by Susan Moody
I wanted to hear the shaven-headed guy speak English. If he had the same voice as the person who’d spoken to me just before I blanked out, I was going to find a means of hurting him in some way. Badly. Not necessarily cutting off his todger, but pretty close. Something really painful, just like Sandro had promised he would do when he discovered who had been responsible for the thefts from Cesare’s apartment. At the thought of Sandro, my bruises throbbed. Where was he? More importantly, was he still alive?
‘What’s the drill tonight?’ I asked, my voice returning. I sat up, pulling the bedclothes up under my chin. I’d have killed for a cup of tea.
‘Hasn’t changed. Burano, launch coming by, half the ransom money dropped in from the bridge, the Marchese hurries to the next designated bridge, other half dropped into the boat and off it goes. Heading, we presume, for the big city.’
‘And where’s Sandro in all this?’
‘That’s going to be the problem. The Marchese has arranged to have a boat posted at each departure point across the lagoon, so wherever they go, we can follow them. But they’re not going to bring him with them, are they?’
I shook my head. Then wished I hadn’t. ‘You do realize that they’re on to us, don’t you? Even if they weren’t before.’
‘Which you’d assume they must have been or they wouldn’t have snatched you last night. Nor addressed you by name.’
‘Joey, you said the police had given you the baker’s address. Have you—’
‘I staked the place out most of yesterday. According to the neighbours, they’ve seen him around recently but nobody’s seen the wife and two children for about five days.’
‘Scarpered? Or murdered?’
‘The former, I hope. And I’m reckoning he’s due to join them as soon as he’s collected the cash.’
‘Somewhere in Scandiland?’
‘So I should imagine.’
Aching, I pushed back my covers. ‘Excuse me, Joey, but I need to get dressed.’
‘Oh, don’t mind me, doll.’
‘Out!’
‘Spoilsport. I’ll be downstairs.’
Fifteen minutes later, feeling a little better, I was washed, dressed and more or less ready to roll. In the mirror of the small bathroom, I could see there were bruises all up and down my body. Those bastards must have just chucked me into the boarded-up ground-floor room like a sack of melons.
Downstairs, Joey was lounging about in the tiny foyer. ‘Let’s walk along the canal before we go back to the city,’ I said. ‘I’d like to try and identify the house where they were holding me.’ As we went, my eyes hidden behind sunglasses, I scoped the place out, checking to the left and the right for stocky men or shaven-headed bakers. One of the stocky bastards might even have bruises all down the side of his face. But I saw nobody.
Nor could I be absolutely certain exactly which side street I’d been on the corner of when I had been snatched, let alone to which of the narrow, bundled together houses I’d been taken by my kidnappers. At night, and despite the street lamps, they’d all seemed identical. Under cover of my dark lenses, I surveyed the houses from across the canal but could see no identifying characteristics, although I could narrow the choice down to four or five. It was the same with the house to which I’d run. Although I was able to narrow it down to one of four with reasonable certainty, I couldn’t possibly say which one it had been. Joey and I crossed over the canal. It was easy enough to knock at the doors of the houses in question, but nobody seemed to be home at any of them.
As we walked away, there was no point pretending Joey and I weren’t together. With the theft of my mobile, the bad guys were now several steps ahead of us in the grim game that was being played out. I didn’t know how long they’d been aware of why I was in Venice before they took me off the streets, but maybe they’d picked up on me from the moment I arrived – though logic told me that wasn’t possible. How could they have been, unless they were art lovers? Which was a stretch too far for me. And even if they were, they can’t have known of any connection between me and the Marchese. Mainly because there wasn’t one. Not really. Unless … I would have to get on to Renzo Vitali again, find out more about the rumour he’d hinted at concerning stolen drawings. I was beginning to think that the Tiepolos, too, had been lifted from Cesare’s appartamento.
