The Venice Conspiracy (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

Flight UA:716
Destination: Venice

Mid-Atlantic, Tom Shaman looks again at the postcard Rosanna Romano gave him.

He knows now that the painter is Giovanni Canaletto and the scene is an eighteenth-century view of the Grand Canal and the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. He knows it because he searched the internet all day until he found it. It was this card and this view that made him decide leaving LA was the right thing to do. Not for a short time. Not for a vacation. But for ever.

From the moment he picked the card up off the floor near his bed, he knew his days as a priest were over. The hands that held the postcard were stained by mortal sin. Murderer’s hands. They could never hold the host again. Never baptise. Never marry. Never consecrate.

Oddly, he feels both he and God are happy with this decision. Tom can’t yet figure out why, but it seems as right to quit now as it did to join the clergy when he was still at college.

The cops said the girl who’d been raped went kind of crazy. Found out she was pregnant. Wouldn’t leave her bedroom. Just sat there in the dark all day and needed her mother to sit with her. It broke Tom’s heart to hear about it. He tried several times to visit her, but she wouldn’t see him. She sent a message through the cops that she was unclean - unholy - and he must stay away.

Poor kid.

Tom still blames himself. If only he’d been more alert, stepped in earlier, been more decisive. He might have saved her. Might have spared her all this pain.

The thoughts still haunt him as the Airbus begins its descent into Marco Polo.

Dipping through thin cloud on a crisp, clear morning he catches a tantalising glimpse of the Dolomites and shimmering Adriatic. Next comes the Ponte della Libertà, the long road and rail causeway that links the historic centre of Venice with mainland Italy. Finally, the distinctive outline of the Campanile di San Marco and the meandering outreaches of the Canal Grande. The waterway doesn’t seem to have changed much since Canaletto’s time.

Marco Polo’s runway lies parallel to the dazzling coastline and, unless you’re perched on the pilot’s knee, the view you get does nothing to reassure you that you’re not landing in the centre of the lagoon. There’s a cheer of relief and a round of applause as the plane bumps on to the blacktop and the brakes judder.

In the main terminal, everyone’s in a mad hurry to get places. And the madness reaches a climax in the baggage hall.

Tom’s luggage isn’t there.

All his belongings, crushed into one big, old suitcase, have vanished.

The nice airline people promise to try to trace it. But Tom’s heard promises like that before, usually said by people kneeling in front of him confessing their sins and then rattling out prayers like they were ordering cheeseburgers and Cokes.

By the time Tom gets out into the blinding sunlight he sees the funny side. Maybe it’s right that he starts his new life with nothing but the clothes on his back.

CHAPTER 4

Venice

‘Piazzale Roma!’ shouts the bus driver, almost as though it’s a profanity. ‘
Finito. Grazie.’

The small, dark cube of a man jumps from his vehicle and is outside smoking long before the first passenger disembarks. Tom slings his sports bag over his shoulder and asks directions: ‘
Scusi, dove l’hotel Rotoletti?
’

The driver blows out smoke. Small black eyes take in the fresh-faced American with his phrasebook Italian. ‘It no far from here.’ He wafts his cigarette towards the far end of the Piazzale. ‘Turn left at corner - at bottom you see ’otel.’

The guy’s right: ‘it no far’ at all - Tom’s there in seconds.

A woman behind a cheap wooden reception desk is polite but falls far short of friendly. She shows him to a claustrophobic bedroom that is badly furnished in bloodshot red and faded blue. A small dirty window overlooks the air-con plant and doesn’t open. Tom dumps his bag and heads back to the streets as fast as he can.

After half an hour of walking, he finds himself in Piazza San Marco, dodging a million pigeons and window shopping for clothes that he soon realises he can’t afford. Silk ties cost more here than he paid for a stack of shirts and pants back in the discount mall. He prays his suitcase shows up soon.

The smell of fresh-roasted coffee and the buzz of tourist chatter and laughter draws him into Florin’s. He orders a cappuccino and a salade Niçoise. Aside from a blonde woman in her early thirties reading at the table next to him, everyone else is in pairs or small family groups. A middle-aged British guy sitting opposite is telling his over-made-up and under-dressed young girlfriend how, centuries ago, the café was an up-market brothel and high-class music club. Both Tom and the blonde look up to eavesdrop on his monologue about eighteenth-century Venice, Casanova and libertine life.

‘Sounds like we arrived three hundred years too late,’ the blonde whispers huskily across to Tom.

He spoons froth from his coffee. ‘Not sure about that. I have enough problems with modern life, let alone Venetian decadence at its peak.’ He smiles comfortably as he really notices her for the first time. ‘Anyway, how did you know I spoke English?’

