She pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the bath. Nico still had his back to her, face turned up into the overhead shower and hands both clasping a tablet of soap. He was rubbing at his shoulders and chest, and his breath came in short gasps.
She stepped forward and reached around to his stomach.
Nico jumped and spun around, almost sending her sprawling. The shower reached her, and it was scalding hot across her face, shoulders, and chest. She gasped.
“I just can’t get myself clean,” he said, and for the first time since she had met him, he sounded like a child.
“I’ll help you,” she said. He nodded and smiled gratefully, and for the next half an hour as she scrubbed his skin pink, he projected only an unfamiliar, heartrending vulnerability.
Domenic returned mid-morning with a doctor, and although Nico protested, he let the doctor look him over. There were no injuries and no obvious indications of any head trauma. He sat through the whole examination looking vaguely befuddled, and when the doctor stood to leave, Nico walked him to the door.
“How is he?” Domenic whispered.
“I don’t know,” Geena said. “It’s like he’s been away a lot longer.”
“How do you mean?”
She shrugged. How could she communicate to Domenic the subtle differences, the awkwardness between them that had never been there before? So instead she changed the subject. Divert your mind and sometimes the answers will creep up on you, her father used to tell her. He’d never given her a piece of advice that had failed her yet.
“Is Dr. Schiavo angry that we’re not at the site?” she asked.
“Of course not. You two have had quite a trauma—”
Geena frowned. “Not more than anyone else who was down there when the wall gave way.”
“Not true,” Domenic said. “I didn’t explain to Dr. Schiavo what had happened with you and Nico—that’s not my business to explain to him—but I told him you’d both had a close call. Ramus is site manager and he’s been there all day, talking with the city engineers about shoring up the canal wall, getting pumps in, all of it. You let us worry about all of that for today.”
“Have you looked at the film yet?” she asked.
“No, but your BBC friend is all over us.” Domenic rolled his eyes.
“Let’s have a viewing here. Finch can come, too.”
“You’re sure?” He looked around uncertainly, and at first she thought he was still worried about Nico. But then she realized the source of his discomfort and smiled.
“Sure. I don’t think we can pretend that Nico and I are a secret anymore, can we?”
“I suppose not,” Domenic said, returning her smile. “I’ll call the others and get them here for … two o’clock?”
“What’s at two o’clock?” Nico said, entering from the hallway.
“We’re going to watch the footage Sabrina shot,” Geena said.
“Of course!” he said, and his eagerness was troubling. He pushed past them with a vague smile and started picking up books and magazines, clearing the sofa, tidying Geena’s room in preparation for visitors. She watched him, wondering why she was unsettled, and it was only when Domenic touched her shoulder that it clicked.
“Geena? I said, do you want me to pick up some food?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, and she went into the kitchen to fetch her purse. He still smells of the canal, she thought. As Nico had passed her by, she’d caught a whiff of Venice’s old, dirty water, even after all that scrubbing.
As if it were as ingrained in his skin as it was in the foundations of the city itself.
Domenic brought pizza and Finch arrived with two bottles of cheap wine, wearing a bemused expression at actually being invited. Geena welcomed him in and chatted inconsequentialities, and when he saw Nico standing by her living room window he nodded once.
“Glad to see you’re well,” he said.
Nico only smiled in response.
Ramus and Sabrina arrived around two p.m., hot and hassled from their dash through the city. The temperature had been rising all day, and now the air had grown motionless and heavy with humidity. Geena had opened all her windows and turned on the ceiling fan in her living room, but all these measures only seemed to push the hot air around rather than provide a cooling breeze. She’d chilled the red wine, much to Finch’s consternation, and they drank from tall glasses filled with ice. She would happily forsake some of its subtler tastes to be refreshed.
With other people in the flat, Nico projected his normal self. There were familiar intimacies: his fingers playing across Geena’s as she handed him a wineglass; the touch in the small of her back that always made her weak at the knees; his smile, dazzling and beautiful, the best part reserved for her. But there was still something different about him that went beyond the faint aroma beneath his aftershave and perspiration. She did her best to shut out the strange time spent in the shower in case lingering sexual frustration was clouding her thoughts. Even then, there was a distance between them that had not been there before. And she could think of no better way to describe it than how she had put it to Domenic.
It’s like he’s been away a lot longer.
She was glad when Ramus closed her blinds and Sabrina loaded up the DVD player.
“Burned this an hour ago,” she said. “Dr. Schiavo wanted to see the footage first, so I left the camera in the lab, told him I had to get home for my grandmother’s birthday. He’s quite concerned.”
“You told him we’re all fine, though?” Geena said.
“Yes, yes,” Sabrina said, then looked away sheepishly. “Actually, I meant he’s concerned about Petrarch’s library.”
“Well,” Geena said, letting the word hang for a while.
“Maybe we fucked up,” Domenic said. No one answered, and for that Geena was grateful. This was her responsibility, and she usually had strong shoulders.
“I haven’t even had time to check that it works,” Sabrina said, slipping the disc into the machine.
