The Thief of Venice (16 page)

But it wasn't. When she wrote LUCIA on the side of her paper boat, they were puzzled for a minute, but then at once they began fighting over Guido's boat, which had won unfairly because he sank Regina's with a stone.

She would be patient. Lucia was an optimist. The world had not come to an end. Eventually things would straighten themselves out.

In the meantime, while she waited for something to happen, there was nothing to do. There was a tedious sameness to every day. With her wraparound dark glasses and loose hair, she felt disguised enough to walk as far as the Strada Nuova for a newspaper, careful to choose times of day when the rising water was not a problem. She didn't dare go farther. She didn't dare show herself in public places where she might run into people she knew.

Longingly Lucia read the notice in
Il Gazzettino
about a concert in the great monastic Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. A chorus and soloists from the Conservatory of Padua were to be accompanied by the local Orchestra di Venezia, musicians decked out in eighteenth-century costume.

She wished she could go. She wanted to hear arias and choruses from one of Monteverdi's Venetian operas and from oratorios by Handel and Hayden. There would even be a sumptuous chorus from Bach's
Saint Matthew Passion
.

On the night of the concert Lucia went to bed early. As soon as she closed her eyes a fragmentary vision from last month came back without her bidding, the day when that crazy man had walked into her office with his two ridiculous proposals. Like a constantly rewound piece of tape, the vision appeared and reappeared.

He would walk in and put his hands on her desk and say that insane thing, and then a moment later, after the tape had rewound itself, he would walk in just as gallantly and say it again. And then again.
 

*33*

Homer Kelly had nothing against music. In fact he liked music, on the whole. And he had heard some of this music before.

How could he ever forget the performance of Handel's
Messiah
in Harvard's Memorial Hall, with its wild interruption? Of course it had been Bach's
Saint John Passion
, not the
Saint Matthew
, that he had heard with Mary in the Church of the Commonwealth in Boston, but that event had been insane too, because the entire audience had narrowly escaped being crushed to death by a collapsing vault. In Homer's experience exalted music was often accompanied by staggering climaxes of catastrophe or joy.

But there were no astonishing interruptions this evening in the enormous spaces of the monastic Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari during the performance of selections from the sacred music of Hayden and Handel, Monteverdi and Bach. The lofty vaults stayed put. No long-dead ghost appeared beyond the rood screen to bring the entire audience to its feet, to topple the bass viols and entangle the music stands of the second violins. Tonight the several parts of the program followed one another serenely.

Sam Bell sat with Mary and Homer on folding chairs between the old choir stalls, listening, staring up at the same time at the painting over the altar, Titian's
Assumption of the Virgin
. Buoyed up on clouds and supported by the thrust of the springy bellies of her attendant cherubs, she seemed to be lifting her hands in wonder at the chorus from the
Saint Matthew Passion
.

It was the wild mob scene near the end, with all the citizens of Jerusalem shouting at Pilate,
"Lass ihn kreuzigen, lass ihn kreuzigen."

Homer stuck his elbow into Sam's side, and muttered, "What the hell are they saying?"

"Ssshhh, Homer," whispered Mary.

Sam gave Homer a bitter sidelong glance and translated softly,
"Let him be crucified."

"Oh," said Homer, and for a moment he kept still, but when the chorus shouted something else,
"Sein Blut komme uber uns und unsere Kinder,"
he nudged Sam again. "Blood, what's that they're singing about blood?"

Sam muttered it under his breath, "His blood be on us and on our children. Shut up, Homer."

"Oh, right."

"Please!"
Someone was leaning forward from the row of seats behind them, hissing in Homer's ear, "Would you kindly pipe down?
Some
of us are trying to hear the
music
."

It was the bishop of Seven Oaks, acting as spokesman for his delegation of music lovers from the British Isles.

Homer squirmed around and saw the four glowering British faces, and perceived at once that he had been a boor. "Oh, sorry, sorry." He hunched his head apologetically down into his shoulders and turned back to the chorus.

