The Gondola Scam (15 page)

At the airport Cosima bustled about
with her clipboard in the arrivals hall. I stood like a suspect while she
checked my three badges and my Cosol Tours placard.

I said lightly, "Here, Cosima.
What's happened to Agnes? You know, David thingy's elderly bird. The hotel said
she'd booked out."

Cosima pursed her lips, pushing me into
a more favorable position along the row of tour operators' reception stalls
opposite the Customs exit. "They were recalled."

I tut-tutted. "Holiday cut short,
eh?"

Cosima said absently, frowning with
concentration at the flight indicator, "They flew out during the
night."

"Shame," I said.
 

"Film people," she said with
a pretty tilted shrug. "Sudden people,
non
e vero?"

"Lives not their own," I
agreed sympathetically as the concourse filled with our arriving passengers.
"Cosol Tours," I started up. "Cosol this way, please."

15

The trouble with some people is their
heads never switch off. I'm the same. Even kipping's a busy time with me, all
manner of guesses and frighteners swarming through a gray matter that's
basically angry that the rest of the body's dozing just when it wants to play.
What with all this free activity, you'd think I'd be marvelous at planning
ahead, a veritable Sherlock Holmes.

Wrong.

I'm a duckegg. Absolutely pathetic.
There's proof: that bad day at Torcello.

It was all my idea. I admit that. But
having an idea doesn't mean everything that happens is my fault.

Like I said, Venice is a mass of
islands, and Torcello was practically the first of the Venetian islands ever to
be colonized by the people fleeing from troubles on the fifth-century mainland.
In those early days it was even boss island, with tens of thousands all doing
their thing in the new maritime nation. They say it's dying away, but aren't we
all? It's the speed that matters.

Everybody's heard of Torcello and its
famous detached campanile (again leaning at a perilous angle) and the lovely
wood-domed Santa Fosca church, so I was all agog to catch the
vaporetto
out and see it for myself.
Heartrending to tear myself away from Venice proper, but we needn't be too long
about it. In my mind I suppose was the notion of a last fling before I tackled
the Palazzo Malcontento. Of course, I was here because I was genuinely
interested in justice and truth, in preventing that yellow-suited nerk from
committing murder again.

But everybody deserves a rest now and
again. So to think up a day in luscious old Torcello with the delectable Cosima
was perfectly reasonable. A well-deserved rest.

Among the mob I'd handled previously
were two Australian blokes, doing Europe on a shilling with Venice their
launch-pad. I’d shared a bottle of vino with them in the bar. One was a
flaxen-haired drifter called Gerry, a real dreamer. Farthing-clever-penny-daft,
my old Gran would have called him. He claimed to paint butterflies, and lived
this great vision where suddenly the whole world rushed at him demanding
canvases covered with acrylic butterflies. I asked him if he ever painted
anything else and he looked at me as if I was off my nut. It takes all sorts.
His mate Keith was lankier, cooler, more on the make and poisonously practical,
daft on engines. Opposite poles attract and all that. Synergism implies
difference. So clever old Lovejoy in a drunken stupor put the big dig when the
fourth bottle was easier to lift than its predecessors, but they knew nothing
about David and Nancy.

"Never met them, sport,"
Keith said. That was as far as I got, because Gerry wanted to talk about
painting butterflies and Keith about engines.

"Engines," Keith insisted
tipsily. "They're the future. What's missing in Venice, Lovejoy? Answer:
engines!
What's missing in the air, in
Europe, in outer space? Answer: engines! Same in Australia, Africa, India,
everywhere!"

Nodding, I got blearily sloshed. Nancy
had gone without trace. I felt so kindly towards this weird pair I got the next
bottle, carefully charging it up to Cosol Tours to show off, and bragged to
them about Torcello. In a drunken humor I told Gerry I'd heard it was riddled
with butterflies and Keith it had lots of old engines.

I was still part sloshed when for the
umpteenth time I fell over Ivan the Terrible near the second bridge along the
Riva, scattering his unsold lottery tickets. He was nearly as

pickled as me, and we exchanged a
mouthful of friendly abuse while I helped him to find them in the lamplight.

"Drunk because you couldn't find
your lovely American lady?" he demanded, to rile me. He made a crude
gesture.

"Shut up, you old fool." I
paused. "Here, Ivan. How d'you know she was a Yank?"

"She spoke like one. I'm not yet
deaf."

So he'd seen the whole scenario: Nancy
being drawn by the artist, somebody coming urgently for her, the artist
shouting rape because his fee went missing.

"Was he a Yank, too?"

"The one who took her? One was.
But the other." Ivan the Terrible spat into the canal and closed his tatty
old case. "One of them pretty-pretty boys from the Malcontento. Suit of
many colors. They should all stay in Naples."

In a fit of misguided generosity I gave
him a note for another bottle and went to watch the reflected lights out on the
lagoon. If I hadn't been stewed, I'd have tried to think. As it was, I did
nothing but watch the lights until I nodded off and woke shivering.

The next morning Cosima and I caught
the boat from the Fondamenta Nuove. I was a bit embarrassed seeing Keith and
Gerry already on the boat among the crowd in the bows, but was pleased they saw
me with a beautiful bird. I was proud of her. Some things are so beautiful you
have to look at them piecemeal or they blind you. Cosima was like that. They
both waved back, Keith especially smiling wide. Cosima, I observed, pinked up
and gave them only the briefest nod.

