The Kaisho (25 page)

They broke abruptly out onto a wide
fondamenta.
To their right were row houses and shops, to their left a wrought-iron railing beyond which was a
rio,
crossed by two small stone bridges.

“This was the reason the
campo
and the convent were so well fortified,” Celeste said as they went down
the fondamenta.
“You can’t find another entrance to the church or the convent from the
campo.”

Perhaps halfway down the
fondamenta
they came to an old doorway in a stucco building. The sign above read:
SCUOLA
ELEMENTARE
ARMANDO
DIAZ
. After looking down the entire length of the
fondamenta,
Celeste drew him through this open portal.

They went through a stinking
sottoportego,
emerging on the other side into a grassy courtyard faced on three sides by fairly modern brown-brick buildings. The sounds of children could be heard behind the facades.

Celeste led him through a courtyard dotted with enormous zelkova trees and brightly painted swings, tricycles, and other paraphernalia of small children. Beyond this innocuous facade was a remarkable surprise: the rear of the San Zaccaria.

Celeste took him into the basement of the oldest of the brown-brick buildings. It smelled of ashes, and urine. At the far end of a large boiler room was a wooden door, scarred and ancient. Celeste pushed it open, and Nicholas could immediately smell
rio
water. He could hear the squeal of rats, see the ruby eyes in the dark.

The sound of their soles echoed off stone walls that Nicholas was sure were very old. They seemed to be in a network of tunnels.

This theory Celeste confirmed: “The doges of Venice were a paranoid lot. They were made so by circumstance, I’m afraid. So they had these tunnels installed as a measure of security for their entrances and exits from San Zaccaria. Centuries later, the school was built on the bedrock just above, under the direction of the San Zaccaria nuns, who did not want part of their tradition destroyed.”

The dark air was alive and moving with stone dust and history. Ahead of him, Nicholas could see the bright wash of Celeste’s hair as if it were a lamp leading him down the corridor of time.

The tunnel ended at a small wooden door bound by old, studded iron bands. She gave a soft knock in a curious rhythm, and almost immediately, the door swung inward. She slipped quickly inside, pulled Nicholas in after her. The door swung shut.

A torch flared and Nicholas saw a small woman in a nun’s habit. Celeste spoke to her rapidly and softly in Venetian dialect so that even if he were within earshot, Nicholas would not have understood the conversation. At length, the nun signaled with the torch, silently bid them follow her up a winding flight of stone stairs, worn to shallow arcs in the centers of the treads.

“Where are we?”

Celeste turned to him. “You wanted a mirror. I’ve given you one.” She nodded. “Over here.”

She led him to a shuttered window made of leaded stained glass. She set the torch in a wall sconce, pointed through the colored glass of the window. “Look. The
campo
where we just were.”

Nicholas looked out and down, and indeed, he could make out the front of the convent.

“The power of paranoia; the imperative of Venetian politics. It was all like quicksand,” Celeste said. “Some of the predecessors of those doges I spoke of never returned to their palazzo, having been assassinated on their way from vespers at just this spot you’re looking at. The Venetians, when aroused, could be astonishingly bloodthirsty.”

Like everything else in Venice, Nicholas thought, the darkness mingled with the light.

As he continued to peer down into the
campo,
he saw a man appear. He was dressed as any modern-day Venetian might be, except that he wore an old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat that threw deep shadow across his face. From his elevated position, Nicholas could not make out his features.

“Is this our pursuer?” Celeste asked.

Nicholas watched as the man moved carefully across the
campo.
His hands moved expertly over the doorways and windows he passed, checking on whether they were locked or open. So naturally did he do this that anyone casually watching would think nothing of his movements.

“That’s our man,” Nicholas said. “Come on.”

They went back down the stairs, emerging into the gloom of the ground-floor anteroom. Nicholas moved to the door, put his hand on the wrought-iron lock. Now it was time to pursue the pursuer.

Together, they left their mirror, traversing the tunnel, the schoolyard, heading back down the
fondamenta,
away from the convent.

