AHMM, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The blood drummed in my ears. Knowing myself for a fool, I opened my mouth to protest as the nobleman swept by on his way out.

  Casali grabbed my arm. “Let it be, Tito,” he whispered. “The contract is made, legal and binding."

  "But, Maestro—"

  "It's all been arranged. I knew Morosini would be fascinated by the boy. Even as we speak, the surgeon is waiting."

  To my shame, my tongue remained limp in my mouth.

  I refused to let myself think about the fate that awaited young Paolo. What I craved was air, the scouring wind of the sirocco to scrub me free of the treachery and greed that enveloped me like a miasma. I hurried from the theater with Gussie at my heels.

  Out on the square, the rain had slacked off. The ferocious wind had not. Several men scuttled over the wet paving stones, their black cloaks billowing out like ravens’ wings. Otherwise, all was deserted.

  Without discussion, Gussie and I plodded north toward the Cannaregio, the domestic quarter where my home was located. Our route wound through a warren of calli and small squares divided by threads of water. The tide was coming in. Waves off the lagoon swept up those narrow canals, swelling the dark, angry water even with the lip of the walkway. We hastened along in single file, hugging the sides of the shuttered shops, until a gust of wind howled down the tunnel of high, packed buildings and drove a wall of water over the flat pavement.

  I fell to my knees. The rushing water pulled at me like a many-armed demon intent on dragging my soul down to a frigid hell. Coughing and sputtering, I managed to brace myself against the support of the stairs to a wooden bridge. When the surge subsided, I scuttled, crabwise, to the nearest opening between the buildings. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gussie do the same, farther down the pavement.

  Rhythmic billows surged again and again, then receded in clutching fingers of pea green foam. They drove me down twisting alleyways and covered passages and forced me into strange squares where I called Gussie's name. Receiving no reply, I ran on, my only thought to keep moving and outrun the acqua alta.

  When I finally stopped at the entrance to a narrow calle, my heart was pounding and a stitch burned in my side. The corner of the building where a street sign should have hung was blank, but the nameless alley seemed somehow familiar. I shivered. I was thoroughly wet, and my sodden cloak dragged at my shoulders like a fifty-pound weight. I had to find shelter quickly or I'd end up fighting pneumonia instead of performing Maestro Vivaldi's new opera.

  I entered the dim passage. Within its shelter, the sirocco's blast eased to a distant roar and my footsteps sounded in loud, hollow clops. The buildings rose to three stories with shops on ground level and living quarters above. I banged at shuttered doorways, intent on rousing someone who could give me shelter from the flood. No one answered, but as the passage bent to the left, I saw a light shining through the gathering mist.

  I ran to a door that stood wide open on a small shop. Light beamed from an oil lamp that sat on a counter on the opposite wall, but no shopkeeper was in evidence, only bulbous china jars that glinted in the flickering flame.

  "Hello,” I called. “Is anyone there?"

  No answer.

  Chilled to the bone, I threw ceremony aside and stepped over the threshold. The jars on the counter were labeled with exotic ingredients. Wormwood, opium, mercury, and ... leeches. My mouth went suddenly dry. This was an apothecary shop, a disturbingly familiar apothecary shop.

  I whirled around and found what I sought almost immediately: an aloe plant the size of a bushel basket, growing from a creamware pot set before the window. A tightening began deep in my stomach, rippling outward, tensing every muscle in my body. Surely not, I thought. This wasn't the scene of my nightmares. Nearly every apothecary in Venice must have such a plant.

  A rustling came from behind a curtain drawn across an archway in the shop's dark depths. “Who is there?” I called out, the nerves in my scalp tingling.

  Silence.

  I moved slowly around the counter. Barely breathing, listening intently, I clutched the coarse curtain fabric. Nothing stirred on the other side. On a burst of courage, I jerked the curtain aside.

  For one terrible moment, I was ten years old again. Strapped to the table with my hands tied to a post above my head. Trying with all my will to fight the drug that had been forced down my throat, to scream for my father to stop the man with the shiny blade. But this wasn't a dream. I was there, at the place where my life had changed forever. And this time my hands were free.

