JESSICA OPENS HER eyes but doesn’t turn toward the man who just entered the auditorium. She waits until her nostrils catch the scent of his sweet aftershave.
“Zesika,” Colombano says. His voice bears a hint of sarcasm, presumably in an attempt to mask his surprise and confusion.
Jessica turns. Colombano is looking at her with his hands deep in the pockets of his khaki trousers, his white dress shirt unbuttoned nearly to his navel.
“You’ve come back to Venice,” he says as the woman Jessica now knows is his sister slips through the door and shuts it behind her. The two of them are alone now.
Jessica notices her voice is shaking. “I never left.”
Colombano chuckles. “What?”
“I’ve been in Murano this whole time.”
For a moment Colombano shakes his head as if Jessica is utterly mad. Maybe she is. And not because she’s been lying, paralyzed, in a hotel room for months on end, but because she has come back.
“Listen. I’m sorry we ended the way we did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, Zesika. Look at yourself. . . . You look terrible, frankly. How did such a beautiful, well-dressed girl turn into such a . . . fat, dowdy troll?”
“So I’m not your princess anymore? Something you want to share with your friends?”
Colombano bursts out in a rollicking laugh. “I never shared you with anyone.”
“No, you didn’t. Your friend just watched while you raped me.”
“You’re talking crazy. Come on, now, let’s go out from here.”
“I know Chiara’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I know she committed suicide because she couldn’t take it anymore. Because you’re a narcissist who sucks up all the oxygen in the room. You have a way of making a person feel important, desirable. But you’re even better at dragging them back down to earth, stripping them of all self-respect and self-esteem—”
“Shut your mouth.”
“But I wanted you to know,” Jessica says, and now her eyes grow moist from tears for the first time in weeks, as if the numbness that took over her mind and body for months has released its grip during one sentence, “that I see through you. And I despise you. And so does your sister.”
Colombano guffaws. “You have some nerve.”
“Go ahead, laugh. We both know it’s an act.”
“You don’t know anything, you fucking whore.” Colombano stalks over and grabs her wrist, yanks her to her feet. “You know what I think? I bet you’re still so in love with me that you couldn’t leave. And in the end you came back to me like a junkie craving their fix. Am I right? You came back for more of what you think you hate . . . but that you really love.”
Colombano says these last words right at the base of Jessica’s ear, spraying warm spittle onto her throat. She looks him in the eye and feels a swelling panic inside. Colombano’s powerful fingers are wrapped around her slender wrist. She came her of her own free will, put herself at the mercy of this sadistic man. The two of them are alone in the auditorium. No one is going to come to her aid.
“Come.” Colombano wrenches Jessica down the row of seats toward the door. Her knee bumps painfully against a chair, knocking it over. She is clutching her little purse in her free hand.
“No!” Jessica cries, her voice echoing in the deserted space.
Colombano’s grip on her wrist tightens, and Jessica feels a tingling in her fingers where the blood isn’t properly circulating. He yanks her past the tall pillars into a smaller room and across it to a door at the far side.
“Let go of me!”
“Don’t pretend you came here just to talk. . . .”
Colombano opens the door and shoves Jessica in so hard that she falls face-first to the floor. She catches a glimpse of the room: it’s an office of some sort, its walls covered with old concert posters; there are a desk with computers in the middle of it, a threadbare sofa, and an outside door on the opposite wall.
Jessica hears a rustling and clinking in Colombano’s hands, then feels a leather belt around her throat.
“You show up here just to fuck with me! To spoil my concert . . . to ruin my concentration.”
Jessica tries to breathe; her fingers fumble for her throat and the belt tightened around it. She feels Colombano raise her black dress and sink his fingers deep into the flesh of her buttocks. Jessica screams and reaches for her purse, which has fallen to the floor. Her fingers grab at the strap, at the wooden handle jutting out from inside.
