The Gondola Scam (25 page)

When he was on my list of suspects it
was simple to hate him. Now he was proving a real stalwart trusty loyal pal for
Cosima in her adversity, I hated him even more. The smarmy creep.

Because of the coming night's labor I'd
had a couple of tons of pizza along the Garibaldi. As I walked towards Cesare's
boat, a bottle of wine clinked in my pocket and I carried three spare pizzas
for the late hours working on Giovanni's stone capitals.

"Wotcher, Cesare. Got me a
tip?"

He jumped at that, recovered enough to
keep calm and finish his list. The thin girl eyed me speculatively, tit for
tat, and asked Cesare what time she should report tomorrow. He simply said,
"Later," so it was him and me in the late afternoon on the Riva
jetties with crowds all about having a last cappuccino before getting sloshed
for the night.

"Lovejoy. You're back, then."

"Never left, did I," I said,
quite pleasant. "As you well know. I went to see her today."

He shrugged, unworried. In a scrap with
him I'd last half a minute. "You're no good for her, Lovejoy. You know it.
Now Cosima does, also. You went through four of those tourists in as many days.
Randy sod. Leave Cosima alone."

'Three," I said indignantly.

'Three plus Nancy. Four."

'Tell me who shot Cosima, mate." I
leaned crossed forearms on the wobbling handrail to show my pacific intentions.

"She was shot," he said
thoughtfully, gauging my motives. 'The police said so. And somebody took her to
safety. I've that to thank you for, Lovejoy."

Bloody cheek.
Him
thank
me
for Cosima?
"Get on with it."

"But without you, she'd not have
been shot in the first place."

"Does all this paranoia mean you
don't know?"

"If I did . . ."He let me
guess what the silence meant.

I wondered for a second how useful
another falsehood might be. Could do no harm, so I said, "She sent you a
message, Cesare. Before she left."

"She has gone?" The alarm of
a thwarted lover leapt to his eyes.

"Yes. Sorry about it. She's going
to convalescence and she wanted me to see you got the address." I
scribbled a fictitious name of any old mythical sanitorium.

"In Palermo?" he said,
suspicious sod. "Sicily?"

I nodded. "There's a special team
of doctors there, for the, erm, thoracic esophagus. Wise to go far afield. That
shooting was an attempt on her life, no?"

"Very wise." He folded the
paper and put it away carefully. "Thank you."

I didn't altogether like the way he
said that, but didn't realize exactly why until much later.

We parted, scarcely the best of
friends. He saw me as the archvillain. I saw him as a non-ally, that most
unpredictable species of friend. I should have remembered that.

For an hour I sat in a pew in the
Gesuati church, poring over a replacement map of the lagoon and laboriously
working out possibilities by the light of the candles on the second altar.

When the boatman came for me at eight o'clock
I was mapless and dozing fitfully at one of the cafe tables on the waterfront,
and pretending not to notice the lovely white yacht
Eveline
moored two hundred yards away, which I'd last seen rocking
in the cold wind of an East Anglian estuary.

The drill was the same: searched,
hooded, and changed boats here and there. Drift. Turn, drift again. Motor on a
short while, cut engines, move on. Finally, bump and ashore with more than one
pair of hands pushing me along and the same old inertness of those taps on my
elbows. No funny ducking jokes, though, ending with me brained on some low
overhang. And no Carlo. Well. Maybe it was his night off, I thought as they
took me down the steps and doors clanged shut behind.

Third in, this time. Luciano was
already hard at it up there on his high desk, giving me a friendly specky
twinkle. Giovanni wasn't there yet, but Domenico was slogging away. A new bloke
was painting across in the opposite corner, on panel as far as I could tell at
a distance. No Tonio, either. A goon motioning me to the stonemason's screens.

"Start immediately, Lovejoy,"
Luciano called.

"Got my wages sorted out?" I
shed my jacket and waded in with the ventilator on above the stone block.

