That Winter in Venice

by Ciji Ware

  Stefano was in the bathroom when his cell phone began to vibrate in its silenced mode.

  “Your phone!” she’d croaked.

  “Let it ring,” he answered.

  Fifteen minutes later, it had vibrated against Stefan’s wooden bedside table again—and again, he didn’t answer it in her presence. Serena had repressed a smile, guessing that, perhaps, the young lady in Verona whom Serena had overheard vociferously protesting Stefano’s coming to her rescue at the leaky palazzo was determined to get hold of him.

  Serena had to admit that for a moment that morning she’d been sorely tempted—given her dream and the unrelenting melancholy she’d battled since Jack’s departure—to surrender to Stefano’s romantic overtures. His constant wheedling and flattery continued when he handed her a perfectly made cup of espresso that he’d produced in his minuscule kitchen. She longed for human comfort, if only for the temporary solace his lavish attentions might offer. Why couldn’t she just be like a guy, she thought wistfully. Why couldn’t she just seek a nice warm body as attractive as Stefano’s for a night or two to help her forget her troubles? But she knew it wouldn’t work... not really... and the insistent and repeated ringing of his mobile phone on his bedside table signaled it would be foolish of her to try this tactic. Instead, she dutifully bid him a grateful and chaste farewell before she headed back to her own lodgings and slept the entire day and night away.

  A modern Casanova... but an awfully charming one.

  Within the hour of Rosa helping Serena stitch the latest muslin version of the creation next in the queue of customer’s costumes, Allegra arrived at the workshop to see how her American assistant was feeling. She had also come to check on progress for costumes being made for the last of her very best—and wealthiest—clients. In less than five days Il Ballo di Carnevale was due to take place.

  As for Stefano Fabrini, Serena had to admit—lothario or not—the handsome young Italian had been a Godsend both to her and Allegra, commandeering a crew not only to pump out every drop of moisture in the leaking areas of the palazzo’s lower floors, but also to search for a solution to the disintegrating foundations that allowed more water to seep in, the second the pumps were turned off.

  “We just need Stefano to keep us dry until after the ball,” Allegra sighed. “The weather report just announced there’s yet a new storm brewing in the Adriatic that’s expected to dump more sleet and snow on Venice. I doubt there’s any pump invented that could keep up with that much extra water flowing into that building.”

  “Oh, no,” groaned Serena before a paroxysm of coughing took hold. “Just what we don’t need,” she gasped.

  The next morning, Serena came to event headquarters after her latest early-morning conference with Stefano at the palazzo. She mounted the circular stairs and knocked on the doorframe of Allegra’s office.

  “Now Stefano’s problem is getting permission from the city’s historic landmarks commission to apply a new type of sealant that he says ‘might’ keep the palazzo’s walls more water tight—that is, if he can even obtain such a product to ward off disaster during the next storm that’s due to hit full force tomorrow. Apparently, the best ones are made in the U.S.”

  This day, Allegra, too, had swathed her throat with a warm scarf. Over night she’d come down with the same cold her entire staff had been battling for weeks. She regarded Serena closely. Another coughing fit had seized the younger woman and she’d turned her back until it had passed.

  “Cara, we should both probably be resting in bed, or perhaps in hospital,” Allegra said with black humor. “Your work assisting the pattern-maker is done. I insist you go to your lodgings and rest for today.”

  “Absolutely not,” Serena insisted, fighting off more coughing that practically made her gag. “Rosa is making all of us pots of her special tea. Everyone is sick, so I’m not infecting anyone. I’ll drink my tea and help the others with the endless beading still left to do on the costumes draped on those mannequins at the workshop. I’ll be fine. In fact,” she said, forcing a smile, “I think I’m actually on the mend, now.”

  It was midnight by the time Rosa and the last seamstress left for the night. Just as she heard the gate close on the other side of the door, her phone pinged. She had to smile to see that Stefano had sent her a text.

