When Shadows Come

by Vincent Zandri

  I shift my eyes from the now-blurry gondola to Giovanni, who is standing on the edge of the canal bank, lighting a cigarette. If I didn’t already know who he was, I would have no way of recognizing him from where I’m standing.

  “I’ll call you back in a few minutes,” I say, cutting the connection.

  Chapter 50

  I shout to Giovanni.

  He turns to me, smiling. Always smiling, while blue smoke oozes out the corners of his mouth and nostrils.

  “Did you find out about the fingerprints?” he asks.

  “Just mine and Grace’s on the ring. Some other partial, unidentifiable ones, but that only makes sense. A thin ring isn’t exactly an ideal surface for finding prints.”

  He nods, smokes.

  “I’ll go home now,” I say. “No need to follow me. I feel like my eyesight is going to stay for a while.”

  His smile dissolves. “It is my duty and my pleasure to look after you, Captain.”

  He’s peering into my eyes like he’s not about to take no for an answer. Like he’s ordered not to take no for an answer.

  “Grazie,” I say, but it spills out of my mouth sounding as cold and dirty as the canal water.

  When we come to the big wood door that marks the entrance to my building, I turn and thank Giovanni.

  “How long have you worked at the caffè?”

  He smokes the last of his cigarette, tosses it down onto the cobbles instead of into the garbage-infested canal, which is only a few feet away.

  “Why do you ask?” he says, the smoke gently escaping out his mouth and nose.

  In my head I’m hearing Anna. “Who, prior to yourself, was the last man to touch the ring?”

  “The owners are generous to you. They give you a lot of time off.”

  He cocks his head over his left shoulder. “They are very generous indeed. But this is Italy, Captain. Not America. We are not so obsessed with making money. Our rather corrupt government takes it all away from us in taxes anyway.” He works up his now-familiar smile, which I characterize as decidedly false. “Therefore, we are more concerned with la dolce vita.”

  “Of course,” I say, the first signs of total gray, total blur, beginning to mask my vision. In a few moments I will be blind again. But in the blindness, I will begin to see things. Things having to do with my lost Grace.

  “The good life,” I add.

  “Yes, the good life.”

  The kind of life I wished for Grace and myself . . .

  I unlock the door, step inside, and close it behind me.

  By the time I get upstairs my eyesight is coming and going. Mostly going.

  I use what sight I have left to view the keypad on my mobile phone while calling Anna back.

  “I’m home,” I tell her. “How long will it take you to get here?”

  “Not long,” she says. “I understand the urgency of the situation. The gravity. You know what they used to say back in ’39 during the Blitz.”

  “No, what did they say during the Blitz?”

  “Keep calm and carry on.”

  “I’ll try and hold it together.”

  “Hold what together exactly, Captain?”

  “Me. My vision. My memories. My broken heart.”

  When Anna arrives, I am seeing only gray. The French doors are open and I can hear familiar sounds coming from the narrow alley below and the occasional motorboat that travels over the canal. Voices. Footsteps. Laughter. Not a single one of them Grace’s.

  Will she have coffee? Anna tells me she’ll take care of making it for the both of us. No arguments from me. I just stand in the French doors, letting the sunlight soak my open eyes. The breeze blows in on me, and the smells from the water city fill my head.

  “Interpol,” I say after a time. “The last person to touch the ring besides myself was a man I know. His name is Giovanni. He works in the caffè where Grace was abducted. He helps me.”

  “How exactly does he help you, Captain?”

  “He was the one who found Grace’s ring. He was the one who alerted me to it and gave it back to me. He also acts as my seeing-eye dog. He even walks with me when the blindness isn’t there, just in case it should suddenly come back.”

  She’s standing by the kitchenette, filling the coffeepot, setting it on the stove, turning on the gas, lighting the flame, setting out the cups. I don’t have to see her to picture her every movement.

  “Do you know Giovanni’s last name?”

  “I’ve never asked.”

  “Maybe you should. Or perhaps we can go see him together. This afternoon.”

