Alibi

by Joseph Kanon

  “Like The House of Levi,” I said, thinking to myself.

  “What?” my mother said.

  “It was The Last Supper. He changed the title because the pope didn’t like it.”

  “The Inquisition didn’t like it,” Gianni said. “More Nazis. Torture. Burnings. Worse, sometimes. Castrating people. You learn how to bend with a history like ours.”

  “But that was a question of belief.”

  “You think Goebbels didn’t believe? Any of them? Right up to the end they believed in something. I don’t know what-their own hate, maybe. And when the Inquisition lit the fires under people, what did they believe? To save them. By killing them. Compared to the Church, the Nazis were amateurs. At least the Nazis didn’t ask you to think they were right to do it. They didn’t care what you thought.” He studied his wine. “Forgive me, no more speeches. But your painting-does it matter what it’s called? So long as it’s beautiful?”

  “No.”

  “You see, an Italian answer. And Veronese, you know he was also being a tiny bit naughty. Putting all that in, the dwarfs, the drinking. A sacred scene. He knew what they would think. But that’s Italian too, maybe, to tweak the nose-that’s right? tweak? — of the Church. You can do that if you bend. The Germans never understood that-they never bend and they destroy themselves. Why?” He shook his head. “Northern people. Sometimes they are all a mystery.”

  “All of us?” my mother said, flirting.

  “Oh, you, certainly. A great mystery. But that’s because you’re a woman. All women are mysteries.” A stage courtliness, the two of them practically winking at each other.

  The polenta arrived, covered in tiny brown shrimp from the lagoon.

  “Funny about Bertie knowing him,” my mother said. “He was careful with him, did you notice? I’ll bet it wasn’t half as easy as he makes out. During the war.”

  “No, not for anyone,” Gianni said. “Of course, Bertie has many friends. I don’t think it was dangerous for him.”

  “Irish, my foot,” my mother said, laughing to herself. She glanced over at Gianni, her face soft. Not just a dinner companion, someone to take charge of the wine list.

  “In Germany, you were a soldier?” Gianni said, keeping the conversation going.

  “G-2. Intelligence. We investigated Germans suspected of Nazi activity.”

  “Ah, that explains your interest in Cavallini. One investigator to another, eh? You want to compare methods?” He was smiling.

  “Ours was mostly pushing paper around.”

  He laughed. “So was his, I think. But it must have been difficult, yes? Surely the real Nazis would lie. So how do you know?”

  “We don’t always. That’s what makes it difficult.”

  “Impossible, maybe.”

  “Maybe. We still have to try.”

  “But why? The war is over.”

  “Their crimes aren’t.”

  “Ah. A passion for justice,” he said, nodding, a paternal indulgence. “Maybe you’ll be a lawyer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh darling, really?” my mother said. “I haven’t wanted to ask. You’ve seemed-at such loose ends.”

  “Don’t rush,” Gianni said. “To be this age, it’s wonderful. You don’t have to decide anything. Not yet. Not like us, eh?” he said to my mother. “We have to hurry with everything now.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Ah, you see,” he said, ostensibly to me, “how she makes fun of me.” His hand moved slightly toward hers and just grazed it.

  I looked away. “Did you always want to be a doctor?” I said.

  “Well, for me it was different. A family tradition. One of us was for medicine and one for-well, to carry the name. But he died, so it’s the end. I have only a daughter.”

  “You’re married?” I said, not expecting this.

  “I was. She died.”

  “I’m sorry. Where is your daughter?”

  “Bologna. At the university.”

  “Medicine?”

  He smiled. “No, an avvocato. Another one with a passion for justice. How did it happen?” he said to my mother. “To have such children?”

  “Think of theirs.”

  “Would you like to see the hospital?” Gianni said to me, not an offhand invitation, an obvious effort to get closer.

  “The hospital?”