  Cara... I am below stairs hiding in the

  shadows from Rosa, but I’ve come to walk

  you home.

  “Why the hell not?” she said aloud, texting him back that she’d be down in a minute. She reached for her anorak and ubiquitous muffler that she wrapped tightly around her neck.

  The broad-shoulder Italian stood at the foot of the stone staircase, his hands shoved into his cognac colored leather jacket. Her heart flipped over and all she could remember was a rainy, sleet-filled night when she’d run down these very steps to throw herself into Jack’s arms. It had been the first night they’d made love...

  “Signora Benedetti makes you work too hard,” Stefano scolded, linking her arm in his as soon as she’d shut the downstairs metal gate.

  “She tried to make me go home at noon,” Serena defended her mentoress. “It’s just that there is so much to do in the little time we have left. How did it go with those bureaucrats at building department?”

  “I will explain it all over dinner.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve already eaten.” She declined to tell him all she’d had was a cup of soup. She continued to lean on his arm as they tramped through the accumulated snow piled along the narrow canal that led in the direction of her guesthouse near Campo San Polo. “But I am happy you came to walk me home while you tell me the latest.”

  “Cara... I think you are one of those women who play... ah... how you say? Hard to achieve?”

  “Hard to get?” Serena replied with a laugh. “That’s right, Stefano... but no worries. I can see you’re irresistible to lots of women, so you have plenty of female company and you and I can just be friends, which I think will be much more long lasting, si? Now, tell me what you’ve learned today when you called on the authorities who are making such impossible demands on us.”

  “You make me so sad, La Serenissima,” he complained, his full lips in a genuine pout, “but, alright. I will tell you what happened today.” He slipped an arm around her waist as they continued to walk toward her lodgings at Ca’Arco Antico. In Italian he said, “They demand proof that any new sealant we suggest using won’t destroy the centuries-old plaster.”

  Serena shrugged.

  “Well, at least that’s a legitimate issue. The bureaucrats need proof that anything you put on to fix the situation won’t make it worse.” She suddenly had an idea how she could get proof that a particular product had already proven its worth. “I think I know how to get them an answer they may accept.”

  “If you can do that,” Stefano said with a grim expression she’d seldom seen on his normally cheerful countenance, “you are a genius, dear Serena.”

  Her thoughts sped first to Jack, and veered quickly to Jack’s best friend—her third cousin, once removed—Kingsbury Duvallon, the celebrated historic preservationist back home. Silently, she determined she’d simply call him directly, without Jack Durand serving as intermediary, to find out if the revered New Orleans Historic Preservation Alliance had ever found an acceptable product that might keep the lower floors dry, at least until the ball was over. As she and her Italian escort made their way toward the front door of her guesthouse, the snow had begun to fall again in earnest. With lightening speed, he seized the key from her hands and opened the door that led to the small hotel’s foyer.

  Serena prepared herself for the kiss she knew he would attempt to bestow. Mounting a pre-emptive strike she said firmly, “Buona notte, Stefano. E mille grazie, mio amico!” she emphasized.

  He gently seized both of her shoulders between his large hands and cast her a doleful look, refusing to give up.

  “Bella, bella... let me come in with you to keep you warm tonight. Ou
r walk in the snow has you shivering again.”

  Serena was, in fact, trembling from the cold, despite the warmth of her anorak. She was also tired and sad. She wondered if Jack was following the alarming Italian weather reports? If he was, he hadn’t made any further attempt to get in touch about their current snow emergency.

  What do you expect, Serena? You practically hung up on the guy!

  Still and all, he could have reached out to her one more time and he hadn’t, she thought with a startling flash of anger. Ashamed to admit it, she was sorely tempted to allow the increasingly ardent and totally charming Signor Fabrini to have his way with her. It would serve Jack right!

  Sensing her indecision, Stefano drew closer.

  “You might, at least, consider letting me come upstairs with you, si?” he said with a broad smile just bordering on triumphant.

