by James Becker
And the horrors apparently hadn’t stopped there. Much later, in the early twentieth century, a mental hospital had been built on the island. Some of the inmates had reportedly been subjected to inhuman tortures, mutilated and then butchered by a notoriously sadistic doctor. This man had apparently then gone mad himself, and had climbed to the top of the old bell tower and jumped to his death.
It was no wonder that the island was hardly ever mentioned in the guidebooks, and was almost never visited. In fact, the book stated that Poveglia was officially off-limits to everyone, locals and visitors. Angela couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone could possibly want to go there. And that, of course, meant that it would provide an excellent hiding place for the ancient document Marco was seeking.
She put the book to one side and turned back to her translation, but the text didn’t seem to provide any further details of where the source document might be hidden. Angela looked at the detailed map that was included in the chapter on Poveglia, jotted down a few notes, principally dates and events, and then sat back.
She didn’t think it would have been buried in the ground somewhere, not least because of the plague pits that were the dominant feature of the island’s soil, so that left one of the ruined buildings on Poveglia. The document couldn’t possibly be hidden in the lunatic asylum — part of which had apparently also been used as a retirement home for senior citizens, a thought which made Angela shudder again — because the building hadn’t been erected until 1922. Several of the other structures were also comparatively recent, certainly built after Carmelita’s death.
The oldest structure on the island was the bell tower, the only surviving remnant of the twelfth-century church of San Vitale, which had been abandoned and then destroyed hundreds of years earlier. The translation Angela had completed was quite specific. It stated that after the source document had been prepared it had then been secreted beside the guardian in the new place where the legions of the dead reign supreme. Apart from the reference to the ‘guardian’, which still bothered her because she didn’t fully understand it, the meaning was perfectly clear. The document had originally been hidden somewhere else but, after Carmelita had seen it, for some reason it had then been concealed in a different hiding place.
If her reading of the Latin was correct, and assuming the document still existed, that meant there was only one place it could possibly have been hidden on Poveglia: it had to be somewhere in the bell tower.
45
Marietta lay on her back on the thin and uncomfortable mattress, eyes wide open and staring at the cracked and discoloured plaster on the ceiling above her. The food tray sat untouched on the floor beside the bed.
When the guard had casually, callously, confirmed her worst fears, when she had finally realized that there really was no hope, it had driven all other thoughts from her mind. The idea of eating or drinking didn’t even occur to her. Her mind was filled with vivid images of the horrendous events of the previous evening — of Benedetta strapped on the stone table, struggling futilely against her bonds, her screams reduced to muffled grunts and moans as she was violently raped and her blood drained from the wound on her neck.
Now, Marietta knew what fate awaited her, knew that sometime — sometime soon — the guards would appear in the cellar and instruct her to wash her body. Would she resist? And, if so, how? There were no weapons she could use against her captors, no arguments or persuasion that would do anything to alter the events she knew would take place in the next few hours.
The choice was stark. Marietta was a fighter. But she was also a realist. If she refused to obey orders she knew the guards would simply rape her or beat her into submission, or just strip her naked and then hose her down. Her best, and in fact her only, choice was to do it the easy way: do her best to detach her mind from the awful reality of what was going to happen to her and hope it would all be over quickly.
She thought again of her family, of her father and mother, and of the mental anguish she knew they would be feeling after her disappearance. When they’d read reports in the newspapers, or seen television programmes about the other girls who had vanished from the streets of Venice, her mother had always said that the worst part was the uncertainty. For a mother, not knowing if her daughter was alive or dead was a burden not many could bear. At least if a body was found, the grieving process could start: the news would be devastating, in the proper sense of that word, but the family would be able to make their farewells, and then try their best to move on.
But when a person vanished, leaving no trace behind, every waking moment would be a torture. That could be the day where two grim-faced police officers would knock at the door to bring the final, dreadful news. Or — and this was the hope that Marietta was sure every mother would cling to — perhaps that would be the day when her daughter would at last walk back through the door.
Marietta closed her eyes again, but still the tears came, coursing down her cheeks, because she knew, beyond all reasonable doubt, that her own mother would never, ever, find out what had happened to her. And she felt her heart breaking as she realized this.
She took a deep breath and tried to get herself back under control. She knew she was going to die, but she was determined to do her best to die with dignity, not to scream, not to shout. And, above all, not to cry. She rubbed angrily at her cheeks with her free hand. She would show them.
She was a Venetian, after all, descended — so she’d been told — from important, perhaps even noble, blood. No matter what they did to her, she would cling to what shreds of dignity she could during her ordeal.
46
Angela was so engrossed in what she was doing that she didn’t see or hear the drawing-room door swing open. She was just suddenly aware of a pungent and acrid smell, and of Marco jumping to his feet.
She turned round in her chair to look behind her and saw a figure clad in an all-enveloping black cloak, the hood covering his face, moving silently across the wooden floor towards her. She started to rise, but immediately Marco shouted out to her, ‘Sit down and face the wall.’
