The Thief of Venice(32)

The beautiful six-hundred-year-old reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista lay flat on the table. The small crystal chamber had been shattered. The fragment of the True Cross was gone.





*27*


The most striking thing about Doctor Richard Henchard was not the fact that he was a capable surgeon, educated at the University of London and the Collegio Medico at Bologna. The dominating thing about him was his appearance. If women didn't exactly faint in his presence, they found him irresistible. Sensible grandmothers lost their dignity, middle-aged women made fools of themselves, young women fell all over him.

The poor man couldn't help having an endless series of extramarital affairs. It could hardly be called his fault. What could a man do if women perpetually surrounded him in billowing clouds, with the fatty muscles clothing their femurs exposed to the great trochanter, their chubby glutei maximi swaying, their globular mammary glands brushing his chest?

Actually Henchard wasn't especially interested in women except as a sort of useful subspecies. You could hardly call them human. Of course he was married to Vittoria, because everybody had a wife, and now he was stuck with that stupida ragazza Giovanna, because he couldn't get rid of her, she was always threatening to tell Vittoria. The new place he had found for Giovanna was far too expensive for a mere slut, but naturally he couldn't let her move into the first one on the Rio della Sensa because of the fortune hidden in the closet.

No, women were a bore. What truly engaged Henchard's interest was his medical practice. The patients who came to his office in the Ospedale Civile suffered from fascinating melanomas and other malignancies, and occasionally he ran across a truly remarkable metastatic sarcoma. How could a mere female compare?

And yet the American woman was different. Henchard was captivated by her majestic attractiveness, her clear-eyed calm. He had never known a woman like Mary Kelly. At first he had thought of her as a promising fish, one to be caught with only the most delicate tugs on the line, but now he was letting the line run free. He could see only a day ahead. The quest was thrilling, but it called for patience, for a sedate and old-fashioned kind of wooing. This woman was not about to be fucked against a wall.

But somehow, and sooner rather than later, he would net his fish.

On the day the golden reliquary from the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista arrived under guard at Sam Bell's house in the sestiere of Castello, Richard Henchard walked out of his own house on Campo San Salvador near Piazza San Marco with a rolled-up sleeping bag under his arm.

Of course Vittoria was as sharp-eyed as ever. "Riccardo, what are you going to do with that thing? "

"One of the interns is going camping," said Henchard smoothly. He patted her backside and kissed her. "Ciao, cara."

She leaned against the doorway, watching him go, helplessly enamored in spite of their furious verbal battles. That strong cleft chin of his, those little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes!



In the apartment where his treasure lay, Henchard put the bedroll down in the corner and undid the padlock on the closet door. He wanted to ogle his treasure.

Thank Christ he had come along in time to witness the foolish thievery of that young spazzino. Thank God he had seen him standing there with his head through the hole and a gold platter in his hand. The poor ragazzo wouldn't have known what to do with it. He would have told his mother and his girlfriend. He might even have gone straight to the editorial offices of Il Gazzettino. And then what would have happened? Everybody would have put in their nose.

That bitch in the agenzia, Signorina Pastora, she would have fought for the stuff like a cat. The absentee landlord in Milan didn't need the money, but by God he'd put in a powerful claim. And in the end who would get it all, every single thing, every precious piece of Henchard's wonderful discovery? The city of Venice would purloin it as part of its glorious historic heritage. So the wretched spazzino would have got nothing. He didn't count.

Nor did Signorina Pastora's client Lorenzo Costanza, Henchard's competitor for possession of the treasure, the fool who had wanted the apartment for his elegant girlfriend. He didn't count either, not anymore. He had been taken care of, and the blame had fallen on his wife. It had been a stroke of luck, the discovery of the weapon in the drawer with her underwear, the little nine-millimeter handgun that was so exactly like his own.

Signora Costanza had run away. Her husband was gone. The spazzino was gone. Henchard's treasure was safe.

He knelt within the open door of the closet and looked at the magnificent painting and the gold plates and candlesticks and the odd little castles with their tiny doors. Very carefully he unrolled one of the scrolls. The parchment was covered with handwritten words in another language. What was it? Greek? Hebrew?