A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Nick knew there was no more waiting. He groped his pant pockets. “Oh no,” he gasped.

  Lynn sat down on the bench. “Oh no, what?” she replied.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Are you all right?” John asked in a concerned, fatherly voice.

  Nick must have turned green. He felt green, or whatever color matched the disgust crashing over him for taking advantage of these people—good people, kind people. His only consolation was the fact that they’d never know. He was stealing a ride; that was the extent of his crime.

  “I don’t have my wallet. Oh, Christ! I must have left it on the plane.”

  Lynn slapped her palm against her heart. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  Nick performed a second perfunctory groping of his pants and wormed his hands up his sides, careful to avoid his back pocket. He stared at the family with a sincere expression of panic.

  “All my cash and credit cards.”

  “Did you check your carry-on bag?” Lynn asked.

  “Good thinking!” Nick replied. He opened his bag and made a show of rifling through it. Then he lifted his hands in defeat. “No, not there.” He threw John an apologetic look. “Let’s go directly to your stop, San Samuele. I can’t give you my half of the fare. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” John rasped. “Don’t worry about that right now. The least we can do is drop you at Ca’ Rezzonico. You should call the airline immediately—”

  “I will.” Nick patted the breast pocket of his blazer. “I have my phone and passport. I’ll call as soon as I get off the boat.”

  “It had all of your money?” Lynn groaned. “You have no cash on you at all?” Hadn’t they already established this fact? Nick was beginning to resent the gullibility of the Warbly-Gardeners. He would have to continue performing this inept charade as long as they refused to give up hope.

  “Have you checked the cushions in the cabin?” August suggested. “Maybe it fell out there?”

  “I’ll look!” squealed Magnus, the only family member who didn’t seem unduly bothered by Nick’s loss. They heard the farting sounds of a child’s hands squeezing into leather crevices. “Nope,” came the report.

  “Ca’ Rezzonico,” the captain shouted as the motoscafo tipped toward a rickety wood dock. A massive white palazzo loomed in front of him, set back from the water by a strip of pavement. Nick felt the weight of guilt lift just seeing the dock. He’d soon be free of them.

  “Well, this is me,” Nick announced, lifting the strap of his carry-on bag over his shoulder. “Again, I’m sorry about my half of the ride.”

  “Will you be okay?” Lynn worried. She climbed to her feet, only to be tossed off balance by the rocking waves. She stabilized herself against her husband’s chest.

  “I’ll be fine. Thank you so much. It was really nice to meet you.” He meant it. They’d been baptized into Venice together, and he was grateful for their half hour of kindness. Maybe he’d run into them again in twenty years and admit he’d been too poor to afford the ride. It would be funny in twenty years.

  Lynn whispered urgently into John’s ear. Nick couldn’t hear what she was saying and decided not to wait around to find out. The captain was already struggling to deposit his suitcase securely on the dock; the swaying of the boat was frustrating his efforts. Nick glanced beyond the sagging planks of Ca’ Rezzonico, where a long brick walkway telescoped into the city’s dark innards. He saw a figure advancing toward him, a mere pinprick expanding between two walls.

  Nick crawled through the cabin and spun around to give one last wave to the family, only to find one of them missing. Instead, John was now ducking out from the cabin doors with a fan of orange euro notes in his hand.

  “Nicholas,” John said severely. “Take this.” He waved the fifties, still crisp from the airport ATM.

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll be okay.”

  “No,” John persisted. “I insist. It’s only three hundred euros, but it should see you through until you make arrangements with your bank.”

  “Honestly, I’ll be fine.” Nick’s foot searched blindly for the dock step. “Really, you’ve already helped too much. I don’t want to take any more.”

  Lynn climbed out of the cabin and clung to her husband’s arm. “Don’t be crazy. We’re not going to leave you stranded in Venice without a cent. Take the money.” John shook the cash in accompaniment to her pleas. “It makes us happy to help you. We’d feel terrible if we didn’t!”

  “I’d rather not,” Nick whimpered. “I don’t want it.”

  “You can pay us back,” John reasoned. “You have my card.”

  “Please,” Lynn begged. “You’ll ruin our vacation if you don’t accept it!”