The smell grew stronger as the figure approached, and Angela was seized by an overwhelming feeling of horror and dread, made worse by the uncanny silence with which the man moved. Even though she couldn’t see him, because she was obeying Marco’s commands to the letter and staring fixedly at the wall behind the desk, she knew that the man had stopped directly behind her.
Marco strode across towards her as well, and stood beside her.
‘We may have it, Master,’ he said, pointing down at Angela’s translations of the Latin text.
‘Where?’ The voice was little more than a whisper, a sibilant hiss.
‘Poveglia,’ Marco said.
There was a short silence as the new arrival apparently digested this information, and then Angela heard his quiet voice again. ‘Get the boat ready,’ he said, ‘and bring her as well.’
47
Bronson pushed the throttle all the way forward to the stop, and the bow of the speedboat lifted in response to the increased revolutions of the outboard engine’s propeller.
Ahead of him, the blue powerboat had also increased speed, and was now clearly heading directly towards the square inlet on the northern side of Venice that was known as the Sacca della Misericordia. There were two canals that opened off the inlet, and any number of smaller canals that connected with those two. Bronson knew that once they got into the canal system, he would have his work cut out trying to keep track of them, so he kept up his speed, heedless of the increasing number of boats manoeuvring in the water around him.
The blue powerboat swung left into the Sacca della Misericordia, weaving around vaporettos and gondolas and launches and various other types of craft, the driver pushing the boat much too quickly in the congested waters.
Behind him, Bronson was starting to close the gap, simply because he wasn’t yet in the thick of the water traffic. But as he, too, entered the inlet, he was forced to reduce s
peed considerably. A vaporetto was heading straight for him, probably aiming for the Fondamente Nuove vaporetto stop down to the south-east, and Bronson was forced to turn the boat hard to the right to avoid a collision. He straightened up and steered around the passenger craft, the driver shaking his fist angrily at Bronson and mouthing expletives as he, too, took evasive action. Bronson ignored him, his attention still fixed on his quarry as he instinctively manoeuvred the boat around all the other vessels in the congested area.
The blue powerboat steered to the left of the Sacca della Misericordia and, still travelling quickly, started heading down the Rio di Noale canal, which would lead them directly to the Grand Canal and its myriad tributaries. Bronson knew that if his quarry managed to reach there, they could vanish into any one of the smaller canals, and he would probably never see them again. At all costs, he had to keep them in sight.
He increased speed as much as he dared — smashing the boat into the side wall of the canal or into another vessel would absolutely ensure that his pursuit would end prematurely — and powered into the canal after them.
A short distance down the canal the waterway split in a Y-junction, the wider Rio di Noale veering to the right, while a slightly narrower canal, the Rio di San Felice, lay straight ahead. That was the quickest route straight through to the Grand Canal, Bronson guessed, as the blue boat kept to the left of the stone breakwater that marked the junction.
Then he saw something that made him smile. At the end of the canal, where it narrowed still further, was a veritable logjam of gondolas, all manoeuvring either in or out of the Grand Canal at the junction ahead. The blue powerboat would have to slow down to a crawl to get through the melee. Either that, or they’d have to take a different route.
In fact, the blue boat did both: it slowed and turned. Bronson saw the wake diminish markedly as the driver pulled back the throttle, slowing down, and then accelerated again as he steered the boat into the entrance to another canal on the left-hand side.
Bronson eased back the throttle, ensuring that he was travelling slowly enough to make the turn, then accelerated again once he was inside the other canal. The sound of the two fast revving engines on the boats echoed off the walls of the surrounding buildings, and the waves from their wakes slapped hard against the stones that lined the canal.
The waterway ran straight for a short distance, but at the end it swung through about ninety degrees to the left. There were also two other canals that had junctions with the one they were in, both on the left-hand side and leading away from the Grand Canal. Bronson had managed to keep up with the other boat so far, and he knew that he could go on chasing the two men through the canals of Venice until he ran out of fuel or miscalculated some corner and smashed up the boat, but this wouldn’t help him to find Angela. Instead, what he needed to do was convince the men he was chasing that he’d given up. He knew they wouldn’t head for home until they were sure he was no longer on their tail.
But how could he convince the two men that he was a spent force? At that moment he could think of only one way to do this. It was a risky manoeuvre, and if it went wrong, he’d be dead in minutes. It all depended on timing, and the inherent inaccuracy of semi-automatic pistols, especially when such pistols were being fired from an unstable platform, like a boat travelling at speed.
The driver of the blue boat turned the wheel hard to the left, steered the vessel into the first of the subsidiary canals and increased speed again. This canal was slightly narrower than the one they’d just left, and there were only a few other boats in it, mainly moored at various landing stages and jetties along the sides. There were no gondolas in sight. It was as good a place as any.
Bronson pulled the Browning semi-automatic pistol from his pocket, pointed it in the general direction of the boat in front of him, and pulled the trigger twice. The shots boomed out, deafeningly loud in the narrow canal. As far as he could see, neither bullet went anywhere near its target, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted a reaction. A reaction he could use to his own advantage.
