The Gondola Scam (18 page)

The engine sound was dwindling. Varying
a bit, as he swung in and out of the inlets, but very definitely receding. Odd,
that. No sense in rising to risk a look. One glimpse of us, and he'd come at
us. We'd be lost. I let it go on for another minute, put my skinned shoulder to
the stem again, took hold, and got my aching legs going. Nine or ten shoves and
we emerged into an open channel. I almost infarcted doing a frenetic backpedal
but should have realized the only straight waterways in the Venetian lagoon are
the man-made canals. All the rest are snaky, shaggy thoroughfares, no two
alike, and bending any way they want every few yards.

My brain managed to insert a reasoned
logical thought among its waves of terror: As long as that droning engine
didn't sound nearer, and as long as the channels didn't straighten out to give
a clear long-distance view, it was better for us to move along the open water.
That way, no reeds would waggle to reveal where Lovejoy was panicking his
untidy shambolic passage through the water foliage, and no traces would be left
of his movement.

Mentally I measured the intensity of
the swine's outboard, then edged cautiously into the channel and rotated to
move off along it. As I resumed my shoving, unbelievably I glimpsed a campanile
in the distance. Only a glimpse, snatched between two coincident channels
between slightly raised
barene
, but
it was real and definite. I'd recognize those great stone shutters anywhere.
Torcello. It was to the rear, back over my poor old knackered shoulder, now
scraped raw and bloodied. We were moving away from it.

Still smoke everywhere. As I floundered
on along the narrow channel, I moved my head from one side to the other of the
curved stem. I was becoming certain the bastard was between us and where I'd
glimpsed the groat campanile. Difficult to judge, but the sound was constant.
Maybe he thought we would head for Torcello and was patrolling between the
burning area of the lagoon and the tall cathedral tower.

Sickened at the implication I kept on,
ploughing my legs down into the soft mud, thrusting, dragging my weight on one
hand or the other to keep to the channel. I wanted to avoid the wretched boat
running aground and jarring Cosima, but was terrified of creating any more reed
shaking.

When you work at a particular horrid
thing—like blindly sploshing a tiny boat through a muddy lagoon— your mind
detaches and floats off somewhere, leaving your poor old hulk timelessly
slogging away down there in the clag.

Eventually, though, two events filtered
through to my basking brain. The first was gradual awareness of that engine
sound. It had all but dwindled away. Whether we'd simply moved apart or whether
he'd stayed put as I'd blundered further and further away was impossible to
say.

The second thing was this long white
wall.

17

The smoke had diminished by distance and
eventually, I suppose, lack of reed fuel by the time the long white wall really
made its mark. Of course I'd been dimly aware for eons of a vague blur up
there, but what's one blur a million miles away when you're being drowned,
burned, smothered, and shot, hour after bloody hour?

When I finally halted and groaned a few
sloshed hunchback paces into the reeds, the wall was there, across a wider
spread of water than the narrow channels through which I'd slaved. I couldn't straighten
up and stayed mud-covered and gasping, hands on my knees and waist-deep in
lagoon water. Blearily I noticed with astonishment that, the further I looked
away from the white wall which rimmed the island, the darker the world seemed.
It took several rethinks before the penny dropped. Daylight was leaving the
lagoon. No bright sun, no brilliant blue. That ocher sediment was washing
upwards making a dusted haze out of an azure sky. It was approaching dusk. All
I'd done was knacker myself, and get Cosima no nearer to a hospital. What 1
needed was a stray
vaporetto
or a
holiday cruiser to happen by. Instead, I thought bitterly, I find a long white
wall sticking upright out of the frigging lagoon.

No engine sounds now. Nothing. Not even
a duck's quack. The island seemed fairly tallish for this part of the lagoon,
raised vegetation showing over the wall. It didn't look inhabited. Except for
some low water steps over to the right, where a solid gate interrupted the line
of the wall, there was no indication that anybody had ever even lived there.

