Death in a Serene City Read Online Free PDF Page B

of seeing him later if she let him mull things over as he got himself good and wet.
    It wasn’t that he had a particular preference for rainy days in themselves. There had been enough of them in New Orleans to last him a lifetime, and here in Venice they could penetrate to your very core even if you never ventured out. It was just that the rain usually cleared the narrow streets and squares of even the Venetians themselves and he could indulge in his harmless little fantasy that the city was a bit closer to being his alone.
    Now, as he turned his umbrella to the rain that was being driven in by the wind from the lagoon, no one else was in sight except for a man rushing toward the shelter of the portico of the Merceric, a copy of Il Gazzettino held over his head. A few seconds later another man emerged from the Mercerie, going toward the Molo San Marco at a leisurely pace, protected by boots, a mackintosh, and a shapeless hat. Despite his unhurried gait, he did not stop to look up at San Marco, as if to illustrate the truth of Ruskin’s exaggeration that Venetians pass its splendors by regardlessly.
    Urbino, however, despite what the Contessa might think about his having been “Venetianized,” never ceased to see it. He stopped now before he got any closer to see it the better. The Basilica didn’t loom above him as other great cathedrals did but seemed almost to prostrate itself in Oriental fashion before the high tower of the Campanile. And yet the ornate Basilica, with its onion domes, colored marble, mosaics, statues, arches, and porches, had all the splendors of a sultan reclining on his cushions, while the bell tower with its plain brick facade resembled a servant of the realm standing silently at attention. This was one of the many scenes to be found throughout Venice whose appeal was due to the improbable, the excessive, and the unexpected.
    Raised planks had been set up in front of the Basilica so that people would be able to avoid the water that might well up through the paving stones of the Piazza or wash in from the lagoon if these rains continued. Although he knew full well not only the inconvenience of finding his route through the labyrinthine city detoured almost endlessly by flooded streets but also the serious damage done by floods, even small ones, Urbino nonetheless came close to wishing for an acqua alta , came close to saying, like one of Banquo’s murderers, “Let it come down,” as he looked at the even darker clouds now rolling in from the north.
    Family and friends who came to visit often spent much of their time complaining about the odor of the canals in summer and the rains and flooded streets in winter. But Urbino himself was the kind of lover who transformed even the most brutish of faults into the most engaging of virtues—or willed himself blind. Love that did anything else didn’t deserve the name. If his brief marriage right after college had been an exercise in just such blindness, it hadn’t warned him off completely.
    If it had, he might never have been captivated by Venice ten years ago following the death of his parents in a car accident. He had arrived during the madness of the tourist season, intending to finish his business and return home, where his biography of the chess player Paul Morphy had just been sold to the films. Instead, amid all the heat, the odors, the crowds, and the noise, he had decided to stay forever.
    He had come to Venice to decide what to do with the Veneto-Byzantine palazzo in the Cannaregio near Santa Fosca that had been in his mother’s family for generations. His mother, an only child like himself, had seldom traveled far from her native New Orleans, although she had often talked about the city where her grandfather had been born.
    She had known little about the property except that it was called the Palazzo Uccello. She didn’t even have a photograph. When Urbino saw it, he laughed out loud for it was little