The Jester smiled and said, “You’re from Paris?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too. Sometimes I perform in the plaza in front of Beaubourg.”
“I’ll look for you there.”
They walked along together. The Jester said, “There are many generous people at Carnival, but few are as generous as you.”
“Not many performers are as excellent as you.”
Wandering, they talked about inconsequential things. The Jester’s bells tinkled as they walked, surrounding the two of them with a web of sound. At last the Jester said, “Do you know what I would like?”
“What?”
“I would like to see your face without the mask.”
Jean-Pierre shook his head. “I look awful today. I’m wearing the mask because I don’t want to show my face to anyone.”
“I’m sure it isn’t awful at all. Please?”
“I can t.”
The Jester smiled in a wheedling way. “Even if we went somewhere private? So no one but me could see you?”
Jean-Pierre looked at the Jester. The Jester touched Jean-Pierre’s shoulder. “Please?”
After a moment Jean-Pierre said, “All right. We can go to my hotel.”
When they reached the hotel, Jean-Pierre took no notice of the conventional-looking brown-haired man in a gray suit who was leaving as they entered. Jean-Pierre had taken his key with him, and he did not check for messages.
When he and the Jester were in his room, the Jester said, “Now.”
Jean-Pierre took off his mask and put it on the dresser. The Jester moved toward him. He stood in front of Jean-Pierre. He put cool fingertips on Jean-Pierre’s swollen eyes. Jean-Pierre breathed deeply at his touch.
“Someone hurt you,” the Jester said. He pressed the tender skin of Jean-Pierre’s cheeks.
“Yes.”
“Your lover?”
“Yes.”
“Love can be brutal, they say.”
“It can.”
The Jester said, “I’ll show you my face, if you like. Would you like that?”
“Yes.”
The Jester went into the bathroom and closed the door. Jean-Pierre heard bells jingling, water running. He undressed and turned down the freshly made bed. The sheets were cool and smooth beneath his body.
When the Jester came out, he had taken off his cap, and his face was clean. His brown hair was tousled. He had a small, dark birthmark high on one tanned cheek. He looked very young.
The Jester saw Jean-Pierre and said, “Good.” He came to the bed, bent and kissed Jean-Pierre. His mouth tasted sweet to Jean-Pierre, as if the Jester had been eating candy.
Jean-Pierre’s crazy ecstasy returned. It knifed through him, accompanied by the sound of bells as he clasped the Jester. Then the bells fell away.
When Jean-Pierre was about to be overwhelmed, he said, “My lover is dead.”
Dozing, Jean-Pierre felt the Jester slide out of bed, heard him slip into his tinkling costume. He opened an eye and saw the Jester find Jean-Pierre’s wallet and remove the rest of his money. Jean-Pierre saw the Jester take his watch from the dresser where it lay beside his mask. Jean-Pierre closed his eye and listened to the soft opening and closing of the door as the Jester made his exit.
Love can be brutal, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing more for Jean-Pierre to care about, or learn. The Jester was welcome to what he could salvage from the wreck of Jean-Pierre, because Jean-Pierre already had all he would need.
Rolf And Michèle
As always in Rosa and Gianni’s neighborhood, kids were kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the wide, paved area between the cheerless brick apartment houses. The ball sailed Rolf’s way, and he grounded it expertly and kicked it back to them. It scudded across the pavement toward a slight man in a gray suit, an overcoat slung around his shoulders, who was leaning in a doorway almost opposite Rosa and Gianni’s building. The man straightened and approached Rolf. When he got closer, he said Rolf’s name.
Rolf was instantly wary. He studied the man, wondering if they’d ever met before. Possibly, but right now the straight, thin nose, upward-curving mouth and light brown eyes didn’t look familiar. It wasn’t a face that would stick in your mind. “Yes?” he said, slowing his pace only slightly.
“I wonder if you have time to speak with me? I’m a friend of Brian’s.”
