The Handbook

Tanya 06:58
[Photo: a fishmonger’s marble slab heaped with small, greenish crabs, some still moving]

Tanya 06:58
Moeche. Soft-shell crabs from the lagoon. They’re only soft for a few days, right after they molt, and they fry them alive in batter. The fishmonger says it’s the most Venetian thing there is.

Samantha 07:20
It’s 7am. We’re in a hotel in Florence and M is asleep. Why are you sending me crabs

Tanya 07:21
Because nobody in this city is safe, and I thought you should know.

Samantha 07:21
Who is she

Tanya 07:22
Who says there’s a she

Samantha 07:22
You sent me crabs at 7am. There’s a she

Tanya 07:24
Tour guide. Met her on the train. Red umbrella. She’s going to walk me off my feet at ten.

Samantha 07:31
M’s awake. She says: Rule One?

Tanya 07:31
Tell M I wrote it.

---

The Rialto fish market at a quarter to seven in the morning is the best thing Tanya has seen in Italy, and she has seen a woman tied to a nine-hundred-year-old well.

It’s a long open hall of stone arches beside the Grand Canal, and the boats are still coming in low in the water, and men in rubber aprons are throwing crates of ice up onto the quay. Everything is wet. Everything shines. Sardines heaped like spilled coins, cuttlefish weeping ink into their own trays, a swordfish’s head propped on its sword like a drunk asleep on his arm, pink scampi still feebly waving. Grandmothers in quilted vests prod the fish and argue in Venetian, which sounds like Italian that has been left out in the rain.

And at one stall, in a shallow tray, a heap of small greenish crabs, still moving.

“Moeche,” says the fishmonger, a man of sixty with forearms like hams and a gold tooth. “Soft. Only now, end of the season.” He mimes a crab climbing out of its own shell. “They change the jacket. For one day, two days, they are naked.” He grins. “We catch them naked.”

“And then what?”

“Egg. Flour. Hot oil.” He mimes dropping one into a pan. “Alive. Is the only way.”

Tanya looks at the crabs for some time. Small and soft and defenseless for two days, between one shell and the next. There’s probably a lesson in that, and she decides firmly that she’s on vacation and refuses to learn it before breakfast.

She takes a photograph to annoy Samantha and drinks a coffee standing up at a bar by the bridge, with a pastry full of custard, and watches the city wake: delivery boats, garbage boats, a boat full of washing machines, a boat full of nuns, a man rowing a gondola full of nothing and singing to himself, off key.

She has three hours before the tour and an itch under her skin that coffee isn’t touching.

---

At four minutes to ten, Campo San Polo is full of pigeons, children on scooters, nine Americans in sensible shoes, a Danish couple in matching linen and two elderly sisters from Lyon with their own folding stools. Tanya stands at the back by the well-head in a white shirt and jeans and the best walking shoes she owns, which aren’t very good.

At ten exactly a red umbrella goes up over the crowd like a flag over a battlefield, and Chiara is under it: blue cotton dress, curls pinned up with the same pencil, talking before she’s stopped walking. “Good morning, I’m Chiara. Venice is sinking, the pigeons are not native, and I’m not allowed to tell you where the good restaurants are, because the bad ones belong to my cousins. If you can’t see the umbrella, you’re in the wrong city.”

Her eyes go over the group, counting heads. They reach the back. The well-head. The white shirt.

The umbrella dips an inch. Then she says, “Andiamo,” and sets off across the campo at a speed that makes one of the Americans say whoa.

She does walk very fast. By the third bridge Tanya, who once ran up four flights of hospital stairs with a crash bag, is doing the half-trot of a woman late for a train. It’s a good tour, which is annoying: alleys too narrow for two people to pass, bridges with no railings, a fig tree growing out of a wall, plague doctors, cisterns, the foundry that gave the world the word ghetto.

“Tintoretto,” Chiara says, walking backward over a bridge with the umbrella aloft, “made little wax figures and hung them on strings in a box with a candle.” Her eyes find the back of the group. “So he could see bodies from every side. Twisting. Falling. Held up from above. Bodies that couldn’t help how they hung.” A tiny pause. “Somebody on a train told me that yesterday. I already knew it, obviously. I’m licensed.”

Tanya, at the back, keeps her face very straight.

---

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco is a vast dim box full of Tintorettos from floor to ceiling, so dark that coming in out of the white campo is like walking into a cave where everyone is having a great many feelings at once. There’s a rack of square hand mirrors by the door.

“The ceiling is the best part,” Chiara tells them, handing them out. “But you’ll break your neck. So hold the mirror flat at your waist and look down into it, and there’s the ceiling.”

The Americans wander the great hall staring into their mirrors and bumping gently into one another like people at a séance.

Chiara gives Tanya her mirror last, and holds the other side of it one second longer than she needs to.

Tanya looks down into it. The ceiling swims up at her, dark and gold and writhing, bodies falling and reaching and twisting in the light. And at the edge of the frame, small and upside down, a woman in a blue dress stands under a painting of Moses striking a rock, talking to nobody about Moses at all, looking at Tanya’s reflection.

Tanya tilts the mirror until the guide’s face is in the center of the glass. Then she does something she’s been wanting to do since Mestre. She lifts one finger and lays it, very lightly, on the reflected mouth.

