“Freddy,” he gently whispered. “I love you.” He kissed him softly on the forehead. He kissed him on each warm island of a closed eye. Freddy was squeezing Clay’s thumb with all of his might, like a passenger in a downed plane gripping for mercy on an armrest. “Okay, sweetheart,” Clay said. “It’s time now.” Clay was having trouble keeping his breaths steady. His fingers holding the syringe were shaking. “I love you so much. Thank you for everything. Thank you for letting me in.” A nod. A little sad moan lost in the back of the throat. “Think of Venice, okay? Think of that fantastic city with all the lights on the Grand Canal. We’re there on the water. I’m with you. I’m right next to you there. Okay. It’s time.” The needle prodded the vein, and Clay’s thumb touched the plunger. “I love you. Here you go.”
Chapter 14
FOR SALE BY OWNER, 15TH-CENTURY PALAZZINO, GOING FAST, MEDIOCRE CONDITION, LOWBALL OFFERS ACCEPTED AND PRICED TO MOVE. IDEAL FOR EXTENDING YOUR OWN QUARTERS, IF YOU HAPPEN TO LIVE NEXT DOOR. INQUIRE WITHIN.
It was a shame Clay couldn’t plant a for-sale sign in the front yard and wait for Richard West to spot it. Clay and Nick agreed that the best way to entice West into buying the van der Haar palazzino—and thus restoring all of Palazzo Contarini to its original design—was to make it seem like it was his idea. That tactic had worked so flawlessly with the silver, thanks to Nick’s guiding hand. But this time, Nick couldn’t exert much influence without raising suspicion. The lion’s share of the scheming rested on Clay. Of course, he could simply notify his neighbor that he was interested in selling, but that might give West the opportunity to do his homework. They wanted West hungry, scrambling, in danger of missing out, and trusting his instincts—confusing himself for the hunter instead of the prey. Ultimately, Clay devised a straightforward method for the news of the sale to reach his neighbor next door. Venice had the most baffling postal address system ever assigned to a city; the occasional mix-up among house numbers was inevitable.
“That’s right, yes, I’m interested in selling my side of Palazzo Contarini,” Clay said over the phone to a local realtor in Italian. “I’d like to schedule an appointment for you to come over and tour the place, the sooner the better.” Palazzo Contarini’s street number was 4228—shared conjointly by the van der Haars (4228A) and the Wests (4228B). Clay knew from his assistant days how much Richard resented being the Beta to the far paltrier Alpha. “Yes, noon tomorrow works perfectly. My name is Clay Guillory. The address is 4228B, that’s B as in bacio. Ring the buzzer and make sure to tell whoever answers that you’re here to do an appraisal to sell the house. Grazie mille! A thousand thanks!”
The next day, Clay positioned himself at the second-floor window overlooking the front entrance. At 12:12, a balding man in a loose-fitting maroon suit marched toward the door with an annoyed expression. Clay caught sight of West at the end of the alley, peeking around the corner. By the time Clay ran downstairs to greet the agent, West was gone.
“I’m sorry, did I say B? I swore I told you A as in amore. Anyway, come in.” He gave the realtor a perfunctory house tour. Depending on the condition of the room they entered, the man’s face publicized revulsion or delight.
“Ha una sua bellezza particolare!” It was indeed a peculiar property, very small, and a challenge to sell, the realtor admitted. It would have been far easier if the van der Haars had divided their wing by floor, instead of the awkward vertical cake slice down the side of the house. When Clay told the realtor that the Sebastiano Ricci fresco was not officially listed as vincolato with the Italian government’s preservation board, he expected the response to be equally damning. “Oh, but that makes it so much easier!” the man exclaimed. “It would slow down the process by months if we needed to wait for permission! Don’t tell them! The fresco will help the sale, and this way the new owners can do whatever they want with it!” The exposed wires and corroded sconces didn’t seem to faze the realtor either; he’d simply target buyers looking for a restoration project. Still, Clay shouldn’t get his hopes up. Venetian real estate was largely a western market. The cash-flush sheiks and Russians turned up their noses at palazzi: “Not blingy enough,” the realtor said in American-accented English, as if to emphasize crass taste. “Too many restrictions. No pools or hot tubs. It is easier to park a yacht with all of those amenities in the lagoon.” Clay’s best bet was a rich European retiree—“We’ve had a lot of interest from the French recently.” The realtor would have to crunch the numbers back at his office, but four million euros seemed a sensible listing price. At hearing that massive figure, Clay tried to look like his eyeballs hadn’t been blasted into the back of his skull.