That stopped Rolf. I should’ve gotten out. Why didn’t I get out? “Yeah? What do you want?”
“I’d like a word with you about yesterday afternoon.”
The guy was a policeman, investigating Sally’s death. How could he have found Rolf? But wait. A policeman wouldn’t say he was a friend of Brian’s. And no policeman Rolf had ever seen dressed in thousand-dollar suits. Rolf started walking again. “Fuck off.”
Rolf heard footsteps behind him. The man’s voice said, “I know you were there.”
Rolf halted abruptly and heard the man stop. The drab, ugly neighborhood vanished, became a gray emptiness waiting to swallow Rolf. If Rolf let that cold grayness surround him, he would be lost. He waited, and in a short while he could again see the buildings, the lines of laundry flapping above, could hear the shouts of the children. He turned around. “What are you talking about?”
“You were wearing a black cloak and hood, and you had a mirror over your face.”
The grayness was back. Rolf’s hands clutched at the white plastic bag containing Jean-Pierre’s Pierrot costume. “You’re crazy.”
The man smiled. “Perhaps I’m crazy, but I’m still correct.”
Rolf had to swallow several times. Nobody knew who was behind that mirror, yet this stranger knew. Rolf had been worried about the group, one of them knowing about him and sending a poem, and here came a man Rolf had never seen before who knew Rolf had been behind that mirror. Rolf felt painfully, achingly, exposed, as if he had inadvertently shouted out all his secrets in the Piazza.
“You chose an appropriately Venetian disguise,” the man said. “Perhaps you realized that the glass mirror was invented here? The mirror craftsmen were not allowed to leave Venice, for fear they would give away the secret. The secret became known, anyway, as secrets often do.”
Rolf scrambled for control. “Talk as much as you like, you lunatic. I have no idea what this is about.”
“It takes panache to insist on a claim so easily disproved,” the man said. Almost apologetically, he nodded in the direction of the boys kicking the soccer ball. “Before you arrived, I had a conversation with the children over there. One of them told me that you’re staying at his home. Yesterday he saw you— or at least, he saw the mirror-man— coming out his front door. I suppose one could claim that isn’t absolute proof, but I think—” Rolf dropped his bag and lunged at the man, but the man stepped easily past his grasping hands. The man’s face took on a pink tinge, and he looked as if he were about to laugh.
Rolf stopped. He forced himself to breathe, to clear his head. He picked up the bag. “Maybe I did dress that way. That still doesn’t mean I was— I was—”
“At the Rio della Madonna? But you were.”
The flush on the man’s cheeks had deepened. He looked as if he were having a great time. Rolf’s chest expanded with fury. “How do you know? You can’t prove it.”
All at once, Rolf remembered a white figure, a loony-looking bride, with flowers on her head and tattered white material hanging off her. That person had seen him for sure, had stared at him from across the little canal. Rolf said, “Were you the bride?”
The man looked confused. Then realization seemed to dawn. “You mean the corpse,” he said. He leaned forward with a confidential air. “You know, To be dead is to be a prey for the living.”
The panic and rage Rolf had barely been keeping in check took over. “Get away from me!” he shouted. “I don’t care what you saw! I didn’t kill Sally!”
The man’s brows moved toward one another. “Sally?”
“Leave me alone, you maniac!�
� If only those goddamn kids weren’t around, Rolf would grab this guy and batter him until he was pulp on the pavement, until blood flew everywhere. Rolf would stick his thumbs in the guy’s eyes and pop his eyeballs.
The man stared at Rolf in a distracted way. He muttered, “Ciao,” turned, and walked quickly away.
Fighting the shakes, Rolf crossed the pavement to the front door of Rosa and Gianni’s house. He saw Rosa framed in a downstairs window, looking out at him.
She opened the door, her eyes wide. She pointed after the man’s receding back and said, “I just see il conte Zanon.”
He stared at her. “You know that man?”
“Si. Yes.”
“His name is Count Zanon?”
“Yes. Michèle Zanon.”
