A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Chapter 12

  On a calm day, a vaporetto can wind along its path with the unrushed pageantry of a parade float. Tourists help complete that impression, waving ceremonially from the deck at passing crowds. This afternoon, however, as the commuter boat launched itself across the lagoon, jostled by waves and rain squalls, the sensation inside the cabin was more like a stone skipping across the water right before it sinks.

  Clay had already chewed three pink mal di stomaco tablets, and his intestines were still seizing up on him. The choppy lagoon water wasn’t helping, nor was the teeth-rattling vibration from the vaporetto’s overtaxed motor. Despite it all, Clay was happy. Happier than he’d been in a very long time, and he had Nick to thank. He glanced out the window as the boat lumbered by the island of San Michele. Spring leaves sprouted above the cemetery walls. Clay thought of wiring his father the hundred and twenty thousand that he owed him and finally putting their long-standing feud to rest. The $750K from West had landed in Clay’s account that morning. For the first time in years, he could look into the future and find bright spots of optimism beyond the metal bars of debt.

  Even today’s bad weather was encouraging: The rain made it highly unlikely that anyone would stumble upon him and Nick together on the island of Murano. Even though the money was now in hand, they still had to maintain their secrecy until they left town. Thus, Clay sat on the 4.2 vaporetto line, being ferried across the bay to the distant meeting point. No Venetian would bother with a trip to Murano during a storm. Only dripping, die-hard tourists packed the waterbus.

  He and Nick could leave for the south tomorrow. They could rent a room in Palermo and watch the fishermen reel in their nets of tuna on Favignana. Was it too early in the year to swim off Pantelleria? Yes, it was, but it wouldn’t be soon. And there was the rest of Europe to consider. Portugal, Finland—and he’d always wanted to see Copenhagen. It was all waiting for them. Nick was his polestar now. That was all the future he needed.

  Earlier that morning, Clay had gone alone to the Accademia Museum, as he’d done on a near weekly basis when he lived in Venice as an intern. For an hour he sat on the wood bench in front of his favorite painting, an enormous dinner-party scene by Paolo Veronese. It wasn’t so much what he was visiting, but whom. There was a figure in the tableau, a young black man in a purple-and-white robe, ascending the steps in the canvas’s lower left corner. Several black men inhabited Veronese’s rowdy sixteenth-century Venetian banquet—servants, mainly, like the Moors in Richard West’s bedroom, or turbaned emissaries blowing in from the exotic East. But Clay’s favorite figure didn’t fall into any of those stale roles. Something about the guy in the painting spoke to him, the way cameos of black men and women did when they’d flitted across the television screen in his youth, usually in the background behind the white leads who wouldn’t get out of the camera’s way.

  Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi was one of the museum’s masterpieces, although Clay doubted any visitor had spent as much time with it as he had. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was about the young man in the painting that fascinated him. He looked a little bit like his cousin Gad, who’d been “taken by the streets,” as his aunt used to phrase it, when Clay was still a boy. (Clay often wondered if his being gay had saved him—saved him from walking down certain alleys and entering certain buildings. Being gay might have kept him alive.) No, it wasn’t the similarity to his lost cousin. There was something in the young man’s expression that kept Clay coming back—chin down, eyes darting to the side, head uncovered, eyebrows lifted as if to ask the viewer a defiant What?, carrying nothing more than his own attitude. He was out of place at this dinner party, as if he had somewhere more important to be. Clay spent an hour with this star figure, glad to visit him one last time before he skipped town. Who knew how long until he’d be back?

  The vaporetto groaned against the concrete pier like a wounded elephant, heralding their arrival on Murano. The boat heaved and tilted as the attendant lassoed the ropes to the mooring piles. The tourists inside the cabin stumbled and swayed, knocked off balance with arms flailing. It was an odd way to reach an island known for its fragile glass. Clay hurried onto the dock and followed the masses up the lane lined in glass shops. The restaurant that he’d chosen was in a tiny campo that most tourists confused for a private courtyard.

