Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Had I poisoned the cat with my toxic fish?

  That would have been domestic crime number two.

  For a day or two, I let it go. A contadina would laugh in my face, I thought, if I, a townie, started making a fuss about a missing cat. Even so, I didn’t have to wait very long before my curiosity was satisfied. The next day, as I jogged back toward my gate, Signora Amalia stood up straight and stared at me. I waved to her, and she shook a handful of radishes at me. I thought that she was being neighborly, and that she wanted me to have them.

  I stopped by her gate, and the old woman came to meet me.

  “No more fish,” she said, and she frowned, as if she missed them. As if the cats missed them. That was how I preferred to think of it. As if Il Rosso missed them.

  “I have to run,” I said. “I have to get well. I need to go back to work.”

  “Eat radish,” she said. “Eat cheese.” I had seen her three goats, as well. I had seen her churning goat’s milk in a bucket. Incredible as it might seem, this old lady was producing edible organic things that all her neighbors bought from the local Despar supermarket. “I owe you these,” she said, holding up the radishes, offering them to me.

  “What for?”

  “The fish,” she said.

  I took the radishes, thanked her, turned away, then turned back. I couldn’t stop myself. I missed Il Rosso. “What happened to the cat?” I asked.

  “Which one?” There were two or three cats in her vicinity, but not the one that I was looking for. These were rangy, stringy spotted beasts, the sort you wouldn’t touch for fear of the diseases they might be carrying.

  “Il Rosso,” I said.

  She looked at me, and her eyes narrowed. They were distant, cold. “Il Rosso’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  She stared at me even harder. “You know where.”

  I was lost. What did she mean? Was she accusing me of having stolen her cat?

  “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  “Ehi!” she responded, her voice a lilting doubt. “If it’s not you, then it’s one of them.” Her eyes flashed over at the building where I lived.

  “One of them?”

  “They’re good, they are.”

  I didn’t understand what she was saying until she made a gesture which is typical of the people in the north of Italy. She pushed her forefinger into her right cheek and gave it a rapid twist, as if she were drilling a hole. It means, It’s really tasty. “Il Rosso?”

  “Ehi!” she said again, waving her finger at me. Then she spoke some more in thick Venetian: “Ghe son più bòn dei conigi!”

  I went home and I thought about domestic crime number three. They’re tastier than rabbits. That was what the old lady had said. Somebody had murdered and eaten Il Rosso. Signor Amalia laid the blame on me, or on one of the other people in the apartment block. And she was resentful too.

  Was it because she had been planning to feed up, murder, and eat Il Rosso herself?

  A week later, I had seen the doctor, been signed off, and I was back at work in time for the trial of the kid who had shot me. He was seventeen years old, sleek as a greyhound, eyes as cold as the dead fish from the canals behind my house. I had walked into a tobacconist’s shop while a holdup was taking place. The kid didn’t hesitate, he turned and fired at me point-blank. Then he stepped over my body and walked away, leaving me for dead.

  I had seen the same look in the eyes of Signora Amalia.

  Fortunately for me, she’d been holding radishes, not that roncola with the rusty blade.

  A CLOSED BOOK

  BY MARY HOFFMAN

  Rialto Bridge

  The woman with the fancy camera spent a long time at the edge of the piazzetta, adjusting the focus and firing off shot after shot. Some of the gondoliers looked up and glared. They were used to tourists taking souvenir photos; some of the men even offered to pose—but they charged for it. This woman, though, seemed too focused on herself to be collecting memories of a holiday.

  “Giornalista,” grumbled one of the older men, glaring into the zoom lens.

  If this woman—English, surely, from the straggly brown ponytail and utilitarian clothes—was writing an article about Venice, like so many of her countrywomen, she should expect to pay for taking pictures.

  But she wasn’t a journalist.

  After a last shot or two, she walked away from the water and perched at the first outside table she came to, belonging to the first overpriced café, and ordered a caffé latte, although it was nearly lunchtime.

  She reviewed her morning’s work, but was dissatisfied. Face after Venetian face scowled at her from the little screen on the back of her camera—old, middle-aged, the occasional thirty-something—stubbled, bald, fat, self-satisfied. There was no gondolier that fit her exacting standards. She sat back, stretching her long denim-clad legs in front of her, drinking her expensive coffee, crumbling the biscotto in her saucer.

  The woman left an unnecessarily large euro note for the waiter and set off toward the Riva degli Schiavoni, without a backward glance at the gondoliers who had taken so much of her attention a short while ago. There were even more of them here in the busy waterway that ran under the bridge, alongside the Doge’s Palace. She leaned on the north parapet of the Ponte della Paglia and looked away from the lagoon toward the ridiculously picturesque Ponte dei Sospiri.

  A shrill voice floated up from the water behind her.

  “If only you were half the man he is!” complained a woman to her husband.

