Venetian Blood

by Christine Evelyn Volker

  He let out a laugh. “I have flexible hours.”

  She gazed at his biceps, distracted.

  “Come, I want to show you something.”

  When they ventured into the bedroom, a wispy filament of light glowed from a silken floor lamp, while the bed lay in penumbra. A loft arched over the far wall. Anna stared at the huge skylight above it, framing a patch of blue. The sun had come out.

  “Sometimes I lie up there on my back and look at the sky,” Roberto told her. “The clouds floating, coming together to form fantastic shapes before they pull away from each other, sometimes white, gray, pink, the light always changing. You can feel time passing, the earth spinning, as you watch.”

  “We forget to lift up our eyes.” Anna felt as if they were binary stars orbiting one another, locked in mutual gravitation.

  “You may hear stories about me, Anna. Not all of them are true.”

  “How will I know which ones to believe?”

  “When you listen with your heart.”

  Anna was drawn to a painting of a red-haired young woman staring out to a slate blue sea, her velvet shawl grazing a shy, pink nipple. In the distance, tumultuous waves curled and broke along a curving shore. She wasn’t surprised to see Andrew McMullan’s signature.

  She pivoted away and soon felt Roberto nuzzling her neck and earlobes from behind. When he unwrapped her turban, her hair now falling around her shoulders, she leaned back to kiss him. Then she turned, confronting his bold nakedness. The broadness of his shoulders and chest gave way to a flat, thatched abdomen. Moaning, she clutched him, her robe opening.

  He guided her forefinger onto his lips before licking and sucking it. Closing her eyes, she tenderly touched his broad forehead, his brows and cheekbones, his strong chin and neck, his vulnerable Adam’s apple. His mouth traveled from her throat, to the concentric circle of her nipple, along the soft slope of her breast to the chalice of her waist.

  “Vuoi stare con me?” he asked, looking up at her, his eyes glistening.

  Yes, I want to be with you, she thought. A hope vibrated within her, about setting sail and never returning. He grabbed her by the arc of her hips, drawing her closer to the bed. She glanced over his shoulder at a bronze duvet with a seashell pattern, and an unwelcome memory arose, of the bed in that Milan hotel, all the lacy pillows. What if another woman lies here tonight?

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” Anna said, pulling away. “It’s too much right now.”

  The light drained from his face, taking the life with it, making him seem as if he had turned into a frescoed figure blankly staring out from a forgotten wall.

  Racing to the bathroom to retrieve her clothes, she yanked open a wooden door in the hallway instead. It was empty except for the video camera perched on a stand, its lens aligned perfectly with a hole in the wood.

  “What is this, Roberto?” Her voice shook. “You, too? Is this your own twisted hobby or do you think I’m for sale?” Damn fool that I am, she thought, slamming the door shut.

  She threw on her clothes and ran out of the cottage, as a faint voice called, “No, no. Stop. I can explain.”

  Dashing through the garden, she closed the gate. When she reached the tiny square, she heard the sound of wooden flutes. A breeze tossed the musicians’ long black hair. A bright green feather lay on the locks of a flutist. As a conch shell sounded, the plume floated onto the wet ground, to be trampled underfoot.

  Dr. Zampone

  Thursday, noon

  Opening her heart, yet again, she had fallen for another Italian user. Was it luck or did she put out some sort of magnetic field that attracted such men?

  Trudging through unfamiliar streets, the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Human Touch” rumbled through her head as she sought distance from Roberto. She wondered who would betray her next. Who was friend? Who was foe? She had no faith she could distinguish between them anymore. Fearful of what people were hiding behind their smiles, she quickened her pace. Strangers looked placid and unthreatening, she told herself—yeah, like the water’s calm surface before a riptide pulls you out and under.