Up ahead, he could see the shadow of the man as he cautiously emerged from the
campo,
moved through the maze of streets. He was very good, Nicholas observed, methodical and careful not to overlook any possibility. More than once, he used glass surfaces to check the route behind him. The first time he did this, Nicholas was almost caught off guard, but he managed to flatten them against a recessed doorway just in time.

It became easier as he began to get a sense of the man’s MO, but at a certain point it would get very difficult indeed. When the tick found that he had permanently lost his quarry, he would cease to be deliberate and would get himself back to his base as quickly as possible in order to give whoever was running him the bad news. At that point, Nicholas knew, they would have to be very quick as well as a little bit lucky in order to stay with him without being detected.

The tick took them back into the Piazza San Marco itself, filled now with tour groups and children running with their hands full of bread crumbs, simultaneously attracting and scattering the platoons of pigeons that clattered and cooed across the square.

The man passed beneath an arch just to the right of the Torre dell’Orologio, the clocktower at the northern edge, and plunged into the narrow, crowded streets of the Mercerie. This shopping district, where once only the fantastic Venetian fabrics and dress goods were sold, twisted and turned all the way from the Piazza San Marco to the Rialto. Now it contained shops and restaurants of every description.

The light was dim here after the sun-splashed openness of the piazza and possessed a mysterious quality, as if filtered by the gauzy veils of time. Even the shops of ultramodern designers such as Gianfranco Ferre and Franco Zancan had about them a timeless quality.

The tick stopped at an antiques shop, stood just outside its open doorway, chatting with the woman owner. Nicholas grabbed Celeste, drawing her quickly into the recesses of the shop of a clothes designer, the Venetian Roberta di Camerino. There he directed Celeste to a display of fine woolen dresses in the Venetian colors of sea aquamarine and sky indigo, while he glanced through a corner window at the antiques shop across the street.

“He’s stopped to make certain he isn’t being followed,” Nicholas whispered to her. “This man is very clever.”

A chicly clothed saleswoman was doing her best to get Celeste to try on one of the dresses.

“Do you recognize him?” Celeste asked.

“I haven’t gotten a good look at his face,” Nicholas said as Celeste politely waved the saleswoman away. “We’re always behind him, and he’s keeping well to the shadows.

“It would be helpful to see his face,” Nicholas said thoughtfully. He extended his psyche, feeling the soft beat against
kokoro,
the center, the heart of the universe.

A sudden gust of wind seemed to beat up against the tick, lifting the bottom of his jacket. It took his hat, swirled it off his head, making it tumble crown first into the street.

And there was the face: bronze skin, oriental features, but a mixture; not a pure Japanese face, the hard lines softened, perhaps, by a bit of Khmer or Burmese or Tibetan blood, the lips firm; a mole on his lip at the corner of his mouth. A memorable face, nonetheless, at least as far as Nicholas was concerned.

Without hesitation, the tick bent to retrieve his hat, snatching it out of the gutter. He was extended for a moment, and Nicholas saw the curvature of muscle and sinew in shoulder and arm, the absolute lack of fat along waist and pelvis, no tension in the face, none at all. And then he had straightened up, the hat securely back on his head.

“Come on.”

The tick was on the move again, weaving them through the fabric of the city. They followed him down a street, saw him disappear around a sharp turn to the left. When they reached it, they found themselves in a tiny courtyard of stone and twining bougainvillea, at the far end of which was the entrance to a restaurant. They went into what appeared to be the plushly appointed dining car of a train. A gleaming mahogany bar took up the left-hand side of the room, while three intimate banquettes were arrayed on their right.

“This place has another entrance,” Celeste said urgently.

They hurried down the passageway, through the small, velvet-covered anteroom to the restaurant, then through double doors onto another street.

“There!” Nicholas said, pointing to their right. They broke into a sprint, bolting down the narrow street.

“Christ, I think he’s headed toward the Rialto,” Celeste said after a time. “That’s bad news for us. There’s always such a crush of people around the bridge we’ll stand a good chance of losing him.”

