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.
Chapter Sixty-One
After the morning’s sunshine, the afternoon was turning quickly chilly as a thick mist rolled in like smoke from the water. Alex’s hair was beginning to drip with moisture as they eventually found the baroque facade of the red and cream building that was the Grand School of San Rocco.
Inside, the place was virtually deserted. As they walked from room to room and gallery to gallery, gazing around them at the displays of Venetian art, Joel leafed carefully through the guide leaflet he’d grabbed from a tourist information stand in the foyer.
‘Hey!’ he said as Alex plucked it from his fingers and started skimming through it at high speed.
‘Got it,’ she said. ‘We need to go this way.’ She pointed towards a broad upward flight of white marble steps, and tugged his arm.
‘What’s that way?’
‘This,’ she said, and pointed at the enormous painting that adorned the wall to the right of the staircase. The gleaming mural depicted in intricate detail a crowd of miserable-looking people in various poses, pointing upwards with looks of reverent astonishment as a heavenly apparition descended on a cloud to meet them.
‘I’m not exactly an art expert,’ Joel said, walking up to it.
‘You think I am?’ Alex waved the leaflet at him. ‘Check it out. The Virgin Appears to the Plague Victims, by Antonio Zanchi, born 1631.’
‘You and your speed reading.’
‘And he painted it when he was thirty-five years of age,’ she added meaningfully.
Joel frowned. ‘And that’s relevant because—’
‘Because it means you can forget Damien and the Antichrist. 666 was just a date, with the number one chewed away.’
