The Rape of Venice

by Dennis Wheatley

  Desperately he struck out up the narrower canal. Fifty yards ahead, where the Malderini palace ended, he could see a flight of steps leading up onto the canal’s side-walk. If he could reach them and land there was still a chance that he might escape from his pursuers.

  But a broad-bottomed boat, loaded high with vegetables, was coming down the canal towards him. The man who was steering the boat gave a swift twist with his long sweep and its prow veered round, barring Roger’s passage. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Malderini’s gondola, with its two liveried men urged on by their fellow servants craning over the balcony, was bearing down upon him.

  Caught between the two, he temporarily accepted the lesser evil and allowed a thick-necked peasant to haul him onto the vegetable boat. No sooner was he on it than he gave his rescuer a violent shove, which sent him over backwards upon a great pile of artichokes, then dived back into the canal on the boat’s far side.

  As he came up again, once more shaking the foul water from his eyes, he realised that the odds were hopelessly against him. He was now like a bear in a bear-pit surrounded by a pack of fierce dogs. With swift strokes, craft of all sorts had moved up from both directions. They were full of excited shouting people and their boats now formed a solid ring only ten feet away all round him.

  The Malderini gondola shot out from the circle that hemmed him in. Stooping, the liveried servant in its prow seized him by the arm. He resisted wildly, but someone threw an empty bottle that hit him on the head. It did not stun him but temporarily dazed him to a degree that robbed him of the strength to break free.

  Muzzy, panting, soaking and exhausted he was dragged on board. The excitement now being over, the other craft disengaged themselves and the mass of boats began to break up. Overhead from the balcony Pietro was shouting down to Malderini’s gondoliers. ‘Don’t let him escape! Have a care that he does not escape! Bring him into the palace! Quickly! Quickly!’

  Roger’s bemused brain took in the shouted order. Again it was borne in upon him that once he became a captive inside the palace there would be little chance of his getting out of it alive. Desperately he looked round for some means of saving himself. Suddenly his glance fell on a gondola not far off which had as passengers four French soldiers. Struggling into a sitting position he called to them:

  ‘A moi! A moi! C’est un Français qui vous appel! Au secours! Mes braves! Au secours!’

  Hearing his cries the soldiers immediately took a renewed interest. Shouting back to him, they had their gondola turned in his direction. It arrived at the same moment as Malderini’s at the steps of the palace. Still half dazed, Roger was hauled out onto the landing place by the two gondoliers, but while struggling with them he called again to the Frenchmen:

  ‘Help comrades; help! I am a Frenchman! Don’t let them take me inside the palace. They mean to murder me.’

  The soldiers promptly jumped ashore, and their leader, a Sergeant cried in execrable Italian, ‘Let this man go. Take your hands off him.’

  Pietro, meanwhile, had run downstairs, and now appeared with three of the other servants at his heels. At a glance he took in the situation. Pointing at Roger he shouted in French as execrable as the Sergeant’s Italian. ‘This man is an Englishman, an assassin and a thief. He has stolen jewels from my mistress. We must take him in and search him for them.’

  Roger was getting his wits back. Swiftly he denied the charge and offered to be searched there and then.

  A heated wrangle ensued during which most of those participating could understand less than half of what the others said. But one thing at least appeared beyond dispute to the soldiers—Roger spoke French with the fluency and accent of a native; so he must be a Frenchman. Therefore, whether he was a thief or not, they were not going to let him be maltreated by a bunch of Italians. They insisted that he should be taken to the Municipality, and that they would accompany him to see fair play.

  Forced to give in, Pietro, now brandishing a stiletto as a threat to Roger should he make a further attempt to escape, made him get back into the gondola and got in beside him. The soldiers reboarded theirs, and the two craft set off side by side down the canal.

  The Municipality had taken over the administrative offices in the Doge’s Palace, and, owing to the epidemic of lawlessness that had swept the city since the fall of the old régime, a magistrate’s court was maintained in perpetual session there.

