A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Clay still felt uneasy about implicating Nick in the con. Every time he tried to talk him out of it, Nick had replied almost braggingly, “It was my idea!” Nick’s part in the scheme wouldn’t extend beyond a ten-minute window, but his role, in its way, was the deeper betrayal. Folded up in Clay’s shirt pocket was a photograph of their target. Clay had ripped it out of a Venetian society magazine to give to Nick so he could memorize the man’s face—just in case he hadn’t bothered to google him. Clay reached for the folded picture with his free hand but stopped himself. There was no reason to sour Nick’s happiness right now. He’d let him remain the innocent sightseer for a little bit longer before broaching the ugly business of the scam.

  They walked through a flock of pigeons that erupted around them, and Nick shot his hand toward the suitcase. “Let me take that,” he said. “You don’t need to carry my bag for me.”

  “It’s okay,” Clay replied. “You relax after your flight. I’ll need your help carrying it over the bridge ahead.” Clay was taking Nick on a slight detour to reach the apartment he’d secured for him. There was a shorter route up the fondamenta that didn’t involve bridges, but that was far less scenic and Clay wanted Nick to appreciate the cloistered activity of Campo Santa Margherita. The square was a hive of university students who hung around the outdoor caffès. It might convince Nick that Venice wasn’t solely occupied by tourists.

  Clay stopped at the foot of a narrow bridge. He’d been having stomach pains for the past month. Right now, a little electroshock fired through his intestines, but he masked it with a few theatrical weight lifter breaths. Nick grabbed the other end of the suitcase, and they carried it like an ambulance stretcher over the stone arc. As they descended, Clay’s nose picked up the sweet reek of the canal, a medieval waft of rot and brine. Unlike the rest of humanity, Clay loved that rancid Venetian perfume; it reminded him of his first days here, a middle-class black kid from the Bronx suddenly crowned a prince of Italy. Months and even years later, when he had been back in New York living with Freddy, there had been spots—certain subway platforms on humid summer days—where he’d catch a whiff of that familiar odor. The subway commute from Freddy’s brownstone in Bed-Stuy all the way up to Clay’s old neighborhood in the Bronx was a torturous hour-and-a-half ride, and its only reward was the dank smell of the platforms. The subway started out black in Brooklyn. By the time the train reached Manhattan, its skin had turned white, and it stayed that way until 116th Street, when the Columbia kids disembarked. Then the snake shed its white skin for black again and continued on in its original color, Clay’s color, to its final stops in the Bronx. Sometimes he could find that smell on the Van Cortlandt Park stop, sometimes on 238th Street, and he’d wait there and breathe in the aroma of fetid water and rat death and it would bring back the tingling world of his first days in Venice.

  “Stings your eyes a bit,” Nick noted with a scrunched nose. “Do you ever get used to the smell?”

  “Never,” Clay replied. He commandeered the suitcase again, and they proceeded past a few gelato shops on the periphery of the square.

  “Sorry about my bag,” Nick said. “I’m sorry it’s so heavy. I wish you’d let me take it.” Gratuitous apologizing was one of Nick’s midwestern tics. Nick was a one-man chorus of I’m sorry and Pardon me. Today, though, Clay didn’t razz Nick for being so sorry. The poor guy was jetlagged and still shaken from his accidental theft of three hundred euros from the American family on the motoscafo. (Never in Clay’s life had he been offered three hundred euros from concerned strangers; never had he been invited to share a motorboat from the airport.) Clay simply said, “It’s fine. We’re close now.” They had reached the mouth of the campo.

