The Chamber of Ten (30 page)

She had to find some way to get an advantage over him, to shift the balance of power between them, just in case. It had been in the back of her thoughts all night, and an idea had begun to coalesce, but it would require more contemplation.

Crossing a canal, Geena stopped on the bridge to watch a gondolier ply the filthy water below. A middle-aged couple sat in the prow of the gondola, snuggling close in a romantic haze, oblivious to the dirty water, the rats scuttling along building ledges, and the dark, malignant powers beginning to wage war in the city around them. She envied them for their blissful ignorance, and hated them for it at the same time.

The gondolier poled toward a blind corner ahead and shouted out to any of his brethren who might be approaching from the other angle. A reply echoed off the stone façades of the buildings around them and the gondolier maneuvered his charges to one side, steadying the gondola as another made the corner ahead, a trio of college-aged girls on board.

The gondoliers greeted one another with a cheerful camaraderie, and it hurt Geena’s heart to see their smiles. Suddenly she could not bear to be alone tonight, could not put off the restoration of her life until the sunrise. How could she sleep at all, alone in her apartment, knowing that Nico was out there with that insidious, conniving magician holding the reins on his soul?

Awash in moonlight, ignoring people who passed her on the bridge and the gondolas now retreating in either direction, she pulled out her phone and stood there listening to the thirteen voice messages that her friends had left her. Even Finch had called twice purely out of concern rather than business, despite the fact that they’d only known each other for a few days.

Tonio wanted her in his office first thing in the morning. His tone was difficult to read, but she knew the conversation would be grim. Yet she welcomed it. Her whole life was crumbling around her and she needed to take action
to prevent it from falling apart completely. And whatever was going on in the tomb revealed in Dorsoduro, Tonio would surely know all about it.

There were three new messages from Domenic. He and the rest of the team had gone to a small café in San Polo called Il Bacio where they sometimes gathered, and he said they were all hoping she would join them if she felt up to it. Geena doubted that they were all that enthusiastic about her company tonight, but she believed Domenic was sincere, and the lure of human companionship was powerful. And perhaps she wouldn’t have to wait until morning to ask about the hidden Foscari tomb.

Gripping the phone in her hand like some kind of talisman—a connection to normalcy—she left the bridge and canal behind and started off through alleys and courtyards. In the years she had spent in Venice, some areas of its complex labyrinth had become very familiar to her and she tried not to stray into sections she did not know well. Tonight she navigated the maze purely by instinct. Il Bacio was just a few minutes walk from the Rialto Bridge and she made her way in that direction.

The phone felt solid and real in her hand, but she needed more than that. It was late, but not so late that a ringing phone would alarm anyone. At the risk of waking his children or irritating his wife, she dialed Tonio. Her toe caught on a loose cobblestone and she stumbled but did not fall, cursing softly.

“Geena? Are you all right?” Tonio answered. He’d heard her swear, which was not the way she’d hoped to begin the conversation.

“I am,” she said. “I really am. I’m sorry to call you so late, but I didn’t want to leave it until morning.”

“So you intend to come back to work tomorrow?”

Geena hesitated. “I … of course I do. This is my project. I should be there.”

“And there’s nowhere I would rather you be,” Tonio replied gently. “But you were attacked by your … assistant. You were stabbed. You should take time to—”

“Tonio, please, just listen.”

A brief silence, and then: “All right.”

“I’ve just been to the police. I’m not going to press charges against Nico—”

“But he stabbed you with a knife!” Tonio said, incredulous. “I know you love him, Geena, but he could have killed you.”

“No. There’s … there’s more to it than that. It’s difficult to explain. Anyway, the knife barely drew blood. There’s barely a mark. I won’t even have a scar.”

“Geena, he
stabbed
you.”

She stopped in the middle of a courtyard where cobblestones were cracked and uneven, the only light aside from the moon coming from an old iron lantern hanging beside the door to a long building that had once been a convent but now contained apartments. If the lantern had run on oil instead of electricity, she might have thought herself in another of Volpe’s memories.

