Thief of Venice

by Jane Langton

  And then there was a scene of chaos. Ursula crowded forward, and the gap in the procession became a knot. Henchard slammed right into it, and now all of them were rolling on the damp pavement, four screaming little girls in blue uniforms and a cursing man in a three-piece suit.

  Had she lost him? Mary had been heading for the Riva, but now she turned back. There was only one other way to go, but it was the right way. Mary had a compass inside her head, and she knew she was heading west. She couldn’t be very far from Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta and the Biblioteca Marciana. And there in the Marciana she would find Homer, and it was Homer she so desperately wanted.

  She ran quickly, dodging around a man with a cell phone against his ear, then encountering a stoppage at a jovial meeting of two old friends.

  “Ciao! Come stai, tutto bene?”

  “Sì, grazie, e tu?”

  “Bene, bene, grazie!”

  “Ciao! Ci vediamo!”

  “Ciao! A presto!”

  They parted and at last Mary ran past them to an intersection, a little square with a church, where her progress was again obstructed. Even in her haste and confusion she recognized the two young people blocking her way. They were still in costume, still calling out “Concerti!” and holding their tickets high. The boy was still scrappily dressed in a grubby brocaded coat, but his bare feet were inches deep in water. The girl still wore her panniered skirt, but the hem was below the waterline. They looked at her curiously and called out, “Concerto, signora?”

  “No, no, grazie!” Mary shook her head and dodged through a sottoportico, hoping to find a detour on the other side. But it was only a courtyard, a dead end, a mistake. She couldn’t stay here. Catching her breath, she hid behind a scaffolding bearing a sign, COMUNE DI VENEZIA LAVORI, and peered around it to look back.

  At once she saw Henchard run up to the ticket-selling kids and stop. He was gesturing excitedly, asking a question. To her horror she saw the boy in the brocaded coat and the girl in the wide skirt responding, flinging out their arms—but they were pointing the wrong way!

  Back again in the little square, Mary gave the ticket sellers a glowing look, and galloped away in the direction of Piazza San Marco. At once she ran into deeper water.

  There was nothing to do but splash straight into it. Her boots were too short. The water poured over their tops and engulfed her feet. It was like walking in filled buckets. Her trousers were soaked to the knees.

  Most of the people on the street had taken heed of the warning siren. They were moving confidently through the running stream with their feet dry inside their tall boots. One boy carried his girlfriend on his back. A fashionably dressed woman minced along in stocking feet, holding up her skirt with one hand and her shoes with the other. A family of Korean tourists had been supplied by their hotel with plastic trash bags, and they shuffled through the water doggedly, holding the bags around their hips, heading slowly in the direction of San Marco and the expensive shops on the Mercerie. They looked glum. Galumphing past them, Mary guessed they were feeling cheated—was it for this they had paid so many millions of won to take a once-in-a-lifetime tour? Their gloom increased as the rain began again.

  Mary missed her umbrella. She was thankful to climb out of deep water onto the steps of a bridge. On the other side she was of course in deep water again, but now she could see the domes of San Marco. Looking back, she saw no sign of her pursuer, and she sloshed confidently through the Piazzetta dei Leoni into the piazza, which had become a lake.

  But here at last the duckboards began, and like everyone else she could step up on the wooden platform and hurry along in single file toward the square, while another parade of people streamed past her the other way, cocking their umbrellas sideways.

  But it was no good. Just as the huddled procession in front of her passed the first of the five entrances to the basilica, Mary glanced back and saw between the umbrellas the piercing dark eyes of Richard Visconti, the man who had followed her so far across the city, over a score of little bridges and through a labyrinth of narrow streets and little squares bearing the names of saints. Now he was moving rapidly forward on the same platform of narrow planks, staring around someone’s shoulder. She could hear him shout, “Andiamo, signore,” because the timid old man in front of him had stopped in his tracks, jostled by umbrellas, frightened by the advancing column rushing past him, afraid of tipping off into the water.

