The Gondola Scam (17 page)

"Why are you so suspicious,
Lovejoy? About what?" She nudged me with an elbow so I tumbled. There she
was, kneeling up in the daylight above me, pinning her hair, head illuminated
by the lowering sun, when she fell with a cough onto me.

I was helpless laughing at her sudden
slumping weight, not realizing. "
Now
you change your mind!" The hairpins rattled on her teeth. She was making a
coughing noise, moving on me, pinning me down.

Another shot sounded. The dry reeds
gave a concerted tap, loud.

"Cosima? Cut it out. Somebody's
playing silly buggers."

I'd stopped laughing. Her face was on
my chest, eyes dosed, and her breathing was a two-tone hiss between teeth where
a hairpin clattered. There was a brown redness, wet and new, spoiling her white
blouse above her right breast.

"Love?" I tried to get up
under her weight.
"Love?''
Then
I was scrambling, scrabbling erect and yelling for help and bawling abuse and
fury at stupid careless pigs of duck hunters who loosed off in any direction.

"Help, for Christ's sweet sake!
Help!" Like a fool I stood up and waved both arms, any direction, anywhere
over the endless expanses of reeds. "Somebody's been hurt!" I even
bawled for an ambulance. Hysterical, I turned because I couldn't see anybody,
not a boat, between us and Torcello's distant campanile, and stood on Cosima's
ankle and fell aside as the reeds did their concerted snap.

"What?" I remember bleating
as if somebody had asked me a daft question. "Eh?"

But I stayed down. Shooting. It was
coming this way. At us. Then I grabbed for Cosima, careful and low and on my
belly because she'd been shot and there was no chance of help, not from anyone
except ourselves. And that meant me, because Cosima was lying in a strewn
attitude, still breathing but no thanks to me who'd fetched her out here to get
her beautiful lovely life shot to oblivion. I was blubbering all sorts, holding
her and heartbroken because I hadn't realized and had been laughing my silly
bloody head off when she was getting herself shot. She kept making that
coughing noise, endless and soft.

I fumbled in her handbag. My own
hankie's always months out of the wash, but hers was pristine. Gingerly, I
blotted the blood. There was a circular wound, a little swollen, no longer
leaking blood. That was a good sign, wasn't it, on the pictures when the
cowboy's shot in the shoulder and a single wedged bandage did miraculous things
for recovery? I looked about helplessly, frantic. The reeds snapped again,
once. Two shots. Two shots of that lighter, businesslike cracking sound of the
rifle. No shotgun that. If I'd not been so preoccupied with my own thoughts and
my own selfish bastard schemes, I'd have realized hours ago somebody out there
had a rifle, not a shotgun. We'd have been safely back in Torcello, tea at the
locanda
, the crowded
vaporetto
on its tranquil way.

Cosima moaned faintly as I lay down and
pulled myself and her along the ground through the reeds. It's damned hard,
especially when you're still sobbing incoherent remorse and you don't know what
the hell you're supposed to be doing. And you've no idea what to do next and .
. . and that noise. Outboard motor, but which direction? There hadn't been any
boat in sight when I'd goonishly stood upright to wave to our murderers to show
exactly where I was and how very sensibly I was responding to the whole
frigging mess.

Think. I tried, but it's difficult when
you're frightened to death. We were within a few feet of the
sandolo
. I'd wedged it among the reeds
ashore as far as I could. God alone knows how big the flat island was, or how
much of it got covered by tides. I tried thinking. The rifleman—two of them if
they were Gerry and Keith—was being careful. No need to rush up through the
reeds. After all, I might have a knife or even a gun and lie in the tall reeds
in ambush. Wiser to wait until I made a move into the open water between the
island and the mud flats.

Yet stay too long and we'd be awash.
Anyway, Cosima couldn't wait. Move, and we'd reveal our track of escape by the
movement of the dense reeds.

The engine sound was shifting. It
sounded like a low-powered outboard motor on a
sandolo
, going once round the island. A patrol, just making sure.
Clever sod. The rifleman was in the boat. I knew that for absolute certain,
because I'd raised such a hullabaloo in my first panic that any innocent
fisherman or duck shooter must have heard and would already be calling out
asking directions as they came closer. It had to be him. Them.

