22.

WE CLIMBED UP from the beach and plunged back into the blazing galleries. The blaring chatter ricocheted off the white walls faster than ever, and no one seemed to be looking at the art, which posed patiently in its vitrines like statues in Midas’s garden. We threaded our way among the shifting groups, the eccentrically cut dresses and colorful cummerbunds and glittering handbags and women’s eyes painted to look like peacock feathers. No Bernard. As we approached the end of the colonnade, I began to worry, realizing that the door would certainly be locked; I didn’t have a key, we would have to find Agnes and ask her for it. But the handle gave at once under my hand. A black gap yawned in the white surface of the wall, and we slid through, pulling the door shut behind us.

It was pitch-black in the hallway. The cascading lights were off. Pipes clanked in the walls, and my heart clapped like a muted bell in my chest as Chris switched on a flashlight, swinging the beam around to take the measure of the space. Aiming the light downward, he picked out the perforated metal wedges of the spiral staircase steps. “This way?”

There wasn’t any other way to go.

Down and around he clattered, disappearing into the dark until I could see only the top of his head, the pale fuzz that I tried to keep in view as I picked my way down as fast as I dared, clutching the railing, the smell of damp earth filling my nostrils. I could hear Agnes’s voice as though her words still echoed in the stairwell: Careful. You don’t want to fall.

Below me, the footsteps stopped. There was no sound, only the yellow glow of the flashlight beam. Then Chris’s voice rang out cheerily: “Hey—this is better than the stuff upstairs. You should charge people money and let them come down here!”

Another voice floated up toward me. “I thought you were a man of simple tastes,” it said. It was Bernard’s voice, though stretched and made echoey by the shape of the stairwell, giving it a ghostly sound.

“No. Just modest means.”

“You could always start taking bribes.”

“How much are you offering?”

“Me? Why—did I do something?”

I hurried down the remaining stairs and stepped into the long, low room with its carpets and carvings and fringed silk scarves, its heavy textured wallpaper and haunting smell of jasmine. “I don’t know,” Chris said lightly. “Did you?”

Bernard lay stretched out on one of the velvet sofas with a cigarette between his lips, the smoke catching the light from a single lamp burning on a polished side table. I had never seen him smoke before. In his tuxedo, with his full lips and his dark eyes and the elegant sweep of his wrist as he dangled the cigarette over the edge of the sofa, he looked like a movie star from the thirties, the kind who was most handsome when dissipated. One ankle was crossed over the other, and his shined and tasseled loafers winked in the light, the crimson tip of his cigarette reflected in the patent leather. A fluted glass sweated on an inlaid table within arm’s reach. Seeing me, he struggled to sit up, then changed his mind and fell back again into the cushions. “Cara! I apologize. I’m not discharging my duties very well.”

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”

“Drinking and smoking. As you see.”

Chris fiddled with a cloisonné box. “That’s what they’re doing upstairs too.”

“But without the same concentration,” Bernard said.

Chris opened the lid, raised his pale eyebrows, and shut it again. I leaned against the wall, running my fingers over the seaweedlike ridges in the wallpaper. It was clear enough to me why Bernard was here: it was the closest he could get to being with Alena. I thought how they must have snuck down to this room together during the openings of the past, tossing back a quick drink before reemerging, fortified by intimacy and gin. How they must have laughed together, compared notes, shared triumph or exasperation—maybe shared a cigarette too, or a joint. I could see them passing it back and forth, her violent lipstick making its way, via that burning conduit, to his mouth.

Bernard exhaled streams of smoke through his nostrils. “You want some bourbon?” he asked Chris.

“Actually, I’m working.” There was a pause, and something seemed to shift, the way the ocean floor shifts underwater after a storm. Then Chris said, “I wanted to let you know. The boot we found matches a description of one that belonged to Alena.”

I want to say a silence descended over the room—that was what it felt like—but really the world clanged and clamored on as noisily as ever. The ocean crashed; the crickets trilled; the sounds of the party drifted toward us as though from another country. Still, there was that sensation: as though the volume on a film had been suddenly turned down.

