Venetian Masks

by Kim Fielding

  “So how’d you go from porn star to touring Zagreb with Eddie?” Jeff asked.

  “Indirectly. Eddie was having a big private party at one of his clubs in LA. He sent word out through some of the photographers and producers, looking for talent. Men and women. He wanted a lot of pretty faces there. Some willing bodies too, but that was optional. All I cared about was I’d get seven hundred bucks for hanging out and pretending a bunch of old guys were fascinating. Only it turns out I caught Eddie’s eye instead.”

  “Did he catch yours?”

  Cleve paused for a few moments and then shrugged. “I guess. He’s not bad-looking, and I’ve always had a thing for blonds.” He reached over and tugged a lock of Jeff’s hair. “He was rich—really rich, fuck-you rich, where he didn’t have to prove to anyone how thick his wallet was. And he was sophisticated and he didn’t… he didn’t want to just take me into a room somewhere and fuck me, you know? He talked to me, like maybe he realized I had a brain too. And he asked me if I wanted to fly to Rome with him the next day. I said Hell yeah!”

  They’d come to a little patch of grass with an iron bench. Jeff sat down, squinting up at Cleve. He couldn’t imagine himself leaving for Rome on a day’s notice. But then he’d come to Croatia nearly as impulsively, so maybe it wasn’t so inconceivable.

  Cleve leaned up against a thick-trunked tree, stroking the crumbly bark with one hand. “After Rome it was Milan and then Paris and then… fuck, I don’t remember. Barcelona, I think. We’d go to clubs and fancy restaurants, and because I was with Eddie, nobody treated me like a dude who fucked for a living.”

  “You got respect.”

  “Yeah.” Cleve flashed him a quick look. “I guess so.”

  “Didn’t you know he was a mobster? You’re not an idiot.”

  “I knew he was into some illegal shit, but that’s nothing new in the industry. Drugs, whores, kiddie porn, whatever. I’d been looking the other way for years. I didn’t realize how deep he was in. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t care as long as it didn’t touch me. I don’t know. Wasn’t thinking things through at the time.” He turned sideways, the bright sun putting him in silhouette, and dropped his voice. “I think Eddie loved me, in his own way. Like the way he loved his Ferrari and his Picasso and his del Gesù violin. I liked being… valued. Even if it came at a price.”

  A cold chill ran down Jeff’s spine. “What price?”

  “Dunno. Freedom. Dignity. He’s a jealous fuck, a real control freak, and he used to hit me sometimes when he got pissed off. I’m bigger than him and twenty years younger, but I couldn’t hit back, could I? It was a power thing and he had all the power. Once he got drunk and shot at me. Lucky he was too drunk to aim.”

  “Fuck.”

  Cleve shrugged. “Wasn’t all bad. I got to travel a lot. He’s a busy guy, so I had a lotta time to myself. I’d read, get to really know the places we visited.” He placed his back against the tree trunk and slid to the ground, hunching his knees against his chest like a scared child. “I learned Italian, German, French. Not bad for a high school dropout from Cleveland.”

  Jeff wanted to kneel beside him and gather him in his arms, but wasn’t sure Cleve wanted comforting. Jeff hadn’t been too keen on it himself in the past. When his parents or Kyle had tried to console him, he had become prickly, convincing himself that he didn’t deserve comforting, or maybe that accepting it was a sign of weakness.

  “Eddie used to fuck around sometimes,” Cleve said quietly. “’Course, I wasn’t allowed to. But he’d bring home these kids, these starry-eyed boys, and I wasn’t supposed to say anything. Couple times he tried to get me to join them, and I said no, and at least he listened to that. We were in London—I’d been with Eddie for almost four years by then—and he came home one night with this boy who was maybe eighteen, nineteen. Pretty as fuck but trying to look tough, you know?”

  Cleve’s voice had become so quiet that Jeff was having trouble hearing it, so despite his misgivings, he rose from the bench and sat beside him. He didn’t touch him, not quite, but their bodies were close enough for Jeff to feel Cleve’s heat.

