The kaisho, p.30
The Kaisho, page 30
“Why did you show me these?” she breathed at last. “They’re so—beyond any logic of human behavior.”
“Yes. Now you know why I’m here.”
Her fingers were as white and rigid as bone. “I only agreed to talk to you because—”
“Because I’m a cop.”
Margarite shook her head. “The feds seem to believe I owe them some kind of debt for taking Dom into WITSEC. Well, they’re mistaken because they didn’t live up to their end of the bargain. They didn’t protect him.”
“That’s one side of it. The other side is that Dominic Goldoni violated the rules of WITSEC and that breach got him killed. You forget that no one’s ever gotten to a WITSEC-protected person who hasn’t violated his contract.”
“WITSEC never had my brother before.”
Touché, Croaker thought.
“You know how the modern world works, my detective,” Margarite said in a voice less brittle and more fragile. “No one will admit responsibility. But then I never expected the feds to say to me, ‘Sorry, we fucked up.’ It’s too potentially embarrassing for the program. The inmates will get spooked, try to bolt, and some of them will get their brains splattered all over the place.”
He thought that was an accurate assessment of the situation, as far as it went.
“See, here’s the thing. What did Dominic Goldoni do to get himself killed?” He watched her now, as carefully as if she were the rottweiler ready to strike. “He brought his mistress—a woman named Ginnie, Virginia Morris—out from Queens to be with him where WITSEC stashed him.”
Margarite had her head down. One by one she was wiping her tears off a photo of her dead brother.
“Ginnie was murdered, too, in the same spot where we discovered your brother.” Her head jerked up so fast he could hear her vertebrae crack. “I came here because I’m trying to figure out what got Dominic to break the WITSEC rules. My theory is he wanted out of his relationship with Ginnie, she didn’t want it to end, and in the sensitive situation he was in, I think he called someone—probably your husband—to help him with the problem. The call’s maybe what got him killed, someone tracing it back to him—to where he was stashed.”
“Tony won’t help you. He wouldn’t help a crippled cop across the street.”
“Did you know Ginnie?”
“What?”
Something she had said or the way she had said it had triggered the thought in the back of his mind. She and her brother had been very close, and this, after all, had been a female problem.
“Well, you must’ve known your brother fooled around on the side, you two being close.”
She got up abruptly and the photos slid to the ground. Croaker bent to retrieve them, slid them into their folder as he hurried after her.
“Yeah, maybe not,” he said when he had caught up to her. “That Sicilian thing. Women and business don’t mix.”
“Dom’s sexual appetite had nothing to do with business,” she said curtly. “Besides, the Goldonis aren’t Sicilians, which is more than I can say for my husband. Our family comes from Venice.”
“But you and your brother are half-Sicilian.”
“His mother. Not mine.”
The rottweiler had moved so quickly it had almost pulled its handler off his feet. Now it stood, its rear legs apart, its forepaws holding a small animal, a chipmunk or a vole, perhaps. The rottweiler began to gnaw on it with increasing vigor. There was a small but distinct crack! as it crushed the animal’s skull. Margarite stood regarding the scene with no particular fascination or revulsion, merely curiosity. It was the same expression she had had on when she had first seen him.
Croaker said, “So you know Ginnie Morris.”
“I didn’t say that.” She looked around as if someone on this heavily guarded estate might be eavesdropping. “But the fact is I did. I knew all his mistresses. I was the only one he could trust to confide in.”
“Then you knew where WITSEC put your brother.”
“No. I only got Ginnie ready for the move. The rest Dom did on his own.”
“Good Christ.” He could see why she had been crying over the photos: she had helped her brother violate the WITSEC rules, and that violation was what had gotten him killed.
“Dominic was . . . different, in many ways,” Margarite said. “As far as his womanizing was concerned, he was like John Kennedy—he couldn’t help it. I think there’s a medical term for what they both suffered from: satyriasis.”
“You mean your brother was an addict for pussy.”
