Then she spread out the other pictures on the bed and made a selection. The rejected ones she put away, along with the negatives. Afterward she couldn't find them. She remembered exactly where Richard's picture was because she kept taking it out and putting it back, but she couldn't remember where to find the fuzzy picture of a shop window somewhere in San Polo or a miscellaneous bridge that might be anywhere or a random palace somewhere along the Grand Canal.
Her pictures were not sharp and the colors were poor, but Ursula liked them. She leaned against Mary and beamed at the glossy photograph of pigeons eating from her hand in Piazza San Marco.
Her grandmother flipped through them quickly, looking for the picture of herself. "It isn't here," she said, disappointed.
"Oh, there are more." Mary went to look for her second-best collection. Again she couldn't find it. She couldn't find the negatives. Where the hell were they? "I'm sorry, Dorothea," she said, coming back empty-handed. "I'll take another right now if you like."
Mrs. Wellesley went off to arrange her hair, and Mary showed Ursula an out-of-focus shot of a church blanketed in white marble statuary. "Do you know which one this is? I've got them all mixed up." Ursula shook her head. "Oh, well, I'll ask your father. He'll know right away."
*31*
Next day Homer told Mary in confidence about Sam's ghastly troublethe theft of a couple of relics and the smashing of the borrowed reliquary. "The poor man doesn't know what to do. He's beside himself."
"Well, no wonder. How terrible! Who could have done such a thing? "
"Who knows? Somebody must have a key." Homer sank his voice to a whisper. "Sam suspects his mother-in-law. She's Savonarola in reverse."
"You mean?"
"Instead of burning vanities like fancy clothes and jewelry, she'd like to burn the Bible."
"I see." Mary laughed. "Look, why don't we take him out to dinner? I'll bring along my pictures, and he can tell me which is which."
Every day the high water was worse. The meteorologist reporting for the local TV station in the Palazzo Labia talked excitedly about the dire results of bureaucratic delay in dealing with acqua alta. "One!"he held up his left hand and raised his ringers one at a time"the delay in raising the level of the pavement in Piazza San Marco. Two! the delay in constructing mobile barriers and reinforcing the jetties at the three entrances to the lagoon. Three! the delay in completing the dredging of silt from the canals to speed up the flushing of high water. Four! the delay in preventing pollution from the passage of tankers within the island barrier. Five! the delay in preventing the discharge of pollutants from the mainland." The meteorologist gave up on his fingers as a large map appeared behind him. It was alive with arrows running northward in the Adriatic, pointing directly at the city of Venice. The arrows were the violent winds resulting from a steep drop in atmospheric pressure.
The wind was real. Homer, Mary, and Sam were blown sideways as they splashed to the San Zaccaria stop on the Riva through a retreating slop of water, and took the next vaporetto up the Grand Canal. At Ca' Rezzonico there was a famous restaurant with a garden. They sat under a leafy trellis and ordered what Sam recommended, malfatti alia panna and scampi fritti. Sam himself ordered a plate of squid cooked in its own black ink.
While they were waiting, Mary took out her photographs. "Oh, Sam, forgive me, these are just typical tourist pictures, but perhaps you can identify the ones I can't remember. This one, for instance." She shoved a photograph of an imposing doorway under his nose.
Sam gave it a glance while the waiter set down their plates, and then he snatched it up and looked at it again. "What's this?"
"I don't know." Mary took it from him and showed it to Homer. "That's why I'm asking you. It's a church somewhere, but I don't know which one. Do you know, Homer?"
"God, how should I know?" said Homer, who was still steeped in ignorance, except of course about the Aldine Dream of Poliphilius and the illuminated Vitruvius of Cardinal Bessarion, and other ancient works.
Sam took the picture back and said softly, "It's Lucia. I swear it's Lucia."
"Lucia?"
"This woman walking in front of the church. It's Lucia Costanza. The new procurator of San Marco. You remember, Homer. I told you about her."
"Oh, right," said Homer, taking an interest at once. "I read about her in the New York Times before we came. She's the one who's supposed to have killed her husband, only you swear she didn't."
"Because she disappeared," exclaimed Mary, putting two and two together. "Isn't she the woman the carabinieri are looking for? The one who vanished when her husband was murdered?"