Midnight in Venice (4 page)

“And they don't rot?” Olivia asked.

“No. They're never exposed to air. Some of them are over a thousand years old. It truly is a city like no other.”

“I love it already. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.”

“No, it's the other way around. Thank you for choosing Silvio Milan. Marco has told me of the excellent work you've been doing in Toronto and of your knowledge of art history. You're going to be a brilliant asset to our head office.”

“You're very kind. I love my apartment too.”

“You're most welcome. Let's go inside and toast your arrival with a glass of Prosecco. I trust your flight was uneventful?”

“It was fine,” she replied. There was no need to mention the whole embarrassing incident, but Marco did it for her.

“Except for the bomb scare,” he said.

Silvio raised a questioning eyebrow. “Bomb scare?”

“Yes, when I arrived to pick up Olivia, they had the whole terminal cordoned off. There were cops everywhere. Apparently, someone had phoned in a threat. The president and his family were on their way here for Christmas.”

“But all a false alarm, I take it?” he asked, looking at Olivia with concern.

She nodded, deciding not to tell them about the toy teeth.

“That's good,” he said, leading them to a sideboard where a bottle rested on ice. He poured three glasses, handing them theirs before raising his own. “Welcome to Venice,” he said, and they touched glasses. “While we have our wine, I can show you your office, but first, let me give you this,” he said, handing her a new iPhone; she was going to have to put her other phone away somewhere so she didn't mix them up. “It's on the company account. Use it for all your calls and texts, including any you want to make home to Canada. Don't worry about the expense. It's not like Canada.”

Olivia laughed. She turned on her new phone and saw a list of names and numbers, including Silvio, Marco, Dino, her mother, and her sister.

“All our staff and clients are already programmed in. The staff members prefer to text each other—they find it much less invasive than a call. I prefer it too. It gives time to think before replying, and it's easier to ignore if I'm in the middle of something with a client. And it doesn't matter if you're in the next room or on the other side of the world. It's something I still find amazing—but then I don't share your cousin's comfort with technology, one of the many reasons I like to have him around. Now, let's go see your office.”

Her office was one of the rooms encircling the
piano nobile
. A large desk dominated the room, and the computer at its center was the only obvious modern intrusion. There was a balcony with a view of the courtyard, and in the corner, a cabinet that held Murano glassware, some new and some old. Olivia regarded the glass pieces with awe. “That's sixteenth century,” she exclaimed.

“You're right. Murano glass is a big part of our business, so it's important you know it well. After Christmas, you'll meet many glass artists as well as dealers. You'll learn what makes a piece particularly valuable and what our various clients are looking for. In fact, I wondered if you and Marco were part of the famous Moretti glassmaking family. While Marco assures me it is only a coincidence, it certainly won't hurt to have that name around here.”

Most of the staff was already off for Christmas, but on the way out for dinner, Silvio showed her the ground floor and introduced her to Luigi, a diminutive man in his mid-fifties, whose small features were dominated by a large mustache. “Luigi here oversees the packing of every item to ensure it arrives safely at its destination and deals with Customs and other unglamorous but important things like that.” The ground floor was devoted mainly to storage and workrooms. It was prone to flooding, and Luigi demonstrated how all the benches could be raised with the help of a rope-and-pulley system.

They exited by the water entrance, and Silvio helped her onto the water taxi that was waiting for them. “We meet again,” Dino said. And while his smile seemed genuine enough, Olivia felt some of her earlier unease. But she knew first impressions could be hard to shake, and she resolved to overcome them.

Their destination that night was the Fortuny Restaurant in the Hotel Cipriani on Giudecca Island, and they were soon skimming down the Grand Canal, past the Piazza San Marco. They sat in the back of the boat, and Olivia held back her hair to keep it from flying in her face. Despite the winter wind, she felt like Katharine Hepburn in the movie
Summertime
. Silvio was extolling the virtues of Fortuny's when Olivia remembered something about the restaurant.

“The Cipriani family invented the Bellini cocktail, right? There's a restaurant called Cipriani in New York. I've never eaten there, of course. I've only been to New York twice, and my dining was mostly limited to hot dog carts.”

“Well, perhaps when you're there in early February, I'll make reservations for you.”

“I'm going to New York in February? she asked, surprised.

“Marco didn't tell you?”

“No,” Marco said. “I left the bad news for you.”

“No,” Silvio said, laughing, “it's not bad at all. It just means leaving Venice for a week in Manhattan. We're showing some Murano glass jewelry at our gallery there.”

“But I know so little about Murano glass . . .”

“Don't be so modest. You recognized the goblet in your office as sixteenth century without a moment of hesitation. You'll know more than you ever need to by then. Not to worry. And, if it makes you feel any better, the artist will be accompanying you, and you'll be spending most of your time translating for him.”

“Okay. That I know I can do. I just don't want to let you down.”

“You won't. By the way, where did you get the glass beads you're wearing?”

“A Christmas present from Marco.”

“They go so beautifully with your eyes—which I'm sure Marco intended. Did you tell her who designed them, Marco?”

“No. It's the color that was important.”