“Where does he live? Um— Dove vive?”
“Ooh—” Rosa made lavish gestures indicating, Rolf guessed, a mansion. “Beautiful palazzo! So beautiful!”
“Dove?”
“Canal Grande.” She put a finger on her chin, thinking. “Imbarcadero San Angelo.”
All right. Rolf knew who the man was, and he knew where to find him. That’s all he needed. He looked at Rosa, who was blushing, and nodding. As he’d known it would, her earlier petulance had vanished. Well, she’d done him a hell of a favor. He folded her to him, moving his hands down her back to her round bottom. He kissed her, his tongue deep in her mouth, until she broke away, panting. She pointed outside and said, “Boys. Later.”
Good. He wasn’t in the mood right now. He climbed the stairs to his room, sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. Staring at the smoke, he thought about Count Michèle Zanon.
Part III
INTERLUDE
This sunny day is Fat Tuesday, mardi gras, the end of Carnival. Tomorrow comes the boredom of Lent. The rains will disintegrate confetti the sweepers have missed, costumes will be aired, folded, and put away, and for the weeks before the summer tourist onslaught it will be possible to get a table at Florian’s or Harry’s Bar.
For now, Carnival continues. The pace has become feverish, because the cleansing rain and emptiness loom so close. Last chances hover: The last chance to sell a postcard, a ruffled blue net boa, a necklace of glass flowers, a print of old Venice, a striped gondolier’s shirt; the last chance to go in costume to a concert, to dance impromptu with a stranger, to walk through the streets behind a bouquet of balloons as tall as the second-floor windows, to stand at midnight in the Bocca di Piazza and listen to twenty angelic-looking teenagers singing motets; the last chance to wear a mask; the last chance to get what you hoped Carnival would give you.
The sun is shining, and the good weather may continue. Perhaps Venice will be so beautiful it will not matter that very little time remains.
Michèle Returns
Sally sat in Michèle’s salon overlooking the Grand Canal, eating salami, brown bread, and wrinkled black olives and drinking fizzy mineral water. Sun flooded in from the balcony through a wall of leaded bull’s-eye glass. It fell on a huge vase of lilies and a faded Oriental carpet patterned in blue and gold, and made a path of light over the paintings that were hung one above the other to the ceiling.
She was still jittery from her ordeal with the Medusa, but she felt better after a visit from the police. When the dark-eyed policeman left, taking with him her report of the Medusa’s attack, Michèle had said, “Sally, I must go out for a while. Please stay here and rest. Maria is here, and Sandro. You will be quite safe.”
Sally had been in no mood to argue. She lay down and dozed for a while, but kept waking with a start, thinking she heard noises. When she got up and wandered downstairs to this room, Maria, the housekeeper whose shoes Sally had worn to Torcello, appeared with the snack she had now almost finished. Only a few cookies, liberally dusted with confectioners’ sugar, remained. Sally didn’t want to get sugar and crumbs on the heavy silk upholstery of the chair she was sitting in, or on the carpet. She wrapped the cookies in her napkin and took them with her out onto the narrow white stone balcony overlooking the Canal.
The air was fresh and cold, the sky still bright, although occasional rushing shadows showed that clouds were forming. The Canal shone its distinctive blue-green and was alive with activity. Sally leaned on the railing and watched the vaporettos, barges, water taxis, and gondolas below and the wheeling, screaming seagulls overhead. Motors drummed, oars and ropes splashed, people shrieked with laughter or called out to one another. Across the Canal were other palazzos with tall arched or pointed windows, elaborate carved medallions or winged lions for decoration, white balconies like the one on which she stood.
Venice was beautiful, if you saw it like this, if you could stand in the sun after a good meal and forget your troubles for a minute or two.
She remembered the words her father had said this morning: You’ll come back here with us, sweetheart.
