Love and Death in Venice: A Caulfield, Sheridan Mystery

By Bonnie Braendlin

While visiting professors Ariadne Caulfield and Judith Sheridan are recovering from romantic losses in Venice, Italy, new loves enter their lives. Judith meets Suzanne Hanks and Ariadne falls for a wealthy art dealer. But then . . . Brutal, dangerous, and corrupt, Tarek Duka is a thug intent on finding Rachele—a woman who does not want to be found. When Tarek discovers her working at the hotel where Ariadne and Judith are staying, their paths cross—and the professors’ summer changes drastically. Before they know it, Judith and Ariadne find themselves dealing with the darker side of the once-gilded city, where romance and fantasy are the veneer while the Mafia, sex-traffickers, and death dance in the shadows to avoid the light. Love and Death in Venice is the first novel in a series of adventures for professors Caulfield and Sheridan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Jan 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781634138758

Book preview

them.

Acknowledgments

I WANT TO THANK those who gave the manuscript careful and helpful readings and advice, in particular Valle and Al Brokes, JoAnne Butler, Janet McCann, Susan Scrivner, Nishith Singh, and Priscilla Yotter. Thanks also to the courteous, helpful, dedicated staff at Langdon Street Press.

Many thanks to Wolfgang Adolph for his excellent computer troubleshooting.

And most of all, thanks to Jeanne Ruppert for her expert reading and judicious editing, and for her unfailing support and friendship.

I, of course, accept responsibility for any errors in the text.

Chapter

1

"WHERE IS SHE, puttana? Tarek Duka repeatedly hissed the insistent question into Chibuogu’s bruised ear. Grasping the small, thin Nigerian woman’s arm with one hand, Tarek slapped her with the other. Where is she?"

When his heavily accented Italian, the only language they shared, reached her numbed brain, Chibuogu closed her dark eyes and shifted her aching head from side to side in a pathetic gesture of helplessness. Through swollen lips she managed to whisper an unacceptable answer, I don’t know. I don’t . . . Another blow to her head silenced her.

As Tarek lessened his grip she marshaled the little strength left in her legs and staggered toward the door. But instantly he was again upon her, wrapping his sinewy arm around her waist, dragging her back into the tiny room. As he pushed her up against the wall, the hooded snake tattoo on his left arm flexed its muscle.

I must find Earta, he snarled, and you know where she is. Tell me or I’ll kill you.

I don’t know anything . . . Her voice cracked and she emitted a low moan as Tarek’s fist bashed into her midsection and she slumped onto the ratty carpet.

Grasping her shoulders Tarek hauled her up and propped her back up against the wall. Listen to me, he commanded. You escaped with Earta from Roma. Is she here too?

Her pain eclipsed his voice but the words Earta and Roma unearthed suppressed images from that horrible time . . . the dank, ugly, two-room apartment housing ten women . . . thin mattresses strewn on the wooden floors . . . the stinking toilet on the floor below. She groaned under the weight of horrific memories. Nights standing on the streets or highways . . . dressed in a skimpy skirt and bra . . . freezing in the cold . . . going with men to squalid hotels or parked cars . . . being beaten by her captors if she didn’t bring in enough money or if she tried to escape.

A blow to her chest doubled her over.

Tarek jerked her up and pressed her against the wall, his breath singeing her ear. Where is Earta? Where? He punctuated each word with a blow to her body. Where? Where?

Separated from the other rescued women when she’d been taken to the mainland across from Venice to work in a Porto Marghera factory, she had no idea where they were now. But through the pain she dimly realized she would have to say something or die. Venezia? crept out of her swollen lips, more of a question than a surety.

Venezia? Tarek echoed. Where in Venezia?

She shook her head and lowered it to her chest as her aching, exhausted body began to crumple.

Where?

Tarek grabbed her under her arms and struggled to lift her mutilated body but Chibuogu slipped from his grasp and collapsed. As his anger flared, Tarek kicked her in the stomach and when she doubled over, he punched her head, smashing it like a soccer ball against the wall. For a moment her eyes widened, staring directly at him, and then the pupils turned upward as her head rolled to one side and dropped to her shoulder. A thin line of blood trickled down from under her closely cut curly black hair and dripped onto her cheek.

Gioia! Are you there?

Tarek jumped away from his victim when he heard a woman’s voice outside the door on which she was knocking. He looked again at the recumbent Chibuogu, limp and motionless as a rag doll. Cursing under his breath, he leaped out a window onto the dirt patch behind the rooming house, hoisted himself over a low fence, and took off running down the narrow alleyway.

Gioia? Alessandra DeSoto inserted her key, opened the door, and entered the room. "Dio mio!" She knelt beside the injured woman and, feeling a faint pulse, hauled out her telefonino and called for an ambulanza. She then rang Commissario Marcello Rossi at the Venezia police station. Quickly explaining the situation, she begged him to meet her at the Ospedale Civile. I’m having Gioia taken there, she told him, and I’ll stay with her as long as I can. She has no one else.