I figured that if we drew a blank at the address we were heading for, we could always go back to the house with the red door, if the cops hadn’t sealed it off as a crime scene. Sandro had to physically be somewhere, almost certainly right here somewhere in the Veneto, and if we could find him before Cesare paid the ransom, so much the better.
We took a convenient vaporetto back across to Venice and started walking. When we reached the bald man’s home address, it was obvious we weren’t going to find our quarry there. All the shutters on the house were up. Some strands of wilted leafage and dead geraniums hung forlornly down from a balcony. The place looked as though it had been unoccupied for years.
Joey banged on the door of the neighbour’s house and asked if there had been any sighting of Baldy since yesterday, and she shook her head. Did some of that Continental shrugging, using a lot of body motion. Retreated back into her house and shut the door. Not rude, simply uncommunicative.
‘A woman of few words,’ I said.
‘But nonetheless informative.’
‘So I guess it’s back to the red door.’
‘Exactly.’
As before, we found the front door slightly ajar. When we pushed at it hard, it grudgingly screeched open again, just as it had the last time I was there. We walked into the tiny front hall. To my surprise, there was absolutely no indication that the police had ever been there. We climbed the stairs to the top and found the same thing. The door to the apartment was firmly closed. Though Joey knocked several times, there was no answer. He turned the handle and pushed, but the door was locked.
We walked down to the next floor and were met by a woman – not the one I’d encountered on my last visit here – who was standing by her open door and wanted to know if she could help. Subtext: What the hell are you doing here?
Joey immediately launched into a spate of Italian, telling her that he and his wife – here he indicated me – were in Venice in the hope of catching up with his mother’s cousin, who hadn’t been in touch for a while and the family was getting worried about him.
‘You mean the man from – where is it – Sweden?’ she asked, speaking hesitant English.
‘Sweden, yes. Stockholm,’ said Joey, his accent subtly adopting faintly Scandinavian overtones. ‘We need to tell him that Farmor – his grandmother – is dying and desperately wants to see him again before she goes to join the angels.’ It was very neatly done.
The woman looked sceptical. She pointed upstairs. ‘Believe me, there’s someone who won’t be joining the angels when he goes,’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ Joey said, looking downcast and slightly shaking his head. ‘Has my cousin – how can I put this? – taken up with the … uh … wrong kind of people?’
‘All I can say is the men who come up and down these stairs don’t look like nice types, much more what my husband calls “undesirables”. Certainly not the sort of people we want living here.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Joey again. ‘My mother will be very upset to hear that. The family really hoped he would make a fresh start here in Venice.’
The woman snorted.
‘You don’t have any idea where he might be, do you?’ Joey asked hopefully.
‘I believe he works somewhere on the other side of the Rialto Bridge,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t tell you where, or what at.’
Joey turned to me and shrugged sadly. ‘We’ll just have to go on looking for him, then, darling.’ To the woman, he added, ‘If you see him, please tell him that we’d hoped to catch up with him and why.’
‘And you are?’
‘Niels. Niels Rasmusssen,’ said Joey. ‘And this is my wife, Helga.’
She nodded at me in a friendly fashion. As she turned to go back inside her apartment, she said, ‘If you want my advice, I would leave him alone.’
‘One moment, signora. My mother’s cousin … just to make sure … we are talking about the same man, aren’t we? Not very tall, about my wife’s height’ – he pointed at me – ‘with reddish hair and a bit of a limp?’ He gave a sad little laugh. ‘A relic from the time he jumped over a wall after burglarizing a neighbour’s house!’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No, this man is tall, quite big and burly, with a shaven head and an earring. And a tattoo on his neck. A black spider, quite horrible.’
Joey looked at me in feigned surprise and I looked back ditto. ‘Helga,’ he said. ‘We’ve been given the wrong address, I think.’ He turned back to the woman. ‘Definitely no red hair, no limp?’
‘Definitely not, signor.’
