A Secret Affair

Joe, ever the cynic, ever the pessimist, shot back, “Want to bet?”

“No, I don’t,” Bill replied swiftly. “You can never really tell what’s going to happen with the Serbs. They talk out of both sides of their mouths.”

“And shoot from the hip with both hands. Always fast on the draw, the fucking maniacs,” Joe exclaimed. “They started this war and they’re only going to end it when it suits them. When they get what they want.”

“Which is most of Bosnia, if not, indeed, all of it,” Bill said. “This war’s always been about territorial greed, as well as power, racial bigotry, and ethnic cleansing.”

“Greed, power, and hatred, a pretty potent combination,” Mike murmured.

The cameraman glanced at his plate of food, his expression glum. He grimaced and put down his fork; his nose curled in distaste. “The soup was watery and tasteless, now this meat is greasy and tasteless. Jeez, this damn curfew has been getting to me more than ever lately. I hate having to eat here every night. I wish we could find somewhere else.”

“There’s nowhere else to eat in Sarajevo, nowhere that’s any better, and you know we can’t go out at night anyway,” Bill reminded him. “Besides, it’s difficult driving without any streetlights.” Bill stopped, sat back in his chair, suddenly feeling worried about Mike and Joe. They rarely complained about anything; lately they had done nothing but complain to him. He couldn’t say he blamed them. Living conditions in Bosnia never improved, only got worse. He thought of the line he had heard when he first came to the Balkans at the outset of the conflict. It had been told to him by a reporter from a French news magazine and he had never forgotten it: A day in Bosnia is like a week anywhere else; a week is like a month, a month is like a year. And it was true. The country was wearing and wearying. It killed the soul, drained the spirit, and damaged the psyche. He was itching to get out himself, just as Mike and Joe were.

“It’s not much of a menu, I’ll grant you that,” Joe suddenly said, and laughed hollowly. “It’s always the same crummy food every night, that’s the problem.”

“Most people are starving in Bosnia,” Bill began and decided not to continue along these lines.

All of a sudden Mike sat up straighter and announced, “Personally, I aim to be in the good old U.S. of A. in November, come hell or high water. I plan to be out on Long Island for Thanksgiving if it’s the last thing I ever do. I want to be with my mom and dad, my kid brother and sister. It’s been too long since I’ve seen them. I’m certainly not going to be in this godforsaken place, that’s for sure.”

“I know what you mean, old buddy,” Joe said. “Me…I’d like to be in New Jersey for my turkey dinner. With my folks. I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving in Bosnia either. Screw that!” Joe threw Bill a pointed look, and finished with, “Let’s tell Jack Clayton we want out, Billy boy.”

“Sure, I’ll do it tomorrow. No problem. I’m positive our grateful and adoring news editor will understand your feelings, and Mike’s, and mine. He’ll tell us to hop a plane to Paris, any plane we can get, and to hell with the expense, and then board the first Concorde out of Paris to New York. Pronto, pronto. Sure, he’ll tell us to do that.”

“Sarcasm has never been your forte, Bill,” Mike remarked with an engaging grin, then went on: “But very seriously, talk to Jack tomorrow. Our rest period is long overdue. Originally, we were supposed to have it in July, then it got shifted to August, and finally it was canceled altogether. We haven’t been out of Bosnia, except for a few long weekends in Hungary, for three months. I happen to think that we’ve all reached the end of our individual bits of rope.”

“Could be we have. And you’re right, Mike, so is Joe. Our R & R has been postponed for too long now. We’re all edgy. Look, the peace talks are about to start in Dayton in October. That’s only a few days away. Things ought to be relatively quiet here during that period, so I can’t see that there would be any problems. Jack’ll just have to send in another news team, should anything serious erupt when we’re gone.”

“There could easily be trouble,” Mike remarked in a thoughtful tone. “Just because the peace talks are on doesn’t mean that the guns will be silent. Not here. Anything goes.”

“Only too true,” Joe agreed. “Let’s not hold our collective breath on that one.”