❧

Ever since the Nigerian woman had arrived at the rescue shelter, Alessandra had looked after her, helping her change her name from Chibuogu, a name no one in Italy could pronounce correctly, to Gioia. From protected by God to joy, in celebration of her new-found, but now short-lived, happiness. Whoever did this to her, Alessandra said to Marcello hours later in the hall outside Gioia’s hospital room, "could be one or more of those bastardi who brought her to Italy and made her a sex slave. Her hazel eyes filled with tears, her brow furrowed in anger. Prego, Marcello. You must find out who they are."

The Commissario’s six-foot height was tall for an Italian but he was not that much taller than Alessandra, who looked directly into his tawny eyes, a shade darker than her own. He spoke softly to calm her down. Look, Alessandra, I understand your concern, given the brutality of this crime, and I, too, want to find the culprits. But it happened in Mestre, on the mainland, out of my jurisdiction. You should have had her taken to a hospital there and called in the local police.

Her blonde bobbed hair swung from side to side as she shook her head. Don’t be absurd, Marcello! You know as well as I do that the Mestre police would have given only a cursory investigation to the beating of an immigrant, especially one they would assume to be a prostitute. And I know in my heart that the Syndicate is behind the attack somehow. So the local police would have closed the case as soon as they realized it also.

Be careful, Alessandra, Marcello warned her. You know how dangerous it is to speculate in that direction. Seeing her frown, he clasped both her hands in his. But of course I will do all I can to discover who is responsible for this brutal beating.

"Grazie, Marcello, grazie mille."

As Marcello stepped aside to allow a nurse to enter the patient’s room, he caught a glimpse of Gioia’s bandaged head and body, anchored by long tubes to bedside machines. What is the prognosis? he asked Alessandra as the door closed behind the nurse.

Not good at this point. She’s in a coma and the doctor says it’s too early to tell if she’ll come out of it.

Is she African? Marcello asked, having noted her dark skin.

Yes, Alessandra said. One of the many women brought here from Nigeria by slave traders to be prostitutes. Almost as many as those trafficked from Eastern Europe. We’ve been supervising Gioia’s progress toward citizenship for two years now. She wiped her eyes. "Prego, prego, Marcello, I’m begging you to find whoever did this to her."

Marcello tried to reassure her although he had his doubts, knowing sex trafficking to be both clandestine and protected by groups like the Syndicate. Of course I will try, Alessandra.

❧

Tarek darted through the Mestre city streets, anger mingling with fear in his feverish brain. Back in the dingy room where the Syndicate had sequestered him, he paced back and forth, tugging at his long stringy hair and rubbing his cobra tattoo as if to rouse it to life. After he had learned that the Nigerian woman was also in Mestre, he had followed her in hopes she might lead him to Earta. But during the few days he had stalked her, she had gone nowhere except to the factory where she worked, her rooming house, a grocery in the neighborhood, and once to Venezia on a bus. And he had seen her with no one else although he suspected that she might have contacted Earta when he wasn’t around. He wondered if he been stupid to attack her, especially since she might die from her injuries. Maybe she would have given up Earta if he had bribed rather than beaten her. But he had no money for bribes.

Now and then he paused to glance out the dirty window down into the narrow street below. The person who had found her would contact the police, who would see her as a prostitute, which she probably still was, and so they wouldn’t take the beating very seriously, but still . . . What if she died? Even the murder of a whore would start an investigation. He swigged the last swallow of grappa from a bottle on the rickety table, stumbling a bit as he continued to pace.

Then Tarek almost howled as another possibility struck him.

If that puttana didn’t die . . . then she could identify him to the police. Worse yet, his bosses might find out what he had done and they were ruthless about punishing those who initiated criminal actions on their own. He cursed again and threw the empty grappa bottle across the room where it bounced against his dirty, tattered mattress lying on the floor. He sank down on a rickety wooden chair and buried his head in his folded arms on the table beside it. Think . . . have to think. Was Earta really in Venezia? He wanted desperately to believe the black bitch but had she lied just to stop the beating?

Minutes passed before he raised his head and pounded the table with his fist. He had to find Earta and he had to get money for both of them to escape to a better life together elsewhere. He stood up and flexed his muscular arms, making the cobra twitch its flat fanged head. Pulling his cap down over his forehead he set out for the bus to carry him over the Ponte della Libertà into Venezia. He was determined to find Earta or die trying.

Chapter

2

"JUDITH, LOOK, there’s Venice!" Ariadne Caulfield exclaimed as she peered out the train window across the aquamarine water of the laguna, shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight. It’s even more beautiful than I remembered it! She and her companion, Judith Sheridan, seated behind her, her forehead pressed against the window, ignored the right-hand view of industrialized Mestre, its utilitarian apartment buildings and Porto Marghera factories creating an ugly contrast to its glamorous sister city.

