“Just follow the channel markers,” I said, still kissing her.
She stopped, pushing me away and breathing deeply, then smiled. “You’re the one who wanted me to come.”
I leaned my face into her neck. “I don’t know what I was thinking. We’ll stay here until the torches go. Look what they do to your skin,” I said, taking her chin and tilting her head so that her neck was caught in the light, golden. “Bertie says you’re complicated.”
“No, you,” she said, arching her neck as I kissed it. “You make it complicated. I was happy in the hotel. Everything was simple. Now look.” She pulled away, smiling. “We have to see Mama. Am I all right?” she said, touching her face. “Smeared?”
I took out a handkerchief. “Here, blot. Then you’re perfect.”
“See if there’s anyone out there. Think how it looks, coming out of the boat room.”
I laughed but peeked first, then motioned her forward to the stairs.
Either we had become accustomed to the torchlight or the electricity had finally come back at full strength, but the piano nobile seemed brighter than before, the big chandeliers blazing. My mother saw us over Gianni’s shoulder and smiled, breaking away from the group.
“Darling, at last. I was wondering where-”
“Claudia, you know my mother. And this is Dr. Maglione,” I said, but I saw that she knew him too. Her eyes went suddenly wide in recognition, then closed down, her whole face twisting. She glared at me, accusing, as if I had set a trap, then turned back to Gianni, breathing heavily, someone recovering from being kicked. The moment was one-sided. Gianni, smiling broadly, didn’t know who she was.
“How nice you could come,” my mother said, playing hostess, but Claudia ignored her, moving closer to Gianni and speaking Italian, her voice low, her mouth still twisted in a kind of sneer.
Gianni stepped back, as if the words were a physical assault, and answered her in Italian, quick and sharp.
“ Assassino! ” she said, louder, and then “ Assassino! ” almost yelling.
People nearby turned. My mother, pale, looked at me frantically. But Gianni had started to talk again, so fast that the words went by me in a blur.
“You thought we were dead,” Claudia said in English. “All of us dead. Who would know? But not all. Not all. Assassino! ” she said again, this time quieter, with contempt.
I looked at her face-someone else, unrecognizable. Now it was Gianni who raised his voice, upset, caught somewhere between scolding and fighting back. The people around us had begun to look uneasy, the foreigners, not understanding, thinking they’d blundered into a scene of volatile Italians, the Italians embarrassed, shocked by what they were hearing. I tried to follow, helpless.
“ Assassino,” Claudia said again, then “Murderer,” and for an odd second, hearing both words, I thought of Gianni’s speech, two languages.
Gianni answered, then stepped forward to grab her elbow, clearly intending to take her out of the room. The touch, just a graze, triggered something in her. She wrenched herself away from his hand and reached up to his face, clawing at it, shouting at him again. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her away, leaving scratch marks on his face. I heard a gasp. He held her for a moment like that, hands up in the air, away from his face, letting her body wriggle but holding her hands still, until finally she spat at him and, shocked, he dropped her hands.
No one moved. I saw the spittle gleam on his cheek, the stunned faces around us, Claudia heaving, a hysterical intake of breath. She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears, and then around, aware for the first time of the rest of the room, the appalled guests. Gianni hadn’t moved. “ Assassino,” she whispered one last time. Then she let out a sound, a kind of whimper, and turned to the stairs. She started to run, the darting movement like a signal to everyone else to come back to life, out of the stopped moment, the room noisy all at once with talk.
“What in god’s name-?”
“But what were they saying?”
My mother was daubing Gianni’s face with a handkerchief. “Adam, I don’t understand. Your friend-”
“She’s your friend?” Gianni said to me. “She’s a crazy woman.”
“My god, look at you,” my mother said. “Does it hurt?”
“No, no.”
I looked toward the stairs, but the crowd had swallowed her up, cutting me off.
“It’s a Jewish matter,” an Italian said, translating for another guest.
“What Jewish matter? Why Gianni?”
“Her father. It’s a confusion.”
“Well, yes, it must be, I suppose.”
But what confusion? I looked at Gianni, now surrounded, then started pushing through the crowd. “Adam,” I heard my mother say, but I was moving frantically now, down the stairs.
“Claudia!” I shouted, but when I got to the bottom no one was in the hall except one of the maids, standing in front of the makeshift cloakroom with Claudia’s coat over her arm. She glanced at me, alarmed, then toward the open door. I raced down the hall and grabbed the coat.
Outside, there was no sign of her, just the dark back calles of Dorsoduro. But she wouldn’t go to Salute, a dead end. I headed toward the Accademia, trying to pick up the sound of heels, anything, going faster at the corners, where there were little pools of light. At Foscarini I looked left, toward the Zattere. Then I saw a figure in the other direction, running past the Accademia to the vaporetto stop.
“Claudia!” I yelled, but she didn’t even turn around, determined simply to get away. I ran toward the lights of the floating dock, the coat flapping in my arms. The boat was loading, almost done, but it was going in the wrong direction, up the canal, not down to San Marco and home. She’d wait for the right one. But she didn’t. She looked over her shoulder and ran up the gangplank, the last one on before the crew pulled it back and caught the ropes. I could see her take a seat in the glassed-in section, hunching into herself.
Now what? She’d get off on the other side of the canal and head back. But the next stop was still on this side, not far, just past San Barnaba at Ca’ Rezzonico. Impossible to outrun a boat, but the vaporettos were slow and lumbering, even slower in the dark, and this was the part of Venice I knew best, my sleepwalking streets. And what was the alternative? I ran to the end of the campo.
The calles here were fairly direct-no long detours to go around dead ends. I raced across the bridge over the Rio San Trovaso, heading to San Barnaba. No one was out, and my shoes echoed in the empty street, the sound of a chase, desperate, so that when I did pass one old woman she moved to the side, frightened, and I realized that what she saw was a thief running with a stolen coat. My lungs began to hurt a little, gulping in cold air, but it would be only minutes-all the time in the world later to catch my breath. Calle Toletta-shops closed, sealed off with grates. Another bridge, even a few steps now an effort. Finally the open space of San Barnaba, a yellow light slanting out of a bar window.
I swerved right and down the calle to the landing. The boat was already there, motor idling noisily as passengers got off. One of the ropes was tossed back. I was going to miss it again. No, one more passenger, a woman with a string bag, taking her time. I was running so fast now that if they pulled away I might actually hit the water, unable to stop. But here was the gangplank, clanging under my feet. I grabbed at a pole to break my momentum and took a few deep breaths. One of the uniformed boatmen said something to me in Italian, which I assumed meant there’s always another boat.
She was huddled at the far end of one of the benches, looking out at the canal, so she didn’t see me come into the passenger area, didn’t even turn until she felt the coat on her shoulders. She started, then hunched back into herself.
“Go away,” she said.
“Don’t be silly. You’ll freeze.” I sat next to her, draping the coat around her. The boat moved away from the dock. “What the hell was that?” I said, still breathing heavily. The scene, pushed out of mind during the run, now came back in a blur.
“Go away,” she said again. “That’s who you want me to meet? People like that?”
“Like what? Why murderer? Who did he murder?”
“My father. With a nod of his head. ‘That one.’ A nod.”
“Gianni?”
“Gianni,” she repeated, drawing it out. “Yes, Gianni. I saw him do it. Him. You didn’t know? No, how would