“I know,” she said quietly. “But I promise you there’s more to it.”

“But you can’t tell me what it is.”

She smiled softly to herself, but it faded instantly. “It’s … difficult.”

Tonio sighed. “You love him.”

It wasn’t a question.

“And because you love him,” he continued, “I won’t press charges on behalf of the university. But he no longer has a job here. You understand that, yes? The liability
if we were to continue to employ him and there was some further incident of violence would be enormous. But more than that, I won’t have him here. It would seem as if I were condoning his behavior.”

Geena swallowed hard. “I understand. And thank you.”

“You should get as far away from him as you can,” Tonio continued. “I fear for you.”

I fear for myself
, Geena wanted to say, but she could not. Tonio would misinterpret her words.

“You’re a good man,” she told him.

“Rest tonight,” Tonio replied. “Regain your focus. Come in late tomorrow if you need the time, but do come in. Not because we need you, though we do, but for your own sake. This is the biggest moment of your career, Geena. I would hate to see you let it slip out of your hands.”

Il Bacio buzzed with the sounds of humanity. Voices were punctuated by laughter and the clinking of glasses and music that came from small speakers overhead and seemed to rise and fall on the dips and swells of conversation. Geena weaved through the busy café with an easy familiarity, tension already easing out of her shoulders. This dose of normality could not erase the madness of the past few days, the horrors of what she had seen and endured just since morning, but it could help her shut it all out for an hour, and she needed that respite.

She spotted Sabrina first, sitting close with another young woman, who Geena recognized as a student at the university but could not name. The two of them whispered to each other in a way that could only be thought of as intimate, and their eyes sparkled in what might have been mischief or flirtation. Geena arched an eyebrow,
but neither option troubled her. Sabrina intrigued her and had proven herself a loyal employee, but they weren’t really friends. There were doubtless many things they did not know about each other.

Three tables had been dragged together, and the group was much larger than Geena had anticipated. There were graduate students, several undergrads, lovers and friends and spouses, and even Sandro Pustizzi, a history professor from Ca’Foscari. Coffee cups and wineglasses festooned the table, along with silver trays that had borne many pizzas, most of which had been devoured by now. No matter how long she lived in Italy, she would never get used to how late the Italians often ate their meals.

A waitress bumped her, skillfully managing not to dump the tray of drinks in her hand, and they danced away from each other in the swirl of movement in the café. When Geena looked at the table again, Ramus had already jumped up from the table and was rushing toward her with a broad smile on his face, his skin flushed from too much wine.

“Dr. Hodge! I’m so glad you came!” he said, glancing at her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Geena nodded, wondering what Ramus would say if he could see her unmarred skin. She had worn a thin cotton top, but fortunately it hid the absence of a wound.

“A claret wouldn’t go amiss,” she said.

This seemed all the confirmation Ramus needed of her physical and mental well-being, and he went in search of a drink.

That left Geena standing alone and awkward a few feet from the table, but by now perhaps a third of those gathered there had turned to notice her arrival. Sabrina
waved, some people whispered to their immediate companions—gossip about her, no doubt—but Domenic stared at her with a relief that made her swell with gratitude that she had such a friend.

He dragged an empty chair from another table and slid it in beside him just as she approached, and he gestured for her to sit. Thankful, she sank into the chair and then, before either of them had spoken a word, she sighed and leaned on his shoulder.

“I’m so glad you called me,” she said, sitting up and turning to face him.

“I’m glad you
came,”
Domenic replied. “You need to be around sane people for a while.”

Geena surprised herself by laughing, and Domenic joined her.

“You look all right, considering,” he said. “What’s going on? Did you talk to Tonio? Have you seen Nico since …”

The questions stalled as Geena held up a hand. “Please, let’s not talk about it. Just tell me about the project. Where are we?”

Domenic warmed to the subject immediately, happy to provide her with a distraction.

“You’ll never believe it,” he said excitedly. “After you and I left—after all the drama and the bloodletting—Sabrina and our divers and the BBC team were documenting everything down in the Chamber when some men from the city engineer’s office showed up with enormous pumps and hoses and said they’d finished shoring up the canal wall.”

