Alibi Read online

  Alibi

  Joseph Kanon

  Joseph Kanon

  Alibi

  CHAPTER ONE

  After the war, my mother took a house in Venice. She’d gone first to Paris, hoping to pick up the threads of her old life, but Paris had become grim, grumbling about shortages, even her friends worn and evasive. The city was still at war, this time with itself, and everything she’d come back for-the big flat on the Rue du Bac, the cafes, the market on the Raspail, memories all burnished after five years to a rich glow-now seemed pinched and sour, dingy under a permanent cover of gray cloud.

  After two weeks she fled south. Venice at least would look the same, and it reminded her of my father, the early years when they idled away afternoons on the Lido and danced at night. In the photographs they were always tanned, sitting on beach chairs in front of striped changing huts, clowning with friends, everyone in caftans or bulky one-piece woolen bathing suits. Cole Porter had been there, writing patter songs, and since my mother knew Linda, there were a lot of evenings drinking around the piano, that summer when they’d just married. When her train from Paris finally crossed over the lagoon, the sun was so bright on the water that for a few dazzling minutes it actually seemed to be that first summer. Bertie, another figure in the Lido pictures, met her at the station in a motorboat, and as they swung down the Grand Canal, the sun so bright, the palazzos as glorious as ever, the whole improbable city just the same after all these years, she thought she might be happy again.

  A week later, with Bertie negotiating in Italian, she leased three floors of a house on the far side of Dorsoduro that once belonged to the Ventimiglia family and was still called Ca’ Venti. The current owner, whom she would later refer to, with no evidence, as the marchesa, took clothes, some silver-framed family photographs, and my mother’s check and moved to the former servants’ quarters on the top floor. The rest of the house was sparsely furnished, as if the marchesa had been selling it off piece by piece, but the piano nobile, all damask and chandeliers, had survived intact, and Bertie made a lend-lease of some modern furniture from his palazzo on the Grand Canal to fill a sitting room at the back. The great feature was the light, pouring in from windows that looked out past the Zattere to the Giudecca. There were maids, who came with the house without seeming to live there, a boat moored on the canal, and a dining room with a painted ceiling that Bertie said was scuola di Tiepolo but not Tiepolo himself. The expatriate community had begun to come back, opening shuttered houses and planning parties. Coffee and sugar were hard to get, but wine was cheap and the daily catch still glistened and flopped on the market tables of the pescaria. La Fenice was open. Mimi Mortimer had arrived from New York and was promising to give a ball. Above all, the city was still beautiful, every turn of a corner a painting, the water a soft pastel in the early evening, before the lamps came on. Then the music started at Florian’s and the boats rocked gently at the edge of the piazzetta, and it all seemed timeless, lovely, as if the war had never happened.

  I learned all this many weeks later in a telephone call she had somehow managed to put through by “going to the top.” At this time the trunk lines into Germany were reserved for the military, so I imagined that a general, some friend of a friend, had been charmed or browbeaten into lifting a few restrictions. The call, in any case, caused a lot of raised eyebrows in the old I. G. Farben building outside Frankfurt where I pushed files into one tray or another for US-FET while I waited for my separation papers. I had been in Germany since the beginning of the year, first with G-2, then attached to one of the de-Nazification teams separating the wicked from the merely acquiescent. Frankfurt was still a mess, the streets barely passable, filled with DPs and hollow-eyed children with edema bruises. The phone call, with its scratches and delays, seemed to come from another world, so far from the rubble and desperation just outside my window that its news seemed irrelevant. The marchesa was quiet; you hardly knew she was there (“darling, not even a flush ”). My room had a wonderful view. Her pictures hadn’t arrived from New York yet, but Bertie, a treasure and fluent, was looking into it. It was a call that began in what my father used to call her medias res-a plunge into the middle of whatever she was thinking, followed by exasperation when you didn’t know what she was talking about. Finally I understood that she had moved to Venice intending to stay, which meant that my home would be there too. The point of the call, in fact, was to say she was expecting me for Christmas.

