The Good Thief's Guide to Venice (12 page)

‘Quite. But it struck me as a sound investment. And I was right, wouldn’t you say?’

I would say. Victoria’s ordnance cache was enough to give Batman weapon envy.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a rectangular slab of matt-black plastic.

‘Stun gun.’

‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Quick question for you. What’s the difference between a stun gun and a Taser?’

Her mouth twitched into a crooked grin. ‘Want me to show you?’

No, I didn’t think that’d be strictly necessary. ‘Why don’t you tell me about the lipstick instead?’

‘Ah, one of my favourites.’ She set the document wallet down on my bed and freed the lipstick from its Velcro fastening, then yanked off the top to reveal what looked like a mini aerosol. ‘Pepper spray.’

‘Ingenious.’

‘I think so. And the lid conceals a tiny listening device.’ She tapped it with her nail, as if she was aiming to deafen a team of MI6 spooks in a safe house across the street. ‘It transmits wirelessly to this digital data recorder,’ she told me, pointing to a small chrome object that had the appearance of a miniature Dictaphone. ‘The signal’s good for a distance of 500 metres.’

‘And the thing that looks like a pen?’

‘It’s just a pen.’

I felt my eyebrows knit together as I gave her my best don’t-mess-me-around look.

‘Oh all right,’ she said, with a wave of her hand. ‘The nib contains a powerful sedative.’

‘Holy crap. And the cigarettes?’

There were three of them, strapped into position in a perfect line. The filters were pale-white in colour, ringed with two gold bands, but in all other respects they looked remarkably normal.

Victoria winced. ‘Would you believe me if I told you I really don’t know what they do?’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes, though I wouldn’t recommend that you smoke them. They were my one extravagance. I just saw them in the display case and felt like I had to have them.’

‘Didn’t you ask?’

‘By that stage I was like a kid in a sweet shop. Point and grab.’

‘Christ, the owner must have loved you.’

‘I suppose he did do rather well.’ She shrugged. ‘But then, so have you, wouldn’t you agree?’

I crossed my arms over my chest. ‘How do you mean?’

Victoria replaced the lid of the lipstick and set about returning it to its little sculpted hollow in the wallet. ‘Well come now, don’t tell me you haven’t given some thought to the predicament you’re in. This Graziella character, the cat burglar – if we believe that’s all she is – she’ll know you opened the briefcase.’

‘Possibly.’

‘No possibly about it. Of course she’ll know – a bloody big bomb went off. And she also knows where you live.’

I gulped. Thinking the same thoughts myself had been troubling enough, but having Victoria voice them aloud was even more disturbing.

‘It seems to me quite obvious,’ Victoria went on, ‘that she may come looking for you. And that this time, she could do something much worse than steal a book.’

‘You think she may threaten me?’

‘I think she may kill you.’

I felt myself blanch. I supposed it made a change from blushing.

‘Well, attempt to, anyway,’ Victoria said, patting my knee through the bedcovers. ‘But thanks to me, you have the means to protect yourself. Here.’ She removed the stun gun from her arsenal. It was no bigger than an electric razor, with a lid that flipped back to reveal a pair of metal prongs. ‘Click this switch,’ she said, meanwhile sliding a locking device to one side with her thumb, ‘and then depress this button. And Hey Presto!’ Blue sparks arced between the red-hot prongs at the head of the device. Victoria grinned toothily in the glow. ‘Fifty thousand volts. Quite disabling. Like to try for yourself?’

‘Not just now, thanks,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘And stop waving the damn thing about, will you?’

‘Killjoy.’ She released her finger and the current fizzed away to nothing, leaving a smell of burned carbon in the room. She threw the contraption at me. ‘You can keep it under your pillow.’

The plastic casing was toasty-warm, and I wasn’t all that happy to conceal it close to where I planned to lay my head, but Victoria clearly wasn’t in a mood to take no for an answer. She watched me until the device was safely stowed, then nodded as if it was perfectly conventional behaviour.

‘There’s more,’ she told me.

‘I feared there might be.’

‘Nonsense. I expect you’ll recognise this little fellow.’

She was right about that – I did have more than a passing familiarity with the piece of equipment in the vacuum-packed case she removed from the pocket of her dressing gown. It was a small, battery-operated sensor alarm, a very basic model, capable of casting an infrared beam into a room and sounding an alarm if anything happened to disrupt it. I didn’t mean to dent Victoria’s enthusiasm, but I couldn’t see it helping us a great deal.

