Venetian Masks

by Kim Fielding

  “Fuck.” Jeff thought quickly. “What does he want from Cleve? Is Cleve in danger?”

  Very solemnly, the chef nodded. “Sì. Molto pericolo.”

  Jeff didn’t need a translation for that. “I’ll go to the cops, then. They’ll—”

  “No!” The chef grabbed Jeff’s right shoulder and squeezed hard. “La polizia, some are… Eddie’s friends. Capisce? Not all, but some.”

  Great. So Eddie—whoever the hell he was—was connected. “What can I do?” Jeff asked.

  The chef turned his hands palms up. “Hope that Cleve is somewhere safe.”

  DESPITE the glorious weather, the walk back to the time-share seemed fraught with danger, as if something evil might suddenly leap out at him from among the gangs of tourists. Jeff tried to force himself to walk slowly and look relaxed, just in case he was being followed. And then, despite everything, he had to smile a little. Who would have thought he’d end up like some character in a suspense novel, tailed through the streets of Venice? He was Just Jeff, and nothing interesting ever happened to him. “Hah!” he said, slightly startling a trio of French teenagers.

  Mita had already come on shift by the time he got back to the building. She smiled at him and looked past him, no doubt searching for Cleve. “And where is your ragazzo today?” she chirped.

  “He’s… he’s gone.”

  “Ah, e’ un peccato! He is molto bello. And he said to me….” She paused, biting her pierced lip.

  “What? What did he say?”

  She gave a tiny sigh. “He said you are a thief who has stolen his heart.”

  Jeff’s own heart clenched tightly and totally inappropriately. Just part of his act, he told himself, and out loud he said, “He ought to know about thieves.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, frowning. “Is there a problem?”

  “No. I just… sometimes things get complicated.”

  “My nonno—my grandfather, yes?—he was born in Venezia and lived here his whole life, but also he owned a small house in the country. Very small: just two rooms, no electric. A fireplace for heat and a well for water. He would go there on holiday and do nothing, he said, except ‘guardo gli alberi crescere’, watch the trees grow. He was happy in this place because it was, uh, simple. But always he returned to Venezia, because he liked the… the complicated. A man needs both, he said.”

  Jeff chuckled lightly. “I’ve sort of ended up with more complicated than I’m used to.”

  “But maybe it is worth it,” Mita answered with a smile.

  The conversation with Mita lightened Jeff’s mood a little, but when he returned to his kitchen, there were the note and the mask on the table. He sat and stared at them as if he could magically decipher their hidden message if he only looked long enough.

  He finally booted up his laptop and typed “Eddie Viebool” into the search engine. When that didn’t work, he tried “Eddie Vybool” and several other variations on the theme. Finally he randomly approximated the real spelling enough for Google to figure out what the hell he meant. It turned out that there was an Edvin Weibull, and the guy was, in fact, bad news.

  Jeff found a couple dozen articles about Weibull, the earliest dating back about fifteen years. As best as Jeff could tell, Weibull was one of those rich men who seemed to have his hands in a lot of shady businesses but never managed to get hauled to prison for any of them. There were a couple US trials for tax evasion and a charge of jury tampering, but he wasn’t convicted. Spain didn’t seem too happy with him either—in that case, it was drugs—but he got away from that too. He definitely owned nightclubs in various cities in the US, Canada, and Europe, and also seemed to have something to do with a couple of businesses with “Entertainment” in the titles, but maybe those were legal. A club he owned in Toronto burned down under somewhat suspicious circumstances, killing three people, and there were several overdoses and unexplained deaths associated with the employees of his media enterprises. But nothing that stuck to Weibull specifically.

  Jeff tried to find photos of the man, but the few that turned up were grainy, with Weibull’s back to the camera or his hands in front of his face. Jeff would have felt a little less uneasy if he could at least have learned what Weibull looked like, although, of course, the guy probably had stooges to do his dirty work anyway. In any case, if this Weibull guy was pissed off at Cleve for some reason, and if he’d recently shown up in Venice, then hightailing it was probably a good choice for Cleve.