Across the hall, Chiara’s lips part. She loses her place in the sentence about Moses, and has to start it again.

---

The tour ends at noon on a bridge near the Rialto, with applause and a twenty-euro note pressed into Chiara’s hand by an American woman who says you were so fun. Tanya waits on the bridge, watching a barge full of lettuces go under. Chiara comes and leans on the parapet an arm’s length away, with the umbrella between them.

“That was cheating,” she says. “With the mirror.”

“I’m on vacation. Cheating’s included.”

“You came. I say ten o’clock to everybody. Most people take the card and I never see them again. They decide they’d rather see Botticelli.”

“Everybody in a Botticelli is standing very still waiting to be looked at,” says Tanya. “I prefer it when something’s happening.”

Chiara turns her head and looks at her properly, the way she looked at the Dutch girls’ hands.

“There’s a bacaro behind the fish market,” she says. “I can tell you that one, because it doesn’t belong to my cousins. Best cicchetti in San Polo. Very bad spritz.” A breath. “Buy me a glass of wine?”

---

The bacaro is a dark wooden room with a counter and a wall of bottles and men in work boots eating small things on bread, standing up. Tanya buys two spritzes, the bitter red Venetian kind, and a plate of cicchetti: salt cod beaten to a cream on toast, sardines in sweet-sour onions with pine nuts and raisins, half a boiled egg with an anchovy curled on top. The barman, who has an enormous mustache and the manner of a bishop, says something to Chiara that makes her swat at him.

“What did he say?”

“That I don’t usually bring the customers.” She takes the plate. “Out. The quay’s nicer.”

They sit on the edge of the quay with their legs hanging over the slow green water and eat with their fingers. The moeche come in a paper cone, hot, battered, crisp outside and soft and sweet inside and tasting of the lagoon. Tanya eats one in two bites and closes her eyes.

“Good?”

“Obscene.”

“They have to be alive when they go in. Otherwise they’re bitter.” Chiara licks oil off her thumb. “Everything good in this city is a little bit cruel.”

Tanya doesn’t say anything. Most people will tell you exactly what they want if you give them a drink and a long enough silence. She learned that in triage, and then again, more usefully, in a red foyer.

Chiara lasts about four minutes.

She tells it in pieces, circling. A boyfriend in Bologna she once asked to hold her wrists down and not let go. “He did it for about thirty seconds. Then he let go and asked if it was okay, like a waiter asking about your meal. Then he said sorry three times and I had to make him feel better.” A girl kissed at a party in Padova for science, and once more afterward, not for science. And then, looking at the water, with the color coming up her throat:

“Being found. That’s what I think about. Hiding somewhere in the dark, and somebody looking for me. I can hear them coming and there’s nowhere left to run, and I can’t scream, because I’m not allowed. And they find me.” She breathes out. “And then it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“To change my mind. Not that I would. But that I couldn’t. That’s the whole thing.” She frowns at her knees. “I’ve read the words for it. I don’t know if they’re me. I’ve never done any of it.”

“Nobody knows before they’ve tried it,” says Tanya. “Words are overrated. I say that as a woman who reads on trains.”

Chiara laughs, and something unclenches in her shoulders.

But Tanya isn’t really listening to the words. She’s doing what she did for three years in a cubicle with a curtain around it, with patients who swore the pain was a three while their knuckles went white on the bed rail: watching the body tell her what the mouth won’t. People lie with their mouths all the time. Bodies are terrible liars.

So she tries things. Lightly, looking out at the canal, in the voice she’d use for the weather.

“Some people like to be held still. Not tied, to start with. Just a hand on the back of the neck. Not allowed to move.”

Chiara’s breath catches—one quick intake, held. Her pupils, already wide in the shade, open further. Under the white cotton her nipples have drawn up into two hard points.

“Some people like to be told what a good girl they are.”

A small polite smile. The breath goes on evenly. Not that, then. Or not yet.

“And some people,” says Tanya, “like to be looked at. When they can’t do anything about it. When they’re on display, and everybody in the room knows exactly how wet they are.”

This time it isn’t subtle. The color comes out of Chiara’s collar and keeps climbing, into her jaw, to the tips of her ears and the little silver ring through the top of the left one. A fine dew of sweat breaks out by the mole at the corner of her mouth. She presses her thighs together on the stone, and then, realizing she’s done it, tries to undo it, and can’t quite manage. Her breathing has gone shallow and high.

Display: yes, very much. Being held still: yes. Praise: not yet. Pain, she hasn’t tried, so she tries it. She reaches over without asking and takes the rim of the girl’s left ear between finger and thumb, just below the silver ring, and pinches. Not hard. Hard enough.

Chiara’s lips part. Her eyes close. Her whole body leans about a centimeter toward the pinch.

Tanya lets go.

“What was that?” Chiara says, hoarsely.

“Research.”

Chiara stares at her. Then, without a word, she takes something wrapped in tissue paper out of her canvas tote and unwraps it on her knee.

A black velvet oval, plain, two eye holes. On the inside, where a mouth would go, a small black button on a short stem.

