Venetian Blood

by Christine Evelyn Volker

  “Why don’t you do it later on?” Margo asked.

  “It’s already set. They’re calling me at the pensione.”

  Spotting Roberto in the distance, scouring the crowd, Anna hurried to the gate. When she reached it, an accented voice called out to her, and Pablo approached.

  “I just love the view from this palazzo,” he said, sweeping his arm in the direction of the Grand Canal. “It seems like a fantasy, a watery dream.”

  Anna smoothed an errant curl, feeling trapped. Not wanting to be rude, she replied, “It can be, I’m sure. But a lot of history took place here.”

  “Some proud, some sad. Never really a war though, thanks God. Think of the beauty that would have been lost forever. Dudley and I many times have talked about how Napoleon invaded Venice, taking over peacefully from the last doge in 1797. The Venetian nobles were so afraid of anarchy, they surrendered to him and betrayed their country. The French stole the artwork, but didn’t destroy the city.”

  “Yes.” Anna had read the John Julius Norwich history of Venice. Gambling had been a national pursuit, the nobles held all the power, debt piled sky high, even caffeine consumption went through the roof. Clearly, it was a society that had lost its way, ready to topple.

  Pablo swallowed hard. “How different from ancient Peru where Incan palaces were demolished to build their cathedrals. Art treasures and golden sculptures melted down into gold ingots with one-fifth going to their king. In return, they gave us smallpox, misery, and death.”

  “How do you mean ‘us’? You’re part Spanish, aren’t you?”

  “No. Indian. Puro.”

  For the first time, Anna noted his regal stance, his skin the color of manzanita, gleaming in the sun.

  “I come from those who got away.” Pablo’s words poured out, like the crimson flow from a wound never staunched. “Atahualpa and his men met the conquistadors, without weapons. Eighty of his most noble warriors, carrying him on a golden litter, refused to let him fall when they were attacked by the Spanish, who cut off their hands. Toledo steel. Toledo swords. Human flesh was no match.” Pablo’s eyes smoldered. “Their places were taken by others, knowing theirs was the same fate but refusing to let their master go. Despite their sacrifice, Atahualpa became a prisoner. It was then that the other side won. Or thought they did.”

  Visions of swords piercing flesh, screams, Spaniards slaughtering natives filled Anna’s mind. Blood splattering. Hands piling up. Her stomach lurched.

  “Yes, Charles the Fifth, Carlos Quinto, damn him.” Pablo stepped closer. “He had the absurd notion of being the Christian emperor of the world, of bringing Christianity to the heathens, to civilize us, control us. He could not put the two halves together. Had no idea what his conquistadors were destroying: our culture, our wisdom. He did not see the evil in his own men. Endless greed was their true religion. Raping our people, our land. We can never forget.”

  Anna could hardly recognize the doctor and diplomat she had met at Count Favier’s home. She had not realized how ancient sores festered within him. Pablo was revealing himself a revolutionary.

  “And the last ruler, Tupac Amaru, ‘splendid serpent’ in our Quechua language, fled with his wife, about to give birth. She refused to flee in the canoe that would have headed deep into the Amazon and saved their lives. Too scared. Couldn’t swim. The Spanish dragged them back.” Pablo scowled. “When Tupac was beheaded in the square, their church bells pealed while our people wept. Some of us escaped into the jungle, unconquered, under the waves of green. The rest ended up enslaved.”

  Anna looked longingly at the exit. Pablo was working himself into a state. “I’m sorry, Pablo. So tragic and ignored to this day.”

  “It has started once again,” Pablo said.

  Anna studied him, trying to decipher what he meant and where all this was coming from. Taking a wild guess, hoping to find a nugget about the murder, she asked softly, “Did Sergio do something? What?”

  “Corrin!” Pablo glared at the nearest hydrangea.

  “Amorcito,” Yolanda called, coming toward them, holding the hand of an anorexic auburn-haired young woman in a lemon-yellow dress. “I want to introduce you to Constanza.” For some reason, the woman stared at Anna.

  Strange, Anna thought. “I should be off,” she murmured to Pablo, slipping out the gate and vowing to pursue their conversation.

