What Casanova Told Me by Susan Swan Read Free Book Online

hoisted criminals in a cage up the Campanile? The inquisitors had spies everywhere. You could get your neighbour arrested just by sending them a letter.”
    “Wasn’t Venice the first modern police state?”
    “Speak up, Luce. I can’t hear when you whisper.”
    “I think Venice is lovely.”
    “It is, isn’t it?” Lee nodded as they passed the Quadri where a string quartet was playing “Yesterday.”
    “Oh, Lordy! The Beatles. I find nostalgia a bore.” Luce saw Lee frown, as if daring her to disagree, and she found herself nodding obligingly. As they passed by an arcade, Luce noticed a man watching her from under one of its arches. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t see his face without her sunglasses, and it was too dark for them now. Could it be Dino Fabbiani? Or was she just alarmed by the density of Venice, where everyone appeared to be watching everyone else? She turned to stare at him and the man stepped back into the shadows.
    As they walked on, Luce felt sure the man was following them. Yet when she turned around to look, no one was there. She must be imagining things, influenced perversely by the play of moonlit shadows on the old buildings. A moment later, she turned again.
    “I think someone is following us,” she said.
    “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. Venice has the lowest crime rate in Europe.”
    “I don’t like being stared at.”
    “Hang on for a minute, will you?” Lee stopped to catch herbreath in a lane outside the square. “You know, Luce, you tilt your head just like Kitty.”
    Not certain she had understood Lee properly, Luce bent her head down to hear the shorter woman.
    “You remind me of your mother, Luce. The way you listen.”
    “I’m nothing like her.” Luce shook her head in a fierce, embarrassed little gesture.
    Lee’s smile wavered but she composed herself and pointed down a side street. “The Flora is that way.”
    A few minutes later Lee admitted she had overlooked the little lane, hardly wider than a pair of shoulders, that led to the Hotel Flora. They had to retrace their steps three times before they saw the hotel’s discreet sign, with the symbol of a tree in white on a black background.
    Alone in her room, Lee Pronski exchanged her leisure suit for a black kimono sprinkled with tiny yellow tigers, and reflected on the evening. Despite Luce’s ridiculous clothes—what was that fringe of lace peeking above the girl’s jeans, anyway? Her underpants? Probably. The jeans were cut so low you could see her belly button. Still, despite the girl’s clothing and her boyishly cropped chestnut hair, there was an old-fashioned air of naivety about her lover’s grave, soft-spoken daughter. She saw it in the girl’s large, trusting grey eyes, the beautiful, myopic eyes of someone prone to introspection. A pity Luce tried to hide her short-sightedness behind those round sunglasses. And then the incongruous combination of her height with that whispery voice, a frustrating susurration of apology mixed with resentment. What, she wondered, did Luce feel resentful about? She had led a life of ease in the bosom of Kitty’s well-to-do family.
    Lee wanted to feel protective towards her lover’s child, but it had made her sad to see the solemn way Luce tilted her head when she concentrated. The mannerism induced a slight double chin, out of place on someone her age though it had seemed so endearing in Kitty. Otherwise, Luce was right: she was cut from a different cloth than her petite, energetic mother whose skin and hair were so fair she seemed to have been hewn from pine.
    At dinner, she had put her foot in her mouth, she knew that, telling Luce how Kitty felt about her daughter’s shyness. But she had been trying to convey that she, too, had sometimes felt like an introvert with Kitty, whose chatty, outgoing manner disarmed everyone she met. Time was, Lee thought, when I would have handled the situation with more finesse. She wasn’t unkind by nature, although her