The Four Horsemen Read online

  Mild curiosity gave way at once to intense concern. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “But she’s looking after the people who were assailed by the thieves.”

  “So you were right,” he said.

  “I’m afraid so. Now I intend to go after them.”

  “Where?”

  “I want you to tell me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Sior Fabrizio, do you remember telling me that the Venier family had built a temple to Venus on an island in the lagoon?”

  “Yes, of course. You didn’t seem very interested.”

  “I was agitated at the time,” I said. “But now I’ve remembered something I heard Isabella Venier say to Komnenos. She said the stuff’ would be watched over by their own goddess.”

  “Oh really? How interesting. So the Venier family keeps up this legend of Venus, then.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, perhaps a little brusquely. “But do you see what it means? That’s where they will be hiding the booty. So can you remember where this island is?”

  “Oh, goodness,” he said. “You know, I did go out there once with friends. Just to see what this temple was. Over beyond Burano. North of Sant’Ariano.”

  “Bepi, are you listening?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re suggesting we go out in the fog to the northern marshes and look for an island with a temple.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what they’re doing. So it is possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” said Bepi. “But of course they know where they’re going.”

  “Well, we do too, more or less. Sior Fabrizio, how big is this temple?”

  “Oh, it’s just a little round thing, an imitation of the temple of Vesta in Rome. Of course, it’s absurd to conflate the two goddesses, but I don’t think they were greatly concerned with classical exactitude. There used to be a little statue of Venus inside, but I suspect that has gone.”

  “But we should be able to see it, even in the fog.”

  “Oh, I should think so. The island is not very big; not much bigger than, say, the island of Sant’Elena. Some of it is just barene.” He used the Venetian word for the marshy terrain that constitutes a great portion of the lagoon. “There’s also a little wooded part. The temple is right in the middle, but it stands out.”

  I turned to Bepi. “Is that helpful?”

  He nodded. “I know where he means. I’ve been out there with my brothers once. We were duck-hunting. I can find it.”

  “Good,” I said with slightly artificial jauntiness. “So we’re prepared.”

  “I suppose so. I’ve still got that cudgel.”

  “Right.”

  “You haven’t got hold of a pistol in the meantime?”

  “Goodness me,” said Fabrizio, “what are you suggesting, Sior Bepi?”

  “Just a thought, you know,” he said. “Of course we might need some other kind of protection when we pass Sant’Ariano.”

  “What’s Sant’Ariano?” I asked.

  “It’s the bone island.”

  “The what?”

  “Where they take the bones when the cemeteries fill up. There’s nothing else on it. Just bones. Four or five feet deep, I believe.”

  “Well, should be easy to recognise,” I said. “That’ll help us navigate.”

  I gave my hand to Fabrizio as he climbed out of the gondola. “You’d better go to Lucia now,” I said to him. “And if you can, try to convince the authorities that they need to come out to Venier’s island. But knowing the people you’ll be dealing with, I suspect that will take some time. And it probably won’t help if you say that I asked you to tell them.”

  “I see,” said Fabrizio. “Well, I’ll do what I can.”

  “You’ll need to enter by the Porta dei Fiori,” I said.

  He set off towards the basilica, at a faster pace than his usual gait.

  “Come on,” I said to Bepi. “Let’s start. Are you sure you don’t want any help with the rowing?” This was a question I asked him every other month or so, always eliciting the same negative response. The fact that he would first have to teach me to row was, of course, the major stumbling block.

  “Not if we want to get there before daybreak,” was all he said this time.

  We set off, heading eastwards. Bepi then swung to the left and we entered Rio dei Greci. We passed the Greek church with its leaning tower. Bepi said, “Perhaps they’ve stopped here for the night. That would save us a little time.”

  “Not very likely,” I said. “This time Komnenos has burned all bridges with Venice. As have his cronies. They’re going to be on the run for ever.”

  “What do they think they’re going to do with the stuff?”

  “Good question. I think it’s more the gesture that counts. I didn’t have time to look very closely back in the treasury, but I did get the impression that they had only taken stuff that once belonged to Constantinople. I think they didn’t take any items that were made by Venetians – at least, not knowingly.”

  “I suppose we can be thankful they left the horses.”

  “Oh, if they get away with this, I expect they’ll be back for them at some point.”

  We passed Campo San Lorenzo and then turned right towards Santa Giustina.

  “There’s where we started as a team,” I said, pointing to the Teatro Santa Giustina.

  “Ah yes,” said Bepi, a touch of nostalgia in his voice. I remembered that it had taken him a while to recover from the heady experience of being on a stage, even without an audience. “Good days.”

  The canal broadened. The darkness seemed to have acquired an extra layer of density ahead of us; it was the open expanse of the northern lagoon, shrouded in even thicker fog. After a few strokes there was nothing around us but the clammy darkness. It was as if the whole of the rest of the world had suddenly been wiped out, leaving just Bepi’s gondola and the feeble glows of our lanterns to indicate that there had ever been life on Earth. The only noise was the faint sloshing of water and the regular creak of the oar in the forcola.