  Even if Margo was everything she seemed, Anna’s story about Roberto would unleash an eruption. Was there no one trustworthy she could confide in? Angling south, she remembered the address of the psychiatrist her therapist had recommended and searched for Dorsoduro 175 in a tangled nest of numbers. Maybe Dr. Claudio Zampone could help, or at least, listen. Near the Guggenheim, she spotted a tangerine stucco building. Curtains were open, and a curly-haired man sat at a desk, writing.

  The doctor greeted her warmly, his navy eyes holding a spark of sincerity. About her age, rangy, with an angular face, he wore a black jacket and gray pleated pants. He had the rest of the afternoon free and was pleased to accommodate her. Dr. Levine, back in the United States, had prepped him in case Anna got in touch.

  He led her into an expansive room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases along one long wall and an antique Venetian mirror with tiny black flecks, like age spots, on another. Large windows infused the space with light from the Grand Canal, making Anna, in her damp clothes, eager to soak up the warmth.

  “Dr. Levine told me you are working through the pain of your divorce,” he said, giving her his card and escorting her to a damask couch. “That is good. You cannot grow if you try to escape by popping happy pills.”

  He took a seat in a leather chair opposite and peered at her. A writing tablet lay on his lap like a small, obedient dog. “What brought you here today?”

  “Frankly, Doctor, I’m at the end of my rope,” she said. Her eyes moistened, and she struggled not to grab a tissue peeking from a gilded box. “I can’t figure things out anymore.” In rapid fire, she told him about an older man she had met in Milan who betrayed and threatened her, along with another here in Venice. She relayed a string of frightening experiences: people denying what she had heard, being chased, almost drowning.

  Through it all, Dr. Zampone listened intently, scribbling notes and nodding his head so hard, his dark hair shook.

  “Well.” He coughed. “You were right to come. You have been through a lot. But please, tell me a little about yourself.”

  As succinctly as she could, Anna told him about the early deaths of her parents, being raised by her grandparents, the kind of work she did, and her unhappy, barren marriage. “But that’s not why I came here.”

  “I understand. Let us discuss the two men first. Do you think they planned to trap you?”

  “Definitely the first one. He had seduced me in order to blackmail me.”

  “How?”

  “I’d rather not say. It was connected to work.”

  “And the second?”

  “With his video camera. Roberto was picking up where the first one left off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The older one took embarrassing photos of me. I didn’t know it at the time. The second one videotaped me.”

  “Why do you think they did these things?”

  “To force me to cooperate with them, so they could pursue their illegal activities.”

  “Which are?”

  “I don’t know all the details, but the first man was a money launderer.”

  “I see.” He made a note. “And do you think this is related to the footsteps you heard following you and later to the rolling cart? Or was that someone else?”

  “It doesn’t make sense that it’d be them. It was another person. At least one.”

  “So we have three, maybe four people out to get you. Two for blackmail or coercing you in some way, the rest to scare or . . . eliminate you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did anyone witness the, as you say, attack with the cart?”

  “I don’t think so. An elderly lady passed me after I climbed out of the canal, but I don’t know who she is or what she may have seen. I was in the water for a while.”

  “So no one was there in the moments when you dove into the canal?”

  “No one be
sides my attacker.”

  “Who pushed the cart?”

  “It couldn’t have raced toward me on its own. The carts were tied together. Also, I tossed aside a diary I was carrying, and when I got out of the water, it was gone. Someone took it.”

  “And did you actually see someone chasing you after the party?”

  “I saw shadows on the wall and heard footsteps. They sped up when I did.”

  He pulled his glasses down and peeked over the rims.

  “Have you ever had similar experiences back home?”

  “Absolutely not.” She looked at him, drawing her brows together. “I’m not making this up.”

  “I believe you believe it. I keep an open mind.” He crossed his legs. “Tell me about what you saw or heard that other people contradicted. If I understand correctly, there was a baby crying and someone singing opera after midnight?”

  “Yes.”

  “How rare do you think this is in the city of Venice?”

  “Not very,” she said, hunching her shoulders.

  “Then why were you disturbed by it?”

