by Unknown
She almost said it. She came within an inch of saying, “You’re the one whose husband just left her for a younger woman.” I got the distinct impression that it wasn’t a slip of the tongue at all; that she meant to get right up to the word “husband” and then quickly change to the ridiculous, “ . . . who’s known Lettie since she was a child.” I was not shocked that she knew about it. I assumed Lettie and Beth had discussed my troubles at length, and that Meg, who shared a house with Beth, would have heard about it. I certainly had bent poor Lettie’s ear for untold hours over the past year. Dear thing, she never once picked up the phone and said, “You again?” although I’m sure she wanted to.
I snatched a glass of red wine from a waiter’s tray with my shaking hands, oblivious of the peril it held for my white blouse. I leaned forward and sucked in enough wine to lower the level in the glass to a region of relative safety. Alone near the bar, a woman in a pristine white blouse sipped a white wine spritzer. She looked as though she could use some company, so I introduced myself, thus escaping further slashes from the talons of Meg Bauer. The spritzer woman turned out to be Shirley Hostetter, and the Crystal I had seen on the list was, as I had guessed, her daughter.
“Crystal is up in our room, brooding,” she said. “She’s fifteen, and since she’s too young to drink, she didn’t want to come down and ‘hang around a bunch of old people,’ as she put it.” Shirley managed to dash out air quotes with her fingers while spilling not a single drop of her wine. I was impressed. “Crystal is going through a phase—you know what teens are like—do you have children?”
“Five,” I said. I love that look I always get when I say that. “Four boys and one girl, but they’re all grown now.” People usually want my advice when they hear I’ve raised five kids. It seems to make me some kind of authority or something, but the fact is, teenagers confuse me as much as they do anyone else.
Over Shirley’s shoulder, I noticed a man standing by the door with a professional-looking camera around his neck. He’s really playing the tourist role to the hilt, I thought. A tall man with a coarse shock of salt-and pepper hair pushed past him, head down, and out through a door into the hall. The man with the camera immediately jerked to attention and left by the same door. Somehow, I knew those two exits were not unrelated. There was something about the way the camera-toting man’s face tightened. What was going on here?
“That was Paul Vogel,” said Shirley. Apparently, she’d seen me watching him.
“Who was the other man who just left? The tall one with the hair?”
I almost said, “shagg fiir,” but every time I say something like that, I get an answer like, “My fiancé.”
Shirley looked around as if assessing who was absent. “Must have been Dick Kramer. He’s head of some kind of company, and he’s traveling with that rather handsome young man over by the window. His name is Michael.”
So that, I deduced, must be Michael Melon, and “rather handsome” was an understatement.
“What sort of company?” I asked.
“Something to do with furniture, I think. Home décor—that sort of thing. I talked to him at breakfast this morning, and he was kind of vague, but I got the idea they import things and do renovations.”
“Doesn’t this seem like a strange way to go about importing things? I’d think they would just come over and visit manufacturers. Why waste time with a tour?”
“I don’t know.”
A little woman who looked like one of those Russian nesting dolls, but with bowl-cut black hair instead of a babushka, jostled Shirley aside and surged onto the bar. “Scotch and water,” she ordered. “Easy on the water.”
Shirley held her tongue until the woman had backed away with her fresh drink and then muttered, “Pellegrino Tours won’t make any money on her; that’s her fifth drink in . . .” She checked her watch. “In less than forty minutes.”
“Who is she?”
“Lucille Vogel. She’s a nightclub singer or something like that. Or used to be. I get the idea that her career is a thing of the past.”
“Wife of Paul Vogel? The man with the camera?”
“Yes, or at least I assume they’re husband and wife. But maybe not. Yesterday afternoon, shortly after most of us arrived, she was out in the hall yelling at Tessa because they had a room with a double bed, and she had specifically asked for twin beds.”
“Yelling?”
“Oh, yes. Very unpleasant. I was embarrassed for her. Don’t you just hate it when Americans go to another country and act like asses? It makes us all look bad.”
“Do you travel a lot?”
