A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  At 3:00 p.m., Nick accepted his fate and paid the eight-euro admission fee at the Scuola’s entrance. His feet echoed through the ground-floor hall, and he climbed a stone staircase without noticing the enormous Antonio Zanchi paintings of Mary soaring over a plague-ridden city. The second floor opened onto a sprawling gilt ballroom. Nick searched the murky chamber for Dulles. Instead, he saw visitors wandering around the room as they peered down into the glowing iPads in their hands. As Nick drew closer, though, he realized the screens weren’t iPads but mirrors. The visitors were examining the ceiling through its reflection, looking down in order to gaze up.

  Nick grabbed a mirror from a side table. The room’s walls were covered with carved wooden figures. Some of the bodies were tranquil and angelic; others seemed to thrash and writhe. It was a dark forest of serpents and chains and screaming mouths. Nick preferred the Tintoretto canvases above him, all toppling saints and white-lit skies. It took him a moment to adjust to the mirror, but his brain reorientated, and soon he was lost to his own steps as he followed the biblical scenes around the coffered ceiling. He stopped when a monstrous gray-green face eclipsed his view.

  Dulles stood before him, holding a glossy booklet. One of the wall figures was featured on the cover: a long-haired blindfolded man shoving out his tongue.

  “‘The Beauty of Virtue and the Ugliness of Vice,’” Dulles quoted the cover’s subtitle. “It’s usually the other way around, don’t you think? The ugliness of virtue, the beauty of vice.” His voice was frail, less whinnying, almost teetering on compassionate, which might be an attempt at intimacy, or due to the mandatory hush of a museum, or because the walk across the city after too many vodkas had sapped his strength. Dulles thrust the book into Nick’s hand before bundling his red handkerchief against his dripping nostrils. “Take it,” he said. “I bought it for you in the gift shop.”

  “Thanks,” Nick replied hesitantly. He wasn’t sure how to react. Back in New York, when Dulles dropped by at Wickston, Nick reacted by avoiding contact. Desks, doors, and staircases were the preferred barriers. Nick now pretended to skim the booklet with interest.

  Dulles pressed his wet palm over Nick’s hand to shut the book.

  “Nick,” he purred. “What kind of scam have you gotten yourself into?”

  “What do you mean?” Nick asked coolly as he took a step back.

  Dulles stepped forward with a grunt. “Don’t,” he warned. “We both know those van der Haar silver pieces are about as real as your business card. What shocks me is that Richard actually believed such a sweet, dimple-faced twink”—Dulles swept his knuckles toward Nick’s cheek, but Nick pulled away—“could actually be a reputable antiques appraiser. You must have really floored him with your tap dance.” Dulles let out a laugh and seemed to appreciate the way it reverberated around the room. A man sitting in a folding chair, drawing in a sketchpad, stomped his foot to demand quiet. Dulles didn’t lower his voice; he simply moved closer to his victim. “My real question is, how are you and the Guillory kid splitting the seven hundred and fifty thousand? Is it even-steven right down the middle? Because you deserve at least seventy-five percent for the performance you must have put on.”

  “Clay doesn’t know anything about it,” Nick fired back. “He doesn’t know that the silver isn’t real. He inherited it from Freddy and thinks it’s authentic.” It seemed smarter to take all the blame. Not only would it protect Clay, but he had a better chance of convincing Dulles to spare him if he thought he was acting alone.

  Dulles whistled incredulously. “Give me a break. That little New York hustler knows. I don’t buy it. Freddy was dead broke at the end, and the trick wants his money for his time and effort. Why the fuck else would he clean up van der Haar vomit for months on end?” Dulles took the opportunity to study Nick’s face, and his eyes lingered over its features. “You look very handsome, Nick. I like you with a little sun on your skin. I always told Ari what a beauty you are. I take it he doesn’t have a clue what you’re up to?”

