The Gondola Scam

by Jonathan Gash

  "It's this place, love."

  "Vanished splendor?"

  "Maybe." I was beginning to feel lost, remote, altogether too far from civilization and safety. All this silence, these miles of empty shallows and tangled channels with only the occasional distant campanile slanting to catch the late afternoon sun.

  "Want to get back? There's a vaporetto from Torcello and Mazzorbo in an hour. We've plenty of time."

  There it was again, the spooky reminder. Mazzorbo's name means "great city," and I knew for a fact it was nothing more than a few villas, a boatyard, one cypress tree, and an ivy-covered campanile. Perhaps I was letting myself become nervous. Silly, really, because there was nothing to be worried about. Especially not out here.

  "Know why I came?"

  "Ulterior motive." She was smiling, kneeling up doing her hair, mouth full of hairpins, head to one side.

  "Several."

  "How many are female, Lovejoy?"

  "One. You."

  A warning shake of the comb at me before she resumed her hair. 'That's all right, then."

  'Then I wanted to find out why you've cornered the world market in television people."

  'That's easy, darling. They're a rich signora's playthings."

  I sat up. "Eh?"

  "We did a group charter—unfortunately through those Milanese agents, absolute gangsters with their endless moans about commission."

  "Signora Norman," I said, relief washing over me so I prickled with sweat.

  "Si. You'd think a rich woman wouldn't worry about a special price, wouldn't you, but she argued over every single lira." She rapped me on my belly with the comb. It didn't half sting. "Bruto! You said one female, Lovejoy! How did you know her name?"

  I reached, tried to pull her down while she elbowed me off, hands in her hair still. "Never even seen the woman, love. I was only worried because it was you who approached me in the cafe that night."

  "Why are you so suspicious, Lovejoy? About what?" She nudged me with an elbow so I tumbled. There she was, kneeling up in the daylight above me, pinning her hair, head illuminated by the lowering sun, when she fell with a cough onto me.

  I was helpless laughing at her sudden slumping weight, not realizing. "Now you change your mind!" The hairpins rattled on her teeth. She was making a coughing noise, moving on me, pinning me down.

  Another shot sounded. The dry reeds gave a concerted tap, loud.

  "Cosima? Cut it out. Somebody's playing silly buggers."

  I'd stopped laughing. Her face was on my chest, eyes dosed, and her breathing was a two-tone hiss between teeth where a hairpin clattered. There was a brown redness, wet and new, spoiling her white blouse above her right breast.

  "Love?" I tried to get up under her weight. "Love?'' Then I was scrambling, scrabbling erect and yelling for help and bawling abuse and fury at stupid careless pigs of duck hunters who loosed off in any direction.

  "Help, for Christ's sweet sake! Help!" Like a fool I stood up and waved both arms, any direction, anywhere over the endless expanses of reeds. "Somebody's been hurt!" I even bawled for an ambulance. Hysterical, I turned because I couldn't see anybody, not a boat, between us and Torcello's distant campanile, and stood on Cosima's ankle and fell aside as the reeds did their concerted snap.

  "What?" I remember bleating as if somebody had asked me a daft question. "Eh?"

  But I stayed down. Shooting. It was coming this way. At us. Then I grabbed for Cosima, careful and low and on my belly because she'd been shot and there was no chance of help, not from anyone except ourselves. And that meant me, because Cosima was lying in a strewn attitude, still breathing but no thanks to me who'd fetched her out here to get her beautiful lovely life shot to oblivion. I was blubbering all sorts, holding her and heartbroken because I hadn't realized and had been laughing my silly bloody head off when she was getting herself shot. She kept making that coughing noise, endless and soft.

  I fumbled in her handbag. My own hankie's always months out of the wash, but hers was pristine. Gingerly, I blotted the blood. There was a circular wound, a little swollen, no longer leaking blood. That was a good sign, wasn't it, on the pictures when the cowboy's shot in the shoulder and a single wedged bandage did miraculous things for recovery? I looked about helplessly, frantic. The reeds snapped again, once. Two shots. Two shots of that lighter, businesslike cracking sound of the rifle. No shotgun that. If I'd not been so preoccupied with my own thoughts and my own selfish bastard schemes, I'd have realized hours ago somebody out there had a rifle, not a shotgun. We'd have been safely back in Torcello, tea at the locanda, the crowded vaporetto on its tranquil way.