“My friend Marta makes them,” she says. “In a workshop in Dorsoduro. I went at eight this morning. Before the tour. I didn’t know if you’d come. I bought it anyway.” She doesn’t look up. “Nobody ever makes me wait for anything, you know. I’m the one who walks fast.”

It’s the most erotic object anyone has ever handed Tanya, and she has been handed a great many things.

“There’s only one rule,” she says. “If you want anything to stop, anything at all, at any moment, you say a word. Pick one.”

Chiara looks out at the canal. “Acqua alta. The flood. When the sirens go and everyone gets out.”

“And if you can’t speak, you let that fall. Open your mouth and let it drop, and the second I see your face, everything stops, and I come to you.”

“If I let it fall, it stops.” Chiara swallows. “And you come.”

“Every time.” Tanya stands and holds out a hand to pull her up. “Half past ten tonight. I’ll send you the address. Now go away. I have shopping to do.”

“Shopping for what?”

Tanya just smiles, and Chiara’s lips part, and she goes.

---

Nine hours, two luggage straps, and nothing else to tie anyone up with.

The first thing she buys, at a pharmacy near the Rialto, is a pair of blunt-ended scissors, the rounded kind that will slide under a rope against bare skin without nicking anybody. She’ll keep them the whole trip. Then condoms and water-based lube. Then she sets off with her hands in her pockets and an eye that has stopped seeing shops and started seeing equipment.

Venice turns out to be a superb city for a woman with no kit and a professional imagination. A glass shop full of twisted Murano candlesticks in poison colors: absolutely not. Glass is a hard limit; she has picked enough of it out of enough people at three in the morning. A butcher trussing a rolled loin with twine: she admires his knots and thinks too thin, it’ll cut. A shop selling gondoliers’ straw boaters with red ribbons, which she considers purely for the comedy, and resists.

Then, down a calle behind San Polo so narrow she has to turn sideways to pass a man with a dog, a dim little shop that sells nothing but passementerie: tassels and fringes and braid and rope for the curtains of palazzi, in every color a curtain has ever wanted to be. On a wooden roller by the counter, a coil of silk cord, deep oxblood, thick as her little finger, twisted tight and soft as a cat.

“For the curtains,” says the old woman behind the counter. “To tie them back.”

Tanya runs a length through her fist. It doesn’t burn. It doesn’t stretch. She knots it and hauls on the knot, and it holds, and she picks it apart with one tug and it lets go without a fight. That’s more than you can say for a silk scarf, which cinches tighter the more you pull and has to be cut off at three in the morning while somebody cries. She has cut off a great many silk scarves.

“Four meters,” she says. “In two pieces, please.”

Outside, on a bridge, she lays the coils on the warm stone parapet with the tassels hanging in the shop window behind them, and photographs them.

Tanya 15:12
[Photo: two coils of oxblood silk cord on a stone parapet, tassels hanging in a shop window behind]

Tanya 15:12
Guess what this is for.

Samantha 15:30
Curtains

Tanya 15:31
Technically correct. Where are you?

Samantha 15:31
Uffizi. M wanted to see the Botticellis

Tanya 15:31
Of course she did.

Tanya 15:32
Hold your wrists out. Right there. Together. As if you’re waiting for something.

Samantha 15:32
I’m in front of the Birth of Venus. There are about 400 people here

Tanya 15:32
Then do it in front of 400 people.

Samantha 15:35
I did it

Tanya 15:35
Good girl. Now imagine this around them. Two turns and a cinch. The other end around a bedpost, so your hands are up over your head and nowhere near anything you’d like to cover.

Tanya 15:36
Everyone in a Botticelli is standing very still waiting to be looked at. So are you.

Samantha 15:38
M says: wrists. She says obviously wrists.

Samantha 15:38
She also says I’ve gone red and the guard is staring at me

Tanya 15:39
Out of ten?

Samantha 15:39
7

Samantha 15:40
8

Tanya 15:40
Nobody’s ten.

She puts the phone away and finds she’s grinning at a pigeon. Venetian pigeons, she decides, have seen absolutely everything, and are bored by it.

Behind the Frari, in a street of shops that sell rosaries and holy pictures, there’s a shop that sells nothing but candles for churches: tall altar candles in racks, boxes of votive lights, and fat ivory pillar candles with rounded tops, smooth as soap, as thick as her wrist. Tanya chooses one with great care. Plain wax, unscented, undyed, no seams, no drips, the top polished round. It will never be lit. She pays a woman who looks as if she has been selling candles to nuns for fifty years, and the woman wraps it in brown paper and says Dio la benedica, God bless you, and Tanya says grazie with a perfectly straight face and has to stand in the street outside for a minute before she can walk.

On the way back she buys a packet of baicoli, the thin dry cookies Venetian sailors used to take to sea, and a bottle of very cold white from a wine shop where the man asks if it’s for a celebration, and she says, “In a manner of speaking.”

---

In daylight the locanda is even better. The palazzo is crumbling gently into its canal and the hot water takes four minutes to arrive, but it’s the piano nobile, the floor where the family lived when there was a family, and the rooms open off one long central hall—seventy feet of red-and-cream terrazzo running from the stairs to a balcony over the canal, with doors on both sides like chapels off a nave. Guest rooms. A breakfast room. A little salon with a piano nobody plays.

