Venetian Masks (15 page)

He held the mask to his face and looked out through the eyeholes, thinking.

J
EFF
had taken heed of the warnings on every travel website he’d visited, and he had a record of the stolen credit card number, plus the international phone number for reporting it stolen. In fact, he had this information recorded twice, once in his phone and once on a piece of paper hidden in his suitcase. So all he had to do was press a few buttons and the card would be canceled. Whatever charges Cleve had already racked up would come out of the bank’s pocket; Jeff’s maximum liability was fifty bucks.

But he didn’t call, at least not right away.

Instead he showered and changed into some of the clothes he’d laundered and that were finally dry. He drank some tea and ate a bit of steak and bread left over from the night before. He checked his e-mail—nothing from Kyle—and sent his mother a short message that didn’t mention Cleve or the theft at all. And then he sat at the kitchen table, staring at the note and the mask. Considering.

Cleve could have stolen a lot more than he did. The phone, the watch, the Kindle, probably some other stuff as well. Maybe it wasn’t worth a fortune, but certainly it was worth more than a few hundred euros and a MasterCard that would get canceled pretty quickly. Cleve was no idiot, and the watch and other things had been in plain sight. So why hadn’t he taken them too?

After a lot of thought, Jeff came up with two explanations. One possibility was that Cleve was in too big of a hurry to bother fencing items. This made some sense, especially given the obvious unease he’d been feeling the entire previous day. Of course, Jeff had no idea what might have caused Cleve’s desperation.

The other possibility was less likely. Under that scenario, Cleve needed money badly but cared too much for Jeff to cause him serious loss. Jeff
wanted
to believe this. His heart told him that what he felt for Cleve was real, and that Cleve reciprocated. But hearts could lie and so could Cleve, and Jeff didn’t know what the hell to believe anymore.

It was also possible, he realized, that both explanations were true. Or neither. He wished he read mysteries instead of romance novels; maybe then he’d be better at this.

“All right,” he said out loud, because sometimes he thought better that way, “what
do
I know?”

He knew Cleve had taken about four hundred euros and a credit card. He knew he’d paid the guy two hundred before that, so Cleve might have other cash on hand as well. He knew Cleve had a shady past. He knew Cleve had acted jumpy after he’d spoken with the chef at lunch. He knew Cleve didn’t have to leave him a farewell note at all, even if it was packed with lies.

He knew that the smartest thing he could do was call the credit card company, pack his bag, and get on the train to Vienna in the morning. He could spend a week being incompetent in German instead of Italian. He’d have some good memories of Venice, a great story he could maybe share with someone someday, a few good pictures and a mask as souvenirs. Hell, he’d had a bona fide adventure, the first in his boring Just-Jeff life. And he had three more weeks of vacation remaining, three weeks in three new countries. Who knew what he might find there?

Jeff opened his laptop and brought up the account page for his stolen credit card. He was just double-checking the theft policies, he told himself. But instead of reading through fine-print legalese, he found himself looking at the summary of charges. There was nothing unfamiliar there. But Cleve had been gone no longer than eight hours, and it sometimes took a day or more for new purchases to show up.

For an additional five minutes or so—more than long enough for his screen to go blank—Jeff sat there, chin in palm, fingertips of the other hand tapping restlessly on the tabletop. Then he woke up the computer and typed “Cleve Prieto” into the browser’s search box.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t find anything useful. Changing to “Cleveland Prieto” informed him that a right-hander named Ariel Prieto once played minor-league ball for Cleveland, a fact that might have interested Jeff’s father but didn’t seem especially relevant to Jeff’s concerns. There was nothing at all on the Internet about the man Jeff had slept with the night before—whose real name, in all likelihood, was not Cleve Prieto.

Really, the only thing Jeff knew for sure about that man was what he looked like.

And that got Jeff thinking again. Several months earlier he’d attended a trade show in San Francisco for IT folks. He’d had fun spending a few days in the city on the company’s dime. Although he’d have enjoyed himself a hell of a lot less if he’d known that instead of being buried under a pile of litigation, Kyle actually spent those days buried under a litigator. But that was water under the bridge.

What mattered now was that Jeff had spent a few minutes at one of the trade show booths looking at another company’s facial recognition software. The software was intended mostly for security purposes and didn’t meet any of Jeff’s employer’s needs, but the demo was pretty cool. You uploaded a picture—or, even better, several pictures—and the program scoured the Internet for matches. A lot of what came up was useless—people who simply resembled the target—but when the saleswoman searched for photos of Jeff and a couple of other potential customers who wandered by, the software scored some real hits. In Jeff’s case, it brought up some photos from Kyle’s Facebook page, as well as a slightly embarrassing old newspaper picture from when he was in college and was interviewed for one of those stupid man-on-the-street questions.

It took Jeff a few minutes to track down the name of that software company, but when he accessed their webpage, he discovered he could buy a trial version of the program for $29.95. The trial version would only permit him to conduct five searches, but since he really only wanted to do one, that was just fine. Within the time it took to heat another cup of tea, the program was installed and running, and he’d uploaded yesterday’s photos. Jeff selected Cleve’s face in one of the pictures—he didn’t need to do another search for himself—and clicked Find.

It was a really good program. He ought to write a testimonial. Because within just a few seconds, the results box was flooded with photos of Cleve in full color and amazing detail. And with nothing left to the imagination.

“Fuck,” said Jeff out loud. Which was appropriate, considering the activities Cleve was engaging in on his screen.

If Jeff’s habits had been different, he might have recognized Cleve from the start, because apparently the man had a fairly active career in gay porn. But Jeff had never been much into surfing X-rated sites—more of the same stupid guilt that kept him from jerking off as frequently as he wanted to. He’d… dabbled a little, now and then. Not enough to realize that the guy he met in Venice showed up naked all over the Net, mostly in still photos but sometimes in videos as well. Apparently, Cleve acted under the name Max Palmer.

