By the last day of March, Nick had used up every spare mile and was reaching the point where the car must swerve or accept the cliff’s edge. He and Ari worked later than usual in the shop that night, inventorying a collection of rare Guatemalan silver that Ari decided to sell and tissue-wrapping a collection of pre-Columbian gold that Ari didn’t feel he had the expertise to represent. As they Ubered to a sushi restaurant around the corner from their apartment, Nick was aware that at that exact moment, Clay was hurtling through the air at 35,000 feet, halfway over the Atlantic Ocean en route to Venice, his suitcase stuffed with fake eighteenth-century colonial American silver. Somehow that bizarre fact was all Nick’s doing.
The sky had been purpling when they entered the restaurant, and it was night by the time they exited. They walked in silence up Broadway, crossing the squares of pavement that sparkled with diamond dust. Ari stopped on the corner to give his spare change to a homeless man who was semi-visibly drunk and visibly bleeding from the sneaker. Ari made a habit of donating his day’s pocket change to one of the local homeless. He might delight in witnessing authentic displays of New York cruelty, but he was never cruel himself.
They turned onto 104th Street and began walking toward the Hudson River. It was now or never. Nick had to say it right now. Or right now. Or right now. He would let the words cyclone from his tongue, just three or four of them and they’d build and accelerate and spin on their own. But every step along 104th Street held the promise of a next step and another after that one on which to wreck his world. Nick walked the entire block locked in fear. It was impossible to form the words in English. It would be easier to give up the next sixty years of his life to Ari than to devastate him for a single moment. Nick had been silent like this before, back in Ohio. He knew how to do it.
As they crossed West End Avenue, the real possibility of saying nothing occurred to him. He could just not get on his flight to Venice in four days. Clay would understand. He’d know that Nick couldn’t risk sacrificing all he had with Ari. Hell, Clay probably already assumed that he wouldn’t get on the plane. And he could still Skype Richard Forsyth West and vouch for the silver in a way that helped Clay’s case but didn’t tarnish the Wickston name. If he just stayed quiet, he would be free to spend the summer in rural Pennsylvania and raise a child that looked a bit like Ari and take up jogging while birding and still get wasted once a month with Leo at a club downtown. That life wasn’t so bad. It was more than he ever thought he deserved. He was only twenty-five, still a kid really, and the fling with Clay could be chalked up to a kid’s mistake. Ari would pop the question by the slate pool over a field of barley and he would say yes and ride that word all the way to old age.
They turned onto Riverside, and Ari dug into his pocket for the house keys. The park across the street rustled with shadowy movement. Another option came to Nick. Maybe a mugger would run out of the park, waving a gun and demanding their wallets. Nick could make a stupid move and the mugger would shoot him in the chest. That would be the cleanest way out. But New York was no longer that unsafe, and its citizens couldn’t rely on a gun being pulled on them as they walked home at night.
“We should buy a car,” Ari said as he slipped his key into the security door.
“Oh, god, where would we park it?” Nick replied as they passed through the lobby. The elevator took them up six flights, and Ari unlocked the dead bolt to their apartment. Nick didn’t turn around to lock it after they went in.
Ari set the needle on the black circle of Schubert in the living room. A sad, slow melody poured from the speakers. It was Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960. Nick had learned it by heart.
Ari popped a nicotine lozenge into his mouth and sat on the sofa, his arm stretched across its back cushions. Nick stood immobile in the hallway. All he had to do was shut up and be happy. All he had to do was sit down and listen to piano music. His entire future required nothing more than a few more footsteps. Within a year’s time, he could be standing in this very passage as a husband and a father.
“What’s the matter?” Ari stared at him. “Why are you standing there?”
Nick closed his eyes and uttered Ari’s name. It came out as two warped syllables, with all of Nick’s life caught in his throat. “Ari. I need to tell you something. Please just listen.”
