078 The Phantom Of Venice Read Free

guide, please to call on Zorzi!”
    “We’ll remember!” Nancy promised.
    Inside the vestibule, Tara rang a bell under a small card bearing the name, Sra. Angela Spinelli.
    Moments later, the ring was answered by a Venetian quite different from anyone either girl had expected. Nancy caught her breath and her heart skipped a beat as their eyes met.
    The young man who had just opened the door was, beyond question, the most gorgeous man she had ever seen!

2
A Shot in the Dark
    The young man’s hair was dark and curly, his eyes a rich greenish-amber. When he smiled—and he was smiling now as he regarded the two pretty girls standing on the doorstep—he revealed gleaming, even white teeth and a dimple at each corner of his mouth.
    “Si . . . ?”
    His questioning voice as he looked at them sounded, to Nancy’s ears at least, as melodious as Luciano Pavarotti’s. He was not quite as tall as the average movie hero—perhaps five-nine or five-ten, at most—but his slim figure was beautifully proportioned, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and his chest and bare arms, revealed by his open-necked,short-sleeved knit shirt, were smoothly and gloriously muscled.
    His smile gave way to a throaty chuckle, and Nancy became abruptly and embarrassingly aware that she had been staring at him, and so had her girl friend.
    “Ah, si! Ma certo!” he exclaimed to Tara. “You must be Signorina Egan!”
    “Y-y-yes, I am. And this is my . . . my friend, Nancy Drew.”
    A thrill ran through the teenager from River Heights as his lustrous eyes rested on her—for only a brief moment, but long enough to notice her attractive face and figure.
    “Delighted to meet you both, Signorine! Please to come in!”
    As he led the way from the tiled vestibule up a dark, well-worn flight of stairs, the young man went on, half turning as he spoke, “Mi perdonate for not introducing myself. I forget my manners. I am Giovanni Spinelli, but you must call me simply Gianni!”
    He pronounced his nickname like “Zanni.” Nancy suddenly realized that this was Venetian dialect, which meant that Zorzi’s real name therefore was “Giorgio.”
    The stairway led to a second-floor apartment with a cluttered and disorderly, but cheerful, lived-in look. The furniture and carpeting seemed old and worn, but there were gay, colorful touches all about inthe form of batik drapes, oriental cushions, sculptured ornaments and wall paintings.
    An attractive blond woman in her late thirties emerged from the kitchen in response to a volley of Italian from Gianni. As he gestured toward Tara, the woman rushed up to her and, with tears in her eyes, embraced the American girl emotionally. “Ah, mia poverina! To think that we must meet at last under such unhappy circumstances! I am Angela, of course, Angela Spinelli, your father’s dear friend! He loved you so much and spoke of you so often and so fondly!”
    It was obvious from the moisture glistening in her own eyes that Tara Egan was deeply moved. She introduced Nancy to Angela, who in turn explained that Gianni was her younger brother. She begged the American girls to join them in a meal of pasta, but upon learning that they had already lunched aboard the plane from Rome, she contented herself with serving them caffe espresso and dainty little almond-flavored Italian cookies.
    “And now,” Signora Spinelli said when her two visitors had been shown the proper hospitality, “I know that the time has come that we must talk about your father, my dear Tara, even though this will pain us both. No doubt you will wish to know the unhappy facts concerning his death.”
    Tara could only nod and bite her lower lip to keep it from trembling.
    “What I can tell you will not take long,” Angelawent on sadly. “Rolf, your father, was returning home late one night in a hired gondola. Suddenly a shot rang out from the fondamenta, one of the quays or stone curbs that they were passing. This is what the gondolier reported