A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Two bridges farther on, tourists licked gelato, their expressions blissfully ignorant of the death that had just befallen one of their own not a quarter of a mile away. How far did Nick have to walk until he was free to run? How much distance did he have to put between himself and his crime before the security footage of a young American sprinting down a side street would not be linked to the death of a drunk British retiree in a two-star hotel? Nick still had traces of Dulles’s spit and semen all over him. But to his relief he also had his own wallet, phone, and all of his clothing. He’d left no macroscopic evidence behind in room 503.

  He checked the time: 7:06 p.m. Clay’s train must be hurtling across the lagoon right now, making its own distance, rushing toward the border. Nick would give anything to be with him, half-asleep with his temple against Clay’s shoulder, soon to cross into another country that spoke a different language. When Nick spotted the Rialto Bridge, its twin arcades shining with spotlights, couples leaning like kissing gargoyles over its balustrades, he finally gave in to his impulse. He ran across the Grand Canal as fast as he could, and he didn’t stop until the sun set.

  Chapter 17

  Nick took the night boat into the lagoon. He’d waited thirty minutes in various states of consciousness for the off-hour vaporetto to snail up to Piazza San Marco. He couldn’t remember how he’d managed to make his way to the dock at four in the morning and extract a ticket from the machine. He could have simply crawled under the turnstile, but Nick had always been a good boy. Such a fucking good boy, his entire life. Forget finding Piazza San Marco, how the hell had he managed to hold on to his wallet all night?

  He stumbled through the vacant waterbus cabin, unsure whether the boat’s fierce pitching was disguising or dramatizing his drunkenness. He struggled with the back-door latch and banged his head on the frame as he stepped onto the stern’s outer deck. He fell onto a plastic seat. From here he could watch the twinkle of Venice recede against the tarry waters. The city was now nothing but a strand of white Christmas lights. White Christmas lights were reserved for the wealthy sections of Dayton. His family, like the other suckers in their middle-everything neighborhood, went for the tacky glory of reds and blues and greens. The motor grumbled as the vaporetto accelerated into open water. Soon they’d touch the sea.

  After he’d sprinted over the Rialto Bridge earlier that evening, he’d kept running until he wandered down a narrow alley that dead-ended on a shoelace canal. On one side, there was a thin stone ledge, and Nick balled himself up there. He covered his eyes with his knees and tried to delete all memories of the Grazia Salvifica, but they kept flaring up—the bedspread, the elevator shaft—more so when his eyes were shut than open. Eventually he returned to the alley, his footsteps thunderously loud on the stone, and made his way to Campo Santa Margherita. It seemed safer to be around people, especially ones who didn’t speak his language. He picked the noisiest jam-packed spot on the far side of the square. “Vodka con club soda,” he told the bartender. He was served a vodka con tonic water, which he promptly chugged, and downed the next one that he ordered and the one after that. Nick was trying to flood the elevator shaft from his head. A sweaty Italian with a goatee bumped into him while trying to get the bartender’s attention. He clapped Nick’s shoulder and called his friends over to marvel at the lone, morose American drinking in their student dive. They were university kids studying in Venice. Four girls, three guys. Nick couldn’t have said whether they were attractive. He was only judging people on whether they seemed like threats or not. They acted friendly as they joined him at his drinking pace. The goateed Italian even bought him a vodka.

  “Andiamo! Come with us, American!”

  Nick went along with the group, heedless of the direction, happy to submit to someone else’s plan. All they seemed to want from Nick was his Americanness, and he felt shielded by these Italians on their home turf. He followed their footsteps and singing through the streets. “Our only discotheque in town. Piccolo. We bring you, but in trade, you promise to take us clubbing when we visit you in Manhattan.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Nick replied. “Sure.”

