The Gondola Scam (31 page)

"When did you take Caterina's
shilling, you pig?" I blazed. "Right from the start or only
recently?"

"What you'd sneer at as patrimony
we know as duty, Lovejoy." He wasn't at all discomfited. "You'll
learn soon enough that others have the same honor."

"Caterina!" I yelled, to shut
the bum up. "Did you know Tonio was going to do Malleson and
Crampie?"

"Oh, dear, no!" she trilled,
all little-girl.

Even as Cesare roared with laughter, I
thought. Surely she can't be joking? Not about people getting killed.

"Are you sure?"

"I'd never have let him go back
and keep on hitting him that way, Lovejoy!" And she too laughed.

I turned and left them to get on with
it, sickened.

'Thank you for locking me in with a
lovely lady, Lovejoy!" Cesare's shout was just audible as I reached the
gloom, fog, and obscurity. My natural habitat.

Maybe my distress made me careless.
Maybe I walked straight ahead for a few dazed steps. I honestly thought I
turned the correct way coming from the exit door, but after a few steps I
stopped and tried to retrace my steps. It was hopeless. I finished up crouched
down feeling for the edges of the path. No good. I was lost.

Stupidity's an art. It seemed best to
me, at that daft moment, to crouch down and pad round in small circles feeling
as I went. Logically, move in increasing-sized circles, and you sooner or later
touch on the place you've lost, right? Well, it's logical if you go in precise
circles. Do an oval or a spiral and you're more lost.

The last thing I wanted to do now was
use my Keeler torch, in case Tonio was already here. Cesare had sounded too
confident. And all that shouting. I fell down, over a mound of soft earth among
the vegetation.

Feeling more carefully, I tried to work
it out. Somebody had been digging. Recently. A patch maybe big enough to bury a
sizable load of antiques? My hand touched an instrument. I lifted it. A hand
hoe. Something left by a monk, or the recent digger? In a welter of bitterness
it would be at least one way of getting back at them all, if I were to nick
whatever it was they'd hidden. Possibly their most precious fake or antique. I
decided to risk it and scrabbled at one end of the mound. Maybe six feet by
three feet, possibly a good-sized original statue that wouldn't hurt from the
water now ploshing about my ankles and seeping into the hole I was scuffing. An
obstacle. I'd found something. Grinning evilly and whispering to myself. I put
out my hand and felt. Definitely features. A face. Definitely configurations of
... a face. Pliable. Soft. Waxen softness of eyelids. A fucking face. Whiskers
... I screamed, screamed, and clawed babbling and screaming away from Carlo's
face and ran crashing into every fucking thing and anything, flinging myself
demented and still screaming through bushes with the aid of the hand hoe and
splashing through the encroaching water, leaving that ghoulish grave behind me
in its solitary nightmare. Shivering and retching, I ran blind, the wavering
blur of my Keeler light which I'd somehow got out doing more to make the fog
opaque than show me the way.

A pane of glass cracked underfoot. A
tendril lapped round my neck and I howled, terror-stricken. A building hit me.
I reeled away, tried to find those precious bricks again, couldn't, and ran and
ran. A tree, its roots awash in rising waters, shot out of the fog and dazed me
as we collided. I screamed and wailed, reeling. Somebody told me to stand still
and put my hands up. I screamed in terror and tried to run.

A hand grabbed my shoulder. I saw this
figure. He looked immense, looming out of the fog like a Disney giant. I struck
out with both hands, felt my hoe send a shock up my arm and struck again and
again in the darkness because my light had gone. I ran, flinging the hoe into
the space where the figure had stood. And ran until the water was up to my
knees, and there was only stillness and the water. There was no direction,
nowhere else to go. I was a ruin, breathing and coughing like a spent horse and
weeping and whining at the whole frigging mess, hands on my knees and the black
water rising.

God knows how long I stood there before
I did the only sensible thing I'd done since I came to Venice. I put my head
back and bawled,
''Help!”

