“No, no, I do. Michael! It is Michael. But I forget your second name,” he said apologetically.
“Your wife, I think, took our booking. How is Lucrezia?”
“Michael Sutherland! I remember you! And that nobleman friend of yours-he was not English, I remember, but he was as English as any Englishman.” Claudio grinned widely. “Is he with you? I remember him. One or two of the ladies remember him too.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do, and yes, he is with us, and he’s a Welshman,” Michael said all in one go. “It’s good to see you again.”
“And my wife is well,” Claudio said.
“And I hope she’ll be happy to receive this,” Michael said, handing over a small cloth-covered box. The man looked a trifle suspicious and opened the hinged lid. Inside was a small replica axe, long-handled and fashioned in pure silver, with a small booklet accompanying it. He certainly hadn’t planned on bringing it. He’d discovered it in one of the zip-fastened pockets of one of his travel bags, forgotten entirely when or why he’d bought it, but it seemed to fit the bill.
“It’s a replica of the axe that beheaded two of the wives of our King Henry the Eighth,” Michael told him conspiratorially. “Created by the silversmiths of the Tower of London. The original axe was used,” he said slyly, nodding his head secretively and barely managing to keep from winking, “to deal with wives who were not always as obedient as their husbands might wish.”
For a ghastly moment be thought he’d mistaken Claudio’s sense of humor, and the magnificent rows he had with his wife. Inside one week he and Geraint had seen half a dozen items of crockery flung by the fierce redhead at her husband before the delighted customers at the cafe. Then the man burst into a huge laugh and reached across the wooden counter, grabbed Michael by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.
“You are a wicked, mischievous Englishman,” the man laughed. “She will be delighted with it. I will see to it.”
“I hope so.” Michael was laughing now too, ignoring the intense garlic aroma that lingered from the man’s greeting.
“Ah, so here is the lordship now, yes.” Claudio beamed as Geraint, Serrin, and Kristen pushed past Streak as he struggled with the Last of the bags. “Hey!” he announced to the multitude. “This is an English lordship staying at my place! What you think of that?”
“Oh, shit,” Michael said between clenched teeth. Anyone who managed to trace them to Venice wouldn’t find it hard to locate them now. English nobility visiting Venice would hardly be unusual, but staying here would be. That was the whole point of coming here. Geraint glowered at him, and then had to force himself to smile as various comments, some respectful but most ribald, were hooted at him from various quarters of the cafe. Doing the only thing he could, he bowed to the customers, who cheered him and then returned to their wine.
“Thanks for that,” he snarled at Michael as they climbed the rickety wooden steps. “Why not put up a poster and advertise our presence?”
“It would have been less effective,” Michael said sadly. When they got to the landing, Geraint was still visibly seething. Kristen took a determined step forward and faced him squarely, hands on her hips.
“You’re not angry,” she told him. She grabbed him by the arm and half-dragged him over to the small window facing south. “Look,” she said.
“It’s the piazza,” he said, wondering what she meant. She stared at him. He almost had to look away; she was very intense, her body stiff.
“I said look, pampoen,” she repeated, using the Africans for idiot. “Look at it, look at it. Look at those horses, they’re almost alive.” She was pointing to the gilded bronze horses of St. Mark prancing above the huge central doorways of the basilica. “And look at that tower, it reaches up to heaven. Now don’t you dare to be angry when this is so beautiful.”
Geraint understood what she meant and what she was telling, and for a moment he felt a tinge of some small sadness that he couldn’t feel the same about the place. But he had forebodings about the city after what he’d seen in the Tarot cards, and besides that he carried his own troubles, he didn’t have eyes to see the wonder of San Marco right then.
“I’m sorry.” He gave a slight shrug. “You’re seeing all this for the first time… Of course, you’re taken with it. Why not go out and stroll around the square? I’m sure it’s safe.”
“I will,” she said, a little deflated. Something wasn’t quite right with Geraint, and it puzzled her that she didn’t have a glimmering of what it was.
“When you’ve finished fannying around,” Streak said it a businesslike way as he dragged some bags to the nearest door. “Do the honors, guv.”
Michael unlocked his door on cue. “I have one or two calls to make, and then I think it’s an early night. But we need to plan what we’re going to do tomorrow,” he said to Geraint.
“Fair enough. I think a Ministry interest in the remarkable engineering work of the city would be entirely appropriate. I need to call the consulate office here as well, go and flatter some egos,” Geraint replied. “Okay, let’s get organized. Chop chop.”
“We’re going out,” Kristen told Serrin. It was anything but a question.
“I kind of got that impression,” he said with a smile.
The two of them dumped their bags in their room and strode down the stairs and into the night. The square was uncluttered with drinkers at tables, the ordinances of the city forbidding this in the square before the palace itself, and only small knots of tourists like themselves occupied the piazza, save for the guardsmen stationed decoratively before the basilica itself. They walked across the mosaics of the piazza, through a night that seemed to be hushed before the magnificence of the buildings.
They went quietly toward the basilica, stopping ten meters or so before the central doorways. The horses, underlit with small spotlights, reared into the inky night sky, and the black-and-silver-dressed guardsmen stood impassively before the colonnades of the doorways. The huge frontage of the basilica, with its astonishing statuary and frescoes, stretched out on both sides of them.
“Can you imagine building this?” Serrin asked softly. The wonder of the place had struck him too. Flags and pennants hung down from atop the doorways and alcoves, and as he looked at them he saw they were portraits and paintings. He stepped a little closer to examine the nearer of them.
They were, he guessed, reproductions of paintings by the many artists whose work graced the city’s buildings; and that had been most of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, that time in human history when art and science had not so much progressed or flourished as exploded in the minds of so many men of brilliance. It had been an era when the shackles of a corrupt and authoritarian church had begun to be loosened, yet so much of the art of the era had been sacred, and used to decorate many of the churches and cathedrals of Europe’s great cities.
By sheer coincidence, the first painting he saw on its, lightly fluttering flag was Leonardo’s John the Baptist. Opposite it, across the doorways, was a greatly smoothed and polished reproduction of another of the artist’s surviving works.
“The Last Supper,” Serrin said. “Christ and his disciples. I don’t think the original looks quite as clear that.”
Kristen looked at it curiously, stepping closer to examine it.
“I can’t see Judas,” she said.
“I’m not sure where he is. I can’t even remember if he was there or not,” Serrin said. “I didn’t pay enough attention in Sunday school.”
“He’s got to be there, but the arm is wrong,” she said, pointing to the left of the picture.
“What?” he asked, stepping forward himself to see what she was talking about.
“Look. There. Someone is holding a knife at that man’s stomach, but you can only see the arm. Whoever the arm belongs to you can’t see. And he isn’t pointing it at Jesus,” she added, a little confused. “And why are they all accusing him? Look at their hands.”