Those Who Walk Away (2 page)

The boat was a good-sized launch, and it rapidly filled with silent, solemn English and blond Scandinavians who had been waiting when Ray’s plane landed. The launch backed from the pier, turned smartly, dropped its stern like a charging horse, and shot away at full speed. Cheerful piano music, such as one might have expected in a cocktail lounge, came softly from the loud-speaker, but did not seem to lift anyone’s spirits. Speechless, white-faced, everyone faced front as if the boat were rushing them to their execution. The launch deposited them at the Alitalia air terminal pier near the San Marco stop from which Ray hoped to take a vaporetto—his destination was the Accademia stop—but before he realized what was happening, his suitcase was on a trolley and being pushed into the Alitalia building. Ray ran after it, was checked by a jam of people at the doorway, and when he got inside, his suitcase was not in sight. He had to wait at a counter, while two busy porters tried to obey the shouts of fifty travellers and hand them their proper luggage. When Ray got his, and walked out of the building with it, a vaporetto was just pulling away from the San Marco stop.

That meant a long wait, probably, but he did not particularly care.

“Where are you going, sir? I’ll carry it for you,” said a husky porter in faded blue, reaching for his suitcase.

“Accademia.”

“Ah, you just missed a vaporetto.” A smile. “Another forty-five minutes. Pensione Seguso?”

“Si,” said Ray.

“I will accompany you. Mille lire.”

“Grazie. It is not a long walk from Accademia.”

“A ten-minute walk.”

It was certainly not, but Ray waved him away with a smile. He walked to the San Marco pier, on to the creaking, swaying dock, and lit a cigarette. There was nothing moving at the moment on the water. The big church of Santa Maria della Salute on the opposite bank of the canal was only palely lit, as perfunctorily as the street-lights seemed lit, Ray felt, because November wasn’t the tourist season. The water lapped gently but powerfully against the stanchions of the pier. Ray thought of Coleman, Inez and Antonio asleep somewhere in Venice. Coleman and Inez might be in the same bed, perhaps in the Gritti or the Danieli, since Inez would be paying the bills. (Coleman had let him know she was wealthy.) Antonio, though probably financed on this trip by Inez, too, would be in a cheaper place.

Two Italian men, well-dressed, carrying briefcases, joined him on the pier. They were talking about expanding a garage somewhere. Their presence and their conversation was somehow comforting to Ray; but still he shivered, and glanced around hopefully for the second time for a coffee-bar, and saw none. Harry’s Bar looked like a grey glass-and-stone tomb. And not a window was lighted in the red façade of the Hotel Monaco e Grand Canal opposite it. Ray walked in small circles around his suitcase.

At first the vaporetto emerged from a dark curve of canal far to the left, a little blaze of welcome, yellowish light. It slowed to touch at a stop before San Marco. Ray, like the two Italians, stared at it as if fascinated. The boat drew large and close, until Ray could see the five or six passengers on it, and could see the calm, handsome face of the man in the white yachting cap who would fling the mooring rope. On the boat, Ray bought a ticket for himself and a fifty-lire ticket for his suitcase. The boat passed della Salute, and entered the narrower mouth of the Grand Canal. The Gritti Palace’s lights were elegant and discreet: two softly lighted electric lanterns held aloft by oversized female statues at the water’s edge. Boats arriving at the Gritti would dock between them. Motor-boats under canvas covers bobbed between poles. Their names were
Ca’ Corner
and
Aldebaran
. The colour everywhere was black, the rare lights only small yellow splotches against it, sometimes revealing a faint red or green of stone.

At the Accademia stop, the third, Ray walked briskly with his suitcase into the wide, paved way across the island towards the Zattere quay. He cut through by way of an arched passage into what looked like a blind alley, but he remembered that it turned left after a few yards, and remembered also the blue tile plaque on the side of the house straight ahead that said John Ruskin had lived and worked there. The Pensione Seguso was just to the left after the left turn. Ray disliked awakening the porter. He pushed the bell.

After two minutes or so, an old man in a red jacket that he had not taken time to fasten opened the door and greeted him courteously and rode up with him in a small lift to the third floor.

