The Gondola Scam (13 page)

Lesson: Venetian catburglary using a
gondola is simply not on. I'd have to think of another way, and fairly soon. I
was running out of options.

I sat on my balcony overlooking the
lagoon lights. I'd tried dialing Nancy's number, but the phone maintained a sulky
silence, so I gave that up. Some convenient lie would spring to my rescue when
I saw her in the morning.

A big cargo ship was coming in, slowly
threshing the night westwards between us and the San Giorgio. Soon she would
turn leftish to avoid the Grand Canal by passing between the long shallow curve
of the Giudecca island and the Zattere. Who would think that some of the most
efficient docks in Europe lay beyond those beautiful churches and elegant
rooftops?

By the time the ship's lights passed
into the darkness, I was pondering the curious spin-off problem of David's
little group. Talking with Nancy while, erm, resting in her bed, I'd learned
nothing. But what was wrong with being in Venice "on assignment"?
Their business, not mine. I should forget this side problem and concentrate on
my main hassle of Mr. Pinder and his lunatic scheme to nick Venice. I fell
asleep trying to work out how you could fold up Venice and stuff it into a
single palazzo.

When I woke from my doze, stiff as a
plank and damp from the dawn mist on the balcony, I had at least one answer. If
you can't gain entry into a lady's house by dishonest means like good old
reliable burglary, you just have to resort to honesty. That's really underhand.
Hard, but there it is. Nothing for it.

Plan X.

Incredibly, next day was free of
incoming flights. All Cosima and I had to do was see off one taxi load. After
that nothing. I tried being my usual pleasant unassuming self to Cesare, but he
was more sullen than ever and hardly responded. Maybe I'd absent-mindedly said
a wrong declension or something.

Cosima was standing beside me on the
Riva as our boat slewed into the Canale dell' Arsenale with the departing
tourists. Cesare would be at least an hour away.

"What now, love?"

"You handle the first flight
arriving tomorrow, Lovejoy. The rest of today is yours."

Neither of us moved. It was blowing
gently. Cosima had on one of those plain headscarves which even the tiniest
Venetian girls wear to match their little sober brown boots in March. I could
have eaten her.

"I, er, look, Cosima—"

"Yes?"

"I'll understand if you say no,
but are you doing anything, well, particular today?"

"Well, no. Not really."

That might have been untrue. Every day
she was becoming more stylish. Today she would outshine the most elegant bunch
of tourists. In fact I was a bit embarrassed just being with her, because I
look a scruff at the best of times. Vaguely I wondered who the bloke was,
though it didn't matter. If she had a couple of hours to spare she could help
Plan X along its thorny road.

"Would you show me the bits of
Venice you like?"

She hesitated at that and I hurried to
reassure her. "I've a clean shirt I can put on. I've no other shoes
but—"

"No," she said quickly.
"Don't. It wouldn't be you, dressed up."

I didn't know how to take that. It
narked me, really. Everybody has their own twists. I admit I'm not exactly
Savile Row, but I'm clean underneath. In fact my old gran had this perennial
nightmare I'd get knocked down and be carried into the doctor's surgery where
All Would Be Revealed, and she labored for years to pass on this paranoiac
delusion to me, so it's second nature by now to de-filth daily. But some people
can look stylish as anything, like Cosima, and others like me just can't, so
it's no use us bothering.

She was looking at her foot. "I
must call at the office first. Then I'll be free."

"You mean you'll come? With
me?"

She took my arm. It made me tingle.
"With pleasure, Lovejoy."

Our office—I didn't know we had one—was
near the San Giorgio dei Greci church, its tower inevitably leaning at an
alarming angle over the canal. I only hope the people living nearby got danger
money, at least a rent rebate. You get used to Venice's leaning campaniles, but
at first you go about hoping you'll escape before they topple. They all look
scarily out of true, and I do mean a terrible angle. Pisa's got one sloper.
Venice has a forest of them. You could plonk Pisa's Leaning Tower in Venice and
nobody would notice.

