He peers down at my hand.
“But you have injured yourself?”
Without asking he takes hold of my hand, the cuts on my fingers stinging for a quick instant. Instinct kicks in and I pull the hand back. Something washes over me then. There’s the click in my head and a quick flash of a face. A round, almost cherubic face, smiling . . .
I shake the image off.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I did not mean to be so abrupt.”
I make a fist with my injured hand. “I cut it by mistake, stumbling around in the studio.”
The noise of the many outboard motors fills the wet Venetian landscape. I start walking.
“Finally, you have a witness,” the leather-jacketed Giovanni says, but he’s not following me. “I knew it. Only a matter of time, Captain.” He pulls out a cigarette, lights it.
I don’t share his optimism.
They are watching . . .
The man I communicated with over the phone sounded nervous and unsure. Like he was being watched or, worse, warned against talking with me. Or maybe my imagination is playing tricks on me again. When you spend more than half your time without the use of your eyes, you learn to see things in your head. You learn to dig up the memories buried there, no matter how painful. Dig them up with hammer and chisel if necessary. But the things you see are not entirely real. They are a collage of what you remember and what you believe to be true. More often they are a cob job of fact, fantasy, and paranoia. Things happen. Events pile up, one on top of another, like a cairn of rocks, differing shapes and sizes, weights, and colors.
There’s just no pattern or predictability to anything. No logic. It’s possible you built a replica of Venice out of boxes, spoons, and plates. It’s possible you are somehow communicating with your missing fiancée.
Or maybe something else is going on.
Maybe you are being set up by the stranger who stole Grace in the first place. Maybe the overcoat man has a key to the apartment. Maybe he’s the one who’s trying to drive you insane. Terrorize you.
Or maybe you are just plain crazy and delusional. A casualty of war. A malady. Maybe you should have stayed put in upstate New York like the army insisted. Maybe Grace was beginning to see the madness in you, and she had no choice but to leave you for good. But then, what choice do you have other than to keep on looking for her? Looking for the truth?
“We should go,” I say, pointing in the direction of the Rialto, “while I still have my vision.”
But the vision I have for now is not one-hundred-percent clarity. Not even close. My sight is okay for maybe ten or fifteen feet. Beyond that, all objects begin to lose their shape, all edges blur.
“It’s your dime, Captain.”
I start walking again, praying my eyes don’t fail me as much as my mind seems to be.
Chapter 47
Just like the Bridge of Sighs and the Ponte degli Scalzi, the Rialto is said to be one of the most romantic bridges in Venice. A bridge for lovers and suicides. Therefore it is constantly occupied by tourists, their cameras, and video cams. Giovanni tells me he’ll wait for me at the bottom of the bone-colored marble steps while “You do what you have to do.” He won’t be far should the darkness suddenly return to my eyes.
I climb the steps, my eyes scanning the men and women I pass, none of them paying me any particular attention. Until I spot a man standing at the top of the stairs. He’s a short man. Pudgy. Stocky. His head is bald and his blue eyes lock onto mine the closer I come to the top.
I stop on the stair tread just below his, making us the same height.
“Captain Angel?” A question for which he already knows the answer. “My name is Geoff Miles, from Cleveland. My wife and I are here on vacation. A second honeymoon, really.” Smiling. “You can call me Miles. All my friends do.”
“What do you know about my fiancée?” I ask. “Who stole her away?”
The near panic in my voice increases with intensity with every word I speak. I want to grab hold of this little man, shake him, scream at him, demand he tell me what he knows. But that’s the last thing I should do.
He steps up onto the landing of the pale stone-covered bridge, approaches the marble banister. I follow, and together we stand at the top of the Rialto looking out through the marble arches onto the Grand Canal and the near-chaotic boat traffic that approaches and disappears beneath our feet.
“I was having lunch with my wife,” he begins. “We were seated a couple of tables away from yours. Forgive me for saying this, but I couldn’t help staring at you. Truth be told, you were . . . are . . . a handsome couple. But it was the way you spoke to one another that captured my attention.”
“My blindness.”
He nods, and turns to me. He peers into my eyes as though distrusting them more than I do.
“You’re not blind right now, are you?” he asks.
“It comes and goes. The condition is not physical. Only the result of the condition is physical.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been involved in quite a few military actions,” I explain. “The most recent conflict, the war in Afghanistan. Things happened there. Bad things.”
Now instead of shaking his head, he begins to nod.
“I’m sorry,” he offers. “I was deployed with the Marines in Vietnam. I was at Tet in the summer of ’68. Just in time for my eighteenth birthday. I saw some things, much like you, I imagine. Things I’d rather forget. But I tend to forget my anniversary more than the human beings I killed. Their faces. Their eyes.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t start the war. You did what you were told.” Grace’s mantra. “Now tell me, what did you see, Miles?”
He thinks about his answer for a moment while staring out at the busy canal and the bobbing of the boats on the endlessly upset water.
“Your fiancée seemed fixated on a man,” he says after a beat.