The best bet for the sale of Il Dormitorio was not a French retiree. The best bet was the American next door, and right on cue, ten minutes after the realtor departed, Clay heard four heavy knocks from behind the bookshelf in Freddy’s bedroom. Clay opened the walnut door, temporarily blinded by the afternoon sunlight. West stood in the frame.
“How are you?” West asked with an urgency that didn’t fit the question. Before Clay could respond, West yammered out an excuse for the interruption. “I wanted to check that the money for the silver made it into your account okay. Did it?”
“Yes,” Clay replied. “Thanks for sending it. I hope you’re enjoying the pieces.”
“Indeed! You’ll have to come over sometime and see them in the cupboard.” West gazed down at the floor and watched his espadrille draw an invisible line across the terrazzo. “Are you staying in Venice awhile, or will you be off soon?”
Just ask, Clay thought. Just ask me outright if I’m selling the house. Tell me you want it, and that you would make me a better deal if I cut the realtor out of negotiations.
“I’m staying on a little longer,” he answered casually. “I’m still getting Freddy’s belongings in order. There’s been a lot to go through.”
“I can imagine,” West said. And as if to buy time, he renewed the half-hearted invitation. “When you do come over, you’ll have to stay for dinner. Karine would like that.” Did Karine even know that Clay existed? Was Karine aware that he had been her husband’s Venice companion before she’d moved here from Germany?
“A dinner would be . . .” Clay nodded vaguely instead of settling on a word.
“Perfect!” West said in a timbre of sincerity. “I’ll check our calendar.”
Clay reached for the doorknob to indicate an end to the conversation.
“One last thing!” West blurted and blushed. “A man rang my bell earlier. A realtor who said he was looking for you in order to do an appraisal?”
“Ah, sorry about that. Our addresses . . .”
West laughed. “I still get gift baskets delivered from lonely parents in Wisconsin wondering how their daughter is surviving her internship.”
“I’ve told the interns to have their mail sent to the Guggenheim. I’ll call—”
“Oh, it’s not too much of a bother.” West drew another line with his shoe, and this time he was determined to step over it. “But about the realtor. I hope this doesn’t mean you’re putting the house on the market. I’m not losing you as a neighbor already, am I?” West glanced over Clay’s shoulder, lifting up on tiptoe as if to signal how eager he was to get beyond the doorway. He made no effort to disguise his interest. West was a rare kind of person who had never been forced to hide his wants.
“I wish that realtor hadn’t said anything.”
“I don’t mean to pry. But I am concerned. We do share a roof and a wall.”
Clay paused for a moment, arranging his words carefully. Several million euros depended upon putting them in the right order. “The truth is I haven’t made up my mind about what to do with the house. I love Venice. But I’m not sure how feasible it is to keep this place when I’m trying to build a life, post-Freddy, in New York.”
“Post-Freddy,” West repeated drolly. “Hurricane recovery.”
“In a way, yeah.” Clay took a deep breath and let it sputter out of him.
“Anyway, you might not be losing me as a neighbor just yet. But if that does happen, I’m sure your new ones won’t be the type to receive care packages from worried parents.”
West pursed his lips. Clay knew that behind his seemingly innocuous joke about care packages, he’d delivered a pointed threat. A new resident inside Palazzo Contarini might be far more disquieting than a cast of rotating Ivy League interns on their best behavior. They could end up being even wealthier than the Wests, and thus more entitled, more demanding, and more outrageous in their plans for extensive renovations.
