by James Becker
He’d ended up in a canal called the Rio della Racchetta, and the men he’d been chasing would have to continue down the adjoining waterway until they reached the larger Rio del Gesuiti, because they’d already passed the only other canal entrance. What he didn’t know was which way they’d turn when they reached it. Left would take them the shorter distance, out into the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove, the open water that lay on the north-east side of Venice. If they swung right, they’d have a longer run down the canal until they reached the Canal Grande — the Grand Canal — itself.
A wooden launch — its engine had been what Bronson had heard — swept down one side of the powerboat, the driver staring at him with some curiosity as he passed. He had obviously seen the pirouettes that Bronson’s craft had been describing in the water, and probably thought he was drunk.
Bronson ignored him. His only concern was to try to second-guess the men he was following. The trouble was, he had very little to go on. When the blue powerboat had pulled away from the Island of the Dead, the driver had headed south-east. If his destination had been one of the islands at the north-eastern end of the Laguna Veneta, somewhere near Burano, for example, Bronson would have expected them to head in that direction. The fact that they’d continued along the north side of Venice suggested that they were going to sail around the eastern end of the island, and perhaps then turn south-west, towards the other end of the lagoon, where he knew there was a scattering of small islands.
It was a long shot, though, and for perhaps half a minute, Bronson sat at the wheel of the boat, his mind racked by indecision. He had just one chance. If he guessed wrong, he’d never see the blue boat again, which would mean he’d lose Angela. He had to get it right.
His mind made up, he spun the wheel and opened the throttle, sending the boat speeding south down the Rio della Racchetta, retracing the course he’d followed just minutes earlier. At the end of the canal, he turned the boat right and almost immediately left, back into the Rio di San Felice, where he’d seen the jam caused by the gondolas. As he made the turn, he prayed that this time the waterway would be clear.
It wasn’t, but there were far fewer boats in the way. Bronson kept the speed up as much as he dared, then pulled the throttle back as he reached the nearest gondola. He started to weave his way through the jostling boats, his passage attracting a torrent of abuse in high-speed Italian, all of which he ignored.
A couple of minutes later he was through, and swung the boat to the left, into the Canal Grande itself. As he did so, he glanced to his left and saw a long wooden-hulled launch bearing down on him, just yards away. Bronson knew immediately that if he continued turning towards the boat, he’d never miss it. He reacted instantly, spinning the steering wheel to the right and pushed the throttle forward, sending his boat straight across the bow of the oncoming vessel.
There was a bang from the rear of Bronson’s boat, as the bow of the much larger launch hit the left-hand rear of his powerboat, cracking the fibreglass and scattering paint flakes across the water. But the outboard motor was undamaged, and he was certain that the impact had been well above the waterline, so there was no danger of him taking in water. And in fact fibreglass boats of the type he was in were so full of air pockets that they were virtually unsinkable.
The driver of the launch immediately reduced speed, obviously intending to do the Italian marine equivalent of exchanging names and addresses. But Bronson had not the slightest intention of stopping or even slowing down. His boat’s throttle was still wide open and the outboard engine roaring, so he twitched the steering wheel to the left and sped away, heedless of the angry shouts echoing from behind him.
The Grand Canal in Venice follows an S-shaped course from the Stazione Ferrovie dello Stato Santa Lucia, the railway station, to its southern end near the Piazza San Marco, where it opens out into the Bacino di San Marco and the much wider canale of the same name. Bronson had joined the canal about a third of the way along, so he knew he would have to contend with the fairly heavy water traffic for some time before he could get into the clearer and more open waters to the south of the city. And then, of course, he would have the even more difficult task of spotting the blue powerboat carrying the two men, amongst the hundreds of similar craft that plied the waters in and around Venice. And that assumed that he’d been right in his guess that the boat would be heading into the waters of the lagoon somewhere to the south of the city.
He also knew that although the men he’d been following now believed that he was dead or badly wounded, they would still be keeping their own eyes peeled for any sign of pursuit, and paying particular attention to anybody who looked like him. There was nothing he could do about the design and colour of his boat, but Bronson realized that there were things — three things, in fact — that he could do to try to change his own appearance.
He was wearing his black leather jacket, so he took this off and dropped it on the floor of the boat beside him. Underneath, he had on a plain white shirt, which would give him an entirely different appearance to anyone viewing him from a distance. And in his shirt pocket he had a baseball cap and a pair of large sunglasses with impenetrable mirrored black lenses. He took out the sunglasses and slipped them on as he powered the boat down the Grand Canal towards the open water at its end, then settled the cap on his head, ensuring that it completely covered the dressing over the wound on his scalp.
Unless he got so close to the other boat that the men in it could actually see his features, Bronson guessed that he now looked quite different. Rolling his shoulders to ease away some of his tension, and trying hard not to think about what could be happening to Angela, he focused on the task in hand: spotting the other vessel, a challenge that made finding a needle in a haystack seem easy by comparison.
