Playing With Fire (13 page)

I feel her eyes on me as I consider my response.
Must stay calm, must stay agreeable.
“I’ll need some time to get ready for this,” I say. “I want to talk to my husband first. And I need to make sure Aunt Val is able to help with Lily.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“Since I might be gone for a while, there are practical details to arrange.”

“We aren’t talking about forever, Mrs. Ansdell.”

But for my mother, it
was
forever. For my mother, a mental institution was the final stop in her short, turbulent life.

Dr. Rose walks me out to the waiting room, where Rob has been sitting. To be certain I made it to this appointment, he drove me here himself, and I see the questioning look he gives Dr. Rose. She nods to him, her silent assurance that all went well and the crazy wife will cooperate with their plans.

And I do cooperate. What alternative do I have? I sit meekly in the car while Rob drives. When we get home, he lingers for a while, watching to make sure I don’t jump out a window or slit my wrists. I putter around the kitchen, set a kettle on the stove, trying to appear as normal as I can, even though my nerves are so frayed they could snap at any instant. When at last he leaves to go back to work, I’m so relieved I let out a sob and collapse into a chair at the kitchen table.

So this is what it’s like to go insane.

I drop my head in my hands and think about mental hospitals.
A clinic
was what Dr. Rose called it, but I know what kind of place they want to send me to. I’ve seen a photo of the institution where my mother died. It had beautiful trees and sweeping lawns; it also had locks on the windows. Is that the sort of place where I too will end my days?

The kettle screams for my attention.

I get up to pour hot water into the teapot. Then I sit down to confront the stack of mail that’s accumulated on the kitchen table. There’s three days’ worth, still unopened; that’s how distracted we’ve been, too embroiled in our family crisis to deal with the day-to-day issues like ironing shirts or paying bills. No wonder Rob looks so rumpled lately. His wife is too busy going nuts to starch his collars.

On top of the stack is an offer for a free manicure at my local mall, as if I give a damn anymore about my nails. In a sudden rage I sweep the mail off the table and it goes flying. An envelope lands on the floor at my feet. An envelope with a Rome postmark. I recognize the sender’s name: Anna Maria Padrone.

I snatch it up and rip it open.

Dear Mrs. Ansdell,

I am sorry it has taken me so long to reply, but we have had a terrible tragedy. My grandfather is dead. A few days after I last wrote to you, he was killed during a robbery at the shop. The police are investigating, but we have little hope they will find whoever did this. My family is in mourning, and we wish to be left in peace. I am sorry, but I cannot answer any more of your questions. I ask that you do not call or write me again. Please respect our privacy.

For a long time I sit staring at what Anna Maria has written me. I’m desperate to share this news, but with whom? Not Rob or Val, who already think I’m dangerously obsessed with
Incendio.
Not Dr. Rose, who’ll just add this to her evidence list for why I’m crazy.

I pick up the phone and call Gerda.

“Oh my God,” she murmurs. “He was
murdered
?”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me, Gerda. He had nothing but junk in his shop, old furniture and horrible paintings. There are so many other antiques shops on that street. Why would thieves break into his?”

“Maybe it looked like an easy target. Maybe there were more valuable items you didn’t notice.”

“Old books and music? That was the most valuable stuff he had. Hardly what a thief would go for.” I look down at the letter from Rome. “The granddaughter doesn’t want to hear from me again, so I guess we’ll never find out where the music comes from.”

“There’s still a way,” says Gerda. “We have that Venice address, written on the back of the book of Gypsy tunes. If the composer once lived there, maybe we could track down his family. What if he’s written other music that’s never been published? What if we could be the first to record it?”

“Your fantasies are getting ahead of you. We don’t even know if he lived there.”

“I’ll try to find out. I’m packing for Trieste right now. Remember that gig I told you about? Right after it’s over, I’m heading to Venice. I’ve already booked a cute little hotel in Dorsoduro.” She pauses. “Why don’t you meet me there?”

“In Venice?”

“You’ve been sounding so depressed lately, Julia. You could use a little escape to Italy. We could solve the mystery of
Incendio
and have a girl’s getaway at the same time. What do you think? Can Rob set you free for a week?”

“I wish I
could
go.”

“Why can’t you?”

Because I’m about to be locked away in the nuthouse and I’ll probably never see Italy again.

