Alibi: A Novel by Joseph Kanon Page B

voice low, her mouth still twisted in a kind of sneer.
    Gianni stepped back, as if the words were a physical assault, and answered her in Italian, quick and sharp.
    “
Assassino!
” she said, louder, and then “
Assassino!
” almost yelling.
    People nearby turned. My mother, pale, looked at me frantically. But Gianni had started to talk again, so fast that the words went by me in a blur.
    “You thought we were dead,” Claudia said in English. “All of us dead. Who would know? But not all. Not all.
Assassino!
” she said again, this time quieter, with contempt.
    I looked at her face—someone else, unrecognizable. Now it was Gianni who raised his voice, upset, caught somewhere between scolding and fighting back. The people around us had begun to look uneasy, the foreigners, not understanding, thinking they’d blundered into a scene of volatile Italians, the Italians embarrassed, shocked by what they were hearing. I tried to follow, helpless.
    “
Assassino
,” Claudia said again, then “Murderer,” and for an odd second, hearing both words, I thought of Gianni’s speech, two languages.
    Gianni answered, then stepped forward to grab her elbow, clearly intending to take her out of the room. The touch, just a graze, triggered something in her. She wrenched herself away from his hand and reached up to his face, clawing at it, shouting at him again. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her away, leaving scratch marks on his face. I heard a gasp. He held her for a moment like that, hands up in the air, away from his face, letting her body wriggle but holding her hands still, until finally she spat at him and, shocked, he dropped her hands.
    No one moved. I saw the spittle gleam on his cheek, the stunned faces around us, Claudia heaving, a hysterical intake of breath. She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears, and then around, aware for the first time of the rest of the room, the appalled guests. Gianni hadn’t moved. “
Assassino
,” she whispered one last time. Then she letout a sound, a kind of whimper, and turned to the stairs. She started to run, the darting movement like a signal to everyone else to come back to life, out of the stopped moment, the room noisy all at once with talk.
    “What in god’s name—?”
    “But what were they
saying
?”
    My mother was daubing Gianni’s face with a handkerchief. “Adam, I don’t understand. Your friend—”
    “She’s your friend?” Gianni said to me. “She’s a crazy woman.”
    “My god, look at you,” my mother said. “Does it hurt?”
    “No, no.”
    I looked toward the stairs, but the crowd had swallowed her up, cutting me off.
    “It’s a Jewish matter,” an Italian said, translating for another guest.
    “What Jewish matter? Why Gianni?”
    “Her father. It’s a confusion.”
    “Well, yes, it must be, I suppose.”
    But what confusion? I looked at Gianni, now surrounded, then started pushing through the crowd. “Adam,” I heard my mother say, but I was moving frantically now, down the stairs.
    “Claudia!” I shouted, but when I got to the bottom no one was in the hall except one of the maids, standing in front of the makeshift cloakroom with Claudia’s coat over her arm. She glanced at me, alarmed, then toward the open door. I raced down the hall and grabbed the coat.
    Outside, there was no sign of her, just the dark back calles of Dorsoduro. But she wouldn’t go to Salute, a dead end. I headed toward the Accademia, trying to pick up the sound of heels, anything, going faster at the corners, where there were little pools of light. At Foscarini I looked left, toward the Zattere. Then I saw a figure in the other direction, running past the Accademia to the vaporetto stop.
    “Claudia!” I yelled, but she didn’t even turn around, determined simply to get away. I ran toward the lights of the floating dock, the coat flapping in my arms. The boat was loading, almost done, but it was going in the wrong direction, up the canal, not down to