  The square spread out in a large rectangle that the strong one o’clock sun turned the color of elephant hide. A few lean chestnut trees were beginning to bud in the center. A fruit stand supplied painterly orbs of reds and yellows, while a nearby fish stand presented a science experiment of plastic tubs and rubber hoses. Around the perimeter, canvas umbrellas and metal chairs were herded in their separate pens, one caffè’s allotment nearly indistinguishable from the next. It was a lovely springtime scene, although Clay never forgot the epic fistfight he’d once witnessed in this square late one night outside a bar. It was no mere one-two punch like the neighborhood fights of his youth. The unchecked violence went on for a good ten minutes, with two local men falling over tables and punching the teeth out of each other. It had been the only fight he’d seen in his eight months in Venice, but it served as a reminder that the city was a tougher place than its postcard appearance let on.

  “Over there,” Clay said, pointing to a yellow awning, “is a great pizza spot.” He moved his finger a few storefronts to the right. “And that’s the caffè I went to every day after work. I’d stay all night drinking red wine. It’s close to Daniela’s apartment, so you can hop over for a glass and watch the world stroll by.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nick replied distantly, battling a yawn. Clay had the unpleasant sensation of a father giving his bored son a tour of his alma mater. Nick’s fatigue was catching up to him, and he swayed zombielike while squinting his eyes. “We can’t even sleep together,” he abruptly exclaimed. “I wish we were staying in the same place.”

  “Me too,” Clay said. “But that wouldn’t really work for our plan, would it? We wouldn’t get far on that arrangement.”

  “Still . . .” Nick’s frail attempt at a fight trailed off.

  “It’s only a week. Two at most, and then we’ll be together all the time. We can go south to Ravello or west to San Remo. We can even hide out in a hotel here in Venice on Giudecca.”

  “My feet hurt,” Nick complained, so quietly it seemed more like a message he was relaying between remote parts of his brain. Clay glanced down at Nick’s black alligator penny loafers, which were barely broken in and would definitely lead to blisters in this punishing walking town. Clay dug into his pocket, located a copper two-cent euro coin, and bent down to insert it in the empty leather slot on Nick’s right shoe.

  “You put one coin in backward for good luck,” Clay explained. “Only on one shoe. Two is bad luck.” For Clay, the coin made all the difference; the loafers looked owned now instead of borrowed. He stood up and smiled, presuming this gesture of affection would swing Nick into a sweeter mood. Instead, Nick grimaced down at his foot, as if he’d taken Clay’s minor adjustment as a criticism of his outfit.

  “Thanks,” Nick said hollowly. “At least when I look down, I can think of you.”

  Clay gave a contrite laugh. “It will bring us both luck.” He pushed Nick forward through the square. “In bocca al lupo. That’s how you say good luck in Italian. ‘Into the wolf’s mouth.’ And then you answer, ‘Crepi!’ That means ‘die.’”

  “Huh? What are you talking about? A wolf dies?”

  Clay decided to stick to essential facts. “You’ll like Daniela,” he promised. “Do me a favor and take her out to dinner now that you’re flush with euros. By the way, don’t call her trans. She doesn’t appreciate that word. She’s old-school. She’s a woman. Not fluid, not trans. Got it?”

  Clay waited for a reaction from Nick. Another person’s idea of normalcy was always a foreign country, just as your own borders on that dominion were constantly expanding or shrinking, ejecting proud, long-standing residents while taking in exciting new émigrés that would have been denied entry the year before. Clay decided to make the judgment easy for Nick. “Daniela’s the best person in Venice,” he said. “The very best.”

  In truth, Daniela was Clay’s one remaining friend in Venice. She’d also been the first friend of Freddy’s he’d ever met. It had been back during that cold fall, or free fall really, after Clay had lost all employment prospects and was holding on to the city for dear life. In a sense, by introducing Daniela and Clay, Freddy had given them like gifts to each other. And Daniela had treated him like family—like a rightful member of Freddy’s close-knit band of bohemian spirits. In the en
d, she would prove the only friend of Freddy’s to see Clay in that light.