  In the clock tower high above the piazza the two half-naked bronze giants swung their hammers against the bell. Solemnly it bonged five times, dropping its echoing vibrations over the square, shivering the green water. Below them the gold leaf on the winged lion of Saint Mark sparkled in the rain, as he held open with one paw his famous book to show the blessing of the angel of God, the words that were the pride of Venice, its glory and triumph. Under him another symbol of the city sat enthroned, the Virgin Mary with her child.

  No one looked up at these monumental reminders of the greatness of Venice. Everyone in the square was engrossed by the watery problem at hand.

  The problem was nothing new to Richard Henchard. He was perfectly accustomed to high water. Unfortunately he had left his boots at home under the coatrack by the door—where his wife discovered them later on, so she called the hospital to urge him to come for them, but his nurse said, “Mi dispiace, Signora ’Enciard, the doctor was here for an appointment, but then he went out again. Have you heard about the miracle?” and when Vittoria said warily, “No, what miracle?” the nurse told her the whole story about the recovery of one of her husband’s patients with the help of the Virgin’s Veil.

  There was only one miracle that Henchard needed now, and that was a guarantee of the safety of his billions of lire, those billions upon billions for which he had already taken so much trouble. With extraordinary care he had identified the dangers, he had removed them one by one, silencing forever those other interfering claims. Now there was only a single claimant left, the woman hurrying ahead of him across the square, the last of the rats, darting here, darting there, trying to escape, but she would never escape. He was close now, very close. If only the old idiot in front of him would move a little faster! “Vada avanti, signore!”

  But the old man was frightened. His cane slipped on the wet boards. He slowed down and stopped. Henchard cursed and jumped off into the water. It was above his knees, but he surged forward, passing half a dozen other creeping fools.

  It was a tactical mistake. Mary jumped off on the other side. Now there was a moving human wall between them. She lunged forward, dragging her heavy legs, sending up foaming splashes left and right, catching glimpses of Visconti in flashes between hurrying raincoats and dangling cameras.

  Beside them loomed the basilica in all the frolicsome giddiness of its clustered columns and mosaics, its golden lion and winged angels and gesturing saints and delicate pointed cupolas. And above the columns and angels and saints and cupolas rose the strange wild domes like a vision out of the Arabian Nights. Another set of platforms had been provided as an approach to the central portal, and at the junction with the north-south stream of traffic there was a teetering confusion of tourists and tossing umbrellas.

  Once again Henchard was blocked. Looking back, Mary saw him leap up into the middle of the tangle and force his way across. When she dared to look again, nothing lay between them but a broad sheet of water, pockmarked with rain. Running for her life, heaving her slow legs through a tide of water two feet high, Mary had a heartsick vision of home—of a dreamy autumn day on Fairhaven Bay, her paddle dipping silently in the dark river and a great blue heron motionless on the shore. Shuddering, she felt again the wincing place in the small of her back as though her drenched denim jacket were painted like a marksman’s target. She was exhausted, her heart was throbbing, but she had to keep trying, she had to reach the long arcade that stretched away beyond the campanile.

  There she would surely be safe, swallowed up in the seething mass of people trying to escape the deep wate
r in the square. Mary plowed on, dragging her feet in their heavy rubber buckets. On the south side of the square the little plastic chairs and tiny tables belonging to Florian’s were piled in disappointed heaps, but the jazz piano was plunking out a show tune. Florian’s was doing its best to whip up a little cheer in spite of the rain and high water.

  Closer, she was closer now, she was almost there, she was very near. But not near enough, because she could hear Visconti splashing closer and closer behind her, he was catching up with her, he had her by the arm!

  She whirled to face him, and at once he gripped her by both arms. “No, no,” sobbed Mary, trying to wrench herself free. She pulled away, then lost her balance and fell on hands and knees. She was breast-deep in seawater. Henchard laid rough hands on her shoulders and tried to jerk her upright, but then other hands were helping her, lifting her gently.

  “Sta bene, signora?”

  “Oh, signora, ha bisogno diqualcosa?”