It’s the first week of June, midweek, and three rooms are empty. The other four are let to a German couple who go to bed at nine. Signora Bon, who owns the place, goes home to Giudecca at ten and leaves her guests a key to the water door.

Tanya puts the blunt scissors on the table beside the four-poster, handle out, where her hand could find them in the dark. She lays the evening out on the coverlet the way she’d lay out a dressing tray: two coils of oxblood cord, the luggage straps, an ivory church candle, condoms, lube, a bottle of water, the baicoli. It’s the smallest kit she’s worked with in twelve years. She has never in her life been this excited by a bedspread.

Then she runs a bath in the enormous chipped clawfoot tub and lies in it with the window open to the canal, and does not touch herself. She keeps her hands on the rim where she can see them, and lies there for twenty minutes wanting, with her nipples tight and the water lapping at the crease of her thighs and her pulse going slow and heavy between her legs, and it’s the most delicious twenty minutes she’s spent in a week. Nobody gets to deny Tanya anything. So, very occasionally, as a treat, she does it herself.

---

At half past ten, when Signora Bon has gone and the Germans’ light has gone out under their door, Tanya goes down and leaves the water door on the latch, and at twenty to eleven Chiara comes up the stairs from it.

She’s in a short black dress, and her hair is down. It changes her face. There’s a great deal of it, dark and springy and alive, and she looks less like a guide and more like something a guide would warn you about. She has the tissue-paper package in one hand.

Tanya waits at the top of the stairs in the black lace-up one-piece from the auction, and boots, and the whistle on its ribbon, and nothing else. On the console table beside her: a single glass of very cold white wine and one candle.

Chiara stops on the top step and looks at the one-piece for a long time. Her mouth opens slightly.

“Rule One,” says Tanya, and hands her the glass.

Chiara drinks it in four long swallows with her eyes on Tanya over the rim. “Is Rule One always the same?”

“So far.” Tanya sets the glass down. “Take the dress off.”

There’s a pause, long enough for Tanya to watch the girl understand that it has started, and that from here on there’s only the word, or the game. Then Chiara reaches behind her for the zip and lets the black dress slide down and pool on the terrazzo, and steps out of it.

She isn’t wearing anything under it.

She stands at the top of the palazzo stairs in the candlelight, and Tanya takes a long, slow inventory, because she’s earned it.

Narrow-shouldered, with a dancer’s waist and then, absurdly, those heavy round breasts, full and high and swaying when she breathes, the nipples broad and the color of milky coffee and already puckered tight. A sunburned V at her throat where the lanyard sits, the pale ghost of a watch strap on her left wrist, and every other inch of her as pale as the inside of a shell. Hard round calves, the long muscles of her thighs flexing as she shifts her weight. On the jut of her right hip bone, a tattoo no bigger than a thumbprint: the winged lion of Saint Mark, slightly blurred, the kind of thing you get in Mestre at eighteen on a dare. Tanya wants her mouth on it so badly her jaw aches. The hair between the girl’s legs is dark and trimmed close, and her thighs are pressed together, and her hands don’t know where to go.

“Nice lion,” says Tanya.

“It was a bet,” says Chiara, scarlet.

“Did you win?”

“I lost. That’s why I have the lion.”

“Hands behind your back. Until I want them.”

They go behind her back. It pushes her breasts out toward Tanya, and she knows it does, and she flushes all the way down to them. Tanya watches the flush the way she’d watch a monitor: it starts at the breastbone and spreads in a blotchy pink lace across the tops of her breasts, and the nipples crinkle tighter still. Her pulse is visible in the side of her neck. Being looked at, Tanya thinks. I was right.

“Here’s the game,” she says. “You’ve got a hundred seconds to hide. Anywhere on this floor except the two doors with shoes outside them. Not the stairs. Not the balcony. If I can’t find you in ten minutes, you win.”

“What do I win?”

“Dinner anywhere you like tomorrow. And I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“And if you find me?”

Tanya steps close enough that the girl has to tip her chin up to hold her eyes. She takes the tissue paper from Chiara’s hand and unwraps the velvet oval and holds it up between them.

“Then it’s too late,” she says. “Until three.”

Chiara’s breath goes out of her in a long, shaky stream.

“Open.”

Chiara opens her mouth, and Tanya presses the mask to her face. The velvet covers eyes and nose and lips, and Chiara’s teeth close on the button inside—Tanya feels it through her palm, a small definite click of enamel on wood. She takes her hand away, and the mask stays on, held by nothing in the world but a woman’s own bite.

It’s extraordinary. Tanya has put a hundred gags on a hundred women and never seen anything like it. The face is simply gone—the gap in the teeth, the licensed guide, every expression the girl owns—replaced by a blank black oval as smooth and sightless as a river stone, with two dark living eyes in it. And below it the naked body, perfectly human and perfectly legible, flushing and trembling and breathing fast through its nose. She can’t speak. She can’t negotiate. She can’t ask if everything’s all right with the meal. All she can do is be looked at.

“Dio,” says Tanya softly, which is the only appropriate Italian she knows, and the eyes in the velvet go very wide.

She puts the whistle to her lips. “A hundred,” she says around it. “Go.”

