At a quarter to six, Orlando, who’d been playing Happy Spiders all afternoon, insisted they go back to the apartment and wait for Renzo.
They walked back through the thickening fog. She paused at the top of the Accademia Bridge, the view reduced to hazy pinpoints of light in the fog. In the glow of her cellphone, she looked at one of the padlocks attached to the railing. It was professionally engraved with a heart encircling the names Morgan and Phillip. What happened when Morgan and Phillip were no longer in love? She imagined one of them returning and sawing off the lock.
Olivia and Orlando were descending the bridge’s steps when Orlando’s phone rang. “Pronto,” he said. There was a brief pause. “No problemo, ciao.” He dropped the phone back into his pocket. “That was Columbo. There’s a hundred-car pileup on the causeway. It’ll take them all night to clear it. Renzo’s stuck in it, so you’re stuck with me. The airport’s closed too. Not even a vaporetto running. There’s no way into the city and no way out. We’re entirely cut off from the rest of the world.”
While he made it sound dramatic, he didn’t sound terribly displeased, and it hardly mattered to Olivia one way or another.
“You have anything to eat at your apartment?” he asked. “I know it’s early, but I’m starving.”
She shook her head. “I was supposed to be in New York, remember? There might be a jar of spaghetti sauce and some pasta.”
“Yuck. No self-respecting Italian eats spaghetti sauce from a jar. Mind if we stop off for some dinner? There’s a spot behind the Accademia that opens early.”
It was a place Marco had once recommended to her. “Sure,” she said, although she didn’t feel the least bit hungry.
She followed him in. They were alone in the restaurant except for a couple of tourists standing at the bar poring over a map.
Orlando encouraged her to eat, and she consented to a fruit salad, the only thing on the menu she thought she could choke down.
“You want to watch a movie tonight?” Orlando asked. “I noticed you had some thrillers. How about Fargo?”
“I’ve seen that a million times with my cousin. Maybe later. Right now, I want to go for a walk.”
“A walk? It’s miserable out.”
“I don’t care. And if the city is at a standstill and no one can get in or out, your job should be easy.” She knew she sounded irritable, but she didn’t care.
“Not how I want to spend a cold, damp evening, but if you insist,” he said resignedly. “Where do you want to go?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her phone pinged. Heart pounding, she grabbed it. But, of course, it wasn’t Alessandro. It was only Marco. What are you up to tonight? Aron and I planning on a quiet evening in our hotel room—though we’re hoping to keep up the steamy theme. ;) Hope you’re okay.
Olivia typed: Just had dinner in the place you like behind the Accademia. Going for a walk now. Have a nice evening. It might be uncharitable of her, but Marco’s happiness only made her feel worse.
Marco replied instantly: Can you check on my building and make sure water isn’t creeping over the doorstep? I might have to call the caretaker.
Sure, she texted back. I’ll be there in an hour or so.
Outside, the fog was deeper, if such a thing were possible. With Orlando a couple of steps behind her, they walked toward the Salute. She wrapped her scarf around her neck one more turn and pulled her hat down over her ears. The narrow streets were dark and empty, the fog muffling their footsteps.
A few minutes later, they crossed the bridge into the campo of the Salute. A few people, not yet realizing the vaporetti had stopped running, stood waiting in the shelter, but other than that it was deserted.
She climbed the steps of the church and gazed across the canal, wondering if the faint golden glow coming from the other side was from the chandelier hanging in Silvio Milan’s piano nobile. She remembered standing on Silvio’s balcony on her first day in Venice and looking over to where she was standing now, convinced she was the luckiest woman alive.
Another little circle of light appeared a few palazzos down. Beatrix’s? It had only been two nights since Beatrix’s party, but it seemed like a million years ago.
She turned toward the church doors and almost stumbled over the blind woman, Maria, kneeling in the shadows, head bent over her empty basket.
“Buonasera, Signorina Olivia,” Maria said. It always amazed Olivia that Maria recognized her from her step.
“Buonasera, Maria. You should go home. It’s miserable out.”
“A night for ghosts and evil,” Maria whispered earnestly.
While Olivia wasn’t superstitious, she couldn’t help but shudder at the words. If ever there were a night to believe in spirits, this was it.
“Isn’t the church usually closed by now?” Olivia asked.
“Special mass tonight at twenty hundred hours. So I keep watch. Undercover stakeout,” she whispered conspiratorially.
