an option.' Janek laughed.
'You're ordering me to go?'
'We take a bad rap here. Murder City. Five to ten fresh homicides a day.'
She linked her fingers, then set her hands straight in front of her.
Just like a chief, he thought. 11… so if some big shot foreign cops want to hear what it's like playing detective in New York, we're going to accommodate them.' She paused. 'I checked your caseload. You've got nothing much going. When you get back, that's going to change. I want you to attend the conference, then take a vacation, two, three weeks, anywhere you like. The point is get some rest, come back here feeling good. A month from now I don't want to see you dragging your ass around. Okay?' 'Look, I appreciate-'
'This isn't charity, Frank. I need you in good condition.'
'For what?'
'We'll discuss it when you get back.'
Janek looked at her. He knew her well. They'd been lovers for two months twenty years before and then had parted bitterly. Five years after they split, they ran into each other at a police banquet, hit a bar together afterward for a drink, discovered they liked each other, and started dining out once a month. What had begun with sex, then soured to dislike had developed into a deep and mellow friendship. Janek thought of Kit Kopta as one of his half dozen closest friends in the department.
'Thinking of making me your special assistant?'
'Maybe something like that.'
'People will talk, Kit.'
'Let 'em talk. We won't give a shit, will we, Frank?'
Janek smiled. 'Still the ballsy broad,'
'I don't define myself that way. I like to think I'm… feline.'
'Feline! '
Her eyes burned defiantly. 'What's the matter?'
'Nothing. Just that in a Chief of Detectives 'feline' isn't what people expect.'
She nodded. 'People, as you call them, are going to have a lot of novel experiences now that I'm chief.' She stood to signal the interview was over. 'So it's settled. You're going to Lugano, then taking leave. Who knows, Frank? You might even enjoy yourself.' She smiled. 'Wouldn't that be different?'
'It would be,' he said. 'It sure as hell would.'
Kit stepped out from behind her desk. 'Give me a hug,' she ordered.
Janek hugged her.
''Ballsy broad'!' She laughed. 'You gotta be kidding, Frank.'
He didn't much enjoy the conference, even though he was lionized.
British, French, German, Dutch@very detective in Europe seemed to know about Switched Heads. 'I'd give my left ball for a case like that,' one Australian inspector confided.
His talk was well attended. After he finished, he politely fielded questions for an hour and could have gone on indefinitely except that the hall was needed for a symposium on computer crime. Afterward a mustachioed Spanish police captain, famous for single-handedly tracking down a cell of Basque terrorists, asked Janek to join him for a drink.
The Spaniard, proud of his own achievement said he would have preferred to have solved a great psychological case like the Switch.
'The young ones here, all they talk about is DNA fingerprinting,' he said, gesturing at a group of husky young detectives hovering around the busy hotel bar. 'they don't understand that the great cases, the only ones that can justify living the best part of your life in the gutter, are crimes of the wounded spirit. And the detectives who solves crimes like that are men like us, men who have wounds of our own…
After dinner Janek walked by himself through the deserted arcade of shops facing Lake Lugano, then crossed the avenue and paused to gaze across the water, seeking out the farther shore. It was lost in mist. The lake's surface was smooth, like an expanse of black glass, and the lamps along the embankment, huge lanterns on bronze pedestals, burned gaseous and yellow in the murky night.
He thought about what the Spanish captain had said: 'Wounds of our own.
..' What are my wounds? he asked himself. How many have I got? A long, loveless marriage that had ended in a bitter divorce, a few affairs that had ended badly, a lot of experience with the worst sort of people and the attendant law enforcer's disillusionment. A picture came into his mind, a network of scars, old and deep, crisscrossing his middle-aged torso. He shook his head; he didn't like the image. He turned away from the water and started back toward the hotel.
Once again under the arcade, the window of a travel agency caught his eye. He halted and stared in. A poster showed a gondolier in silhouette against sparkling water and the dark outline of a
great domed church. The words below were few and to the point: VENICE THE DREAM.
The next morning he returned and bought himself a ticket.
2
It was a morose autumnal Venice he had come to. The first afternoon the air turned chilly; after that he wore a raincoat when he walked. It was mid-October, near the end of the season, and there weren't many tourists. The Piazza San Marco was inhabited mostly by pigeons, and Cafe Florian was deserted, its waiters lonely sentinels guarding neat rows of empty seats. He bought a guidebook, then set out to explore in a studious manner, intending to work his way through a list of churches, museums, bridges, palaces of cultural importance. But he soon realized that it was not great paintings of the Crucifixion that interested him; it was the lore of the old republic, her hardness, her cruelties. He understood, with a start, that it was her crimes he wanted to understand.
When he learned, for instance, that state enemies were once routinely executed by being drowned secretly in the middle of the night, he hastened to the Orphan Canal, where the drownings were alleged to have taken place. And he was equally fascinated by tales surrounding the feared Council of Ten and the even more really feared 9 Three Inquisitors-tales of informers, night arrests, mysterious disappearances, undisclosed detentions, paid government assassins, official torturings, stranglings, knifings, poisonings, and beheadings, public and private, justified and capricious, the bodies often displayed without explanation between the 'fatal pillars' in the Piazzetta. to live as a Venetian in the time of the republic, he understood, was to reside in a paranoid's nightmare. Stealth, vengeance, institutionalized terror-these, too, were among the traditions of La Serenissima. they were traditions he understood at least as well as the dignity of the churches and the grace of the bridges and canals.
As there was nothing to do at night, he went to an English-language bookstore, bought a copy of stories by Thomas Mann, and began to read Death in Venice after dinner in his room.
A dense and dreary tale, he thought, about a famous middle-aged German writer, hitherto tightly controlled, who finds his fate in Venice, intoxicated by a pale adolescent boy. The novel cut deeper than that, of course, was about form and formlessness, art and obsession, rationality and madness. Janek understood it, could savor its intricate design, but in the end he could not identify with its hero.
Aschenbach, author of great books, and Janek, solver of a 'great' case-both outsiders, lonely men, who had come to Venice on a quest. But while Aschenbach sought the abyss, Janek wanted only to crawl out of it, to be redeemed.
He noticed the woman several times before he really looked at her, and then, it seemed, he saw her everywhere, until, in his mind at least, their intersections became something of a joke.
She was a Northern European, most likely Austrian or Swiss, though possibly a German or a Dane. A stunning, stylish person, she looked to be in her late thirties. Very well put together, too: excellent figure, proud walk, handsome face, precision-cut blond hair. She wore exquisite clothes, well-cut slacks, elegant suede boots, and, over a salmon blouse, the finest, softest, blackest leather jacket he had ever seen. He liked the way she wore her silk scarf tied smartly at the side of her neck.
But it was far more than her style and grooming that caught his interest; it was, above all else, her eyes. Large soft gray-green eyes, sensitive, yearning-they reminded him of the eyes of the great French movie star of the
