James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

Marietta was completely unaware that two men were following her, and had in fact picked her out even before she’d boarded the vaporetto at the Arsenale stop on the east side of Venice.

She wasn’t a random target. The two men had been sent out that evening to find her, and her alone. One of them was holding a folded sheet of paper in his hand. On it was a full-face photograph of their quarry, plus her address, and details of the company for which she worked. And there was a very specific and compelling reason why she had been chosen.

As she left the Campo San Stefano, Marietta took one of the narrow streets to the right, and almost immediately the press of people reduced, and she found herself walking along with just a handful of other pedestrians.

Then she took another turning, moving further and further from the crowded thoroughfares and closer to her destination: her boyfriend’s apartment near the centre of the old city. And only then did she wonder if the two men were following her.

Marietta didn’t feel concerned, not at first. Venice was a crowded city and it was almost impossible to walk down most of the streets at any time of the day or night without finding other people there. But when she took another turning, and the men continued to follow her down this narrow — and conspicuously empty — street, she glanced behind her again and then quickened her pace.

Immediately, both men started running and in a few seconds they had caught up with her. One of them slammed Marietta back against a wall. She opened her mouth to scream, but then collapsed to the ground when the second man produced a black pistol-like object from his pocket, pressed it against her stomach and pulled the trigger. The taser sent a charge of over one hundred thousand volts through her body, rendering her senseless for a few minutes.

This was all the time the men needed. One of them swiftly applied a sticking plaster gag to her face and lashed her wrists together with plastic cable ties, while the other man unzipped the bulky bag he was carrying, and pulled out a folded lightweight carpet — an old, but still very effective, way of concealing a body. He dropped it flat on the ground and, working together, they rolled the girl’s unconscious body into it. In moments, the bigger of the two men had hoisted the carpet on to his shoulder, and the two of them walked down the street towards one of the canals that penetrated central Venice from all sides. The other man took out a small mobile phone and spoke urgently into it.

When they reached the bank of the canal, they stopped and peered to their right, towards the junction with the encircling Grand Canal. A dark blue speedboat was heading towards them, a single figure at the controls. The vessel came to a halt at the landing stage in front of the two men. The driver climbed out, holding a mooring line which he wrapped around a vertical wooden post, and held the boat steady while the two men embarked in it. Then he released the rope and climbed back aboard himself, swung the boat around in a half circle and headed back the way he’d come.

The bundle in the carpet began moving, and one of the men unrolled it just enough to reveal the girl’s terrified face. He held the taser in front of her eyes and squeezed the trigger. A vicious high-voltage spark leapt between the two electrodes with an audible crackle.

‘Shut up and lie still,’ he hissed in colloquial Italian, ‘or I’ll give you another dose of this.’

Then he flipped the end of the carpet back over Marietta’s face.

‘You need to be careful with that thing,’ his companion murmured. ‘Hit somebody too often with it and you can kill them. And we need her in prime condition.’

‘I know, but all we need to do is keep her quiet until we get into the lagoon. Then she can scream and wriggle about all she wants to, because it won’t make any difference.’

At that moment, the powerboat swung left into the Grand Canal and heeled over as the driver opened the throttle and increased speed.

Venice is a stunning and amazing place, Bronson thought, but it also has a lot of problems.

Possibly the most beautiful city in the world, it is spread over a total of one hundred and seventeen islands set in a shallow lagoon, and its population of around sixty thousand live in a maze of streets so confusing that even natives of the city can still get lost in them. And, although it possesses some of the most outstanding architectural jewels in Italy, arguably in the world, the vast majority are slowly and inexorably sinking into the mud of the lagoon as their wooden foundations yield to the enormous weight of masonry pressing down on them. Many buildings have been abandoned; many others will suffer the same fate without very extensive — and very expensive — renovation and recovery work.

It is perhaps therefore not surprising that hotels in Venice are a long way from being the cheapest in the world.

Angela had made the booking over the Internet, and had managed to find a small hotel tucked away in the Cannaregio district, to the north of central Venice, which wasn’t charging anything like the rates demanded by some of the more central establishments. To be fair, the rooms were small and cramped, there was no lift, and the only views available from any room were of the walls of the adjacent buildings or the street outside. But, as she’d explained to Bronson, the whole point about being in Venice was to get out and see the city, not lounge around in a hotel bedroom all day, so in her opinion the views were much less important than the price.

They’d caught a vaporetto back to the Fondamente Nuove stop from the Isola di San Michele a few minutes after the two carabinieri had left with the pathologist, but Angela had stubbornly refused to show him what she’d taken from the grave until they reached the hotel.

The narrow streets were dark and silent as they walked towards their hotel, the only noise the lapping of the water in the canals beside them. There was something about the atmosphere Bronson didn’t like, and it was a relief when he saw the lights of the hotel lobby shining brightly in front of them.

‘Right, Angela,’ Bronson said, once they were safely inside their room, ‘what was it in the tomb that’s got you so excited?’

‘What we saw back there was the tomb of a vampire.’

For a few seconds, Bronson just stared at her. Then his face creased into a smile, and he laughed. ‘Of course it was,’ he said. ‘Now stop messing around and tell me what you really mean.’

Angela smiled back at him. ‘I’m being perfectly serious,’ she said. ‘Or, to be absolutely exact, the people who broke into that tomb about a century and a half ago were being perfectly serious.’

‘A vampire? But you and I both know that vampires don’t exist. Just like werewolves and krakens and golems don’t exist. They’re the product of myth and legend, nothing more than that.’

‘ We know that, here and now in the twenty-first century. But it wasn’t always that clear cut, you know.’

‘But I thought Bram Stoker more or less invented the vampire myth when he wrote Dracula in, what, the late nineteenth century?’

‘No,’ Angela said. ‘Nobody knows exactly when people first started believing in vampires, but it certainly predates the Middle Ages, and possibly dates back a lot further than that, maybe as early as the Assyrians. There’s also some suspicion that vampire-like creatures were believed to exist in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin as early as five thousand BC, and one of the ancient Egyptian gods — Shezmu — had what you might call vampire-like habits. He was the old god of execution, slaughter, blood and wine, and often killed people by decapitating them, putting their heads in a wine press and drinking the blood that came out.’