CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zago regretted the decision to turn Irinka away immediately.
He closed the door with great finality but then stood there on the other side of it, cursing himself. Cursing the weakness that still allowed her to haunt him like this, whether she turned up at the palazzo or stayed in London.
Because one place she always was, night and day, was in his head.
But he did not turn around, throw open the door again, and welcome her in, because he’d meant what he’d said to her.
That night he barely slept, certain that he had made the greatest mistake of his life—but then, that was every night. He had to believe that sooner or later, he would get used to it.
Sooner or later, he would stop worrying about how a man could live a whole life without his own heart.
Yet by dawn it was clear to him that the only thing he needed to learn to live with was his surpassing weakness. Because he knew as he watched the sun bloom into being, caressing the ruined old buildings and illuminating the water outside, that if she came back again this day, he would not have the fortitude to deny her entry once again.
But Irinka didn’t come.
“And there is your answer,” he told himself darkly that following night, as he lay awake in that bed that he might as well go ahead and burn, now. Because it was little more than an altar to his memories of her.
It might as well have been a mausoleum.
When he drifted off to sleep, he kept thinking that he caught her scent—like she was just out of reach on the same mattress—and he would spring awake to find her and touch her, but he was always alone.
And there came a point where he could no longer bear being a ghost inside his own home, like all the rest who were trapped in the old walls. Yet it was as if the ancient, floating city itself—murmuring and sighing all around him—was trying its level best to make him feel as haunted as possible.
Venice was ever a city of echoes. Ghosts were noisy here, and the dead were never truly buried. It was the easiest thing in the world to turn down the wrong, narrow lane and find a part of the city he didn’t know.
It is like falling in love with a woman, his father had told him on one of their rare walks through the old city on a pretty evening, when Zago had still been young and both of his parents had still been here and he had not understood, yet, how drastically things could change. She is ever-changing. She is always herself, always a mystery, unknowable and eternal. This city must be the love of your life and to love her, you must lose her and find her, again and again, a thousand times a day.
Zago hoped he never grew too old or too bitter to enjoy the simple things in life, like following an echo wherever it led and then wandering the streets of Venice until he found his way back home.
He threw himself into the routines of his daily life as a lifelong resident and the scion of an ancient family, who had spent many years deeply involved in the local community. It was already summer and the cruise liners came in daily, hunkering over the city and discharging their hordes into the Piazza San Marco. Like most Venetians, he supported tourism insofar as it kept the city alive, yet grew weary of the summer hordes.
Still, he walked to have his morning espresso in cafés that were not in guidebooks. It was important to meet with friends and neighbors, have a coffee, and ground himself in the world of the living again. To speak again of art and literature and local politics.
To remind himself that there was more to his life than a woman who had left him.
Twice.
But the ghosts would not leave him alone.
It was a few days after Irinka had turned up at his door—and had been turned away with a great strength of will he was still surprised he’d had in him—when he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the figure of a woman.
Zago lost track of the story his friend was telling him in an animated fashion, leaning against the side of a high-top table. He looked again, and then shook his head, not certain why he had reacted so strongly to a mere glimpse of this woman. A closer examination only baffled him more.
It was not Irinka. It was a different woman entirely, blonder, huskier. Older.
And yet the sighting left him almost winded.
He even dreamed about it that night, the blonde woman changing into Irinka as he watched, then melting off into the bright sun outside…
“You sound strange,” his sister told him when he made his daily call to her the following day. She laughed. “Stranger than usual, I mean.”
“I beg your pardon,” he protested, but mildly, because he hadn’t heard her laugh in some while. “That is no way to speak to your revered and beloved older brother.”
“Sometimes, Zago, I think you are a ghost yourself,” Nicolosa told him, and though she laughed again then, it did not make him quite as happy as before.
Because how could he tell her that he was haunted entirely by his own hand?
A few days later, Zago left the crowded tourist areas behind, making his way through the snarl of lanes and bridges that led into the part of Venice that was largely without signs. A person either knew their way here, or they did not.
This was one reason that the farther he walked, the fewer people were about.
It was late into the evening, the lamps aglow and the sky still flirting with the last of its blue. He was heading into one of the neighborhoods only locals tended to know about and one of his favorite osterias to meet up with friends, enjoying the particular joy of Venice in the evening, The canals and the hints of music and laughter, dancing down the alleys.
