Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He’s reserved a suite in a five-star boutique hotel “reeking of old-regime opulence,” as one guidebook put it. With opulence being the key to Gauke’s entire life, he immediately feels at home in the Gritti Palace. The receptionist (the plaque on the counter identifies him as Umberto Ziani) consults the computer and locates his booking.

  “For just three nights, Signor Gauke?”

  “Correct.” His eyes rest on the plaque and he quietly adds: “Umberto.”

  As Umberto photocopies his passport Gauke wonders if he’d been wrong not to travel under a different name, grow a beard, dye his hair, insert an earring into his nose. The thought causes an involuntary shudder of his head: no, he’d decided against all that nonsense months ago. The idea of being cornered, looking like some bum on the run, was too humiliating for serious consideration.

  The young porter summoned to show him his suite releases the catch on the handle of his suitcase and sticks it loudly into its innards, like a stiletto. His immaculate white gloves flash as he lifts it onto the golden luggage trolley.

  “You been to Venice before, signor?” the man asks as they travel up in the elevator.

  “Many times.”

  Gauke wraps himself in lies. Much as the linen binding an Egyptian mummy is there to preserve the person inside, so it is with Gauke. Indeed, it’s ironic that this habit took root early in his childhood, dealing with his mummy. So overweening was her love for him that he rapidly learned, in a desperate act of survival, to use falsehoods as a shell to protect the formation of his secret inner self. Lying is a habit he perfected and never lost. The elevator reaches the first floor and they move along the corridor. Gauke stops at a door to read the name of the suite.

  “Know who Ernest Hemingway is?”

  The boy looks puzzled. “Mi scusi, signor?”

  Gauke tut-tuts and wags his finger disapprovingly. “No mi scusi, kid. He was a famous writer. Americano. Often checked in to this hotel.”

  They reach a suite farther along. The porter opens it up, letting Gauke enter first. “Spent my honeymoon in this very suite.” He strides across the sitting room, his handmade shoes sinking into the Oriental carpet. At the huge picture window he holds back the damask drapes to get a better view of the canal below. “Over forty years ago.”

  “Your wife, she—”

  Gauke cuts the boy’s words off sharply: “My wife’s dead.”

  He catches sight of himself in the ornate wall mirror on the far side of the room and smiles. Gauke is one of those among us prone to private smiles, causing the uneasy observer to ponder the reason for such apparent inner happiness. On this occasion he’s wondering if his wife, Eve, has realized he’s no longer in their apartment, let alone their country. Eve is a busy woman with many interests (including some demanding charities) so it’s possible she hasn’t yet noticed his absence.

  Gauke finds his wallet and fishes out an excessive tip which he gives to the wide-eyed porter.

  “Mille grazie, signor.”

  “Prego.”

  On his way to the door the porter turns when he’s called.

  “Hey, kid! Smart guy, that Hemingway. When he saw the game was up he did the final check-out. Into the void.” He shapes the index finger of his right hand into a gun barrel and holds it to his head. “Booom! Blew his brains out with a hunting gun. Big balls; big gun.” His laughter follows the boy as he retreats from the room and quietly closes the door behind him.

  Gauke is still laughing as he showers. When he emerges a bottle of Taittinger Comtes de Champagne waits in an ice bucket, compliments of the hotel. He pulls the bottle out as he dries his hair and checks the vintage. It’s 1998. Satisfied, he pours himself a glass, switches on the television, and finds CNN. The pair of smiling newscasters, sitting like conjoined twins, have the personality of action dolls. He momentarily imagines a giant hand dressing them before placing them in the frame. Still, he watches the world news intently from start to finish before dressing and leaving.

  Gauke has what used to be called, and maybe still is, a photographic memory. That intuitive ability, married to the acquired one of speed-reading, accounts for his lethal precision in all forms of commerce. He realized, as he indelibly absorbed no less than three guidebooks (including maps of the city) on the flight to Europe, just how the personality of Venice, with its maze of intertwining alleys and secrets, mirrors his own.

