A Beautiful Crime Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  FOR EDMUND WHITE

  Epigraph

  “You may either win your peace, or buy it.”

  —JOHN RUSKIN

  “In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas.”

  —DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I: Setting the Trap

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II: The Things That Get Caught in the Trap

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Bollen

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Down below the cry of gulls, below floors of tourists undressing and dressing for dinner, below even the shrinking figure of his killer, a man lies crumpled and bleeding. He’s been dead for only a few seconds. He’s sprawled on his stomach, his body twisted at the hips, his left arm hooked in a U above his head. From a distance, from high above, he looks almost as if he is sleeping. It’s the blood leaking through his pink shirt that gives the crime away.

  Outside, the sun is setting on what is unarguably the most beautiful city on the planet. There are a lot of dead bodies in this town. Upstairs in the man’s room, an English guidebook recommends taking a boat out to San Michele to visit an entire island of them. Among the legions buried there are the composer Igor Stravinsky, the ballet director Sergei Diaghilev, and the poet Ezra Pound.

  This city is sinking and has been for centuries. Enjoy it while you can. The blood is pooling around the body. Screams are blaring from all directions. The killer is making a run for the exit.

  But none of this has happened yet.

  Part I

  Setting the Trap

  Chapter 1

  The plane from New York landed just before dawn, its wheels tapping blindly along the edges of the runway. Nick Brink awoke to economy-class clapping and slumped forward with a quiet animal groan. His neck muscles were wrenched. Two bruises pulsed above his left ear. Somewhere in the cramped confusion below his waist, his legs were completely numb. It was not a good idea to be over six feet tall on a nine-hour flight in a discount seat. But as the plane decelerated across Marco Polo Airport, all he really felt was lucky. For Nicholas Brink, at age twenty-five, had never been to Venice.

  No mythical city should be judged by its airport. Nick, born in a nonmythical city with a famous airport (“Dayton taught the world to fly”), knew not to expect too much from the view out his window. Still, through the dreary wash of tarmac grays, the few foreign words he spotted, USCITA and SICUREZZA and IMBARCO, read like promises of love and wild music. He had made it—or at least, he’d almost made it. The real Venice floated somewhere beyond this Gobi of concrete, and Nick had plenty of time to reach it. He wasn’t meeting Clay on the Grand Canal for another three hours. If by some miracle he got through the airport in record time, he might even catch the sunrise while standing on one of the city’s stone bridges.

  Nick slipped his feet into his shoes just as the plane rolled to a defeated stop forty yards from the terminal. Please, God, no, he prayed. After nine hours morgued in the same position, he felt it might be beyond his endurance to sit still for another ten seconds.

  “Folks, there’s a delay at the gate,” the pilot announced to the long tube of American sighs. “A very slight delay.”

  Nick watched helplessly as morning began to thaw on the tarmac. Eventually, a flicker of molten orange seeped around a distant tail wing. As the sunlight reached his window, he leaned his face into the glass. This is enough, he decided. It was midnight in New York.

  When they finally taxied to the gate, a bell dinged and seat belts clattered. Passengers rushed from their rows only to find themselves stuck once again. They clung to their spots in the aisle like insects to a strip of flypaper.

  “I’m here on a tour,” a beefy young man in front of Nick announced to no one in particular. He wore a red NASCAR sweatshirt and nylon shorts hiked up to expose a talcum-white tan line across his thighs. He hugged a bed pillow to his stomach, and in his palm lay two earplugs, yellow and gnarled like extracted teeth. “I’m meeting my cousin. We’re doing the whole bus package.” He turned around to make eye contact with trapped Nick. “Milan, Perugia, Florence, Siena. I’m forgetting some places. What’s that town with the famous wells? We’ve got two full days in Venice.” He volunteered this information with a manic urgency, as if he were afraid this might be his last opportunity to speak to another American.