  Degli Incurabili, Of the Incurables

  Tuesday, evening

  The Filberts’ party had become more than Anna could take: suffering Sean’s accusations, Andrew’s vulgarity, Pablo’s alarming rage. With scant progress on solving Sergio’s murder, each clue drew her deeper into a thicket.

  She took lungfuls of moist air. At San Trovaso, she counted scores of gondolas resting on the sloping ground. Counting was clear and calming, her comfort and her lullaby. She could still recall lying in her bunny pajamas, reciting her numbers in a sleepy voice: “Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei.” The black wooden bellies facing skyward suggested the fertility of an ebony goddess. She had read that the squero here was a gondola hospital and birthplace. When the gondola next touched the canal waters, it would be like a baptism.

  Her own baptism was lost in the past. Her dress had a long, white satin bow. It was one of the few things to survive the flames. She had spotted it while rummaging in Nonna’s dresser drawers, hidden among the handkerchiefs, between drunken sniffs of lavender sachets. The patterns of the lace, delicate as snowflakes, were defined by their empty spaces. She was a big girl of six, she had told herself, and this tiny dress was for a baby. She had tried to refold it as she’d found it, but a picture in the drawer got in the way. She was the infant in the lace dress, clutching a silver rattle. Her mustachioed father was embracing her dark-haired, smiling mother, holding her in her arms. With her pudgy fingers, Anna had touched their faces in the picture, like a blind person struggling to learn Braille, wanting to make them alive again. Years later, the black-and-white photo joined the gallery in their hallway, before it went west with Anna to California.

  How tidy and steady her upbringing had been. Nonno and Nonna had loved her with the mellowness of the late-afternoon sun, not its burning brightness at midday. A pat on the hand was good, two pats were better. A peck on the cheek and a soft hug were best. There was harmony and beauty in their love. Like a melodious string quartet by Vivaldi, each instrument enriching and complementing the others. Discordant tones, one member’s virtuosity at the expense of the whole, were not part of their world. Anna had sometimes dreamed of what life would have been had her parents survived. How much better, she couldn’t say, time having eroded her memories of them into a dusty, evanescent trail. But surely, this gnawing rootlessness would not be a part of her.

  Hoping to clear her head, she sought the sharp evening breeze, turning from the small calle to face the broad Giudecca Canal. Fingers of air cooled her forehead, hushing her thoughts. In the distance, the lights of Giudecca twinkled like fallen stars from the far shore of the wind.

  Past the Gesuati, she wove along the canal-side row of bustling restaurants where uniformed waiters pirouetted on the sidewalk, racing to serve eager-faced patrons. Pitchers of Prosecco bubbled on the red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Anna could smell the tangy, melted cheese in the quattro stagioni and capricciosa pizzas.

  Shunning such liveliness, she moved on to a dim and deserted stretch of the Zattere promenade, closer to the open water where wind-whipped waves pounded the stone barricades and threatened the sidewalk. Amsterdam had dikes. Venice had only low borders of Istrian stone. How can you keep the waves out? It took discipline and force.

  Ruminating on her failed marriage, she knew that Jack and she had loved one another. As the years slid by, she had grown to love him in an orderly way, giving tender, passionless kisses, while embracing a growing stubbornness to endure. She had fallen for an ambitious and confident man who had become as helpless as a baby. Which had come first, the drinking or the failure? Jack had chosen to drown himself u
nder a sea of bottles. One day, his bold canvases had hung in Sutter Street galleries and his calendar had been filled with receptions. On the next, or so it seemed now, he had taken his place among the street vendors and crushed dreams on Telegraph Avenue in the rain. A crisis of confidence, crisis of manhood, and crisis, he had said, in the way she loved, had changed him. She, on the other hand, had not cracked. She had tried not to be bitter as each succeeding year added its weight to the others. Somehow she could never muster the strength or discipline to face the void of life alone.

  A plump stone cherub atop a brick wall held out a book, its writings lost to decades of raindrops. Shimmering steps near the Swiss consulate led to a choppy canal. More steps plunged to a submerged stone platform, where the incoming swells gently lifted braids of algae before smacking them down, the next breaker raising them once again. The trembling green filaments resembled the dancing hair of a drowned corpse. Anna imagined descending into the numbing coldness of the water as it darkened the green of her gown before engulfing her face.

