Good Thief's Guide to Venice

by Ewan, Chris

  I was just reaching for a card when a sense of movement caught my eye and I glanced up at a lopsided sash window positioned above the kitchen sink. I could see the reflection of my torch beam in the glass, along with a translucent outline of myself. There was something about my opaque double that didn’t quite add up – a second form behind the first, like the ghost on a badly tuned television. Then, quite suddenly, it made sense in the most abrupt and grievous way I could have imagined, and I experienced a hard, sharp jolt to the back of my head.

  My legs gave out and I slumped to my knees, my torch falling from my slackened hands. I cried out in shock, then in pain, and was aiming to twist around when the blur of an arm came down a second time. There was a crunching noise I didn’t appreciate, and my head pitched sideways until my chin played kissy-kissy with the wooden floor. The impact seemed to have dislodged something inside me – something that was too big to be contained. It swelled and pressed up against my skull, then trickled out in a warm dribble from my ear. I was still conscious, but only just. I’d been struck twice, and neither blow had been quite on the money, but I wasn’t dumb enough to invite another attempt. I stayed down and closed my eyes, jaw gaping open as I performed my best impression of an Englishman beaten utterly senseless.

  A shoe was planted beside my nose, smelling of rubber, and my head was yanked up by the hair, close to where I’d been hit. It hurt just fine, but I was determined not to whimper. I was pretty good at it, even if I do say so myself, and I must have lasted a clear half-second before the sound of footfall and voices became audible from the spiral stairs at the end of the hall.

  My attacker let go of my hair, giving my nose a fair stab at breaking itself on the floor. Then a pair of hands were hooked beneath my armpits and I was heaved back behind the door.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The voices belonged to a woman and a man. Even with a dashed skull I recognised Graziella. She was talking with her companion in rapid-fire French, which gave me a pretty good idea of who to expect.

  My shadowy friend with the speedy arm had forgotten to snatch up my torch. It was shining in a diagonal slant across the floor, casting the spider plant and the picture of Audrey Hepburn in a weak spotlight. If things had been going my way, it might have been enough to alert Graziella to the danger that was lurking behind her door, but it wasn’t to be. An overhead light snicked on and she bustled inside, followed by the oversize blackjack champ with the pronounced limp and out-of-control beard. His fedora was missing – perhaps he’d tossed it onto the hat stand – but he did have on his XXL camel-hair coat, his black suit trousers and white sports socks. Graziella was wearing her tuxedo, minus the bow tie, with her pearl-white blouse open at the collar.

  They approached the kitchen table, chatting at a quick tempo. It sounded as if they were in high spirits, which suggested that she hadn’t popped her head inside the bookshop on the way upstairs to see what had become of her uncle.

  Beardy was carrying a metal attaché briefcase of a design I couldn’t fail to recognise. He swung it freely in his huge fist and slapped it down on top of the playing cards on the chequered tablecloth, then twirled it around so that the combination dials were pointing towards Graziella. He spread his arms wide, grinning toothily, like a game-show host flaunting a star prize. Graziella smirked, then hung her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and was just in the process of entering the combination when she happened to glance sideways and fix directly on me.

  The colour left her face. So did the animation.

  I heard a click, followed by a ratchet sound, and then my mysterious companion stepped out from behind me and shouted, ‘Peek-a-boo!’

  Well all right, he didn’t do that, but he did straighten his arm and point a finger. Scratch that – a gun. I might have been slumped on the ground, peering out from half-lidded eyes as I performed my man-in-a-coma routine, but I could see the pistol quite clearly. It was a big, clumsy thing, fitted with a screw-on suppressor. And hell, it looked an awful lot like the weapon Graziella had provided me with.

  I’d last seen the pistol when I’d ditched my bumbag on the floor of the bedroom in which we’d restrained Borelli. Since that was also the last time I’d seen the Count, I suppose it was only fitting that he was the chap toting the gun.

