A Beast in Venice: (Literary Horror set in Venice) (7 page)

He poured them each a glass.

“What’d you do today?” she asked. “You were out for a while.”

“Mauro’s serious about this shroud eater thing. We went to the herbalist in Campo Santa Margherita to talk to her about it.”

“This salad is delicious,” Rose said as she chased an olive around the plate with her fork. “Did the woman think you were nuts?”

“To the contrary. She believes the shroud eaters have come back.”

“Back from where?”

“She didn’t say.”

Brigham served the pasta.

Rose took a forkful of pasta and sauce, with a bit of the sausage. “So what did she say?” 

“She knows what to do.”

“This pasta is great. Where did you get the recipe?”

“I made it up.” 

“You should be a chef.”

Brigham shook his head and through a mouthful of sausage and penne said, “Too much work. I’m lazy.”

The candles threw dim and cozy light around the room and lit Rose’s face in a warm glow, like an angel from a painting by Caravaggio. How did he deserve her? 

“You know,” she said, “you and your gondolier friend are going to get yourselves into a lot of trouble.”

He swallowed a mouthful of wine. “Nah, don’t worry. It’s all a bunch of crap. I’m only going along with it because it’s a form of entertainment. And to keep him out of trouble, I suppose. He’s so funny when he’s serious.”

“Well, watch yourself. You’ve already got people pushing you around.”

“Not related.”

“You don’t know that.”

No, he didn’t.

AFTER CLEANUP, which was her job whenever Brigham cooked, Rose turned on the television to watch the Italian version of some reality TV show.

“How can you watch that bullshit?” he asked. “It’s just a lot of horrible young people sitting around fighting with each other. You’re above that. Write a treatise. Read some Schopenhauer.”

“Watching TV helps me learn Italian,” she said, curling her legs up under her on the couch.

“But they’re not speaking proper Italian. They have to bleep every other word, and you’ll end up talking like that.
Ciao
, bleeeep,
come
bleeeep,
va
?”

She laughed. “I know, but I learn a lot from it. Now be quiet.”

“You know I can’t stand it. I think I’ll go to a café and have a glass of brandy.”

“Good.” Rose said, motioning for him to get out of the way. “Are you taking the mutts?”

He kissed her forehead. “Not yet. I’ll do that later.” He put on his coat and walked toward the front door.

“Don’t fall into a canal.” 

BRIGHAM STROLLED THROUGH THE DARK STREETS, not far from where he had been attacked. As he approached the Church of the Mendicoli he came into a small square, along which ran a garden wall with a beautiful doorway flanked by marble plaques with relief carvings; one of a Greek or Roman soldier, the other a vase. The doorway had been filled in with brick. The beauty of the wall, its rustic and crumbling bricks and the ancient plaques, had always fascinated him.

A man labored to drag a large burlap bag containing an irregularly shaped mass across the stones, leaving a trail of red that glistened wet under the streetlights. The man dragged it to the old garden wall, whereupon he and his cargo disappeared into the brick-filled gate.

“Fuckin-A,” Brigham whispered. “Not again.”

Blood streaked the paving stones, ending at the wall. The sound of wooden heels running on the pavement echoed from the surrounding buildings, making it impossible to tell where it was coming from. After a few seconds, Brigham realized someone was running toward him from around the corner. Although unusual for anyone to be running there, he had no reason to be concerned. Then two men appeared. One pointed at him, the other bore a police baton. They strode toward him. He sprinted over the bridge in front of the Mendicoli, then to the right. At the next bridge, another man came toward him from the left. Brigham crossed the bridge and dashed toward Campo San Barnaba. Simply running into the campo yelling for help would do no good. The city was packed with crazies for Carnevale, and one more person yelling would be ignored, even by the police.

At Campo San Barnaba he ran for the canal, did a cannonball, and landed with a great splash in the middle of it. He gasped for air in the icy water. People hurried over to help him get out. His assailants had vanished.

