Behind him, Francine said, “I suppose you’ve been talking to the police.”
He continued to watch his reflection as he said, “You know better than that. Did I talk to the police in ’68? I don’t talk to those assassins.” Tom was pleased with his speech, but not with the way his jowls shivered as he gave it. He looked toward Francine. “Why? Have you?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
This encounter wasn’t progressing as Tom had hoped. He tried another tack. “Brian dressed as Medusa,” he said.
Francine shifted her body impatiently. “Yes. Even his final gesture was a mockery.”
“A mockery?”
“Of me. Of Sartre.”
Tom wished he could take notes. “Dressing as Medusa was a mockery of Sartre? How?”
Francine tightened her crossed arms. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Tom could tell she wasn’t about to explain voluntarily. He’d have to trick her. “I don’t think it had anything to do with Sartre,” he said. “I think the Medusa was a symbol of Brian’s sexual ambiguity. I mean, Freud said the Medusa represents the female genitals.”
“Freud is the only person in the world who was stupider than Brian.”
“No, really. See, the snakes are pubic hair, and—”
“And presto! We have the creature whose visage turns others to stone.” Francine’s tone was scathing.
Tom stared. “So it was you,” he said.
“Me?”
“That poem. The creature whose visage turns others to stone. What a monstrous act of hostility.”
“You’re mad,” said Francine promptly.
Tom took a step toward her. “Who do you think you are? Sending me poems, jerking me around?”
“Stop shouting!” said Francine in a furious whisper. “I didn’t write the poem. I didn’t know Brian would dress as Medusa, did I? I received a copy, too.”
Tom thought about it. “Yeah, but if you had done it that’s exactly what you’d say.”
Francine shrugged. She got up, went into the bathroom and closed the door. Tom heard the toilet flush, and water running. He could still feel a draft on his face. He checked the window, but it seemed to be tightly closed.
Francine emerged from the bathroom, rubbing her face with a towel. “I wonder where Brian and Sally were staying,” she said meditatively.
“Albergo Rondini.” Distracted by the mysterious draft, Tom had spoken without thinking. He stood very still, hoping Francine hadn’t caught what he’d said.
She stiffened. “I see.” She crossed to face him. “Albergo Rondini. And how would you know that? You haven’t been spying, have you?”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said.
“Yes. Yes, you were,” she said slowly. “You had on a silver robe with symbols on it, didn’t you, and a silver mask with a white beard. I saw you in the Piazza, and now I remember that I saw you here, too. Outside, hanging about in the campo, spying on me. You’re a cheat and a spy.”
“Now look, Francine—”
“A pathetic, filthy spy.”
“Shut up!” Tom shouted, and Francine hissed, “Keep your voice down!”
Breathing heavily, they regarded each other. Then Francine said, “I saw you somewhere else, too. At the Rio della Madonna.”
Tom saw the scene again. Brian’s streaming body, his ruined face. The murmurs of the crowd, a woman whimpering, a man saying in a British accent, “Killed him, by God.” Tom looked at Francine’s trousers, her loosened tie. She’d been padded around the middle. That had fooled him.
“I was there, and so were you,” he said. “I recognize you now.” The frustration of the past hours, days, years boiled up. “What were you dressed as? A troll? A troglodyte?”
Francine’s eyes were wide. “Get out,” she said.
“A troll! A spiritually deformed freak—”
“Get out of here!” Francine screamed. “You’re a fool! You understand nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” She stamped her foot, hard, with each repetition of the word.
He heard voices in the next room, and a door opening and closing somewhere in the house. He crossed to the door. “Don’t call me a fool. I’m warning you,” he said.
They exchanged a last, furious look before he left, giving the door a shivering slam behind him.
Another Slammed Door
Tom stormed down the stairs, brushing past a beefy, sleepy-looking— and possibly also angry-looking— man in a red terry-cloth bathrobe who was on his way up. Outside, he didn’t allow himself to run, but walked briskly away at a pace calculated to put him out of the immediate neighborhood before the beefy man had a chance to get dressed and come after him, if that’s what the beefy man decided to do.
