Wallflower (4 page)

"Boyish." She corrected him. "I'm so glad you were boyish. It was exciting to feel pursued." She met his eyes. "If you're not a cross between a psychologist and a priest, then what exactly are you, Frank?"

He shrugged. "Just a detective," he said.

T
hey spent the night together in her room. Early the next morning Janek moved out of his hotel near the Giardino Papadopoli and into a single at the Danieli, just down the hall from No. 13.

"Every morning I'll sneak back in and ruffle up my bedding," he told her.

She was amused. "That won
^'
t fool the chambermaids."

"I'm sure it won't, but I hope they'll appreciate my efforts."

"What do you want them to think? That you're discreet?"

Janek shook his head. "I want them to know I am protective of the German lady's reputation."

She laughed, then hugged him. "You're a very funny man."

J
anek hired a speedboat to take them to Torcello, where they lunched on grilled fresh scampi, then explored the island's little lanes. In the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta they stood in awe before the apse, meeting the grave gaze of the Teotoca Madonna, whose cheeks are laced with mosaic tears.

T
o eat, make love, experience the beauty of Venice—these things became their enterprise. She had much to teach him about art, and he had much to teach her about the streets. On golden mornings they wandered the city, strolling along her white and ocher walls, upon her stone and marble alleys, across her rainbow-hued canals. They watched glass being blown. They sat in cafés and made up tales about the people who passed. They told each other the stories of their lives.

Then, late in the afternoon, when the sweet fragrance of autumnal decay mingled with the saline scent of the lagoon, the heady aroma aroused their lust and drew them back to No. 13 and to her bed. Here, as the sun painted the walls gold and pink, they kissed, grew intoxicated, rolled together, and explored each other with their tongues. They made love lazily until darkness fell. Then they slept for an hour in each other's arms, showered, and went out to dine.

M
onika's husband, Franz Daskai, was thirty years older than she. A handsome, athletic man with leonine features and a full head of iron gray hair, he had been chief of psychiatry at the Hamburg hospital where she had served out
her residency. One day he stopped to watch her play tennis on the staff court behind the residents' dormitory. A couple of days later he called her to his office to invite her to be his doubles partner in an informal inter-hospital tournament. She accepted; they battled fiercely and to everyone's amazement won the cup. A few months later, when she began to see patients, she asked him to be her supervising analyst. A year later they were married.

Franz, Monika told Janek, was a wise, sane man who was an exemplar to all his students. The men worshiped him, and the women adored him, perhaps because he was one of the few people in the profession who lived the kind of rational life that is the supposed goal of psychoanalysis.

Over their ten years together he had taught her much, but she believed his most memorable lesson was the eloquent way he
defined the mission of a therapist. At some point in every patient's
past, he believed, there occurs a character-distorting moment when an emotion and an experience, normally incompatible, come to
gether and lock. Abuse and love, shame and pleasure—no matter how contradictory, the pieces engage so the person can survive his fear and rage. It then becomes the task of the therapist to locate this hidden lock, analyze its parts, then gently open it up to set the patient free.

"He taught me how to be a healer," Monika said. "That was his greatest gift. When, that first evening, you spoke of crimes as wounds and your role as detective-confessor—well, I thought, you and Franz would have liked each other. I think he would have understood you."

"And that's very important to you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "I believe it is."

A
s Monika was due back in Hamburg the following Monday, she and Janek planned to spend their final weekend together visiting some of the famous villas of Veneto. Instead of reveling further in the marvelous stage set that is Venice, they would seek composure on the mainland in Palladio's rational geometry.

But very early Saturday morning, even before the dawn, the phone rang in Monika's room. The call, surprisingly, was for Janek. He began to complain: Although the management no doubt knew he was sleeping in Dr. Daskai's room, it really had no right to ring him there. . . . Then he stopped. A familiar voice had come on the line. Immediately he felt a portent of woe.

"Frank, it's Kit. Tough job to track you down. But the Venice police are pretty good. Course, we had to kick some ass."

Something was wrong.
"There's trouble, isn't there?"

"Yeah, Frank." Her tone was grave. "There is."

"Please don't stall. Just tell me, okay?"

"It's Jess."

His goddaughter.
Oh, God!
"What happened?"

"Stabbed, Frank. She was jogging in the park, and someone, we
don't know who—"

"She's going to be all right?" But even as he asked, he knew the answer.

"Uh-uh, she's not. She's dead. I'm so sorry to be the one to have to tell you."

Something piercing like a silent scream burst across his brain.

". . . listening, Frank? Laura Dorance called, asked me to find you and let you know. She hopes you can come back. The funeral's tomorrow afternoon. What shall I tell her?"

"Tell her I'll be there," Janek said. Then he set down the phone, turned from Monika, faced the window, and wept.

"
J
esus! She was just a kid! Twenty years old! A junior in college!" They were in Janek's narrow room, Monika watching from the bed as, frantic and bitter, Janek paced and ranted while throwing his clothes into his bag.

Suddenly he stopped and turned to her.

"I can't believe it! I can't." He sat down beside her. She hugged him.

"I loved her, Monika. So much . . ."

I
n the lobby, after he had booked his flight, Janek gulped down three cappuccinos.