  Roger was marched through the great courtyard of the palace to the part of it in which the court sat and handed over to its officers. Pietro having charged him with theft, he was taken to a cell and searched. During the process, he thanked his gods that while in Venice he had followed his usual practice, when living under an assumed identity, of hiding his papers and most of his money under a floor-board in his room; for the discovery of his Bills on London and, above all, Mr. Pitt’s letter, would have been the end of him. His one chance of regaining his freedom was, he felt sure, to continue to maintain that he was a Frenchman, in the hope that he would reap the benefit of the licence which the French forced the Venedans to extend to their nationals whenever one of them committed a crime that was not of a really serious nature.

  Twenty minutes later he was taken into the court, and he saw at a glance that it inspired a little more confidence in the dispensation of strict justice than had the tribunals he had often attended in Paris during the Revolution. It differed only in that there was no crowd of sans-culottes and shrewish women to throw gibes at the unfortunate prisoners. But a group of French soldiers leaned against one wall smoking short clay pipes and frequently spitting, a handful of lawyers, some unshaven and others with their feet up, lounged on the benches, the straw on the floor did not look as though it had been changed for a month, and the place smelled foul.

  Three men sat up on a dais behind a table littered with papers. Two wore tricolour sashes of office in the new Italian colours. One of them was a quite young man with the burning eyes of a fanatic, and wearing a workman’s blouse; the other who, as he sat in the centre, was evidently the President, was much older, well but untidily dressed, and with a mean little pursed-up mouth. The third, to Roger’s great relief, was a French Captain, evidently acting as a Provost-Marshal.

  Pietro gave evidence that Roger had got into the Malderini Palace on the pretence of being an Arab perfume seller; but that he was, in fact, an Englishman, and a thief who had been caught in the act of robbing the Signora Malderini of her jewels. Further, that he had attacked the Signor Malderini, doing him serious injury by throwing pepper in his eyes, and wounded one of the servants with a knife. The fact that no jewels had been found on Roger, Pietro argued, was no defence, as he must have dropped them when he fell into the canal.

  For the past hour Roger had been frantically exercising his wits for the best defence he could put up, and had decided on romance. The charge that he was an Englishman and a thief he declared to be sheer malice, and addressing himself to the Provost-Marshal broke into fluent French. He admitted having got into the palace under false pretences, but said he had fallen violently in love with the Signora Malderini, and had disguised himself as an Arab scent merchant so that he might see her alone and declare his love for her. Upon being surprised by her husband, he had naturally defended himself, and done so by throwing at him a sample of pepper which he happened to have in his tray because the merchant from whom he had bought it dealt in spices as well as perfumes.

  To the Captain’s questions he replied that his name was Breuc, that he had been born in Strasbourg but had lived the greater part of his life in Paris, and he had little difficulty in convincing his questioner that he was a Frenchman.

  This relieved him of his worst anxiety, and he felt that he was now well on the way to getting out of the very nasty scrape in which he had landed himself. But, next moment, to his dismay and alarm, he heard the Provost-Marshal say to the two magistrates that, as the accused was not a member of the French armed forces, the case was outside his province.

  T
he two Italians then took over, and a sharp argument ensued between them. Again Roger’s hopes were raised for a moment, by hearing the young magistrate with the fanatical eyes declare that they were not there to protect the wives of rich ex-senators from their would-be lovers and that the prisoner had been punished enough for his prank. But the older man retorted sharply that, all men being equal, all had a right to equal protection from the law. Then, with what Roger felt sure was special pleasure in for once having a free hand to punish a Frenchman, he snapped at him:

  ‘The charge of theft remains unproved. Your method of pursuing your amorous designs, although reprehensible, is no business of this court; but that you have wantonly assaulted a peaceful citizen and his servant is beyond dispute. We order that you be confined to prison during the pleasure of the Municipality.’

