The Teleportation Accident

‘You could run away. You could get out of Los Angeles.’

‘And go where? Cambridge?’

Loeser thought back to Dames! And how to Lay them. ‘If you’ve got the fever hots for a velvety piece, but the egg timer’s running out, you may need to put your balls in your mouth and just straight up swing for an elopement. You might think it’s a one in a million shot, but sometimes the lady’s so surprised her brain will flip upside down and she’ll say yes and kiss you. That, see, is how God made her.’ Could that actually work? Could the gland skip off and take with it the kidney stone, no anaesthetic required? Of course, if Mildred wasn’t around to marry Clowne, then Clowne would have no reason to stub out Plumridge’s streetcar scheme, and that would probably mean Blimk would lose his shop. But it was lot easier to stick to tiresome rules like ‘Don’t be a total prick to the people who try to be nice to you’ when you hadn’t just fallen (mostly) in love. And if Lavicini could kill twenty-five people over a woman, or whatever it said in the book he hadn’t read yet, then this didn’t seem so bad in comparison. He’d never tried anything like this in his life, but he knew now that he had to leave Los Angeles whatever happened. He had nothing to lose.

‘New York,’ he said. ‘Come to New York with me.’

Mildred regarded him for a while and then shrugged. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I have anything better to do.’

PART IV Zeitgeisterbahnhofe (Four Endings)

8. VENICE, 1691

The gondolier wore the mask of a plague doctor, with a long white beak, and when he shook his head the gibbous moon flashed in the red glass of the mask’s eyes. ‘You don’t want to go to Vignole.’

‘Why not?’ said Sauvage.

‘It’s nice enough on a warm afternoon, but there’s nothing much there. I haven’t been across for months. I’ll take you to Murano instead. Much more pleasant. Much more to do at night.’

‘I have business on the island.’

‘Are you in negotiations with an old lunatic to buy a dead vegetable patch?’

‘Perhaps I am.’

‘You really don’t want to go to Vignole. If I don’t talk you out of it now, you’ll just blame me afterwards. And rightly so. You’re a Frenchman, aren’t you? In Venice we look after our visitors.’

Sauvage, who wore an ordinary gilded bauta that left his mouth uncovered, took two gold zecchini out of the purse at his belt and pressed them into the gondolier’s gloved hand. ‘In that case, please indulge me.’

The gondolier was silent for a moment and then gestured for Sauvage to step down into the boat. As they pushed off into the lagoon, Sauvage looked up at the two guard towers that rose to the west above the ramparts of the Arsenal. Often since coming to Venice it had seemed to him that the city was not an island but a great loose raft, tied together only with bridges and washing lines and the complacency of pigeons, ready to cut loose and float off south if at any time it began to lose interest in the mainland.

‘Why do you wear that particular mask?’ he said.

‘Plagues come into Venice by sea,’ said the gondolier. ‘Not for a while now, but they will again. We in the boats live in the kingdom of plague just as much as any doctor.’ He rowed fast but there was no exertion in his voice. ‘Also, my nephews love it.’

When they got to the other shore, a wolf sat there watching them like something crystallised in an alembic out of the reflection of the moonlight on the surface of the water. For a moment the beauty of it made Sauvage’s spine ring like a xylophone, but then the gondolier banged his oar several times on the side of the boat and the wolf rose and trotted away, unhurried, on its surprisingly spindly legs.

‘You’ll wait for me here?’ said Sauvage when they knocked against the little wooden jetty.

‘I’d better come with you. For all you know there could be a whole pack near by.’

‘I’ve never heard of the wolves in Venice attacking a human being.’

‘Not over there,’ said the gondolier, pointing his thumb back in the direction of the Arsenal. ‘But out on Vignole they don’t get so many scraps.’

So Sauvage waited while the gondolier tied up his boat, and then they set off along the shore towards a small church, with only the stump of a collapsed steeple, which stood next to a copse of trees.

‘Do you know anything about that place?’ said Sauvage. After a week in Venice, he was struck by the silence of Vignole at night.

‘Not much. It’s old, I think. Goes back to Barbarigo’s time at least. But during the plague that killed my great-grandmother, the priest there started taking in the sick. Before long it filled up, and then the priest himself died, and after the plague went away there was no one who wanted to take it over.’

Instead of heading straight for the church, Sauvage made his way up the low hill on his right, and the gondolier followed. When they got to the top, Sauvage unfolded a sheet of paper that had been tucked inside his purse: a workmanlike pencil sketch of the view from the hill on which they stood, with the Arsenal on the left and the marshes stretching off to the right. ‘I came here to check something I couldn’t quite confirm from the other shore. This drawing was made fifteen years ago by a Siamese man who came to Venice to learn to paint. The church should be here in the foreground, next to the trees. But it isn’t.’

‘Maybe he just left it out. Orientals are godless, after all.’

‘He’s a Christian, actually, and he didn’t leave anything out. I asked him.’

‘You met him?’

‘Yes. He’s still in Venice. I bought this from him and he made me a gift to go with it.’ Sauvage took a small cloth bag from his belt and showed the contents to the gondolier.

‘What are those?’

‘What do they look like?’

‘Armoured raspberries.’

‘They’re called lychees. They come from Siam.’

‘How do they get all the way to Venice?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sauvage ate one, then peeled three more and dropped them on the grass. ‘Maybe the wolves will find these and it will make up for some of the scraps they don’t get.’ It saddened him to think that in a hundred years there would be no wild animals left in cities.

They went back down the hill towards the church. Pink flowers burst from the bark of the Judas trees near by as if their trunks were stuffed beyond capacity. ‘Why are you so interested in this church?’ said the gondolier.

‘You say it was — oops — abandoned sixty years ago,’ said Sauvage, nearly tripping on a dead vine. ‘And that’s how it looks. But fifteen years ago, it wasn’t here. Don’t you think that’s interesting?’

As they came closer, they could see that not only had the steeple collapsed but also the front wall of the church, leaving the whole structure open like a cart shed. Inside, there was nothing but rotting pews leading up to an altar and a stained-glass window at the opposite end, which confided none of its colours in the moonlight. ‘Have you ever seen anyone enter or leave this church?’ said Sauvage.

‘I told you, I don’t often come to Vignole. But I can assure you no one uses this place.’

‘How can you be certain?’

The gondolier pointed. ‘Bats.’ And indeed Sauvage could see the silhouettes of dozens of the little creatures hanging upside down from the rafters, a few of them stirring or swaying in the gloom. The stone under his feet was scurfy with dried guano. ‘Rats don’t mind people. Nor do cats or birds or spiders. But bats can’t stand to be