  “For the architectural interest. It was once the Scuola di San Marco. Near Zanipolo. The library has the most beautiful ceiling in all of Venice.”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” I said, the only possible answer.

  “Even the hospitals,” my mother said, a little dreamy, finding romance in everything now.

  “The joke is that you can see San Michele from the wards-the cemetery island. So they say the doctors finish you and the priests at San Lazzaro bless you and the boat outside takes you away. One operation, door to door.” He winked at my mother. “You see how practical we can be.”

  And so it went, through the grilled branzino, the radicchio from Trevisio, the little cups of coffee and the shared plate of biscotti-light, aimless conversation meant to make us easy with one another, a kind of wooing. My mother was happy, enjoying herself, her eyes shiny, catching the light the way her earrings did, in tiny glints. She made jokes, laughed at his, until the table seemed as carefree as one of those afternoons at the Lido. Gianni looked at her with a fondness that surprised and then disconcerted me. And I, who was the object of the wooing, sat wondering why they were bothering. What did it matter what I thought, if they wanted to make eyes at each other and play at being twenty again? What could be nicer? A season in Venice with something to talk about later, over drinks at the Plaza. An old friend, not somebody she’d picked up in a hotel lounge. With a daughter at the university. That respectable. What business was it of mine? The truth was that I didn’t want to think about them at all. My mind was elsewhere, back at the station hotel, in that perfectly hermetic world of sex, where no one else existed. In the warm dining room, with my body loose and tired, all I wanted was my own life.

  When we got up to go to the lounge for brandy, I took it as my cue to leave. Gianni would want to sit with my mother in the dim light and look across the water to Salute, letting the evening settle around them. I imagined a kiss tasting of cognac, a last cigarette, low voices-everything the lounge was meant for, what you paid for. But when I suggested going, he insisted I stay for a nightcap. For some reason it took a while to order-everything seemed to have slowed down, even the waiters-and then we drank without saying much. There were only a few other people and a piano near the door, played so softly it seemed the pianist too was logy with food and drink. Gianni fixed a time next week for me to go to the hospital. He sat back with a cigarette, looking contented. Outside the hotel, gondolas with different-colored tarps bobbed on the tide. I slouched, exhausted. There was nothing to do now but wait it out.

  “Such a surprise, darling. A lawyer. So sensible.”

  “It’s just an idea,” I said, but she waved her hand, brushing it away, and I saw that she hadn’t actually been talking to me but to some unseen audience.

  I looked over, hearing the abstract, self-amused talk of drink. My mother, like all her friends, had a strong head, but it had been a long evening since the first Prosecco, through Gianni’s special bottle of Soave and the vin santo at table. Her words were still precise, but everything else about her seemed to have grown a little blurry. Even her lipstick was no longer fresh, faint at the lines. She was nestled into the corner of the settee, her fur draped around her, smiling, in love with the world.

  “It’s late,” I said. “We should go.”

  “Oh, Adam,” she said, teasing. “So sensible.”

  “If you’re tired,” Gianni said to me. “Don’t worry, I will take her home. She’s happy here, you see.”

  “Maybe too happy,” I said to him, not loud enough for her to hear.

  “There is no such thing as too happy,” Gianni said mildly. “I wil
l see that she gets home.” Firmly, a dismissal. “Can I call you a taxi?”

  “No, that’s all right,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Oh, you’re going,” my mother said, evidently a new idea to her. She leaned forward to be kissed.

  I bent over for a quick peck, and as I stood back I stopped, suddenly dismayed, seeing once again what Gianni must be seeing, not a carefree girl this time but a woman slack with drink, pliable, draped against the couch, her soft white throat tilted up. What he’d waited for all evening, what came after brandy. Did he take a room here, part of the Monaco service? My heart sank a little as I looked at her, a physical drop. When had this happened, this fading into someone else? While I’d been away, not paying attention. And each year she’d become a little more vulnerable, until all it took was a kind word and table manners, someone like Gianni.