  Clay ran his hand over his hair before entering the trattoria, its windows of bull’s-eye glass as thick as soda bottles. The restaurant was so old that Clay could smell the decades of wine that had seeped into the floorboards. He spotted Nick at a table at the far end of the room. He was wearing a navy sweater that was unraveling at the collar, and his skin was still wet from the rain. Sexy, adorable Nick with his who-me? smile. Nick had managed to wield that innocent midwestern charm like a weapon. Clay trusted his boyfriend too much to worry about that weapon being turned on him.

  “Hi,” Clay said happily as he sat down.

  “I ordered us some wine.”

  “Good.” He bent toward Nick and whispered, “I want to kiss you so badly right now.”

  Nick wrinkled his forehead. “Why don’t you then?”

  “Nah . . . ,” Clay balked. But in an instant he leaned over the table and pressed his lips against Nick’s. It felt bold to kiss him here, more public than in a shadowy church or in the safety of Daniela’s apartment. He returned to his seat with a smile, readjusting himself under the table. “We did it! Thank you, Nicky. I feel brand-new today. All that crap in the past is no longer haunting me.”

  “I’m glad it worked.”

  “It’s you who made it work.” Clay opened his palm on the table and Nick took it. He was happy to finally be able to speak to Nick above a furtive whisper. “Honestly, I can’t thank you enough. We can leave tomorrow if you want. You pick the first place, and I’ll pick the second. That’s how we’ll do it, okay? How about—”

  A waiter in a tuxedo vest inserted two glasses of red wine between them, each one poured to the rim. If the waiter had noticed them kissing, he didn’t seem to mind. They both took siphoning sips before clinking their glasses.

  “We’re rich!” Clay toasted. Nick nodded meekly, tentatively. He didn’t look like someone who had just come into hundreds of thousands of dollars. “What’s wrong? It’s your money too.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Nick replied. His eyes roamed Clay’s face, and Clay instinctively wiped his mouth. “I’m sorry. Yes, we did it. And you’ve got what you need, that’s the most important thing.”

  “What’s the second most important?”

  Nick laughed and took a sip of wine. “Well, I’ve been thinking.” He exhaled deeply. “Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars after you pay off all your debts. I know it sounds like a lot, but is it?” The question worked like a dimmer switch on Clay’s enthusiasm. His answer was yes, although Nick’s tone made it clear it was supposed to be no. “It’s not really a lot when you consider how expensive Europe is. Flights and hotels and meals every day. Clothes and toiletries and who knows what else. Medical bills if we get sick. I figure that amount could carry us for three or four years, max.”

  “Three or four years is a long time,” Clay answered, his hand balling on the table.

  “I know it is,” Nick said with a meaningful nod. “And I’m happy to take that. I’m just wondering, what happens after three or four years? You’ve got Il Dormitorio, your very own house in Venice whenever you want it, but what do I have to fall back on?” Nick leaned into the table on his elbows, and for a second the rest of his body seemed to go limp between the twin tent poles of his shoulders. He let out a haggard breath. “Clay, listen. I don’t want to go back to New York.” Nick’s eyes glistened as he said the name of that city. Clay suspected the ghost of Ari Halfon must flash through his head every time he thought of New York. Clay understood too well the fear of returning and how a hard loss could become the defining landmark of a place.

  “I don’t have anything back in New York anymore,” Nick contin
ued, his voice stronger now, more determined. “What if we could stay away longer, for as long as we wanted—with more money? What if we figured out a way to get our hands on a few million dollars?” Nick again reached for Clay’s hand on the table, and he felt Nick’s fingers trying to worm into his locked fist.

  Clay pulled his hand away. “A few million dollars sounds great,” he said coolly. “But how exactly do you propose we get it?”

  “I have an idea. Just hear me out, okay?” Nick straightened up, and a little frightened smile shot across his face like a test fire. “We sell Il Dormitorio to Richard West. Just like we did with the silver, we offer the house to him at an absurdly reduced price, which he’d be insane not to accept. We’d make it seem like he’s taking advantage of you and landing the deal of a lifetime. We know he’d kill to have the run of the whole van der Haar palazzo. We get the payment in cash, and we go.”

