Tom nods. 'You're on the money.' He places her accent as Manhattan. Uptown. 'What are you, some kind of cop?'
She laughs again, deeper and longer this time, even nicer to hear. 'Me? No. No way. I'm a travel writer. Freelance. Everything from Lonely Planet to Conde Nast.' She leans across the tables. 'Tina – Tina Ricci.'
'Pleased to meet you, Tina.' He shakes her hand.
She looks into his warm brown eyes and waits for his move. Waits to be asked to his table. Waits for the follow-up line that she's sure will come.
It doesn't. Tom says nothing. He grows awkward and looks away, his heart beating like he's just gone three rounds back in the boxing ring in Compton. He can feel her still staring. The bell's rung and, for the first time in his life, he's stuck in his corner wondering what to do.
CHAPTER 5
Present Day Venice The stranger looks different now.
No longer the good Samaritan who helped her when she was lost in the labyrinth of shadowy streets.
No longer a friendly local lending a helping hand to a confused and anxious teenager who'd stormed off after a row with her father.
He's dressed differently too. Long black robes and a sinister silver mask shielding his face.
The girl grimaces as her bound and gagged body is dragged along the moss-slimed deck boards. He's taking her to his sacred area. The libation altar. The spot where he will let her blood feed the water.
He pushes the teenager's head over the edge. Makes it dangle in that supernatural space between sky and earth. Limbo. The place where he'll steal her soul.
Only when she stares directly up at him does he begin.
An incision by the left ear. A long red slice beneath her cute little chin.
A popping noise in her slender throat.
The gag in her mouth slackens.
A fountain of red. Then a splutter. The greedy black water drinks until she's bled dry.
Indifferently, he drops her skull with a dull thump on the wooden decking, then unwraps the tools he needs to complete his bloody ritual.
He kneels and prays.
A doctrine handed down across the centuries. A verbal chain of unbreakable belief.
Now there's a whispering in his mind. A swelling choir of voices. Communal prayers of those who came and killed before him. The chants of the believers climax as he completes his ceremony.
He wraps the sinner's sticky corpse in sheets of black plastic then tucks it beneath the tarpaulin in the gondola and waits for night to come.
Ribbons of milky moonlight finally flutter across the boards of the boathouse.
A long, deathly nothingness hums in his ears and fizzes in his blood.
He breathes it in. Absorbs its blackness. Feels it transform him.
The unlit, black gondola glides invisibly through the city's canals and out into the lagoon.
The end is beginning.
An end planned six hundred years before the birth of Christ.
CHAPTER 6
The Following Day Venice The streets are cool, dark and deserted. It's just after 5 a.m., and Tom's already been up for an hour and is walking the city's majestic bridges. Locals say that the best way to get to know Venice is to get lost, and Tom is at least halfway there. The most he's aware of is that he's meandering vaguely towards the Rialto. Maybe it's years of rising early that shook him from his bed, or the fact that crossing time zones has messed up his body clock. Then again, it could be that he's still trying to understand why yesterday he didn't ask Tina – was her full name Tina, or something longer, like Christina? – if she wanted to catch up later for a drink, or maybe dinner. The words that deserted him like an awkward teenager come easily now.
He leans over the rails at the foot of a bridge and looks along the water. His head is spinning. Anyway, what did he really expect to come from a short conversation with a woman in a cafe?
It's a good time of the day to clear his mind and see the city. He seems to have it to himself – like a private viewing at an art gallery. And Venice certainly has fascinating exhibits. A hundred and fifty canals, spanned by four hundred bridges. A hundred and seventeen separate islands. Three hundred alleyways.
Tom lifts his head. He's heard something.
Maybe locals going to work. The first wheels of Venetian life grinding into daily motion. Perhaps even priests making their way to church for early prayers.
He takes his hands off the cool iron railings. Looks around. The noise comes again – this time it's more of a shout than anything. A man calling something in Italian? Tom steps up on to the crest of the bridge and listens more attentively. Tries to get a bearing. Pins it down to a spot straight ahead and off to the right somewhere.
He jogs down the other side.
The streets smell of wet stones and rotting vegetables. The road here is cobbled and his worn leather soles slide on the smooth surface.
He takes two more bridges. Shuffles to a halt. 'Hello! Hello, is anyone there?'
'Here! Here!' comes the out-of-sight reply.
Tom sets off again. Maybe two more bridges to the right?
He crosses the hump of the second and sees him.
An old man.
White shirt, white hair, dark crumpled trousers.
Kneeling by the edge of the water, like he's fallen, or he's trying to pull something out of the canal.
Probably a small boat.
Maybe a bag or something he's dropped.
'Hang on. I'll help you.'
Tom hurries alongside. The old man's face is strained. His knuckles white from gripping and pulling.
Now Tom sees it.
A sailing rope is tied around the railings and the old guy is heaving something heavy from below.
'Don't strain yourself – let me give you a hand.'
The pensioner falls back. There's a splash. He cracks his bony back on the cobbles. Puts his slack-skinned hands to his face and starts to sob.
Tom pats him on the shoulder, squeezes it reassuringly as he moves to the water's edge and looks over the stone slabs into the canal.
Now he understands the desperation.
Dangling from the rope is the naked and mutilated body of a young woman.
EIGHT MOON
666 BC
Atmanta Teucer and Tetia sit together outside their hut, watching an autumnal dawn break across a perfect Etruscan skyline. Burnt orange, pale lemon and deepest cherry colour the distant forests.
Neither of them sleep well any more.
They sit here most mornings, holding hands, resting against the outside of the modest hillside home Teucer constructed of hewn timber, thatch, wattle and terracotta paste.
But life is better.
They have got away with it.
The thing they never now speak of – they are sure they have got away with.
Tetia leans her head on her husband's shoulder. 'One day soon we will sit here with our child and teach it the beauty of our world.' She puts his hand on her bump and hopes he feels the magic of the child kicking.
Teucer smiles. But it is not the expression of an excited father-to-be. It is one of a husband putting on a brave face, one who is worried that the unborn may not be his but that of the man who raped her.
Tetia squeezes his hand. 'Look, only the pines over by the curte seem to hold their green. Everywhere else has been set ablaze by the gods.'
He follows her eyes across the canopies of trees and tries not to think of his growing hate for the child she carries. 'The fires of the season cleanse the grounds for the coming crops.'