  “First, because I had seen a light in that palazzo, and a teddy bear, even though Count Favier says no one lives there. When I told the desk clerk about the singing, which I had thought came from the same palazzo, he said I was wrong and that it was a quiet neighborhood.”

  “So you allow a desk clerk to throw you off balance?”

  “He seemed part of a pattern.”

  “Do not be discouraged. We can work through this.”

  Anna wondered what he was talking about.

  “Are you afraid to leave your hotel room?”

  Anna groaned. “Not at all, though I’m no longer going anywhere off the beaten tourist track at night. At this point, it would be tempting fate.”

  “I can understand. But your fate, Signora Lottol, is in great part of your own making.”

  Ignoring his comment, Anna said, “I haven’t told you about something else that scared me.” She described her dream of killing Sergio in detail but omitted his name.

  Dr. Zampone fingered a button on his canary-yellow shirt. “This dream, where you killed the man you met in Milan, how many times did you have it?”

  “Twice.” Anna shifted on the couch cushion.

  He leaned forward in his chair and spoke in a hushed tone, as if he were giving counsel in a confessional. “Veda, dreams, you understand, are expressed in symbols, the language of the unconscious. We should not take them literally. They are written in code, like the computer languages you have studied, but they do lend you clues about your existence.”

  “What do you think this one means?”

  “All right. The man is sitting in a gondola, a symbol of romance, of fantasy. He is smirking, not taking it or you seriously. You lost your temper with this man, you are enraged. You wish to sever your sexual relationship with him, but it is very difficult, evidenced by a dull knife. And the cake—you feel you have not been getting your fair share. He is a callous man, a competitive man, making fun of the count . . . the details I do not know. That is my interpretation.”

  Was this some special talent? Anna wondered. Or some off-the-shelf interpretation—some psychobabble that sounds insightful but means absolutely nothing?

  Dr. Zampone focused his eyes on Anna. “Does this man still live?”

  “Is everything I tell you held in confidence?”

  “Of course, as long as you are not a danger to yourself or others. All my patients need to know they can speak freely.”

  “He was murdered last weekend.”

  Dr. Zampone bolted upright in his chair. “I read the papers. So you talk of Count Sergio Corrin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Count Corrin, revered here in Venice, using his fortune to help the city?”

  “The same one.”

  “Why did you have relations with him?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Maybe he was a father figure for a girl who lost hers?”

  “Woman. That’s disgusting!”

  “You had the dream after he was dead, nothing similar before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think you dreamt it a second time?”

  Anna toyed with a lock of her hair. “He’s always on my mind. I’m trying to clear my name with the police. Until then, I can’t escape thinking about that horrid man.”

  “One moment, please. What police? You did not speak of them.”

  “I’m a law-abiding citizen, Dr. Zampone, with a very sensitive job. I made a terrible mistake. I was embarrassed and worried by what had happened with Sergio in Milan. At first, I lied to the detective when he questioned me. Now he views me as a suspect.”

  “Why did they question you in the first place?”

  “I was at the hotel where Sergio was killed, and somebody drew a sketch of me running away.”

  He rubbed his temple. “How did you weather the interrogation? How did it make you feel?”

  “Terrified and angry. They kept me in a dank room and Detective Biondi grilled me, tried to trick me, threatened me, even showed me a picture of Sergio with his head bashed in, blood everywhere.” She trembled.

  “Do not go there. Do not relive it. But I ask you, are the police out to get you as well?”

  She pressed her thumbnail into her forefinger. “Well, later Detective Biondi dragged me to the police department for more questions and was about to charge me with murder, I know.”

  “But he let you go?”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “I am sure the police will find the guilty party without your assistance.” Dr. Zampone stood up and started pacing on the terrazzo floor. “Let’s go back to your dream. I interpret the gondola as a form of transport to a place you were imagining, a place that never existed. The issue, Signora Lottol, may be how you see men: imbued with fantasy, instead of how they really are. I know your life story and now all what you told me about your time in Venice. Perhaps in the dream, Count Corrin was not making fun of Count Favier. Maybe he was pantomiming his escape from you, sliding away in his gondola rocked by the waves. But you stopped him so he could not abandon you, like your father did.”