Sprawling, I cradled Cosima. I was
almost screaming with the fury of impotence, at my own stupidity and
helplessness. We couldn't stay much longer. He'd come closer each circuit, more
and more sure of himself. Swim for it? But how far could I get pulling Cosima
through the water before he caught us up? He might simply see us and shoot
casually from where he was. Sitting ducks. No wonder some maniacs go hunting.
Bloody ducks can't shoot back. No weapons. And Cosima's picnic was too neat,
too prepared. One plastic spatula between us. Plates cardboard, little basket,
nothing. Good for starting a fire but not for making into weapons to— Fire.

"Wait, love. I'll be a sec."

I laid her down and edged back to where
we'd lain. Her handbag was open where I'd fumbled for her hankie. No matches,
but a small lighter, heart-shaped, red enamel.

It could click, and fired a light
damned near into my eyes. Gas, flame height adjustable with one of those small
wheel things. I tried it on a blade of grass which flared, a reed which
shriveled vertically almost in a flash, but I snuffed both immediately. Nothing
must happen as long as that outboard engine kept whining and the hunter kept
moving closer out there among the reeds.

Cosima was coughing less now, still
comatose, still breathing. I tried cupping my hands round my ears and turning
slowly to get some idea of where the bastard was, but couldn't for the life of
me fix the direction. I’d have to stand up, for that to work properly.
Presumably he knew more or less where our
sandolo
lay, but for an accurate shot he'd actually need to see us clearly. He'd only
hit Cosima second or third go, as far as I could recollect from thinking back
on those noises the brackeny reeds had made, and even then he'd been trying for
me. If we'd not been fooling about, up and down at the moment of shooting, he'd
have got me and then it would have been anybody's guess what would have
happened to Cosima.

It had to be done. "I'm back,
love," I gasped, trying not to quake, and reached up a hand to haul on the
sandolo
. Obediently it moved down
almost into the water, six hauls. These boats are all curves, pointed up at the
front and having a funny wedge-shaped decking there. To get Cosima in without
being seen I'd have to pull the
sandolo
somehow on its side. I got the boat round after shoving it out to the end of
its rope, then pulling it hard round as I crawled. The stupid thing nearly
rolled onto me, and I must have created quite a disturbance in the reeds but at
least I had it slewed on a thick clump so it showed its interior towards us.

That outboard was still whining away
out there, and no more shots. Sooner or later the swine would have to land on
one of the zillion creeks to loose off a reasonable shot. Teeth chattering in
fright, I stripped and lobbed my clothes any old how near the front of the
sandolo
. I'd carefully put Cosima's
little red lighter on a mass of dry sedge, some old nest built by exterminated
ducks, I suppose. With gasped apologies and endearments to my lovely crumpled
girl I clasped her tight and shoved myself along through the reeds.

Easy to criticize, and I know anybody
else could have done it better, but the only way I could think of getting her
in was to lift her legs in, then shove her bum on the gunwale, then worm
beneath her poor bloodstained trunk and rise up so she more or less rolled in.
Hardly a fireman's lift, with me groaning in sympathy with every murmur of pain
from her. The effort left me wheezing and in anguish at the needless hurt I'd
caused her, but I kept going and slowly maneuvered the
sandolo
away from the ground until it floated.

Three or four minutes of waiting with
me whimpering at the slightest sound from the reeds and inwardly cursing hate
upwards to where a jet trace indicated a planeload of selfish swine living it
up while I was starkers down here getting frigging murdered in the mud. Then
the hunter's boat cut its sound, then sounded louder and gave that diminishing
whine. He was turning somewhere. Not closer, but definitely about to cut his
engine and run ashore and . . . He'd glimpsed our
sandolo
, or seen my disturbance of the reeds. Even as I realized
that this was it, that he'd pinpointed us accurately enough, his engine coughed
into silence and I was scrabbling like a mad thing, ripping at the reeds and
twisting them into vertical clusters.

