Three Emperors (9780062194138) by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page A

pursuers leaped ashore. More boats were converging.
    I waited like a fox to lead the posse on a merry chase. Richter said they were scholars of the rose. Were my pursuers Rosicrucians? Or had I run afoul of some new secret society I’d never heard of?
    I heard shouts, pounding on doors, shutters opening, a bell clanging, and then the rat-a-tat tramp of boots racing up stairways. Richter’s allies were ascending like an army of ants.
    Ahead was a jumbled sea of roofs, with the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio half a mile distant. Another shot, this one whining past as the shooter aimed at my silhouette against the sky. I took off running on the ridge crests and didn’t gauge the leap required by the first alley so much as stumble onto its yawning cavity, lunging across from sheer momentum. I crashed onto tiles on the other side, lurched up, and looked back.
    Two dozen caped figures had heaved themselves over the eave of the palazzo’s roof and were fanning out to pursue and surround me. Yes, this was about more than a card game.
    I scampered along roof crests like a cat, pistols banging behind me. The sizzle of the shots got the blood up. I became reckless, vaulting from housing block to block like a madman. I learned to leap the canal canyons at full tilt, legs and arms pumping as I churned into space. I’d slam onto the other side, slide perilously down the clay tiles, grab desperately to arrest my fall, kick with my legs, and be off again. I could hear the crashes and grunts of agile men making the same jumps.
    They were bunching into a pack, as I’d intended.
    I wove in and out of narrow chimneys, feeling their heat, and made for the clothesline I’d earlier stretched between two of them. I hopped across the taut rope and kept running, my pursuers bounding like bats, with capes flaunted behind. When I paused and shouted to taunt, I drew more shots. The excitement helped them come on heedlessly.
    â€œHe’s slowing! We’ve got him!”
    They vaulted a roof ridge, came down charging, and ran full tilt into my tripwire. It snapped, breaking the clay tube of a chimney, but not before half a dozen gave a snarling shout of surprise and went tumbling over the edge, hitting a canal below with cannonball splashes.
    The rest had to slow, wary of more mischief.
    I spied the brothel I had earlier scouted. There was an attic dormer window hung with translucent red linen and illuminated by a candle. I eased myself in, gave a somewhat damp salute to a couple’s buttocks arrested in mid-coitus, and descended narrow stairs to the salon below. It’s best to be bold when striding into a place you don’t belong, especially when dripping from a canal. I strutted like a rooster, complimented the madam that “the clothed bath” was as invigorating as her strumpet had promised, tossed a coin from my recovered purse, slipped out a balcony door, and scrambled across another roof to where I could clamber through the bell windows of the adjacent church tower. Ladders led down to Santa Maria del Giglio.
    I was in a marble side chapel with baptismal font. I looked about, panting. A few candles illuminated a baroque facade of winged angels, fat cherubs, and draped saints. There was a brass organ mammoth enough to herald the Second Coming, and paintings the size of mainsails that showed pious people doing virtuous things. More to the point was a line of rough-hewn wood coffins to transport Venice’s dead to a burial place outside the city.
    The church was a way station, I’d learned, where the deceased were gathered for transfer to a cemetery island.
    This, like so many things, had been Napoleon’s idea. One reason perfume is so popular in Venice is the city’s stink, and the odor of the insufficient lagoon circulation was made worse by the Venetian practice of disposing of corpses. There’s no ground, the city being built on pilings in a marshy lagoon, and