He looked at me with great solemnity, as if he were a judge, or a priest, but then he nodded. “All right, my friend, I accept your apology. I have no desire to worry Kate, and I very much appreciate your taking the trouble to come here. But, please, do not mention what you said to my wife.”
“Of course not.”
He took off his eyeglasses. “I had no idea that Kate had told you so much about us. We have always been a family who prefer to keep to ourselves.”
“Enrico—Kate has told me nothing at all about you. I haven’t spoken to Kate for nearly a month.”
At that moment, however, Kate came into the drawing room, carrying half a dozen shopping bags.
“Hello, musician.” she smiled. She was wearing the same putty-colored trench coat she had worn in London, and a brown beret. She was just as skinny as ever, but she had much more color in her cheeks than the day she had walked out on me, and her hair was shinier.
She set down her bags on a nearby sofa and I went up to her and took hold of her hands.
“Hello, Kate,” I said, and kissed her, and when I inhaled her fragrance, and tasted her lip gloss, all of the misery of the past three weeks simply curled up and disappeared, like a dead chrysanthemum on a bonfire.
Kate turned around. Close behind her stood a small, dark-haired woman in a red plaid poncho.
“Ciao,” she said. “Benventuo all nostra casa.”
“Salvina, this is Gideon Lake,” said Enrico. “Gideon, my wife Salvina.”
Salvina had a prominent nose with a bump on the bridge, huge brown eyes and pouting red lips. She took off her poncho and underneath she was wearing a black wool dress with a wide, red patent-leather belt. She had a vaselike figure, with enormous bosoms, a narrow waist and generous hips.
“I am so delighted,” she said. “Welcome to Venice, Gideon. We are so grateful that you could come.”
“I’m extremely pleased to be here,” I told her, and kissed her on each cheek. She smelled strongly of some musky, heavy-duty perfume like Trussardi.
“I have to unpack all of this shopping,” she said. “Enrico, why don’t you ask our guests if they would care for a Punt e Mes, or maybe a glass of wine? I know I would!”
She bustled off to the kitchen, with Enrico following her, carrying the rest of the bags for her. I turned back to Kate and said, “It’s so good to see you. You’re looking great.”
She turned her face away, almost shyly. I loved that very slight droop of her eyelids, as if she were feeling drowsy. “It’s good to see you, too, Gideon. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“You don’t have to apologize. You told me right at the beginning that you couldn’t explain everything, not all at once.”
I put my arms around her and kissed her again—her cheek, her hair and the curve of her ear. She reached up and touched my face as if she couldn’t believe that I was really here. “You saw Michael,” she said.
I nodded. “That was when I began to understand what you wanted from me.”
“Poor Michael. Do you know what I used to call him? Michael-Row-The-Boat-Ashore. I used to sing it to him, and it always sent him off to sleep.”
“How old was he?”
“Six months, seven days. He’s buried in Sherman, in North Cemetery, next to his great-grandparents.”
“I’m very sorry. How did he die?”
Kate gave the slightest of shrugs. “Heart condition. The doctors did everything they could, but—”
“I saw him, Kate. I saw you pushing him in his stroller, in the park. I saw you carrying him along the street.”
Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “He was my little darling. I miss him so much. But that was still no excuse for Victor to be so angry.”
I held her close. It was then that Enrico came back into the room, carrying a tray with four aperitif glasses and a bottle of Punt E Mes. He spooned ice into the glasses, poured the aperitif, and added a slice of orange to each one.
Salvina came in, too, and we all raised our glasses and drank a toast.
“Memorie felice,” said Enrico. “To happy memories, and happy times together.”
“Memorie felice,” we all echoed.
* * *
While Salvina started to prepare dinner, and Enrico went into his study to write some letters, Kate and I went for a walk outside, across the Campo San Polo. The sun was going down and the square was not so crowded now, although there were still several lines of Japanese tourists winding their way from one side to the other, led by tour guides with raised umbrellas.