  They knocked on a gleaming brass door and trudged down a narrow staircase to a bleak basement retrofitted in bedazzled mirrors and black-lacquer benches. Drinks were skinnier and double the price. But Nick felt safe underground, and the vodka untightened his body enough for his hips to crank back and forth as the others jumped around him on the dance floor. Clubbing, what a stupid, embarrassing word, and yet right now it seemed perversely accurate for the fist movements the crowd was making around him. Lasers flashed on the ceiling. In the flickering pyrotechnics, he spotted a husky young woman in a yellow dress standing not five feet away, her fleshy American face staring at him in recognition. She was the daughter of the Warbly-Gardeners, the girl on the motoscafo from the airport that first day. She knew that Nick was a thief. She might call the police on him. Nick tried to disappear into the dance floor, but he was immediately pushed backward by a muscly Italian. He fell drunkenly against August Warbly-Gardener, her arms catching him before he could take her down with him. Scrambling, he grabbed at her shoulders for stability. This young woman had two working arms, no cast. She was not the young American. As he looked at her, her face sharpened into Eastern European features, and a man behind her glared menacingly with his fist raised.

  Nick fought his way to the other side of the basement, and the world went black for a while. He didn’t know how long he stayed in the subterranean club, filling his credit card with drink purchases. He wasn’t entirely sure that the youths he left with were the same ones who had brought him. But it was still night when he reached the surface, and there was still too much fear in his head to brave it alone. He followed his new friends down a web of alleys to an iron-spiked door. Inside, the abandoned palazzo’s walls were crumbling, its garland-molded plaster worn through to scabs of brick. Red swirls of spray-paint made a Persian carpet across the marble floor. The staircase had caved in, and American hip-hop blasted from a set of speakers. The only furniture in the room was a ring of mattresses surrounding a pond of melted candles. In the corner, painted signs and protest banners lay drying. Someone handed Nick a half-filled bottle of wine. He sat down on the closest mattress, right next to a couple who were making out, and he drank down the rest of the bottle. His Americanness seemed to have lost its novelty. No one noticed him. “Hey,” he whispered to the two Venetians next to him. “Hey.” They stopped kissing and stared at him. “Do you know if there’s any more alcohol?” They didn’t respond; Nick wasn’t sure he was even speaking clear English. “Or drugs? Do you have drugs? I’ll take anything really.” He laughed. “You wouldn’t believe how much I need them.” He somehow managed to crawl to his feet and find the front door.

  He couldn’t go back to Daniela’s in his current state. She and Benny might still be up, sitting in the kitchen, their eyes reading his guilt. Worse, he couldn’t handle being locked up alone in the tiny guest room. The leash-tight walkways of Dorsoduro were already starting to close in on him like a straitjacket. He was glad that Clay was off in Paris. Otherwise, he would have lost his self-control and shown up banging on Il Dormitorio’s door, crying loudly for his help.

  An idea came to him: the Lido, so close that boats went there from Piazza San Marco. The Lido was open beach. He could breathe out there unseen, away from the city.

  Almost an hour later, slumped on the back deck of a vaporetto, Nick realized his mistake. The straitjacket had been keeping him from harming himself. He’d been safer around strangers; now he was alone with the memory of what had happened. He stood up and gripped the railing. It was too low to prevent him from falling over if the boat lurched; nothing in this world had been designed with him in mind. He rested his head against the railing’s cold metal to quiet the growling of his brain.

  Finally the vaporetto rubbed against the landing platform of the Lido. Nick scuttled off with a weary grazie to the boatman. He crossed a wide, paved road that ca
rs must drive down—the world of automobiles seemed momentarily exotic to him. Streetlights illuminated a row of tidy hotels and houses. The facades here looked quaint and village-like, as if they belonged to the rose-dotted waterfronts of Southern France. Nick cut down a side street with arrows pointing toward SPIAGGIA LIBERA. He passed shuttered boutiques and swimsuit shops before reaching a series of enormous dark monoliths looming against the blue-black cloud cover. These were the Belle Epoque seafront hotels, sinister empty mansions without a single light on; it was too early in the season for guests at the beach resort. Nick stumbled down a concrete ramp, and before he was ready for it, the hard ground gave way to sand. He pulled off his shoes and socks and carried them out toward the crash of waves. The sand hadn’t been raked yet for summer, and jagged shells stabbed at his feet. He’d sobered up enough to realize how cold it was on the beach. On the horizon, a clean line of blue cut across the dark world.

