by Gregg Loomis
As Gurt and Lang crossed the Piazza San Marco, she said, “We do not have to meet the plane until this afternoon. We have time to terminate.”
As a native of Germany, Gurt’s grasp of the American idiom was less than perfect.
Lang groaned inwardly at the prospect of another church. He had viewed all of the martyred saints, ascending virgins and bleeding crucifixions he wanted.
“Time to kill.”
“How would you ‘kill’ time? It does not live.”
“We haven’t ridden the vaporetto . . . water bus,” Lang said, hoping to foreclose additional exposure to religious art by changing the subject. “It’s a great way to see the city.”
“Why not a gondola?”
Lang remembered the last time he had been in one of the romantic if expensive boats. He had been here with Dawn, his first wife. He had met her while still employed with the Agency, one of the few careers open to a liberal-arts graduate. He had anticipated all the excitement of a James Bond film. As is often the case, experience did not meet expectations. It wasn’t even close. Instead of the Operations Division, he had been assigned to Intelligence, where his duties consisted not of slinking about the capitals of Eastern Europe and seducing the beautiful female agents of the opposition but of reading newspapers and monitoring TV broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain from a dingy suite of offices across the street from the Frankfurt rail station. There he had met Gurt and had had a brief affair that terminated when she was transferred to another station.
Then he had met Dawn and married her. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it became clear that opportunities and advancement inside the Agency would be limited. Lang resigned and went to law school while Dawn worked. After his practice of defending white-collar criminals began to flourish, he had taken his wife to Italy as a very small reward for her labors.
She had fallen in love with Venice. Where Lang saw fetid, malodorous canals, she saw romantic waterways. When Lang pointed out that the persistently higher tides had encrusted the lower parts of most buildings with a salty layer of slime, she regarded it as a sign of antiquity. She even endured, if not enjoyed, the endless hawking of the glass merchants in their efforts to persuade tourists to take a “free” trip to their factories on the island of Murano, a place from which no one returned—not until purchasing at least one set of the artfully colored Venetian glass.
Lang supposed the set of six pale blue martini stem glasses had perished along with his other possessions when his condominium had been blown up in an attempt to kill him at the beginning of what he thought of as the Coptic Affair.
Within months of their return home, Dawn had received a death sentence from her doctor. For months Lang had sat at her bedside, making plans for a return to Italy they both knew would never happen. Years after her death, he encountered Gurt again while tracking down the deadly Pegasus organization. A stop-and-go relationship became permanent with the unintended birth of their son, Manfred.
“Lang?”
Gurt’s tone made him realize he had tuned out the present.
“You do not wish a gondola ride?”
Lang nodded toward the basilica’s doors, where a small crowd had gathered. “What’s going on now?”
He changed his direction, giving Gurt little choice but to follow. She caught up with him as he spotted Gower and the heavily endowed Angelia.
Lang now could see uniformed police coming and going from the church.
“Isn’t it exciting?” Angelia cooed. “They say the priest found blood on one of the interior columns when he opened the church for early mass. Like somebody had been injured.”
“Injured?” Lang tried to seem curious. “Do they know who?”
“I don’t think so. He wasn’t hurt too badly to get away. The police think he might have been involved in a theft.”
“Oh? Of what?”
Gower interjected, “I understand some holy relic was taken from under the altar.”
That answered the question of the need to be drilling late in the night. “Saint Mark’s bones? They’re under the altar.” Lang was perplexed. “Who would want Saint Mark’s bones?”
“Saint who?” Angelia asked.
At the same time, back at the costume-rental store, things were not going so well for Pietro, the proprietor, despite the windfall of being able to pocket part of the American’s deposit.
When the man, clearly Asian, had walked in, the owner assumed he had another customer for the clown suit and another sale of the bright red rubber ball of a nose that went with it. Instead, the man had asked to see the American’s credit-card receipt, an unusual request, to say the least. When met with a polite denial, the man, the customer, had grabbed Pietro by the neck of his costume, twisting it into a choke hold.
It didn’t take the Pietro long to realize the prior customer’s privacy or identity or whatever the Asian wanted wasn’t worth his life. Besides, the customer’s name wouldn’t be on the receipt, and all but the last four digits of the card appeared as Xs. What harm could be done with that? A great deal less than Pietro faced if he didn’t give this madman what he wanted.
At the Piazza San Marco, the crowd was beginning to disperse when it became obvious that there was nothing more to be seen. Gurt and Lang said their good-byes to Gower and his lady friend.
Lang glanced at his watch, noting they still had several hours before the foundation’s Gulfstream would arrive at Marco Polo International Airport to pick them up for the trip home.
“Now what?”
“The boat from the hotel . . . Why do we not ask the driver to take us on a tour of the canals?”
Lang looked around at the gaudy displays of the square’s shops. “First, I need to get Manfred something. I promised him a souvenir.”
Gurt shook her head, smiling. “You have already gotten him a puppet, a model of a gondolier and a nice leather jacket he will outgrow before spring. Do you believe another toy will diminish your guilt at leaving him at home?”
She had hit the mark and Lang knew it. He had resigned himself to being childless until, like a miracle, Gurt reentered his life with a son he had not known existed.
