When Shadows Come

by Vincent Zandri

  Giovanni isn’t expected at work until the evening. In the half hour it takes him to get here, I shower and change my clothes. For now, it is far safer to go out in the world with someone who can look after me when and if the lights go out. I meet him down in the street and together we share a coffee at a cramped bar before heading toward the Ponte di Rialto, where we’ll cross over onto the opposite side of the Grand Canal into what used to be the Jewish ghetto.

  “Let me get this straight,” the tall, black-haired Giovanni says as he sips his caffè macchiato. “The police have located Grace’s passport, and now they believe she was indeed kidnapped. But they still have no witnesses to the event.”

  “Other than me,” I confirm, taking a careful sip of my caffè Americano.

  “But you were blind at the time. So you are, how you say in English . . . an unreliable witness?”

  I nod. “That about sums it up.”

  “And now you see again.”

  “But I don’t know for how long.”

  “And why do we want to visit the church where the blind Santa Lucia rests in her peace?”

  “Because that’s what I told myself to do in my sleep.”

  He nearly chokes on his coffee.

  “Scusi?” he says, wiping coffee from his lips with the back of his hand.

  I drink some more coffee, explain to him in as few words as possible about my three separate bouts of sleepwalking during the past three nights. During the first night, I climbed onto the roof. On the second night, when Grace was gone, I began to build a city inside the apartment. A 3-D map out of boxes, spoons, knives, forks, and dishes. I didn’t know what city I was building until I completed it and it most definitely became a model of Venice, complete with the Grand Canal in its center. And at the very head of the canal was placed a mass card depicting the eyeless face of Santa Lucia. It’s as if my subconscious has been trying to give me directions.

  “Are you suggesting,” he says as he finishes off his coffee in one swift pull, “that you can see things in your head before they happen?”

  I shake my head.

  “Not exactly,” I explain. “But what if it’s possible that Grace is trying to communicate with me? Like two people who are so connected they anticipate one another’s phone calls before they happen. They call one another at the exact same time. So exact that the phone doesn’t even ring. Suddenly that person is there, on the line.”

  “You and Grace are that close.”

  I down the rest of my coffee.

  “Not as close as we’re trying to be,” I say. “I suppose I can’t read her mind exactly. But I believe it’s possible to somehow feel her trying to communicate with me. It’s a matter of believing she wants to come back.”

  “But you might be all wrong in your beliefs. It’s also possible that Grace doesn’t want to communicate with you.”

  He’s right, of course, and it’s a possibility I must accept. My sleepwalking could be just that, sleepwalking and nothing more. The city I’ve built out of those boxes and plates could simply be the work of an anxiety-ridden soldier trying to cope with the horrible effects of PTSD. End of story. Maybe I placed the mass card of Santa Lucia on the floor or maybe there’s some other explanation of how it got there. The apartment is rented to lots of military men and women. So I’m told. Many of them must visit the church where Santa Lucia lies inside her glass coffin. It is a Venetian landmark. Maybe the occupant of the studio prior to Grace and me paid a visit to the blind saint and carried the mass card home with him.

  “I understand what you’re trying to tell me. It’s possible my logic is broken, but then even a broken clock can be relied on to tell the right time twice a day.”

  Giovanni nods, then places a couple of euros on the counter.

  “Your blindness,” he says, laying a hand on my arm. “It might make you more in tune with her thoughts. You try harder to feel what she feels. To see what she sees.”

  “My blindness can provide me with a special tool,” I agree. “But I need my eyesight in order to find her.”

  “You need both. You need the dark and the light.”

  As we exit the coffee bar, I find myself praying for the onset of blindness. But not yet.

  Chapter 32

  We walk along the cobblestones that line the flat banks of the Grand Canal, until we come to the Ponte di Rialto, the white-marbled bridge of stairs spanning the canal’s head. Descending the steps on the opposite side of the bridge, I spot the train station to my left and the pedestrian street that leads deep into the old Jewish district, now filled with artists, shops, student housing, and restaurants. Tourists cram into the cobbled passageways along with gelato and fruit venders. As we pass a small piazza, a group of clowns are performing magic tricks with metal hoops, rope, and long walking sticks. Not much farther up the way from them a violinist plays a sad harmony. He’s an old man dressed in wool jacket and matching trousers. On his head, he wears a black wool skullcap. For shoes, old leather cordovans that now are riddled with holes and held precariously together with strips of filthy gray duct tape. Laid out on the cobbles is his open violin case. Fumbling inside my pocket, I find a ten-euro note and drop it into the case. He nods, smiles.

  We move on in the direction of San Geremia, where Santa Lucia lies in state, the blind seeking out the blind.

  We find the church nestled at the far end of a square that’s bookended by feeder canals. Some children are playing in the square, kicking a soccer ball back and forth. It’s going on nine in the morning and the sun has risen, warm and bright. Raising my face, I feel it seep in through the thin skin that covers my eyes, and into my eyeballs. I’ve been able to see now without interruption for more than three hours.

