The Thief of Venice (6 page)

The wife of the member of Parliament glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. "American, I think."

"Porto ora il secondo piatto?"
said the waiter. "If you please, the second course?"

"Mi piace spaghetti alle vongole,"
said the bishop at once, showing off, getting the reflexive pronoun right, forgetting that
spaghetti
was a plural noun.

His wife ordered
fegato alia veneziana
, then let the rest of them in on a secret. She was beginning a novel set in Venice, full of rotting palaces, crumbling bridges, stinking canals, and leering gondoliers. "Honestly, it's all in my head. All I have to do is put pen to paper, so to speak."

The piano player ran his finger up the keyboard and splashed into "Younger Than Springtime," and Mary Kelly moved out of sight into the Piazzetta and took a picture of the Ducal Palace.

"When in doubt push the button. More is better. Push the button, push the button, change the film, push the button.
 

*12*

Doctor Richard Henchard wandered around the room for a few minutes, thinking quickly, his eyes darting here and there. Then to quiet his beating heart he sat down in a comfortable chair beside the body of Lorenzo Costanza, and read once again the letter from Costanza's wife that he had found on the table—

Lorenzo,
I'm leaving you. You know why. I'm taking an apartment. I've withdrawn all my savings from the bank. Enclosed is a certified check for half the entire sum.
L

Henchard couldn't help grinning.
You know why.
Well, of course the poor
sciocco
knew why. Henchard knew why too. The man had a wandering eye. He'd rented that place on Rio della Sensa, or tried to rent it, for the same reason Henchard himself had taken it, for a girlfriend. The man who now lay dead on the floor had wanted a place for the handsome woman Henchard had met coming out of the apartment.

So naturally he had never told his wife about it. It wasn't the sort of thing you told your wife. Costanza's wife was probably another fat bitch just like Vittoria, his own wife. She wasn't in on her husband's little secrets. She knew nothing about the apartment and its contents. She guessed that he was two-timing her, that was all. Wives, they always knew.

Well, the poor bastard had lost his wife and his life on the same day. But he had also, thank God, lost the treasure that lay behind the closet wall in the house on Rio della Sensa.

The letter looked useful somehow. What could he do with it? Lovingly Henchard fingered the check, but he couldn't possibly cash it. That would be madness.

Getting up, he began exploring the rest of the house. It was a handsome place, tastefully furnished with country cupboards and Biedermeier chairs. In Signora Costanza's bedroom he rummaged in the bureau drawers. And there, to his flabbergasted delight, he found among the underwear—
eccolo!
—a handgun of precisely the same make and model as his own.
"Un modello molto popolare,"
the dealer in the Milanese gunshop had told him.
"Anche io, ho la stessa pistola."
The dealer had the same gun himself!

It lay there like a miracle among the brassieres and panties. Surely the woman had handled it—her prints must be all over it. Reverently he picked it up with a pair of the silken panties and wondered how to make use of this stroke of luck. What if he were to make this man's death look like a suicide? It was wonderful what you could learn from television—you just squeezed the dead fingers around the grip of the gun, and there you were.

But did he actually
want
a suicide? What if he made it look as if the man's own wife had killed him?

The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The gun already bore the wife's fingerprints. He would take away his own identical piece, the one that had actually done the deed, and leave hers in its place, a weapon of the same caliber using the same cartridges, covered all over with her own prints. What's more—Henchard laughed out loud—she had run away! It would look highly suspicious. And what about her bank account! She had withdrawn all the money from her bank account! Better and better!

Carrying the signora's gun still safely wrapped in her panties, Henchard went back downstairs. Stepping over the body of Lorenzo Costanza, he went to the window and peered out, looking for a place to deposit the weapon. It had to be just right. It mustn't be so well hidden that it would not be found immediately, but on the other hand it mustn't seem planted on purpose. It should look as though the woman in her emotional distress and in a fever of guilty remorse had tossed it away and fled.

All the houses along this pleasant street in the
sestiere
of San Polo had little front gardens. This one was just right. Henchard opened the window softly and dropped the woman's weapon into the ground cover below.

Closing the window, he wondered what else he could do to incriminate the lady. Her departure must look like a hasty retreat. He went upstairs again to her bedroom and examined the wardrobe. It was nearly empty. Obviously she had already taken away most of her clothes.

Artfully Henchard took a few pieces of her leftover underwear from the drawer in which he had found the weapon, threw them on the bed, and scattered more on the floor.

He was almost ready to go. There was only one thing more.

In the kitchen he found a box of matches. Henchard scratched a match against the side of the box and held the flame under the envelope that contained the certified check and Lucia's farewell note. It flared up. When it was nearly consumed, he dropped it in the sink, blew on his scorched fingers, and washed the ashes down the drain.

Before leaving the house he went back to the room where the body lay. In his surgical practice Henchard had seen many anesthetized men and women, and all of them had shown this same helpless look. They had been transformed from lively, upright, intelligent beings into logs of wood. If they were Henchard's patients they woke up and resumed their active selves, at least for a while—obviously some were doomed. But this log of wood was stone dead. It would never rise again.