Surprisingly they hurt like hell, maybe
because they were so dense, but I clutched and twisted until I'd cleared about
a square yard of reeds and got them all doubled over in coils. I'd seen the men
do it often enough along the sea marshes at home, while idling down the
estuaries. The watermen always clear a space as wide as the reeds are tall. He
must have left his boat, and now was crawling along the sedge grass towards us.
A click, a spurt of flame, and the looped reeds caught, the sedge grass caught.
The nest caught. The funny low tangles of grass caught. Every bloody thing
caught, swooshing up flame and sprinkling the air with sparks and black fluff.
The reeds caught up the flame, passing it across the island. I ran at a crouch,
scrambled at the
sandolo
and
floundered the stupid slow thing out among the thinner reeds into the channel,
swimming like the clappers at the stem. Smoke spread everywhere, lying over the
water.

None of these channels is very wide,
and they're all completely irregular. That whole area of the lagoon is a jigsaw
of islands,
barene
flats covered at
high tide, with shallows and treacherous mudbanks everywhere. You can hide, but
always only temporarily, because if you can take a boat anywhere down these
labyrinthine little channels, so can the hunter. A shot sounded, clearly angry
guesswork on his part. No buzzing and reeds cracking about us. The fire was
spreading fast. I was going too slowly. Smoke billowed over us as I swam on,
praying for a hidden creek where I could lay up a few minutes unseen and fix
our outboard engine. With that thing mounted—if it went—I could make a run for
it. And I'd not stop till I reached the Fondamenta Nuove in Venice where the
hospital was.

Opposite where we'd beached the
sandolo
there was an inlet about twenty
or thirty feet off, but it was too obvious. Instead, retching and sputtering, I
kept to the smoke and shoved to the right following the channel, the silly
boat's curved stem bumping on my head as I swam and pushed. It was then I made
the most miraculous and ecstatic discovery. My knees—not my feet, even—touched
something down in the water. I'd squealed and let go of the boat before I
realized it wasn't a shark jawing my poor defenseless flailing limbs. It was
mud, glorious mud. The lagoon here was shallow enough to stand up in.

It takes some doing if you're as
terrified as me. But honestly I actually did drop my feet and start shoving,
still hunched from cowardice yet thrusting that
sandolo
now at a hell of a lick. The hunter's engine still hadn't
started up to show he was coming after us when I swung the
sandolo
to penetrate the thick reed beds. We hadn't come this way,
and heaven knows where we were heading, but I shoved on and on, moving always
where the reeds were thinner but now never breaking out into any of the
tempting open channels which sometimes showed to either side. Definitely I
avoided the thick patches of reeds. Already my fire was proving as much a risk
to us as to him. Sparks were carrying the fire across the reeds in jumps rather
than a slow spread, and somewhere to the left a new fire had begun. Worse, the
wind seemed erratic and once I practically choked in the smoke which seemed to
stick to the water. Cosima was coughing again at the bastard smoke. I’d lost
all direction, staggering on practically on my knees, shoving as hard as I
could go and trying to guess which way to take by peering along the side of the
sandolo
.

How long it was before the sound of the
outboard motor penetrated my consciousness I’ll never know. By then I’d adopted
this method of gaining momentum by using my weight. Head tucked down, left
shoulder rammed hard against the stern, and my hands raised to clutch the
gunwale and take my weight partly on my arms, I could then kick my legs down
into the muddy lagoon bed and keep the boat moving at a fair speed. Now,
though, I let my legs trail me to a gurgling stop. No use giving our position
away by unnecessary motion. I relinquished my hold and slumped my head against
the curved wood, gasping and retching water. Smoke covered us once or twice,
thinned, thickened again, thinned. Cosima coughed gently, moaned occasionally.
I blurted out a whispered assurance, thinking. What a bloody mess.

The hunter's boat sounded no nearer. A
few yards off, the reeds caught a floating spark and flared vertical fire and
soot for a moment. Away off in the distance I actually heard a man's voice call
in one prolonged hail over the sound of his engine, but it was never repeated
and there was no way of telling from which direction. Or whether he was a
friend or foe, for that matter.