Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (16 page)

Six months ago this spit of sand, Venice’s beach resort lapped by the Adriatic, teemed with bikini-clad nymphs, thugs, tourists, movie moguls, and middle-aged men in nylon Speedo briefs.

But now it’s January on the Lido, a time of fogs and muggings.

That’s why I always carry a .25 caliber semi-automatic thrust in the depths of my trench coat.

When my wife and I split up six months ago, she got the condo in Taos and the income stream from the screenplay. I got to keep my laptop, the paperback rights to the novel (maybe eight thou a year) and my wool-lined Burberry.

In the distance the caretaker busies himself around a freshly dug excavation awaiting its cadaver. In the foreground a female figure in a black wool coat and retro cloche-style felt hat fitted with exotic feathers stands before a weedy gravesite. In fact the entire gloomy cemetery is thick with brambles, vines, stunted palmettos, and the brown skeletons of last summer’s weeds. When there isn’t a corpse to handle, the caretaker spends his time sleeping in his chair pulled close to the gas heater.

When the woman visitor turns in my direction, for an instant I think she’s an old bag of bones, stark naked under her open coat. Like photos of Auschwitz victims. Aghast, I look quickly away; two seconds later curiosity pulls me back.

In fact she’s young, maybe twenty, and only almost naked. How did I make those mistakes? A pale pink cocktail dress stretches from nipples to upper thighs. Four-inch heels perfectly sculpt her legs.

My eyes follow the exposed flesh upward to a cleft chin affixed to a long, sad face. Who died? I wonder.

An affirmative nose and high cheekbones reminiscent of a Botticelli nymph dominate the midpoint of her face. Her eyes are unobservable; hooded by heavy lids, they trace back and forth across the gravel path looking for something. A thumb and forefinger tug at one earlobe. Black hair curls from beneath her hat like tendrils of smoke. Taken together these oddments coalesce into a face of astounding beauty.

For a moment I stop breathing.

An electrical current flutters around my
cojones
like the blue aura of a flying saucer. Testosterone pumps through my blood. My prick tightens. I must go to bed with this woman.

Then it occurs to me that I’m completely and utterly out of my fucking mind!

Start out slow. Offer to buy her a
café correcto
or a
fine
. Or lunch at Harry’s Bar.

Before I can act on these thoughts the woman abandons her search and comes in my direction. Without the slightest acknowledgement, she walks past me down the modest slope and disappears through the open half of the ironwork gate. I can’t speak. I’m a nervous wreck. Her eyes are green.

Asshole, I think. I take a final drag on my cigarette and grind it under the heel of my shoe. Then wracked by guilt about littering on hallowed ground, I lean down to retrieve the butt. Next to it lays a medallion-shaped gold earring. When I rub away the dirt, the profile of a Levantine naiad appears like a vision.

This is what she was looking for!

Helter-skelter I rush out of the graveyard bearing my find. The road in front of the cemetery stretches straight for some distance in either direction. But the woman has totally disappeared.

Panic ignites. I start to run back toward the canal. But that doesn’t feel right, so I turn and jog in the other direction. A couple walking a Doberman appears at the next intersection. I stop, panting, blocking their progress.

“A woman…” I stutter. “A tall woman in a black coat.”

To the couple I must appear crazed. I am crazed. I have to find this woman.

“We haven’t seen anyone,” the woman says defensively.

The man looks me in the eye.

“Calm down,” he says.

He reaches out a hand toward my shoulder.

I don’t want to calm down. And I still don’t believe she went in the direction of the canal. She must have come this way. Are these two playing a game?

“I don’t believe you! And don’t touch me!”

The couple steps abruptly away from me, their eyes surveillance cameras watching my every move. The dog growls low and long. For a moment I consider shooting it on the spot, an anticipatory strike. Then I realize I’m out of control.

My face twists into a grimace of apology.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” I say, holding out a hand, open palm facing the pair. “I was just released from a…a hospital. Just a little unused to interacting in the real world. But there’s nothing to worry about. It gets better every day.”

