The City of Falling Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

memories.” Gino kissed her.
     
     
    Suddenly, there was another earth-shaking boom. The roof over the backstage had fallen in.
     
     
    A fire captain came up the stairs and told the Segusos, almost apologetically, that his men would have to run a hose through their living room to a window facing the Fenice, just in case the fire breached the wall across the canal. But first the firemen cleared a path for the hose. With care verging on reverence, they moved Archimede Seguso’s works of art in glass—the abstract, modernist pieces he had made in the 1920s and 1930s when most other Venetian glassmakers were still turning out flowery, eighteenth-century designs. When they laid down the fire hose, it was flanked by an honor guard of glass objects touched by Seguso’s genius—bowls and vases embedded with fine threads of colored glass resembling lace, or with undulating ribbons of color, or with tiny bubbles suspended in rows and spirals. There were remarkable solid sculptures of people and animals made from single masses of molten glass, a seemingly impossible feat that he alone had mastered.
     
     
    Gino came to his father’s bedroom door accompanied by the fire captain. The captain, rather than presuming to address the old man directly, turned to Gino and said, “We are very concerned for the maestro’s safety.”
     
     
    Signor Seguso continued to stare out the window in silence.
     
     
    “Papa,” said Gino in a gently pleading voice, “the fire is getting closer. I think we should leave.”
     
     
    Gino’s father kept his eye on the Fenice, watching as bursts of green, purple, umber, and blue flames punctuated the fire. He could see the flames through the slits in the louvered shutters at the back of the Fenice, and he saw their reflections on the rippling puddles at the bottom of the canal. He saw great, long tongues of fire licking out through windows and geysers of glowing ash soaring through holes in the roof. The winter air outside the bedroom window had turned blazing hot. The Fenice had become a furnace.
     
     
    “I’m staying here,” Archimede Seguso said quietly.
     
     
     
 
IN CONVERSATIONS AT HAIG’S BAR, certain words kept coming up again and again, words that seemed to have nothing to do with the Fenice or with each other: Bari . . . Petruzzelli . . . San Giovanni in Laterano . . . Uffizi . . . Milano . . . Palermo. But there was another word, also frequently overheard, that tied them all together: Mafia.
     
     
    The mob had recently been engaged in arson and bombings. The most unsettling incident, in view of what was happening tonight at the Fenice, was the 1991 fire that destroyed the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari. It was subsequently discovered that the Mafia boss in Bari had ordered the fire after bribing the manager to award him lucrative contracts for the reconstruction. More than a few people watching the Fenice fire believed that this was a replay. The Mafia was also suspected in the deadly car-bomb attacks that had destroyed parts of the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan. The bombings had been interpreted as a warning to Pope John Paul II for his frequent anti-Mafia statements and to the Italian government for its aggressive judicial crackdown on the mob. Even now, in Mestre on the mainland shore of the Venetian Lagoon, a Sicilian don was being tried for the car-bomb murder of a tough anti-Mafia judge, his wife, and bodyguards in Palermo. The fire at the Fenice could be a heavy-handed warning to stop the trial.
     
     
    “The Mafia!” Girolamo Marcello exclaimed, speaking to friends who had joined him on his altana. “If they did set the fire, they could have saved themselves the trouble. The Fenice would have burned without any help from them. It’s been chaos over there for months.
     
     
    “Just after the renovation work started,” Marcello went on, “the superintendent of the Fenice