"Glad they came," I said
conversationally. 'The only two who aren't moviemakers." She didn't rise,
just gave a noncommittal mmm.

The boat goes to Murano and Burano
before reaching Torcello. Naturally I'd forgotten my map, so Cosima had to point
out the places we passed. A true Venetian, to her Murano was a sort of
industrial slum island and she barely glanced at it as the
vaporetto
chugged nearer, past the posh bright brickwork which rims
San Michele cemetery island.

"We had to put all the glassmakers
in one place safely away from the rest of us," she explained casually.
"Their furnaces kept setting Venice afire."

"Recently?" I was only
joking, but her pretty, serious face showed concentration reflected in the boat
windows.

'Thirteenth century. Of course, it was
as well they were moved out to Murano, Lovejoy. It became a little . . .
depraved."

I'd heard that too, but never in such
tones of reproof. Moral indignation from a Venetian is a scream, seeing they
invented Carnival and the cicisbeo, that sissy upper-class version of a gigolo.
Still, depravity makes you even more interested, so I looked with fascination
as we stopped to let droves of folk on and off, then puttered past the line of
glassmakers' slipways and wharves. Lovely to see higgledy-piggledy industry
flourishing exactly as it did six centuries gone. The pleasure gardens are now
all vanished beneath hundreds of tiny crammed glass factories, but I thought it
looked lovely. My sort of scene. Especially the idea of all those lovely
special glasses made by those old-generation glassmakers on every mantelpiece.
She'd made the glass-makers' banishment sound somewhere near Mongolia. It's
hardly a mile.

"Pity Cesare couldn't come,"
I said as our prow turned towards Burano. "We could have gone to see the
San Donato if we'd had his boat."

She did glance at the gliding islands
then. Her hair was moving in the wind that breezed down the length of the
boat's interior, silkier than on any telly advert. "I am content,” she
said quietly.

"Yes, er, great. Me too." For
the first time I realized she looked even more like a million quid than usual.
Were relatives lurking on Torcello? Were we going to drop in on a mob of uncles
and crones for colazione? An ordeal loomed. God. I felt in a state, sloppy as
always. "San Donato," I said lamely. "Not every day you see a
saint whose spit kills dragons. The Muranese say they've the dragon's bones
behind the high altar."

She shrugged dismissively. "The
Muranese!"

The boat moved slowly into the northern
waters of the lagoon. Still a warming sun, still that lovely brittle daylight.
But as the occasional island stops came and went and Venice's doomed city
receded in the morning mists, the beat and rush of the boat seemed lonelier
than it had. The water seemed muddy, less blue. We could hardly see the long
lines of the islands and banks to seaward, and the islands now seemed
threadbare and even desolate.

Cosima touched my knee. "Are you
well, dear?"

I grinned with every erg, determined to
show I was on top of the world. "The best day I ever had so far,
love."

She drew breath the way women do when
checking they won't be overheard. About us the passengers had thinned, so out
it came. "Please do not jump to conclusions, Lovejoy," she said.
"I am merely anxious to accompany you to Torcello, since you appear to
have read of the Teocota Madonna."

I hastily agreed to whatever it was she
was blathering about, and dismissed her mood as one of these weirdities they
often have, because Burano was in sight, its splash of blues, reds, and yellow
houses a brilliant set of nursery bricks crammed any old how among the drab
lagoon marshes. You can't help loving it. It is a toytown. Its campanile leans
like a Saturday drunk. Everything, from canals to doorways, is dinky. No wonder
they're born lacemakers. Delighted as I was, though, Cosima stayed aloof.

"They made a lace collar of blond
hair for Louis XIV," I babbled, delighted at the colorful island.
"They have a museum for Venetian point lace—"

"Torcello soon, dear," Cosima
said, her face lighting into a smile that dried me up.

“Er, good."

Only love illuminates a woman's eyes
with that kind of radiance. Love and all its works. My instant conclusion:
Lover-boy lives somewhere on Torcello, and we'd presumably bump, accidentally
of course, into this rustic cretin, which would give her the excuse to leave me
stranded. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't narked. I mean, all's fair in love and
all that. But even gigolos get paid. I'd somehow got myself into the position
of unpaid stooge. For a few minutes, as the boat moved on serenely through the
bright delicate mists of the morning, I maintained a pained silence so
pointedly that Cosima shyly reached across and took my hand, her eyes avoiding
mine. My frost didn't last long. It couldn't. Nobody's frost can last long when
that ancient warmth beats out of the waters and the stones shriek at you of
past human existence and love preserved in the works of Man.

'Torcello, dear," Cosima was
saying. "I hope you'll . . ."

But I was already eager to be on the
landing stage, and only later, when it was altogether too hopelessly late for
both of us, did I piece together the conversation on the
vaporetto
with my lovely Cosima.

Like I said. Pathetic.

Torcello.

We'd gone a few hundred yards when I
stopped.

"Where is it, love?"

She paused with me, holding my arm.
"This is Torcello, dear."

"But the city. The great
palaces."

Her eyes moistened, gazing at me.
"You didn't read quite enough. Torcello is . . . ending."