Venice is even prettier than in the guidebook photos, Judith said. And so is the lagoon. Behind her rimless glasses her blue-green eyes darted between the skyline of the graceful city that seemed to float on the sparkling water and the boats of various types and sizes skirting around one another between tall gray pilings tied together in groups of threes and spaced out to mark the traffic lanes in the laguna.

Ariadne pointed out the islands of Burano and Torcello in the distance and, closer to the train, Murano, site of the famed blown-glass factories, and San Michele, the city’s cemetery, ringed by cypress trees. The cypress is a symbol of death in Italy, she explained and felt a stab of grief, remembering the death by drowning of her husband, André Duvalier, three years earlier, in the Adriatic Sea near the Venetian Lido. His accident had happened one morning when he had gone sailing alone while she was teaching at the American International College. She had been paralyzed with shock and grief for months until Judith had coaxed her into therapy, which helped to ease her return to teaching at Rutherford College in Coowahchobee, Florida, where both women were professors.

When an opportunity arose this year to return to Venice to teach another summer session at the American college, Ariadne had persuaded her friend to accompany her. Judith, whose partner Zoe had recently left her for a new job and life in California, was not enthusiastic about the venture but finally agreed. Because there were no more teaching positions in English open at the college there, she had arranged to work at a center for rescued sex slaves, one recommended by the refuge house she volunteered at in nearby Tallahassee. En route to Venice the two women had spent several days sightseeing in Paris, followed by this train ride through the Swiss Alps and across the Veneto through Mestre to the fabled city, with its panorama of bell towers and domes now fanned out before their eyes like a fairytale vista.

As the train neared the Santa Lucia station and Judith turned toward the adjacent seat to retrieve her belongings, she noticed a man perched on the armrest, his trench coat laid over her handbag. When she pushed the coat aside, she saw him fumbling with its clasp. What the hell, she sputtered as he withdrew his hand, took up his coat, and, as if nothing untoward had happened, walked down the aisle toward the door, where eager passengers, suitcases in hand, were waiting to get off. Judith called out for them to stop him, but he squeezed past the group and, as the train came to a stop, stepped down to the platform and hurried away.

Why are you shouting? Ariadne asked. Do you know that man?

That jerk tried to open my bag. Judith’s voice quivered with disbelief and rising anger.

I’ll get the conductor, Ariadne said, heading for the door, but returning in a couple of minutes. I can’t find him. Come on, let’s get our suitcases and see if he’s out on the platform.

As Judith stood up and reached for her handbag, she knocked it off the seat, spilling the contents across the aisle. Damn. She grabbed the bag and began gathering the scattered items and sticking them into it. Ariadne helped her retrieve them, kneeling down to check under the seats.

Come, come. Go, go! The conductor came towards them, waving his hands toward the end of the car.

As they followed him up the aisle, Ariadne tried to explain about the pickpocket. When she admitted the man had exited the train at least five minutes earlier, the conductor said, Report him to train office, madam, with a shrug suggesting the futility of that action.

At the inner door of the train car they stopped to pick up their larger suitcases, stowed in a rack there. Ariadne claimed the only one remaining in the rack as Judith exclaimed, Oh shit, what now? My suitcase is gone!

They rushed to the outer door and looked up and down the platform, where crowds were emerging from their train and another across the way, all heading for the station, but they could not spot Judith’s suitcase from dozens of others looking just like it.

Help us, please, Ariadne said to the train conductor, who was waiting for them outside the train. Somebody’s taken one of our suitcases.

This time the conductor escorted them to the railroad office. Ariadne pulled her suitcase with one hand and with the other steered Judith along, trying to comfort her with the hope that someone might have taken hers by mistake and would turn it in when they realized it wasn’t theirs.

Why the hell, Judith thought, did I agree to come here?

❧

Having filled out official forms detailing the incident of the missing suitcase for the train officials and the Carabinieri, who promised to locate it as soon as possible, and having phoned the college to report why they were being delayed, Ariadne and Judith emerged two hours later from the hectic activity in the train station and paused to get their bearings. Dozens of people milled about or sat on a wide staircase watching boat traffic bustle up and down the Grand Canal. Swift water taxis dodged the slower broad, flat barges carrying luggage, stacks of water bottles, fresh fruits and vegetables, and other foodstuffs to the hotels and restaurants downstream. These boats skillfully avoided the larger, slower vaporetti, official city waterbuses swimming like voracious beetles from one station to another, disgorging departing passengers before swallowing up new ones. A couple of gondolas dipped and swayed in the wakes of the bigger, faster craft.

A cacophony of sounds assailed Ariadne and Judith: people chattering in several languages, workmen on the boats shouting to one another over the noise of their motors, and seagulls exchanging sharp cries as they swooped down to steal