The Gondola Scam

by Jonathan Gash

  That was a measure of the appalling height the tide had risen. As far as I could recall, they had made me climb steps. Now they were all awash. All height is relative. Everybody knows that. But any increase is bad news when you're looking for some underground factory.

  Some things were on my side: My barge was black and quiet, and Tonio wouldn't come with lights blazing. He'd come with stealth like me, the smarmy bastard, determined to rely on unfairness in a fight. That meant my boat might remain undetected if I tied her close inshore further along. This I did, moving by grope till I found a rickety post about fifty feet from the submerged landing stage. Caterina might come alone, in which case it was a waste—only partial, but still waste. But like all women, she could have done the natural feminine thing and lied in her teeth.

  The island was silent. The path felt right. I risked the Keeler torch, crouching to peer at the ground and trying to guess directions. Even the vegetation felt right. It was great. The watch I'd borrowed from Gerry—at least they'd lent me that, I thought bitterly—showed one hour to Caterina's arrival. For Caterina read Tonio.

  Being alone on a derelict island isn't good for one's nerves. For a lily-livered no-good like me, it's terrifying. The place through which I was creeping was obviously some kind of derelict vegetable garden, with stupid shoots trailing about and the path crumbling. A couple of times I came close to brick walling, one with broken or shuttered windows. Either monks or military. Originally, when blindfolded, I'd counted my paces. I wasn't to know there'd be no need. The path led only to one place.

  The doorway was steel, rivets driven in at its sides and its two padlocks reinforced by a welded steel plate. The purist would have been disappointed at these feeble precautions. I was relieved and delighted. Of course, there was normally our full-time night shift of industrious fakers busy in the subterranean forgery factory, and two or more murderous men watching over all. It was only on such a night as this that guards would seem superfluous.

  Nothing looks more daunting than a padlock, and nothing's easier. If you've got one on your garden shed, try picking it with a thick hairpin. Some come simple, like this first one. Five seconds. The second had some combination rollers I'd never seen before, so I sawed it through with my hacksaw—always carry the smallest and cheapest, incidentally. The door gave, beautifully oiled.

  Funny feeling, seeing a familiar corridor for the first time. We'd all been blindfolded, of course, but I wasn't prepared for how narrow the corridor was. I put the door to, and followed my little torch. Finding a handrail just where I knew it always was, by the steps, was somehow astonishing. There were no other obstacles, no alarms, no angry shouts. Two careful minutes, and I entered the subterranean factory. I was in possession. Exactly as I'd planned.

  A quick look round. Everything just as left, fakes in various stages of completion, each faker's position showing his own particular level of tidiness. All predictable and well. My wall plate had not been disturbed, thank God. I slung my jacket and started work.

  28

  A couple of tallow lanterns did for light. Domenico, ham-fisted as ever, aged his handiwork by tallow smoke. Only the Cantonese still try that kid's trick nowadays, which shows you the level of my fellow faker's expertise Duck-eggs.

  In our stone masonry comer I'd drilled a steel plate, head height and as wide as a man can stretch, nothing more than some old shoring batten left by the military. Now it was pinned into the thick wall by four long steel bolts. From its face projected three metal pegs. Ostensibly it was a simple reinforced lifting device. To me it was one gigantic cork. If anything pulled at it from outside, a hell of a gap would appear in the cellar wall, and maybe the wall would go with it.

  Nothing like fear to make you crack on speed. I used a cold chisel to bang out the bricks, levering with a crowbar and flinging the debris anywhere like someone demented. One brick to either side, top and bottom. Then another between. And another. When I could reach my arm round behind the big steel batten, I was satisfied. Then I set to weakening the wall still further, slamming the chisel into mortar, peppering my face with brick fragments.

  There came that ugly moment when the mortar in one of my new recesses grew damp and started seeping water. I drew off with a terrified yelp. Like a fool, I even began cramming bricks back to stop it before I realized my stupidity and made myself pause to think straight.

  Every faker of Old Masters carries packets of children's balloons, to hold his pigments. They're a godsend. They can be tied at the neck. They're waterproof, airproof. They're cheap, lightweight. They don't crack or shatter, so buy a bumper pack and you can match the balloons with the pigment each contains. The cleverer the forger the neater he is. I easily blew up a whole bag of them to about a quarter of their capacity so quick I went dizzy. By now I was going like the clappers and reeled a bit as I tied the balloons to a string, a long multicolored chain. The string I fastened to a strong cord, and the cord to the metal chain. I fixed its free end to a metal peg on my plate.