Now that Nick had performed his bogus appraisal, all that was left for him to do in Venice was wait. The next morning, West sent Clay an offer of $750K for the entire collection. That fucker! Nick wrote back when Clay texted the news. I told him to offer 800k! Ask for more. Maybe go as high as nine and see what he says? But Clay got cold feet about negotiating with a business shark. He figured $750K was already fifty thousand more than they’d initially hoped, and accepted on the spot.
It would take four days for the money to clear Clay’s bank account. During those four anxious days, it still felt possible that West would come to his senses and call his dollars back home. Nick and Clay agreed it was best not to meet—not even to talk on the phone—until the money landed in the account. It felt like jinxing matters to celebrate early or even make out in a church.
Nick was far from idle. He spent those days making preparations, should he convince Clay to go along with his brilliant new scheme. He bought a bottle of silver polish and had it wrapped in foil like champagne as a present for West the next time he saw him. He sent Eva a spree of jokey text messages, to all of which she replied with witty rejoinders or obscene emoji chains. Nick might need Eva for his plan to work. On the third morning, he texted her, The client in Milan is delayed in Geneva, so I may be staying here a little longer. I’m sorry to put you at risk of seeing my face again. Eva replied with an emoji of praying hands.
Nick felt sure he had managed to win over Daniela during his stay. If he had become an expert on anything in his time in New York, it was being a conscientious roommate. He knew when his presence was wanted—when, for example, he could put his talent as a tall person to use by fetching high-shelved kitchenware—and when to make himself invisible. Nick’s chore was the bathroom, which he mopped and scrubbed as if it were a crime scene. When he informed Daniela that he might be staying another week or so—“If that’s okay with you, of course”—she merely nodded her consent and reminded him that she was promised a dinner on the town.
Nick wandered the city, gazing at listings in the windows of real-estate offices. He made an appointment with one high-end realtor, pretending to have inherited an apartment near San Marco that he was in a hurry to sell. Was it a complicated process? What was the fastest he could get it off his hands? “It can be complicated. But if we find an eager buyer, you wouldn’t believe how fast!” the realtor swore with a wicked grin. “Many wealthy visitors fall under the spell of Venice. Our authorities have made it, shall we say, expedient to close the sale before they have a change of heart. That heart change usually transpires at the airport. We try not to let them get there before they sign.”
One afternoon, Nick walked through Campo Santa Margherita and watched as university students hung a white bedsheet across a second-floor balcony. NO GRANDI NAVI was printed across it, with a red slash through the image of a cruise ship. Another student with dyed fuchsia hair passed out flyers for an upcoming protest against the development in Mestre. Nick returned to the flat off Calle Degolin and found Daniela in the garden on her rowing machine. He debated whether home exercise was one of those moments where it was best to become invisible. Daniela wore a gray sweat suit with green piping. She had a strong, rhythmic stride, but her face was tilted off to the side, its far-off expression belonging to someone lost in thought at a library. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she wasn’t wearing her glasses. The machine’s whirling turbine created a light wind that ruffled a newspaper lying open on the garden table. Nick chanced sitting at the table. He teetered on the seat’s edge, ready to evacuate it at the first indication of annoyance.
“Horrible!” Daniela said as she glided forward. Nick was about to apologiz
e when, on her next forward glide, she added, “That story in the paper.” Nick stared down at the article in Italian, meaningless to him, and at its accompanying photograph of a construction site on a coastline. The half-built cinder-block structures looked like mausoleums or sugar cubes. They were the same photographs that had appeared on the protest flyer.
“Thanks to our little mayor . . . ,” Daniela began amid the natural ellipses of backward thrusts, “they’re building an entire mini city of cheap hotel rooms in Mestre . . . tens of thousands of beds for tens of thousands more tourists . . . Guess who that helps? Besides our little mayor whose pockets have been stuffed for approving the development . . . It helps the town of Mestre . . . but those tens of thousands of more tourists aren’t coming to see Mestre . . . They’ll take the train in for the day to swarm Venice . . . All they do is walk around and use the plumbing.” Nick decided that Daniela was obsessed with toilets. “That means more crowds and Carnival-mask shops, and out go amenities that Venetians need in order to live . . . No more dentists, dry cleaners, or butchers. How can you live in an unreal city? . . . We Venetians are going extinct! . . . And these anonymous foreign developers, who won’t even name themselves for fear of repercussions, are getting rich off our deaths.”
