"Why the ten-minute intervals, Luciano?"
"It's the arrangement here."
"Who makes the arrangements?"
Silence. Luciano polished his specs and had a good look at my carving. "Not bad. Good and fast."
"Better than your crummy plaster cast of the original. Careless."
He murmured apologies. "Done officially while they restored it a couple of years ago. We weren't really organized and used all sorts of rubbishy labor."
"At least tell me about my pay, Luciano."
"They'll tell you."
I gave up and wandered about looking at the others' progress. For all my criticism of Domenico, he'd fairly shifted. A youngish bloke across the other side was faking one of the monumental arched Tiepolo paintings from the Madonna dell' Orto church apse, but I noticed he'd had the sense not to use the camera lucida trick for that majestic piece. As the goons called me, I felt a gentle bong of recognition in my chest and went past Luciano's high desk. An illuminated page lay fully exposed on it among his forged pages. The forgetful old lunatic had carelessly left a priceless original, beautiful and redolent with age, glowing in all its serene tempera brilliance for any careless nerk to scrape its wonderful surface with a ruinous elbow. Luciano must be past it. I tutted and maneuvered it gently under the protection of a new sheet of parchment. Then I cursed myself. Luciano was regarding me quizzically. The sly old sod had done it deliberately, been watching all the time.
I said pleasantly, "You're not a bad advert for senility, Luciano. Keep it up."
"Don't talk so much, son," he said. Not a smile. "Go home and rest."
I went up to the goons and obediently bent my head to be hooded.
"Be at the same place, same time, tonight," the nerks said. "Understand?"
"Carlo's day off, eh?" I asked jokingly into my hood, but nobody answered.
A stranger in a stranger's boat dropped me off at the Zattere waterfront after four blundering and scary switches of craft out in the darkness of the lagoon. It was getting on for five-thirty.
When you think of it, having no place to sleep's no hardship for an hour or two. Or three. Or five. After that it gets to you. Gradually as the hours pass a kind of restlessness seeps into your soul. You don't need a place to rest, but the idea that you haven't got one to go to eventually becomes pretty horrible. You become desperate.
Maybe that's what made me burgle Giuseppe's Cosol office.
It's less than a twenty-minute walk from the Zattere across the Accademia Bridge, even going a long way round to avoid my old pals of the Riva wharf. True to the style of the Venetian early worker, I whistled, kicked the occasional carton, and generally made myself part of the local scene.
Giuseppe's precautions consisted of a chain with a padlock, and the old double lock. Two keys are supposed to make it difficult. As if two hands and two bits of bent wire were rarities.
Half past six o'clock in the morning when I found the lists. The garrulous chatterbox hadn't even filed the damned things. Cosima would go berserk at all this untidiness. I risked the light after shutting the door to the staircase. The lists were almost complete. Giuseppe was hardly in for Venice's Dedicated Worker award, so he'd probably bowl up no earlier than 9 a.m. Plenty of time. I made myself some instant coffee on his office's mini-boiler and settled down comfortably to read.
Signora Norman had truly forked out. First class for David, Nancy, and the older pair. Which raised a lorry-load of new questions. Why exactly did a lady pulling an antique scam so huge that it needed a whole factory full of forgers need a movie mogul? And why had he vanished so suddenly that his secretary Nancy wasn't even allowed time for the entirely harmless purpose of leaving her erstwhile lover a thoughtful little souvenir?
Nearly seven o'clock when I'd finished searching, and the dawn showing and the mists clearing. Nothing, except more suspicions. Grumbling, I nicked the paltry sum of ready cash scattered around in the drawers and left.
I didn't shut the door. Let somebody else worry for a change. Even if it was only Giuseppe.
My first two goes on the phone were hopeless. Something to do with time zones. Third go I got a secretary after spending a fortune in these gettoni you have to buy in order to use the Venetian blowers. My accent was phony as anything.
"Iz zatt joo, David?"
"Mr. Vidal's at a signing conference today, sir."
"I particularly want speaking wiz eem. Eez ee returned from Venice, ja? Eee said me ring most urgent. Zee financial contract—"
Uncertainty crept m, thank God. "Hold, please." I was down to my last three tokens when the girl said breathlessly, "You're through, sir."
And David's voice said, "Hello. Vidal here."
Lips pursed, I gave a crackly electronic splutter and downed the receiver gently.
Message: David vanished fast, but made it home. And it probably was the same for the other three. I'd have to think some more when I wasn't so knackered.
Happier now the possibilities were narrowing, I went down the Lista di Spagna looking for lodgings.
Not far from Harry's Bar is the Giardinetti near where poor distended tourists queue for a million years to go for a pee. Always there are the relieved halves of couples hanging about while the other half, still bulbous with agony, wait in agonized lines clutching their 200-lira tickets, praying for an empty loo. Sitting by the trees, I decided it might be my last chance to see Cosima so, knackered as I was, I'd have to take it. I went among the mobs to the boat terminus at the San Marco.
Maybe it was because I was so exhausted that I accidentally made an astounding discovery. A Lido steamer was pulling out as I plodded towards my waterbus stop. What with the droves of children and the engines, I put my fingers in my ears. There was an odd beating sensation. I stopped, removed my fingers. Stuck them in again.