  Two women were holding her, mopping at the drenched front of her jacket, helping her along. Henchard slopped after them, nearly bumping against Mary’s back as the women supported her up the shallow steps. What was she telling them? Oh, God, there was no time, there was no time.

  It was the thickest crowd Mary had ever seen. The thousands of tourists who normally spread themselves over the broad square, ambling in all directions, buying postcards, feeding pigeons, and taking pictures of each other, were now condensed and squeezed together under the arcades that stretched around the piazza and the Piazzetta. Even here the cresting tide washed high around their legs, but they were talking and laughing loudly, seeming to take pleasure in the extremity of the crisis.

  For Mary the close pressure was just what she wanted, and she was sorry when the two women withdrew their arms and said courteously, “Sta bene?” and slipped away.

  Visconti was still there. He was right behind her, treading on her heels, pushing up against her back. She turned and hissed at him, “Piss off!” but he only stared at her blankly as she tried to edge between thickets of elderly people who were trailing the lifted banner of their tour guide.

  The entrance to the Marciana was very near. Mary could see the welcoming figures of the two tall statues in the doorway, their bare toes underwater. Then Visconti grabbed her from the back and his gun rammed against her spine. She couldn’t free herself, she could only drag him after her through the door into the pool of water in the vestibule and up beyond the coatroom and past the dragon’s lair. The glass cage was empty, but the place was milling with people.

  They looked at her in surprise, their mouths open, and at last Henchard came to his senses and tried to back away. But suddenly Homer was there, gaping at them through the glass door of the rare book room. Mary stretched out her arms and called his name.

  Homer was no athlete, everybody knew that, but he was six feet six inches tall and a lot broader and heavier than Richard Henchard. He dropped the books he was carrying on the wet floor—Marin Sanudo’s De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis venetae and Martino da Canal’s Les estoires de Venise—and, barging through the glass door, he knocked Henchard down.

  CHAPTER 48

  And then Henchard got away.

  In the wild scramble of clutching hands, bewildered scholars and horrified librarians, in the clumsy flailing of the students who had been moving books from low shelves to high shelves in the reading room, with Mary shouting at the top of her lungs and Homer punching out in all directions, the man at the center of the commotion melted away.

  “Where is he?” cried Mary, staring furiously around.

  “My God,” said Homer. He bounded down the hall toward the outer door, slithering sideways in the water below the coat-room, nearly losing his balance. Bursting out into the arcade he collided with a flood of men and women from Denmark who were taking refuge from the rain. More participants in the holiday tour from Copenhagen poured up from the motor launch that had transported them from their hotel.

  Homer squeezed through the soggy crowd of Danes and craned his neck to stare down the length of the Molo. Mary caught up with him and caught his arm and looked too. They could not see Henchard, but they could see a moving wave of staggering Scandinavians and hear them shouting, “Hold op! Hold op!”

  Mary pointed and shrieked, “There he goes.”

  Again they were too late. By the time they had shoved their way to the vaporetto stop, butting through another procession of indignant tourists from Copenhagen, Henchard’s hired water taxi was veering away from the slip, heading out into the lagoon.

  Within five minutes half a dozen powerboats of the special force of the carabinieri, the Nucleo Natanti, were after him, but the directions they had been given were conflicting. A hundred hands pointed left, right, and straight across the water, and a dozen voices on emergency line 112 shouted, Lido, Giudecca, the Giardini.

  Mary Kelly’s was the only voice of reason. With Homer’s arm wrapped tightly around her she stood dripping in the carabinieri station in Campo San Zaccaria and drew her finger across a map. “Try here,” she said thoughtfully. “Try the Rio dei Gesuiti.”

  Her hair hung in sopping strings across her face and her clothes were waterlogged, but her voice was authoritative, and they took her advice.

  CHAPTER 49

  Lucia heard the thumping approach on the stairs. At once she got to her feet and hobbled into the bathroom. Her arm had begun to throb painfully.