I desperately wanted to ask if a body had been found upstairs, whether the police had been in the house, but to do so would make it clear that I’d been there before, which would blow our cover story right out of the water. So we thanked her profusely and went on down the stairs. Outside, I said admiringly, ‘Mr Preston, I have to admit that you’re pretty slick. What I don’t quite understand is what happened to the body I found when I came here before. How could they have spirited it down the stairs and away, without leaving the slightest trace, before the police arrived?’
‘Perhaps they never did.’
‘What?’ I stared at him in astonishment. ‘But I specifically asked the woman on the landing below to call them.’
‘Perhaps she had her own reasons not to do so.’
Frowning, I thought about it. It was a possibility which hadn’t occurred to me, though I suppose it should have done. As an ex-cop, I knew how many people hid dark secrets beneath perfectly respectable-seeming exteriors. I remembered the florist in Maidstone who had a thriving business growing – and selling – cannabis in between the Interflora activity, the wedding business and the bouquets for other special occasions. And the popular publican of a pretty village pub near Whitstable who had three Romanian women chained up in the beer cellar under the saloon bar and let the local riff-raff in after hours to use them in whatever repulsive way they saw fit.
Meanwhile, here we seemed to have drawn a blank. And time was running out. If we were to find Sandro before the ransom was paid, we needed some kind of a lucky break. It wasn’t the payment which bothered me – Dominic could easily afford it – it was the need to see justice done, unscrupulous villains brought to book. We live in a society, which necessarily means there are rules which have to be obeyed. No society can prosper if individuals choose to ignore the rules and behave as they please.
We walked on. My thoughts turned to the other semi-criminal events which had recently taken place in my life. The doge’s ring, the small almost-Botticelli. The Tiepolos. And – it came back to me in a rush – Renzo’s hint that not only did he know about the drawings which had gone missing, but that he also knew where they’d gone missing from. And as we rounded a corner into a small cobbled square, there, by golly, was the man himself, ugly as sin, eating lunch on his own at an outside table and frowning over some papers.
‘You’re not with me, Joey,’ I said quietly.
Joey was quick. Without a glance at me, he carried smoothly onwards, frowning at his watch as though late for an engagement, while I surged across to Renzo’s table. ‘Ciao, Renzo!’ I cried, all girly and excited.
‘Caro!’ he said. He stood up, holding his napkin to his crotch. ‘What a pleasure.’ He indicated the empty seat at his table. ‘You will join me, of course?’
I smiled, shook my head and sat down. ‘But a glass of wine would be lovely,’ I gushed.
‘So how are you?’ he enquired tenderly. Over-tenderly, in my opinion, but I had to go along with it until I could extract the information I needed.
‘A little tired,’ I said. ‘But otherwise …’ I flipped my hand back and forth.
‘Too much partying, eh?’ If I’d been closer to him, he’d have nudged me in the ribs in a roguish fashion, which, given my bruises, would have been painful.
‘Actually, I’m here for work,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes, I believe you said so when we met at your brother’s house.’ One of his hairy hands clamped itself to my wrist. ‘You shouldn’t overdo things, though.’
‘Oh, I know. Venice is far too beautiful to spend all one’s time working. I went to see the ceiling frescos in I Gesuati, this morning. Very beautiful work.’
‘Indeed it is.’
A glass of prosecco had appeared in front of me and I lifted it, tilted it towards him and then took a sip. Very nice.
‘You like Tiepolo, obviously.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ I leaned my elbows on the table and linked my hands beneath my chin. ‘So,’ I said confidingly. ‘You mentioned last time we were together that you thought the drawings I’ve seen, which have been attributed to him, might have been stolen from some collection or other right here in Venice.’
‘I didn’t exactly say—’
‘I’d really love to know where you thought they might have originated. This is so I can go back to England and tell the person who currently owns them – or thinks he owns them – that he doesn’t. Strange as it may seem to you, a dealer and collector of some renown, he’d be extremely relieved to have them off his hands. He’s a simple man, and would be the first to agree that he knows nothing about art or artists.’