Almost against his will, Jeff searched the Web for more.

He found pictures of Max Palmer looking very young—possibly not even legal—and without the tattoos. Those photos were still unmistakably Cleve, however. There was the familiar cocky grin, the hair that was somewhere between red and brown, the brown eyes flecked with green and gold. The ink appeared soon, but not all at once. It covered Cleve’s lower arms first—the scars, of course—and then twined up to his shoulders. As it did, Cleve’s face grew a little older, his body more muscular, and his smile, Jeff imagined, a little more worn. Shadows began to deepen in his eyes.

Max Palmer was versatile. He appeared in—or mostly out of—sexy clothing, bathing suits, underwear, fetish wear. He was a cowboy, a cop, a gladiator. He was solo, standing or slouching, soft or erect, stroking and fingering himself. Or he was with other men, topping or bottoming, although mostly the latter. Whoever he was with or whatever he was doing, he was always sexy as hell. And despite everything—despite the shock and disappointment and even jealousy that ran through Jeff’s body—Jeff was achingly, urgently hard.

Unwilling to fork out more money, Jeff watched a couple of video clips. Teasers. The sound of Cleve’s familiar voice sent shivers down his spine, and he realized he was looking for particular phrases, particular moves, dreading the confirmation that sex with him had been just another act for Cleve. He didn’t find that confirmation, at least not in the short videos he watched. In fact, Max Palmer seemed to resemble Cleve Prieto only in physique and voice. The ways that Max moved and the sounds he made while fucking weren’t familiar at all. Stupidly, Jeff was comforted by that knowledge.

“I fucked a porn star,” Jeff said out loud. That didn’t sound so bad. Hell, a lot of guys would be really envious of him. He’d actually touched the body thousands of men had only fantasized about. And if last night had seemed more like making love than simple screwing, well, that meant Max Palmer was a very good actor. Like when he’d claimed to not be a whore.

Jeff suddenly stood and began to pace the small kitchen. His dick was still hard, but he was
not
going to do anything about it. He was also not going to think about how much fun it had been to share this kitchen with Cleve, joking and preparing a simple meal together. Only when his hard-on finally wilted, maybe freeing a few blood cells to float to his brain, did Jeff realize something else. He hurried to the laptop and woke it up again, then began to click very quickly through the photos and videos. Sure enough, although Max was clearly several years older in some of the porn than he’d been in the uninked early days, he never looked quite as old as he did now. Maybe the porn sites were just good at airbrushing, but those faint crinkly lines never appeared at the corners of his eyes.

“Finally I know how to do something!” Jeff sat down so quickly he almost toppled his chair. He clicked through some of the images again, this time choosing only the ones where Max looked the oldest. And then Jeff peeked at the code behind those images, figuratively lifting the kilts of all those photos and videos to see what was underneath. He did this for a while—long enough that lunchtime rolled around and his stomach began to growl. But no matter how many he looked at, the answer seemed the same.

He tipped back in his chair. “Huh.” As best as he could tell, everything he’d looked at was at least five years old.

A few pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. Cleve had made a living off porn for a while. But in a culture that practically worshipped youth, maybe he’d grown too old to demand top dollar. Perhaps the offers had slowed down. The work he’d done was hot and explicit, but even Jeff realized that it was relatively vanilla. Maybe as Max Palmer aged, the roles he’d been offered were kinkier, raunchier. Out of his comfort zone, wherever that zone might be. So he’d quit and turned to living off tourists, guiding them and then stealing from them. Not such a terrible way to live your life, Jeff supposed, and if you kept the thefts relatively small, maybe neither the police nor your conscience would bug you too much.

The police. Maybe that’s why Cleve had been in such a hurry—maybe the chef had warned him that the cops were on his tail. But even after lunch yesterday, when Jeff and Cleve happened to pass a few of Venice’s finest, Cleve hadn’t seemed nervous about them at all. In fact, Jeff recalled, Cleve had even exchanged a friendly
Buon giorno
with one uniformed man who’d just climbed out of a police boat.

If it wasn’t the cops who worried Cleve, then who was it? And more importantly, why did Jeff fucking care?

Chapter 10

T
HE
day was incongruously bright and warm. Tourists were everywhere in their T-shirts and waist packs, clutching their maps and guidebooks, clogging the streets and yammering in a dozen languages. Jeff frowned at them. He also frowned at the gondoliers and the men hawking scarves and cheap jewelry. He frowned at the waiters in the cafés, especially the waiters at
his
café in
his
campo
, where he knew perfectly well he would not discover a handsome man waiting for him with a grin—and of course he did not.

He frowned at the people in front of him in the ATM line.

He even frowned at the pair of little boys who came darting out of a candy shop, shrieking with delight, enormous foil-wrapped bunnies clutched in their grubby little hands. That frown took some effort, though, especially when the boys’ mother shouted something at them that almost certainly meant “Slow down! Be careful!” and the boys ignored her as thoroughly as children could.

When he found himself walking toward the Jewish ghetto, he told himself he was just doing some more sightseeing, here on his final day in town. And when he reached for the door to the restaurant where he and Cleve had eaten lunch the day before? He was hungry, dammit, and the food had been pretty good.

If the waiter recognized him, he gave no sign of it. He led Jeff to a tiny rickety table near the front window and handed him a menu. Jeff had been relying on Cleve to translate for him all week and wasn’t in the mood for food roulette. He settled on the same dish he’d had before, spaghetti with clams. He ordered prosecco too, because when in Venice….