Over three weeks went by. We had an early snowfall, and across the street, kids were running around the park, throwing snowballs and pulling plastic sledges behind them.
All I can remember about those three weeks is darkness. Every day the sky was overcast, and if the sun appeared at all, it was only as a dim crimson disk behind the Franks Building.
I had been commissioned by CBS to write the incidental music for a new courtroom-style quiz show called Asked And Answered, and I had signed a contract with the DDB Agency for six new Diet Pepsi commercials. But all of my inspiration seemed to have walked out of the door along with Kate. I sat at my keyboard for hours, tinkling random minor-key melodies, but they were all too discordant for TV jingles. You can’t sell Diet Pepsi with music that makes you cry.
The best piece I wrote was a soft, sad song about walking through a snowstorm, trying to catch up with the woman you love. As the snow falls thicker and thicker, she disappears from sight, and you can only follow her footsteps. Gradually, however, her footsteps are obliterated, too, and you have lost her for ever. I called it Snow Blind.
I drank too much Zinfandel and spent hours staring out of the window, hoping to see Kate coming down the steps, or walking in James J. Walker Park, across the street. Knowing that I would never be able to kiss her and hold her in my arms again made me feel as if my stomach had been completely filled with lead, like a cold casting, and I had a dull metallic taste in my mouth.
When I was awake, I kept thinking over and over: why did she lose faith in me? Why did she think she was asking too much of me? She had told me more than once that I had vision, and sensitivity, and resonance. She had said I could make her friends come to life. So what did she think I was lacking?
It couldn’t be trust. I had trusted her, hadn’t I, even when she seemed to be talking in conundrums? I had stayed in Stockholm when she had asked me, even after I had seen things that would have turned my hair gray, if it hadn’t been gray already. I had followed her to London, and seen horrors and pain and mysteries that seemed to have no logical connection whatsoever.
Maybe she thought I didn’t have the stones to do what she was eventually going to ask me. But I had already witnessed more weirdness than most people get to experience in the whole of their lives, and even if I was baffled and confused, I was still reasonably sane, and I wasn’t so frightened that I wanted to back out altogether. Why had she taken it as a sign of weakness that I had wanted to know what in God’s name was actually going on?
When I slept, I had nightmare after nightmare. In one, I was running through the Westerlunds’ apartment in Stockholm, trying to catch Elsa and Felicia as they fled along the corridors in their nightdresses. In another, I was hammering with my fists on our bedroom window in London, while Helena Philips stood in the yard outside, blazing from head to foot, her eyes staring and flames leaping out of her mouth, so that the skin of her lips blistered and curled.
In yet another, Kate and I were making love. As she climaxed, she threw herself backward and screamed, so that the chandelier exploded and our bedroom windows burst inward. We were deluged in glittering glass splinters, and our bed was turned into a bloodbath.
Every morning I woke up and put out my hand, even though I knew that Kate wouldn’t be lying next to me. Every morning I eased myself out of bed like a man twice my age, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all.
I stopped playing music in the evening, in the hope that I could hear Kate’s voice coming up through the floor. But all I ever heard was Victor, talking too loudly on his cellphone, or arguing, or singing along with Tony Bennett. Either that, or Tony Bennett himself, singing I Wish I Were In Love Again.
Now and again I heard the red-haired woman. Almost every time she left the house, she seemed to forget something, because she would slam the front door behind her, and then immediately unlock it again, and slam it again, and then go out a second time, with yet another slam. When Margot was with me, and the red-haired woman left the house like that, she always said, ‘slam, barn, thank you ma’am!’
Margot helped me a lot through those days. She would come around, and make me a sandwich, or one of her pasta dishes, but she didn’t try to cheer me up, or take my mind off Kate. She knew that I was hurting and that only time would heal what was wrong with me, not jokes.
One day I would feel angry with Kate, for taking me for granted. The next day I would feel angry with myself, for having allowed her to do it. The day after, I would simply feel lonely, and depressed, and I would sit playing Snow Blind over and over, and singing the lyric in a whisper.
The snowflakes fell so thick and fast
I couldn’t see where you had passed
You left me far behind
So many miles behind
Snow blind …
One evening I sat on the stairs outside the Solways’ apartment for nearly three hours, hoping that Kate might come in or out. Victor arrived home shortly after 10 p.m. He gave me an odd look and said, ‘Gideon! How are you doing, sport?’, after which I gave up waiting and climbed wearily back upstairs.