And blows.

---

The girl runs. Bare feet slapping away down the long dark hall, and gone.

Tanya turns to the wall and counts aloud. English to fifty. Then, without deciding to, French—cinquante et un, cinquante-deux—the way she always does when she’s turned on. Nobody at the Labyrinth knows she does that, because nobody has ever been close enough at the right moment to hear her.

Behind her a door closes very softly. Another. A floorboard.

Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. Cent.

She turns around.

The hall is dark, seventy feet of it, going away to the tall windows at the canal end, where the light off the water comes through the glass in pale shifting bars. Doors on both sides, half open, half shut.

She pulls off her boots and leaves them at the top of the stairs, and leaves the candle. She once walked a hundred-yard corridor at the Labyrinth in a power cut with forty frightened guests behind her; she knows how to move through a building by sound and by air.

An empty guest room, the bed stripped: the air in it still. The breakfast room, its tables laid for the morning with little jars of jam: nothing under the tables, nothing behind the curtains. She stands in the dark and listens to the house. The canal. A motorboat, far off. Through a wall, the German husband snoring like a man sawing a very small log. And under it all, so faint she almost misses it, the sound she knows better than her own name: somebody who has been told not to make a sound, breathing hard through her nose, trying to slow it down and failing.

Tanya smiles in the dark, and feels herself go wet.

She doesn’t hurry. She goes back into the hall and lets the sound find her. Right side. Toward the water. It grows very slightly louder as she walks, and then it stops. The girl has heard her coming, and is holding her breath.

The last door on the right is the little salon, with the piano under its dust sheet. The door is open a hand’s width. Tanya goes in.

Tall windows onto the canal, floor to ceiling, hung with long curtains of thin silk faded almost to white. The moon is up, and the canal throws its light up through the silk. And behind the third curtain, pressed back into the deep stone sill, outlined against the moonlit glass as clearly as one of Tintoretto’s wax figures in its lit box, is a small, naked, curly-headed shape, hands still clasped obediently behind its back, an oval for a face.

She hasn’t realized. She can’t see her own silhouette. She thinks she’s hidden.

Tanya stands in the middle of the room and looks at her for a long time, because it’s beautiful, and because she can: the heavy breasts in outline, the rise and fall of them, the curve of the belly, the thighs clamped together. Then she walks up to the curtain and stops on the other side of the silk, close enough that her breath must move it. The shape goes completely still.

“Found you,” says Tanya, through the silk.

The shape doesn’t move. But it’s trembling, curls and shoulders shivering, breath coming high and fast through the nose.

Tanya lays her palm flat on the silk at the height of the girl’s breastbone. Through the fabric the skin is hot, and the heart under it is going like a drum in a parade. She draws her hand down slowly over the curve of one breast and finds the nipple, hard as a knuckle through the thin silk, and rolls it between finger and thumb, and pinches.

A sound comes from behind the velvet: a high sealed cry, like someone shouting into a pillow. The whole curtain shivers.

“You didn’t know I could see you,” Tanya says conversationally. “Did you. You’ve been standing here with the moon behind you, every inch of you lit up, for anybody who walked in. If this were the club, there’d be a crowd at that door by now, with drinks, watching the little Venetian who thinks she’s invisible.” She pinches harder, and the sound comes again. “Would you like that? A crowd?”

Behind the silk, very slightly, the oval nods.

Tanya draws her hand lower. Over the soft belly, which jumps. Down between the thighs, which are pressed so hard together they’re shaking, and she lays her palm over the mound through the curtain and rocks the heel of her hand, slowly, and feels it: the heat of her, and then the faintest damp coming through the old silk. A beginning.

“Oh, darling,” says Tanya. “That’s a start. Give me half an hour and Signora Bon is going to have to wash her curtains.”

The shape sags against the glass. Tanya draws the curtain back.

---

She takes her by the wrist, the way you take the wrist of someone who might faint, and walks her down the dark hall to the bedroom. The girl comes quick and stumbling, her free hand still behind her back as if she’s forgotten she’s allowed to move it, the black oval turned toward Tanya the whole way.

In the bedroom six candles are lit, and the four-poster stands in the middle of the room like an altar in a church nobody goes to any more.

“Face the post. Arms around it.”

The girl wraps her arms around the post at the foot of the bed, a column of dark carved wood as thick as her thigh, and Tanya ties her wrists together on the far side with the first coil of cord: two turns and a cinch, firm, nothing that will slip. She’s hugging the post now, with her cheek against the carved grapes and her breasts squeezed either side of it, and her back and her ass and the long pale backs of her thighs turned to the room.

“Spread your feet. Wider.”

Wider.

Tanya steps back and looks. The candlelight goes gold over her skin. Her ass is round and high and perfectly pale, untouched, and between her spread thighs her lips are flushed darker than the rest of her and beginning to swell open, and there’s a shine on them now that catches the candles.

“I do love a red ass,” Tanya says, to the room in general. “It’s my weakness. Some women like flowers.”

She lays her palm on the right cheek. Just lays it there, warm. Lets her feel it, and wait.

Then she lifts it, and brings it down.