  The photographer turned for a better look at the gondolier who had provoked the comparison so unflattering to the tourist’s husband, who was sitting scarlet-faced on the cushions of the vessel. In fact, literally the opposite was true, for the husband was obese and the gondolier trim and well muscled.

  It was not clear what had led to the woman’s outburst but it amused the gondolier so much that somewhere between the two bridges he lost his balance and tipped into the cold and murky water of the canal. The splash was galvanizing and the photographer hurried over in time to see him come up spluttering and shaking his hair. His fellow oarsmen laughed and clapped and the tourist in the gondola allowed himself a tiny smirk at his furious wife, who seemed now to have decided that all men were useless.

  The little bar in Cannaregio had only one tourist in it but she attracted no more than a quick second glance from the regulars, since she was with Taddeo, who was a local. At that second glance they saw that she was buying, and that gave them quite the wrong impression.

  Taddeo was having trouble with her name: Kathy Hughes was hard work for a Venetian tongue and he soon renamed her Caterina, which she liked, sitting up a bit straighter on the barstool and loosening her hair from its elastic band.

  “So, Taddeo,” she said, “have you fallen in before?”

  He shrugged. Taddeo didn’t feel his masculinity compromised; every gondolier got the occasional dunking. “It is a—what do you call it?—a sort of industrial accident.”

  “Like a prostitute’s orgasm,” the woman said.

  Taddeo choked over his drink.

  “I’m writing a book,” she continued, as if that was the natural course of the conversation.

  “You want to put me in it?”

  “Maybe.”

  Taddeo preened just a bit.

  “It’s not a novel, though,” she added, draining her glass of Campari. “It’s a book of short stories.”

  It made no difference to the gondolier; he was more interested in the next round of drinks, which soon arrived.

  “They’re called Scorpion Tales,” said Kathy.

  Taddeo’s English was pretty good but he couldn’t quite grasp puns. “Where they have the stings,” he said, nodding.

  She let it pass; her stories did have a sting in the tail: that was the point of them. She wanted to impress him but she saw the limitations of his literary knowledge. He would not ask her if books of short stories were not a notoriously difficult
genre to sell and she would not have to tell him that her father was the director of a successful publishing house.

  “The thing is,” she said, “I want to set one of them in Venice. But I can’t get at it.”

  “Get at what?”

  “The real Venice. It’s all … tourist rip-offs,” she explained.

  “Gondola rides at eighty euros for a forty-minute stock trip up the Grand Canal, cappuccinos at ten euros, tatty masks, plastic fans, sweeties made of glass—nothing I can get my teeth into.” She looked around the bar. “This is the realest place I’ve found since I got here.”

  Taddeo didn’t want to disagree; he was hoping to get dinner out of this and maybe more. She wasn’t really his type—not enough flesh on her—but a young foreign woman who wasn’t his wife, well, that was irresistible.

  Kathy wasn’t looking for sex. She hadn’t been photographing gondoliers to find the best-looking one; she wanted to find the different one. She loved the bar in Cannaregio and liked the restaurant even better. This was the real Venice at last. She had spent the evening getting Taddeo to tell her about crimes, the more gruesome the better. And as she got more and more out of him, the gondolier began to think he would prefer to be back home with Micola, his wife, after all.

  “Caterina” was interested in all the most bloodthirsty crimes and Taddeo began to invent ones that he had only half-heard about, embellishing and extending with a drowning here, a strangling there. Then he told her about the famous murder in Cannaregio: “Just a little way from here—they got the murderer, at least one of the murderers. He’s in prison. But he made it look like a Mafia crime, fixing the victim up like a sacrificial goat.”

  Then he had to explain incaprettare to her, the process of tying hands and feet behind the back in such a way that the more the victim struggled, the more the noose around his neck tightened. She liked that; he got the feeling there was someone she would like to do that to.

  By now Taddeo was sweating. It was great to have a free meal and plenty to drink but surely it wasn’t natural for a young woman to want to talk about nothing but rapes and murders, crimes of passion, incest … Ah, incest. Heading her off from the murder of the greengrocer, he had chanced to mention a case of familial abuse from years back, simply because the perpetrator shared a first name with the fixed-up corpse.

  Signor Giampaolo Volpe was a dentist with two daughters. After the death of his wife, Volpe turned his attentions to the daughters, first the older, then, when she fled, the younger. It all came out when the dentist’s body was found floating in the lagoon. There was not a mark on him, so it could have been accidental, and the sisters, who had been estranged for some years, both had alibis.

  As the stories poured out of him, Taddeo became a bit loose with the wine and all the food. The woman was taking notes in a little book she drew from her handbag; he wished that he could just stop. He was singing for his supper and not just a single aria; he was beginning to feel as if he had performed a complete Tosca.

  At last the flow of words slowed to a trickle and he slumped in his seat.

  “Can you take me out in your gondola tomorrow night?” she asked, merciless. “I’ll pay twice what you normally charge.”