“He’s your son, too,” Lang observed defensively.
“If you continue to smother him in gifts, he will be my spoiled son.”
It was an argument without end or rancor. Gurt certainly loved their son but she was a no-nonsense martinet. Like so many men who had a child comparatively late in life, Lang tended to give in to his son’s whims, to tolerate behavior Gurt discouraged.
Realizing the futility of the debate, Lang changed the subject. “You said something about a ride in the hotel’s boat?”
The boat driver had made this suggestion when they first arrived. The price was well below that of a gondola and the trip far more inclusive. It had seemed a good idea at the time. Within minutes, Gurt had used her cell phone to call the hotel, and the small craft was on its way. From the tour, they would return to the hotel on the Lido, collect their bags and be ferried to the airport.
Lang stood at the Molo San Marco, his back to the canal as he took in a last view of the Doge’s Palace and the facade of the basilica. A man loitering a few feet away between two columns drew his attention. Tall, definitely Asian. Lang had seen him . . . where?
He nudged Gurt. “Without being obvious, take a look at the guy in the tan windbreaker over there by the columns. I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
Gurt was more interested in a wedding party disembarking from a motoscafo, a smaller, sleeker and faster version of the water bus, no doubt headed for a service at the basilica. “He is perhaps Japanese. There are Japanese tourists everywhere.”
“Can’t be. He doesn’t have a camera.”
Gurt gave him another glance. The object of their attention was suddenly interested in something that required him to turn his face away. “He was shopping the windows near the place we returned our costumes.”
Now Lang remembered. He had noted at t
he time the single, tall man with Asian features. Most Asians in Europe either were low-level employees, kitchen helpers and the like, students or tourists. The man was too old to be a student and not with a tour group, to which the Japanese clung like life preservers. If he had a job in someone’s kitchen, why was he standing around here when the lunch trade would be in full swing shortly? Stereotypes existed because they were correct more often than not. And this particular stereotype was an aberration from the norm like a junk car parked in a ritzy neighborhood or a street beggar with an expensive wristwatch.
For the moment, Lang forgot him as the sleek little wooden speedboat from the hotel nudged its way between gondolas and other craft.
Helping Gurt and Lang aboard, the driver began, “I understand you want a canal tour, yes?”
They did.
“We start here, the Rio del Palazzo, the Canal of the Palace, which, as you can see, runs along the back, or eastern side, of the Doge’s Palace. We take this canal, join some of the smaller ones and we come out on the Grand Canal to come back here.”
Gurt’s elbow gave Lang a sharp nudge as she whispered, “Don’t look so bored! You might learn something on this tour of the canals of Venice.”
The man spoke excellent English as he continued, pointing to an enclosed bridge. “This is the Bridge of Sighs. It connected the Doge’s Palace, which was where criminal court was held, with the prison. The bridge takes its name from the sighs of prisoners as they were led to trial. Now, if you look to your left . . .”
Lang was more concerned about the motorboat that had entered the canal behind them, a fiberglass Italian-made Riva. The craft’s slow speed matched their own, bow level rather than raised as would be the case on open water. He could see two men on board, but the distance was too great to make out facial features.
What made him think he knew what one of them looked like?
The hotel’s boat turned left onto a canal not fifteen feet wide. Even at their slow speed, a sluggish wake washed over steps to doors less than a foot above the water. The houses themselves formed the banks of the canal. The height of the reddish ochre buildings, three to four stories, provided perpetual twilight. What Lang noticed most, though, was that this hundred-, hundred-and-a-half-yard stretch of canal was empty of any other craft.
As though his mind had been read, the roar of throttles pushed forward echoed from plaster facades more used to the songs of boatmen and the oohs and aahs of tourists.
Lang and Gurt’s guide turned to look over his shoulder. “He crazy! Not allowed to make wake here!”
Its bow pointed well above the water now, the Riva was closing the distance between them quickly.
“Never mind the wake,” Lang shouted. “Get us the hell out of here!”
“But signor . . .”
Lang didn’t have time for a debate. Shoving the astonished boatman aside, he leaned over the control panel and slammed both throttles forward as far as they would go. It was as if the small craft had been shoved by a giant hand. The Cris-Craft look-alike stood on its stern like a rearing horse as twin props dug into the water. A quick look behind him showed Gurt clutching the starboard gunwale for all she was worth. More gratifying, the rate at which the following craft was gaining was diminishing rapidly.
The man from the hotel wasn’t going to give up so easily. He was trying to wrestle the wheel from Lang when a staccato burst of gunfire reverberated against the surrounding buildings, and splinters of what had been the boat’s control panel whined past Lang’s face.
Terrified, the guide let go of the wheel, off balance just long enough for Lang to hit his legs with a jerk of the hip that sent him flying into the canal. Lang had a split-second view of a mouth open in a terrified scream he could not hear above the motors’ roar before the man hit the water.
Another fusillade of automatic-weapon fire stitched across the boat’s stern. Up ahead was a right-angle turn into another canal, one even more narrow. Lang took it at full speed, the boat heeled over so steeply that the left gunwale seemed to scrape the water’s surface.