The driver of the blue boat obliged him.
He was just coming up to the entrance to another canal on the right, and swung the boat into it. As he did so, the man in the bow of the boat raised his own pistol and fired off a shot towards Bronson.
That was what he’d been waiting for. Pulling back on the throttle, Bronson spun the wheel hard to the right, to make sure that the boat would circle in more or less the same place. Then, rising in his seat, he clutched at his chest and slumped down out of sight, the Browning still in his hand, just in case the two men decided to come alongside his boat for a closer look.
From his position on the floor of the powerboat, Bronson could see nothing except the sky and the tops of the buildings that lined the canal, so he was relying entirely on his ears to deduce what was happening. He heard the sound of the engine of the other boat fade away sharply, which meant the driver had chopped back the throttle. Then the engine noise — and Bronson was sure it was the same engine — increased again, and appeared to be getting closer, though it was difficult to be certain of this because of the way the noise echoed from both sides of the man-made canyon. It certainly sounded as though the two men were approaching to make sure he was dead.
Bronson checked the Browning was ready to fire, and waited as the sound of the other boat’s engine grew louder.
48
About an hour later, Angela was taken out of the main door of the house into the pale watery light of a cloudy afternoon in the Venetian lagoon.
After the hooded man had left the drawing-room, Marco had instructed her to make a complete translation of the rest of that section of the diary as quickly as possible, obviously hoping that the remainder of the Latin text would provide details of the precise location of the source document. It didn’t. The only reference Angela found was to the ‘campanile of light’, which just served to confirm her assumption that the document must be somewhere in the ancient bell tower. From her reading of the chapter dealing with the history of Poveglia, she knew that the bell tower had for a time been converted into a lighthouse. But she still had no idea exactly where to start looking.
Marco and another of his men hustled her down the path towards the jetty at the end of the island, where two men were already waiting, standing in the stern of a powerboat, the rumble of the engine clearly audible.
‘Why do you want me to go with you?’ Angela asked, as Marco pushed her inside the small cabin.
‘You’ve read and translated the Latin,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, but there might be something, some clue, that you’ll see and understand but we won’t. That’s why you’re here.’
‘What happens if you don’t find what you’re looking for?’
‘You’d better pray that we do. Finding the source document is the only thing that’s keeping you alive right now. If it isn’t there, then we have no further use for you.’
The casual, almost conversational, tone of his voice scared Angela even more than the words he’d used, and she sat in silence as Marco handcuffed her wrists together, looping the link between the cuffs behind a hand rail, immobilizing her. Then he left the cabin.
A few moments later the door opened again and the hooded man entered, the now familiar stench preceding him. Angela shrank back in her seat as the figure passed right beside her, and then took a seat at the opposite end of the cabin.
Moments later, she felt the boat start to move, and soon the bow was cutting through the choppy waters of the lagoon, the waves thumping rhythmically against the hull.
She had no idea how long the journey would take, because she didn’t know where she’d been imprisoned, and the view through the side windows of the boat was so restricted that she could see almost nothing of her surroundings. And in truth, her thoughts were dominated by the hooded man she was sharing the cabin with. He had said nothing to her, and gave no sign that he was even aware of her presence, but the all-perva
sive smell of rotting meat seemed to fill the air, and she was simply terrified in case he came close or, worse, touched her.
A few minutes later, Marco returned to the cabin and sat down opposite Angela, which actually made her feel safer and slightly more comfortable. At least the menace Marco represented was clear and tangible. The hooded man inspired only feelings of horror and revulsion, which were far worse than any physical threat.
‘Who is that man?’ she asked quietly, nodding towards the silent figure. ‘He terrifies me.’
Marco smiled bleakly. ‘He should.’
49
Bronson tensed as the sound of the boat drew closer, and a moment later he felt a slight bump as some part of the other craft touched his boat. He kept his eyes half-open, and lay as still as possible, the Browning held loosely by his side but ready to fire.
He could hear the two men talking as they manoeuvred their boat alongside his, their efforts hampered by the fact that the engine of Bronson’s craft was still running, and the boat was describing a small circle at the junction of the two canals.
‘I can see him,’ one of the men said. ‘He’s not moving.’
‘He must be dead then,’ the other replied, ‘or at least he’s badly wounded. Let’s get out of here before a police launch comes along.’
Bronson heard the noise of another boat’s engine approaching, he thought from the opposite direction, though it was difficult to tell. But what he was quite certain about was that the blue boat was moving away. That sound was unmistakable.
For about thirty seconds he did nothing, then he eased himself up cautiously, and risked a quick glance over the side of the vessel. There was a slight bend in the canal to the east and, as he looked in that direction, he saw the blue powerboat disappear around it. The moment it was out of sight, he sat up, centred the steering wheel to stop the circular motion of the boat, grabbed his map of the Venetian waterways, and quickly worked out where he was.