  Cosima moaned faintly as I lay down and pulled myself and her along the ground through the reeds. It's damned hard, especially when you're still sobbing incoherent remorse and you don't know what the hell you're supposed to be doing. And you've no idea what to do next and . . . and that noise. Outboard motor, but which direction? There hadn't been any boat in sight when I'd goonishly stood upright to wave to our murderers to show exactly where I was and how very sensibly I was responding to the whole frigging mess.

  Think. I tried, but it's difficult when you're frightened to death. We were within a few feet of the sandolo. I'd wedged it among the reeds ashore as far as I could. God alone knows how big the flat island was, or how much of it got covered by tides. I tried thinking. The rifleman—two of them if they were Gerry and Keith—was being careful. No need to rush up through the reeds. After all, I might have a knife or even a gun and lie in the tall reeds in ambush. Wiser to wait until I made a move into the open water between the island and the mud flats.

  Yet stay too long and we'd be awash. Anyway, Cosima couldn't wait. Move, and we'd reveal our track of escape by the movement of the dense reeds.

  The engine sound was shifting. It sounded like a low-powered outboard motor on a sandolo, going once round the island. A patrol, just making sure. Clever sod. The rifleman was in the boat. I knew that for absolute certain, because I'd raised such a hullabaloo in my first panic that any innocent fisherman or duck shooter must have heard and would already be calling out asking directions as they came closer. It had to be him. Them.

  Sprawling, I cradled Cosima. I was almost screaming with the fury of impotence, at my own stupidity and helplessness. We couldn't stay much longer. He'd come closer each circuit, more and more sure of himself. Swim for it? But how far could I get pulling Cosima through the water before he caught us up? He might simply see us and shoot casually from where he was. Sitting ducks. No wonder some maniacs go hunting. Bloody ducks can't shoot back. No weapons. And Cosima's picnic was too neat, too prepared. One plastic spatula between us. Plates cardboard, little basket, nothing. Good for starting a fire but not for making into weapons to— Fire.

  "Wait, love. I'll be a sec."

  I laid her down and edged back to where we'd lain. Her handbag was open where I'd fumbled for her hankie. No matches, but a small lighter, heart-shaped, red enamel.

  It could click, and fired a light damned near into my eyes. Gas, flame height adjustable with one of those small wheel things. I tried it on a blade of grass which flared, a reed which shriveled vertically almost in a flash, but I snuffed both immediately. Nothing must happen as long as that outboard engine kept whining and the hunter kept moving closer out there among the reeds.

  Cosima was coughing less now, still comatose, still breathing. I tried cupping my hands round my ears and turning slowly to get some idea of where the bastard was, but couldn't for the life of me fix the direction. I’d have to stand up, for that to work properly. Presumably he knew more or less where our sandolo lay, but for an accurate shot he'd actually need to see us clearly. He'd only hit Cosima second or third go, as far as I could recollect from thinking back on those noises the brackeny reeds had made, and even then he'd been trying for me. If we'd not been fooling about, up and down at the moment of shooting, he'd have got me and then it would have been anybody's guess what would have happened to Cosima.


  It had to be done. "I'm back, love," I gasped, trying not to quake, and reached up a hand to haul on the sandolo. Obediently it moved down almost into the water, six hauls. These boats are all curves, pointed up at the front and having a funny wedge-shaped decking there. To get Cosima in without being seen I'd have to pull the sandolo somehow on its side. I got the boat round after shoving it out to the end of its rope, then pulling it hard round as I crawled. The stupid thing nearly rolled onto me, and I must have created quite a disturbance in the reeds but at least I had it slewed on a thick clump so it showed its interior towards us.

  That outboard was still whining away out there, and no more shots. Sooner or later the swine would have to land on one of the zillion creeks to loose off a reasonable shot. Teeth chattering in fright, I stripped and lobbed my clothes any old how near the front of the sandolo. I'd carefully put Cosima's little red lighter on a mass of dry sedge, some old nest built by exterminated ducks, I suppose. With gasped apologies and endearments to my lovely crumpled girl I clasped her tight and shoved myself along through the reeds.