"Her father, Tim Foy—he and I were partners for five years. Then Tim transferred to narcotics, worked undercover, was found out, and assassinated. One morning he went out to his car, parked as usual in front of his house. He turned the key, and the car blew up—twenty pounds of dynamite. Jess, who was five at the time, was watching from the kitchen window. He waved to her; she waved back; then her whole world exploded before her eyes. According to Laura, she didn't start crying for a minute, just stared, confused, at the place where Tim's car had been. Tim, you see, was something of an amateur magician. Maybe Jess thought he was playing a trick. Some trick! They never found all the pieces of him. Her tears, God! They flowed and flowed. Later we learned her hearing got damaged, too. . ."

T
hey entered St. Mark's. The cathedral was deserted. The aroma of the incense was cloying and thick. Janek fell to his knees on the hard stones before the altar. Monika knelt beside him and held his hand as he prayed.

Afterward they did a tour of the piazza. It would be their final walk together in Venice.

"
My wife and I never had children. So Jess was like my own daughter. When Laura was struggling, I was over at her place all the time, helping with Jess, baby-sitting, assisting with homework, telling stories. I even taught her how to play baseball in Flushing Park. That's when I realized she could be an athlete. She turned
out to be a damn good one, too. She's on the Columbia College women's fencing team. Or, I should say, she was. . . ."

Monika held tightly to his hand.

Even after Laura Foy went to law school, met and married Stanton Dorance, and she and Jess moved into Dorance's big apartment on Park Avenue—even then Janek remained close to the girl.

"What a waste, Monika. A fine young life like that! What a terrible waste." He paused, then spoke quietly. "I don't think I could have loved my own child more."

H
e sat with Monika in the rear of the chartered speedboat, racing for the airport, knowing that now his life would be forever changed.

"I headed up the team that went after Tim Foy's killer. Today they won't let you work a case that's personal, but back then you could swing a deal or two. Anyway, it didn't take us long to find the guy who built and placed the bomb. A scrawny little character; I can't even remember his name. Anyway, we caught him, turned him, and he gave us the guy who ordered it done, a slimy, rat-faced drug dealer. He's serving a life sentence now." Janek squeezed her hand. "Sorry to make you listen to all this sordid stuff."

"Keep talking, Frank. I don't find it sordid." She touched his face, then gently kissed his cheek. "I want to stay with you as long as possible, stay close to you before you fly off."

"I wouldn't have had anyone to talk to if I hadn't found you."

"Well, we found each other, didn't we?"

Janek peered around. Venice was lost in mist behind. Ahead the lagoon was as still and flat and white as it had been the morning he arrived. The rising vapor carried the same faint sweet salt-marsh smell of decay.

"I wonder if I'll ever be able to come back here now. That call from Kit—I think I'll always associate it with Venice. The call . . . that broke my heart."

He didn't turn away from her this time, didn't mind now if she saw his tears. And when she mopped his cheeks with her fine silk scarf, he kissed her hand and whispered, "Thanks. . . ."

A
t the airport there was time to call Aaron Greenberg and arrange to be met in New York.

"Aaron and I work together," he told Monika in the coffee bar on the airport roof. "He knew Jess, too. He says the tabloids are full of it. Stanton, Jess's stepfather, is a big corporation lawyer. He and Laura—I feel so sorry for them. They say the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose a child. You never get over it, they say. . . ."

M
onika accompanied him to the security gate. There he put down his bags so they could embrace.

"This can't be good-bye. I don't want to lose you."

"We're not going to lose each other. Don't even think that," she said.

"You've been the best thing to happen to me in years."

"I feel the same. We'll stay close. Somehow we'll manage to see each other, perhaps sooner than you think."

"I'll phone you tomorrow night."

The final call for his flight was announced. It was time to go. He hugged her as tight as he could. Then, just before he reached down for his bags, she handed him a package.

"I bought this for myself, before I met you." She smiled. "Now I want you to have it. Please take it, Frank."

O
n the plane, somewhere between Venice and Rome, he carefully unwrapped her gift. It was a fine antique Venetian wineglass, pure Renaissance in style, nothing fancy, no spirals or wavy bands of color, just a simple graceful transparent cone set upon an octagonal base.

As Janek held it to the window so the wondrous light of the Italian sky could play upon it and fill it up, he knew, by the way it reminded him of the clear, yearning beauty of Monika's eyes, that it was the choicest piece of glass he had seen in Venice.

"
C
an you hear me, dear?"

"I can hear you, Mama."

"It's getting to be time again."

"Yes, Mama."

"Remember, it's not enough to feel the pain and then the fury.
You've got to do something about it. Got to fix them good."

"I understand, Mama."

"He deserves it. Doesn't he?"

"Oh, he deserves it! He surely does deserve it!"

"So?"

"I'll use Tool again."

"What will you do to him?"

"The same as to the others."

"Let's hear you say it."

"Fix him. Shut him up forever."

"
Why
, child?"

"Because of what he did."

"And what was that?"

"Must I, Mama? Please!"

"You
must! You
know you
must!
Now tell me what he did."

"He was unkind."

"Ha!"

"Very
unkind!"

"Don't make me laugh."

"Well, he
was."

"Of course, he
was,
you goose. But what did he
do?
Tell me!"