  Shaken to the core by the possible implications of such a sentence, Roger was led away. He had escaped death at Malderini’s hands by calling on the soldiers for help, but was to be imprisoned for an indefinite period. There raced through his mind the awful fate that had in certain cases befallen men so condemned. Without friends to petition for their release, they had been forgotten and left for years to rot in the dungeons of such prisons as the Bastille and the Leads. Many must have died from debility or despair, but some, owing to a new Governor of the prison being unable even to learn the crime for which they had long ago been incarcerated, had been released, old, feeble, half-blind and with beards down to their waists.

  This nightmare possibility filled him with such dread that he hardly noticed where he was being taken until his guards, having marched him up a long flight of stairs, turned with him into a narrow passage with an abrupt upward slope. It was only by noticing that both walls had perpendicular slits in them to let in daylight, and that on reaching the top of the slope, the passage beyond sloped downward with equal steepness, that he realised that he was crossing the Bridge of Sighs.

  Two minutes later he had entered the Leads. He was taken down a spiral staircase and along a gloomy passage made from rough hewn stone blocks; a stout wooden door was opened, and he was thrust inside a cell. He glimpsed a wooden bench, some rusty chains fixed to staples in the wall, then the door was swung to and locked, leaving him in total darkness.

  Groping his way to the bench, he sat down upon it and sank his head in his hands. He felt now that he might have done better to take his chance with Malderini. Death, even a painful one, would have been better than the appalling empty, hopeless future which he felt now faced him.

  Suddenly he began to shiver. His clothes had still been wringing wet when he had been brought to the Doge’s Palace. The midday heat of August which penetrated its courts and rooms had been sufficient to prevent his feeling any discomfort during the hour he had been in them. But down in the dungeons there reigned the cold of a perpetual winter. It dawned on him that if he let his damp clothes dry on him he would catch a chill which would probably result in his death from pneumonia within a week. Urged to it by the instinct of self-preservation he stripped to the skin, laid out his clothes on the dusty floor, then flailed his arms and beat his body all over with the flat of his palms to restore his circulation.

  He kept at it until he was exhausted, and the violent activity took his mind temporarily off his frightful situation. But as he sank down on the bench again, the highlights of the trap in which he had helped to catch himself impinged upon him with renewed force.

  He had no friends in Venice to whom he could appeal for help, even if he could get a message out, except John Watson; and to have disclosed his association with the British Consul would have been fatal. The Municipality had no reason to accord him a quick release. On the contrary, as he was believed to be a Frenchman, spite would influence them to leave him there indefinitely. There remained Malderini. It seemed just possible that when he had recovered his sight, he might press for some more definite penalty. That would lead to the prisoner being brought before the court again, and at least give him another chance to appeal to the French authorities for protection. But why should Malderini take such a step? What better revenge could he hope for than to have his enemy left to rot in one of the lower dungeons of the Leads? Surely he would use such influence as he had to prevent the case ever being raised again, so that after a few months the prisoner would become only a number in a cell and all else about him be forgotten.

  Some hours later, the door of the dungeon opened, a bearded jailer set down inside it a jug of water, a hunk of bread and a crock containing a few spoonfuls of luke-warm vegetable stew. By then, although from time to time Roger had endeavoured to warm himself up, he was blue with cold; so he eagerly snatched at the blanket that the jailer, with a surprised look at his nakedness, threw to him. The door slammed and once more the darkness of perpetual night shut out his grim surroundings.

  After rubbing himself fiercely with the blanket, as though it were a towel, he wrapped it round him, and cautiously felt about until he could find and eat his meagre supper. His clothes, he found, were nearly but not quite dry; so, still wrapped in the blanket, he lay down on the bench and pulled them on top of him for extra warmth.

  The night seemed endless. At times he dozed, but he never fell properly asleep and for hour after hour remained semiconscious of his physical discomfort and hopeless situation. It was not until the jailer brought another skimpy meal that he realised morning had at last come. After eating it he dressed again in his now dry clothes, then sat huddled on the bench staring into the darkness.

