Wallflower (2 page)

"Thinking of making me your special assistant?"

"Maybe something like that."

"People will talk, Kit."

"Let 'em talk. We won't give a shit, will we, Frank?"

Janek smiled. "Still the ballsy broad."

"I don't define myself that way. I like to think I'm . . . feline."

"Feline!"

Her eyes burned defiantly. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Just that in a Chief of Detectives 'feline' isn't what people expect."

She nodded. "People, as you call them, are going to have a lot of novel experiences now that I'm chief." She stood to signal the interview was over. "So it's settled. You're going to Lugano, then taking leave. Who knows, Frank? You might even enjoy yourself." She smiled. "Wouldn't that be different?"

"It would be," he said. "It sure as hell would."

Kit stepped out from behind her desk. "Give me a hug," she ordered. Janek hugged her.

"'Ballsy broad'!" She laughed. "You gotta be kidding, Frank."

H
e didn't much enjoy the conference, even though he was lionized. British, French, German, Dutch—every detective in Europe seemed to know about Switched Heads. "I'd give my left ball for a case like that," one Australian inspector confided.

His talk was well attended. After he finished, he politely fielded questions for an hour and could have gone on indefinitely except that the hall was needed for a symposium on computer crime.

Afterward a mustachioed Spanish police captain, famous for single-handedly tracking down a cell of Basque terrorists, asked Janek to join him for a drink. The Spaniard, proud of his own achievement, said he would have preferred to have solved a great psychological case like the Switch.

"The young ones here, all they talk about is DNA," he said, gesturing at a group of husky young detectives hovering around the busy hotel bar. "They don't understand that the great cases, the only ones that can justify living the best part of your life in the gutter, are crimes of the wounded spirit. And the detectives who solve crimes like that are men like us, men who have wounds of our own. . . ."

After dinner Janek walked by himself through the deserted arcade of shops facing Lake Lugano, then crossed the avenue and paused to gaze across the water, seeking out the farther shore. It was lost in mist. The lake's surface was smooth, like an expanse of black glass, and the lamps along the embankment, huge lanterns on bronze pedestals, burned gaseous and yellow in the murky night.

He thought about what the Spanish captain had said: "Wounds of our own. . ."
What are my wounds?
he asked himself.
How many have I got?
A long, loveless marriage that had ended in a bitter divorce, a few affairs that had ended badly, a lot of experience with the worst sort of people and the attendant law enforcer's disillusionment. A picture came into his mind, a network of scars, old and deep, crisscrossing his middle-aged torso. He shook his head;
he didn't like the image. He turned away from the water and started back toward the hotel.

Once again under the arcade, the window of a travel agency caught his eye. He halted and stared in. A poster showed a gondolier in silhouette against sparkling water and the dark outline of a great domed church. The words below were few and to the point:
VENICE THE DREAM.

The next morning he returned and bought himself a ticket.

I
t was a morose autumnal Venice he had come to. The first afternoon the air turned chilly; after that he wore a raincoat when he walked. It was mid-October, near the end of the season, and there weren't many tourists. The Piazza San Marco was inhabited mostly by pigeons, and Café Florian was deserted, its waiters lonely sentinels guarding neat rows of empty seats.

He bought a guidebook, then set out to explore in a studious manner, intending to work his way through a list of churches, museums, bridges, palaces of cultural importance. But he soon realized that it was not great paintings of the Crucifixion that interested him; it was the lore of the old republic, her hardness, her cruelties. He understood, with a start, that it was her crimes he wanted to understand.

When he learned, for instance, that state enemies were once routinely executed by being drowned secretly in the middle of the night, he hastened to the Orphan Canal, where the drownings were alleged to have taken place. And he was equally fascinated by tales surrounding the feared Council of Ten and the even more greatly feared Three Inquisitors—tales of informers, night arrests, mysterious disappearances, undisclosed detentions, paid government assassins, official torturings, stranglings, knifings, poisonings, and beheadings, public and private, justified and capricious, the bodies often displayed without explanation between the
"
fatal pillars" in the Piazzetta. To live as a Venetian in the time of the republic, he
understood, was to reside in a paranoid's nightmare. Stealth, vengeance, institutionalized terror—these, too, were among the traditions of
La Serenissima
. They were traditions he understood at least as well as the dignity of the churches and the grace of the bridges and canals.

As there was nothing to do at night, he went to an English-language bookstore, bought a copy of stories by Thomas Mann, and began to read
Death in Venice
after dinner in his room.

A dense and dreary tale, he thought, about a famous middle-aged German writer, hitherto tightly controlled, who finds his fate in Venice, intoxicated by a pale adolescent boy. The novel cut deeper than that, of course, was about form and formlessness, art and obsession, rationality and madness. Janek understood it, could savor its intricate design, but in the end he could not identify with its hero. Aschenbach, author of great books, and Janek, solver of a "great" case—both outsiders, lonely men, who had come to Venice on a quest. But while Aschenbach sought the abyss, Janek wanted only to crawl out of it, to be redeemed.

H
e noticed the woman several times before he really looked at her, and then, it seemed, he saw her everywhere, until, in his mind at least, their intersections became something of a joke.

She was a Northern European, most likely Austrian or Swiss, though possibly a German or a Dane. A stunning, stylish person, she looked to be in her late thirties. Very well put together, too: excellent figure, proud walk, handsome face, precision-cut blond hair. She wore exquisite clothes, well-cut slacks, elegant suede boots, and, over a salmon blouse, the finest, softest, blackest leather jacket he had ever seen. He liked the way she wore her silk scarf tied smartly at the side of her neck.