Geena stared at him. “You’re not serious? That quickly?”

“That’s what
I
said. There’s obviously more work to
be done out there, but they’ve filled the hole, at least temporarily. The BBC must have put a ton of money into it, both on the table and under it, to make it happen that fast.”

“I guess,” Geena said, but she wasn’t so sure. Finch’s people had money, all right, but graft and corruption were nothing new in Italian government. How much money would it have taken to get the local authorities moving so swiftly? Was there enough money in the world?

Or were the Doges somehow involved? She tried to think of a reason they might use their influence in that fashion, why they might want access to the Chamber of Ten, but nothing occurred to her.

Maybe you’re just being paranoid. These guys aren’t pulling the strings on everything
. She was so tired and confused.

“We got the pumps running right away,” Domenic was saying.

“How long, do you think, until the chamber’s dry?”

“Maybe forever. Whatever kept it dry—which Sabrina found no sign of, by the way—it isn’t working now. The pumps have probably already drained what flooded in, but there’s still going to be groundwater. Once the canal wall is permanently repaired we’ll know more, but my guess is a drainage system might need to be installed long-term.”

Geena let that sink in. Right now, as they sat there talking, the Chamber of Ten might be accessible. Who knew how much damage it had sustained? The broken wall, of course, and one of the obelisks had cracked. And then there was the urn …

“Domenic, there’s something I need you to do for me,” she said. “Now. Tonight.”

He nodded. “Of course. Anything.”

Geena spoke quickly and quietly, so that only Domenic could hear her over the din of the café. If he thought her request strange he showed no sign of it, only agreed to do as she asked.

“Now, tell me about this horrible thing in Dorsoduro,” she said. “What is this crypt they’ve discovered?”

“Awful, isn’t it?” Domenic said. “You saw it on the news?”

“Heard it from a waitress in a café, actually.”

“That’s what I love about Venice. We get our news over coffee.” Domenic smiled and then nodded toward a young guy who was one of the graduate students. “Luciano was over there today.”

Domenic got the grad student’s attention and made the introductions, though given his field of study, Luciano was well aware of Dr. Geena Hodge. It would have been almost impossible to be an archaeology student in Venice and not be familiar with her.

“Lu, Dr. Hodge was just asking about the tomb in Dorsoduro.”

Luciano nodded enthusiastically, as though being allowed to visit the site had been the best gift he had ever received.

“Dr. Schiavo sent a group of us down to observe,” Luciano said. “The city council wanted us there as consultants, or something. I’ve never seen anything like it, Dr. Hodge. Most of the building slid into the canal. No one seemed sure why. There was talk of explosives, but I overheard policemen saying there was no sign of anything like that. But if it hadn’t collapsed, the tomb wouldn’t have been discovered right away. It’s a mass grave, really. The building had a subchamber, probably 16th century.
It’s similar in some ways to Petrarch’s library, but its only purpose was for burial. From what we could tell based on an initial evaluation, there’s not a single marking to indicate the identity of any of the entombed dead. Don’t you think that’s bizarre?”

Geena nodded to urge him on. “Very peculiar. And what about the tomb? Was it intact?”

Luciano had been excited to tell her his story, building up to something, but now his excitement left him in a single exhalation and he looked at her oddly.

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing. That’s why I’m asking. Why?”

He gave a small shrug. “It’s just weird that you would ask, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“I received a call just before I came over here,” Luciano said. “A couple of my classmates went down there tonight with a camera and a lighting rig to begin documenting the inside of the tomb so they would have photographs of what the site looked like before they started disturbing things tomorrow. The area around the building had been blocked off and the workers had gone home for the day. But there should have been at least a handful of police on guard, for safety if nothing else. Yet no one tried to stop them when they arrived with the equipment, or approached to ask them what they were doing. They called Dr. Schiavo and he called the police, who said there were officers posted there, but whatever their orders were, those police were nowhere to be found. My friends went inside the tomb—”