“I would hope that—” West broke off and tried again in a harsher, more businesslike tone. “When I bought my side of the building ten years ago, there was an implicit understanding—” He aborted this attempt too. It was too aggressive. “Selling is not something to take lightly,” West finally rationalized in a calmer voice.
“I was only getting the realtor’s opinion. That’s why I wish he hadn’t bothered you.”
“What was his opinion, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Clay demurred. “It was only a quick assessment. He didn’t—”
“I understand. But what did he say?”
There was no point in being coy anymore. When Clay had been bargaining with Richard West over silver cups, there had still been a life to go back to in New York: an estranged father, boxes of his books and clothes, a degree from a local university. But Clay knew the stakes in selling the palazzino: there was a solid chance he’d never be able to return safely to that old life. One day, West would probably discover the fraud—a felony in Italy, punishable with prison time—and he’d come looking for him. Clay was going to build a future somewhere far away. In order to do that, he and Nick would need all the money they could get.
“He appraised it somewhere in the region of five million euros,” Clay answered with a straight face. “Upper five.” He was pushing his luck, but he had been pushing his luck for a while now. “The place needs work. But there’s the Ricci fresco, which ups the value considerably.”
West digested the “upper five” with a flare of his nostrils. “Really,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have thought it could fetch that much. No offense, but it’s the size of some people’s walk-in closets. He really said upper five?”
Clay shrugged. “It’s a lot to take in,” he granted.
“And you have all of your documents in order?” West asked. “I mean, everything’s in your name. No contestation of the will from Freddy’s sister? No delays with the Italian authorities or the visura catastale?”
“It’s all in place,” Clay lied and continued to lie. “As I told you, the sister’s been out of the picture for a long time. And the realtor thinks any of the additional paperwork will be easy to process.” Clay could tell that West’s brain was absorbing these facts like nutrients. Could this actually be working? For the first time, the rickety plan that he and Nick had assembled in a Murano restaurant seemed genuinely plausible.
A woman’s voice cried from deep in the sunlight. “Dick?” West turned his head and replied, “Yes, dear, one second.”
West looked frustrated when he turned his attention back to Clay. “I’d like to talk to you about this further,” he said. Clay nodded. “After all, it affects me considerably. It’s been a mission of mine to preserve the integrity of this palazzo, which mattered to Freddy as well, no matter how he let his side go in the end.” Clay stopped nodding. “I’d like you to give me some time to think before you put the house on the market. As you say, you’re still mulling the decision over.”
Clay had no intention of allowing his neighbor time to think. “I’m going to decide in the next few days,” Clay replied bluntly. “I’m not sticking around for the summer tourist season.”
West clucked. “Some of these properties sit on the market for years with their price slowly dropping. You should be prepared for that likelihood. You might be waiting awhile.”
Clay smiled. “Yeah, the realtor said that does happen half the time. And for the other half, if they’re priced to sell, they’re snapped up in minutes.”
Karine’s voice called insistently again, and they exchanged abrupt goodbyes. Clay shut the door. Now that this crucial step in the scheme was completed, he set to work on the next one. He’d already scoured Freddy’s papers to locate examples of Cecilia van der Haar’s signature, and he knew from several nights of online research that a minimum of three official documents would be needed to convince an Italian notary. This next step was the most critical and least dependable. It required an act that could only be supplied by Freddy’s orbit of lawless friends. There were benefits, after all, to a life built on the margins. No one had ever whispered a stock tip in Clay’s ear, but thanks to Freddy, he did have connections that could deliver semiautomatic rifles anywhere within five minutes.
He googled the number for the Ritz in Paris off Place Vendôme.
“May I speak with Antonin Marceau?” he asked the receptionist in his twelfth-grade French.
“Monsieur Marceau doesn’t accept outside phone calls,” the receptionist informed him. “He only makes calls. He does not accept.” It was a typical whimsical roadblock erected by one of Freddy’s oldest-and-dearests.
“Can I leave a message?”
“Monsieur does not accept messages.”
