As soon as we opened our bedroom door the next morning we could hear the family chatting and laughing in the kitchen. I looked at Kate but all she said was, ‘Go on. They’re lovely kids. You’ll like them.’
We went into the kitchen and the three Cesaretti children were sitting around the table, eating zucchini fritters. Salvina was standing by the stove, frying a whole lot more. Apart from the smell of zucchinis and hot butter, the kitchen was filled with a rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee and baking bread.
As soon as we came in, Enrico stood up, one hand pressed flat against his necktie, and drained the last of his coffee.
‘Buon giorno, Kate! Buon giorno, Gideon! I hope you slept peacefully. I am sorry that I have to rush. I have a very complex operation to undertake this morning.’
He turned to his children and said, ‘Amalea – Raffaella – Massimo – this is Kate’s friend Gideon. Say buon giorno, and benvenuto alla nostra casa.’
‘Good morning,’ said Amalea. ‘You are very welcome to our house.’
I nodded, but I couldn’t think what to say to her. It was hair-raising, meeting her here in the kitchen, when I had seen her white and naked in the drawing room yesterday evening, and stitched on to a mattress on the back of a launch.
And here was young Massimo, too, whose head I had pulled off his shoulders, chatting away as if nothing had happened to him. In a way, I was even more disturbed by seeing him here, because he was so young, and so cheerful, and when he looked up at me he gave me such a conspiratorial grin, as if we had shared some huge joke together.
‘Please, sit,’ said Amalea, pulling out a chair for me. She was pretty in a thin, dark, almond-eyed way, with a curtain of shiny black hair that fell straight to her shoulders. She could almost have been Egyptian, rather than Italian. She was wearing a skinny-rib sweater, in black, and Essenza designer jeans.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of what might have happened to her, or what was about to happen to her. All she did was smile back at me shyly, embarrassed that I was staring at her so intently.
‘Papa,’ she said, ‘on your way home tonight, can you buy me some of those Ducale biscotti? Pretty please?’
‘You’re so greedy,’ Raffaella protested. ‘You’re always eating but you never get fat. It isn’t fair!’
Raffaella was plumper than Amalea, with fraying blonde hair and blue eyes and rosy-red cheeks. She was just as pretty, though, and she had her mother’s generous breasts, which she showed off with a V-necked sweater dress, in ultramarine.
Young Massimo was big-eyed and pale-skinned, with a dark bowl-shaped haircut, and when he grew up, I could see that he would look like his father. Except that he would never grow up.
Kate and I sat down opposite them, and Salvina laid knives and forks for us. ‘You like zucchini frittata?’ she asked me. ‘And maybe some pomegranate juice, and coffee?’
‘Sounds great,’ I told her.
Kate said, ‘How’s art college, Amalea?’
‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ smiled Amalea. ‘We are making lace now, in the style of Anita Belleschi Grifoni, it’s so beautiful. I passed my second-level exam last month, with a commendation for my tulle.’
‘Amalea is brilliant with all kinds of needlework,’ put in Salvina. ‘She has been taught the classic techniques, yes? but her designs are very young, molto moderno.’
I thought of the suture holes that I had seen in Amalea’s back. Maybe it had just been a grisly coincidence that somebody had sewn her to a mattress, or maybe they had known how skilled she was with a needle and thread, and had been playing a deeply sick joke.
‘How about you, Raffaella?’ I asked her. ‘Are you at college, too?’
‘I study to be a nurse,’ said Raffaella. ‘I want to care for young children.’
‘And how about you, Massimo? What do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘Football,’ said Massimo, promptly.
‘You’re good at football?’
Raffaella said, ‘He would be much better if he did not keep kicking his footballs into the canals. He lost so many that papa stopped buying them for him. In one week he lost five!’
‘But I make a new one, myself!’ Massimo told me.
‘That was pretty smart,’ I told him. ‘What did you make it out of?’
Salvina served me a plateful of frittata. ‘There – for a very special musician!’
‘Salvina, that’s enough to feed the New York Symphony Orchestra!’