  “That kid stuck around for a couple days, running around the place mostly naked, getting high. Probably trying to steal shit too, I don’t know. I had my own room and I kept to myself. And then—I don’t know if the kid did something wrong or if Eddie was just in a bad fucking mood. But when he took out his gun that time, he wasn’t too drunk to miss.”

  “Jesus,” Jeff said. He’d suspected something like this was coming, but it was still hard to hear.

  Cleve twisted his neck to look at Jeff. His cheeks were damp with tears and his voice was hoarse, but he was obviously trying hard not to break down. “I saw him. Ran down the hall to see what was going on—stupid of me—and there was the kid on the floor, full of holes. He still had Eddie’s come wet on his face. Eddie was standing there with the gun in his hand and he turned and looked at me. Jeff, his face was… cool. Like a mask. But his fucking eyes—I swear it was like looking at the devil himself.” He let out a long, shaky breath and tipped his head against Jeff’s shoulder.

  “What happened?” asked Jeff.

  “Nothing. I walked back to my room. He never mentioned that kid to me, and I never said a word about it to him. But a few weeks later we were in Berlin and I took off. Didn’t plan it or anything. I had the clothes on my back, my passport, about a hundred euros—that’s it. I hopped on the next train and ended up in Prague. That was a year ago. I haven’t stopped moving since, not for very long.”

  “Why didn’t you—why can’t you go to the cops?”

  “Thought about it. But nothing sticks to him. You did your research, you know that. He buys people off and he has fancy lawyers and… I don’t know. I’m nobody. I bet he’d pin the murder on me—I was a jealous lover, right? And his goons would back him up. Or else he’d just kill me. Hell, he’d kill me for leaving him even if I wasn’t a witness to a murder.”

  If Jeff were in that position, he’d be hyperventilating. Freaking out. But Cleve just sounded hopeless, like a guy who was used to finding himself in bad places with no good way out. “You could go back to the US,” Jeff suggested.

  “Not safe there either. So I’ve been going here and there, making a few bucks off tourists who want a guide and some company.” He sat up so he could look at Jeff. “I haven’t been fucking them, I swear I haven’t. I’m just making enough for meals and a roof over my head, then train fare when I have to leave.”

  For no particular reason, Jeff believed him. He nodded slightly, and Cleve seemed to slump a little with relief. Neither of them paid any attention to the elderly lady who hobbled by clutching a bouquet of flowers.

  “He caught up to you in Venice?” Jeff asked after a while.

  “Yeah. He always does, eventually. I came here because it seemed a little less obvious. Plus Croatia’s not EU yet, and I’m hoping that makes things a little harder for him. For a few days.”

  “Then where will you go?”

  “Dunno, man.”

  Chapter 14

  THEY didn’t speak to each other on the bus ride back to the cathedral. Cleve seemed lost in his own thoughts and Jeff had no advice for him, no words that wouldn’t sound trite. They walked down a hill and into the main square, and for a time they just stood there, watching small children play in the fountain.

  “I could go for some lunch,” Cleve finally said. Jeff didn’t answer; he simply followed Cleve out of the square and down a block, then along the street that paralleled Ilica. They stopped at an outdoor sandwich place that had a few tables and stools tucked under an arched roof. Cleve ordered and paid again, and they ate sausage and tomatoes on good bread, with Cokes on the side. Jeff hadn’t had a Coke since he left Sacramento; he thought this one tasted different from what he was used to. They chewed and slurped and swallowed, and didn’t say anything to each other, even though there were a thousand things Jeff wanted to say.

  When they’d finished lunch, they to
ssed the wrappers into a trash can and stood awkwardly on the sidewalk. “You want to go get your stuff now?” Jeff finally asked.

  Cleve’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “So you can bring it to my place.”

  He was met with blank-faced silence and then a shake of the head. “You heard everything,” Cleve said, “and you’re not running away. Why the fuck not?”

  Because I love you, moron, Jeff thought. Or meant to think, but then Cleve’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open in shock.

  “You what?” Cleve squawked.

  “Oh, fuck. I didn’t mean— Look, let’s pretend I didn’t say that, okay?”

  “We fucking well will not! Say it again.”

  Passersby were staring at the men who were arguing in English. Jeff glared defiantly at an older man in a gray suit and then took a deep breath. “I love you, moron,” he repeated.