I thought of writing to her, or recording a message on a CD. In the end, I did both, but the letter was too long and read as if it had been written by a lovesick high-school student. The CD was better, especially since I played Snow Blind on it, as well as telling her how much I missed her. I addressed it to Mrs K. Solway, Strictly Confidential and put it into the Solways’ mailbox. I was taking a risk that Victor would open it, and play it, but who gave a shit? I had lost her anyhow.
One snowy morning, a little over a week later, I looked out of the window and saw Victor leaving the house, with Kate close behind him. I called out, ‘Kate!’ although she couldn’t have heard me, and I knocked on the window pane. This time, though, she didn’t look up at me, the way she had when I very first caught sight of her.
Victor stopped at the bottom of the steps and tugged on a pair of black leather gloves. He didn’t say goodbye to Kate, or even look at her, but started to walk briskly toward Hudson Street. Kate turned left, in the direction of Seventh Avenue, and it was then that I saw that she was carrying a wrapped-up bundle inside her overcoat. It was a baby, in the same blue knitted bonnet that I had seen before, with ear flaps. I couldn’t see its face.
‘Kate,’ I said, although no sound actually came out.
I ran downstairs in my socks and opened up the front door. I took the steps three at a time. I jogged along the sidewalk a little way, until I realized that I couldn’t see her. She had vanished into the snow, just like the woman in my song. Maybe she had hailed a cab, or a friend had picked her up.
A black man overtook me. He was wearing a huge padded coat, with a padded hood, so that he looked like a quilt on legs. He turned around and stared at me in my T-shirt and my socks, and there was such pity on his face that I almost felt sorry for myself.
I climbed the steps back into the house and it was only then that I realized that my socks were soaked.
*
I saw her again two days later. I was climbing out of a taxi after a meeting on Madison Avenue when I saw her walking diagonally across the park, in her overcoat and her gray woolly hat. I pushed twenty dollars into the cab driver’s hand and said, ‘Keep it.’ Then I dodged across the street and into the park. This time I was determined not to lose her.
I glimpsed her between the trees, about eighty yards in front of me. She was walking quite quickly and I could see now that she was pushing a stroller with a baby in it. I started to run. It was growing dark in the park and I knew that it would be closing soon.
I lost sight of her for a moment, but then I saw her again, and somehow she had managed to walk as far as the south-west corner of the handball court, over a hundred yards away.
‘Kate!’ I shouted. ‘Kate – wait up, will you!’
She kept on walking, and disappeared behind the fence. I ran after her again, but when I reached the handball court she had gone.
I walked slowly along the path toward Seventh Avenue. It was so gloomy that she could easily have hidden behind the fence someplace, or behind a tree, or the low concrete wall that surrounded the bocci ball court.
I stopped. Six or seven scraggy-looking pigeons waddled around me, expecting me to feed them.
‘Kate!’ I called out. ‘I don’t know whether you can hear me or not, but I really miss you! I don’t care what I have to do, I want you back!’
My voice echoed flatly around the handball court. An old woman in a plaid coat stood watching me, only twenty yards away, with her toothless mouth turned down like a caricature of a witch.
‘Kate! I need you, and I’ll do anything to make you happy! I’m beginning to see what you’re trying to show me! Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, I’ll help you, and I won’t ask any more questions! Did you listen to my song? I meant every word of it! I love you! I miss you, and I love you with all of my heart!’
I waited for a while, but even if she had heard me, Kate didn’t answer. The pigeons warbled crossly all around me, and the traffic rumbled, and after a few minutes the old woman in the plaid coat sniffed and coughed and wandered off. I don’t know what kind of public drama she had been expecting, but she was obviously disappointed.
I walked slowly back to St Luke’s Place, turning around every few yards to see if Kate might be following me, but the park was too shadowy now. When I climbed the front steps and opened the door, the first thing I heard was Tony Bennett, singing The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
I trudged up to the second-floor landing. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was tired, and dispirited, and just as confused by Kate’s behavior as ever. She must have heard me, when I first called out to her. Why hadn’t she stopped? She had nothing to be afraid of, and if she really didn’t want to see me ever again, all she had to do was say so. I was a thirty-one-year-old man, after all. I couldn’t pretend that it wouldn’t hurt me, but I would just have to learn to get over it.
As I reached the landing, however, I saw that I had an unexpected visitor. Malkin was sitting in front of my door, her paws neatly tucked in front of her.
