The Gondola Scam (12 page)

"But—"

"But nothing! Couriers and tourists are not allowed to . . .
to . . .”
 
 

The trouble is, pretty women have the edge. They make you
tongue-tied even when you're honest. It's bloody unfair.

"Look, Cosima, love," I said brokenly, taking her arms.
"I didn't want to do this job. I was on holiday, remember? It's only that
I, well, falling for you like I did makes me—"

"All
right
,
Lovejoy!" She pushed away, but not at all mollified. God, she was lovely.
Her hair was sheer silk. I'd never seen any hair lustrous as that. I bet it
would be lovely spread out on a soft white pillow, just like Margaret's and
Helen's and Liz's. "All
right!
But you just remember."

"I was only trying to do what you said, love."

She spun round on her way to the door.
"What
I
said?"

"The tourist is always
right." Biting my lip, I subsided on the bed, clearly misunderstood and
close to heartbreak.

She hesitated. "Well, yes. I know I
did say that . . ."

I shrugged, deeply hurt. "You
don't know how it feels . . ."

“Look," Cosima said, but less
firmly. "I don't want you to take it too much to heart, Lovejoy. I just
had to speak out before you got, well,
drawn
in
. I've seen it happen."

"I'll remember," I said
bravely, Gunga Din on the battlements.

"Very well. Then we need say no
more about it."

There was a brief pause. I didn't raise
my eyes, because we Gunga Dins are soulful creatures and don't particularly
want our innermost feelings revealed.

She too was hesitant now.
"Lovejoy, have you had time yet to find any more of those restaurants I listed
for you?"

"No." I heaved a sigh.
"I was going to have a bath, then go out with the map."

She said seriously, "As it
happens, I was intending to, well, take a quick walk round the Cannaregio.
Since neither of us has really eaten properly today, it might be convenient to
take the opportunity—"

"As long as you're my guest,"
I said. "Please. It would give me such pleasure."

"Very well. Eight o'clock at the
Fondamenta di Santa Lucia? We needn't be too late."

"Thank you, love."

I waited until the lift doors clashed
before recovering from my heartbreak. Already I knew enough to know that the
Cannaregio Canal was not really a tourist area. If anything it was somewhat out
of the way. Still, another crisis was averted by the simple tactic of agreeing
to spend the evening with such a beautiful bird as Cosima. Painless.

In the bath I bellowed some Gilbert and
Sullivan, making myself laugh by trying to translate the words into Italian as
I went.

What with the hectic state of our
affairs, I saw very little of my favorite group, that mini-mob of eight who had
rushed and talked me off my feet in the Doge's Palace. Only after those two
endless slogging days did I happen to bump into Nancy Waterson in the bar.
Honestly it really was accidental.

It was pretty late, going on midnight.
As I entered the bar, worn out, a lovely but older woman beckoned me. Lovely
perfume, bluish eyes, dressed to kill with that elegance middle-aged Italian
women capture so perfectly. And tons and tons of makeup—always turns me on,
that. She wore a seventeenth-century Florentine crucifix as a brooch pin, not
quite her only mistake. A two-carat central stone of j that rarest of gems,
Royal Lavulite, a translucent luscious purple, carried off its misplaced setting
in the crucifix's center with utter nonchalance.

She looked me over like they do horses.
"You the guide? Get me a rusty nail."

"What for?"

She pulled me round. I'd been walking
past. "You're supposed to be a guide and you don't know the great Italian
invention of the cocktail?"

The penny dropped. A rusty nail must be
a drink. That wasn't quite as important as the fact that this high-class bird
thought I was a serf. I shook her off. Venice was full of people she could
order about without starting on me.

"French tradition, please. Amedee
Peychaud was a Froggie pharmacist in New Orleans, love, and he invented the
cocktail." She still looked blank. "'Course, he did it mostly with
absinthe and cognac in those natty little eggcups—
coquetiers
—now so highly prized as collectors' items—"

"Who are you?" she said,
wondering.