  Even though darkness has fallen, and a swirling fog is seeping into the city, he walks the streets, crosses the bridges and piazzas with the confidence of one born and bred there. The somber ugly church of San Moise looms out of the darkness, revealed by weak flickering streetlights. Buried inside, he remembers from a guidebook, is John Law, the Scotsman who created one of the very first financial scams graced with the title “bubble.” Although many distinguished names—Richard Wagner, Robert Browning, Sergei Diaghilev—have been chiseled into Venetian gravestones, it amuses Gauke that a fraudster, John Law, is among them. He died in poverty, a state that has always terrified Gauke. He quickly shakes the thought from his head; unpleasantness features little in his life. Emotionally he’s fitted with a very effective garbage disposal unit. Turning into Calle Vallaresso he’s treated to the distant lights of the San Marco pier bustling with traghetti crisscrossing the Grand Canal. The phantom taste of that first cold prosecco excites him.

  A single table waits for him in Harry’s Bar. Even if the ghosts of the jet set that once frequented it, of Hemingway, Welles, Capote, and Churchill, had bowed out before the avalanche of the nouveaux riches, Gauke had still wanted to experience the place. Already crammed with guzzling customers, he wouldn’t have made it past the front door if a booking hadn’t been made. One of his investors, an heiress and the distant relative of a Venetian count, had pulled some strings. Silk strings. His table is against the back wall: a prime position from which to observe the antics of his fellow consumers. Gauke’s adult life has been spent scrutinizing the behavior of the wealthy—this evening is no exception. The prices listed in the menu confirm that your pockets need to be deep to eat here. No matter. He orders carpaccio and cucina Veneziana, then sits back, sips his drink, and lets his sky-blue eyes scan the posturing on display.

  Filthy rich?

  Stinking rich?

  Eating alone in a restaurant frequented by the wealthy, as Gauke often does, witnessing them with their noses in the gilded trough, allows the observer uninterrupted time to appreciate just how grotesque, vacuous, vain, tasteless, and ignorant most of them are. He has every right to hate and destroy them; to strip them of their wealth; to deflate the thing he loathes most about them—their goddamn complacency. Tonight Gauke is like a pathologist dissecting not only the scene beyond his table but the lonely voyeur sitting behind it. He begins to cautiously apply his scalpel to himself. Where had he gone wrong? When did it all go sour? At college he had studied philosophy. Why? He simply can’t remember. Was he that ideological? Maybe. It must have been short-lived because the net result of three years studying ethics, semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics was one obsession: money. That was the only reality that interested him.

  His time at Harvard, however, was not wasted when it came to that most valuable of attributes for the ambitious: connections. This network of influential contacts, sustained by his silver tongue and its ability to inspire trust, was the springboard from which he was able to dive into a vast pool of liquid funds. If he had ever been ideological, he’d certainly executed a perfect volte-face and entered without a ripple. At first even he was surprised at the level of greed he found among the wealthy. Greed soon became his bait; greed became the trump card he played every day of his professional life. For over thirty years he’s had to stomach a constant diet of undiluted avarice; watch dollar signs eternally spinning in rapacious eyes; peer into the unfathomable depths of insatiable covetousness.

  Gauke hungrily polishes off the thin strips of raw beef in the exquisite knowledge that carpaccio was reputedly first created in this very ba
r. The waiter now places the main dish in front of him: a stew of wild boar, peacock, and venison. Picking up his knife and fork he hesitates, not sure if it’s his contemplation of this money-grubbing world, or sight of the cooked meats, that causes him to suddenly gag with nausea. He calls the waiter back.

  “Il conto.”

  * * *

  Outside, he breathes in deeply, seemingly unaware of the thick damp fog enveloping him. A violent fit of coughing grabs him, shaking the gathering vomit from his mouth. Not since childhood has he felt so forsaken; never before has his pursuit of loneliness become so apparent. His vibrating frame shifts from coughing to crying. The sound of his sobs is lost in the fog; not even God Almighty could hear or see him. It’s as if Lenny Gauke no longer exists.

  The journey back to the hotel is painfully slow and frightening. Hands reaching out like a blind man, he feels his way along walls, over bridges, bumping into railings and, occasionally, people. Each time he calls out, asking where he is, but nobody bothers to reply. He hears the water lapping in the canals and makes sure he veers away from the source of the sound. Moisture clings to his face and hands, saturates his clothes which adhere to his body. Hours pass. Close to collapse he suddenly, and inexplicably, finds himself in front of the Gritti Palace. The hotel just emerges from the fog like a photograph in a developing tray.

