'I can't believe it! I can't.' He sat down beside her. She hugged him. 'I loved her, Monika. So much In the lobby, after he had booked his flight, Janek gulped down three cappuccinos. 'Her father, Tim Foy-he and I were partners for five years.
Then Tim transferred to narcotics, worked undercover, was found out, and assassinated. One morning he went out to his car, parked as usual in front of his house. He turned the key, and the car blew up-twenty pounds of dynamite. Jess, who was five at the time, was watching from the kitchen window. He waved to her; she waved back; then her whole world exploded before her eyes. According to Laura, she didn't start crying for a minute, just stared, confused, at the place where Tim's car had been. Tim, you see, was something of an amateur magician. Maybe Jess thought he was playing a trick. Some trick! they never found all the pieces of him. Her tears, God! they flowed and flowed. Later we learned her hearing got damaged, too. they entered St. Mark's. The cathedral was deserted. The aroma of the incense was cloying and thick. Janek fell to his knees on the hard stones before the altar. Monika knelt beside him and held his hand as he prayed.
Afterward they did a tour of the piazza. It would be their final walk together in Venice.
'My wife and I never had children. So Jess was like my own daughter. When Laura was struggling, I was over at her place all the time, helping with Jess, baby-sitting, assisting with homework, telling stories. I even taught her how to play baseball in Flushing Park. That's when I realized she could be an athlete. She turned out to be a damn good one, too. She's on the Columbia University women's fencing team. Or, I should say, she was.
Monika held tightly to his hand.
Even after Laura Foy went to law school, met and married Stanton Dorance, and she and Jess moved into Dorance's big apartment on Park Avenue-even then Janek remained close to the girl.
'What a waste, Monika. A fine young life like that! What a terrible waste.' He paused, then spoke quietly. 'I don't think I could have loved my own child more.'
He sat with Monika in the rear of the chartered speedboat, racing for the airport, knowing that now his life would be forever changed.
'I headed up the team that went after Tim Foy's killer. today they won't let you work a case that's personal, but back then you could swing a deal or two. Anyway, it didn't take us long to find the guy who built and placed the bomb. A scrawny little character; I can't even remember his name. Anyway, we caught him, turned him, and he gave us the guy who ordered it done, a slimy, rat-faced drug dealer. He's serving a life sentence now.' Janek squeezed her hand. 'Sorry to make you listen to all this sordid stuff.'
'Keep talking, Frank. I don't find it sordid.' She touched his face, then gently kissed his cheek. 'I want to stay with you as long as possible, stay close to you before you fly off.'
'I wouldn't have had anyone to talk to if I hadn't found you.'
'Well, we found each other, didn't we?'
Janek peered around. Venice was lost in mist behind. Ahead the lagoon was as still and flat and white as it had been the morning he arrived. The rising vapor carried the same faint sweet salt-marsh smell of decay.
'I wonder if I'll ever be able to come back here now. That call from Kit-I think I'll always associate it with Venice. The call..
. that broke my heart.'
He didn't turn away from her this time, didn't mind now if she saw his tears. And when she mopped his cheeks with her fine silk scarf, he kissed her hand and whispered, 'Thanks…
At the airport there was time to call Aaron Greenberg and arrange to be met in New York.
'Aaron and I work together,' he told Monika in the coffee bar on the airport roof, 'He knew Jess, too. He says the tabloids are full of it. Stanton, Jess's stepfather, is a big corporation lawyer. He and Laura-I feel so sorry for them. they say the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose a child. You never get over it, they say. ….
Monika accompanied him to the security gate. There he put down his bags so they could embrace.
'This can't be good-bye. I don't want to lose you,'
'We're not going to lose each other. Don't even think that,' she said.
'You've been the best thing to happen to me in years.'
'I feel the same. We'll stay close. Somehow we'll manage to see each other, perhaps sooner than you think.'
'I'll phone you tomorrow night.'
The final call for his flight was announced. It was time to go. He hugged her as tight as he could. Then, just before he reached down for his bags, she handed him a package. 'I bought this for myself, before I met you.' She smiled. 'Now I want you to have it.
Please take it, Frank.'
On the plane, somewhere between Venice and Rome, he carefully unwrapped her gift. It was a fine antique Venetian wineglass, pure Renaissance in style, nothing fancy, no spirals or wavy bands of color, just a simple graceful transparent cone set upon an octagonal base.
As Janek held it to the window so the wondrous light of the Italian sky could play upon it and fill it up, he knew, by the way it reminded him of the clear, yearning beauty of Monika's eyes, that it was the choicest piece of glass he had seen in Venice.
3
Conversation with Mama 'Can you hear me, dear?' 'I can hear you, Mama.' 'It's getting to be time again.' 'Yes, Mama.' 'Remember, it's not enough to feel the pain and then the fury. You've got to do something about it. Got to fix them good.' 'I understand, Mama.' 'He deserves it. Doesn't ie.
'Oh, he deserves it! He surely does deserve it!' 'So?' 'I'll use Tool again.' 'What will you do to him?' 'The same as to the others.'
'Let's hear you say it.' 'Fix him. Shut him up forever.' 'Why, child?' 'Because of what he did.' 'And what was that?' 'Must I, Mama?
Please!' 'You must! You know you must! Now tell me what he did.' 'He was unkind.'
'Forever.' 'Ha!
'Very unkind!' 'Say it again.'
'Don't make me laugh.' 'Kill him and fix him and shut him up forever.
'Well, he was,' 'There, that's the ticket. You got it, child. Yeah, you got it now.' 'Of course, he was, you goose. But what did he do?
Tell me!'
'Insulted me.'
'Is that all?' 'Hurt me.'
'Is that really all he did? Come on, child. Spill your guts.'
'He hartned me.'
'Can't say it, can you?'
'I can say it, Mama. I can say it all right. It hurts me to say it. But I can.'
'Then say it, for God's sakes. Say it!' 'He-' 'Wlwt?'
'Humiliated me.'
'Don't whimper, child. Say it loud.'
'He humiliated me!'
'Yep, that's what he did. So what're you going to do about it?'
'Pay him back.' 'How?'
'Use Tool.'
'Use Tool to do what?' 'Kill him.'
'And?'
'Fix him!' 'And?'
'Shut him up!'
'For how long?'