I hunkered down and stroked her head, so that she flattened her ears. ‘Well now,’ I said, ‘why are you here, puss? Brought me a message, did you? Or did you only come up here because you were hungry?’
Malkin stretched herself up and clawed at my door. I let myself in and she followed me inside. Without hesitation, she trotted across to the window and jumped up on to the sill. I went up to her and said, ‘What?’
Across the street, I saw Kate, with her stroller, although now the stroller was empty. She was looking west, toward Hudson Street, although I couldn’t make out what she was looking at. All the same, I suddenly understood what she was doing; and she must have sensed how close I was to understanding it, or else she wouldn’t have sent Malkin up here.
The visions that I had seen in Stockholm and London were flashbacks of traumatic events that had happened in the recent past, and these visions of Kate were flashbacks, too. Once I had fitted them altogether, I would know exactly why she needed my help. She wasn’t yet showing me the finished jigsaw, but she was giving me some of the most important pieces. It was not only the Westerlunds and the Philips who had suffered, it was Kate, too.
The baby in the stroller and in her arms – the baby she called Michael – he wasn’t a friend’s baby that she was looking after, he was hers. He was the baby that Victor had fathered – the baby whose loss had made Victor so angry that he never wanted them to try for another.
I walked around my apartment, switching on the table lamps, but I didn’t draw the drapes. I didn’t know if she was still out there, in the street, but I guess I was trying to give Kate a sign that I had seen the light.
*
I didn’t go to bed that night until well after 2:30 a.m. I was hoping that Kate might come knocking at my door, looking for Malkin. But Malkin wolfed down a supper of liver pâté and prosciutto, which was all I had in the fridge, apart from some holey Swiss cheese, and then she curled herself up and went to sleep in one of my armchairs, as if she wasn’t expecting to be disturbed.
But the next morning, around 8:30 a.m., I heard something drop through my apartment door. I rolled out of bed and found that Malkin had beaten me to it, and was sniffing at a large brown envelope. I opened the door at once, but there was nobody there. I stepped out on the landing, and called ‘Hallo?’ but nobody answered. As I did so, Malkin ran between my legs and fled downstairs.
I waited for a moment and then I went back inside. The envelope contained two weighty objects, nearly six inches long, and even before I tore it open I knew what they were. Two new brass keys – obviously modern copies of antique keys, with plain bows but very complicated blades.
There was also a business-class air ticket for the following morning —Alitalia 7617 from JFK to Marco Polo airport, Venice – costing $7,618. And a sheet of notepaper with a handwritten address on it: Professore Enrico Cesaretti, Apt # 1, Palazzetto Di Nerezza, Campo San Polo, San Polo, Venezia.
That was all. No note, no explanation. No invitation. Not even, ‘Dear Gideon, I’m sorry for everything I said … I really do love you after all.’ But she didn’t really need to. If she had listened to the song that I had recorded for her, and heard me shouting out to her in the park, she would know that I forgave her everything.
I went into the kitchen and switched on my Nespresso coffee machine. While it was spitting and gurgling, I weighed up the two brass door-keys in the palm of my hand. I couldn’t believe how much of a rush I felt. I had always wanted to visit Venice, and now I was not only going to visit Venice, but get back with Kate again, too.
I sat down at my keyboard and played The One-Handed Clock, deliberately out of key. Whatever happened in Venice, I had no illusions that it was going to be easy; and there was every possibility that whoever the Cesarettis were, I was going to experience some very disturbing visions of them. But up until now, none of my visions had done me any physical harm, had they, no matter how terrifying they might have been. And maybe I would finally find out what had happened to all of Kate’s friends, and where Victor and Kate’s lost baby fitted into the picture.
I called Margot. There was a whole lot of clanking and banging going on in the background. ‘Brad’s here and I’m making pancakes,’ she said. ‘You can come on over and help us to eat them if you like. There’s far too many for two.’
‘Hey, I don’t want to be the ghost at the breakfast. Besides, I have to pack. Believe it or not, Kate’s been back in touch. I haven’t spoken to her yet, but she’s invited me to Venice.’
‘So you two are back together again? That’s good news, I hope. I just hope this trip doesn’t turn out as Scooby-Doo as the last one.’
‘I don’t know. I think it might. But she needs me, Margot, and she’s made it pretty clear that I’m the only person who can help her.’
‘If she needs you, she has a funny way of showing it, walking out on you like that.’