His room was simple and clean and had a view through its tall windows of Giudecca across the water and, directly below, of the small canal that went along one side of the pensione. Ray put on his pyjamas and washed at the basin—there hadn’t been a room with bath free, the porter said—and fell into bed. He had thought he was very tired, but after a few minutes he was sure he would not be able to get to sleep. He was familiar with the sensation from the Mallorca days, a tremulous exhaustion that put a faint shakiness in his penline or his handwriting. The only thing to do was walk it off. He got up and dressed in comfortable clothes, and let himself quietly out of the hotel.

Dawn was rising now. A gondolier swathed in navy blue propelled a cargo of Coca-Cola crates into the canal beside the pensione. A motor-boat dashed in a straight line up the Giudecca Canal, as if scurrying home guiltily after a late party.

Ray ran up the arched steps of the Accademia bridge and headed inland for San Marco. He walked through narrow grey streets whose shop-fronts were tight closed, through small squares—Campo Morosini, Campo Manin, familiar, unchanged, yet Ray did not know them well enough to remember every detail of them. He passed only one person, an old woman with a large flat basket of Brussels sprouts. Then the American Express’s tiles appeared under his feet, directing him with an arrow to their office, and he saw the lower part of the Piazza San Marco’s columns in front of him.

He walked into the giant rectangle of the Piazza. The space seemed to make a sound like ‘Ah-h’ on his ears, like an unending exhalation of a spirit. To right and left, the arches of two arcades diminished in regular progression. Out of a strange self-consciousness at standing still, Ray began to walk, shy now of the humble brushing sound of his desert boot soles on the cement. A few awakening pigeons fluttered around their nests in the arcades, and two or three came down to peck for food on the Piazza. They paid no more attention to Ray, who walked very near them, than if he had not existed. Then Ray took to the shelter of the arcade. Jewellers’ shops were curtained and barred by folding grillwork. Near the end of the arcade, he went out into the Piazza again and looked at the cathedral as he walked by it, blinked as he always had at its complexity, its variety of styles all crammed together. An artistic mess, he supposed, yet it had been erected to amaze and impress, and in that it succeeded.

Ray had been to Venice five or six times before, beginning when he had come with his parents at the age of fourteen. His mother had known Europe far better than his father, but his father had been stricter about making him study it, making him listen to his teaching records in Italian and French. The summer he was seventeen, his father had presented him with a crash course in French at the Berlitz School in St Louis. Ray had always liked Italy and Italian cities better than Paris, better than the chateau district which his father so admired and whose scenery had seemed to Ray as a boy like calendar pictures.

It was six-forty-five. Ray found a bar-caffé that was opening, went in and stood at the counter. A healthy-looking blonde girl with large blue-grey eyes and cheeks like peaches took his order for a cappuccino, and made it herself at the machine. A boy assistant was busy filling glass containers with buns. The girl wore a fresh, pale blue smock uniform. She looked into his eyes as she set the cup before him, not in a flirtatious or even personal way, but in the way Ray felt all Italians of whatever age or sex looked at people—as if they actually saw them. Did she live with her parents, Ray wondered, or was she recently married? But she went away before he could glance at her hand for a ring, and in fact he didn’t care. He cupped his cold hands round the hot cup, and was aware of the girl’s happy, healthy face on the other side of the counter, though he did not look at her again. With his second coffee, he got a croissant, paid the extra to sit down, and went to a small table. Next door, now, he was able to buy a newspaper. He sat for nearly an hour while the city awakened around him, and the street outside began to fill with people hurrying in both directions. The skinny little boy in black trousers and white jacket took out tray after tray of cappuccini for delivery in the neighbourhood, and returned swinging his empty tray between thumb and forefinger. Though he looked no more than twelve and should have been in school, he had a crush on the blonde girl, who treated him like a kid brother, tweaking the back of his hair.

It was up to him to find Coleman and party, Ray supposed, not for them to run into each other in some restaurant or in the Piazza, Coleman perhaps registering shock, or saying, “Ray, what a surprise to see you here!” But it was barely eight, too early to try to ring them at the Gritti or anywhere. Ray debated going back to the pensione for some sleep, then decided to walk a bit farther. Shopkeepers were arranging their wares now, hanging pocketbooks and scarves outside the doors of cramped shops, rolling up blinds to reveal windows full of leather goods.

