Venice Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2012 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Venice map by Aaron Petrovich

  “Venus Aphrodisiac” Copyright ©2012 Peter James

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-118-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-073-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960951

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana V. López & Carmen Ospina

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Cape Cod Noir, edited by David L. Ulin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaëlis

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & Johnny Byrd

  Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Pittsburgh Noir, edited by Kathleen George

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Bogotá Noir (Colombia), edited by Andrea Montejo

  Boston Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Dennis Lehane, Jaime Clarke & Mary Cotton

  Buffalo Noir, edited by Brigid Hughes & Ed Park

  Jerusalem Noir, edited by Sayed Kashua

  Kansas City Noir, edited by Steve Paul

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Manila Noir (Philippines), edited by Jessica Hagedorn

  St. Petersburg Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Seoul Noir (Korea), edited by BS Publishing Co.

  Staten Island Noir, edited by Patricia Smith

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: AMONGST THE VENETIANS

  MATTEO RIGHETTO

  Cannaregio

  Cloudy Water

  FRANCESCO FERRACIN

  Calcavia

  The Comedy Is Over

  BARBARA BARALDI

  Mestre

  Commissario Clelia Vinci

  FRANCESCA MAZZUCATO

  Ghetto Vecchio

  Little Sister

  PART II: SHADOWS OF THE PAST

  MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  Lido

  Lido Winter

  MICHELLE LOVRIC

  Santo Stefano

  Pantegana

  ISABELLA SANTACROCE

  Piazza San Marco

  Desdemona Undicesima

  PART III: TOURISTS & OTHER TROUBLED FOLK

  PETER JAMES

  Canal Grande

  Venice Aphrodisiac

  EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

  Ponte dei Sospiri

  Drifter

  TONY CARTANO

  Calle Larga XXII Marzo

  Rendezvous

  MIKE HODGES

  Palazzo Ducale

  Signor Gauke’s Tongue

  PART IV: AN IMPERFECT PRESENT

  MARIA TRONCA

  Santa Maria Formosa

  Tourists for Supper

  MICHAEL GREGORIO

  Porto Marghera

  Laguna Blues

  MARY HOFFMAN

  Rialto Bridge

  A Closed Book

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  SLOWLY SINKING

  It’s one of the most famous cities in the world. Immortalized by writers throughout the years, frozen in amber by film and photography, the picturesque survivor of a wild history whose centuries encompass splendor, decay, pestilence, beauty, and never-ending wonders. A city built on water, whose geographical position once almost saw it rule the world and form a vital crossing point between West and East. A city of merchants, artists, glamour, abject poverty, philosophers, corrupt nobles, refugees, courtesans, and unforgettable lovers, buffeted by the tides of wars, a unique place whose architecture is a subtle palette reflecting the successive waves of settlers, invaders, religions, and short-term rulers.

  Venice is ever present in the popular imagination, and there is no denying its incomparable visual beauty. The flow of the Grand Canal and its cortege of palazzi, the famous bridges, the thousand and one churches, Piazza San Marco and its pigeons (and annual floods), the glassblowers of Murano, the Doge’s Palace, the calm waters of its lagoon, the 117 neighboring islands so full of dark history and legend, the gondolas, carnival time, the markets overflowing with food, fish, jewellery, and trinkets—all images that evoke the beauty and strangeness of Venice in everyone’s mind, whether you have been there or not.

  They call her La Serenissima, La Dominante, the Queen of the Adriatic, the City of Water, the Floating City, and the City of Canals.

  Venice has always been a magnet for writers, and the pilgrimage there has become a necessary rite of passage. An endless list would include, in no
particular order of importance or chronological order (somehow chronology is of no importance when it comes to Venice; it is a city to a certain extent frozen in time, poised on a knife edge between the past and the future, where decay is an integral part of the surrounding atmosphere): Thomas Mann, Lord Byron, Daphne du Maurier, D.H. Lawrence, Jan Morris, Patricia Highsmith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henry James, Goethe, George Sand, Robert Browning, Goldoni, Ruskin, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, John Berendt, Donna Leon, Tiziano Scarpa, Marcel Proust, Michael Dibdin, Dickens, Joseph Brodsky, Hemingway, Philippe Sollers, Sarah Dunant, Ezra Pound, and possibly the best-known Venetian author of them all, Giacomo Casanova, the great seductor and the epitome of Venice’s edgy blend of sensuality and morbidity. And don’t get me started on all the filmmakers who’ve attempted to catch the true essence of Venice on celluloid, while dodging the clichés and the tourist throngs …

