A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Clay remembered the initial disturbing emails, sent via Daniela’s address and never directly to Clay: If there is any indication they’re on to me, I’ll take the opposite route of the refugees, I’ll smuggle myself into North Africa and disappear there.

  Clay remembered the later life-affirming emails: Linosa is paradise! Black volcanic-rock beaches, prickly-pear cactuses, no banks, not even a single ATM! And I met this great guy Franco who’s teaching me how to ride the only horse on the island. (Clay could admit to hoping that Franco was a cantankerous octogenarian with a soft spot for troubled Americans rather than a cute twenty-year-old islander.)

  The more recent emails were terse and written, to Clay’s amazement, in semi-decent Italian: It’s safe now. I can’t wait any longer. When are you coming?

  “Go!” Daniela begged him. “If for nothing else, so that I can stop playing emissary between you two. Your Nicky really turned out to be the worst houseguest I’ve ever had. You know, he never did take me out for that thank-you dinner.”

  Was it safe now? Clay wasn’t sure. On that vicious morning last May, Eva had returned to Palazzo Contarini from the liquor store to discover her uncle lying bloody and unconscious on the living-room floor. Richard West had been water-ambulanced to the emergency room at Ospedale SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In the three subsequent days that West remained stable but unconscious in the ICU, the Venetian police went to work investigating a violent assault that lacked a single eyewitness. Naturally, initial suspicion fell on Clay, and if it hadn’t been for Battista supplying him with an alibi—as well as a dozen Venetians who saw him running around Santa Croce at the time of the attack—he probably would have taken the rap. Clay was too neat a package not to have done it. “I’m sure it’s that neighbor!” Eva told the police. “They hated each other. My uncle didn’t have another enemy in the world!”

  Clay’s interview with the detectives wasn’t without its land mines. He denied possession of forged real-estate documents, and since he hadn’t submitted any papers to the notary, he’d committed no actual crime. His story didn’t sit well with the detectives, who were hungry for an arrest, but they were forced to let him go. They gave him a warning that his younger self would have swooned to receive from the local authorities—Please don’t leave the city in the foreseeable future. We will likely want to see you again.

  Eventually, Eva floated a second theory, outrageous even to her own grief-addled mind: “There was a young man, Nicholas Brink, who was supposed to stop by before he left town. At least, I invited him over. He never said whether he’d come or not. But it doesn’t make sense. He was a friend. There’d be no reason for him to do something like that . . .” The detectives got as far as confirming that a man matching Nick’s description had taken the 11:50 train to Milan. Before they could track his movements any farther, the suspect pool widened dramatically.

  SAVE VENICE FROM THOSE WHO WANT TO SAVE VENICE. The newspaper headlines were merciless. Battista decided to step forward and publicly denounce his boss as one of the anonymous foreign investors of the Mestre development. The list of local suspects with a possible grudge against the victim ballooned to roughly fifty-three thousand. The detectives speculated that one of the protesters might have caught wind of the information before the media had, and decided to take matters into their own hands. The police still promised that an arrest was imminent, but Clay sensed that they’d soured on their taste for fast justice. The detectives, after all, were also born-and-raised Venetians. “We cannot rule out a random burglary,” one of them told Eva within earshot of Il Dormitorio’s windows. “A crime of convenience. Are you sure you shut the gate when you went to buy your prosecco that morning?” On day three, the hospital called with news. Richard West had woken up in the ICU.

  West didn’t speak. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He was capable only of nodding or shaking his head before withdrawing into a blank, uneasy silence. MRI scans revealed no discernible neurological damage, although admittedly Giovanni e Paolo was a hospital with limited resources. It might simply be a matter of time before the trauma subsided and his speech returned. Clay watched from a garret window as Karine, Eva, and a hired male nurse brought West home on a motoscafo, carrying him in through the palazzo’s canal-front doors, whose chain had to be clipped because the key couldn’t be located. Clay wondered whether shame was the real reason for West’s sudden muteness. If he didn’t speak, he wouldn’t have to account to old friends and new adversaries for his duplicitous involvement in the Mestre development. In any case, it was no warm homecoming. On the second night, a brick was thrown through the palazzo’s piano nobile window. Trash was strewn in the garden. Vandals spray-painted TRAITOR and MAIALE CAPITALISTA on the brick walls surrounding the house. Still, the detectives routinely visited West to see if his condition had improved enough to identify his attacker. Clay expected that sooner or later the aggressive, need-to-win West would conquer the meek and humiliated one, and Nick’s involvement would come to light. But maybe West was more broken than Clay knew.

