Ghost Music (28 page)

We walked back across the piazza. We had just reached the colonnades in the northwest 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 cafés 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 on 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 café.

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,
“Viel Dank für den Waltz, 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 them, 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?”

“Okay. 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.”

“Okay. 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, okay? 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 nose 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 shit. 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 jerk 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 faceup 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.