Page 10 of The Collector
Chiara reached for the duvet.
“Don’t move,” said Gabriel.
“I’m cold.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
Chiara returned to her original pose. “Did you ever paint her?”
“Anna? Never.”
“She refused to sit for you?”
“Actually, she begged me to paint her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid of what I might find there.”
“You don’t really believe she needs to rehearse the Mendelssohn violin concerto.”
“She can play it in her sleep.”
“So why is she leaving?”
“I’ll show you in a few minutes.”
“You have exactly ten seconds.”
Gabriel snapped her photograph with his Israeli-made Solaris phone, the world’s most secure.
“Reprobate,” said Chiara, and reached for her coffee.
One hour later, showered and dressed and cloaked in oilskin coats against the gentle rain, they stood side by side on theimbarcaderoof the San Tomà vaporetto stop. Chiara’s San Marco–bound Number2 arrived first.
“Are you free for lunch?” asked Gabriel.
She fixed him with a stare of reproach. “You can’t be serious.”
“It was the sketch.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and boarded the vaporetto.
“Well?” he called out as the vessel drew away from the dock.
“I might be free at one.”
“I’ll pick up something to eat.”
“Don’t bother,” she replied, and blew him a kiss.
A Number 1 was approaching San Tomà from the direction of the university. Gabriel rode it to the Rialto, then hiked across Cannaregio to the Fondamente Nove, where he quickly downed a coffee at Bar Cupido before boarding his next vaporetto, a Number 4.1. It made a single stop along the western flank of San Michele, the island of the dead, then headed for Murano. Gabriel disembarked at Museo, the second of the island’s two stops, and walked past the glass shops lining the Fondamenta Venier to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
There had been a Christian place of worship on the site since 1188, but the current structure, with its listing bell tower and khaki-colored brick exterior, dated to 1529. In the late eighteenth century, a philosopher and adventurer who associated with the likes of Mozart and Voltaire had regularly attended Mass there. It was not faith that drew the man to the church, for he had none. He came in hopes of a fleeting encounter with a beautiful young nun who resided in the adjoining convent. The man, whose name was Giacomo Casanova, had many such relationships—hundreds, in fact—though he carefully guarded the identity of his secret lover from the convent. In his memoirs, he identified the woman, rumored to be the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat, only as M.M.
There were others like her at the convent, daughters of the republic’s wealthiest citizens, so the abbess was rarely short of funds. Shenevertheless balked when a popular painter who would one day be known as Titian demanded five hundred ducats for a depiction of the annunciation that he had produced for the church’s high altar. Offended, Titian gave the painting to Isabella, wife of Charles V, and the abbess hired Il Pordenone, a ruthlessly ambitious Mannerist who had been accused of hiring assassins to kill his brother, to produce a replacement. Pordenone undoubtedly leapt at the opportunity, for he viewed himself as Titian’s most serious artistic rival in Venice.
Titian’s original altarpiece disappeared without a trace during the Napoleonic Wars, but Pordenone’s lesser work survived. At present it was secured to a purpose-built wooden armature in the center of the nave. On the wall behind the high altar was a black rectangle of corresponding dimensions where once the canvas had hung—and where it would hang again when the extensive restoration of the ancient church was complete. Adrianna Zinetti, perched atop a towering scaffold, was removing a century’s worth of dust and grime from the ornate marble frame. She wore a zippered fleece jacket and fingerless gloves. The interior of the church was cold as a crypt.
