The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  “How the hell do you keep finding me?” I called across the water.

  “It vas not easy.” He drew himself up, straightened his lapels. Brightened visibly as it came to him. “Ve haf ways,” he said.

  I snickered. “Really? You are going with that? What’s next? ‘Vere ist your little friend?’”

  He frowned and tried to look dignified.

  “Say, ‘I see nuffing, I know nuffing!’ I dare you!”

  “This is your last chance, Fräulein Fox.”

  “Or what? Notice the next bridge is a city block away? You going to swim after me? No, seriously, let’s get back to that accent. That can’t be your real accent. Heck, are you even German? I’m going to start calling you ‘Herr Satz.’”

  He sighed. He really didn’t look so good. I told him so.

  “I know. Did you really have to run halfway across Europe?” He sounded as tired as he looked. He’d also cut way back on the accent, I noticed.

  I almost felt a little sympathy. Almost. “Here, let me find a tissue for those crocodile tears.” I set down the bag and pretended to rummage through it.

  A couple of kids ran past, wriggling to get through the foot traffic. The young woman trailing them bumped into my elbow.

  “Ah…scusi…” I fumbled for the right language to apologize in.

  “Mi scusi!” she said brightly.

  “Fox!” Herr Satz shouted.

  “What?”

  “The sherd!”

  I looked down. My bag was no longer where I’d set it down. I whipped around, tried to make a grab for the woman.

  “Not her, Fox!” Satz was shouting across the rio. “Him!”

  I looked where he pointed. A young man was strolling along, heading down the fondamente away from us. As he felt my eyes on him his head went down and he started to run.

  “I’ll cut him off!” Satz promised. He ducked back through the sottoportego behind him, running hard.

  I took off after the thief.

  We ducked and weaved through the late afternoon foot traffic like we were at football practice. The thief was better than I was at it, though. Much better.

  Oof. Up ahead was a clot of people waiting in front of a trendy-looking shop. We were far too close to the main drags here. Somehow he’d made it through but I wouldn’t.

  A gap in the low wall. I twisted and threw myself that way. Just as I’d hoped. A little wooden dock was running parallel to the fondamente. I pounded down that, leaping over boxes and ropes and other clutter, shouting “Scusi!” to a poor boat tender as I thrust past him.

  There wasn’t a stair on this end. No matter. I threw myself at the wall and clambered over, startling more people. I’d lost ground though. I barely caught sight of him as he ducked into a calle heading away from the water.

  Where was Ezio Auditore when you needed him? I leaned into my run. An opening, maybe a campo, trees everywhere and more gelato-seekers filling the air with raised voices but there was a different tenor to the shouts on my left. I went that way. He was ahead of me, feet echoing in a long sottoportego passing through at least one full building, old brick almost black in the shadow.

  We broke through into another campo. There was only one piazza in Venice, and it was the big one. Again I barely caught sight of him as he changed direction once again. I could see my bag clenched in one fist, strap trailing behind.

  My breaths were coming easy now, the blood moving in the large muscles of my legs, the first tickles of cooling sweat inside my shirt. It felt good to be in action again. I still would have felt better with a chroma-key screen behind me.

  Water again. What a surprise. The water was wider than the rio we’d started at. Might be a full canal, I didn’t know. A larger ponte was before me. I took the stairs up at a full sprint, pushing past startled tourists, and skidded to a stop.

  Which way?

  There. He’d chosen the fondamente instead. This was a wide one, a main way. There was significant water traffic in the canal it ran along. I doubled back and tried to catch up.

  A new commotion. Satz had managed to get ahead of us. He was pushing vigorously through the denser crowds in his direction, shouting in German to try to get them to move out of the way.

  The thief spotted him. Looked back over his shoulder to see where I was. And, almost casually, slapped a pass on the gates at the stop and boarded a just-departing vaporetto.

  No way either of us could make it. The water bus was heading my way but that was worse news. I looked back over my shoulder and there were no other stops. Just the one bridge and then he’d be on the Grand Canal.

