Chapter Thirty-Two
We stopped in Podgorica for a bit of medical treatment, food, and rest. Naomi got us a hotel suite and a doctor who made house calls. Once he’d patched us up—mostly cleaning and taping things and setting a few stitches—Naomi ordered two of everything on the room service menu and found us some new clothes. After that, we napped and ate again, and then boarded a plane for Venice. We touched down near midnight, coming in over the waters of the lagoon that rippled black as a widow’s skirt. The moon rose, a little lopsided now, with a sliver pared off the edge. Taverner held my hand as we climbed into a private launch. We rode it as near as we could get to the Campo Santa Margherita where the house with the rose-colored walls waited for us.
And it wasn’t just the house that waited. The door was flung open before Taverner even punched in the first number on the code. Akiko threw herself at Mary Alice while Minka looked me over to assess the damage and Wolfie gave Taverner a hearty hug.
“You are all okay?” Wolfie asked anxiously as we gathered in the salon. There were snacks and drinks laid out, but nobody touched anything. There were stories to tell, questions to answer, and a few secrets to keep. They didn’t need to know everything . But still the talking went on for hours. It was nearly dawn before anybody moved towards bed.
“So, what now?” Wolfie asked.
“You’re free to go back to your apartment,” Helen told him. “You can start rehearsing again at La Fenice, go out in public. Galina is gone, Wolfie. Nobody is going to come after you.”
His shoulders sagged a bit. He seemed relieved and deflated, and I wasn’t sure which emotion was stronger. “This has been an interesting time,” he said slowly. “I do not know what to think about it all.”
Mary Alice jotted a number on a card. “Call if you like.”
He looked touched. “This is your number?”
“No. It’s a psychologist our organization keeps on retainer for dealing with post-traumatic stress. Free of charge, but you might want to speak with a professional,” she said kindly.
He nodded. “I think this is good.”
“And you can come visit us in Greece,” Taverner said. I resisted the urge to kick him. Taverner was always inviting people to come stay and I was always finding reasons not to let them.
“Maybe when your time at La Fenice is over,” I suggested. A lot could happen between then and June.
There was no reason for him to linger after that. He shook hands awkwardly, hugged Taverner again, and left with a box of Malvestio pastries tucked under his arm.
“I think I’m going to miss that kid,” Helen said as she closed the door behind him. We sat quietly for a while, listening to the sounds of the campo stirring to life outside. Eventually, Helen turned to the rest of us. “What now? Sleep?”
“I’m too restless,” Mary Alice said. Akiko had curled herself into a corner of the sofa with one of the cats and was snoring gently. The other cat was using Minka for a cushion as they dozed together on the floor. Taverner was in an armchair, legs stretched out on an ottoman, face relaxed in sleep.
“I have an idea,” I said. I grabbed a bottle of champagne from the fridge and jotted a note to Taverner, tucking it in his shirt so he’d find it when he woke up.
We eased out of the house and made our way slowly through the alleyways of the Dorsoduro. Shopkeepers were hosing off the stones in front of their stores, taking deliveries, raising metal shutters. Mothers—and a few fathers—walked their children to school, quizzing them about alphabets and times tables. Early-bird tourists were also starting their days, emerging from albergos with cameras looped around their necks and maps flapping. We climbed half a dozen bridges, pausing at each to watch the morning traffic picking up on the canals. Even first thing in the morning, Venice doesn’t buzz; it shimmers, the heart of it beating with its own rhythm unlike anywhere else in the world. That morning, I like to think it was beating for us.
We were early, of course. The museum didn’t open until ten am , but we’d bought pastries and we sat on a step outside and shared the box, stuffing ourselves with maritozzi, each one bursting with cream we licked off our fingers.
As Nat and Mary Alice scrapped over the last pastry, Helen’s phone rang. She glanced at the name on the screen and smiled as she sent it to voicemail.
“I really am sorry about your house burning down,” I said after a minute.
“Don’t be. I’ve been thinking of a few improvements I could make if I rebuilt it from the ground up—without any ghosts this time.” Her expression was serene, like a woman who’d finished a good book and was ready to leave that particular story behind.
“Oh?”
She nodded. “It’s time to let them go, I think—Kenneth, Constance. They may be gone, but I’m still here. I’d forgotten that for too long, but I’m ready for some changes. For starters, I’m going to put in heated floors and a plunge pool in the basement.”
“That sounds expensive,” I noted.
“Naomi and I had a comprehensive discussion on the subject of money before she left,” Helen told me in a silky voice. “I think she understands what it will take to do right by us.”
I liked the sound of that. “Rebuilding Benscombe will take a while. Where will you stay in the meantime?” I asked innocently.
“I’m sure I can find a spare bed,” she said, blushing like a teenager.
I bumped her shoulder with mine. A thrust of pain in my ribs reminded me of what I’d put my body through in the last few days, and I thought of our little house in Greece with a longing I’d never felt before. It was time for a good, long rest on an island of herb-scented breezes set in seas once sailed by the sons of the gods.
Helen bumped me back. “You should make an honest man of him,” she said. “Does Taverner ever propose?”
“He knows better,” I told her. “We’re good. We’re forever. Just as we are.”
Just then the guard approached the gate and I took Helen’s hand to help me get to my feet. “Worry about your own love life,” I said with a grin. “And send me a postcard of the Mannekin Pis .”
When the guard finally opened the gate, we went inside and paid our admission, the first visitors of the day. He looked appalled at the bottle of champagne—probably because it wasn’t good Italian prosecco—but a fifty-euro note bought his approval. I didn’t need to look at the map to know where to go. I’d been there before.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in a small palazzo right on the Grand Canal. It’s the kind of place that makes you think being stupidly wealthy is maybe not a bad thing at all. It’s a little jewel, full of modern art that old Peggy herself chose with a meticulous eye. Masterpiece after masterpiece in room after room, each one selected for its power, its unexpectedness. You could lose yourself for hours in front of any of them.
But we ignored them all. Instead, we walked straight through the dining room to where she hung. Leonor Fini’s Shepherdess of the Sphinxes . It had been painted in 1941, when the second world war was gouging fresh scars into the landscaped face of Europe. The painting showed a similar setting, a bleak and featureless expanse painted in deep, rich colors to contrast with the emptiness. It presented a herd of sphinxes—not the Egyptian kind with lion faces. These were the Greek sort, with the torsos of beautiful women grafted onto the bodies of lionesses. They were wild in their ferocity, absolutely untamable.
And in the center stood the shepherdess herself, a fantastical figure striding through the field with her crook. She had the kind of big hair a 1980s supermodel would have envied, and a taut, muscular body in a silvery garment shaped like a strappy bathing suit. Around the sphinxes were scattered the remains of the men they had devoured, nothing but assorted bones and scraps of humanity. The leftovers reduced to litter. But they weren’t ashamed, those sphinxes. They arched their backs and tossed their manes, and above them all, their shepherdess looked at them fondly, with pride. She didn’t despise them for what they were. She knew they were simply being true to their nature. Some creatures are born to destroy.
The cork made a gentle hiss as I eased it out of the bottle. Helen had packed a cluster of plastic cups into her Birkin and I poured out a bit of fizz for each of us. The champagne foamed like the tide of the Adriatic, then ebbed.
I raised my cup. “To Constance Halliday. The original shepherdess. For teaching her sphinxes that we are all necessary monsters.”
“To Constance and the necessary monsters,” the others said.
We touched our cups together and drank.
The champagne wasn’t icy and the cups weren’t crystal, but it was enough.