The Rape of Venice (54 page)

‘Would you swear to that in front of a magistrate?' Roger
asked quickly. ‘If so, we'll break out together now. I've a pistol so could hold off the servants. We'll get a warrant and return with the municipals to search the palace. Somewhere in it there is bound to be corroborative evidence: an altar to the Devil, perhaps, books on Satanism, robes with…'

‘No! No! No!' She shrank away from him in terror. ‘I dare not! Even to attempt it would be useless. His familiar spirits would warn him of what we were about to do. He would strike me dumb from afar.'

‘I cannot believe that he has the power to do that.'

‘He has! He has! The evil gods give it to him in return for those blood sacrifices he makes to them. You believe him to be a charlatan because you caught him out in a trick. He is greedy for money and has used it successfully several times to win wagers. Yet he can levitate me. He has done so several times. He learnt how from the fakirs in Bahna. But to perform the feat requires weeks of patient preparation.'

Roger shook his head. ‘He only made you believe solely by his will-power that he raised you from the ground. That he has extraordinarily strong hypnotic powers I admit. I have had personal experience of them. But all this Black Magic hocus-pocus, and the abominable rites he practises, do no more than give him immense confidence that, by one means or another, he will achieve his ends.'

‘You are wrong!' she cried. ‘Wrong! He can overlook people from a distance. Of that I am certain. He is the Devil incarnate, the very embodiment of evil, and has become the recipient of many strange powers. He may be overlooking us at this very moment, and listening to us conspiring against him.'

As though to confirm her terrified apprehensions, the tall, gilded double doors of the apartment were thrown open, and Malderini stood framed between them.

Immediately behind Malderini, and towering above him, stood the lank-haired Pietro. Farther back there was a group of half a dozen menservants.

Malderini advanced a few paces into the room. His malevolent glance fixed itself on Roger, who had instinctively looked straight at him. Then, without shifting his gaze, he said, presumably to Pietro:

‘You were right. He is the Englishman.'

Again Roger felt the impact of those terrible soulless eyes which fastened on his own, seemed to dissolve his will and bear him down. But he had come prepared for the possibility that Malderini might return earlier than he had on the past two days and catch him in the palace. Swiftly his left hand went inside his robe, fastened on a small packet and drew it out. Tearing his eyes from Malderini's riveting stare, he shook the contents of the packet out into the palm of his right hand, then springing forward, he flung it into his enemy's face.

It was red pepper. Malderini's grey eyes blinked for a second then he shut them with an agonised cry. Next moment he was sneezing violently. His big fleshy face distorted by pain and rage, he staggered forward blindly. With his hands clutching like talons at the empty air, he cried in his thin, high voice:

‘Seize him! Seize him! Pietro! Stefano! Bimbo! A hundred sequins to the man who brings him down.'

They needed no bidding. Barely a second after Roger had flung the pepper, Pietro dodged out from behind his master, and the other men started forward after him. Roger had barely time to pull out his pistol, and not enough to cock it and hold
them up as he had hoped. The weapon was dashed from his hand by Pietro's onslaught.

Swivelling round, Roger overturned a small table. The long-legged valet tripped over it and went crashing onto the parquet floor. The Princess screamed, but got in the way of the next man to make a grab at Roger. He threw a quick glance at the double doors. There were five men between him and them. Even having rendered Malderini
hors de combat,
without a sword he knew he could not possibly fight his way out. Driving his right fist into the stomach of a fat bald man, with his left he fended off a blow from another. A third man dived for his legs, seized his ankles and, with a jerk, threw him over backwards. His bottom hit the floor with an awful bump, but his head was saved by coming down on the cushioned seat of a chair some feet behind him. He kicked out savagely, freeing his legs; then, by a lucky stroke, he landed a kick on the chin of the man who had thrown him.

