The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage

by Robert Sheckley

  “One meets all kinds in Venice,” Karinovsky said, and settled back comfortably in his chair. All part of the grand manner. But a little irritating, since the success of his pose depended upon my playing the alarmed straight man.

  I was damned if I was going to do it. I took out my, cigarettes, offered one to Karinovsky, lit one for myself. We blew out gray plumes of contented smoke. I thought I heard footsteps in the garden. Karinovsky offered me another drink. The iron gate rattled suddenly. I decided to play the straight man.

  “All right,” I said. “What do you suggest we do now?”

  “1 suggest that you rescue me.”

  “And how do you suggest that I go about it?”

  Karinovsky flicked ash from the end of his cigarette. “Knowing your boundless resources, my friend, and your collection of varied skills, I have no doubt that you can find a way. Unless, of course, you prefer to follow Guesci’s somewhat dubious scheme.”

  “Dubious?”

  “Perhaps I don’t do it justice,” Karinovsky said. “Guesci’s plan is certainly very ingenious. Perhaps a little too ingenious, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t. I don’t even know what his plan is.”

  “It will amuse you,” Karinovsky said. “It is based, of course, upon your renowned and diverse talents.”

  I felt a sudden cold chill. What had Guesci planned for us? And what did it have to do with the talents of Agent X? I tried to remember what accomplishments were imputed to me, and I couldn’t. I felt that it was time to clear up the situation.

  “Karinovsky,” I said, “about those skills—”

  “Yes?” he said pleasantly.

  “I’m afraid they may have become exaggerated in the retelling.”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  “No, really. As a matter of fact, I’m quite an untalented person.”

  Karinovsky laughed. “It is apparent that you are given to sudden attacks of modesty,” he said. “It is a chronic disease of the Anglo-Saxon mentality. Next you’ll be telling me that you don’t really consider yourself a secret agent.”

  I managed to produce a sickly grin. “That would be going a little too far,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “Come now, we’ll have no genteel disclaimers. Not between us, my friend.”

  “All right,” I said. Apparently it was not the time to clear up the status of Agent X. “But remember—I may be a trifle rusty.”

  “Accepted. Some more wine?”

  “No, thank you. Let’s get down to business. This house is probably surrounded, you know.” “Guesci’s plan assumed that eventuality.”

  “Are we supposed to walk out of here disguised as delivery men?”

  “Nothing so obvious.”

  “Then how?”

  “Let us examine the problem,” Karinovsky said, with infuriating nonchalance. “What do you think about a flight over the rooftops?”

  “Forster must be prepared for that.”

  “True. But what about the canal? Could we make our escape by boat, do you think?”

  I shook my head. “Forster would have thought of that. The canals of Venice are fairly conspicuous.”

  “Very well,” Karinovsky said. “The obvious exits are blocked. Now, following Guesci’s line of reasoning, we must look to the inobvious. That is to say, we must seek out the apparently impractical, the unreasonable, the unlikely. We must do what Forster does not expect; or better, we must do what he has never even considered. We must—”

  Karinovsky’s flight of oratory was ended by the sound of glass breaking upstairs. For a moment there was silence, and then we heard something land on the floor with a heavy thump.

  “Commando tactics,” Karinovsky said scornfully. He leaned back and lighted another cigarette. I wanted to stuff it down his ham actor’s throat.

  We could hear the man or men upstairs moving cautiously in the darkness. Then the outer gate began to rattle. There was a brief ringing noise; it sounded as if the bolt had been cut. After a moment, we could hear the gate creak open.

  “I suppose,” Karinovsky said, “that we should be on our way.”

  He stood up, slipped his left arm out of the sling, and glanced at his watch. He took a final drag on his cigarette and stamped it out on the carpet. Then, having run out of gestures, he led me out of the room and down a hallway.

  We stopped beside a heavy wooden door. A flashlight was set in brackets beside it. Karinovsky took the flashlight and pulled the door open. We entered, and he threw the bolts.

  We went down a shallow staircase into a bare stone chamber. The walls were watersoaked, and smelled of sour antiquity: an odor compounded of garlic, mud, crushed granite and stagnant water. There was an iron door in the far wall, and something lay in a shapeless heap beside it.