  The present world briefly drifted away, and the past did exactly what it was good at doing: it engulfed Clay in guilt and sorrow. He pictured Freddy in Brooklyn, so sick he could barely suck down oxygen, begging for Clay to put a pillow over his face to stop the pain, but in his few lucid moments imploring him to hold on to the palazzino, at least until Cecilia croaked. He didn’t want his sister to get her hands on his favorite earthly refuge.

  Clay chose laughter as the safest response. “You’re funny, Nicky. You forget that I don’t own Il Dormitorio. I co-own it. Cecilia van der Haar is an equal owner, and she would never agree. She’d torture me over it, just as she tortured her brother. That is, if I could track her down.”

  “Exactly!” Nick cried. “She’s so far out of the picture, she’d never know you sold it. She hates Venice. Who cares that an eighty-year-old woman on a horse farm in South America believes she still owns a sliver of property in Italy that she hasn’t visited in thirty years? She’s probably senile at this point anyway!”

  Clay snorted. “Wow, you’ve really done your homework.” This was not the conversation he expected to be having with Nick right now. Portugal. Finland. The Tyrrhenian Sea where it rubbed against golden Africa. “Then you’ll know Cecilia’s name is listed on the deed along with mine. There’s no getting around that fact.”

  “You could make it seem like you’re representing her and yourself.” Nick’s cheeks reddened. Perhaps he was embarrassed by how much thought he’d put into the intricacies of his plan. “Anyway, thanks to the lie you told West, he already believes you own the whole house. So what if Cecilia’s name is still on some old Venetian ledger? The van der Haars were messy people who never got around to amending it. West has never met Freddy’s sister. He doesn’t know what she’s like. She’s too old to travel now, so you’re representing the estate. Come on, if the deal of a lifetime is waved in his face, do you really think he’s going to err on the side of caution? Not if we make it seem legit. Not if we make him think it’s now or never. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but if we do it quickly—”

  “No,” Clay said firmly, his palms flat on the table. “No, Nicky. You’re getting greedy. Getting greedy is what will get us into trouble. Let’s be satisfied with three hundred and fifty. Look, even if we could figure out some way to cheat the records, eventually it would be discovered.”

  “In ten years!” Nick exclaimed. “Or twenty. Or never, like the Turkish guy who snapped up Daniela’s building. You told me once you had contacts that could produce forgeries. And if, years down the line, it ever does come to light, we’d be so far away they’d never find us.”

  Nick was hallucinating. He was mistaking marble ballrooms and gilt facades and velvet-upholstered gondolas for real life. People went mad in Venice because it lacked the reality check of poverty and ugliness and ordinary struggles. Clay needed to remind Nick how hard the cement was in the rest of the world.

  “And whose ass would be on the line if it was found out?” he hissed. “Mine! That’s a prison sentence in Italy. I’d be the one to take the rap for fraud, not you.” As Clay spoke those words, it hit him that the inverse had been true with the silver. Nick had willingly put himself under the blade, while Clay could have pleaded ignorance. He softened his tone. “Look, I can’t sell the house, okay? It’s a fantastic idea, and I don’t blame you for dreaming it up. But I promised Freddy I wouldn’t.”

  Nick tapped his finger on the table. “No, you promised him that you wouldn’t let it fall into his sister’s hands. If we sell it to West, she’d be cut out of the deal. Freddy couldn’t have expected you to keep the place forever. It’s not a mausoleum.”

  Clay shook his head. “I’m sorry, Nicky. I can’t betray him. The answer is no.”

  Nick stared across the table in disbelief, as if Clay was the one suffering delusions. “Betray him? I get that you loved him. But Freddy’s dead. You gave him everything when he was alive. Jesus, you borrowed money from your father just so he could keep living in that house. You broke your back for him. When is Freddy going to stop taking from you? He’s dead and he’s still taking from you.” Nick threw his hands up to preempt any response. “Maybe I am being greedy,” he said more calmly. “I did the silver deal to get you out of the debt that Freddy buried you in. But now, because of it, I can’t come back to Venice. I guess you are planning on coming back. If you need that house to keep mourning Freddy, that’s your decision. All I’m saying is that we have this opportunity right here, this rich guy ready to buy a piece of property that’s in your name. When are we ever going to be in this position again?” Nick reached across the table and slid his palm over Clay’s knuckles. “Look, even if we walk away now, I’m glad I gave up what I did. All I’m asking is that you consider it. Just think how long the future could go if we made this work.”

