“He would have screamed, but he’d completely lost his voice. All he could do was watch in mute horror as the headless woman stepped onto the bottom rung of the ladder and disappeared from view. Then, to his further horror, the ship’s hull passed right over him. It didn’t sink him—it was a ghost ship made of fog, full of dead souls wailing for mercy.
“When the ship had finally passed over him, the gondolier was left alone in the fog. Shaking, he turned his gondola around and rowed back to the gondola yard. The next morning, the head of a young woman was found in the canal, bumping up against the sides of the Rio de San Vio. Her body was never found.”
A night for ghosts and evil, Maria had said.
Chapter 39
“You still want to go for a walk after that?” Orlando asked as the group of Venetians discussed the credibility of the story.
“Of course. I don’t think we’re in much danger from headless women.”
She looked at her watch. Eight o’clock. She pulled out her phone and checked it, even though with the ringer on high she would’ve heard it. She should just resign herself to the fact that Alessandro wasn’t going to call.
They wished the owners a buonasera and were once again swallowed by the fog. With Orlando following behind, she crossed the bridge and, going around the church of San Trovaso, started along the deserted Rio dei Ognissanti.
For the next hour she walked, not really caring where she was going, choosing one deserted street after another, crossing over the Grand Canal at the train station and continuing on the other side through Cannareggio and back toward San Marco.
At last, Orlando begged her to go home. “I don’t know about you, but my feet are killing me, and I don’t think trailing after you in the fog was exactly what Alessandro had in mind when he told me not to let you out of my sight.”
She muttered she really didn’t care what Alessandro had in mind, but then it wasn’t Orlando’s fault her life was falling apart. She was about to turn in the direction of home when she heard a man chant in a low voice, “Gondola, gondola.” Olivia wondered what he was still doing out when all the other gondoliers had long given up hope and gone home.
There was still one hundred euros in her bag. She handed it to the gondolier. “Please take us past the opera house, then over to the Rio de San Vio.” She turned to Orlando. “There. You won’t have to walk any more. But I told my cousin I’d go past his place. He’s worried about high water.”
“You want to take a gondola after that story?” Orlando asked with a long-suffering sigh.
The gondolier helped Olivia into the boat. She sat on the velvet-cushioned seat and Orlando settled in beside her. He took out his phone, and she watched as smiling spiders spun webs across the screen, beeping happily as they ensnared swarms of leering houseflies.
There were other snippets of sound too. The lap of the paddle, the sound of a piano being played with one finger. Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run . . . An urgent bit of conversation, voices disembodied by the fog: Please stay . . . Not tonight . . . Another time. A crying baby. A barking dog.
The gondolier ducked his head as he steered under a low bridge, startling a huge rat. It stared at Olivia with its beady eyes before disappearing down a crack in some mossy steps. A pair of shutters creaked closed, iron bolts snapping into place, while behind them footsteps echoed over the bridge.
Olivia turned to see three white-masked men illuminated by lamplight. It’s still Carnival, she thought, though these were the first costumed people she’d seen all night.
The gondola glided around the opera house. She’d leaned against the rail, the rain pattering on this very canal, and Alessandro had kissed her. Their first kiss. How happy she’d been!
They drifted on. One palazzo, two palazzos, three palazzos, four. Number five was Marco’s. The water didn’t seem high, but maybe the problem was on the street side. She’d tell him to call the caretaker anyway.
She looked up to see light spilling out of Marco’s open shutters. Was someone staying there? No, there couldn’t be, or he would have asked them to check for water. She took out her phone, the screen lighting up as she typed: In a gondola. Looks fine from the canal side, but I’d call the caretaker anyway. Did you know your lights are on?
As the message left with a whoosh, she felt Orlando’s hand on her arm. He leaned close to her, his lips almost brushing her ear. “I saw that plague doctor when we were in Al Bottegon,” Orlando whispered. “Up there on the next bridge. It stopped and peered into the bar as if looking for someone, but didn’t come in.”
Olivia looked up from the screen to the plague doctor, its long deformed beak piercing the fog.
The same plague doctor she’d seen her first day in Venice, the one on the bridge outside her apartment. It had pulled the petals from a red rose and dropped them into the canal like a trail of blood, and she’d thought it knew her somehow and was threatening her.
Now here it was again, the very same one, its white feather the same color as the fog.
“Something’s not right,” Orlando whispered tensely.
Suddenly, on either side of the plague doctor, two of the masked men from the last bridge appeared. Where was the third one?
She felt Orlando’s arm against her side as he pulled out his gun.
The gondolier, seemingly oblivious to the tension around him, rowed on. The boat glided closer to the plague doctor, now pulling out its phone and peering through black eyeholes at the screen as it lit up.
The third white-masked man appeared, stepping out from a darkened alley onto the steps leading to the canal.
It can’t be! It just can’t. It didn’t make sense.
She looked down at her phone again.
“Get down behind me,” Orlando whispered.