  When Nick didn’t respond, Dulles patted Nick’s chest. Then his hand descended in light, caressing swirls down his abdomen. “Ari doesn’t have a clue at all,” Dulles answered for him. “Can you imagine Ari doing anything dishonest? But don’t worry, I understand. I’ve been through a lot of lean years in this business. You do what you have to do to survive. Ari can afford his scruples because he has his wealthy family. We aren’t so lucky, you and I.” Dulles’s fingertips stopped at Nick’s belly button. “But some advice for next time. Try to flog pieces that are a bit more passable. It was smart to choose a novice like West who has big eyes and no interest in educating himself on what he wants. But eventually, in a few years, someone’s going to come for a visit to his palazzo and set him straight.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Nick said. He stepped back, leaving Dulles’s hand to float in midair. “So what do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Dulles mused as if he were surveying a menu. He wiped the sweat from his face. The question seemed self-evident. What he wanted was what he was doing, to torment Nick.

  “You weren’t on your way to Rome when you got West’s email, were you?”

  “Actually, I will go to Rome in two days. But no, a trip to Italy wasn’t initially on my calendar. Rest assured, though, I’ve traveled farther for a lot less. As I said, I’ve always had my eye on you.”

  The realization of what Dulles was intimating rose like bile up Nick’s throat. It wasn’t money he was after, which would have been so much easier. They could slip him fifty thousand dollars to keep his mouth shut.

  “Come on, Dulles,” Nick whined.

  “You aren’t with Ari anymore. It won’t be a betrayal. I’m sure you’ll recover your dignity in no time.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said flatly.

  Dulles grunted. “Of course you don’t.” He grabbed the booklet out of Nick’s hand and reached into his jacket pocket for a pen. He scribbled in red ink across the back page. “I’m sorry it can’t be tonight,” he muttered. “I have dinner plans with an old friend, a princess. If you must know, she’s a Thurn und Taxis.” Dulles’s commitment to name-dropping at the very moment he was using blackmail for sex made Nick despise him even more. He noticed that Dulles’s back teeth were black at the root and faded to a lemonade yellow, while his front incisors were porcelain white. But it was not the time to find more physical flaws in Dulles Hawkes. Dulles shoved the booklet against Nick’s chest, and he opened it to see what he’d written. The lettering was nearly illegible.

  “What does this say?” Nick asked. “Hotel—”

  “Hotel Grazia Salvifica,” Dulles translated. “Room five-oh-three. Five p.m. tomorrow? The hotel is by the train station. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m afraid it isn’t even three stars.” Nick closed both the book and his eyes. Dulles took the opportunity to pat him lightly on the ass. “A few hours of fun,” Dulles whispered. “That’s all I’m asking. I promise I won’t be too hard on you. Deal?”

  A group of schoolchildren ran like warring invaders up the stone steps.

  Chapter 16

  Nick’s brain was doing it again, separating worlds. It didn’t occur to him until deep in the night that the meeting at Dulles’s hotel conflicted with his plan to see Clay off at the train station. Clay was due to roll out of Venice just after seven, and Nick wanted to see him off at the platform. The Santa Lucia ferrovia station was a cement slab shaped like a sandwich press, with tourists and their luggage oozing from every side. It was the safest place in the city for a furtive encounter; no one wandered the station unless they had good reason. It was a short walk from Hotel Grazia Salvifica, but Nick didn’t know how long that meeting would last or what kind of man he’d be when he left it.

  He lay in bed all night with his eyes shut and his mind awake. The guest-room door was closed, but Daniela and her boyfriend were two lovebirds thrashing around in the kitchen—laughing, kissing, racing for a fresh bottle, inventing minor gripes that required tend
er explanations. Benny was a dashing man in his early fifties. Like most couples over the age of thirty, Daniela and Benny made no sense together until they were actually in the same room, where they made perfect sense together. Benny had black hair gelled and parted with surgical precision and a chin that tilted upward, even when he wasn’t talking to Daniela’s tall houseguest. Nick had assumed Benny would be older, more guarded, and less delighted to find another man in his girlfriend’s apartment. But as soon as Nick met him, he too was smitten. Daniela had spent days preparing for his visit from Shanghai. Nick had helped her scrub the floors and hang a green sheet over the cement garden like a caravan awning. They’d invited Nick to join their dinner, but he declined. He knew he’d be awful company. Imprisoned in his room, exiled from the oblivion of sleep, head submerged under two pillows, he clocked eight of the next ten hours in his own awful company. Nick left his bed the next morning more broken than when he’d crawled into it.