  Daniela had been born a Henrik in Frankfurt, the son of banking parents, and she’d moved to Venice at age thirty to become a permanent expat under her new self-assigned name. The only reminder of that border crossing was a slit-like scar across her neck where her Adam’s apple had once protruded. Daniela was now in her late sixties and stayed afloat exporting local Burano lace to Northern European capitals. When Clay phoned her last week to ask about the small guest room in her ground-floor flat off Calle Degolin, she’d been exceedingly generous. “Ah,” she’d crowed. “Now your friend can say he is staying at the Daniela!”

  Clay repeated the joke now. “You can tell everyone you’re staying at the Daniela!” Nick’s confused frown testified to his ignorance of the famous five-star Danieli hotel off San Marco. “Never mind.”

  They curled around the side of the square and headed toward a second bridge that took them over the same canal they had already crossed. Clay wondered whether Nick noticed the detour. Impossible. Venice really was all maze. After a right and another left, they entered a tunnel where strips of stucco were peeling off the brick like wet billboard paper. Nick had to duck so as not to hit his head. One more turn, and Clay opened a black gate to enter a tiny concrete garden with enough room for a clothes-drying rack and a circular wrought-iron table.

  Daniela appeared as a red streak across the bank of dirty windows. She then emerged into the sunlight exactly as Clay had remembered her. She wore a red blouse with opal buttons and a pair of loose-legged magenta pants. Her hair was a two-tone confection of blond and wheat brown, cut into a practical suburban bob. Enormous red-framed glasses magnified her gray eyes.

  “Oh, Clay,” she cried with a hint of residual mourning. They had already grieved together twice by phone—first in a marathon two-hour tearjerker right after Freddy died, and again last week for a more celebratory fifteen minutes of memory volleying.

  They kissed on both cheeks. Daniela turned to apply the same double kiss to Nick with bumbling, apologetic negotiations. It required a whisper of instruction on Daniela’s part. “I am European. Let me kiss the other cheek, okay?” She stepped back and eyed Nick’s enormous suitcase, nibbling on her thumbnail with concern. An “Effff” escaped her lips.

  “I’m sorry I’m staying with you,” Nick said clumsily.

  She stared up at him with her thumbnail still wedged between her teeth. “Why?” She threw a sly glance at Clay, which spoke everything about her first impression of Nick—Cute, but I’m not sure he’s clever enough for you, doll.

  “I think he means—” Clay attempted a rescue.

  “Whatever he means, welcome!” Daniela proclaimed in a warm tone. “It really is a pleasure to have you. How lucky! Your first time in Venice!” Clay worried she might make the Danieli joke. “Ah, but first, a glass of champagne!” She scrambled into the dark interior. Nick stood still, waiting to be formally invited into the apartment. Clay grabbed his hand to lead him through the doorway. He pinched Nick’s pinkie affectionately and was relieved when Nick curled it around his thumb in a tiny embrace.

  Daniela’s low-ceilinged apartment was crowded with a lifetime of benign hoarding. Work papers, receipts, invoices, and swatches of lace were stacked across a thin kitchen table pushed up against the front windows. Dry flowers the shape of mop heads sprouted out of vases. A small refrigerator (which Daniela now opened to extract the promised bottle of champagne) stood next to a washing machine, and together the two units supported a wooden board for added counter space. A rowing machine leaned against the far wall. Clay pictured Daniela using it in her concrete garden every morning with her German sense of discipline, a stationary rower in a city of singing gondoliers.

  She peeled off the gold foil and popped the cork with a toddler-like “Wheee!” It was the same exclamation that Freddy would make when he opened a champagne bottle. It became code for any point in the day when Freddy wished he could be drinking champagne, and he squealed it most insistently at the least appropriate moments (“Wheee!” as they inched along a hospital corridor leading to his chemotherapy session). Daniela gathered three crystal glasses from the shelf above the stove.