  Nick felt the urgent need to purge his body of Dulles Hawkes. If he could unzip his own skin, he would have done so; instead he began to strip, folding his clothes in a neat pile, which he left on the sand. Naked, he walked into the sea, the first waves sharp as paper cuts on his ankles. But the memory of Dulles on his body pushed him forward, and Nick held his breath as he hopped into the water and let the sea swallow him to his waist. Before caution could send him back to shore, he ducked his head under and swam out. A series of small fires erupted along his nerve endings, but he would need only another minute or two in the freezing surf to rinse his body of the contamination. He felt sick and half-dead, but he did not feel guilty. He would have felt guilty about Dulles if it had come down to money. But when he thought of the hour and twenty-three minutes he’d spent in the hotel room and the promise of more in the days to come, Nick didn’t feel much beyond numb.

  Still, a voice in his head told him to keep swimming out. That voice was as familiar to him as his childhood bed. It had been there, a bright, silvery menace in a corner of his brain, from as early as the age of twelve. Keep swimming, go on, toward the line on the horizon. It spoke to him of easy exits. But Nick disobeyed. He turned around and swam back to shore.

  In the morning Nick took the vaporetto back to San Marco. It was a brutal ride with a drumming headache and no sunglasses. Sand flaked off his arms and legs whenever he moved them. He’d slept for too few hours, hunched under the shelter of a boardwalk concession stand.

  Nick’s sobriety returned in time for a new fear to grip him. It came in the form of the newspapers that several Lido commuters read as they crossed the lagoon. Nick tried to study the Italian headlines over their shoulders, waiting for them to turn the pages before searching the next collection of black block letters and pixilated photographs. Had any of the papers reported the death of a British tourist at a hotel by the train station? When the chinless executive in front of him read too slowly, Nick switched seats. But the mother nursing her infant wasn’t much faster. Nick was desperate to find out whether Dulles’s death had been ruled an accident or whether it was being investigated as a homicide. Surely the Hotel Grazia Salvifica was too stingy to have surveillance equipment on every floor. Surely, and yet he couldn’t be sure at all.

  He took out his phone. At some point in the night, the screen had cracked. But as he began to type into the web browser, he realized the mistake he was making. If Dulles’s death hadn’t yet been made public, the random assortment of nouns would read like a confession: DULLES HAWKES VENICE TOURIST FALL ELEVATOR MURDER HOTEL ACCIDENT GRAZIA SALVIFICA PUSH. In the event that the police ever checked his phone history, it would not be wise to predict killings on search engines.

  Nick disembarked at San Marco and bought two papers at the nearest kiosk. He flipped through them as he headed toward Dorsoduro. From what he could glean, there was no news on Dulles. At another kiosk mere footsteps from the Accademia Bridge, he bought another paper, with the same result. Certainly even an accidental death of a foreigner would merit a write-up.

  Nick loped into Campo San Barnaba mentally drained and physically exhausted, and yet he was still too jittery to surrender to Daniela’s guest bedroom. He needed reassurance of some kind. Another mistake he wouldn’t make would be to return to the scene of the crime, lingering outside the Grazia Salvifica for clues. Nick never wanted to go back to that street again. If he visited Venice in fifty years, he’d refuse to walk that section of the Strada Nuova.

  He considered phoning Richard West or, better still, Eva. They might have already heard about Dulles. But both had been present when Dulles made plans to meet Nick at San Rocco, and he didn’t want to stir up that memory in their heads. There was another person, more indirect, whom he could try. He searched his phone for Battista’s number and dialed.

  “Pronto!” said the familiar hostile voice.

  “Ciao, Battista, it’s Nick. Come stai?”

  “Bene, Nick. How are you? Are you still in Venezia?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. Battista had been the nearest approximation to a friend that Nick had spoken to since the incident. Even still, hearing his voice shouldn’t provoke the tears that flooded his eyes. “I’m still here!” he said emphatically. “How is everything?”

  “So busy,” Battista groaned. “Pazzo! More busy than when I saw you last.”

