Venetian Masks (16 page)

While he ate, conversation ebbed and flowed around him, never quite touching him, as if he were a rock beached high on an island, surrounded by a sea of words. People walked past his window, never glancing inside, and he began to feel as though he might be invisible. But when his food was finished, he flagged down the waiter and said, “Can I speak to the chef, please?”

A line appeared between the waiter’s bushy brows. “The food, it is not to your liking, signore?”

“No, the food was great. I just have a question to ask him.”

The waiter remained unmoving. Jeff began to calculate the odds that he could stand up, dart past the guy, and make it to the kitchen without being stopped. He also calculated the odds that he’d end up spending the night in an Italian jail. But then the waiter nodded once and stomped to the back of the restaurant.

The chef came out a few moments later. He was still wearing a stained apron, and his face was still red and sweaty, but he had a pleasant enough expression on his face as he approached Jeff’s table. “Is there a problem, signore?”

Thankful that the man spoke English, Jeff shook his head. “No, no problem. Loved the spaghetti. I just need to ask…. Um, I was here yesterday with… a friend. Cleve Prieto.”

Jeff hadn’t been sure whether the name would mean anything to the chef, but then the big man nodded. “Sì, sì. I remember.” He looked a little wary.

“You said something to Cleve that really worried him. I need to know what you told him. Please.”

But the chef was shaking his head before Jeff was even done speaking. “No, I cannot. I am sorry.”

Jeff had been sitting, but now he stood. “
Please
. Look, Cleve… he disappeared this morning. I’m worried about him and I don’t know where to find him. If you could just tell me what—”

“I cannot,” the chef repeated.

Jeff wanted to cry with frustration. “I’m worried and I’m afraid he doesn’t… he doesn’t really have anyone looking out for him, does he? I don’t know where else to turn.”

He could see the chef sizing him up, maybe wavering a little at the desperation that must have shown in Jeff’s eyes. “You no want to get, uh, mixed up in this,” the chef finally said, very quietly. “Bad business. You go back to America, forget this. That is best.”

“I can’t forget this.”

The chef narrowed his eyes. “How I know you no one of them?”

A chill ran down Jeff’s spine. “One of who?” When the other man didn’t seem inclined to respond, Jeff made an aggravated little moan. “Look, I’m just… just nobody. But I met Cleve and I… I like him. You seemed pretty friendly with him. If you can’t tell me anything, if you can’t help, tell me someone who can. Please.”

The chef stared for a while and then wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Then he leaned forward and almost whispered, “I tell Cleve that Eddie is here, looking for him.”

“Eddie? Who’s Eddie?”

“Eddie Viebool.” When Jeff showed no reaction to the name, the chef shrugged. “Very bad man.”

“Fuck.” Jeff thought quickly. “What does he want from Cleve? Is Cleve in danger?”

Very solemnly, the chef nodded. “Sì. Molto pericolo.”

Jeff didn’t need a translation for that. “I’ll go to the cops, then. They’ll—”

“No!” The chef grabbed Jeff’s right shoulder and squeezed hard. “
La polizia
, some are… Eddie’s friends.
Capisce?
Not all, but some.”

Great. So Eddie—whoever the hell he was—was connected. “What can I do?” Jeff asked.

The chef turned his hands palms up. “Hope that Cleve is somewhere safe.”

D
ESPITE
the glorious weather, the walk back to the time-share seemed fraught with danger, as if something evil might suddenly leap out at him from among the gangs of tourists. Jeff tried to force himself to walk slowly and look relaxed, just in case he was being followed. And then, despite everything, he had to smile a little. Who would have thought he’d end up like some character in a suspense novel, tailed through the streets of Venice? He was Just Jeff, and nothing interesting ever happened to him. “Hah!” he said, slightly startling a trio of French teenagers.

Mita had already come on shift by the time he got back to the building. She smiled at him and looked past him, no doubt searching for Cleve. “And where is your
ragazzo
today?” she chirped.

“He’s… he’s gone.”