In fact, this is all true. I got so worked up during my divorce, when it was over I checked myself into a private loony bin for a three-month rest cure. Two days after my release, I maxed out my credit card and flew Business Class to Venice.

Before the coupe can respond I skirt around them and continue jogging up the cross street toward the beach.

I decide a car must have been waiting for her outside the gate. Was her lover driving? Surely just a relative or friend. Crazy as it may sound, I’m the one who wants to be her lover.

Or maybe not so crazy. She has to be Jewish. Who else would visit a Jewish cemetery? Which means my mother would have approved. A small but important detail.

But why was she in the boneyard?

Maybe her lover died. Yes, I’m sure of it. That’s whose grave she was visiting.

Two more blocks and I’m striding along the beachfront with its rows and rows of deserted cabanas like the coffins of summer stretching outward onto the flat fog-bound beach. Occasional cars zip past on the oceanfront avenue. Other than the couple I scared shitless, I meet no one. The woman from the cemetery has vanished into thin air.

I console myself with the thought that the Lido is a small place, especially in winter when most of the hotels and restaurants and shops are closed. Sooner or later I will find her.

Then I’m at the Piazzale Bucintoro intersection, beyond which towers the façade of the old Excelsior Hotel, its windows shuttered for the winter. From there I turn down the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elizabetta, heading back to my room and work.

But I can’t get the face of the woman at the boneyard out of my head.

I’m writing a new screenplay, one that will make a lot of money. But today it’s not going well. My laptop display shows a blank page.

A cup of tea laced with Teacher’s doesn’t help. I smoke another cigarette. I even try reading a novel.
The Dunwich Horror
. Next moment I’m pacing back and forth between my hot plate and the drafty windows of my rented lodgings. Ancient floorboards creak under my steps; dead flies litter the windowsill.

I can’t stop thinking about the lady who vanished. Her haunting face materializes like a faded photograph in the cloud of blue cigarette smoke circumnavigating my room. She must have been freezing her ass off in that skimpy outfit with her coat hanging open, her nipples as hard as teak in the bone-chilling damp.

When I look down I have a hard-on.

I need some air.

I need to get laid.

Shrugging into my raincoat and leaving the gold earring on my bedside table, I stomp down to the
vaporetto
stop for San Marco. A crowd is waiting, including several attractive women. I try to catch an eye, even commenting on the arctic weather to one tart wearing a gypsy skirt and dangly bead earrings. But there are no takers. Their mothers warned them long ago to beware of
gringos
bearing gifts.

It’s even colder out on the water, as we cross the channel from the Lido to Venice proper. But I stay on deck sucking down the salt-rimmed air.

When we arrive at the Piazza San Marco
vaporetto
stop, I stroll up the stone jetty to the Hotel Danieli. A grande olde dame, a former
doges
palace from the Renaissance, the Danieli looks across the jetty to the treacherous tides and currents of the Basino di San Marco, where the Grande Canal meets the unforgiving sea. Its unassuming dusty rose façade reminds me of a lithe older woman who answers her door wearing a terrycloth robe. Going inside is like watching her disrobe. The lobby is a vast golden whorehouse, its atrium soaring five-stories, ascended on two sides by a grand staircase. The pick-up lounge, supported by exquisitely carved columns and soundproofed by thick oriental carpets, is as vast as the Russian steppe.

Taking a
Wall Street Journal
from the pile at one end of the concierge desk, I sit down in the lobby lounge and order a beer. On my left two women sit close together talking earnestly in German. I wonder if they’re planning the resurrection of the Third Reich. The younger, perhaps in her thirties, suddenly jumps up and runs from the lounge in tears. A domestic dispute.

Abandoning my newspaper, I pick up my glass of beer and walk over to the survivor, a woman at the end of her fifties stuffed into tight leather pants and a chocolate-brown blouse, her hair combed straight back like a man’s. High cheekbones have kept her face from collapsing. But her mouth is as thin and careworn as a cheap motel room.

“Is this seat taken?” I ask.

She smiles up at me, her canine teeth glinting in the light of a chandelier, and motions noncommittally to the empty chair.

“May I be entirely honest?” I ask, leaning forward from the edge of the seat.

“If you must.”