  With a wordless bellow, I grabbed an iron poker from a hook by the stove. I wielded that poker like a battle-ax. Slashing, beating, striking, smashing. Nothing was safe from my all-consuming rage. Glass shattered, thick tallow candles went flying, and books rained down from high shelves. I had no plan, no fixed idea of what I meant to do; my mind seemed to have split off from my body. Destruction was all I knew.

  The table with the hideous leather straps was the last thing to go. I kicked it over and pounded it to splinters, stopping only when someone grabbed me from behind and shook me until my leaden arms dropped my weapon.

  "Gussie!” I cried. “Where did you come from?"

  My friend's yellow hair had escaped its ribbon and hung in wet strands around his worried face. “I've been searching for you everywhere. Up one alley and down another. Finally, I heard your screams. What's going on here?"

  I swayed on my feet, fatigue suddenly washing over me. “Retribution,” I whispered. “That's what's going on."

  Gussie reached for the one candle that my explosive tantrum had miraculously spared. Shining the weak light into the dark corners, he picked his way around the periphery of the glass-littered room. When he reached an overturned bookshelf, he stopped and sent me a startled look.

  "Tito, help me.” He bent to lift the shelf off a pair of legs entwined in a bloody apron. The top half of the body was buried in books and papers. Once we'd cleared these away, I was staring into a face I knew as well as my own. It was the surgeon from my nightmare, right down to the wart at the end of his very dead nose.

  I began to tremble. What had I done? “But Gussie, I didn't see him. I don't remember hitting him with the poker."

  Gussie grabbed my arm. “Tito, pull yourself together. Look, he wasn't beaten to death.” He held the candle to the man's chest. The hilt of one of his own surgical instruments protruded from the front of the bloody apron.

  "I didn't do that.” My head shook uncontrollably.

  "Then who did?” my friend asked gravely.

  We heard the tinkle of broken glass and the scrape of metal on stone. A tiny voice spoke up from across the room. “I did it. I stabbed him."

  Paolo emerged from behind the stove, stripped to his shirt, pipestem legs bare and white.

  "I had to stop him,” the boy cried. “I couldn't let him cut me. One of the big men was trying to strap me down. I bit his thumb and ... somehow I got off the table. I don't remember how. That was before I grabbed the knife...” Paolo's words trailed off and his eyes reflected Gussie's candle flame like a pair of miniature black mirrors.

  I crossed the floor and took his hands in mine. They were as cold as ice. “Where's your father?” I asked.

  He shook his head dazedly.

  "Think, boy.” I squeezed his hands until he winced. “We have to move quickly."

  "Papa said good-bye before they put me on the table. He said he couldn't bear to watch. The other men ran off when they saw I had a knife.” Paolo took a huge gulp and asked in a shaky voice, “Are you going to get the constables?"

  I looked at Gussie. “No!” we both cried at the same time.

  Arranging Paolo's escape was the work of minutes. Gussie dragged the bookshelf back onto the surgeon's body, while I helped Paolo into his breeches and found him a dry cloak. As we bundled him through the outer room of the shop, my eye lit on the cash box behind the counter. I retrieved the poker, smashed the box, and stuffed a wad of paper notes in Paolo's jacket pocket.


  "Now it looks like the man was killed in a robbery,” I whispered to Gussie over Paolo's curly head.

  We sped away from the shop unobserved, but Gussie refused to let me go with him and Paolo to locate Cousin Flavio's ship. Ever mindful of my fragile throat, the Englishman wound his own muffler around my neck and sent me home posthaste.

  * * * *

  My story is not yet done. When Gussie returned from delivering Paolo to the wharf, my friend had a surprise for me. He found me in the kitchen, basking in the warmth of the fire. My sister Annetta had wrapped me in blankets and was pouring steaming water into a basin for my feet.

  "Well, Tito,” Gussie began, as he rubbed his damp hair with a towel. “It's time I answered your question."

  "What question?"

  "Before Paolo crashed into me at the theater, you asked me what one man could do to stop healthy boys being turned into capons."

  I nodded slowly. Already that conversation seemed like it had happened days ago.