Squarely in front was a gondola, black, curved bow and stern and taking up the middle of the waterway.
Gurt saw it, too, and squeezed her eyes shut, yelling, “Look out!”
Lang cut savagely to the right, missing the gondola by inches, though it did the gondolier little good. Standing on a raised platform at the stern of the flat-bottomed craft designed for shallow and placid waters, holding onto nothing but a single long oar, the wake of the speeding craft that all but swamped it rolled it with a violence that sent him into the canal also.
Dividing his time between looking ahead for more canal traffic and keeping track of the pursuing craft, Lang saw it also dodge the gondola, this time sending both of its passengers, a white-haired man and woman, splashing into the water.
So much for their romantic tour of Venice by gondola.
He sniffed the air. There was something besides that odor of a salt swamp Venice carried like a lady’s favorite perfume. He looked around for an answer. A thin white trail of smoke was streaming from the craft’s exhaust. A look at the ruins of the instrument panel told him why: there was next to no oil pressure in the starboard engine. A bullet must have severed an oil line or the crank case or pump, or any number of vital parts of an internal-combustion engine. Worse, highly flammable fuel could be leaking into the engine compartment beneath his feet, waiting for the right temperature to set it off. His options were to shut the motor down or keep pressing it to the firewall until heat and friction froze it.
Not much of a choice.
“We’re going to have to end this pretty quick!” he yelled at Gurt.
“Is OK with me,” she hollered back. “The quicker the happier.”
Lang was not sure where he was but he guessed the Grand Canal that swept through the city like an reversed S was somewhere off to his left. To seek the crowded waterway and, perhaps, the police was tempting but unrealistic. There was too much traffic, and the consequences of hitting another craft would be just as deadly as the gunfire from behind.
He was going to have to think of something else.
And fast.
Before the engine quit.
Torcello
The same time
Wan Ng had chosen this small island northeast of Venice for a number of reasons. It, not Venice, had been the leading city of the lagoon for hundreds of years. It boasted the magnificent seventh- and eighth-century Romanesque cathedral of Santa Maria dell’Assunta and had been a thriving port and commercial center. Then its canals had silted up, sending commerce to Venice. Malaria had claimed a good number of those who remained.
Few tourists took the trouble to ride the vaporetto to the stop at the other end of one of the few remaining canals from the basilica. In fact, in this, the days of Carnevale, visitors were more likely to stay in Venice itself anyway. The innkeeper of the small hotel in sight of the cathedral’s tower was as willing to accept the explanation that the four Chinese men were from a university here to study the twelfth-and thirteenth-century mosaics as he was to accept advance payment in full.
Ng couldn’t have cared less about mosaics, the cathedral or, for that matter, Venice itself. He had a job to do. He had no idea why it had been necessary to steal a box sealed under the altar of San Marco, but that is exactly what he and his men had done. Had it not been for the untimely intervention of the man in the clown costume and the woman, the theft might well have gone undetected. Now, short a man, he had been ordered to take care of both of the intruders in spite of the serious doubts he had expressed to his superiors that there had been sufficient light for the clown and his female companion to recognize any faces, let alone be aware that the thieves were Chinese. That had been the reason that the body of his former comrade had been removed from the basilica where his neck had been broken and unceremoniously dumped in a canal after making sure he had no identifying evidence on him. By the time the police got around to comparing his face to a
ny surveillance-camera pictures that might have been taken when he presented his false American passport entering the country, Ng and the others would be long gone.
Ng was used to carrying out orders he did not understand, and these would allow him to avenge the loss of the man the woman had killed so easily. He thought about that for a moment. The woman was obviously an expert in martial arts—kung fu, judo, jujitsu, the lot. The dead man had been trained in them as all Ng’s men had, but the woman was simply faster and better. What kind of female was that?
At least he was now forewarned that the woman, if not the man also, could be dangerous.
He only hoped his remaining two men succeeded in the task of eliminating the couple before it was necessary to use the information he was seeking on the laptop in front of him. Hacking into the credit-card company’s files had been surprisingly easy. It was a wonder the identity theft of which Americans constantly complained was not even more widely spread than it was. Once into the database, it was simply a matter of viewing all charges made that morning in Venice, Italy, at a specific costume shop during the time it took the Americans to return the clown outfit and the woman’s costume.
He stopped scrolling and smiled. There was only one. Here it was now: the card belonged to Langford Reilly. Accommodatingly, the list also provided an address in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
If his men did not succeed in taking care of the pair today, Ng could look forward to a trip to the States, something he enjoyed. He had learned English, a requirement of his service, and had had ample opportunity to polish it at China’s American Academy. The institution was a requisite for his service and turned out fluent, American-idiom-speaking graduates conversant in rap music, sports teams and other singularly American institutions. He had been told he had the accent of the American Midwest.
He almost looked forward for a chance to use it again.
Venice
Reluctantly, Lang flicked his eyes at the oil-pressure gauge. It was almost at the bottom of the dial. He didn’t have a lot of time before the right engine went belly-up. He was slowly losing ground. The craft were about equally powered, but he was zigzagging erratically to throw off the aim of his adversaries, while they had the luxury of a straight path.