Page 26 of Vengeance in Venice
“Not usual, no.” Alvise shrugged. “He must have felt threatened. His position on the council, his friendship with the Austrians… Feelings still run high.”
“Then it wasn’t a personal threat that inspired this…protection? For example, Signor Giusti?”
“Perhaps both. I don’t know. Perhaps Giusti is part of the same problem.”
“Being a nationalist,” Solomon murmured. He frowned. “How loyal would these bravos be to Savelli’s family?”
“Very. As long as they are paid.”
Then they did not expect Elena Savelli to stop paying them as she had threatened during her first conversation with Solomon. They still obeyed her without question, despite her clear disdain. Interesting. Possibly…
Like him, Constance seemed unwilling to discuss too much in front of Alvise, whose grasp of English was increasing daily. Back at the Palazzo Zulian, Solomon dismissed the boatman, and Constance almost flew into the house and up the stairs to their favorite drawing room.
By the time he closed the door behind them, she had already found paper and a pen and was seated at the charming little bureau between the two central windows. He knew she would be writing down everything they knew about the case and those involved with it—not in case she forgot, for actually she remembered everything that was said to her and everything sheread, almost verbatim. But it helped her—helped both of them—to see connections and different points of view.
Constance said, “I don’t want her to have done it either. But she could have. She is hidingsomething. Something besides discontent and loneliness.”
“It need not be anything incriminating. After all, she is happy for us to question her servants, even to keep coming back.”
“Is she?” Constance looked up, her pen stilling. “Can you be sure she translated all our questions accurately? Let alone the answers?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not completely sure. But I didn’t catch any obfuscation.”
Constance sighed. “Do you think she regretted marrying him?”
“I think it left her without family and friends. Whether that is enough…”
“Is it enough for you?” Constance said suddenly.
“I had very few friends in the first place and, to my knowledge, no one rejects you. Or me. We may be an odd couple, but our marriage hurts no one. I think Elena’s did.”
“Giusti, for one.”
“And possibly Elena herself. In which case, if Savelli knew it, he would also have been hurt.”
Constance began to write again, furiously. “There are too many oddities here. What was Savelli afraid of to have hired such men? It seems incongruous. He was not a brawling man. He was much too refined and self-disciplined. And yet he sent them after Giusti. And made them feel it was permissible to abduct Giusti’s mistress—me, apparently.”
“Something was bothering Savelli, at least on the night he died, but possibly for much longer. If he didn’t sleep well, he might not have been thinking very clearly. He might have made several bad decisions.”
“Like hiring these men in the first place,” Constance said. “Like assaulting Giusti. Like going out unarmed and half dressed in the middle in the night, his bed not properly slept in.” She stopped writing again and stared at him, her eyes gleaming. “He was waiting for someone!”
“Perhaps,” Solomon allowed. “His dressing room overlooks the back of the house. He could have seen someone arrive by boat and dashed out to meet them.”
“A lover?” Constance suggested. “That would certainly explain Elena’s unhappiness. And her secretiveness. She would hide it, pretend she neither knew nor cared…” She frowned and shook her head. “Except I could swear he loved his wife. He was more concerned for what she might think about my departure from the house than about anything else. He did not want her hurt or humiliated, and not just because it might earn him an earful of abuse. He cared for her.”
“And she chose him over Giusti. We keep coming back to Ludovico. Somehow, he is involved in this story.”
“He had another woman,” Constance recalled. “And I don’t think Elena liked that. She definitely disliked the idea of Giusti and me knowing each other.”
“Well, you can’t help being a threat to any woman’s amorous ambitions.”
Constance stuck out her tongue at him. “She is not indifferent to Giusti. But it might just be a dog-in-the manger-ish possessiveness. I don’t know her well enough to say.”
“Shall we go and see Giusti this afternoon? I want to know why he was so determined to hold on to those jewels, including Elena’s father’s ring. That does not seem very…gentlemanly.”
“We could and should see Giusti,” she replied, a sparkle in her brilliant eyes. “But first, we could discover the portrait painter’s view of the Savellis.”
Solomon raised his eyebrows. “Do you have his name?”