  Nick stood quietly by the front door like a shy fan who’d managed to sneak backstage and now hoped to disappear into the scenery. Clay stared over at him, trying to induce a smile by example. His blond hair was curling around his ears as it dried, and his bottom teeth scraped distractedly against his upper lip. Clay experienced a flash of astonishment at how handsome his boyfriend was. A few feet away loomed the doorway to the guest bedroom. Daniela had made up the narrow bed with military precision. A square of cobalt blue from the room’s shaded skylight shone across the white sheets. It excited Clay to think of sex with Nick on that bed, and the added exertion of having to keep quiet so Daniela wouldn’t overhear them.

  “You must have champagne the first hour you get to Venice,” Daniela instructed as she poured. “Not prosecco. Champagne. It gives you your legs back after a long trip.” She wiped her fingers, wet from overpour, on a dish towel. “You know who taught me that? Freddy.”

  “Of course he did!” Clay responded.

  “He was so good with life knowledge, wasn’t he?”

  Freddy had done more than school Clay on the health benefits of champagne. Twice Freddy had saved him, taking him in when he’d been out of options. That ferocious, beautiful man had been the first or last of his kind—first or last, Clay could never decide which; maybe he was an only. But Clay didn’t want to be lured into another grieving session, especially in front of Nick. That sort of grief didn’t allow room for anyone else. He cleared his throat and muttered a dejected “Yeah.” He considered switching to Italian so that Nick wouldn’t detect the tremble in his voice. “Freddy taught me a lot of things.”

  Daniela smiled at him compassionately. “I miss him too. The other day, I found a picture of us from twenty years ago, snapped during acqua alta. We look like two gypsies. I left it out to show you . . .” She spun around, searching the countertops, but failed to locate the photo. She handed a glass of champagne to Clay and held one out for Nick, forcing him to join them. They clinked glasses and drank.

  “Feel better?” Daniela asked her new roommate.

  “Maybe you need a nap, Nicky,” Clay suggested.

  “I’m sorry I’m so out of it,” Nick replied, wiping his face as if to manually clear his tired expression. “I’m really happy to be here. I’ll try not to bother you.”

  “Oh, I live to be bothered,” she assured him as she poured herself a second glass. “Make yourself at home. Your bedroom is right behind you. It’s a bit cramped, but . . .”

  After Nick steered his suitcase into the room to get settled, Daniela leaned over the counter with a whisper. “Do I call him Nick or Nicky?”

  “He comes if you call him by either name.”

  She smirked. “You’re so bad.”

  “Don’t be fooled. I really like him.”

  “Oh, I sense that. Is he always so sorry for everything?”

  “Yes! He is!”

  “That suitcase!” She laughed as she tapped her nail on the counter. “He’s a looker. I’ll give you that.”

  It occurred to Clay that he was showing Nick off to Daniela, the silent brag of an attractive companion. She’d never known him to have a boyfriend or even a date in all the months he’d lived in Venice. “What about you?” Clay asked. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  Daniela took a swallow of champagne. “Well,” she said. “I’ve had my heart stomped on twice last year. But I’m seeing a prominent businessman from Shanghai, and I’ll admit I’m unnerved by how smitten I am. You know, the Chinese have basically bought up all of San Marco. I mean, all of it in the past few years. So who knows? Maybe I’ll become La Signora of Palazzo Barbaro yet!”

  “Which is exactly where you deserve to be,” he told her, although Clay felt sure that Daniela was destined to remain in this apartment
until the day she died. She played up the part of the romantic, but she was too smart to let love save her from herself. Clay glanced around with admiring eyes. “The place looks great.”

  “This old bunker!” Daniela groaned. “For the last century two branches of a Venetian family were fighting over this pile of bricks. Last year, a Turkish ne’er-do-well strolled in with all the right forged documents, and now, according to the courts, he owns it. Venetian real estate!” She shook her head. “On the plus side, he didn’t raise my rent.” Daniela smiled and squeezed Clay’s hand. “Are you staying at Il Dormitorio?” The Dormitory was the nickname for Freddy’s toothpick of a palazzo. Clay nodded. “Freddy would want you there. Try to keep it for as long as you can.”