  “I’m not exactly seeing anyone right now.” I laugh. But nothing’s funny.

  The sound of percolating coffee claims the studio space. She shuts off the gas, killing the burner. Anna pours the coffee and carries the cups over to the table, sets them down to cool. About a minute later, she places my cup in my hands.

  “How long will your blindness last?” she asks.

  “It could last a week. Or it could last a few minutes. I’ve come to learn that it usually means I need to rest. Sleep. Most times, when I wake up, I can see again. Sometimes I sleepwalk, and apparently I can see when I sleepwalk. But of course, I cannot remember what I’ve seen. The sleepwalking is brand new to me and pretty damned frightening. I’m a combat soldier. I prefer to be in total control of my fate.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  I recall waking up on the roof of this building. For a brief moment I think of telling her about it. But then I decide not to. I don’t want her to think I’m crazy.

  I set down the coffee cup. “Can I have the ring?”

  She shuffles around in her pockets. Or that’s what it sounds like she’s doing, anyway. She takes hold of my hands, places the ring into the palm of my hand. I close my fingers around the ring, squeeze tight. It isn’t until I feel a trail of wetness on one of my cheeks that I realize I’m weeping.

  “What do you feel?” asks the journalist.

  “I feel Grace,” I say. “I feel her heart beating. Her lungs breathing. I feel Grace alive.”

  “You understand that if she has been abducted, she could be anything but alive, Captain.”

  Another tear slides down the opposite cheek. “I refuse to believe that. Just like I refuse to believe she has simply walked away from me.”

  “This man who gave you the ring . . . Giovanni. A waiter. You believe he could be with Interpol?”

  “I’m not sure what to believe anymore. Maybe this whole thing is an elaborate dream. Maybe Grace isn’t really missing. Maybe you’re not real. Maybe I died on that hill in Afghanistan.”

  Maybe the little boy’s bomb detonated and killed me . . . killed us all . . .

  She shuffles around in her pockets once more. By the sound of it, I know she then unfolds a sheet of paper.

  “I have an image of the Interpol man we identified by his print on the ring. But of course, you can’t see it now.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Heath Lowrance. Originally from New Jersey. Princeton undergraduate in criminal justice. Did his master’s at Oxford before joining the military and earning the rank of captain in the Army Rangers. Fought in Operation Desert Storm. Strangely, however, his outfit and unit information are not available. The file does list him as decorated. He also fought in Iraq in the second Gulf War. Decorated. Fought in Afghanistan. Again decorated. Knows several languages fluently including Italian, his dialect decidedly Tuscan. More recently he’d been recruited by Interpol to work in both the war crimes and terrorism divisions.”

  His résumé sounds a little too similar to my own.

  “Could be he waits tables in Piazza San Marco on the side.”

  “Could be that’s his cover right now while he keeps an eye on you. That is, if Interpol and the US military feel the need to keep an eye on you.”

  In my head, I’m seeing the hill in Tajik country. I see the ancient village situated near the top of it. An ancient village bombed back to
the Stone Age. I also see a battlefield from twenty years ago. A wide-open desert in Kuwait, littered with damaged tanks and vehicles, bodies burned beyond recognition. Oil wells on fire, thick black smoke rising up to the heavens.

  “Captain,” Anna says. “Is there something else that happened to you in Afghanistan? Something you have not told me?”

  With full clarity, I see the sun reflecting off the A-10 Thunderbolt’s tan, green, and yellow “splinter” color scheme as it screams across the valley. See it nosedive toward the hilltop. See the bursts of 30mm rounds from its nose-mounted rotary cannon and the rockets shooting out from under the wings. See them strike the village, the red-hot lightning explosions visible before I hear their back-to-back concussive bursts. In my head I climb the hill once more, see the wrecked stone and wood buildings, the burnt-out shells and the dead bodies. I see a small boy coming around the corner of a building. See the package strapped to his chest. I see him coming for me and my men as I shoulder my M4, plant a bead not on the bomb, but the only place I can without detonating it. His face. My finger on the trigger, I shout, “Don’t do it. Don’t you do it!”

