Death in a Serene City by Edward Sklepowich Read Free Book Online Page A

was devoted to icons and a portable altar of the Virgin, St. Ambrose, and St. Gregory. Urbino surveyed the scene as he talked with Voyd. The Contessa, although engaged in close conversation with Stefano Bellorini and the curator of the Glass Museum, kept sending anxious glances in their direction.
    She might have spared herself, however, for things were moving along swimmingly.
    â€œI hear you have a veritable passion for that old decadent Huysmans,” Voyd had said for openers after striding across the room as if he had been waiting for Urbino to arrive. He was a heavyset, good-looking man about the Contessa’s age. “Your reputation has preceded you in more ways than one.”
    â€œAs has yours, Mr. Voyd.”
    Somehow the man managed to look both sheepish and vain at the same time.
    â€œTell me,” he said, “if you love that book so much, do you go for all its ideas? Are your rooms in colors that look best by artificial light? Do you favor orange and a lot of episcopal violet and cardinal purple? Indigo moldings as well? And absolutely thousands and thousands of richly bound books and exotic flowers, preferably artificial ones that look real and real ones that look unmistakably artificial? And—and all the rest?”
    â€œNot quite, Mr. Voyd. I have no gold-plated tortoise encrusted with jewels either and I certainly don’t compel my maid Natalia to wear a costume of Flemish grogram with a medieval coif. But I take what suits my sensibility and character and leave all the rest.”
    â€œBut I’m still as much up in the air as before.”
    â€œLet me put it this way, Mr. Voyd. If you were to come to the Palazzo Uccello you wouldn’t find anything very strange.”
    â€œBecause there’s nothing strange there or you keep it all well hidden? Pardon me if I josh you in this way, but I find your enthusiasm for Huysmans rather unusual. In my youth—my first youth, that is,” he added, smoothing down his bald spot with a wry smile, “I found him deliciously wicked but still could never understand how poor Dorian Gray could have been corrupted by him.”
    After a few moments of silence Urbino thought that the man was finished teasing him, but then the writer said, “I’ve also heard that you’re one of those men most to be feared.” He paused for a few beats for Urbino to suffer whatever response had been sought. Fear? Confusion? Amusement? It was difficult to tell. He smiled broadly. “I mean, of course, that you write biographies. Tell me, do you really believe we gain anything by seeing the naked man—or the naked woman, as the case might be?”
    â€œSuch biographies have their place. What you call nakedness is sometimes nothing more than the person stripped of myths and distortions, frequently of his own creation. My own books, I like to think, make a small contribution to a more balanced perspective.”
    â€œBe assured I was speaking only generically,” Voyd said with the air of soothing a tender ego. “I regret to say I haven’t read any of your little lives.” He shrugged apologetically—not, it seemed, for the slight of the “ little lives ” but for the neglect of an unfortunately busy man. “I do seem to remember a review of one or two of them, though.”
    He smiled broadly again.
    â€œBut don’t take what I say personally. I know many intelligent people who wouldn’t be caught dead with fiction in their hands, no matter who the author. It’s just that I have a mortal dread of the biographer. I do all I can to thwart him. I feel as if I am always making moves against an opponent perhaps not even born yet, someone who will want to reveal what should be kept in the dark and who will make up all the rest.” He gave Urbino an exaggeratedly judicious look. “Who knows, Mr. Macintyre? It might even be you.”
    â€œI doubt it. I’m committed to my Venetian