“Nonsense. He's just being modest and doesn't want you to know how valuable they are. Well, I won't tell you either. Finding out who made them can be your first assignment,” he concluded as the taxi pulled up to the dock in front of the hotel.

She should have been pleased that Silvio sounded confident of her potential, but as he took her hand and helped her out of the boat, she felt some of the pleasure drain out of the evening. Not that she was averse to New York, but somehow she thought she'd be spending all her time in Venice. Marco, though, seemed to have no problem flying to Paris, London, New York, or Iceland at a moment's notice. This was the life she was choosing, she reminded herself, and she just was going to have to get used to it.

The hotel dining room sparkled with thousands of white Christmas lights, and the Bellini cocktail Silvio insisted on her having raised her spirits, as did the conversation over dinner. Silvio was, as Marco had said, extremely knowledgeable, and Olivia felt that in the course of the excellent meal (one she was glad she wasn't paying for), she'd already doubled her knowledge of Venetian art.

And while she felt pressured to learn everything she possibly could about Murano glass, Silvio said she was to have the week to herself. “It is Christmas, after all. The staff will be with their families, and the office will be very quiet. All I want you to do now is soak up the culture. Your first stop should be the Accademia. It's one of the finest art galleries in Italy, if not the world. Enjoy it.”

Just then, his cellphone beeped. He glanced at the display and smiled. “Please excuse me. I must make a personal call. It may take a moment; it's rather complicated.”

“I think you're off the hook,” Marco said after Silvio left.

“What do you mean?”

“He's dating a married woman.”

“How can you tell?”

“For Silvio, ‘complicated' means married, and he must be smitten, because he usually likes to keep things very simple.”

When Silvio returned, he was smiling even more widely. “Where were we? Ah yes, to
la dolce vita
,” he said, raising his glass to them.

The sweet life indeed. She didn't know how she felt about Silvio dating a married woman, but at least now she didn't have to worry about her boss hitting on her and could just concentrate on her job. She looked around the luxurious restaurant, the white-draped tables, the silverware sparkling under Murano glass chandeliers, the beautifully decorated Christmas tree. Handsome waiters glided between the tables of richly dressed patrons, handing out luscious plates of food and pouring glasses of wine.

Her eye caught a man standing at the window, looking out to where the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore was lit against the night sky. Tall, his dark hair just brushing his collar, he stood with his back to her, and unlike the other patrons dressed in black dinner jackets, he was wearing a black leather jacket.
Alessandro Rossi.
It had to be!

She watched him, wondering what she would do if he turned around and saw her sitting there. Feeling a rising sense of excitement, she set down her glass, ready to wave should he look her way.

Finally, the man did turn and said something to a couple sitting at the table behind him.

It wasn't him.

“Your plague doctor again?” Marco asked.

“No,” she said. “Just someone I thought I knew. But then I only just arrived here, so how could that be?” She smiled and raised her glass again. “
La dolce vita
.”

And if there was the tiniest hint of disappointment in her tone, she was sure she had concealed it well.

 

When Alessandro arrived home from his office, he poured himself a Scotch and took it out onto the narrow balcony of his apartment to watch a vaporetto pull up under the lights on the Sant'Elena dock. No one got off the water bus, but a few people got on, probably on their way over to Lido Island to pick up groceries.

This was the quiet end of Venice. It was only a ten-minute walk along the
riva
from San Marco, but very few tourists came this way. In the spring, when the leaves were on the trees in the park outside his windows, he couldn't see the dock or the lagoon beyond, although occasionally above the trees he could glimpse the smokestack of an especially tall cruise ship.

It stunned his colleagues that he chose to live in such modest surroundings. But the apartment was convenient enough to his job, and unlike the palazzo on Giudecca Island that his father had bought him as a wedding present, it contained no memories of Katarina. There were, of course, the boxes of files stacked in a corner that related to her disappearance, but she'd never passed through its doorways, never sat in the little kitchen with a morning cappuccino, never waved to him from the balcony. It had only four rooms, and the furniture was functional and simple. Only his Fazioli grand piano gave an indication that he was anything other than a cop on a cop's salary.

Occasionally, on weekends and holidays, he went to the family home on the Brenta River outside Padua, a thirty-room Palladian villa of long, cool marble halls and enormous frescoed rooms that opened onto terraces where he could watch the swans drift on the quiet waters of the pond. He sometimes couldn't believe it was his home, and the first thing he'd do on arriving was walk through the rooms like a tourist wondering what it must be like to live in such splendor. And yet it was his family's, the place he'd spent his summers as a child. The Rossis had owned it for more than four hundred years, and it pained his father that Alessandro might never have children to pass it down to. Of course, he and Katarina had talked about having children, but they'd thought they had lots of time.

As the vaporetto pulled away from the Sant'Elena dock, Alessandro took another sip of Scotch. It had been a long day, and it had left him more restless than usual. And while he told himself it was because it had been a waste, it was also because of that woman, Olivia Moretti. Beyond those violet eyes, he wondered, what impulse had made him give her his card? Was he finally ready? It had been almost four years. He remembered Olivia blushing as he picked up her lingerie. Did she know he was picturing her in it?