  Exhaling, I say, “Like I’ve already told you, I ordered an airstrike on a village. A Tajik village. A Taliban holdout. I ordered an airstrike and it killed people. Other things happened too.”

  “People die in war, Captain. What made this different from any other airstrike?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

  “But if the bombing or what happened after the bombing stole your eyesight, perhaps you should talk about it.”

  Shaking my head. “I am not at liberty to discuss military affairs with the press. And you are not my shrink. In my time as a professional soldier, I bombed a lot of villages and saw a lot of people die. Men, women, children.”

  “Captain, your fiancée is missing. It’s possible you are being monitored by Interpol’s war crimes division. The police seem to be uncooperative and you are left alone to find out the truth in a foreign country with eyes that are no longer reliable. I wish you would speak to me.”

  “War crimes?” I say. “Maybe the president should spend a week in northern Afghanistan. Then he’ll realize that fighting a war with both hands tied behind our backs is not the sure path to success.” I close my eyes, lie down on the bed. “Please just let me rest for a moment,” I say, exhaustion rinsing over me from head to toe. “It’s possible my sight will return if only I can sleep for a few minutes.”

  Soon I feel a blanket being draped over me.

  I hear the words “Rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  I want to tell Anna, “Thank you.” But before I can get the words out, I’m already drifting off to sleep.

  I’m riding with Karen in the passenger seat of her Volvo station wagon after she’s picked me up from the bar. The look on her face is not a happy one. It’s the same face I’ve been seeing day after day over the past few months. She pushes her long dark hair back behind her ear with her right hand, shakes her head. “If only you’d open up to me,” she says. “If only you’d talk.” I know what she wants, but also how impossible it is to make her happy. “I want a child,” she says. “I want a child more than I want you. Do you understand me?” I say nothing. She drives onto the Patroon Island Bridge that spans the Hudson River. She turns to me again, her hands on the wheel. “I’m going to have a child with or without you!” She’s screaming now, her eyes not on the road, but on me. Just up ahead, a road crew, a cement truck, a man standing there, a sign that says STOP gripped in one hand, while he waves his other hand frantically to capture our attention. “Karen!” I shout. “Stop!” She turns to face the road, screams, the car veering to the right. We burst through the barrier, the front end plummeting the twenty feet into the river. The car takes on water. Karen is stunned from the impact. I reach over, try to open her door, but the pressure of the water against it is too great. “Karen, we have to get out.” But she just looks at me, smiles. “My baby,” she says. “Our baby is already inside me.” My window is open, the water rushing in as the car sinks. I manage to undo my seat belt, but Karen’s is stuck. She just stares at me, like she wants to drown. The cold water overtakes us as the car becomes completely submerged. I try to pull her out with me, but I can’t. My last vision of her before I escape out the open passenger window is her wide-open eyes and her hair swimming in the water . . .

  Chapter 51

  When I wake I’m shivering. I open my eyes, and although I am not entirely blinded, my vision is blurry at best. I am breathing. Hard. Heart pounds. There’s a sharp pain behind my eyeballs as if someone were pressing their thumbs against them, only from the inside out.

  It takes me a moment to realize Anna is holding my hand, tightly.

  “You were having a terrible nightmare,” she says from where she sits beside me on the couch. “You shouted, ‘Karen, stop!’”

  Pulling my hand away from hers, I yank off the blanket and sit up, my head aching from the battle of memories waged inside my brain. My head ringing like a bell. My brow moist with sweat.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Thirty minutes,” she reveals. “Perhaps a few minutes more.”

  I rub the life back into my face with my ice-cold palms. Try to rub some sight back into my eyes. Rub out the soreness. But the world around me is still blurry and nondescript. My sight is returning again. But I have no idea how long the process can take. A few more seconds. Or hours. It’s entirely up to God. Or is it?

