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Mary imagined a travel agent in Tokyo offering dirt-cheap package tours. In Venice the Japanese were polite and interested, but they had come in such numbers that they sometimes blocked her way. Courteously they squeezed together as they stopped to take pictures. They were obviously as eager as she was to record the fabulous city and keep it forever. She couldn't avoid capturing them in the foreground of her pictures of Santa Maria della Salute and the Rialto Bridge. And of course many of their multitudinous shots would show one Mary Kelly as a miscellaneous object in front of the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, a woman striding past the Campanile or moving among the pigeons in the square.
    Whether they wanted to or not, they were capturing each other's faces. Next month in Tokyo the tall solid figure of an American woman would appear on screens in a hundred darkened rooms. She would be an anonymous part of the background behind beaming rows of family members. And her own Venetian scrapbook would show flocks of Japanese visitors feeding the pigeons, admiring the four bronze horses over the portals of San Marco, or sitting at the little tables in front of Florian's.

    Today the two British couples were in everybody's pictures too, having lunch at Florian's, sitting under the arcade eating fish soup and drinking white wine while the man at the piano played Broadway show tunes.
    "There's a striking-looking woman," said the bishop, taking off his reading glasses and staring across the square at Mary Kelly.
    "Where? " said his wife, turning her head through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees.
    The wife of the member of Parliament glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. "American, I think."
    "Porto ora il secondo piatto?" said the waiter. "If you please, the second course?"
    "Mi piace spaghetti alle vongole," said the bishop at once, showing off, getting the reflexive pronoun right, forgetting that spaghetti was a plural noun.
    His wife ordered fegato alia veneziana , then let the rest of them in on a secret. She was beginning a novel set in Venice, full of rotting palaces, crumbling bridges, stinking canals, and leering gondoliers. "Honestly, it's all in my head. All I have to do is put pen to paper, so to speak."
    The piano player ran his finger up the keyboard and splashed into "Younger Than Springtime," and Mary Kelly moved out of sight into the Piazzetta and took a picture of the Ducal Palace.
    "When in doubt push the button. More is better. Push the button, push the button, change the film, push the button.
 
    *12*
    Doctor Richard Henchard wandered around the room for a few minutes, thinking quickly, his eyes darting here and there. Then to quiet his beating heart he sat down in a comfortable chair beside the body of Lorenzo Costanza, and read once again the letter from Costanza's wife that he had found on the table—
Lorenzo,
I'm leaving you. You know why. I'm taking an apartment. I've withdrawn all my savings from the bank. Enclosed is a certified check for half the entire sum.
L
     
    Henchard couldn't help grinning. You know why. Well, of course the poor sciocco knew why. Henchard knew why too. The man had a wandering eye. He'd rented that place on Rio della Sensa, or tried to rent it, for the same reason Henchard himself had taken it, for a girlfriend. The man who now lay dead on the floor had wanted a place for the handsome woman Henchard had met coming out of the apartment.
    So naturally he had never told his wife about it. It wasn't the sort of thing you told your wife. Costanza's wife was probably another fat bitch just like Vittoria, his own wife. She wasn't in on her husband's little secrets. She knew nothing about the apartment and its contents. She guessed that he was two-timing her, that was all. Wives, they always knew.
    Well, the poor bastard had lost his wife and his life on the same day. But he had also, thank God, lost the treasure that lay behind the closet wall in the house on Rio della