50
Marco released Angela’s handcuffs, and led her out of the cabin. The boat was already moored, a bow and stern line attached, and it was easy enough to step from the side of the vessel onto the landing stage. She looked around. The boat was positioned a short distance down the channel between the small octagonal island that lay at the southern tip of Poveglia and the middle island. In the distance, looking south, she could make out buildings on the Lido.
The octagonal island looked like a flat-topped fort, the inward-sloping sides made of stone, and mooring alongside that would have been difficult. But that wasn’t their objective. A short distance along the level stone landing stage that marked the southern end of the larger island was an impressive-looking building. It reminded Angela of a typical Venetian palazzo, and must, she thought, have been part of the retirement home on the island, before being abandoned in the 1960s. The facade was covered with a web-like exoskeleton of rusting scaffolding. That, Angela knew from her research, was not part of some renovation project, but had been erected almost a quarter of a century earlier simply to stop the buildings from falling down.
She looked over to the north-east, and there, beyond the trees, rose the imposing stone bell tower, looking something like a church steeple, its tall red-tiled roof supporting a large metal crucifix at the very top. All the openings in the tower appeared to have been bricked up, possibly when the scaffolding was put in place. A chill wind blew in suddenly from the waters of the lagoon, bringing with it a swirl of mist, and from somewhere nearby Angela heard the faint sound of a bell ringing.
She glanced at Marco. ‘Did you hear that bell?’ she asked, and pointed towards the tower. ‘I thought it came from over there.’
He looked at her dismissively. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘The bell was removed in nineteen thirteen.’
‘I know what I heard,’ Angela insisted, but her voice lacked conviction. She’d read in the guidebook that the sound of a bell was still sometimes heard on the island.
The hooded man emerged from the cabin of the boat and began moving silently — his feet never seemed to make a sound — towards the derelict building that lay closest to the tower.
Marco checked that Angela’s
handcuffs were still secured, and then pushed her in the same direction, two of his men following behind.
The short procession entered the building through an opening that had obviously once been a doorway, but which now gaped open to the elements. Inside, it was a scene of almost total devastation. Rubbish and debris lay strewn across the floor. Plaster had fallen off the walls and ceiling, and in several places the floor timbers of the storey above had broken, and pointed downwards into the ground-floor room like long, blackened and jagged teeth. On many of the pieces of surviving plaster, graffiti had been scrawled. Cast-iron radiators stood forlornly against the walls, rust covering the areas where the paint had flaked off. In one corner, two windows had disappeared, and a heavy growth of vegetation had forced its way inside and was beginning the long slow process of reclaiming the building.
Angela was not of a nervous disposition, but she knew absolutely that if she had had any choice in the matter, she would have walked out, climbed back on to the boat and never, ever returned to Poveglia.
The very fabric of the building seemed to echo with the cries of the dying, and the knowledge that the thin soil on the island covered the bones of tens of thousands of plague victims weighed heavily upon her. If there was any place on the face of the earth where the dead could speak, this, this island of Poveglia, was probably it. She could so easily imagine the giant fires consuming piles of smouldering bodies, and the shallow graves tended by workers who were themselves diseased. Through it all would stalk the bizarre and otherworldly figures of the doctors, trying vainly to fight a contagion that they didn’t understand and could not cure, their only protection against the disease being the hook-nosed masks they wore, filled with peppers and spices which they believed might filter out the infective elements. These men must have looked like massive predatory birds as they tried in vain to bring some relief to the sufferers.
Suddenly, a movement caught her eye and Angela gave a little cry of alarm. A shadow played across the wall as a beam of sunlight entered the building, and she could almost swear that she saw the shape of a man wearing a beak-like mask somewhere outside the building. Then the wind blew again and the shape dissolved and reformed, as the branches of the tree shifted.
‘Come on,’ Marco ordered, tugging at Angela’s arm.
Following the hooded man, they stepped over and around the debris to the far end of the room and made their way carefully over to the bell tower.
Inside, little light penetrated because the windows and other openings had been bricked up. The tower extended above their heads, a vertical well of darkness. In the gloom, they saw the first few steps of a rusting spiral staircase which ran around the walls of the tower.
‘So where is it?’ Marco demanded.
For an instant, Angela didn’t realize that he was talking to her, then she pulled herself together.
‘The text doesn’t say,’ she replied. ‘It just seems to suggest that it’s hidden somewhere here, in this place. There’s nothing else I can tell you, and I did translate all the rest of the Latin.’
Marco looked at her for a long moment, then switched his glance to the stairs before turning to one of his men and issuing a crisp order in Italian. The man turned and strode swiftly out of the tower.
‘We need torches,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the document is hidden anywhere down here. People still come to this island — you can tell that from the graffiti they’ve scrawled on the walls — and if it had been found already, we would have known about it. So it’s probably hidden somewhere that people wouldn’t normally visit or explore.’ He looked again at Angela. ‘I hope you’re not afraid of heights,’ he said, ‘because my guess is that Carmelita, or whoever hid it, probably put it right at the top of the bell tower. You’re going up there to find it for us.’