“Okay. But he is staying at the Ritz right now, yes?”
“Mais oui,” she replied. “He is most certainly here.”
“And he’ll be staying at the hotel for the next week?”
“Monsieur Marceau is always with us,” the receptionist said wearily, as if the portly black-market gangster were a French virtue or a troublesome ghost.
“Well, if you happen to see him, please tell him a friend is coming to town for a visit.”
Chapter 15
The late-morning sun was strong on Nick’s face as he crossed a wide, chair-rimmed campo. He carried the foil-wrapped bottle of silver polish that he’d bought for Richard West. Nick couldn’t convince West to make a bid on Il Dormitorio directly, but there were other means of persuasion that might help to push the plan along. Earlier in the morning, he’d texted Eva to ask her to lunch. She sent the address of a seafood restaurant in Cannaregio off Sacca della Misericordia.
Passing down a narrow alley, its stones still slick from a nighttime rain, Nick caught the dank Venetian odor that Clay loved. He tried to find some love for it too, although it reminded him too much of his childhood basement. The path ahead was blocked by tourists, leaving only a tiny ant-tunnel gap that pedestrians had to slip through one at a time. As Nick made his way through the gap, he spotted Battista approaching from the other end of the passage. He wore a black shirt with a blue silk tie. His backpack was tight around his shoulders with the familiar black tube sticking out of it. He appeared to be guiding an older Italian man shuffling right behind him. That man had rake tines of gray hair streaked over his bald head and an unlit brown cigarette clenched in his teeth. He held a bloated leather briefcase to his chest as if it were a pile of firewood. Midway down the alley, Battista stopped under a sign for a trattoria and gestured for the older man to enter. Nick shouted Battista’s name before he followed the man into the restaurant.
Battista glanced up and for once offered a sincere smile. Nick picked up his pace as Battista pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Through the trattoria’s window Nick watched the bald man reaching a table where a woman was already seated. She had a pile of folders on the plate in front of her as if paperwork were her meal, and her companion quickly added folders to his own plate. It had somehow escaped Nick that there could be tedious work lunches in Venice.
Nick didn’t usually go for smokers, but Battista made the habit look seductive. The smoke drifted around the Italian’s curly black hair, mimicking its waves and coils. Two mosquito bites rose along his upper neck, the lower one dusted in fine hairs he’d missed while shaving.
“I thought you had already left for Milano, Nick.”
“Not ye
t,” Nick replied with what he hoped was an attractive grin. He nodded toward the cardboard tube. “You’re still lugging that around.”
Battista reached behind him to pat the backpack. His RESIDENTE RESISTENTE pin sparkled in the light. “These are very important plans for Mr. West’s projects. We have been working night and day. I have been so busy lately.” He winked as he added, “Too busy.” The Italian wink, Nick had learned, was a standard gesture of affection, rare in New York and virtually nonexistent in Ohio. Nick liked this friendlier version of West’s assistant. Maybe he’d only been remote on their previous meetings because his boss had been looming in the background.
“You should ask for a vacation,” Nick advised.
“No, I couldn’t,” Battista said vehemently, shaking his head as if such a request would be career suicide. Serving as the private secretary to a rich American must be a more prestigious position for a young Venetian than Nick had imagined.
“Do you like working for Richard?”
“Very much,” Battista replied. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, and as he gazed skyward, he seemed to be pondering the full depths of the question. “Do you know what it is like for young people in Venezia?”
“No,” Nick admitted.
“It is impossible,” he said as he lowered his eyes. “There are few opportunities for work that improves my city. I love the projects that Mr. West is planning, because they help Venezia, they bring it back to life. Most jobs for locals my age are about playing a fool, dressing up in costumes for tourists or driving them around on boats. Almost all of my friends”—he licked the sweat that was forming on his lip—“they had to move to the mainland after school to find work. All but two from my class are gone, and they won’t be back. But because of Mr. West, I can stay and make a difference. I can work to keep my city alive. That is important, no?”
A Beautiful Crime Page 26
