The woman with the fancy camera spent a long time at the edge of the piazzetta, adjusting the focus and firing off shot after shot. Some of the gondoliers looked up and glared. They were used to tourists taking souvenir photos; some of the men even offered to pose—but they charged for it. This woman, though, seemed too focused on herself to be collecting memories of a holiday.
“Giornalista,” grumbled one of the older men, glaring into the zoom lens.
If this woman—English, surely, from the straggly brown ponytail and utilitarian clothes—was writing an article about Venice, like so many of her countrywomen, she should expect to pay for taking pictures.
But she wasn’t a journalist.
After a last shot or two, she walked away from the water and perched at the first outside table she came to, belonging to the first overpriced café, and ordered a caffé latte, although it was nearly lunchtime.
She reviewed her morning’s work, but was dissatisfied. Face after Venetian face scowled at her from the little screen on the back of her camera—old, middle-aged, the occasional thirty-something—stubbled, bald, fat, self-satisfied. There was no gondolier that fit her exacting standards. She sat back, stretching her long denim-clad legs in front of her, drinking her expensive coffee, crumbling the biscotto in her saucer.
The woman left an unnecessarily large euro note for the waiter and set off toward the Riva degli Schiavoni, without a backward glance at the gondoliers who had taken so much of her attention a short while ago. There were even more of them here in the busy waterway that ran under the bridge, alongside the Doge’s Palace. She leaned on the north parapet of the Ponte della Paglia and looked away from the lagoon toward the ridiculously picturesque Ponte dei Sospiri.
A shrill voice floated up from the water behind her.
“If only you were half the man he is!” complained a woman to her husband.
The photographer turned for a better look at the gondolier who had provoked the comparison so unflattering to the tourist’s husband, who was sitting scarlet-faced on the cushions of the vessel. In fact, literally the opposite was true, for the husband was obese and the gondolier trim and well muscled.
It was not clear what had led to the woman’s outburst but it amused the gondolier so much that somewhere between the two bridges he lost his balance and tipped into the cold and murky water of the canal. The splash was galvanizing and the photographer hurried over in time to see him come up spluttering and shaking his hair. His fellow oarsmen laughed and clapped and the tourist in the gondola allowed himself a tiny smirk at his furious wife, who seemed now to have decided that all men were useless.
The little bar in Cannaregio had only one tourist in it but she attracted no more than a quick second glance from the regulars, since she was with Taddeo, who was a local. At that second glance they saw that she was buying, and that gave them quite the wrong impression.
Taddeo was having trouble with her name: Kathy Hughes was hard work for a Venetian tongue and he soon renamed her Caterina, which she liked, sitting up a bit straighter on the barstool and loosening her hair from its elastic band.
“So, Taddeo,” she said, “have you fallen in before?”
He shrugged. Taddeo didn’t feel his masculinity compromised; every gondolier got the occasional dunking. “It is a—what do you call it?—a sort of industrial accident.”
“Like a prostitute’s orgasm,” the woman said.
Taddeo choked over his drink.
“I’m writing a book,” she continued, as if that was the natural course of the conversation.
“You want to put me in it?”
“Maybe.”
Taddeo preened just a bit.
“It’s not a novel, though,” she added, draining her glass of Campari. “It’s a book of short stories.”
It made no difference to the gondolier; he was more interested in the next round of drinks, which soon arrived.
“They’re called Scorpion Tales,” said Kathy.
Taddeo’s English was pretty good but he couldn’t quite grasp puns. “Where they have the stings,” he said, nodding.
She let it pass; her stories did have a sting in the tail: that was the point of them. She wanted to impress him but she saw the limitations of his literary knowledge. He would not ask her if books of short stories were not a notoriously difficult genre to sell and she would not have to tell him that her father was the director of a successful publishing house.
“The thing is,” she said, “I want to set one of them in Venice. But I can’t get at it.”
“Get at what?”
“The real Venice. It’s all … tourist rip-offs,” she explained.
“Gondola rides at eighty euros for a forty-minute stock trip up the Grand Canal, cappuccinos at ten euros, tatty masks, plastic fans, sweeties made of glass—nothing I can get my teeth into.” She looked around the bar. “This is the realest place I’ve found since I got here.”
Taddeo didn’t want to disagree; he was hoping to get dinner out of this and maybe more. She wasn’t really his type—not enough flesh on her—but a young foreign woman who wasn’t his wife, well, that was irresistible.