‘Listen, Vic, I think I can see where you’re going with this, but if Graziella is even half as good as I believe she is, she’ll be able to disarm it no problem.’

‘Ah, but you’re forgetting the element of surprise. Last time she broke in there were no alarms. Why would she think you’d have one now?’

Hmm, I supposed there could be something to her theory, and perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to rig the thing up. Not that I was the man for the task – I could hardly keep my head straight on my shoulders. I yawned, then wriggled down between my sheets, cringing at the stab of pain in my inner ear.

‘You’re not getting up?’ Victoria asked me.

‘I can’t,’ I groaned. ‘It’s a wonder I’m still conscious.’

Victoria tucked the intruder alarm back inside her pocket, then ran the zip around her modified document wallet. She smoothed her hand lovingly over the pigskin, and I got the impression she was every bit as pleased with the case as she was with its contents. Standing there in her pyjamas and dressing gown, a contented smile on her lips, she looked like a child who’d just received the perfect birthday gift.

‘By the way, I read some more of your manuscript,’ she told me, clutching the case to her bosom. ‘It’s beginning to grow on me.’

‘Like a fungus?’

‘No, in a good way.’ She hitched her shoulders. ‘I can see the potential now, but I do think it needs toning down. There’s too much action, too many explosions and gun fights and chase scenes.’

‘Really?’

A line of furrows appeared on her forehead. ‘Of course. And you’ve gone rather overboard with the new complications you introduce for poor Faulks at the end of each chapter. Once or twice, maybe, but not all the time. It’s too much.’

I hummed, then I hawed. ‘Doesn’t that make you read on, though?’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t always have to be such a big thing. It could just be a matter of having one character ask a question that hasn’t been posed before. Or even better, a simple knock at the door.’

Now, you may very well not believe me, but I swear that just as Victoria said those self-same words, there was a
tap-tap-tap
on the front door. She tensed and exchanged a look with me. It wasn’t the most complacent expression I’d ever seen. In fact, it was downright accusing.

‘Was that you?’ she whispered.

‘Nope.’

The knock sounded again, a jaunty little rap, the kind a friend might make – or a burglar-cum-killer in a deceptively good mood. I showed Victoria my palms, as if to prove I’d had nothing to do with it.

She looked from me, to the hallway, and back again. ‘What do we do?’ she hissed.

‘Well, I know what Faulks would say. If you want to find out what happens next, he’d tell you to go and answer the door.’

Victoria took her pepper spray with her, concealed in the sleeve of her dressing gown, and I kept watch from my bed with her Taser for company. The Taser was fitted with a laser to assist my aim. I closed one eye and circled the red dot menacingly over the wall at the end of my bed, straining to hear what was happening.

Naturally, it would have been a lot easier if my ears hadn’t been buzzing like a couple of horse flies were trapped in them. The interference wasn’t quite as bad as it had been, but it was enough to cloak Victoria’s words. Luckily, I could at least make out her tone, and she didn’t sound alarmed or threatened. Perhaps more reassuringly, there was no howling or wailing or, in fact, any other indication that she’d opted to discharge a dose of chemicals in our visitor’s face.

A few moments later, footsteps approached. I hooked my finger around the trigger on the Taser, depressed it slightly and edged the red dot towards the back of my bedroom door. The handle turned, the door opened, and Victoria poked her head through the gap, then recoiled as the laser hit her square in the eye. She glared at me and I cringed an apology before lowering the gun.

‘Charlie,’ she said, in her most polite society voice, ‘your landlords are here. They’d like to check that you’re okay.’

As she finished speaking, Victoria jabbed an accusing finger towards her weapons cache. I shoved the case beneath my bed covers, along with the Taser.

‘Er, okay,’ I said, rearranging my blanket.

‘
Ciao
, Charlie,’ Antea called, in a cheery, sing-song voice, from somewhere out of sight behind Victoria’s shoulder. ‘We are just a little worried about you.’

‘I’m fine,’ I replied, my throat still hoarse. ‘But you can come in.’

Victoria stepped inside, followed by Antea and Martin, and I watched with some embarrassment as Antea’s jaw dropped and she made the sign of the cross over her generous bosom. She had a round, pudgy face, and an equally round and pudgy body. Her customary outfit, which she’d favoured again this morning, was some variety of floral house dress with a plunging neckline, usually set-off with a chunky Murano glass necklace. She wore plenty of make-up, and her raven-black hair was permanently fixed into a tight bun. Flighty and emotional, she was the polar opposite of her husband.