  Christ, now the inside of Jeff’s head sounded like a bad novel, and not even a bad romance novel.

  For a while after that, Jeff dithered. He was a little afraid to leave the apartment in case he ran into gangsters. Which was stupid, because there was no reason for the bad guys to come after him. Even if they knew Cleve had hung out with him lately, they must also know Cleve hung out with a lot of tourists. Jeff was undoubtedly just the latest in a long string and of no particular interest to anyone.

  Tomorrow he would get on that train to Vienna and the whole thing would be over for him.

  Okay, maybe not. Maybe he’d always wonder about Cleve’s story and who he really was. And what the hell happened to him. But none of that was Jeff’s business. Jeff’s business was IT in Sacramento.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, annoyed with himself. That was the problem with solo travel, he decided. You got on your own nerves.

  He sat down again and logged into his credit card account—which he still hadn’t canceled. There were two new charges. The first was for sixty euros and was, he deciphered with some help from a Web translation site, made at the Venice train station. And the second seemed to be for a hotel in Zagreb, Croatia.

  “Zagreb,” he said. “Where the fuck is that?” A few minutes of searching showed him it wasn’t very far from Venice at all. Less than two hundred miles, in fact. About the same as from Sacramento to Fresno. Not only that, but it was possible to take a train directly from Venice to Zagreb.

  He didn’t know anything about Croatia in general or Zagreb specifically. He didn’t have the Rick Steves book for the region and he hadn’t done any research about it online. It wasn’t one of the places he and Kyle had planned to go.

  “Ass hat,” Jeff said. Then he clicked over to his employer’s website—the website he maintained—to see if the company owned any properties in Zagreb.

  Chapter 11

  HE SPENT his last evening in Venice making decisions and then second-guessing them, until he was ready to smack himself upside the head. Finally, he marched out to the lobby, where Mita was reading a book, and made a desperate sort of groaning noise. “Help,” he whined.

  She put down her book at once. “Of course! How can I help you?”

  “Do I forget about Cleve and move on to Vienna? Or do I go to a city I don’t know anything about in the small hope I can track him down, find out if he really cares about me, and haul his ass out of trouble?”

  “Easy,” she said with a shrug. “The second choice.”

  He grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Grazie. Grazie mille!”

  “Ah, molto bene! See? You are a local already.”

  “And you are a peach. You ever need any IT help? I’m your guy.” Which was kind of lame, but all he had to offer.

  “Buon viaggio and buona fortuna.”

  He went back to his room and changed his reservations from Vienna to Zagreb. Then he e-mailed his mother to tell her about the change of plans. He was evasive about the reason—Something about Zagreb intrigues me, he wrote. He ate all the food left in the apartment and drank the rest of the beer. He did a little research to ensure that he wouldn’t need a visa to enter the country and to learn a few basic facts. They spoke Croatian—okay, that made sense. They weren’t admitted to the European Union, although accession was expected soon. Their currency was called the kuna. And they had miles and miles of famously beautiful coastline and vacation-worthy islands, none of which was anywhere near the capital city of Zagreb. And then he picked up his
Kindle and read about the vicomte who, needless to say, followed the dictates of his heart—or at least the dictates of his dick—and hooked up with the hunky peasant.

  Jeff intended then to take his pills and go to sleep. But maybe reading smut before bedtime wasn’t such a great idea, because as he wandered to the bathroom, his hand wandered to his groin, where his cock was demandingly hard. Willing away the erection while he brushed his teeth didn’t work. He ended up back at the kitchen table, naked, in front of his laptop, giving in to the inevitability of what would come next.

  He typed “Max Palmer” into his browser. He ignored the videos that came up—seeing Cleve move and hearing him speak would be too much. Jeff also ignored the photos in which Max was with other men. Instead, he clicked on a picture of Max with his arms only half-inked, sitting on a locker room bench, an open locker full of sports equipment behind him. Max was shirtless but wearing a pair of white football pants. His chest was hairless—waxed, Jeff assumed. Max’s eyes were closed and his right hand was caressing the obvious bulge at his groin. Jeff stroked his own cock as he gazed at the broad shoulders, the erect nipples, the line down the center of Max’s abdomen.