  These monsters, Nick thought, and at the same exact moment, These wonderful people. He lifted his eyes to escape them and gazed down the brick corridor beyond the dock. He recognized the beautiful orb of his boyfriend’s head and his loose, darting stride that favored the right hip. Nick felt his throat catch with adrenaline and love. Nothing else mattered, least of all this stupid test to see if he could scam a free boat ride. He noticed that Clay had undergone a slight change in appearance since he last saw him: his hair was clipped short against his scalp and he wore a preppy blue-and-white-striped button-down. They were both new men in Venice.

  “Email me when you get your funds settled,” John instructed. “You can PayPal the money back to me. Don’t forget, we have that bit of business to discuss anyway.”

  Accepting the money would be easier than arguing a case for refusing it. Nick opened his palm and slid the three hundred euros from the relentlessly generous Warbly-Gardeners into his jacket pocket.

  “Did he take the money?” August asked as she too emerged from the cabin, banging her cast against the doorframe. Charity had become a family affair. Only Magnus remained in the back—Nick’s new favorite family member—writhing across the butterscotch cushions like a child prince.

  “Yes,” Lynn exhaled. “But we had to threaten him.”

  “Um, if you’re going to be in Venice for the next few days,” August began, “we could—” But the invitation was interrupted by the captain’s peevish grunt. It was time for Nick to disembark.

  “Again, thank you. I really appreciate it,” Nick said as he took the captain’s hand and prepared for his leap onto the dock. He aimed for the shelf of wood next to his suitcase. But at the very moment he sprung, a wave struck the boat, pitching it downward. The impact muted Nick’s trajectory, and he barely managed to anchor a knee and two palms on the splintered planks. His bloated leather bag slammed against his ribs. He’d nearly become a first-day casualty of the Grand Canal. But it was only when he got to his feet on the dock, with his right knee burning and perhaps bleeding, that he felt the lightness in his back pocket. His hand raced to recover what was no longer there.

  His wallet was splayed on the pin-striped deck, his own abundant supply of euros spilling out of the billfold right at the tip of John’s shoe. When the captain picked it up and reached out to return it to its rightful owner, Nick didn’t dare make eye contact with the family. He grabbed the wallet with out-of-focus eyes.

  The captain shifted the engine into reverse, and the boat swirled backward into the blue. Three faces stared at him from across the water. Silent, blank, only beginning to curdle with anger.

  Nick’s hands were shaking. He bent down, his heart pressed against his knee, breathing hard, with tremors moving up his windpipe that might erupt into tears or laughter. In the lottery of emotions, he wasn’t sure which would win.

  “Nicky!” Clay called as he rounded the corner. “See! I never doubted for a second you’d come!” Nick stood up, trying to straighten his jacket, trying to be the man he’d pictured yesterday when he’d put on these clothes. The act wasn’t working. Clay slowed his advance. “What’s wrong?”

  Nick wanted to say something tough or witty. Failing that, he wanted to forget what had happened and bask in the lunatic be
auty of Venice. He and Clay were still new as a couple, and first impressions mattered. But Nick had lost his courage, and out sputtered the truth. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I’m a really bad crook.”

  Clay grabbed the suitcase and took him by the shoulder. In the shadows of the alley, he kissed Nick on the mouth. “Don’t worry, I’m not any better at it.” He squeezed Nick’s arm. “A bad crook is the best kind.”

  Chapter 2

  The list of speakers for the dead wasn’t long.

  It was a freezing New York morning that past February. Inside the church vestibule, Nick scanned the program and found, to his relief, only five names printed under REMARKS. Today’s memorial service wasn’t the first that Nick had attended to honor a legendary New Yorker whom he’d never actually met in life. In their sixteen months together, Ari had brought Nick to half a dozen of them, and that total didn’t count funerals or wakes. Nick would have preferred a funeral. The mourners tended to be too choked in grief to say much, and a sense of urgency hung over the proceedings, as if the coffin were a hot coal that had to be buried in the ground before it cooled and crumbled.

  Memorial services were a very different beast. Because they occurred months and sometimes years after death, these “celebrations of life” gave everyone license to showboat. People spoke with anguished, saw-toothed voices; they used their moment at the microphone to rattle off decades of anecdotes, playing up their own parts and stealing all of the clever lines; some presented slide shows; a few took the opportunity to settle old scores; others had the audacity to sing. Funerals respected the sacrifice of an hour. But an 11:00 a.m. memorial service like this one for Freddy van der Haar could easily open a sinkhole in the center of the day.