  “Tristamente, no,” she rejected him gently in Italian. She pointed to the scarf around her neck and said in English, “I’m still very sick. I don’t want you to catch this terrible cold. Allegra and I need you to stay well, so you can be our hero and fix the palazzo in time for the ball!”

  She kissed two fingertips and touched the side of his cheek, stubbled with a rather sexy day’s growth of beard.

  Stefano’s gaze grew smoky with his hope that he would ultimately wear down her resistance.

  “You are so kind, cara, to have a care for my health. I will do anything to help you and Signora Allegra. Perhaps you will invite me to this outrageously expensive ballo. I can be your... how you say... escorta... accompagnatore?”

  “My date for the ball?” Serena replied with a smile. “Unfortunately, I will be working like a fiend that night... and I’m sure Allegra will want you monitoring the basement. I will ask, though, that you be given a complimentary ticket and at some point, come upstairs and have supper. Perhaps we will have a dance at the disco together before dawn breaks. Would that please you?”

  She retrieved her door key from his hand, bid him goodnight, pushing him playfully out the front door, and firmly closed it behind her. She turned and mounted the marble staircase to her room with the brass plaque that read in elegant script Canaletto, wondering briefly why she was being so noble when nothing would soothe her sore heart as much as to be enfolded in the ardent embrace of such a drop-dead, handsome Italian.

  Or would it?

  It was long past the usual hour that Jack’s colleagues at the Times-Picayune departed for the night. He squinted tiredly at his glowing computer screen as the first page appeared of a long document that Corlis McCullough had generously sent him from a web citation in the files of WJAZ. It was merely one of the myriad official, public reports and original documents obtained by the TV station through the Freedom of Information Act. He’d been scrolling through them all day to glean the known facts about the collapse of the 17th Street and London canals a decade earlier.

  Fighting off the day’s fatigue, he was determined, before he quit for the night, to tackle a history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ work on supposed improvements both to the city’s canal walls and the gigantic “Mr. GO” construction—an acronym that stood for Mississippi Gulf River Outlet. The man-made channel designed for tankers was a little-used, 72-mile shortcut from the Gulf of Mexico to the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. Over the years, the canal had allowed salt water to seep in and destroy the wetlands, the very barriers in times past that had kept Gulf water surges from inundating the city.

  Jack prayed that this document, going back to the nineteen eighties when his Uncle Jacques Durand was a wet-behind-the-ears junior engineer, would finally answer the questions: what did Jacques know about the inferior construction history of the two canals—and when did he know it?

  Corlis had emphasized that she had worked on a different aspect of the “Katrina Aftermath” story ten years earlier, “but I remember that we’d used the Information Act to secure some of these documents, which therefore are available for all to read—including you! Ten years ago, I only briefly thumbed through the ones that didn’t relate directly to my assignment. Let me know if you hit pay-dirt, which I suppose you’re hoping you don’t,” she’d added in a sympathetic postscript to the attachments she’d sent over by email.

  Jack initiated a global search for his uncle’s name, along with the dates Corlis thought might match up with what the reporter was looking for. He physically held his breath for the second it took the search engine to pull up all references to “Jacques Durand” buried within the scan of the original document that was now more than three decades old. He blessed the forgotten government minion who had been tasked with electronically converting all this material and filing it in the Corps’ database. His eyes raked a dozen or so pages that his search turned up. Twenty minutes later, he reared back in his chair.

  “Bingo,” he muttered. And then, “Oh, shit!”

  There on the screen was the scanned signature Jacques Durand, Engineer, one of several signatures at the bottom of the final specifications for making the 1982 improvements to the 17th Street Canal walls.

  Jack made a quick calculation. In 1982, his uncle was twenty-four years old. Just as King Duvallon had speculated, Jacques was a very junior engineer who had, curiously enough, been asked to sign off on the nuts-and-bolts requirements of a very large, publicly funded project.

