He was neither the first, nor by any means the last, to disappear, but he was one of the most prominent and beloved. A country-wide search led to nothing but the blood-drenched car in which he had been taken, which proved to be owned and driven by the Fascist secret police—close colleagues and friends of the Prime Minister himself. When Matteotti’s body was finally discovered in August, crowds lined the funeral route. Anti-Fascist posters went up on walls. All fingers pointed at Mussolini. The world waited gleefully for Italian Fascism to crumble under charges of conspiracy and murder, and another would-be tyrant to fade away behind bars.
Yet it did not. Instead, the thugs succeeded. Newspapers critical of the cause were shut down. The Italian king decided that he feared the country’s Republicans and Socialists more than he did the Fascists, and refused to dismiss the Mussolini government.
And a few months later, in January of this year, Benito Mussolini stood before his nation to declare himself absolute ruler of his country, and to take proud responsibility for the violence that had put him there. As he put it, “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give it these things—with love if possible, with force if necessary.”
The trains would run on time.
As I vaguely remembered from the half-heard conversation in Mycroft’s flat, my brother-in-law had been saying that the April election did indeed show any number of irregularities, from Fascist intimidation to disappearing ballots, and that at the time of his death, Matteotti had in hand documents suggesting that Il Duce and his cronies had pocketed a great deal of money from a sale of their country’s oil rights. Mycroft had also heard, from his grey inside sources, that Mussolini himself had hesitated over making himself dictator, until his fellow Fascist leaders threatened to take over themselves if he did not.
Once the tail was wagging the dog, Italy was doomed.
Up until now, I had not really made any link between my soft, floating-world memories of Venice and the brutalities taking place in the rest of the country. But clearly Holmes had.
In centuries past, the Venice lagoon had been a moat that kept the world at bay. Would it still, in this harsh modern era?
Chapter Twenty
THE TRAIN CAME TO ITS end on Sunday, two days and four nations after we’d stepped out of our Sussex door.
The ideal approach to Venice is from the sea, standing at a ship’s rails as the faint traces of buildings take form through the mist. She resembles (and I must agree with tradition here: Venice is feminine) a queen seated on a throne in a wide, flat field. Solitary and regal, she waits in patience for those who would come to do homage.
Instead of that entry to La Serenissima, we puffed across two miles of water on hundreds of stone arches, waited while the customs men came to check our hand luggage, and climbed down into the cacophony of any railway station on the planet. The salty air churned with the sounds of shouting porters and crashing equipment, customs inspectors and street urchins, the hiss of venting steam and the slams of compartment doors, the cries of greeting and the occasional shriek of a traveller seeing her bags vanish into the crowd.
And yet, this was different. There was no stink of idling taxis, for one thing, no clop of hooves or rumble of motor lorries or whine of motor-cycles. We were in a port city, yet there was no sign of heavy-goods traffic. Groups of laughing foreigners suggested a resort town, yet bright holiday clothing was more than balanced by workaday garments. Uniforms of various kinds put the crowd into order, funnelling traffic from iron rails to waterborne craft.
I watched the familiar scene with pleasure, until my eye was drawn to an oddity: two black-clad figures created an eddy in the swarm, in a way that even the customs officials did not. Most of the people giving them wide berth seemed unaware that they were doing so, but even the laughing tourists subsided a touch as they approached the Blackshirts, and their laughter resumed only when they were out of earshot from the two Fascist representatives.
I shook off the creeping awareness of the outside world and turned my mind to our next moves.
The previous Friday, when Thomas Cook & Co. had proven a broken reed and failed to come up with adequate rooms, I had dredged the name of an hotel from the depths of memory and sent them a wire. We had left Sussex before any response could arrive, and since the tourist season was clearly well under way—despite heat, Fascists, mosquitoes, and the stench of summer canals—I only hoped that someone had recalled my mother’s name with enough affection to offer us a servant’s room under the sweltering eaves.
As I prepared to join the milling crowds heading towards the water and thus the Venetian equivalent of a taxi, I became aware of a person standing before me, very still and quite close. I adjusted my eyes, and found a trim young man in hotel livery, with a name in fancy stitching on his breast:
H?tel Londres
&
Beau Rivage
“Signor and Signora Russell?”
“Yes,” Holmes said. Thanks to Mycroft, he even had a passport in the name of Sheldon Russell, an ebony-haired gent, pampered and well glossed from the tips of his shoes to the teeth behind his pencil-thin moustache. Thin disguise, but along with the change in his stance and the languid air he wore, even someone who knew him would hesitate, wondering, might this be a cousin…?
“The keys to your luggage, please? I shall see it through Customs. Come, your boat is just here.”
I followed his pointing finger, and saw a sleek steam launch with a man in the same uniform. I held out the keys and my valise, but told him, “We’ll walk, thanks. It’s been a long train ride. Oh—and tell the maid not to unpack the bags. We prefer to do so on our own.” And had, ever since the day one inexplicably thorough hotel maid had happened across a hidden compartment, dutifully removed the contents for cleaning, and sent a bullet whizzing through the next room.
The hotel man bowed, cheerfully acknowledging our English eccentricity, accepted my tip, and trotted to the hotel launch with our valises. While he explained to his colleague, hands gesturing, that these mad English guests wanted to walk to the hotel, the even sleeker launch beside it drew in its gangway and let out a belch of steam. This one bore the name Hotel Excelsior, and it turned away with an air of disdain, as if to show that its guests did not need to wait along with hoi polloi. The launch went serenely off, ignoring the gondolas, cargo transports, fishing boats with furled sails, many varieties of shallow-hulled canal boats, and one lone rowing skiff.
Holmes scowled at our own waiting launch. “Do you suppose we shall ever see our possessions again?” he asked me.
“It’s quite a good hotel, Holmes.”
“All the more reason for a thief to pick their jacket out of a laundry.”
Was I being na?ve, gullible—touristic? I did not think so. “Venice has little serious crime, and a very clear sense of honour.”
“Amongst thieves,” he grumbled, so I slid my arm through his and urged my husband and partner towards the foot-bridge linking the modern world with the timeless city known as La Serenissima.
This most unlikely of cities grew out of the waters centuries ago, a refuge from chaos following the disintegration of the Roman Empire (another power that kept the trains running, metaphorically speaking). Its residents expanded their literal footholds in the lagoon by driving trees down into the mud and perching buildings on top. Before long, its ships ruled—and plundered—the known world.
In the process, Venice gave rise to an idiosyncratic, oddly democratic, and utterly ruthless system of government. The Doge and his Council were absolute rulers, and yet a constant and precarious balance of power ensured that no one man—or even family—could establish a permanent authority over the others. A Doge’s salary was small, forcing him to maintain his interest in healthy commerce. After a Doge died—and the number of Doges who failed to succumb to natural causes served as a cautionary tale to each successor—his estate was reviewed, and pillaged if any trace of misdoing was found.