Zago was halfway over a small bridge when the sound of a footstep behind him echoed strangely. He glanced back in time to see the side of a woman’s head as she retreated back into the shadows of the alley he’d just come through. And he knew immediately it wasn’t Irinka.
This woman had short hair and was dressed like an American tourist, in torn jeans and dirty sneakers, and she was swallowed up by the darkness before he could look at her straight on.
There was no reason that he should think twice about it.
But that night, sitting in a loud, happy group of friends he’d had since childhood, Zago found himself thinking about that American again and again. For one thing, tourists did not usually make it that far away from the bright piazza and famous bridges, the gelaterias and mask shops. And certainly not alone.
And for another, she had to have been following him, or he would have passed her on the bridge. There was no other way to get to that particular alley.
Zago couldn’t shake the odd notion that she had retreated back into the mouth of that alley when he’d turned to look at her.
And later that night, he found himself pacing in his bedchamber, wondering if he was losing it. If these odd sightings of strange women were a sign that his weakness was more mental than emotional. If he was destined to tear out his own hair and become one more ghost story the enterprising storytellers of this city would use to titillate the visitors on their nightly spooky tours.
But apart from finding himself fixated on strangers, he felt relentlessly the same. His work was the same. He tended to the accounts, he supervised the endless and ongoing maintenance of the palazzo, and he made certain that the financial portion of the family legacy was self-sustaining and would outlive them all. He allowed himself more access to la bella vita , as all Italians should.
His only trouble was that he kept thinking he saw Irinka everywhere.
Once more near an ancient church, its small square thick with guided tours and ill-behaved children, though she turned out to be a hugely pregnant woman. And again, standing on a bridge as his boat passed beneath it, half her face obscured with a camera—though something about her jawline lingered.
“If you’ll forgive my saying so, il padrone ,” Roderigo intoned one afternoon, “you have seemed rather on edge of late.”
“I feel on edge,” Zago agreed, closing his laptop and standing. He accepted the espresso that the older man set before him with a nod. “Tell me, Roderigo. Are you worried that I’m losing my grasp on reality?”
His maggiordomo slid a look his way, his face almost too blank. “I am now,” he said.
“I cannot be the only man who sees ghosts in Venice,” Zago said, perhaps more to himself. “Though I know that we will all become ghosts ourselves, if the water has its way.”
“I prefer to do without a haunting, if at all possible,” Roderigo said, sounding only slightly reproving—but that was a comfort. Even now, when he spoke of Zago’s mother, it was with that same gentle kindness that he remembered from back then. If Roderigo had been at all concerned about Zago, he would not be reproving at all.
The older man picked up the small cup and saucer after Zago tossed back the espresso. “This is already a city of too many masks, is it not? A ghost seems like overkill.”
Zago didn’t think much more about that conversation. The days grew warmer, the city more crowded, but also more musical and less haunted than it seemed in the darker months, where melancholy seemed to float along the canals like memories and barges.
He thought he caught the sound of Irinka’s laughter on the breeze one fine morning, but when he turned, reluctantly, there was no one nearby—save an old woman and the birds she was feeding on the other side of the narrow waterway.
A few nights later, he made his way through the city at dusk, picking his way through the crowds waiting outside overpriced restaurants and eying glass beads through shop windows. He was heading for an art gallery not far from the Piazza San Marco and decided that tonight he was determined to be on guard against the tricks his memory intended to play on him.
No ghosts, he told himself sternly.
When he got there, the gallery was loud and full. Zago knew many of the guests, as well as the patron and the artist herself.
He took his time with the exhibit, lingering on each work to really take it in, and then it happened. As he moved from one grand canvas to the next, he thought he saw a particular smile flash just beyond the nearest pillar.
So much for his no ghosts rule.
Zago was tired of himself. He kept his eyes trained on the canvas before him, a lavish painting of one of Venice’s masked balls.
And he thought about what Roderigo had said a few days ago. That theirs was a city of masks. That these masks allowed intimates to move amongst each other, unseen. Every family in Venice had stories about masks and balls and the particular delights of being anonymous in this place where they were all known too well.