“You don’t deserve any answers. . . . You were just a girl at the cemetery. Do you think you’re the only one? You’re all so fucking predictable and weak. And stupid! Coming here alone to pester me, ask dumb questions. Am I sorry? No, you dumb cow. Look at yourself. You’re fat! A twenty-year-old slut . . . If I didn’t have to discipline you, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole anymore—”
Colombano’s sentence ends in an abrupt thud. For a moment, all is utterly still; then he roars and rises. Jessica feels the belt around her neck give, and she rolls over onto her back.
Colombano takes a few dazed steps backward, tries to see where his gaze can’t fully turn, spies the handle of the steak knife sticking out under his collarbone. Farther up, on either side of his Adam’s apple, blood pumps from two stab wounds. For a second, it looks as if he has horns, but when he steps forward, it turns out to be a poster for the opera Faust.
“What the fuck . . . ?” he rasps, and grabs the knife handle. Blood drips between his fingers. He and Jessica look at each other in astonishment, as if they are seeing each other for the first time in some wholly unexpected place. He manages to pull the blade out only an inch and grimaces in pain.
“You fucking whore!”
All calculation and resolve have evaporated from Colombano’s eyes. All that’s left is pure rage. He takes a few strides and lunges at Jessica with all his strength. Jessica feels his blood drip onto her face, his powerful, rough fingers around her throat. His animal roar in her ears. And only now does Jessica understand why she returned to this accursed building, why she wanted to confront this monster again: she believed Colombano would do what she hasn’t been capable of during these months alone in her hotel room. Soon everything will be over.
But then Colombano’s grip slips.
Jessica opens her eyes. The man who was on top of her, bearing down on her with all his weight, is gone.
“Oletko kunnossa?”
Jessica doesn’t recognize the voice, but the words are Finnish. Are you all right?
She hears a faint cry from Colombano. A stranger steps across her. Jessica lies there, letting her breathing steady. Eventually she wipes her blood-smeared face and sits up. The leather belt is lying on the floor, but she can still feel it choking her.
Colombano is lying a few meters away, knife in his chest. Next to his wheezing carcass stands a man, about forty years old. The same man Jessica saw earlier that evening in the audience. His fingers are wrapped around a small statuette, which he presumably used to wallop Colombano in the back of the head.
“Who . . . who are you?” Jessica asks, and notices how foreign the Finnish words sound when she utters them. She hasn’t spoken Finnish in ages.
“Jessica. Listen,” the man says, wiping blood from his forehead. “It was self-defense.”
He speaks calmly, and Jessica thinks she can make out a dialect of some sort.
“Is he—”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, damn it. . . .”
At that instant, Colombano’s body goes limp, and his hands fall lifelessly to his sides. Jessica bursts into silent tears.
“We have to get out of here,” the man continues, glancing around nervously. He stalks over to the door he entered through a moment earlier and makes sure the auditorium is still empty. Then he locks the door and walks over to the outside door. He carefully cracks it, thrusts his head out, and returns to Jessica.
“You don’t want to hang around to figure this out with the Venice police. And I don’t either. We have to leave this mess behind. Go back to Helsinki.”
“We? Who . . . who the hell are you?”
“I came to bring you home. People are worried about you.”
“What people?”
“Your aunt.”
“But—”
“Jessica,” the man says, and squeezes Jessica’s shoulders. He smells of stale tobacco and faintly of whisky. His face is hard and deeply grooved but gentle. “There’s a sink over there,” he says in a firm voice. “Wash your face and walk out that door. It leads to a little canal. The street looked empty when I looked out. But check to be sure before you step out. No one must see you, under any circumstances.”
“But what . . . ?” Jessica stammers as the man shifts his worried face to the prone Colombano. The violinist’s eyes are open, staring into eternity.
“I’ll clean up this mess. Go to your hotel in Murano and wait for me there. I’ll come as fast as I can. And then we’ll leave. I promise you, everything is going to be OK.”
Jessica starts sobbing as she looks at the man. Only now does she realize that what she hears in the man’s voice is a foreign accent. “Who are you?”
“Erne,” he says, pulling his police badge out of his breast pocket. “You can trust me.”