Cosima insisted I come in with her.
Cosol Tours, Inc., seen close to was less than munificent. One small office
heaped with forms, a small computer thing with its flex unconnected, a couple
of phones, and Giuseppe Fusi. Our big wheel. He was homely, portly,
comfortable, and proudly showed me photos of his numerous offspring while
Cosima delved irritably among the dust.

"Any tourist problem,
Lovejoy," Signor Fusi announced grandly, "I solve instantly!"

"Giuseppe, that charter special
manifest," Cosima said.

'Think of my office as the hub of the
Cosol Tours empire!"

"Great," I said uneasily,
thinking, God Almighty.

"Giuseppe," Cosima said,
endless patience in her voice.

Giuseppe's shoulders slumped. Work
called. "Yes, Cosima?"

While Cosima gave him a drubbing over
the tourist manifests I had a quiet smile. Giuseppe was obviously one of those
blokes who love gossip and a glass. Everything else was death. He must look
forward to Cosima's visits like the end of the tax year.

The canal below the window, wider than
most, ran straight to enter the lagoon where Vivaldi's
la Pieta
church stands on the Riva. Lovely, strikingly unique Venice.
It really does warm you. I looked round to find somewhere to perch and enjoy
the view while I waited. Smiling to keep out of her firing line, I gently moved
a pile of papers and sat on the desk edge to watch a small motorized mini-barge
amble up the
rio
. These craft carry
everything from soft drinks to groceries, and are steered with skilled
recklessness by young blokes in overalls—

Norman?
One of the papers I'd just moved had Signora Norman's name on it.

"Ready, Lovejoy!"

I nodded, eagerly watching the barge go
below the window. "A minute, love, please. I want to see how he shoots the
ponte
. He might go left."

"Ah, Lovejoy!" Giuseppe
swiftly sensed a chat. "No. He will go straight ahead, because the angle
is too acute. Now, let me explain. If he wanted to make deliveries near the
Palazzo Priuli, he would always come up the Rio del Vin, to meet this
rio
at a point below the Rio dei Greci.
And why? Because—"

"Giuseppe," Cosima said, too
practiced to waste a minute, bless her heart. "This Geneva flight. .
."

Giuseppe's only satisfaction was that
the barge went straight on. Mine was that, turning to tell Giuseppe that he had
been proved right, I accidentally knocked over some of the desk papers. It took
us a full minute to restore the heap to its original shambles. I of course was
very apologetic, and took particular care the papers were all in order.

We left with Cosima happily calling
exhortations up the stairs and Giuseppe shouting endless devotion-to-duty down.
Cosima and I were laughing about Giuseppe as we crossed the bridge, but all the
way along the narrow Fondamenta dell' Osmarin all I could see was Signora
Norman's name. It had been on an invoice, address the Malcontento house. Mr. D.
Vidal and Mrs. N. Waterson had flown at her expense. I came to with Cosima
shaking my arm.

"You've not been listening,
Lovejoy. I said where to?"

"Sorry, love." I went all
misty. "I was just thinking how happy I am, being with you like
this." Her arm seemed so natural linked with mine. "You're showing me
what Venice is up to, remember? Lead on."

We combed Venice, exhilarated. Of
course, I was constantly looking for something different from what Cosima was
showing me. As the bridges came and went in a confusion of buildings, elegant
facades, canals, and alleys, Cosima blossomed. Her rather guarded anxiety
vanished and we walked with what can only be called merriment. She astonished
me with a zillion odd facts.

"Galileo's house," she'd say.
"He showed our Doge his new invention at the top of the Campanile,"
and you would know she meant the Galileo, his new invention being the telescope
and his demonstration that business in 1609. No accident that the Flanders
spectacle makers zipped to Venice with their improved magnifying lenses, spying
practically being a Venetian patent. Galileo just happened to hear of these
lenses there.