“Who told you that?” Bernard’s voice was like a shiny glaze on fired clay.

“She had distinctive things, didn’t she? This boot, it’s pink plastic. Translucent. Studded with stars. Some designer, apparently, I forget the name. Plastic holds up pretty well in seawater, as we know from those sad pictures of sea turtles crippled by six-pack rings.”

Bernard stubbed his cigarette out in a green glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me.” He directed his words at the primrose-yellow ceiling. “We agreed a few days ago, a swimmer wouldn’t be wearing a boot.”

“Well, maybe she wasn’t swimming,” Chris said.

“What would she have been doing, then?”

“I thought you might be able to tell me.”

Bernard swung his legs around and sat up. He stared at Chris, his eyes pale and cold. “How would I know? I was in Venice.” He pulled a cigarette case out of his pocket. It was gold, sleek, engraved with his initials: B.O.A. I realized I had no idea what the O stood for—what his middle name might be. I didn’t know Bernard, not really. Not at all. Waiting for him to answer, I started running through possibilities in my mind: Oscar, Oliver, Owen, Oswald. The long blunt-tipped fingers dipped back into the tuxedo pocket and emerged with a lighter, also gold. He spun the wheel, producing a gold-colored flame. Even the cigarettes themselves, longer and slimmer than the Marlboros my father smoked, were goldish in hue—the color of sunflowers in autumn. Bernard lit one and let the case clatter onto the table. He drew a long pull of smoke into his lungs and it drifted out through his flared nostrils, diffusing the harsh, haunting smell of burning tobacco into the jasmine air.

Orlando, Omar, Otis.

“I just thought,” Chris said, “you might have some idea. Who she gave things to. Or whose boat, say, she might have gone out on. I know she didn’t have one of her own.”

“If she’d disappeared from someone’s boat, wouldn’t they have reported it?” Bernard said.

“Or maybe she took a boat out by herself.”

“Then where is it now?”

Otto? Obadiah? Or maybe it was a family name—Oakes or Ogilvy, Osmond or Olson—in which case I’d never guess it, not in a million years.

Chris leaned forward and picked up Bernard’s cigarette case. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it sank. I don’t know anything, really, except that things were different than we thought before. Maybe Alena swam out alone and got caught in a current, and maybe she didn’t. I came to ask if you could help me. I know it’s difficult.”

“I’d like to help,” Bernard said. “I wish I could.”

“Why don’t you tell me about Venice,” Chris said. “Let’s start with that.”

Bernard’s cigarette had burned down and his glass was empty. His fingers toyed with the edge of his pocket in a way that made him look old, like an old man worrying his bathrobe. I didn’t like it, seeing him like that. I crossed the thick Sarouk carpet and sat on the sofa next to him, and I took his hand. It was cold, as though he had been out gloveless in the snow. I thought of my grandparents’ stories about carrying hot stones or baked potatoes in their pockets during the bitter Wisconsin winters. Bernard could have used some of those.

“We were supposed to meet at a party,” he said at last. “A grand reception. But she never came.” His voice sounded different now that I was sitting so close. Less hollow. It sounded flatter and scratchier, like an old record, like he had something unclearable caught in his throat.

“And?”

“And, nothing. I thought she must have missed her connection. Or that the flight had been delayed. When I got back to the hotel, I asked at the desk, and they said she hadn’t checked in, so I figured it was that, a problem with a flight, and I put it out of my mind. And then the next day, I kept thinking she’d show up. Probably I called her cell and got no answer. Obviously. But I wasn’t worried. Things come up. Alena was impulsive. The reason we weren’t traveling together was that she’d decided to visit some friends in Paris first. She’d switched her flight. I thought she might have decided to stay on longer there and not bothered to tell me. It was the sort of thing she might do.”

In my corner of the sofa, I held my breath. I’d thirsted for information about Alena the way a plowed field thirsts for rain, and now the first drops were scattering from the darkened skies.

“Did you call the friends?”

“I didn’t have their number.”