She brushes a fall of blonde hair away from her sparkling pale blue eyes. ‘No disrespect, but you don’t look or dress anything like an Italian.’ She pauses. ‘In fact, I’m not sure what you dress like.’ A small laugh - not unkind - confident and warm. ‘And I guess the big giveaway is that you’re drinking cappuccino in the afternoon and playing with it, with a spoon.’ She nods to the middle-aged guy across from them. ‘The Brits are probably the only Europeans unsophisticated enough to drink cappuccino after breakfast. So I have you down as a fellow American, and judging from the tan, West Coast.’

Tom nods. ‘You’re on the money.’ He places her accent as Manhattan. Uptown. ‘What are you, some kind of cop?’

She laughs again, deeper and longer this time, even nicer to hear. ‘Me? No. No way. I’m a travel writer. Freelance. Everything from Lonely Planet to Condé Nast.’ She leans across the tables. ‘Tina - Tina Ricci.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Tina.’ He shakes her hand.

She looks into his warm brown eyes and waits for his move. Waits to be asked to his table. Waits for the follow-up line that she’s sure will come.

It doesn’t. Tom says nothing. He grows awkward and looks away, his heart beating like he’s just gone three rounds back in the boxing ring in Compton. He can feel her still staring. The bell’s rung and, for the first time in his life, he’s stuck in his corner wondering what to do.

CHAPTER 5

Present Day
Venice

The stranger looks different now.

No longer the good Samaritan who helped her when she was lost in the labyrinth of shadowy streets.

No longer a friendly local lending a helping hand to a confused and anxious teenager who’d stormed off after a row with her father.

He’s dressed differently too. Long black robes and a sinister silver mask shielding his face.

The girl grimaces as her bound and gagged body is dragged along the moss-slimed deck boards. He’s taking her to his sacred area. The libation altar. The spot where he will let her blood feed the water.

He pushes the teenager’s head over the edge. Makes it dangle in that supernatural space between sky and earth. Limbo. The place where he’ll steal her soul.

Only when she stares directly up at him does he begin.

An incision by the left ear. A long red slice beneath her cute little chin.

A popping noise in her slender throat.

The gag in her mouth slackens.

A fountain of red. Then a splutter. The greedy black water drinks until she’s bled dry.

Indifferently, he drops her skull with a dull thump on the wooden decking, then unwraps the tools he needs to complete his bloody ritual.

He kneels and prays.

A doctrine handed down across the centuries. A verbal chain of unbreakable belief.

Now there’s a whispering in his mind. A swelling choir of voices. Communal prayers of those who came and killed before him. The chants of the believers climax as he completes his ceremony.

He wraps the sinner’s sticky corpse in sheets of black plastic then tucks it beneath the tarpaulin in the gondola and waits for night to come.

Ribbons of milky moonlight finally flutter across the boards of the boathouse.

A long, deathly nothingness hums in his ears and fizzes in his blood.

He breathes it in. Absorbs its blackness. Feels it transform him.

The unlit, black gondola glides invisibly through the city’s canals and out into the lagoon.

The end is beginning.

An end planned six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

CHAPTER 6

The Following Day
Venice

The streets are cool, dark and deserted. It’s just after 5 a.m., and Tom’s already been up for an hour and is walking the city’s majestic bridges. Locals say that the best way to get to know Venice is to get lost, and Tom is at least halfway there. The most he’s aware of is that he’s meandering vaguely towards the Rialto. Maybe it’s years of rising early that shook him from his bed, or the fact that crossing time zones has messed up his body clock. Then again, it could be that he’s still trying to understand why yesterday he didn’t ask Tina -
was her full name Tina, or something longer, like Christina?
- if she wanted to catch up later for a drink, or maybe dinner. The words that deserted him like an awkward teenager come easily now.

He leans over the rails at the foot of a bridge and looks along the water. His head is spinning. Anyway, what did he really expect to come from a short conversation with a woman in a café?

It’s a good time of the day to clear his mind and see the city. He seems to have it to himself - like a private viewing at an art gallery. And Venice certainly has fascinating exhibits. A hundred and fifty canals, spanned by four hundred bridges. A hundred and seventeen separate islands. Three hundred alleyways.

Tom lifts his head. He’s heard something.

Maybe locals going to work. The first wheels of Venetian life grinding into daily motion. Perhaps even priests making their way to church for early prayers.

He takes his hands off the cool iron railings. Looks around. The noise comes again - this time it’s more of a shout than anything. A man calling something in Italian? Tom steps up on to the crest of the bridge and listens more attentively. Tries to get a bearing. Pins it down to a spot straight ahead and off to the right somewhere.

He jogs down the other side.

The streets smell of wet stones and rotting vegetables. The road here is cobbled and his worn leather soles slide on the smooth surface.

He takes two more bridges. Shuffles to a halt. ‘Hello!
Hello
, is anyone there?’

‘
Here! Here!
’ comes the out-of-sight reply.

Tom sets off again. Maybe two more bridges to the right?