In the city of Plymouth, where Henchard had been raised, his mother had been a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and always there had been a heavy emphasis on the necessity to separate oneself from evil, to avoid every possible contact with sin. Of course young Ricky had paid no attention to his mother, but he couldn't help remembering some of her sour maxims and guilt-inducing platitudes—
This have I done for thee. What hast thou done for me?

Later on, at the time of his marriage in Venice, he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, and another weight of moral reproof had landed on his shoulders.

Both of these influences had been feeble, and he had shrugged them off. Yet now as he looked at the dead man they peered around the corner of his conscience.

Today in the operating room of the Ospedale with a gastric carcinoma under his knife, something else had affected him. Poised over the tumor he had seen a sharp vision of the anguished face of the dying
spazzino
, and it had given him a turn. "Separate thyself from evil," cautioned his mother. "Repent and thy sins will be forgiven," promised the Holy Father.

As Henchard made his escape from the house of Lucia and Lorenzo Costanza, he added another item to his list of the things to be done next day. Between a colon resection and a lumpectomy he would stop off in San Marco and make a proper papist confession. He would whisper to the priest behind the curtain,
Father, I have sinned
, and the priest would tell him to go in peace and say a hundred Hail Marys. Or should he confess to a mortal sin?
Father, I have committed a mortal sin.
Henchard's wife was always talking about mortal sin. Adultery, she said, was a mortal sin.

It didn't matter, one way or the other. He would make his confession to that famous priest in San Marco, and then there would be no more painful visions.
 

*13*

The official letter to Samuele Bell from Lucia Costanza arrived only three days after Sam's visit to her office. On that day he had come away besotted, but of course there were overwhelming reasons why he could not pursue the matter, namely—

Reason One
and
Reason Two.

The letter was strictly formal:

Dottor Samuele Bell
Biblioteca Marciana
San Marco 7
30124 Venezia

Gentilissimo Dottor Bell,

Enclosed is a copy of a letter I have sent to His Excellency, Pietro Caravello, Cardinal Patriarch of the Basilica of San Marco. As you see, it is a formal request for his cooperation in your study of the authenticity of the relics in the Treasury.

Also included is his official response, agreeing to the project under very specific terms, which are as follows:

For every loan there will be documents requiring your signature. No more than fifteen objects at a time may be borrowed from the Treasury. Transport will require the presence of one carabiniere, both going and coming. Each object may remain in your possession for only thirty days.

The only slightly personal note in the letter was a final warning—

As the caretaker of precious volumes in the Marciana you will understand the necessity of absolute promptness in the return of every relic. None may be kept out "overdue."

Distinti saluti
Dottoressa Lucia Costanza
Procuratore di San Marco

Sam was overjoyed. He sat at his desk savoring the letter and its enclosures, delighted not only with the opportunity for debunking superstition, but also with the fact that he now had a reason for speaking to the dottoressa again.

He called her office at once.

"Pronto?"
The voice was loud and masculine.

"This is Dottor Samuele Bell. May I speak with Dottoressa Costanza?"

There was a slight pause. "Perhaps you have not read the paper," said Lucia's assistant, whose name, Sam remembered, was Bernardi.

"The paper! No! What's happened?"

"Signora Costanza's husband has been murdered, and the signora is missing."

"What!"

"And I regret to say," continued Bernardi mercilessly, "an object from her desk is missing as well, a certain very precious statuette." Bernardi fingered the heavy lump in the pocket of his trousers. The statuette was a seventeenth-century bronze centaur, as valuable as it was charming.

Sam tried to speak, but Bernardi interrupted. "In her absence I am acting as procurator, although my permanent appointment will of course be delayed. And I must say, Signor Bell, on reviewing her recent letter to you concerning various sacred relics, I think Signora Costanza's rash decision must be reconsidered."

"
Dottoressa
Costanza," said Sam sharply, almost beside himself, "she is a dottoressa," and he slammed down the phone.

It was a little while before he could recover himself enough to go out for a paper. And then when he stumbled down two flights of stairs to the entry hall, he saw out of the corner of his eye the imposing figure of a museum director from Hong Kong. The man was darting forward to cut him off.

Sam grinned at him with all his teeth and made a clumsy dash tor the door. Outside in the arcade he almost collided with a gigantic African scholar in a green robe, gold sandals, and white socks.
"Mi displace,"
cried Sam in apology, and hurried away around the corner.

The Molo was thick with tourists. He moved against the tide, heading for the newsstand at the vaporetto stop, where one of the vaporetti was just pulling up, grinding against the floating dock. Tourists poured out and moved eagerly toward the Piazetta as Sam paid for two local papers and unfolded the first with nervous fingers.

Oh, God, yes, there was the story on the front page of
Il Gazzettino
—

PROCURATORE COSTANZA UN' 0M1C1DA?

Below the brutal headline was a dim photograph of the murdered husband,
Signor Lorenzo Costanza.

Sam fumbled his way across the moving crowd of jolly tourists, jolly couples taking pictures of each other, jolly mamas pushing jolly baby buggies, and sat down on the stone wall at the edge of the water.
Gondole, gondole
, sang out a jolly gondolier in a striped shirt, drumming up trade. The gondolas lay rocking below the barrier, their brass fittings glinting joyfully in the sun.