  Hours later, as it seemed to him, but actually about nine o’clock, he received a visit from the head turnkey. This functionary knew nothing of the crime for which he was imprisoned or of how long he was likely to remain; his sole interest being in whether Roger had money, or friends who would find it on his behalf, to pay for various privileges such as better food, a light, writing materials and books to read.

  When Roger had been searched his money-belt had not been taken from him, and in it were twenty-six sequins, so he felt a natural impulse to jump at the chance of securing these amenities; but the caution inherited from his Scots mother saved him from being too badly swindled. By hard bargaining he reduced the turnkey’s extortionate demands to the still extravagant figure of a sequin—which was about nine shillings—a day for better food, rushlights that would last eight hours, two extra blankets, and a book to be changed twice a week.

  The book brought to him was Dante’s Divina Comedia, which was long enough to hold his interest for many hours, and his improved ration was to include a litre a day of cheap wine; so at the thought of this new dispensation his spirits revived a little. But only temporarily, as these small comforts could do nothing to improve his future prospects, and those filled him with abysmal depression. There seemed no reason why the Municipality should release him and every reason why Malderini should use all the influence he had to keep him there. In less than a month, unless he were to forgo the better food and books so that he could prolong his purchase of rush lights, the awful darkness would close about him for good.

  He had already several times considered his chances of making an escape and been compelled to dismiss them as negligible. It was well known that only one prisoner had ever succeeded in escaping from the Leads, and that had been the notorious adventurer Casanova, some forty years earlier. How he had succeeded was common knowledge, because for years afterwards he had entertained people in half the capitals in Europe by telling them the tale. He had been confined in a cell up on the top storey immediately under the great lead roof that gave the prison its name; had managed to squeeze himself through a small window and, risking death from a single slip, had, with extraordinary courage, walked fifty yards along a nine-inch ledge to freedom. But Roger was in a windowless dungeon in the depths of the prison and, even if by a bribe he could have got himself transferred to the top floor, he knew that his head for heights was not good enough to have emulated Casanova’s remarkable feat.

  The only other possibilities wer
e either to bribe the jailer to leave the dungeon door unlocked, or spring upon and overcome him. But many other prisoners in the past must have got so far with their attempts only to be caught at one of the check-posts before they could escape from the building; otherwise, Casanova’s claim that he was the only prisoner ever to have got away would have been disputed.

  Eventually Roger came to the conclusion that his one and only hope lay in writing to the French Chargeé d’Affaires. He was most reluctant to do so because that meant he would have to substantiate his claim to French citizenship. That, he felt, should not be difficult, for during the Revolution he had been an original member of the Commune of Paris, had undertaken missions for the Committee of Public Safety as Citizen Representant Breuc and after the fall of Robiespierre had become a Colonel on Barras’s staff. He had, therefore, been quite a prominent figure and could claim the friendship of Carnot, Buonaparte and numerous other highly placed Frenchmen. But doing so was certain to result in his having to provide an account of his activities for the past seventeen months, and to cover such a lengthy period with a chronicle composed of plausible lies was going to be anything but easy.

  Nevertheless, the risk of being caught out was one that he must now take as the only alternative to remaining where he was; so, when the jailer brought his afternoon meal, he asked to see the head turnkey again, as he had decided after all that he would like to buy some writing materials from him.

  An hour later the turnkey arrived with them and, having parted with another of his sequins, Roger asked him how much he wanted to deliver a letter. For this service the man demanded ten sequins, and this time Roger tried in vain to beat him down. If he paid that price it would at one stroke deprive him of half his capital, and there was the awful risk that the avaricious ruffian might tear the letter up instead of delivering it. Tortured by this thought, he managed to strike a bargain to the effect that, should the letter not result in his being again brought before the court, he would receive books and light free for a month. That having been agreed to, the man promised to come back for the letter in an hour and to deliver it that evening.