Gregg Loomis: The Bonaparte Secret

Gurt looked at him inquisitively. “Your nose? It does not seem to be hurt.”

Lang’s eyes were searching the paving around him. “My clown’s nose. It must have come loose when I hit the floor.” He touched his bare head. “And my clown’s hat, too.”

She gave him a tug toward the canal and, hopefully, the old Chris-Craft. “You have been clown enough for tonight. Drop the gun into the canal before you have to explain it to the police.”

Calle Fiubera 32, Venice

The next morning

Lang looked down the short, narrow street to the point it ended in a corte, or courtyard, in which a small limestone church, San Zulian, perched like a Baroque wedding cake on a platter. It was one of the few in the San Marco district Gurt had not dragged him into to see paintings and sculpture by Bellini, Giorgione, Tintoretto and a dozen or so more names he could remember no better than he could pronounce them. He offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving as Gurt entered the shop paying no particular attention to the church.

Inside, the place had the same sweet, musty smell he recalled from two days ago, when he and Gurt arrived to be fitted for the costumes she had reserved by e-mail months before. Somehow using electronics to visit an event that had its roots in the Shrove Tuesday celebration of the republic’s 1162 victory over the patriarch of Aquileia seemed anachronistic. The older Lang got, the more that word came up.

The shopkeeper, himself in Carnevale costume, examined the set of hangers Gurt handed him, his eyes going to a ragged tear in the bodice of the copy of the seventeenth-century costume. He tsk-tsked when he noted Lang’s hat was missing. The nose Lang had had to purchase, it being not reusable “for sanitary reasons,” the first time he recalled ever hearing that phrase used in connection with anything Venetian.

Reluctantly, Lang agreed to the deduction of a hundred and fifty euros from his deposit.

“Rip-off!” Lang growled as they left. “The damn hat couldn’t have cost more than fifteen, twenty bucks and it will take less than that to sew up the tear in your costume.”

The store’s door had hardly closed behind them when the merchant began punching numbers into his cell phone as he read them from a slip of paper. “The clown costume you wanted to rent?” he asked in English. “It has been returned. Yes, just this moment…”

As Gurt and Lang crossed the Piazza San Marco, she said, “We do not have to meet the plane until this afternoon. We have time to terminate.”

As a native of Germany, Gurt’s grasp of the American idiom was less than perfect.

Lang groaned inwardly at the prospect of another church. He had viewed all of the martyred saints, ascending virgins and bleeding crucifixions he wanted.

“Time to kill.”

“How would you ‘kill’ time? It does not live.”

“We haven’t ridden the vaporetto… water bus,” Lang said, hoping to foreclose additional exposure to religious art by changing the subject. “It’s a great way to see the city.”

“Why not a gondola?”

Lang remembered the last time he had been in one of the romantic if expensive boats. He had been here with Dawn, his first wife. He had met her while still employed with the Agency, one of the few careers open to a liberal-arts graduate. He had anticipated all the excitement of a James Bond film. As is often the case, experience did not meet expectations. It wasn’t even close. Instead of the Operations Division, he had been assigned to Intelligence, where his duties consisted not of slinking about the capitals of Eastern Europe and seducing the beautiful female agents of the opposition but of reading newspapers and monitoring TV broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain from a dingy suite of offices across the street from the Frankfurt rail station. There he had met Gurt and had had a brief affair that terminated when she was transferred to another station.

Then he had met Dawn and married her. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it became clear that opportunities and advancement inside the Agency would be limited. Lang resigned and went to law school while Dawn worked. After his practice of defending white-collar criminals began to flourish, he had taken his wife to Italy as a very small reward for her labors.

She had fallen in love with Venice. Where Lang saw fetid, malodorous canals, she saw romantic waterways. When Lang pointed out that the persistently higher tides had encrusted the lower parts of most buildings with a salty layer of slime, she regarded it as a sign of antiquity. She even endured, if not enjoyed, the endless hawking of the glass merchants in their efforts to persuade tourists to take a “free” trip to their factories on the island of Murano, a place from which no one returned-not until purchasing at least one set of the artfully colored Venetian glass.

Lang supposed the set of six pale blue martini stem glasses had perished along with his other possessions when his condominium had been blown up in an attempt to kill him at the beginning of what he thought of as the Coptic Affair.

Within months of their return home, Dawn had received a death sentence from her doctor. For months Lang had sat at her bedside, making plans for a return to Italy they both knew would never happen. Years after her death, he encountered Gurt again while tracking down the deadly Pegasus organization. A stop-and-go relationship became permanent with the unintended birth of their son, Manfred.

“Lang?”

Gurt’s tone made him realize he had tuned out the present.

“You do not wish a gondola ride?”

Lang nodded toward the basilica’s doors, where a small crowd had gathered. “What’s going on now?”

He changed his direction, giving Gurt little choice but to follow. She caught up with him as he spotted Gower and the heavily endowed Angelia.

Lang now could see uniformed police coming and going from the church.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Angelia cooed. “They say the priest found blood on one of the interior columns when he opened the church for early mass. Like somebody had been injured.”

“Injured?” Lang tried to seem curious. “Do they know who?”

“I don’t think so. He wasn’t hurt too badly to get away. The police think he might have been involved in a theft.”

“Oh? Of what?”

Gower interjected, “I understand some holy relic was taken from under the altar.”

That answered the question of the need to be drilling late in the night. “Saint Mark’s bones? They’re under the altar.” Lang was perplexed. “Who would want Saint Mark’s bones?”

“Saint who?” Angelia asked.

At the same time, back at the costume-rental store, things were not going so well for Pietro, the proprietor, despite the windfall of being able to pocket part of the American’s deposit.

When the man, clearly Asian, had walked in, the owner assumed he had another customer for the clown suit and another sale of the bright red rubber ball of a nose that went with it. Instead, the man had asked to see the American’s credit-card receipt, an unusual request, to say the least. When met with a polite denial, the man, the customer, had grabbed Pietro by the neck of his costume, twisting it into a choke hold.

It didn’t take the Pietro long to realize the prior customer’s privacy or identity or whatever the Asian wanted wasn’t worth his life. Besides, the customer’s name wouldn’t be on the receipt, and all but the last four digits of the card appeared as Xs. What harm could be done with that? A great deal less than Pietro faced if he didn’t give this madman what he wanted.

At the Piazza San Marco, the crowd was beginning to disperse when it became obvious that there was nothing more to be seen. Gurt and Lang said their good-byes to Gower and his lady friend.