‘She was worried that she was expecting too much of me, that’s all. This has something to do with the baby she lost, although I don’t exactly know what.
‘Really? What does she want you to do – father another one?’
‘Hey, come on, Margot. I don’t think it’s anything like that. Whatever it is, though, I’m not going to push her into telling me, not until she’s ready. She needs my help, and my support, and I love her, and that’s why she’s going to get them.’
‘Well, it’s all très bizarre, if you ask me. But if you love her, and she loves you, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’
‘Thanks, Margot.’
‘What are you thanking me for?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t think of anybody else who would have put up with all of my moping and all of my miserable music, the way that you did.’
‘That’s what friends are for, Lalo. Brad – stop stuffing so much into your mouth at once, will you? You look like a goddamned chipmunk.’
*
I was on my way out of the house to do some shopping at Sushila’s when a taxi stopped at the curb, and Victor and the red-haired woman climbed out. The red-haired woman was laughing loudly, and Victor had a self-satisfied grin on his face.
‘God, you’re such a scream!’ said the red-haired woman. ‘Which part did you get?’ I’m telling you!’
‘Hey, Gideon,’ said Victor. ‘How’s our in-house musical genius?’
‘Good, thanks.’
‘Me and Monica, we haven’t been disturbing you, have we? I haven’t formally introduced you to Monica yet, have I? Monica – Gideon – Gideon – Monica.’
‘So nice to meet you, Gideon,’ said Monica, holding out her hand as if she expected me to kiss it. She had false chisel-shaped nails, painted dark crimson. ‘I’ve heard you playing a few times, late at night. You play so romantic.’
‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you.’
‘There’s worse ways of being disturbed, believe you me.’ With that, she gave Victor a dig in the ribs with her elbow, and laughed out loud. ‘Just kidding, lover.’
I was thinking of asking Victor where Kate was, just to see what his reaction would be. I would have liked to talk to her about this Venice trip before I actually flew there. I would also have liked to talk to her about her lost baby. But I wasn’t at all sure that it was a good idea for me to show any interest in Kate. Victor might already be suspicious that she was seeing another man, and I didn’t want to confirm his suspicions – especially since I had been warned how bad-tempered he could be. I was also beginning to think that if the baby was somehow involved in what had happened to the Westerlunds and the Philips, then maybe Victor was, too.
‘You take care, Gideon,’ said Victor, squeezing my arm. ‘We’re having a party next weekend, and you’re invited. Bring a friend, why don’t you? Maybe you can tinkle out some tunes for us.’
‘Sure. There’s nothing I like better than tinkling out tunes.’
They went into their apartment and closed the door. I heard Monica screaming with laughter, and I couldn’t help wondering whether she was laughing at me.
*
It was sunny when I walked out of Marco Polo Airport, but the temperature wasn’t much higher than 50 degrees, and there was a fresh, chilly wind blowing from the Alps.
I could have reached the city by bus, but Hazel McCall had urged me to take the water taxi, even though it was expensive. She was right. I sat in the back of the little motor launch as it made its way south-westward across the lagoon, and gradually the spires and domes of Venice rose from the horizon, like a drowned city in a fairy tale.
We puttered slowly along the Grand Canal. I felt like I was traveling through some medieval painting, with balconied palaces and colorful houses on either side, reds and yellows and greens. The waterway was teeming with gondolas and vaporetti crowded with tourists. We passed under the Rialto bridge, and after a few minutes we turned into a narrow canal between tall, russet-painted buildings.
We moored up against a sheer green-stained wall. The water taxi was dipping up and down, and I almost stumbled, but the driver held my elbow and helped me to balance my way on to a steep stone staircase.
‘Grazie, signore,’ he said, grinning at me with tobacco-stained teeth, and I realized that a €20 tip was probably far too much. ‘Faccia attenzione. A Venezia potete non fidarsi mai di qualcuno.’
‘Sure, you too,’ I told him. I climbed up to the top of the steps and found myself in a small paved garden, with a dried-up marble fountain and decorative urns that must have been filled with geraniums during the summer, but contained nothing now but trailing brown weeds.
I looked up. The palazzetto was four stories high, painted a pale tangerine, with elegantly pillared windows, although all the windows facing the canal had their shutters closed. I crossed the garden to an arched doorway, with a black-painted door. There were four bell-pushes, but none of them had name cards next to them, only Roman numerals, I, II, III and IV.