‘You need your strength, Gideon.’
‘I make my new football from a sack,’ said Massimo. ‘Inside it I put my maglione.’
‘He used a canvas bag that used to have soap in it,’ Amalea explained. ‘He stuffed it with one of his old sweaters.’
‘It was good!’ declared Massimo. ‘It was a good football!’
‘Of course it was, until you kicked it into the canal, just like you did all the others!’
I was beginning not to like the way this conversation was going. It seemed like both Amalea and Massimo were about to be tortured or even killed by somebody who knew what they liked the most. Because what had Massimo’s head most resembled, when I walked into his bedroom last night? An improvised football, made out of a sack.
‘So, what will you two do today?’ Salvina asked us, sitting down at last.
‘I’m going to take Gideon for a walk,’ said Kate. ‘From here, to San Sebastiano, and then to the Piazza San Marco, and then lunch at Harry’s Bar.’
‘Lunch? After a breakfast like this? Are you kidding me?’
‘You only have to have the carpaccio, and a Bellini cocktail. But you can’t visit Venice without going to Harry’s Bar and trying those.’
‘You will love it,’ said Salvina. ‘Your credit card will scream out loud. But you will love it.’
*
The morning was damp and foggy, and we walked through the streets of Venice with our coat collars turned up and scarves wrapped around our chins. It felt as if the city were detached from the rest of the world, a forgotten archipelago populated only by memories.
Kate took me down the narrow alleys that led from the south-western corner of the Campo San Polo to the Campo San Tomà. In the square itself, we went to look at the church, with its bas-relief of St Thomas the Shoemaker over the doors.
‘Can I save them?’ I asked Kate, as we walked beside the Rio di Santa Margherita Canal.
‘The children, you mean?’
The water was very dark, and the buildings that were reflected in it were distorted by the constant gliding past of gondolas. Everybody I saw sitting in a gondola looked decidedly glum, as if they would rather be doing anything else than sitting in a narrow boat on a freezing-cold morning, being punted around a maze of canals and diseased-looking houses.
‘Yes, you can save them,’ said Kate. ‘But not in the way that you think.’
I told her what I had thought at breakfast, about Amalea’s stitches and Massimo’s football.
‘You’re probably right,’ she nodded.
‘Well, if I am right, then we’re dealing with some seriously sick sadistic bastard, wouldn’t you say?’
She didn’t answer. We kept on walking until we reached the church of San Sebastiano, which looked like an ordinary little Italian church on the outside, with a flat gray facade, but its interior had been lavishly painted and gilded by the sixteenth-century painter Veronese. It was chilly inside, and hushed, because it was still too early for the usual crowds of tourists, and our footsteps echoed on the shiny stone floor. Kate took me to the south wall, to look at a vast painting of a half-naked guy lying on the ground, being pummeled by an angry mob.
‘The martyrdom of San Sebastian,’ she told me.
‘I thought Saint Sebastian was the dude who had all those arrows shot into him, like a pincushion.’
‘He survived that. Some peasant woman found him and nursed him back to health. But later the Romans caught him and tried him again, and this time they beat him to death.’
‘Second time unlucky, huh?’
Outside the church, Kate took hold of my hands and stood very close to me, although she wouldn’t look me directly in the eye. ‘I want you to know this, Gideon. I love you.’
I didn’t say anything. What could I say, except ‘I love you, too, sweetheart’? and for some reason I felt that would have sounded trite, especially on that foggy, spectral day, with the black gondolas passing us like funeral boats.
‘I didn’t expect to fall in love with you,’ she said. ‘Not like this. I thought that it was nothing more than a way to get myself free.’
‘I thought you said that you couldn’t leave Victor, no matter what.’
‘You still don’t understand, my darling. But you’ve never let me down, not once, even when you must have thought that you were going crazy. I promise you that you will soon see everything clearly.’