  I looked at him, half expecting a leer, something predatory, but he was smiling blandly, at ease with himself. What he must be used to, another of the lonely women who floated through Venice, away from home, a little drunk, easy. Without daughters at university and family names. Without anything, except money to buy a little pleasure, an evening out. This one had come with a son-an inconvenience, but now he’d been charmed too, taken care of, and he was leaving. Would they come back to Dorsoduro? Appear at coffee in the morning without even a blush, all of us grown up?

  For a second I stood there, trying somehow to put myself between them. It’s not what she is, I wanted to say to him, but wasn’t it? Isn’t it what she wanted too? Who had actually paid for dinner? I couldn’t remember there being a bill, the sort of discreet arrangement a lady might make. But how do you protect people? And after all, what was the harm? One of those things. Unless it wasn’t. I looked down at her again, wondering what bargain she was making with herself. A fling? But maybe she hadn’t even thought about it, just followed an impulse, the way she’d come to a city where she could read menus and street signs but whose real language was unknown to her.

  “Darling, you say you’re going, then you don’t go,” she said, laughing.

  I smiled, shaking my head. “Just thinking.”

  “Oh, god.”

  I held up my hand. “All right, I’m off. Don’t be too late,” I said, imitating her.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Gianni said without a hint of guile. “She’s in safe hands.”

  The next day I found a hotel near the Rialto with cheap off-season rates and a side view of the canal. The old-fashioned radiator in the room actually produced heat, a luxury that winter, so I took the room for a week, using a chunk of my separation pay. Not what the army had intended, precisely, but in fact the room did finally separate me from the war. Every afternoon we sealed ourselves away behind the fake damask walls, too absorbed in each other to imagine anything outside.

  After that first day, we settled into a pattern. At one Claudia would walk over from the Accademia-ten minutes, if she hurried-and we would make love until she had to go back, dressing and leaving me in bed. I think it excited her to leave first, as if the room were in a brothel and she had somehow bought my time. She liked everything about the room-the touristy Murano chandelier, the chipped gold paint on the sideboard-because it seemed to her what such a room should look like, a little tawdry, worn from years of afternoon sex. She never came to my mother’s house and didn’t want me to go to hers. An affair was set apart from real life, something you did in hotels.

  I had never had sex with anyone who responded the way she did, not just with pleasure or curiosity but the way I’d seen children eat in Germany, with a greedy determination to fill themselves up, not sure they would ever eat again. The afternoons were for both of us a kind of daily feast, sampling and tasting. Day after day in our cheap hideaway room, warm with radiator heat, we slid against each other, slick with sweat, until, finally exhausted, we felt the world begin to come back a little. Then she would dress and lean over to kiss me in the damp sheets, not saying good-bye but fixing a time for tomorrow, when we’d begin again. Days of it like this, drunk with sex.

  We didn’t go out for dinner or have a drink at Harry’s or meet each other anywhere but at the hotel. At first she said she had to be careful, she didn’t want people at work to know, but after a while I realized the secrecy itself, the sense of being illicit, was erotic to her. When she closed the door to the hotel room, she could do anything, away from everyone, even herself.

  Then, after a few days, the afternoons weren’t enough. I wanted to know where she went, how she spent her time. Wanted her, in fact, to spend it with me.

  “I don’t want to go to restaurants. It’s nice the way it is.”

  “But I want to talk to you. To know you.”

  “Who knows me better than you? Do you think I’m like this with everyone?”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “I know what you mean. I know you a little now too. You like the fans, the masks. Old Venice.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You know, all the fans, that was to end up here,” she said, patting the bed.

  “So maybe we missed something, skipping all that.”

  She shook her head. “No.” She pulled me down to her. “Do you think we missed something?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s enough. Here.”

  “All I did was ask you to dinner,” I said, kissing her.

  “I can eat anytime. Wouldn’t you rather do this?”

  “Yes.”