Tom was trembling. At this rate, Brian’s death would be a complete waste, and Tom’s efforts and humiliations would count for nothing. Why had Tom said those two words, “Albergo Rondini”? It was as if he were trying to sabotage himself. He’d heard of criminals doing that, out of guilt and a subconscious desire to be caught.
Tom didn’t want to be caught. He wanted to do everything right— starting now— and pull this off.
Albergo Rondini. Like a jackass, he’d said it. As much as he’d tried to forget the damn place, forget the snotty concierge saying, “Can I help you, sir?” and “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now. Perhaps you can locate your friends tomorrow.” Tom flushed. What was the two-bit Albergo Rondini doing with a concierge who acted as if he worked for the Gritti Palace Hotel?
At least Francine hadn’t gone to the police. That much was very fortunate.
Tom stopped abruptly halfway up the steps of a bridge. A man behind him, who was wrestling a dolly loaded with empty soft drink bottles up the steps, looked at him inquiringly as he laboriously pulled the dolly around Tom’s motionless body.
Sally. Shit, yes, Sally would talk to the police. And not only that. When the police started asking questions at the Albergo Rondini, and the concierge started telling his story, and Sally said, “Oh, that description sounds like Tom—”
God damn Sally. She was as much of a troublemaker as Brian.
Tom entered a brightly lit cafe, where a few men who looked like workers were clustered at the bar drinking espresso. He sat at a Formica table next to a jukebox and ordered cappuccino and rolls. His hand kept straying to his face, his fingertips moving over the flesh and incipient stubble. He didn’t like the cold air, the rough feeling where the hairs that protected him so long had been rudely and precipitously chopped off. He looked at his distorted reflection in the polished chrome of the jukebox. With his beard, he had looked wise. Without it he was afraid he looked like what Francine had said he was— a fool.
He finished his cappuccino and wiped the foam from his naked upper lip. He wasn’t far from the Accademia Bridge. If he crossed there, it would be only a short walk to the neighborhood of the Salute church, where Jean-Pierre’s hotel was located. He would start again.
A watery sun was breaking through the mist as he climbed the wooden steps of the bridge. He stopped in the middle, leaned on the railing, and gazed toward the point where the Canal opened into the Basin of San Marco, at the gleaming golden globe on top of the Customs House. A barge piled high with refuse churned along beneath him. Then a gondola slid by, and Tom caught a few bars of the tune the gondolier was whistling. The passengers were a man and woman muffled in hats, coats, and scarves. They were holding hands. Two suitcases sat in front of them in the gondola.
Taking a romantic gondola ride to the train station, Tom thought. The idea made his chest ache.
He wondered what he was hanging around here for instead of going on to see Jean-Pierre. Tom’s face was chilly again. He’d have to buy a wool scarf to wind around his neck and chin. Or a mask. A mask would keep the air off.
When he got to Jean-Pierre’s hotel, he checked the breakfast room first, but Jean-Pierre was not among the people drinking caffe-latte and eating rolls and jam at the crumb-littered tables. Tom tr
udged upstairs. He had gotten everybody’s room number when he called around. He found Jean-Pierre’s room and knocked on the door.
There was no answer. He knocked again, more forcefully, and said, “Jean-Pierre?”
Tom heard footsteps, and then the door opened and Jean-Pierre looked out. His face was bloated, his eyes swollen nearly shut. Tom knew he looked shocked at Jean-Pierre’s appearance, and he could see his own surprised expression mirrored in Jean-Pierre’s puffy eyes. Then he remembered. “It’s Tom,” he said. “I shaved off my beard.”
Jean-Pierre was dressed in slacks and a pullover. He stood back to let Tom in. His room was in complete disarray— the bed not just rumpled, but sheets and blankets wadded, pummeled-looking pillows flung on the floor. On the floor, also, crumpled under a chair, was a black-and-white Pierrot costume. A mask with a shiny tear embedded in the cheek lay in a corner. Tom had, he remembered abruptly, predicted to himself that Jean-Pierre would dress as Pierrot. He had been right. Yet now he realized that his own reasons for thinking of Jean-Pierre as Pierrot and Jean-Pierre’s reasons were probably completely different, and that he couldn’t imagine what Jean-Pierre’s reasons might be.