Kathy wasn’t looking for sex. She hadn’t been photographing gondoliers to find the best-looking one; she wanted to find the different one. She loved the bar in Cannaregio and liked the restaurant even better. This was the real Venice at last. She had spent the evening getting Taddeo to tell her about crimes, the more gruesome the better. And as she got more and more out of him, the gondolier began to think he would prefer to be back home with Micola, his wife, after all.
“Caterina” was interested in all the most bloodthirsty crimes and Taddeo began to invent ones that he had only half-heard about, embellishing and extending with a drowning here, a strangling there. Then he told her about the famous murder in Cannaregio: “Just a little way from here—they got the murderer, at least one of the murderers. He’s in prison. But he made it look like a Mafia crime, fixing the victim up like a sacrificial goat.”
Then he had to explain incaprettare to her, the process of tying hands and feet behind the back in such a way that the more the victim struggled, the more the noose around his neck tightened. She liked that; he got the feeling there was someone she would like to do that to.
By now Taddeo was sweating. It was great to have a free meal and plenty to drink but surely it wasn’t natural for a young woman to want to talk about nothing but rapes and murders, crimes of passion, incest … Ah, incest. Heading her off from the murder of the greengrocer, he had chanced to mention a case of familial abuse from years back, simply because the perpetrator shared a first name with the fixed-up corpse.
Signor Giampaolo Volpe was a dentist with two daughters. After the death of his wife, Volpe turned his attentions to the daughters, first the older, then, when she fled, the younger. It all came out when the dentist’s body was found floating in the lagoon. There was not a mark on him, so it could have been accidental, and the sisters, who had been estranged for some years, both had alibis.
As the stories poured out of him, Taddeo became a bit loose with the wine and all the food. The woman was taking notes in a little book she drew from her handbag; he wished that he could just stop. He was singing for his supper and not just a single aria; he was beginning to feel as if he had performed a complete Tosca.
At last the flow of words slowed to a trickle and he slumped in his seat.
“Can you take me out in your gondola tomorrow night?” she asked, merciless. “I’ll pay twice what you normally charge.”
The craft slipped silently through the back canals of the city, black hull sliding through black water. Taddeo was relieved that tonight she wanted no talk at all. There was no sound but the splash of his oar and no light but the lantern on the gondola and the eerie mezzotint of the scene under the full moon. It would have been peaceful if only Taddeo’s passenger hadn’t been so tense; she was not lying back on the cushions drinking in the romance of the lagoon city by night, but sitting upright and fiddling with the gold heart she wore on a chain around her neck.
“Take me to where they found the dentist,” was all she had said when he’d led her into the gondola and wrapped her up with rugs.
He couldn’t remember where that corpse had washed up so he took her to a place that looked right, a lonely minor canal where no gondoliers sculled tourists, where a little bridge reflected itself in the still water like a perfect circle.
“He was washed up against one side of the bridge,” he lied.
The woman made him stop and she took lots more photos of the supposed site of the body’s discovery before motioning him onward.
There were few people about in the little campi or on the bridges of the district they were gliding past. “Caterina” emitted a small, satisfied sigh; she was finding the real Venice.
Taddeo no longer found her even slightly attractive but she had very deep pockets and that had its own appeal.
“You are finding your scorpion stings?” he asked after a while.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Drop me back somewhere central soon. I want to write them up.”
Taddeo realized he didn’t even know where she was staying; all he had was her cell phone number. He let her out near the Rialto as courteously as he could manage and she pressed a large bundle of bills into his hand. It was all he could do not to shudder at the coldness of her touch.
The woman typed furiously in her room. It was the last story in her collection and she sat back with a small smile when it was finished, cracking her knuckles. This one had a good sting. The best.
She sent an e-mail to her father, attaching the file. She didn’t bother to revise what she had written; he would publish whatever she sent him. After a slight pause, she sent it again, this time to her sister in London. She backed it up on her flash drive and her cloud storage account. Then she permitted herself a larger smile.
Time for room service.
In a small cluttered office in Covent Garden, a computer beeped to let its user know he had mail. A rumpled, middleaged man read the attachment with growing horror; of course the first story he had opened was “The Good Father.” He did not need to see any more. He sat slumped, with his head in his hands.