  The craft slipped silently through the back canals of the city, black hull sliding through black water. Taddeo was relieved that tonight she wanted no talk at all. There was no sound but the splash of his oar and no light but the lantern on the gondola and the eerie mezzotint of the scene under the full moon. It would have been peaceful if only Taddeo’s passenger hadn’t been so tense; she was not lying back on the cushions drinking in the romance of the lagoon city by night, but sitting upright and fiddling with the gold heart she wore on a chain around her neck.

  “Take me to where they found the dentist,” was all she had said when he’d led her into the gondola and wrapped her up with rugs.

  He couldn’t remember where that corpse had washed up so he took her to a place that looked right, a lonely minor canal where no gondoliers sculled tourists, where a little bridge reflected itself in the still water like a perfect circle.

  “He was washed up against one side of the bridge,” he lied.

  The woman made him stop and she took lots more photos of the supposed site of the body’s discovery before motioning him onward.

  There were few people about in the little campi or on the bridges of the district they were gliding past. “Caterina” emitted a small, satisfied sigh; she was finding the real Venice.

  Taddeo no longer found her even slightly attractive but she had very deep pockets and that had its own appeal.

  “You are finding your scorpion stings?” he asked after a while.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Drop me back somewhere central soon. I want to write them up.”

  Taddeo realized he didn’t even know where she was staying; all he had was her cell phone number. He let her out near the Rialto as courteously as he could manage and she pressed a large bundle of bills into his hand. It was all he could do not to shudder at the coldness of her touch.

  The woman typed furiously in her room. It was the last story in her collection and she sat back with a small smile when it was finished, cracking her knuckles. This one had a good sting. The best.

  She sent an e-mail to her father, attaching the file. She didn’t bother to revise what she had written; he would publish whatever she sent him. After a slight pause, she sent it again, this time to her sister in London. She backed it up on her flash drive and her cloud storage account. Then she permitted herself a larger smile.

  Time for room service.

  In a small cluttered office in Covent Garden, a computer beeped to let its user know he had mail. A rumpled, middleaged man read the attachment with growing horror; of course the first story he had opened was “The Good Father.” He did not need to see any more. He sat slumped, with his head in his hands.

  Then took out his cell phone and dialed a number he had hoped never to use again.

  Three days later it was all over the lagoon city and the police came to visit Taddeo.

  She had been found in her room, strangled with the cable from her laptop, of which there was no sign. Her wallet was also missing though nothing else seemed to have been taken; the police didn’t know about the flash drive or cloud account. An expensive camera remained on the desk and the police took that. It was only the cable that made them realize there had been a laptop computer. It had been used as a garrote, with a pencil twisted up in it to apply the necessary force for asphyxiation.

  The staff at the Gritti Palace knew nothing, had seen no one suspicious, and said no visitor to her room had stopped at the desk. They were appalled at the blow to their reputation. But there were more visitors to the bar that night than usual. The barman, who scarcely remembered what Kathy Hughes had looked like, gathered a large number of tips as he embroidered his memories for their benefit.

  Hardly anyone who knew her would have recognized the woman from the photographs the police showed Taddeo. Their methods were unorthodox but they hoped to shock him into a confession. Instead they sent him running for the bathroom where they could hear him vomiting copiously and comprehensively.

  The black-and-white photos taken at the scene showed her lying on the carpet between the round table and the draped double bed, in front of long windows that overlooked the canal. Her tongue protruded from her darkened face and her eyes were stained with bloody spots. The only recognizable thing about her was the little gold heart locket on its chain; the murderer had not taken that.

  “When did you go to the Gritti Palace?” asked the older of the two officers when Taddeo got back from the bathroom, his face several shades paler.

  “I have never been inside the Gritti,” said the gondolier. “Only picked people up or dropped them outside.”

  “You were seen,” lied the younger detective.

  “Whoever says that is wrong,” said Taddeo. Then he had a thought. “Is that where she was found? I never knew where
she was staying.”

  “You admit you knew her then?”

  There was no point in denying it.

  “I took her out in my gondola,” he said.

  “And you had drinks with her and dinner—more than once,” said the older detective.

  It was true. After the gondola ride by night, when she had been so silent and absorbed, he had seen “Caterina” twice more. Once she had asked him to do the usual tourist thing along the Grand Canal and had insisted on his giving her the standard spiel.

  And then, yes, he had let her take him out to dinner again; perhaps that had been unwise. In fact, looking back at his short relationship—hardly a relationship!—with the murdered woman, he wished heartily that he had never set eyes on her. She had given him a lot of money and paid for every drink and dish they had shared, but now he was a murder suspect.

  “How much do you know about this Kathy Hughes?” asked the younger detective, stumbling over the barbaric English name.

  “Nothing! Almost nothing,” he said.

  “And yet you had dinner with her,” the older man consulted a notebook, “twice. What did she talk about?”

  “She didn’t talk much. She wanted me to talk—about crime in Venice. She was writing a book, about scorpions.”