The Gondola Scam

by Jonathan Gash

  For a start, it's hideous. It's horribly industrial. Its traffic is a shambles, its buildings ridiculous. It is definitely shop-soiled. Its docks are full of oil and all the greasy activity which the undesirable substance brings. Love on sight.

  Soon after arrival I stood watching traffic along the Ponte della Liberta, comparing. At one end of the long causeway sits sluttish old smog-ridden Mestre. At the other lies queenly Venice, glittering, spectacular. And make no mistake. Venice is a luscious sight, pulling and compelling.

  The sky was a balmy blue. The lagoon shone the azure back into the air about the Serene Republic, imparting a fluorescence so bright it almost hurts your eyes to look.

  It was over to the left, out there in the lagoon from where I was standing, that my little Cosima had nearly died. The hospital said she was now out of the worst and was expected to make a steady return to health and who was speaking, because the police . . . ? Don't get me wrong. I wasn't actually planning revenge. I'm not that sort of bloke. No, honestly. Ask anybody. All right, I admit that revenge is a pretty good way of getting even, but it's hardly my style to hold a grudge. Reasonable old me, always trying to be fair. The bad temper I'd felt, the hatred, the panic and sick fear were all gone now. I was my usual smiley self.

  Standing there near the causeway in the sunshine, I thought of Venice.

  These days we can't even begin to perceive what "Venetian" meant to the ancients. Oh, the factual bit is clear: Venice was viewed as a strong maritime power simply because she was. And okay, Venice meant self-interest. Like when the thousands of knights and soldiers of the Fourth Crusade arrived at the Venetian Lido asking for help in the name of God, charity and compassion, the Doge of Venice actually demanded what was in it for him.

  But beyond Venice's blunt greed there was something deeper and especially horrid. To the ancient people of the past centuries Venice simply meant fright, evil, everything sinister. Venice meant perverse secrecy of the most surreptitious and malevolent kind. Venice meant secret trials, silent stabbings, spies, clandestine murder, and sudden vanishing without trace. Venice meant a slit throat while sleeping, and violent unfathomable assassination. Venice meant poison—it took a Venetian priest to murder a communicant by slipping poison into the very Host. Venice meant sly crime and refined treachery and skullduggery. Venice meant a reign of hidden terror, brutal but stealthily quiet imprisonments. Venice meant stark cold cruelty.

  Throughout the long centuries of her prime, Venice was a permeating fear, a cloud of terror over Europe, a world of malevolent horror. Strong men quaked before her. Wise men shunned her. Rich men durstn't trust her. Poor men were simply out of Venice's reckoning, and thankfully praised God for being so. Even her glass industry was partly tainted by this weird fame. Venetian glass was reputed so delicate that it would shatter if poison touched it.

  Her reputation was not undeserved. Venice's secret councils saw to that. Venetians learned to go about their business with a cool disregard for the abrupt absence of friends. One morning the feet of three miscreants were observed sticking up out of the paving in St. Mark's Square, where they'd been buried alive—and all Venice passed by this fearsome execution blandly oblivious. God was obviously in His heaven, and the dreaded Council of Ten was simply doing its usual Venetian stuff in the dark hours. Naturally, other nations were at it too. Like the time the Venetian ambassador was shocked to find his current secret correspondence, neatly labeled and bound into volumes, pointedly displayed on the shelves of a London library— possibly the all-time put-down for a spy. Despite these occasional setbacks, though, it was generally conceded that for dank dark deeds Venice took the biscuit. Nobody argued.

  Well, with a reputation that formidable against me, I'd have to fight fire with fire. And forgery is the only skullduggery I know. Somebody had to knock on the door of the Palazzo Malcontento. Old Ivan the Terrible had given me a good enough clue: The fancy bloke from there had whisked Nancy away.

  I thought. Right, you bastards. Here I come.

  The money I had left wasn't a fortune. It'd have to do, though, because there wasn't all that much time. A sense of urgency was coming on me.

  By evening, I'd got a part-time job as a kitchen helper washing up afternoons and evenings in a biggish nosh bar near the docks, not far from a toolmaker's workshop I had my eye on. Day pay.