  He lingered through the morning in the darkness of Daniela’s apartment. The lovebirds had flown out by ten to leave him in peace. When Clay phoned, Nick was collecting bottles and dirty plates in the kitchen. “You aren’t going to believe it!” Clay shouted through the receiver. “I think we got him.”

  A corner of the green sheet had come untied in the garden, and through the window Nick was watching the fabric rippling in the breeze.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what happened?” Clay prompted.

  “Yes,” Nick said with a jolt. He poured some warmth into his words. “Yes, sorry. I’m here. That’s great!”

  Clay laughed testily. “What I mean is, this morning I get a message from West. He wants to talk. He asked if he could bring his wife and niece over to tour Il Dormitorio. Oh, man, he even asked if I’d consider a scrittura privata, which is like an unofficial agreement with a deposit down to hold his claim. But I just want to get it all done so we can get out of here. Nicky, this is really happening! I’ll be honest. I didn’t think it would work. I thought we were insane!”

  Nick knew it was his turn to speak, but his tongue wasn’t cooperating. Worse, his throat kept making a strange clicking sound when he tried to summon his voice.

  “Nicky? Are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. That’s great news!” Nick grabbed for a more logical reply. “What did you tell him? Did you name a price?”

  “Not yet. I said I was going out of town for two days, but he could bring the family over when I’m back. It’s good to keep him waiting. Nicky!” Clay shouted his name as if calling out for someone lost. “We could be millionaires! Us! Can you believe it? We’ll be set.”

  “We’ll be set,” Nick repeated. He could swim for hours in the warm flow of Clay’s voice.

  “It comes down to Paris. It’s the last piece we need. I pray I can convince Antonin to help us. He did say any time . . .”

  “You’ll make it work,” Nick replied. “It’ll happen and we’ll be out of here. Let’s not wait much longer, okay? Let’s do it and go.”

  Nick felt he’d injected a convincing dose of enthusiasm into that last exchange. He only realized he’d failed when Clay asked, point-blank, “What’s wrong? You’re not sounding like yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Everything’s fine. I just can’t, uh . . . I can’t meet you at the station tonight. I’m sorry. Something’s come up.”

  “Something’s come up?” Clay didn’t have to state the obvious: What could possibly come up in a foreign town where Nick barely knew anyone? Nick exhaled into the mouthpiece. “There’s a little glitch.” Before Clay could ask the nature of it, Nick dove forward. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’ve got it under control. It’s about the silver. Well, it’s more about my job at Wickston than anything to do with the van der Haar deal. I’m making it sound way bigger than it is. I’m sorry.” He needed to stop tying his sentences in knots. “It’s nothing. Really. You just concentrate on Paris, okay? Everything’s fine. I’m handling it.”

  “Nicky.” Clay released a heavy sigh. “Should we stop before we get in any deeper? Tell me the truth. Maybe we let things settle down and don’t jump into trying to sell—”

  “No!” Nick cut him off. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s a very minor snag that I can take care of. Will you trust me? I can handle things too, you know. I’m not completely inefficient.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “Go to Paris. We’re so close now. We’ll get the money and be out of here.”

  “Do you want me to stop by Daniela’s before I go?”

  On any other day Nick would have said yes. But today he didn’t want that. He couldn’t take an afternoon naked with Clay before “a few hours of fun” in a two-star hotel with a man he could barely stand looking at. The contrast would be too unbearable.

  “Benny’s visiting,” Nick said. “We should let them have the apartment today.”

  “Ooohh. Is Benny a good guy?”

  “Yeah. He’s pretty irresistible. Daniela’s so far over the moon she’s currently orbiting Proxima B.”

  Clay laughed, and Nick felt calmer hearing his boyfriend’s tone lighten.

  “I love you so much,” he said and waited, with eyes stinging, for those same words to echo back to him in a different voice.

