He jumped at the truth. "You have a key, don't you? You have a key to that room."
"Well, of course I don't have a key. How can you accuse me of such a thing, your own mother-in-law?"
"Because somebody opened that door." Sam was so angry he didn't care what he said. "How do I know it wasn't you?"
It was no use. Dorothea Wellesley had an ace in the hole, and it was better than the ace of clubs, the ace of diamonds, the ace of hearts, or the ace of spaces. It trumped every other card in the deck. It was the ace of gold. She simply had a fit.
Sam had seen her fits before. The sceneDorothea Wellesley having a fitwas familiar and deadly dull. He watched as she threw herself on her bed and gasped between sobs, "How can you say a thing like that to me, me, the mother of your own dead wife, whom you drove into the grave?"
Frustrated, Sam waited. At last he said loudly over the noisy gulping floods of tears, "Well, have there been any strangers in the house? Could someone else have broken in?"
The tears stopped at once. His mother-in-law sat up, sniffling, and said craftily, "Yes. A plumber. There was a plumber here, fixing the sink."
"Which sink?"
"The kitchen sink. It was plugged up."
Oh, of course, thought Sam, it would be a plumber. There was always a plumber. "You called him? What company was it?"
"Oh, I don't know. I didn't pay much attention. He was in the phone book."
Without a word Sam turned away to find the Pagine Gialle and brought it back into her room. He stood over her, flipping the pages, and asked a clever question. "What did you look under? How did you find the list of plumbers in the phone book?"
He had played his ace. Dorothea Wellesley knew little Italian, although she had been married to an Italian and had lived here for years. Sam knew she could never have found a plumber under the word Idraulici.
But his ace, as usual, was only the ace of spades. Hers was the usual stupefying ace of gold. Flopping back on the sofa, she began to howl.
*29*
Homer Kelly sat in the Rare Book Room on the ground floor of the Marciana, where precious books could be examined by serious scholars. He had been given the freedom of this room with the benevolent permission of his friend Samuele Bell, although serious purpose had he none.
It was like a vacation in the South Seas. The overhead lights were the tropical sun, the librarians grass-skirted dancers, the books themselves a feast of roast pig and pineapple. Utterly vanished was the New England landscape that Homer cherished in Concord, the woods and fields of Henry Thoreau, the cold skies that had dropped such transcendental eloquence on the head of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
All that was far away andcould it be?a little pinched and dry, compared to the wreathed and garlanded riches of the Italian Renaissance. Homer could almost taste the humanist greed of Cardinal Bessarion as he called for the manufacture of yet another codex in Latin or Greek, another Aristotle or Saint Jerome.
Well, it was heaven. Whenever Homer's eyes began to close and he drooped over a beautiful vellum page, he could walk outside to the arcade to watch people threading their way on wooden planks across the pond that was the Piazzetta. Or he could gaze at the staggering view of the lagoon, with San Giorgio Maggiore emerging from the sea like a temple in a dream, and there below the Molo the massed gondolas and the lumbering vaporetti.
This morning he saw a wedding gondola spread with a golden cloth, the bride's dress foaming out of the fairy vessel like a flower.
"The embarkation for Cythera," murmured Homer, going back indoors, enchanted, unconscious of Sam Bell's wistful dream about a pink-sailed cockleshell that would bear him away to a Cytherean bower with the missing procurator of San Marco, Lucia Constanza.
"Cosa?" said the librarian.
"Niente. Mi scusi," whispered Homer, going back to his place at the table.
Today he was bowed over a volume containing the first five books of the Bible. Was it in Hebrew? There were three columns, each in a different hand, all of them hard to decipher.
When Sam touched his shoulder, Homer looked up blindly and said, "I don't understand this at all. Is it Hebrew?"
Sam glanced at the open page and murmured, "The Pentateuch. It's in three languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It's the first five books of the Bible, bound backward like a Hebrew Torah. Deuteronomy comes first, Genesis last." Sam grasped Homer's coat sleeve and hissed in his ear, "Listen to me, Homer. Can you put this aside for now?"
Homer came to his senses and saw his friend's face clearly. At once he pushed back his chair and whispered, "What's the matter?"
Together they went outside and walked along the arcade in a flood of French teenagers. "Allans y!" cried the tour guide, holding aloft her umbrella and waving her charges out onto a path of planks leading to San Marco. Some of them merely stepped down into the water, shrieking with laughter.