He wasn’t looking at my reflection anymore but staring pensively at the floor.
I waited for him to say something. He didn’t.
Desolate but resigned, I turned to leave, saying “I shall be gone in the morning.”
I crossed the huge, dark room as quickly as I could without running, because I was perilously close to bursting into tears, and that was something I didn’t want him to see. Better to hasten back to my chamber, close the door, and bury my face in my pillow.
I was almost to the door when I heard him say, “Hannah.”
Turning, I saw him walking toward me with those lengthy but slightly halting strides that imparted an almost stately aura.
He stopped about a yard from me. Quietly he said, “If you really want to come to Venice, Hannah, then come. But not as my mistress.”
I looked down, swallowing the sob that rose in my throat.
“’Twas never what I intended,” he said, “but I can be clumsy with words when it comes to certain matters. When I told you I only wanted you to be with me, what I meant was… that I wanted you to be my wife.”
I stared at him as he took a step toward me, his eyes huge and glistening in the dark.
“’Tis still what I want,” he said hoarsely, “more than anything, if you’ll have me.”
I did start crying then, my sobs mixing with laughter as he gathered me in his arms.
“You knew how I loved you,” he murmured, rubbing his cheek against my hair. “You must have known.”
I shook my head.
“Well, I did,” he said. “I do, with all my heart, and I intend to spend the rest of my life proving it.”
OMENICO AND I were married the following spring in Venice’s magnificent Basilica di San Marco, with my Uncle Guy there to give me away. Elle was among the hundreds of guests at the lavish wedding. Also in attendance were some two dozen young women who had become, through Domenico’s patronage, among the most elegant and esteemed cortigianas onesta in the city. These included Lucy, Sibylla, and Bianca, with whom I have remained friends over the years despite my lofty status as Signora Domenico Vitturi.
No ordinary Venetian matron would deign to make eye contact with a courtesan, much less befriend one. In truth, they wouldn’t have much opportunity even if they were so inclined, cloistered as they are within the thick stone walls of their homes. Domenico had promised me, however, that I would never suffer this benign captivity, that I would be free to go about as I wished, to mingle with thinkers, artists, and politicians, and even to accompany him to a ridotto on occasion for an evening of cards and witty conversation. By way of justification to those men who would raise their eyebrows at my unfettered ways, he explains that ours is not the customary Venetian marriage, but a “unione Inglese.”
“When I wed an Englishwoman,” he tells them, “I agreed to an English marriage. ’Tis a small enough price to pay for a lifetime with the most brilliant and beautiful woman in Europe.”
That visit to Grotte Cachée in the summer of 1626 was to be Domenico’s last. He never sponsored another courtesan, but a few months ago, at the urging of friends, he set about writing a memoir of his experiences as Pygmalion to a harem of wanton beauties. He’s using the title I suggested, Una Durata di Piacere, A Life of Pleasure, and he plans to have a handful of copies privately published—under a nom de plume, of course, lest it bring embarrassment to our children and grandchildren.
I must now lay down my quill, not only because my tale has come to an end, but because Domenico has stolen up behind me and kissed my neck and told me it’s time to come downstairs. Our head gondolier is waiting to take us for our customary twilight cruise through the canals.
Already, my husband tells me, the setting sun is painting the city gold.
By Rupert Brooke
(Sung, on one night, in the cities, in the darkness.)
Come away! Come away!
Ye are sober and dull through the common day,
But now it is night!
It is shameful night, and God is asleep!
(Have you not felt the quick fires that creep
Through the hungry flesh, and the lust of delight,
And hot secrets of dreams that day cannot say?).
The house is dumb;
The night calls out to you.—Come, ah, come!
Down the dim stairs, through the creaking door,
Naked, crawling on hands and feet
—It is meet! it is meet!
Ye are men no longer, but less and more,
Beast and God…. Down the lampless street,
By little black ways, and secret places,
In the darkness and mire,
Faint laughter around, and evil faces
By the star-glint seen—ah! follow with us!
