Venetian Blood

by Christine Evelyn Volker

  Biondi pursed his lips. “I repeat. Did you know him?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Subject indicated no,” Biondi said into the tape recorder. “I tell you one thing, Signora Lottol. Someone saw a woman running from the hotel last night. Lucky for us he was an artist. Good likeness, no?” He placed a drawing on the table.

  Anna examined the rendering of a woman in motion and took a sharp breath. The sketch captured her slender torso, long legs, and broad stride, hinting at her athleticism. The same dark eyes as hers peered from behind wire-rimmed glasses she sometimes wore. But the nose was bulbous instead of straight, the chin weaker. Framed by long, wavy hair, the oval face was unlined, free of incipient crow’s feet, making her appear five years younger than her age of forty. A phalanx of cops must have been trawling the train station and airport armed with that sketch. One group or another would have seized her eventually. She felt her skin grow clammy, her eyes drilling into her depiction.

  “Well?” Biondi asked.

  She felt like retching, but was convinced that recanting her lie would only make things worse. Five years of precious life if she trusted him, she thought, before saying, “There’s a resemblance, yes. But, I wasn’t in Venice last night.”

  “You,” he stabbed the air with his forefinger, “deny you were at the Belvedere Hotel?”

  “The where?” she asked, blanking, her thoughts blurring.

  “I already told you—the Belvedere Hotel,” he barked. “Where the murder took place.”

  He’s going to end it right here and arrest me now, she thought, hiding her shaking hands in her lap. “Murder . . . God, no. I would never . . . How could I? I was in Zürich—I just arrived here by train this evening. I’m a tourist, like thousands of other people.”

  “Porca miseria,” Biondi mumbled.

  Anna understood this to mean “bloody hell.” That’s where she’d be sent soon, she feared.

  “All right, we do this the hard way,” he said in a raspy voice. “If you have a train ticket and address book, I would like to see them. Right now.”

  Pushing away from the table, Anna fumbled in her purse with jerky, abrupt motions, her trembling hand going in circles, her mind struggling to remember his request.

  “You need help?” Biondi’s voice rose. “Shall I do it?”

  “No,” she managed to say. Her hand brushed against a business card. She tried to control her breathing. In, then out, in, then out, calm, like the cool-down of her aerobics class. She breathed more deeply. Keys, compact, eyeglasses, lipstick, address book, yes. She handed it over.

  Biondi shoved the leather book to one side, took her passport out of his pocket, and flipped the pages with manicured hands. “You are married, yet the husband is not with you.”

  “I’m traveling alone.”

  “You say you came from Zürich this evening?”

  Anna nodded. “I flew to Zürich and took the train here.”

  “I see the Zürich Flughafen stamp from the airport. You arrived there yesterday morning.” He sought her gaze.

  She plunged her thumbnail into her forefinger and tried not to flick her eyes away. “That’s right. That’s what I meant. I . . . I was sightseeing there.”

  “In Zürich?”

  “It’s a lovely, historic city,” she said. “Venice is not the only beautiful one, you know.”

  “Gray city. Full of banks and bankers. What did you see?”

  “Um . . . watches. I went shopping and saw lots of expensive watches.”

  “No Künsthaus or Lake Zürich for you?” A scowl washed across his face. “Just watches. You buy any?”

  “No.” Her right hand jerked, hitting the underbelly of the table. A tangle of gouges, a finger’s width apart, had left the wood tortured and raw.

  “Missing a stamp here for Italian customs.” He flung the passport onto the table.

  “You know on the train they generally don’t do that,” she said, recalling three other times she had entered Italy by rail.

  “You think you are an expert? Biondi is a simple man, Signora Lottol. All I know is that we have the dead body of a Venetian count. With a person of interest, looking like you, likely American or British by their accent in Italian. You will need to prove me that you were not here last night. And where is that train ticket?”

  “Tossed it out.” Anna congratulated herself on having thrown the ticket into a bin by the track as soon as she had arrived.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t remember, maybe outside the station. Do you save your train tickets?” She smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle in her brown-checkered raincoat.