We continued our walk, hand-in-hand, not saying much, but taking deep pleasure in each other’s closeness. We crossed the Grand Canal over the high steel arch of the Ponte del Accademia, with vaporetti and motor launches passing underneath us. Then we made our way through a warren of alleyways where we passed every high-end jeweler’s and fashion boutique I could think of. Chanel, Bulgari, Dolce e Gabbana, you name it.
‘I’d like to buy you something,’ I said. ‘A ring, maybe.’
‘No,’ said Kate. ‘It’s too late for that.’
‘Too late or too early?’
‘Both.’
We shuffled our way through more and more tourists until we eventually arrived at the Piazza San Marco, the wide square that you always see in travel pictures of Venice. It was thick with scabby gray pigeons and crowded with even more tourists, and there was already a long line to climb up the Campanile, the tallest tower in Venice.
It should have been romantic and heartbreakingly beautiful – the Basilica of San Marco and the Ducal Palace, and the two granite columns that stand in front of the palace, by the waterfront, one topped by the lion of St Mark, and the other by St Theodore and some mysterious beast of unknown origin. But it was impossible to ignore the hordes of sightseers, pushing and jostling and posing for photographs.
‘Don’t walk between these two pillars,’ Kate warned me. ‘They used to execute people here, and it’s supposed to be bad luck.’
I gave one last look around. ‘My dogs are barking,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we find this Harry’s Bar and treat ourselves to one of these famous Bellinis? Eleven o’clock isn’t too early, is it?’
She smiled. ‘I know how you feel. That’s the trouble with Venice. You feel like somebody has trodden on your dream. Well, about a thousand people have trodden on your dream, in sneakers.’
We walked back across the piazza. We had just reached the colonnades in the north-west corner when I caught sight of two men in the crowds up ahead of us – two men with a young boy in between them. One of the men was wearing a black cap and a black topcoat, the other had a squarish head and iron-gray hair. The boy was wearing a dark-blue duffel coat with the hood pulled up.
‘Kate,’ I said. ‘Who do those guys remind you of?’
I lost sight of them for a moment, but as we left the piazza and entered the pedestrian street beyond it, I saw them again, pushing their way through a milling crowd of Danish tourists and turning left. I elbowed my way after them. Kate kept up with me, but she said, anxiously, ‘Gideon – maybe you shouldn’t.’
‘It’s the same guys we saw in London, I’m sure of it.’
‘But even if they are, what can you do about it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. They’re all part of the puzzle, aren’t they? You said so yourself.’
The two men were heading west, past crowded cafes and glassware stores and Nigerians selling fake designer purses. Considering they had a young boy with them, they were moving with surprising speed, and they seemed to be able to melt their way through the crowds as if they were no more substantial than shadows.
They hurried up a flight of shallow stone steps, and over a bridge. As they crossed it, I saw the boy trip and stumble and almost fall over, but the two men seized his elbows and lifted him up, so that his feet didn’t even touch the ground.
I started to run, pushing people out of the way.
Kate called, ‘Gideon! This is not the same as London! Be careful!’
I glanced back briefly and she was still standing on the bridge. I raised my hand to acknowledge that I had heard her, and then I continued running – dodging and jinking and shoving as if I were still in my high-school football team, and heading for a touchdown.
‘Pazzo!’ one old woman shouted, as I knocked over a row of chairs outside her cafe.
But now I was less than twenty yards behind the two men and the boy, and I was determined to catch them and confront them, no matter how crazy or embarrassing it turned out to be.
Without warning, they took a right turn into an even narrower passageway, and promptly disappeared from sight. I ran to the corner, but as I did so, six or seven German tourists came down the passageway toward me, with bags and cameras, and for several precious seconds I danced from one side of the passageway to the other, trying to get past them.
They all thought this was highly amusing, and one of them bowed from the waist, and cried out, ‘Vielen Dank für den Walzer, mein Herr!’
By the time I reached the end of the passageway, the two men and the boy had vanished. I didn’t know whether to turn left or right. There were signs on the wall, pointing in opposite directions, but both of them said S. Marco Rialto. A Venetian idea of a joke, I supposed.