For the darkness whispers a blind desire,
And the fingers of night are amorous
Keep close as we speed,
Though mad whispers woo you, and hot hands cling,
And the touch and the smell of bare flesh sting,
Soft flank by your flank, and side brushing side—
Tonight never heed!
Unswerving and silent follow with me,
Till the city ends sheer,
And the crook’d lanes open wide,
Out of the voices of night,
Beyond lust and fear,
To the level waters of moonlight,
To the level waters, quiet and clear,
To the black unresting plains of the calling sea.
OW ABOUT A BITE?”
Anton Turek heard Galiana Solsa’s seductively husky voice, raised a few decibels for his benefit, as he stood in a moonlit alley off Bleecker Street, lighting a fourth Gitanes off the third.
Took you long enough. Turek ground the unsmoked cigarette underfoot and retreated deeper into the brick-walled passage, ducking behind an artfully arranged jumble of old wooden pallets. He crouched, rather than knelt, so as to keep the knees of his new black Dolce & Gabbana jeans from coming into contact with the grimy concrete.
The crack-crack-crack of Galiana’s stilettos grew louder, underscored by thudding from the big, multibuckled boots worn by the guy she’d been rubbing up against at The Fallout Shelter around the corner on MacDougal. Fallout was a teeming, murky, screaming-loud little joint with cinder-block walls that drew a punk-goth clientele of which Galiana’s takeout du jour, who’d introduced himself as Oxy, was drearily typical: swastika neck tattoo, studded motorcycle jacket, striped stovepipe pants, the clown boots, and chopped-up lampblack hair that had been waxed and sprayed into a calcified semblance of disarray.
Oxy and Galiana had been tossing them back for about an hour—Irish whisky for him and silver bullets for her, both on her tab—when she whispered something in his ear while molding his hand to the crotch of her low-rise spandex booty shorts.
The mind is subtle, she liked to say. The cock is not.
She’d caught Turek’s eye, smiled, and gave him a little nod. He’d drained his Booker’s Manhattan, bit the cherry off the stem, laid a fifty on the bar, and made his way to this, her favorite alley in the Village.
That had been forty minutes ago. She didn’t give a damn how long she made him cool his heels, she never had.
“Well?” Galiana’s footsteps ceased, followed by Oxy’s.
Turek’s gums tickled as he peered between the weathered wooden slats of his “hunting blind,” as he thought of it— although it was Galiana who did most of the actual hunting, per se. He had a hard time getting humans to let down their defenses enough to go off alone with him. Something about him put them off. It didn’t used to be that way. Before his forty Lost Years, as he thought of them, he’d been fairly adept at the kind of interpersonal bullshit that won people over. It had come naturally to him; in fact, he’d been known for his savoir faire.
Not anymore.
Galiana and Oxy stood facing each other on the sidewalk right outside the alley. He was quite the strapping specimen by punk
standards, but Galiana, propelled to six and a half feet in those heels and draped in one of the “zip-capes” she liked to wear when she was on the prowl—long and hooded, with linebacker shoulder pads—could have been Darth Vader next to his puny Luke Skywalker.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“You fucking bitch, you gotta be shitting me.” Oxy’s booze-thickened snarl made Turek smile. His cock twitched. Galiana didn’t care to be spoken to that way. It made her cross.
It made her ravenous.
“You rub a guy’s hand on your snatch and whisper that dirty shit in his ear,” Oxy said, “you don’t just take him outside and tell him it’s time to eat.”
In a cartoonishly suggestive purr, she said, “I didn’t say what it was time to eat.”
It took him a second, and then he snorted in an “I get it” way that prompted Galiana, as she turned and strode into the alley, to roll her eyes in Turek’s direction. Tonight, her blue-black hair was sculpted into fat coils and severe bangs—a neo-forties, Blade Runner look enhanced by those ink-stroke brows and kohl-limned eyes.
The zip-cape was fashioned, like her thigh-high boots, of licorice-black vinyl. It billowed with her leonine strides despite the fifty pounds of lead ingots sewn into its hidden pockets, since their weight was located mostly in the upper back and shoulder pads. Most women could barely lift such a garment, much less wear it. Brass zippers lined every edge, from the floor-skimming hem to the deep hood, and there were two oversize belt loops, or what looked like belt loops, one on each side.