“I’ve heard it put that way before,” she said, watching the rottweiler devour the creature at last, but then she turned to face him and her face was set in a cool expression. “You’re here now as my guest, Detective. I suggest in the future that you treat my brother’s memory with respect.”
He had wanted to shock her yet again, to elicit an uncalculated response. When he had first driven up, he had been ready to dismiss her as just another piece of Italian window-dressing. But she had proved to be much more than that. And now he began to see that perhaps his basic assumption regarding these three—Dominic, Tony, and Margarite—was totally off base.
He had assumed that boys being boys Tony DeCamillo must have been Dominic Goldoni’s confidant. On the face of it, this typical scenario had made sense: it was Tony whom Dom had designated his successor. But the longer he talked with Margarite the deeper his conviction became that the two men had never really been that close. Now the one question nagged at him: if Margarite had been his confidante regarding his mistresses, what else had he confided to her?
“I’ve been living alone too long. I guess my manners aren’t what they used to be.”
“You mean on the streets of New York?”
He couldn’t help but laugh at that. “I take your point, Mrs. DeCamillo. I apologize. But I wish you’d call me Lew. Detective sounds so . . .”
“Generic?”
He laughed again, suddenly happy to be in her company.
She turned to him. “Why don’t I call you Lew and you can call me Margarite?”
“Fair enough.”
“I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”
She drove him in her Lexus coupe. A Ford Taurus was on their tail the entire time. Croaker, glancing at the rearview mirror, hoped the wiseguys had left the rottweiler at home.
Margarite drove quickly and efficiently. She knew where all the cop cars were lying in wait along the back roads and the highway’s service road, ready to pick off speeders. Ten minutes later, they pulled into one of those elaborate diners with the fake goldstone facades, an enormous six-page menu, and food that appeared to have been prepared at some vast central kitchen that serviced all like-looking establishments in Queens and Long Island.
The owner, a dark-complexioned man who could have been from virtually any country on the Mediterranean, hurried up as they slid into a booth large enough to accommodate six oversize adults. It was covered in turquoise vinyl.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. D.,” he said deferentially. “What can we get you today?”
“Order pasta,” Margarite said to Croaker without opening the menu. “It’s the only thing made here.”
“And a bottle of Valpolicella, on the house,” the owner said, beaming as he scurried away.
They ate pasta al o’lio with hot, crusty Italian bread. Margarite put a handful of crushed red-pepper flakes into hers. Croaker had been in Marco Island so long he had forgotten what really good pasta tasted like.
Margarite drank most of the wine.
“Why exactly did you agree to let me be your guest?” Croaker asked halfway through the meal.
“Curiosity,” Margarite replied in that very direct way of hers that was so disarming. “When you drove up, you were just another cop sent out here to give us grief. But then I talked to you and found my basic assumptions about you were all wrong. I was operating on stereotypes.”
Croaker laughed. “That’s exactly what happened to me. I thought that you being Tony D.’s wife, you know . . .” He broke off, suddenly, oddly embarrassed.
“The Sicilians have a saying, Lew. Women are for cleaning, cooking, and making babies—preferably sons—every two years. I’m not Sicilian; I fit none of those parameters.”
“Yet Tony the Sicilian married you.”
She dabbed oil off the corners of her mouth. “I was very young and he was drunk on sex. He loved to fuck me.”
“And you? What did you love?”
“About Tony? He was like a white knight—strong, handsome, powerful. He was older and he knew what he wanted and how to get it. For a young girl, that kind of direct force can be a potent aphrodisiac—especially when every other boy you know is floundering around not knowing what he wants to be.”
Croaker poured her more wine and she smiled. “You can’t get me drunk, Lew, don’t even try.”
“So you got married early,” he said, ignoring her remark. “Then what?”
“Then . . .” She paused, frowning, took up her glass of wine, studied it. “Christ, then life—real life, not fantasy—came crashing down on me.” She sipped the wine. “All of a sudden I was no longer Margarite Goldoni. I was Mrs. Anthony DeCamillo, Tony’s wife. And then I realized that that was all he wanted me to be, and it was such a shock—” She broke off again, put the glass aside, smiled at Croaker.