  “You can’t.”

  “That’s what I thought too. I never….” He never had said those words before, not even to Kyle, although Kyle used to say them to him. In retrospect, his ex’s ass hattery might not have been entirely Kyle’s fault. “It’s true,” he added lamely.

  “I lied to you. I stole from you. I ran away from you. I told you what I’ve been doing with myself for the last twenty years. How could you love me?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff replied. “I didn’t plan to. I didn’t—I’m standing in the middle of some street I don’t even know the name of—”

  “Bogovićeva.”

  “Okay, some street I can’t pronounce, in a city I couldn’t have found on a map a week ago, and everything’s all fucked up and hopeless and stupid and I know I’m just some guy with a MasterCard as far as you’re concerned. But I love you.”

  Cleve stared at him for a long minute. And then Cleve’s face broke into a wide and sunny smile. “Let’s go get my stuff.”

  “YOU’RE not, you know,” Cleve said.

  They were only a half block from the sandwich place, still a few blocks away from the Empire, and Jeff felt a little lightheaded. He couldn’t believe he’d just declared his love, and it took him a moment to process Cleve’s statement. “Not what?”

  “Not just some guy with a MasterCard. I chose you.”

  “Yeah. ’Cause I looked clueless and lonely.”

  Cleve gently shoved his arm. “You did. But you also looked… beautiful. Your hair was kind of falling in your face and you had this little frown line between your eyebrows and you looked so goddamn… ordinary.”

  “Ordinary? Thanks a lot.”

  Cleve caught at his arm, stopping him, and looked earnestly into his face. “You heard my story. Don’t you have any idea how much I want ordinary?” He shook his head. “When I first saw you, I almost thought you were a goddamn hallucination. You were the man of my fucking dreams.”

  They were blocking the sidewalk, leading to many exasperated looks from passersby, but Jeff didn’t care. He was holding his breath, waiting for Cleve to tell him what a disappointment he’d been. Probably he’d say it nicely.

  “You’re not ordinary,” Cleve said, and while Jeff stood there, trying to decide if that was a good thing or bad, Cleve let go of his arm and squeezed his shoulder instead. “Not ordinary at all, Just Jeff,” he rasped.

  “Cleve—”

  “I’ve never loved anyone. Don’t know what it feels like. But I’d rather get in front of one of Eddie’s bullets than go on without you, and I’m thinking maybe that’s close enough.”

  Jeff could only gape in response.

  “C’mon,” Cleve said with a chuckle. “Let’s move before someone pushes us in front of a tram.”

  The clerk at the Empire was the guy who’d been there the day before, the one who claimed not to know anything about Cleve. He looked a little sheepish when Jeff walked into the lobby with Cleve at his side, and Jeff couldn’t avoid a slightly smug grin.

  “Gonna be checking out, Ivan,” Cleve said as they walked by. “I’ll be back in a sec.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The Empire’s elevator was larger than the one in the time-share but even more antiquated. It wheezed audibly as it rose, and Jeff was sure it would have been faster for them to climb the stairs. But finally the number four lit up in red, a gasping sort of dinging noise sounded, and the doors inched open. “Nice place,” Jeff said as they exited. The hallway was carpeted and wallpapered in dingy red.

  “Used to be a nice place, back when the Habsburgs paid a visit. I was trying not to max out your credit card.”

  “Thanks.”

  The hotel still used old-fashioned metal keys instead of plastic cards. Cleve rattled his in the lock for a moment, swore softly, and finally got the door open.

  “Shit!” he yelled immediately.

  Jeff crowded in beside him. The bed was made up neatly, but clothing was scattered all over the mattress and the floor. Jeff was just processing the realization that the clothing was in shreds when Cleve turned around and shoved him out the door. “Go! Goddamn it, Jeff, get the fuck out of here!” His voice was high with panic.

  Jeff was slowed by confusion. “What—”

  “What do you think? They’ve been here! Go!” Cleve pushed him again in the chest, almost hard enough to make Jeff stumble.

  “But I don’t—” When Cleve pushed him a third time, toward the far end of the hallway, Jeff dug in his heels. “What are you doing?”