Block your ears, and the big boat's engines went thump-thump-thump. Remove them, and the engines whine and growl amid the pandemonium of the crowd, the rush of water. I did it so often, just to check, that two little children on the concourse started laughing and imitating. With a sheepish grin I moved away, then went into a cafe for some wine and a quick change of mind.
The walk to the railway station took me thirty minutes and half a liter of bianco. The train journey to Padua was about the same.
23
For the purposes of visiting Cosima, I became the excitable relative of a patient in the women's surgical ward. My mythical sister was suffering from some unspeakable—not to say unpronounceable—malady, and my anxieties knew no bounds. I explained this to everyone I met in the hospital corridor. The most baffled country cousin in Padua that day, I managed to blunder into the outpatients' entrance and got myself redirected. God, but they're patient in Padua. If I'd been that nurse in Outpatients, I'd have flung me out.
Cosima was up! I mean it. Really sitting up and having a drink. No tubes, no drips. And bonny as a bird, in a new nightie, with her hair done and her face shining. Her face lit to see me. And I too was all of a do, until she asked me where Cesare was today.
"Cesare?" I hadn't mentally cleared him of shooting Cosima, so her mentioning his name with such expectation pulled me up short.
She searched my eyes. "Didn't he find you? I've had him searching all Venice for you."
"Lazy old Cesare!" When I'd glimpsed Cesare he hadn't looked at all like a boatman doing a desperate private eye. And there are ways of putting the word out which only boatmen knew. Cesare hadn't searched very hard.
"Then how did you know to come today? I go to convalescence in an hour."
We talked of our day out on the lagoon. The police had maintained a bedside vigil until she'd given her story. Mercifully, she'd told them I was just a casual acquaintance, that we'd met somewhere at a party. She actually remembered very little of our escape, except being lifted ashore and the sandolo rocking, and having this dreadful cough which pained.
"And hearing you blaspheme, Lovejoy."
"Me?"
"In a ca
r. Everything was dark. Your face was lit by the dashboard's glow. You were threatening fire and slaughter against everybody on earth. Even Cesare."
"Me?" I was appropriately amazed. "I'm not like that. Delusions, love. Common in gunshot wounds."
She shook her lovely hair. "I tried to ask you to stop shouting, Lovejoy. But you looked . . . possessed. A fiend."
"When did Cesare show?"
"Giuseppe and Cesare come almost every day. And the two Australians. They've all been so marvelous."
I was so busy crossing suspects off my mental list that I had no response. My silence was her big moment.
"Where did you go, Lovejoy?"
"Go? Me? Well, I was so exhausted—"
"You vanished." She looked aside along the ward, coloring slightly. "I read your message on my hand. The police said a Swiss businessman found me and fetched me in. They thought you'd drowned."
'They're always red hot." I'd made the bitter crack before I could prevent myself. The comprehension in her gaze was unnerving.
"So you were simply keeping on running. I knew it. Why?"
"I had to, love. What did the police tell you?"
"Nothing. They thought some madman had shot me, or a stray bullet from an illicit marsh hunter."
"Accidental, eh?" Good old police. Same everywhere, desperate not to get too involved in troublesome mischief.
"Lovejoy. If Cesare didn't find you to bring you here today, why did you not keep on running?"
Honestly. Women are always after motives.
'That was me phoning," I said indignantly. "Didn't you get messages?"
She smiled, my downfall. "Practically every two hours. However did you manage to dash around to all those different places so fast?"
"I was in Mestre all the—" Caught.
"All the time?" she completed for me. "So you only pretended to run." No smile now. Just a terrible sadness and eyes slowly filling. "Darling. What is it that you're doing? Even before this . . . accident, I wondered about you. So many things unexplained. And your mind's always miles away."
See what I mean? Women are really sly. Even when there's nothing wrong their busy little minds are working out different angles It's no wonder most of the world's bent, with all this suspicion going on.
After that it wasn't a lot of use. I tried hard being happy and friendly and she tried hard to match my poisonous chirpiness but we parted a few minutes later, me with the address of her convalescent home written out and her with my bunch of chrysanthemums. She'd be gone a few days.
"I'll phone, love," I promised.
"Where will you be, Lovejoy? In Venice?"
"Certainly," I said heartily. "Where else?"
''At the same hotel? Honestly, now."
"Of course! I'll keep in touch, through Cesare.”
"And you'll look after yourself? Promise?"
"Hand on my heart," I said fervently. That was how we parted, truth and lies approximately half and half. I was heartbroken, because I sincerely really honestly loved Cosima, and now she'd as good as told me it was goodbye. That's always heartbreaking. But at least things were a lot dearer.
From the Padua railway station I phoned my lodgings along the Lista di Spagna in Venice and explained that Lovejoy, who'd taken a room there today, had just died in a plane crash over the Aegean and wouldn't be needing it anymore, thank you.
Another two half-liters later I broke into Cosima's little apartment, locked the door after me, and went fast asleep.
Watching Cesare and that thin lass going over their clipboards in the dying sunshine made me quite envious. It's the humdrum blokes of this world that get on. The meek really do inherit—if not the earth, at least the leavings. Cesare'd kept a low profile. Then, when the Lovejoys and other scatterbrains have blundered on their lunatic way, idle sods like Cesare inherit the birds.
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.
The Gondola Scam Page 17