  Karinovsky crossed the room and opened the iron door. I saw a gleam of light upon water. We were at the canal entrance of the house.

  I started to lean out, but Karinovsky pulled me back. “You might be spotted,” he told me. “I am quite sure that Forster has this exit under surveillance.”

  “Then how do we reach the boat?”

  “We have no boat out there,” Karinovsky said. “We crossed out that possibility, did we not?”

  I heard footsteps on the floor above us. Then there was a sound of blows on the door to our chamber.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “Swim?”

  “After a fashion,” Karinovsky said. He pointed his flashlight at the heap near the door. I saw bright yellow cylinders, splay-footed fins, air regulators, and grotesque black rubber masks with oval cyclops’ eyes.

  “We swim,” Karinovsky said, “but in a manner that Forster might not have anticipated. I am sorry for the delay; but we had to wait for full high tide, otherwise some of the canals on our route are impassable. Now I suggest that we change rather hurriedly and make our departure. The door might not hold for long.”

  16

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to give praise for cleverness or curses for folly. Perhaps fortunately, there was no time to evolve an attitude. We changed quickly and adjusted our face masks. Forster’s men were hammering at the door, and the hinges were beginning to tear loose. Karinovsky bit down on the mouthpiece of his regulator and slipped into the dark water of the canal. I followed close behind. As I went in, I heard an angry shout. I turned my head and saw a boat less than twenty feet away. Forster had not overlooked the water gate.

  I could just make out Karinovsky’s flippers ahead of me. The water was warm and faintly slimy, and it smelled of sewage and marsh gas. I controlled a desire to retch, and followed Karinovsky to the bottom of the canal, a depth of perhaps ten feet. He turned left, found the canal wall for a guide, and began to swim strongly. I had to work hard to stay up with him.

  I knew roughly where we were. Karinovsky’s house had fronted on the wide Rio San Agostin, near the center of the city. He had turned left, following the canal under the Calle Dona and the Calle della Vida bridges. If we continued long enough in this direction, and if we succeeded in finding our way through the intricate canal system, we would come out on Venice’s northern periphery, facing the lagoon and the encircling mainland. At the moment, the plan seemed eminently reasonable, though not for tender stomachs.

  I stayed less than a foot behind Karinovsky’s flippers, gliding just above a bottom of foul-smelling black mud. My fingertips brushed the gummy outlines of a barrel, a half-buried plank, the edge of a steamer trunk. The canals of Venice serve as unofficial garbage dump for the bordering houses. This one evidently had not been drained and cleaned in a long time. We swam through a thin, revolting soup in which orange peels, half-eaten bananas, eggshells, lobster claws and apple cores hung in suspension. It was quite unpleasant. I tried to convince myself that it was preferable to a last desperate run through narrow alleys.

  Karinovsky’s fingertips located an intersection and swung right into the Rio San Giacomo dall’Orio. As turned, there was a muffled
explosion overhead, and I saw a small, shiny object plunge past me and bury itself in the sand. I looked upward and saw a long, narrow shadow like a monster barracuda glide near me.

  I braked, letting it slip past. Karinovsky had done the same. The boat from the water-gate had evidently given chase. From its length and shape, I knew that it was a gondola.

  The strong yellow finger of a searchlight probed the water. I could hear men talking. The gondola was braked expertly, and then began to slide backward. Karinovsky tugged at my arm, gestured, and I nodded. We sprinted under the boat’s keel, toward the Terra Prima bridge. I knew almost at once that we weren’t going to make it.

  The silent gondola, propelled by its single big oar, was easily capable of four times our speed. Our position was given away by the telltale stream of bubbles from our respirators. Glancing back, I saw the narrow black shadow of the gondola overhauling us. The searchlight beam rested on my back, and I heard the dull explosion of a gun.

  The bullet missed me by inches. Karinovsky was swimming hard, and I gritted my teeth and kicked, trying to shake off that clinging yellow light.