“I know Jack’s a tough news editor, but he is fair. He’ll agree to this. Don’t forget, we elected to stay when the NATO bombs started falling at the end of August. Jack was very appreciative that we did.” Bill paused, thought quickly, and made a sudden decision. “Let’s plan on getting out of here in a week. How does that sound, guys? Okay with you?”

Mike and Joe stared at him, dumbfounded. Then they grinned and exclaimed in unison, “Okay!”

CHAPTER TWO

Venice, November 1995

The light in the piazza was silvery, the sky leaden, frosty. A faint mist rising from the lagoon and the many canals swathed everything in a veil of gray on this cold winter’s afternoon.

Bill Fitzgerald walked slowly across St. Mark’s Square, not caring about the weather in the least. There had been too many abortive attempts on his part to get to Venice, and he was glad he had finally made it.

It was a relief to be here after life in the battlefields of Bosnia; also a relief that the tides and the winds were cooperating and Venice was not flooded, as it frequently was at this time of year. Even if it had been, he wouldn’t have cared about that either. The Venetians always managed very well when the city lay under water, so why shouldn’t he?

He had been coming here whenever possible for the past few years. It was relatively easy to get to Venice from most cities in Europe, which was where he invariably was, on foreign assignment for his network. And even after only a couple of days here he always felt considerably refreshed, lighter in spirit, and uplifted.

La Serenissima, the Venetians called it, this city of churches and palaces floating on water, blazing with color and liquid light, brimming with treasures of art and architecture. Bill thought it was one of the most intriguing and evocative places in the world, its aspects bound to delight even the most jaundiced eye.

On his first visit twelve years ago, he had spent a great deal of time in many of those churches and palaces, gazing at the breathtaking paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, and Canaletto. These masterpieces touched his soul with their incomparable beauty and, thereafter, the Venetian school of painting was one of his favorites.

He had always wished he could paint, but he was not in the least gifted in that respect. His only talent was with words.

“He’s kissed the Blarney Stone, that one,” his maternal grandmother, Bronagh Kelly, used to say when he was growing up. “True,” his mother would agree. “That’s his gift, a way with words. And he writes like an angel. We must remember that the pen is mightier than the sword.”

Bill was an only child. He had spent a lot of time with adults when he was young, and his lovely Irish grandmother, in particular, was a favorite of his. He had been especially attached to her.

When he was little she had held him spellbound with her stories of leprechauns, lucky shamrocks, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Bronagh had left Ireland with her parents and a younger brother when she was eight, and had grown up in Boston. It was here that she had met and married his grandfather, a lawyer named Kevin Kelly.

“I was born in 1905, and what a birth it was, Billy!” she would exclaim. “I came into this world at the stroke of midnight on the twelfth of June in the middle of the most violent thunderstorm,” she’d tell him. “And me darlin’ mama said it was a bad omen, that storm.” She always embellished the details of her birth with every retelling, obviously enjoying his rapt expression and widening eyes. “And indeed it’s been a stormy life I’ve lived ever since, Billy,” she would add, with a huge laugh, which led him to believe she had relished her stormy life.

His wife, Sylvie, had loved Grandma Bronagh as much as he had, and the two had become very close over the years. His grandmother had been a true Celt, spiritual, mystical, and a little fey. Sylvie had shared these traits, been very much like her in many ways.

His only regret, whenever he came back to Venice, was that he had not brought Sylvie here before she died. They had put it off and put it off, and suddenly, unexpectedly, it was too late. Sylvie was gone. Who could have known that she would die like that? In childbirth, of all things in this day and age. “Eclampsia” it was called; it began with seizures and ended in coma and death.

Losing Sylvie was the worst thing that ever happened to him. She had been too young to die, only twenty-six. His grief had overwhelmed him; he had been inconsolable for a long time. In the end, he had managed to come to grips with it, throwing himself into work in an effort to keep that grief in check and at bay.