“Did you call Agnes? Or anyone at the Nauk?”

“No. Not for a few days.”

“Why not?”

“Because Alena was in Paris.”

Chris shrugged. “You thought she’d changed her plans and stayed in Paris, but you didn’t think she might have changed her plans and never gone there at all?”

Bernard hesitated, thinking about that. “No,” he said. “In my mind she was in Paris.”

“Still, Agnes might have heard from her. They were so close.”

“I think Agnes had gone away too,” Bernard said. “I think her mother was dying.”

Chris nodded. He didn’t have a notebook, or if he did, he wasn’t using it. I thought he must already know where Agnes had been when Alena disappeared. I remembered now that Agnes had told me she’d gone away when Alena went to Venice, that her mother had been ill. Dying, Bernard said. How terrible for Agnes to lose her mother and Alena at the same time. I found that I felt sorry for her.

“And then?”

“And then nothing. I called her phone a bunch of times. I believe I was annoyed. I thought she was being irresponsible, having fun in Paris, or, I don’t know, maybe she had gone on somewhere else. I was angry that she wasn’t returning my calls.”

“But you did eventually call the Nauk, a few days later. Tell me about that.”

“I called Sloan and asked her if anyone had happened to hear from Alena. She said no, but that Agnes had called asking the same thing. Agnes had emailed Alena, texted her, and hadn’t heard back.”

“Agnes was worried. Were you?”

“No.” Bernard’s scratchy tone hollowed, harshened. “I’ve never known anyone who could take care of herself better than Alena!”

“Well,” Chris said mildly. “But apparently not so well, after all.”

“Look,” Bernard said. “After a certain point, I threw my hands up. I could picture her, sitting in Paris or wherever, seeing my name come up on her phone and not answering. Counting up my messages to see how many there were. One thing about Alena, she craved attention. She liked you to think about her before you thought about anyone else. I was getting tired of it.”

“Of course,” Chris said. “But I still don’t really understand. It’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have shown up in Venice—the Biennale is the art-world event, right?—and you wouldn’t have been worried about her, even a little? Even if she could take care of herself. Even if you were annoyed at her. Unless maybe you’d had an argument?”

Bernard didn’t answer right away. I waited, perched on the velvet sofa, my fist pulsing like a heart inside his hand. Then he said, “We had disagreed. That’s true. About the direction the Nauk should take.”

“Disagreed how?”

Yes, I thought, how?

“About what kind of art we should show. Alena was increasingly interested in more extreme art than I was.”

I could almost hear Chris Passoa thinking: More extreme than piles of candies having something to do with AIDS?

“What, specifically?”

Bernard’s voice was still flat, but an acid derision seemed to leak up around the edges, eating away at his impassivity. “Body art. Performative stuff. She had experimented with that—doing it, I mean—before she was a curator. You were talking about her masquerades the other day. But this was different.”

“Performative?”

“Like Marina . Vito Acconci. Michel Journiac. Have you heard of any of them?”

“No.”

Bernard looked at me.

I said, “Michel Journiac is best known for giving out pieces of blood sausage, made from his own blood, during a mock Mass. For Marina ’s most famous work, she lay down next to an array of seventy-two objects, including a feather, a gun, a rose, honey, scissors. The audience could use these things to do anything they wanted to her. And they did.”

Policeman or not, Chris looked shocked. Which was, of course, the point. “Alena wanted to do things like that at the Nauk?”

“Not exactly like that,” Bernard said.

I thought of Morgan McManus, his intricate prostheses and fabricated corpses and recorded screams. But that was more atrocity art than body art—more documentary than performance. It wasn’t as though McManus was mutilating himself; the war had done that work for him.

“So you argued about that? And then you went off to Venice, and when she didn’t show up, you thought, Just as well. Is that what you’re saying?”

Bernard’s hand grew heavier in mine as though somebody had turned gravity up. “Look,” he said. “I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. You don’t even know if those are Alena’s bones.”

“That’s true,” Chris said. “I don’t.”

“Like you said, maybe she gave the boots away. Maybe she sold them on the internet!”