He crosses the hump of the second and sees him.

An old man.

White shirt, white hair, dark crumpled trousers.

Kneeling by the edge of the water, like he’s fallen, or he’s trying to pull something out of the canal.

Probably a small boat.

Maybe a bag or something he’s dropped.

‘Hang on. I’ll help you.’

Tom hurries alongside. The old man’s face is strained. His knuckles white from gripping and pulling.

Now Tom sees it.

A sailing rope is tied around the railings and the old guy is heaving something heavy from below.

‘Don’t strain yourself - let me give you a hand.’

The pensioner falls back. There’s a splash. He cracks his bony back on the cobbles. Puts his slack-skinned hands to his face and starts to sob.

Tom pats him on the shoulder, squeezes it reassuringly as he moves to the water’s edge and looks over the stone slabs into the canal.

Now he understands the desperation.

Dangling from the rope is the naked and mutilated body of a young woman.

EIGHT MOON
CYCLES LATER

666 BC

CAPITOLO III

Atmanta

Teucer and Tetia sit together outside their hut, watching an autumnal dawn break across a perfect Etruscan skyline. Burnt orange, pale lemon and deepest cherry colour the distant forests.

Neither of them sleep well any more.

They sit here most mornings, holding hands, resting against the outside of the modest hillside home Teucer constructed of hewn timber, thatch, wattle and terracotta paste.

But life is better.

They have got away with it.

The thing they never now speak of - they are sure they have got away with.

Tetia leans her head on her husband’s shoulder. ‘One day soon we will sit here with our child and teach it the beauty of our world.’ She puts his hand on her bump and hopes he feels the magic of the child kicking.

Teucer smiles. But it is not the expression of an excited father-to-be. It is one of a husband putting on a brave face, one who is worried that the unborn may not be his but that of the man who raped her.

Tetia squeezes his hand. ‘Look, only the pines over by the curte seem to hold their green. Everywhere else has been set ablaze by the gods.’

He follows her eyes across the canopies of trees and tries not to think of his growing hate for the child she carries. ‘The fires of the season cleanse the grounds for the coming crops.’

‘You have seen this, husband?’

He laughs. ‘It is not divination, it is fact.’

She wraps an arm around him and falls silent. Silence is often best these days. Somehow it seems to hold them together, heals the wounds they dare not speak of.

The sun is dripping golden light on to the valley. The syrup of a perfect morning is being poured. They notice a dark shape down the opposite hillside, rolling like a boulder.

Teucer sees it first. He stares hard. Blinks. Hopes he is mistaken. Maybe it’s a giant bird or a wild cat, its black shadow cast on the straw-coloured land.

It’s not.

His mouth grows dry.

Tetia sits up straight, brushes her long black hair from her eyes and squints into the warm light.

There’s only one house on the other side of the hill.

Only one man who would send a rider from there so early in the day.

The dark shape gets bigger. In the seat of the valley it stops.

Teucer knows the figure is looking at them.

Preparing for them.

Coming for them.

CAPITOLO IV

The figure on the hillside is Larth. Larth the Punisher. Larth, the most feared man in Atmanta.

There are many reasons to be afraid of the mountain of muscle who has come from his master, Magistrate Pesna. First, Larth kills people. Executes them coldly in the name of local justice. Second, he tortures people, again at the behest of his master. Third, and perhaps most disturbingly of all, he enjoys every gruesome aspect of his work.

Teucer thinks of all these things as he sensibly complies with Larth’s gruff demand to take his horse and ride back with him. The young netsvis thinks too about Magistrate Pesna. The man is young and much resented. His wealth comes from the new industry of silver mining and the old art of political intrigue. Like all politicians he is different than he seems. Outwardly, he’s a nobleman, a businessman and pillar of the community. Privately, he’s corrupt - a debauched, sexual animal and voracious power seeker.

Inside the high-walled gardens of Pesna’s home, Larth leads Teucer into a vast room with an endless floor, tiled in a strange stone the colour of milk. The Punisher leaves him with a servant so young it will be a hundred moons before he needs to shave. Teucer feels his heart beating and his knees knocking. After all this time, he was certain neither he nor Tetia would be connected with the killing near the curte. He calms himself by admiring the opulence around him. The furniture is beautifully crafted from different local woods, some bleached white and covered in thick skins, some stained red and brown using berries and plants such as Madder. Life-size bronze statues representing orators, workers and slaves line the walls. The room is alive with murals showing dancers, musicians and revellers. In each corner there are huge pots, all glazed black and intricately covered in gold-leaf paintings.

Two servants fling open large lattice-worked doors and hurry into the room. Teucer’s heartbeat doubles again. They set about tidying skins and cushions on a large high-backed wooden seat where the magistrate intends sitting.

Pesna enters.