  Nick curled the program in his fist and drummed it against Ari’s shoulder. Five speakers wasn’t too egregious. He could handle five speeches.

  “Hey,” Nick murmured. “What did Freddy die of, anyway?” But a choir had erupted inside the chapel, and Ari was tugging him through the vestibule doors to locate seats.

  “They’re dying in droves,” Ari had said in the taxi that morning as they threaded their way through Manhattan.

  “Who are?” Nick asked.

  “The old New York scene,” he’d replied, drawing an intricate shape with his finger on the fogged back window. Nick tilted his head from side to side, trying to discern the image. All he caught were the blurry traffic colors of Second Avenue that the freshest lines let in. “So sad, all of that talent wiped out. It’s been a terrible season for them.”

  Ari made “old New York” sound like a losing football team. But Nick understood what his boyfriend meant. While Nick was far too young to have any direct connection to the artists and bohemians who blew up Manhattan in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Ari had managed to breathe some of their final intoxicating vapors. Of course, Ari had the advantage of time and place. He’d been born and bred on the Upper West Side, an only child of posh, quasi-bohemian Sephardic Jews. At forty-three, Ari never tired of bragging about coming of age in a New York “right before the rabbit-toothed grim reaper Giuliani scythed the entire garden.” He reminisced about wild nights in bars and clubs that existed in a far-off galaxy before the advent of camera phones. After two glasses of wine, Ari was prone to turn epitaphic: It’s gone. People talk like New York still exists, but it doesn’t. It’s not here anymore. Maybe it moved to your town in Ohio, while we’re all stuck on this island searching for it. Nick, annoyed at learning for the umpteenth time that his adopted city was actually a mirage, had to stifle the desire to scream, Good, I’m glad it’s gone! Now we can go on without the pressure of living up to it!

  Nick wanted to love New York in the present—right here, right now, in the brightest, energy-sapping neon of today. Well, maybe not right now, right today. In February, the worn-out animal of Manhattan took on the dull camouflage of its pigeons. February was the worst month for the city, a flat hangover stretch after too many holidays clumped together. Memorial services for strangers—that was a fitting ceremony for the season.

  Nick had attempted to bail out of the one today. Wouldn’t it be more respectful not to pay his respects to a dead man he didn’t know? Waking under three blankets and a down comforter, he’d contemplated a sudden flu, even test-firing a few phlegmy coughs. But Ari, lying next to him in the tucked-up position of a cannonball diver, gripped his chest with a cold hand that had fallen free from the covers in the night. “No way, Nick,” he grumbled. “You’re coming. I promise it’ll be interesting. Van der Haar was one of the last true eccentrics. Imagine the freaks and crazies that the service will draw.” When that bait failed to lure Nick, Ari retracted his hand and sent it scouting across the nightstand for his phone. “Don’t forget, Freddy was also a client.”

  Nick couldn’t argue that point.

  Inside the church he expected to find the usual misery of gray stone and stained glass. Instead, the compact, sunlit space looked more like a New England village meetinghouse. It had scruffy beige carpeting, opaque casement windows, and red velveteen cushions running the length of the pews. There wasn’t a cross or a confession booth in sight. Still, Nick sensed a hostile welcome; a riptide of irritated glances made it clear that they’d arrived late, and on top of it Nick had failed to keep the door from slamming shut behind them. Six gospel singers—four older black women and two younger white men—clapped and swayed at the altar in a spill of shimmery purple. Their deep, harmonic voices were accompanied by the tuneless pings and bangs of an antique radiator. Ari grabbed Nick’s hand to advertise that they were in the market for two seats together, and they scurried down the aisle with apologetic bent backs.

