Uprising

Chapter Sixty

The Metropole Hotel, Venice

6.23 a.m. local time

‘Where did you go?’ Joel mumbled sleepily from under the covers.

Alex froze where she stood on the balcony. Behind her, the light of dawn was breaking over the Venetian skyline. For a second she thought Joel had seen her climb over the balustrade from the street below, and her mind raced to find an explanation for the unorthodox entrance.

‘I didn’t hear the door,’ he said, rubbing his eyes and sitting up in bed, and she could breathe again.

‘I sometimes don’t sleep well at night,’ she explained nonchalantly. ‘A walk helps.

Didn’t want to wake you.’

Joel kicked his legs out from under the rumpled sheets. ‘You should have woken me. I’d have come with you.’

She smiled. ‘A girl likes to be alone sometimes.’

‘What about now?’

‘Now I want to be with you.’ She walked over to the bed and rested her hands on his shoulders.

‘I can’t believe you were just out in the cold. Your hands are toasty.’

‘I have good circulation,’ she said. Especially when her veins were filled with someone else’s fresh blood. The recent memory of last night’s two victims replayed in a flash through her mind. The first had been a young guy on his way home from a late-night bar. She’d stalked him in silence for a few hundred yards before jumping him in an alleyway.

The second had been something of an indulgence. She’d been making her way back to the hotel, crossing a bridge when a solitary gondolier had appeared like a vision through the pre-dawn mist and drifted up the canal beneath her. Too much to resist. By the time he’d realised he had an uninvited passenger, his blood was being sucked from his neck.

She’d only just had enough Vambloc left for the second one. Running out was a big worry.

But now, at least, Joel was safe with her. And that mattered a great deal.

‘Look what we did to this bed last night,’ he said, smiling as he started unbuttoning her coat. ‘It’s wrecked.’

‘Impetuous,’ she murmured. The coat slipped from her shoulders, and then his fingers were running up under her blouse. She pushed him down on the bed and clambered astride him.

After making love for the second time in a few hours, they called room service.

During breakfast in bed, he kept looking at her and wanting to clasp her hand. ‘This feels so weird to me,’ he said. ‘We’ve only just met, but it’s like I’ve known you all my life.’

‘Maybe you have,’ she replied.

It was bright, crisp and cold as they wandered the streets and squares of Venice.

Hours of discussion, of studying the notebook and racking their brains still hadn’t led them anywhere, and the day was beginning to pass them by with nothing to show for it.

By the time noon had come and gone, they were walking almost aimlessly through the old city. On their left, row after row of moored boats and gondolas drifted on the sparkling waters of the Grand Canal as they passed the Doge’s Palace and the Archaeological Museum. During high season the place would have been swarming with thousands of people, but today only a thin smattering of tourists were ambling around the spectacular sights, snapping cameras here and there as their guides pointed out sites of interest and rambled through the history of the different buildings.

‘What are you looking at?’ Alex smiled, catching Joel’s eye as they walked under the pale sun.

‘I was admiring the view,’ he said, not taking his eyes off her.

‘You’ve got to keep your mind on what we’re looking for.’ She tried to sound reprimanding, but the grin on his face was infectious, and she couldn’t stop her smile from widening. ‘Be serious.’

‘I am serious. I want to find this thing and go home. You know, that looks heavy,’ he added, pointing at the colourful backpack she was wearing. Whatever she was carrying inside, the straps were strained tight over her shoulders. ‘Want me to take it for a while?’

‘I can manage, thanks.’

‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘More girl stuff.’

‘You said it. Plus I brought along my mallet and stakes, in case we run into any vampires.’

‘Now who isn’t being serious?’

She was about to reply when she sensed something behind them. She glanced over her shoulder at the crowds of people, scanning the faces of the tourists. They all seemed to be either gazing around them at the Venetian scenery, or perusing their guidebooks, or fiddling with the settings on their cameras.

All except two pairs of eyes. Both hidden behind sunglasses, both angled towards them. The pair of men were hanging back a hundred yards or so as Alex and Joel turned inland and emerged into the huge open space of St Mark’s Square.

‘What?’ he said, noticing the sudden look of tension on her face.

‘Don’t look now,’ she said, ‘but apparently someone else is less than interested in the architecture too. Back near the wall over there. Five o’clock. There are two of them.’

Joel pretended to stumble over an uneven paving stone. ‘Got them. You think they’re following us?’

‘I don’t think they’ve mistaken us for Brad and Angelina, do you?’

