While the attendants attempt to give first aid to Sollers, who squirms and makes horrible moaning noises, Kristeva takes the urn containing the testicles and leaves the room.
Bayard and Simon follow her.
She quickly crosses Piazza San Marco, cradling the urn in her arms. The night is still young and the square is packed with tourists, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, actors in eighteenth-century costumes pretending to duel with swords. Simon and Bayard push their way through the crowds so as not to lose her. She rushes down narrow alleyways, crosses bridges, does not turn around once. A man dressed as Harlequin grabs her by the waist to kiss her, but she emits a piercing cry, escapes his clutches like a small wild animal, and runs away carrying her urn. Crosses the Rialto. Bayard and Simon are not certain that she knows where she is going. From far off, in the sky, they hear fireworks exploding. Kristeva trips on a step and almost drops the urn. Her breath hangs in the air. It’s cold, and she has left her coat at the Doge’s Palace.
All the same, she does make it somewhere: to the basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, home, in her husband’s own words, to “the glorious heart of the Serenissima,” with Titian’s tomb and his red Assumption. At this time of night, the basilica is closed. But she doesn’t want to go inside.
It is chance that has brought her here.
She advances over the little bridge that straddles the Rio dei Frari and stops in the middle. She puts the urn on the stone ledge. Simon and Bayard are just behind her, but they dare not set foot on the bridge, nor climb the handful of steps to join her.
Kristeva listens to the murmur of the city, and her dark eyes stare down at the little waves formed by the nocturnal breeze. A fine rain wets her short hair.
From within her blouse, she takes a sheet of paper folded in four.
Bayard feels an urge to throw himself at her and tear the document from her hands, but Simon holds him back. She turns toward them and narrows her eyes, as though she has only just noticed their presence, as though she has only just learned of their existence, and glares at them with hatred, a cold look that petrifies Bayard, while she unfolds the page.
It is too dark to see what is written on it, but Simon thinks he can make out a few cramped letters. And there is definitely writing on both sides.
Slowly, calmly, Kristeva starts to rip it up.
As she does this, the increasingly small scraps fly off over the canal.
In the end, nothing remains but the black wind and the delicate sound of rain.
93
“But in your opinion, did she know or didn’t she?”
Bayard tries to understand.
Simon is perplexed.
It seems possible that Sollers failed to realize that the seventh function didn’t work. But Kristeva?
“Difficult to say. I’d have had to read the document.”
Why would she have betrayed her husband? And, from another perspective, why not use the function herself to compete?
Bayard says to Simon: “Maybe she was like us. Maybe she wanted to see if it worked before she tried it?”
Simon watches the crowd of tourists leaving Venice as if in slow motion. Bayard and he are waiting for the vaporetto with their little suitcases and, as Carnival is coming to an end, the line is long, with hordes of tourists heading to the train station and the airport. A vaporetto arrives, but it’s not the right one; they must wait a little longer.
Simon is pensive, and asks Bayard: “What is reality, for you?”
As Bayard obviously has no idea what he’s talking about, Simon tries to be more specific: “How do you know that you’re not in a novel? How do you know you are not living inside a work of fiction? How do you know that you’re real?”
Bayard looks at Simon with genuine curiosity and replies indulgently: “Are you stupid or what? Reality is what we live, that’s all.”
Their vaporetto arrives, and as it draws alongside, Bayard pats Simon’s shoulder: “Don’t ask yourself so many questions, son.”
The vessel is boarded in a disorderly scramble, the vaporetto guys herding the stupid tourists who climb on board so clumsily, with their bags and their children.
When it is Simon’s turn to get in the boat, the head-count man brings down a metal barrier just behind his back. Stuck on the dock, Bayard tries to protest, but the Italian replies indifferently: “Tutto esaurito.”
Bayard tells Simon to wait for him at the next stop. Simon waves goodbye, as a joke.
The vaporetto moves away. Bayard lights a cigarette. Behind him, he hears raised voices. He turns around and sees two Japanese men yelling at each other. Intrigued, he goes over to them. One of the Japanese men says to him, in French: “Your friend has just been abducted.”
It takes Bayard a second or two to process this information.
A second or two, no more, then he switches into cop mode and asks the only question a cop must ask: “Why?”
The second Japanese man says: “Because he won, the day before yesterday.”
The Italian he beat is a very powerful Neapolitan politician, and he did not take defeat well. Bayard knows about the assault after the party at the Ca’ Rezzonico. The Japanese men explain: the Neapolitan sent some henchmen to beat Simon up so he couldn’t compete, because he was afraid of him. Now that he has lost the duel, he wants vengeance.
Bayard watches the vanishing vaporetto. He quickly analyzes the situation, then looks around: he sees the bronze statue of a sort of general with a thick mustache, he sees the façade of the Hotel Danieli, he sees boats moored at the dock. He sees a gondolier on his gondola, waiting for the tourists.
He jumps in the gondola, along with the Japanese men. The gondolier does not seem overly surprised and welcomes them by singing to himself in Italian, but Bayard tells him:
“Follow that vaporetto!”
The gondolier pretends not to understand, so Bayard takes out a wad of lire and the gondolier starts to scull.
The vaporetto is a good three hundred yards ahead, and in 1981 there are no mobile phones.
The gondolier is surprised. It’s strange, he says: that vaporetto is not going the right way. It’s headed toward the island of Murano.
The vaporetto has been hijacked.
On board, Simon has not realized what is happening, since almost all the passengers are tourists with no idea where they should be going, and apart from two or three Italians who protest to the driver, no one notices that they are headed the wrong way. Besides, Italians complaining loudly is nothing new; the passengers simply think it is part of the local color. The vaporetto docks at Murano.
In the distance, Bayard’s gondola is attempting to catch up. Bayard and the Japanese men exhort the gondolier to go faster, and they yell Simon’s name to warn him, but they are too far away and Simon has no reason to pay them any attention.
But he does suddenly feel the point of a knife in his back and hears a voice behind him say: “Prego.” He understands that he must get off the boat. He obeys. The tourists, in a rush to catch their plane, do not see the knife, and the vaporetto is on its way again.
Simon stands on the dock. He feels almost certain that the men behind him are the same three who attacked him in masks the other night.
They enter one of the glassblowers’ workshops that open directly onto the docks. Inside, a craftsman is kneading a piece of molten glass just removed from the oven, and Simon watches, fascinated, as the bubble of glass is blown, stretched, modeled, taking shape with only a few touches of a plunger as a little rearing horse.
Next to the oven stands a balding, paunchy man in a mismatched suit. Simon recognizes him; his opponent from La Fenice.
“Benvenuto!”
Simon faces the Neapolitan, surrounded by the three thugs. The glassblower continues shaping his little horses unperturbed.