“What?”
“I just overheard a conversation; I know where we’re going.”
“Where?”
“Some place called the Isola di San Michele. That’s the third reference to Saint Michael that’s come our way.”
“Maybe it’s an omen,” Holliday said and smiled.
“You’re making fun of me,” said the nun, color rising in her cheeks.
“I’m making a joke,” said Holliday, exasperated.
“At my expense.”
“Don’t be so sensitive,” said Holliday. “We don’t have time for it. There’s a dead kid back there with a hole in his head, remember?”
Sister Meg lapsed into silence. Overhead the rattling of the rain on the canvas canopy slowed and then stopped altogether. As quickly as the storm had come it vanished, the clouds rolling back and letting in broad, slanting beams of sunlight. On their left the canal widened considerably and a forest of masts appeared—a large marina, and beyond it the sudden sweep of the Venice ship channel between the islands of the archipelago and the mainland.
“Sacca della Misericordia,”
said the tired man in the sailor’s hat, still slumped on his stool.
“Sacca,”
said Holliday. “What the hell is a
sacca
, a bag of some kind? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Cove, I think,” said Sister Meg. “Cove of the sheltering virgin.”
The man in the hat pointed to an island to their right about half a mile out into the broad ship channel. “Isola di San Michele,
una isola del muerte
.”
Holliday squinted. The island looked almost artificial, a wall surrounding it with towers at the corners. A prison?
“Cimetero di Napoleon,”
the tour guide explained.
“It’s a cemetery,” said Holliday. “We’re going on a tour of a cemetery.”
13
At one time in its history the Isola di San Michele had actually been two islands divided by a canal. During Napoleon’s brief occupation of Venice he decreed, quite rightly, that the mainland cemeteries were unsanitary, their swampy “vapors” almost certainly the cause of the endless rounds of cholera and plague epidemics that regularly visited the tiny republic on the shore of the Adriatic. If there was one thing Napoleon was good at, it was cemeteries. He’d moved dozens of local cemeteries during the reconstruction of imperial Paris and he did the same thing in Venice.
Thousands of bodies were exhumed, packed in ossuary boxes and taken to the islands. The canal was filled in, making the two islands into one, and a wall was built around the entire perimeter.
Within a few years new burials took precedence over the old and special funeral gondolas plied the waters between the city and the island with the regularity of a bus route. Napoleon’s prim, gardenlike cemetery with its parks, lines of tall trees and statuary became a cluttered slum of headstones and monuments that ranged from the simple and plain to the ornately vulgar.
Over time the “Island of the Dead” attained a certain romantic cachet and it became the final destination for a broad spectrum of the famous and the infamous, from Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet; Ezra Pound, the exiled American poet; Igor Stravinsky, the composer; and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, the dance impresario and founder of the Ballets Russe. A little more than two hundred years from its beginnings the island had apparently now become a tourist attraction.
The boat edged around to the near side of the island and a small wharf. With the sun shining brightly out of a clearing sky, the passengers obediently trudged off the barge and headed through a gate in the wall that led to the cemetery.
“Now what?” Sister Meg asked.
“We have to get to the mainland,” said Holliday as they followed some stragglers along a broad gravel pathway. The cemetery had been subdivided into immense neat squares, each square crammed with hundreds of headstones, new and old. From the looks of things there were only a few real mourners; the rest were tourists taking photographs and peering at inscriptions.
“I think the tour is heading back to the city when we’re finished here. I heard people talking about getting to the hotel in time for dinner.”
“There has to be another way off the island,” said Holliday. “They’re almost certain to have found the kid by now.”
“It looked like there was another little dock farther along the wall,” suggested Meg. “Maybe we can find someone to rent us a boat or something.”
The path they were on ended at the façade of San Michele in Isola, an early Renaissance church fitted into one corner of the island. There was a redbrick cloister attached to one side of the church. Sandaled, dark-robed Franciscan monks were tending the flower beds around the church. More Franciscans, thought Holliday, the male counterparts to the Poor Clare nuns of the St. Agnes convent in Prague. A Franciscan conspiracy? That was right up there with
The Da Vinci Code
on the religious conspiracy paranoia scale. The Vatican might be a hotbed of conspiracy, but all of them were inevitably and invariably about money.