  Now for the nasty bit. I'd no idea where the water level normally came to on the outside. All I knew was it would be hellish high out there now. Shaking scared at the possibilities, I procured one of the polythene tubes from Luciano's rolls of painting canvas. They're about four feet long, and wide enough to take the chain. The balloon string went into it easily, trailing the rope and chain. There'd be a hell of a squirt from the water out there, so I collected great bags of clay from the sculptors' enclave across the factory floor, and made sure it was handy. Then, all ready, I slammed my chisel into the seeping mortar and tore the half brick out.

  The water shot me off my perch like a popgun going off. The horrid filthy stuff cascaded into the cellar with such force I was slithering screaming across the floor, scrabbling for a hold to stop myself. I was lucky not to have been brained. Panicking at the near destruction I'd caused, I avoided the violent rush and climbed up underneath it to see what I'd done.

  My hole into the lagoon was about as big as my palm. Enough for the tube. The water which had clouted me so savagely was merely a thin spout, as if from a hose. Not much. It leapt over my shoulder and hit the cellar floor about halfway across. I lifted the tube and got drenched shoving the damned thing into the waterspout, driving it in. Naturally the chain and my balloon rope was washed out so I had to do the whole thing again. That's where my time went. It must have taken all of half an hour to fix it in place, the seeps sealed with clay and the edges of the tube held with nailed battens. I was a wreck. The clay packed the tube, so no seepage from that.

  Out there on the surface of the lagoon, beyond the cellar wall, there now bobbed a string of multicolored balloons. Easy enough for anybody to find. I could have done with a kip, but drove myself to make certain my chain was securely fixed to the steel plate. Once that went it'd need more than Lovejoy with a handful of clay to stop the water flooding and sweeping in, rising . . .

  "Agh." I’d yelped, scaring myself even worse, but only for a split second. It took me just as long to grab my jacket, blow out the tallows and dash out of that now vulnerable cellar, with its puddles of water and mini-workshops crowded along its walls like huddles of untidy market stalls. Even so, leaving that mass of fakes and forgeries there, some hopeless, others not really too bad, was a pang, but I've always found that terror's a better prime mover than petrol ever was.

  Odd, but I felt clean in my funeral boat as I did the rest of the job. Even though I knew that time had gone faster than my plans wanted, I was somehow content. Almost confident. I found the balloon string by creeping the barge along the building's lagoon wall and dangling over the side with my Keeler torch practically on the water.

  Still in that extraordinary mood of euphoric contentment when it seems nothing can possibly go wrong and everything's going right, I cut the engine and gently hauled the balloon string aboard. The chain came into my hand. I hauled as much aboard as would come. About eight feet, until the chain stopped with a jerk and I knew it was holding taut on my steel
plate in my weakened wall. I cut the balloon string and airily chucked them overboard. Let some seaborne sleuth work that one out when they were found bobbing mysteriously on the briny. More cavalier still, I let the little stern anchor go overboard and used its shackle to fasten the chain to the barge's stern. Now my barge would stay there for sure. No nautical complexities like anchors to worry about.

  Phase X of my plan had depended almost entirely on Keith nicking a dredger and bringing it over to the island. Fix chain to dredger, drive off and out comes the steel plate bringing half the cellar wall with it. Cellar flooded, and the subterranean factory would be submerged in a torrent of lagoon. They'd stay submerged forever in the sinking mud of the lagoon floor. That was the idea. Do Tonio in the eye and leave old Mr. Pinder's scam untouched, if not vastly improved. If it wasn't for Keith, the idle sod. He was probably paralytic drunk back in Venice by now. I'd have to nick the dredger myself now, once I found some way of fixing the chain in some prominent way. Then I'd use the dredger's engine to pull the plug, and home to report to old Pinder and reap a richly earned reward. Pity about my stone carving, but I didn't mind too much, because I'd signed "Lovejoy fecit" with the date to entertain any future archeologist who came diving through the nuclear fallout in years to come.

