Page 2 of The Collector
“Surely you must have been thinking about something,” she insisted.
“I probably shouldn’t say it aloud. The old ones might never recover.”
The bench upon which they were seated was a few paces from the doorway of the Casa Israelitica di Riposo, a rest home for aged members of Venice’s dwindling Jewish community.
“Our future address,” remarked Chiara, and dragged the tip of her finger through the platinum-colored hair at Gabriel’s temple. It was longer than he had worn it in many years. “Some of us sooner than others.”
“Will you visit me?”
“Every day.”
“And what about them?”
Gabriel directed his gaze toward the center of the broad square, where Irene and Raphael were engaged in a hard-fought contest of some sort with several other children from thesestiere. The apartment buildings behind them, the tallest in Venice, were awash with the sienna light of the declining sun.
“What on earth is the point of the game?” asked Chiara.
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
The competition involved a ball and thecampo’s ancient wellhead, but otherwise its rules and scoring system were, to a nonparticipant,indecipherable. Irene seemed to be clinging to a narrow advantage, though her twin brother had organized a furious counterattack among the other players. The boy had been cursed with Gabriel’s face and with his unusually green eyes. He also possessed an aptitude for mathematics and recently had begun working with a private tutor. Irene, a climate alarmist who feared that Venice would soon be swallowed by the sea, had decided that Raphael should use his gifts to save the planet. She had yet to choose a career for herself. For now, she enjoyed nothing more than tormenting her father.
An errant kick sent the ball bounding toward the doorway of the Casa. Gabriel hastened to his feet and with a deft flick of his foot sent the ball back into play. Then, after acknowledging the torpid applause of a heavily armed Carabinieri sentry, he turned to face the seven bas-relief panels of the ghetto’s Holocaust memorial. It was dedicated to the 243 Venetian Jews—including twenty-nine residents of the convalescent home—who were arrested in December 1943, interned in concentration camps, and later deported to Auschwitz. Among them was Adolfo Ottolenghi, the chief rabbi of Venice, who was murdered in September 1944.
The current leader of the Jewish community, Rabbi Jacob Zolli, was a descendant of Sephardic Jews from Andalusia who were expelled from Spain in 1492. His daughter was at that moment seated on a bench in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, watching over her two young children. Like the rabbi’s famous son-in-law, she was a former officer of Israel’s secret intelligence service. She now served as the general manager of the Tiepolo Restoration Company, the most prominent such enterprise in the Veneto. Gabriel, an art conservator of international renown, was the director of the firm’s paintings department. Which meant that, for all intents and purposes, he worked for his wife.
“What are you thinking now?” she asked.
He was wondering, not for the first time, whether his mother had noticed the arrival of several thousand Italian Jews at Auschwitz beginning in the terrible autumn of 1943. Like many survivors of the camps, she had refused to talk about the nightmare world into which she had been cast. Instead, she had recorded her testimony on a few pages of onionskin and locked it away in the file rooms of Yad Vashem. Tormented by the past—and by an abiding guilt over having survived—she had been incapable of showing her only child genuine affection for fear he might be taken from her. She had bequeathed to him her ability to paint, her Berlin-accented German, and perhaps a modicum of her physical courage. And then she had left him. With each passing year, Gabriel’s memories of her grew more diffuse. She was a distant figure standing before an easel, a bandage on her left forearm, her back forever turned. That was the reason Gabriel had momentarily detached himself from his wife and children. He had been trying, without success, to see his mother’s face.
“I was thinking,” he answered, glancing at his wristwatch, “that we ought to be leaving soon.”
“And miss the end of the game? I wouldn’t dream of it. Besides,” added Chiara, “your girlfriend’s concert doesn’t begin until eight.”
It was the annual black-tie gala to benefit the Venice Preservation Society, the London-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the care and restoration of the city’s fragile art and architecture. Gabriel had prevailed upon the renowned Swiss violinist Anna Rolfe, with whom he had once had a brief romantic entanglement, to appear at the fundraiser. She had dined the previous evening at the Allon family’s luxurious four-bedroompianonobiledellaloggiaoverlooking the Grand Canal. Gabriel was only pleased that his wife, who had expertly prepared and served the meal, was once again speaking to him.
She stared straight ahead, a Mona Lisa smile on her face, as he returned to the bench. “Now is the point in the conversation,” she saidevenly, “when you remind me that the world’s most famous violinist is no longer your girlfriend.”
“I didn’t think it was necessary.”
“It is.”
“She isn’t.”
Chiara dug a thumbnail into the back of his hand. “And you were never in love with her.”
“Never,” vowed Gabriel.
Chiara released the pressure and gently massaged the crescent-shaped indentation in his skin. “She’s bewitched your children. Irene informed me this morning that she’d like to begin studying the violin.”
“She’s a charmer, our Anna.”
“She’s a train wreck.”
“But an extremely talented one.” Gabriel had attended Anna’s rehearsal earlier that afternoon at Teatro La Fenice, Venice’s historic opera house. He had never heard her play so well.
“It’s funny,” said Chiara, “but she’s not as pretty in person as she is on the covers of her CDs. I suppose photographers use special filters when shooting older women.”
“That was beneath you.”