It was too bad that Nick couldn’t introduce Daniela to Richard West. Their shared Doomsday-Venice prophecies would have rendered them instant allies.
Daniela stopped gliding and reached for a towel. Nick waited in silence, hoping thirty seconds might be a respectful mourning period for the city before he introduced a new topic. He’d interrupted Daniela’s workout to glean some necessary information.
Daniela patted her cheeks. “Benny arrives from Shanghai in a few days. You’ll love him. Wear that coat of his I gave you, yeah?” Nick nodded, avoiding any mention of the damage he’d inflicted on it. But, to Daniela’s larger point, it had taken Nick more than an hour to locate a tailor to mend the sleeve. He’d passed a hundred mask shops in the process.
“I was curious to ask you about someone,” he said.
“You were curious? What made you stop?”
“Ha! No. I’m still curious. It’s about Freddy’s sister, Cecilia van der—”
“Older sister,” Daniela emphasized, like that lone detail was all Nick needed to know about the woman.
“Clay mentioned that they’d been estranged for a long time.” He was baiting, but Daniela wasn’t biting. “Clay said they didn’t get along, and that no one even knows where Cecilia is.”
Daniela folded the towel with precision, as if that activity might carry over into the delivery of an extremely precise answer. But when she was finished folding, she slapped the towel carelessly down on the cement.
“That woman is a beast!” she cried. “A true horror. Freddy hated her with a vengeance. He and his sister were mortal enemies. Clay told me that she only acknowledged Freddy’s death through a solicitor. I’m surprised she did that much.”
“Where is she—”
“Horses!” Daniela spat. She grabbed the handle of the rowing machine and held it out in front of her like an angry water-skier. “That’s all she cared about. I’m a firm believer in obsessions, but Cecilia had only one thing on the brain since she was a little girl. Horses. She jumped and did . . . oh, you know”—she danced her feet along the ground—“dressage. Horse tricks. Cecilia was basically raised in a stable. Freddy always said that was the reason their parents spiraled into poverty. It was due to all the money Cecilia made them shell out as a stomping eleven-year-old to keep her in Andalusians and Dutch Warmbloods. But can you picture Freddy on a horse?” Nick could not. Even after months of handling some of Freddy’s most private possessions, Nick still had trouble picturing Freddy at all. “He was a city creature from the start, born in a golden sewer grate. So, it was pretty much sibling warfare.”
Nick tried his question again. “Where is she—”
“She didn’t approve of Freddy’s lifestyle. That’s what they called it back then. A lifestyle. Like it’s a hairstyle. Like loving boys and making art and living a radically free existence is akin to the upholstery you’ve chosen for your living-room sofa. Oh, he’s such an embarrassment. Oh, Freddy’s ruining the family name. Oh, Freddy is a disgusting degenerate. Well, he was a great disgusting degenerate, let me tell you. And yet little Cecilia van der Haar, with crinkly brown hair down to her ass, was decidedly not ruining the family name by plowing through the family money to feed and groom her own cavalry.” Daniela dropped the handle. “I’m glad Clay never met her. I’m so glad that for once she didn’t inflict more harm and decided to stay away. I know that if she’d found Clay sitting in Freddy’s brownstone . . . Never in her racist, classist head would she have accepted him.”
Nick decided against repeating his question, assuming that “Where is she?” worked as a password to set off a tangent. Instead he asked, “Did you ever meet her?”