And blessedly, out of the wet night,
quite close, came Keith's voice delightedly yelling, "Lovejoy! That you,
blue? Keep shouting, mate! We're on you!"

And lights began to glow as I bawled
and bawled.

29

We worms of this world can't look
heroes. I tried my best to seem noble while Tonio died on the dredger, where
Keith and his two burly mates had finally managed to carry him.

I could hardly look. He was covered in
blood where my hoe had dug into his neck, his cheek, his temple. It was Gerry,
astonishingly along, who did what could be done for him. In the brilliant light
of the great dredger's cabin everything was ghastly. Blood and mud everywhere.
But even in all this, Caterina had to get away.

"Caterina knew about you killing
Mr. Malleson and Crampie," I said to Tonio. "She told me." It
came out like an accusation. I'd meant to sound kind. "You had to do
Malleson. Mr. Pinder had hired him to recover that Carpaccio fake. He'd guessed
about you and Caterina, hadn't he? And your plan to cheat Lavinia as well as
his syndicate."

He smiled, oddly friendly for the first
time. "She was there, Lovejoy," he explained. His voice seemed oddly
chatty, no hard feelings.

"Where?" I said blankly.

"She's left-handed. Ask the
witnesses." His neck ran brown blood. Gerry thrust me aside and did
something with a folded white square that instantly bloomed bright scarlet.

"What's he saying?" one of
Keith's burly dredger pals said irritably.

"I'm not," Tonio informed us
all in quite a conversational tone, and died in silence.

"Not what?" the dredger bloke
demanded. He was annoyed with practically everything. I wondered what it all
had to with him.

"Not left-handed. He was telling
us.'

"What the hell!" the man said.
"He died?"

"Poor, poor thing!" Gerry was
in tears, kneeling beside Tonio on the cabin floor. "If he hadn't been so
hacked about. . ."

Christ, I thought, faint. It would have
been me otherwise. Tonio had a frigging gun with him. No wonder Cesare and Caterina
had laughed. Chains rattled outside.

Keith consoled, "Don't cry, Gerry,
dear. Please." A call sounded from the outside man, and his mate yanked a
lever and put the wheel over, probably turning us or something. Tonio's body
rocked a bit.

Hopeless. Me nearly demented,
frightened out of my senses on an island being flooded by the highest tide ever
recorded, blinded in a fog, stumbling on buried corpses all over the frigging
universe, attacked by an armed psychopath, and Keith tells Gerry please don't
sob. I felt sick.

"Listen, you burke,” I said to
Keith. "Why the hell were you so late?"

"The fog. We were watching the
island, but—"

"Watching?" I said, furious.
The chains rattled. The outside bloke shouted in a slow shout. "In this? I
said eleven o'clock."

The dredger's motor gunned. The cabin
gave one shake as we began to move, and a sudden jerk. The driver swore.

"We couldn't come any
earlier," Keith said, apologetic. "We had to call at the Rio dei
Greci for permission."

"Eh?" I began wondering if
Keith was off his nut. There's nothing down there except the water police
depot.

"Oh, Lovejoy!" Gerry sobbed.
"I said don't come out here tonight!"

"I'm sorry, dear," Keith
consoled Gerry. I looked at the steerman for enlightenment, but he was
preoccupied with something outside in his fog-blind searchlight. The big
dredger lifted an inch, maybe the tide turning.

"What's he on about?" I asked
Keith, suddenly uneasy.

Keith gazed fondly at his mate and
explained, "He's so tender-hearted. He feels things so, Lovejoy. And
you're under arrest."

"Eh? Me?"

"You."

"Here," I said queasily.
"You can't do that. Can he?" I added to the steerman.

He finally took notice of me as he
swung the wheel frantically, "
Si
,
signore," he said bluntly. "And so can I."

"Oh, Lovejoy," Gerry wailed.
"I said.”

