45

The senatorial primary in Kentucky is a lively affair. Senator Royce Tillman competes for his seat against the sitting lieutenant governor, a man named Mitchell.

Mitchell is decent and honest, but untried on the national level. He is given to spontaneous acts of charity and compassion. He is sincere in his politics. He is unapologetically bald. He is quite dull and unengaging.

By comparison, Senator Royce Tillman is remarkably colorful. He has recovered from a debilitating bout of Asian brain fever. An imported virus. Just the sort of thing that, with the aid of the voters, he would help keep from our shores.

Tillman’s wife, Delores, joins him at campaign stops to gaze fondly upon him, kiss him chastely on the lips, hold tightly to his hand.

Senator Royce Tillman has killed a man in his Asian brain fever delirium, but the Lord has forgiven him for it. The man’s widow has forgiven him for it. She routinely joins Royce and Delores on the dais to weep with them before the flag.

From either side of the stage, nightly and with unswerving vigor, Lewis and Jack Proctor lead the applause.

It is a sort of a honeymoon for them. The three of them. The service was small and private. Janice wept uncontrollably. Ted and Duane sniped at each other in hissed whispers. Beatrice’s mother could hardly stop grinning. A son-in-law and a granddaughter, both at once!

After the vows were taken, they lingered in the chapel. Chatting. Snapping pictures. Sweetly and without prompting, Jenny threw her arms around Beatrice and kissed her on the cheek.

“Beety,” she said.

They landed in Venice on a gray, foggy afternoon and hired a water taxi to carry them to their hotel. Across the lagoon. Past Murano. Into the Rio di San Giustina that bisects the city.

There was just the low hum of the inboard as they traveled along the narrow canal. Through the mist. Between the lurching rows of stuccoed buildings in their tumbledown antiquity.

With a blast of his horn, their driver swung them into the San Marco basin. Jenny, quite audibly, gasped.

Gondolas. Barges. Vaporetti. The twin columns on the molo. The teeming tourists. The delicate, pink, moorish facade of the Palazzo Ducale.

They have eaten tiny, tender calamaretti at Da Fiore. Razor clams at La Corte Sconta. Pastries at Cafe Florian. They have followed Beatrice through the cramped, winding alleyways of the city into gloriously sun washed campos. They have waded in the Adriatic. They have visited Beatrice’s whiskery uncle on Murano.

They have purchased, finally, tickets to the doge’s palace. They have toured the armory. The prison. They have crossed the Bridge of Sighs. They stand in the massive council chamber looking up at the veiled painting of Marino Falieri.

“It’s Latin,” Beatrice says. “‘Here is the place of Marino Falieri, beheaded for his crimes’.”

“Doesn’t look like much from here, does it?” Doug says as he gazes toward the ceiling.

Jenny tugs at Doug’s hand.

“Please, Daddy.”

She has discovered gelato. There is a stand on the Rialto. The vendor knows her name.

“Okay, okay. Here we go.”

They leave the council chamber. They move along a vaulted corridor and out onto the Giants’ Stairway. They descend into the courtyard below. It is just as Doug remembers from his dream. The massive statuary. The carved railings. The tiles pitched and sloped toward an ancient stone grate.

Doug would like to peer into the drain, but Jenny grabs him. She tugs at him.

“Daddy, please!”

“Go on,” he tells her. “We’re coming.”

Jenny runs ahead, through the gateway and into the piazza.

Doug smiles at Beatrice. He takes her face in his hands. He kisses her.

Arm in arm, the walk through the porta della carta and into the sun-drenched plaza beyond.

A Japanese tourist in the cavernous council chamber is the first to notice. He points, speechless.

The paint on the veiled portrait of the Doge Marino Falieri bubbles and blisters. It liquifies and runs in streaks down the polished marble chamber wall. A hushed and reverential silence falls upon the room.

Paint melts and drains from the canvas until it is virtually scoured and unmarked. An aged and parchment yellow. As if it has never seen the first speck of pigment. The first stroke of a brush.

Deep in the drain of the palace courtyard, along a fractured length of clay pipe, scarlet lizards are piled thick upon each other. They clot the way. Their yellow eyes glow. They smolder.

The smoke thickens and billows as the creatures go to ash. A scarlet plume boils out of the grate and wafts up the Giants’ Stairway. A uniformed guard on the upper balcony shouts with alarm. “Fuoco!”

As Doug, Beatrice, and Jenny board a vaporetto on the Riva, carabinieri run into the Piazza. From the east along the fondamenta. From the north beyond the clock tower. They blow their whistles to clear the way. They dash toward the ornate gateway of the Palazzo Ducale. It boils with gaudy scarlet smoke.

Beatrice and Jenny and Doug stand at the rail of the water bus. Oblivious to the tumult behind them, they look out across the lagoon. They admire the Redentore. They debate restaurants for dinner.

The vaporetto warps away from it mooring and swings out into the chop. It chugs west across the San Marco Basin. Away up the Grand Canal.

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