The Thief of Venice (5 page)

*9*

The great conference had not yet begun, although a few scholars from here and there were already nosing around the Biblioteca Marciana, getting in the way, having to be rescued from the fierce clutches of the official dragon at the door with her insistence on some reason why they should be admitted, people of the exalted stature of the Herr-Direktor of the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, two scholars from the Uffizi, two more from the Morgan Library in New York, and the curator of early printed books in Chicago's Newberry Library.

These august visitors kept turning up, much too soon, while preparations were still frantically in progress. There they would be, eminently important people cooling their heels in the entry of the Marciana under the dark suspicious gaze of the dragon until Sam could be summoned. And then he would have to come downstairs to apologize in person, and spend the rest of the day taking them to lunch and showing them around, and explaining about the water slipping over the stone banks of the canals at certain times of day.

"Oh, no matter," exclaimed the man from the Houghton Library at Harvard. "After all, I spend half my time in swamps, studying the flora and fauna."

"And surely this is nothing!" said the woman from the British Museum. "I was expecting Noah's Flood!"

"Should we start pairing off?" joked the director of the Fitzwilliam. "Two camels, two giraffes, two students of early printed books?" He winked at the woman from the British Museum, but she pursed her mouth.

And therefore Sam was harried and worried, but Homer Kelly basked in happiness. He adored libraries, any library, from a closet full of books in a rural town hall to the vast collections of Widener Library in Harvard Yard. To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand. At least that was Homer's opinion. This library too was holy ground.

And he was helping! Sam had drafted Homer to fetch and carry. He was permitted to enter the sacred storage vault and extract one priceless volume after another and carry it up through a private passage into the magnificent reading room, the Sala della Libreria.

This reading room was not like the workaday one downstairs, marvelous as that chamber might be. It was a masterpiece of the Venetian High Renaissance, every inch of it decorated by Venetian artists and craftsmen. Here, surrounded by glory upon glory, Homer Kelly and Sam's other assistants unwrapped the beautiful volumes from the bubble envelopes that protected them against woodworm.

With reverent hands Homer helped place them upright in the display cases. Then Sam Bell himself walked up and down, choosing the pages to be held open with satin ribbons.

When the work was done, Homer spent an hour ogling the elegant pages, trying to read the Latin names. He could guess at Sallust's
Catiline
, which was adorned with floating cherubs, but Sam had to help him with the Greek titles, Ptolemy's
Geography
and the Epistles of Paul.

"How many books did Cardinal Bessarion have altogether?" said Homer, gazing at the foliated initials of a Latin Livy.

"Oh, thousands. That's why the library had to be built to house them." Sam took Homer's arm and led him to a case across the aisle. Leaning over it, he breathed a reverent mist on the glass. "Of course you're aware, Homer, that the printing press of Aldus Manutius was one of the first in Venice. This is his masterpiece,
The Dream of Poliphilius
. I think it's the most beautiful book ever printed."

Homer was six feet six inches tall, his beard was gray and bushy, and he was fifty years old, but he wanted to weep like a child. His wife Mary sometimes complained about the way he was forever being hooked by some new obsession. The man was incapable of being bored by anything human, nor by any branch of learning, no matter how feeble his understanding. Now he was overwhelmed with sentimental awe, and he made a gulping sound in his throat.

Sam clapped him on the back. "Come on.
Facciamo uno spuntino.
I've got a bottle of Prosecco in my office. I'll just make sure there aren't any dignitaries with hurt feelings swarming around downstairs."

They walked through the glorious vestibule, where Homer craned his neck to admire Titian's allegorical figure of Wisdom on the ceiling—obviously a library enthusiast herself because she was consulting both a book and a scroll. Then they descended Sansovino's stupendous staircase, negotiated the open-air arcade, and walked up another set of stairs. As they climbed the second long flight very slowly—Sam was tired and Homer was out of shape—Sam told himself once again that nothing mattered anymore. He could do whatever he wanted.

He could abandon everything, the whole damn thing, the exhibition and the conference and all his duties as caretaker of some of the most valuable books in the Western world. He could flee from all of that and embark in a little boat with Dottoressa Lucia Costanza, and its pink sail would be blown by a gentle wind, carrying them to the island of Cythera. It would be so easy, so simple. All he had to do was entice her away from the eminence of her procuratorship, burst her marriage chains, and make love to her at last in some flowery bower.

"What did you say, Homer? Oh, of course, here we are. Come right in."

The telephone was ringing in the outer office. Sam's secretary held up the phone and murmured, "
Il sindaco.
"

"The mayor," said Sam apologetically, waving Homer on into the big room with its view of the lagoon. When he hurried in a few minutes later, he explained that the mayor was organizing a council to deal with
acqua alta
. "You know, consisting of everybody around the piazza."

"Acqua alta?"
said Homer. "Oh, you mean high water. Right. Well, it's here already. It's not so bad."

Sam looked at him in disbelief. "Just wait, Homer," he said. "You haven't seen anything yet."