  The next photo looked like a still from a fake medical scenario. Max lay on his belly on a metal exam table. He was wearing a paper hospital johnny, the opening of which revealed his rounded bare butt. His head was pillowed on his crossed arms, and he was looking straight at the camera, very seriously, as if daring the viewer to touch. Jeff, of course, could only touch himself. He spread his legs farther apart on the chair and sped the movements of his fist.

  Max was sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, dangling his feet in the water. He was very tan, and the sun illuminated his hair, bringing out its auburn tinge. He was leaning back a little on his fully tattooed arms, showing off a gleaming chest, and the crown of his hard cock was peeking out from the top of his Speedo. Jeff could imagine himself swimming over and placing himself between those sturdy legs, reaching up with a chlorine-scented hand to tug Cleve’s dick completely free, and sinking his mouth over the plump reddened glans. He would feel the sun’s rays burning his pale back and shoulders, but he wouldn’t care, not when Cleve was gripping fistfuls of his hair and gasping out his pleasure to the sky.

  The next picture continued the aquatic theme: Max nude in a stone-tiled shower, legs slightly spread. His back was to the camera and he leaned slightly against his left arm, which was stretched out along the wall. His right hand was hidden, but the angle and position of his elbow suggested he was stroking himself. He looked back over his shoulder, mouth and eyes wide, as if he’d been taken by surprise. As Jeff’s eyes traced the line of Cleve’s spine, the narrowing at his waist, the slight dip above the swell of buttocks, Jeff’s hand tugged harder, faster. He was dimly aware of the slick sounds of skin against skin, of the slightly splintery seat under his ass, of the sound of the refrigerator humming away.

  But still Jeff clicked on another photo. This was one he’d looked at earlier in the day and, as far as he could tell, one of the most recent. Max was sitting on a couch, naked, legs splayed. But his cock was lying softly on his thigh, and he was looking off to the side, not at the camera. He wasn’t smiling or trying to look sexy, and somehow Jeff had the impression that he wasn’t posing at all, that the photographer had seen him sitting like that and couldn’t resist snapping a candid shot. Cleve looked a little sad, as if he were longing for something he couldn’t have. Or someone, maybe.

  With a sigh, Jeff climaxed into his hand.

  THE Santa Lucia train station sprawled along the banks of the Grand Canal. It was a long, low building, many centuries more modern than the rest of the city, with a winged FS symbol on the front. The broad stairs in front of the station were full of people sitting next to suitcases and shopping bags, munching on slices of pizza or just watching the boats go by. Santa Lucia wasn’t far from the time-share, so although he kind of wished for one last vaporetto ride, Jeff had simply walked.

  Inside the station, he had a fairly confusing conversation with a ticket agent, the upshot of which was that he could not exchange or return his Vienna ticket but he was apparently eligible for some mysterious discount on the ticket to Zagreb. He paid only thirty euros for something the agent called a couchette.

  The train wouldn’t leave the station until 2120—which Jeff recalculated as 9:20 in the evening. That left him with most of the day free, so he left his suitcase at the station’s baggage consignment office and made his way back outside.

  It was another lovely day, and after buying a bottle of water and bag of potato chips from a nearby shop, he took a seat on the concrete stairs. He watched the pigeons and the passersby. Several boats were tied up a few yards away, and in one of them a cute young guy was sitting on a stack of what looked like bags of cement, talking animatedly on his cell phone. Jeff watched him for a while, careful not to catch the man’s eyes. When a boy and a girl in their early twenties descended a few of the slippery steps alongside the canal and posed for pictures, smiling and kissing, Jeff was reminded of the photos the gondolier had taken. Silently cursing his own stupidity, he fished out his phone and scrolled through them. He and Cleve looked every bit as happy, every bit as in love, as the couple by the canal.