I took a guess and went to the left, because that was the general direction in which they had been heading before. On either side of the alley there was one dead end after another, most of them giving access to tenement doors, with bicycles and plant pots in the, but no men and no boy. Shit. I had lost them. But when I reached the sixth or the seventh dead end, and looked into it, something hit me hard across the bridge of my nose – so hard that I staggered back against the opposite side of the alley, and collided with a souvenir store window. If it hadn’t been covered by wrought-iron security bars, I probably would have crashed straight through it, and into a display of colorful glass necklaces and carnival masks.
The man in the black cap had hit me with a thick wooden walking stick. I lifted my left arm to protect myself, but he took two steps toward me and struck me on the knuckles, and then on the side of my head. I slid down the wall into a sitting position, with my left ear singing.
Behind the man in the black cap, in the dead-end alleyway, I saw the man with the iron-gray hair, and he was holding the boy in front of him, gripping his shoulders so that there was no chance of him running away. The boy had the hood of his coat still raised, but I could see his face. He was pasty and thin, with two crimson bruises around his eyes. He looked terrified. But he wasn’t Massimo. I didn’t recognize him at all.
The man in the black cap, though – him I recognized, even though his collar was turned up and he was wearing dark glasses.
‘Jack!’ I said. ‘It’s Gideon, for Christ’s sake! What the hell did you hit me for, man? What are you doing to that kid?’
Jack took off his dark glasses and prodded me with the end of his stick. He had grown two or three days’ worth of black stubble, and his eyes were pouchy. He looked even more Satanic than he had in New York.
‘What did I hit you for? What did I hit you for? What the fuck do you think I fucking hit you for? You were following me, you asshole.’
‘I just wanted to talk to you, man,’ I protested. ‘I recognized you and I wanted to know what you were doing here, that’s all. Come on … I meet you in New York and here you are in Venice, of all places.’ I didn’t mention that I had seen him, twice, in London.
Jack prodded me again. Two middle-aged women tourists stopped and stared at us, but he bared his teeth at them and snarled, ‘Get lost, you nosy old witches! Vada via!’ and they bustled away.
I climbed to my feet. My left hand felt as if it had swollen to twice its normal size, and my nose felt enormous, too.
‘You’re a maniac, you know that?’ I told him.
He came up close to me, with his stick still raised. I could smell garlic on his breath, and both of his eyes were bloodshot.
‘You listen to me. You didn’t see me today and if you ever happen to see me again, you didn’t see me then, neither. You got it?’
‘OK. But supposing I call the police?’
He blinked, in slow motion. ‘You’re not serious, right?’
‘Come on, Jack, I don’t know what you and your friend are doing here, with this kid, but it sure doesn’t look kosher.’
‘Kosher?’ At first Jack stared at me with a wide-eyed look that was close to insane. But his lips gradually started to twitch at the corners, and curl up, and he gave me the oiliest of smiles. ‘Kosher, yes, sure, see what you mean. Two guys, hauling off a nine-year-old boy between them. But rest assured. This kid belongs to the Grimani family, and he’s been cutting school and mixing with all kinds of undesirables, and my friend here and me, we’ve been commissioned by his parents to bring him home. So you could say that what we’re doing here is performing a valuable social service.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ I asked him.
‘How many reasons do you want?’
‘One is fine. So long as it makes some kind of sense.’
‘OK. Let’s see if this makes sense. If you fucking follow me again, slick, I’ll chop off your fucking fingers.’
There was a long, long stretch of silence, during which Jack continued to stare at me as if he were daring me to challenge him, so that he could hit me again. Eventually I raised both hands, and said, ‘Fine. I don’t care one way or another, to tell you the truth. I’m leaving now, OK? I won’t follow you anymore. Whatever you have to do – well, you just go ahead and do it.’
Without another word, Jack beckoned to the man with the iron-gray hair, and he brought the boy out of the dead end and into the street. The boy looked up at me as if he badly wanted to say something, but Jack laid an arm around his shoulders and hurried him away, so fast that he could barely keep up. As they reached the next turning, the boy turned his head to see if I was still there, and he looked seriously frightened, but I didn’t know what I could do about it.