We sat down together on a bench, under a naked tree. The sky was still intensely blue, although the temperature had dropped like a brick, and I couldn’t stop myself from shivering. Twenty or thirty pigeons came stalking up to us, to see if we were going to feed them, but when they realized that we weren’t, they irritably stalked off again. I was reminded of the pigeons in James J. Walker Park.
“What changed your mind?” I asked Kate. “All you had to do was knock at my door.”
“I know,” she said. “But if I had done that, we would have had the same argument again, sooner or later, wouldn’t we? I know that some of the things I’ve been showing you have been strange, and frightening. But I needed to be sure that you could accept them for what they were and gradually come to understand them, without my having to explain them to you, because I can’t. But when you followed me into the park, and called out to me like that, I knew that you would understand them, eventually—and more than that, I knew that you could.”
Kate laid her hand on top of mine. “Besides that, my darling, we’ve come too far together to stop now. And it’s much too important.”
I said, “I still don’t really understand how I saw you pushing Michael through the park.”
“It’s not difficult. You saw me in exactly the same way that you saw Elsa and Felicia, and the Philips boy. Life is like a flicker book. You run through the pictures, one after the other, until you get to the end. But after you’ve finished looking at them, all of the pictures are still there, aren’t they? And some people can turn back to them, and look at them again. People like you.”
I turned toward the sinking sun, raising my hand to shield my eyes. “I’ve had another vision,” I told her. “Vision, hallucination, whatever you want to call it.”
“Here? Already?”
“Almost as soon as I arrived I saw a girl, drowned in the bathtub. I not only saw her, I felt her. I tried to lift her out. But when I called Enrico, she was gone. My sleeves were still wet but the bathtub was bone-dry.”
“Do you know who it was?”
I shook my head. “She was young, with long dark hair. I tried to get her out of the tub but I couldn’t.”
Kate said, “I won’t lie to you, Gideon. You’ll see more visions. But I don’t know everything that happened here, any more than you do. All I can tell you is that this is the last time I’ll ask you to come away with me. There isn’t much time left, less than a month. After that, it should all be over.”
“I sure hope so.”
She kissed me. The tip of her nose was cold. “I’m so pleased you decided to come. I missed you so much. Heaven knows what I’m going to do without you.”
“What did you say that for? I’m not going anyplace. All I have to do is push Victor under a crosstown bus and we can live happily ever after.”
“You shouldn’t joke about it.”
“Well, you’re right. Nobody seems to have much of a sense of humor around here, especially Enrico.”
* * *
That evening, Salvina served us up a supper of Venetian specialties, baccala montecato—whipped salt cod with garlic, served on toast—and fegato alla veneziana, calves’ liver in thyme and onions.
We ate in the kitchen, which was almost as large as the drawing room, and tiled in rich reds and greens. Enrico opened two bottles of red Venetian wine, and poured it into decorative glasses. Then he proposed a toast.
“I drink to Kate, who has devoted h
erself to finding us peace. When we felt despair, she came to us, bringing hope. I thank her from the bottom of my heart.”
“To Kate,” I said, and Kate mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
After supper, we went back into the drawing room. Enrico poured us some sweet Venetian dessert wine and I played a few melodies on the piano, including an impromptu tribute to Venice.
“Venice is a city you surely won’t forget . . . especially since the avenues are all so goddamned wet . . .”
I was running through a medley of my best-known TV themes when I happened to glance sideways, toward the window. Abruptly, I stopped playing. My hands tingled as if I had touched a bare electric wire.
Standing in the corner, beside the drapes, was a naked girl.
She must have been about seventeen or eighteen years old, although it was hard to tell because her face was completely covered by her dark brown hair. Her skin was as white as the marble statue in the hallway, and she was wet.
I turned my head around to look at Enrico and Salvina. Enrico was sitting back in his armchair, smoking a cigarette, while Salvina was concentrating on her embroidery. They must be able to see this girl, surely? And yet both of them seemed to be completely unruffled.