She started to type again, her shaky fingers hardly able to hit the right letters:
Help m . . .
What would have come after that she didn’t know. The masked men vaulted over the bridge’s railing, dropping with a thud into the gondola.
Damn! First one, then the others swore as they fought to maintain their balance.
Olivia’s phone bounced into the cushions, and she scrambled after it, fumbling with the display, trying desperately to hit Send as a foot came down painfully on her wrist.
“Give me that!” one of them said, reaching down and grabbing it from her hand. The second had Orlando and, having already wrestled the gun out his hand, was now going for his phone. It flew through the air, a spider still smiling absurdly as the phone hit the dark water.
Orlando aimed a punch at his attacker, stopping when another brought his gun to Olivia’s temple.
“Don’t try anything,” the man said in accented Italian to Orlando, and Orlando raised his hands in the air in a sign of surrender, not protesting when they bound his wrists and ankles, unable to protest as they pressed duct tape over his mouth.
“You going to scream?” the man with the gun asked Olivia, speaking with the same accent as the first.
She shook her head vigorously, too frightened to speak.
“Well, we’ll just make sure,” he said, taping her mouth before tying her up too.
Only the gondolier had maintained his balance, but the attackers still had the element of surprise, and the third already had the gondolier bound.
“Leave him in the street,” said the one who had Olivia. The gondolier struggled as he was dragged him over the side, his head and shoulders striking the stone steps.
Olivia didn’t hear the motorboat until it pulled alongside. She and Orlando were pushed onboard and shoved to the floor.
“Here’s her phone,” one of the men said. “I see she sent a message to Rossi. Let him sweat for an hour, then message him again with his instructions. Leave the phone on the gondolier.”
The plague doctor leaned over her, it
s hideous beak only inches from her face. The black eyeholes were pitiless. One gloved hand held a sponge over her nose. She held her breath and tried to twist away from the acrid fumes. How could you?
“Stay still. This is hard for me too,” the plague doctor said.
She twisted away from the sponge, but now a hand was stroking her hair. “Just stay calm. It’ll be okay.”
Not able to hold her breath another second, she breathed in deeply.
How could you? And then blackness.
Chapter 40
I’m so sorry, but I didn’t have a choice . . .
Chapter 41
Eduard Alberti was waiting in the fog at the foot of his driveway. Alessandro pulled in and, leaving the lights on, turned off the car and got out. Leaning against the car door, he crossed his arms over his chest in a “ready to listen” posture.
“I came down here in case you arrest me,” Eduard said shakily. “I didn’t want the children to see. It’s been bad enough having that cop car parked outside the door.”
“And why would I arrest you?” Alessandro asked.
Eduard looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. In the headlights, his eyes had a crazed look, his hair was dirty, and his nails were gnawed down to the quick. “I didn’t tell you everything the other day.”
“I assumed that. What do you know? If you help me, maybe I can help you.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. I just want this over. I’ve been living with this for too long. My children deserve a better father.”
“We’ll see about that. Children are forgiving.”
“I didn’t know until I saw the newspaper this morning who you were. The Billionaire of Venice. They say your wife is alive . . .”
“Go on,” Alessandro said.
“They’re wrong. I think the same thing happened to her as Vanessa,” Eduard said evenly.
In the silence that followed this statement, Alessandro weighed Eduard’s words.
“Vanessa knew about the drugs,” Eduard elaborated. “But she knew about it longer ago than I admitted, and she didn’t tell anyone, because Benito—”
“She knew Benito?”
“Yes, though his name isn’t really Benito. He’s an admirer of the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.”
“Nice,” Alessandro said sarcastically. “Did she mention a Dino?”
“Yes. She overheard Benito talking on the phone to a Dino. She assumed he was a partner, but she never met him. Benito told her to keep quiet, and if she did he would make it worth her while. If she went to the police, he would bury her under the Fort of Maximilian on Sant’Erasmo, next to a glassblower who tried to call the police.”
Katarina was dead.
Again.
The cold that gripped Alessandro had nothing to do with the icy wind. “Did he say anything else about this glassblower?”
“No. But when I read in the paper about her husband who became a cop and had been searching for her ever since, I knew it was the same person.” Eduard started to cry. “We should have gone to the police, but to tell you the truth, we were in so much financial trouble. I made some bad investments. My debts are higher than these hills, and I have this place mortgaged to the hilt.” He was sobbing uncontrollably now. “It was my grandfather’s. It means everything to me . . . or it did . . . Now I just want my wife back.”
And Katarina would do anything to save her family’s glassblowing business, Alessandro thought. Even deal drugs. He knew everything now.
“Go back to your family,” Alessandro said, not unkindly. Eduard would be charged with obstruction of justice, but not today.
Alessandro drove away, only to stop at the first crossroad. He pulled the car over to the shoulder but didn’t turn off the engine. He needed to think.