  “Tell me, Captain,” Anna presses. “If you won’t tell me what happened in Afghanistan after you bombed the village, then perhaps you can tell me the circumstances behind your wife’s suicide.”

  The car is being pulled out of the river by a flatbed tow truck. I see myself standing on the edge of the riverbank, the bridge that spans the river from Albany to Troy only a few yards away. My clothing is damp . . .

  Suicide . . . Was it ever a suicide? Or was that just something I wanted to believe? Detective Carbone’s report said it was suicide, too. Are my memories exposing the lies of my past? Or am I lying to myself now?

  “Why?” I say to Anna. “What does any of it have to do with Grace’s disappearance?”

  “It could have nothing to do with her. But then, my instincts say it could have everything to do with her.”

  Getting up, I fumble for my cell phone. I find it, but I still can’t read it.

  “Do you know if anyone has called?”

  “It’s been silent,” she says, her tone apologetic.

  “What time is it?”

  “A little past noon.”

  “Are you busy right now?”

  “Do I look it?”

  “I’d like you to accompany me to Piazza San Marco,” I say. “You will be my seeing-eye dog for a while. Together, we’ll find out one important truth.”

  “What truth, Captain?”

  “If Giovanni, the man who has been helping me, is in fact my enemy.”

  Chapter 52

  Anna wraps her right arm around my left, as if we’re lovers contemplatively strolling along the banks of the Grand Canal instead of a half-blind soldier with a big post-traumatic stress problem and a curious British journalist trying to negotiate the two flights of marble stairs to the bottom without tripping. We exit the front door of the building, proceed past the empty bookshop window, and make our way beyond the feeder canal toward the Grand Canal, where we take the Number 1 Vaporetto along the busy, winding, S-shaped canal to San Marco.

  Anna’s arm still wrapped around mine, we enter the piazza, make our way through the crowd to the caffè. Past the tour groups and the tour guides waving bright flags high above their heads so no one gets disconnected or, worse, lost. Past the flocks of pigeons and a brass band that strikes up a dramatic song that bounces off the stone floor and stone walls of the square and the cathedral.

  By the time we come to the caffè situated along the basin, most of my eyesight has returned. Raising my head to a sky of
clear blue accented with fluffy white marshmallow clouds, I then lower my gaze to the table where I last sat with Grace. The table is now occupied by a family. Mom, dad, and two teenagers on vacation. But to me, the table screams of emptiness. It’s all I can do to hold back tears. But I’m not sure if I’d be crying for myself or for Grace.

  “Let’s go inside,” the journalist suggests.

  Together we head for the entrance. “Before we go in,” I say, just outside the glass-and-wood doors, “I want to see the picture of the man from Interpol.”

  “Your eyes have recovered?” asks Anna, some of the thick strands of her short red hair moving with the breeze coming off the basin.

  “As well as can be expected for the time being.”

  For the first time since we left my apartment, she releases my arm. She reaches into her bag and produces the folded sheet of standard copy stock. Unfolding it, she hands it to me.

  I look at the face of the man. Look at it for almost a full minute.

  “Is it him?” she asks.

  The man in the photo has brown eyes and thick black hair. He is clean shaven, his face round and smooth and pleasantly inviting. Lips not too thick, not too thin, his thick brows protecting his eyes with an expression of permanent curiosity and kindness.

  The man in the photo is someone I’ve seen before. But not in Italy. He is a man I’ve seen in another life.

  “Yes,” I say, “I believe it is.”

  I hand her back the paper and open the door to the caffè with all the caution and anxiety of reentering a combat zone.

  The caffè interior is as busy as its exterior seating area. Waiters of all shapes and sizes dressed in black and wearing long white aprons dart around the tables like hungry starlings around a couple dozen nests. We stand in the doorway, my now-seeing eyes searching the gold-trimmed and gilded-mirrored interior for Giovanni. But he doesn’t seem to be working.

  “Do you see him?” Anna says.

  “Not yet. He could be in the back office. He took me there on two separate occasions.”