by Gregg Loomis
Lang had thought it was merely shadows playing tricks, but closer inspection showed the door was cracked open.
“Had no idea they left the place open at night,” Lang said. “Let’s take a look.”
The inside was lit by low-wattage bulbs. Even so, it was obvious that the ceiling and walls were covered in gold mosaics, more like the churches Lang had seen in Istanbul than those in Europe.
He was about to comment when he heard a low whine.
“What…?” Gurt whispered.
“Maybe they’re getting ready for the requiem mass tomorrow,” Lang suggested softly.
“With an electric drill?”
It was only then Lang recognized what he was hearing. He and Gurt instinctively moved closer to the wall, where the shadows were deepest. Moving from column to gilded column, they made their way toward the altar, which sat in the center of a dim spotlight, its two hundred fifty golden panels shining in spite of the low light.
At first mere shadows, forms moved back and forth under the alabaster altar canopy like ghosts. As Gurt and Lang got closer, the shapes took on distinct human shape. Both peered around a column.
“Why are they drilling?” Gurt asked just loudly enough to hear over the whine.
Lang shook his head, having no idea. “I don’t know, but the fact they they’re working at this hour tells me it’s probably not kosher.”
“And that they are not Italians.”
“And maybe we’re intruding on something we weren’t intended to see. Let’s go.”
Lang was walking backward, keeping an eye on what was going on as he moved toward the exit while feeling his way. Gurt was a few feet closer to the altar.
With the next step, something hard and cold was pressing against the back of his head, something very much like the muzzle of a gun. Freezing, he slowly raised his arms.
He almost stumbled as he was roughly shoved forward. By the time he regained his balance, he was pushed again. Whoever was behind him wanted him to head toward where the drilling was going on.
Years of Agency training kicked in. When you have no choice, cooperate, don’t give someone an excuse to kill you. But keep your eyes and mind open. Use whatever assets you have.
Like Gurt.
Instead of going directly to the source of the noise, Lang moved cautiously along the row of columns that had guided him before being taken prisoner. Even in the dim light, anyone could see his hands raised in surrender.
Including Gurt.
He was hoping that the dusky twilight, the deep shadows, had prevented his captor from seeing her, leaving her free to go for help once they passed the spot where he had last seen her.
It had never occurred to him he might need a weapon at Carnevale. He had left the Browning HP 9 mm in his bedside table back in Atlanta. Damn! How dumb could he get? Arriving by the foundation’s Gulfstream, neither he nor Gurt were subject to security screening. Either or both could have brought the firearms he wished they had. On the other hand, had the Browning been in the small of his back, he could well have gotten himself killed trying for it. But Gurt…
His stream of self-condemnation ended with the sound of a very solid thump, an expulsion of breath and the sound of metal hitting the marble floor. The gun was no longer against the back of Lang’s skull.
Spinning, he caught sight of a man trying to regain his balance as he took a second blow from Gurt’s handbag, swung on its strap like the weapon it had become. Now Gurt was between Lang and the light. He could only see her silhouette as she moved forward on her victim.
The man yelled something in a language Lang didn’t understand, but he heard Gurt clearly say, “The gun, get his gun. He dropped it.”
There was a grunt as Gurt’s adversary apparently launched a counterattack.
Had it been any other woman, or most men, Lang would have felt compelled to protect her. Instead, it was her opponent who was going to need protection, he guessed. At the top of her martial-arts class of women in the Agency, she had insisted on practicing with the men. The only problem was finding competition after breaking one man’s arm and the ribs of another.
Lang contented himself with a hands-and-knees search of the area as he heard flesh meet flesh and a very masculine yelp of pain. He found what he was looking for and came to his feet just in time to see the man make a slicing motion toward Gurt’s throat with the heel of his open right hand.
It was his final mistake. Ducking under the blow that would have seriously damaged if not crushed her larynx, she grabbed the hand, snatching downward, diverting the force of the blow and sending her assailant headfirst into a nearby pillar with a clearly audible crunch of bone versus stone. He slumped to the floor with a fluid motion that almost denied his status as a vertebrate. He didn’t move.
Lang slid back the slide on the automatic, checking with a finger to make sure there was a bullet in the chamber. “Hope you didn’t have anything breakable in your pocket-book.”
Gurt was peering into the gloom in the general direction from which the noise of the drill had ceased. “I should have thought of that.”
With the hand not holding the gun, Lang took Gurt’s. “I’d be surprised if someone didn’t hear that guy yell. Let’s get out of here before-”
A shot split the quiet, filling the basilica with sharp echoes. Marble chips from a pillar stung Lang’s face. Both he and Gurt dropped to the floor, where they merged with the inky darkness.
“You see where that came from?” Lang whispered
“No.”
Lang took a second to think. On the floor, he and Gurt could remain hidden in a darkness as deep as Jonah must have experienced. They could move on their bellies commando-style but to get out of the church they would have to navigate a puddle of light just where narthex met nave. He had little doubt whoever had been drilling would come looking for the man lying beside the column and then for whoever had left him there. There was equal certainty that that person would also be armed.
“Give me your purse,” he whispered.
