The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage Read Free Page B

San Marco, and the motorboats racing down the Grand Canal, and myself walking into Doney’s with money in my pocket. …
    Colonel Baker and I had a short, interesting discussion on the subject of money. I finally accepted the sum of fifteen hundred dollars for what should be no more than two days’ work. I thought that I was doing very well. I even felt a little embarrassed at taking such a large sum for such an easy assignment.
    I was very busy for the next forty-eight hours, studying dossiers, poring over maps of Venice, and soaking up the necessary background. Then Baker got word from Guesci. Karinovsky had gone into hiding, and the escape route was ready. The next morning I was on an airplane to Venice.
     
     

 
    3
     
     
    My airplane touched down at Venice’s Aeroporto Marco Polo at 11:30 in the morning. I cleared customs and passport control without difficulty, and walked out of the airport building.
    It was a warm and lucid day. Directly ahead of me was the pier, crowded with boatmen offering their assorted craft for the short journey across the lagoon to the Piazza San Marco. Across the gleaming water I could see Venice itself, presenting its incredible skyline of sagging spires and tilted rectangular towers, pinnacles and chimneys, humpbacked buildings and crenellated walls.
    My first reaction was literary and spurious; I thought of Atlantis, Port-Royal, and Ys of Armorica. Then I took notice of the huge grain elevator, and I saw how the fairy silhouettes were bound together by a tracery of power lines and television aerials. The city now seemed a fraud, a clumsy and willful anachronism. But that wasn’t the truth, either.
    This double effect was uniquely Venetian. The city has always been too stunning and too meretricious, and much too demanding of raw appreciation. When you see the Serenissima admiring herself in her mirror of dirty water, you are inevitably annoyed. But, however much you may deplore the lady’s conceits, honesty forces you to admit her charms.
    I wanted to go to her at once; but my instructions were to proceed first to the mainland city of Mestre, there to meet Guesci and discuss strategy. I turned regretfully to the west, where a great oily pall of smoke marked my immediate destination.
    A green and black Fiat pulled up, driven by a smiling, glossy-haired young man wearing amber shades.
    “How much to the Excelsior in Mestre?” I asked him.
    “Sir, I will make you a very good price–”
    Then I was shouldered aside. A fat man with a fat camera, wearing a blond business suit and a hand-painted necktie, with a porter behind him carrying two leather bags of expensive appearance, pushed past me.
    “Take me to Mestre,” he said, “and make it snappy.” His strident tones and flat vowels identified him as a countryman of mine.
    “This taxi is already occupied,” the driver said.
    “Like hell it is,” the fat man said, easing himself through the doorway like a maggot entering a wound.
    “It is occupied,” the driver said again.
    The fat man noticed me for the first time. He decided to be charming. “You don’t mind, do you? I’m really in one hell of a hurry.”
    I did mind, but not very much. “Help yourself,” I said, and started to pull my B-4 bag away.
    But my glossy young driver shook his head firmly and put a restraining hand on my wrist. “No,” he said, “you have hired me.”
    “Look, he said it was OK,” the fat man said.
    “But I have not said it was OK,” the driver told him. He was not smiling now. He was a nervous little fellow, and his sensibilities had been outraged. I hadn’t received any instructions about taxis, but at this point I wouldn’t have ridden across the street with him without an armed escort. Call it a premonition.
    The fat man had made himself comfortable on the back seat. He wiped his forehead and said to the driver, “Look, stop being ridiculous, let’s roll.”
    “We shall not roll,” the driver said. It looked as if the one big