The Venetian Betrayal

But first, he thought, they apparently needed the seventh medallion.

He retreated from the helm down three steps into the forward cabin adorned with tasseled curtains, embroidered seats, and polished mahogany. Ornate for a rental. He’d bought a Venetian guidebook at the airport and decided to learn what he could about Torcello.

Romans first inhabited the tiny island in the fifth and sixth centuries. Then, in the eighth century, frightened mainlanders fled invading Lombards and Huns and reoccupied it. By the 1500s twenty thousand people lived in a thriving colony among churches, convents, palaces, markets, and an active shipping center. The merchants who stole the body of St. Mark from Alexandria in 828 were citizens of Torcello. The guidebook noted it as a place where “ Rome first met Byzantium.” A watershed. To the west lay the Houses of Parliament. To the east the Taj Mahal. Then, pestilent fever, malaria, and silt clogging its canals brought a decline. Its most vigorous citizens moved to central Venice. The merchant houses folded. All of the palaces became forgotten. Builders from other islands eventually scrabbled among its rubble for the right stone or sculptured cornice, and everything gradually disappeared. Marshland reclaimed high ground and now fewer than sixty people lived there in only a handful of houses.

He stared out the forward windows and spotted a single redbrick tower-old, proud, and lonely-stretching skyward. A photograph in the guidebook matched the outline. He read and learned the bell tower stood beside Torcello’s remaining claim to fame. The Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, built in the seventh century, Venice ’s oldest house of worship. Beside it, according to the guidebook, sat a squat of a church in the shape of a Greek cross, erected six hundred years later. Santa Fosca.

The engines dimmed as Cassiopeia throttled down and the boat settled into the water. He climbed back to where she stood at the helm. Ahead he spotted thin streaks of ochre-colored sandbank cloaked in reeds, rushes, and gnarly cypresses. The boat slowed to a crawl and they entered a muddy canal, its bulwarks flanked on one side by overgrown fields and on the other by a paved lane. To their left, one of the city’s water buses was taking on passengers at the island’s only public transportation terminal.

“Torcello,” she said. “Let’s hope we got here first.”

VIKTOR STEPPED OFF THE VAPORETTO WITH RAFAEL FOLLOWING.

The water bus had delivered them from San Marco to Torcello in a laborious chug across the Venetian lagoon. He’d chosen public transportation as the most inconspicuous way to reco

They followed a crowd of camera-clad tourists making their way toward the island’s two famed churches, a sidewalklike street flanking a languid canal. The path ended near a low huddle of stone buildings that accommodated a couple of restaurants, a few tourist vendors, and an i

They’d flown from Hamburg, with a stop in Munich. After here, they would head back to the Federation and home, their European foray completed. Per the Supreme Minister’s orders, Viktor needed to obtain the seventh medallion before midnight, as he was due at the basilica in San Marco by one A.M.

Zovastina’s coming to Venice was highly unusual.

Whatever she’d been anticipating had apparently started.

But at least this theft should be easy.

MALONE STARED DOWN AT THE ARCHITECTURAL ELEGANCE OF the island’s bell tower, a mass of brick and marble ingeniously held together by pilasters and arches. A hundred and fifty feet tall, like a talisman in the waste, the path to the top, on ramps that wound upward along the exterior walls, had reminded him of the Round Tower in Copenhagen. They’d paid the six euros admission and made the climb to study the island from its highest point.

He stood at a chest-high wall and stared out open arches, noting how the land and water seemed to pursue each other in a tight embrace. White herons soared skyward from a grassy marsh. Orchards and artichoke fields loomed quiet. The somber scene seemed like a ghost town from the American West.

Below, the basilica stood, nothing warm or welcoming to it, a makeshift barnlike feel to its design, as if uncompleted. Malone had read in the guidebook that it was built in a hurry by men who thought the world would end in the year 1000.

“It’s a great allegory,” he said to Cassiopeia. “A Byzantine cathedral right beside a Greek church. East and West, side by side. Just like Venice.”

In front of the two churches stretched a grass-infested piazzetta. Once the center of city life, now no more than a village green. Dusty paths stretched outward, a couple leading to a second canal, more winding toward distant farmhouses. Two other stone buildings fronted the piazzetta, both small, maybe forty by twenty feet, two-storied, with gabled roofs. Together they comprised the Museo di Torcello. The guidebook noted they were once palazzos, occupied centuries ago by wealthy merchants, but were now owned by the state.

Cassiopeia pointed at the building on the left. “The medallion is in there, on the second floor. Not much of a museum. Mosaic fragments, capitals, a few paintings, some books, and coins. Greek, Roman, and Egyptian artifacts.”

He faced her. She continued to stare out over the island. To the south loomed the outline of Venice central, its campaniles reaching for a darkening sky, the hint of a storm rising. “What are we doing here?”

She did not immediately answer. He reached over and touched her arm. She shuddered at the contact, but did not resist. Her eyes watered and he wondered if Torcello’s sad atmosphere had reminded her of memories better left forgotten.

“This place is all gone,” she muttered.

They were alone at the top of the tower, the lazy silence disturbed only by footfalls, voices, and laughter from others, below, making the climb.

“So is Ely,” he said.

“I miss him.” She bit her lip.

He wondered if her burst of sincerity implied a growing trust. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

He did not like the sound of her words. “What do you have in mind?”

She did not answer and he did not press. Instead, he stared with her across the church rooftops. A few stalls selling lace, glassware, and souvenirs flanked a short lane leading from the village to the grassy piazzetta. A group of visitors were making their way toward the churches. Among them, Malone spotted a familiar face.

Viktor.

“I see him, too,” Cassiopeia said.

People arrived at the top, in the bell chamber.

“The man beside him is the one who slashed the car tires,” she said.

They watched as the two men headed straight for the museum.

“We need to get down from here,” he said. “They might decide to check the high ground, too. Remember they think we’re dead.”

“Like this whole place,” she muttered.