  Then I saw what Karinovsky had spotted: a huge rectangular darkness beneath the Terra Prima bridge. We reached it and found a flat-bottomed work barge, moored for the night. There was barely two feet of room for us between its barnacled keel and the glutinous mud bottom.

  The gondola swept past, then came to a stop. The searchlight poked and probed, and the gondola inched backward. There was a crisp rasping of wood as they came alongside the barge; a sleepy, outraged voice asked them what in hell they were doing.

  At the height of the argument we sneaked out from under the barge and continued up the Rio di San Baldo. We were gaining valuable yards while an argument raged between bargemen and gondolier. Then it was broken off abruptly, and the gondola’s oar splashed and gained a purchase on the water. Again, our air bubbles must have given us away.

  We were in a wide stretch of the canal, and the gondola was coming up fast. Karinovsky turned hard to his right, continued for a dozen yards, and turned right again, as if to enter the Rio Maceningo. But he straightened out and continued to the Rio della Pergola. The gondola hesitated at the entrance to Maceningo, losing time in tracing the path of our bubbles.

  We went by the heavy wooden piles of Santa Maria Mater Domini, and turned left, into a waterway about five feet wide. I thought we must have lost the gondola; but when I looked back, I saw the marching yellow point of its searchlight about thirty feet behind.

  It came straight into our narrow waterway, filling it and scraping the embankment on either side, but still gaining on us. A man in the bow was shouting encouragement to the gondolier, and the barracuda shape crept up behind me. I wanted to tell Karinovsky that we were trapped, that we had better make an attempt to turn back under the boat. I tugged at his leg. He turned and grinned, patted the top of his head and swam on.

  I couldn’t understand what he meant. The searchlight was on us again, and they had begun firing. Then Karinovsky disappeared.

  Immediately after that, I disappeared.

  I was in complete darkness. Stone scraped my left arm. I straightened out and hit my head against the right wall. I thought I could hear triumphant voices behind me, and I scraped again on the left. The passage couldn’t have been more than three feet wide. Then I was out of it, swimming through the lighter gloom of a canal.

  We surfaced. The spires of the Mater Domini filled the night sky behind us. We had followed a canal that ran beneath the church. It might have been passable for gondolas at low tide, but at high tide it was completely flooded.

  Karinovsky said, “We’ll have to keep on going. They can back out and come around by way of the Maceningo Canal in five minutes.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Karinovsky gestured boldly. “Like Lord Byron, we are going to swim across the Grand Canal. After that our quickest way would be straight up the Canale della Misericordia and into the Lagoon. But we can’t risk so obvious a route. For safety’s sake we shall do a little extra swimming through the Quartiere Grimani. I will take you by the scenic route, of course.”

  “Thanks. Will our air tanks hold out?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You don’t think we can try it on foot now?”

  “No. Forster may have a dozen men on foot, but surely no more than a few in boats. The odds favor us in the water.”

  I was about to ask what we would do when we reached the Lagoon. But then I noticed the harsh lines of strain on Karinovsky’s face.

  “How is your arm?”

  “Proving more of a nuisance than I had expected. But not enough to impede us, I think. Now we had better—”

  Someone shouted at us from the embankment: “Hey, what in hell is going on out there?”

  We submerged, moved quickly past San Stae, and into the Grand Canal. Halfway across, Karinovsky came to the surface, lined up the Palazzo Erizzo and the Maddalena Church, and submerged again. It seemed to me that he was swimming more slowly, and at a greater expenditure of energy.

  A vaporetto churned past us, and then a work barge. Twenty minutes later we had crossed the seventy-odd yards of the Canal, and were entering the dog-leg Rio della Maddalena.

  It seemed safe enough here. We swam undisturbed into the Rio dei Servi, and followed its winding course into the Rio di San Girolamo. After passing the Ghetto Nuovo, Karinovsky led us by a connecting channel into the Rio della Sansa. A gondola passed over us, but no searchlight reached into the water, and no voice shouted an alarm. Instead, a cracked tenor sang a Neapolitan love song, and a girl giggled.