  “Don’t get too smug. We speak to conductors and the Ferrovie. Did you ride in first or second class?”

  “Second.”

  “You have receipts from your trip?”

  “I got rid of them. I hate clutter.” Anna shifted in her chair, struggling to fire up neural connections, despite a sinking feeling that her fabrications were fraying.

  “Any people you remember, who might remember you?”

  “No.”

  “Where you stay in Zürich?”

  “The Grüner Baum. I do have that receipt.” Fishing it out of her saddlebag, victorious, she unfurled it as if it were the captured flag of a vanquished army. “Here.”

  He took a cursory look.

  “This is not proof of your innocence.” Biondi planted both hands on the table and brought his face so close to Anna’s that she smelled the coffee on his breath. “How do I know you did not arrive in Venice yesterday?”

  Well, he was right. The Zürich hotel had charged her in advance, and when she had marched into the lobby, arguing that her plans had changed at the last minute and she wouldn’t be staying there, they had refused to refund her money. Tightwads. She’d ended up occupying the room after all, showering and taking a nap before boarding the train to Venice for the meeting with Sergio.

  “You come here and kill him at midnight, when the bells ring loud,” Biondi continued. “You even could have gone back to Switzerland after that, checked out in late morning, and now you return again with the Zürich train. Perfect alibi. It doesn’t matter if you stayed there. The trip is six hours and there are plenty trains.”

  “Please—”

  “You don’t look like our typical murderer, but then maybe you are one. After all, women are coming up in the world.”

  “Not as far as you think. But Detective Biondi, why would I have murdered that man? And if I had, why wouldn’t I have left Italy right away?”

  “Our killers, not all of them have sense. Some return to the scene. They like very much the thrill. And they want to make Biondi look like a fool.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Anna said, her anger vaporizing her fear. “I’m not a murderer. I can’t believe I’m in Italy and not in some dictatorship. Wouldn’t the meticulous Swiss have stamped my passport if I had reentered their country by train, like in your hypothesis? You saw they didn’t.” She studied his stony face. “I have a friend here who’s expecting me today. She was supposed to meet my train. Now I’ve probably missed her.”

  “Your social life is no concern to me. Except how it intersects the victim’s.”

  Her mouth parched, Anna thrust out her hand for the water glass, bumping the open purse, spilling its contents, and causing thuds and jangles as her heavy wallet and assorted coins hit the floor.

  Biondi swung his gaze to the widespread pile. “Let me assist you.”

  Anna spotted Sergio’s thick business card, with its eye-catching, ornate script, lying upside down next to her glasses case. She willed herself not to lunge for it.

  “What is this I see?” Biondi asked, reaching down and snatching something.

  Anna bit her cheek.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Then why you have matches in your pocketbook?”

  “Do I?”

  “From Caffè Orientale, quite a walk from here.” He w
aved them at her. “Over by Rio Marin. Impossible to have gone there and back if you just arrived, even if you ran all the way.” He looked beneath the table. “In your heels.”

  She almost didn’t recognize the matchbook. She had met Sergio at the caffè yesterday, where they had had a drink and fought.

  “Oh those.” She forced a chuckle, feeling flushed at the thought that Biondi would now beat a path to its door. “I . . . I bought a Coke at the train station bar and must’ve grabbed them. Like a memento, I guess.”

  “I should believe that? Venice has many memorable sites—the Cipriani, the Belvedere, the Gritti Palace, Hotel Danieli, but no, Signora Lottol desires a keepsake from the Santa Lucia train station. How you say—grungy?”

  Biondi undoubtedly was congratulating himself on his mastery of American slang, thinking he had caught his mouse. As he made a quick entry in his notebook, Anna unhurriedly leaned down and scooped up Sergio’s card, along with her eyeglass case, and secured them in the purse’s zippered pouch before allowing herself to steady her hands on the sides of her chair.