But the shouting had stopped. For a moment the high vaults rang with the echo—
Kinder, Kinder
—and then the fiddlers and flutists lowered their instruments and mopped their brows and the singers filed out. It was all over.

Gasping, emotionally frazzled, Mary and Homer staggered out of their seats and wandered around the huge church, while Sam guided them to more masterpieces of Venetian painting. They could hardly take them in. They were suffering from something they had experienced in Florence, aesthetic overload.

Rising against one wall were reliquaries like the ones in the Treasury of Saint Mark, containing miscellaneous holy bits of bone. Sam gave them a contemptuous wave of his arm, and they headed for home.

It was true that there had been no collapse of the high brick vaulting, no astonishing apparition disrupting the music. And yet something alarming and climactic had happened, although Homer was not yet aware of it. A crack had appeared in his mind. Later on it would produce a mighty fall of rock.
 

*34*

Once again it was raining. In the Hotel Danieli a lavish morning tea was spread before the bishop of Seven Oaks and his lady and the member of Parliament for the Channel Islands and his wife. There were sofas and tapestried chairs, silver teapots and damask napkins, tea wagons with cakes and scones and raspberry jam.

Everything within the hotel was perfectly satisfactory. Outside, it was not. Water slopped over the edge of the lagoon and slipped across the pavement to the very door of the hotel.

The bishop, Arthur Cluff-Luffter, was accustomed to speaking with authority. "You know, we don't have to stay here. There are other hotels in this city."

"But won't the management be angry?" said Louise Alderney, wife of Tertius Alderney, the member of Parliament. "Aren't we committed here to a full week?"

"Oh, we may have to pay an extra day in apology, but it's not like a contract in law."

Then the bishop leaned forward, waving a cupcake. "I know an excellent alternative, the Hotel Flora. Everybody recommends the Flora."

"But is it on higher ground?" said his wife shrewdly. "That's the important thing. It's all that really matters."

The bishop popped the cupcake into his mouth and whipped out a map showing the distribution of high water. He consulted it gravely, changing one pair of spectacles for another. Then he folded the map and shook his head. "Sorry, chaps, it won't do. It's an island surrounded by water."

"Our big mistake was the decision to come in November," said the MP, frowning at the bishop, who had been at fault.

"Oh, it doesn't really matter," said Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter generously, throwing herself back in her chair. "I can write my novel anywhere. It's all in my head."

"But, Elizabeth," said Louise Alderney, "they say the water is rising every day. It's going to get worse and worse. Perhaps we should all go home."

"Nonsense, Louise," said Elizabeth. "Where's your fighting spirit? Don't be so timid." She raised her fist in a gallant gesture. "Let us splash on."

"Oh, if only I'd brought my wellies," said Louise.
 

The Piazza Council was not as accepting of the current state of
acqua alta
in the city of Venice as was Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter. At their second urgent meeting in the Hall of the Council of Ten, three more members of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova showed up. They sat together at one end of the table and complained loudly about their bad press, when of course everyone knew perfectly well that the delay in the construction of the mobile barriers in the lagoon was not their fault at all, it was the fault of the City Council.

Angry looks were directed at the other end of the table, where the mayor sat between Sam Bell and Acting Procurator Tommaso Bernardi. Behind the mayor a door opened on the staircase where wretched citizens accused by the Council of Ten had once been led away to prison cells. Obviously the Consorzio Venezia Nuova would have liked to enjoy the same condemnatory power.

They glowered at the mayor and one of them spoke his mind. "It is the City Council which has prevented the construction of the floodgates at the ports of Lido, Malamocco, and Chioggia. Our hydraulic model at Voltabarozzo has been proven to work. When can we expect the permission and the funding to begin in earnest?"

"Unfortunately," growled the mayor, "your hydraulic model does not take into account all the complexities of the situation."

It was a typical long-standing argument. Sam broke in to plead for practical temporary measures to protect the piazza right now, because, after all, it was no joke. When the worst of the high water came rushing into the square, there would be injury to the foundations of their grand historic buildings and flooding of their ground floors, accompanied by all the bad effects of moisture on walls and ceilings and precious works of art, including the rare old books in the Biblioteca Marciana.