  “You’re sure you know the direction?” I said. Instinctively my voice had lowered to a whisper.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been to Burano enough times. It’s beyond Burano I’m a bit less certain of.” After a pause he added, “Perhaps we’ll hear the clacking of the bones.”

  I didn’t answer this, even with a laugh. I was all too ready to believe it possible.

  “I’m heading for Murano,” he said, “and then I’ll follow the Canale San Giacomo. Otherwise we could get stranded on the barene.”

  It is almost impossible to go anywhere in the lagoon in a straight line. There are great stretches of water that are too shallow for even the lightest of craft, and there is often no clear demarcation between lagoon, barene and mudflats; they merge indistinguishably. That is why the deeper canals are carefully marked out with poles.

  I was waiting for Bepi to ask the obvious question: what was the plan? I wouldn’t be able to answer. My mind was like the barene: a marshy mishmash with no clear-cut canals of purpose or design. As ever, it would probably not be until our boat crunched into the pebbles of the island that my brain would start operating usefully. At least I hoped it would.

  We coasted past the dim shapes of the kilns and furnaces of the glass factories of Murano and began following the regularly placed poles that marked out the navigable canal leading towards Mazzorbo and Burano. Occasionally a seagull would rise from a pole ahead of us with a shriek, its belly and wings flashing a ghostly white in the light from our lanterns. There were no other boats. If one had passed this way before us it must have done so some considerable time earlier, to judge from the unruffled dark surface of the water that lay endlessly ahead of us.

  Probably ninety minutes or so later we made our way down the canal between Mazzorbetto and Mazzorbo, the houses all shuttered and silent on both sides of us. I imagined that the fishermen and lace-workers of those islands had to rise
very early.

  Bepi then steered us in the direction of the island with the oldest buildings in the lagoon, Torcello. However, before its eleventh-century basilica became visible to us, he turned into the canal along the island’s eastern flank, and we made our way into the boggy innards of the Dead Lagoon.

  “This is where it gets tricky,” muttered Bepi. “It’s all barene and mudflats from here on.”

  I thought Bepi probably didn’t need to be told that it was, indeed, on account of the ever-increasing bogginess of this part of the lagoon that the inhabitants of Torcello had begun to abandon it from the fifteenth century on, so that all that remained of the once lively city was just a cluster of small houses scattered loosely around the magnificent basilica. Malaria had also contributed, of course, to the exodus. This part of the lagoon was a very unlikely place to build a temple to the goddess of love, but probably the area had been very different when the Venier family had first acquired their island. Almost certainly their nearest neighbours had not then been skeletons.

  Some twenty minutes later, after much skilful twisting and turning, Bepi said quietly, “That’s Sant’Ariano on the left.”

  I peered out. I could only see the dim dark shape of a brick wall rising from the water.

  “No bones,” I said, trying to sound breezily disappointed.

  “Climb up on that wall and you’ll see them,” Bepi said. He freed one hand from the oar and crossed himself.

  We fell silent, and the gondola continued to thread its way along the narrow canal between the marshy banks.

  “Now I think we have to make our way up here to the left,” Bepi muttered a little while later, when the canal split into two diverging branches.

  “Do you think we should put out the lanterns?” I asked.

  “And then how do we get there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still trying to think what . . .”

  “. . . what we’re going to do when we get there,” concluded Bepi.

  I smiled. “You do know me.”

  “Anyway, it’s along here, I’m fairly sure.” The gondola pivoted to his command, and we nosed our way along an even narrower canal, flanked by reeds and spongy terrain.

  Some considerable time later, during which we saw and heard nothing but the muted melancholy sounds of the marsh, a more solid shape appeared ahead of us. Bepi began to row more slowly. “Now might be a good time to douse the lanterns,” he whispered.

  I extinguished the lights and we paused for a moment, allowing our eyesight to grow accustomed to the almost total darkness. Then he slowly urged us forward. We began to distinguish the shapes of low trees ahead of us to the left and the jagged shape of some kind of tumbledown building to the right. Straight ahead there slowly emerged in the mist the outline of a more elegantly shaped building with a low conical roof, which had to be the temple.

  There was a gently sloping, shingly shore right in front of us. No lights could be discerned anywhere and there was not a sound of life.

  “Do you think they’ve already left?” I whispered.

  “Possibly,” he said.

  “Well, shall we go and see if they’ve left the treasure?” That would certainly make things a great deal simpler.

  He manoeuvred us towards the little beach, and with a slow hissing, crunching sound we came to a halt. We both clambered out. There was nothing to moor the boat to, so Bepi and I simply dragged it a little further up the beach.

  “We might as well light a lantern again,” I said. I was still instinctively whispering.

  He found the tinderbox and got one of the lanterns alight. With this in my right hand we made our way along a very rudimentary path that seemed to lead in the direction of the temple. There was a good deal of brambly undergrowth on both sides of the path, and to the left this undergrowth became, after a few yards, a fairly thick wood. Ahead of us the temple took on greater solidity, a little round structure surrounded by a circle of marble pillars supporting a conical roof. The whole thing stood on a miniature mound, to which ascended a flight of six or seven steps. At the top of the stairs was the black oblong of an open doorway leading into the interior of the temple.