  The latch looked feeble. It had lost a screw. Lucia shot the bolt across, then leaned her back against the door to brace it. She was sickeningly aware that she could not be allowed to coexist in the same world with the precious things in the next room, the Torah scrolls, the seven-branched candlesticks, the Passover plates, the Raphael, the illuminated manuscripts from the library of Cardinal Bessarion, and the most celebrated single work from the Aldine press, The Dream of Poliphilius. A choice between all of those things on the one hand and this miscellaneous and irrelevant woman on the other was no choice at all. They would stay, she would go.

  The clumping footsteps stopped. A key rattled in the lock.

  Coraggio, Lucia. She put her ear against the bathroom door and listened, her eyes filling with tears. Her ridiculous momentary happiness was about to come to an end. It had been too good to be true.

  But for Richard Henchard, Lucia Costanza’s life or death was of no interest any longer. He failed even to notice that she was no longer lying on the floor. He had lost interest in everything reasonable and sane, he had forgotten every sensible concern with cause and effect. His mind was empty of everything but the passion of possession—these things are mine.

  He was not the first man to lose his sanity to a dream of fabulous riches, a vision of gold coins glistening in wobbling patterns under the sea, the sound of a shovel thunking against the buried lid of a strongbox. The difference between Henchard and all the other madmen pursuing fantastic dreams of unimaginable wealth was that his own treasure had been found, he possessed it, it was right here under his hand.

  Lucia could hear him cursing. He had left his trophies securely wrapped, and now they had been taken out of their wrappings and exposed. It was another mark against his prisoner. Once again she braced her whole weight against the door.

  But nothing happened. There was no howl of accusation, no violent smashing of the cracked panels of the bathroom door. There was only the sound of heavy breathing, the scraping of objects across the floor, a loud clanging as something was dropped, and for a moment a discordant jangling of the bells on the Torah scrolls. She could hear his grunts and curses, and again and again the thump of his feet on the stairs, going rapidly down and slowly up, down and up, and finally down for good.

  Was he gone? Lucia held her breath. She waited for ten minutes before softly unlocking the bathroom door and looking out. She was alone. Quietly she walked into the next room and gazed at the floor where the treasure had lain.

  It was gone, it was all gone but for a few yellowed pieces of pape
r blowing across the floor. Turning, she saw that the breeze came from the staircase. The door of her prison stood wide open.

  CHAPTER 50

  Like a mother tucking a baby into a perambulator, adjusting the pillow and arranging the blankets just so, Henchard bowed over the objects in the cart and shifted them this way and that.

  First he tried putting the painting on the bottom. Then he leaned it upright against the side. The gold plates went in flat, with the book resting on top of them. The Torah scrolls were too long for the cart, so he had to set them in at an angle, and then the tarpaulin kept slipping off the jeweled crowns on the ends of the long handles. The bells jingled and jangled.

  It had stopped raining. The tide was going down. The high water that had drenched his trousers during his frantic pursuit of the goddamn American woman was now only a few puddles here and there, but the legs of his pants were still wet. They stuck unpleasantly to Henchard’s shins as he began racing the cart along Calle de la Madonna. Luckily it was getting dark. Right turn coming up, left on Calle Varisco, then straight across Campiello Stella.

  So far, so good. It was all backstreets, not broad avenues like the Strada Nuova. But the hospital was not yet in sight, and there would soon be busy places like Campiello Widman to get across.

  As a hiding place for his jingling Torah scrolls and his golden plates and his beautiful old manuscripts and his precious Titian painting, the hospital was a desperate temporary fallback, but if he could get the cart across Rio de la Panada and Rio dei Mendicanti and take it in by the tradesmen’s entrance to a certain very capacious closet, then everything would be okay—Henchard remembered the closet particularly because he had once been cornered inside it by an aggressive little nurse’s aide.

  Campiello Widman was full of people going and coming in the dusk of evening, women on their way to the brightly lighted shops on the Strada Nuova, a man tramping along with a ladder on his shoulder, children playing in the street, a pair of lost Americans gazing at a map, holding it up to the remains of the daylight.