  About a mile from the nosh bar I found Signora Lamberti. She was one of those massive affable ladies who understand every customer's need. To her, speech was a necessity, but only for purposes of agreement.

  "Is it quiet here?" I asked, meaning were people of the district inclined to be nosy.

  "Certo,” she bawled over the whistle of a passing train. "You cannot even hear the station!"

  ''Molto tranquillo," I yelled in agreement, paying her a day's advance for a tiny but clean room. She took down her vacancy sign as I howled promises to fetch my nonexistent but voluminous luggage.

  "At the signore's convenience!" she shouted understandingly as a goods train rattled by. We smiled at the fiction. Words are fine up to a point, her bustly attitude said, but don't let them get in the way of money.

  That was the easy bit. It took me two whole days more to find the little piece of wood I needed. It was in a small lumberyard, nothing more than a squat piece of sycamore with closer grain even than usual, taken from some nineteenth-century furniture. None of those distinct rays you sometimes see in sycamore wood, so I was happy. The driver in the yard said I could have it for nothing. I told him ta, my warmth showing him he'd done somebody a really good turn.

  In case you don't know, sycamore's one of the Acer genus. Like Mestre, it's a real pal. For a start it is a strong, hard, pretty heavy wood. It can be artificially weathered by rotten crooks like antique dealers to look much older than it actually is, if you know how (tell you in a minute), and it stains up and polishes like an angel. The point of all this is you can work it quickly and accurately and expect very little trouble even if you're not expert. Its "comparative workability" is 3.0 (white pine, that corny old stuff you can carve practically with a bent pin, is the basic 1.0).

  You get the idea. Sycamore is faker's wood. The wood of the forger.

  The bloke slogging away in the toolmaker's workshop looked up and saw me grinning at him on my fourth morning in gorgeous old Mestre, and he said good morning. I'd passed by there and paused on the third day, but he'd tolerated my presence in his doorway without a word. He'd not once nodded or let his work be interrupted. Evidently he had no helpers. His wife, a hurrying tub of breathless-ness, came out and gave him a coffee, glanced across at me with curiosity, but said nothing.

  I'd already decided this was my scene: a man scratching a living, working a one-man show with no time to rest, crucial orders due for delivery, and all that. Politely, that fourth morning I replied good morning, still watching.

  "Nice to have no work, eh?" he said. I liked the look of him, a short and beefy baldish geezer who worked without fuss and whose eyes were steady as his hands.

  "I'm a hard worker, Signor Gambello." The faded name was flaking off a plank nailed over the yard door.

  "But not this morning, eh?" He had a ready if wry grin.

  "My job is kitchen help. Over at the trattoria."

  "You, is it? I'd heard they got a stranger as kitchen scivvy."

  "Poverty is no disgrace, signore."

  ''Certo.”

  "But the mornings bore me."

  "Looking for another hour, eh?" He shook his head. He was lathe-turning short pieces of metal rod about eighteen thou. "Not here, I'm afraid,"

  "Tomorrow morning," I suggested. "Free work."

  "No pay?" That interrupted his work all right. He leant away, cut the machine. "Why would anyone do that?"

  "For an hour's use of your lathe. Private job."

  He wiped his hands on a cloth, gauging me. "What's the catch? Key for your employer's safe? An illegal gun barrel?"

  "Wood, signore. I want to make a present for my auntie's b
irthday. A surprise."

  'That's original." The bloke was cynical too.

  'You can watch me if you like. To check."

  He still eyed me. "Maybe I will. What's the present?"

  "Eh? Oh, only table mats."

  “Very well. Tomorrow, right?" "Agreed."

  He watched me go, disbelieving. I left, smiling again. I'd turn up if I had to crawl.

  Our agreement was that I'd slog in Gambello's yard from nine till eleven each morning. From then until noon I'd have free use of those tools not in use.

  His actual job was lathing cylindrical metal rod into spindle-ended mini-shanks, and putting a screw thread partway along it. God knows why. Something to do with engines. Signor Gambello had to make six thousand before the end of that week. I tried explaining how much more interesting the job would be if we rigged up a sapling gear like the Benedictines used for furniture, but he only stared, mystified. So we did it his way, on this shrill electric Woods lathe that turned his little metal sticks out like shelling peas. Great, but bloody boring.