  Whether they have lived there at some time or not, all these authors have written about Venice and its fascinating atmosphere, its smells and colors, its people and visitors, in a myriad of different ways. So why yet another book about Venice? As Erica Jong puts it, “Was it Henry James or Mary Mc-Carthy who said, ‘There is nothing new to say about Venice’?”

  Unlike any other place, the new Venice is also the old Venice, and change in this most curious of cities is something almost imperceptible and invisible to the naked eye. Walking just a few minutes away from the Rialto Bridge, for instance, and losing yourself in backstreets, where the canals and small connecting bridges leave just enough space to pass along the buildings without falling into the water, it’s as if you are stepping into a past century altogether, with no indication whatsoever of modernity. You wade through a labyrinth of stone, water, and wrought-iron bridges, and after dark feel part of another world where electricity isn’t yet invented, a most unsettling feeling nothing can prepare you for.

  In a city overcome by tourists, that would not be able to make a living without them, the ambiguous relationship between visitors and residents becomes a source of tension and studied hesitancy. Venice today is indeed a city in decline, slowly sinking with no real plans yet settled upon to avert the inevitable further decay, where the population is shrinking year after year, its youth abandoning its shores for lack of opportunities outside of service industries or actual criminality. At its center are the architectural splendors, on its margins the industrial port and factory zones and all their attendant murkiness. A complex but perfect background for the seductions of “noir,” and despite the contrast between a rich historical past and the evolving present, as was the case in the volume dedicated to Rome in this same Noir Series, which I edited with Chiara Stangalino, a fresh canvas for writers to conjugate new waltzes in darkness, balancing the old, the new, and the in-between, the undeniable beauty of the surrounding landscape and the rotten core on the inside that of course never features on all the picture postcards of Venice most of us blissfully ignore to our peril.

  I’ve always felt that Venice belongs to the world, attracting us from all over in its spiderweb of beauty, crumbling stones, and water, so this time around I didn’t just invite Italian writers to let their imaginations loose on the city, and summoned the mischievous and noir imaginations of writers hailing from the UK, the USA, Canada, France, and Australia too. The portrait they draw in Venice Noir is compelling, as hapless visitors and troubled locals wander the canals, bridges, and waters of La Serenissima, with a heartful of darkness and wonder, evoking all the secrets, sounds, sights, and smells of the city. And there’s not even a gondola in every story! Which goes to show that in any noir city, you should expect the unexpected.

  Maxim Jakubowski

  February 2012

  PART I

  AMONGST THE VENETIANS

  CLOUDY WATER

  BY MATTEO RIGHETTO

  Cannaregio

  Translated from Italian by Judith Forshaw

  The sun had set a couple of hours ago and, like every evening, a light mist started to rise slowly from the water, blanketing the whole city. Alvise was sitting in the stern of his small boat—an old patanella with a half-scraped hull. He was moving quietly along Rio della Misericordia, trying not to think about anything but Tania, who he would soon be seeing. She knew exactly how to make him relax.

  They had met by chance a few months before, friends of friends, which is nearly always how it happens in a city where people’s social lives mainly take place in the local bars. They’d chatted as they had a few drinks, and they liked each other; they started seeing each other a few days later.

  Tania was twenty-five and worked in a small shop selling kitsch souvenirs in Rio Terà San Leonardo, not far from the rented flat where she lived. Alvise was ten years older than she was and didn’t have a proper job. Or rather, he didn’t have one anymore, since he’d been fired by the petrochemical company in Porto Marghera where he had worked for almost fifteen years. With no wages coming in, he had begun work as a porter, toting tourists’ luggage from Piazzale Roma to the nearby hotels, an exhausting and badly paying job. However, he had given this up almost immediately, when Dario, an old school friend, had met him one day in his local bar and, between glasses of white wine and chitchat, mentioned an interesting job that they could do together—“A job that will solve all your problems,” Dario had told him that day. And, in fact, his proposal sounded so interesting that Alvise said yes without thinking twice.