  In love. It was a strange concept. Jeff had cared about Kyle a great deal—he’d even loved him. But now he wondered if he and Kyle had ever truly been in love. Kyle had never made his heart race the way Cleve did, had never made him feel so strongly. After five years together, Jeff hadn’t even bothered to chase Kyle across town when he’d run off to his new boyfriend. But after only five days together, he was chasing Cleve to another country—despite his deep doubts about whether Cleve reciprocated his feelings, and despite the lurking and sinister Eddie Weibull.

  Jeff had read hundreds of books in which characters fell madly head over heels. He’d even believed that this happened sometimes to real people in real life. His parents, for example—even when they squabbled, even after forty years of marriage, they adored each other. But he’d always assumed emotions like these were beyond him and that comfort, companionship, and commonality were the best he could have. Those weren’t such bad things to settle for. He’d believed that the capacity for anything deeper and more romantic was missing from his psyche, perhaps sunken to the bottom of a waterway in the Sacramento Delta.

  But now, sitting on the hard stairs in front of the train station, an empty water bottle and crumpled chip bag in his hand, Jeff was quite certain that he was capable of falling in love—and that he was now in very, very deep.

  This is stupid, he thought. You don’t even know his real name. You can’t fall in love with a guy you don’t know. Except that maybe you could.

  “Fuck,” he said out loud.

  He stood and walked, crossed a very modern-looking long bridge, then walked some more. He walked, in fact, until his feet were sore and his legs ached, pausing only for a gelato and, later, an espresso. The amazing thing was that no matter how long he walked or how randomly he wandered, he was never lost. Thanks to the time he’d spent on foot in Venice, both alone and with Cleve, he knew his way around the city better than he knew most of Sacramento. The realization comforted him somehow. He still didn’t speak the language, and he still hadn’t figured out which euro coin was which, but he felt… in place. It was like playing tag and having not one home base but a pair: two widely separated locations where you could go and feel safe.

  Safe, that is, aside from potentially scary mobsters.

  JEFF had never ridden a train before, unless you counted the antique ones in Old Sacramento. The one that chugged in on track eight at Santa Lucia did not have a steam engine. He couldn’t decode his ticket and had to ask for help from one of the employees, who pointed out the proper car. A porter waited on the steps of the carriage, checked Jeff’s ticket and passport, took him inside, and led him to one of several small compartments.

  As it turned out, the couchette had six bunks per compartment
, three on each side. Jeff’s was at the top. He hauled his bag up, and when he lay down, he had about as much space as in a coffin. A slightly undersized coffin, and he had to bend his legs a little to fit. The four bottom berths were soon filled with a quartet of quiet men he thought might be Hungarian, while the bunk opposite him remained empty.

  It wasn’t long before the train began to move, sluggishly at first and then picking up speed. The porter shut the door to the compartment, and one of the Hungarians locked it. The hour was still early, and Jeff supposed he could have gotten up and explored the train a little. But dreams had prevented him from sleeping well the night before, and he was nervous about what he would face when he arrived in Zagreb, so he decided to take his meds. A small bottle of water had been provided, which was handy. He swallowed three pills instead of his usual two—something he very rarely did, but he didn’t want to wake up his bunkmates by screaming.

  The pillow was tiny and the blanket thin, but the train’s motion was very soothing. He was probably asleep before they left the suburbs.

  He wasn’t sure what woke him—the rustling sounds, the movements of the other passengers, or the weak overhead light. He almost bashed his head on the ceiling of the car before he remembered where he was. He looked blearily at his watch. Three thirty. Christ.

  Someone knocked lightly on the door, one of the Hungarians unlocked it, and the porter squeezed in. He was carrying plastic trays. He handed one up to Jeff, who had to sit far hunched over to accept it. There was a cardboard cup of terrible coffee, another diminutive water bottle, and a plastic package containing a plasticky pastry. It was the first bad meal he’d had since arriving in Europe.

  He managed to make his way down to the floor without kicking anyone in the head and then traversed the swaying carriage to the bathroom, which was smelly. He pissed, rinsed out his mouth, and splashed water on his face. What he really wanted was a hot shower and a big bed. Preferably shared with a companion.