  “I’m still in the army.”

  “Well, they give passes, don’t they? I mean, it’s not as if the war’s still on. And I’m sure you could use the break. I’ve seen the newsreels-it looks just awful there.”

  “Yes.” Camps full of corpses, wheeled out in farm carts to mass graves. Feral kids eating out of PX garbage cans. Women passing bricks hand over hand, digging out. Not what anyone had expected, pushing over the Rhine. GIs rich with a pack of Luckies. What happens after.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Won’t it be wonderful? To have Christmas together? It’s been years.”

  “In a Fascist country,” I said, half teasing.

  “It’s not the same thing at all. They weren’t Nazis. Anyway, all that’s over. It’s lovely here, just like before. I can’t wait for you to see the house. Maybe it’ll snow. They say it’s enchanting in the snow.”

  Characteristically, she hung up without giving me her address, so it was to Bertie that I later wrote to say that I’d be spending Christmas in the hospital. After surviving actual combat and the tough early days of the occupation, what got me, embarrassingly, was a rusty nail, a careless step in the debris of a Frankfurt street that caused a puncture wound and required tetanus treatment and a holiday spent with amputees and boys with nervous tics. By the time I finally got to Venice it was February, I was out of the army, and the city was huddled against a damp, misty cold.

  The piano nobile, as grand and formal as described, was freezing, kept dark but not draftless by long, heavy drapes. The sitting room, warmed by space heaters from Bertie, was comfortable, but the high Tiepolo dining room made meals so chilly and unpleasant that my mother had taken to eating in the kitchen or off a tray sitting next to the bars of her electric fire. Above us, the marchesa had become so silent that a maid was sent up to check, as if she might be one of those birds who grow still on a winter branch, then suddenly fall over. What would have changed everything was sun, cutting across the Adriatic to seep into all the tile roofs and parquet floors as it often did even in February, but the sky that winter was German, cloudy and gray. In the evenings, near our house, there was no light at all. A fog would come in from the sea, filling the Giudecca channel, streetlights were spaced far apart to save power, and the calles became dark medieval paths again, designed for people with torches.

  I noticed none of this-or rather, it was all so like the gray I was used to that I accepted it as natural, the way things were. The gloomy afternoons were no different from the weather in my head, full of listless shadows, an urge to draw in. Does anyone really come back from the war? The lucky ones just keep going, on to the next fight, unaware that they’re breathing different air. The rest of us have to be brought up in stages, like deep-sea divers, to prevent the bends. The boys in the hospital had come back too fast-their faces twitched, their eyes darted at every sound, prey. I slept. The fog that came in at night from the lagoon would fill my head too, a lulling numbness, asking to be wrapped in blankets, left alone. Sometimes there were dreams-really ways of going back, reminders of the nightmare time that was supposed to be over-but mostly the sleep was just fog, opaque and shapeless.

  “Just like Swann, couche de bonne heure,” my mother would say, but idly, not really worried, for by this time Dr. Maglione had come back into her life, so she was spending evenings out, unaware that when s
he left me with a book I was already halfway up the stairs in my mind, curling up with the fog.

  The result was that I was waking early, before first light. It wasn’t insomnia-I slept deeply, snug under a warm duvet-but some automatic awareness that the light was about to change, the way plants are said to lift their heads toward the dawn. My bedroom window faced across the channel to the Redentore, and I would look out into the darkness waiting for its lines to start forming, as if Palladio himself were sketching them in again, until finally everything had definition, still murky but real. Then I would put on my heavy wool army coat and leave the house without making a sound, quieter even than the shy marchesa, and begin my walk.

  Venice is often said to be a dream, but at that hour, when there is no one out, no sounds but your own steps, it is really so, no longer metaphor-whatever separates the actual paving stones from the alleys in your mind dissolves. The morning mist and the gothic shapes from childhood stories have something to do with this, the rocking slap of boats on the water, tugging at their mooring poles, but mostly it’s the emptiness. The campos and largos are deserted, the buoy marker lights in the lagoon undisturbed by wakes, the noisy day, when the visitors fan out into the calles from the Piazzale Roma, still just a single echo. Things appear at that hour the way they do in sleep, gliding unconnected from one to the next, bolted garden door to shadowy church steps to shuttered shopwindow, no more substantial than fragments of mist.