  In the first week of June, Eva returned to Toulouse. At the end of the month, Karine decided to move her husband to the clinic in Leipzig, which offered far more advanced facilities for neurological disorders. There were no goodbye dinner parties, no last-minute visitors, no midnight disco music blaring through the walls. The Wests closed the house and unceremoniously left by motoscafo one evening without any indication as to when they’d return. In her hurry, Karine neglected to board up the connecting door to Il Dormitorio. The day after the Wests departed, Clay opened the walnut door and saw the ghostly white-sheeted furniture. As he moved through the rooms, it occurred to him that for the first time in more than a century, all of Palazzo Contarini was home to a single inhabitant.

  Clay stayed in Venice for the summer, still part owner of a toothpick of a palazzo. He heard nothing—not even an indirect word—from Freddy’s sister in Uruguay. The Celsius spiked, and the days were swampy with heat and tourist fat and the nights were cramped and windless, the air as heavy as old paint. Clay loved it. He’d forgotten how dazzling Venice looked with heatstroke and how each dark church was a cold gift of refuge from the sun. He spent most of his evenings with Daniela, but twice a week he’d meet up with Battista for a drink. They’d become close—the handsome Italian unemployed but determined not to leave for the mainland—and in their awkward pauses Clay felt a lingering possibility. What kept him from pursuing it was Nick, waiting in Linosa, waiting for West to come to his senses and name him, waiting to become a wanted felon, waiting for the police to match the fingerprints on the doorstop, waiting for the coast to clear. Three months went by and there was no accusation from Leipzig. Then four. In the end, Nick was waiting for Clay.

  “I don’t feel ready,” he admitted to Daniela. “I don’t know. I’m worried things have changed too much between us. I haven’t seen him in four months. And, really, it’s been longer than that, since we only met in secret the whole time we were in Venice. Hell, we were meeting in secret from the very beginning in New York.”

  “Welcome to how it’s been for our kind for centuries!” Daniela exclaimed. “It doesn’t make your relationship any less valid. Some might argue it makes it more valid.”

  He knew he should listen to her. But he was apprehensive all the same about the prospect of facing Nick.

  “Anyway, I can’t go yet,” he reasoned. “What if the police track me? What if it’s a trap and I lead them right to Nick? It might look suspicious if I left. They specifically asked me to stay in town.”

  Daniela conjured her best imitation of Freddy. “Now why on earth, doll, would you ever want to do what the police told you to?”

  In Lampedusa, he took a taxi from the airport to the dock. He was driven through a town comprised entirely of two-story cement blocks, the metal grates pulled over whatever summer diversions they held. Not a soul in sight but for one boy on a corner, squatting down with scabbed knees, his head bent between his legs, his shoulders and neck covered in
sand and dirt. He looked like he had been there for weeks. It was an eerie, inhospitable island.

  “We don’t get many like you,” the taxi driver told him. At least, that’s what Clay thought he said, his Sicilian dialect so difficult to untangle. Clay only half wondered what the driver meant by that remark. He watched the Mediterranean Sea fill his view out the window.

  The ferry to Linosa—a blue island skipper that cut a razor path through the waves—took exactly an hour. The cabin’s few occupants were elderly women and middle-aged men carting groceries, supplies, and caged animals back to the island. Clay tried to identify the animal inside the crate by his seat, but it was just a set of small, black, unblinking eyes in a cube of darkness.

  When Clay had emailed Nick (via Daniela) the date and time of his arrival, Nick responded with a photo of himself on the horse he’d been learning to ride—a shaggy, brown-spotted mare, more bones than muscle, which suited Nick, whose face was hidden under the brim of a straw hat. Nick’s message, all in English, was sprinkled in exclamation points—I’ll meet you at the dock! Although you’d find me in five minutes wherever I was on the island! I’m “l’americano” here. That’s more than just my nickname! Seriously, for the Linosians, I am America. They’ve known so few of us, everything I do and say has come to represent the character of our people! How scary is that? So, you’re probably wondering about the horse. Well, I’ve taken quite a shine to riding. And I’ve been thinking, Freddy’s sister is all alone in Uruguay with her horses. And she still owns half the palazzo. Who better to leave it to than the young, horse-loving American who wandered into town and kept her company in her final years? Something to consider on your trip down . . .

  Clay honestly couldn’t tell whether Nick was joking or not. No, they hadn’t run off with four million euros. But they still had a couple hundred thousand from the silver, and that should see them through for a few years. For Clay, it was enough.