  “If they’ve just left it in there for us,” I said, “then we can go straight back.” But my heart was hammering as I climbed the steps. I somehow knew it could not be that simple.

  I raised the lantern and we peered into the musty interior together. Seconds later we both let out something between a gasp and a yelp.

  29

  It had taken us those few seconds to understand what we were seeing on the floor of the temple. But it was only a visual comprehension. For the moment our minds could do no more than reel in shock; they certainly could not make sense of what our eyes were telling them.

  The floor was apparently covered with an old fishing net, thrown down in a snarled, bunched tangle. After a few seconds it became clear that the bunches were caused by the sprawling objects that lay beneath the net, and another couple of seconds told us what those objects were. They also explained the dark glistening sheen that coated much of the net.

  Underneath the net lay hacked, gashed bodies, with twisted limbs and battered heads. The blood was still flowing in places.

  “My God,” said Bepi, “my God . . .” He was staggering back.

  I forced myself to take another look, holding the lantern high, and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. I could see three heads, two still attached to bodies, and the third gorily free of its neck, lying with its eyes rolled upwards to the dark heights of the ceiling. Above the clotted mess of the stump and through the slimy interstices of the net I recognised the bearded face of Father Giorgos. I guessed the other two must be Dimitris and Alexis. I realised the lantern was shaking in my hand, which explained why the bodies seemed to be moving beneath the net, as the light flickered over them.

  “Let’s go,” said Bepi in an urgent whisper, tugging at my arm.

  “Yes,” I said, “you’re right.” I realised I had no breath. I stepped back and turned round, extinguishing the lantern as I did so.

  “Over here!” came a voice from the wood, hissed and urgent.

  “Oh shit,” said Bepi. He began to run down the steps, and I followed him. He was running blindly, and suddenly I saw him trip and sprawl ahead of me. I leaned over him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, trying to scramble to his feet. I saw his face contort with pain as he rose. “I’ve twisted my ankle.” He leaned on me.

  The voice came again from the bushes: “Over here, quickly!”

  “Oh, God,” said Bepi. “I don’t think I can run.”

  There was a rustling amid the bushes, and we saw a dark shape emerge.

  “Quickly,” said Bepi. “Let’s get to the boat.”

  “It’s too late,” said the dark figure, still moving towards us.

  “You can’t scare us,” said Bepi. “We’re ready for you.”

  That would have sounded more convincing if he had not been leaning heavily on my arm and his voice had not been choked with pain.

  “I’m Komnenos,” said the figure, and now I recognised both the voice and the dark outline of the man approaching us.

  “What do you want?” I said, bracing myself for I knew not what.

  “Come with me into the wood. It’s too dangerous here.”

  “We’re going back to our boat,” said Bepi.

  “You won’t make it in time,” Komnenos repeated.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’ll attack you while you’re trying to launch it.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know. A maniac with an axe. Come with me.”

  We had little choice, so we followed Komnenos back into the bushes, Bepi limping painfully.

  “And you’re not the maniac?” I said, feeling someone had to say it.

  “I am not,” he said simply.

  We were now pushing aside damp brambly branches an
d kicking our way through clingy undergrowth. After a few yards Komnenos came to a halt in a small clearing. “He can’t see us now,” he said in a whisper. Bepi gave a sigh of relief; steadying himself on a tree trunk, he lowered himself to the ground. Komnenos and I also crouched down.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, whispering as well.

  Komnenos took a breath. “You presumably know that we’ve retaken possession of our treasures.”

  Now was not the time to start a discussion about rights of ownership. I just said, “Yes. We’ve seen the treasury.”

  “So the four of us – Father Giorgos, Dimitris, Alexis and I – came out to this island with the treasures.”

  “Who was rowing?” asked Bepi. It was the natural question for a gondolier to ask.

  “We’d hired two gondoliers to take us from San Marco. They had no idea what we were doing. They rowed us to the Fondamenta Nuove where we had our own sandolo waiting for us. Dimitri and Alexios are skilled oarsmen – were skilled oarsmen.” He corrected the tense with something very close to a sob. “And they rowed us out here.”

  “Where’s your boat?” asked Bepi.

  “It’s no good,” said Komnenos. “He’s smashed it up. I heard him do it.”

  “But where is it?”

  “We always leave it on the other side of the island. Can’t be seen there.” He sank down to a kneeling position, and I did the same. Bepi was sitting on the ground against the tree trunk, one leg stretched out in front of him, and the other crossed awkwardly over it.

  “So you’ve been here before,” I said.

  “Of course,” Komnenos said.

  “The island of Venus,” I said.

  He didn’t respond to this but went on, “I stayed to secure the boat while the other three took the chest to the temple. Then I heard screams, sounds of fighting – and then just silence. It was the silence that was most terrifying.” He fell silent himself, and we all found ourselves listening hard to the new silence that hung over the island. For a few seconds there was scarcely any noise at all, just the intermittent sound of dripping from the fog-soaked vegetation around us. Then Komnenos started whispering again, the syllables coming out in an urgent, breathy rush.