“I trust you.” I figured the collection of small bills had come from either his take at the flea market or the pawn shop. I slid the envelope beneath the laptop and started the shutdown process.
As I did that, he asked, “You know anything about prostate cancer?”
I was thrown off by that question, and all I could do was say no.
“They say it’s no big deal,” Venable said. “It’s a slow-growing cancer, it’s usually localized in the prostate. And who needs the prostate anyway? All it does is create the fluid that carries the sperm, and if you’re not going to have kids, it’s about as useful as tits on a bull.”
“I never really gave it much thought,” I said. “Don’t they call the prostate the male G-spot?”
I kicked myself mentally. What was I doing bringing up sex, when that was the last thing I wanted to talk to Jesse Venable about?
“Yeah, but I was never much of a bottom,” he said. “So when the doc told me that my prostate had swelled up to the size of ripe mango, and it was the reason why I had to take a piss every hour, I was fine with getting rid of it. Kick the fucker out, I said.”
He looked at me. “I used to have a figure, you know,” he said. “I was never as slim or as muscular as you, but I swam every day, watched what I ate, all that crap. I was so fucking glad I never got AIDS, all the sex I had, that I swore I was going to treat my body like a temple.”
Jesse Venable wanted to talk, so I was going to listen. Maybe I’d be able to swing the conversation to Larry Kane at some point.
“As you can see, I ended up more like a Buddha than a temple,” he said. “One thing the doc neglected to tell me before he cut me was that there are these nerves wrapped around the prostate.” He held up his hands as if he was cupping something. “These nerves, they’re what control your ability to get a hard-on. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t either, back when I was young and I could get hard just looking at a cute guy. Tell me the truth, that’s the way it is with you, isn’t it?”
“It can get embarrassing sometimes,” I admitted.
He roared with laughter. “Tell me about it. And you know, I’m no slouch in the size department, so when I got excited the world knew about it.”
His laughter ended up with a hiccup, and it took him a moment to get his breath back. “So after a week or so, they took the tube out of my dick and I could piss again, the stitches healed up and the pain went away. I ask the doc, when can I get laid again? And he gives me this bullshit about every man is different, yada yada yada.”
I reached over to the cooler and grabbed a bottle of cold water. “You want one?” I asked him, and when he said yes I tossed one over to him.
He took a long swig from the bottle, and then leaned forward. “But I don’t get hard, so three months later, I’m back in the office and he explains this shit about the nerves. The cancer had gotten into the area by them, he had to take them all out, and that’s that. He can give me a pump, I can get injections, he’ll get my sex drive back for me, no problem.”
I drank some of my water. While I was sorry to hear about his problems, I really wanted to find a way to ask him about Larry Kane.
“It was like pissing money away,” he continued. “Nothing worked. I started eating like nobody’s business, put on all this weight. And the only thing that gives me any pleasure is looking at guys.” He took another long swig. “Paintings, photos on the Internet, the real thing when I can convince a good looking guy like you to come out here and play around.”
He must have seen something on my face then because he said, “Not sexually. Like I said, I can’t get it up, and to be honest with you, I never got much pleasure from dicks in my mouth. Call me a selfish pig, call me a complete top or a complete asshole, doesn’t change the truth. All I got left to me is watching.”
I couldn’t help my curiosity. “So you never get off?” It seemed like a gay man’s worst nightmare.
“I do, but I gotta handle it myself, if you know what I mean. Takes a long time to get where I’m going, and other guys, even if you pay ‘em, they don’t have the patience. And I can see it in their faces when they look at me. Big fat sloppy pig. Can they even find my dick under all those layers of lard?”
“Ouch,” I said. “That must hurt.”
“Yeah. But if you don’t expect anything from people, you don’t get disappointed, you don’t get hurt,” he said.
He was a crook, but my heart still broke for Jesse Venable. I tried not to take my looks for granted, but I’d never considered what would happen if I lost them completely. What if I ended up fat and sad, with a limp dick like his? I’d hate to be the object of anyone’s pity.
“So I gotta surround myself with people I trust,” Venable said after a while. “The managers at all my locations, I pay them well so I know they’ve got my back.”
Finally, my opportunity. “The guy from your flea market booth, too,” I said. “I noticed on his time sheet he was running a lot of errands for you. You must trust him.”
“I did,” Venable said. “You know that bastard was homeless when I met him?”
“Really?”
He nodded. “His father caught him giving a neighbor boy a blow job, kicked him out of the nest at fifteen. He made his way down here and he was living on the street, giving blow jobs and taking it up the ass for anybody who’d pay. I found him in the alley behind the pawn shop, miserable little rat in the pouring rain.”
He shook his head. “You ask anybody I do business with, they’ll laugh if you say I have a heart. But I took the kid in that night, dried him off, gave him clean clothes. Hooked him up with a job at the pawn shop. Treated him like my own kid.”
“But there are no more time sheets from him after last Saturday,” I said. I realized that connected with what Paul Snyder had said, that Venable had fired Larry on Saturday, right after I’d bought the fake belt at the booth and witnessed the incident with the other vendor. Why? “He’s not still working for you?”
