Chapter Eighteen
It was a pleasant day, warmer than expected, and as we climbed the Accademia bridge, the sun made an appearance, glittering on the wide green curve of the Grand Canal.
“God, I love this city,” Mary Alice breathed. I would have agreed with her if it hadn’t been for the hordes of tourists packing the bridge with their selfie sticks and slices of takeaway pizza. Mary Alice and Akiko had honeymooned in Venice, and I had my own pleasant memories of the city. One of my favorite assassinations had taken place there, in the Gritti Palace—touristy, but with a delicious if overpriced Bellini. I always thought it was a nice touch that they served their drinks with little bowls of potato chips.
Over the bridge, we skirted the green space surrounding the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti.
“Remind me to stop there on the way back to get Akiko some flowers,” Mary Alice said as we passed the tiny florist shop tucked up beside the gates of the palazzo. Buckets of blooms were banked against the front of the shop, spilling onto the pavement. Peonies and lilies of the valley jostled with callas and honeysuckle, sending a riot of perfume into the air. Small potted lemon trees and ferns stood by for the more practical buyers, but even these were glossy green and luscious.
We had no choice but to cross the wide-open length of the Campo Santo Stefano, but we kept our heads down, large sunglasses firmly in place. Mary Alice even wore a hat, a crushable straw thing with a broad brim that threw her face into shadow. A few more turns brought us out in the narrow alley that ran beside the Teatro La Fenice. In the side wall of the theatre, there was a service entrance of wide blue doors embellished with metal bars that looked like spears. Just opposite there was a campiello, a miniature square that housed a taverna, a pair of boutique hotels, and a few private apartment buildings. It was late afternoon, the perfect time to settle in with a drink, so Mary Alice and I chose that as our surveillance cover, diving into a pair of red leather armchairs set outside the taverna just as they became free. We ordered spritzers and a charcuterie plate and settled in to wait, looking like any other women of a certain age enjoying an unseasonably warm Venetian afternoon as we picked at the food and sipped our drinks.
We dragged it out as long as we could before giving up. A succession of builders and decorators had used the side door of the theatre, but everybody who had gone in carried a ladder or a paintbrush.
“I am starving ,” Mary Alice muttered as she reached for the last of the prosciutto.
“You’ve eaten a pound and a half of pork by yourself,” I reminded her.
“Charcuterie calories don’t count. Everybody knows that.” She wrapped the scrap of prosciutto around a piece of provolone and ate it in two bites.
I looked away briefly from the theatre door. “What else doesn’t count?”
“Food eaten standing up, food that takes longer than forty seconds to chew, and anything eaten on Super Bowl Sunday.”
“Mary Alice, that is the most insane—” I broke off as the door opened. Mary Alice was too well trained to turn around. Instead, she watched in the reflection of my sunglasses.
“Is that a can of paint he’s carrying?” she asked.
“Yep. Still nothing but the scenic crew.”
She shrugged and went back to her picking. “You want the last of this?” she asked, nodding towards the plate. There were a few bits of cheese and a sad-looking olive. I shook my head and she helped herself. When she finished, she nodded somewhere vaguely in the direction of the Rialto bridge. “Over that way, there’s a pharmacy with a little sign in the window, one of those programmable things with the little red bulbs. It shows a number, just five digits. Do you know what the number is?”
“Should I?”
“It’s the current population of the city,” she told me. “There’s a memo taped up above it that shows Venice had a hundred and forty thousand people living here in 1750.”
“How many does it have now?”
“A hell of a lot less. That sign has become a tourist attraction. You know why? Because people are ghouls.”
“What’s ghoulish about it?” I asked.
“The number is always going down,” she explained. “It’s not just that the city is sinking, so is the population. Venice is dying.” She paused and pointed in the opposite direction. “Out in the lagoon, past Giudecca but before you get to the Lido, is an island called Poveglia. Do you know what it’s famous for?”
“Do I want to?”