  Did his uncle know what he was signing back then, Jack wondered? Was he aware that the specifications listed in this document were much lower than the recommendations of an outside consulting firm—cited, as he’d seen earlier, at the back of the report? Had he seen the consultants’ urgent advice that had recommended much deeper pilings to hold the walls in place than those that were ultimately sunk into the sandy soil?

  Without warning, the familiar vision that Jack all too often imagined in his mind’s eye rose before him once again: many feet of water, pushed by the storm surge, inexorably bearing down against the walls’ lower extremities and exerting enormous pounds-per-square-inch pressure. He could easily imagine it eating away at a structure that—this document proved—was sunk a paltry ten feet below the land’s surface, instead of the recommended forty. And when that water ultimately punched through the bottom walls, it rushed like a locomotive into the yards and past the jungle gyms and garden swings of million-dollar houses that lined the waffle-iron street grid that was the New Orleans suburb of Lakeview.

  Jack closed his eyes against the recurring image of Serena’s brother rushing to the side of his pregnant wife, urging her to quickly scramble up a narrow, retractable stairway to the attic. But the waters were quicker than Cosimo Antonelli’s urgent pleas that she hurry. In agonizing seconds, the black waters rose, turning Lurleen Antonelli’s nightgown into a billowing parachute that could do nothing to save her. The force of the water swept both husband and wife the last few feet toward the enclosed attic where they drowned in its swirling depths.

  What if that had been him, trying to save another Antonelli... trying to save Serena?

  Just then, Jack’s cellphone rang, jolting him out of this disturbing reverie. He punched the phone’s answer button.

  “Hey, buddy,” King began. “Working late again?”

  Without a pause, he asked Jack if he had been paying attention to the latest news bulletins on CNN about the rising waters assaulting Venice, Italy that week.

  Alarmed to hear this, Jack replied, “No, I’ve done nothing all day but dive into all the documentation that Corlis emailed me. I didn’t realize how late it’s gotten to be.” He glanced at the array of muted TV sets strung against the newsroom’s far wall. “It’s on CNN, even? Do they say how high the tides are?”

  “Well, it’s morning in Venice right now and all I can say is that I hope that nice lady you met is staying dry. Last I saw, there’s a four-and-a-half-foot high tidal surge from a big, ole’ Adriatic storm rolling through that poor place. All the historic preservationists around the globe that report into my list serve say they’re plenty worried about this one.”r />
  Jack felt his chest tighten and fretted that Serena was not only threatened by flood waters, but she had sounded so congested when he last talked to her, she might have pneumonia by now. How would she get herself to a clinic or hospital in those high waters, if she needed to? Unbidden, his thoughts flew back ten years to Charity Hospital and the poor patients stranded on the rooftop awaiting rescues that, for some, came too late.

  There was a long silence between Jack and his best friend, and then King said, “Just so you know, that very same nice lady rang me up.”

  “Serena did what? Is she okay?”

  “I thought you’d be interested,” King chuckled. “She wanted to know my opinion about using this new mineral-based waterproofing product that some building engineer told her about. It’s actually a liquid-applied invention and made in America. Turns out, it’s the one we slapped on, big time, on scores of old buildings around here after the storm.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Damn right, it did! We put it on structures made of two-hundred-year-old plaster. You know, the stuff we’ve got all over the French Quarter.”

  “You’re kidding me! Serena Antonelli called you?”

  “She sure did. Told me to turn on CNN. She said she figured that since she and I are second or third cousins, once removed, on the Kingsbury side, she didn’t need a formal introduction.”

  “So, what did you tell her?” Jack demanded, highly incensed that Serena hadn’t gotten in touch with him in such a dire emergency.

  “I told her that the brand of sealant she’d heard about is a mighty fine product and that it’s a pre-mixed, advanced liquid rubber that dries fairly quickly after it’s applied.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She was thrilled to hear that the beauty of this stuff is that it turns into an extremely quick-drying waterproofing and crack-isolation membrane. I also pointed out that it provides a thin, continuous barrier to protect the walls and floors from further water damage.”