  “Yes! Ha! You’re really busy!” Nick couldn’t access his usual smooth conversational prowess. “Is all good with everyone? Any news?” He winced. Why had he asked such a clumsy question?

  “Only Il Dormitorio, the palazzino next door. The guy who inherited it, he is selling it. I work on this with Mr. West too.”

  “Oh, wow!” Nick enthused. This was good news, and Nick needed good news right now. “Richard is considering buying it? It’s a great investment.”

  “Yes, we will take it!” Battista said boastfully. “The guy is an imbroglione, un delinquente, how do you say it in English?” Nick could guess the meaning; he’d heard the same characterization of Clay a hundred times. “He wants five million euros! There is no way to pay that much. But we are smarter. We screw him over on the deal.” Battista uttered the American term screw him over like a child practicing a dirty word. The second time was more convincing: “He is in a hurry to sell, so we screw him over completely!”

  “That’s great!” Nick replied. It was great. Let Richard seize the chance to offer Clay a trifle of his asking amount—four million, or three, or two. If it were up to Nick, he’d accept one. They could take whatever they got and be out of Venice in a matter of days. Nowhere in Italy was far away enough from the elevator shaft on Rio Terà San Leonardo. They could fly to Indonesia or Australia or Cameroon. “How soon do you think he’ll make an offer?” Nick asked. “He should snap it up before others learn it’s for sale! Try to convince him, Battista. Make him buy it quickly!”

  “I will try,” Battista promised. “Mr. West promised me a bonus if I get all of the arrangements ready in time. That is why I cannot meet for a drink today. I am sorry.”

  “Yes, let’s get a drink sometime. That’s why I was calling. Ciao.”

  Nick stopped in a caffè and ordered an espresso. He tried to appear normal, lounging at the bar counter like just another expat enjoying a late-morning coffee. But when the espresso arrived, his stomach revolted. Did late editions of local newspapers still exist? Should he wait to check the kiosks again in an hour? His foot tapping furiously, he decided to text Eva a simple “Hi” to gauge the reaction it garnered. For the next twenty minutes Nick stared into the cracked screen at his own Hi, willing a response. No reply came. He placed two coins on the bar and left.

  He’d pushed a man to his death. As he walked down Fondamenta Gherardini, that fact pounced on him as if it were a revelation. He’d have to carry that millisecond shove around with him for the rest of his life. From now on, he’d always be a murderer, even if it had been in self-defense.

  He worried he’d lost his sanity somewhere in the past twenty-four hours. His reflection in the window of a mask shop confirmed it. Patc
hes of sand caked his neck and ears. His curly wet hair had dried in the shape of a cresting tidal wave. He’d been walking around with the stench of the sea on him all morning. What was wrong with him? Why hadn’t he gone back to his guest room right away?

  He picked up his pace, ducked down the tunnel, and opened the metal gate onto the concrete garden. He shook the gate to make sure it had locked behind him, and hid his face from the neighbor smoking on his upstairs balcony. Nick was relieved to find the apartment empty. He shut the guest-room door, pulled down the window shade, and sat on the corner of the bed. Here in the soothing darkness, he felt safe. He was still sitting in the same position some hours later when his phone pinged with an incoming message. It was Clay, with good news from Paris.

  Chapter 18

  Was there a term for forgeries that looked too authentic?

  Clay spread the forms out on the kitchen counter. Antonin had certainly come through for him. The three forged documents—a private agreement backdated to 1997, signed by Cecilia van der Haar, transferring ownership of the Venice property; a New York State notarized contract conceding power of attorney over the property to her brother and his subsequent heirs; and an Italian apostille festooned with more badges and stamps than a general’s chest—looked more legitimate than the authentic scruffy, ink-blotted documents provided by Freddy’s lawyer. Clay wasn’t worried. Antonin had promised these papers would convince even the most diligent Italian notary, and it had only taken him a day of phone calls at the Ritz to conjure them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get them for you sooner,” Antonin had said in all seriousness when the courier dropped the package at the hotel. “We are still a bit of the old world—slow on Sundays.”