He shook the feeling off and looked for a way around the church. In the far corner, against the brick wall of the cemetery, they found a simple wooden door. Checking to see if anyone was watching, Holliday gently tried the latch. The door creaked open on rusty hinges. Just beyond the doorway he caught the ripe smell of rotting wood and seaweed.
“Come on,” he said, and stepped through the doorway.
They found themselves standing on a narrow breakwater. The only thing between them and the dark waters of the ship channel was a row of tarred beams creating an artificial barrier against erosion.
To their right was the rear façade of the church, to the left a small brick boathouse. In front of the boathouse was an old cabin cruiser that looked almost homemade—sheets of plywood painted flat, robin’s egg blue for the stubby hull, with more painted plywood for a simple deckhouse.
The tired-looking craft was powered by a big Mercury outboard clamped to the frail-looking transom. The boat was hugely overpowered. An engine that size at full throttle would tear itself off the transom. The name on the stern identified the ramshackle boat as the
Casanova III
and its home port as Venice. There were half a dozen long fishing poles scattered on the roof of the deckhouse, and the afterdeck itself was cluttered with more fishing equipment, most of it obviously untended for a long time. A wooden five-spoked wheel was positioned on the cabin bulkhead and a set of controls was bolted to the port gunwale. A narrow door led into the cabin proper.
“Our chariot awaits,” said Holliday.
“Where’s the owner?” Meg asked. “We can’t just steal it.” She paused. “Can we?”
“I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Holliday. He went quickly along the narrow sea-wall and jumped down into the boat. There were bow and stern lines looped around cast iron rings set into the blackened, railway-tie-sized beams. “Cast off the lines,” he said.
Meg didn’t hesitate. She undid the twin lines, tossed them inboard and jumped into the deck well herself. While Holliday figured out how to start up the
Casanova
, she picked up a long gaff hook and pushed them away from the wooden breakwater.
Holliday examined the rudimentary controls. There was a single throttle connected by a cable to the outboard. The ignition switch looked as though it had come out of an old car, but instead of a key there was a yellow-handled Phillips screwdriver jammed into the mechanism. It was a wonder that the boat hadn’t been stolen long before this, thought Holliday.
He twisted the screwdriver. There was a preliminary whine and cough from the engine and then it caught, the full-throated sound of the big outboard shattering the somber calm and quiet of the church and the cemetery beyond.
Holliday notched the throttle into the forward position and spun the wheel, taking them away from the island. Directly ahead of them was the much larger island of Murano. To the port side Holliday could see the dark line of the train bridge connecting Venice to the mainland.
He closed his eye briefly, trying to recall the simple map he’d seen back at the hotel. On the far side of Murano was open water and Marco Polo Airport. Twenty minutes across the bay and they’d be home free. He ratcheted the throttle a little farther forward and the decaying old boat started bouncing over the small waves, the deck beneath his feet as springy as a trampoline.
As a child he’d often gone fishing with his uncle Henry on Canadaway Creek a few miles inland from Lake Erie in upstate New York. Every now and again, just for the hell of it, his uncle would take their flat-bottomed rowboat down to the lake and let the little twenty-five-horsepower trolling engine rip. They’d go flying over the lake, skipping like a stone across the water, the bottom of the boat thumping and jumping just like the
Casanova
was now. Remembering his uncle and missing him, Holliday let out a whoop of pleasure to his memory as they pounded across the bay; luck was with them once again.
It was a wonder that the boat hadn’t been stolen long before.
Holliday had a sudden, vivid image of the shower scene from
Psycho
. He’d had recurring nightmares for weeks after he’d seen the film one afternoon while playing hooky from the Christian Brothers Parochial School.
For a while he’d even believed his confessor, who’d told him the nightmares were divine retribution for the sin of cutting classes.
The screwdriver in the ignition.
Casanova III
had been stolen.