  Nick listened to the guy ramble on about discount hotel rates and the tour’s fifty-seat luxury coach with its state-of-the-art AC. It wasn’t the ideal soundtrack for Nick’s first morning in a foreign country; he would have liked to grab the earplugs out of the guy’s hand and shove them in his own ears with a look of disdain. Instead, he nodded along dutifully and even improvised a few enthusiastic Oh, cools. Although Nick had lived in New York City for seven years, he’d never developed the talent for rudeness. He believed in friendliness the same way he believed in his youth: he thought both would save him. His youth and friendliness were master keys to all future rooms.

  “You’re going to have a wonderful time,” Nick assured him.

  “Yeah,” the young man conceded. “What about you? Is this a vacation?”

  Nick smiled as the aisle cleared ahead of them.

  “I hope not.”

  One delay bred others: first at passport control and then at baggage claim. There were no announcements this time, only the same group of passengers from his flight rearranged in a fidgety, classless clump by the conveyor belt. After forty minutes, the first-class bags began to rain down the ramp, each suitcase decorated with a neon-fuchsia PRIORITY tag. But Nick was in luck. Perhaps the Italian handlers had mistaken his neon-orange HEAVY, OVERWEIGHT tag as a special class all its own, because his silver-metal case tumbled down before the other economy flotsam. Nick anchored his shoe on the carousel’s lip and hoisted the HEAVY, OVERWEIGHT suitcase onto still land. The suitcase contained every last possession he owned.

  The spring air outside was moist from a recent rain and cut with fresh diesel exhaust. He wheeled his suitcase beyond the airport’s automatic doors, pausing to help corral an elderly Canadian couple’s runaway luggage. Near a huddle of smoking, bickering Italians, Nick veered off the walkway and rested his leather carry-on bag on his suitcase. He quickly dug through it for his passport and cell phone. Then he kept digging. He couldn’t find the map of Venice that Clay had given him, with their meeting point circled in red. In his jetlagged state, all he could recall was that it was a dock on the Grand Canal. A dock with two words to its name—or was it three?

  Nick patted his body for the folded square of paper, the panic building with each breath. He was in danger of botching up the plan on his very first morning in Venice. It didn’t help his search that most of the clothes he had on were borrowed, the pockets still as unfamiliar to him as rooms in a stranger’s house. Usually he’d wear jeans or sweats for such a long flight, but he’d wanted to enter Venice dressed like he bel
onged. He wore a pink button-down shirt underneath a billiard-green blazer that was already proving too hot for April in Italy. His twill pants were ocean blue and they felt heavy on his legs, as if he were indeed climbing out of an ocean in pants. The shoes were his, black alligator loafers that he’d saved up for months to buy and therefore rarely wore. Closet dust was still embedded between the scales.

  The expensive borrowed clothes might have been a mistake. Yesterday, in New York, as he dressed for the airport, he tried to shove his wallet in the back pocket of his pants, only to discover that it was sewn shut. Nick couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to rip the seam open or not. Ultimately he tore the stitch loose, but his ineptitude in operating a simple pair of pants hadn’t been a boost to his international confidence. Now here he was, frantically frisking himself down outside the airport. He fought the urge to toss the ridiculous, too-heavy blazer in the garbage. Who was he fooling by wearing it anyway?

  His hand struck a corner of folded paper: the map had fallen through a hole in the blazer’s lining. He tweezed it out with relief. Clay had circled a dock called Ca’ Rezzonico that sat halfway along the snaking Grand Canal. Nick couldn’t resist taking the word for a joyride, singsonging it aloud—“Ca’ Rezzonico. Ca’ Rezzzooooniccooo. Ca’ Reeeezzooooonicoooo”—each time exerting more gas on the vowels until they glided over the speed bumps of consonants. He had memorized only a handful of Italian expressions. Thankfully, Clay spoke Italian. Clay had once lived in Venice for eight months. His expertise would see them both through. “Ca’ Rezzoooonicccooooo!”

