by James Becker
Marco and another of his men hustled her down the path towards the jetty at the end of the island, where two men were already waiting, standing in the stern of a powerboat, the rumble of the engine clearly audible.
‘Why do you want me to go with you?’ Angela asked, as Marco pushed her inside the small cabin.
‘You’ve read and translated the Latin,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, but there might be something, some clue, that you’ll see and understand but we won’t. That’s why you’re here.’
‘What happens if you don’t find what you’re looking for?’
‘You’d better pray that we do. Finding the source document is the only thing that’s keeping you alive right now. If it isn’t there, then we have no further use for you.’
The casual, almost conversational, tone of his voice scared Angela even more than the words he’d used, and she sat in silence as Marco handcuffed her wrists together, looping the link between the cuffs behind a hand rail, immobilizing her. Then he left the cabin.
A few moments later the door opened again and the hooded man entered, the now familiar stench preceding him. Angela shrank back in her seat as the figure passed right beside her, and then took a seat at the opposite end of the cabin.
Moments later, she felt the boat start to move, and soon the bow was cutting through the choppy waters of the lagoon, the waves thumping rhythmically against the hull.
She had no idea how long the journey would take, because she didn’t know where she’d been imprisoned, and the view through the side windows of the boat was so restricted that she could see almost nothing of her surroundings. And in truth, her thoughts were dominated by the hooded man she was sharing the cabin with. He had said nothing to her, and gave no sign that he was even aware of her presence, but the all-pervasive smell of rotting meat seemed to fill the air, and she was simply terrified in case he came close or, worse, touched her.
A few minutes later, Marco returned to the cabin and sat down opposite Angela, which actually made her feel safer and slightly more comfortable. At least the menace Marco represented was clear and tangible. The hooded man inspired only feelings of horror and revulsion, which were far worse than any physical threat.
‘Who is that man?’ she asked quietly, nodding towards the silent figure. ‘He terrifies me.’
Marco smiled bleakly. ‘He should.’
49
Bronson tensed as the sound of the boat drew closer, and a moment later he felt a slight bump as some part of the other craft touched his boat. He kept his eyes half-open, and lay as still as possible, the Browning held loosely by his side but ready to fire.
He could hear the two men talking as they manoeuvred their boat alongside his, their efforts hampered by the fact that the engine of Bronson’s craft was still running, and the boat was describing a small circle at the junction of the two canals.
‘I can see him,’ one of the men said. ‘He’s not moving.’
‘He must be dead then,’ the other replied, ‘or at least he’s badly wounded. Let’s get out of here before a police launch comes along.’
Bronson heard the noise of another boat’s engine approaching, he thought from the opposite direction, though it was difficult to tell. But what he was quite certain about was that the blue boat was moving away. That sound was unmistakable.
For about thirty seconds he did nothing, then he eased himself up cautiously, and risked a quick glance over the side of the vessel. There was a slight bend in the canal to the east and, as he looked in that direction, he saw the blue powerboat disappear around it. The moment it was out of sight, he sat up, centred the steering wheel to stop the circular motion of the boat, grabbed his map of the Venetian waterways, and quickly worked out where he was.
He’d ended up in a canal called the Rio della Racchetta, and the men he’d been chasing would have to continue down the adjoining waterway until they reached the larger Rio del Gesuiti, because they’d already passed the only other canal entrance. What he didn’t know was which way they’d turn when they reached it. Left would take them the shorter distance, out into the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove, the open water that lay on the north-east side of Venice. If they swung right, they’d have a longer run down the canal until they reached the Canal Grande – the Grand Canal – itself.
A wooden launch – its engine had been what Bronson had heard – swept down one side of the powerboat, the driver staring at him with some curiosity as he passed. He had obviously seen the pirouettes that Bronson’s craft had been describing in the water, and probably thought he was drunk.
Bronson ignored him. His only concern was to try to second-guess the men he was following. The trouble was, he had very little to go on. When the blue powerboat had pulled away from the Island of the Dead, the driver had headed south-east. If his destination had been one of the islands at the north-eastern end of the Laguna Veneta, somewhere near Burano, for example, Bronson would have expected them to head in that direction. The fact that they’d continued along the north side of Venice suggested that they were going to sail around the eastern end of the island, and perhaps then turn south-west, towards the other end of the lagoon, where he knew there was a scattering of small islands.
It was a long shot, though, and for perhaps half a minute, Bronson sat at the wheel of the boat, his mind racked by indecision. He had just one chance. If he guessed wrong, he’d never see the blue boat again, which would mean he’d lose Angela. He had to get it right.
His mind made up, he spun the wheel and opened the throttle, sending the boat speeding south down the Rio della Racchetta, retracing the course he’d followed just minutes earlier. At the end of the canal, he turned the boat right and almost immediately left, back into the Rio di San Felice, where he’d seen the jam caused by the gondolas. As he made the turn, he prayed that this time the waterway would be clear.