"My grannie said not to talk to
strange women in honky-tonks."

I moved on, her chain-saw laughter
following me as I pushed in. The barman tried, "Lovejoy. A rusty nail's
half-and-half Scotch—"

"Great news," I said.
"Stick at it, Alessandro."

The presence of Nancy in the far corner
straightened my gaze. The older woman departing, that left nobody else about
except the barman watching a telly screen and Nancy. She flagged me over and
gave me a glass of her wine. Her bar table was covered with notebooks. Too
casually she shut them one by one. David, I learned happily, was out.

"Look," I said. "I
didn't mean to get Agnes in trouble by asking—"

'That afternoon? Forget it. Movie
people are like that. Touchy."

"You too?"

She finally could not hold back and
burst out laughing. And I do mean rolled in the aisles. She was helpless. The
night barman smiled with the distant politeness of his kind but kept his eyes
on the video-recorded football match.

"Your accent's slipping again,
Lovejoy."

Well I was so tired I'd become
confused. So many faces, nationalities, different hotels. I was bushed. And I'd
told different stories to each lot. To the Danes in the Danieli—or was it the
Londra?—I was a penniless music student working out my tuition fee. To the West
Germans in the Firenze—or was it the Bisanzio?—I was an Australian spinning out
the grand tour. To the Americans, I was an Italian ex-waiter scratching a
living.

Narked, I sat glowering while Nancy
dried her eyes and made a gasping recovery, clutching her ribs. "Oh,
Lovejoy! That laugh did me good!" She touched my hand and refilled my
glass. "Don't be annoyed, honey. Only, it's so obvious. What exactly's going
on, for heaven's sake?"

"Nothing." Do Yanks really
say "honey," or was she mucking about?

"Come on. Don't sulk." She
was still laughing, silly bitch. "We're all full of different theories
about you. You know Tom and George are running a book? Dave Vidal's got
six-to-four you're an antiquarian down on his luck."

"Oh, he has, has he?" I said
bitterly, thinking that I was bloody well born that. "What's
favorite?"

"Agnes and Doris put ten dollars
even you're an actor practicing different roles."

"And you, Nancy?"

She quietened. Her smile vanished.
"Me, Lovejoy? I can't quite make up my mind between some sort of policeman—"

'They don't work this nard,
either." I pinched the rest of her carafe and asked if her budget would
run to a slab of nosh.

"Maybe," she said, still grave.
"If you'll tell me what drives a man harder than hunters and hunted."

It was bloody difficult, but I forced a
buoyant smile. "Ifs a deal." I pulled her to her feet and helped her
to sweep her books together. "Come on. I'll introduce you to polenta in a
boatman's nosh bar in a
calle
around
the comer. You'll love it."

She started smiling again and found her
coat.

I kept a weather eye out for Cosima all
the way to the little bridge caff by the San Zaccaria. Not that I was worried.
I just didn't want her getting ideas.

Then I nicked this gondola.

13

Love's supposed to be the great
pacifier. It is nothing of the sort. It's a torment, a stirrer, the ultimate
hellraiser. Really great.

Oddly, Nancy and me were friendly, not
at all like the usual carry-on with savage undertones, riotous
misunderstandings, bitterness, and suchlike. It only rarely happens. I found it
very strange, almost weird, to be lying awake in Nancy's single bed, hardly
knowing who she was yet actually liking her. And not a scar on either of us.
The mayhem was missing. A very disturbing sign, this. I was worried. It might
be the way serfdom starts.

She was in the bathroom when I got
dressed and slipped out. Luckily we were on different floors, so I was able to
nip downstairs quite legitimately. Nobody was about. The phone in my room
started ringing as I collected my map. That would be Nancy looking for me and
ready to play hell. I didn't even pause. The reception-counter clock said
three-thirty, almost too late to embark on a night prowl.