“Once!” Daniela answered. “Once she came to Venice. She hates it here. We don’t have horses. We also aren’t impressed with dusty old names, which is really all she has in her favor. But little Cecilia van der Haar did come once. This was maybe the late eighties? She came with her new husband and naturally stayed at a hotel because Il Dormitorio, even back then, was far too run-down for her liking. But Freddy, for once, was eager to see his sister. He wanted to make amends. It was during one of his dry spells when he’d stopped using heroin. Ahh! Yes, that was one horse Freddy did ride back in the day. But when his sister arrived in Venice he wasn’t on the nod.” Daniela, with an open mouth, mimed falling asleep on her own shoulder. “He really tried to make peace with her. But Cecilia was having none of it! She attacked him the moment her shoe left the boat. She called him a faggot, a junkie, a humiliation. She blamed him for the attention he was getting for his photographs, demanding that he use a pseudonym so as not to blemish her name. She even threatened him—I swear to god, I was in the room—about the disgrace he’d cause if he contracted AIDS! How can you threaten your brother about a disease that was massacring his friends at that very moment? How? No empathy is how! Nothing human in her! Looking back, I’m afraid Freddy probably had already caught the virus by then. I’d hoped he’d be spared because he was a sissy top.”
“A what?” Nick asked. “A sss—”
Daniela laughed. “A sissy top. That’s what we used to call an effeminate gay man who prefers the top position.” She waved her hand at the inevitable ephemerality of sex terms. “But, you see, Freddy shot up, and I’m sure it was the needles that got him.” Daniela paused. “Where were we?”
“Cecilia was visiting Venice.”
“That’s right! And to Freddy’s credit, he tried to stomach his sister’s wrath, but it finally came to a head at a dinner she threw at the Gritti Palace. Her new husband was evidently loaded, and she wanted to show off in front of a bunch of Italian aristos. She organized a table right on the roof, and everything had to be just so, all that old-school social decorum that mattered to Cecilia. She drew up the seating chart, and it was man, woman, man, woman around the table. Do I need to tell you the rest?” Daniela thrust backward on the glider, as if to allow Nick a view of her body. “In the late eighties, I was already as I am now. A full woman. I have always been a full woman, for that matter. But little Cecilia van der Haar managed to jab a thorn into Freddy whenever she could, and she seated me between two women, where a man should sit.”
Nick grimaced. “Evil,” he said.
“I don’t think anyone else even noticed,” Daniela continued. “But I noticed, and Freddy certainly did. He stood up, called his sister a cunt first in English and then in Italian, and stormed out. Freddy and his sister never really spoke again.”
Daniela pointed to a water bottle under the table, which Nick retrieved. As she drank, he dared to tackle his initial question. “Where is she now?”
Daniela shrugged. “No idea. She married two more times. Rich men who could pay for her equestrian whims. Last I heard she was in Brazil.
Or was it Argentina? A horse farm somewhere in South America.”
“But her name is still on the deed of Il Dormitorio alongside Clay’s.”
Daniela smiled. “I think that was Freddy’s final act of revenge. Don’t let Cecilia get her hands on his precious Venetian hideaway. Freddy must have loved the idea of his sister sharing a title with a young gay black man from the Bronx. But it hardly matters. She despises Venice.”
Nick glanced up and noticed an elderly man smoking a cigarette on an upstairs terrace. His hairy arm straddled the railing, and he was peering down on the garden.
“Your neighbor is watching,” Nick whispered.
Daniela looked up and shouted a greeting in Italian.
“Is that the Turkish guy who swooped in with the right paperwork to claim this building?” Nick asked. Even with her glasses off, Daniela managed to fix him with a suspicious glare. “I overheard you telling Clay about it the day I arrived.”
Daniela smirked. “No, that’s my neighbor Signore Breghetto. Until recently, he was under the impression that his family had owned this building for centuries.”
“There’s nothing he can do to fight the claim?”
She shook her head. “My new Turkish landlord is a very good con man. His only mistake has been choosing to settle now in Venice. No question he owns the building. But it’s unlikely he will get to keep his life.”
A Beautiful Crime Page 22