  I follow Giovanni to the wood doors of the stone-faced, Gothic church. He pulls the door open and we are greeted by a barred ticket window. I dig out another ten-euro note and pay for the both of us. We’re handed two entry tickets attached to the same card containing the image of Santa Lucia holding her extracted eyes that I found on my apartment floor. When I hand my ticket to the ticket taker, he tears the card, or stub, off at the perforated seam and hands it back to me. I stuff the card into my pants pocket along with the one I found this morning. Giovanni hands over his ticket, gets the card back in return.

  Then we enter the church.

  The old church smells of burning incense and, aside from Giovanni and myself, there are no other visitors to be found at this hour of the morning. The pews are empty, as are the small chapels that flank the main altar. Placed in the center of the altar is a glass coffin that contains a red-robed body laid out on a bed of silver. It immediately grabs my attention the same way a hot fire can suddenly rob you of your breath.

  “What do you wish me to do?” Giovanni whispers, his voice taking on a slight echo despite its soft tone.

  “Just stay close to me. Keep your eyes open for Grace.”

  “But the church, she is empty.”

  “Not everything is as it appears, my friend.”

  The church comes alive with the sound of our leather soles slapping the hard marble floor. It makes me feel like I’m about to wake the dead.

  As a born and bred Roman Catholic who long ago abandoned his church and its rules, I’m not a praying man by any means. I’ve seen too much death and devastation, and I’ve witnessed too many men and women willingly blow themselves up in the name of a God who promises them paradise and dozens of vestal virgins as a reward. But when we come to the altar, I intuitively drop to one knee and make the sign of the cross. It takes me by surprise when Giovanni does the same thing. Standing, we approach the glass tomb.

  Santa Lucia was a small woman. Smaller than small by today’s standards. She can’t occupy more than four and a half feet inside the glass coffin in which she is laid out, her more than five-hundred-year-old body somehow nearly perfectly preserved, as if touched by God the moment her heart stopped beating. In the place of her gouged-out eyes are a pair of fake, glass eyes. They
are strikingly green, just like Grace’s. Peering at them through the glass coffin, I find myself growing dizzy and out of balance.

  Is this why I was drawn to this place in my sleep? To witness this old saint’s fake eyes? Eyes that look back at me from the dead? Eyes that look like Grace’s?

  For a brief moment, I feel like I might lose consciousness. Sensing my fall, Giovanni grabs hold of me.

  “Are you all right, Captain?”

  I nod. At the same time, I feel my vision begin to fade in and out of focus. I know I will soon lose my ability to see altogether. But not yet. I must make a sweep of the entire church before that happens. It’s exactly how I explain it to Giovanni.

  We search the church and find no sign of Grace.

  In the end, I feel thoroughly exhausted and consumed with grief, as if I came to this place only to realize that Grace is already dead. I sit inside the final row of pews, close my eyes, and feel the onset of dread. When I open my eyes again, a single wet tear falls down my cheek and I see something through the haze of rapidly diminishing eyesight.

  I see a man wearing a long brown overcoat.

  Chapter 33

  He’s standing at the altar, facing the rows of pews, his back to the glass coffin.

  The man who took my Grace.

  He’s staring directly at me, those black eyes reflecting the firelight from the candles. At first I think I might be seeing things. Maybe I fell asleep and now I’m conjuring up his image in a dream. A vivid dream. But I know this is not a dream when Giovanni gently elbows me.

  “There is the bastardo,” he says loudly.

  Standing, he jumps over the pew, and takes off after the overcoat man.

  Chapter 34

  I follow on Giovanni’s heels, both of us sprinting the length of the aisle toward the altar.

  “Stop!” I shout, the demand sounding entirely inadequate despite an amplifying echo.

  It takes only about a second and a half for us to reach the altar. But when we get there, the overcoat man has vanished.

  Giovanni turns to me.

  “Other side of the coffin!” I bark.

  Coming from behind me, the shouts of the church guards. They are yelling at us to stay where we are. They’re running toward us, blaring voices and stomping boots reverberating against the stone walls. Giovanni disappears behind the glass coffin. I follow.

  We eye one another. Where the hell did he go?

  Until I see the sacristy door only a couple feet away from Giovanni.

  “There!” I say, lunging for the solid wood-paneled door.

  I open the door and Giovanni and I both slip inside. Closing it, I grab hold of a chair leaning up against the wall and shove the chair back under the handle. Just in time. The guards converge on the door. They attempt to plow through it by shoving their shoulders into the panel. But the door and the chair are holding.

  The sacristy is like a pantry for dozens of robes and cassocks. The shelves store gold chalices, incense burners, crucifix staffs, and wine bottles. The room transports me back to the days when I was an altar boy. It’s long and narrow and leads to an exterior door.

  The door is open.

  Without having to utter another word, Giovanni and I sprint for the open door and head back out into the salty Venetian air.

  Chapter 35

  We stand on the narrow walkway. Directly before us is a feeder canal, its water calm and undisturbed. To our right and left, nothing but empty, cobblestone-covered walkway.

  “Do you believe we really saw the man in the brown overcoat, Captain?” Giovanni whispers after a time.

  “We saw him,” I answer, my heart just beginning to dislodge itself from my throat. “We saw him and he got away.”