He is tall and handsome, clad in a long robe made from a shimmering fabric that Teucer doesn’t recognise. It is held on his shoulder by a silver clasp that looks like the gripping knuckles of a woman’s hand. His feet are cosseted in finest leather sandals, buckled in silver.

Pesna glances at Teucer and then disapprovingly back into a bronze mirror he is carrying at arm’s length. ‘You have a good complexion. The sun is not kind to my skin. It makes it dry and sore and red. Though to look pale is to seem as though you are wishing the white ghost of death to carry you to your tomb.’ He lowers himself into his seat. ‘What do you think, Netsvis?’

Teucer tries to sound calm. ‘The gods have made us as we are. Our true selves need no alterations other than those they deign to give us.’

‘Quite.’ Pesna takes a final look in the mirror and beckons his servant. ‘Tonight, make sure this is polished with bone of cuttlefish and pumice. Tomorrow I wish to be seen in a better light.’

The slave runs off and the magistrate turns his attention to the young seer who is admiring a bronze. ‘My courtiers tell me I have the finest collection of art outside of Greece. I am thinking that, once a year, I shall let the commoners in to view the pieces. What say you? Is this gesture likely to win me favours from the gods?’

Teucer is sickened by the man’s vanity but knows he must watch his tongue. ‘To patronise the arts is to shine light, not only into the present, but also into the future of those who inherit our lands. It follows then that the gods may reward you in the afterlife for such benevolence.’

‘Good. This is what I wanted to be told.’

‘Though, if I may be so bold as to add’ - he glances around - ‘it may also work to your favour to collect some works that honour the gods as well as mere mortals.’

Pesna grows reflective. ‘I will be vigilant in my search for such pieces. Thank you.’

Teucer feels confident enough to push his luck: ‘My wife is a sculptress, she would be delighted to advise or take commission from you.’

Pesna looks irritated. ‘Then send her. But I have asked you here not so that you may tout for family business but on a more serious matter.’ He walks a half-circle around the netsvis, staring intently into his face.

Teucer feels a fluttering in his stomach.

‘I have a problem, Netsvis, and I need the guidance and approval of the gods.’

‘I will try my best, Magistrate.’

Pesna steps close and glares at him. ‘Best is good - but only if your best is good enough.’ He pauses and studies the young seer’s face. Teucer hopes he cannot see the fear in his eyes. To Pesna, fear is more important than respect. ‘Etruria is growing,’ he continues. ‘The states are now numerous, the total populace close to a third of a million. I need new lands, new riches, new challenges, or Atmanta will be but one reed by the riverside when it should be a forest stretching further than the eye can see.’ He peers again at Teucer. ‘You understand my needs and ambitions, my dedication to the generations still to come?’

Teucer nods.

The magistrate changes his tone, speaks more confidentially. ‘Some moons ago, there was a very disturbing murder. One that has tongues wagging and threatens to become the stuff of widespread storytelling.’

Teucer’s heart skips a beat. He’d thought he was out of trouble.

‘The victim was a grown man. He was slaughtered like a wild animal. His guts pulled out and his liver cast away. I presume you have heard of this?’

Teucer nods respectfully.

‘You and I - dear Netsvis - know that the liver is the seat of the soul. Its removal can prevent a person passing into the afterlife.’ He pauses and reads assent on Teucer’s face. ‘Such acts can panic a community like ours.’ For the first time the magistrate also looks worried. He tries to take the fear out of his voice. ‘An elder told me such a murder would be the work of Aita, the lord of the underworld. Could this be so?’

Teucer senses a chance to offset the blame. ‘It is possible. Aita has monstrous power, he takes souls in any way he can. Normally, I would expect him to send a succubus to seduce a man and take his spirit during ejaculation, however—’

‘Gods forbid!’ Pesna interrupts, thinking of his own pleasures and vulnerability. ‘Sweet gods in the sky, do not say such things!’ He takes a moment to clear the image from his head and return to his wishes. ‘Netsvis, let me get to the point. I will shortly embark upon a campaign of great importance. I cannot do this if we are cursed or seen to be cursed. Do you understand?’

Teucer’s not sure he does. ‘What would you have me do, Magistrate?’

The politician flaps his arms. ‘Sacrifice something. Work some charms to ensure our settlements are peaceful and clear of rumours. I cannot have my plans disrupted by unfriendly gods, or even stories of unfriendly gods. Do I make myself clear?’

‘What would you have me sacrifice and to whom? Perhaps three different animals, all in honour of the trinity, Uni, Tinia and Menrva?’

Pesna snaps. He grabs the seer by the front of his tunic. ‘In the name of all the deities, just do your job, man! Do I have to think
for
you? Sacrifice women and children - I don’t care, provided it works.’ He pushes him away. ‘Don’t fail in this. I warn you, if you fail me, then next time I send Larth for you, it will be to have him vent my dissatisfaction upon your body.’