“No, I didn’t mean to give that impression at all. No. I had to save up for this trip. I ran into Meg Bauer—do you know her?” I nodded and Shirley went on. “I ran into Meg at her hospital in Baltimore this spring. I’m a nurse, too.”
“Oh, Meg is a nurse?” I didn’t recall Lettie ever telling me what Meg did. If she was a nurse, I’d like to nominate her for the Worst Bedside Manner award.
“Yes. Anyway, I’m head nurse in the neonatal unit of my hospital in Philadelphia, and we’ve just adopted a new scheduling system—new computer program to keep track of schedules—so I had to go to Baltimore for a few days because they were already using that program. I remembered Meg from when we had worked at the same hospital some, oh, I guess, fifteen years ago. Meg moned that she was going with her sisters to Italy in early summer, and I said to myself, ‘That’s just the thing for Crystal and me.’”
“Oh?” I slid my empty glass onto the bar and grabbed another red wine.
“Crystal is so hard for me to talk to now. It’s like she’s rebelling against everything that’s important to me. The kids she hangs around with are just . . .” Shirley left that sentence unfinished. “Well, my husband was all for us taking this trip, although he couldn’t take time off from work himself, so he couldn’t come. But I thought it might be good for Crystal and me to have some time together, away from her friends.”
“And you’ll see new things together. New experiences.” I glanced around the room. “Can you help me put any more names with faces? I just got here, you know, and so far I only know my friend Lettie, the three Bauer sisters, and the Reese-Burtons.”
“You haven’t met Tessa yet?”
“Oh, yes. She came to Milan and picked us up.”
Shirley nodded toward a man standing at the window near the handsome Michael Melon. “That’s Walter Everard. His wife, Elaine, is . . . well, she must have gone to the bathroom or something. She was here earlier.”
“Our list said Elaine King.”
“Right. See the couple over by the wall?” She nodded toward a sort of dull gray couple who sipped their drinks in solitary contemplation of their own napkins. They didn’t appear to be mixing a lot. “They are the Kellys. Jim and . . . I forgot . . . oh, Wilma. They’re from Canada. Somewhere near Toronto. Farmers.”
“I see.”
“And the man with his elbows on the bar is Achille—sounds like Achilles, the Greek hero, doesn’t it?—our bus driver.”
I tugged at Shirley’s sleeve quickly to keep Lucille Vogel from flattening her. Lucille was back for another scotch-and-water-easy-on-the-water. The door to the hall swung open again, and a woman with tons of dark blonde hair pulled back in a scrunchy slipped in and quickly located Walter Everard with her eyes. “That would be Elaine?”
“Yes. And it looks like they’re calling us in to dinner, now.”
Behind the black-jacketed maître d’ in the doorway, a halo of fluorescent pink radiated out from a clump of black leather. The magenta mass turned, and on the other side, a face burdened with several pounds of hardware poked painfully through holes in the brows, nose, lips, and ears, starred blankly at a display case full of Venetian glass. The eyes were heavily ringed with black pencil that exactly matched the lipstick and the nail polish. This was Crystal.
* * * * *
Lettie waved me into the dining room and to a table she had alread
y selected. Meg, Beth, and the Reese-Burtons were already there, and the table was set for six. I decided I was strong enough to have another go at making Meg’s acquaintance, and the Reese-Burtons might help to soften the experience. I rather liked them. As I planted my purse beside Lettie’s chair, Meg shouted across the table in a voice that could have been heard back in the kitchen, “We’re having chicken tonight, Lettie. Careful you don’t lose your teeth in it!” She followed this outrage with the sort of laugh I hadn’t heard since I caught the neighborhood bully, Frankie Joe Norton, teasing my Brian about his stammer. I had taken care of Frankie Joe in a manner that I couldn’t possibly use on Meg. I took a deep breath, edged shakily around to Meg’s place, and bent over her shoulder.
“That was mean,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “You need to apologize to Lettie, and I want to be there when you do it. Not now, though, there are too many people watching, no thanks to you. Don’t even try to say you didn’t mean to embarrass her, because you did! Before you go to bed tonight, I want to hear you apologize. You got that?” I don’t think anyone heard what I said, but if they did, I didn’t care. I reclaimed my seat with as much dignity as I could, as dozens of eyes cut sidelong glances toward our table.