“It’s the most haunted place in Italy. There was a mental asylum where experiments were carried out on the insane, but before that, it was the place they sent their plague victims to die alone so they wouldn’t infect healthy people.”
“Jesus, Mary Alice. That’s grim.”
She shrugged again. “There’s a cemetery island too. Nothing but graves. Like I said, Venice is dying. What do you think that says about Galina that she chooses to live here?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe she just lives here because her boyfriend works here.”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. I think she’s got that gloomy Russian thing going on.”
“She’s only half-Russian,” I reminded her. “She’s also half-Bulgarian.”
“Bulgarians are gloomy too,” Mary Alice said.
I couldn’t argue with that. I looked again at the service door of the theatre. “A man should have the good manners to show up for his own extortion,” I said. “Even if it is a surprise.”
“Well, this one isn’t,” she said, gesturing towards the waiter for the check. She paid cash and we strolled out of the campiello.
When we got back to the house, ready to admit defeat for the day, Nat appeared from the kitchen, her hair standing on end, flour on her nose. She was wrapped in an apron that was creased and stained with what might have been blood or wine. Akiko was right behind her, also wearing an apron but looking much tidier.
“What happened to you?” Mary Alice asked Nat. “Your hair looks like it belongs on one of those shelter dogs on a humane society commercial.”
“Taverner’s out, so I was making dinner and the steam got to me,” Nat said. “And save your insults, because I just had a brilliant idea that will get us Wolfgang tomorrow.”
She retrieved her phone from the pocket of her apron and scrolled for a few minutes, jotting notes onto the back of her hand with a felt-tip pen. Then she tapped out a number before handing the phone to me. “La Fenice’s personnel office. Get Wolfgang’s personal cell number.”
“What the hell, Natalie,” I started, but just then the phone was answered with an abrupt, “Pronto.”
I switched to Italian, smoothing it into the Venetian dialect. “Good evening, signora. I am calling from the office of—” I reached for a name, any name, and blurted out “Dottoressa Lidia Maradona. We must reach a patient of hers, Wolfgang Praetorius, but the telephone number we have for him is incorrect. Please give us the correct number so that we can give him his test results.”
I waited, expecting her to argue. Italians love nothing more than thwarting you with bureaucracy, but the woman I was speaking to was bored or hated her job or didn’t give a shit, because she simply rattled off a series of numbers.
“Grazie mille,” I said, ending the call and handing the phone back to Natalie.
Akiko stared, wide-eyed. “Do Italians not have the equivalent of HIPAA? I can’t believe that worked.”
I shrugged. “You’d be surprised how often people are willing to hand out personal information if you just act like you’re entitled to it.”
Helen came in while Nat keyed in the numbers I gave her and we brought her up to speed. Nat waited, her expression expectant, then mouthed a word at us. “Voicemail.” When the greeting ended, she left a message, lapsing into her natural New York accent with a little extra nasal something thrown in. “Good evening, I’m phoning on behalf of Christine Fellowes, honorary chair of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Ms. Fellowes is in Venice for a short time and has an opening in her schedule to meet with you and discuss a possible opportunity for you to sing with us next season. Please confirm your availability to meet with her at your earliest convenience at this number.”
She pressed “end call” and sat back.
“There’s no way,” Mary Alice began. But before she could finish, the phone rang. Nat looked at the screen and grinned.
“It’s him. You were saying?”
The conversation was short. They set up a rendezvous for the following morning, and Nat stressed to him the importance of discretion. “Ms. Fellowes is not authorized to formally offer a contract,” we heard her tell him, “but if she likes you, well, she has great sway with the rest of the board. Naturally, we would not wish for La Fenice to get wind of this,” she added. “Secrecy is of the utmost importance.”
We could hear a torrent of vehement reassurances on Wolfgang’s end.
“I am glad to hear it,” she told him. “I will text you the address to meet Ms. Fellowes.”
She ended the call while he was still talking. “I am embarrassed for him,” she said. “He was so eager, he didn’t even take the time to google Christine Fellowes.”
