A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  “Nick,” he groaned almost apologetically. “Come in. Please.” There was no coy smile as Nick had expected, no I-got-you tone. Nick was the one to smile first, followed by a rumple of his lips to indicate an attempt at a détente. They could both still walk away. Run, really.

  Dulles closed the door behind him. The drapes were drawn across the windows. The combined smell of aftershave, uncorked alcohol, and a chemical carpet sanitizer took up a larger presence in the room than an odor should. A lamp on the bureau provided enough light for Nick to make out a collection of red-crusted wineglasses, a half-drunk bottle of whiskey, a square wallet-sized mirror smeared with white residue, two cell phones, and a torn map of the Doge’s Palace. A small silk-covered box sat open on the nightstand. Where a more introspective man might have stowed a set of meditation balls, Dulles had compiled a stack of condoms. Dulles made his way across the room, knocking his hip against the bureau and leaving Nick alone by the door with a pounding heart. Maybe Dulles was already too drunk to try anything. Maybe he was on the verge of passing out. Nick couldn’t decide whether that prospect would save him or merely prolong the misery.

  “Do you want a drink?” Dulles asked. He steadied himself on the arm of a sofa chair before sitting.

  “No, thank you. My stomach’s a little off.” Nick gave what he hoped was a pitiable smile. “Are you all packed for your trip to Rome tomorrow?” It was clear by the state of the room that he wasn’t.

  “It’s such a nightmare when it comes time to shove everything back in the suitcase. It’s like your possessions have gained weight on a holiday, isn’t it?” Dulles smiled stiffly. “Have a seat,” he implored, extending his hand toward the side of the bed. The cheap, machine-quilted nylon bedspread suppressed a faint whimper of hinges when Nick followed the instructions. Dulles reached under his chair to locate a glass filled with a large pour of tawny liquid. He then brought the glass to rest on his lap with the exhausted sigh of a grandparent lifting a toddler. Dulles swilled his drink and sipped. “I’m sorry I’ve asked you over like this,” he said, his watery eyes glinting with the scant daylight that seeped into the room. His jaw was trembling. “I’ve been very lonely, especially since I’ve closed the shop.” He took a bigger sip, and the glass muffled another exclamation of “very lonely.” Nick sat on the bed with his fists jammed into the mattress at his sides, like a gymnast on a pommel horse. “I should never have retired. Don’t ever retire, Nick. It’s death,” Dulles advised. “It can’t be pleasant for you to be with a man my age.”

  Actually, a couple of times, Nick had been with a man Dulles’s age. He remembered appreciating the way those men had gone out of their way to ensure his pleasure as well as their own. But Nick wasn’t about to correct Dulles on this point. He still harbored a distant hope that he might be let off the hook.

  “Oh, Christ!” Dulles cried. He downed the rest of the whiskey and rose with effort to his feet. “What a mess I’ve made.” He stepped sideways to wipe the white powder off the mirror. Two fingers acted as a toothbrush with which to rub the residue into his gums. Then he lowered those fingers to his shirt collar. He started to unbutton his Oxford from the top down.

  “This can still be fun,” Dulles promised hollowly. He walked over and pressed his palm against Nick’s inert leg. The palm seemed to be the canary sent to test the safety of exploration. The hand lunged for Nick’s chest. It gouged his left pectoral with several nipple-missing pinches before flailing higher to cup his chin. “You’re a very beautiful young man,” he whispered. “Take your clothes off.”

  Nick stood up. His fists wanted to be useful and punch Dulles in the stomach. He had a clear shot of it now that he’d removed his pink Oxford. The skin of Dulles’s body was white and smooth, like the skin of an inmate who hadn’t been allowed into the prison yard for decades. The flabby wilt of his chest and elbows reminded Nick of melted candle wax. He purposely didn’t inspect Dulles’s body any further. Get this over with. Nick took off his shirt and unbuttoned his pants.

  “Slower,” Dulles ordered, falling back into the chair as he tried to step out of the puddle of his own pants. “Go slower, dammit!” Nick went faster. Shoes kicked off. Pants and socks removed. Nick grabbed for the waistline of his white briefs. “Wait!” Dulles shouted. “Not yet! Stop!” But Nick didn’t listen. He slid them off and sat down naked on the bed, his eyes on the torn map of the Doge’s Palace.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” Dulles asked. “Or something more?”