  The island swelled on the horizon, high desert hills braiding together like a coiled diamondback. The water grew calm as it flattened into shallow turquoise. The ferry nudged the cement jetty. A paved road led up a hillside toward a huddle of single-story buildings, each painted a different bright fluorescent hue, as if to shout to those far out at sea, We’re here!

  Clay spotted him right away. He was the only tall man at the end of the jetty. His hair was curlier and blonder than Clay had ever seen it, a yellow bonfire, and he wore jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his shoulder blades. A deep tan blurred his features. But as Clay approached, he could see that Nick’s face had grown thinner, the boy in him gone. His eyes were the same, though, and that was all the assurance Clay needed. They didn’t run to each other. They didn’t take each other up in their arms. They didn’t kiss. The world was still too dangerous. But they were at home on the sea, and they would find their way.

  Acknowledgments

  In the summer of 1999, I lived in Venice for an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. My months there had a substantial impact on the writing of this book. I want to thank the Peggy Guggenheim—and its godsend of an internship program—for opening Venice up to me at such a young age. That said, I couldn’t have captured this complicated, multilayered city without the help of key Venetian friends and experts. Chief among them is Toto Bergamo Rossi, who not only offered countless guided tours and a spare bedroom when needed but generously fielded a zillion disparate questions on the nature of palazzos, restoration materials, and Italian slang to give this story a firm foundation. Thank you also to Shaul Bassi, Simone Francescato, Pietro Rusconi, and Olympia Scarry for their own insights on Venice. A very special thanks to James Ivory for essential introductions.

  Although I spent as much time as possible doing research in Venice, much of this novel was written in Paris. That would never have been feasible without the residency I graciously received from Maison de la Poésie. Thank you to Olivier Chaudenson, Caroline Boidé Brénaud, and the entire staff, as well as to Centre International d’Accueil et d’Échanges des Récollets and the welcoming spirit of Chrystel Dozias and Aurélie Philippe. I could have stayed in that monastery in the 10th arrondissement for the rest of my days. Thank you to Tiffany Godoy for being the woman who figures everything out, and to Alexander Hertling and Monroe Hertling for the Parisian dinner breaks.

  The novel dips its feet in several specialized fields, and I am grateful for those patient professionals who shared their knowledge with me. On the subject of antique silver, thank you to Tim Martin, Jill Waddell, Ian Irving, Betsy Pochoda, and Tom Delavan. On legal matters, thank you to Meyer Fedida, Gianluca Russo, and Elana Bronson. On the study of neuroscience, thank you to my Récollets neighbor Daniel Margulies. A big thank-you to Daniela Guglielmino for correcting my Italian as much as one could.

  No writing gets done without the guidance of my friend, adviser, sounding board, and support supplier Bill Clegg. Thanks to him and to everyone at the Clegg Agency—Marion Duvert, Simon Toop, and David Kambhu among them—for making it all happen. This novel was a labor of love, and my deepest appreciation goes to my editor, Jennifer Barth, for shouldering a good deal of this labor’s weight and for seeing all of my good intentions and then forcing me to make them work on the page; her constant, unerring advice improved this story in countless ways. Thank you to Jonathan Burnham, who gets it and yet understands how it could work even better. Thank you to Sarah Ried for her tireless help. Thank you to the whole team at Harper.

  This novel is, in many ways, a tribute to the wild, radical, street-smart souls who became the patriarchs and matriarchs of my adopted family over the years. I am particularly indebted to the late, great artist David Armstrong whose spirit hovered over me as I wrote this novel; I pilfered his brownstone on Jefferson Avenue, his predilection for the endearment “doll,” and his extraordinary photography archive as direct inspirations. Thank you to those friends who helped me down this road: George Miscamble, James Haslam, Lisa Love, Wade Guyton, Thomas Alexander, Joseph Logan, Zadie Smith, the folks at Interview Magazine, Leo Bersani, Patrik Ervell, T. Cole Rachel, T.J. Wilcox, Ana and Danko Steiner, and always the Cincinnati brood.

  About the Author

  CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Destroyers, Orient, and Lightning People. He is the editor at large for Interview magazine and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Christopher Bollen

  Lightning People

  Orient

  The Destroyers

  Copyright

  A BEAUTIFUL CRIME. Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Bollen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover illustration © Jonathan Meeks/Shutterstock

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bollen, Christopher, 1975–, author.

  Title: A beautiful crime: a novel / Christopher Bollen.

  Description: First Edition. | New York, NY: Harper, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019010893 (print) | LCCN 2019012934 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062853905 (E-book) | ISBN 9780062853882 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.O6545 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.O6545 S48 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010893

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Digital Edition JANUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-285390-5

  Version 11212019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285388-2

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