He looked again at Jean-Pierre’s face. “What happened to you?”
Jean-Pierre didn’t answer. He leaned against the dresser.
It was time to begin. Tom cleared his throat. “About Brian,” he said.
Jean-Pierre held up his hand palm out, like a policeman stopping traffic. “I will not speak about Brian,” he said. His voice was barely louder than a whisper.
“I came to ask you—”
Jean-Pierre shook his head. “I have told you I will not speak about it.”
“Look, Jean-Pierre—”
“You look.” Jean-Pierre’s voice cracked. “I will not say anything, I will not listen to anything. You came here, yes. But I do not have to talk with you or hear you or see you.”
Tom’s anger flooded in again. “Right. You don’t have to talk with me or hear me or see me,” he said. “I don’t even have to talk with you or hear you or see you.” He turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door behind him.
His fury was molten. He flung himself downstairs and out into the pale sunshine. The bells of the Salute began to peal.
A New Mask
The sound of the slamming door reverberated through the room as Jean-Pierre collapsed on the bed. He had been sure it was the police. How had Tom found him? Breathing through his mouth, he blotted perspiration from his forehead with the palm of his hand.
In a little while he felt calmer, if a state of dull agony could be called calm. Thank God Tom was gone. His face had looked naked without his beard— unprotected, like a newborn animal. Jean-Pierre sat up and looked in the mirror. Horrible.
Gazing at his swollen face, Jean-Pierre wondered why he didn’t take the next obvious step and kill himself. Why continue to breathe the grief-laden air in this hotel room, to look at his wretched reflection, to feel this torture that would never abate? That he could descend the stairs like any other human being and eat breakfast, that he could walk in the winter sunshine on the streets of Venice, was unthinkable. Yet he knew that was exactly what he was going to do.
Exactly, yet not exactly. He would eat and walk like any other human being, but he himself would know that he had been transformed, as if the composition of every chemical in his body had been altered.
He couldn’t forget the poem. The hateful, taunting Medusa poem that had poisoned and changed him. One person, and one person only, had reason to taunt Jean-Pierre, and that person was Sally. Sally had been so quiet, so sly, waiting in the background. She had brought on the destruction of what had been so beautiful, and it was that knowledge, the knowledge of who was to blame, that was keeping Jean-Pierre alive.
It was time to go to breakfast now, but he didn’t want to be seen with his face like this. It was less a matter of vanity than an unwillingness to call attention to himself. He could have breakfast sent up, but that would mean waiting, and all at once he was claustrophobically anxious to get out of the room.
He could wear a mask. Carnival revelers often wore masks and costumes at breakfast. To put on his Pierrot mask was unthinkable, though.
He remembered that a French champagne company was giving away thousands of yellow cardboard eye masks imprinted with the company’s name. They were passed out in the streets and left in cafés and hotels, and there was a bowl of them on a table at the end of the hall.
Jean-Pierre slipped out and took a mask from the bowl. Back in his room, he tried it on. It was flimsy, the elastic wouldn’t last long, but it would do until he could get a better one. When he wore it, his face didn’t look quite so awful.
He took one of the hotel’s plastic laundry bags from the closet. In it he crammed his Pierrot costume and mask. He wadded the bag up and wrapped it in his jacket. Then he went downstairs to breakfast.
On The Giudecca
Rolf was asleep, or almost, but a bar of sunlight was teasing his eyes. He tossed, trying to escape it, and raised a cloud of cat hair from the sofa on which he lay in his sleeping bag. As the hair invaded his nostrils, he sneezed, and his eyes flew open.
Shit. He sneezed again. Downstairs the kids were screaming at each other, and then Rosa joined in with “Basta! Basta!” What was it about Italians, that they had to conduct their business at the top of their lungs? If they weren’t yelling, they were singing.
