Ghost Music (27 page)

There's no need to panic
, I told myself.
This isn't real. This is just another hallucination
. All the same, my heart was beating like the long-case clock in the drawing room, ga-
thump
, ga-
thump
, ga-
thump
, and I could hear my blood rushing through my ears.

Maybe I should open the hood, I thought. Maybe this was nothing but a trick, or an optical illusion, and the boy's head was made out of nothing but papier-mâché. But supposing he was real. He had pleaded with me so desperately not to take off his hood, and I didn't think I could face his dead eyes staring at me, accusing me of killing him.

I stood up, almost losing my balance. I stepped over his body and all of his toys, and quietly left the room, closing the door behind me. I listened, but the apartment was still silent.

When I got back to our bedroom, I went around to Kate's side of the bed and this time I switched on her bedside lamp, too, and shook her hard.

“Kate—wake up! Kate, for Christ's sake—it's happening again!”

Kate stirred and murmured and opened her eyes. She blinked at me as if she had never seen me before in her life. “What—what is it?”

“It's happening again. The visions. The nightmares. Whatever you want to call them.”

She sat up, and took hold of my hands. “What did you see?”

“It's not what I saw—it's what I
did
.”

I told her about the young boy in the hood and she listened to me seriously, but she didn't seem to be surprised. “That would have been Massimo,” she said.

“But I pulled his goddamned head off!”

“No, you didn't. Do you want to see for yourself?”

She climbed out of bed and led me back toward the young boy's bedroom, still holding my hand. She opened the door, and led me toward the bed. The toy chest was closed, and there were no toys lying on the floor. In the middle of the bed a young dark-haired boy was sleeping, his cheeks flushed. His mouth was open and his breathing was sticky, as if he had a slight cold.

“This is Massimo,” said Kate. “You'll meet him at breakfast. He's such a sweet boy.”

“I'll meet him at breakfast? How come I didn't see him this evening?”

Kate kissed my cheek. “Because people come and people go. Doors open and doors close, and people go through.”

“Pearl said something like that. Pearl upstairs. I don't really understand what she meant.”

“Oh, I think you do. Or you're beginning to. Anyhow, you'll see young Massimo in the morning. And the girls, too, Raffaella and Amalea.”

We left Massimo's bedroom and went back to bed. “So long as I didn't really hurt him,” I said. “He was begging with me not to take his hood off, so you can imagine what I felt like when his head came with it.”

“You didn't hurt him. You won't ever hurt him. You won't hurt any of this family. Somebody else will hurt them, yes. Somebody else
has
hurt them. But not you.”

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
benevenuto 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 onto 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
.” Amalea smiled. “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 southwestern 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 St. 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 dell'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 & 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.”