"Nothin'," said Homer, correcting Sam's English. "I ain't seen nothin' yet."

Sam looked puzzled. "But isn't that bad grammar?"

"You betcha," said Homer, grinning at him.

"Ah, a colloquial expression," said Sam. He poured bubbly wine into Homer's glass, lifted his own, and then, to show that he too was acquainted with American slang, he said, "Well, here's dirt in your eye."

Homer let it pass, and went back to the subject of the great cardinal. "Tell me, Sam, has the library got every single one of Bessarion's books?"

"Oh, no. A great many are missing. The library didn't exist until long after he gave them to the city. So they were stored in crates here and there, and borrowed like library books, so some fell by the wayside. And then that blundering idiot Napoleon Bonaparte decided to found an Italian library, so a lot of Bessarion books sat around in Padua, waiting for it, only it never happened, and they began to disappear. That's what I've heard."

"But what about the printed books? Are there any more of that divine
Dream of Poliphilius
still kicking around somewhere?"

"Oh, yes, a few. They're outrageously valuable."

Homer leaned back in his chair and looked at the row of portraits on the wall over Sam Bell's head. "Who are all those people? Your predecessors, I'll bet. Will your picture be up there someday, the distinguished
conservatore dei libri rari
, Dottor Samuele Bell?"

Sam winced. He glanced up at the painted series of scholar-professors. He had known some of them in person. Not one of those dignified people, so far as he knew, had ever dreamed of abandoning his duties and embarking with a lady love for the fanciful island of Cythera, that blessed place sacred to Venus, where lovemaking lasted into eternity, and where there was no death.
 

*10*

The phone was ringing. Ursula picked it up and said a timid
"Pronto?"
A strong male voice asked for Dottor Samuele Bell, but at once her father picked up the phone in his study.

Instead of hanging up, Ursula listened.

When they were finished she went silently into her room and closed the door. After a while she came out again and checked to see if her grandmother had come home from shopping.

No, she hadn't. Ursula hurried straight into her grandmother's bedroom and opened the drawer where Mrs. Wellesley kept pills, bottles of perfume, violet and green eye shadow, black mascara, false eyelashes, wrinkle-control creams, and a messy jewel box spilling over with bracelets, brooches, button earrings, old pairs of bifocals, and strings of cultured pearls.

There was an envelope under the jewel box. Ursula extracted it and helped herself to a five-thousand-lire note. Then she tucked the envelope back where it belonged, closed the drawer gently, and slipped out of the room.

Next day after school, she stopped in the shop.

"Buonasera, piccola,"
said the man behind the counter. "
Un altro, oggi?
You must have quite a collection by now. Which one would you like today?"

"That one, please," said Ursula.
 

*11*

Mary had been having a good time too. She had been going out every day to explore the city, not minding that the camera around her neck made her look like a tourist. After all, she
was
a tourist, an eager inquisitive tourist who consulted her guidebook at every street corner and struggled to unfold and fold her map while the wind blew its creases the wrong way.

Before leaving Massachusetts she had bought ten rolls of film at a discount pharmacy. Now she had begun using them freely. Her camera was always at the ready.
When in doubt, push the button.
She didn't care how trite her subjects were, or how many other tourists were taking the same pictures. She envisioned the mills of Kodak grinding out enormous batches of identical shots of the same famous places. She didn't care.

At first Mary had a plan. She would explore one part of the city at a time and keep a list of every picture she took. On the first day she had been scrupulous about recording every shot:

1.
    
Riva degli Schiavoni, statue of Vittorio Emanuele

2.
    
View of the lagoon with San Giorgio Maggiore

3.
    
Another view of the lagoon

4.
    
Gondolas carrying Japanese tourists under the Bridge of Sighs

Tour groups from Japan were everywhere. Mary imagined a travel agent in Tokyo offering dirt-cheap package tours. In Venice the Japanese were polite and interested, but they had come in such numbers that they sometimes blocked her way. Courteously they squeezed together as they stopped to take pictures. They were obviously as eager as she was to record the fabulous city and keep it forever. She couldn't avoid capturing them in the foreground of her pictures of Santa Maria della Salute and the Rialto Bridge. And of course many of their multitudinous shots would show one Mary Kelly as a miscellaneous object in front of the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, a woman striding past the Campanile or moving among the pigeons in the square.

Whether they wanted to or not, they were capturing each other's faces. Next month in Tokyo the tall solid figure of an American woman would appear on screens in a hundred darkened rooms. She would be an anonymous part of the background behind beaming rows of family members. And her own Venetian scrapbook would show flocks of Japanese visitors feeding the pigeons, admiring the four bronze horses over the portals of San Marco, or sitting at the little tables in front of Florian's.

Today the two British couples were in everybody's pictures too, having lunch at Florian's, sitting under the arcade eating fish soup and drinking white wine while the man at the piano played Broadway show tunes.

"There's a striking-looking woman," said the bishop, taking off his reading glasses and staring across the square at Mary Kelly.

"Where? " said his wife, turning her head through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees.