The Venice Conspiracy Read online

  Unbaked bricks and wood make up its walls. The grand façade is dominated by a triangular fronton. The wide and low double sloping roof will soon be tiled in terracotta.

  When it’s finished, Teucer will consecrate the altars and the gods will be pleased.

  Everything will be good again.

  But he’s unsure when that will be. All the workers have been redeployed to the local mine to dig for silver. Worship is now secondary to commerce.

  He walks to the rear of the temple and the three areas dedicated to the main deities: Tinia, Uni and Menrva. Once his wife has completed the bronze statues of the holy pantheon, he will bless them in their respective chambers.

  This final thought brings him peace and comfort, but not enough self-respect to go home.

  Still melancholic, he meanders through the long, overgrown grass and wanders into a thick copse of limes and oaks.

  He hears them long before he sees them. Young commoners from a neighbouring settlement. Running. Chasing. Shouting. Three of them, up to some kind of horseplay.

  As he draws closer, he’s less sure of their innocence.

  The sun is in his eyes but it seems they have a boy on the ground.

  One of the youths has the boy’s head locked between his knees – like a sheep trapped for shearing. The other two have pulled up his tunic. He is naked from the waist down and is being raped by the biggest member of the group.

  Teucer stays back. He’s tall and wiry, but knows he is no match for savages like these.

  Cloud flickers across the sun and fleetingly he gets a clearer view.

  The slight figure is not a boy. It’s Tetia.

  Now he doesn’t hesitate. The field flies beneath his feet. As he runs he pulls out the knife he uses for sacred sacrifices, the blade he uses to gut animals.

  He plunges it into the back of the rapist.

  The brute screams and knocks Tetia over as he falls. Teucer sweeps the blade at the face of the beast who’d been holding her, slashing him across the face.

  Now there are arms around his neck. The third one is on him. Choking him. Pulling him over.

  They crash to the ground. Teucer feels dizzy. He’s banged his head and everything’s going black.

  But before he passes out, he feels one thing. The knife.

  It is being taken from his slackening grasp.

  CAPITOLO II

  ‘Teucer!’

  The seer thinks he’s dreaming.

  ‘Teucer! Wake up!’

  He opens his eyes. They hurt. Tetia’s staring down at him but he can’t see her face properly because the sun is burning so brightly behind her.

  It must all have been a dream.

  But the look on her face says it isn’t.

  The blood on her hands says it isn’t.

  He turns on his side and slowly pulls himself upright. He looks around. Sees nothing. He gets to his feet and puts out his shaking hands to her. ‘Are you all right?’

  There’s a look of terror on her face. She is staring behind him.

  Teucer turns.

  He can’t believe what he sees.

  It was real. All very real.

  The body of the rapist is still there. Laid out in the dirt. His face and body have been cut to bits. The man whose face he cut has fled, along with his accomplice.

  Teucer looks at his wife. She’s soaked in blood.

  He doesn’t have to ask what happened; it’s obvious. When he passed out, she must have taken the knife and stabbed her attacker to death. Stabbed and stabbed and stabbed until she was absolutely sure he was dead.

  And she didn’t stop there.

  Teucer can’t speak. Can’t look at his wife.

  She’s gutted him.

  Tetia has driven the blade deep into the man’s body and sliced him open. Organs are spread everywhere. Heart. Kidney. Liver. She’s butchered him like a goat.

  Finally, Teucer turns to her. His voice is stretched and heavy with worry. ‘Tetia? What did you do?’

  Her face hardens. ‘He raped me.’ She points at the remains. ‘That pig of a man raped me!’ Tears glisten in her eyes.

  He takes her by the hands and feels her tremble as she struggles to explain. ‘He’s dead and I am glad that he is. I have sliced him up so he will never reach the afterlife.’ She tilts her head towards the offal of his body, organs like those she has seen her husband rip from animals in sacrifice to the gods. ‘I have had his liver and Aita has his soul.’

  Her words stun him. Aita – lord of the underworld. Stealer of souls. The name no netsvis dares speak. His feet are sticky with the blood of the man his wife has slaughtered – the man who debased and defiled him almost as much as her. A wave of sickness washes through him. He looks around at the carnage. It astonishes him. He never thought Tetia had the strength, let alone the anger. Gradually Teucer snaps out of his thoughts. ‘We must go. We must visit the magistrate and tell him what has happened. How you were attacked and defended yourself. Everything that happened.’

  ‘Ha!’ Tetia throws her hands out with an exasperated laugh. ‘And what of this?’ She turns in a circle to indicate the slaughter. ‘Must I be pointed at and talked about for the rest of my years? “See her! See that woman there? She was raped and went mad.”’

  Teucer goes to comfort her. ‘People will understand.’

  She pulls away. ‘No!’ She holds her bloody hands to her face. ‘No, Teucer! No, they won’t!’

  He grabs her wrists, tries to pull her hands away but can’t. Instead, he draws her to him and holds her tight. She’s shaking. He puts his face into her hair and kisses her softly. What he’s thinking is wrong. He knows it’s wrong. But he also knows it’s the only thing they can do.

  Teucer steps a pace away, hands now on her elbows. ‘Then we go and wash in the stream. We go home and burn these clothes. And if anyone asks, we have been together at home all night.’

  She looks relieved.

  ‘And we never say a word of this to anyone. Do you understand?’

  Tetia nods. She folds herself in his arms and feels safe. But she also feels different. Different in a way she dare not describe. A way that will alter their lives for ever.

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER 3

  Flight UA:716

  Destination: Venice

  Mid-Atlantic, Tom Shaman looks again at the postcard Rosanna Romano gave him.

  He knows now that the painter is Giovanni Canaletto and the scene is an eighteenth-century view of the Grand Canal and the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. He knows it because he searched the internet all day until he found it. It was this card and this view that made him decide leaving LA was the right thing to do. Not for a short time. Not for a vacation. But for ever.

  From the moment he picked the card up off the floor near his bed, he knew his days as a priest were over. The hands that held the postcard were stained by mortal sin. Murderer’s hands. They could never hold the host again. Never baptise. Never marry. Never consecrate.

  Oddly, he feels both he and God are happy with this decision. Tom can’t yet figure out why, but it seems as right to quit now as it did to join the clergy when he was still at college.

  The cops said the girl who’d been raped went kind of crazy. Found out she was pregnant. Wouldn’t leave her bedroom. Just sat there in the dark all day and needed her mother to sit with her. It broke Tom’s heart to hear about it. He tried several times to visit her, but she wouldn’t see him. She sent a message through the cops that she was unclean – unholy – and he must stay away.

  Poor kid.

  Tom still blames himself. If only he’d been more alert, stepped in earlier, been more decisive. He might have saved her. Might have spared her all this pain.

  The thoughts still haunt him as the Airbus begins its descent into Marco Polo.

  Dipping through thin cloud on a crisp, clear morning he catches a tantalising glimpse of the Dolomites and shimmering Adriatic. Next comes the Ponte d
ella Libertà, the long road and rail causeway that links the historic centre of Venice with mainland Italy. Finally, the distinctive outline of the Campanile di San Marco and the meandering outreaches of the Canal Grande. The waterway doesn’t seem to have changed much since Canaletto’s time.

  Marco Polo’s runway lies parallel to the dazzling coastline and, unless you’re perched on the pilot’s knee, the view you get does nothing to reassure you that you’re not landing in the centre of the lagoon. There’s a cheer of relief and a round of applause as the plane bumps on to the blacktop and the brakes judder.

  In the main terminal, everyone’s in a mad hurry to get places. And the madness reaches a climax in the baggage hall.

  Tom’s luggage isn’t there.

  All his belongings, crushed into one big, old suitcase, have vanished.

  The nice airline people promise to try to trace it. But Tom’s heard promises like that before, usually said by people kneeling in front of him confessing their sins and then rattling out prayers like they were ordering cheeseburgers and Cokes.

  By the time Tom gets out into the blinding sunlight he sees the funny side. Maybe it’s right that he starts his new life with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  CHAPTER 4

  Venice

  ‘Piazzale Roma!’ shouts the bus driver, almost as though it’s a profanity.

  ‘Finito. Grazie.’

  The small, dark cube of a man jumps from his vehicle and is outside smoking long before the first passenger disembarks. Tom slings his sports bag over his shoulder and asks directions: ‘Scusi, dove l’hotel Rotoletti?’

  The driver blows out smoke. Small black eyes take in the fresh-faced American with his phrasebook Italian. ‘It no far from here.’ He wafts his cigarette towards the far end of the Piazzale. ‘Turn left at corner – at bottom you see ’otel.’

  The guy’s right: ‘it no far’ at all – Tom’s there in seconds.

  A woman behind a cheap wooden reception desk is polite but falls far short of friendly. She shows him to a claustrophobic bedroom that is badly furnished in bloodshot red and faded blue. A small dirty window overlooks the air-con plant and doesn’t open. Tom dumps his bag and heads back to the streets as fast as he can.

  After half an hour of walking, he finds himself in Piazza San Marco, dodging a million pigeons and window shopping for clothes that he soon realises he can’t afford. Silk ties cost more here than he paid for a stack of shirts and pants back in the discount mall. He prays his suitcase shows up soon.

  The smell of fresh-roasted coffee and the buzz of tourist chatter and laughter draws him into Florin’s. He orders a cappuccino and a salade Niçoise. Aside from a blonde woman in her early thirties reading at the table next to him, everyone else is in pairs or small family groups. A middle-aged British guy sitting opposite is telling his over-made-up and under-dressed young girlfriend how, centuries ago, the café was an upmarket brothel and high-class music club. Both Tom and the blonde look up to eavesdrop on his monologue about eighteenth-century Venice, Casanova and libertine life.

  ‘Sounds like we arrived three hundred years too late,’ the blonde whispers huskily across to Tom.

  He spoons froth from his coffee. ‘Not sure about that. I have enough problems with modern life, let alone Venetian decadence at its peak.’ He smiles comfortably as he really notices her for the first time. ‘Anyway, how did you know I spoke English?’

  She brushes a fall of blonde hair away from her sparkling pale blue eyes. ‘No disrespect, but you don’t look or dress anything like an Italian.’ She pauses. ‘In fact, I’m not sure what you dress like.’ A small laugh – not unkind – confident and warm. ‘And I guess the big giveaway is that you’re drinking cappuccino in the afternoon and playing with it, with a spoon.’ She nods to the middle-aged guy across from them. ‘The Brits are probably the only Europeans unsophisticated enough to drink cappuccino after breakfast. So I have you down as a fellow American, and judging from the tan, West Coast.’

  Tom nods. ‘You’re on the money.’ He places her accent as Manhattan. Uptown. ‘What are you, some kind of cop?’

  She laughs again, deeper and longer this time, even nicer to hear. ‘Me? No. No way. I’m a travel writer. Freelance. Everything from Lonely Planet to Condé Nast.’ She leans across the tables. ‘Tina – Tina Ricci.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Tina.’ He shakes her hand.

  She looks into his warm brown eyes and waits for his move. Waits to be asked to his table. Waits for the follow-up line that she’s sure will come.

  It doesn’t. Tom says nothing. He grows awkward and looks away, his heart beating like he’s just gone three rounds back in the boxing ring in Compton. He can feel her still staring. The bell’s rung and, for the first time in his life, he’s stuck in his corner wondering what to do.

  CHAPTER 5

  Present Day

  Venice

  The stranger looks different now.

  No longer the good Samaritan who helped her when she was lost in the labyrinth of shadowy streets.

  No longer a friendly local lending a helping hand to a confused and anxious teenager who’d stormed off after a row with her father.

  He’s dressed differently too. Long black robes and a sinister silver mask shielding his face.

  The girl grimaces as her bound and gagged body is dragged along the moss-slimed deck boards. He’s taking her to his sacred area. The libation altar. The spot where he will let her blood feed the water.

  He pushes the teenager’s head over the edge. Makes it dangle in that supernatural space between sky and earth. Limbo. The place where he’ll steal her soul.

  Only when she stares directly up at him does he begin.

  An incision by the left ear. A long red slice beneath her cute little chin.

  A popping noise in her slender throat.

  The gag in her mouth slackens.

  A fountain of red. Then a splutter. The greedy black water drinks until she’s bled dry.

  Indifferently, he drops her skull with a dull thump on the wooden decking, then unwraps the tools he needs to complete his bloody ritual.

  He kneels and prays.

  A doctrine handed down across the centuries. A verbal chain of unbreakable belief.

  Now there’s a whispering in his mind. A swelling choir of voices. Communal prayers of those who came and killed before him. The chants of the believers climax as he completes his ceremony.

  He wraps the sinner’s sticky corpse in sheets of black plastic then tucks it beneath the tarpaulin in the gondola and waits for night to come.

  Ribbons of milky moonlight finally flutter across the boards of the boathouse.

  A long, deathly nothingness hums in his ears and fizzes in his blood.

  He breathes it in. Absorbs its blackness. Feels it transform him.

  The unlit, black gondola glides invisibly through the city’s canals and out into the lagoon.

  The end is beginning.

  An end planned six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Following Day

  Venice

  The streets are cool, dark and deserted. It’s just after 5 a.m., and Tom’s already been up for an hour and is walking the city’s majestic bridges. Locals say that the best way to get to know Venice is to get lost, and Tom is at least halfway there. The most he’s aware of is that he’s meandering vaguely towards the Rialto. Maybe it’s years of rising early that shook him from his bed, or the fact that crossing time zones has messed up his body clock. Then again, it could be that he’s still trying to understand why yesterday he didn’t ask Tina – was her full name Tina, or something longer, like Christina? – if she wanted to catch up later for a drink, or maybe dinner. The words that deserted him like an awkward teenager come easily now.

  He leans over the rails at the foot of a bridge and looks along the water. His head is spinning. Anyway, what did he really expect to come from a short conversation with a woman in a café
?

  It’s a good time of the day to clear his mind and see the city. He seems to have it to himself – like a private viewing at an art gallery. And Venice certainly has fascinating exhibits. A hundred and fifty canals, spanned by four hundred bridges. A hundred and seventeen separate islands. Three hundred alleyways.

  Tom lifts his head. He’s heard something.

  Maybe locals going to work. The first wheels of Venetian life grinding into daily motion. Perhaps even priests making their way to church for early prayers.

  He takes his hands off the cool iron railings. Looks around. The noise comes again – this time it’s more of a shout than anything. A man calling something in Italian? Tom steps up on to the crest of the bridge and listens more attentively. Tries to get a bearing. Pins it down to a spot straight ahead and off to the right somewhere.

  He jogs down the other side.

  The streets smell of wet stones and rotting vegetables. The road here is cobbled and his worn leather soles slide on the smooth surface.

  He takes two more bridges. Shuffles to a halt. ‘Hello! Hello, is anyone there?’

  ‘Here! Here!’ comes the out-of-sight reply.

  Tom sets off again. Maybe two more bridges to the right?

  He crosses the hump of the second and sees him.

  An old man.

  White shirt, white hair, dark crumpled trousers.

  Kneeling by the edge of the water, like he’s fallen, or he’s trying to pull something out of the canal.

  Probably a small boat.

  Maybe a bag or something he’s dropped.

  ‘Hang on. I’ll help you.’

  Tom hurries alongside. The old man’s face is strained. His knuckles white from gripping and pulling.

  Now Tom sees it.

  A sailing rope is tied around the railings and the old guy is heaving something heavy from below.