I had to chance it. A bit of solitude,
with Cosima carefully concealed out of sight beyond the wall, and I might even
get the chance of mounting the outboard motor and possibly making a run for it
in the manner to which I was accustomed—namely, with a hell of a lot more speed
than trogging across this reedy expanse like a stranded cod.

Weeping at the bloody futility of
everything, I bent to the stem and strove my slow course out into the open
water separating the reed channels from the island, making for the steps. To my
alarm, the mud vanished underneath my flailing feet and I was back to swimming,
pushing the boat with my head or hands or wherever my dwindling strength made
me meet the useless frigging
sandolo
.

The sudden stop had slammed the stem's
long curved rib into my shoulder. I blubbered and wailed in agony. I was sorry
for myself, quite justifiably, but Cosima moaned, thank Christ, and I looked to
see what had stopped us. It was the water steps of the white-walled island, hit
straight in the middle. The one time I want to land gently I hurtle into a
whole island, torturing my poor Cosima and practically knackering myself.
Typical. But in a few minutes I'd have sanctuary of some sort. I could stop
moving, suss out the safest run to safety, have a proper look at Cosima,
examine the lagoon for evidence of the hunter. Everything.

There was a tall barred gate, padlocked
chained. The wall was continuous and quite tall, but over to one side it was a
bit disheveled and lower. Vegetation, evidently casual scrubby wild bushes and
undergrowth, showed there. Admittedly a low-lying sort of place, but still high
enough to be a better vantage point than anything else in the lagoon except the
campaniles.

By now I was utterly flaked. How I got
Cosima out and over the wall I'll never know—that's untrue: I know only too
well the way I handled her, finally just straddling the wall in the lessening
light and letting Cosima slide in an untidy heap onto the surprisingly white
ground below. I hate to think of the pain she must have been in because I was
too scared and shagged out to lower her properly.

From the foot of the wall the island
sloped almost immediately into the water, only a few feet of rim at most. Even
that was whitish stonework. Funny bloody place, I remember thinking, hauling
myself along the pale slope back towards the steps. Why, even the ground inside
the perimeter was whitish. Clever old trees to stay green in all this ghostly
pallor. No signs of a house, though, from the one quick dazed glance I'd had.

An engine. An outboard engine. The sun
was gone, and the sound was distant, but there hadn't been one a minute ago.
Same sound. Presumably our same old faithful hunter.

"Oooooh." That was me,
scrabbling down to the
sandolo
and
all but rupturing myself lifting the outboard in its plastic bag. The only
place was over the wall, so clunk it went among the bushes any old how. Fine
thing if I'd ruined it. My clothes too and the oars went over. Which left our
swine of a boat.

The stones were loose, possibly dropped
there by one of those dredgers to reinforce the base of the wall. I got a
monster one, put it into the
sandolo
and tilted the boat by sitting astride the gunwale. She filled with maddening
slowness, and even then hung about below the surface with her prow and stem
tips showing. No good if she bobbed up just as our hunter came cruising past. I
kicked her to one side of the water steps, in case the bastard landed and saw
it. Even in my state that
sandolo
astonished me. I'd thought that one puncture finished the average boat, but
this wretched thing kept cheerfully floating up even when I'd actually sunk it.
I hauled more dredged stones from the artificial shore. It took eight of the
damned monsters to keep the
sandolo
convincingly down before I could scramble over the wall into the scruffy brush.

No signs of life here among all this
perennial whiteness. Not even a dilapidated palazzo or other building.
Stiffened into a hunchback, I found it murderously hard getting to where I'd
dropped Cosima. The white ground seemed to be made up entirely of these
irregular pale stones. They gave a hollowish clatter as I stumbled along so I
had to steady myself with a hand on the wall. A rum place, with its patchy
mini-jungles of undergrowth. Odd that the Venetian authorities had taken so
much trouble— dredging, the wall, the gate, that expensive littoral shoring
with valuable masonry—especially since nobody lived here.