  “Go out the back way. I’ll take the elevator down to the lobby.”

  “And then we’ll meet where?” Jeff asked, still confused.

  “We won’t! You’re gonna get the fuck out of Dodge, man.”

  Cleve looked close to tears, probably more out of frustration and desperation than grief. But Jeff grabbed his arm. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

  “Now is not the time to be a goddamn hero! Go!”

  “No,” Jeff said evenly, stubbornly. “Get whatever you need and let’s go. Together.”

  “Fuck!” Cleve bared his teeth and shook his head but then slumped a little. “There’s nothing in there I need.”

  They ran down the back stairway together. Jeff felt a little bit like someone in an action movie—Tom Cruise, maybe, or Matt Damon. Oh! Daniel Craig. Jeff had always wanted to wear a tuxedo and have someone give him cool spy gadgets.

  They burst out a back door and ended up in a courtyard with laundry flapping above them. They were both breathing hard. Cleve grabbed Jeff by the shoulders and shoved him roughly against a gray plastered wall. “This isn’t a movie,” he said as if he’d been reading Jeff’s mind. “This isn’t a fucking novel. Eddie’s bullets kill you for real. I can tell you that for sure. Go home to your mom and dad, Jeff. They love you.”

  Jeff clutched at Cleve’s hair and pulled him close. “But I love you.” And although the timing was totally inappropriate, Jeff kissed him furiously.

  When he released Cleve, the other man shook his head mournfully and yet couldn’t quite hide a small smile. Maybe he was relieved to finally have someone on his side, even if that someone was just an IT guy from Sacramento.

  “You think it’s safe to go to the time-share and get my stuff?” Jeff asked.

  “Probably not. But let’s go.”

  Jeff tried to walk quickly but unobtrusively, which was harder than he expected. He felt as though every eye in Zagreb was focused on him, as if every person they passed was hiding an Uzi under their shirt. “Do you think Eddie’s here or just his people?” Jeff asked.

  “Dunno. He was in Venice.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Tall, blond, midfifties. Thin. He’s supposed to wear glasses but usually doesn’t when he’s not at home.”

  Jeff looked around. There were no pale myopic men nearby, at least as far as he could tell.

  Their route to the time-share was via some narrow streets Jeff hadn’t been on before, and twice they cut through courtyards. Jelena smiled at them when they entered the building, but Jeff only gave he
r a quick wave as they ran by. He was enormously relieved to discover that his room looked untouched. Most of his clothing was still in his suitcase, and it took him only a couple of minutes to pack up his toiletries and tuck his laptop and Kindle away. The mask Cleve had given him was still safely packed, along with the gifts he’d bought his mother. The suitcase seemed very heavy when he looked at Cleve’s empty hands. “Is there anything you need before we go?” Jeff asked.

  “I have my passport and the clothes I’m wearing. Everything else just weighs me down. If I had something worth keeping, I would.” He smiled a little. “Might have to borrow your toothbrush again.”

  Jeff nodded and didn’t ask where they were going next.

  They had to stop in the lobby before they left. Jelena frowned when she saw Jeff’s luggage. “Is your room not to your liking?”

  “The room was fine. I’ve had a change of plans is all.” He inclined his head slightly in Cleve’s direction.

  Jelena raised her perfectly tweezed eyebrows and twitched the corners of her mouth. “Oh. I see.”

  Cleve grinned wolfishly. “I’m gonna take him to Plitvice Lakes. He’s never been. And then we’ll drive down to Dubrovnik.”

  “Oh, you will like these places very much,” Jelena told Jeff earnestly.

  “I’m sure I will. But can I have my passport back?”

  “Of course!” She bent her knees a little and did something under the counter; Jeff heard the click-click of a safe being opened. A moment later she handed the blue-covered document over the desk. “Here you are. Do you wish me to cancel the remainder of your reservation?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  She shrugged. “It is normal. Plans change.”

  Chapter 15

  THE train rocked comfortably as they rolled alongside a green river. Steep hills towered over them on either side, with little chalets tucked here and there and, at the top of the tallest peaks, sharp-spired churches.