078 The Phantom Of Venice (13 page)

Authors: Carolyn Keene

Like fleeting shadows, they moved swiftly toward
the doorway of the plant office. One was a woman; one of the two men held a gun.

At the crucial moment, somebody’s foot scuffed a piece of glass and sent it tinkling across the floor. Pietro slammed the phone back in its cradle and whirled to face the doorway.

“Don’t try anything foolish!” warned the gunman. Neither his accent nor his words were Italian.

By the light from the office, Nancy could see the faces of the three intruders. The other man was Rubini, the Falcone glassworks manager.

The woman was Katrina van Holst!

“You know what we are after, Pietro, so let us not waste time!” she said crisply. “Give it to us, or you will never leave here alive!”

“It’s gone!” Pietro snarled back. “Don’t ask me where! Some thieving rat snatched it while your thugs were holding me prisoner! Maybe your stooge Rubini took it! Why don’t you ask him?!”

As the furious exchange went on, Don Madison suddenly moved forward on tiptoe. The attention of Katrina and her two companions was concentrated totally on the man in the office, and their angry voices covered any sound of footsteps.

Suddenly Don lunged toward the gunman’s back! One arm clamped around the man’s neck in a choking grip. His other hand grabbed the intruder’s wrist.

Instantly a violent struggle erupted! Pietro rushed at Rubini and staggered him with a fist to the mouth.
Nancy grabbed Katrina’s long blond hair from behind and tugged with both hands till the Dutch woman screamed.

The gunman dropped his weapon as Don twisted his wrist. A moment later Don sent him flying through the air with a martial-arts body throw. He slammed against the wall and landed on the floor in a stunned heap.

Meanwhile, Don had snatched up the gun and taken charge of the situation. “Hold it—everybody! You three—Katrina, Rubini, you there on the floor—line up with your backs to the wall, and keep your hands in plain sight. Pietro, old pal—I think it’s time you did some talking.”

“May I say something?” said Nancy.

Don threw her a quizzical grin. “Why not? It was your game plan that brought all these characters out of the woodwork and into the open. Go right ahead.”

“Is this what you were looking for, Mr. Rinaldi?” she said and plucked the rainbow glass paperweight out of her shoulder bag.

The expression on Pietro’s face was the only answer needed. “Do you know what you are holding there?” he replied in a taut voice that was husky with emotion.

“Drop your gun, Madison!” a voice suddenly broke in. “And if you value your life, do not look around!”

Nancy didn’t have to. She knew it was Gianni Spinelli. He must have followed Katrina and her two companions, while they in turn were trailing Pietro.

“Is he bluffing, Pietro?” Don gritted.

The master glassblower shook his head. “No—unfortunately. Better do as he says.”

Don let the gun fall to the floor.

“Kick it this way,
grullo!”
Gianni ordered. Turning to Nancy, he added, “And you,
cara,
hand me your pretty little glass egg!”

“Okay, if you insist,” said Nancy—and threw the paperweight in his face!

Her move caught Gianni completely unprepared. He jerked his head and flung up an arm to block the glass missile.

Don was on him like a tiger, staggering him with a right cross and kicking the gun out of his hand in a single lightning one-two combination!

The rainbow paperweight lay on the floor, cracked in two. Something was protruding from one of the broken pieces.

• • •

Much later that night, Nancy, Don, and Pietro faced Carson Drew, Tara Egan and the Marchese del Falcone in the drawing room of the palace.

Pietro had just finished telling his story. Five years ago in Morocco, he and Rolf Egan had been approached by an I.D.B., or illegal diamond buyer, named Hans Aacht. Over drinks in a Moorish cafe, he described how the world’s diamond business was tightly controlled by a single cartel, whose tough security force kept watch over all diamond mining on
the African continent. But Aacht was sure he could build up a steady trade in precious stones from native prospectors—if Rolf and Pietro would grubstake him with a few thousand dollars.