Up ahead, a slender young female guide was pointing up at St Mark’s Basilica, the huge cathedral that dominated one end of the square and the huddled streets and buildings beyond, for the benefit of the small crowd of Americans who were tagging slowly along in her wake. She looked like she was having to work hard to maintain their attention. As they caught up with the group, Alex and Joel caught snatches of her talking about its five Byzantine domes. A few zoom lenses whirred and shutters clicked.

The tourists all gazed dully at the magnificence of the ornate sculptures and dazzling mosaics, the glittering pyramidal spire of the enormous bell tower next to the basilica.

Alex also gazed casually up at the buildings, but only so she could throw a discreet glance back towards the two men — and saw that they’d melted into the crowd. But she hadn’t imagined them.

‘How does anybody know we’re here?’ Joel said tensely.

‘Interesting question. I was wondering the same thing myself.’

‘At least they can’t be…you know. Not if they’re walking about in daylight.’ Joel thought of Seymour Finch and quickly realised that was small consolation.

‘No,’ Alex said after a moment’s pause. ‘No, they can’t.’

Pressing deeper inside the crowd, they used its cover to scan the square far and wide for any trace of the two men. Alex could see nothing but she was certain they were still being watched from a distance.

The tour group had drifted closer to St Mark’s Basilica, and the guide pointed out the large bronze horses that overlooked the square from the cathedral’s facade.

‘They were said to have been part of the treasure sacked from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade,’ she told the disinterested crowd. ‘Napoleon Bonaparte removed them to Paris in 1797, but they were restored to Venice eighteen years later.

Sadly, the horses you see here are only replicas, but I’m pleased to tell you that the real ones are inside, if you’ll follow me—’

One of the families of tourists had with them a chubby little girl of about seven.

Where her face wasn’t smeared with chocolate, it was mottled red with bored dissatisfaction. She twisted grumpily to her mother and complained loudly, ‘Mommy, I wanna see the vampires!’

Alex snapped her head round to stare at her through the crowd. The child caught her eye and her face turned pale — but then everyone started laughing at her comment, and the tension of the moment was diffused. The guide smiled.

‘I believe our learned little friend is referring to the gruesome discovery, made just last year right here in Venice, of skulls that some have claimed once belonged to real-life vampires.’

A mutter ran through the crowd as they momentarily forgot all about Napoleon and the Fourth Crusade.

‘That’s right,’ the guide went on, obviously pleased that she’d got their attention at last. ‘Vampires. They were the skulls of women, and they had had bricks or stone wedges hammered into their mouths to stop them from biting more victims. Then, just like in the story of Dracula, they would have been staked through the heart.’ She paused, and pulled a face. ‘But the terrible truth is that these women, far from being blood-sucking monsters, are likely to have been the hapless victims of a superstition that was still very prevalent during the time that the Black Death struck the city during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, killing 150,000 people, a whole third of Venice’s population.’

Another fascinated murmur from the crowd. The guide was on a roll now.

‘The plague was actually believed by many to be a form of vampiric possession, because of the way the victims’ mouths would ooze blood as they succumbed to the disease. In fact, the succession of plagues that struck Europe during the centuries was responsible for encouraging a mass belief in vampirism. Thankfully, we now know that Count Dracula and his brides are not stalking the streets of Venice.’

Everybody laughed, except Alex and Joel.

‘For those of you who may be interested,’ the guide went on, ‘the terrible ravages of the Black Death in Venice are depicted in artwork by painters such as Tintoretto and Zanchi, whose works are displayed in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.’

She smiled. ‘But now, returning to the famous basilica here in front of us…’

Alex didn’t hear any more. She glanced at Joel, and could see that he’d had the same idea.

‘Did you get that?’ she asked.

He looked stunned by the realisation. ‘Zanchi.’

‘Right. Take away the Z and you’ve got—’

‘Anchi. The bit we couldn’t figure out.’

She nodded. ‘We were reading it wrongly. The guy was a painter. And what do you always see depicted in Italian artwork from that time? The Virgin Mary.’

‘Salvation lies at the feet of the Virgin,’ Joel said.

‘Which means we need to go to the Grand School of San Rocco.’

They broke off from the tour group and hurried away across the square, back towards the Grand Canal. Out of the corner of her eye, Alex spotted the two men reappear from a doorway and start following them at a fast trot.

As they approached the edge of the canal, a waterbus was pulling into the side to let off passengers. Alex glanced back as they boarded and saw the two men exchange looks of frustration. She gave them a little wave.

‘Bye, bye, assholes.’ She smiled to herself as the waterbus burbled away.