Then took out his cell phone and dialed a number he had hoped never to use again.
Three days later it was all over the lagoon city and the police came to visit Taddeo.
She had been found in her room, strangled with the cable from her laptop, of which there was no sign. Her wallet was also missing though nothing else seemed to have been taken; the police didn’t know about the flash drive or cloud account. An expensive camera remained on the desk and the police took that. It was only the cable that made them realize there had been a laptop computer. It had been used as a garrote, with a pencil twisted up in it to apply the necessary force for asphyxiation.
The staff at the Gritti Palace knew nothing, had seen no one suspicious, and said no visitor to her room had stopped at the desk. They were appalled at the blow to their reputation. But there were more visitors to the bar that night than usual. The barman, who scarcely remembered what Kathy Hughes had looked like, gathered a large number of tips as he embroidered his memories for their benefit.
Hardly anyone who knew her would have recognized the woman from the photographs the police showed Taddeo. Their methods were unorthodox but they hoped to shock him into a confession. Instead they sent him running for the bathroom where they could hear him vomiting copiously and comprehensively.
The black-and-white photos taken at the scene showed her lying on the carpet between the round table and the draped double bed, in front of long windows that overlooked the canal. Her tongue protruded from her darkened face and her eyes were stained with bloody spots. The only recognizable thing about her was the little gold heart locket on its chain; the murderer had not taken that.
“When did you go to the Gritti Palace?” asked the older of the two officers when Taddeo got back from the bathroom, his face several shades paler.
“I have never been inside the Gritti,” said the gondolier. “Only picked people up or dropped them outside.”
“You were seen,” lied the younger detective.
“Whoever says that is wrong,” said Taddeo. Then he had a thought. “Is that where she was found? I never knew where she was staying.”
“You admit you knew her then?”
There was no point in denying it.
“I took her out in my gondola,” he said.
“And you had drinks with her and dinner—more than once,” said the older detective.
It was true. After the gondola ride by night, when she had been so silent and absorbed, he had seen “Caterina” twice more. Once she had asked him to do the usual tourist thing along the Grand Canal and had insisted on his giving her the standard spiel.
And then, yes, he had let her take him out to dinner again; perhaps that had been unwise. In fact, looking back at his short relationship—hardly a relationship!—with the murdered woman, he wished heartily that he had never set eyes on her. She had given him a lot of money and paid for every drink and dish they had shared, but now he was a murder suspect.
“How much do you know about this Kathy Hughes?” asked the younger detective, stumbling over the barbaric English name.
“Nothing! Almost nothing,” he said.
“And yet you had dinner with her,” the older man consulted a notebook, “twice. What did she talk about?”
“She didn’t talk much. She wanted me to talk—about crime in Venice. She was writing a book, about scorpions.”
“Scorpions?” The detectives exchanged dubious looks.
“She was interested in murders and rapes and things like that.” Taddeo immediately realized it would have been better to say nothing.
“Well, let me tell you about her,” said the older policeman. “She was English—that you know—twentyseven years old. Unmarried. One sister, younger, called,” he screwed his face up into a grimace, “Tabitha. Parents divorced. Mother’s whereabouts unknown. Father lives in London. Interpol has sent the information to Scotland Yard so they can inform Signor Hughes about his daughter’s death.”
“She had been in Venice only a week,” said the younger officer. “Had no friends or contacts here. The only person whose company she has been seen in is you.”
Micola arrived back from a friend’s house at that point. When Taddeo explained why the police were there, she shrieked at him.
“What did I tell you? That Englishwoman is trouble!”
She had said that. But then Micola had feared he was sleeping with her. Taddeo shuddered to remember how he had once contemplated doing that. Now all he could see in his mind were the obscene tongue and eyes.
The police wanted to question Micola too. And at the end of their interview with her, they arrested Taddeo on suspicion of the murder of Kathy Hughes.
He was not at the office when the news came, but in his tall thin house in Tufnell Park. The doorbell rang and there were two uniformed officers on the doorstep—one male, one female. He knew what that meant; anyone who had ever watched a TV crime series knew what that meant.
“Which one?” he managed to get out, meaning his daughters.
“Can we come in?” asked the policewoman, professionally gentle. “It’s Kathy, I’m afraid,” she continued, when the three of them were seated at his scrubbed-pine kitchen table. Her male colleague moved instinctively to the kettle.