She saw the brick house in Tallahassee where her parents lived, where she had grown up. There were pink azaleas in the yard, and trees hung with Spanish moss. Sally and her parents would drink iced tea and watch the news on television in the evenings. She’d get a teaching job. Maybe she’d meet some young man just finishing law school, and they’d get married and her life would become what she’d thought it was going to be with Brian.
Except this new man would be plain-looking. And he would never have heard of the Sorbonne.
Venice was beautiful if you could forget your troubles, but Sally couldn’t. Brian had been murdered, and she herself was threatened.
True, Michèle had saved her from the Medusa’s attack. Her first reaction had been overwhelming relief and gratitude. Now, she’d had time to think.
What had resulted from the episode with the Medusa? Sally lost the letters she had been taking to the police, the bizarre letters Brian had received in Paris. Suppose Michèle wanted those letters? Suppose he and the ghost Medusa were working together? Sally didn’t know how Michèle might have arranged it, but she had seen enough of him to believe he could.
The sky was becoming more overcast. Sally went back inside.
Suppose Michèle and the Medusa were working together. Michèle had retrieved her bag. Maybe he ended up with the letters.
She could search around while he was out, see if she found them. If she found the letters, it would prove that she couldn’t trust Michèle. At least that would be settled.
In a casual, aimless way, still not certain what she would do, Sally drifted through the dining room, polished and pristine, a huge bouquet of yellow roses on the shining table, and down a hall. She passed the open door of a sitting room, where there was a table with an inlaid chessboard and dried flower arrangements under glass bells. Next to the sitting room was a small bathroom and beyond it a closet, and that was it. Sally drifted the other way, back through the salon and the dining room. At the end of a hall she found a small library. It looked like a private place, not as grand and polished as the other rooms on this floor. The walls were lined with old-looking books in dark wood cases fronted by tarnished brass mesh. Two cracked green leather chairs faced one another in front of a cold fireplace. Beyond tall French windows was a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the garden. A small desk held a stack of papers under a paperweight of swirling, multicolored Venetian glass.
Sally walked into the room. She stood at the desk, looking down at the stack of papers. The top one was a letter to Michèle, written in Italian.
Sally rested her hand on the paperweight, then moved the paperweight to one side.
She picked up the papers and riffled through them, looking for the envelopes or for the small sheets with their short, ambiguous sentences. She was searching so intently she almost missed the paper in Brian’s handwriting. She leafed past it and had to go back to look again.
The paper had been folded, then straightened again. Brian’s writing was wavery, but it was definitely his writing. A purple stain that looked like wine had discolored one corner of the page. She read:
The creature whose visage
turns others to stone
Changes trusting friends into people alone.
The creature who has snakes for hair
Changes faithful lovers to men in despair.
There’s no way to guess what the Gorgon will do.
Who can predict what she’ll change about you?
This was the poem Michèle had told her about, the poem Brian had written, that Michèle copied and sent to the members of the group. Sally read it several times. How could Brian have hated himself so much? she wondered. She was still standing there, her search forgotten, when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Quickly she replaced the papers, except for the poem, and put the paperweight on top. She folded the poem and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. She turned and saw that Michèle had just reached the top of the stairs. She watched him coming toward her.
When he walked in she said, “I was looking for you.”
He frowned. “Why? Has something happened?”
“No. I thought maybe you’d gotten back.”
“But you have been quite all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good, good.”
Michèle, she noticed, seemed highly excited, his usually pallid face flushed. He took her by the shoulders. “I have something to tell you,” he said. “I think I may have found out who murdered Brian.”
Explanations
“Rolf? Are you sure?” Sally didn’t know what she’d expected Michèle to say, but it wasn’t that.
Michèle was pacing. Sally sat in one of the chairs in front of the cold fireplace. “He was the mirror-man,” Michèle said. “He tried to deny it at first. He said”— Michèle drew himself up, and a snarl transformed his features— “Fuck off!”
In half a second and two words Michèle had evoked Rolf so vividly that Sally could see and hear him herself.
Michèle’s features relaxed. “But of course I had proof. A witness. So he admitted it.”
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 72