Death in the Palazzo by Edward Sklepowich Read Free Book Online Page B

exacted the same promise from the son or daughter we never had, who would have inherited the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
    I should have spoken about it to you long ago but the happiness of our life together made it more difficult to recount its sad history. I felt that its blight would fall on our marriage.
    It’s for you to decide what to do, now that I am gone and after you have read the following pages. Whatever you do, however, never sleep in the Caravaggio Room or have any blood relative of the family do so—or anyone you truly care about.
    I love you with all my heart and will be with you forever.
    The Contessa laid aside this page and began to read the others.
    I am writing this in my forty-fifth year upon the occasion of my marriage. It is a time to take the measure of the past and to look forward to the long future I hope to share with my beloved wife. I hope and pray that our future will be blessed with at least one child and that this child will, in the course of events, inherit the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. It is to this child that I address these lines, which explain in as full a fashion as I can remember them certain events of extreme importance to our family. I cannot trust that I will not be taken away suddenly by the will of God, or that my memory will not fail me.
    There is a room on the second floor of the palazzo which has come to be called the Caravaggio Room. It has been locked since May of 1938, nearly twenty years ago, a day I remember very well.
    Less well remembered, since I was only a boy of nine at the time, was the discovery made by my father, the Conte Amerigo, may God rest his soul, that eventuated in the designation “the Caravaggio Room.”
    One winter—the year was 1922—my father made an unusual discovery in one of the rooms of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. The family had moved to this palazzo on the Grand Canal thirty years earlier. The previous owner, a man sadly without any heirs or immediate family, in my estimation a form of living death, fell seriously ill and was eager to make a sale to move to a warmer climate. My grandfather was in a position to meet this ailing man’s rather outlandish financial expectations. The building in the San Polo quarter was sold and the family moved to the “new” Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. Our family finally had what they had wanted for centuries: a splendid palazzo, this one designed by Cominelli, on the Canalazzo.
    Following the death of my grandfather, my father was taking stock of the palazzo from top to bottom. He was rummaging through one of the lumber rooms on the pianoterreno . He said that he had a premonition when he found a bundle wrapped in canvas in a trunk large enough to contain the body of a man.
    When he unwrapped it, he found a painting of sixty-six by fifty centimeters. It was dark with age, and mold had invaded one whole lower corner. It was a portrait of a round-faced youth holding a mandolin, and with lipstick, rouge, and a white flower in thick auburn hair that resembled a wig. At first my father assumed, with good reason, that it was a young woman. On closer examination, however, he determined that it must indeed be a young man, strange though he looked with his makeup and in a green robe that slipped provocatively off one shoulder. This young man stared at my father with a mocking kind of smile.
    For no other reason than that my father played the mandolin, he immediately liked the painting. Nothing identified either the name of the painting or its painter.
    The next day my father took the painting to one of the good Armenian monks on the island of San Lazzaro in the lagoon. The monk was a man who loved art and who was a master at cleaning paintings. When he saw the painting, he blessed himself. “By our Blessed Mother,” he said, “this is either a Caravaggio or a devilish imitation. It could be very valuable.” The name of this painter meant nothing to my father, whose knowledge