‘Bastards really roughed you up,’ Martin said. ‘Best let me see.’

He advanced towards me and swung an old-fashioned medical bag onto the foot of my bed, close to where I’d concealed the Taser. He removed a pair of disposable surgical gloves that he stretched over his hands and snapped against his wrists. The gloves were something to bear in mind – a convenient future supply, perhaps.

Martin was dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a plum-coloured V-neck jumper over a plain white shirt, yellowing at the collar. He was rake-thin, with a full head of silver-grey hair that he liked to comb into a floppy, slanted fringe. The fringe was Martin’s pride and joy. He was constantly smoothing it down or throwing it back over his head with a foppish waft of his hand. He might have retired as a doctor many years ago, but I’d long-since formed the impression that he’d never fully abandon his medical persona.

Placing his hands on either side of my head, he probed my skull with his fingers and thumbs. I could smell the rubber of his gloves, and the musty scent of his forearms.

‘I explained about the mugging,’ Victoria said, finally bringing me up to speed on the tale she’d weaved.

‘We hear you last night.’ Antea rubbed her hands together in an anxious fashion. ‘And when we hear talk of the
polizia
.’ She gasped and clapped a palm to her cheek. ‘I tell Martin to come check on you, but he say we must wait until morning.’

‘No fractures,’ Martin announced, as if there was a nurse in the room to take notes. ‘I understand you took a blow to the head.’

I locked eyes with Victoria. She nodded minutely.

‘I think so.’

‘No sign of any serious trauma. What about these cuts on your arms?’ He raised my limbs for closer inspection, then turned up his nose as if underwhelmed.

‘I was pushed into a wall. I used my arms to protect myself.’

‘Hmm. They’ll heal.’ He dropped my wrists and flicked his head back, clearing his fringe from his eyes. ‘Anything else?’

‘My hearing,’ I told him. ‘There was a loud noise when they first attacked me. I think they may have used some kind of banger to disorient me.’

‘Mamma Mia!’
Antea cried, and covered her mouth with her hands.

Martin ignored her outburst and returned to his medical bag for an otoscope. He clicked the little light on, poked the pointy end into my ear and crouched down to take a peek at my deepest, darkest thoughts. ‘Hmm. Looks like you may have sustained some damage. There’s a small amount of blood, and the area looks inflamed. Check the other side.’ I tilted my head as much as I dared. ‘Same thing,’ Martin said. ‘They must have fired this banger bloody close.’

He backed up and looked at me with a stern expression that suggested he didn’t entirely believe me.

‘I don’t remember too much about it, to be honest.’

‘Mmm.’ That got a scowl. ‘Any dizziness?’

‘A bit.’

‘Well, you’re doing the right thing by staying in bed. Hearing should improve with rest, but I’ll check up on you tomorrow. Get much sleep?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘He lost consciousness for a while,’ Victoria put in. ‘I’m not sure you’d call it sleep.’

‘Should he go to
l’ospedale
, Martin?’ Antea asked, worrying her hands in such a complex manner that I was amazed she didn’t break a finger.

‘The hospital
and
the police.’ He smoothed back his fringe, then fixed on me. ‘Going to do it?’

I shook my head. Cautiously.

‘Didn’t think so. Can’t blame you, either – lot of red tape over here. I’ll give you something for the pain, help you sleep.’ He dropped the otoscope into his bag and searched around until he removed a disposable syringe and a tiny vial containing a clear plastic liquid. He passed the vial to Antea. ‘Read the date will you? Didn’t bring my glasses.’

Antea held the little glass bottle up to the light of the standing lamp and peered at the label. ‘It go out of date last year, Martin.’

‘That’ll do.’

‘Er, will it?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely, old man. Not licensed to get fresh supplies these days, understand? But the dates are just flimflam. Drug
might
be a little less potent. I’ll up the dosage to compensate.’

Taking the vial back from Antea, he upended it and pierced the seal with the needle, then eased back the plunger, peering myopically at the measurements along the side. Once he was satisfied, he squirted a little of the liquid into the air, flicked the syringe with his nail, swabbed a spot on my bicep and stabbed me.