  But a few days later I got a chance to force the issue when my mother came down with a cold and Gianni, now the attending physician, offered me his seats at La Fenice.

  “I’ve never been,” Claudia said, tempted.

  “Let’s do it right. We’ll take a gondola.”

  “Ouf. A gondola from San Isepo, with everyone at the window. I’ll take the vaporetto.”

  “Then you’ll come?”

  “I always wanted to see it, La Fenice.”

  “Do you have something to wear? We can buy you a dress.”

  “No, you don’t buy me a dress. I’m not-” She turned away. “I can dress myself. Even for La Fenice.”

  I hired the gondola anyway and met her at San Marco, then maneuvered her into the rocking boat for the short trip through the back canals.

  “You’re extravagant,” she said.

  “You have to go this way. Where else can you do it? Pulling up to the opera in a boat?”

  “You can also walk,” she said, but smiling as the dark houses glided by, surprised to see a different city from this angle. Under her wool coat she was wearing a long evening dress she said she had made herself, gloves, and rhinestone-studded slippers.

  “Where’d you get the shoes?”

  “Borrowed. A friend keeps them for Carnival every year.”

  “Very fancy.”

  “Vulgar?” she said, concerned.

  I smiled at her. “No, fancy. Perfect.”

  The canals got narrower after we drifted past the hotels and began to circle around to the Fenice water entrance. There was no sound but an occasional snatch of radio and the smack of the steering pole hitting the water. A light mist was rising, just high enough to soften the lights.

  “My god, it’s beautiful like this,” she said. “No wonder they come.”

  “You’ve lived here all your life.”

  “Not in a gondola. It’s different.” She turned to me. “You make me a tourist.”

  We turned a corner into a small lighted basin and one of those scenes that gives Venice its storybook quality-a traffic jam of boats rocking against one another as people stepped up to the pavement, the familiar taxi drop-off made theatrical by the water. After the shadowy canals, the lights here were festive, opening-night bright, catching jewels and white silk scarves.

  “You see, it’s another city. People like that,” she said. A woman covered in white fur was being handed up to a footman.

  “Never mind. They’ll all b
e looking at you. ‘Who’s that up there in the box?’ ”

  “It’s a box? Whose?”

  “A friend of my mother’s.”

  “A rich American?”

  “No, Venetian. Not rich either. A doctor.”

  “My father was a doctor. He didn’t have a box at La Fenice.”

  “This one had doges in the family.”

  “Oo la. A doge’s box.”

  I smiled at her. “You don’t believe me?”

  “You, yes. Maybe not him.”

  Then our gondola reached the entrance and I had to help her out and tip the gondolier, and her attention shifted to the crowd inside. We took the stairs to the second tier and followed the number plates to Gianni’s box. Every light in the theater seemed to be on, making the red-and-gold walls glow, almost burning. We were the first to arrive, so took the seats nearest the rail.

  “Who else is coming?” Claudia said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he has the whole thing. Here, let me take your coat.”

  “A minute,” she said, reaching into the pocket and pulling out a fan, then opening it, her eyes lowered in a mock flirtation over the edge. “Like this?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “With the shoes. A Carnival costume.”

  “Not that, though,” I said, nodding at the brooch on the front of her dress.

  “No, my mother’s. A friend hid it.”

  “Hid it?”

  “When I was away.”

  She went to the edge of the box and leaned forward, taking in the scene like gulps of air. Below, people were settling in and looking around, nodding to one another, testing their opera glasses, everyone smiling, expectant.

  “Look at them, like birds,” she said, her eyes darting around the theater.

  I glanced down-the dresses in fact were as bright as feathers-then over at her. Her dress, a dark blue clinging fabric gathered at the waist, would have been dull without the pin, but it opened at the neck in a way that drew your eyes upward, toward the face, flushed and eager, and her hair had been pulled back, exposing her ears, making her look even younger. A different Claudia, girlish and wide-eyed, not the woman in the hotel room. How many others were there?