“Had to fire him last week. He’d been stealing from me but I didn’t know it until I showed up there on Saturday evening—I was gonna take Larry out to dinner, celebrate another successful season. But he’d already shut the booth down and booked, which wasn’t like him at all. Then the nosy broad at the next booth told me to check my accounts, that she saw him pocketing way more cash than he should have been.”
That was probably the woman I’d spoken to myself when I went back to the market.
I remembered that Larry hadn’t written down anything about the sale of the belt, at least not while I was watching. Was that how he’d been stealing? Writing down one price on the inventory documents and pocketing the difference between what the customer paid?
“I tracked him down on his phone and challenged him, and he admitted it right up front. Talking about all the risks I made him take, how he needed to be better compensated. Little turd. I shit-canned him right then and there.”
Did Jesse Venable know that Larry Kane was dead? Had he been responsible for it? I wasn’t ready to confront him. My business, after all, wasn’t Kane’s death. I had bigger fish to fry and I needed to keep Venable on sizzle for a while. So I stood up. “Hot out here,” I said. “You mind if I take a dip in the pool?”
“My pleasure,” he said.
I repeated my process of the other day—a jump into the deep end, a number of laps, then pulled myself out, cascading water. Did I notice Venable’s hand move quickly away from his groin? Was I creeped out to be putting myself on display for him?
Or was I just doing my job, getting his trust? Either way, I felt dirty, and the shower I took before I left the pool area didn’t do much to make me feel cleaner.
15 – Surprising Offer
When I returned from changing back into my clothes, Venable was waiting for me in the living room. “I trust you, Angus. You’ve got one of those faces, you know? Like a Renaissance angel.”
; I could feel myself blushing, and not just because of the artistic reference. I was exactly the guy he shouldn’t be trusting right then.
He offered me a glass of wine, and I accepted. I sat on his oversized sofa until he returned with two balloon glasses of white wine. “An Italian pinot grigio,” he said. “In honor of our mutual interest in Italy.”
It took me a moment to remember that I’d talked to him about Danny’s studies in Florence. I sipped the wine, which was cold and fruity and quite good. “I got those photos you asked for,” he said. “Of the painting in Italy.”
He picked up a manila folder from the table next to him. “This is a photograph of the painting, front and back,” he said, as he handed a sheet to me, with two color photos.
The picture looked even more vibrant and alive than it had when I’d seen it online, or in the movie Frank Sena had shown me, and I felt again that curious sense of connection to it. The water in the background reminded me of bathing in the Lackawanna River at Nay Aug Park with Danny when we were both kids.
Because I didn’t want to reveal too much knowledge, I asked Venable about the markings on the back of the painting, the ones that indicated it had been stolen from a Jew in Venice, and he either didn’t know what they meant, or wasn’t telling. He said they were simply some kind of code from a dealer who’d sold the painting at some point.
“The man with the painting is ready to sell. He’s willing to ship the painting to me, or to Mr. Sena, but I don’t know this guy from Adam, and I’m not about to send a stranger fifty thousand dollars without knowing what I’m getting.”
He sat back in his chair, one hand around the stem of his wineglass. “I spoke to Mr. Sena about this idea, and he agreed it’s a good one. He’s willing to pay you to go to Venice and pick up the painting.”
“Me? Why?” I was stunned, yet in a way not so surprised. I’d been trying to position myself both as an intermediary between Frank Sena and Jesse Venable, and also as someone Venable could trust. But send me to Italy?
“Because you have the art smarts. I can’t make the trip myself. If I sit for too long, even in a first-class seat, I’m subject to deep vein thrombosis in my legs. You’re young and healthy. Mr. Sena thinks it would be too emotional for him to go back to this place where his family lived for generations. We both agree that we can trust you.”
I experienced a momentary pang of guilt. Though Frank could trust me, Venable certainly shouldn’t.
“You could take a few days’ vacation, couldn’t you?” he asked. “As a freelancer, you set your own work hours. You could even visit your brother while you’re there. And your friend Mr. Sena has offered to cover the cost of your flight, your hotel, even your meals while you’re in Venice.”
The offer was very tempting. I really did want to see Danny and see Italy, too. But what would Miriam say? Was this a legitimate extension of my undercover work?”
“I can’t say yes right now. I have to speak with Frank, of course. Then check my schedule, see when I could free up a couple of days. When did you want me to go?”
“As soon as possible. Mr. Sena doesn’t want to let this painting slip away, and like I said, we have no reason to trust this guy in Italy.”
I left Venable’s house a few minutes later, with a promise to get back to him quickly. I called Miriam’s cell phone, but got her voice mail, and asked if I could meet with her first thing Monday morning to go over a new development.
The other person with a vested interest in the painting was Frank Sena and on my way home, I called and asked if I could stop by and chat with him more about Venable’s request. He agreed, and I fought my way through Saturday afternoon traffic to the Intracoastal. At the top of the bridge, I caught a glimpse of bright blue water sparkling in the late afternoon sunshine, and not for the first time realized how lucky I was to have landed in South Florida.