“Now you tell us!” Ramus said.
“They usually work,” she muttered defensively.
“Yeah, I’ve heard about you and your home movies,” Domenic quipped.
“Make sure you’ve put the right one in!” Ramus seconded.
“Oh, you’ve seen them as well?”
The banter continued until Sabrina held up a hand, smiled as she made a gun with forefinger and thumb, and shot Ramus.
“Jealous boy,” she purred, and then the screen blinked into life. She paused the picture on the title card, which contained the date, location, and time of the filming. She glanced around at Geena, then her eyes flickered briefly to Finch.
“I invited him here,” Geena said. “Mr. Finch is more interested than ever.”
“I am,” Finch said. He sat at the small window table, wineglass already empty before him. He was sweating and uncomfortable, but there was an eagerness about him, too. “After what I saw, I’m certain this could be a fascinating documentary.”
“We lost about half of what was still down there,” Domenic said bitterly.
“And it’s the recovery of what was saved that will make the program,” Finch said slowly, talking down to him, though the silver-haired Domenic wasn’t much younger than Finch himself. Geena was still unsure whether she liked the British man for his candidness, or hated him for his vacuous pomposity.
“Nothing to do with a fucking flood and half of us almost dying,” Ramus muttered. The room fell silent for a few seconds, then Sabrina chuckled and pressed PLAY.
Nico tensed as soon as the first images appeared. Geena felt his thigh harden against hers, and another waft of dirty-water smell stung her nostrils. Doesn’t anyone else smell that? she thought. Perhaps afterward she would ask Domenic. She glanced sidelong at Nico, but his face seemed calm, eyes flickering with the reflected TV picture.
Heads bobbed on the screen as Sabrina and her camera followed them down the curving staircase. They paused at the bottom,
then Geena opened the door and stepped into the lower chamber.
I should have held back, Geena thought. I was much too eager to see what was down there, and a lot of that came from Nico. I sensed his excitement. He projected it to me. She glanced at him again but he seemed enrapt with the picture. So why can’t I feel anything from him now?
She rested her hand on his knee—an intimate gesture that she had performed a thousand times before when they’d been sitting beside each other. But this time felt like the first, and he flinched before settling back against her. She gasped softly, confused, and his awkwardness bristled the small hairs at the nape of her neck.
“Get your hair cut!” Domenic said to Ramus. The younger man’s flowing mane filled the screen for a few seconds, and sitting on Geena’s floor he ran both hands through his hair.
“No way,” he said. “Gives me my sexual power.”
Nico shifted a little, but Geena did not move her arm.
On the screen, flashlights were shone around the chamber. She concentrated, trying to see anything they’d missed down there before. In their excitement there might have been obvious features that eluded them, or which the dancing lights had skimmed across too fast to see. She knew that a camera saw things differently.
“Strange columns,” Ramus muttered. “Why have three for support when one would do the job?”
“It’s a hiding place,” Geena said, thinking of how the man had stood within those columns, in his elaborate robes.
“Hiding what?” Sabrina said.
“None of us saw the urn until Nico touched it,” Finch said, and Geena started. It was the first time anyone had called it an urn, and the first she’d thought of it as such.
On screen they circled the room, examining the obelisks and then the granite disk in the stone floor of the chamber. Their voices coming from the TV sounded tinny and distorted.
“What is that?” Nico asked, nodding toward the screen.
Geena frowned. He’d only been twenty feet away while they’d been looking at the granite disk. He must have overheard them. But when she glanced at his face, she realized he had not. His entire focus had been on the stone jar hidden amidst those three columns.
“Some kind of plug, we think,” Domenic offered.
“Plug?” Nico echoed. “Covering what?”
“A drain or a well?” Geena suggested. “Or a subchamber.”
“Is that even possible?” Nico asked.
But no one replied. None of them knew how to answer that, and now the plug was submerged under water in a room whose structural integrity was uncertain. It would have to be a question for another day.
It was strange seeing herself on the television, and stranger still seeing Nico. Geena concentrated on his image, on the way his eyes had widened and he seemed drawn to the shadowy space amongst those columns. She should have noticed something off about him, even then.
“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered, and the screen flickered and blurred.
“Damn it!” Sabrina said, picking up the remote control. The image paused, jerked up and down a little, then started again.
“Dirt on the disc?” Ramus asked.
“No,” Sabrina said, grinning. “I put the right one in.”
On-screen, Nico was standing close to the three columns now, looking into where their shadows met. Geena watched herself approach him, shining her flashlight into his face, then leaning over to see what he was seeing.
Ramus’ head filled the screen, then Sabrina’s hand appeared before the camera, picture shaking, and she pulled him aside. The jar—
—Urn, Geena thought, maybe that is what it was—
—filled the screen, and then Nico’s voice rustled through the speakers, indistinct and yet clear to Geena. She remembered exactly what he’d said before everything changed.
“Do you hear it? Like there’s electricity in the walls.”