  Nick saw from the corner of his eye that Dulles had removed his boxers. A gray cloud of pubic hair haunted a fleshy hip bone. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Dulles inhaled with hurt satisfaction. Nick’s insult seemed to be exactly what he was hoping for. It erased any lingering sympathy he held for him. Now Dulles could use him without remorse.

  “Get on your hands and knees. In the center of the bed.”

  Nick did what he was told. He thought of the handyman on his hands and knees in the lobby five flights down. He thought of the screaming Italian woman in her scratchy blue housedress and of the polished Chinese manager dragging out the orange traffic cone. He thought of all of them and of the mother and daughter holding hands in the elevator, but Nick did not allow his mind to travel beyond the hotel’s automatic doors. He kept his thoughts outside room 503 but within the confines of the Grazia Salvifica. He wouldn’t let them contaminate the rest of Venice.

  “Spread your knees farther apart!” Dulles demanded from somewhere behind him. Nick, on all fours, moved his knees eight inches apart on the nylon bedspread. “More!” Nick moved them ten inches apart. “A little more!” Another inch. “There! Perfect! Yes! I can see it all now.” There was a long pause. “How tight is that little ass of yours?”

  Nick didn’t have an answer to that question. He didn’t want his participation to extend into words.

  Dulles growled, “Dad wants to know how tight it is, boy?”

  So that was the make of this old man’s fantasy: father/son. “Tight,” Nick murmured, simply to end the debate.

  Nick felt a hand grip his testicles, exploring the sac with ungentle squeezes, followed by a painful, milking tug on each ball. Nick was not the slightest bit erect, and when he allowed himself a peek behind him, he discovered with a mixture of vindication and despair that Dulles wasn’t either. Below the swollen stomach and the wisp of gray hair hung a shriveled newt-like penis. The tugging hand let go.

  Nick heard the recognizable acoustics of sex preparations in the darkness, as familiar to him as the clattering sounds of a table being set for dinner: the pop of a prescription bottle, the gulp of a pill, the deep, single-nostril snort of poppers, the plastic snap of a lube bottle, the flimsy metallic rustle of a condom wrapper.

  “Relax,” Dulles commanded. Slick palms steadied themselves against Nick’s hips. “You’re going to be like this for a while.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” Nick muttered, feeling the need to lodge a final objection—to whom, he wasn’t even sure.

  “Good. Squirm for me like you don’t want it. Beg a bit. I like to hear you whimper, and the more you cry the longer it will take.”

  All Nick could do was study the bedspread, its weft infinitely complex in the dim evening light, its color the chapped tan of a blighted desert that many before him had crossed but where no one would choose to live.

  According to the antique silver traveler’s clock on the nightstand, the act took one hour and twenty-three minutes. Dulles peeled himself off the bed, more sober and steady-footed now, and turned on the shower in the bathroom. Nick lay on the mattress, his eyes on the glowing pink column between the drapes, thinking that if he hurried he could still catch Clay at the station. He imagined Clay walking there right now, perhaps not even a hundred yards from this hotel. If Nick ran, he could see him off, maybe even buy a last-minute ticket and take the train up with him to Paris, where they could walk around in the open without any worry of being seen together. They had
never been able to do that, not in New York and not here in Venice. Nick let that vision of Paris play on in his mind until the shower shut off. That was Nick’s alarm to jump from the bed and get dressed.

  He desperately wanted a shower, but he wasn’t willing to spend an extra minute in this room. He slid on his underwear and pants and was fumbling to button his shirt when Dulles drifted out in a cloud of steam with a towel knotted around his sucked-in stomach. Nick jammed his feet into his laced-up shoes. He picked the condom off the bed, stepped into the bathroom, and flung it in the toilet. He flushed it down, washed his hands in the sink, and splashed water on his cheeks. Mercifully, the mirror was fogged so he didn’t have to catch sight of himself.

  When Nick returned to the bedroom, Dulles had already finished dressing and was gathering up a stack of euro coins from the bureau.

