A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Elisabetta was just getting started when the drum machine kicked in; she began climbing a steep hill in slow motion. Karine was giving it her all with one leg, endlessly squashing a cigarette underfoot. Eva was catching invisible balls in front of her to the beat. Giovanna appeared at Nick’s side, and she lassoed her arms around his neck. Nick glanced down at her thick, fake eyelashes as he placed his hands on her hips. Giovanna was so warm to the touch, so beautiful really, with all her layers of long hair, that he felt the privilege of holding her. He put his nose near her neck to breathe in her smell.

  Only Battista pouted on the sidelines. Nick remembered that Eva had ridiculed him at the market for his dancing—Battista is a terrific dancer. Eva snapped her fingers to call him onto the dance floor: it must be time for the clown’s performance. Battista frowned in resistance for another second before springing into action and gliding across the terrazzo. He spun around on one heel and froze with his spine arched and his hands at his shoulders like he was about to lift an invisible barbell. His legs spaghettied and he shrank to the floor as cleanly as a cobra dropping into a basket. Then he jumped up with a smile on his face and lifted his arms in triumph.

  Eva’s remark at the fish market hadn’t been sarcastic. Battista is a terrific dancer. Giovanna even let go of Nick to clap for him. Giacomo spotted this year’s angel temporarily without a dance partner and made a move to take Nick’s place. Then, as the music shifted to a slightly slower disco track, the unthinkable happened. Nick felt Battista’s back press against his own. They were grinding shoulder blades to the supple synth beat and cries in broken English for “more, more love.” Nick wasn’t sure whether he was participating in a traditional back-to-back Italian folk dance or a secret flirtation. Battista was shorter than Nick; he could feel the Italian’s sweaty hair against his neck and his round ass against his upper thighs. He imagined kissing Battista and reaching a hand inside his clothes to explore all the different parts of him. When the song ended, Battista abruptly ripped himself away. But when they turned to face each other, Nick saw West’s assistant grinning with an unmistakable, inviting look on his face.

  Nick’s eyes fled to the bookshelf as if a portrait of Clay hung there. It wasn’t a case of Nick being forbidden to mess around with other men, as it had been with Ari; he and Clay were open, free to be with whomever they desired, finally unleashing the pent-up, tree-sniffing body from the tired, tyrannical mind. No, Nick realized that his stupidity lay in choosing for a conquest someone who worked for West. He had forgotten himself for a moment, forgotten Clay and his entire mission in Venice. The coin in his loafer winked as he dragged himself off the dance floor.

  West was standing at the makeshift bar. He gazed casually over at Nick as he approached and said, just as casually, as if it had only just occurred to him, “Why don’t we talk in my study?”

  “Of course,” Nick exclaimed. Then he added, he wasn’t sure quite why, “I’m sorry. I’d love to.”

  He followed West down a narrow hall lit by a series of recessed ceiling fixtures. One side of the hallway received most of the light’s attention. It served as a portrait gallery of gold-framed photographs, all of them adhering to the template of West with a renowned figure, touching shoulders or shaking hands. The self-made mogul had risen up in the world just in time to meet a late-middle-aged Jacqueline Onassis and a young, prematurely gray Bill Gates. There were other figures Nick readily identified—two vice presidents, a bisexual Latin pop star, a famous children’s puppet. Many others evaded recognition, but surely with a few more years of sophistication, Nick would find the entire constellation of faces impressive. West took a left at the end of the hall. Nick was turning to follow when a photo of his host with Freddy van der Haar caught his eye. In the snapshot, Freddy looked like a Rolling Stones groupie circa Altamont—a yellow bandanna tied around his forehead, a black leather jacket with eagle feathers pluming down both arms. It must have been taken on a fairly recent visit to Venice because Nick spotted Clay standing glumly at Freddy’s side. Nick wanted to linger in front of this surprise appearance of his boyfriend—he liked being reminded of his eyes. But he was afraid West might catch him studying this particular photograph on an entire wall of somebodies. He passed on, sad to leave Clay trapped there in a gold frame alongside his dead best friend and his sworn enemy. He entered West’s study.