Finch appeared on-screen behind Nico, muttering something as Geena’s lover leaned in and grabbed the jar. The picture flickered again. Lines crossed the screen, snow made nonsense of the images. And behind the crackle and hiss, something more definable: a hum of potential.
When the picture resolved again, the jar was already broken on the floor. Nico stood with his head back and his hands fisted at his sides, and Geena saw herself slumping slowly down against the nearest of the three central columns, one hand reaching for the back of her head. She was muttering something.
“What’s that I’m saying?” she asked, leaning forward on the sofa.
“Don’t know,” Sabrina said.
Nico was talking on the screen as well, and his voice seemed louder and more insistent, clearer and yet no easier to understand.
“That’s a very old dialect you’re speaking there, Nico,” Domenic said, his voice level, though his eyes were full of questions and mystery.
Geena could read and translate some of the old Venetian dialects easily enough, and her students all had differing abilities to do the same. But the last time she’d heard anyone actually talking like this was Domenic, and even he had to refer to carefully prepared pages to do so.
On the screen, Nico seemed to be standing straighter, his voice filled with confidence, and he raised one shadowy hand to point around the edges of the room. The old words still tumbled from his mouth, but his voice had deepened. His shadow, thrown against one of the obelisks by the camera light, seemed to grow taller, though Nico himself was not moving. Then he held both hands out in front of him and shouted.
“Huh?” Sabrina said, sitting on the rug before the TV.
“That’s weird,” Ramus said. “Don’t remember that at all.”
Geena did not remember it, either. Those few seconds … they all seemed mystified by the moments unfolding on-screen. They had all been there, but none of them seemed to recall what the camera had captured.
“How do you know that dialect, Nico?” Domenic asked.
Nico said nothing, only stared at the screen, and now it was as if the interference from the TV had transferred into his eyes. They looked different. She held her breath and reached for him, glancing around because no one else seemed to have noticed, and then she hesitated.
Who am I about to touch?
She grabbed his shoulder and shook gently.
As Nico turned, the TV went blank again, and this time the picture seemed to have vanished for good.
“Nico?”
A tear streaked from his right eye and ran down his cheek. He did not speak. His face was Nico, and so were his eyes, but for a beat there seemed to be something else inside him.
“What is it, Nico?” she asked softly.
“That’s it,” Sabrina said. “There’s no more. All the filming I did after that …”
“Maybe it’ll still be on the camera?” Finch asked, standing from the small table.
“Maybe.”
Nico glanced around at everyone, then looked back to Geena. For a moment he seemed to be imploring her to do or see something—eyes widening, leaning toward her as if for an embrace—but he said nothing, and the moment passed. He leaned back in the sofa and closed his eyes.
“I’m so tired,” he said. “I’m going to rest.” He stood slowly and walked from the room, and Geena watched him all the way.
“So where’s the rest of the footage?” Finch asked. “And what the hell was he doing down there? He didn’t look like much of an archaeologist to me, not when—”
“Just shut up!” Geena shouted, turning on Finch. He looked away, embarrassed, and stood beside the window staring out.
“Geena, I think you were saying the same,” Domenic said.
“What?” She frowned at him, confused, angry at everyone speaking at once when all she wanted to do was go after Nico, hold him, find out what was wrong.
“On the film. I couldn’t quite hear what you were speaking, but it didn’t interrupt Nico’s words. It flowed with them.” He frowned as if struggling to verbalize his thoughts. “It’s like �
� you were repeating what he said.”
“But I …” I don’t know that language, she wanted to say. But then she recalled the vision she’d had, broadcast to her from Nico, of those men in the chamber so long ago. The words they were speaking, and how she had understood every one.
“I need to go to Nico.” She stood and left the room, and it was a relief. Glancing back once before entering the bedroom, she saw that all eyes were on her.
Domenic was the last to leave. Ramus had guided Finch from the flat with the promise of a meal in one of Venice’s better restaurants—on the BBC’s expense account, of course—and as Geena heard the two men leave she knew that Finch was in good hands. Ramus was gregarious but circumspect, and he’d leave Finch later that evening with nothing but an impending hangover. Sabrina went next, quiet and brooding. And then Domenic, sparing a glance into Geena’s bedroom as he passed the open door. They locked eyes for a moment, and Geena offered a soft smile. Nico was asleep beside her. She didn’t want to talk in case he woke up.
Domenic smiled back, feigned speaking into a phone—Call me if you need me—and left.
You were repeating what he said, Domenic had told her. She shivered and wondered what that meant.
“Cold?” Nico asked.
Geena jumped. She’d been certain that he was asleep. Nico turned on his side and rested one arm across her chest, hand cupping her left breast through her shirt.
“Just worried,” she said. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, and for a while today I thought …” She shook her head and gasped, trying to hold back the tears. She hated crying. It took her back to that long period of grief following the death of her mother, after which she had vowed to live well in tribute to her mother’s memory. Tears wasted time that could be happy.
The Chamber of Ten Page 5