My teeth were chattering when I found
Cosima and straightened her. It had become quite cold . . . but, of course, I
was in my nip so I went and collected my clothes and tried arranging them round
her. No good hugging her till I dried because I was perished and I'd only wet
her through. That horrible whining noise of the boat on the lagoon was coming
closer. Queer how menacing a slow approaching threat can be.

Any movement on these white stone
mounds might create a clatter I couldn't quieten, so I froze. He was here. The
engine droned, dropped a tone. Closer. To look at the gateway? Cosima and I
were about twenty yards from the gate, very close to the wall. I couldn't take
the risk of looking, because I suddenly might have had to duck back into cover
and set these hollow stones rattling.

He didn't stay, just cruised slowly
past between the island and the reed channels from which we'd blundered. Once,
he returned with his outboard deeper and slower. Not too close, I prayed, or
you'll run into my sunken sandolo and get yourself sunk. Then he might climb
out of the water and I'd have a scrap on my hands. I was in no shape to start
hide-and-seek in this loony place.

The engine snapped into higher pitch.
He was off. I listened as the note gradually dopplered off into the gathering
dusk. Of course, he could be circling the white island to come at us from the
other side, but I was beyond working it all out anymore. For the minute I was
safe with Cosima, which was more than we'd been ever since we left Torcello.

Light was now surprisingly poor. I
clambered to my feet and resumed my exercises. Once I got myself un-perished
and the sound of that outboard had dwindled to zero, I’d chance a look out over
the wall. Maybe then I could think about getting away.

Twenty minutes later I'd realized two
things. One was that I was a million miles from Torcello. Vaguely, the slender
line of Torcello's campanile showed against the sky glow which must be Venice
itself. So that was south. I must have struggled northward all afternoon long.
Not by reason of skilled knowledge of the lagoon, but only because the reed
beds and the channels and the smoke had given most chance of concealment. Well,
the lagoon had to end some- i where, even in that direction, but it might prove
all too easy to waste away the night frantically careening among the marsh
channels. And an outboard motor makes a telltale sound. No, getting the boat up
and Cosima to a doctor was our priority. Since the killer had only to sit in
Torcello and wait for us, which was presumably where the bastard had gone now,
we had to go travel in the opposite direction.

The second thing I realized was what
all these mounds of white stones were.

I was sitting mournfully by my lovely
wounded Cosima when it dawned on me that I could maybe arrange some of these
hollowish white stones into a pillow and make her breathing a bit easier. My
trousers could be wedged on top for softness, and the movement would keep me
from freezing to death, because it was now becoming bitter. You can die from
cold. Every muscle screeching, I listlessly fumbled for a rounded stone, got
one, and felt it to see which of its aspects was most regular. My finger
waggled. I felt some more. My thumb was on teeth. My index finger was in an eye
socket. It was a skull. I screamed and leapt, flinging the bloody skull away so
it clacked and clattered among the foliage.

And I felt the ground. No soil. Only
long bones, thin bones, round skull bones, spine bones, shoulder bones and hip
bones, and skull, skull, skull bones. The whole frigging island was one great
charnel house. We were on Santa Ariana, the osseria. The bone island. A world
of bones. Gibbering, I danced clumsily on the bones trying to keep my feet off
the bloody things before I found myself over the wall and dementedly
floundering down into the water where I’d sunk the
sandolo
and lobbing those great stones out of her as though they
weighed nothing.

It seemed years of shuddering feverish
activity hauling the
sandolo
on its
side up the sloping margin to get it empty then screwing the outboard in place,
all by feel and murky peering. Probably it was no more than half an hour or
even less before I got the damp
sandolo
floating in soggy obedience. Going back for Cosima, my clothes and the oars was
the hardest thing I've ever done. I didn't even wait to dress. The old woman's
engine started first yank of its string, and I was off into the gloom any old
where. My own noise, my own engine, choice surging back into me with all the
power it brings.