  Hurrying along to the Zattere degli Incurabili, the section of Venice that once housed the incurably ill, she witnessed day surrendering to night, as apricot clouds faded into charcoal phantasms flying across the sky. By the time she arrived at the old Customs House, shadows had swallowed its columned porticoes. The triangular mass of stone on which it sat, the angry blackness of the Giudecca Canal on one side and the calmer Grand Canal on the other, cut the water like a silent ship’s prow. On the opposite shore, a spectacle of lights illuminated the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Campanile.

  She strode to the edge of the pavement and felt the city’s magical rhythm with each beat of the waves. Wind gusting along the water’s edge, cold and wet against her skin, drove her back again. A flicker of movement startled her. Peering into the darkness settling on the fondamenta, she suddenly felt vulnerable. Coming here, remote from the crowds, had not been a good idea, she realized. You read about these people the next day in the newspapers. Was Sergio’s murder really related to some “complication” in his life, as Roberto had claimed, or was a lunatic loose in Venice?

  She was turning to flee when a form took shape from the gloom. “Finally, I have caught you,” Roberto’s voice echoed as he rushed toward her. “Despite those Venetian slippers, you walk fast.” His teeth flashed. “It was rude for you to leave me stranded without even saying goodbye. Is that how you treat everyone?”

  “I . . . I asked Margo to do it. Sorry, but I became very tired. I suppose I’m not quite over my jet lag.” Anna feebly met his eyes and made a half-hearted attempt to laugh.

  His gaze flowed down her silhouette, like the caress of the spring rain and a flower bud before ascending again. “You should have taken the fast return to your pensione, not the long and beautiful way back.”

  “How do you know where I’m staying?” Anna heard her voice rising.

  “People talk,” Roberto replied matter-of-factly.

  “You mean you ask.”

  He shrugged. “Asking has never been a crime.” He tilted his head back and examined the building’s blackened dome. “I used to come here, to La Dogana, with girlfriends when I was young. It’s very dark, you think?” He turned toward her again.

  “What do you want?” She retreated against a wall, the narrow pleats of her dress splaying into an elaborate, quivering fan.

  “Nothing, really.” He touched her shoulder. “Just to say goodbye . . . properly . . . the Italian way.” He came close and whispered, “Voglio baciarti.”—“I want to kiss you.”

  He softly kissed both her cheeks, then paused before sucking his forefinger and tracing the outline of her lips. When he pulled her close, she couldn’t help stroking his satiny hair, feeling she could melt into him and perhaps find peace. He was a beguiling undertow. But then, what would become of her, if she lost control?

  In that moment, Anna was the observer and the observed. The observer rounded up her fears and summoned the strength to push him away. A distant voice, barely her own, stammered, “I really don’t want any of this, Roberto. I just want to be left alone.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said sluggishly, as if emerging from a daze.

  “Who are you to say that to me?”

  “I don’t stay where I’m not wanted. And frankly, Anna, I don’t think you know what you want.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket and headed back to the Zattere, disappearing into the curves of the night.

  Anna was unsure what she felt. Staring at the white shores of San Giorgio Maggiore, she tried to lose herself in the ballet on the water. The passing ship strewing a frothy organza wake on the obsidian waves. The water taxi buzzing by. The profile of a distant gondola with masked passengers disintegrating into darkness. Looking up into the arc of heaven, she spotted Deneb, sixty thousand times brighter than the sun, the head of the Northern Cross, and the tail of the swan.

  Moving past the wreath of the Caduti and the barren steps of Santa Maria della Salute, she zigzagged away from the water, occasionally losing her way. A spooky sotoportego, a tunnel under a building, looked like it led nowhere and loomed ahead. A more promising route terminated at the fretted bridge of a single residence. Turning more corners, she strayed into dim culs-de-sac from which she was forced to retrace her steps. Finally, she navigated an improbably narrow passageway that led her through deepening shadows before finally disgorging near the Guggenheim Museum—a solitary star in the darkness.

  Maybe I’ll avoid wandering all night after all, she laughed to herself, glancing at her watch. It wasn’t late, but it might as well have been two in the morning. Not a soul, not even one of the city’s ubiquitous cats, was in sight.