  “Welcome to my wunderkammer. Shut the door,” West directed. But Nick found no door on the frame. “I mean the curtain. Pull it shut.” Nick took a handful of thick tan velvet and tugged it across a gold rod. The fabric did a decent job of silencing the disco. Nick turned with a laugh, the wine and prosecco still tugging his brain in competing directions. The room was large, with piles of art books lining the walls. Many of them were still wrapped in cellophane. An oak desk stood in the center of the room; its top was decorated in tortoiseshell marquetry, and it was so wide that even Nick’s extra-long arms couldn’t have spanned it. One study wall was fitted with a mahogany cupboard that displayed a set of porcelain plates. The opposite wall boasted a fresco rendered in pellucid oranges and grays; voluptuous women were being dragged off on the shoulders of studly, armor-clad centurions. Nick thought the painting captured the pitch and sway of a crisis—and then remembered that he had saved that very description to compliment the Titian in the Gesuiti. Did all paintings in Venice pitch and sway with crisis? West hadn’t yet asked Nick about the Titian. Maybe he had brought him into his study to discuss it now.

  West leaned against the desk in the cool, relaxed pose of a high-school truant propping himself on the grille of a sports car. His white clothes took on the colors of the desk lamps, one shaded green and the other red. In the dim light, West looked younger and his body stronger, with an outline of pectoral muscles visible under his sweater. He crossed his arms, and his foot toyed with the espadrille that had come unhooked from his heel.

  “What did you think of those German coasters at dinner?” he asked. Nick should have known this question was coming. And yet, unlike the inquiry into where he was staying, he hadn’t prepared an answer for it. He’d been too busy dancing.

  “I thought those were German!” he replied to buy time. “I couldn’t really see them in the candlelight, but they looked exquisite.” He knew the best method of evasion was to go on the offense with a question. “How much did they set you back, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” West murmured. “They were a gift from Karine’s brother.” He smiled with the pride of a man who didn’t keep tabs on the monetary worth of his possessions. “You’re having a good time?” he asked abruptly, repeating the first question he’d posed to Nick that evening. West seemed to be building toward a sensitive topic and couldn’t find the exact words to transport them there.

  “Oh, yeah! A wonderful time.”

  “Good.” West lifted his eyebrows like a dare and just as quickly dropped them. When his head fell toward the green lamp, his white hair and beard took on a toxic phosphorescence and his wrinkles deepened. Nick wished he’d remain in the green light so he could glimpse West as the monster that Clay saw. “We like it here in Venice so much, I want you to like it the way we do. It’s too easy to get the wrong impression of the city, the brochure version, the ten-dollar tour-guide version with the operatic gondolier and a quick gawk at the Bridge of Sighs. That’s all wrong.”

  “I can’t thank you enough. I never want to see the Bridge of Sighs.”

  West clucked. “Did you get a chance to talk to Eva at dinner?” It was another swerve of a question, and Nick was still uncertain where West was trying to aim them.

  “A little bit, when she wasn’t speaking Italian. She seems eager to start on conservation projects in Venice. Like what you’re trying to do here.”

  West nodded in agreement, but said, “No, Eva wants to get her hands dirty. I just put up the money to protect the stuff. Eva’s the real artist. You know, she’s pretty much the only family I’ve got left. She’s very important to me.”
Nick wasn’t sure if this confession was meant as a warning to stay clear of Eva or as an enticement to befriend her. He didn’t get the chance to find out, because West dropped the subject as quickly as he’d introduced it. He lifted himself from his desk to stand in front of the fresco. He stared into it as if it were a window instead of swirls of dry plaster.

  “It’s stunning,” Nick said. He had to be careful not to overflatter. One too many compliments endangered all of the ones that came before it.