  Satz was shouting at one of the charter motorboats, trying to get them to pick him up.

  I had a different idea.

  Back towards the ponte. The vaporetto was out on the water now, engines churning spray as it headed towards the Grand Canal. I jogged back the way I’d come. The engines were in my ears as I hit the steep stairs. Good, because if there was time to think about this I wouldn’t be doing it.

  “Get!” I shouted at some person between me and the rail. Gods. This might not be a bridge of size but it felt a lot taller from up here.

  The white nose of the vaporetto had just poked into view from under the ponte. Well, I was no James Fenimore Cooper Indian. I rolled over the railing, held on for a moment, then dropped.

  Knees buckled when I hit the roof over the main deck space. I rolled through it, just like bailing on a route. Except my climbing gym had thick rubber mats. Well, nothing hurt. This time.

  I crawled on hands and knees towards the front of the boat, ignoring the shouting from below. The thief had made it to the open area at the bow. He turned and looked up, saw me, mouthed the words, “You bitch!”

  And threw my bag into the canal.

  I dove after it.

  At some point I was really going to have to grow up and stop doing things like this. I hit the water hard. It was further than it looked. Kept my mouth firmly shut as I thrashed my way back to the surface. When I popped up the bag was floating near me. Good thing I didn’t have to fish for it! I paddled over and grabbed it and there was a chorus of cheers.

  The vaporetto I’d dove from was still near. I could see my thief, looking smaller than I remembered, pulling in on himself as the other passengers jeered at him. I couldn’t help noticing his hair was as dark and unruly as mine. “Butto salvagente!” one voice rose above the rest, phlegmatic and oddly Russian-sounding. “Butto salvagente!”

  A gondola had already reached me. It was simpler looking than the ones that plied the canals, no upholstered seats or spiffy paint job. I grabbed for the side. As the gondolier helped me in I heard the engines engage and the water bus trundled off to continue its route.

  “Next time, let the purse go,” my gondolier was lecturing me. “You can’t splash about in our canals. It is disrespectful.”

  “Mi scusi,” I said. “I know that’s not enough but that’s all I know. I wish I had the right words to say how very much I would never wish to disrespect this amazing city.”

  “Those words aren’t bad.”

  A distinctive “dee, deedledeedledeedle” siren. The cutest blue jet ski was approaching, blue flashers, helmeted cop and all.

  “And it isn’t mine to let go. A colleague entrusted me with something that has to get back to Athens. I had to save it.”

  “Well,” the gondolier said to that. “Hold on, we’re going to the dock.” The jet ski escorted us, doing s-curves in our wake. “Away from the Polizia.”

  The two officers he had mentioned were still pushing through the crowd when we disembarked. There were a lot of comments following them, and they didn’t sound polite. The cop on the jet ski shouted something. A stout shopkeeper near the front shouted back. Italians were pretty good at the loud voices thing when they wanted to be. My rescuer was deep in a crowd of people congratulating him, shaking his hand, and asking for all the details with dramatic semaphoring.

  “It sounds very exciting,” I sa
id to a young boy sitting at the edge of the water, swinging his legs and humming tuneless along to whatever was in his headphones.

  “They want to arrest you,” he said, not bothering to look up. He hummed some more.

  “Why?”

  He took out one earbud, licked it clean, stuck it back in. “Public nuisance,” he said.

  “Arrest me?” He didn’t respond. I pulled on one earbud. He put a hand on my knee. I pushed the hand off. “Arrest me?” I tried again.

  “Or just give you a big fine.” He licked the other earbud. Made a hawking sound and spat on the ground.

  The shopkeeper wagged his finger at him, then went back to haranguing the cops.

  “Poppa says you did a good thing,” the kid suddenly volunteered. “He says the police never do anything about the Rom.”

  Rom? Romany? Didn’t matter. I’d grown up in Los Angeles. I knew a “those people” word when I heard one.

  “Rom,” the kid said. “Bass Ded says they are pigeons without money.”

  “Pigeons have money?”