  The canal turned right, and we lost contact with the retaining wall. When we surfaced, I saw that we were in the Venetian Lagoon. The city lay just behind us, its glistening spires and tilted domes rising from the water like a romantic sketch of Atlantis. A mile or so ahead of us was the marshy Veneto coast; to our right was the island of Murano, and very close on our left was Venice’s causeway to Mestre.

  “Do we swim across the Lagoon?” I asked.

  “No,” Karinovsky said, “We are spared that. We merely follow the shoreline around the Sacca di San Girolamo, to a position near the Ricovero Penitenti. Once there, our troubles should be ended.”

  He was floating with difficulty, his head thrown back and the breath rasping in his throat. He turned over and began to swim, slowly and doggedly, following the contour of the land to the west. In ten minutes we reached a low, flat, deserted piece of land near the entrance to the Cannareggio Canal, almost opposite the slaughterhouse. The Ricovero was fifty yards away, half-hidden behind its stone walls.

  “Behold!” Karinovsky said proudly.

  I saw the boat, dark and sleek, moored to the seawall. Something about its long low hull disturbed me, touching a memory just beyond recall. Suddenly I wanted nothing to do with that boat. But my feeling was illogical and absurd, so I ignored it and followed Karinovsky to the boat, which we boarded by means of a ladder.

  17

  No one was aboard. We got rid of the air cylinders and crept down the narrow deck into the cockpit. We sat for a while and caught our breath, then changed into dry clothes that had been stored for us under the seat. I was very tired from the long swim, and Karinovsky looked close to exhaustion. But we couldn’t afford to rest now: We had shaken off our pursuers, at least for the moment; but we had to use our advantage before they had a chance to find us again.

  Karinovsky opened the dashboard compartment and took out a map and a small flashlight. The map showed the northern part of the Laguna Veneta, from the Causeway to Torcello.

  “This is our position,” Karinovsky told me. “The causeway is on our left, San Michele and Murano on our right, the mainland straight ahead to the north. We follow the main channel, marked here in red, past Isola Tessera, to the vicinity of Marco Polo Airport. But we do not go to the airport wharf.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “That would be too easy.”

  “
Too dangerous,” Karinovsky amended. “We turn eastward before reaching the wharf, take the channel past San Giacomo in Palude, and continue nearly as far as Mazzorbo. Do you see Mazzorbo circled there?”

  “I thought it was a flyspeck. What kind of chart is this?”

  “Albanian. It is a copy of a Yugoslav naval chart.”

  “Couldn’t Guesci have gotten us an Italian chart?”

  “The Government Printing Office was out of stock. The Lagoon is being resurveyed.”

  “A British Admiralty chart would have been best of all.”

  “Guesci couldn’t very well write to London for one, could he?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “In any event, he assured me that a child could navigate by this. Look, the main islands and channels are clearly marked. All you have to do is steer for the airport, then turn right at the next-to-last marker and continue toward Mazzorbo, then turn left at number 5 marker and follow the channel into Palude del Monte.”

  Karinovsky spread his hands to show how easy it would be. I was not so sure. I had done some day-sailing on Long Island Sound, enough to know how tricky it could get trying to follow a nautical chart at night across an unfamiliar body of water.

  I examined the chart. Its markings were conventional. Channels were shown in a series of bold dashes. Navigational aids were white or red dots. Marsh or sandy areas were shaded with little blue crosses; there were plenty of them. Depths in the Lagoon reached a low tide maximum of six feet, but the average was more like three. There were entirely too many places to run aground, and to do so now, on a falling tide, could be disastrous.

  Karinovsky was beginning to fidget, but I took a moment to examine the boat. She was a flat, unlovely, shark-headed old beast, paint-sick and scarred, with a fin in the rear and a massive ten feet of engine cowling in the bow. That cowling looked big enough to house a truck engine. The dashboard had the usual array of controls; nothing very much out of the ordinary except for something called a “trim-tab.” I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to leave it alone. There were two tachometers, one for the engine and one for the supercharger. There was a bronze plaque in the center that gave the boat’s vital statistics: 28 feet 6 inches long, 11 feet 6 inches wide, gross weight of 5,200 lbs. Engine: Rolls Royce Merlin. Horsepower: 2,000.