  The walk was always the same. First down along the Zattere, past the lonely vaporetto stations. Just before the Stazione Marittima I would turn into the calle leading to San Sebastiano, Veronese’s church, and a bar for stazione workers that was always open by the time I got there, the windows already moist with steam hissing from the coffee machines. The other customers, in blue workers’ coveralls bulked with sweaters underneath, would nod from their spots at the bar, taking in the army coat, then ignore me, turning back to their coffee and cigarettes, voices kept low, as if someone were still sleeping upstairs. Even at that hour a few were tossing back brandies. The coffee had been cut with something-chicory? acorns? — but was still strong enough to jolt me awake, and standing there with a first cigarette, suddenly alert to everything-the steamed windows, the whiff of scalded milk, isolated words of dialect-it seemed to me that I’d never been asleep at all.

  Outside there were a few more people-a boy in a waiter’s uniform heading toward one of the hotels, an old woman in a fur coat coaxing a dog to pee, a priest with his hands in his sleeves, staying warm, all the insomniacs and early risers I’d never seen before I became one of them. I supposed that if I headed over to the Rialto I could see the fish stalls being set up and the boats unloading, the early-morning working world, but I preferred the empty dream city. From San Sebastiano it was a straight path, only slightly angled by bridges, to Campo San Barnaba. No produce market yet, just a man hurrying toward the traghetto station, perhaps still not home from the night before. Then right toward the Accademia, following the natural course of the streets the way water runs in canals, looping finally around the museum, then through the back alleys toward Salute, not a soul in sight again, past the great swirling church and out along the fondamenta to the tip. Here, huddled in my coat with my back against the old customs house, I sat for hours looking across the water to the postcard everyone knew-Ruskin’s waves of marble, the gilt of San Marco catching the first morning sun, the columned landing stage filling with boat traffic, all the beautiful buildings rising out of the water, out of consciousness, the city’s last dream.

  I thought at first that my mother would tire of it, the way she tired of everything finally except the past, but Dr. Maglione was an unexpected wrinkle, a piece of future. After my father died there had been a period of melodramatic grief, followed, I assumed, by a series of friendships. But these had happened, if they had happened, offstage. I was away at school, then in the army, then overseas, so what I knew came from letters, and these had been full of other things-volunteer work, openings, her three-week job (unpaid) at the Art of This Century gallery and the inevitable fight with Peggy Guggenheim that followed. Then she had come back to Europe, not really looking for anyone, and suddenly there he was. Not slick or too young or in any way unpleasant-not unlike my father, in fact, gray hair thinning at the temples, quiet, almost reticent. And yet amused by her, the way my father had been, both of them perhaps drawn to a quicksilver quality neither possessed himself. In any case, he was here, making her look brighter, in love with Venice, not even aware the rooms were cold. So I put off going back to New York, unsettled, not sure where any of us was heading.

  “He’s not a fortune hunter, you know,” Bertie said. “Besides, if you’re after money, why not young money? Much nicer. And you know I adore Grace, but she can be a handful. Anyway, he had doges in his family.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It does if you have them. And he’s a real doctor, you know, it’s not an honorific. My doctor, in fact, and I’m still here.”

  “I thought it was drink.”

  He picked up his glass. “Well, that too. The point is, he’s not a gigolo.”

  “So you introduced them.”

  “No, no. They’ve known each other for years. Since the old days. When we were all-well, younger than we are now. The parties, my god. I suppose that’s part of it. It reminds them. Anyway, you ought to be grateful. You don’t want her sitting home alone, do you? Imagine what that would be like. It’s the first thing that occurred to me. There she was, all excited on the phone and packing bags, and I thought, what on earth am I going to do with her? In the winter, no less. People think they’re going to like it here in the winter-they come for Carnival and wouldn’t this be nice? — but they never do. The third night at Harry’s, you can see it on their faces. Bored stiff.”

