They blinked. They couldn't believe it. There was nothing but sky where the palazzo had been, sky and a mysterious puff of smoke that was already wafting away on the wind.
The clocks in the church towers all over Venice were striking noon. The palazzo had disappeared as if it were an empty dream.
The experience was uncanny, said the Argentines. For several minutes they sat dumbly in their gondola, too stunned to speak, staring into that patch of newly empty sky.
Of course the palazzo had made some noise collapsing, but not enough to be heard above the loud pealing of the city's church bells, which engineers later speculated might have upset the palazzo's delicate balance with their combined vibrations. And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the smoke, although it would take twenty-four hours to discover it.
While the stunned Argentines sat immobile in their gondola, other parties of tourists began to arrive on the scene from up and down the Grand Canal. The gondoliers landed and what they found astonished them, just as it astonished the police who arrived some minutes later.
For it seemed the Argentines' strange impression had not been wrong at all, rather it was based on airy fact. The floors and interior walls of the palazzo had all been removed, indeed, its insides in their entirety.
There had been absolutely nothing at all left in there.
The palazzo had been an empty dream before it collapsed.
It didn't take the police long to find out what had happened. When they went to question the servants who had worked in the palazzo, they found them all living in richly decorated villas far beyond their means, as were many of their relatives. One servant after another broke down and confessed.
The pillage, they admitted, had been going on since the beginning of their employment there. It had progressed from single objects to stripping whole rooms, to ripping out the plumbing and wiring, then to the marble in the floors and the wood and stonework in the walls.
The previous night they had finally made an end to the job by carrying away what was left of the floors and interior walls, leaving an empty shell behind.
By the evening of December 22, the scandal had taken on enormous proportions, particularly because the palazzo had been owned by a foreigner. The ability of the Fascist government to maintain law and order was being held up to ridicule, and tourists were leaving by train for Switzerland and by ship for Patras, outraged that a foreigner in Italy could be treated in such a manner. The police had to act immediately or the situation would have become intolerable.
Thus by ten o'clock that night seventeen former servants and several hundred of their relatives, screaming and weeping and shouting, had been dragged before judges and arraigned for a multitude of offenses ranging from unpremeditated theft and similar crimes of passion, to the systematic defacement of a national landmark, which an urgent cable from Rome, received just after dark, indicated the palazzo had secretly been for about the last one hundred years, unknown to anyone in Venice.
Meanwhile the search went on for the victim of this terrible conspiracy, who was described by the former servants as an Albanian millionaire, about twenty-seven years old, of extremely eccentric habits.
By gondoliers who for months had been carrying the little millionaire back to the palazzo just before dawn, he was identified as that bizarre figure who had been haunting the piazza in front of San Marco's through the hours of darkness for almost a year, dressed in evening clothes and a top hat and an opera cape and thoroughly drunk from some powerful alcoholic beverage, which he carried in a wooden canteen slung over his shoulder.
As for his activities at night in the piazza, thousands of witnesses were ready to testify that they had seen the little millionaire sneaking up behind tourists in cafés and annoying them in the most flagrant manner by whispering on endlessly about something called Gronk, as if this single word, unrecognizable to anyone, not only conveyed a whole host of meanings but also implied unlimited possibilities of an unknown nature.
And always he had carried in his arms a stack of journals titled The Boy, which he had tried to give away but never could, it apparently being the little millionaire's destiny to go on carrying The Boy around with him forever.
These furtive nightly performances were known to thousands in Venice, but other than that the police could learn only one other fact concerning the little millionaire's public life. Several restaurant owners stated that he had been in the habit of dropping in around midnight to order a single baked chicken wing, which he then carried off into the darkness in a paper bag.
Yet even though he hadn't come to the piazza in front of San Marco's on the night before his palazzo collapsed, the servants reported that he definitely wasn't to be seen in the empty dream when they had carried out the last supporting beam. Nor had a body been found in the ruins.
WHERE IS THE MAD NIGHTLY PEDDLER OF GRONK? screamed the headlines in the newspapers.
The police intensified their search on the morning of December 23. Lists were checked and it was found that a footman from the palazzo was not among those arrested. The footman hadn't returned home and had last been seen by other servants on the morning before the collapse, dressed in blue satin livery and carrying a pickax and shovel in the vicinity of the kitchen.
The police put out an alarm for the man and before noon they were led to a Communist laborer in a cheap café on the mainland, drunk on grappa, who was wearing blue satin knee breeches. At first the laborer sullenly denied any knowledge of his satin breeches, saying they would never exist in a Communist state. But under threat of a sound beating from the Fascist police crowding around him, he soon admitted he had taken the breeches off a delirious man who had washed up on the shore two days ago, thinking they would add a little color to his life. After hiding the breeches under his shirt he had hailed a passing group of mendicant monks, who had carried the delirious man back to their monastery to care for him.
The monks were traced and the footman was found lying in a corner of the monastery garage, just emerging from a coma caused by excessive ingestion of Grand Canal water. The police slapped him to bring him around and the footman told a confused tale.
One morning, he said, days or weeks or months ago, he had no idea when the catastrophe had befallen him and how long he had been in a coma, he had been carrying out his normal duties in the subcellar of the palazzo when he had met an apparition of womanhood so horrifying, so unnatural, that he had run upstairs in terror and jumped through a casement window to swim for his life. But the sewerage had been sluggish that morning around the palazzo. As he swam out into the Grand Canal the fumes overwhelmed him, he lost consciousness and didn't know anything after that.
But he did remember that terrible, ghastly apparition he had seen in the subcellar by torchlight.
And never before that moment, swore the footman, crossing himself again and again and shaking violently as putrid bubbles popped out of his mouth, could I have imagined such a female figure existed on this earth, Hail Mary, mother of God.
A subcellar beneath the palazzo? The policemen were amazed, but not so one of the learned mendicant monks who had been listening with them in the monastery garage.
Yes indeed, observed the monk. That palazzo was once shared by Byron and his favorite pimp and catamite, Tito the gondolier, which I happen to know about because Tito was a granduncle on my mother's side. Well to escape the hordes of women and boys who were always besieging Byron in his living quarters, he had a secret subcellar built where he could retire late at night and write his poetry.