A couple of police officers trotted over. Within a few minutes a fire boat arrived, followed by a police boat. This was why he jumped in. Although the city was crisscrossed with canals, to hear the splash of a person hitting the water was unusual. It always drew a crowd and got the police involved as well as firefighters and an ambulance.

The tide was low, so he was able to stand up. The murky water came to just above his waist. As he waded to the steps, he bumped something floating just out of view under the surface. Whatever it was, it seemed to be secured to the bottom by a weight. A couple of firefighters helped him climb out of the frigid water and gave him a blanket as the police came over to investigate. Thankfully, he wasn’t the first American to find himself in a canal in Venice, so they didn’t act as though it were a federal crime, simply an inconvenience.

“
Documenti
,” one of the cops said, holding out a hand.

Brigham didn’t relish being the subject of a police investigation, but he liked being alive, and causing the ruckus was the only real choice he had. The police in Venice were not the heavy-handed brutes one encounters in the US. These two cops were actually attractive young women. One was tall with shoulder-length dark hair, and the other had long hair, dyed blond. They examined his soggy identity card.

“Why you jump into canal?” the tall one asked.

“Some men were chasing me.” Brigham wrung water from his coat.

The cop pulled her head back in disbelief. “Chasing you?”

“Yes, I was back by the Mendicoli, and they started to come after me.” Just as he had started shivering, he gladly accepted a blanket from one of the ambulance folk.

“Why they chase you?”

Brigham shrugged. “I could only speculate.”

The tall cop frowned. “What? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know why. I could only guess.”

“What would you guess, signore?” asked the blonde, crossing her arms in front of her.

Now here was the dilemma. He thought he knew why he was being chased, but would the police believe that? Should he take them there and show them the blood? Of course not. The blood would be gone. And what if he told them about the man disappearing into the wall? He would end up in the drunk tank. On the other hand, he didn’t want to make a false report to the police. It wouldn’t be a lie to guess and tell the cops that he was guessing. He didn’t really know why he was being chased. Was it a lie to leave out a material fact? Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe he ought to just keep his mouth shut. Not wanting to go to jail and not wanting to spend the night trying to explain a cockeyed story, he proceeded carefully.

“My guess is that they were going to rob me.”

“But you do not know?” the blonde asked. He liked the blonde better, for some intangible reason.

“No,” he said, pulling the blanket tightly around him.

“Do you know who was chasing you?” the tall one asked, the blue light of the fire boat flashing in her glasses.

If he knew that, he would probably know why. But he just replied, “No.”

“How many were there?”

“Two.”

“So, you jump in canal to get away?” the blonde asked.

“It seemed like the best way to draw a crowd.”

“I see,” the blonde said in a tone of voice that indicated she might be pissed.

Although Venice had pickpockets, it was rare for people to be attacked in this way. But he was American, and Italians knew there was a lot of crime in America. Americans all carried guns and ate bacon and eggs every day for breakfast.

“
Va bene
,” the tall cop said, giving him back his ID. “You go home.” The two officers turned away.

Brigham considered for a moment whether to keep his mouth shut but decided against it. “There’s one more little thing,” he called after them.

“Yes?”

“When I was getting out of the canal my foot caught something down there.”

“There is much rubbish in the canals,” the blonde said.

“But I don’t think it’s trash.” 

The tall cop motioned to the firefighters. They jabbered in Italian for a few seconds, then a fireman got a grappling hook from his boat. He fished around where Brigham showed him, and a corpse bobbed to the surface. The crowd gasped as the fireman pulled it out, missing, as it was, its guts.

“You stay in Venice,
signore
,” advised the tall cop.

OH FUCKIN’ BOY. It ought to be a barrel of goddamn laughs explaining this to Rose. And he hadn’t even had his drink yet. To mitigate the difficulty of arriving home after having been in a canal, and to correct his failure to have a drink, he went to his studio to clean up, have a martini or three, and then go home. Oh, the ideas that come into a man’s mind.

