty to Possle. Was the mute nothing more than a spectator, like the men and women who had gathered to see the fistfights on the bridge? Had this been his role over the many years of their relationship?

Or had it been something else entirely, a role more malevolent that was still unfolding? Had it been set in motion during the days of Possle’s life of high publicity and might not end even with Possle’s own death. And how might the clipping of the Contessa in Armando’s little room, with Urbino’s figure cut out of it, fit into the picture? Along with the belt, which he was now almost completely convinced was a woman’s, that he had seen on the back staircase of the Ca’ Pozza?

The questions unfolded out of each other like black flowers. Before he had proceeded much further he was in possession of a whole dark bouquet of them.

Their scent was as difficult to describe as the aroma that emanated from Possle’s crystal vaporizer and as rank as the odor that Armando gave off. Only then, as he mentally clutched his perverse little blooms, did he realize where his footsteps were now taking him and where they had inevitably been taking him for the past hour.

No, not to the Ca’ Pozza. He was strong enough to keep to the resolve that he had made upon quitting the Palazzo Uccello. Tonight it was the Ca’ Zenobio degli Armeni. The building was only a short distance down the quayside and over another of the city’s ubiquitous bridges.

He was soon standing on the bridge that provided a view of the silent, unilluminated palazzo on the other side of the canal. Wisps of fog drifted against its white-painted baroque face. A small boat was moored by its water steps. One of the photographs of the palazzo that Urbino had bought from the friar on San Lazzaro degli Armeni had been taken from this same spot.

Last year Urbino and Habib had escorted the Contessa to a ball in the palazzo’s sumptuous Sala degli Specchi with its waves of white-and-gold stuccoes, Dorigni and Tiepolo frescoes, and extravagance of ornate mirrors that gave the room its name.

But now its much more sinister association with the drowned Dilsizian and his Byron poems eclipsed the memories of that magical evening. Surely the Armenian had visited the palazzo as he had San Lazzaro degli Armeni. He might even have spoken about the poems to someone there, as he had to Father Nazar.

If Possle were to be believed, those same poems were now in his exclusive possession. They would be somewhere in the Ca’ Pozza. Possle wouldn’t be inclined to have them far from him, but somewhere in his bedroom or the gondola room. Perhaps they were buried among the cushions of the gondola. It somehow seemed the thing that Possle would do with his spoils.

On the Accademia Bridge, Urbino had reminded himself that Possle was a thief, the thief of San Polo, as the Contessa had dubbed him the day of their outing to the Naval Museum. Thefts came in many different forms. At first Possle’s had seemed innocuous enough, being versions of the ideas and words of those who had gone before him. In a manner of thinking such pilferings weren’t even thefts at all but instead clever, even artistic, manipulations, rearrangements, recreations. There could be no doubt that Possle, over the many decades of his life, had, in a sense, cobbled and created himself. Now that same self was trapped and decaying in the Ca’ Pozza.

If only Urbino could find out whether the Byron poems had come Possle’s way without any form of violence or deception. According to the report of the boating accident, it didn’t appear that Mechitar had died through foul play, but Urbino had a temperamental and professional suspicion of appearances.

He had already stolen a key and broken into the Ca’ Pozza like a thief. It was proof of how far he would go when it came to acquisition of the poems. Urbino wanted them, and he wanted them for the reasons Possle had named and for others he hadn’t. It was a measure of Urbino’s peculiar form of greed that, when he turned his back on the Ca’ Zenobio and started to make his way toward home, he almost believed that with the Contessa’s help he might succeed in laying his hands on them if they had indeed come Possle’s way through a card game with Mechitar Dilsizian.

But then reality set in as he broke into his elastic stride. He had temporarily and conveniently forgotten about Armando, about Armando and his devotion to his twin sister, and about what might very well be the darker secret of the Ca’ Pozza.

These thoughts made him more wary of the night and the fog than he had been when he had set out earlier from the Palazzo Uccello.