  The first morning I just helped and saved my own hour. Second morning I lathed for him while he did his books, and then got out my sycamore dead on eleven. It took me forty minutes to turn my piece to a perfect cylinder. First I needed a thin slice four inches across and three-eighths thick. Ten minutes flat. Then a flat cylindrical box, perfectly round, made to stand squat. That meant machining it in two bits so its lid settled easily inside—never an external-sliding lid for Elizabethan table-mat holders, remember.

  There was an old tin in the yard. I half filled it with pieces of bark I'd flaked off the elderly Quercus tree standing near the eastern crossroad traffic lights, on my way in. An old brown leather shoe I'd got from a dustbin, cut in slices, filled the tin; top up with water, and set it boiling in a comer of the yard. Signora Gambello touchingly brought me out a coffee and some panino breads with cheese. I explained I was only doing my own thing, that I'd really finished the proper yard work at eleven, but she said to have it all the same. I thought that was really kind.

  Waiting for my stew to darken, I had the nosh and then fetched out my pound of black grapes. I only wanted the seeds and skins. It nearly killed me eating the pulp and sucking the skins clean, but I did it after an hour. Added to the stewing mess with as much Chinese green tea as it would take, and my tin ponged to high heaven. Twice I crossed the yard to apologize to Signora Gambello. Before going to work at the nosh bar I put the horrible mess to cool in the comer by the gate.

  Next day my flat circular box and the thin disc went in and out of the dark mess about ten times while I worked the lathe between times. Gambello had a coke furnace for annealing wrought iron, and he said it was all right if I dried my wood pieces on the flue between each soaking. Neither of the Gambellos asked anything, but their curiosity was more and more apparent as the phony Elizabethan place mat and its container became increasingly warped and stained. A split developed in the thin disc about noon—I worked on at the lathe unasked—and Signor Gambello was itching to point this out, but still I pressed on. He'd want to weld it. Every few minutes both pieces went into the tin of stain for a soak, then were warmed to dryness on the furnace flue.

  That noon I postponed my nosh to impose coarser turning marks on the surface, using a coarse bastard file and setting the Woods lathe to a laborious two hundred revs, then I had my colazione while Gambello resumed the metal work in my place.

  Next day at ten-thirty we knocked off the last of his mini-shanks and got them boxed and loaded on his truck. That gave me nearly three hours before I'd have to leave for my washing-up job.

  The inscription I'd chosen was something vaguely remembered from school. Old Benkie, our literature teacher, once clipped my ear in a temper over forgetting a Chaucer quotation: 'The answer to this lete I to divines." Which divines, and answer to what, was anybody's guess, but the quotation was enough to fill the center of the disc if I arranged a dot-and-vine-leaf pattern round the edge. At least it was the right period. Ordinary red ink, diluted, for the inscription, and a tube of artist's black acrylic paint for the pattern. The quill and steel with which the Elizabethans wrote was a difficulty. The way out is to take the cap of a ballpoint pen—use a Bic top for forging everything except parchment or paper manuscripts—and file the projecting bit down to a sixteenth-of-an-inch tip. Cut a part-thickness groove all the way along, and perforate the top to hold a bit of doweling wood. Epoxy resin to fasten, and there's your Elizabethan pen. I nearly spelled the inscription wrong like a fool, but at the finish held it up proudly. One more fast dry to fade the ink (remember phony reds fade faster than phony blacks) and . . . and . . .

  Signore Gambello was watching me. Oho.

  "Nice job," he said, coming close to look. "You know,” he went on, examining my piece, "if I hadn't seen you make it, I'd swear it was really . . . old."

  "Good heavens," I said evenly.

  "Certo. It has that look." There was a pause. "I'm sure your auntie will be very pleased."

  "Eh?"

  "Your auntie. It's her surprise present, non e vero?"

  I remembered. "Ah yes. Let's hope so, signore."

  There was a pause while we looked around the workshop and out into the yard. Signora Gambello was listening, arms folded, by the door.

  "You will not work more, eh?"

  "Just the trattoria. One more day."

  'Then thank you."

  'Thank you, signore," I said fervently. 'The debt is mine."