But when the facts had been conveyed, the father stood up, passed his hands through his already disheveled gray hair, and said, like a character in one of those TV shows, “I’m going to need something stronger than tea.”
Russell Hughes didn’t even bother to offer them the malt. He poured himself a slug and knocked it back too quickly for something that expensive, and then poured another glassful which he just cradled in his big hands.
“What was your daughter doing in Venice, Mr. Hughes?” asked the policewoman. “Can you tell us?”
“She was on vacation, I suppose,” he said.
“You suppose? When did you last see Kathy, Mr. Hughes?”
“About nine months ago.” He didn’t see any reason to mention the book proposal.
“You were not close?”
How often was it normal to see one’s adult children? He shrugged. “Why all the questions? Have they caught the bastard who did this?”
“The Italian police will keep us fully informed,” said the male officer.
“What would you like to happen to the body?” asked the female.
Russell Hughes stared at her, appalled.
“I mean, after the autopsy in Venice,” she explained. “Would you like her body flown back here? You and your exwife are her official next of kin and we have not been able to reach Mrs. Hughes. Do you know where she is?”
“I haven’t had any contact with her for thirteen years,” he said.
The policewoman did a mental calculation. “Who had custody of the two girls when you divorced?”
“My wife. It’s always the wife, isn’t it?”
“And you haven’t seen her since Kathy was—what?—fourteen?”
“That’s right.”
“But you had contact with Kathy? And her sister?”
“Of course,” he said irritably. “Their mother just kept out of my way.”
“Do you have contact details for Kathy’s sister, Mr. Hughes?” asked the policewoman. “We’re trying to get in touch with her.”
“You want to tell her what happened to Kathy?”
“Not necessarily. We assumed you’d want to phone her yourself. But we’d like to ask her about Kathy’s Venice trip. She might have said more to her sister.”
“I don’t think they saw that much of each other,” he said. “But I’ll go and get Tabby’s details. My Filofax is in the study.”
He took another swig of malt and left the room unsteadily.
The policeman rolled his eyes. “What kind of a father has to look up his daughter’s address?” His own little girls were aged nine and seven.
“One who’s just had a shock?” suggested his colleague.
The gondolier community of Venice is a close-knit one. There are just over four hundred of them. Two are women. One has published a right-wing book. Three have recorded albums. But usually they are not in the headlines. They are background figures, charging outrageous prices for less than an hour’s ride—shorter than even a psychoanalyst’s hour—but feeling exploited if a passerby takes their photograph without permission. And now Taddeo Columbini has his picture in every local paper, his wife has red-rimmed eyes, and his friends shake their heads.
Taddeo had been arrested though not charged, and released after twenty-four hours. But the word on the canal was that it was only a matter of time before he was charged and remanded for the murder of Kathy Hughes. A strand of her hair had been found twisted around a button on his shirt and his DNA had shown up on her clothes too. There was no other suspect.
But why would he kill her? That was what they were saying amongst themselves. It would have been like slaughtering the golden goose. She was giving him plenty by all accounts. And stealing a laptop? Without taking its cable, which would not be that easy to replace in Venice. It didn’t add up.
And it was having a bad effect on trade. No female tourist would get into a gondola alone now, and though this had never been a large part of their custom, it was a slur on their reputation. Yet they did not spurn Taddeo, who was not working at the moment; they banded together to give him money and support. He was one of them, and when a gondolier was in trouble, it was them against the world.
They decided to mount an investigation of their own.
There were not many mourners at her funeral. The body had been flown back once the pathologists were through with it, and was about to be cremated in East Finchley. Her father and sister were the chief mourners and there was a handful of friends; Kathy Hughes had not been much liked. Of her mother there was no sign.
The service was impersonal and brief. Russell Hughes and his surviving daughter, Tabitha, sat two feet apart in a front pew. She gave a suppressed sob as the coffin slid away between the curtains to its fiery destination, but her father remained almost impassive. Ever since the police officers had first contacted him, he had moved like an automaton, numb to what was going on around him.
After the service, an awkward knot formed on the gravel drive outside where a light summer rain was falling; they decided against going to a pub and drifted apart again.
“Can I give you a lift anywhere?” the father asked the daughter formally.
She flashed a glare at him. “I came in my own car,” she said, walking quickly to where she had parked. She hoped she would never see him again.