“What did the man look like?”
“I was just about to tell you. He was a tall man, wearing a long brown coat. Dark complexion, dark hair. Sunglasses masked his eyes.”
I gently take hold of his arm with my right hand. His eyes widen, but he is not so much alarmed as he is surprised.
“Did this man kidnap my fiancée?”
I remove my hand, as if it’s impossible for him to answer otherwise.
“There were so many people in the piazza that day. So many people surrounding the tables.”
The blood inside my brain begins to simmer.
“Did he take her or not? Please, Miles, please.”
“To be perfectly frank, Captain, I’m not sure.”
I stare into his round face, feel his eyes glued to mine.
“How can you not be sure when you were looking right at us? At her? At him?”
“The man approached the table. This seemed to cause some alarm in your fiancée. She spilled her drink and started to rise out of her chair as the man came within two feet from you. Behind you. So close he could have simply reached out and touched you on the back of your head.”
“But you didn’t see him taking her?”
“Yes, or, I mean . . . no.”
I take hold of his arm again. Harder this time. “Which is it?”
He struggles to free himself. But he can’t.
“A group of people stepped in front of my table right then. A Japanese tour group. There must have been twenty or thirty people suddenly streaming in between our tables. By the time they finished shuffling through and I was able to get another unobstructed view of your table, the man and your fiancée were gone.”
My heart sinks to new depths.
“Did you see them walking? Could you see them in the crowd?”
“That’s just it. They were gone. Vanished. I truly looked for her. For him, since it was clear they had abandoned you. But it was no use. They were gone. And when I looked back at your table, you were still talking, as if she were seated there across from you.”
“Still talking,” I say, releasing his arm again. “Until I realized she wasn’t seated there any longer.”
“I could tell when it dawned on you that she was gone. You stood up. When you shouted, the waiter came and took you away.” Exhaling, staring down at his feet. “My wife started to cry. We finished our lunch and waited for the police to arrive, thinking they would come right away. But it took some time. Enough for us to finish our lunch, and then some. Not that we had much of an appetite by then.”
“But you told the police your story.”
“They wouldn’t listen to us at first. In fact, they wouldn’t talk with us at all. They weren’t the least bit interested in what we saw that afternoon. And, far as I could tell, we were the only ones they spoke with at the restaurant.”
“How can they not take your statement? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Exactly. It bothered me enough that, later in the day, I paid a visit to the Venice metropolitan police and asked to see a detective. A big, bearded, well-dressed man saw me immediately. A Detective Carbone.”
“I know him,” I interject.
“He escorted me into a small interview room and listened to what I had to say. I thought he was listening to me. I was convinced that man had kidnapped your wife somehow. But the detective told me that in all likelihood there was no abduction. No kidnapping. That it was more likely your fiancée left of her own accord.”
“That’s impossible,” I insist. “We love one another. We were getting married soon . . . we are getting married soon.”
He holds both his hands up, palms facing me, eyes closed, like he’s surrendering. Surrendering to my emotions. Agreeing and commiserating with my sadness, frustration, and confusion.
“Detective Carbone wouldn’t listen. He just smoked and stared out the window, as if . . .”
His sentence drifts off, like the supply boats and barges that move away from us in the distance. “As if he couldn’t lie to my face.”
“And why would the police be lying, Mr. Miles?”
He looks at me blankly. “Why have you been experiencing blindness as of late, Captain Angel?”
“I don’t really know. No one knows.”
“Exactly. I wish I could tell you that’s where my story ends but it doesn’t. A day after I spoke with Detective Carbone, I received a visit to my hotel from a representative of the US Embassy.”
My heart sinks deeper.
“Was his name David Graham?”
He nods. “Yes. He asked me for a favor.”
“A favor.”
“He asked me to forgo interfering in Grace’s disappearance. That it was a police matter now. He also told me if I continued to get involved, the Italian government might be forced to detain me for an unspecified amount of time.” Pursing his lips, he said, “I’m sixty-two years old and I project-manage commercial construction jobs in a terrible market. I have barely enough vacation time as it is. Being detained for months or even weeks would cost me my job.”
“I get it. I don’t want you to lose your job.”
He raises his right hand, sets it on my shoulder.
“Listen, Captain,” he says, “during the war . . . my war . . . the army asked some of us to do things.”
“What kinds of things?”
He exhales, bites down on his bottom lip. “Most of it has been made public by now. The army wanted to see how long a human being could go without sleep and still be able to fight. Pre-deprivation performance testing, they called it. Some of us volunteered for the program, took the drugs, drank the Kool-Aid, played the role of guinea pig to a bunch of white-lab-coated doctors. Anything to get off the line and back to the States for a while. I think, in the end, one of us made it a week before even the drugs wouldn’t work and he collapsed from a coronary at nineteen or twenty years old. But the things they made us do while on those drugs . . . well, let’s just say that a coronary was a more merciful way to go out.”