As he went toward the Basilica, his thoughts were still centered on Sylvie. She had died in 1989; the baby, a little girl, had lived. She was called Helena, the name he and Sylvie had chosen. Now six years old, she was the spitting image of her mother, an adorable creature who entranced everyone she met.

Certainly she was a great joy to him. Whenever he felt depressed and disturbed by the rottenness of the world, he had only to conjure up her face and instantly he felt better. She made life worth living, his beautiful child.

A fleeting smile crossed Bill’s face, touched his eyes when he thought of her. Because his job as a foreign correspondent took him all over the world, she lived with his mother in New York. Fortunately, he saw her frequently and the time they spent together was genuinely meaningful. She was a good little girl, spirited, intelligent, and not too spoiled, although his mother did dote on her only grandchild.

He had just spent two weeks in Manhattan with them, after covering the start of the Bosnia peace talks in Ohio. He would go back again in December, to celebrate Christmas at his mother’s apartment in the East Sixties. When he wasn’t in the middle of a battlefield or covering a major story in some far-flung corner of the globe, Bill made a point of being with “my best girls,” as he called them. There was nowhere else he wanted to be, especially on important occasions and holidays.

But this week in Venice was his time for himself. He needed it badly, needed to put himself back together after his three-month stint in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bill felt diminished by the conflict he had witnessed in the Balkans, and he was depleted, weary of war, of the destruction and the killing.

He wanted to forget. Not that he ever really would forget any of it. Who could? But he might at least be able to diffuse some of those horrifying images, still so vivid, that had left such a terrible scar on his mind.

His best friend, Francis Peterson, a war correspondent for Time magazine, believed that none of the newsmen would ever be able to expunge the violent images of Bosnia. “They’re trapped in our minds like flies trapped in amber, there for all time,” Frankie kept saying, and Bill agreed with him. All of them had seen too much savagery; its imprint was indelible.

Francis and Bill had met at Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 1980, and they had been fast friends ever since. They were often covering the same wars, the same stories, but even when they were not, and were in different parts of the world, they stayed in constant touch.

Francis was currently assigned to Beirut, but he would be arriving in Venice in an hour or two, and they would spend a few days together. Later in the week, Frankie would fly to New York to celebrate his father’s seventieth birthday.

Bill was glad his old friend was able to join him. They were exceptionally close, shared the same interests and understood each other well, were usually on the same wavelength.

Suddenly Bill realized he was the only person in St. Mark’s Square, alone except for flocks of pigeons. The birds flew around him, soaring up above the Basilica. Usually the square was the center of animation in Venice, teeming with people, mostly tourists from all over the world. Now he was its solitary occupant, and as he glanced about it seemed odd to him, strangely surreal.

As he continued to walk, he became aware for the first time of the unique paving in the piazza. In the past when he had strolled here, there had been hundreds and hundreds of pairs of feet covering it, obviously the reason he had never noticed it before now.

His eyes followed the flow of the pattern: flat gray stones covering most of the square, balanced on either side by narrow white marble bands set in classical motifs. At once he was struck by the way the motifs directed the eye and the feet toward the Basilica. No accident, he thought, walking on. When he came to the church, he did not go inside. Instead, he turned right and went down the Piazzetta San Marco, which led to the water’s edge.

For a long time Bill stood looking out across the lagoon. Sky and sea merged to become a vast expanse of muted gray, which soon began to take on the look of dull chrome in the lowering afternoon light.

It was so peaceful here it was hard to believe that just across the Adriatic Sea a bloody war still raged. Nothing ever changes really, Bill thought as he turned away from the water at last. The world is the same as it’s always been, full of monsters, full of evil. We’ve learned nothing over the centuries. We’re no more civilized now than we were in the Dark Ages. Man’s monstrosities boggled his mind.

Hunching deeper into his trench coat, Bill Fitzgerald retraced his steps across the empty square. He began to hurry now as dusk descended, making for the Gritti Palace, where he always stayed. He loved its old-fashioned charm, comfort, and elegance.