“Ah,
e’ un peccato
! He is
molto bello
. And he said to me….” She paused, biting her pierced lip.

“What? What did he say?”

She gave a tiny sigh. “He said you are a thief who has stolen his heart.”

Jeff’s own heart clenched tightly and totally inappropriately.
Just part of his act
, he told himself, and out loud he said, “He ought to know about thieves.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked, frowning. “Is there a problem?”

“No. I just… sometimes things get complicated.”

“My
nonno
—my grandfather, yes?—he was born in Venezia and lived here his whole life, but also he owned a small house in the country. Very small: just two rooms, no electric. A fireplace for heat and a well for water. He would go there on holiday and do nothing, he said, except ‘
guardo gli alberi crescere
’, watch the trees grow. He was happy in this place because it was, uh, simple. But always he returned to Venezia, because he liked the… the complicated. A man needs both, he said.”

Jeff chuckled lightly. “I’ve sort of ended up with more complicated than I’m used to.”

“But maybe it is worth it,” Mita answered with a smile.

The conversation with Mita lightened Jeff’s mood a little, but when he returned to his kitchen, there were the note and the mask on the table. He sat and stared at them as if he could magically decipher their hidden message if he only looked long enough.

He finally booted up his laptop and typed “Eddie Viebool” into the search engine. When that didn’t work, he tried “Eddie Vybool” and several other variations on the theme. Finally he randomly approximated the real spelling enough for Google to figure out what the hell he meant. It turned out that there was an Edvin Weibull, and the guy was, in fact, bad news.

Jeff found a couple dozen articles about Weibull, the earliest dating back about fifteen years. As best as Jeff could tell, Weibull was one of those rich men who seemed to have his hands in a lot of shady businesses but never managed to get hauled to prison for any of them. There were a couple US trials for tax evasion and a charge of jury tampering, but he wasn’t convicted. Spain didn’t seem too happy with him either—in that case, it was drugs—but he got away from that too. He definitely owned nightclubs in various cities in the US, Canada, and Europe, and also seemed to have something to do with a couple of businesses with “Entertainment” in the titles, but maybe those were legal. A club he owned in Toronto burned down under somewhat suspicious circumstances, killing three people, and there were several overdoses and unexplained deaths associated with the employees of his media enterprises. But nothing that stuck to Weibull specifically.

Jeff tried to find photos of the man, but the few that turned up were grainy, with Weibull’s back to the camera or his hands in front of his face. Jeff would have felt a little less uneasy if he could at least have learned what Weibull looked like, although, of course, the guy probably had stooges to do his dirty work anyway. In any case, if this Weibull guy was pissed off at Cleve for some reason, and if he’d recently shown up in Venice, then hightailing it was probably a good choice for Cleve.

Christ, now the inside of Jeff’s head sounded like a bad novel, and not even a bad romance novel.

For a while after that, Jeff dithered. He was a little afraid to leave the apartment in case he ran into gangsters. Which was stupid, because there was no reason for the bad guys to come after him. Even if they knew Cleve had hung out with him lately, they must also know Cleve hung out with a lot of tourists. Jeff was undoubtedly just the latest in a long string and of no particular interest to anyone.

Tomorrow he would get on that train to Vienna and the whole thing would be over for him.

Okay, maybe not. Maybe he’d always wonder about Cleve’s story and who he really was. And what the hell happened to him. But none of that was Jeff’s business. Jeff’s business was IT in Sacramento.

“Jesus Christ!” he said, annoyed with himself. That was the problem with solo travel, he decided. You got on your own nerves.

He sat down again and logged into his credit card account—which he still hadn’t canceled. There were two new charges. The first was for sixty euros and was, he deciphered with some help from a Web translation site, made at the Venice train station. And the second seemed to be for a hotel in Zagreb, Croatia.

“Zagreb,” he said. “Where the fuck is that?” A few minutes of searching showed him it wasn’t very far from Venice at all. Less than two hundred miles, in fact. About the same as from Sacramento to Fresno. Not only that, but it was possible to take a train directly from Venice to Zagreb.