  He was still about ten minutes away from Tania’s house when he realized that the packet in his jacket pocket had only two cigarettes left in it and that his fuel tank was almost empty.

  He did a quick calculation and worked out that he would have enough gas to get to her house and then back home, but the fags were a different matter: with just two left he could survive for no more than an hour, and he well knew that he wouldn’t find a single tobacconist in that part of the city. Like a Pavlovian response, he looked round anyway, vainly searching for a sign with a white T, then he spat into the water, pulled the second-to-last cigarette out of the pack, and lit it. Although he was dosed up with painkillers, his shoulder hurt more than ever, and the humidity that ruled over Venice like a tyrant certainly didn’t help him get any relief. He had an insane urge to see Tania, and the nearer he got to his destination, the more his desire to touch her grew inside him, to hug her and enjoy her warm body, even if deep down he felt worried and restless in a way he had not felt recently. He breathed out a cloud of smoke that blurred into the mist. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, then tossed it into the canal that cuts through the heart of Cannaregio, one of the most working-class and rundown neighborhoods of the city, and finally he looked at his watch. It was quarter past nine, and he noticed that there wasn’t a soul on the stark Fondamenta degli Ormesini, except for a couple of tourists—probably American—who looked like they were lost among the alleys and squares and were trying to get their bearings, consulting a guidebook. Alvise thought that the tourists were all the same; they managed to see only the surface of Venice, just like when you look at the surface of the sea and think you’ve seen it all.

  No one else around, neither to the right nor the left. No one.

  After a few minutes his old patanella finally reached its destination. He slowed down, turned off the engine, and glided under the bridge that leads to the Jewish quarter, then gently drew up by the bank and moored the boat. He looked around and, careful not to strain his aching shoulder, jumped down to the ground. He checked the time again: twenty past nine. He went over the wrought-iron bridge and down into Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, striding confidently.

  Tania lived very close by. She lived on her own in a small apartment on the fourth floor of one of the tallest buildings in the city. On the ground floor there was a yeshiva where Hasidic Jews from all over the world used to come to study and pray day and night like they were possessed.

  Alvise crossed the large square and headed toward the main wooden door of the building. He rang the bell and, while he was waiting
for Tania to answer, peeked through the windows of the orthodox school, where he saw dozens of young men praying and reading the Talmud out loud, swaying like grandfather clocks, apparently in the throes of a collective ecstasy. Every time he saw them there he had a strange feeling that was somewhere between rapture and a deep compassion, a mixture of admiration and pity that not even he was able to understand clearly.

  “Who is it?” asked Tania over the intercom.

  He didn’t answer, and for a moment he stood looking at the pale young men, all the same, dressed in black, with ringlets that sprang out from under their hats and white shirts drenched in sweat from the movement of their prayers.

  He watched them fascinated, careful not to be seen, and it was as if their prayers were so powerful he could imagine them leaving the building and rising up into the sky like steam.

  When he climbed the stairs and crossed the threshold of the tiny flat, he was immediately assailed by the strong smell of incense floating throughout the house.

  “Indian samskruti. I got it today. Do you like it?” she said to him as she welcomed him and took off his jacket.

  “A bit strong …”

  “It’s for meditating. I really like it, but if you want I’ll put it out.”

  Alvise shook his head, touched his shoulder, and settled down on the green sofa that stood in the small kitchen-cum-living-space.

  “Does it still hurt?” the girl asked, gazing at him adoringly.

  “It’ll pass.”

  Tania had clearly only just come out of the shower: she was wrapped in a silk dressing gown and her long dark hair, still slightly wet, fell over her shoulders and onto her chest.

  “It’s because of the carousel, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What?”

  “The pain in your shoulder …”

  “Right.”

  Alvise was on edge; he couldn’t speak and he felt strange, as if something were hovering around him without ever completely revealing itself.