But it was far more than her style and grooming that caught his interest; it was, above all else, her eyes. Large soft gray-green eyes, sensitive, yearning—they reminded him of the eyes of the great French movie star of the forties Michele Morgan.

It became a game with him: Could he choose a church or museum at random, go there, and
not
run into her? There were other tourists trekking their way through Venice, but she seemed the only one on the same track as himself. How were they connected? Were their consciousnesses linked? Perhaps they should sit down and discuss it. But first she would have to recognize him and acknowledge the humor of their meetings.

For a while he was certain she didn't notice him, or else, he decided, she was the coolest woman in Venice. Then, while eating lunch alone in Harry's Bar, he saw her enter, pause, peruse the room, smile (or did he merely imagine that she did?) as she sighted him, then quickly turn away. He smiled back but was too late; she was on her way to a table at the opposite end. He watched to see if she was joining a companion, was relieved to see her sit down alone.

Relieved.
What right had he to feel that way? The answer came to him almost at once. She was so damn attractive! Everything about her, her gestures, the way she moved . . . he knew he
had
to meet her. And the first step was to find out who she was.

In New York there would be no problem. He would simply follow her to her hotel, flash his shield at the clerk, and ask. But here in Venice he had no status, was but one of five thousand end-of-the-season stragglers in a centuries-long parade.

However, after three days of fortuitous encounters, he decided that he
would
follow her. A crazy idea, a little too close, perhaps, to Aschenbach's pursuit of the boy. But the notion appealed to him. He was a detective; he had the skills and also great curiosity. She certainly interested him more than any lifeless work of art. Let the tarted-up old whore of a city offer her meretricious charms to someone else. The lonely middle-aged detective from North America would track the live young beauty through her streets.

He picked her up outside Palazzo Ca' d'Oro.
How amazing,
he thought,
that I knew she'd come here!
He hung back, waiting, and then, as she wandered the galleries, began carefully to stalk her. She paused a long while before Mantegna's painting of St. Sebastian. Perhaps the naked, limp, pierced body of the executed saint excited her. Or else (and he hoped this was true) it aroused her compassion.

She boarded the No. 1
vaporetto
. No difficulty following her onto the crowded ferry; he had only to linger among the workers to remain unseen. She disembarked at Pontile Sant' Angelo, and there he almost missed her; he nearly didn't make it off.

She began to walk down narrow alleyways and to cross little bridges, as if wandering irregularly without a plan. As he followed, he tried to stay a building's distance back. Once, when she stopped, he stopped as well. Then he watched as she consulted her map.

She entered an elegant women's store. Beautiful shoes and fine silk dresses were displayed in the window. She reappeared after fifteen minutes, and he was gratified that she carried no packages. Then she went into a tiny boutique that sold marbled papers and hand-bound notebooks. When she came out, she carried a shopping bag embellished with a golden lion.

Look at what I'm doing: making up a personality for her, just the way I would for a criminal!

He was tempted to stop right there, leave her alone, retreat. But it was too late. He was fascinated. The game was on, and now he must play it out.

Seeing that she was following a narrow street that would dead-end on the Grand Canal and thus force her to return and meet him face-to-face, he cleverly moved to a parallel alley, then walked beside her, invisible though only a few feet away. Trying to match his steps to the soft thud of her boots upon the stones, he could not deny to himself that he was thrilled.

She carried a camera, a viewfinder Leica, but he didn't see her use it until she paused before a tiny violin shop near the Fenice Theater. Then she stepped back onto a delicately scaled footbridge and carefully composed a shot. After she moved on, he stood where she had stood and saw what she had seen: three fiddles hanging in the shop doorway reflected in the canal beneath the shadow of the bridge. It would make a fine picture, he thought. And then:
Perhaps I am beginning to know her a little bit.

She looked more at home when she reached the Piazza San Marco. She paused at its entrance, peered ahead, then crossed it with brisk, athletic strides. She paused again, to look up at the campanile, then moved rapidly into the Doges' Palace.

The Bridge of Straw; the Bridge of Sighs: he crossed them both close behind her, employing a small French-speaking group as his shield.

He followed her across the vast marble floor of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio and was surprised that she did not give even a glance to the huge Tintoretto on the wall.

Something was different about her. She seemed impatient, annoyed. Her forehead was creased, her stride anxious. She glanced at her watch. Did she have a date? Was she apprehensive about it? Was she meeting a man?

She backtracked to Santa Maria Formosa, then paused to study the stone head of a monster. Slowly he was learning more about her. Now, it seemed, she was interested in the grotesque.

Surely something was bothering her, for she abruptly turned again, and this time it was hopeless to avoid her. He walked straight past her, refusing to meet her eyes, circled, and deftly picked her up again as she headed rapidly back through the Piazzetta, then along the wide expanse that follows St. Mark's Canal.

Along the Riva degli Schiavoni, then, very briskly, tensely, across the Bridge of Wine and the Bridge of Piety to the open portion of the waterfront where old Venetians huddled on wooden benches trying to catch the faint heat cast by the brilliant October sun.

She was out of the labyrinth, in the open, and suddenly he knew why.
She's made me! Damn! Too
late now to retreat. A queasy feeling as he understood she was going to confront him.
Damn! Nothing I can do.
He would have to try to brave it out.

But when she finally turned on him, as he knew she would, she did not show an angry face. Rather, she smiled teasingly as she raised her camera and began to take his picture. Once, twice, then rapidly five more times, moving closer at each exposure, until, when she finally lowered the Leica, she was but three yards from his face.

"Do you speak English?" she asked with a German accent. He nodded. "I believe you're following me. You will please explain?"