  “Yes, The Rape of the Sabine Women. It’s really held its colors over the centuries. We didn’t need to do too much to restore it. I also have two fantastic frescoes of Moors in my bedroom.” West turned to Nick with a wan grin. “But all of my frescoes are painted by the disciples of Sebastiano Ricci. The van der Haars kept the real prize for themselves when they blocked up their corner of this house. They have a ceiling fresco of the Virgin Mary painted by Ricci himself.” West boldly tapped The Rape of the Sabine Women with his finger. The Virgin Mary fresco must be on the other side of the wall. “Those fuckers,” West added with a snort.

  “Ha!” Nick blasted.

  “Does that name mean anything to you?” West asked. “Van der Haar? They were the neighbors I was talking about earlier.”

  All this time, Nick had been waiting to deliver a few lines of poetry on Titian’s painting at the Gesuiti. But right now Richard West was coming at him head-on with the main event, the whole crux of the scheme. Nick took an automatic step back, as if to weigh the moment from a safer distance. He regretted the last rounds of Elisabetta’s heavy pour into his glass. He needed his wits.

  “Van der Haar,” Nick repeated pensively. “You mean, the New York van der Haars?” West nodded, but Nick wasn’t awarded a smile for the correct answer. West’s face had aged suddenly in a clench of seriousness. Nick quickly continued. “Of course I know of them. They were one of America’s founding Dutch families. Their names were once chiseled into hospitals and fountains all over New York.”

  Ari’s lines elicited the right response. “Yes, exactly, them,” West said with a snap of his teeth. “So you must know about their silver.” West grabbed a large monograph off the top of the nearest book pile and opened it to a page that was already marked with a yellow Post-it. The grainy, time-blurred black-and-white photograph showed a trove of silver artifacts—plates, trophies, tankards, cups, teapots, bowls—sitting on a large wood cupboard. Nick knew the photograph by heart. It had been blown up several sizes and hung in multiples around the attic of Freddy van der Haar’s Brooklyn brownstone. The photo had served as the primary reference to the antiques that had once belonged to the van der Haars, and thus it had also served as a more recent reference on which pieces were still plausible for Freddy to own.

  “I know that photo well,” Nick admitted. “Everyone in my field does. The van der Haars had one of the great colonial American silver collections. It’s been broken up quite a bit. Many of those pieces have found their way into museums.” Nick pointed to a porringer with pierced handles that was on permanent display at the Met. “Most of the rest have gone into private collections. But a few of the best items are presumably still in the family’s possession.” Nick’s tongue stiffened at the delivery of this lie, and he swept that wet, uncooperative muscle over his dry lips. He glanced up at West with cringing exasperation, as if he expected to find a skeptical glare. “I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I’m probably boring you. But how funny that they’re your neighbors! Or maybe that should be expected in a place like Venice.”

  West didn’t grab him by the shirt collar and scream “Liar!” into his face. Instead he beamed. The serious, wrinkled man was now replaced with an impulsive, wide-eyed younger one. He held the book open in front of him and walked backward until he stood by his cupboard of decorative china.

  “Do you see?” he asked, drawing his hand back and forth between the two cupboards. Nick already knew from Clay that Richard West was obsessed with the van der Haar family—and that their silver would be like candy to him—but even Nick hadn’t expected West to build an exact replica of their Victorian cupboard.

  “God,” Nick sputtered. “It’s so similar to the one in the photo. Almost perfect.”

  West shook his head. “Not almost. It is perfect. If you ignore all of Karine’s Nymphenburg porcelain, you’ll see it’s the same exact one!”

  Nick performed an ingratiating laugh while darting his eyes between image and reality.

  “This photo was taken at the eighteenth-century van der Haar mansion on the south side of Albany,” West explained. “The van der Haars once had a huge stone house near the river. By the time I was a kid, the family was long gone and the mansion was boarded up and abandoned. My friends and I used to break in and skate through the rooms. I’m sure I skated by this very cupboard! I’m sure of it!”