  “My father, Antonio, died a terrible death. He didn’t abandon me.”

  “Emotionally, you were left without a father.”

  “I had my Nonno. And once I found out more about Sergio, I was repulsed.”

  “Only after a painful lesson, which you nearly repeated, like with that Roberto. In your dream, why did you want to kill Count Corrin?” He stood still, his eyes boring into her. “What were you feeling at the time?”

  “Hatred. He was an evil man. And I had to stand up for Count Favier. No one else would.”

  “Count Favier—a man you just met. Signora Lottol, it appears to me that you have unresolved issues. The fishes in the gondola, they symbolize fertility, life, sexuality, and in the dream, yours are about to die. The dolls, which represent your femininity, are buried in a dollhouse filled with sand and seawater. It has become a death trap.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When we dream about houses of any kind, we are dreaming about ourselves,” he said. “Yours is half-buried, littered with what the sea, the great unconscious, the original soup of life, has thrown into it. Your self is not much of your own making. It may be easily overwhelmed. So I am concerned about the strength of your ego, and its boundaries.”

  There he was, storming ahead, Anna thought, going into the deep end of the pool, yet barely knowing her. She had always prided herself on having a strong will. Could she really have been so weak without ever knowing it?

  “It is not easy seeing yourself in a mirror. Most go through life avoiding it. They place one foot after another like sleepwalkers. Sometimes, one day, they awaken, and it is often too late. They cry out, having hoped for a different outcome, now powerless to change it. Brava, Anna, for being courageous. But your instincts get you in trouble. You are caught in a repe
tition cycle, like a tide that comes in and sweeps you out again. Now you can begin to weaken the pull of others—to work on your relationship with yourself instead of seeking paradise in the arms of men.” Before Anna could speak, he added, “Do you feel you made too much sacrifice for your marriage?”

  “Yes.” She reached for a tissue and wiped her nose. There was no doubt Zampone had hit the mark. He was accurate on the relationship with Jack. How did he glean this from what she had told him and what Dr. Levine had shared? Anna remembered Jack’s confident façade cracking in their ninth or tenth year of marriage. His paintings weren’t selling anymore and none of the galleries would show his new works. All depicting local landmarks, they were becoming increasingly surreal and outrageous. The UC Berkeley campanile spearing Oski, the school’s bear mascot. Memorial Stadium as a giant fish bowl, with UC Regents and administrators as sharks, the students as bait, Berkeley’s mayor resembling a giant blowfish. Coit Tower transformed and renamed “Tower of Babble—City Hall.” When the San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic had skewered his work, Jack had suspected malevolent political influence. His artistic energies dwindled as his drinking grew. Time limped along. Then came the scandal with his model, her buttocks spread across the canvas, molded onto the face of a local public relations executive.

  “Maybe you’re the problem,” Jack used to say between nirvana-seeking bouts with the bottle. “If you didn’t earn a good salary, I’d be more driven. You’re too masculine. And you always have to win.”

  Could it all be her fault? Weighing his claims carefully, like the scientist she was, Anna had sifted among them for a grain of truth. Even if she couldn’t find one, what would she do about it, quit her job? She couldn’t divorce him, breaking the Roman Catholic hearts of Nonno and Nonna back in New York. They had already sacrificed so much, coping with the fiery deaths of their only daughter and her husband, raising their granddaughter when they should have been enjoying their own retirement. She didn’t have the heart to do it. Even after her grandparents died, she couldn’t face leaving Jack, telling herself he depended on her. The years deposited their encrustations as she waited for something to change. But nothing ever did, no matter how many pretzel-like contortions she put herself through. Until she went to Milan.