I was still standing outside the souvenir store when Kate caught up with me.
‘My God, Gideon, are you all right? Your nose is bleeding.’
I patted my upper lip. When I took my fingers away they were sticky with congealing blood.
‘It was Jack,’ I said. ‘Your husband’s pal Jack. He whacked me right on the beezer with a goddamned walking stick.’
Kate pulled two or three sheets of Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed my face. ‘I told you to be careful. You know what Victor’s like, and his friends are the same. Worse, some of them.’
‘I don’t give a skit. I’m going to report him to the cops.’
Kate shook her head. ‘Hold still … there, that’s better. But no. Don’t report him.’
‘Kate – that was out-and-out assault and battery! And who knows what they’re going to do to that kid.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘Sure. He gave me some cock-and-bull story about the kid playing hooky, and that he and that other mook had been hired by his parents to find him. But, come on. Do you believe that? So maybe the kid’s cut a couple of Play-doh classes, but who hires a thug like Jack to bring him back home? I’m calling the cops.’
Kate dabbed the bridge of my nose, and I winced.
‘It’s not too bad,’ she told me. ‘Only a bruise. Let’s go to Harry’s Bar and get you a drink and then we can decide what to do next.’
*
Harry’s Bar is small and gloomy and very formal, and also seriously expensive. It’s historic, I’ll grant it that, and it has plenty of 1930s atmosphere, with its wood paneling and its marble-topped cocktail bar and its white-jacketed waiters. Orson Welles used to come here, as well as Truman Capote and the Aga Khan, and Ernest Hemingway was a regular.
Kate and I sat down at one of the small circular tables by the window, and a snooty waiter took our order. Kate wanted a Bellini, peach purée and champagne, which is the signature drink at Harry’s Bar, but I badly needed a double brandy.
‘Whatever the Italian is for ‘police station’, I’m going to have this drink and then I’m going to find one and Jack Friendly is going to be toast.’ I couldn’t stop squeezing the bridge of my nose, which felt as if it had swollen to five times its normal size, and had started to throb. When I picked up my glass of Vecchia Romagna, my hands were trembling.
‘Gideon, I don’t think that going to the police is a very good idea.’ Kate was sitting with her back to the tinted glass window, so that it was difficult for me to see her face.
‘Oh, no? And specifically why not? He had a nine-year-old boy with him, Kate, and the kid was obviously terrified. Don’t tell me we’re going to do nothing.’
She reached across and held my hand. ‘You feel cold,’ she said. ‘You’re still shaking.’
I looked at her narrowly. ‘You know what Jack is going to do to that kid, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘He’s not going to hurt him, is he?’
‘I don’t know. I hope not. It depends.’
‘And you still don’t think we should call the police? I mean, it looked very much like abduction to me. And I’m talking about forcible abduction.’
‘I know. But if we call the police, worse will happen, very much worse, and very much more quickly.’
‘Like what?’
Kate leaned forward and tenderly stroked my cheek. ‘You’re so nearly there, my darling. You nearly understand. I think it’s time you went back to New York and asked for some answers.’
She finished her Bellini. ‘Do you want another one?’ I asked her.
‘No.’
‘Well, I’m going to have another brandy.’ I beckoned to the waiter, and said, ‘Un altro brandy, per favore.’
‘You didn’t like this one, signore?’ he asked me, with the smoothest sarcasm.
‘Molto divertente,’ Kate snapped at him. ‘Un nuovo brandy, per favore.’ The waiter gave her a smile like a spoonful of virgin olive oil and went off to get it. I said, ‘You keep telling me to look for answers. But I’m not sure I know what the question is.’
‘Follow your heart,’ Kate told me. ‘If I could tell you any more, I would. You know that. But your heart will open your eyes, Gideon, I promise you, and your eyes will show you everything you need to know.’