  “How about a drink over on the canal?” Dulles asked. The old man poured out a tiny shot of whiskey from a bottle on the bureau and tossed it back, as if the very mention of a drink proved too much of a temptation. “My treat. Or there’s a great cicchetti spot around the corner with the most delicious sardines.”

  “No, thank you,” Nick said dryly as he started toward the door.

  “Wait!” Dulles ordered. He crossed the room and stood in front of Nick. Then he lifted up on his tiptoes and leaned in for a kiss, his eyes shut romantically. It was as if the entire hideous sex act had merely been a preamble for what Dulles was really after: one evening of reliable company in Venice.

  Nick pushed Dulles back with a hand to his chest, lightly but firmly.

  “No, Dulles. I already did what you wanted. We’re finished.”

  The man sniveled as his heels dropped to the floor. “We’re both leaving the hotel at the same time. The least I can do is buy you a Campari. Come on, it’s twenty more minutes of your night.”

  “No,” Nick said more defiantly. “We had an agreement. We made a deal. I fulfilled my part. This is the end.”

  “End,” Dulles repeated. “What end?” He clapped Nick’s arm as Nick reached for the doorknob. “Okay,” he said quickly. “It’s fine if you aren’t free tonight. I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Does five p.m. work for you again?” Nick’s fingers froze on the knob. Dulles was smiling, a blush blooming on his cheeks. Perhaps he was ashamed of his nastiness, but the shame hadn’t stopped him from inflicting it.

  “I’m not coming back,” Nick replied. “You won’t be here tomorrow anyway. You said you were leaving for Rome.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t see the point in rushing off.” Dulles tried to rub Nick’s back, but Nick flattened himself against the door. “Besides,” Dulles said, “we got a good start today, but there’s still more I’d like to try with you.”

  The words were out of Nick’s mouth before he registered them. “Are you fucking insane? I’m never doing that again!” There was no chance Nick was going to enter this hotel room a second time. The thought of it broke him. It slumped him watery-kneed against the wall.

  Dulles took a step backward, just beyond reach. “We also still haven’t discussed the money part.”

  “What money part?”

  “Well.” Dulles glanced down at his fingers as they fidgeted with his room key. “You and your partner made—what? seven hundred and fifty thousand?—off Richard. Certainly my silence as an accredited silver expert is worth half of that. Let’s say three hundred and seventy and I walk away. I’ll even confirm they’re real and what a brilliant job you did. That’s fair, isn’t it? And with my stamp of approval, you can probably sell more pieces to him in the future.”

  “What?” Nick’s saliva had transformed into glue. His tongue was stiff, and his lips weren’t moving correctly. The amount of hush money that Dulles was demanding wouldn’t leave them with enough to pay off Clay’s debts, let alone see them through the next few years in Europe.

  Dulles sprang for the door and managed to open it wide enough to slip out into the hallway. Nick grabbed the doorknob and chased after him down the red-carpeted corridor. “Dulles,” he whispered in a voice far calmer than he imagined himself capable; his ears were ringing, and his breath didn’t seem to be reaching his lungs. “Dulles, please. Wait a second.”

  Dulles ignored him. He continued to move swiftly down the hall, either to indicate he meant business or to avoid a physical altercation. Nick shouldn’t have let him escape his hotel room. He should have grabbed Dulles by the collar, shoved him against the wall, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave for Rome tonight. Nick could have walked him to the station and watched him board a train. But Nick had no experience as a thug. He had survived on earth for twenty-five years without once punching another human being. He used to be proud of that fact, but now he realized its crucial disadvantages.

  “All right!” Nick cried. Dulles stopped at the housekeeping trolley and allowed Nick to catch up to him. “All right,” Nick said with his head bent, his neck yoked in shame. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Five p.m. One more time. And then we’re even, okay?” Nick was on the edge of tears. “You can do whatever you want. Okay?”

  Dulles looked up at him almost sympathetically. “I should have been clearer from the start. I’m afraid it’s not an either-or proposition.” He glanced down the empty hall to ensure that no one would overhear his confession. “The thing is, Nick, I’m broke. Too many debts of my own since retirement. I’ve gotten myself into a jam.” He bunched his lips, as if sorry for leading Nick on. He hadn’t come to Venice for disgusting sex—that was just a bonus. He’d come to refresh his bank account.