  Whatever the kid was listening to came to a good point because he started head-banging, the tuneless humming getting louder. “The pigeons fly in, spreading their shit,” he said sing-song, timing it to the music in his earbuds. “Polizia don’t care, long as Rome gets their bit. Tourist and Rom, they loud and they smell. They and the big-boats. Can all go to hell.”

  Poppa came this way. “E, Polepetto. Basta, basta!” Then to me. “Come, come. The Polizia will go away now.”

  “Um…” I stood. My clothes sloshed.

  “Next time, you throw the Rom in, instead. Now we get the bucket. I kid! You come to my shop, my wife is there, you will wash inside.”

  Yeah. Wash. That water had not looked very clean.

  I didn’t like all the “Rom” stuff I was hearing. But fight one battle at a time. Hell, I didn’t have that much sympathy for my thief. He’d have gotten more from me by selling me a nice belt. The sherd was worthless to him.

  “Katharine Hepburn got an eye infection from the San Barnaba canal and it lasted her the rest of her life,” the kid said suddenly. It was the clearest and most distinct speech I’d heard from him yet.

  “Lead me to that bucket,” I said.

  Venice didn’t do night-life. Not the way I was used to. There wasn’t the competing thunder of dance clubs, there wasn’t the glare of colored lights everywhere, voices weren’t raised to get over the noise and it didn’t look like a fight would be breaking out anytime soon.

  Heck, there weren’t even that many places open. Instead, this was a strolling evening, a laid-back evening of sipping espresso and wandering the back ways and watching the boats pass on the water.

  It was quieter too. The Moors had barely struck the bell high above the city when Venice started quieting down. The streets seemed bare by comparison, now that the pigeons had returned to their great white roosts.

  Even the lighting was more intimate. Sure, the buildings around Piazza San Marco were illuminated. The Rialto Bridge, too, was pale in the light. But most of the light was ground-floor shops and Victorian-looking street lamps. It was a ground-level experience, a people experience.

  I sipped. My latest stunt hadn’t done my knee any favors. Besides, I’d walked enough for one day.

  The duckboards were all up and the Piazza was dry once again. Tides. It had to be tides. Probably that’s what acqua alta meant.

  There had been a metal panel that slid into the door of the shop they’d taken me to. The lower floor was painted with some sort of thick glossy paint but otherwise looked quite ordinary. More Paris Effect. You didn’t get grass huts in modern Africa and I was willing to bet there weren’t a lot of paper walls in Japan. The differences were subtler.

  From what I gathered, the family used to stay upstairs of the shop. Now they rented it. To tourists. It made me start to really wonder what day-to-day was like in streets choked with tourists. It must be like living in the Fisherman’s Wharf area of my hometown. Good luck if you needed groceries or socks; it was all souvenir shops and pizza joints until you got to Bay Street.

  Seeing their back room, talking to them however briefly, had been a too-short glimpse behind the painted walls of Euro-Disney and I treasured it.

  The evening was cooling off. A bit of music was drifting my way. Latin jazz. A bit of that Calypso beat, maybe? It seemed like too much effort to go find it. I was tired. Tired of running, tired of struggling with languages. I wanted to be back in a familiar bed and around the people I knew and back to what little of a personal routine I’d managed to have back home.

  I yawned. There was still too much time to kill. My ship didn’t leave before midnight. I couldn’t even board until ten. But it was getting steadily darker and more quiet and as much as it was romantic and all I was done with that. This wasn’t a time for admiring the water and getting lost in cute little back streets. This was time to get to the terminal and move on.

  I got to my feet. Winced a little. I could find a water cab. Heck, if I wanted to be crazy I could hire a gondola. But I was starting to feel extra guilty about spending Ariadne’s money. So public transit. Which for this particular leg meant a people-mover that apparently dumped you right at the docks.

  Tried not to look back too much. I was starting to feel a real sense of loss. Not for this quiet lovely evening which I needed to leave so I could make sure I made the next connection on my ridiculous odyssey. Not even for the uncertain future of this delicate, quirky survivor of a city, sinking into the seas like a slow-motion Atlantis.