Geoffrey Reese-Burton broke the awkward silence with, “Owd jufine yarum? Oll?”
“I’m sorry?”
“He said, ‘How did you find your room? Is it all right?’” Victoria explained.
“Oh. Yes, it’s just fine.” I put my hand over my wine glass to keep the waiter from pouring any for me. “I’ve had two glasses already, and I’m diabetic, so I keep myself on a two drink limit.” I wondered how Meg would manage to throw that back in my face. There’s nothing embarrassing about diabetes, but I felt certain Meg would find a way to use it.
Beth tossed out a question to the table in general: “What are you most looking forward to?”
I said I couldn’t wait to see the museum of archaeology in Florence. Their collection of Etruscan artifacts is the best in the world. Of course, everyone but Lettie had to be told that I teach ancient and medieval history in a community college, so my interest in Etruscan civilization was not as strange as it might have seemed.
Geoffrey voiced a keen desire to see something that I didn’t quite catch, and Beth said she couldn’t wait to see Michelangelo’s David. Victoria, shifting her cutlery to precisely align it with the edge of the table, chirped, “I plan to do a day trip to San Gimignano while we’re in Florence. They have a medieval torture museum there, and medieval torture is sort of a hobby of mine.”
Napkins rushed to mouths all around the table. I thought I must have heard her wrong, but if I had, apparently so had everyone else. Geoffrey spluttered, “Oh, nonono! Don’t prack . . . read. Y’know.” Or something like that.
Victoria smiled. “Oh, of course. I didn’t mean I practice medieval torture. Oh dear, no. Poor Geoffrey! I’d never . . . no, what I mean is, I operate a book store at home, and I sort of specialize in medieval histories—early England, knights, Celtic stuff, Norman stuff, you know. I’ve always been fascinated by the horrid things they thought of to do to each other. Such short, painful lives they had.”
Lettie cleared her throat rather self-consciously. “I’mrward to our gondola ride tomorrow night; something I’ve always wanted to do. So romantic! Too bad Ollie isn’t here.”
“Maybe you’ll run into a sexy gondolier tomorrow,” I said. “I won’t tell Ollie.” Everyone laughed—everyone except Meg.
Meg just sniffed, pinching even further her already pinched-in nose. “Well I, for one, am going to register a complaint with Pellegrino Tours about this bait-and-switch job they’ve pulled. They’re not going to get away with it.”
“What do you mean, bait-and-switch?”
“I mean Venice. Is this Venice? The brochure promised two nights in Venice, and they’ve stuck us in this god-awful . . . whatever it’s called. It’s certainly not Venice. Do you see any gondolas? Canals? Where are the canals? Look out the window. Is that water or asphalt out there?”
“The brochure said our hotel would be in Mestre,” Victoria said. “To get to Venice proper we have to take a boat. Tessa said we’d go over in the morning right after breakfast.”
“She said hotels along the canals cost the earth. This is an economical alternative.” Lettie dumped Parmesan onto her pasta.
“I wasn’t aware we were taking a cut-rate tour,” Meg sniffed. “For what we’re paying, they should have put us on the Grand Canal.”
Chapter Three
“All gondolas are black, and all gondoliers are men.” Tessa, using a microphone at her little jump seat in the front of the bus, told us a little about the history of gondolas and the canals as Achille drove us down twilit streets to the dock where we would catch the vaporetto to St. Mark’s Plaza and reassemble for our gondola ride. This would be our third vaporetto ride of the day. Our group had done a morning tour of St. Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. The Byzantine domes and mosaics, reminiscent of old Constantinople, jammed in with Romanesque arches and Renaissance frescoes had overwhelmed me. I felt like I stood at the crossroads of civilization. Victoria Reese-Burton had to be dragged out of the dungeons and across the Bridge of Sighs, in the opposite direction from that forced upon the poor condemned prisoners who gave the bridge its name.