  "Here's your answer.” He dug in his waistcoat pocket and threw some pamphlets in my lap. “I collected these earlier today."

  I scanned the booklets that could be had two for a penny at any bookstall in Venice. My clever countrymen rarely muzzled themselves in speech or in print. Pamphlets existed on every subject from the trivial to the sublime, and a particularly popular treatise might be debated in the cafes and coffeehouses for weeks.

  I scratched my head. “You're going to write a pamphlet?"

  "Hardly! No one would pay any attention to the criticism of an Englishman, not where Italian opera is concerned."

  "Well, then. Why show me these?” Puzzled, I continued to leaf through the cheap, thin papers.

  Gussie didn't reply.

  I looked up to find him regarding me solemnly. Light dawned. My mouth dropped open. “You want me to write one? But Gussie, I'm not a writer. I'm a singer."

  "Who better to turn the tide of public opinion? As Venice's most celebrated castrato, people will be fascinated to read whatever you have to say on the matter. I can help you, if you'll let me."

  Thinking furiously, I hugged the warm blankets close. A castrato singer speaking against the practice in the public press? It had never been done. A pamphlet like that would cause a sensation. As our house creaked under the sirocco's wild blows, I pictured the scene in the back room at the apothecary's, then Paolo cowering in the hold of a wildly rocking ship.

  I smiled at Gussie. “Bring me paper,” I whispered. “And a quill.” I was already composing the pamphlet's opening lines in my head.

  Copyright © 2009 Beverle Graves Myers

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: THE RULES OF EVIDENCE by STEVEN GORE

  "Maybe I better talk to my lawyer,” Irish McCain said to Detective Spike Pacheco across the gray metal table.

  The interrogation room was a dull canvas, uninterrupted by anything suggesting that a world existed beyond the paint and the locked door. No two-way mirror, no third chair, no muffled chatter of homicide detectives in the squad room down the hall.

  "The Public Defender doesn't make house calls."

  "Screw you."

  Irish smirked at Pacheco's chubby brown face, then folded his arms across his chest. Withered, thirty-year-old tattoos of snakes and daggers hung on skin repeatedly stretched by pumping iron in the joint, then loosened by meth on the street. Pacheco could make out the word “Hell's” tattooed in faded prison-blue ink on the back of Irish's left hand.

  "Anyway,” Pacheco said, “you don't need a lawyer. You're not a suspect."

  "Then why'd you haul me down here?"

  "Because you're a witness."

  Irish snorted. He'd watched a thousand crimes, from dope deals to murders, but never witnessed anything.

  "To what?"

  "Eddie Mucker's killing."

  Irish formed his lips into a smile calculated to mold fiction into fact. “I wasn't even in San Francisco. I was in Sacramento.” But his eyes didn't cooperate with his mouth. They remained uncommitted, as if unsure whether he needed an alibi for when the homicide actually happened or for when the police thought it happened. He ran for safety in the wrong direction. “All day."

  Pacheco opened a manila folder, then slid over Irish's cell phone records covering the previous Wednesday. Six entries surrounding the time of the murder were highlighted in fluorescent yellow.

  "Those calls originated from cell sites in San Francisco,” Pacheco said.

  Irish slid them back with his tattooed “Angels” hand. He'd been through this before and learned that an alibi had nothing to do with where he really was and all to do with where the police couldn't prove he wasn't.

  "My wife had the phone,” Irish said, cocking his head and grinning. “California's a community property state."

  Pacheco answered with a gift-horse smile. “Here I am trying to treat you as a witness and you turn yourself into a suspect."

  "Suspect?” Irish's grin died. “What'd I do?"

  "One forty-eight point nine of the California Penal Code. Lying to a police officer."

  Pacheco pulled out a Miranda advisement form, wrote Mucker's homicide case number at the top, turned it around, then slid it across the table along with a department-issued Bic pen.

  Irish inspected the form. “Looks a lot different than the old ones."

  "New chief. New forms."

  "Same old bullshit.” Irish slid it back, unsigned.

  "You want to get to booking so you can bail out of this place?"

  "Booking?” Irish's head snapped up. “What booking?"

  "On the 148.9."