I caught Kate’s eye, and jerked my head toward the corner.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “I was really enjoying that. What’s the matter?”
I jerked my head again, and said, “There . . . in the corner.”
She frowned directly at the drapes, but then she shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
I played a scattering of discordant notes. Then, hesitantly, like the plinky-plonky music for somebody walking a tightrope, I picked up my TV theme again. All the time, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off the naked girl. I now realized that I was the only person in the room who could see her.
“What is this tune?” asked Salvina. “It is very sad music. Molto malinconico.”
“What?” I said. Then, “Oh . . . yes. This is the theme I wrote for a TV series called Doctor Paleface.”
“Doctor Paleface?”
“Sure—it was all about a white doctor who tried to save Native American tribes from being wiped out by the diseases that the white settlers brought with them. You know—measles, cholera, syphilis—stuff like that.”
Kate said, “I never saw it.”
“I’m not surprised. It was sanctimonious politically correct crap and they axed it after five episodes.”
The naked girl remained in the corner, totally motionless, for almost two minutes. Then slowly she began to raise her hands toward her face. I played slower and slower, and kept hitting the wrong keys, and Enrico sat up and said, “Gideon? Is everything all right?”
“Sure, Enrico, sure. Couldn’t be better.” After what had happened in the bathroom, I didn’t want to upset him again.
But Kate must have sensed that something was badly wrong, because she stood up and came over to the piano, and stood close behind me.
“Do Enrico and Salvina have any kids?” I asked her, out of the corner of my mouth.
She leaned close to my ear. “A boy and two girls, yes. The boy’s name is Massimo and the girls’ names are Amalea and Raffaella.”
“How old?”
“Massimo’s only seven but the girls are both in their teens. Why do you want to know?”
“Because I can see a girl standing in the corner. She has no clothes on, and she’s dripping wet.”
“What does she look like?”
“Hard to say. She has her hair hanging all over her face.”
Even as I said that, though, the girl took hold of her hair, as if she were grasping two dark curtains, and parted it. I stopped playing again, and said, “Shit, Kate. Tell me you can see her. You must be able to see her.”
The girl appeared to be staring in my direction, but where her eyes should have been she had only two black holes. I felt as if my skin were growing tighter and tighter.
She stayed motionless for a while, with both hands still clasping her hair. Then she opened her mouth and let out a falsetto scream. She went on and on, screaming and screaming, and I stumbled up off the piano stool and knocked it over backward.
“Gideon?” said Kate. “Gideon, what’s wrong?”
I pressed my hands over my ears, but the naked girl only screamed louder and shriller. It was then that my wineglass shattered, spilling wine all over the top of the piano. Immediately, the girl stopped.
Enrico stood up. He came over to the piano and picked up the broken stem. He stared at it, as if it could be miraculously mended by staring alone. “These glasses . . . they are Murano.” It was obvious that he was very angry.
“I’m sorry, Enrico. I didn’t touch it.”
“This set . . . they are eighteenth-century, irreplaceable. They used to belong to my grandparents.”
“I swear to God, Enrico, I was nowhere near it.”
Salvina stood up, too. “They are very fragile, these glasses,” she said, trying to be conciliatory. “Perhaps it was not wise to use them. Careful, caro, don’t cut yourself. I will bring a dustpan and clear it up.”
Kate was standing very close to me. “Is the girl still there?” she murmured.
“Yes,” I said. “She screamed, for Christ’s sake, and that’s what broke the wineglass.”
“What’s she doing now?”
“Nothing. She’s not moving. But she’s parted her hair, so that I can see her face. She looks like the girl I saw in the bathtub, except that she doesn’t appear to have any eyes.”
“Che cosa?” asked Enrico. “Che cosa avete detto?”
“Nothing,” said Kate, quickly. “He was only saying that the glass was very beautiful and he’s sorry it broke.”