  Five p.m. was a spiteful hour in Venice. The excitement of the day had faded, and nighttime diversions hadn’t yet ridden in on darker skies. Even the vendors along the loud tourist gauntlet of Strada Nuova soured on their cheap, overpriced souvenirs; at this hour, the salesclerks would shrug and feign no comprehension of English rather than check in the back for additional sizes and colors. There was still enough foot traffic flowing between the train station and the Rialto Bridge to camouflage Nick as he followed his phone map to the Hotel Grazia Salvifica. This was not the first time in his life that Nick had gone to a seedy hotel for a sex date. It wasn’t even the first time he’d gone to a seedy hotel for a sex date while in love with somebody else. But this was the first time Nick knew exactly who the man waiting for him was, and it was the first time he couldn’t simply walk away without a second thought.

  Grazia Salvifica looked like many of its competitors along the crowded span of Rio Terà San Leonardo. It had a scarlet awning stamped in fat gold letters. Automatic doors swooshed open by motion sensor, and the smoked-glass windows boasted printouts of TripAdvisor reviews and the decals of credit cards it accepted. The five-floor pink stucco building had never been an equal to one of the imposing Grand Canal palazzi, but it had no doubt once served as a regal abode for a Renaissance family. Seventy years ago, a hotel chain had taken up residence inside its grand shell, chopping up the interior into guest rooms and installing a long faux-marble reception desk, a glass elevator shaft up the core of the staircase, and a room off the lobby that offered single-serving cereal boxes and unwieldy pitchers of orange juice as a “continental breakfast.”

  The lobby was luxurious only in its air-conditioning, turned to full blast in late April. A scarlet runner striped with the tread marks of luggage racks bisected the narrow lobby and stopped at a chrome elevator bank. There, a man was on his hands and knees on a white drop cloth, bowing before closed elevator doors. Nick sailed by the front desk of the Grazia Salvifica, noticing that it had been left unattended. As he approached the elevator, he saw tools laid out on the drop cloth. The kneeling man was using a screwdriver to pry open a panel. A pimply Chinese manager in gray pinstripes stood at his side, yelling down at him. Behind him, an old, arthritic Italian woman with a firework of gray hair was yelling at the manager. Nick could see the stuck elevator car through the glass shaft. It dangled a few feet above the ground. Trapped inside was a woman holding the hand of a young girl, both wearing visors with the word VENEDIG written across their brims, both with money belts clipped at their waists, both sporting futuristic walking shoes. Their expressions communicated the early minutes of an emergency where panic was only beginning to set in. They hung suspended over the lobby like a
perfect specimen of tourists preserved in amber.

  The manager clapped his hands, disappeared into a back room, and returned with an orange traffic cone, which he placed in front of the drop cloth. The prehistoric Italian woman screamed at a middle-aged couple crossing into the lobby from the breakfast room: “Out of order. No order. Finito! You take steps, steps!”

  Nick knew Dulles’s room number. He circled wide of the traffic cone and followed the couple up the carpeted steps. The staircase curled like a pencil shaving around the elevator shaft, and the carpet got dirtier and more hole-ridden the higher Nick ascended. The couple exited onto the third floor. Nick could still hear the banging of tools far below.

  He was sick to his stomach by the time he reached the fifth floor. Televisions hummed from distant rooms. A housekeeping cart was parked halfway down the corridor, stripped of towels and cluttered with dirty cups as if it had been left abandoned for days. The numbers counted downward along the hall: 507, 506, 505 . . . Bleach stains were spattered across the red carpet. He located the brass doorplate for 503.

  Nick took a few choppy breaths before knocking. No emotions, he told himself. Remember what you’re doing this for. He was doing it for himself and for Clay, for their future, for the seven hundred and fifty thousand already in the bank, for the possibility of millions of euros more. That was worth a few hours submitting to someone else’s idea of fun. He knocked.

  Dulles took thirty seconds to answer, but when he did, pulling the door wide with more force than was required, Nick was relieved by the provisional fact that he was fully clothed. He wore a wrinkled, pink Oxford over a pair of stained, baggy chinos. His stubby toes gripped the carpet fibers and his fly was unzipped, with the edge of a pink shirttail hanging out of it.