  "That's chicken shit."

  "Probably.” Pacheco pointed at the cell phone records. “You want to try a different story?"

  Irish spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “So what if I was in San Francisco? That doesn't mean I was there when Mucker bought it."

  Pacheco withdrew a photocopy of a Burger King receipt he'd found in the garage where Mucker's body was discovered. It was time-stamped 2:13 P.M. on the day of the homicide, a half hour before neighbors cringed at the gunfire that killed Mucker.

  Irish glanced at it, then pushed it back. “Doesn't mean anything. A lot of people like Double Whoppers with extra cheese."

  Pacheco volleyed it back. “Look again."

  Irish's eyes barely widened as he read the date and time. “Still doesn't mean anything."

  Pacheco pulled out another copy, this one showing a fingerprint darkened by graphite powder. “Want to guess which of your greasy fingers made that?"

  Irish didn't answer.

  Pacheco retrieved the two receipts, but left them visible on the table. “You need to decide which you want to be,” Pacheco said. “Witness or suspect."

  Irish glanced at the door. “I'll be a suspect if it gets me out of here sooner."

  Pacheco pointed at the Miranda form. “It's up to you."

  Irish made a check mark in the I'm-not-answering-any-questions box, signed at the bottom, and then rose.

  "Sit down."

  Irish locked his hands on his hips. His face flared. “You said—"

  "No, you said you'd get out of here sooner if you were a suspect, not me."

  "You can't ask me anything.” Irish jabbed a finger at the form. “I invoked my rights."

  "You learn that in prison?"

  "Even my grandson knows what invoking your rights means."

  "Is he like a junior Hell's Angel selling sugar cubes to hyperactive kids at recess?"

  Irish smiled. “Nice try. But I'm not getting into it with you. It's over. You wiseguyed yourself into having to book me or let me go. I'm not saying nothing and you can't ask me nothing."

  "You're only a third right,” Pacheco said. “I can't ask you any questions, but I can say anything I want. So can you."

  Irish's smile faded. His eyes swept the interrogation room, the bare gray walls, the folding metal chairs. “How many times you haul me in here in the last twen
ty years? Eight? Nine? Ten?” He looked down at Pacheco. “You ever get anything out of me?” Irish walked over to the door. His hand slipped around the unmoving knob. He turned back toward Pacheco, glaring. “Open this thing. I got stuff to do."

  "I'm not asking you to snitch on anybody,” Pacheco said. “I already know who killed Mucker."

  "What do you mean you already know?"

  "Billy Willis did it.” Pacheco inspected his thumbnail, then pretended to scrape a bit of gunk from the underside. “You know how I know that?"

  "I—"

  Pacheco held up his palm. “Don't answer, you're a suspect now. That was just a rhetorical question. You know what that means, right? Rhetorical?"

  "I know what rhetorical means, asshole. I went to the JC."

  Pacheco held up his forefinger, then waved it side to side it as if he was a teacher silencing a student speaking out of turn. “That was also a rhetorical question."

  Irish looked skyward, rolling his eyes, then leaned back against the door as if he now controlled it.

  Pacheco pointed at a manila file folder on the table. “I interviewed Billy and his brother. They said the same thing."

  "Which was?"

  "They went over to Mucker's garage to pick up a generator for Billy's Harley. Mucker went off on Billy because he didn't bring the money and because Billy still owed him for the one he bought the week before."

  "What kind of retard needs two generators for one bike?"

  "Good question. You should've been a detective."

  Since Irish wasn't, Pacheco couldn't tell him that a federal wiretap targeting Hell's Angels had intercepted meth dealers using motorcycle parts as code words. Generators were pounds of powder. Crankshafts were eight balls of crystal. Agents listening in the wire room figured it out when they heard Billy asking Mucker about buying half a generator.

  Pacheco continued. “I think Billy and his brother went to rip off Mucker and they brought you along—"

  "You should write for TV."

  "Because you and Mucker go way back—"

  "Or maybe you been watching way too much."

  "The only thing puzzling me is why a guy Mucker's age would go up against a punk Billy's age, unless, of course, he had something like a hand grenade."