  Easy to criticize, and I know anybody else could have done it better, but the only way I could think of getting her in was to lift her legs in, then shove her bum on the gunwale, then worm beneath her poor bloodstained trunk and rise up so she more or less rolled in. Hardly a fireman's lift, with me groaning in sympathy with every murmur of pain from her. The effort left me wheezing and in anguish at the needless hurt I'd caused her, but I kept going and slowly maneuvered the sandolo away from the ground until it floated.

  Three or four minutes of waiting with me whimpering at the slightest sound from the reeds and inwardly cursing hate upwards to where a jet trace indicated a planeload of selfish swine living it up while I was starkers down here getting frigging murdered in the mud. Then the hunter's boat cut its sound, then sounded louder and gave that diminishing whine. He was turning somewhere. Not closer, but definitely about to cut his engine and run ashore and . . . He'd glimpsed our sandolo, or seen my disturbance of the reeds. Even as I realized that this was it, that he'd pinpointed us accurately enough, his engine coughed into silence and I was scrabbling like a mad thing, ripping at the reeds and twisting them into vertical clusters.

  Surprisingly they hurt like hell, maybe because they were so dense, but I clutched and twisted until I'd cleared about a square yard of reeds and got them all doubled over in coils. I'd seen the men do it often enough along the sea marshes at home, while idling down the estuaries. The watermen always clear a space as wide as the reeds are tall. He must have left his boat, and now was crawling along the sedge grass towards us. A click, a spurt of flame, and the looped reeds caught, the sedge grass caught. The nest caught. The funny low tangles of grass caught. Every bloody thing caught, swooshing up flame and sprinkling the air with sparks and black fluff. The reeds caught up the flame, passing it across the island. I ran at a crouch, scrambled at the sandolo and floundered the stupid slow thing out among the thinner reeds into the channel, swimming like the clappers at the stem. Smoke spread everywhere, lying over the water.

  None of these channels is very wide, and they're all completely irregular. That whole area of the lagoon is a jigsaw of islands, barene flats covered at high tide, with shallows and treacherous mudbanks everywhere. You can hide, but always only temporarily, because if you can take a boat anywhere down these labyrinthine little channels, so can the hunter. A shot sounded, clearly angry guesswork on his part. No buzzing and reeds cracking about us. The fire was spreading fast. I was going too slowly. Smoke billowed over us as I swam on, praying for a hidden creek where I could lay up a few minutes unseen and fix our outboard engine. With that thing mounted—if it went—I could make a run for it. And I'd not stop till I reached the Fondamenta Nuove in Venice where the hospital was.

  Opposite where we'd beached the sandolo there was an inlet about twenty or thirty feet off, but it was too obvious. Instead, retching and sputtering, I kept to the smoke and shoved to the right following the channel, the silly boat's curved stem bumping on my head as I swam and pushed. It was then I made the most miraculous and ecstatic discovery. My knees—not my feet, even—touched something down in the water. I'd squealed and let go of the boat before I realized it wasn't a shark jawing my poor defenseless flailing limbs. It was mud, glorious mud. The lagoon here was shallow enough to stand up in.

  It takes some doing if you're as terrified as me. But honestly I actually did drop my feet and start shoving, still hunched from cowardice yet thrusting that sandolo now at a hell of a lick. The hunter's engine still hadn't started up to show he was coming after us when I swung the sandolo to penetrate the thick reed beds. We hadn't come this way, and heaven knows where we were heading, but I shoved on and on, moving always where the reeds were thinner but now never breaking out into any of the tempting open channels which sometimes showed to either side. Definitely I avoided the thick patches of reeds. Already my fire was proving as much a risk to us as to him. Sparks were carrying the fire across the reeds in jumps rather than a slow spread, and somewhere to the left a new fire had begun. Worse, the wind seemed erratic and once I practically choked in the smoke which seemed to stick to the water. Cosima was coughing again at the bastard smoke. I’d lost all direction, staggering on practically on my knees, shoving as hard as I could go and trying to guess which way to take by peering along the side of the sandolo.