  A dull boom sounded. Long, long pause while I waited and tried not to worry about it. An echo from one of those wailing sirens that sounded so mournfully out in the black night? That boom. It was in the building. I thought, Christ. Just when I'd been feeling all confident.

  Cut and run? Every neuron snapped into action, sending tingling messages of escape. I even found myself fiddling with the controls. Then I thought. Caterina. Okay, so she hated me and loved Tonio. So she was double-crossing stepmother Lavinia, who made me laugh and promised me much. And so she possibly knew that Tonio was a psychopath, possibly even knew he had done for Mr. Malleson and old Crampie. But the cellar was a death trap. And what if she honestly had turned up on her own in good faith, like I'd said. I thought. Oh, hell. Just my luck. From perfect confidence I was plunged back into my usual dither. All because of some stupid noise. I'm pathetic, I told myself, pulling on the chain so the barge bumped against the brickwork and I could climb into the entrance above the plaque. My brain felt back-combed. I was completely befuddled, all reasoning gone. Don't think I'd fallen for Caterina. I hadn't. I'm not that daft. Just because a bird has everything and can't stand the sight of a bloke doesn't mean he can't take a hint. And so what, if she has a boyfriend who did for Mr. Malleson?

  The trouble was I hadn't come in this way. I'd sneaked in on the other side of the island. The steps were deeply awash and my feet sloshed nastily in my shoes, making silence difficult. The wretched lagoon was slurping greedily ever higher, bloody thing. As if I'd not enough to worry about.

  Cursing everything, I fumbled round the wall, inching as if on a ledge. I actually might have been, for all I knew or could see. There was comfort in the notion that I could always find my way back to my funeral barge by simply following the wall until I hit.

  A vague golden glow showed brightly to my right and I squelched a pace back. A light. It moved an instant, then was gone. I'd been in the entrance to the factory, not realizing I'd got that far, and the light had been flicked on briefly, as if from a torch. Somebody was in there. And that somebody was being damned quiet. I'd used the same trick myself with my Keeler, partly covering its light with the fingers and putting light ahead for an instant at a time.

  I was almost on the point of deciding to scarper when I heard a low murmur. A man's voice. And a low laugh. Another murmur, receding. They were moving along the corridor and down into my—their—cellar. Still I hesitated, scared, but the logic was inescapable. I knew they were in there. They didn't know I was outside. And I knew for certain there was no other exit except the corridor and this external door. I had them.

  Exulting, I slipped my shoes and socks off, felt round me, and put them beside the door. No need to risk my mini-torch now. The glow down the corridor leading to the underground factory came more frequently, now they felt more certain they were unobserved. Was it plural still? I slid after them, palpating surfaces for stairs, handrails, any landmark at all as I went. They were in the cellar now with no attempt at concealment.

  "He's tried to make a lifter. See? On the wall." Placido? Or . . .

  "What for?" Now that was Caterina's voice.

  They were inspecting my handiwork.

  A laugh. "Hoping to lift all this to the floor above. Poor fool. The high water has defeated more than him." Another laugh. At me, of course. Not Tonio's voice, though.

  "Where is he?"

  "On his way. No need to worry."

  "Come here."

  Then silence. The torch came on, stilled. No movement. Had they sensed me?

  Out in the corridor near the metal door I listened in a fever. Caterina and a bloke, that's for sure. But why the stillness? And they'd gone very, very quiet. Maybe I should just cut my losses and get the hell out, leaving them to it. A faint regular sound, like a distant tapping, struck my ear. Worried, I glanced back along the corridor but it seemed to be coming from inside the cellar where Caterina was. And a, what, a distant but steady beat of noise. As if of a rhythmic exhalation, even a grunting.

  I peered round the door like a kid in a comic.

  Cesare and Caterina were together down there, oblivious. In the torchlight their copulating shadows moved metachronally, explaining the rhythmic beats. Caterina's legs were splayed to take a grip of Cesare. Her arms clasped him. Her mouth was on his as he beat into her on the long central table where the artists and sculptors argued continuously over space to put their materials. Cesare. And—in— Caterina. Not Placido. Not Tonio. Or all the lot of them.