Now I was more or less used to the
place and didn't have Giovanni breathing down my neck, I had the chance to suss
the workshop out as I worked.

Definite thump-thump-thump noises
passed close to the brickwork three times during the first four hours or so.
Very near a lagoon channel for biggish boats?

"Most of these things," I
observed to old Luciano when I stopped for a bite after a good couple of hours,
"are paintings. Why's that, pal?" We were now up to twenty, others
having arrived one at a time under escort.

"Decisions, Lovejoy." A shrug
which accidentally displaced a mound of his manuscripts. I let them fall. His
quill work was good on the Gregorian chant, but the forged paper wouldn't pass
as original in a Finsbury pub. He climbed down, grunting, to retrieve them.

"Same old tale, eh? When're we
going to do Venice's bronze horses?"

He smiled at that. Not pleasantly,
sadly and almost wistfully. I couldn't understand it. Upset, I wandered about,
having a bite of pizza and a swig from my bottle. I became more than interested
in our team of slaving troglodytes. You could put us into two main groups—stone
fakers and painting fakers. I was doing another capital from the Ducal Palace,
that heartrending cycle of love, life and death in tiny scenarios, while a
surly unresponsive bloke under another extractor hood was doing a copy of that
altar bas-relief from the San Trovaso. They simply call the anonymous
Renaissance genius II Maestro di San Trovaso, and a lovely piece of marble work
the original is, too. A metal faker was putting the finishing touches to a
bronze candelabrum. God knows where he'd slogged over the initial stages; hell
of a dust and heat. It had more than a look of the Santa Maria della Salute's
piece by Bressano, though when you think of it their conditions in 1570 were
probably much worse than ours.

The others were painters. There was a
rather shifty geezer doing Jac Tintoretto's
Last
Supper
, another San Trovaso piece, and I saw Titian's
Descent of the Holy Ghost
in its early stages of fakedom being done
at frightening speed by the pimpliest bloke I'd ever clapped eyes on.
Long-haired and young, but bloody good. I was delighted, because Titian's
original in the Salute has been all but massacred by lunatic restoration. Yes,
I definitely approved of Pimple's labors.

It was enjoyable, like having your very
own medieval artists' shop. I was annoyed when one of the overseeing goons came
over and warned me I'd idled long enough.

"I know," I said wearily.
"Get to work."

The ships which thumped so very close
to that brick wall weren't tiny
vaporetti
.
They were big double-deckers.

An "island," they'd said. A
third due was the freedom with which they moved and talked between our landing
point and the steps leading down into our underground factory. Which meant
uninhabited. Fourth: those taps and scrapes on my elbows, as I was marched to
my night work, spoke of an overgrown place, perhaps some once cultivated island
which was now abandoned.

As I slogged on the capital, copying
from the plaster cast, I mentally canceled out the far northern part of the
lagoon and the more westerly bits. Big ships avoid shallows, and I'd discovered
the hard way that those areas were covered in
valli
fish farms and crisscrossed by perimeter nets.

That left the Lido runs, the island
channels like to Burano and Torcello, and the southern bit to Chioggia. I'd
never been south, but it must be a longish trip. Now, you don't need to stop
and feint to conceal direction on a long boat trip, because you can turn ever
so casually over a distance. Therefore delete Chioggia and the south. The Lido
is always thronged with beach-hunting sun-grilled skin-peelers. So it was among
the islands.

Delete the cemetery island of San
Michele—too near, too visited, too much underground to leave room for this vast
factory. And cross out the island where Byron (with a little bit of help from
his friends) dashed off his Armenian dictionary, because the resident Armenian
priests wouldn't appreciate our particular brand of artistry. Delete, too.
Saint Francis of the Desert. The legendary friendliness of the eleven resident
priests would convert us load of crooks by sheer dogged holiness. No quiet
deserted overgrown paths in Murano, because of their obsessional glassmaking
taking every inch of space. Ditto for Burano, that incredibly pretty
"island of the rainbow barque," where each house is a brilliant spectacle
of color and its leaning campanile shows that gravity's all balls. Torcello?
Well, maybe, but tourists and fishermen and its few inhabitants and that posh
locanda
where inquisitive visitors can
stay. No to Torcello.