The waiter brought the check. With tip, three drinks and a bowl of pistachio nuts had cost us the equivalent of $96. Ernest Hemingway must have been earning damn good royalties.
*
As we walked back along the Calle dei Fabbri toward the Grand Canal, a very fine rain began to fall, and the street was suddenly crowded with umbrellas. It was raining even harder by the time we reached the Rialto bridge, and we had to jostle our way through scores of tourists who were trying to shelter beneath its covered archway.
Halfway across, we were brought to a temporary standstill by a crowd of Japanese girl scouts. The warmth of the brandy had all drained out of me now. My head was thumping and I was shivering like a mongrel that had been rescued from a ditch.
As we shuffled impatiently behind the scout troupe, I looked out over the Grand Canal, which was gray and freckled with rain. A gondola passed underneath us, with a black couple huddled together on its red heart-shaped seat, both of them wearing bright yellow waterproof ponchos. They looked spectacularly miserable. Venice is not a city for the confused, or the sad. If you want romance, you should bring it with you.
‘Come on,’ said Kate, ‘let’s push our way through.’ She took hold of my hand and tried to pull me along, but at that moment I glimpsed something floating in the water, six or seven inches beneath the surface, so that it was barely visible. It was following in the wake of the gondola, almost as if the gondola were drawing it along, but it must have been carried by the current.
I said, ‘Wait,’ and went closer to the parapet. I glimpsed it only for a few seconds, but a few seconds was enough. It was the white figure of a naked girl, lying face upward on a sodden mattress. It was Amalea, drowned.
‘What is it?’ asked Kate, and I pointed, but at that moment an anemic sun came out, and shone on the herringbone ripples that the gondola had left behind it, and Amalea disappeared from sight.
‘I saw Amalea. They must have set her adrift, so that the mattress gradually got more and more waterlogged, and she began to sink.’
We stayed where we were for a minute or two, trying to see below the surface of the water, but the sun grew brighter and brighter, and the Grand Canal began to glitter, and we gave it up.
‘I saw her,’ I insisted. ‘Just like I saw her last night.’
‘I know you did,’ said Kate, clinging to my arm.
‘So what should I do? Let her float away, out to sea?’
‘Maybe she already has.’
‘But what if she hasn’t?’
‘Let’s go back to the Cesaretti’s,’ said Kate. ‘You look like you could do with a couple of hours’ rest.’
‘I still think I ought to report Jack Friendly to the polizia. And Amalea’s body to the coastguard, whatever they’re called.’
‘Guardia Costiera. But they’ll never find her.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so together we walked back to the Campo San Polo in silence. The sun grew even warmer, and steam rose from the paving stones, until the streets were filled with a shining fog.
When we got back to the Palazzetto Di Nerezza, Salvina was already there, as were Amalea and Raffaella and Massimo. Salvina was in the kitchen, stirring a large saucepan of spaghetti sauce, while Amalea and Raffaella were both doing their homework at an antique desk in the corner of the drawing room, and Massimo was connecting a long model railroad track along the corridor.
‘Oh! Il vostro naso!’ Salvina exclaimed, when I walked into the kitchen. ‘Your poor nose! What is happened?’
‘Little accident,’ I told her.
‘It looks like un pomodoro grande! A big tomato! You must be careful in case I use it for my bolognese!’
Kate and I went to our bedroom, kicked off our shoes, and stretched ourselves out on the bed. Kate looked into my eyes from only four or five inches away, so that I could hardly focus on her.
We lay together for a while, and then I said, ‘I’ll head for home first thing tomorrow morning. Are you going to fly with me, for a change?’
She shook her head.
‘Can you explain to me exactly why not?’
‘You’ll see, my darling.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I promised not to ask too many questions, and I won’t. But I will ask you one thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you and Victor still sleep together? It’s none of my goddamn business, I know that. But I can’t help thinking about it.’
Kate gave me a smile that was almost coy, and kissed me. ‘You don’t have to worry, Gideon. Victor won’t touch me, not the way that you do, because he can’t.’