Night Journey by Winston Graham Page A

courtyards. Past San Giovanni Crisostomo, I strolled through tiny slits of streets and over narrow bridges. I thought of what Venice must have been like before the introduction of the humped bridge had abolished the horse and made the gondola the universal means of transport. I eventually found myself at the extremity of the island at the church of Madonna dell ’Orto, and then, not wanting to go farther on towards the station, had to retrace my steps to the only bridge, near the Ca d’Oro, which led back into the eastern part of the city. I ate an ice cream opposite the church of Saints Giovanni and Paolo and admired Colleoni’s magnificent statue. Then home, feeling footsore but more relaxed.
    At the hotel they told me someone had beea ringing me on the telephone. No longer relaxed, I dined early, hoping for the best and speculating on all the different varieties of trouble this could mean.
    The gorgonzola had been reached when the waiter came across with the half-expected message. Three kiosks at the door of the hotel. One had the receiver off its hook.
    â€œ Pronto ,” I said.
    â€œSignor Catania?” A woman’s voice.
    â€œSpeaking.”
    â€œAt eight this evening there will be a gondolier at the steps at the side entrance of your hotel. He will wear a white kerchief. If you engage him he will bring you here.” Click.
    â€œWho is that speaking?”
    No answer.
    â€œWho is there? Are you there?”
    The line was dead.
    I came slowly out of the kiosk. Foolish to ask unnecessary questions. Oaly yesterday I had listened to her guttural pronunciation and reflected that she had it both ways: an attractive Colonial burr in English, this soft broken accent in Italian.
    I went back to my dinner and finished it quietly.
    â€œSigner Catania?” said the gondolier. He was a tall youngish man with the hooked nose of a true Venetian and a mop of fair hair. He had only one eye, which may have explained why he was not in the armed forces but gave him a sinister look. I thought of a voice carefully imitated, a gondola ride by night, a blow on the head, a splash in the bottle-green water …
    â€œYou are from …?”
    â€œIf you will be seated, signore .”
    I looked around. The commissionaire from the hotel was listening. I got in the gondola.
    It rocked gently as we were pushed away. I leaned back in the cushions and curtains of the closed interior. It smelled dusty, and of some spicy scent like sandalwood or pine. There was a crude blue picture of the Virgin and two postcards of lesser saints. We mowd off, not towards the Grand Canal but away from it.
    The night was very heavy, with ribs of cloud almost blotting out the moon. My gondolier seemed to be taking a tortuous route; certainly I soon lost direction. At times we slipped silently between the tall bare houses, the only sound the rpple of water and the plash of his oar, the only light the shaded lamp on the ferro of the gondola. Now and then we would run beside a narrow alleys, and a half blacked-out street lamp would cast the shadow of the gondola beniad us, until it crept up, monstrous and misshapen, overtook us and stretched ahead, to merge into a waste of darkness. At times we slipped underneath lines of washing hung across the canals, and there were cats everywhere, mangy, emaciated, half wild, slinking in the shadows of a gutter or peering with savage eyes from the elevation of a wall. Life had never been easy for the innumerable cats of Venice; it would be much harder as the people felt the scarcity of war.
    I put my head out. “ Is this some roundabout route? How much longer shall we be?”
    Some light reflected from his splendid teeth in the darkness. “ Si, signore , I understand your haste.”
    He understood more than I did, but I could not argue. I sat back and waited, We had already been moving half an hour.
    The water ahead abruptly widened and I saw that at last we had come out on the Grand