  Wary of another trap, Anna sought signs to the touristy Accademia Bridge. Then she heard it. Leather on stone, or did she just imagine the sound? Like footsteps hurrying against the light on Market Street in San Francisco. As she passed a cluster of gothic palazzos, she heard the gait persisting. Maybe it was someone like her, heading back to the main part of the island. Could it be Carlo, Biondi’s spy from the vaporetto again?

  Anna quickened her pace for another fifty feet.

  So did her follower.

  With the hastening footsteps, droplets of sweat moistened her face and chest. How stupid I was to take such a lonely walk, she thought. First Roberto, and now this. She was tempted to turn and confront her pursuer. That might be a move she’d regret.

  The click, click, click behind her grew louder. Anna grabbed the flowing skirt of her dress, hiked it up, and broke into a full sprint. Her soft slippers provided no support, and the hard, irregular pavement stones jabbed into the bottom of her feet, like medieval torture devices. Though the pain grew with each step, she accelerated as adrenaline propelled her forward. Back in college, she had run the 100-meter high hurdles at the Edwards Track, winning her competitions more often than not. Thirty-three inches weren’t an obstacle to her once she had mastered the technique to soar over them. But that was twenty years ago. Now she had to run as if her life depended on it. And she did.

  Looking over her shoulder, she noted the flutter of an occasional shadow as her pursuer raced by a streetlamp. He was closing in, the tapping sounds somehow evoking the tightening circles of the toreador’s cape. Soon, he would brandish his sword, and the arena sand would turn red with the tormented bull’s blood. Anna pictured herself cornered against a brick wall, fighting a demon.

  She managed to stay on the main path, hoping to find a footbridge just high enough for a gondola to glide beneath. She recalled that Venice had four hundred pedestrian bridges, and soon a little one came into view. Summoning her strength and muscle memory, Anna ran as fast as she could, extended her right leg and swooped onto the landing. In another second, she pushed hard off her left leg and descended the bridge in a leap. Her soles cried out in protest as her mind raced. The white letters of a sidewalk mosaic flashed as she flew by. “Save yourself,” they seemed to spell out in Italian.

  Frantically won
dering whether to turn left or right, she could barely read an out-of-focus “Campo San Vio” on one of the buildings she passed. Where had she left her glasses? A blurred sign read “Accademia.” Forty feet brought her to another crossing. One, two, three, and she jumped, her body sailing forward, but this time her right foot landed at an angle and she almost stumbled on the top step. She heard her dress rip with a ssst as she jerked herself upright before leaping onto the flat path beyond the bridge.

  Lights danced on a far alley wall. Anna veered around a corner and almost collided with a couple exiting a building. “Scusi!” she cried as she raced past them on the wide, well-illuminated lane. I’ll be safe now, she thought. Beyond an antique jewelry store, where tiny golden jaguars stared from the window, she streaked up the wooden steps and reached the safety of the popular bridge. Listening for footfalls, heart racing, she leaned onto her knees, panting hard. When she looked back, the couple was progressing toward her, arm in arm, laughing and sharing confidences. Behind them lay empty pavement. Her pursuer had vanished.

  The night clerk was rubbing his eyes when she hobbled into the lobby of the pensione. “Camera numero sessantasei per piacere,” she mumbled. He handed her the key, grazing her palm with a long fingernail. Too exhausted to give him a dirty look, Anna limped up the stairs to her room and shut the door.

  Somehow she’d have to pull herself together before Brian’s call.

  In the early morning, Anna dreamed of laughter. Margo, Angela, Sergio, and several people she did not know were at Count Alessandro Favier’s palazzo, drinking Prosecco and eating cake on the terrace. One by one, they walked down the emerald marble steps, took the gleaming elevator to the ground floor and gathered by the empty family gondola floating in the water.

  When Angela pointed to it, the other guests started to laugh. Anna did not know why, but the count did. Tears were streaming down his face. Sergio Corrin climbed into the gondola and sat rocking back and forth, smirking. Small fish jumped aboard, flailing. A miniature dollhouse, filled with sand and water, doll’s feet sticking out a window, lay in the bow of the boat.