She speaks English with a heavy Berlin accent.

“You were the only person I saw when I entered the room.”

“Maybe you should consult an ophthalmologist.”

I take a sip of my beer.

“I like Venice in the winter,” she says.

“Cold as a witch’s tit out there,” I say. Then: “Have you had lunch?”

“I’m afraid I’ve just eaten breakfast.”

“Then an aperitif or a
café correcto
?”

“I’d like to get some air.”

“Have you been to the Lido?”

Outside she lights a cigarette.

“Can you float me a loan?” I whisper, nibbling her neck. “A hundred and fifty
euros
.”

Holding the cigarette between her lips, she rummages in her gaudy chain-draped designer bag the size of a small suitcase, hands me a wad of currency. I slip it into my money clip without counting it.

“You’re American,” she says.

“Does that make a difference?”

“Not so long as you profess your undying hatred of George Bush.”

I clutch her arm and start down the quay toward Piazza San Marco.

“Not the
vaporetto
,” she says. “Let’s take a water taxi. So much more intimate.”

Who am I to object? It’s her nickel. Though I don’t see what’s so intimate about having the two-man speedboat crew gazing lustfully at her ass whenever it sways in their direction.

Her raccoon-collared bomber jacket goes well with her mannish haircut. Just before we board the water taxi I buy a paper cone of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. We stand in the open cockpit of the motor launch scarfing them down and throwing the shells overboard.

“Why was your friend crying?” I ask.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Then make something up.” I take a long swig from my flask before offering it to her, which she declines. “Or tell me your life story.”

After a pause she says: “My father was an officer in the
Waffen-SS
. He was stationed in Venice among other places.”

“That’s weird.” I gaze off across the turgid lagoon. “My dad worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

“He was thrown in prison when the Reich fell. They wanted to bring him to trial and execute him. But he had too many friends. After awhile all charges were dropped and he was released. Then he met my mother and here I am.”

“The key to this game is attention to detail,” I say. I pull a photograph from my wallet. It shows J. Edgar Hoover and another man standing on the steps of the Supreme Court. “That’s my father,” I say, pointing at the other man in the picture.

She laughs.

“I guess your old man did some bad shit during the war,” I say.

But she’s not in a confessional mood.

“I’ll have that drink now, if you don’t mind.

We don’t talk for the rest of the crossing.

From the docks we walk up Gran Viale Santa Maria Elizabetta. The café lights are on. The fog seems to be rolling back in.

“Let’s stop for a coffee first,” I say.

“No,” she says. “Let’s buy a bottle and take it up to your room.”

In no time we’re naked, sitting cross-legged on my bed drinking shots of
slivovitz
and doing high fives. The steam radiator is actually giving off heat and I’m getting excited looking at her plush, slightly-gone-to-seed body.

“Look.” She points. “Your thing is sticking up.”

“My thing? You mean my cock.”

Next moment she’s sucking on it like it’s the holy grail of lollipops.

It’s the beginning of the end.

An hour later my German
frau
, sated, snores contentedly. I realize I don’t even know her name. Nor does she know mine, unless she glanced at the unopened letters on my night table.

Curious, I open her handbag. Amid an assortment of feminine debris, I find a leather cardholder containing a MasterCard and a German
personalausweis
card. They bear the same name: Sabrina Bauer.

Her name has an alliterative crispness like an ice-cold melon with prosciutto. But it doesn’t matter because soon she will be dead!

Jesus! Where did that thought come from?

For a flash moment I see her nude body, twisted by death, sprawled across my bed. A scarlet stain defaces the white linen sheets.

Then I’m thrown back amid the living, where I stagger backward, collapsing into the chair at my writing desk.
Frau
Bauer snorts and turns over onto her stomach. Her sex peaks provocatively beneath the crevasse of her buttocks.

But I’m no longer interested. The lust that drove me to the Danieli is back again but Sabrina Bauer’s charms are not the solution.

My armpits pool with sweat. My head throbs. My ears ring with a siren’s song.

It’s the voice of the woman I witnessed at the cemetery. I’m sure of it, even though I’ve never heard her speak.