  The last two pews seemed to be reserved for the homeless. Sleeping bodies, bundled in torn winter coats, were strewn across the cushions. That left the remaining ten rows crammed with upright guests who were here for Freddy. They whispered, giggled, dabbed tissues to moist eyes, waved flirtatiously to one another, shopped on their phones, and applied heavy doses of makeup. Nick spotted the odd dressed-down celebrity—musicians and artists who had been rediscovered so many times over the decades that their lives had been ransacked for any last item of cultural value. Some attendees looked conspicuously rich; the majority looked conspicuously poor; only one or two men conspicuously straight. But all were well above the age of sixty. By comparison, Ari, with his inky black curls and taut, stubbly cheeks, appeared like an ambassador from the kingdom of youth. Nick wasn’t sure what that made him, nearly twenty years younger than his boyfriend. Youth’s boy assistant? He was bound to hear a nasty comment or two. These cranky, seen-it-all New Yorkers could be so ruthless in their judgments. Even a simple compliment was usually delivered in the shrink-wrap of an insult: “Aren’t you a cute little trick!” Nick wondered what his friends his own age were doing this morning. Sleeping in, just going to sleep, still in a rush to see it all.

  Ari had located an air pocket in the third row. Begrudgingly, several sitters shifted over. One wailed “For fuck’s sake!” to peals of laughter. Nick regretted not taking off his coat before he sat down; the radiator was as effective as it was loud. Technically, his gray-and-black houndstooth coat with leather buttons belonged to Ari. One of the boons of living with a man nearly your exact size was the doubling—or in Nick’s case, quadrupling—of your wardrobe. Ari hadn’t fared as well in that exchange. At first, Ari had bought Nick a few quality shirts and pants in an effort to safeguard his closets. Eventually he just shopped more frequently and tossed his boyfriend the overflow.

  “What kind of church has wall-to-wall carpeting?” Nick whispered.

  “It’s Quaker,” Ari answered. “It was probably the only denomination that would allow a service for such a hedonist. I’m also guessing it was cheap to rent.”

  “But weren’t the van der Haars superrich? I mean, that last name . . .”

  Ari widened his eyes at the obviousness of the claim. “Uh, yeah. Old rich. Like the oldest rich. They were one of the first Dutch families in N
ew York. Nick, you should know about them from their silver collection. Are you forgetting everything you’ve learned at Wickston?” He softened his tone. “When I was a kid, the hospitals and museums had wings dedicated in their name. There was even a van der Haar fountain in Tribeca. That’s all gone now. Newer money took their place.”

  “What did Freddy die of?” Nick asked again, but Ari leaned forward to tap the shoulder of a woman in the pew ahead. She had a gray wasp hive of hair; deep fissures scored her lips, in which foundation collected like shale.

  “Ari, darling, glad you could come,” she whispered. “I’m sorry it’s so jammed. I know. We should have booked a bigger venue.” She rotated farther around to grip the back of the bench. Tabs of canary-yellow nail polish grew from veiny, rake-bent fingers. “The church lets the homeless sleep in here at night. Usually they’re swept out in the morning. But it was so cold today that some of them wouldn’t budge.” She grinned with mischief. “Who cares? Freddy would have loved that detail, don’t you think?”

  Nick wasn’t convinced that anyone would want their memorial service doubling as a homeless shelter, but he gave a nod of earnest agreement. Ari introduced the woman as Gitsy Veros, Freddy’s longtime gallerist. Ari asked her when Freddy’s last show had been, and two of Gitsy’s fingers strolled her chin as she tried to recall. “Ten years maybe? His paintings never sold. His photographs did. Well, less and less. Maybe they will again now.” She slapped the back of the pew. “Were they ever the point? It was Freddy who was the real work of art!”

  The choir ended on a soaring note. Gitsy glided from her seat and approached the altar. On either side of the podium stood two empty white pedestals; Nick wondered if bouquets or framed portraits had been forgotten in the flurry of morning preparations. Gitsy told a story about going up to East Harlem with Freddy in the mid-1980s to hear his favorite gospel choir—“He might’ve been cruising and using me as cover.” She gestured to the front row and introduced the speakers. Nick studied the five elderly men who sat there, trying to assess their likelihood of rambling beyond a humane ten-minute window. The men were cadaverous, their skulls decorated with badly dyed chunks of hair, their bodies too thin for their clothes, two of them clinging to walkers. Nick tried to inflate their hollow chests with once-spectacular personalities. In this church, on a different occasion, they could have passed for veterans or survivors of a brutal war that had killed all of their friends and family. Being old was its own war, Nick supposed, reaching for Ari’s hand. If these men kept their speeches short, they could be out within the hour and on the hunt for a Vietnamese restaurant in the East Village.