  How long it was before the sound of the outboard motor penetrated my consciousness I’ll never know. By then I’d adopted this method of gaining momentum by using my weight. Head tucked down, left shoulder rammed hard against the stern, and my hands raised to clutch the gunwale and take my weight partly on my arms, I could then kick my legs down into the muddy lagoon bed and keep the boat moving at a fair speed. Now, though, I let my legs trail me to a gurgling stop. No use giving our position away by unnecessary motion. I relinquished my hold and slumped my head against the curved wood, gasping and retching water. Smoke covered us once or twice, thinned, thickened again, thinned. Cosima coughed gently, moaned occasionally. I blurted out a whispered assurance, thinking. What a bloody mess.

  The hunter's boat sounded no nearer. A few yards off, the reeds caught a floating spark and flared vertical fire and soot for a moment. Away off in the distance I actually heard a man's voice call in one prolonged hail over the sound of his engine, but it was never repeated and there was no way of telling from which direction. Or whether he was a friend or foe, for that matter.

  The engine sound was dwindling. Varying a bit, as he swung in and out of the inlets, but very definitely receding. Odd, that. No sense in rising to risk a look. One glimpse of us, and he'd come at us. We'd be lost. I let it go on for another minute, put my skinned shoulder to the stem again, took hold, and got my aching legs going. Nine or ten shoves and we emerged into an open channel. I almost infarcted doing a frenetic backpedal but should have realized the only straight waterways in the Venetian lagoon are the man-made canals. All the rest are snaky, shaggy thoroughfares, no two alike, and bending any way they want every few yards.

  My brain managed to insert a reasoned logical thought among its waves of terror: As long as that droning engine didn't sound nearer, and as long as the channels didn't straighten out to give a clear long-distance view, it was better for us to move along the open water. That way, no reeds would waggle to reveal where Lovejoy was panicking his untidy shambolic passage through the water foliage, and no traces would be left of his movement.

  Mentally I measured the intensity of the swine's outboard, then edged cautiously into the channel and rotated to move off along it. As I resumed my shoving, unbelievably I glimpsed a campanile in the distance. Only a glimpse, snatched between two coincident channels between slightly raised barene, but it was real and definite. I'd recognize those great stone shutters anywhere. Torcello. It was to the rear, back over my poor old knackered shoulder, now scraped raw and bloodied. We were moving away from it.

  Still smoke everywhere. As I floundered on along
the narrow channel, I moved my head from one side to the other of the curved stem. I was becoming certain the bastard was between us and where I'd glimpsed the groat campanile. Difficult to judge, but the sound was constant. Maybe he thought we would head for Torcello and was patrolling between the burning area of the lagoon and the tall cathedral tower.

  Sickened at the implication I kept on, ploughing my legs down into the soft mud, thrusting, dragging my weight on one hand or the other to keep to the channel. I wanted to avoid the wretched boat running aground and jarring Cosima, but was terrified of creating any more reed shaking.

  When you work at a particular horrid thing—like blindly sploshing a tiny boat through a muddy lagoon— your mind detaches and floats off somewhere, leaving your poor old hulk timelessly slogging away down there in the clag.

  Eventually, though, two events filtered through to my basking brain. The first was gradual awareness of that engine sound. It had all but dwindled away. Whether we'd simply moved apart or whether he'd stayed put as I'd blundered further and further away was impossible to say.

  The second thing was this long white wall.

  17

  The smoke had diminished by distance and eventually, I suppose, lack of reed fuel by the time the long white wall really made its mark. Of course I'd been dimly aware for eons of a vague blur up there, but what's one blur a million miles away when you're being drowned, burned, smothered, and shot, hour after bloody hour?

  When I finally halted and groaned a few sloshed hunchback paces into the reeds, the wall was there, across a wider spread of water than the narrow channels through which I'd slaved. I couldn't straighten up and stayed mud-covered and gasping, hands on my knees and waist-deep in lagoon water. Blearily I noticed with astonishment that, the further I looked away from the white wall which rimmed the island, the darker the world seemed. It took several rethinks before the penny dropped. Daylight was leaving the lagoon. No bright sun, no brilliant blue. That ocher sediment was washing upwards making a dusted haze out of an azure sky. It was approaching dusk. All I'd done was knacker myself, and get Cosima no nearer to a hospital. What 1 needed was a stray vaporetto or a holiday cruiser to happen by. Instead, I thought bitterly, I find a long white wall sticking upright out of the frigging lagoon.