It wasn’t, but there were far fewer boats in the way. Bronson kept the speed up as much as he dared, then pulled the throttle back as he reached the nearest gondola. He started to weave his way through the jostling boats, his passage attracting a torrent of abuse in high-speed Italian, all of which he ignored.
A couple of minutes later he was through, and swung the boat to the left, into the Canal Grande itself. As he did so, he glanced to his left and saw a long wooden-hulled launch bearing down on him, just yards away. Bronson knew immediately that if he continued turning towards the boat, he’d never miss it. He reacted instantly, spinning the steering wheel to the right and pushed the throttle forward, sending his boat straight across the bow of the oncoming vessel.
There was a bang from the rear of Bronson’s boat, as the bow of the much larger launch hit the left-hand rear of his powerboat, cracking the fibreglass and scattering paint flakes across the water. But the outboard motor was undamaged, and he was certain that the impact had been well above the waterline, so there was no danger of him taking in water. And in fact fibreglass boats of the type he was in were so full of air pockets that they were virtually unsinkable.
The driver of the launch immediately reduced speed, obviously intending to do the Italian marine equivalent of exchanging names and addresses. But Bronson had not the slightest intention of stopping or even slowing down. His boat’s throttle was still wide open and the outboard engine roaring, so he twitched the steering wheel to the left and sped away, heedless of the angry shouts echoing from behind him.
The Grand Canal in Venice follows an S-shaped course from the Stazione Ferrovie dello Stato Santa Lucia, the railway station, to its southern end near the Piazza San Marco, where it opens out into the Bacino di San Marco and the much wider canale of the same name. Bronson had joined the canal about a third of the way along, so he knew he would have to contend with the fairly heavy water traffic for some time before he could get into the clearer and more open waters to the south of the city. And then, of course, he would have the even more difficult task of spotting the blue powerboat carrying the two m
en, amongst the hundreds of similar craft that plied the waters in and around Venice. And that assumed that he’d been right in his guess that the boat would be heading into the waters of the lagoon somewhere to the south of the city.
He also knew that although the men he’d been following now believed that he was dead or badly wounded, they would still be keeping their own eyes peeled for any sign of pursuit, and paying particular attention to anybody who looked like him. There was nothing he could do about the design and colour of his boat, but Bronson realized that there were things – three things, in fact – that he could do to try to change his own appearance.
He was wearing his black leather jacket, so he took this off and dropped it on the floor of the boat beside him. Underneath, he had on a plain white shirt, which would give him an entirely different appearance to anyone viewing him from a distance. And in his shirt pocket he had a baseball cap and a pair of large sunglasses with impenetrable mirrored black lenses. He took out the sunglasses and slipped them on as he powered the boat down the Grand Canal towards the open water at its end, then settled the cap on his head, ensuring that it completely covered the dressing over the wound on his scalp.
Unless he got so close to the other boat that the men in it could actually see his features, Bronson guessed that he now looked quite different. Rolling his shoulders to ease away some of his tension, and trying hard not to think about what could be happening to Angela, he focused on the task in hand: spotting the other vessel, a challenge that made finding a needle in a haystack seem easy by comparison.
50
Marco released Angela’s handcuffs, and led her out of the cabin. The boat was already moored, a bow and stern line attached, and it was easy enough to step from the side of the vessel onto the landing stage. She looked around. The boat was positioned a short distance down the channel between the small octagonal island that lay at the southern tip of Poveglia and the middle island. In the distance, looking south, she could make out buildings on the Lido.
The octagonal island looked like a flat-topped fort, the inward-sloping sides made of stone, and mooring alongside that would have been difficult. But that wasn’t their objective. A short distance along the level stone landing stage that marked the southern end of the larger island was an impressive-looking building. It reminded Angela of a typical Venetian palazzo, and must, she thought, have been part of the retirement home on the island, before being abandoned in the 1960s. The façade was covered with a web-like exoskeleton of rusting scaffolding. That, Angela knew from her research, was not part of some renovation project, but had been erected almost a quarter of a century earlier simply to stop the buildings from falling down.
She looked over to the north-east, and there, beyond the trees, rose the imposing stone bell tower, looking something like a church steeple, its tall red-tiled roof supporting a large metal crucifix at the very top. All the openings in the tower appeared to have been bricked up, possibly when the scaffolding was put in place. A chill wind blew in suddenly from the waters of the lagoon, bringing with it a swirl of mist, and from somewhere nearby Angela heard the faint sound of a bell ringing.
She glanced at Marco. ‘Did you hear that bell?’ she asked, and pointed towards the tower. ‘I thought it came from over there.’
He looked at her dismissively. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘The bell was removed in nineteen thirteen.’
‘I know what I heard,’ Angela insisted, but her voice lacked conviction. She’d read in the guidebook that the sound of a bell was still sometimes heard on the island.
The hooded man emerged from the cabin of the boat and began moving silently – his feet never seemed to make a sound – towards the derelict building that lay closest to the tower.
Marco checked that Angela’s handcuffs were still secured, and then pushed her in the same direction, two of his men following behind.