“But you have your own business.”
“Oh, yes. But only by the good graces of my brother, who interceded for me with Tony. That was a mistake, because Tony lost face and he has made me pay for my business every day since.”
“You mean he takes a piece of it.”
“No,” she said coolly. “He takes a piece of me.”
The mask-maker’s shop was only a short block from the Grand Canal, a small, dingy workspace filled with flour and magic. The ceiling was made up of thousands of masks, hanging facedown, overlapping one another, the colors by turns harmonizing and clashing, creating a sea of emotions trapped within the confines of their wire bones, papiermâché flesh, and enamel skin. These masks, so alive, reminded Nicholas of Circe, who confined the souls of her visitors in the bodies of animals so that they might form a compendium of living art.
His name was Marin Fornovo. He was a smallish man of middle age with the absentminded demeanor of the artist whose inquisitive mind finds the bounds of the mundane world too restricting. His hair was thinning but it was as fine as spun gold. Now and again, as he moved back and forth behind a scarred marble counter littered with the detritus of his art—bowls of flour, coils of wire, pots of lacquer, and the instruments with which to meld, contort, and apply these—light lanced off the round lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses, blanking out his eyes and making him appear as comical as a cartoon.
“Celeste, bellissima!” Fornovo pushed aside the litter, leaned over his counter, and kissed her on both cheeks. “There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of your father and miss him. I tell you, Venice is the worse off now that he is gone.” He spoke slowly and formally, as if he were still part of the doge’s court of long ago.
Celeste introduced Nicholas, and Fornovo gave him a penetrating look before nodding to him with a small smile. When he returned his attention to Celeste, he said, “What mischief have you gotten yourself involved in now, my darling?”
Celeste laughed. “I could never hide anything from you.”
“Neither could your father,” Fornovo said, frowning. “I wish he had taken my advice that day, cara mia. If he had, I believe he would be alive today.”
“That’s all in the past.”
“Ah, yes, the past.” Fornovo sighed deeply. “But in the past are hidden all our sins. And our sins are what, in the end, lead to our undoing.” He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You would do well to remember what your father forgot, my child. I do not want to see his fate become yours.”
“I will remember. I promise.”
The little man grunted, as if, possibly, he did not believe her.
“Marin, we need your help,” Celeste said. “Do you remember the mask you recently made for Okami-san?”
“The Domino. But of course! A magnificent piece of work.” Fornovo scowled. “It has not come to harm?”
“We need some information on the Domino itself,” Celeste said, adroitly sidestepping his question. “I seem to remember that it wasn’t one of the original Venetian characters.”
“No, no, of course not. The Domino was introduced into Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century.” Fornovo began to mix a color in a shallow bowl. “It is actually French in origin. The domino was the name the French gave to the long, thick capes their monks wore, and which, when their noblemen and ambassadors traveled here, they brought into Venetian fashion.”
The color was becoming clear now, a deep cerulean that even in its dull pot appeared luminous. “The mask itself is a kind of joke, however. The Venetians were forever irreverent when it came to their popes.” Fornovo lifted a thick tear-shaped drop of the pigment into the light, eyeing it speculatively. “It was a pope who declared Venice a threat to the rest of the world, you know.” With vigor he smeared the pigment onto the cheek of a naked white mask. “That damnable man. But why should we decry him? We Venetians refused to contemplate the past unless it is beribboned with ritual. But this is what makes us Venetians great.”
He daubed the other cheek, the ends of the eyeholes, the lips, and now, by some alchemical process, the mask had become a face. “Morte ai tiranni! That has always been our battle cry! Death to the tyrants of Rome!—whether they be popes or caesars. Our Republic was the only one to survive the fall of the Roman Empire; that was no happenstance!”