"At least we can be grateful that there are fewer tourists at this time of year," said Father Urbano, thinking of his summertime nightmare, the endless lines of people shuttling through the basilica. "It's amazing that these latecomers are willing to walk on the platforms and wait their turn to come in, even in heavy rain."

"Well, you can't blame them," said the superintendent of Venetian fine arts and history. "They've flown halfway around the world, and by God they're going to see everything they've been promised."

"And of course everything they've been promised," said Sam sarcastically, "is in our part of the city. Which just happens to be at one of the lowest points in Venice. Why don't the tourist agencies tell them about other attractions—the Scuola di San Rocco, for instance, and the Naval Museum?"

Another official body was represented at the meeting, L'Ufficio Idrografico del Magistrate alle Acque. "We will of course," promised their spokesman, "send our usual daily faxes forecasting the heights and times of
acqua alta
."

Gloom prevailed. On the way into the building they had all experienced the results of the rising water. They had threaded their way into the meeting through masses of tourists mincing along the duckboards into San Marco and the Ducal Palace, and through the throngs crowding the arcades of the Procuratie Vecchie, the Procuratie Nuove, the Museo Correr, and the Libreria di Sansovino.

"One finds it so difficult to get into one's office," complained Signor Bernardi, the delegate from the headquarters of the procurators of San Marco.

One's office
, thought Sam angrily. It wasn't
one's
office, it was
Lucia's
office.

"Well, anyway," said the dejected mayor, "does anyone have a suggestion for dealing with the coming disaster?"

"I do," said Signor Bernardi, raising a soft white hand. "I suggest we set up blockades at all the entrances to the piazza and allow only a certain number of people in at a time."

Sam was stunned. How fascinating! He had already admitted Bernardi into his private Society of Bastards, but simple admission was surely not enough. Sam stopped listening to the experts and began thinking up hierarchies of honor—Bastards Simple and Complex, Evil and Malevolent, Filthy and Abominable. Which one was right for Bernardi?

Leaving the meeting, Sam was surprised to find that his appetite had come back. He was actually hungry for lunch.
 

*35*

The siren went off very early, five blasts ten seconds apart.
High water today
, hooted the siren.
Put on your boots!
Mary had no boots, but she didn't care. She had a date with Richard very early. It was as though they could no longer bear to be apart.

"What's that noise?" said Homer drowsily, lifting his head from the pillow.

"It means high water today," murmured Mary, heading for the shower. Homer went back to sleep.

Before creeping out of the apartment Mary left him a note—
Out all day. Love, M.

He wouldn't like it, but at least he wouldn't call the police.

Henchard had prepared the way. The apartment on the Rio della Sensa was grubby, but he couldn't very well take Mary Kelly to his own house, and he certainly couldn't use Giovanna's place on Calle de la Madonna, because Vittoria and Giovanna were squatting in them like toads.

He met Mary at the San Marcuola vaporetto stop, welcoming her with a passionate embrace. Then he took her hand and propelled her along the zigzagging streets of Cannaregio, through Campo Santa Fosca, where there was a statue, but Mary didn't ask whose it was, because they were not talking, only walking very quickly, making a left turn, crossing a bridge, a second bridge, a third, a fourth.

Tintoretto's house, thought Mary, stepping off the last bridge into two inches of water. Together they splashed along the
fondamenta
beside the Rio della Sensa. It was no longer a muddy gulf but a full and brimming canal. Richard did not slow down as they passed the house with the sign on the wall—

JAC. ROBUSTIQUI TINTORETTO DOMUM VETUSTAM

He stopped five or six doors away.

It was where she had first seen him. She had been taking pictures and he had been standing there and she had asked him if Tintoretto's house was open to visitors and he had said no. That was the beginning.

She watched as he fumbled with his key and opened the door. Willingly she followed him up the stairs. They were both overwhelmed.