. . . Crawling through a culvert in the pitch-darkness . . . emerging from the opposite side into an open trench . . . The heat is oppressive . . . Music playing through a radio . . . Arabic music . . . Up above me, a café . . . Men drinking tea, smoking, talking . . . A bearded man wearing a uniform, surrounded by more uniformed men . . . a television mounted to the wall beside a fan . . . the sign reads, Café Baghdad . . . I crawl in the darkness . . . place the package under an empty table . . . crawl back into the pipe . . . await the shock of the explosion . . . Dizziness. Headache. Nausea. I inhale, exhale.
“What’s the point of all this, Miles? What’s it got to do with my fiancée?”
“It has more to do with your eyes. Your temporary blindness. Listen, Captain, some of those men who volunteered for that experiment . . . the ones who made it through . . . their memories of the experiments were repressed for a long time, socked away in some kind of vault or file cabinet in the backs of their brains. Until one day, the file cabinet drawers started to open, one by one, and the memories started coming back. The results weren’t always pleasant.”
“And you? What about you?”
He shakes his head. “I see some of the things we did to one another in my dreams. Makes it hard to sleep sometimes. Insomnia, the docs call it. I call it the persistence of memory. Like that famous painting of the melting clocks.” He smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. He removes his hand. “My wife and I are leaving in a few hours. From here we head to Florence and Rome, and then back to Cleveland. I just want to wish you the best of luck in finding your fiancée.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“No need to thank me. I hope you find her. She loved you. I could see it in her eyes before she disappeared.”
Chapter 48
I relay most of what Miles told me to Giovanni. The both of us standing at the bottom of the Rialto staircase, the tourists passing us in both directions.
The waiter mulls over what I’ve revealed, smiles, stuffs his hands inside his jacket pockets.
“I told you the police cannot be trusted. But then, perhaps your Grace could not be trusted, either.”
Under normal circumstances, I might punch another man in the mouth after a comment like that. But staring into his smooth, almost childlike face, I can’t help but believe he is absolutely right. Perhaps in the end, Grace did simply get up from the table and leave me. For good.
Just the thought of her doing something so drastic and so final, and performing it so coldly, makes my already-bruised heart feel like it’s about to split down the center.
“Your shoulder,” he says. “Did you also hurt it when you stumbled inside your apartment?”
Startled, I look down and pull my hand out of the collar of my button-down shirt. It didn’t even dawn on me that I was rubbing the scar on my shoulder. Doing it without realizing it. I relive the flash of memory I experienced up on the bridge just moments ago. Crawling into a culvert, awaiting the blast. Feeling the blast. Crawling away to safety. Did I make that up? I’m an infantry soldier, for Christ sake, not a commando assassin.
“No,” I say. “I cut my shoulder during the war.”
“Which one?”
I close my eyes, see a fighting knife in my hand. And an identical one held tightly in another man’s hand. But when I try to see his face, it is a featureless blank. Like a mannequin.
“Maybe you would like me to stay with you at the studio?” Giovanni asks. “It’s not a problem.”
The thought of walking back to the apartment alone is unsettling because my vision could cut out completely on the way. But what’s the alternative?
For now, I trust no one.
I haven’t yet taken a step in the direction of my temporary home when my cell phone rings.
Chapter 49
I answer the call from Anna Laiti, press the phone to my ear.
“What did you find out?”
“There are many prints on the ring, as would be expected, including yours and your fiancée’s. Prints from overseas military perso
nnel are easily accessed. Grace’s prints were also in the system as your significant other. No doubt she has visited a base you’ve been assigned to back home.”
“How is it possible that such a small surface area can reveal so many prints?”
“Allow me to correct myself. There are a lot of partials being picked up by the digital fingerprint scanning equipment. Naturally the dominant print will be Grace’s. Maybe your prints would also be somewhat dominant.”
“What about the overcoat man? Were his on there?”
“We have no way of knowing. But there is a third set of prints that might interest you.”
My breathing grows shallow. “I’m listening.”
“The prints belong to a man who works for Interpol.”
I look out onto the canal, barely able to make out a gondola carrying a young couple under the bridge. As they pass beneath the bridge only a few feet away from me, they look at one another and smile longingly, then kiss. I see Grace and me sitting in their place, and it makes my heart grow as heavy as a stone. Makes it bleed. Right now, I wish I were blind.
“Interpol. We’ve had no contact with someone from Interpol.”
“But apparently your fiancée has.”
Turning, I eye the shiny black gondola, which has now passed under the Ponte di Rialto. Although my sight seems to be slowly retreating, I can make out the gondolier precariously perched on the impossibly narrow bow while the young lovers nestle together in their red velvet-covered seats. The Venice that surrounds them a romantic dream come true. In the back of my mind, I picture my Grace, lying at the bottom of the Grand Canal. It is an image I see with 20/20 vision, and it rattles my nerves.
“That’s impossible,” I explain. “She was with me the entire time.”
“Let me ask you another question then. Who, prior to yourself, was the last man to touch the ring?”
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