He set the mask carefully aside, winked at Nicholas. “Here in Venice, we have always been free. That is why the Jews fled here from their persecution in less enlightened lands. The ghetto was invented here just after 1500, and for many years Venice became the heart of rabbinical study in Europe.”
He took up another pot, began to mix a color that might eventually become a shade of scarlet. “The truth is we understood the Jews, and they us. We were the same, really: enigmatic, brilliant, eminently practical—the scholars of business. When the rest of the civilized world was feudal, we were not; the Jews, who could not abide feudal thinking, appreciated this most of all. We were, all of us, capitalists from time out of mind.”
Yes, scarlet, bright, startling as newly drawn blood. He looked at the mask he was working on, nodded, as if satisfied with the magic he had wrought. “Of course, we made the Jews pay for their sanctuary. Why not? They could afford it—and they had nowhere else to go. And we marked them by decreeing that they wear red hats.”
He began to apply the scarlet sparingly, almost, one might say, compassionately. “Was that cruel? Why should anyone say so? We treated them no differently than we treated our own doges. We isolated the Jews in their ghetto just as we incarcerated the doge in his magnificent palace in San Marco. His oath of office became longer each year because we kept adding to the things he was enjoined from doing.”
He lifted a forefinger, waggled it at them. “Of course, from time to time we paid a heavy price for our successes. Like the Jews, we were often despised and envied for what we were. In 1605, when Pope Paul V accused Venice of heresy, didn’t we reply that we were better Christians than he? Who fought the Turk in the name of Christ while Rome sat idly by? Why, Venice, of course!”
“Marin,” Celeste broke in gently. “About the Domino.”
“Yes, yes,” he said almost irritably. Again, he put the mask aside to dry. “I’m coming to that. Did you think I’d forgotten?” He gave Nicholas another sharp look. “We Venetians have a saying: When history is inadequate, myth will do.” He smiled at his own enigmatic joke. “Well, there is a myth concerning the introduction of the Domino into the Carnival and it is this: It was not French noblemen and ambassadors who brought this ironic, irreligious character to Venice, but the Jews fleeing the anti-Semitism in France.”
He turned abruptly, went through a beaded curtain into the rear of his shop. A moment later, he returned, cradling an item in his hands as if it were as fragile as a newborn baby.
“The Domino!” Celeste exclaimed. “But that’s impossible.”
“Hardly, cara mia, because here it is.” Fornovo gave her a crafty smile as he held it out for them to examine. “But this is the original—the oldest mask in my own private collection. I am showing it to you as I did to Okami before you.”
“Did Okami-san know of the origins of the Domino?” Nicholas asked.
“But of course,” Fornovo said, frowning deeply. “Did you think I would be so remiss to sell him one of my prized Dominos without making him cognizant of its history? What kind of a Venetian do you take me for?” He made a face. “Besides, this Domino is special, because it was made in France—Paris to be exact—and brought here by the Jews fleeing persecution.”
Carefully he turned the mask over so that they could see the underside. “Here is the name of the maker: A. Aloins.” He pointed with a thin forefinger. “And here, just below, is the stamp of the company under whose aegis M. Aloins toiled. It is the oldest mask-maker in France, which is saying something. And it still exists.”
He lifted the mask toward them so they could read its name:
Avalon Ltd.
In the ensuing silence the crash of a dish slipping out of a waiter’s hand was stunning, but Margarite’s eyes never left Croaker’s. There was a defiance there that made him believe this was the first time she was confessing this horror.
“He beat me and what’s worse I let him do it. I didn’t complain, didn’t go to Dom, didn’t take my daughter, Francine, and leave. Instead, I stayed and submitted.”
“Why?”
She smiled, but the brittleness had returned, and he had the impression if he reached out and shook her now, she would shatter into ten thousand pieces.
“That’s the billion-dollar question, isn’t it?” She dabbed at her lips again, but there was no longer anything to wipe away. “Maybe I felt I deserved it, marrying against my brother’s wishes.”
