Free The Gondola Scam by Jonathan Gash

the Bridewell
shoe-shop chain. Please       find
accompanying this an open return air ticket to Venice, and       funds calculated at average Continental
daily rates, as permitted by      HM.
Inland Revenue. We estimate ten days.
     
    They remained mine sincerely.
    It was Connie's godspeed. My hand shook as I signed the receipt.
    The lad proudly burned off on his motorbike, with me standing
there looking at the air ticket with vision suddenly gone blurred. She hadn't
believed me one bit.
    Bloody women, I thought, and locked up.
    9
    Venice. If you've never seen it you can't believe it. And when you
clap your eyes on it you still don't believe it.
    I stood on the Riva waterfront utterly bemused. It really is
waterborne, floating in the sunlit mist of the lagoon. I've never seen anything
like it. Nor, incidentally, has anyone else.
    Since meeting old Mr. Pinder, I'd read like a maniac. Even on the
plane to the Marco Polo International Airport— we'd left at an ungodly hour—I
was scrabbling through a potted history without gaining much. Clearly, the
little maritime republic founded on a mudbank on Friday, March 25, in the Year
of Our Lord 421 had done okay for itself. Venice had an eye for the old gelt.
But when I got to the bit about the Venetian calendar starting on March 1 and
Venetian days officially starting in the evening, I chucked it aside. I was
confused enough. I even started on my old Italian course notes, but what can
you do with a language where the words for "need" and "dream"
are so disturbingly similar? I chucked those aside too. My usual Lovejoy method
would have to do—osmosis, fingers crossed, and a penny map.
    Like I said, pathetic.
    The whole waterfront was on the go. Busy, busy. They were all
there, massive black and white tugs, barges, the water taxis, waterbuses—all
nudging the Riva. I must say, the poles to which they were moored looked
decidedly wobbly to me, but there was a jaunty confidence to the scene, as if
Venice had had that sort of useless criticism before and so what? Crowds ambled
around the vaporetto terminus.
Early-season tourists drifted, gazed at the souvenir stalls, peered into canals
from bridges.
    Across the lagoon the beautiful San Giorgio Maggiore rose from the
vague afternoon mist, and, away beyond, a suggestion of the Lido's buildings
showed where the Adriatic Sea was kept at bay. To the left was the Arsenale
shipyard, which had turned out a completed warship every day when the Serene
Republic was doing over the Turks. To the right across the water, the gold gleams
of the Salute church were still celebrating the end of the bubonic plague and
marking the start of the Grand Canal.
    But where were the streets, the avenues, the cars? Odd, that, I’d
heard of Venice's canals, of course. I just wasn't prepared for the fact that
they were everywhere and completely displaced roads. I stood to watch a big
liner shushing slowly past, turning in towards the long raised spine of the
Giudecca island. Another odd thing—despite the bustle, no noise except for the
occasional muffled roar of a water taxi. I finally got the point of Joker
Benchley's cable home: "Streets full of water. Please advise." You
walk in tiny alleys between the canals, on bridges over the water, or in and
out of tiny squares, and that's about it. The fondamente, places where an
actual pavement exists, are practically major landmarks and rare enough to have
special names. All right, I thought. Venice is simply one hell of a tangle,
with hardly anywhere to put your feet.
    But it was still the place where I would find that yacht-owning
lemon-colored smoothie and his two goons that did for Crampie and Mr. Malleson.
Ledger couldn't touch me here, and with luck some delectable antique might fall
my way.
    Right, now. Where to start? I looked about expectantly.
    "You find a welcome, signore?"
    The boatman was smoking nearby. I nodded. "Yes, thank
you."
    The water taxi which had brought us from the mainland