  “Ca’ Rezzonico?” a woman’s voice repeated, like a bird answering a call. Nick turned to find a thin middle-aged woman with gray-blond hair spilling out of a straw hat. The shadow of the brim fell over her eyes, leaving her teeth to do all the work of greeting. They were so square and bleach white that they might have been veneers. “Are you waiting for us?” she asked Nick.

  An American family stood behind her—a slim, freckled husband with a cable-knit sweater tied around his waist; a teenage daughter, husky and pretty in a yellow dress with a plaster arm cast covered in signatures; a dark-haired boy of ten or eleven who, of the whole family, possessed the coldest and wisest stare. They were all sensible packers, each with only a wafer of a suitcase at their side. They exuded the unburdened ease of the wealthy who could simply buy whatever they needed at their next destination. Poor people like Nick had to act like donkeys with their own stuff.

  “Did Giulio send you?” the older woman wanted to know.

  Nick offered an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. You have me confused for someone else.” He glanced around as if it were his job to locate promising substitutes.

  “Lynn!” the husband snapped at the same time the teenage girl whined, “Mom!” Lynn laughed. She clearly relished her role as the family clown. The husband lowered his voice. “I told you, Giulio isn’t sending anyone.”

  “But this young man called out our dock!” she replied. “Ca’ Rezzonico. And you said Giulio would send an American!” She reached for Nick’s arm and tugged on his bicep. Perhaps the billiard-green jacket reminded her of parking attendants back home.

  “And I told you, I canceled that palazzo. We’re renting the one right across the canal, remember? San Samuele is our dock.”

  “Oh.” Lynn released Nick’s arm. She stared up at him and coughed out a laugh. “I’m sorry. I really did think you had come for us.” Her eyes lingered on his face. Nick often attracted the curious attention of older women, as if he were forever being auditioned for some missing element in their lives: adopted son, sex partner, errand boy, devoted gay best friend.

  “It’s no problem,” Nick replied. “I wish I could help.”

  “I wish you could too!” Lynn cried theatrically, as if to compensate for the mix-up. “You’re so handsome!”

  Nick was still unaccustomed to being called handsome. The lanky, awkward Ohio teenager had clung to him through his early twenties. Handsomeness had only crept up on him in recent years. (His mother had proved uncharacteristically perceptive when she’d told him as a child, “Wait, just wait, the best ones take the longest.”) He balked at Lynn’s flattery. Blushing, he glanced at the rest of her family—husband, daughter, son—as if expecting each to confirm the compliment. Instead they gathered their belongings, offered frail waves of goodbye, and followed the signs down a covered walkway for water taxis.

  There were two ways into Venice: by bus or by boat. Even a first-timer like Nick knew that the princely mode of entry was by water. He watched the first-class passengers and their fuchsia-tagged luggage flutter down the same path the American family took. Clay had informed Nick that the bus was the cheap, reliable, and utterly romance-free option. “Take the bus and save money,” he had advised. Nick steered his heavy suitcase toward the bus stop across the road. He gripped his wallet in his back pocket to ensure it was still securely buried in the twill. He couldn’t afford to lose it; the wallet held the nine hundred dollars he’d converted into euros at JFK. It was the lion’s share of his spending money. The wallet also contained one other essential ingredient for his plans in Venice: his old business card.

  Nick reached the cement median in time to taste the burnt fuel of the bus he’d just missed. There was another bus slumped against the curb, its motor rumbling but with no driver at the wheel. Nick boarded the empty vehicle, stowed his carry-on and suitcase on the luggage rack, and took a seat by the window. The upholstery was a pattern of swirling confetti, and the air-conditioning vents produced a hot, whistling halitosis. Nick turned on his phone.

  When the screen brightened, he learned that he only had forty-five minutes to make it to Ca’ Rezzonico. He didn’t have his boyfriend’s new European cell number to warn him he might be late.

  A text appeared, sent several hours ago. It was from his sister.

  What?! You’re moving to Venice?

  That message was followed by variations on the theme.

  You’re kidding, right? What about NYC?

  Nicky???? Only his sister and Clay ever called him Nicky.