  West tucked his hands behind his back and pretended to skate in front of the mahogany shelves. “You have to realize, I was the son of a mechanic. No money in sight, to put it mildly. But for me, playing in that mansion as a kid, the van der Haars represented impossible riches, our country’s first kings.” West snapped the book shut and returned it to the pile, his shoulders pulled back as if to reassert his manliness after his childish performance. West was one of the kings of America now; he was no longer a mechanic’s son breaking into houses that didn’t belong to him. “Anyway, after I’d made my own money and felt I could step away from the tech world, I fell in love with Venice. I saw all sorts of palazzos for sale, and many were far more spectacular than this one. I could have gotten one of the show ponies on the Grand Canal for the same price. But when I learned that Palazzo Contarini once belonged to the van der Haars . . .” West shook his head. “It felt like a sign. I swooped in a decade ago and bought it. I love it here. I love that the family whose mansion I played in as a boy once entertained in these rooms. Honestly, it felt like my duty to buy it and return it to its glory. It was in awful shape.” West leaned wearily against his desk, as if winded by the sentimental trip back in time. “The cupboard arrived five years ago. I heard that the mansion in Albany was being renovated into a hotel, so I asked the owners if I could buy it. After all, it had served as the family’s treasure chest. I thought the van der Haars would prefer it here rather than piled with brochures for river-rafting excursions or visits to Crossgates Mall.” West smiled as he reached out and patted Nick on the shoulder. He touched him much more delicately than he’d tapped his wall fresco. “I hope you’re listening closely. There’s a point to my rambling. I want to know if Wickston has come across any van der Haar silver lately? I know you guys are the last game in New York.”

  Nick couldn’t believe the conversation had arrived at this destination with such little effort on his part. It was frightening how much you could rely on the particular make of a person’s greed. It was as if West had been doomed to take Nick into his home and rattle on about his impoverished childhood from the very moment he’d been handed the Wickston business card. Nick preferred to think of people as messy whirlpools of wants and desires, as unpredictable bundles of urges even when the appropriate bait was placed in front of them. But West was walking right into their con—in a sense, pulling a hesitating Nick along with him—just as Clay said he would. Nick felt a stab of guilt about their deceit, not so much for tricking a rich, retired dilettante as for betraying the dreaming little boy who imagined he’d one day own the spoils of his secret playground.

  “Wickston never had any direct dealings with the van der Haars,” Nick said steadily. “From time to time, a piece would pass through our hands that had belonged to the family. Very rarely, though. And they’d never stay long because they were in high demand. From my understanding, the last remaining heir—oh, what was his name? Freddy!—dealt mostly with Dulles Hawkes. I never met Freddy.”

  “There are two last van der Haar heirs,” West corrected, putting his obsession with the family on display. “Freddy and his older sister, Cecilia. But you’re right, Freddy seemed to
have gotten all the silver.”

  Nick nodded with a weak smile. “Yes. Freddy sold a few pieces privately through Hawkes up until he retired. He never wanted the family artifacts to go to auction. That would be too public. These old families always try to be discreet when it comes to selling heirlooms.” In general, this was true. But in Freddy’s case, he had avoided the auction houses for fear of exposure—not so much out of a need for discretion as because a public auction would have allowed endless sets of expert eyes to scrutinize every relic for mistakes. “Now that Hawkes is closed,” Nick said, “we would have been Freddy’s likely choice for sales. But he never contacted us. We know he still owned a few extremely valuable pieces.” Nick eyed West to ensure that he was buying every word. “Maybe Freddy wanted to hold on to those last treasures. They must have meant a great deal to him. They likely now belong to whoever inherited his estate.”

  Nick wanted to take a bow and flee the house. He’d managed to dispense his lies far more convincingly than he’d imagined he could, and he didn’t want to botch the job by lingering at the scene of the crime. The wine had been a good conspirator, smoothing his nerves, and if West had possessed any doubts, Nick seemed to have survived them. He already pictured telling Clay tomorrow how he’d not only succeeded in giving West his business card but had already laid down the groundwork for the next step in their plan. Nick glanced at the velvet curtain over the door as if to suggest it was time to leave the study.