Every Venetian child was raised on these stories.
And then, perhaps inevitably, he thought about Irinka. But this time he found himself considering that job of hers. The tasks she performed for those clients of hers.
And the fact that she billed herself as a master of disguise.
Those disguises were how she was never recognized. They were how she could pretend to be the girlfriend or wife or long-term mistress of any man at all, and was always believed.
She can dress up as anything or anyone, one of her happy repeat clients had told Zago with great admiration. I reckon she could pass you on the street and you’d never know her.
His pulse was pounding through him.
Irinka.
It had been Irinka all along.
Zago turned, slowly and with all apparent ease, but he did not look toward the pillar where he had last seen her. She would not be so foolish. He would have caught her already if she was that kind of foolish.
He ambled through the gallery, smiling and nodding at all the familiar faces. He had a drink, told a story, laughed with his acquaintances.
But all the while he was scanning the room. Not for the black hair and blue eyes he knew so well, but for other tells that she could not hide so easily. Her height, or someone hunched over to pretend she was shorter—he thought again about the old woman and the birds the other morning—and that was how he found her.
Once he knew what he was looking for, it was easy.
She was hiding by standing out tonight in a blazing red wig in loose, tumbling curls. And he thought from this distance that her eyes were green, suggesting that contacts were involved, and the kind of heavy cosmetics he had never seen on his Irinka.
But it went further than that. He was not a poetic man and yet Zago felt that he could easily write a book of sonnets concerning her particular lithe, lean form. The woman with the red hair, by contrast, was voluptuous. Padding, he assumed.
None of that mattered. He knew it was her.
He could make out those cheekbones he liked to trace with his fingers. He could see the mouth he had kissed too many times to count.
And then there was her smile. He would know it anywhere.
He knew it now.
Zago pretended not to notice her at all. Instead he tracked her movements through the gallery, waiting for an opening. For the right moment.
It came later, after the artist thanked everyone for coming and there were toasts and applause, and the voluptuous redhead who was no ghost after all slipped out the side door, clearly thinking that no one was watching her.
He followed, tracing her into the shadows as she moved from the art gallery, and then wound her way down one crowded, narrow little alleyway into another, before she burst out into the Piazza San Marco itself where the famous clock tower stood watch and the Basilica gleamed in the dark.
It was a mild and pretty summer night. The restaurants were full, orchestras dueled, performers wandered, and the crowds were replete with pasta and gelato and the sea air. Irinka slowed as she wound her way into the thick of it and let the packs of tourists carry her along.
Zago was glad of it. It allowed him to track her all the better. And as he did, he could see that any tension in her body eased away as she let the hordes of people direct her this way and that, no doubt imagining she was in the clear.
Because she always had been before.
She navigated her way across the square toward the Basilica, then ducked around it, back into alleys and byways that led her along a canal off the piazza. Zago knew immediately that she was heading for one of the hotels on the other side.
So he lengthened his stride and caught up to her right there on the crest of the bridge that arched up over the canal. By day there would be a steady stream of people here, moving from one neighborhood to another. But tonight it was only them, a gondolier singing lustily into the night, and the simple satisfaction of the way his hand closed over her wrist at last and tugged her around to face him.
“Can I help you?” she asked boldly as she looked up at him, complete with an Irish accent.
“I told you not to come back unless you planned to stay,” he reminded her, filled with that pulse that hammered at him and the silken menace that was taking him over. “And instead you have taken it as a personal project to turn yourself into a hundred different women, then haunt me in every corner of my life.” She looked as if she was about to argue that, so he tugged her closer, or maybe he simply leaned down into that face that was all hers and not hers at once. “Did it not occur to you that I might worry that the ghosts I kept seeing were an indication that the family madness had reached me, too?”
He saw her eyes change at that, even though they were the wrong color. “I did not think about that,” she admitted. She blew out a breath. Then, more quietly, she said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention.”
“You will have to explain to me what your intentions were, I think.” The gondolier moved around the corner, heading deeper into the stillness and night. They were alone, now, in this pocket of quiet, as if the city floated only for them. “Was this a punishment in kind? You thought you would haunt me for the great sin of turning you away? When you have already left me twice?”