  I didn’t think anyone actually lived in Venice. I thought it was all tourists.

  Wait! Starting my shift, but do you mean Venice Beach, California?

  At the departure gate of JFK, Nick had fallen into a last-minute tailspin about leaving New York. He realized the danger of texting any of his Manhattan friends: they might convince him to stay. His entire plan for Italy hinged on never going back. So instead he’d decided to reach out to his older sister in Dayton. Margaret Brink was a safe source of sentimental contact. Plus, he figured that at least one family member should be notified of his whereabouts.

  The Brink siblings, all two of them, Margaret and Nicholas. Margaret was four years older. Through their vastly different childhoods, they had been close at some points, distant at others, like two radios scanning stations and occasionally landing on the same song. That happened with decreasing frequency as they both made their separate pilgrimages through their teens. Margaret, bleached blond and mahogany brown from weekly tanning-bed appointments, had the time of her life as a teenager—quite literally, she’d never top those flirtatious, attention-rich, alcohol-induced highs of her junior and senior years of high school. The world promised Margaret Brink far more than it could ever deliver, at least in their West Dayton suburb with its ranch houses decorated like country farms and its social jockeying modeled on the cosmopolitanism of nearby Cincinnati. All these years later, Nick could still picture his sister in her bikini, floating in their aboveground pool in the backyard, surrounded by the equally blond froth of her five best friends, Margaret’s hawk eyes trained on the absolutely acquirable prize of the shirtless boy with the gold neck chain posing on the pool ladder. There is another Brink in this cheerful summer tableau, the thirteen-year-old Nick, hiding in the shadows of the second-floor window that overlooked the bright-blue circle of hose water and teenage lust. His eyes were also trained on the lithe chest and scraggly-
muscled arms of the boy on the ladder. The world promised Nick nothing at that age but showed him glimpses of its finest possibilities.

  Nick had the good fortune of a miserable childhood. At eighteen, there was nothing to miss and very little holding him in place. He went east for college. No Brink had ever visited Nick in New York. If they had, they might not have recognized the extroverted young man who lived there.

  He could admit, in hindsight, that Margaret had been a decent sister. She’d watched over him, loved him at the right moments, and, perhaps most compassionately, left the secret grenades embedded inside him undisturbed. (All kids are afraid of the dark, but how many suspected while hiding under the covers that they might also be the monsters?) Nick and Margaret had never once spoken the obvious about his sexuality—she hadn’t asked, and he never offered. As routinely happens with siblings, their relationship flourished in separate cities. Now in their twenties, they volleyed lighthearted jokes or heavyhearted animal news items to each other over text. Nick had gone back to Dayton for three Christmases and two Thanksgivings in his seven years since moving away—each time staying for no more than forty-eight hours. The world had changed drastically in seven years. Surely Dayton was part of the world. Surely it too must have changed and wouldn’t care anymore whom he chose to have sex with. Yet Nick dreaded every return. For him, walking around as a gay man in his hometown was tantamount to being out on bail: he was free to go about his business, but everyone treated him with a heightened suspicion, as if unsure whether he had committed a crime.

  As he sat alone on the bus, it would have been a comfort to hear his sister’s astonished voice. “Venice, Italy? Nicky! You’re crazy! You can’t just move to Venice! Who does that?” It would have confirmed the audacity of the plan. Failing his family’s approval, Nick delighted in their shock; in it, he sensed a hidden admiration for his gift of survival. Unfortunately, Nick knew that Margaret wouldn’t answer her phone right now if he called her. Midway through her night shift as an emergency-room nurse at Dayton Valley Presbyterian, Margaret was elbow deep in “manslaughter”—that’s what she called anything wheeled into the emergency room between the hours of two and five in the morning; it was all men and all slaughter. Margaret was only twenty-nine, but she was already married to her second husband and tortured by her first set of stepkids. She’d been overlooked for a promotion at the hospital. She drove the same car she’d been given by their parents at sixteen. Life in Dayton had not been easy for the adult Margaret Brink.