  Borelli’s face was flushed and he was perspiring heavily. His forehead and upper lip were coated in an oily sheen and his wavy grey hair was flattened on top of his head, as if he’d been smoothing his wet palm over it. His greasy fingers seemed to be slipping on the dimpled pistol grip, but not enough to make life any more comfortable for Graziella and Beardy.

  The clothes he had on didn’t exactly suit him, but that shouldn’t have surprised me, considering they were mine. A hooded sweatshirt and faded jeans, plus a pair of smelly baseball shoes. The jeans were too long for him, caught up around the heels of the trainers, and the hoodie made him look like he was in the grip of a mid-life crisis. He was woefully underdressed, considering the rest of us were in dinner wear, and if only the circumstances had been different, I might have suggested swapping outfits again. Somehow, though, I imagined he’d be reluctant to go the whole way and return my gun-shaped accessory.

  He must have discovered the pistol when he’d been climbing into my duds, but that still left questions unanswered. Questions like: Why wasn’t he being interviewed by the police right now? If he’d been found by the officers I’d seen outside my building, wouldn’t they have insisted on keeping my clothes as evidence of the abduction? And fine, Borelli might have powerful contacts, but could the police really turn a blind eye while he skulked around Venice with a weapon taken from a crime scene?

  I didn’t know, and I wasn’t about to find out any time soon. He raised his chin in the air, peered down his nose, and barked something to Graziella in Italian. She held up her palms and backed off from the table. He repeated the command to Beardy and the hairy slob didn’t require a translation to comply. He did take his time over it, though. I got the impression there wasn’t much he did in a hurry and his grudging reaction suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d been confronted with a gun.

  Borelli waited until he was satisfied with their positioning, then stepped forwards and snatched up the case as if it had been delivered to the room expressly for his convenience. He felt the weight in his hand, bobbing his head from side to side like a set of scales, and snarled more Italian at Graziella. She answered with a sullen nod. I wasn’t entirely clear what he’d asked, but I could hazard an educated guess. If I was him, I’d want to be certain it was all there – the entire 500,000 euros – and judging by the nasty grin that curled his lip and split his face in two, that’s precisely what he’d been told.

  He shuffled backwards, covering Graziella and Beardy with the gun. I didn’t know if he was a good shot but I rated his chances of hitting them as pretty high, and evidently they did too. I could see the anger and frustration bubbling away in Graziella. Her eyes were narrowed, chin jutting forwards, but she didn’t make a move. Beardy sighed loudly and leaned to one side, favouring his good leg.

  Borelli was close to me by now. From where I was lying prone on the floor, it would have been a simple matter to grab his ankle and yank him off his feet, and if this was your typical Hollywood movie, I dare say that’s just what I would have been expected to do. Problem being, like any actor working a scene, I needed to know what my motivation was supposed to be, and quite frankly, I couldn’t think of one. Based on what Alfred had told me, not to mention my recent pistol whipping, I had good reason to suspect that the Count was what one might call a baddie. Then again, Graziella and Beardy were no saints, and if I managed to disarm the Count, there was no guarantee that my situation would improve a whole lot. It didn’t help that my head was pounding in a quite sickening way, or that I’d broken out in a heavy sweat. And then there was the small matter of the bloody big gun the Count had in his hand – a weapon that was liable to go off in a struggle and that might very well be pointed towards
some vital part of my anatomy when it did.

  Hmm. Decisions, decisions. Stay still and avoid being shot, or go down in history as a have-a-go hero with a gory hole where his pulmonary artery used to be?

  Shockingly, I chose option A.

  And I hazard to say, I could have lived quite comfortably with my decision. But then Borelli decided to give his parting speech. All baddies have them, I suppose, and it seemed that he was no exception. Of course, it would have helped if he’d slipped into heavily accented English, or if some snappy subtitles had magically appeared so that I was able to understand his words, but the truth is the vast majority of what he said was a complete mystery to me. Except for one thing. He spat a short sentence and gestured flamboyantly with the gun, pointing down through the floor to the bookshop far below, and fixed a nasty snarl on his face.

  Graziella crumpled. Her knees went from under her and she fell into Beardy, clutching at his camel-hair overcoat and wailing quite disturbingly. She buried her head behind his wide back, as if trying to shield herself from the Count’s words.