  Biondi peeked into her wallet before returning it. “I notice this is filled with lire. You know we accept credit cards in Italy, don’t you?”

  “I want to take advantage of cash discounts,” she said, ignoring his taunt, hoping that he wouldn’t notice the trickle of perspiration she felt sliding down her forehead.

  “Or pay someone off.” He pulled a linen handkerchief from his suit pocket. “You look as if you need this.”

  She laced her fingers together.

  “What is your job at the Treasury Department?”

  “Financial transaction tracking, modeling, algorithm construction. We help catch bad people like money launderers.”

  Biondi’s eyes widened.

  “You have a business card for me?”

  Anna looked into her purse and passed him one.

  “Our bad people spill blood and guts instead of money,” he said.

  He paged through her address book, seeming to memorize the entries. Thank goodness Sergio had never earned a place in it.

  “Tell me, where you stay here?”

  “At the home of Count Alessandro Favier, along with my friend.”

  “Ah, Count Favier—a respected, learned man.” Biondi gazed up, as if studying the immobile ceiling fan.

  “You know him?” Anna’s voice brightened.

  “He comes from a very old family,” Biondi said in a gentler tone. “Who is this Claudio, Claudio Zampone, living in Dorsoduro? What kind of business does he have?”

  “Never met him,” Anna murmured. “He’s, um, a doctor. A friend of someone back home.” Anna was hoping she wouldn’t have to consult him, this just-in-case referral from her psychologist in California.

  “How long you visit?”

  “Ten days.”

  “Excuse me.” Biondi grabbed her passport and business card before leaving in haste.

  She sighed and felt the air flow out of her. All she wanted to do at that moment was to crawl away and hide. Her eagerly anticipated, long-overdue vacation hadn’t even begun before turning into a nightmare. Given Sergio’s outsized charm, glib repartee and command performance at the fundraiser last night, not to mention the ease with which he had issued the venal threats that had turned her life upside down, his death was impossible to believe, despite the photograph. He had seemed too potent and invincible ever to be bashed and bloodied, like a helpless baby harp seal.

  Ironically, his murder had not freed her from the danger of his ultimatum but elevated it, as if he were attacking from the grave. Now her pictures were lying somewhere with a destiny of their own. If Biondi had them, he would have brandished them, even crowed about it. Who would find them first? She imagined the police snickering, then arresting her. Even if she could convince them of her innocence, she would still lose her job if Treasury ever learned of her entanglement with a money launderer.

  Sergio certainly had been slick. How smooth was Biondi? Given his talent for interrogation, the answer must be plenty. Who was he speaking with now, the FBI? Count Favier? Or checking on her alibi?

  She focused on the wall clock. Its ticks sounded ominous, its hands hardly moved. When Biondi returned, she’d surely see the inside of a jail cell. Even if she wasn’t arrested for murder, lying to the police would carry some minimum punishment. She tried to estimate how much an Italian lawyer would cost. With some luck, less than the two-hundred-dollar-an-hour legal bills from her divorce attorney. Everything was so complicated in Italy. She frowned at the specter of a capricious, painful process. Do they even have bail here? she wondered. Would she be allowed to make one phone call? To whom? Jack wouldn’t care about her wasting away in prison, but his fifty percent of everything they owned would be in jeopardy; if the mortgage payments weren’t made, the house would be repossessed. He’d find it in his interest to help her if he were sober enough. Her call would be to Count Favier and Margo. Local connections and someone loyal to her.

  When Biondi banged the door open, Anna jumped.

  “You are free to go,” he grumbled, dropping her passport on the table.

  Too relieved to rejoice, Anna hastily stuffed it and the rest of her belongings into her purse while hoping he wouldn’t change his mind.

  As they walked down the barren hallway, Biondi nodded to the bald officer Anna had met earlier. “Calvino, vieni qua con le valigie,” Biondi shouted, looking wan under the bright lights. “He brings your bags.”