Ray looked through a window at a green-black-and-yellow scarf, its floral pattern nearly covering its white ground. A pang had gone through him at the sight of it, and it seemed that only after the pang did he see the scarf, and still a second later realized he had noticed it because it looked like Peggy. She would have adored it, though in feet he did not remember a scarf of hers that was like this one. He walked on, five or six paces, then turned. He wanted the scarf. The shop was not yet open. To kill time, Ray drank an Espresso and smoked another cigarette in a bar in the same street. When he returned, the shop was opening, and he bought the scarf for two thousand lire. The salesgirl put it into a pretty box and wrapped it with care, thinking he was going to give it to a girl.

Then Ray walked back to the Pensione Seguso. He was calmer now. In his room, he hung the scarf over the back of his straight chair, threw away the paper and box, and got into pyjamas again. He sat on his bed and looked at the scarf. It was as if Peggy were in the room with him. It needed no touch of her perfume, no folds from her tying, to look exactly like Peggy, and Ray wondered if he shouldn’t remove it, put it away in his suitcase at least? Then he decided he was absurd, and lay back on his bed and slept.

He awakened at eleven to the sound of church bells, though he knew they had chimed every quarter of an hour since he fell asleep. Try Coleman, he thought, or they’ll be out for lunch and not back until five. There was no telephone in his room. Ray put on his trench-coat and went into the hall to the telephone that stood on a sideboard.

“Would you ring the Hotel Gritti Palace, please?” he asked.

There was no one named Coleman at the Gritti.

Ray asked for the Royal Danieli.

Again the answer was no.

Had Coleman lied about going to Venice? It seemed rather likely that he had, would have done, whether Ray were killed or not. Ray smiled at the thought that Coleman might be in Naples or Paris or even still in Rome.

There was the Bauer-Gruenwald. Or the Monaco. Ray lifted the telephone again. “The Hotel Bauer-Gruenwald, please.” A longer wait, then he put the question to the new voice.

“Signor Col-e-man. One moment, please.”

Ray waited.

“‘Allo?” said a female voice.

“Madame—Inez?” Ray did not know her last name. “This is Ray Garrett. I’m sorry to disturb you. I wanted to speak to Ed.”

“Ah, Ray! Where are you? Here?”

“Yes, I’m in Venice. Is Ed there? If he’s not, I can—”

“He is here,” she said in a comfortingly firm tone, dropping all her aitches. “One moment, please, Ray.”

It was a long moment. Ray wondered if Coleman was declining to speak. Then Coleman’s voice said:

“Yes?”

“Hello. I thought I’d let you know I’m in Venice.”

“Well, well. Quite a surprise. How long are you here for?”

“Just a day or so—I’d like to see you, if possible.”

“By all means. And you should meet Inez—Inez Schneider.” Coleman sounded just a trifle rattled, but recovered as he said, “Dinner tonight? Where is it we’re going, Inez—Da Colombo around eight thirty,” he said to Ray.

“Maybe I can see you after dinner. Or this afternoon? I’d rather see you alone.” An explosive blast like a Bronx cheer from the telephone numbed Ray’s ear for a moment, and he lost what Coleman was saying. “Could you say that again? Sorry.”

“I said,” Coleman’s taut, ordinary American voice said in a bored manner, “it was high time you met Inez. We’ll see you at eight-thirty at Da Colombo, Ray.” Coleman hung up.

Ray was angry. Should he ring back and say he wouldn’t come for dinner, that he would see him at any other time? He went into his room to think about it, but within a few seconds he decided to let it go and to turn up at half past eight.

3

R
ay was deliberately fifteen minutes late, but not late enough, as Coleman had not arrived. Ray walked twice through the big restaurant, looking for him. He went out and entered the first bar he saw. He ordered a Scotch.

Then he saw Coleman and a woman and a young man walking by the bar, Coleman laughing loudly at something, his body rocking back. Not quite two weeks after his only child had died, Ray thought. A strange man. Ray finished his drink.

He entered the restaurant when he thought they had had time to be seated. They were in the second room he looked into. Ray had to go very close to the table before Coleman deigned to look up and greet him.

“Ah, Ray! Sit down. Inez—may I present Inez Schneider? Ray Garrett.”

“Enchantée, M. Garrett,” she said.

“Enchanté, madame,” Ray replied.