“Yes,” Turek breathed when, instead of hanging the cape on the old wrought-iron lamp hook halfway down the alley, as she most often did, she swung it onto the ground, lining side up. She walked right over it, chuckling when Oxy hesitated to do the same.
“Go ahead,” she said as she turned to face him in front of the alley’s only window, which was tall, narrow, and iron-barred. “I’m chucking it tonight. I’ve had it for ages.” Since 2002, to be precise, which was when she had ordered yet another gross of them from the Hong Kong raincoat manufacturer that had been producing them to her specifications for some twenty years. The remaining three dozen or so of the current batch were hanging in the twenty-by-sixteen-foot dressing room she’d created out of a spare bedroom in their apartment.
Galiana leaned against the window, leveling her most pheromone-drenched gaze at Oxy as she caressed her breasts through her spandex top. It had an ultra-deep U-neck that showed off not just a luxuriant expanse of cleavage but three glittering strands that might have been taken for the bottom loops of a triple diamond necklace—except that she wasn’t wearing a necklace.
Oxy leered as she pulled the elastic fabric open, stretching it around her breasts. Inserted in each nipple was a small platinum ring to which the ends of the three diamond strands were attached.
“On your knees,” Oxy said as he unzipped his fly.
“Yeah, right,” she snickered as she shimmied out of the shorts. Beneath them, she was bare except for a little black lightning bolt of pubic hair and the five-carat diamond adorning her clit. “You’re the one who’s going to be genuflecting tonight, my friend.”
“The fuck I am. Get on your fucking knees, bitch.” He grabbed her shoulders and tried to shove her down.
She swatted him away as casually as she would swat a mosquito.
He slapped her so hard, her head snapped around.
Galiana smiled slowly as she rubbed her cheek. “Ooh, a bad boy,” she said. “You like it rough, bad boy? You like to show your bitches who’s boss? I guess that’s something we have in common.”
She hauled back and punched him in the face.
“Fuck!” Oxy stumbled back, cupping his abraded cheek. “Shit!”
He balled a hand into a fist and whipped it toward Galiana’s head.
She seized his wrist, hissing with bared teeth. With her other hand, she reached into his pants, the muscles of her forearm flexing as she squeezed.
He yowled and tried to wrench her arm away, to no avail.
“Shh.” She whispered some words in the long-dead Etruscan tongue of her homeland.
It was like flipping a switch. Oxy’s mouth still gaped as if in midscream, but all that emerged from it was a strangled whimper.
Still gripping his balls, she said in the low feline rumble that Turek thought of as her Hell Voice, “Who’s the bitch now, bitch?”
His throat spasmed as he tried in vain to form words out of the helpless gurgle rising from it.
Reverting back to her usual Kathleen Turner purr, she said, “I’m not letting go until I get an answer, and I am a very patient woman. Who’s the bitch?”
“I… I… I am.” It was a barely audible rasp, but an impressive effort, considering the grip Galiana had on him, both psychic and physical.
“You’re what?” she demanded. “Say it.”
Fucking drama queen, Turek thought as his stomach grumbled. Galiana loved to toy with her pigeons, get them in a corner with their wings broken, and bat them around a bit before she pounced.
“Th-the bitch,” he croaked.
“Whose bitch?” she demanded.
“Yours.”
“On your knees, bitch.”
She pushed him down, clutching his spiky hair as she thrust herself against his mouth. “Work that tongue. Flick the diamond. Faster.” She slapped his head. “Faster. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah…Now slow down. Back off a little. Make it last.”
Make it last? “Verdammt,” Turek whispered as he crouched there, his knees aching like a motherfucker. “Blöde Fotze.” When a swear word leapt to his lips, it was more often than not in the language of his Bohemian youth, although he’d trained the last vestiges of a Germanic accent out of his English after World War I broke out; too much bullshit to have to deal with during one’s world travels. Galiana had cultivated an American accent, but Turek went with refined British, the better to score the best tables and otherwise throw his weight around in English-speaking countries.