It was cold on the balcony. So he came back in and, closing the French doors, went to sit at the piano. He put down his Scotch and resolved to focus on the music, a resolve that lasted less than a minute. He was soon playing aimlessly, his fingers wandering from one melody into the next.

His father's birthday was in early February, and when Alessandro had asked him how they should celebrate, his father said he wanted to hear him play again—not in Alessandro's apartment or even the villa near the Brenta River, but in a concert hall. “One of my greatest pleasures in life has been hearing you in concert. I miss it, and I keep hoping you'll find some peace in it too.”

Alessandro had met Katarina at a recital he'd given at the church of the Frari. When it was over, she'd waited in the icy November rain for him to appear and asked him if he'd like to have a drink with her—that easily. And he'd said yes. That easily.

She was beautiful, talented, and gracious. Within days, they were the most talked about couple in Venice.

She was a glassblower from an ancient family of glassblowers, and he wasn't only a pianist but also a race-car driver from an old Venetian family that made some of the world's fastest and most expensive cars. She'd said Venetians love their cars because they were exotic to a people who spent their lives surrounded by water. And he'd said Venetians love their glass because it reminded them of water but didn't threaten to drown them.

They married a year later in a lavish wedding attended by every old Venetian family, and everyone was still talking about it when Katarina died a year after that. Or was thought to have died. There was no funeral, as much as Katarina's family wanted one, as much as his own family wanted one. But he kept putting them off, week after week, month after month.
We don't know. She could still be alive.

In the end, a mass had been said. They didn't call it a funeral in the hopes that Alessandro would attend, but he'd refused to go anyway, even knowing that with his refusal, he'd added to their pain.

He blamed himself for what had happened, although the expensive psychiatrists his father had insisted he see had told him he couldn't have known. They told him he was stuck in the cycle of grief. Grief, he was told, went through phases: denial, anger, depression, acceptance.

Most days, it seemed he was still in stage one. He frequently visited the next two stages, but the last one evaded him. While almost four years had passed, he often felt the loss as strongly as he had in that first week, still spent the first hour of every morning working up the courage to face the day without her.

Their last day together had started no differently than any other, though he remembered that as they made love with the early-morning light filtering through the gauzy curtains of their palazzo, she had seemed somehow freer, happier, less worried than usual. After breakfast, she'd called a water taxi and left for the glass studio while he'd sat down at the piano and thought how happy he was. It was a happiness that had persisted until the police came to the door.

A botched kidnapping, the police concluded. “Why didn't she have a bodyguard?”

He said she'd refused, and wondered guiltily why he hadn't insisted.

They told him not to hold out much hope. Given how much of her blood was found in the studio, she would have died quickly without medical intervention.

“We'll see,” Alessandro had argued. “If they want their ransom, they'll be sure to keep her alive.” He'd paced the floors all night, waiting, but no call came.

And when several weeks of sleepless nights had passed and still no call came, they told him it was time to accept that she wasn't coming back.

He'd refused. She could still be out there. And if she was, he'd find her. And if she was dead, he'd find who was responsible.

Six months later, when the trail had long gone cold, he was already training for the Guardia di Finanza, a body of the Italian military police, which had been involved with solving kidnappings in the past. A year after that, he was working in the Venice office.

Columbo, the chief, had been skeptical at first. “You have revenge on your mind, and if you weren't a billionaire, you would've been weeded out in the first round of recruitment interviews. But I suppose with the budget cuts, they're hoping you'll help out when they can't meet payroll.”

Alessandro worked harder than anyone else on the team, earning Columbo's and everyone else's respect—but that didn't mean he'd forgotten. He kept extensive files, cataloging every piece of information about Katarina's case, following up on any lead, no matter how remote. His work led to plenty of convictions, but nothing brought him any closer to finding his wife, if she was alive, or her killer, if she was dead.

He stopped playing now, realizing that if anyone had said,
That was beautiful, what was it?
he couldn't have told them. He picked up a file he'd been looking at the night before and spread it out over his music. It was a record of everyone who'd been interviewed in those first six months before the trail went cold. And there was a name—Olivia. Not the same Olivia, of course, but a clerk in the port authority office who'd been questioned at the time, and now he was distracted again.

It's her eyes
, he concluded. And it wasn't just their unusual color. When he'd looked into Olivia Moretti's lovely eyes, he'd seen confusion, fear, and some justifiable anger, but he'd seen something else, too: interest. Lots of women were interested in him. He knew women found him attractive, and then there was his money. He was wealthy beyond most people's dreams, and when his father died, he'd be wealthier yet. But Olivia Moretti didn't know about his wealth, and he didn't think she was drawn to him just for his looks. There was something about trust.

But if he'd really wanted her to call him, he should have been a little clearer in his message. For all he knew, she might have taken the business card as an official gesture.
Here's my card in case you run into trouble
. He should have just asked her out for a drink, or at least written something a little less cryptic. Something as direct as
Call me
. But then, no doubt, she'd have taken him for some sort of Mediterranean-gigolo type cheating on his wife.

She'd probably never call. And that was probably for the best. He couldn't ask another woman to come second to an obsession. And it would remain an obsession until he found out the truth or the day he died.