Imprecations and wailing filled the air. Malderini still had his clenched fists pressed against his eyes. He reeled about, sneezing, choking, and getting in the way of the others. Sirisha, with the shrill fluency natural to Eastern ladies when wrought up to a high pitch of distress, continued to scream as though she was being beaten. The fat man who had been winded made awful noises as he strove to draw in breath, and the fellow who had been kicked under the chin emitted long heart-rending groans. But Pietro was up again. Followed by the three still uninjured men, he flung himself at Roger.

His dive missed only by inches. Just in time Roger threw his body sideways, and rolled over and over across the polished floor. He was brought to rest by a wrought-iron jardinire containing half a dozen pots of flowers. Squirming round it, he got to his knees, seized it by its slender legs and, as he rose, brought them up with him to chest level. As Pietro and the other men came charging across the floor at him, he used all his strength to hurl it at them.

Pietro, his eyes distended by sudden fear, went over backwards. The end of the jardinire caught the man beside him on the arm and threw him off his balance. But the other two continued to come on.

By that time, Roger was through the open window and out on the balcony. Without looking over he knew that the drop to the canal was a good thirty feet; but if he let himself be captured in the Palace he knew that he would never come out of it
alive. Without a second's hesitation he flung one leg across the stone balustrade. But the two men ran at him and seized him.

Up till then he had not had a second to draw the knife that he carried on the belt beneath his robe. As they grabbed his shoulders, he wrenched it out and jabbed it into the ribs of the nearest. The man gave a piercing cry and, as he doubled up, thrust automatically with his arms at Roger. The violence of the push overbalanced him. The other man had grasped his robe at the back of the neck. As he fell backwards over the stone balustrade the man hung on. For a moment he swung, his legs kicking frantically in the air, suspended by his robe. Suddenly there came a sharp rending sound. The stitching round the collar of the robe gave and it ripped. A ragged remnant of the collar was left dangling from the clutching hand. Roger fell, feet first, like a plummet, into the canal below.

He struck the water with a terrific splash and plunged through it with scarcely less speed. His feet hit mud and went into it as though it were butter. For an instant he panicked, fearing that it would trap him; but his knees had bent double and, as he jerked himself erect, with one wild wriggle he also freed his feet. Automatically he drew in breath. The water gushed up his nostrils, causing him acute pain at the back of his nose. He choked and took in another mouthful of the horrid sewage-tainted water. Then with bulging eyes and straining lungs he came to the surface.

As his head bobbed up its appearance was greeted with a chorus of excited shouts. At this middle-day hour the Grand Canal was full of traffic. Although he had fallen into the Barnaba Canal, scores of people had seen him. Malderini's people were leaning over the balcony yelling, ‘Stop thief! Stop thief!' and half a dozen boats had already turned in his direction.

Desperately he struck out up the narrower canal. Fifty yards ahead, where the Malderini palace ended, he could see a flight of steps leading up onto the canal's side-walk. If he could reach them and land there was still a chance that he might escape from his pursuers.

But a broad-bottomed boat, loaded high with vegetables, was coming down the canal towards him. The man who was steering the boat gave a swift twist with his long sweep and its prow veered round, barring Roger's passage. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Malderini's gondola, with its two liveried
men urged on by their fellow servants craning over the balcony, was bearing down upon him.

Caught between the two, he temporarily accepted the lesser evil and allowed a thick-necked peasant to haul him onto the vegetable boat. No sooner was he on it than he gave his rescuer a violent shove, which sent him over backwards upon a great pile of artichokes, then dived back into the canal on the boat's far side.

As he came up again, once more shaking the foul water from his eyes, he realised that the odds were hopelessly against him. He was now like a bear in a bear-pit surrounded by a pack of fierce dogs. With swift strokes, craft of all sorts had moved up from both directions. They were full of excited shouting people and their boats now formed a solid ring only ten feet away all round him.

The Malderini gondola shot out from the circle that hemmed him in. Stooping, the liveried servant in its prow seized him by the arm. He resisted wildly, but someone threw an empty bottle that hit him on the head. It did not stun him but temporarily dazed him to a degree that robbed him of the strength to break free.