I look down at the letter and think of the gloomy little shop where I found the music. I remember the gargoyles over the door and the Medusa head knocker. And I remember how chilled I felt, as though I already sensed that Death would soon pay a visit there. Somehow I brought the curse of that place home with me, in the guise of a single sheet of manuscript paper. Even if I burned that music here, now, I don’t think I’d ever be able to break free of that curse. I’ll never get my daughter back. Certainly not while locked away inside a mental institution.

This could be my only chance to fight back. My only chance to reclaim my family.

My head lifts. “When will you be in Venice?” I ask Gerda.

“The festival in Trieste runs through Sunday. I plan to take the train to Venice on Monday. Why?”

“I’ve just changed my mind. I’ll meet you there.”

When everyone believes you are being perfectly cooperative, it’s a simple matter to escape your life and slip out of the country. I buy my ticket online at Orbitz—
only two more tickets left at this price!
—departing in the late afternoon, arriving in Venice early the next morning. I ask Val to keep Lily at her house while I prepare for my upcoming hospitalization. I listen attentively to everything Rob says, however inane, so he cannot accuse me of hearing imaginary voices while he’s talking to me. I cook three excellent dinners in a row, serve them all with a smile, and mention not a word about
Incendio
or Italy.

On the day of my flight, I tell him I’ll be at my hairdresser’s until five, which, when you think about it, is a ridiculous excuse because why would any woman care how her hair looks when she’s about to check in to the loony bin? But Rob thinks this is perfectly reasonable. He won’t start to worry about my whereabouts until later in the evening when I don’t return home.

By then I am already over the Atlantic Ocean, sitting in row twenty-eight, middle seat, between an elderly Italian woman on my right and a distracted-looking businessman on my left. Neither one wants to chat with me, which is too bad because I’m desperate to talk with someone, anyone, even this pair of strangers. I want to confess that I’m a runaway wife, that I’m scared but also a little thrilled. That I have nothing left to lose because my husband thinks I’m insane and my psychiatrist wants to lock me away. That I’ve never done anything this crazy and impulsive, and it feels strangely wonderful. It feels like the
real
Julia has broken out of prison, and she has a mission to complete. A mission to reclaim her daughter and her life.

The flight attendants dim the cabin lights and everyone around me nestles down to sleep, but I sit wide awake, thinking about what must be happening at home. Rob will surely call Val and Dr. Rose, and then he’ll call the police.
My crazy wife has disappeared.
He won’t know right away that I’ve left the country. Only Gerda knows where I’m headed, and she’s already in Italy.

While I have been to Rome several times, I have visited Venice only once before, when Rob and I were on vacation four years ago. It was in August, and I remember the city as a confusing maze of alleys and bridges overrun with tourists packed skin to clammy skin. I remember the smell of sweat and seafood and sunscreen. And I remember the white-hot glare of the sun.

Once again, that sun is glaring down as I walk out of the airport, dazed and blinking. Yes, this is the Venice I remember. Only it’s even more crowded—and much more expensive.

I blow almost my entire stash of euros on a private water taxi ride to the neighborhood of Dorsoduro, where Gerda has booked a room in a small hotel. Tucked into a quiet alley, the modest establishment has a dark lobby with worn velvet chairs and the sort of local character that she would call charming, but which I find merely shabby. Although she hasn’t yet checked in, our room is ready and the twin beds look clean and inviting. I’m so exhausted I don’t even bother to shower, but collapse on top of the sheets. In seconds, I am asleep.

“Julia.” A hand nudges me. “Hey, are you ever going to wake up?”

I open my eyes and see Gerda bending over me. She looks bright and cheerful—too cheerful, I think, as I groan and stretch.

“I think I’ve let you sleep long enough. It really is time for you to wake up.”

“When did you get here?”

“Hours ago. I’ve already been out for a walk and had lunch. It’s three o’clock.”

“I didn’t sleep at all on the plane.”

“If you don’t get up soon, you won’t sleep a wink tonight. Come on, or you’ll never get over jet lag.”

As I sit up, I hear my cellphone vibrate on the nightstand.

“It’s done that about half a dozen times now,” she says.

“I turned off the ringer so I could sleep.”

“Maybe you should check your messages. It sounds like someone really wants to reach you.”

I pick up the phone and scroll through the half-dozen missed calls and text messages. Rob, Rob, Rob, Val, Rob. I drop the phone into my purse. “Nothing important. Just Rob checking in.”

“Was he okay with you coming to Venice?”

I shrug. “He’ll understand. If he calls you, don’t bother to answer. He’ll just give you grief about my being here.”

