The Game of Love and Death(4)

She radioed her intentions and piloted back toward the airfield. As she surrendered altitude, her stomach went momentarily weightless. The runway rushed into view. She set the front two wheels down first, then the tail wheel, a more difficult kind of landing than touching all three tires down at once, but a safer and more controlled one, which she executed perfectly. She stepped out of the plane as the sky began to dump in earnest, almost as if it were overcome with the same sadness she felt returning to the earth.





NOT long before Flora’s flight, Love had materialized in Venice, a city made more beautiful by the fact that it was doomed. He stood in Piazza San Marco, in front of an ornate church named for the man who’d run naked from the garden of Gethsemane after Jesus was sentenced to death. Mark’s bones had been smuggled there in a barrel of salted pork — a strange way to keep a man and his memory alive. But what was humanity if not deeply strange?

It was from similar human bones that they’d fashioned the dice for the Game. Two of them, carved and smoothed to perfection, their dots painted in a wine-dark mix of Love’s blood and Death’s tears. These, Love carried with him always. They rattled in his pocket as he strolled toward the Campanile, with its bell that rang periodically to summon politicians, announce midday, and herald executions.

The bell chimed noon as he passed, his shoes tapping the stones loudly enough to rouse a flock of pigeons. Up they rose into the silvery sky, cooing and beating their wings.

Love spent a pleasant if chilly afternoon in the misty, labyrinthine alleys of the Accademia quarter, half expecting to see his opponent around every corner. At a milliner’s, he purchased a handmade bowler, leaving his old hat on the head of a skinny Romany boy who would grow up to be a legendary seducer of women and men. For years afterward, Love regretted not giving the boy his pants.

At the stationer’s next door, he bought a small bottle of cerulean ink because it reminded him of the shade Napoleon had used in his letters to Josephine. Love would record notes with it in the small book he always carried; perhaps it would improve his luck. Perhaps this time, unlike all the other times, he would win.

Wondering whether she had forsaken him, he stopped at a café for a snack of paper-thin prosciutto paired with a mild, milky cheese, washing both down with a glass of sparkling wine. Although his immortal body required neither food nor drink, he liked to pause for such simple pleasures. The appetite was a fundamentally human thing, and it served him to feel it, to understand it.

When he emerged from the shop, his tongue buzzing with salt and wine, the sun was low on the horizon, pulling with it all the color and warmth from the world. Fearing Death would not join him after all, Love vanished and rematerialized inside a glossy black gondola, much to the surprise of the man who’d just dropped off his last passenger of the day. The gondolier had intended to roll a cigarette and stare at the heavens a few moments before he returned his boat to the yard. And yet, here was a new fare, already making himself comfortable on a black-and-gold bench.

The man sighed and spoke. “Solo voi due?”

Just the two of you?

Too late, Love caught a whiff of something sweet over the fetid odor of the canal. Lilies. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

“Sì, solo noi due,” Love agreed.

She descended the crooked set of wooden steps leading down to the gondola, looking like an angel in a long coat of winter-white wool. Her gloves and boots, made of lambskin, were the same hue. A lone spot of color hung around her neck: a red cashmere scarf. His heart sank at the sight of her in this shade.

“Hello, old friend,” she said.

Love helped her into the gondola. Judging her age to be about seventeen this time, he resolved to adjust his own appearance to match. His decision to travel in the guise of someone middle-aged had been a reflection of the weariness he felt with his lot. To spend an eternity losing was enough to make anyone feel damaged by time. But the younger he felt, the more he believed Death was beatable. He would have to remember that.

“Mind if I smoke?” the gondolier asked, a skinny hand-rolled cigarette already between his lips.

Death answered, “Please do.”

And there it was, her Mona Lisa smile, the one that had been the model for the artist. Then came the hiss of flame, the sour whiff of burning tobacco, the dull sizzle of the match as it sank into the canal, one more light, unlike any other, forever gone from the world.

The gondolier, now lost in smoke and thought, eased his craft from the dock and steered them from the Grand Canal through the quiet and picturesque privacy of the narrow water lanes snaking through the quarter.

“A hopeless city,” she said.

Death knew he loved Venice. To deprive her of the satisfaction of wounding him, Love altered his guise so he was wearing a swooping handlebar mustache. Death sprouted a drooping Fu Manchu, but did not crack a smile. Love acknowledged the win, and both their mustaches vanished.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she said in a language known only to the two of them. “It’s appealing, your commitment to the doomed.”

“Perhaps I see things you don’t,” he said.

“Perhaps that is true.” She removed a glove and dipped a knuckle into the water.

“They’re ready,” he said, thinking of his player in the city far away, a city with a model of Venice’s Campanile built at its train station.