  “You can’t have the money,” Nick spat with a shake of his head.

  Dulles closed his eyes, spun around, and launched himself down the hall. Nick followed a few steps behind. Dulles stopped at the elevator doors by the stairwell and pressed the call button. The button glowed with IN ARRIVO printed in black across it.

  Nick was about to inform him that the elevator was out of order, when Dulles turned around to face him with a smirk. “I’d hate to call Ari and tell him what you’ve been up to these past few weeks. That would really break his heart, wouldn’t it, to know you betrayed him like you have?”

  The elevator bell dinged. The doors parted to reveal a gaping hole from which the hellish sounds of hammering and a child’s screams arose. Nick gazed at the enticing void over Dulles’s shoulder, and for a second he gave himself over to its power as a solution. This five-floor drop was really no different from the one a few feet away at the staircase. It wouldn’t be difficult for Nick to push Dulles over that low iron railing when they took the stairs down to the lobby; Nick could point to something on a lower floor and wait for Dulles to lean over to see it. But Dulles wasn’t standing in front of a railing. He had his back to an open drop while taunting the young man he’d just abused in his hotel room for an hour and twenty-three minutes. The empty shaft in front of Nick was monstrously tempting, the perfect human disposal system.

  “Dulles, you should be careful—”

  “I should be?” He fluttered his outraged eyes. “Do you want me to call Ari? Because I will. I’ll put him on the phone with Richard West myself.”

  That last threat had done the trick. Nick smiled warmly and extended his hand. “The elevator’s here.”

  Dulles spun around and brought his right leg forward into the nothingness. Some instinct must have fought through the drugs and alcohol and greed in his brain to warn him of his imminent danger. For as Dulles dropped his right foot toward a floor that didn’t exist, he managed for a trembling second to recalibrate the physics of his body and teeter on his left leg, his arms flailing by his sides. Nick watched Dulles in that second, mesmerized: it seemed as if the force of a mere breath would decide his fate. Nick didn’t wait for the breath. His hand shot out, his palm spread wide as it rammed into Dulles’s shoulder blade. Nick’s eyes shut, and he heard a blunt thwack followed not five seconds later by a deeper, more conclusive thud at the bottom of the shaft.

  He s
tood there, eyes closed, lost in the outer space of his head. When he opened them, he saw a smear of blood on a metal beam inside the shaft that Dulles’s head must have struck on his way down. Now there were real screams, a chorus of sopranos surging from below. The screams seemed to echo up the stairwell rather than the shaft, as if they were taking the safer route.

  His legs shaking, Nick took long, panicky steps backward. Gravity seemed to be pulling him toward the open shaft, as if to devour him too. He tried the knobs of several doors—508, 507, 506—before ducking behind the housekeeping trolley. As he squatted on the floor with his palms clamped over his mouth, more shouts wafted from the lobby. Doors on lower floors slammed. Nick realized he’d soon hear sirens and feet marching up the stairwell, and if he remained where he was, crouched in a child’s hiding spot halfway between the open elevator and Dulles’s room, he’d be IDed as a suspect. His only option was to beat the sirens to the hotel’s front door.

  He stood up, straightened his clothes, and steered toward the mouth of the staircase. He forced himself to slow his pace into the rhythm of a confused, curious onlooker as he took the flights in rushing descent, on each floor joined by more guests who had heard the commotion below. “What happened?” he asked a woman in a bathrobe on the second-floor landing.

  “Is there a fire?” she asked in reply, before they were separated by a family of Spaniards. As he took the final turns of the staircase, Nick kept his eyes from the body on top of the elevator car. The mother and daughter were still stuck inside the cube, lying on its floor now, the daughter sobbing and shrieking while the mother hugged her to her chest.

  The Chinese manager stood frozen by his traffic cone. The handyman was frantically trying to pry open the elevator doors with his bare hands. The Italian grandmother was directing the guests outside with wild gesticulations. Nick did not look back. He exited the Grazia Salvifica and turned left onto the crowded footpath. He made it two blocks walking slowly, fighting the urge to break into a full-throttle run. He crossed a stone bridge and kept going with the tide of meandering restaurant seekers. French children were counting up all the lions they could spot on door knockers, flags, and cornices. They were up to eighty-nine.