The Thief of Venice(43)

Mary stooped and brushed the debris from the newspaper wrapping on one of the packages that lay on the floor. The yellowed sheet was disintegrating at the edges, but the printed name of the newspaper was clear and black—



GAZZETTA DIVENEZIA

DOMENICA 5 DICEMBRE 1943

December 1943! The newspaper was more than half a century old! Mary bent lower and read a fragment of a heading—



PRIMO RASTRELLAMENTO...

EBREIA VENEZIA. I DEPORTATI...

Ebrei meant Jews. She didn't know the meaning of the word rastrellamento but it had an ugly sound. Deportati could mean only one thing.

She stood up and backed away. Something grim and terrible had saturated all the objects in the closet. It permeated everything—the painting, the candlesticks, the gold plates, the tall scrolls with their dangling bells. It struck her in the face like a foul smell.

The sound of the shower stopped. Mary moved back to the sleeping bag and lay down, thinking hard. When Richard came out of the bathroom he knelt beside her, then gave a great start and sprang up, whispering a furious "Shit." Plunging across the room he slammed the door of the closet and rattled the padlock, snapping it shut. Then he came back and stood over Mary, staring down at her, breathing hard.

It was all wrong. Everything had changed. Without a word Mary got to her feet.

Henchard said nothing as she reached for her clothes and carried them into the bathroom. When she came out, fully dressed, he was still standing there, still looking at her, still silent. Mary gathered up her bag. She didn't know how to say good-bye.

Their silence was not like the wordlessness of their earlier panting progress through the streets of Cannaregio, nor like the silence of their rush up the stairs. It was a menacing exchange of unsaid questions and answers—

What are those things in the closet?

I can't say.

Where did they come from?

I can't tell you.

When she was gone, clumping down the stairs in her boots, Henchard cursed his own carelessness. How the bloody hell could he have left the padlock unhooked? She had seen it! She had seen everything, because every goddamn thing was right there in full view.

Angrily he stood at the window and watched her walk away, wading slowly through the rising water of the tide that was threatening to be the highest yet. As usual, the goddamn woman was interested in everything. God, look at her! She was exchanging greetings with a couple of grinning muratori who were wading toward her with picks and shovels. He watched her mount the steps of the bridge and stride across it, glancing back once at his window, her face clear and composed.

Oh, Christ, he shouldn't have let her go! He should have soothed her, he should have overpowered her once again with his ardor, he should have made love to her. And then it would have been so easy to make up a lie about the closet. Almost anything would have been good enough. Instead he had stood there tongue-tied like a fool.

One thing was certain. The things would have to be moved.

She might come back tomorrow, or even today, along with her husband, that big important university professor, and a bunch of goddamn police or carabinieri with handfuls of official documents. Jesus Christ, they'd have a search warrant, un mandate di perquisizione. No, no, it mustn't happen. The stuff had to go. It had to go right now.





*37*


To Richard Henchard, watching her cross the bridge over the Rio della Sensa, Mary Kelly looked serenely untroubled. She was not.

Following her nose in the direction of the wide shopping strada beyond Campo Santa Fosca, she thought about her affair with the man who called himself Richard Visconti. On her part there had been no personal will involved, no choice, no moral pondering. It had been like going over Niagara in a barrel. She did not feel guilty, at least not yet.

But a heavy burden of guilt might have been better than this. If she were merely feeling guilty, she could have preened herself on being like some of her trendy friends, women who carried on extramarital affairs in a wild roller coaster of guilt and excitement.

What was unbearable was the knowledge that she, Mary Morgan Kelly, author of seven scholarly books, tenured professor at a famous university, had been such an idiot.

She had to dodge sideways on the Fondamenta della Misericordia to find another bridge. Beyond it two men hoisted bags of trash into a boat. No gondolas were in sight. Mary guessed that Cannaregio was out of the tourist loop. It was a neighborhood for Italians. The election posters were not for tourists—Per VENEZIA, per MESTRE, per il VENETO, con MASSIMO BARBATO, con MARIO RUSSO.

She kept going, squelching along in her rubber boots, passing a woman trailing a shopping cart, a cat making its way along a housetop, an old man sweeping the pavement, a young man with a cell phone clamped to his ear, a panetteria with fanciful cakes in the window.