Chris ran a hand through the fuzz on his head. “Maybe,” he said. But I don’t think anybody in the room believed Alena would do that.

Upstairs, the opening was winding down, and down in Alena’s room, the interrogation was too. Chris stood up.

“Great show,” he said to me. “Great to see the Nauk open again.” Halfway to the door he stopped and turned. “We should go fishing sometime, Bernard. You still fish, don’t you? Even if you don’t sail.”

“It’s been a while.”

“Why did you sell your boats, by the way?”

Bernard sighed. “I was tired of sailing.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. I mean, there was a time, Bernard. I remember a time when sailing was your life.”

He left the door open when he went out. I thought I should follow him up the stairs, but I had entered that state beyond exhaustion when the mind empties and shimmers like a soap bubble, floating up seemingly outside one’s body. And besides, Bernard kept hold of my hand. “Stay a moment,” he said. “I meant to say—congratulations on your show, cara. Have I said that yet?”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. It’s a beautiful exhibition. Thoughtful and compelling. And you did it so quickly, and with so unconscionably little help.”

The soap bubble quivered and thrilled. “Thank you,” I said again.

“You should be prepared, though,” he went on gently, like a parent explaining to a child why she can’t have a kitten. “I doubt it’s going to get much attention. Don’t let it upset you, it’s just the nature of these things.”

I looked at him, amazed. “There are three hundred people upstairs!”

“For the party. Free food and drink. And, of course, because they’re curious. About you, and me, and about the Nauk.” And about Alena, he didn’t have to say; she was all around us, her body in the rich and opulent objects, her breath in the very air. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

I heard him with my ears, but his words didn’t touch me. I was too light, too high, drifting in the scented eddies up by the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

Bernard leaned back into the plush cushions, sighing, pulling me back too; pulling me toward him until my head rested on his shoulder. I shut my eyes, breathing in the smell of his jacket, his fine white shirt, his skin. “I’ve been— I haven’t been . . .” he said. “Since we got back. I brought you here and then— You’ve deserved a better employer. I’m sorry.” His voice clanged hollowly, like the hulk of a rusted ship hitting rock.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I must have known then, dimly, or suspected; not what he had done exactly, which no one could have guessed, but that he had done something. Like a swimmer caught in a current, I flailed in the tide of my dawning knowledge, unwilling to acknowledge or even consider the implacable, indelible truth.

Upstairs, the party glittered and tintinnabulated on, though its ranks had thinned somewhat. It was undeniable that more sparkling, swaying guests were topping off their glasses than looking at Celia’s work. I slid among them, inconspicuous enough in my black dress, and then, finding the heat and noise unbearable, I ducked out the door, thinking I would go home. Outside, Chris had stopped to chat with some people I didn’t recognize. I tried to slip by, but he caught up to me as I started down the path. “Hey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well,” he said. “Things have changed.”

I didn’t answer. He walked with me down the slope in the dark, through the trilling of the crickets and the rocking of the waves. I kept my head down. I found I didn’t want to look at him. At last he grasped my arm to stop me, the sudden warmth of his hand making me realize how cold I was: cold and wrung out, my ears ringing with voices and screeching laughter and wheezing evasions and half-truths.

“You’re caught up in something,” he said. “You stumbled into it. It has nothing to do with you.”

I looked up, but instead of Chris’s steady noontide face looking down at me, it was Bernard’s face I saw—his grizzled head and his gentleness and the darkness in his eyes. I saw him crouching beside me on the floor in the Arsenale in Venice, his questions and the smell of bitter oranges and his beautiful socks. I heard his voice in my ear as we entered the Scrovegni Chapel, saw him sitting across the table in the breakfast room at the Gritti saying, You could stay with me. He had reached out his hand and pulled me up into this new life. Even with Chris Passoa’s fingers tight on my arm, and warmth rooting through me from his hot skin, I knew, if I had to choose, whom I would choose. And it seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that I did have to.

I pulled away. “I wish you’d leave Bernard alone!” I said. And then I stumbled down the path through the dark.