Turn right along the Riva degli
Schiavoni in the mist under the line of waterfront lamps. Right at the Doge's
Palace. Cross St. Mark's Square obliquely left, avoiding the famous Clock Arch.
Do a quick double dogleg, and you are at a small canal basin between a hotel, a
tiny pavement, and a couple of side
calli
.
A few bored gondoliers usually chat there in preseason slackness, not really
hoping for custom. Seven or eight gondolas are always aligned in the basin, the
tarpaulin covers mostly left on.

Nobody on guard. No signs of life. No
wonder, since there's nowhere you can go in a Venetian gondola except Venice. I
took the end gondola with ease. No way of locking one, hence my brilliant
choice of vehicle. Its cover was murder to shift, and twice I nearly fell in.
As a sign of good faith in case I got nabbed, I took pains to fold the damned
thing, and finally made a wobbly cast off.

Living in the estuaries of East Anglia,
I'm not too bad on a boat, though they've minds of their own; but a gondola's
the queerest craft I've ever tried to handle. For a start, it's deliberately
built off balance. I mean it really is asymmetrical, with its bum leaning over
more one side than the other. You propel it by this one stem oar. Easy enough,
yet you have to keep guessing how much space you have over the toothy
fcrro
thing at the front. Add to that
the bridges which try to brain you every few yards, and you get the idea it's
not plain sailing. It is so low down, especially in a night mist with the damp
house walls rising into the night on either side.

There was only me afloat at this
godforsaken hour. I poled out of the basin, turned a shaky left mostly by
scrabbling along the canal's wet walls. Three bridges later, left again for
two. Then three split fingernails, a few muttered oaths and two head thumps,
and I doglegged out of the Rio di Fenice to see the Grand Canal in the gloom
straight ahead.

So far, nobody on the bridges or in the
calli
as far as I could tell. I
pushed wearily into the thinner
rio
at the back of the great Venice Theater, and a waterbus swished across about a
hundred yards away, frightening me to death. From the vantage point of a
gondola, it looked like the
Queen Mary
,
all lights and motion. The best about these little side canals is they get no
tidal wave to speak of, so I was able to shove the gondola across the
rio
and ride out the minuscule
disturbance. I'd no idea the wretched things ran at night.

Which meant that leaving the safety of
the narrow
rio
was out of the
question. That worried me even more.

I shoved the lopsided craft nervously
forward beneath the bridge from which I'd examined the side of the Palazzo Malcontento.
A few more strokes and I would be alongside that tunnel-like archway I'd seen,
so thoughtfully barred against furtive intruders like me.

A silent Renaissance building, tiers of
rectangular shuttered windows. Seen close to and from the water level, Venice
is alarmingly tattered and patched. Even by the poor
rio
lights I could see that the palazzo was in the same state as
the rest. I gave my gondola one more push and glided along the wall.

The barred archway allowed a head space
of about four feet. I had no torch—me being stupid again—but beyond the bars,
which seemed to be sort of padlocked double-hinged doors, there was a stretch
of water about fifteen feet long running underneath the house. I had the idea I
could make out a couple of wet steps and a kind of cellar space. Of course,
there'd be no other way to move furniture in or out, there being simply no
streets. This kind of entrance must be the Venetian equivalent of driving up to
the front door.

Assuming I could somehow get past the
barred entrance without springing some alarm, it was a way in. It was possibly
wired top to bottom. But it only needed one—
one
—late-night bridge stroller to happen by, and there'd be a hue
and cry at a stray gondola poised outside a respectable palazzo in a
distinguished part of the city. Too chancy.

Depressed, I handwalked the gondola
back up the
rio
to the bridge. A
small
fondamenta
pavement makes it
easy to land there. I tethered the gondola, left a note under the tarpaulin, and
strolled nonchalantly off in the direction of St. Mark's. I'd never felt so
utterly down.