The short procession entered the building through an opening that had obviously once been a doorway, but which now gaped open to the elements. Inside, it was a scene of almost total devastation. Rubbish and debris lay strewn across the floor. Plaster had fallen off the walls and ceiling, and in several places the floor timbers of the storey above had broken, and pointed downwards into the ground-floor room like long, blackened and jagged teeth. On many of the pieces of surviving plaster, graffiti had been scrawled. Cast-iron radiators stood forlornly against the walls, rust covering the areas where the paint had flaked off. In one corner, two windows had disappeared, and a heavy growth of vegetation had forced its way inside and was beginning the long slow process of reclaiming the building.
Angela was not of a nervous disposition, but she knew absolutely that if she had had any choice in the matter, she would have walked out, climbed back on to the boat and never, ever returned to Poveglia.
The very fabric of the building seemed to echo with the cries of the dying, and the knowledge that the thin soil on the island covered the bones of tens of thousands of plague victims weighed heavily upon her. If there was any place on the face of the earth where the dead could speak, this, this island of Poveglia, was probably it. She could so easily imagine the giant fires consuming piles of smouldering bodies, and the shallow graves tended by workers who were themselves diseased. Through it all would stalk the bizarre and otherworldly figures of the doctors, trying vainly to fight a contagion that they didn’t understand and could not cure, their only protection against the disease being the hook-nosed masks they wore, filled with peppers and spices which they believed might filter out the infective elements. These men must have looked like massive predatory birds as they tried in vain to bring some relief to the sufferers.
Suddenly, a movement caught her eye and Angela gave a little cry of alarm. A shadow played across the wall as a beam of sunlight entered the building, and she could almost swear that she saw the shape of a man wearing a beak-like mask somewhere outside the building. Then the wind blew again and the shape dissolved and reformed, as the branches of the tree shifted.
‘Come on,’ Marco ordered, tugging at Angela’s arm.
Following the hooded man, they stepped over and around the debris to the far end of the room and made their way carefully over to the bell tower.
Inside, little light penetrated because the windows and other openings had been bricked up. The tower extended above their heads, a vertical well of darkness. In the gloom, they saw the first few steps of a rusting spiral staircase which ran around the walls of the tower.
‘So where is it?’ Marco demanded.
For an instant, Angela didn’t realize that he was talking to her, then she pulled herself together.
‘The text doesn’t say,’ she replied. ‘It just seems to suggest that it’s hidden somewhere here, in this place. There’s nothing else I can tell you, and I did translate all the rest of the Latin.’
Marco looked at her for a long moment, then switched his glance to the stairs before turning to one of his men and issuing a crisp order in Italian. The man turned and strode swiftly out of the tower.
‘We need torches,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the document is hidden anywhere down here. People still come to this island – you can tell that from the graffiti they’ve scrawled on the walls – and if it had been found already, we would have known about it. So it’s probably hidden somewhere that people wouldn’t normally visit or explore.’ He looked again at Angela. ‘I hope you’re not afraid of heights,’ he said, ‘because my guess is that Carmelita, or whoever hid it, probably put it right at the top of the bell tower. You’re going up there to find it for us.’
When the man he’d sent back to the boat returned, half a dozen torches of different sizes in his hands, Marco stepped across to Angela and unlocked her handcuffs. Then he picked up the biggest torch, a squat, grey and clearly heavy instrument with a rechargeable battery, and shone a powerful beam directly upwards, tracing the course that the spiral staircase followed until it reached a level platform.
‘That can’t be the top of th
e tower,’ Marco said. ‘It’s not high enough. There must be another staircase above that.’
‘I don’t want to do this,’ Angela murmured. ‘I really don’t want to go up there.’
Marco shrugged. ‘You’ve got two choices. Do this and you’ll live, at least for a little while longer. Refuse, and I’ll have one of my men strangle you right now and dump your body here. It’s up to you.’
For a few seconds Angela stared at him, but she knew she had no option. She was quite certain that Marco would order her death with as little compunction as he would order a cup of coffee. She grimaced, reached down and picked up two of the smaller torches, then she strode across to the foot of the spiral staircase.
She switched on one of the torches and shone the beam at the metal treads in front of her. There was little dust or debris visible on them, and even the banister appeared to be intact and in reasonably good condition. She guessed that some of the infrequent and illegal visitors to the island probably climbed at least some distance up into the tower out of idle curiosity, if nothing else. That was good news, because it meant that the staircase should support her weight. Cautiously, she rested her left foot on the lowest tread, then began to climb.
Behind her, she heard the sound of footsteps and glanced back: Marco was following, torch in hand.
‘Keep going,’ he snapped. ‘I’m just here to make sure you do what you’re told.’
The staircase wound up the inside of the tower. For the first few steps, it felt extremely solid, but the higher she climbed the more unhappy Angela felt, realizing she was relying on bolts and fittings that had been in place for a very long time, without the benefit of any kind of maintenance or repair. She moved as close as she could to the wall, where she hoped the old metal might be stronger, and tested each step before she put her full weight on it.