  For an instant a voyeur's curiosity delayed me, almost fatally. I'd no idea clothes looked so ridiculous when couples were taken by storm, in the act as it were. I'd assumed they only got into a mess afterwards somehow. But there was a gun on the table near Cesare's hand and I saw sense.

  "Sorry," I said, as the door slammed and I dropped the great metal stave to lock it. I meant the sudden noise.

  "It's Lovejoy!" came audibly from Caterina a moment later. I moved a few steps away up the corridor in case he shot that damned thing.

  "Yeah, me!" I called. "I see why you were so glad to know where Cosima's convalescing, Cesare."

  He laughed, actually laughed. "Placido's on a little Sicilian trip, Lovejoy. Don't think she'll make a complete recovery."

  "When did you take Caterina's shilling, you pig?" I blazed. "Right from the start or only recently?"

  "What you'd sneer at as patrimony we know as duty, Lovejoy." He wasn't at all discomfited. "You'll learn soon enough that others have the same honor."

  "Caterina!" I yelled, to shut the bum up. "Did you know Tonio was going to do Malleson and Crampie?"

  "Oh, dear, no!" she trilled, all little-girl.

  Even as Cesare roared with laughter, I thought. Surely she can't be joking? Not about people getting killed.

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'd never have let him go back and keep on hitting him that way, Lovejoy!" And she too laughed.

  I turned and left them to get on with it, sickened.

  'Thank you for locking me in with a lovely lady, Lovejoy!" Cesare's shout was just audible as I reached the gloom, fog, and obscurity. My natural habitat.

  Maybe my distress made me careless. Maybe I walked straight ahead for a few dazed steps. I honestly thought I turned the correct way coming from the exit door, but after a few steps I stopped and tried to retrace my steps. It was hopeless. I finished up crouched down feeling for the edges of the path. No good. I was lost.

  Stupidity's an art. It seemed best to me, at that daft moment, to crouch down and pad round in small circles feeling as I went. Logically, move in increasing-sized circles, and you sooner or later touch on the place you've lost, right? Well, it's logical if you go in precise circles. Do an oval or a spiral a
nd you're more lost.

  The last thing I wanted to do now was use my Keeler torch, in case Tonio was already here. Cesare had sounded too confident. And all that shouting. I fell down, over a mound of soft earth among the vegetation.

  Feeling more carefully, I tried to work it out. Somebody had been digging. Recently. A patch maybe big enough to bury a sizable load of antiques? My hand touched an instrument. I lifted it. A hand hoe. Something left by a monk, or the recent digger? In a welter of bitterness it would be at least one way of getting back at them all, if I were to nick whatever it was they'd hidden. Possibly their most precious fake or antique. I decided to risk it and scrabbled at one end of the mound. Maybe six feet by three feet, possibly a good-sized original statue that wouldn't hurt from the water now ploshing about my ankles and seeping into the hole I was scuffing. An obstacle. I'd found something. Grinning evilly and whispering to myself. I put out my hand and felt. Definitely features. A face. Definitely configurations of ... a face. Pliable. Soft. Waxen softness of eyelids. A fucking face. Whiskers ... I screamed, screamed, and clawed babbling and screaming away from Carlo's face and ran crashing into every fucking thing and anything, flinging myself demented and still screaming through bushes with the aid of the hand hoe and splashing through the encroaching water, leaving that ghoulish grave behind me in its solitary nightmare. Shivering and retching, I ran blind, the wavering blur of my Keeler light which I'd somehow got out doing more to make the fog opaque than show me the way.

  A pane of glass cracked underfoot. A tendril lapped round my neck and I howled, terror-stricken. A building hit me. I reeled away, tried to find those precious bricks again, couldn't, and ran and ran. A tree, its roots awash in rising waters, shot out of the fog and dazed me as we collided. I screamed and wailed, reeling. Somebody told me to stand still and put my hands up. I screamed in terror and tried to run.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder. I saw this figure. He looked immense, looming out of the fog like a Disney giant. I struck out with both hands, felt my hoe send a shock up my arm and struck again and again in the darkness because my light had gone. I ran, flinging the hoe into the space where the figure had stood. And ran until the water was up to my knees, and there was only stillness and the water. There was no direction, nowhere else to go. I was a ruin, breathing and coughing like a spent horse and weeping and whining at the whole frigging mess, hands on my knees and the black water rising.