For a long time, the scheme yielded little profit. Then one day Aacht showed up in Venice with a huge raw diamond worth half a million dollars. His scheme had finally paid off with a tremendous jackpot!

Unfortunately he had also run afoul of a deadly gang called the
Diamante
Network, which had close ties with the Mafia and considered international diamond smuggling its private domain. They wanted Aacht’s life or his huge gemstone.

Aacht had slipped the diamond to Rolf, who in turn passed it to Pietro. Rolf disappeared into a Venetian canal. Pietro also disappeared, supposedly into the hands of professional kidnapers, but actually into the clutches of the Diamante Network, bossed by a beautiful but ruthless woman named Katrina van Holst.

“What about the police?” Tara asked Pietro. “Won’t
they
be after you and Hans Aacht for taking the diamond out of Africa?”

Pietro shook his head. “No, because we’ve committed no crime. It’s only the diamond cartel and their security force who try to stop outsiders from trading with native prospectors, as Hans did.”

He explained that Hans had feared the Diamante gang might seize Tara and use her as a hostage
to force Pietro into surrendering the diamond. But Nancy’s clever scheme had forced their hand and tricked them into revealing themselves.

They had, at first, hired Gianni as a spy to help them find Rolf, but out of greed he had tried to grab the diamond for himself.

The apron clue, which Gianni had passed on to the gang, had aroused Katrina’s interest in the Faberge egg, so she had helped her gangster gunhand enter the palace disguised as a masquerade party guest. He was the one who had turned out the lights and filched the egg, which, much to her disgust, had proved to contain only counterfeit gems.

“An amazing feat of detection, my dear Nancy!” beamed Francesco del Falcone.

“Now, if only you could find some trace of my father!” Tara added wistfully.

“You’ve already done that yourself, Tara,” Nancy responded lightly.

“Done what?”

“Found a trace of your father. Don’t you recall those wet footprints you noticed on our bedroom carpet?”

Tara’s eyes became huge. “Oh, Nancy! You’re not really implying they could’ve been made by Daddy’s ghost?”

“Why not pinch him and find out?”

“Pinch
him?!” Tara stared in puzzlement at the teenage sleuth.

“Sure,” said Nancy. “There’s a cellar dungeon where the Marchese’s ancestor hid out that has very wet floors, so the tracks could even have been made by a real flesh-and-blood human. In fact, here comes one right now you might try pinching!”

A tall, bearded blond man had just walked into the room. Tara sprang up with a glad cry, and the two hugged each other so tightly that it seemed as though they were trying to make sure they would never be parted again.

“I tried to let you know I was alive, dear,” Rolf Egan told his daughter, “first by slipping that shell into Nancy’s suitcase, and then by playing ghost.”

“I—I don’t understand,” said Tara in happy bewilderment. “You mean you’ve been hiding out here at the palazzo all the time?”

“Yes—ever since I disappeared. Pietro knew about the palace dungeon, so he sneaked me in there one night with Domenic’s help. Domenic’s known him all his life, you see. We figured I could hide out there till the Diamante gang got off our backs.”

Rolf Egan went on to explain that the first time he tried to see Tara at night, she had screamed before he had a chance to take off his false face, leaving him no choice but to flee. The second time he played ghost, he had tried to calm her by whispering her name, but the effect on Tara was still so terrifying that she again screamed in fear.

The ghostly legend of the Marchese’s ancestor had
first given Nancy the idea that there might be a secret hiding place at the palazzo. The shell and the ghost calling Tara by name had, together, strengthened Nancy’s hunch that Rolf Egan might still be alive and hiding out in the palace.

When he and Tara finally let go of each other, Rolf Egan walked over to clasp Nancy Drew’s hand gratefully. She showed him the broken paperweight. A huge raw diamond was sticking out of one of the halves.

“It’s a shame such a beautiful work of art has to be ruined just to extract the gemstone. But as somebody once remarked,
To make an omelet, you have to break an egg!”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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