“Now is not the time to be checking for damage.”
He told her what he wanted.
“On the count: one, two, three…”
He was never quite sure what object she had removed from her purse and looped overhand in the general direction of the altar. Whatever it was, it smashed against something with a gratifying clatter.
The response was a second shot, a noise that again sent sound caroming from wall to wall. But there was also a muzzle flash, a pinprick of light in the gloom.
Lang was on his knees before the echoes stopped. He fired three quick rounds at the place he had marked as the source of the shot and violently rolled to his left. The reply was a scream and more shots that filled the air with malignantly humming fragments of stone. Lang noted there were at least two shooters.
“They’ll spread out and try and find us,” he said. “I’ll give you cover. Run for it.”
“And you?”
“I’ll think of something. Right now, you best get moving or our son will be an orphan.”
She needed no further incentive.
Lang spread three rapid shots toward the same spot where he had fired previously. Before the second, Gurt was up and dashing for the exit. She drew two shots which, as far as Lang could tell, damaged only the church’s interior.
Moving quickly before his opponents could fire at the source of his volley, Lang was at the edge of the lighted place at the entrance. He heard a footstep behind him and to his right, another from his left. However many of them there were, he could not be sure, but the fact they had distributed their forces was bad news. It meant they were probably professionals, not some random thieves using the distraction of Carnevale to loot the church.
Professional or not, Lang was going to draw fire the instant he crossed that lighted spot. Either that or stay here, hoping Gurt could bring help before they found him.
Then the lights went on.
Not brilliant illumination
, but bright enough in contrast to the murk in which he had been. It was also enough to momentarily blind him.
Instantly, he understood.
That was the purpose! Gurt had somehow found a light switch and blinded whoever had been shooting at them.
He leaped across the space between himself and the narthex like a running back stretching into the end zone.
The impact with the floor knocked the breath from his lungs as two bullets ricocheted from the place he had been a split second before.
Gurt tugged him to his knees. “Hurry! They may be right behind us!”
He didn’t need the encouragement. Staggering to his feet, he stumbled the few feet to the door out onto the lighted piazza, just behind Gurt. Once outside, they both flattened themselves against the basilica’s facade rather than present a target to whoever might choose to fire from the church’s door.
After two or three minutes, Lang asked. “Guess our friends aren’t willing to step out into the light. Want to go back to the dance?”
Gurt pointed. “You will go nowhere with that in your hand.”
Lang had forgotten he still held the gun. He looked at it for the first time he could actually see. “Tokarev TT30. First time I’ve seen one of those in a long time.”
Gurt snorted. “Seven-point-six-two millimeter with an eight-round box clip. Based on the Colt. 45. Used to be the standard Russian sidearm.”
Agency training included a working knowledge of small arms-recognizing them and using them.
“Underpowered piece of crap, if memory serves. But reliable in the worst of conditions.” Lang was examining the weapon more closely. “But this one isn’t Russian.”
He held it up for her inspection.
She pushed it down out of sight. “If someone sees you waving a pistol, the police will not care whether it is Russian or not.”
Lang took a brief glance around the square, confirming its only occupants were a group of very drunk couples staggering at the far end of the Procuratie Nuove toward the long-closed Museo Correr, too far away for them to notice what he might have in his hand.
“Not only not Russian, it’s Chinese. I can see the characters on the barrel.”
“During the Cold War, the Chinese manufactured a number of Russian small arms for their own army, the AK-47 for example.”
Lang held the weapon flat against his leg, invisible to any passerby. “But why would anybody use a gun that dated? I mean…”
“You wish to go back inside and inquire?”
“Not that curious.”
She took his hand. “I have had excitement sufficient for the evening.” She looked at him under half-lidded eyes, an expression he found sexy if not provocative. “Come, let us take the boat back to our hotel and I will provide even more.”
“That’s an offer I can’t refuse.” His hand went to his face. “My nose!”
Gurt looked at him inquisitively. “Your nose? It does not seem to be hurt.”
Lang’s eyes were searching the paving around him. “My clown’s nose. It must have come loose when I hit the floor.” He touched his bare head. “And my clown’s hat, too.”
She gave him a tug toward the canal and, hopefully, the old Chris-Craft. “You have been clown enough for tonight. Drop the gun into the canal before you have to explain it to the police.”
Calle Fiubera 32, Venice
The next morning
Lang looked down the short, narrow street to the point it ended in a corte, or courtyard, in which a small limestone church, San Zulian, perched like a Baroque wedding cake on a platter. It was one of the few in the San Marco district Gurt had not dragged him into to see paintings and sculpture by Bellini, Giorgione, Tintoretto and a dozen or so more names he could remember no better than he could pronounce them. He offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving as Gurt entered the shop paying no particular attention to the church.
Inside, the place had the same sweet, musty smell he recalled from two days ago, when he and Gurt arrived to be fitted for the costumes she had reserved by e-mail months before. Somehow using electronics to visit an event that had its roots in the Shrove Tuesday celebration of the republic’s 1162 victory over the patriarch of Aquileia seemed anachronistic. The older Lang got, the more that word came up.