The water taxi driver was still turning his launch around, and for a moment I was tempted to call out to him, and ask him to take me back to the airport. There was something I seriously didn’t like about the Palazzetto Di Nerezza, something secretive and very forbidding. But I hesitated too long, and the water-taxi burbled back toward the Grand Canal, and I was left with the black-painted door and the key to open it.
The levers in the lock opened with a series of arthritic clicks, and when I pushed open the door itself, it let out a great shuddering groan.
I stepped into a grand hallway with a marble floor, a chandelier, and an elaborate gilded mirror with candleholders on either side of it. On the right, there was a curving staircase with stone banisters and a polished marble handrail.
On my left stood a life-sized marble statue of a nude woman, holding up a headless dove. The poor bird had probably had its head knocked off centuries ago. Beyond her, there was another wide door, in natural oak. I guessed this was the Cesaretti apartment.
I knocked, and waited, and knocked again, but there was no reply. Somewhere upstairs I could faintly hear a television, with what sounded like football scores. ‘Genoa, tre … Udinese Calcio, zero …’
I took out the second key and unlocked the door. Inside, I found myself in a long gallery, with a dark paneled ceiling, and a row of windows with pale-yellow glass in them. There were paintings hanging all the way along it, most of them landscapes, with sombre skies and shadowy forests.
On either side stood six or seven armchairs, each of them heaped with cushions in red and green tapestry, and the floor was covered in assorted Venetian rugs.
I closed the door and walked along the gallery. Through the yellow glass windows I could dimly make out a very large square, which must have been the Campo San Polo. It was crowded with hundreds of shadowy figures, as if an army of ghosts had recently arrived.
I thought that I could hear somebody walking very close behind me, but when I turned around I saw that there was nobody there, and that it must have been an echo.
At the end of the gallery I reached an enormous drawing room, with a high decorated ceiling and a pale woodblock floor. It was lavishly furnished with rococo chairs and sofas, and the drapes were patterned with flowers and leaves and songbirds. In the far corner stood a fine antique piano, with a bust of Verdi on top of it.
I looked up. Suspended high above me, from the vaulted ceiling, hung a huge multi-branched chandelier, carved and gilded, more like a giant golden spider than a light fitting.
I put down my bag. The apartment was utterly silent. It smelled of old wood and pot-pourri and faintly of cigarettes, and there was another smell, too, of damp plaster.
I was still standing there, wondering what I should do next, when I heard a sharp snoring sound, and I almost yelped out loud. I walked cautiously across the room, and found a man sleeping in one of the high-backed armchairs. He was almost completely bald, but he was only about forty-five years old, with a round face and a pointed nose and a sallow suntan. He was wearing an expensive light-gray suit, and dark-blue velvet slippers. In his right hand he was holding a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles.
I coughed, and he flinched, but he didn’t wake up, so I coughed again, much louder this time.
He stirred, and opened his eyes, and stared at me, unfocused.
‘Chi sono voi?’ he snapped. ‘Che cose state facendo qui?’
‘Hey – I’m sorry if I woke you. My name’s Gideon Lake. Kate Solway invited me here.’
The man put on his spectacles and peered at me more closely. ‘Ah yes, Gideon Lake. We have been expecting you. I apologize if I was sleeping. I had a very long night at the hospital.’
He stood up and held out his hand. He was very precise in his gestures, very neat. ‘Enrico Cesaretti. Welcome to Venice. Is this your first time?’
‘It is, yes. I always wanted to come here but I never quite managed to make it before now. It’s a pretty amazing place, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I would prefer it without so many tourists, but I suppose we Venetians have to make a crust of bread somehow.’
‘Do you know when Kate’s going to get here?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, she is here already. She has gone out shopping with my wife.’
‘Have you known Kate long?’
Enrico pointed to my bag. ‘You must be tired. I can show you to your room, then perhaps you would care for a cup of coffee?’
‘Oh – great, thanks.’
He led me through a door at the far end of the drawing room and along a corridor. This side of the apartment was much less formal, with fitted carpets and framed prints on the walls.
‘Here – this is the bathroom if you need it – and this is the room you will share with Kate.’
He opened up the door for me, and ushered me into a huge bedroom with an emperor-sized bed and a carved pine wardrobe that a family of five could have lived in. Outside the windows, through the fine net curtains, I could see a narrow balcony which overlooked the canal, with two cast-iron chairs on it, and a cast-iron table.