Two mourners at the back of the chapel came out and saw the parting of the ways. No one ever recognized them when they were off duty.
“That’s one messed-up family,” said the policewoman.
“I can’t get over Tabitha not knowing her mother’s address,” replied her colleague.
They had followed up on the last known address for Caroline Fletcher, formerly Hughes, but it was five years old and she was no longer there. There just wasn’t enough personpower in the force to follow the trail any farther, and she’d missed the funeral now. Perhaps Kathy’s mother would never know she’d died.
The gondoliers mobilized to find out what would release one of their number from suspicion. Taddeo might cheat on his wife, might overcharge a customer, might lie if in a tight corner, but not one of his colleagues believed him capable of murder. He had an honest, open face and a generally sunny nature; had he not been Mr. August a few years ago in one of Piero Pazzi’s calendars that sold so well to tourists, especially middle-aged women and gay men?
The gondoliers who moored up regularly near the Gritti Palace got more out of the doormen than the police had. The one who had been on duty the night of the killing was nephew to one of the gondoliers and willing to talk over a Cynar with his Uncle Giorgio and two others when his shift ended.
“I told the police all I knew,” he said. “They told me the lock on her door wasn’t broken and no one could have climbed in the window, so she must have opened the door to her killer.”
“So he came in through the main door of the hotel?” said his uncle.
“Yes, I suppose he did. There are staff entrances but you need a card to get through those. As I told the police, I don’t stop people and ask for their ID, do I?”
“Calm down, young Stefano!” said Giorgio. “No one’s blaming you. No one expects you to know what the killer looks like. They don’t all wear shades at night and have a bulge in their jackets.”
“No,” agreed Stefano, draining his drink. “And this one didn’t have a gun—he strangled her.”
All the gondoliers knew the gory details; Taddeo had told them everything. These three nodded and crossed themselves.
“But can you remember any strangers, any people you hadn’t seen before?” one of them inquired.
“They asked me that. She was killed at about eleven o’clock, but her body wasn’t found till the next morning when the maid brought her breakfast. She’s still out sick, poor Eva—can you imagine? But the killer could have come in earlier and had a drink in the bar or just hidden somewhere in the hotel. It’s very busy in high season and there are many places he could have hidden.”
It was a long interview for Stefano so they bought him another drink.
“I didn’t recognize everyone who came in,” he continued. “But it’s the same every shift. The hotel is so expensive people come just for a few nights; they change over all the time. As long as they walk confidently, I just open the doors.”
They all acknowledged that the doorman probably took more notice of guests and visitors leaving than arriving. Those coming out often wanted a gondola or a water taxi, and the doorman had all the relevant information on hand.
Something about this, or perhaps it was the effect of a second Cynar downed rather quickly, gave Stefano an idea.
The hit man had been lying low since the murder. He had done all the usual things—dyed his hair, wore glasses, bought new clothes—but first he had checked out of the Gritti Palace. The police had of course recorded the names of all hotel guests, but it was beyond their powers to keep nearly two hundred wealthy Americans, English, and other Europeans from continuing their holidays or flying back home. And once the police were sure of Taddeo’s guilt, they forgot about the list.
And even if they hadn’t, the assassin had used a false name and fake passport. He was now in a much less grand hotel that was costing his employer a fraction of the price of the Gritti Palace. He didn’t really mind though. The bed was comfortable enough and while it didn’t have air-conditioning, no one minded if he leaned out of his window wearing no more than boxer shorts. But he’d been holed up here for nearly two weeks now and was getting bored.
After drinking half a bottle of vodka a night and smoking his way through many packs of cigarettes, he did not feel very good. And he didn’t sleep well either; the woman with the ponytail floated just behind his eyes whenever he closed them. He hated killing women. He charged extra for that.
One night when he couldn’t sleep, he opened up her computer. His English wasn’t great and it didn’t look that interesting. But he couldn’t sell it; that would bring the police right down on him. He decided the bottom of the canal would be the best place for it; indeed, this is precisely what he’d been instructed to do with it. The little silver thing shaped like a bullet, on the other hand, he kept in his inside jacket pocket and was reluctant to part with. You never knew when it might be helpful to have something you could use for blackmail.