  The staff manning reception are immediately alert to his return, as if they were waiting specifically for him. They whisper conspiratorially while one selects his key. It’s Umberto. Gauke detects a distinct change in his attitude from when he checked in some four hours earlier: the man’s eyes never once meet his and the receptionist makes no comment on his distressed appearance. He wonders if it’s just paranoia on his part. Trying to control his chattering teeth, his voice hits a strident note, more of a bark.

  “Have a bottle of Black Label whiskey sent up to my suite, per favore.”

  Umberto summons a look from the coldest regions of the Alps. “A bottle?”

  “A bottle!”

  Steaming hot water cascades loudly into the bath and Gauke barely hears the knock. The security chain is already in place when he partially opens the door. It’s the boy porter again, this time with the scotch. Even he has lost his bounce, entering cautiously and retreating as soon as Gauke has signed for it. He doesn’t even hang about for another gratuity.

  Gauke is now convinced something momentous happened during his hellish outing to the bar. He makes sure the door is secure, turns the bath taps off and the television on. Pouring a large glass of whiskey, he settles down to watch the news. He sneezes. Instinctively he finds himself worrying if he’s getting a cold—until a remote smile betrays the fleeting thought that it doesn’t matter, as it won’t have time to develop.

  The television spews out reports on the multifarious horrors of human behavior perpetrated that day around the world, holding no interest for Gauke. When it reaches the sports coverage at the end of the newscast he withdraws to the bathroom, disappears in a cloud of steam, and sinks into the hot water. The sound of the television is relayed from hidden speakers. He empties the glass of whiskey in great gulps before sliding under the water; his abundant long white hair floats to the surface, waving like an exotic plant.

  “News is coming in of a body found in a sports car owned by prominent New York stock broker and investment advisor Leonard Gauke.” The voice of the newscaster is drowned as the man himself noisily bursts to the surface. Great globs of water spill from the tub to the floor, saturating the bath mat. “The victim is believed to be the brother …”

  By the time Gauke reaches the television, naked and dripping wet, the item is over and a weather forecast is in progress. He fills the tumbler with whiskey and sinks it down. Was that a knock on the door? He kills the sound of the television. There it is again, a gentle brief knocking on his door. He pads quietly across the room and looks through the security spy hole. The corridor appears to be empty so his visitor must have left, or is standing beside the door with his back to the wall. Now the telephone rings. When he reaches the receiver the caller hangs up, leaving him listening to the tone of a dead line. He sees his naked frame in the same mirror he’d smiled into when he first arrived. This time he doesn’t smile. Instead he retrieves from the bathroom a huge white bathrobe and wraps it around himself.

  When he wakes he finds the whiskey bottle empty. Slithers of cold dawn light percolate past the heavy curtains onto the sofa that he’d collapsed on. The muted television is showing images of himself, Eve, his two daughters, his only son, his brother and his two sons; Gauke, like the Mafia he admires so much, employs mostly family. Unused to heavy drinking he has a hangover so painful he decides against turning up the sound. Besides, the pictures tell their own story. It amuses him to watch the newscasters tossing fact after fact to each other like a shuttlecock.

  Well into the news item they cut to a faded picture of Charles Ponzi from the 1920s, and Gauke knows he’s being compared to the man after whom his particular scheme for defrauding investors has been named. He knew Ponzi was an Italian immigrant, and wondered if he’d come from Venice. Closely watching the newscaster’s mouth he could tell she was saying that he, Lenny Gauke, had masterminded the largest Ponzi scheme ever. All too true. And it had paid for, among many other properties and possessions, the seventy-foot racing yacht now on the screen. There’s its name filling the screen—Making Waves—an apt one under the circumstances.