As if to prove his point, the sound of a man’s voice warbling a song drifted from outside. Sleep? Forget it.
Rolf fumbled in his backpack for his cigarettes, found them, and lit one. He propped his head on the arm of the sofa and expelled smoke into the already stuffy air of the attic storeroom that was also, at the moment, his bedroom. The place was piled with old trunks, battered suitcases with peeling stickers from Naples and Sorrento, colored Sunday supplement magazines from years past, a broken lamp whose shade hung at an angle. Still, it wasn’t a bad place to be, which is what Rolf had realized when he rushed in late yesterday afternoon all hot to get out of town.
Where would he go? He wasn’t going back to Paris, but he couldn’t think of any obvious alternatives. Money was a consideration. He had told Gianni and Rosa he’d be here till Carnival was over, and that wasn’t until tomorrow. He could stay here for free and think about the next move.
Nobody could connect him with Sally’s death. The weird-looking bride had seen him bending over the body, but what she had seen was a guy with a black hood and a mirror-face. Nobody knew that apparition was Rolf. When he’d dressed in his costume yesterday, Rosa and Gianni were out. Nobody had been around except the family cat and some kids kicking a ball to each other down the street. Now the mirror-man was gone— as dead as Sally, floating in the canal.
Most important, Rolf needed to do some investigating here in Venice. Someone in the group— at least one of them— had discovered where Rolf was staying. Granted, that wouldn’t have been the most difficult thing in the world to do. Anyone could have asked Louis at the bistro, and Louis, being the accommodating, jovial fellow he was, would’ve given out the address on the Giudecca without a second thought.
What bothered Rolf was, why would anyone ask? It was breaking the rules, which they’d vowed not to do, but Rolf didn’t care about the damn rules. He just didn’t at all like the idea of someone snooping around, asking about him in order to send him a poem about Sally.
Who can predict what she’ll change about you? Rolf couldn’t tolerate it. It might be dangerous to stay, but if he left, he’d never know who knew about him, or where that person might turn up again.
So. He was here like a rat in a hole, and he’d better move before whoever it was moved on him. The person had had no trouble at all delivering a poem to him yesterday, in a nice white envelope. Unfortunately, one of the kids had answered the door and taken it. Neither of the boys spoke English very well, and the one who’d accepted the poem seemed especially dumb. Rolf had been over the
episode with him several times to no avail, the kid with his closed, sullen face, sitting half off his chair, glancing longingly toward the living room where the TV was playing full blast:
“Who brought the envelope?”
“A boy.”
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
“You never saw him before?”
“No.”
“What did he look like?”
Long hesitation. “A boy.”
“Was he older or younger than you?”
“What?”
“Was he older than you?”
“Yes.” Throat clearing. “I think so.” And on and on. In all probability, the boy who looked like a boy was some urchin hired for the job and wouldn’t know much, although Rolf would give a great deal to lay hands on him, even so.
Rolf put out his cigarette in the butt-filled ashtray on the floor by his backpack. His hand strayed to the backpack’s webbing strap. Maybe he should get out. He hefted the backpack slightly, then put it down again and lay with his hands clasped behind his head.
No. He wasn’t going to run. Somebody knew too much, and Rolf couldn’t have it. He would stay and find out what was going on. The decision made, he felt better.
Some time later he dressed and went downstairs. The kids had gone out— to school, he guessed— and Rosa was in the kitchen rolling out pasta. She was friendly, dark-eyed, sallow-skinned, putting on weight around the hips. She wore a green wool sweater fraying at one elbow and a heavy gold cross around her neck. She spoke a few words of English and French, and Rolf spoke a little Italian, so they got along fine.
Rolf’s decision to stay in Venice and fight had made him feel exceptionally good, he realized as Rosa poured him a cup of coffee. When she put the cup in front of him, he said, with effusive mock gallantry, “Tante grazie, Signora,” and kissed the chapped back of her hand.
“Prego, Signor.” She giggled, pulling her hand away. He noted with satisfaction the flush rising on her plump cheeks.
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 68