  “How did he know to find us here?”

  “I’m not looking for him. But he’s most definitely got his eye on me. Maybe even had his eye on me and Grace since we arrived.” I pause. “There’s something else that bothers me.”

  “What is it?”

  “The card with Santa Lucia that I found on the floor of my apartment this morning. Maybe I found it because the overcoat man put it there.”

  “Mamma mia, Captain, he was in your home? Last night? I thought you put it there in your sleep.”

  I look into his eyes.

  “He was here waiting for us, Giovanni. How could that be unless he led us here?”

  But Giovanni doesn’t have time to answer. Making their way toward us on foot, in the direction of the church entrance, are three uniformed police officers being led by Detective Carbone.

  “Stay where you are!” the detective shouts. “You are under arrest!”

  Chapter 36

  “What makes you think you would find your fiancée inside that church?”

  I remove two identical cards from out of my pocket and hand him the older one I found on my floor. “This morning I found a card on the floor of my apartment. It has the face of Santa Lucia painted on it, and it comes from that church where you unjustly arrested my friend and me.”

  The detective glances down at it, sets it aside on his desk. “I will hang on to this for now. Perhaps have it tested for prints.”

  “Knock yourself out,” I say.

  “Your friend has been released pending further questioning. He’s been escorted back to his caffè in San Marco.”

  “Kind of you, Detective. Why haven’t I been afforded the same courtesy? I am a guest in your country.”

  “Indeed you are, Captain Angel, which makes what I’m about to tell you all the more sensitive.”

  “I hope you are about to tell me you have developed a solid lead on the whereabouts of my fiancée.”

  Carbone stands, comes around his desk, pulls out his cigarettes, and lights one with his silver lighter. Staring out the window onto the Grand Canal, he smokes. Contemplatively.

  “This morning, Captain,” he says, while staring into his reflection, “you could see me. Yet you chose to fake your blindness.”

  My eyes leave his backside and refocus on his desktop. Grace’s waterlogged passport sits on top of it. A voice inside me screams, Grab the passport and make a run for it. But I know that would be like committing suicide.

  I shift my eyes back to him.

  “I’m not sure why I did it,” I confess. “It’s the truth. I panicked. I was afraid you might think I’ve been faking it all along.”

  “Your strategy has had the opposite effect. Indeed, it makes me believe perhaps you have been faking it. Taken together with the argument you had with Grace the afternoon before she disappeared, plus your severe post-traumatic stress disorder, we have reason to believe the proper course of action is to detain you under police custody for the time being.”

  I shoot up from my chair. “A man in an overcoat took Grace. He’s been calling my apartment. He’s been tracking us. It’s quite possible he left a card with the image of Santa Lucia on it on my floor while I was asleep. I saw him inside the church this morning. So did the damn waiter. He’s following me, Detective. Baiting me. Playing with me.”

  I’m shouting, without trying to shout.

  Carbone turns, stares me down.

  “Allow me to better explain, Captain,” he says, coming back to his desk, sitting down on the edge of it, one foot planted firmly on the floor, and the other hanging off the edge. “You are not being arrested . . . yet. But you are under suspicion in the disappearance of your fiancée.”

  “You have no right.”

  “Please sit, Captain, and calm down. It’s not as bad as it may seem.”

  “How much worse could it get?”

  “When I say you are under suspicion, it simply means you have not been eliminated as a suspect. You have no alibi and you’ve already been caught fabricating your blindness. Taken together with the argument you had with Grace only hours prior to her disappearance, we find we simply cannot rule you out as a suspect.”

  “My blindness is real, and it’s temporary. My US military record reflects the truth.
”

  “Indeed it does. But that does not take away from the charade you carried on this morning.”

  “I’m trying to protect Grace from any further harm.”

  “You are only managing to cause her further harm by interrupting my investigation into her disappearance.” He holds out his hand. “Now if you don’t mind, your passport, please.”

  “I want to speak with Mr. Graham at the embassy.”

  “He’s been alerted and he’s aware of our decision. He can’t help you, Captain, but you’re free to contact him at your convenience.” He gestures over his shoulder toward his desktop. “By all means, use my phone.”

  But I decide not to give him the satisfaction. Reaching into the interior pocket of my coat, I retrieve my passport, hand it over to him. What the hell choice do I have?

  “As usual, Captain, I am happy to provide you with a lift back to your apartment.”

  I stand. “No grazie, Detective. I’d rather walk. For now, I can see.” I turn for the door.

  “But what if you should go blind in the meantime?” he asks, some sarcasm sprinkled in his tone. “I would feel terrible unleashing you into Venice without the benefit of your eyes. As you are already sorely aware, this city can be a confusing place even with perfect vision.”

  In my mind, I’m picturing the overcoat man leaving a picture of Santa Lucia on my apartment floor while I’m asleep on the couch. Maybe he was the one who arranged the plates, bowls, knives, forks, and boxes to resemble the water city of Venice. Maybe he somehow baited me up onto the roof of my building in the early morning before he was to kidnap Grace. Maybes. Possibilities. Or perhaps, just wild assumptions on my part.

  “Nor is it without its dangers,” I say.