  Gauke groans when the shot is replaced with one of medics removing a body and bringing it to the quayside. He adored his brother Arthur. It was he who had made, at Lenny’s behest, the arrangement with the Mafia; he who had paid them for services still to be rendered; he who was intending to report the Ponzi scheme to the authorities. “You’ve run out of road, Lenny,” was how Arthur had put it. For all these reasons he’d had to shoot him. Incarceration for either of them was not an option. Incapable of seeing his brother suffer, he’d put him down like he was a favorite pet.

  There’s a knock on the door. Moments later the phone rings. Gauke reacts to neither but hurriedly starts dressing. He drags a chair to the window and waits. Eventually a vaporetto full of new arrivals docks at the hotel pier. As they begin to disembark Gauke stands, quickly pulls the collar of his coat around his ears and a baseball cap tightly over his eyes. He quietly releases the security chain, eases open the door, and slips into the empty corridor. By the time he reaches the foyer the party of guests has engulfed the receptionists. Moving rapidly he circumnavigates the gaggle of people, scuttling unnoticed from the hotel.

  Nothing prepared him for the vast herd of gawping visitors crushed into the Piazza San Marco. The Venice he’d chosen to come to was no longer the Venice of his imagination. That invisible city in his head had been conjured some forty years earlier, long before the devastating tsunami of tourism had hit it. Only then did he recognize the time warp he’d inhabited for so long: fraud had preoccupied him to the exclusion of all else. Reality comes crashing in as he watches in horror the day trippers swarming into the square. Against a setting of such wonder and beauty, man appears ugly, very ugly. That, however, he was prepared for.

  For someone accustomed to receiving preferential treatment wherever and whenever he appears in public, to being feared and fawned over by rich clients, much like the doges whose Palazzo Ducale he can see in the distance, the indignity of being jostled by this crowd of nobodies is unbearable. He’d foolishly expected to walk straight into the Basilica of St. Mark, contemplate in peace the famous mosaics, seek spiritual succour alone in the presence of Tintoretto’s Paradiso, but that was not to be. Gauke immediately dismisses any idea of waiting in line and consequently gets to contemplate nothing except his own misery.

  In a pathetic attempt to hide his lonely status he hovers uncertainly on the outskirts of the square, close to the campanile, where a guide’s sing-song voice catches his attention. The woman explains in execrable English that, like much of Venice, these watch towers were built on mu
d flats and, again like much of Venice, are very unstable. The most famous of them, the Campanile of St. Mark’s, was originally built in 912 and quickly became so much part of the city that it seemed eternal. “One eighteenth-century guidebook,” here she reads from her notebook, “described the tower as never showing the slightest sign of leaning, shaking, or giving way. Then, early one July morning in 1793, it suddenly made a slight shudder, silently shook itself, and slowly collapsed.”

  He wanders aimlessly toward the other side of the square, savoring the words the guide had chosen. Like the old tower in the Piazza San Marco, his ivory one had just shuddered, shaken, and collapsed without warning. What had possessed him to embark on the fraud all those years ago? Surely he’d known from the start the bubble would eventually have to burst. Had he been so delusional as to think otherwise? Or just plain arrogant? Or was it the sheer stupidity of the investors that first began to intrigue, even amuse him. As he’d pumped up his promised returns, making them increasingly ludicrous, even mathematically impossible, the more they clamored to be his clients, part of his elite inner circle. The inanity of the rich, their moronic smugness, their compulsive fixation with money, had finally poisoned him. He began to despise them; he wanted to hurt them, destroy them, make them experience destitution and poverty. Like his parents had.

  This brooding is abruptly broken by a change in the light. The sun has come out. Yes, Venice is proving to be the right choice after all.

  Now the familiar smile returns as he again looks across at the Doge’s Palace. He recalls what lies in store there for the visitor, and has no desire to share it. Its gilded exterior is a beguiling façade for the horrors that still haunt this city. He’s thinking of the dungeons: the sweltering Piombi under the roof, or the damp hellish gloom of the Pozzi in the bowels of the building. Just thinking of Venice’s secret police curdled blood across medieval Europe. The Council of Ten and the Council of Three dispatched agents across every land in pursuit of revenge; nobody escaped. “The Ten send you to the torture chamber,” the Venetians used to say, “the Three to your grave.” He nods in agreement with himself: it’s better for Arthur to be dead than suffering the torture of a life sentence in jail.