Muzzy, panting, soaking and exhausted he was dragged on board. The excitement now being over, the other craft disengaged themselves and the mass of boats began to break up. Overhead from the balcony Pietro was shouting down to Malderini's gondoliers. ‘Don't let him escape! Have a care that he does not escape! Bring him into the palace! Quickly! Quickly!'

Roger's bemused brain took in the shouted order. Again it was borne in upon him that once he became a captive inside the palace there would be little chance of his getting out of it alive. Desperately he looked round for some means of saving himself. Suddenly his glance fell on a gondola not far off which had as passengers four French soldiers. Struggling into a sitting position he called to them:

‘A moi! A moi! C'est un Français qui vous appel! Au secours! Mes braves! Au secours!'

Hearing his cries the soldiers immediately took a renewed interest. Shouting back to him, they had their gondola turned in his direction. It arrived at the same moment as Malderini's at the steps of the palace. Still half dazed, Roger was hauled out onto the landing place by the two gondoliers, but while struggling with them he called again to the Frenchmen:

‘Help comrades; help! I am a Frenchman! Don't let them take me inside the palace. They mean to murder me.'

The soldiers promptly jumped ashore, and their leader, a Sergeant cried in execrable Italian, ‘Let this man go. Take your hands off him.'

Pietro, meanwhile, had run downstairs, and now appeared with three of the other servants at his heels. At a glance he took in the situation. Pointing at Roger he shouted in French as execrable as the Sergeant's Italian. ‘This man is an Englishman, an assassin and a thief. He has stolen jewels from my mistress. We must take him in and search him for them.'

Roger was getting his wits back. Swiftly he denied the charge and offered to be searched there and then.

A heated wrangle ensued during which most of those participating could understand less than half of what the others said. But one thing at least appeared beyond dispute to the soldiers—Roger spoke French with the fluency and accent of a native; so he must be a Frenchman. Therefore, whether he was a thief or not, they were not going to let him be maltreated by a bunch of Italians. They insisted that he should be taken to the Municipality, and that they would accompany him to see fair play.

Forced to give in, Pietro, now brandishing a stiletto as a threat to Roger should he make a further attempt to escape, made him get back into the gondola and got in beside him. The soldiers reboarded theirs, and the two craft set off side by side down the canal.

The Municipality had taken over the administrative offices in the Doge's Palace, and, owing to the epidemic of lawlessness that had swept the city since the fall of the old régime, a magistrate's court was maintained in perpetual session there.

Roger was marched through the great courtyard of the palace to the part of it in which the court sat and handed over to its officers. Pietro having charged him with theft, he was taken to a cell and searched. During the process, he thanked his gods that while in Venice he had followed his usual practice, when living under an assumed identity, of hiding his papers and most of his money under a floor-board in his room; for the discovery of his Bills on London and, above all, Mr. Pitt's letter, would have been the end of him. His one chance of regaining his freedom was, he felt sure, to continue to maintain that he was a Frenchman, in the hope that he would reap the benefit of the licence which the French forced the Venedans
to extend to their nationals whenever one of them committed a crime that was not of a really serious nature.

Twenty minutes later he was taken into the court, and he saw at a glance that it inspired a little more confidence in the dispensation of strict justice than had the tribunals he had often attended in Paris during the Revolution. It differed only in that there was no crowd of
sans-culottes
and shrewish women to throw gibes at the unfortunate prisoners. But a group of French soldiers leaned against one wall smoking short clay pipes and frequently spitting, a handful of lawyers, some unshaven and others with their feet up, lounged on the benches, the straw on the floor did not look as though it had been changed for a month, and the place smelled foul.

Three men sat up on a dais behind a table littered with papers. Two wore tricolour sashes of office in the new Italian colours. One of them was a quite young man with the burning eyes of a fanatic, and wearing a workman's blouse; the other who, as he sat in the centre, was evidently the President, was much older, well but untidily dressed, and with a mean little pursed-up mouth. The third, to Roger's great relief, was a French Captain, evidently acting as a Provost-Marshal.