The crack goes off the high ceiling like a dropped tray. The girl jolts against the post, the sound comes out around the button high and stifled and shocked, and the mask stays on. Tanya watches the jaw clench to hold it.

“I’ll count for you,” she says, “since you can’t. In French. It’s prettier, and you can’t argue with it. Un.”

The left cheek. The girl jumps. The old bed creaks.

“Deux.”

The right again. The first handprint is already coming up, pink and clear, the fingers spread.

“Trois. Quatre.”

She builds it slowly. Each one lands, spreads and blooms before the next arrives. Low on the cheeks; then the tender crease where ass meets thigh, which brings the girl up on her toes squealing into the velvet; then higher again, and back. The pink goes rose and the rose goes a deep even glowing red, hot under Tanya’s palm when she rests it between strokes, and her own palm is stinging and she loves it, and the backs of her own thighs are slippery under the one-piece. Somewhere around quinze the girl’s hips start to move. Not away from the hand. Into it. Tanya sees the exact stroke where it happens: the moment she stops flinching and starts offering.

So she tries something else. On seize she takes a fistful of the dark curls at the nape of the girl’s neck and pulls her head back.

It’s wrong at once. The whole body goes rigid in the wrong way, braced instead of open; the hips stop pushing back; the breath through the nose turns short and careful, a patient’s breath before an injection.

Tanya lets go of the hair instantly and lays her palm flat between the girl’s shoulder blades instead, warm and heavy and still, pinning her to the post. Not the hair. Noted. Within three strokes the hips are pushing back again, harder than before. You don’t get it right the first time with anybody. You get it right by paying attention.

“Vingt,” says Tanya, and stops.

The girl hangs on the bedpost, sobbing great breaths through her nose, scarlet from the small of her back to the tops of her thighs. Heat comes off her like a radiator.

Tanya picks up her phone. “I’m going to take a photo. Okay?”

The oval turns toward her. A pause. Then a single nod, and the girl turns her face away into the carved wood and presses it there. Not my face. As clear as if she’d said it.

Tanya takes two. In the second, the girl has pushed her scarlet ass out toward the lens, just a little, without being told.

---

Tanya kneels behind her and puts both hands on the burning cheeks, and the girl jerks and cries into the mask, and Tanya spreads her gently and holds her open, and looks. She smells of salt and heat and the musk of a woman who has been wet for an hour.

When Tanya’s thumb drifts toward the tight pucker between the cheeks, the girl clenches, hard, and goes braced in that same wrong way. Tanya moves her thumb down, between her legs, and feels the whole body unclench and sag gratefully back toward her. Not there either. Not tonight. She files it.

“Look at the state of you,” she murmurs. “And we’ve barely started.”

She draws one finger down between the girl’s thighs from behind, from her opening up to her clit and back. Slowly. Barely pressing. The girl’s knees go, and for a second the only thing holding her up is the cord around the post.

“Stand up. I didn’t say you could kneel.”

She stands, thighs shaking.

“And that’s five for kneeling.”

Tanya takes one of the luggage straps off the coverlet and doubles it in her fist. The black webbing lands across the backs of both thighs, low, where the hand never went—a flat, wide, hot bar of sting, completely different from a palm—and the girl goes up on her toes against the post and squeals into the velvet. Un. The bed creaks. Deux. She dances on the terrazzo, as far as the cord will let her. Trois. Quatre. By the fifth there are five neat dark-pink stripes across the backs of her thighs below the handprints, and she has stopped dancing, and is standing with her feet wide and her scarlet ass pushed back toward the room, shaking, waiting for more.

“Good,” says Tanya, and drops the strap.

Again: one finger, up through the slick to the hard little bud of her clit, around it once, and away. The girl makes a sound behind the velvet with a whole sentence in it.

“Your boyfriend in Bologna,” says Tanya pleasantly, “should be standing in that doorway right now, taking notes.”

She slides one finger into her, and when the girl pushes back for more, a second, a knuckle at a time, into tight, wet, clenching heat. The girl goes up on her toes with her back arched and the bed groaning, and the sound she makes around the button is the loudest yet. Tanya crooks her fingers and finds the place and presses, steady, while her other hand comes around the girl’s hip and finds her clit from the front and circles it, slow, slow, and feels the hood slide and the little knot under it swell.

The girl comes apart almost at once. Tanya feels it gathering—the hips stuttering, the inside of her fluttering hard around Tanya’s fingers, the breath going high and broken behind the velvet.

She takes both hands away.

The girl screams through the mask. Her hips jerk after the hands, chasing them, and find nothing, and she hangs on the bedpost red and spread and clenching on air, shaking from her scalp to her heels.

“Not yet,” says Tanya.

She walks around the post to where she can see the black oval pressed against the wood, and the two dark eyes in it, swimming.

“You told me nobody ever makes you wait,” she says gently. “Now somebody has.” She lays one fingertip on the velvet where the girl’s lips would be, and waits, and reads her.

The pupils in the eyeholes are blown black. Sweat shines along her spine and in the crease under each heavy breast. Her nipples, pressed against the carved wood, are so hard they look painful. Between her legs her clit has come right up out of its hood, swollen and dark and slick, and Tanya can see it twitch with her pulse, and a slow bright drop of her running down the inside of one thigh. The jaw doesn’t unlock. The velvet doesn’t fall. The girl lifts her chin a fraction off the post and pushes her hips back toward the room, toward the hand that stopped.