He didn’t know anything about Croatia in general or Zagreb specifically. He didn’t have the Rick Steves book for the region and he hadn’t done any research about it online. It wasn’t one of the places he and Kyle had planned to go.

“Ass hat,” Jeff said. Then he clicked over to his employer’s website—the website he maintained—to see if the company owned any properties in Zagreb.

Chapter 11

H
E
SPENT
his last evening in Venice making decisions and then second-guessing them, until he was ready to smack himself upside the head. Finally, he marched out to the lobby, where Mita was reading a book, and made a desperate sort of groaning noise. “Help,” he whined.

She put down her book at once. “Of course! How can I help you?”

“Do I forget about Cleve and move on to Vienna? Or do I go to a city I don’t know anything about in the small hope I can track him down, find out if he really cares about me, and haul his ass out of trouble?”

“Easy,” she said with a shrug. “The second choice.”

He grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Grazie. Grazie mille!”

“Ah,
molto bene!
See? You are a local already.”

“And you are a peach. You ever need any IT help? I’m your guy.” Which was kind of lame, but all he had to offer.

“
Buon viaggio
and
buona fortuna
.”

He went back to his room and changed his reservations from Vienna to Zagreb. Then he e-mailed his mother to tell her about the change of plans. He was evasive about the reason—
Something about Zagreb intrigues me
, he wrote. He ate all the food left in the apartment and drank the rest of the beer. He did a little research to ensure that he wouldn’t need a visa to enter the country and to learn a few basic facts. They spoke Croatian—okay, that made sense. They weren’t admitted to the European Union, although accession was expected soon. Their currency was called the kuna. And they had miles and miles of famously beautiful coastline and vacation-worthy islands, none of which was anywhere near the capital city of Zagreb. And then he picked up his Kindle and read about the vicomte who, needless to say, followed the dictates of his heart—or at least the dictates of his dick—and hooked up with the hunky peasant.

Jeff intended then to take his pills and go to sleep. But maybe reading smut before bedtime wasn’t such a great idea, because as he wandered to the bathroom, his hand wandered to his groin, where his cock was demandingly hard. Willing away the erection while he brushed his teeth didn’t work. He ended up back at the kitchen table, naked, in front of his laptop, giving in to the inevitability of what would come next.

He typed “Max Palmer” into his browser. He ignored the videos that came up—seeing Cleve move and hearing him speak would be too much. Jeff also ignored the photos in which Max was with other men. Instead, he clicked on a picture of Max with his arms only half-inked, sitting on a locker room bench, an open locker full of sports equipment behind him. Max was shirtless but wearing a pair of white football pants. His chest was hairless—waxed, Jeff assumed. Max’s eyes were closed and his right hand was caressing the obvious bulge at his groin. Jeff stroked his own cock as he gazed at the broad shoulders, the erect nipples, the line down the center of Max’s abdomen.

The next photo looked like a still from a fake medical scenario. Max lay on his belly on a metal exam table. He was wearing a paper hospital johnny, the opening of which revealed his rounded bare butt. His head was pillowed on his crossed arms, and he was looking straight at the camera, very seriously, as if daring the viewer to touch. Jeff, of course, could only touch himself. He spread his legs farther apart on the chair and sped the movements of his fist.

Max was sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, dangling his feet in the water. He was very tan, and the sun illuminated his hair, bringing out its auburn tinge. He was leaning back a little on his fully tattooed arms, showing off a gleaming chest, and the crown of his hard cock was peeking out from the top of his Speedo. Jeff could imagine himself swimming over and placing himself between those sturdy legs, reaching up with a chlorine-scented hand to tug Cleve’s dick completely free, and sinking his mouth over the plump reddened glans. He would feel the sun’s rays burning his pale back and shoulders, but he wouldn’t care, not when Cleve was gripping fistfuls of his hair and gasping out his pleasure to the sky.