  “Just because I release you now does not mean I believe you,” he told her. “If I need to question you more I contact you at Count Favier’s palazzo. Do not try to leave Venice before checking with me or you find you cannot. We have eyes everywhere. Here, take this.” He reached into his jacket and gave Anna his card. “One more thing. No hiding. Remember,” he added, tapping the side of his prominent nose with his forefinger, “Biondi will track you down.”

  “How was he killed?” Anna asked as she claimed her luggage.

  “Details are not your business. You must know that specially as a foreigner, we can detain you at any time for questioning.” He glowered at her. “For weeks.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “That is what they all say.”

  The Sinuous Voyage

  Sunday, September 13, 1992

  Barely believing that she had been freed, Anna staggered outside to the station steps, where she lowered herself into a niche by a planter, not far from the green waters of the Grand Canal. She hugged her knees and closed her eyes as a shiver shot through her.

  Sergio murdered? Late last night, dressed in a tuxedo and a Pinocchio mask, he had bounded onto the stage to announce in his gravelly voice that he’d be sharing great news with the crowd at midnight. How much time had elapsed between her rapid exit from the hotel garden and when Sergio, his mask still strapped under his chin, lost his life? Ten minutes and a few hundred yards at most. He had sauntered past without seeing her, heading in the direction of the Casanova grove. His pace had been leisurely, indicating he hadn’t been meeting someone there. In fact, the garden had looked curiously devoid of other guests.

  She had heard no struggle, no cries, nothing besides the orchestra playing “Ti voglio tanto bene.” For her own protection, she’d have to be consistent with everyone and never let on that she had known him. And she scarcely had. Those four days in Milan seemed a lifetime ago. Her rash mistake was nobody’s business, yet now it was roaring back into her life with its fingers pressing against her throat. Biondi and his officers would be working overtime to uncover everything they could about her. How could she prove she wasn’t guilty? She settled her despondent gaze on the canal waters and felt as if she were sinking.

  People swarmed down the station steps on all sides, engulfing her in a sea of babble and dim figures: Italians, Americans, Germans, French, Spaniards, and British. Boisterous first-timers snapped pictures of one another by Venice’s watery street. Quieter, experienced visitors deftly wove
their way to the Grand Canal, gritting their teeth against the entry pandemonium. Oh to be one of those making a grand tour of Italy’s art and culture, luxuriating in Venice’s dreamlike atmosphere, she thought with a pang. She clutched her purse and stared across the canal at the faded green cupola of San Simeone Piccolo, its pediment depicting the martyrdom of Christ’s cousin.

  She smelled the moist air and touched the empty space on her ring finger, tempted to cry as the seabirds now did against the darkening sky. She had no one to blame but herself for coming here. The more Nonno had tried to dissuade her, all those years ago, the more she had secretly vowed to see the city for herself one day. Repeating the litany of train stops bringing her to Venice—Zürich, Zug, Thun, Lugano, Milano, Sirmione, Verona, Vicenza, Venezia—led her to wonder whether she should jump onto an outbound train and elude Biondi’s travel ban before he made his next move.

  As the air grew cool, she felt stranded. The Scalzi Bridge, connecting the train station with the heart of Venice, became a shadowy suggestion. She doubted she could find Count Favier’s palazzo, tucked among alleys, away from famous landmarks, on her own. At least she had the phone number. Pulling out her wallet, Anna inspected the coins, growing resentful. Only Swiss francs remained; the five-hundred-lire pieces used in public phones were still on the interrogation room floor. To call the count, she’d have to go someplace and break the tiny thousand-lire notes or buy some slotted gettoni, which fit perfectly into the phones.

  But if she left the station steps, she might miss Margo altogether. The Zürich train Margo had expected her to be on had pulled in ninety minutes ago. Had Margo come and gone? Hard to say, since Margo Fruhling was rarely punctual. She’d been late more often than not, ever since they had met in English 101 at UC Berkeley twenty years ago. Perhaps it was Margo’s small expression of rebellion, or thumbing her nose at the rules, or just her disorganized life. God knows how Margo, a journalist, ever met a deadline.