Everything in that body is saying more. Tanya has never needed a word from a woman whose body is talking this loudly.

---

She unties her from the post and lays her on her back in the middle of the dark coverlet, and ties her wrists above her head to the carved headboard with the second coil of cord, and the girl’s breasts lift with it, full and flushed and tipped with dark tight nipples. She lies there in the candlelight with her hair everywhere and her knees together and her blank black face turned up, and Tanya stands at the foot of the bed and looks at her until, very slowly and without being told, the knees fall open.

“Good girl.”

It’s the first time Tanya has said it to her, and she watches it land. Not much—a flicker in the belly—but more than on the quay.

She climbs onto the bed between the spread thighs. She bends first to the right hip and puts her open mouth on the little winged lion and bites it, gently, and feels the whole girl shudder under her teeth. Then she pushes the knees wider, and lowers her head, and licks her: one long slow stroke with the flat of her tongue, from her opening to her clit. She tastes of salt and copper and something faintly sweet, and she is soaking.

The girl’s hips come off the bed.

Tanya pins them with a forearm across the belly and does it again. And again. She takes her time. She learns her the way she learns everyone, with her eyes as much as her mouth: what makes the thighs jump, what makes the breath catch, what drags that sealed, desperate sound out from behind the velvet. Broad slow strokes make the belly ripple; the tip of the tongue flicked fast makes her toes curl. And when Tanya talks to her, low, with her mouth against her—I can see everything, darling, every inch of you, you’re dripping on the coverlet, you’re shining—she feels the clit under her tongue swell harder and the hips begin to rock. So she keeps talking. She pushes her tongue inside her and draws it out, circles the clit with the tip, closes her lips around it and sucks, very softly, and the girl’s thighs clamp around her head, her heels drum on the coverlet, her back bows against the cord.

And at the very edge, Tanya stops.

She lifts her head. Her chin is wet. The girl is sobbing behind the mask, her whole body straining up after a mouth that isn’t there.

Three times. Four. A little further each time, the stop a little later, until on the fourth the girl actually starts to come—the first long clench of it rolling up through her body—and Tanya lifts her mouth away right in the middle of it, and holds the thighs open, and watches her pussy pulse helplessly on nothing in the candlelight. The girl screams into the velvet. And still, still, the mask doesn’t fall.

Tanya kneels up between her thighs and looks down at her: the sweat shining between her breasts, the trembling belly, the swollen, open sex, the black blank face.

She takes the mask by the edge. “Open.”

The teeth unlock. Tanya lifts the velvet away.

Underneath, Chiara’s face is unrecognizable—flushed dark red from hairline to throat, wet with tears and sweat, lips swollen and parted, a small red dent on the inside of her lower lip where she’s been biting down on the button for an hour. Her eyes are black and enormous.

“You may speak,” says Tanya.

What comes out is Venetian. An avalanche of it, fast and broken and shameless. Ti prego, ti prego, ti prego, fammi venire—please, please, please, let me come, I can’t, I can’t any more. And then English on top of it, hoarse: “Please, Tanya, please, I’ll do anything, please let me—”

Tanya reaches for the candle.

She unwraps it from its brown paper where the girl can see, and rolls a condom down over the rounded ivory top, and slicks it, and Chiara’s eyes go even wider.

“Madonna,” she whispers. “That’s from the Frari—”

“It’s never been lit.”

“Tanya—”

Tanya sets the rounded top against her and pushes it into her, slowly, all the way, thick and smooth and unyielding, and Chiara’s back arches off the coverlet and the cord creaks on the headboard and whatever she was going to say about the Frari turns into a long, raw, wordless sound. Tanya fucks her with it, slow and deep, twisting the fat wax pillar a little on every stroke, with her thumb on the girl’s clit, and looks down into her face from a foot away while it comes apart.

“Now,” she says.

Chiara comes so hard the headboard bangs the wall. She comes with her eyes open and her mouth open and her voice going up into the eighteen-foot ceiling, nothing between her teeth now, nothing to stop it: a long, raw, astonished cry that turns into Tanya’s name and then into nothing. She clamps on the candle in long hard waves, over and over, wetness running down over Tanya’s wrist, and Tanya keeps her thumb moving through every one of them until the girl is gasping and twisting away from it and laughing, actually laughing, and only then does she ease off.

Somewhere through the wall, the German stops snoring.

They both freeze. Then Chiara starts to giggle helplessly, tied to the bed, and Tanya puts a hand over her mouth, and Chiara bites it.

---

Tanya doesn’t untie her.

She gets off the bed and unlaces the one-piece slowly, eyelet by eyelet, all the way down the front, while the girl watches with her wrists over her head and her hair stuck to her face. She peels it off her shoulders and steps out of it. She has wanted this since the bath, and before that since the bridge, and before that, if she’s honest, since a plastic cup of prosecco at Mestre. She climbs back onto the bed and kneels up over the girl’s face, one knee each side of the curly head, so close that Chiara can see how wet she is, and smell it.

Chiara looks up at her. Slowly, as she works out what’s about to happen, the gap in her teeth shows.