  It didn’t work. If anything, it just seemed to encourage him. He kept up his talk, seeming to revel in the pain he was administering, and meanwhile he mimed something. The mime was quite clear. Picture the briefcase as a man’s head. Picture the gun as, well, a gun. Now watch him press the gun against the briefcase – see him dry-fire the pistol. The bastard even made a plosive noise with his lips.

  Language barrier aside, it was perfectly clear to me that Graziella’s uncle hadn’t shot himself. Borelli had done it for him. And judging by the perverse delight he seemed to take in sharing the news, he wasn’t the least bit sorry about it, either.

  Now, on reflection, I can’t say that I was conscious of my motivation having changed. But something definitely shifted inside me, especially when I looked at Graziella and saw the snivelling mess she’d become. She was curled into a ball, gripping hold of Beardy’s trouser leg, banging her head against the cupboard door beneath the sink. And yes, I might have been coward enough to dither over the role I should have been playing, but right at that moment, my emotions took over and I watched with some amazement as I dug a hand inside my pocket, flicked off the lid of the pepper spray with my thumbnail and surged up from the floor.

  The surprise helped, and I had plenty of time to depress the aerosol. Sadly, what I lacked was an opportunity to check my aim. No, the outlet wasn’t pointing towards me, but it wasn’t pointing towards Borelli, either. I blitzed the wall between us, coating it with a dirty brown smear, and before I was able to correct my mistake, Borelli’s face twisted in anger and distaste, and he swiped down fast with the gun, knocking the canister from my fingers.

  On instinct, I grabbed for his wrist with both hands. He tried to tear himself free, cursing me in extravagant, full-blooded Italian, but I knew what letting go would mean and I held on for all I was worth. I felt the muscles of his hand flex. His trigger finger curled. Pfft. There was a flash of light and a bullet went high, thunking into the ceiling with a shower of plaster dust. Beardy ducked for cover, his bad leg giving way like the rotten foundations of a collapsing warehouse.

  The Count’s hand jerked backwards with the recoil. He was fighting to bring his arm down while I strained to force it up. It would have helped if I could have snatched a hand free and punched him in the face, but I didn’t have the strength. It was a different story for him, and he seemed to have a similar idea. Bumping me with his hip, he swung with his free arm and the briefcase came around in a fast arc, heading for my kidney. I raised my leg and took the blow on my thigh. He cursed me some more and swung back for a second go, and meanwhile I stamped down on his toe. Bad idea. The move worked, but he keeled sideways. Pfft. The second bullet went lower, pinging off a kitchen tile. If Beardy hadn’t been crouching already, it would have punctured his abdomen.

  I wrenched Borelli’s arm up, forcing the gun towards the ceiling, and we lost our footing and toppled over onto the floor. The Count was on top of me, rolling around fitfully, using his elbows and his weight to crush the air from my lungs and the hooded sweater to smother my face. It was beginning to work. I couldn’t inhale. I felt my grip loosen a fraction, and he was just seconds from having the gun all to himself when Beardy pushed himself up with a mighty groan and came lumbering across the room, kicking the Count in the temple and tearing the weapon from us with all the ease of an adult confiscating a toy from a pair of brawling kids.

  I skittered clear of Borelli, who was clutching his head and moaning groggily, and rested on my back, panting for a moment. The moment was short. Before I could do anything more, Beardy stomped around me, aimed down at the Count and squirted two carefree rounds into his bucking chest.

  Borelli didn’t cry and clutch at his wounds. He didn’t yell out in pain. He lay prone. Unmoving. Dead.

  Beardy swivelled, lungs heaving, and kicked the pepper spray away into a distant corner of the room with a twitch of his bad leg. Then he aligned the gun with my forehead, stifled a yawn, and presented me with the opportunity for a brief spell of introspection.

  When I’m writing about Michael Faulks, I like to exploit what I think of as his key moments of awareness. Every now and again, I move the action inside his head so that my readers can listen to him think, hear him tick. And if I do this often enough, and at the right instances, then when Faulks faces a major test, he’ll experience a key moment of awareness where he begins to understand something fundamentally important about himself.