  Next morning I left Signora Lamberti's emporium—a bawled farewell over the racket from the shunting engines—and made my special purchase. With the money I'd saved from washing-up I had enough.

  Mestre isn't exactly bulging with antiques. It had taken me a lot of searching to find something Venetian and genuinely antique. The book itself was ordinary, a third edition Venetian dialect dictionary, falling to bits. It contained a few scraps of paper, though, on which people had doodled and drawn occasional shapes. This only goes to show how you can pick up a fortune. I bought the book, went around the comer, and chucked it away. One doodled-on paper I cherished: only a figure study, pen with brown ink on a gray-blue wash. Even with four elementary figures there was a lot of vigorous activity going on in swirly-clothed classical tableau round a sprawling babe.

  Art has a million mysteries. Many of them occur in Venetian art, which was pre-eminent by a mile in the eighteenth century. To me, one of the most fascinating of all an mysteries is the great R.V.H. Mystery—R.V.H. for "Reliable Venetian Hand."

  It must have been really miraculous in those days. Walk around the comer in Venice and you met artists like Canaletto, Tiepolo, Piazzetta, or Ricci, or bumped into musicians like the "red priest" Antonio Vivaldi, already on his way to getting himself defrocked. It was all happening in Venice then.

  The tragedy is that artists die unrecognized, obscurely in poverty. I mean, we don't know enough about Mozart or Constable, while the discovery that Shakespeare's dad sold a few condoms, "Venus gloves," on the side—quite customary for all glovemakers those days—is treated as a major revelation. Not even collectors take enough notice of artists, until the artists pass on and it's all too late.

  But once upon a time one collector did. Back there in that miraculous eighteenth century in Venice one collector bought the doodles, sketches, plans, any little drawing he could afford, from the original artists themselves. And he saved them, tidily, in complete safety until the day he died. By then he—she?—had scores of them, and of course they were dispersed to the four winds after that. But this collector did one last inestimable service for Art. In lovely copperplate handwriting, he labeled each tiny scrap with the name of the original artist. And he's always— always! —absolutely correct in his attributions. Museums the world over reflexly search every old stray paper for the names of Venetian artists in that precise elegant giveaway handwriting. We don't know who the collector was, so we call him the Reliable Venetian Hand. Now, promise you'll never go browsing in old junk
shops again without a fervent vow to remember old R.V.H. of blessed memory. And just occasionally light a candle for him/her. He did a greater job for civilization and art than the lot of us will probably ever do.

  The dashed-off drawing I'd picked up had the name Sebastiano Ricci evenly subscribed in that immortal copperplate. In my whole life I've seen three R.V.H.'s items j found, and the great museums of Europe abound with ! them, so you've no excuse for ignorance. Sebastiano Ricci, as far as I remembered on the spot, painted a chapel apse in Chelsea Hospital. Most of his stuff is in Windsor Castle or at Venice's Accademia.

  Fully armed for battle, I got the train across the causeway. By eleven I was disembarking from the number-two waterbus at the Rialto on the Grand Canal, and cutting through the narrow calle that brings you out by the Goldoni Theater. Ten minutes later I was ringing the brass push bell of the Palazzo Malcontento, and smiling with fright, but in sure anticipation.

  Looking back on it now, I think how reasonable I was to go berserk.

  20

  The bloke who eventually opened the door was twice my size. All curly black hair and droopy mustache. Nothing to match Ivan the Terrible's description this time. He might actually be the man in the waiting motorboat who watched me the day Cosima showed me round the Gobbo's market. We greeted each other politely, friendly politicians.

  "Name of Lovejoy." I offered the information into his longish silence. A waterbus rushed past. The traghetto man cursed in his rocking gondola.

  "The locande are—"

  Cheeky swine. I didn't want a place to doss down. "I want to see the lady of the house, please. Signora Norman."

  'Not in." Slam.

  Ah, well. I idled over to watch the traghetto come and go across the Grand Canal, keeping an eye on the Palazzo Malcontento. I'd never seen so much wrought iron. Even the balconies of the great tall rectangular windows were covered with the damned stuff. Lovely and antique, but you'd need oxyacetylene and a Sheffield gang just to let in some fresh air. Clever of Mrs. Norman.