“You’ve never,” says Tanya.

“Never.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. God. Green. Green—”

Tanya lowers herself onto her mouth.

The girl is clumsy. Of course she is—eager and astonished, licking in quick wet flutters, too fast and everywhere and nowhere, making small greedy noises into her. Tanya takes hold of the carved headboard with both hands and rocks, and teaches her. Slower. There. No—there. Flat. Like that. Oh, like that. The guide learns very fast, the way she presumably learned the dates of the doges, and inside a minute she’s found the rhythm, inside two she’s found the place, and her tongue is working Tanya’s clit in long, devoted strokes, moaning into her, her wrists still tied above her head and her hips lifting off the bed as if it were her being fucked.

Tanya grinds down on that mouth with her head thrown back and the candlelight on her breasts and the carved grapes in her fists, and lets it come.

She hasn’t let anybody do this to her in four days. Longer, honestly. Not like this—without a towel over her arm, without a guest to keep an eye on, without anyone watching to see it was done properly. Just a woman from the lagoon with a dent in her lip, underneath her in the dark, eating her like she’s starving, as if this was what she’d been hiding from in the moonlight all along.

It comes up through Tanya from the soles of her feet. She bears down hard and comes on the girl’s open mouth with a long low sound that isn’t English or French or anything, until she’s emptied out and trembling, with her forehead against the carved wood.

Underneath her, muffled, Chiara is laughing again, shakily and smugly, into the inside of her thigh.

---

Afterward there’s water. There’s always water. Tanya unties the girl’s wrists and rubs the blood back into them, checking each fingertip for color the way she was taught on a ward in Whitechapel. She holds a glass to her lips. She works arnica into the scarlet ass in slow circles while Chiara lies face down, purring into the coverlet. Chiara eats four baicoli and gets crumbs everywhere and says her grandmother used to dunk them in hot chocolate, and she will never, ever be able to look her grandmother in the eye again. Or set foot in the Frari. Or, possibly, light a candle.

Tanya pulls the coverlet over them both and holds her.

This part she’s good at. Sometimes she thinks she’s better at it than at all the rest: the water, the holding, slow fingers in damp curls, a low voice going back over what happened, what was good, where it hurts and whether it’s the good kind. She has done it in the White Room at the Labyrinth at three in the morning more times than she can count. She knows exactly how long a body takes to come down.

Chiara’s shaking stops at about half past two. She lies with her head on Tanya’s shoulder and her hand over the whistle, which Tanya never took off.

“Can I stay?” she murmurs.

“Until three.”

A pause. Chiara’s fingers move on the whistle.

“You’re counting,” she says.

Tanya doesn’t answer.

Chiara lifts her head and looks at her, sleepy and flushed and frowning, and then past her, at the watch on the wrist on the pillow. Tanya has looked at that watch four times since the shaking stopped.

“You’ve been counting since I stopped shaking,” Chiara says. Not hurt. Curious, the way she was curious about a dark painting in a dark room. “I could feel you doing it.”

“Habit.”

“From where?”

Outside, a boat goes slowly down the canal. Its wake slaps the water door below, once, twice, three times, and goes quiet.

At three o’clock exactly, Tanya calls her a water taxi.

---

She stands on the balcony at the end of the long hall in the locanda’s thin bathrobe and watches the little wooden boat go away down the black canal, with its one lamp at the stern and a curly head in the back, not looking around.

Then she goes back and lies down in the warm hollow the girl left, which smells of her, and finds that she isn’t remotely sleepy. She’s wide awake and humming like a struck glass. She has come once, and she wants about eleven more.

So she runs another bath, and lies in the chipped tub with one foot up on the faucet, and slides two fingers into herself, and thinks about a black velvet oval held on by a woman’s own teeth. She comes twice, quickly, with the back of her other hand pressed against her mouth, and the second time she isn’t thinking about Chiara at all but about a white collar, and a lock, and the back seat of a car. She lies in the cooling water considering that, and decides she isn’t going to consider it.

Then she dries off and opens the photograph and looks at it for a long time, and opens the thread with Samantha and writes it the way she used to write up a case: what happened, in order, without adjectives.

Then she reads it back, and puts the adjectives in.

She sends it at 03:22, one message at a time, and doesn’t wait for an answer.

Last, she takes out the oxblood notebook, turns to the second page, and writes:

Rule Two. New is the rarest thing in the building. Don’t waste it, and don’t let anyone else waste it either.

And then, smaller, in a hand she doesn’t quite recognize:

Including you.

She crosses it out neatly, one line, so it can still be read.

On the bedside table, next to the scissors, there’s a postcard from the fish market: an old black-and-white photograph of a woman in a moretta, her face a blank oval of velvet over a lace collar. She turns it over and writes, small, to fit:

S. Venice. The stationery is criminal. You’d weep at the vaporetto signage. Met a woman who bites buttons. Ate a crab that was alive about forty seconds before I did. Everyone got a glass of wine first. T.

And sideways down the edge, because she’s run out of room:

P.S. Is she staying awake?

She’ll mail it in the morning. It will take three weeks to arrive. That seems, at half past three in an eighty-euro room in Venice, exactly the right speed for everything.