‘It’s real generous of you to have me here, Enrico. You don’t mind if I call you Enrico?’
‘Of course,’ he smiled. ‘I expect only my staff and my patients to call me “professore”. And the generosity is yours. These days, not so many people are prepared to give up their time so unselfishly.’
I didn’t really know what he meant, but I shrugged and smiled as if I did.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Please refresh yourself and we can have some coffee and you must tell me all about your music.’
‘Oh … Kate’s told you already.’
‘Of course. She considers you to be molto speciale. Very special.’
‘Well, I think she is, too.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He took off his spectacles, and nodded. ‘To try so hard to make amends for the unforgivable sins of others, that is almost holy.’
‘I’m not too sure that I follow you.’
‘Please – if there is anything you need. Anything at all, just ask.’
He left me to unpack. Quite suddenly, I felt exhausted, and I would happily have climbed into that enormous bed, pulled the quilt up over my head, and gone to sleep for the rest of the day.
After I had stowed away my sweaters and my jeans in that cavernous wardrobe, I took my toiletries bag and went into the bathroom. It was tiled from floor to ceiling in gleaming white, and fitted with a monstrous washbasin with old-fashioned faucets, an antiquated shower stall, and a massive bathtub on lion’s-claw feet, surrounded by a white plastic curtain.
I splashed my face with cold water and reached for a hand towel. As I dried myself, I looked at myself in the mirror. What the hell are you doing here, dude? Pursuing some hopeless fantasy that you and Kate will ever get together as a real couple? Looking for an answer when you don’t even know what the question is? Are you some kind of masochist, or just a fool?
In my bones, though, I knew I was here for a reason, even if I didn’t understand what it was. This was no time for giving up. Kate had almost given up, back in New York, but she had clearly changed her mind. Otherwise she wouldn’t have given me the keys to the Cesaretti’s apartment, and stumped up over seven thousand dollars for me to fly here.
As I stood there, I became conscious that the bathtub faucet was dripping. It made a flat plip, plip, plip as if the bath were full up with water. I finished drying my face and then I went over and drew back the curtain. The tub was brimming, right up to the overflow.
But more than that, there was a distorted pink shape lying on the bottom. A naked woman, with her dark hair completely covering her face. I was so shocked that I yanked at the curtain, and pulled out some of the curtain rings.
I took hold of the chain and pulled out the bath plug. Then I plunged my hands into the water and tried to lift the woman out. The water was freezing and she was so slippery that I could hardly get a grip on her. I managed to lift her head above the surface, and pull some of her hair away from her face.
She was a young woman. Her lips were blue and she wasn’t breathing. Her brown eyes were wide open and she was staring at me as if she were trying to convince me that any attempt to save her would be useless. I tried to heave her further out of the tub but she was so heavy and floppy and the sides of the bath were so high that it was difficult for me to get any leverage.
‘Enrico!’ I shouted. ‘Enrico, help me! There’s a woman drowned in here!’
By now, with a lascivious gurgle, the last of the water was draining out of the bath. I managed to maneuver the woman so that she was lying on her side, and water poured out of her nose and mouth. But she still wasn’t breathing, and when I felt her neck there was no sign of any pulse.
‘Enrico! I need some help in here! Enrico!’
Still no response. The walls of the palazzetto were so thick that he probably hadn’t heard me, so I went out into the corridor and shouted out again.
‘Enrico!’
Enrico appeared almost at once, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel. ‘Gideon? Is something wrong?’
‘There’s a woman in the bathtub … I think she’s dead.’
‘What?’
He came hurrying along the corridor, and followed me into the bathroom.
‘The curtain was drawn … I didn’t see her at first.’
I looked into the bath. It was empty. Not only was it empty, it was dry. Enrico frowned at me, and said, ‘Ciò è uno scherzo, si? This is a joke?’
I didn’t know what to say. I could only think: not again. Not more hallucinations, and people who aren’t really there.
‘I was sure,’ I told him. ‘I pulled back the curtain and there she was.’
Enrico looked down at the broken curtain rings with undisguised displeasure. ‘Pah,’ he said.
‘Look, I realize you don’t believe me, Enrico, but check my sleeves out. They’re soaking.’
He didn’t even bother to look. ‘I expect you are tired,’ he said. But you must understand that what you have said is in very poor taste.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was absolutely convinced that I saw what I saw. It wasn’t a joke, I promise you.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Now, coffee is ready, if you are.’