The Thief of Venice(35)

The tide was ebbing. The next high water was ten hours away. Homer was starving. "What about lunch?" he said. "But, good God, not here."

"No, of course not here," said Sam, and they swept past the little tables of Florian's, where last week Homer had paid six dollars for a cup of cappuccino. "There's a good place across the Rialto Bridge," said Sam. "We'll be there in ten minutes."

To Homer Kelly, Dottor Samuele Bell was half an enigma. He understood the Bell part all right, the American part, but the Italian part was beyond his grasp. It was clear that Sam was contemptuous of fools. Was that an Italian quality? If so, there was nothing wrong with it. Someone had once told Homer that Italians were a melancholy race—jolly on the surface but gloomy within. Like most generalizations it was probably a lot of bull.

Together they walked quickly to the Rialto Bridge. Halfway up the long staircase Sam stopped to rest, and they leaned over the stone railing and looked down. Below them on the Grand Canal there was a traffic jam. A grubby working boat with a hydraulic lift was crowding a neatly painted craft heading for the Hotel Gritti with a delectable freight of shellfish and fruit. There were cries of Attenzione! A crate of grapes tipped into the water. The man at the tiller shouted obscenities, Vaffanculo! Porca puttana! and a fishing boat loaded with mussels swerved away in a wide arc.

They turned away from the spectacle and kept on climbing. At the crest of the bridge Homer wondered if he himself had two sides like Sam. It was true that his famous cheerfulness was sometimes only a skim over misery, but usually a healthy optimism prevailed.

"Whoops!" Homer apologized for cannoning into an American girl who had stopped cold in front of him to look at a guidebook, and then he hurried after Sam past the fruit and vegetable stands in the narrow street below the bridge. Beyond the blackberries and grapes he could smell the rich aroma of the fish market, and catch a glimpse of men scooping ice over heaps of calamari and eels, and hear the hoarse cry of Gamberetti! Cozze! Scampi!

"Sam, wait for me!" shouted Homer, but he was wedged against a counter of glass baubles from the island of Murano. Nobody was buying glass goldfish. Homer was amused to see the young proprietor talking loudly into a cell phone.

"Hey, look at that kid!" shouted Homer, trying to catch up with Sam. "Those little phones are everywhere."

"I know," said Sam, looking back. "Everybody wants to—what do you call it?—show off with a telefonino." He was trying to lead the way into a broad intersection, but it was almost impossible to squeeze through crowds of tourists buying carnival masks like suns and moons and funny hats with checkers and stripes.





Homer shuffled after him, looking at the greedy smiling faces of his American compatriots, wondering if callow cheerfulness was a general American trait. If so, then he was ashamed for his fellow citizens and ashamed for himself. In the face of the troubles of the world, surely cheerfulness was an infantile attitude.

But in the crowded interior of the Cantina do Spade cheerfulness prevailed. Sam and Homer settled down at a small table and Homer looked eagerly at the menu.





Sam was not interested in food. He began talking quickly, leaning forward across the table, his face a mask of misery, and at once Homer was confronted with the enigmatically Italian part of Samuele Bell. He listened with horrified sympathy as Sam told him about the smashed reliquary.

"All I want is to get the relic back," said Sam. "The broken crystal can be repaired. I know a craftsman who can do it. But I can't just whittle another piece of wood to replace the relic that the Scuola has been so proud of for the last five hundred years."

Homer tried to focus his attention on Sam's problem, but he couldn't help looking around and taking pleasure in his surroundings. Dreamily he said, "Byron is supposed to have liked this place."

Sam said despairingly, "Think of the impossibility of finding a few chips of wood in this labyrinth of a city. Probably they've been thrown in the trash already, or dropped into a canal."

Homer tried to sound hopeful. "What if somebody stole them as miracle-working pieces of the True Cross? Is there a marketplace for relics? A dealer in miracles? Hey, you're not eating your lunch. Drink up your wine."

Sam smiled. "Sorry, Homer." He stirred the pasta on his plate. "And there's another thing."

Homer wound fettuccine around his fork and said, "Another thing?"

"Dottoressa Costanza is still missing and the polizia aren't getting anywhere. The carabinieri haven't found her either."

"Dottoressa Costanza? Oh, you mean that woman who killed her husband? The one who ran away with a priceless work of art?"