Sam gazed at Mary's picture. "She's alive, she's here. She's somewhere here in Venice." He threw back his napkin and stood up. "When was this? When did you take this picture? Where were you?"
"Oh, Sam, I'm terribly sorry. I haven't the faintest idea where I was."
Sam pawed at the back of his chair and pulled on his coat. "I'll look for it. I'll look until I find it."
Mary groped under the table for her bag. "Books, Sam, we can look for it in books. I've got a really good guidebook. It's chock-full of churches."
"You mean we're leaving?" Homer looked with dismay at his dinner, for which he was about to pay forty thousand lire.
In a far corner of the same restaurant Doctor Richard Henchard was having dinner. Turning his head, he saw Mary Kelly in the company of two men. One was familiar to him. At once he shifted his chair behind the trunk of a climbing vine. Turning up the collar of his jacket, he shivered and said to his dinner partner, "Hofreddo. E lei? Non trova chefaccia un po' freddo?"
The pretty nurse with whom he was dining was new in his surgery, a clumsy girl with a habit of dropping instruments into abdominal cavities. In answer to his question she shook her head and went on with her story about the Virgin's veil.
"Haven't you heard? It's so exciting. They've found a piece of the blue veil of the Virgin Mary. It's on display in the Church of Santo Spirito. Of course"the nurse didn't want to seem old-fashioned, because, after all, Riccardo was a scientist"one doesn't know whether to believe it or not, but they say it's already cured a crippled child." The nurse gazed at Henchard worshipfully. "What do you think, Riccardo?" Oh, God, he had such magnificent eyes, with the most adorable little wrinkles at the corners. In addressing her he was still using the formal "lei." The pretty nurse hoped for an impassioned "tu" before the evening was over.
She hoped in vain. Henchard had another conquest in mind. Not tonight, but soon, very soon.
*32*
They couldn't find it, the place where Lucia Costanza was striding so purposefully across Mary's photograph from right to left. The church facade in the background refused to be identified.
Mary looked for it in her guidebooks. Sam ransacked his shelves for textbooks on Venetian architecture. He borrowed Dorothea's big coffee-table book, Venice, City of Enchantment, which was packed with huge color photographs of the Ducal Palace, San Marco, the crowds in the piazza, gondolas against the sunset, the masked revelers of carnival time, the costumed rowers of the Regata Storica. The church they were looking for was not to be found.
Next day Sam fell ill. He set out early in the morning two hours before his first appointment in the Marciana to look at obscure churches in the unvisited neighborhood north of the public gardens. It was one of the many places where Mary had lost her way.
"I took pictures just the same," she told Sam, "even when I didn't know where I was. I wandered all over the place in Sant' Elena beyond the Giardini, and I was really mixed up between the Zattere and the Rio Nuovo."
The sestiere called Sant' Elena was one of the higher regions of the city. There was little evidence of high water, but before Sam had been out of the house five minutes on his way along the Riva to the Giardini, he felt so faint he had to turn around and go back.
He locked himself in his study, dropped heavily on the bed, and turned his face away from the sight of the vandalized reliquary on the table.
At once the usual scene began to play in his head. A courtyard with statuary, a staircase, a woman on the stairs, an office, a window overlooking another courtyard, the woman walking quickly in front of him and sitting down, his own hands on her desk, his voice and her laughter. Where was she?
She was not far away. Dottoressa Lucia Costanza had not fled to the mainland to conceal herself somewhere in the Veneto. It had never occurred to Lucia to lose herself in some crowded metropolis like New York or London or even in the city of Rome. She was serenely convinced that the crime of her husband's murder would sooner or later be solved, and then she could come out of hiding and reorganize her life and resume her interrupted career.
Her attempt at renting an apartment, that simple little place near the Casa del Tintoretto, had been cut short by the man who had turned up on the doorstep claiming to have an earlier lease.
The apartment hadn't been worth fighting for anyway. It was dingy, and serious repairs would have been required to fix the closet wall. Lucia had given up at once, deciding to take a chance on the loan of a place in Cannaregio belonging to an old school friend, now working in America. She had nearly forgotten the key the friend had thrust upon her, but now she extracted it gratefully from her bag and settled in.