‘Well …’ Renzo looked around the little square, checking to see that no one was listening in to our conversation. ‘This is only a rumour, mind you, but I’m not breaking any confidences if I tell you that the Marchese de Farnese de Peron may have been the victim of a robbery – including the Tiepolos.’
Given the fact that the ring and the little Botticelli had been stolen, I’d suspected that the Tiepolos were another outrageous theft from the Marchese’s art collection, but I opened my eyes as wide as I could. ‘How amazing. Are there rumours of thefts from any other private collections?’
‘None that have reached my ears.’
‘Do you think that the Marchese has been targeted for some reason?’
‘It does rather look like it.’
‘Any idea what that reason might be?’
Renzo paused to shove some more of his lunch into his mouth, while I took another dainty sip of my wine. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever met him,’ he said after a moment or two, ‘but he is known far and wide as a hard man. Hard and controlling. Maybe someone has taken exception and decided to hurt him where it would wound him most – that is to say, by stealing his possessions.’
‘It doesn’t look as though the thief is after money, does it? The places where these precious artefacts ended up weren’t exactly going to make him – or her, of course – rich.’
‘I will tell you what it is, Alessandra. It is an insult. A calculated insult.’
‘You really see it that way?’
‘I do.’
‘Not just to the Marchese,’ I said. ‘To Tiepolo as well.’
Renzo dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. ‘You are absolutely right.’
Having got the information I wanted, I tossed back the last of my wine and prepared to leave. Once again, a hairy paw attached itself to my wrist, looking like one of those huntsman spiders you get in Australia. ‘How much longer are you staying in Venice?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure. I have to get back to England pretty soon … articles to finish before their deadline, and I have a talk to give to one of our local schools. I just heard that my poor old mother has come down with pneumonia. But I’ll be back very soon. Apart from anything else, I’m anxious to see your stanza segreta.’
‘Not as anxious as I am to see you again, signorina.’
Oh, Gawd … I extricated myself as best I could, with many a false promise and flirtatious smile. Then proceeded in the direction I’d seen Joey heading. I was guessing h
e’d been keeping an eye out for me and, sure enough, there he was, musing over a coffee a square or two away.
‘Oh la la!’ He batted his eyelashes at me and coyly put his head on one side. ‘Oh, Mr Italian Man,’ he said in a high falsetto. ‘You are sooo very wonderful.’ He indicated the empty seat beside him, and I sat down.
‘You can laugh,’ I said. ‘But I got the info I was after.’ I sighed. ‘What one has to do as a seeker of truth.’
‘I thought at one point you were going to strip off and beg him to take you right then and there.’
I ignored him.
‘Any idea what your friends of yesterday evening were planning to do with you?’ he said.
‘None at all. I mean, what could they do?’
‘They must have thought you could be used as some kind of bargaining chip.’
‘I can’t see how. What use could I possi—’ I broke off. Crossing the corner of the square was the bald Scandinavian. ‘Joey,’ I said urgently. ‘Look …’ I jerked my head. ‘Can you get after him, see where he goes?’
‘Do my best.’
‘I really need to hear him speak,’ I said, although I instinctively felt that his would not turn out to be the voice I’d heard when I’d been snatched off the street.
‘Not sure how I’ll manage that.’
‘Perhaps you could find out which bakery he works at, and then I could go in and order a couple of cornettos or a ciabatta or something.’
‘If he’s the baker, is he likely to be fronting the shop? I don’t think so.’
‘You’re right. But it’s worth a try.’ I explained about my need to track down the genderless voice which had spoken to me when I was first snatched. ‘The more I think about it, the more impossible it seems to pinpoint its sex. One thing I’m fairly sure of: it wasn’t one of Sandro’s friends. At least, not one of the ones who were in Venice the night those things went missing from the Marchese’s palazzo.’