'That place was Napoleon's," she'd
say, not even bothering to look. "Your Lord Byron lived over there; a lady
threw herself into
that
canal for
love of him." And occasionally her dear little face would frown with
intensity as she asked a question to check that she was not leaving me behind.
"Casanova was born in that
calle
.
You know Casanova?"

"Yes," I'd say gravely, as if
he were still around.

"Good," she'd say, all
serious, and her animated smile would return. "That palazzo is Cristoforo
Moro's. Your Shakespeare changed his name to Othello—you know,
Othello
? —but Shylock lived across
there—you know. Shylock .. . ?"

Soon she was eagerly urging me along,
anxious to show me her favorite spots and prattling all the time.

"Hitler toured Venice on his own
at night—at a fast trot" was one of her gems, supposed to be
encouragement. "Didn't stay long, though."

She had a collection of entertaining
sights as well. One of her favorites was the rubbish collection. Household
rubbish is collected at the lagoon-side entrance of each canal about half past
nine each morning. The brown cardboard boxes and black plastic bags are lifted
into a long bargelike boat of military gray and black by the steersman's two
blue-overalled shore-based helpers. They actually sweep up after themselves.
Incredible. I couldn't get over it.

As we walked, I realized there's this
great trick Venetians have of pretending people from antiquity are still
knocking about. We have a similar knack in East Anglia, but don't take things
quite so personally. She showed me Vivaldi's
la Pieta
church, which old Mr. Pinder had practically wept over. I
thought it beautiful, clean, chill, and excessively neat. "So different
from the Red Priest himself," I mused as we gaped at Piazzetta's
Visitation
painting. 'T wonder if that
soprano Vivaldi shacked up with was as attractive as her sister, and which of
them he really loved?"

Cosima disapproved and quickly pulled
me out of the side entrance. "Father Vivaldi's troubles were of his own
making," she said sternly. "If he'd paid more attention to his church
and less to ... to his music, he wouldn't have been defrocked."

"Falling for the lady was
perfectly natural, Cosima."

She drew away, appalled. "You're
not advocating free love?"

"Is there any other kind?" I
was a picture of innocence.

"It's Father Vivaldi's business,
not ours."

That's how I came to learn the Great
Venetian Trick. Antonio Vivaldi—1678-1741—you must speak and think as if he were
still concertmaster at the girls' school on the Riva degli Schiavoni. You give
the same courtesy to other Venetians. You can mention Marco Polo, but not that
he came from China to knock on his own door and got himself detained because
nobody recognized him after a score of years. You can praise Veronese's
masterpieces to the skies, but not his shameful trial before the Inquisition
about his
Feast in the House of Levi
.
The Great Venetian Trick operates at all times. You can speak about Italians
and all others any way you choose, but Venetians are respectable.

I wish now I'd thought about the
implications, but it's no good crying over spilt milk. Especially when the
spilt milk turned out to be Cosima.

The market near the Rialto Bridge was
another of her favorites. ("Not the gaudy shops on the bridge itself, Lovejoy.
They should never have been allowed there in the first place," she said
severely, criticizing the practice which began in 1592.) The Erberia vegetable
market is everything women love to look at—raw grub in all its horrible
pristine state of execution. Cosima dived in like a footballer, hauling me after
her and yapping indignantly of the price of onions, greens, fruit, artichokes
("Look! A scandal! And Venice the fountain of all artichokes!"), until
she noticed I was pale about the gills and asked what was wrong.

"Those " I indicated with a
jerk of my head but didn't dare look.

'The birds?"

There was this stall selling dead
seagulls and bald quail dangling on hooks.

"Poor dear! Is it the price? We
might get one cheaper round the corner.'

"No, love. It's just—"

"Ah.
Simpatico!
" She hugged my arm as if enormously pleased, then
remembered and dragged me among barrows to confront a granite statue of a
little burdened bloke carrying steps which led up to the Egyptian granite
rostrum.