Tabitha Hughes had been in a daze since her father had phoned her a fortnight earlier. It was true she had not seen much of Kathy since they had left home, and as far as she was concerned she had no mother. Tabitha had created a new family for herself out of workmates and lovers. She didn’t like reminders of the past. But Kathy had been her only sibling and no one else had shared the same childhood.
She had no idea that Kathy had been in contact with their father.
After a few days off work, she had gone back to her job at a catering firm in Holborn. It mainly involved making fancy sandwiches for upmarket offices, which a fleet of young men took out on bicycles with big baskets, but they catered some special occasions as well, usually office parties but sometimes book launches or after-show parties, where the clients were usually more interested in the drink than the food.
Home late after one such party, she poured herself a glass of white wine and opened up her computer for the first time in weeks, intending to catch up with some friends on Facebook. The first thing she noticed was an e-mail from her dead sister.
Hey stranger,
I’m in Venice! Remember how we used to talk about coming here? Not the Danieli but this place, the Gritti Palace, is quite cool. He is paying for everything, one way or another. Read the attachment, at least the last story. It’s all there. I’ve had enough. Blackmail has lost its novelty, I’m up for revenge now. You?
* * *
The hit man answered his door as carelessly as the woman had. Three shots with a silencer and he was dead. The new assassin searched the man’s possessions, took the flash drive from his pocket, and slipped down the stairs as quietly as he had come in. No one would ever associate this crime with the other one: no connection, quite different MOs, and nothing as sophisticated as CCTV in the Hotel Roxy. He waited till he had crossed several little bridges and was in another sestiere before pulling out his phone.
Stefano realized that they needed to concentrate on someone leaving with a bag concealing the victim’s laptop. He asked the person who had worked the shift after his and then reviewed the records for checkouts late at night, which were not that uncommon in the upmarket hotels.
So the gondoliers had a name, almost certainly a false one. And a photocopy of a forged passport. The face was not very distinctive, but hundreds of copies were made of the man’s photo. Before their inquiries had gotten very far underway, however, there was the same face, with a neat bullet hole over one eye, in the papers. He was a bleached blonde now, but the killer was dead.
At that point Giorgio and Stefano went to the police. The gondoliers were the only ones who had made a connection between the man at the Hotel Roxy and the murder at the Gritti Palace.
And the second hit man had made a silly mistake. He had gone to a bar and drunk several cocktails, then flagged down a passing gondola. There was a poster on it saying, Have you seen this man? And a reward offered. The passenger had started to laugh hysterically and the gondolier became suspicious. He had leaped on his passenger and held him down, calling for help from his fellow oarsmen.
Stefano and Giorgio then took the detectives to where they had the man bound in a safe house and there they found the flash drive.
Russell Hughes thought he had gotten away with it, as he had last time. The computer had been deep-sixed somewhere in the muddy waters of a Venetian canal. The strangler had been eliminated.
There had been sympathy at work; a terrible thing for a father to lose his daughter so. Not one of the employees knew she had been given a contract for a book. He had drawn it up himself after hours, using the office template, buying time; he had never intended to publish it.
Now it was a closed book. He roused himself to take a tie from his desk drawer and a brush to push through his unruly hair. They were having a launch party tonight for a celebrity memoir whose advance orders were looking so healthy it was clear the house was going to make serious money. There was already the sound of laughter and clinking glasses coming from the boardroom; he must get a move on or he would be late.
A young woman in a black dress and a white apron gave him a glass of champagne as he entered the room to subdued greetings. The celebrity author had not arrived—was waiting to make an entrance. Another young woman in the same uniform stepped forward to offer him a canapé. There was something familiar about her.
“Hello, Dad,” she said.
“Tabitha!” He didn’t have a chance to wonder why she was there; a commotion erupted in the doorway, which could only mean the Big Name had entered the building.
But no, there were policemen and they were coming toward him. Handcuffs appeared and his rights were read. The house photographer was flashing away—at this stage everyone thought it was a stunt.
Everyone except Russell and Tabitha Hughes. He was staring at her. She looked like her sister—and her mother too. She was smiling. But how had she known?
“‘The Good Father,’” she whispered as they took him away.
He had a stroke in the elevator as they told him about the evidence from his younger daughter’s computer and the connection established by the gondoliers between two seemingly unrelated deaths in Venice.
They didn’t know about Caroline. He tried to tell them. But all that came out was, “Short stories are notoriously difficult to sell.”
They were his last words.