There were undisguised recesses in our
brickwork wall. Seats, where monks could perch and read their office for the
day. Adding two and two, as I ground out the maiden's dress in stone, it came
down to one island in one exact spot. I began whistling, to everybody's
annoyance. They all shouted to shut up and get to work. I did, remembering what
the deserted island of San Giacomo in the Marshes looked like from the boat.
I'd seen it with Cosima as we'd sailed past on the steamer, of course, but in
Venice appearance was entirely for concealment. Cosima's Law.

Now I had everything, or so I thought.
Explanation of the scam. Knowledge. I even knew who was on whose side. Now the
fur could fly. I worked on more carelessly than usual, because there were only
a few hours left to a showdown. My showdown, with Signora Norman. As long as I
winkled her away from that viperous Tonio for a few minutes . . .

"What're you doing?" Giovanni
asked me.

"What do you think?" I said
rudely, wielding the electric drill. "Stone's too soft. It has to be
hoisted." The wretch called Luciano across just the same. I greeted him
with scorn. "Please, teacher. May I erect a ribbed hoist, to double the
speed of this idle burke? There's a strong crosspiece among the heaps of waste
materials over there. It'll take an hour, and save us days rolling these bloody
stones all over the factory floor. If we've over two dozen to make ..."

The old man looked at me, then at
Giovanni. "Do you really need one?"

"Answers on a postcard," I
prompted, not pausing, doing a couple of shallow holes in the mortar. "Get
up off your bum and fetch me some of that chain."

"It would be easier," my mate
said reluctantly to Luciano. "I'd have put one up before, but I've not
really had time."

That made several of us give a derisory
snort. Old Luciano plodded off back to his court-hand script. The guards
relaxed. The painters painted. And I went inside my head:
 
Now if a wall measures four bricks wide, plus
mortar of one inch between bricks, then . . .

"Shut up whistling, Lovejoy,"
Luciano called.

"Sorry, sorry," I called back
to everybody. "Won't happen again, lads."

That was a dead certainty, for the lot
of us.

24

"Luciano." I stepped out of
the alley.

The old man halted in the patchy
darkness which Venice has patented. "Lovejoy? Is that you?"

The Calle dei Frati leads off the
Zattere waterfront. There's always a lot going on at the Maritime Station end.
The advantage is that the Zattere is straight. You can see all down the
fondamenta
paving. Precious few boats at
that ungodly hour, though. Twice I'd been disappointed waiting for Luciano, and
once I'd startled a lady who was sneaking ashore from a muted water taxi near
the great Gesuati church. We'd both recoiled in alarm, then snuck on our
respective ways. Live and let live. I was pleased that somebody at least was
keeping the exotic carnival days alive.

I asked Luciano, "Are they
watching us?"

"At this hour?" That amused
him. "You overestimate their dedication. Once they hand over to the day
shift. . .' He stopped and tutted at his carelessness.

So each transfer between boats was a
two-way swap. One forger going on duty, one off, the factory continuous.

"And compulsory silence to make
sure nobody slips up, eh? What's the punishment, Luciano?"

"For indiscretion?" The old
man glanced apprehensively across the Giudecca Canal. An early thousand-tonner
was shuffling eastwards towards the Adriatic. "Nobody knows."

"Except Carlo, eh?" I
restrained him with a hand. "Where is Carlo, Luciano?"

For the first time he actually seemed
tired. His old body sagged. "Don't do it, Lovejoy. You're young and silly.
I'm older, wiser. Money's too powerful. It has given us our orders. It will
wreak a terrible vengeance on those who oppose its wishes."

"Don't be a bloody fool. Money's
nothing except its own myth." There must be something in the air of Venice
that makes everybody talk like reading Shakespeare. "The forgery factory's
a send-up,
non e vero
?"