Frank opened the door to his apartment for me, looking very formal – black slacks, white shirt, a bright blue silk square in his pocket. All that was missing was a pipe and he’d have looked like a detective in one of those PBS shows.
He went into the kitchen to get me a glass of ice water, and I walked over to the cabinet I’d noticed before, the one full of collectables, in porcelain and silver. I recognized the figurine of a tall, slim boy with a skullcap as Lladro – my mother had a couple of those pieces.
“Are you interested in Judaica?” Frank asked, as he returned with water for both of us and a pair of wood coasters.
“That’s what this is?” I asked.
He nodded. “For the most part, they’re Jewish ritual items. My father had a small collection and I’ve expanded on it, focusing primarily on antiques from the Italian Jewish community.” He pointed to an ornately engraved silver and brass cylinder, about eight inches long. “That’s an antique megillah holder,” he said. “It has a parchment scroll inside, the Book of Esther, which we read at Purim.”
“You can read from that?”
“Well, I can’t. And that scroll is purely decorative. But the rabbis read from that book at the holiday. Beside it, that’s a hamsa, the hand of God.”
The stylized hand he pointed at was decorated with Hebrew letters, curlicues and other designs. “It’s all beautiful,” I said.
I drank some water, then sat in one of Frank’s wing chairs. I placed the water glass on the coaster on the coffee table, then said, “I understand you spoke with Jesse Venable and he suggested I ought to fly to Venice and pick up the painting for you.”
“I agreed with him. I don’t want to make the trip myself.” He frowned. “I went to Venice maybe twenty years ago, on a tour, and it upset me a great deal to be there and think about generations of my family living there, how with one swoop the Nazis destroyed a whole community.”
He took a deep breath. “But I do want to get the painting back. This is about more than just my uncle’s painting, at least to me,” Frank said. “What do you know about the Italian Jews and the Holocaust?”
“Not much. The Fascists under Mussolini were allies of the Germans. So I assume they had the same anti-Jewish policies, right?”
“To a degree. Many of the Jews in Italy were secularized, often intermarrying with Italians. My family can trace its history back to 1492, when the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews, were expelled under the Inquisition. They lived in Italy for centuries after that, so they felt Italian, and when Mussolini enacted laws regulating Jews in 1938 they were completely surprised.”
He sipped his water. “They were called the leggi razziali or racial laws. They restricted civil rights of Jews, banned Jewish books, and excluded Jews from public office and higher education.”
I couldn’t imagine living in my own native country and suddenly being subjected to rules that governed what I could and could not do.
“Your father was in the United States, so how come your uncle didn’t join him?”
“By the time Ugo decided to leave, more laws had been enacted that stripped Jews of their assets and restricted their travel. In his last letters my uncle was very worried, but he still believed that he was Italian before he was Jewish, and that would save him. And he thought that the Pope would intervene, and the Italians, who were fervent Catholics, would obey him rather than the government.”
I could imagine that kind of hubris because I’d seen it in criminals. Laws didn’t matter to them. Even if the laws were wrong.
“The Pope never spoke up,” Frank said. “When Mussolini fell in 1943 and the Nazis occupied the country, they began to round up the Jews for deportation to the camps. From what I can trace, my uncle went into hiding, but eventually he was caught and sent to an internment camp at Fossoli di Carpi near Modena. From there he went to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.”
We were both silent for a moment. Frank’s last word echoed in my ears. I’d been accustomed to thinking of the Holocaust as genocide—a fancier word that hid the true meaning of all those deaths. Murdered was a harsher word—and a true one.
&n
bsp; “I have the money,” Frank said, his voice low and sad. “Tom’s spoken highly of you as a man I can trust, and I’d greatly appreciate this if you could do this favor for me. And for my uncle.”
Ugo Sena had lived in another time, another place, but he was a gay man imprisoned and murdered for the crime of being who he was. It felt like the universe was telling me this was something I had to do.
16 – The Art is in the Selling
As I drove home, I became more and more excited about the chance to go to Italy and see Danny. I just had to get Miriam to sign off on the plan. I couldn’t wait to get to work on Monday morning and spell it all out for her. I thought about emailing Danny or trying to set up a Skype call with him, but I didn’t want to get his hopes up until it was definite. I was enthusiastic enough for both of us.
When I got home, I opened the envelope Jesse Venable had given me. We’d agreed on three-fifty for the work, but once I separated the bills into piles and totaled them up, I counted four hundred bucks. I guessed the fifty-buck bonus was either for a quick turnaround or the chance to see me in my wet bathing suit.
I was scrupulous about recording all my freelance income. I certainly didn’t want to get tripped up by the IRS for neglecting to report what I earned. The mix of small bills was interesting, and I remembered the case I’d helped Katya with earlier that year, the one involving money laundering. Businesses that dealt in cash, like Venable’s pawn shop, were prime opportunities for laundering money.
Had those bills in the envelope come to Venable through illegal means? Maybe he was laundering cash for a drug dealer. I reminded myself that where the cash came from was outside the limits of the investigation into the illegal sale of Ragazzi al Mare, though I made a note to include all that information in the FD302 I’d prepare Monday morning about my interactions with Venable.
Survival Is a Dying Art Page 10