When the man he’d sent back to the boat returned, half a dozen torches of different sizes in his hands, Marco stepped across to Angela and unlocked her handcuffs. Then he picked up the biggest torch, a squat, grey and clearly heavy instrument with a rechargeable battery, and shone a powerful beam directly upwards, tracing the course that the spiral staircase followed until it reached a level platform.
‘That can’t be the top of the tower,’ Marco said. ‘It’s not high enough. There must be another staircase above that.’
‘I don’t want to do this,’ Angela murmured. ‘I really don’t want to go up there.’
Marco shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. Do this and you’ll live, at least for a little while longer. Refuse, and I’ll have one of my men strangle you right now and dump your body here. It’s up to you.’
For a few seconds Angela stared at him, but she knew she had no option. She was quite certain that Marco would order her death with as little compunction as he would order a cup of coffee. She grimaced, reached down and picked up two of the smaller torches, then she strode across to the foot of the spiral staircase.
She switched on one of the torches and shone the beam at the metal treads in front of her. There was little dust or debris visible on them, and even the banister appeared to be intact and in reasonably good condition. She guessed that some of the infrequent and illegal visitors to the island probably climbed at least some distance up into the tower out of idle curiosity, if nothing else. That was good news, because it meant that the staircase should support her weight. Cautiously, she rested her left foot on the lowest tread, then began to climb.
Behind her, she heard the sound of footsteps and glanced back: Marco was following, torch in hand.
‘Keep going,’ he snapped. ‘I’m just here to make sure you do what you’re told.’
The staircase wound up the inside of the tower. For the first few steps, it felt extremely solid, but the higher she climbed the more unhappy Angela felt, realizing she was relying on bolts and fittings that had been in place for a very long time, without the benefit of any kind of maintenance or repair. She moved as close as she could to the wall, where she hoped the old metal might be stronger, and tested each step before she put her full weight on it.
The climb seemed endless, but eventually she stepped on to a platform that she guessed was virtually at the top of the main part of the tower, and looked around. Again, there was graffiti on the walls, which meant that other people had made the same climb fairly recently. There was no obvious hiding place at that level.
Marco appeared beside her within seconds. ‘I told you the bell had been removed,’ he said, pointing at a substantial beam that ran from one wall of the tower to the opposite side, and which had clearly been designed to support some heavy object.
‘I did hear something,’ Angela insisted.
She looked at the walls of the bell chamber, and at the bricked-up openings in the side walls, and shivered.
‘I suppose this was where he jumped from?’ she said quietly.
‘Who?’ Marco asked.
‘The mad doctor. If the story about him in that book was true, I mean.’
‘Nobody knows, and I don’t care.’ Marco looked all around them, quickly reaching the same conclusion as Angela. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘We need to get to the very top.’
Another short flight of stairs brought them to a second level, above the old bell chamber. And the stairs stopped there. Attached to one wall was a steel ladder, around which metal hoops had been bolted to prevent anyone climbing it from falling off. Like the spiral staircase, the metal looked old and rusty, and none too safe.
‘Keep going,’ Marco ordered again.
Angela swallowed hard. Heights didn’t particularly bother her, but she had a horror of falling, and even the metal hoops around the ladder weren’t much of a safe-guard against that happening. But she knew she had no option. She tucked both the torches into the waistband of her trousers, because she’d definitely need both hands free to make the climb, then reached up and began the ascent.
It wasn’t a long climb, perhaps twenty steps in all, and at the top she was faced with a wooden trapdoor set in
to the underside of a narrow platform. There was no bolt or catch, and the trapdoor swung open fairly easily as she pushed up on it. As it swung back against the wall with a dull thud, she took out one of the torches and shone the beam into the void above. Apart from an old broom, it appeared to be completely empty.
She reached up and placed both torches on the floor of the small platform, then heaved herself through the hole and stood up.
Angela could see that Marco was just beginning to make the same climb, and for a fleeting instant she debated dropping some heavy object down on to the top of his head, but then dismissed the thought. Even if she succeeded in hitting him, she would still have to contend with the men waiting on the ground floor down below, and if Marco didn’t reappear, she guessed that she wouldn’t leave the tower alive.
The platform was about eight feet long and three feet wide, and the walls appeared to be just as solid and featureless as those on the two platforms below her. As far she could see, there was nowhere here where anything of any size could be concealed.
Marco pulled himself through the trapdoor and stood next to her. ‘What now?’ he demanded. ‘Where is it?’
Angela shook her head in despair. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I can only tell you what I translated from the Latin text. That didn’t give any indication of where the document might be hidden, apart from mentioning this tower, and even that was far from explicit.’ She looked around at the featureless walls of the platform. ‘If it was ever here, maybe somebody found it and removed it, years ago.’
‘I’ve already told you: if it had been found, we would know about it. It must be here somewhere.’