If he had imagined he would confront her with calm rationality, well. That was as unavailable to him as the gondolier, now only a faint melody in the distance.
“I don’t know,” Irinka said, and she hardly sounded like herself. Her voice seemed too high-pitched, as if something had changed inside her. As if she wasn’t quite the woman that he remembered, and he wanted to take some kind of joy in that.
But he didn’t believe it.
Because these were still games and he was tired of playing them.
“Irinka.” And her name still tasted like a song on his lips. “I told you exactly how you can come back to me. It is simple enough. But it cannot happen in costume and deceit, clambering about in alleyways pretending to be someone else.”
She did not look anything like herself and yet his chest hurt when she looked away, off toward the Bridge of Sighs in the distance, not quite visible from here.
“You say you want everything,” she said, then. Softly. “But that’s not true. You want total capitulation. You want me to come crawling to you.”
“I cannot imagine you crawling.” He turned her wrist over in his grip, tracing the delicate skin on the inside, where her pulse beat like his. “Then again, I did not imagine that you would take to the streets of Venice in costume, your very own Carnival.”
She looked down at the way he was holding her wrist, and he thought he felt her tremble.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly, and it was becoming something like an out-of-body experience to hear her voice coming out of the wrong woman. As if she was presenting him with the essential issue between them with her disguise—the Irinka he longed for and the woman she pretended she was. He could touch them both, but only one of them was real.
What Zago did not know was which one that was.
Irinka lifted her head to look at him, then, her distractingly green eyes solemn. “You say one thing, and I think you believe it, but the truth is that you don’t want everything . No one ever does. So where does it leave me if it turns out that I am a whole lot more than you bargained for?”
He moved closer and lifted her hand as if to put it to her face, but dropped it again. “I can’t look at you while you’re dressed like someone else. It’s disturbing.”
She made a frustrated kind of sound at that. Then she flipped her wrist so she could tug him along with her as she continued across the bridge, and he let her do it.
Because despite what he’d told her, he didn’t know what he wanted. He was outraged, obviously. But there was also a part of him that couldn’t help but like the fact that she hadn’t left Venice. That she had stayed all this time, and had stayed close.
Irinka led him off the bridge and then directly into one of the hotels that waited there on the other side, built on the canal. She swept inside, waved at the dazzled man at the desk, and brought him up a narrow set of stairs to a hotel room with casement windows that opened up over the bridge below.
Once the door was closed behind them, she pulled off the wig and tossed it onto a table, where he could see many other bits and pieces of disguises. Torn jeans. Blond hair. She shot him a look and then strode off into what he assumed was a bathroom.
And when she came out again, she was herself.
His Irinka.
And that was both worse and better, all at once.
“Tell me what you want,” he demanded. She looked haunted, and something like furious, and he didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know what to do with any of this. “If you wish to haunt me, tell me why. Because otherwise it feels like torture, Irinka.”
“I thought it would be entertaining,” she said and she smiled, somewhat self-deprecatingly. “More fool me.”
He moved toward her then, something wild inside of him that was clawing at the inside of his chest. He backed her up until they moved straight out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the canal, the lights of San Marco in the distance.
But there was only the real Venice here, secrets and sighs, and he could not help but indulge himself.
He knew better, but he pulled her into his arms and then swept her back so he could kiss her. Again and again, as if to assure himself that he hadn’t made this up. That he hadn’t been driving himself mad.
That she really had been here in Venice the whole time.
He kissed her and he kissed her and when he thought he might lose control, he set her back on her feet. She gazed at him, her properly blue eyes blurry, and she looked dazed and soft.
And Zago had never wanted anything more than to pick her up in his arms, carry her inside to lay her on that bed inside, and lose himself in her.
But he knew too well that losing himself like that was losing her for good.
So he did not pick her up again. And he kept his hands on her shoulders until she could stand without swaying.
Then he waited until she looked at him. He held her gaze, and didn’t recognize his own voice when he spoke. “If you want to come back, come back. Don’t pretend.”
Her lips parted, and she looked at him as if he’d said something terrible.
Or painful.
“But…” She shook her head, then pressed her lips together. There was a suspicious sheen in her eyes. “But what if pretending is the only thing I know how to do?”