Between the First and Second World Wars, he was occasionally mistaken for Edward, Prince of Wales, which he didn’t get at all. Granted, they were both champagne-blond and Teutonic, and they both knew how to properly tie an ascot, but Turek was a hell of a lot taller and better built, and facially, there was a world of difference. Turek’s eyes were pale gray, not blue, and he had—back then, before 1982 and his “Post-Fuck-up Makeover,” as Galiana insisted on calling it—a much stronger jaw, a broader brow, fuller lips…
His virile good looks and that oh-so-flaxen hair had made him a pussy magnet for six centuries, so it had killed him to have to get the plastic surgery and hazel contacts, not to mention having to dye his hair and eyebrows a darker shade of blond every few weeks. Galiana had wanted him to go with brown or even black, but it wouldn’t have looked natural with his pale complexion. The physical transformation was jarring enough without ending up looking like Wayne Newton.
When Galiana first started talking surgery, he’d tried to argue his way out of it, but eventually he’d had to concede that she was right. They had his mug shot; they knew his name. He was bound to be rearrested eventually; even if he were to leave the country, he could be extradited back to New York. Two centuries had passed since his forty-year stint in a Parisian prison cell, but the memory was still pretty fucking fresh. It wasn’t going to happen again if he could help it.
And it wasn’t like he hadn’t brought the whole shit storm down on himself. He’d been an asshole to let himself be seen dumping that disco bitch’s drained corpse in that Staten Island landfill. If Galiana hadn’t pulled off her “Mission Impossible Jailbreak,” as the New York Post had trumpeted it, he might still be serving time.
“Can you save the dimples?” he’d asked the plastic surgeon as the anesthetic was being injected into his IV.
“You don’t have dimples,” replied the doc, a guy Galiana had found who had his own private little hospital in the Caribbean for well-heeled Bad Guys. “They’re just creases.�
��
“Chicks think they’re dimples. Can you save them?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
Sure. Whatever. Just the kind of precise, scientific response you like to hear from a guy who’s standing over a tray of knives and bone saws while you’re heading into la-la land.
The dimples—and they were dimples—were still there after the surgery, but otherwise you’d never have recognized him from before. His jaw, while still manly, was narrower, and the cleft chin was history; his eyes were a little smaller, but not unattractively so. Turek’s nose had gotten badly broken when one of New York’s finest grabbed his head and slammed it face-first into asphalt. Injuries to his kind healed swiftly, but not always tidily. The nose was a mess, but rather than surgically reshape it, Dr. Whatever had suggested leaving it unset and seeing how it healed. It healed looking like some five-year-old had made it out of Play-Doh.
“It looks like shit,” Turek had said as he inspected his new face in the little hand mirror they gave him after the bandages came off.
“You look like a prizefighter,” Galiana said. “Women will want to kiss it and make it feel better.”
“I can make your cock look like that, too, if you want,” offered Dr. Whatever, and he’d laughed like hell without missing a stroke as he fucked Galiana against the wall next to Turek’s hospital bed.
The good doc had altered his physical features quite thoroughly, right down to grafting on new fingerprints from “a guy who never even got a speeding ticket, so we’re talking squeaky clean.” Turek didn’t ask whether the guy in question was a cadaver or alive, not because it made him queasy, but because he simply didn’t care. He did care that his fingertips had looked a little odd ever since the surgery, but that was a small price to pay for a nice, shiny new set of prints.
By the time Turek got out of the hospital, Galiana, in an effort to make their after-dinner cleanup a bit simpler and more discreet in the future, had already ordered her first batch of zip-capes. She had also arranged for new personal documentation—driver’s license, passport, the works— identifying him as Anthony Prazak, a name he’d chosen because it meant “from Prague,” the city of his birth. He’d taken Galiana’s suggestion to change “Anton” to “Anthony,” only to find himself dubbed “Tony” by just about everyone he met. When he complained to Galiana about being saddled against his will with a nickname that he regarded as juvenile and low-class, her advice was for him to lighten the fuck up.
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