In the headlights, he could just make out the rows of bare grapevines. With their branches trained along horizontal wires, they looked like a legion of ghosts emerging from the fog, bearing down on him with outstretched arms.
He turned off the headlights. He had enough ghosts to deal with right now. He didn’t need to imagine any more.
He knew the truth now.
Katarina was not alive. He tried to think about how that made him feel, but he couldn’t. It was almost like she’d become two people—the one he knew, and the one he didn’t.
But why did Dino tell him Katarina was still alive? What did he have to gain? And who was this Katarina Zucaro in New Jersey?
His cell rang. It was Columbo.
“I don’t know how to say this, Alessandro.” It had to be bad. Columbo always addressed him as Rossi.
“Go ahead,” Alessandro said. “I don’t think the day can get any worse.” Unless, he thought, something has happened to Olivia. “It’s not Olivia, is it?”
“No. She’s still with Orlando. It’s the address we had for Katarina. The American tabloids and paparazzi got there first. It isn’t Katarina.”
“I know. I just spoke to Alberti.” He filled Columbo in on the conversation.
“We’ll take Benito out to Sant’Erasmo tomorrow morning,” Columbo said. “I don’t care if we have to dig up the whole island. We’re going to find her.”
“Thank you,” said Alessandro, “but who’s this woman in New Jersey with Katarina’s name?”
“Identity theft. She’s wanted here in Italy for a murder in Palermo. Looks like Dino set her up with Katarina’s passport. Dino’s got his fingers in a lot of pies. Would you like me to text you her photo?”
“Hold the picture. I have bigger issues. Why would Dino say Katarina is alive if she isn’t?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe just to buy time.”
“I can’t help but think it’s more than that. See what you can get out of him.”
“Yes, boss,” Columbo said without sarcasm.
“No word from Pamela yet?” After hearing that Katarina dealt drugs, it didn’t seem so hard to believe Pamela was jealous. We’re more than partners, you know that, she’d said.
“No word. Her husband hasn’t heard anything either. He said that wasn’t unusual lately, but I can tell he’s worried sick. When this is over, I’m retiring. I’m getting too old for this.”
“You’ve said that every single day since we met,” Alessandro said, forcing some levity into his voice.
“Well, this time I mean it. You may as well stay at your father’s place tonight. There’s no getting over the causeway, and every boat we have is being used to get people off the bridge. It’s a complete disaster.”
“Okay, but call me if Pamela calls.”
“And vice versa.”
Alessandro ended the call but didn’t start the car. Instead, he gazed unseeingly into the darkness and fog. Katarina was dead. Not just assumed to be, but really dead. He knew they’d find her body the next day. His heart was filled with sadness and pity. He’d never really known her, but he was as close to understanding as he ever would be.
But why would Dino tell him the woman in New Jersey was Katarina when surely he knew Alessandro would figure that out the moment he saw her? Was he just messing with him?
He felt the chill of a terrible knowledge come over him. Yes, he would know the woman in New Jersey wasn’t Katarina once he saw her, but he would have to go all the way there to find out—away from Olivia!
Chapter 42
He started the car, and it roared to life, the rows of grapevine ghosts appearing even more threatening than before. He had the sense they were coming for him and would chase him through the fog all the way back to Venice.
He was just putting his car into reverse when his cellphone let out a ping. He looked at the display. It was Olivia.
Help mad ndd fk dlgfktr.
Oh God, what if he was already too late?
He slammed on the brakes and jabbed Orlando’s name on his phone list. It rang. Onc
e. Twice. Three times. Answer, damn it!
“You’ve reached the voicemail of Orlando Molinari, Guardia di—”
Alessandro swore again. He couldn’t risk calling Olivia and have them know she was trying to contact him. Katarina had tried to call the police and had been killed for it.
He jabbed Columbo’s number this time.
Columbo answered on the first ring. “What?”
“I just got a text from Olivia,” he said, describing it. “Now I know why Dino told me Katarina was alive. Because they wanted me out of the way, so they could get to Olivia!”
It was Columbo’s turn to swear. “Did you call Orlando?”
“I can’t reach him. I’m on my way back to Venice.” He continued to back out onto the road, putting the car into forward now and speeding as fast as he dared through the fog toward the highway.
“But the causeway—”
“I’ll get there if I have to swim.”
“What do you think the ‘mad’ was trying to say?” Columbo asked. “‘Me’?”
“Probably. Tell Dino that all deals are off unless he tells you where they’ve taken Olivia. And don’t let anyone else near him. Especially that lawyer of his.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I don’t care. If anything happens to Olivia . . .” He refused to let himself finish that thought as he ended the call.
It took all Alessandro’s professional skill to drive back to Venice. While most people had heeded the traffic warnings and stayed off the highway, there were still cars creeping along in the fog.
Creeping was something Alessandro didn’t have time for. Flying along the highway at law-breaking speeds, he wove in and out of the cars, passing on the shoulder if need be.
Midnight in Venice Page 19