In the studio, the painting with which he had been struggling, the one he called
Pink Jesus
, stared at him as if asking, “What the fuck happened to you?” The pale blue bottle of gin, however, called his name in a less judgmental way. Preferring the blue gin to the Pink Jesus, he fixed himself a martini sans vermouth.

He stared into the mirror behind the sink. What reflected back was a living disaster. His hair and clothing were soaked, and he smelled of canal water; a strange mix of seawater, fish, and sewage. He could rinse and comb his hair, but there was nothing he could do about the clothes. These were not going to dry in any reasonable length of time, and he did not keep an extra set in the studio. He did have a small bottle of dish soap, so he could get some of the mess out of his hair, and he had a comb, but he otherwise would have to report home looking pretty much like he just crawled out of a canal.

The warm water felt good on his head and face. He frothed up the lemony-scented dish soap on his head, rinsed it, and washed his face with hot water. He combed his hair and then sat in a small wooden chair next to an easel, drinking the martini and contemplating his fate. What would he tell her? Maybe he could sneak in.

Emboldened, strengthened, and warmed by the gin, he started for home to face his scourging and crucifixion.

The corgi met him at the door with the usual stretch and howl of delight. Delight, however, was not the howl he heard from other quarters.

“There you are,” Rose said. She was at her desk writing on her laptop.

He tried to sneak to a small room where he had a wardrobe and a dresser. If he could just get these clothes off and into the machine…

“What’s that smell?” she said, getting up and coming into the room where he stood half-undressed.

The corgi followed and observed with an expression of concern.

Brigham, amid a pile of wet clothes, looked up, unable to speak.

“Oh my God, you fell into a canal! And you’ve been drinking. I smell it.”

“I didn’t fall into a canal.” He stepped out of the pile of wet clothes, past Rose, and into the bathroom. He grabbed a towel off the rack and started drying himself off.

Rose stood in the doorway, hands on hips. “Then what happened?”

“I jumped into a canal.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“And I didn’t have anything to drink until after—”

“Please, I know you, and I wasn’t born yesterday. Tell me what really happened.”

He told her. She expressed her disbelief of his story; it was clear to her what had happened to him. The courage from the booze had waned, and the canal-water-and-gin-soaked Brigham, though innocent, was lashed convincingly by the tongue of woman.

“You didn’t see anyone go through a wall” 

“Okay,” was the only answer he could muster.

“And no one was chasing you.”

“Then who were they chasing?”

“They weren’t chasing anyone,” she said, her voice tight but not quite shouting. “They were just running. You are starting to see things. You need to lay off the booze. It’s going to kill you.”

He showered and then lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. There was no point in arguing. Who could blame her? He had been drinking and had fallen into a canal. That’s all she could see, because that’s all there was to see. They didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the night. For the first time in fifteen years they went to bed pissed at each other. She was right about the booze, but he did see people go through walls, and he was chased. And by God and by glory, he was going to find out why.

THE NEXT MORNING, the air still heavy with tension, he made coffee and tea, sliced strawberries, and scrambled eggs with scallions and served it to her in bed.

She smiled when she saw the tray’s contents. “Oh! This is beautiful. And it smells so good.”

“Hard to mess up scrambled eggs and onions.”

“It’s very thoughtful, and I accept your apology.”

“You’re right about the booze.”

“I worry about you. It could really affect your health,” she said, holding out her arms for him to come to her.

He moved toward her. “I’ll try to cut back.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said, giving him a hug and a kiss. “And forget about people going through walls.”

“That too.”

“Perfect.”

IX

At the studio, he made a pot of coffee from a new tin and started to work. He put a blank canvas on an easel, soaked a brush in turpentine, mixed it with black paint, and scribbled a few lines and curves across the barren white surface. He studied it, sipping coffee. It sucked.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t throw you into the canal,” he said to the painting. The painting didn’t answer but stared back innocently.