Lettie, Beth, and I had shopped up and down the narrow alleys and passages all afternoon. I confess that I am not much of a shopper. Lettie and Beth seemed to have a lovely time examining hundreds of carnival masks and tons of glass. Whatever could you do with a carnival mask if you got one, I wondered? But I kept that thought to myself as Beth and Lettie were having so much fun. The glassware, in my opinion, came in two varieties: ugly, and way too expensive. I bought a couple of paperweights for gifts and tagged along, soaking up the atmosphere of this unique, sinking city.
Tessa told us that the gondola business was strictly controlled as was the building of the boats themselves. They’re built slightly asymmetrical so they will travel straight when steered from the right side only. “If you want to be a gondolier,” she said, “you need to be the son of a gondolier. You can’t just set up your own business.”
She led us along the Grand Canal to the row of four gondolas we had hired. Meg, Beth, Amy, Lettie, and I climbed into the first one, which ended up being the last to leave the mooring. Amy stumbled toward a seat and fell across Meg in the process. Meg waved her hand as if fending off bad breath and muttered, “You’re still hung over from last night. If you throw up, Amy, please do it over the side.”
Amy tented her left hand over her right middle finger so only Lettie and I saw the gesture. Shifting several times to find a comfortable place to sit without unbalancing the boat, Amy called across to Tessa. “Can I go with you?” Tessa and our musicians, a singer and an accordionist (we had paid extra for them), had a gondola to themselves. Amy climbed out, giving our boat an unnecessarily vigorous push with her foot as she left.
The Vogels and the Hostetters had elected not to do the gondolas, but had ridden the vaporetto over with the rest of us. They left us and wandered off to “do their own thing.” We pushed off the mooring to the strains of “Santa Lucia” and passed under the Bridge of Sighs to “Back to Sorrento.” That song took me back to my childhood—to my grandmother’s old Victrola and the 78-rpm record she had of that same song. I had sat on her living room floor and played it over and over. At seven, I had thought it the most romantic song in the world. It still was.
Oddly, many windows of regular homes were on eye level as our boat maneuvered through Venice’s narrow passages. Windows and curtains, open to the night air, gave us an uncomfortably voyeuristic glimpse of their dinner hour. We glided past one window where a woman adjusted a table setting, and a man in a dinner jacket slipped up behind her and kissed her neck. The song at that moment was the Godfather theme, “Speak Softly, Love,” or something like that. The pain of it hit me in the stomach as real as a fist. At that moment, I
would have given anything for a kiss or just a snuggle from Chet. Damn him.
Down one dark passage, I heard a crash like a metal can falling over. Lettie and I both jumped. “Probably a rat in a trash can or something,” I said. “I’ll bet there are a lot of water rats and other . . .”
“If you don’t mind, I prefer to believe it was a cat.” Lettie said with finality. Subject closed.
Meg allowed as how it was probably Shirley Hostetter chasing Crystal through the alley, “And being her normal clumsy self. For a nurse, she’s the most uncoordinated woman I ever met. It’s a wonder she doesn’t kill more patients than she does.”
“Kill patients? You can’t be serious!” Beth gulped.
“She generally manages to pump about a quart of air bubbles in ‘em just changing an IV drip.” That was not a specific accusation—it was more like a general bitchy comment, and we all ignored it.
As we rounded our last corner and swerved back into the Grand Canal, there was a flash and a scuffle from the sidewalk near Harry’s Bar. Paparazzi? Why us?
Achille was waiting for us at the ramp to the vaporetto. I would have expected him to meet us at the bus on the other side, but I saw his face light up when he spotted Beth Hines. “Oh ho!” I nudged Lettie.
“Well, well.” Lettie whispered. “ttle summer romance might be just the thing.” Lettie had talked to me at some length about poor Beth’s marital nightmare. Harvey Hines had walked out on her a couple of years ago under circumstances not that different from my own recent ordeal—that is, out of the blue and because of another woman. But Harvey hadn’t given any hint of trouble until he already had his things packed, the bank account cleaned out, and the woman waiting in the car. At least I had found out about Sweet Young Stephie in time to get a lawyer and a generous settlement. I glanced back in time to catch the glow on Beth’s face. It looked to me like she was not surprised Achille was there.
“Does Achille speak English?” I asked Lettie.