And he had. Don't go, he'd said to
Keith. All the time he was pleading with his pal not to betray me.

"And your interest in these
dredgers . . . ?"

"We kept the island under
surveillance from the dredgers. They're the only vessels always left out on the
lagoon. Come hell or
acqua alta
.”

"You a cop too?"

"Art squad. We both are."

"We knew something's been going
on, Lovejoy," Keith explained, his arm consolingly round his pal.
"All those movie people, secret films, sudden departures. A bit amateur,
really. None of the regular art thieves would be so careless. We never even
find a trace of the London-Amsterdam teams. They're still the greatest thieves
of all.”

“So you've been watching us all?"

“Fakes were appearing all over Venice.
Stumbled on them by chance. We had an idea it was Tonio and maybe his grand
signora."

Tonio. Caterina. I tore out of the
cabin to stand helplessly in the grotty fogbound air. And saw the funeral barge
trundling along astern from a towing chain.

'What's that?" I yelled to the
burly man at the rail.

'Only the funeral barge you
stole," he said reprovingly. "We were lucky to find it. It had
fetched up against the wall."

“Did you untie it?" I could hardly
speak the words. “I chained it to ... to ..."

"Thought there was a bit of a
pull." He shrugged. "But what's an anchor worth on a night like
this?" No wonder the wheelman had been struggling to control the dredger.
He was remembering what had made it temporarily difficult to get moving. Oh,
Jesus.

They turned the dredger back when I
managed to convince them. All we found was a caved-in building just submerged
by a tide that had laid almost the whole island awash. No trace of a living
soul. Caterina and Cesare were buried, under the ruins, and under the tide.

My idea had been to release them in
daylight, select the best fakers, and exit laughing as 1 pulled the plug,
destroying all trace of my filching. All I'd done was do for everybody else.

30

The villa was set off the road a
hundred yards or more. It looked pretty, absolutely colorful and charming. A
tennis court, a swimming pool. A splendid orangery in true Victorian style. A
delectable little enclave of vines climbing up ornate trees. And a walled
kitchen garden.

"This it?" I actually felt
pale. The car journey from Mestre hadn't made it any more pleasant, sandwiched
between Keith and Gerry, those two eccentric expatriate members of the Antiques
Fraud Squad.

"This is it, Lovejoy," Keith
confirmed, poisonously cheerful.

"
Bellissima, non e vero
?" The police sergeant who had
accompanied us was delighted it looked so fetching, as if he was trying to sell
me the damned place.

"
Si
, signore," I said courteously.

'So many amenities!"

“All securely netted, wired,
walled." It was a prison.

The sergeant looked despondent.
"So much money in antiques."

"It's that rose-colored
wallpaper," Gerry whispered to Keith. "I'm just not sure."

We walked in. The gate was wrought
iron, head tall, and gave a telling double click when shut.

"Before you case the joint,
Lovejoy," Keith informed me in proudly dated slang, "your duties are
to be available at eight-thirty each morning."

"Where's the trial?"

"No trial, Lovejoy."

I presumed he meant to give evidence.
"See the lawyers?"

"Not that either. You're going to
do an honest day's work, Lovejoy. Every single day."

That shook me badly. "Look, Keith,
mate. If you can pull a few strings ..."

"No way, old sport."

"It's to do with antiques,
Lovejoy." Gerry ushered us all into the living room and waited hopefully
for praise. I gave his decor a surly nod. His face brightened as if I'd
exulted. "Keith's done a great deal with the police."

The villa seemed full of crummy modem
gunge. "Signora Norman's villa is just over the hill," Keith explained.

"A very beautiful, attractive
lady," the police sergeant put in huskily.

"You go there every day to examine
the four caches of assorted antiques and fakes which the signora had
distributed all over North Italy. They will be brought under escort."

Scheming bitch. She'd told me one
houseful. Still, Lavinia wasn't bad company, even after all this.

"And I will divvie them?"