“You did tell him you were coming to Venice, didn’t you?”

“I told him I needed to get away for a while, that’s all. I said I was going on a girls’ holiday and I’ll come home when I’m good and rested.” I see her frowning at me and I add: “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ve got a long way before I max out my credit card.”

“It’s not your credit card that concerns me. I’m worried about you and Rob. This isn’t like you, to leave without telling him where you’re going.”

“You did invite me here, remember?”

“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to jump on a plane without first discussing it with him.” She studies me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I avoid her gaze and turn to look out the window. “He doesn’t believe me, Gerda. He thinks I’m delusional.”

“About the music, you mean?”

“He doesn’t understand its power. He certainly wouldn’t understand why I’ve come all this way to track down the composer. He’d call this trip crazy.”

Gerda sighs. “I guess I must be crazy, too, because I’m here looking for the same answers.”

“Then we should get started.” I pick up my purse and sling it over my shoulder. “Let’s go find Calle del Forno.”

We soon discover there is more than one Calle del Forno in Venice. The first one we visit is in the
sestiere
of Santa Croce, where at 4
P.M.
the alleys are thronged with tourists browsing the little shops and wine bars near the Rialto Bridge. Even this late in the day the heat is stifling and my head is still fogged from jet lag. We cannot find the address No. 11, so we stop at a gelato shop, where Gerda struggles to communicate in her rudimentary Italian with the middle-aged woman behind the counter. The woman looks at the written address, shakes her head, and calls out to a skinny teenage boy who sits slouched at a corner table.

Scowling, the boy pulls off his iPod earbuds and says to us in English, “My mother says you are on the wrong street.”

“But this
is
Calle del Forno, isn’t it?” Gerda hands the boy the written address. “We can’t find number eleven.”

“There is no number eleven on this street. You want Calle del Forno in Cannaregio. A different
sestiere.
”

“Is that neighborhood very far?”

He shrugs. “You cross at Ponte degli Scalzi. Walk five, maybe ten minutes.”

“Could you take us there?”

The teenager flashes her a
why would I do that?
look that needs no translation. Only when Gerda offers to pay him twenty euros to take us there does his face brighten. He shoves to his feet and stuffs the iPod in his pocket. “I show you.”

The boy leads us at a trot through tourist-packed streets, his red T-shirt weaving in and out of sight. Once, after he darts around a corner, we lose sight of him entirely. Then we hear a shout of “Hey! Ladies!” and spot him waving far ahead of us. The boy intends to waste no time collecting those twenty euros, and he keeps urging us forward, impatient with these slow-poke Americans who keep getting hung up in the thronged alleys.

On the other side of Ponte degli Scalzi, the crowds grow even thicker and we’re helplessly swept along in the river of travelers spilling out of the nearby train station. By now I’ve given up trying to remember our route, and I register only what leaps out at me from the swirl of color and noise. The girl with the sunburned face. A shop window with leering Carnevale masks. A bull-sized man in a tank top, his shoulders bristling with hair. Then the boy veers from the canal, and the crowds thin away to nothing. We are alone as we turn down a gloomy passage where crumbling buildings squeeze ever closer, as if leaning in to crush us.

The boy points. “Here. This is number eleven.”

I stare up at flaking paint and sagging walls, at a façade webbed with cracks, like wrinkles on an ancient face. Through the dusty windows, I see empty rooms littered with cardboard boxes and crumpled newspapers.

“This place looks like it’s been abandoned for some time,” says Gerda. She scans the alley and sees two elderly women watching us from a doorway. “Ask those ladies who owns this building,” she commands the boy.

“You promised me twenty euros to bring you here.”

“Okay, okay.” Gerda hands him the money. “Now, could you please just ask them the question?”

The teenager calls out to the elderly women. This leads to a noisy conversation shouted in Italian. The women leave their doorway and approach us. One has an eye that’s milky from a cataract; the other walks with a cane, grasped in a hand that’s grotesquely deformed by arthritis.

“They say an American man bought the building last year,” the boy tells us. “He wants to make an art gallery.”

Both old women snort at the absurdity of yet another gallery in Venice, where the city itself is a living, breathing work of art.

“Before the American bought it, who lived here?” Gerda asks.

The boy points to the arthritic woman with the cane. “She says her family owned it for many years. Her father bought it, after the war.”