  Now, I don’t like to crow, but I believe that having a gun turned on me, especially a gun that had been nonchalantly discharged to kill a man lying a few feet away, could be said to qualify as just such a challenge. And what was I aware of? Absolutely nothing. My mind was a complete blank. I didn’t see my life pass before me. I didn’t ask forgiveness for my sins. All I did was squint through the ache in my head and stare into the gaping hole at the end of the gun muzzle, unsure if it was the last thing I’d ever see.

  I did, though, still retain my sense of hearing, and it was this precious gift that enabled me to listen as Graziella said something in French from a voice that was hoarse and scratchy, but which carried an unmistakable note of urgency. My French might have been limited, but it was better than my Italian, and I got the impression she was telling Beardy not to shoot.

  I saw his meaty hand shift around the butt as he adjusted his grip. I wet my lip and risked glancing up. His eyes didn’t lock with my own – they were focussed on the area of my chest where my heart was beating a jaunty melody I like to call flat out fear.

  ‘Remi,’ Graziella said. At last, I had his name. I can’t say I took much consolation from it. ‘Pose ton arme.’ Put the gun down. Funny how my French was improving. Who knew, maybe if he ever got round to shooting me, I’d die fluent? ‘Pose ton arme,’ she repeated, and to my everlasting relief, he shrugged, scratched his beard, and did just that.

  The gun hung limply at his side, looking like a miniature replica inside his large fist, and I allowed myself the luxury of drawing a breath. I even went so far as to prop myself up on my elbows and blow a gust of air towards my brow. Talk about a key moment of awareness. I was beginning to wonder if there was a chance I might live.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Despite his bulk, Remi was no slouch. I’d barely had time to appreciate my good fortune before he’d manhandled Graziella onto a folding kitchen chair, fitted her limp hand around the gun and arranged her arm so that her elbow was resting on the table and she was pointing the pistol at me. Once he was satisfied with her aim, he nodded to himself and hobbled through to the bathroom, returning moments later with a bundle of towels and the white shower curtain that he’d torn from the rail. By now, he was whistling a carefree tune, and it seemed to occupy him while he used the towels to pack the Count’s chest wounds, then rolled him in the shower curtain until he was thoroughly cocooned. If he was fazed by the nature of the housekeeping task he’d set himself, he didn’t show it. I knew people who found
vacuuming more stressful.

  Graziella appeared to be somewhere else entirely. She didn’t pay attention to what Remi was doing, and she didn’t react when he gathered up the attaché briefcase and set it down on the floor between her feet. He stopped whistling for a moment to watch her, as if uncertain if she could be relied upon, and then he squinted along the barrel of the gun towards me again. Finally content, he murmured a quick instruction into her ear, rustled her hair, then heaved the shrink-wrapped corpse up onto his capacious shoulder like a man lifting a giant vacuum-packed fish fillet, and staggered blithely out of the room to the accompaniment of his own breezy theme tune.

  His uneven footsteps on the spiral stairs gradually faded to nothing, leaving us in silence. I glanced at the dark stain on the floor where Borelli’s body had been, then at a discharged shell from one of the bullets that had killed him, then at Graziella. Her eyes were black swirls, the corners very pink against her colourless skin, her lips forming a perfect circle almost as inert as the gun muzzle.

  I counted off two minutes on the kitchen clock behind her shoulder. Then three.

  ‘Mind if I sit down with you?’ I asked.

  There was a twinge in the muscles of her cheek. Not the surest sign of consent, but I got the impression it was all I was going to get.

  ‘I’ll move slowly,’ I told her. ‘If you want me to stop at any point, you just say.’ No response. ‘Okay, here I come.’

  I’d seen plants grow quicker. It seemed to take forever until I was upright, followed by an eternity until I was close to the chair. I’d left my penlight resting on the floor. Didn’t want her to think I might try to use it as a weapon. ‘I’m sitting down now,’ I told her.