“Oh, crap,” groaned Holliday, putting it together. The hairs on the back of his neck rose in warning, giving him a split-second advantage as the flimsy cabin door burst outward and Antonin Pesek hurtled through the opening, a dark flat automatic already raised in his hand.
Instinctively, Holliday threw the wheel hard over and the flat-bottomed boat slewed drunkenly to port, throwing the assassin off balance, the pistol flying out of his hand as he fought to stay on his feet. The weapon spun across the deck, lost in the clutter of equipment around the transom.
The killer barely paused, a broad-bladed knife appearing almost magically in his right hand. Pesek lunged and Holliday backed against the gunwale as the lethal instrument slashed across his belly. Another quarter inch and Holliday would have been gutted like a fish.
Somehow Pesek had been one step ahead of them. He’d seen Holliday and Meg get on the tour boat and managed to get to the Misericordia marina before them. He’d stolen the cabin cruiser and reached the cemetery island before the lumbering tour boat, lying in wait, knowing that Holliday and the nun would be desperate to get off the island and to the mainland. The
Casanova
had been a baited trap and Holliday had stepped into it like an amateur.
The
Casanova
was swerving wildly now, reacting to the slightest swell or wave, the wheel spinning freely. If they weren’t thrown overboard they’d be swamped or they’d hit another boat.
They were in the middle of the shipping lane from the east, and out of the corner of his eye Holliday could see a massive red-and-black-hulled oil tanker bullying its way across their bow less than a quarter mile ahead, the sheer side of the ship tall as a cliff and getting closer with each passing second.
Pesek lunged again. Behind him, Sister Meg thrust the gaff hook toward his ankles. The assassin’s feet went out from under him and he stumbled forward, cursing and giving Holliday a chance to spin out of his way, one hand clamping the killer’s wrist and dragging him into a close embrace, probably the safest move in a knife fight.
The boat lurched across another wave and Holliday rammed his knee into Pesek’s groin. The killer twisted to one side, taking the blow on his hip, and brought the knife up again, slashing at Holliday’s eyes, forcing him back against the gunwale again.
The oil tanker now completely filled Holliday’s field of view; another few seconds and they’d be nothing but splintered plywood wreckage spread across the water. An earsplitting air horn blasted as someone on the tanker’s bridge saw the approaching cabin cruiser.
As Pesek came after him again, Holliday dropped to the deck, then rolled back toward the transom, scrabbling for the gun.
“Grab the wheel!” Holliday bellowed to Sister Meg. His fingers found the hard weight of the weapon and he rolled onto his back just as Pesek’s boot smashed down toward his face.
Suddenly the
Casanova
went into a wide lurching turn, the hull hammering into the enormous wave thrown up by the tanker’s bulbous, half-submerged bow. Pesek’s foot came down into a tangle of rope and Holliday squeezed the unfamiliar trigger of the compact, Czech-made 9mm automatic, firing upward. The round took Pesek under the chin and drilled up into his brain, killing him instantly. He folded silently, like a suit of clothes without a body to hold it up.
Holliday clambered to his feet and lurched toward Meg as the boat virtually surfed along the hull displacement wave of the tanker. High above them a small group of spectators had gathered at the ship’s rail to take a look at the idiots who’d almost powered into them.
Holliday reached around Meg and took the wheel, his hands covering hers. She turned her head, eyes wide and flashing. They broached the churning wake of the tanker and headed into open water. Directly ahead of them a mile or so distant Holliday could see a jumbo lifting off from one of the two runways that ran parallel to the water.
“Is he dead?” Meg asked, turning to look over her shoulder.
“Very,” answered Holliday.
“Good!” said Meg, a savage note in her voice. She sagged back against Holliday, slipping her hands off the wheel, glad to give up control.
“An eye for an eye?” Holliday said, enjoying the feel of her body against his, every altar boy fiber of his adult body screaming “sacrilege!”
“Something like that,” said Meg. She wasn’t making the slightest attempt to wriggle out of Holliday’s embrace. He stepped back, taking one hand off the wheel to let her go before the situation got too complicated.