“Well, for my part I apologize. I did not intend to lose my temper.”
The naked girl stayed silent, and she had stayed totally still for over a minute. But then she began to turn around, so that I could see her back. She was extremely thin: her shoulder blades were as prominent as triangular plowshares, and I could see the knobbles of her vertebrae. It was her skin, though, that horrified me. I wanted to tell Kate what I could see, but now Enrico was standing close to me, too.
All the way up the back of the girl’s arms and legs, and across her shoulders, there were two continuous rows of small holes. The holes were swollen but they weren’t bleeding, although some of them were torn open so that they joined up with the next one, especially the holes in the back of her forearms.
At first I couldn’t understand what they could be. But then I suddenly remembered visiting my dad in the hospital, when he was recovering from his gall bladder operation. The nurse had been changing his dressing when I was there, and I had seen the six-inch incision in his stomach. On either side of the incision, there had been suture holes exactly like the holes that this girl was showing me.
For some reason, somebody had taken a needle and thread, and stitched something to her back. I couldn’t imagine what.
Enrico said, “Maybe it is time we all went to bed. You will want to see the city tomorrow, Gideon, and I always recommend an early start. By the middle of the morning, everywhere is so crowded with tourists. You even have to stand in line to cross the bridges.”
I nodded. I still couldn’t take my eyes away from the naked girl. Enrico laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “I know that you will do your best for us. It is all a question of time, and understanding. As for the wineglass—”
I turned to him. His expression was infinitely regretful, as if he had suffered a loss from which he would never recover.
“I’ll do my best,” I told him.
“Yes. We have a saying in Venice, you know. ‘Oggi in figura, domani in sepultura.’ It means today we are present in person, talking to each other, eating, laughing, sharing a bottle of wine. Tomorrow we will all be in the grave.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I needed cheering up.”
Kate laughed and took hold of my hand.
“Come on,” she said, “why don’t we have one last drink before we go to bed? And one last tune. Why don’t you play ‘The Pointing Tree’?”
I turned back toward the window. The naked girl had disappeared.
“Okay,” I agreed, even though I remembered what Axel had said, in Stockholm. “There is no such tree. Once you are lost, there is no way back.”
* * *
When we climbed into bed that night, Kate handed me a black silk scarf.
“What’s this for?”
“We’re going to make love, aren’t we?”
“It had crossed my mind, yes.”
“Well, I want you to gag me. We don’t want any more broken glasses, do we? And these water glasses are Murano, too. They must be worth at least a hundred and fifty dollars each.”
“You want me to gag you?”
She smiled. “I think it will be quite erotic, don’t you? You can blindfold me, too, if you like.”
“No way. I like to see your eyes.”
“Not as much as I like to see yours.”
I propped myself up on my elbow. “That girl I saw—”
“I can’t tell you anything, Gideon, I’m sorry.”
“But why would anybody want to stitch anything to her skin like that? And what do you think it was?”
“Try not to think about it. Not tonight, anyhow. Just make love to me. I’ve missed you so much.”
“Was she one of Enrico and Salvina’s daughters?”
Kate gently touched my face with her fingertips, even my eyelids so that I had to close my eyes.
“I didn’t see her, my darling. Only you did.”
I laid my head back down on the pillow. “Okay . . . I promised not to ask questions. But just answer me this. Why are Enrico and Salvina so pleased that we’re here?”
“They think that we can give them justice, that’s why.”
“Justice?”
“Most people never get it. But justice is more important than anything—even revenge. When you’ve been given justice, you can sleep at night.”
“Well, sleep isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
I picked up the black silk scarf. I twisted it, and then I put it between her teeth, and knotted it tightly behind the back of her head. I have to admit that I felt more than a little kinky. I had never been into any kind of bondage before—you know, handcuffs or anything like that—but it was unexpectedly arousing, seeing Kate with a gag in her mouth.
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