  Clay knew he was being asked to make a choice: Nick or Freddy, the living or the dead, Venice or everywhere else. Hours earlier, sitting on the wood bench in the Accademia, he had said goodbye to that lonely young man walking up the loggia steps, the one who spent the last five hundred years glaring out of the frame. Maybe it was Clay’s last goodbye to him. Nick was right. He had been mourning for too many years, first for his mother and then for Freddy. He could go on mourning until it ate up the rest of his twenties and devoured his thirties and he ended up on some desolate shore where his father resided. He could do that, and hold on to the closet-sized palazzo to remind him of the loss of Freddy and his hatred of West. Or he could put it all in the ground. He and Nick could leave with a few million dollars, and they could slip together into the waiting world.

  “How exactly would we pull it off?” Clay asked doubtfully. It was an insane idea. And yet so had been everything else up to now.

  Nick retracted his hand, as if he hadn’t actually expected Clay to go along with the proposition. It took him a second to find words. “We’d figure it out. We’d only do it if we were sure we wouldn’t get caught.”

  “We’d have to be very smart,” Clay said.

  “We would be,” Nick replied. “We will be.” And, after a pause: “I love you.”

  It was a very dark day to let the future in. Flying high over the Venetian islands, a British Airways jet lowered its wheels for touchdown at Marco Polo Airport. On that plane, in the last aisle seat, sat a drunk, heavyset antiquarian dozing on his own shoulder. The elderly antiques dealer did not hear the pilot’s warning about preparing for arrival, but it didn’t matter.

  Dulles Hawkes landed safely in Venice.

  Part II

  The Things That Get Caught in the Trap

  Chapter 13

  Clay murdered Freddy in the fall. He killed him on the first cold day in October, when the nighttime frost silvered the backyard porch and the morning sun was too weak to burn it clear. Clay always loved the first autumn days in New York—his spring, was how he thought of them, with their air of somber hope. This particular fall day, though, the heavy, puke-green curtains remained shut across the brownstone windows and Clay only stepped outside to let in the new hospice nurse. No murderer in human histor
y had ever worked so hard to keep his victim alive. And no murderer proved more superfluous, for Freddy seemed to be dying just fine on his own. He hadn’t eaten in weeks, and the nurse couldn’t find a pulse on his wrist. “I think he’s already dead,” she whispered in her husky Haitian accent. Clay stared down at the withered, bright-yellow skeleton babbling about drugs from his bed. “Yeah, maybe,” Clay agreed. “But he won’t stop talking.”

  When Clay and Freddy met in Venice nearly four years earlier, they’d fallen for each other instantly. Their friendship was so fast and consuming, so tongue-and-groove, they seemed to have bypassed the polite get-to-know-you trial run and by day two were already rolling their eyes at each other’s annoying habits. Clay realized he’d found much more than a temporary overseas companion or even a strategic ally in his hatred of Richard West. Clay sensed in Freddy a fellow orphan whose heart could only be opened by rare hands. He felt safe around him—safe to confide his secrets in him along with whatever uncensored thought happened to bounce through his head. Freddy gave the conflicting impression of a man who had experienced everything before (“I know what it’s like to be broke and out on the streets without even a coat for a pillow”) and one fascinated with the most mundane crisis (“Well, go on! What happened after the cashier told the woman they were out of stamps?”). He managed to warp the world until the big disasters seemed totally survivable and the smallest incidents transformed into acts of alien wonder. The rough spots in him were part of the charm, or at least he had the boldness not to hide his darkest shadows—the naps at all hours and the bad smoker’s breath and the cackling laugh that vibrated Clay’s fillings and the proclivity for filching ashtrays whenever he passed an outdoor caffè. Freddy was tough and unapologetic, a gay man from Clay’s hometown with a fiendish humor, and he fit Venice like its finest piece of furniture. To Clay, their connection made perfect sense. It was as if, after six months guarding masterpieces in the aquatic galleries of the Peggy Guggenheim, he had graduated from artworks to artist.