  “You’re not.”

  “It’s my home. I know what to expect. The point is, Grace needed a friend and now she has one. She’s happy and she’s out of your hair. You’ve got your life to get on with-not worry about her. What are you planning to do, by the way?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Oh, the young. All the time in the world.”

  “Right now I’m enjoying Venice, that’s all.”

  “Are you? Grace says you sleep all day.”

  “No, I walk all day. It’s the only way to see the city. Then I get tired and sleep at night.”

  “Mm, a sort of farmer’s life. Up and down with the birds. Are you that bored?” he said, his voice still light, just a hint of concern underneath.

  “Not really. I like it. It’s like being on leave.”

  “From what?”

  I shrugged. “The army. Everything. Just for a while.”

  “Don’t stay too long, then. You don’t want to get addicted.”

  I looked at him, caught by the word, as if he knew somehow about the mornings sitting against the Dogana, drifting, the beauty of the place a kind of opiate.

  “No. But I want to make sure she’s all right. Doges or no.”

  “Adam, they have dinner. A drink. Chat. Nobody’s posted the banns. You know what I think? I can say this because I’ve known you all your life. Before your life. I remember when Grace was pregnant with you.” He lifted his glass, pointing a finger. “You’ve got a little too much time on your hands. You’re making trouble where there’s no trouble to be made-for yourself, really. My advice-I know, who ever listens? — is be happy for your mother and mind your own business. Of course, maybe that’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “Not enough business of your own.”

  I glanced at his thin, almost elfin face, eyes bright and interested behind the half-moon glasses.

  “I don’t want to be introduced. To anybody. Fix up someone else.”

  “I don’t fix people up,” he said, almost sniffing at the phrase but enjoying himself. “What’s that, army slang?”

  “Yes, you do. Those cozy lunch parties and you sitting there w
atching, like a turtle.”

  “A turtle. Listen to him.” He reached to a box on the coffee table for a cigarette, thinking.

  “I mean it, Bertie. I can make my own friends.”

  “People never do, though, you know. Have you noticed?”

  “You seem to do all right.”

  He lit the cigarette, looking over the flame with an arched eyebrow. “Well, I hire them. Oh, don’t be vulgar, I don’t mean like that.”

  But I grinned anyway, thinking of the long line of research assistants, young men known to be in the house but rarely seen, like upstairs maids.

  “One would think you were still twelve years old. Ten.”

  “Almost,” I said, still grinning. “Anyway, too young for your black book.”

  “Oh, there’s bound to be someone. People have sisters, don’t they?”

  And cousins, as it happened. Or, rather, the cousin’s friend, a connection so tenuous that by the time it had been explained we were already introduced.

  “He always does that,” I said, as Bertie walked away to join another group. “He says it gives people something to talk about. It’s Claudia, yes?”

  She nodded, watching Bertie. It was one of his afternoon drinks parties, too late for tea but early enough to catch the sunset on the Grand Canal outside. Bertie’s palazzo was near the Mocenigo on the Sant Angelo side, just before the canal makes its last bend toward the Accademia bridge, and in winter the late-afternoon light on the water was muted, almost a pale pink. What sun was left seemed to have moved inside to the burning fireplaces making small circles of heat on either side of the room. The crowd was Bertie’s usual mix-pale-faced curators from the Accademia, where he was “attached” without being officially on staff, a few attractive men whom I took to be former research assistants, overdressed expatriates with drinks, and Venetians rich or idle enough not to be at work at five in the afternoon. I had seen her earlier, standing alone by the window, looking out of place and stranded, like someone who’d been promised a drink and been forgotten. She was fingering her collar button, an unconscious distress signal, then caught my eye and stopped, dropping her hand but not looking away. I started over to rescue her, but Bertie suddenly appeared, moving her back into the crowd, still awkward but at least talking to people. By the time he made his way to me, any shyness was gone, her stare frank and curious.