“And if he had?” Helen asked.
Nat grinned. “He’d have found an honorary board member of the Metropolitan Opera. That’s what I was looking up before I called.”
Akiko shook her head. “No way. It cannot be that easy. Nobody is that stupid.”
“It’s not stupidity.” I explained the basic psychology. “It’s optimism. Like any other scam, we’re taking advantage of his longing for something. Wolfgang Praetorius wants to sing for the Met. We dangled the possibility in front of him, and he snapped at the bait. He’s willing to overlook anything suspicious because his ambition outweighs his sense of self-preservation.”
“It happens all the time,” Helen told Akiko. “People look beyond red flags waving right in front of their faces because they want something so desperately that they will explain away anything that might endanger that.”
“You just described two of my marriages,” Natalie said.
“Everybody sees what they want,” Mary Alice said quietly. She got up and went into the kitchen then. Akiko didn’t follow her, but stayed at the table with the rest of us.
I turned to Nat and Helen. “We need to set the meet-up with Wolfgang. Ideas?”
Nat looked up. “I’ve already sent him the address. Bar Foscarini.” It was a small open-air restaurant at the foot of the Accademia bridge, touristy and overpriced, but by way of compensation it had planter boxes full of mandevillas and bottles of decent rosé. And the location meant if anything went south, it would be easy to get away, blending into the crowds that thronged the bridge at any hour of the day.
“Who is going?” Helen asked.
Natalie didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. “Billie.”
“Why me?” I demanded. “Did we draw straws and I missed it?”
Nat tapped on her phone some more, then turned it around. “Christine Fellowes.”
The woman in the picture wasn’t my doppelg?nger, but she was damned close. Like me, she was on the other side of sixty—not too far, but distant enough that I figured the streaks in her blond hair were her natural grey. I kept my body tight with yoga and weightlifting, although she probably achieved the same effect with Pilates and the odd trip to the plastic surgeon’s office. Our haircuts were even similar.
“Damn,” I said to nobody in particular.
I went to my room after dinner to get ready for the next day. Nat had set the rendezvous for eleven am , late enough so the bar would be open, but early enough so that there wouldn’t be too many witnesses to the scene we were going to play. I laid out a linen suit, expensively rumpled, and a bag with a recognizable logo on reluctant loan from Helen. A huge pair of dark glasses would keep Wolfgang from looking too closely even if he had taken the time to google Christine Fellowes. There was nothing we could do about the hundreds of CCTV cameras around the city, but prosperous respectability is always a good disguise.
I was just stocking my bag with the things Christine Fellowes might carry—a tourist map of Venice, a folding fan, a makeup bag and hairbrush—when Taverner came in, smelling of tobacco and sea air.
“Nice evening?” I asked.
“Very,” he told me, slipping out of his leather jacket. “I went on a bacari crawl.” Venice was famous for its wine bars, each one offering standing-room-only service with good wine, heavy appetizers, and as much atmosphere as you could ask for. It was just the sort of evening we would have shared if I hadn’t been working. I wasn’t sure if I was annoyed he’d gone alone or relieved he had been out of the way while we had been plotting Wolfgang’s kidnapping. Taverner was always good for an idea, but I had no intention of letting him get mixed up in this.
I waited for him to introduce the subject of why we were in Venice, but he washed up, humming “American Pie” in the shower—all eight minutes and thirty-four seconds of it—before brushing his teeth and slipping into bed. He was halfway through a Zadie Smith book and picked up where he’d left off.
I stared at him until he looked up with a warm smile. “Is there something you wanted, love?”
I bared my teeth back at him. “No, darling,” I said in a sweet tone. “Nothing at all.”
He patted the bed next to him, and I went to lie under his arm, tucked up against his side. His free hand stroked my hair lazily while he read, brow furrowed over his bifocals. He was being completely courteous, respectful of my boundaries, and doing exactly as I asked of him.
I didn’t trust it for a goddamned minute.