The shopkeeper, himself in Carnevale costume, examined the set of hangers Gurt handed him, his eyes going to a ragged tear in the bodice of the copy of the seventeenth-century costume. He tsk-tsked when he noted Lang’s hat was missing. The nose Lang had had to purchase, it being not reusable “for sanitary reasons,” the first time he recalled ever hearing that phrase used in connection with anything Venetian.
Reluctantly, Lang agreed to the deduction of a hundred and fifty euros from his deposit.
“Rip-off!” Lang growled as they left. “The damn hat couldn’t have cost more than fifteen, twenty bucks and it will take less than that to sew up the tear in your costume.”
The store’s door had hardly closed behind them when the merchant began punching numbers into his cell phone as he read them from a slip of paper. “The clown costume you wanted to rent?” he asked in English. “It has been returned. Yes, just this moment…”
As Gurt and Lang crossed the Piazza San Marco, she said, “We do not have to meet the plane until this afternoon. We have time to terminate.”
As a native of Germany, Gurt’s grasp of the American idiom was less than perfect.
Lang groaned inwardly at the prospect of another church. He had viewed all of the martyred saints, ascending virgins and bleeding crucifixions he wanted.
“Time to kill.”
“How would you ‘kill’ time? It does not live.”
“We haven’t ridden the vaporetto… water bus,” Lang said, hoping to foreclose additional exposure to religious art by changing the subject. “It’s a great way to see the city.”
“Why not a gondola?”
Lang remembered the last time he had been in one of the romantic if expensive boats. He had been here with Dawn, his first wife. He had met her while still employed with the Agency, one of the few careers open to a liberal-arts graduate. He had anticipated all the excitement of a James Bond film. As is often the case, experience did not meet expectations. It wasn’t even close. Instead of the Operations Division, he had been assigned to Intelligence, where his duties consisted not of slinking about the capitals of Eastern Europe and seducing the beautiful female agents of the opposition but of reading newspapers and monitoring TV broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain from a dingy suite of offices across the street from the Frankfurt rail station. There he had met Gurt and had had a brief affair that terminated when she was transferred to another station.
Then he had met Dawn and married her. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it became clear that opportunities and advancement inside the Agency would be limited. Lang resigned and went to law school while Dawn worked. After his practice of defending white-collar criminals began to flourish, he had taken his wife to Italy as a very small reward for her labors.
She had fallen in love with Venice. Where Lang saw fetid, malodorous canals, she saw romantic waterways. When Lang pointed out that the persistently higher tides had encrusted the lower parts of most buildings with a salty layer of slime, she regarded it as a sign of antiquity. She even endured, if not enjoyed, the endless hawking of the glass merchants in their efforts to persuade tourists to take a “free” trip to their factories on the island of Murano, a place from which no one returned-not until purchasing at least one set of the artfully colored Venetian glass.
Lang supposed the set of six pale blue martini stem glasses had perished along with his other possessions when his condominium had been blown up in an attempt to kill him at the beginning of what he thought of as the Coptic Affair.
Within months of their return home, Dawn had received a death sentence from her doctor. For months Lang had sat at her bedside, making plans for a return to Italy they both knew would never happen. Years after her dea
th, he encountered Gurt again while tracking down the deadly Pegasus organization. A stop-and-go relationship became permanent with the unintended birth of their son, Manfred.
“Lang?”
Gurt’s tone made him realize he had tuned out the present.
“You do not wish a gondola ride?”
Lang nodded toward the basilica’s doors, where a small crowd had gathered. “What’s going on now?”
He changed his direction, giving Gurt little choice but to follow. She caught up with him as he spotted Gower and the heavily endowed Angelia.
Lang now could see uniformed police coming and going from the church.
“Isn’t it exciting?” Angelia cooed. “They say the priest found blood on one of the interior columns when he opened the church for early mass. Like somebody had been injured.”
“Injured?” Lang tried to seem curious. “Do they know who?”
“I don’t think so. He wasn’t hurt too badly to get away. The police think he might have been involved in a theft.”
“Oh? Of what?”
Gower interjected, “I understand some holy relic was taken from under the altar.”
That answered the question of the need to be drilling late in the night. “Saint Mark’s bones? They’re under the altar.” Lang was perplexed. “Who would want Saint Mark’s bones?”
“Saint who?” Angelia asked.
At the same time, back at the costume-rental store, things were not going so well for Pietro, the proprietor, despite the windfall of being able to pocket part of the American’s deposit.
When the man, clearly Asian, had walked in, the owner assumed he had another customer for the clown suit and another sale of the bright red rubber ball of a nose that went with it. Instead, the man had asked to see the American’s credit-card receipt, an unusual request, to say the least. When met with a polite denial, the man, the customer, had grabbed Pietro by the neck of his costume, twisting it into a choke hold.
It didn’t take the Pietro long to realize the prior customer’s privacy or identity or whatever the Asian wanted wasn’t worth his life. Besides, the customer’s name wouldn’t be on the receipt, and all but the last four digits of the card appeared as Xs. What harm could be done with that? A great deal less than Pietro faced if he didn’t give this madman what he wanted.