Some moments later, as she had predicted, they broke out onto the quay surrounding the famous covered bridge, until the nineteenth century the only one over the Grand Canal. From its inception, the Ponte di Rialto had been filled with merchants’ shops, and with its confluence of foreign goods and tongues more resembled an Arab souk than it did a Western bridge.

They caught sight of the tick, and Nicholas ran down toward the
rio,
Celeste right behind him. They wove their way along the
fundamenta
just in time to see him step onto the
imbarcadero
as a No. 1
vaporetto
bound in the direction of the Arsenate nosed alongside the dock.

Nicholas and Celeste raced down the quay as he boarded the
vaporetto
along with a host of other people, and they pushed their way onto the
imbarcadero,
sprinting the last several feet onto the boat just as it was about to depart.

Nicholas kept them close to the side of the boat so that they would not have much space to cover should he get off quickly. The
vaporetto
passed the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, an enormous palace of 160 rooms, now the central Post Office, that was originally used by the Tedeschi family as their warehouse and a kind of hotel for visiting members of other merchant families.

They were headed toward the Volta del Canale, the great curve where the Grand Canal begins to bend back upon itself. There, the four Palazzi Mocenigo sit, commanding the Grand Canal as befitted a family that gave Venice seven doges. Celeste spoke to him of these bits of Venetian history as they pretended to be tourist and guide, enjoying a planned itinerary.

The tick swung off just as the
vaporetto
nosed into the Sant’Angelo station, and Nicholas and Celeste broke through the crowd, headed down the
imbarcadero
after him. They passed along the facade of yet another palazzo, this one more traditional than many others Celeste had pointed out.

The tick hurried around the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli, down a narrow alley, then into another street. There, a second palazzo sat, smaller and older, and he pulled open a side door, disappeared inside.

They waited a moment. The seconds edged by, and Nicholas could feel Celeste’s nervousness as she stood close beside him in the shadows. The facade of the palazzo was brick over which traditional Venetian stucco of powdered brick and marble sand in a foundation of lime paste produced the rich rubiate hue so typical of the city.

At length, he signed to her, and they edged up to the door. He put his ear to it, listened for a moment, but heard nothing. What was waiting for them on the other side? Nicholas took a deep breath, pulled the door open.

They went inside, found themselves in a small courtyard filled with roses and a gnarled weeping willow, its thick green trunk looking like a marble column. In one corner, a lion of Istrian stone watched them with implacable objectivity.

Nicholas heard a soft sound from over their heads. Looking up, he saw an open loggia, not much different from the one in the Doges’ Palace. An outside staircase of worn stone and red Verona marble surmounted a series of stilted arches inlaid with complex Byzantine reliefs. The staircase led up to the
piano nobile,
which seemed suspended between sky and earth by rows of slender Byzantine pillars.

At the top of the staircase, they emerged onto the loggia. The floor was composed of tiles of yellow, burnt orange, and pale green set in patterns that echoed its Byzantine predecessors. The inner wall was stucco, painted the color of buttered sweet potatoes. Opposite, the delicate dark-green
verde antica
stone columns were carved into spiral confections.

They looked about; they seemed alone.

Celeste stood very close to him, and he could feel a slight tremor go through her. They had come up onto a section of the loggia that had no doors or windows, a curious feature in a palazzo that, in the Veneto-Byzantine style, should have been more open.

They headed down the length of the loggia. Beyond the copse of helical columns on their left, the trees of the courtyard stirred in a faint breeze, heavier now. The sky was clouding up; a pearlescent light suffused the loggia, devoid of shadow or the kind of orientation sunlight provided.

They continued around a corner. They could see the wedge of a
rio
through a gap in the low buildings. The water had turned dark, a depthless gray that seemed to suck the light out of the afternoon. The roar of a
motoscafo
lifted and died, leaving them in silence.

Then they came upon the door, a heavy oaken affair with brass hardware weathered to a sea-green patina. It was the lone aperture in the stucco wall, and this continued lack of windows became all the more curious.