I reach into my shoulder bag for the book of Gypsy music. From its pages I pull out the single sheet with
Incendio
and point to the composer’s name. “Has she ever heard of this person, L. Todesco?”

The woman with the arthritic hands bends closer and stares at the name. For a long time she says nothing. Reaching out, she gently touches the page and murmurs in Italian.

“What is she saying?” I ask the boy.

“She says they went away and never came back.”

“Who?”

“The people who lived in this building. Before the war.”

Gnarled fingers suddenly grasp my arm and tug, urging me to follow. Down the alley the woman leads us, her cane thunking against the pavement. Despite her age and infirmity, she moves at a determined pace around the corner, into a busier street. I realize the boy’s taken off and abandoned us, so we can’t ask the woman where we’re going. Perhaps she’s misunderstood our request and we’ll end up in her family’s trinket shop. She takes us over a bridge, across a town square, and points a crooked finger at a wall.

Engraved on wood panels is a continuous series of names and numbers:
…GILMO PERLMUTTER 45 BRUNO PERLMUTTER 9 LINA PRANI CORINALDI 71…

“Qui,”
the woman says softly. “Lorenzo.”

It’s Gerda who spots it first. “Oh my God, Julia,” she gasps. “There he is!” She points to the name, engraved among the others:
LORENZO TODESCO 24
.

The old woman looks at me with haunted eyes and whispers:
“L’ultimo treno.”

“Julia, this is some sort of memorial plaque,” Gerda says. “If I understand it correctly, it explains what happened here, in this square.”

Although the words are Italian, their meaning is clear even to me.
Ebraica. Deportati. Fascisti dai nazisti.
Two hundred and forty-six Italian Jews, deported from this city. Among them was a young man named Lorenzo Todesco.

I glance around the square and spot the words
Campo Ghetto Nuovo.
Now I know where we are: the Jewish quarter. I cross the square to a different building, where there are bronze plaques showing scenes of deportation and concentration camps, and I focus on the image of a train spilling out its cargo of doomed human beings.
L’ultimo treno,
the old woman told us. The last train, which took away the family that once lived at No. 11, Calle del Forno.

My head throbs in the heat and I feel dizzy. “I need to sit down,” I tell Gerda. I make my way to the shade of an enormous tree and sink onto the public bench. There I sit massaging my scalp, thinking about Lorenzo Todesco, only twenty-four years old. So young. His home in that now-derelict building on Calle del Forno stands only a few hundred paces from where I now sit. Perhaps he once rested under this same tree, walked across these same paving stones. Perhaps I’m now sitting in the very same spot where the melody of
Incendio
came to him as he contemplated his grim future.

“The Jewish Museum is right over there,” Gerda says, pointing to a nearby building. “Someone in there must speak English. Let me ask them if they know anything about the Todesco family.”

While Gerda heads into the museum, I remain on the bench, my head buzzing as if a million bees are swarming in my brain. Tourists wander past, but it’s only the bees I hear, drowning out the voices and footfalls. I cannot stop thinking about Lorenzo, who was nine years younger than I am now. I think about where I was nine years ago. A newlywed with a whole life ahead of me. I had a comfortable home, a career I loved, and no dark clouds on my horizon. But for Lorenzo, a Jew in a world gone mad, dark clouds were rapidly closing in.

“Julia?” Gerda has returned. Beside her stands a pretty, dark-haired young woman. “This is Francesca, a curator from the Jewish Museum. I told her why we’re here. She’d like to see
Incendio.
”

I pull the music from my shoulder bag and give it to the young woman, who frowns at the name of the composer. “You bought this in Rome?” she asks me.

“I found it in an antiques shop. I paid a hundred euros for it,” I add sheepishly.

“This paper does appear to be old,” Francesca concedes. “But I doubt this composer was from the same Todesco family who lived here in Cannaregio.”

“So you’ve heard of that Todesco family?”

She nods. “We have files on all the Jewish deportees in our archives. Bruno Todesco was a well-known luthier in Venice. I believe he had two sons and a daughter. I’ll have to review the files, but they may have lived on Calle del Forno.”

“Couldn’t this composer L. Todesco be one of his sons? That waltz was tucked into an old music book with the Calle del Forno address written on it.”

Francesca shakes her head. “All the family’s books and papers were burned by the fascists. As far as we know, nothing survived. If the Todescos managed to save anything from the fire, it was later lost in the death camp where they were sent. So this composition…” Francesca holds up
Incendio.
“Should not even exist.”