  No, it was sorrow for the naïve, hopeful tourist who had first stepped off a plane in Athens. I had so much to learn still, but I could sense some strange Stephen Crane-like rite of passage occurring.

  Who was the philosopher who said you can never step in the same river twice? Travel changes you. It changes how you see your own world; all the things you took for granted, all the quirks and ways of your own society that you assumed were common and ordinary. And it changed your view of yourself.

  I had to get on that boat. I had to get back home. Here, on the darkened streets of night-time Venice, the thing I was most afraid of is that I might lose me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I AWOKE AMAZINGLY refreshed. The throbbing of the engines was low and pervasive, rising and falling like a great heartbeat. The ship shifted so slowly and smoothly underfoot it almost didn’t seem to be rolling at all. It had all been extremely soothing.

  I freshened up and locked the bag and, after a thought, the hat inside. I was eager to get out and see the sea.

  Okay, sure, I had no illusions. Basically, this was a floating hotel, with all that implied. My cabin was small and could be cleaner and smelled faintly of diesel fuel. The hall or corridor or whatever you were supposed to call it on a ship was narrow, lined with identical doors, your basic hotel decor down to the thin hard-wearing carpet. Back at the Venice docks it had been clear this was more a commuter trip than a romantic cruise. The Queen Parsiphae was a massive brick-like car ferry. The two-leg passengers had to walk up the same sloping ramp as the cars and camper vans.

  But I was on the Adriatic, on an arm of the Mediterranean. The Great Green as the Egyptians had called it. The waters that joined Europe and the East and Africa in one huge meeting of trade and exploration and conquest and war. What history buff could fail to be excited?

  It was surprisingly hard to find deck access. I passed a bar, a gift shop, a lot of seating area with those overstuffed vinyl settings. And windows, at least. And eventually doors.

  The smell of open water struck me first. I breathed in deeply.

  There was a nice stiff headwind, and it was surprisingly cool for this part of the world. The Adriatic gleamed a striking blue. And where our wake stirred it up, a deep haunting navy bordered by a brilliant cyan like expensive Venetian glass. As hard as I looked, I could see no trace of land on either side, but I could see other ships on the water. My guess is the sea lanes ran rig
ht down the middle, and the Adriatic was of course a sea. The basin itself was over a hundred miles across, narrowing to maybe fifty at the mouth, if I remembered my map. How far could you see over open water? Five miles? Twenty? Still not enough.

  Still amazing. The sky was endless, the waves hypnotic.

  Eventually I had to duck inside and eat something. The a la carté restaurant was attractive, the food was not, and the price was as bad as I should have expected. Then back out.

  The pool at the stern was covered up, and the bar wasn’t set up. It wasn’t exactly the height of the season. That did mean I had the chairs and the windbreak mostly to myself. I curled into a chair and got back to my reading. Yeah, I’d finally found the time to start reading The Odyssey. And I loved this new translation. And I totally agreed with Spooky, too.

  So, sure, I did have a grudging admiration for the Wily Odysseus. He had such a dogged determination. No matter what the universe threw at him (well, mostly what the callous and fickle gods threw at him) he kept going.

  And he was always planning. Always paranoid, always prepared for the worst. Well, duh. He was a mortal man in a world in which every other hero was the son of some god or other (usually Zeus. That guy got around).

  Basically, he was The Batman. No super powers, so you bet he was crazy-prepared.

  The fun character, though, was Athena. Sure, she was as destructive as any other god. But she just seemed to be having so much fun with her disguises and her schemes. Every time you turned around she was there in some other guise. A random urchin, an old lady, a friend, Telemachus himself when she needed to get a crew together for the kid and couldn’t count on his having inherited his father’s silver tongue.

  There was a conversation somewhere late in the poem where Athena, in disguise, meets Odysseus in disguise. He immediately starts into one of his epic lies instead of explaining who is really is and why he is there. She stops him, reluctantly, and reveals her true identity. Without missing a beat, Odysseus starts in on another epic lie.

  That man didn’t trust anyone.