Olivia opened her purse to give her customary two-euro coin, but other than a couple of pennies, her wallet held only fifty-euro bills. What the hell, she thought and put one in the basket. Maria felt its size, her blind eyes opening wider. She stammered an objection, but Olivia insisted she take it.
Maria relented and, after thanking her, tucked it beneath her coat in the bosom of her dress.
“You’re crazy,” Orlando said as they went inside. “Fifty euros?”
“Someone might as well be happy tonight,” she said blandly.
Orlando stood at the door as she wandered around the circular perimeter. Except for the saints who watched from darkened altar paintings, the church was empty. It was silent too, the only sound the echo of her own footsteps on the marble floor. Below the central dome, candles glowed in their red-glass holders, little dots of warmth in the shadowy interior.
She paused in front of the organ where she and Alessandro had listened to the vespers. For Prayers Only, a sign stated. She was tempted, but then, somewhat ashamed by her prayer’s selfish nature, she went back outside.
“I don’t think anyone’s going to come for mass tonight,” she said to Maria.
“I keep watch on church then,” Maria said. “Night for ghosts and evil. Make sure no bad guys steal paintings.”
Olivia smiled in spite of herself. Maria sure took her “job” seriously. “Okay, but go home as soon as you can. You don’t want to catch a cold in this damp.”
Maria agreed, and Olivia and Orlando continued along the canal past the Customs House. Across the Grand Canal, the lights in San Marco were barely visible. She rounded the Customs House and followed the Giudecca Canal. With the water’s edge obscured by the deep fog, she hugged the building as she walked. Looking back, she saw her body had made a dark tunnel in the fog, like the tunnels she’d made through snowbanks as a child. Indeed, this fog was like being lost in a blizzard. Orlando was nowhere to be seen, and she panicked, worried he’d stepped off into the dark waters of the lagoon.
Then suddenly he was beside her, having burrowed his own tunnel.
Feeling spooked now, she turned down the fondamenta opposite the gondola yard and into the bar Al Bottegon. She ordered two red wines and handed one wordlessly to Orlando.
Despite having just eaten, Orlando ordered himself a plate of cicchetti, the appetizers the bar was famous for, and ate them as he watched the street through the bar’s mullioned window. They must have looked like a strange couple, ignoring each other within the small confines of the bar.
She stood with her back against the shelves of wine and listened to an old Venetian man recount a tale of another foggy night. Listening to his story were two other Venetians, only slightly younger, sipping spritzes, still firmly wrapped in their wool coats despite the warmth of the bar. The bar was owned by three generations of a family, and mother and son listened from behind the bar.
“A gondolier was on his way back to the gondola yard when he saw a woman in the Campo San Vio. She waved him down, and he drew up alongside her. She wore a long fur coat with a hood. Between the fog, the darkness, and the hood, he couldn’t make out her face. He asked her where she was going on such a terrible night, but she didn’t answer, pointing instead down the Rio de San Vio toward the Giudecca Canal.”
Olivia, catching the name of the canal she lived on, listened more closely.
“When he emerged onto the Giudecca Canal, he turned to follow the fondamenta toward the gondola yard just up here,” he said, nodding in the direction of the yard Olivia had passed on her way to the bar, “but she shook her outstretched arm toward the Giudecca, and the gondolier, assuming she wanted to go over to the island, turned into the fog. He couldn’t see a thing, but he was an experienced gondolier and confident he could get his passenger safely to the other side.
“It went smoothly at first, but when he’d reached the center of the canal, he heard a foghorn. Alarmed, he looked up and saw an enormous ship looming over them. His heart nearly stopped. He was sure he was about to be run through by the ship’s hull. But then a rope ladder fell from the ship into the gondola, and his passenger dropped her hood. Finally, he thought, I will see her face! Imagine his shock when instead of a face, he saw the ragged, bloody stump of her neck—her head was completely gone!
“He would have screamed, but he’d completely lost his voice. All he could do was watch in mute horror as the headless woman stepped onto the bottom rung of the ladder and disappeared from view. Then, to his further horror, the ship’s hull passed right over him. It didn’t sink him—it was a ghost ship made of fog, full of dead souls wailing for mercy.
“When the ship had finally passed over him, the gondolier was left alone in the fog. Shaking, he turned his gondola around and rowed back to the gondola yard. The next morning, the head of a young woman was found in the canal, bumping up against the sides of the Rio de San Vio. Her body was never found.”
A night for ghosts and evil, Maria had said.