Olivia woke up, her head pounding, an unfamiliar room spinning around her. It was the sirens that had roused her, creeping through the drug-induced sleep. Acqua alta—high water. She closed her eyes, waiting for the sirens and the spinning to subside.
Where was she? She remembered nothing after the plague doctor put the evil-smelling sponge to her nose. Chloroform? Would serious kidnappers resort to a murder-mystery cliché to knock out their victims?
Thinking back, she slowly pieced the events together. She’d been writing a text to Marco about his apartment. He’d asked her to check the water level around the palazzo. It had been fine, but the lights were on.
She remembered the text she’d sent: In a gondola. Looks fine from the canal side, but I’d call the caretaker anyway. Did you know your lights are on?
Then Orlando had leaned close to her and whispered: I saw that plague doctor when we were in Al Bottegon.
She remembered looking up from the screen to the bridge ahead of her. It was the plague doctor all right, and suddenly she knew who was under that mask. Only it was impossible to believe.
No. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.
An instant later, the plague doctor held up its cellphone and looked at the glowing display, then back to her.
Marco.
The plague doctor was Marco.
All along it had been Marco.
But how could it be? Marco was in Iceland. Maybe someone using his phone?
She opened her eyes again. The room was spinning a little less, and the sirens had stopped. For now. She could just make out a stone floor, a door to the street, a bare lightbulb, a beamed ceiling above her with stairs leading up to a trapdoor. This must be the ground floor. When the high water struck, would it be flooded?
She was cold and stiff, the only thing between her and the floor a canvas tarp. Her arms and legs were still bound, and along with her pounding head she could feel a lump on her forehead.
It just couldn’t be Marco.
The staff members prefer to text each other, Silvio had said that first day when he’d given her the company phone. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the next room or on the other side of the world . . . And Rocco on the day of the concert, saying, I thought I saw Marco near San Marco the other day, but Silvio tells me he’s in Iceland.
All she had to prove that Marco was in Iceland were his texts, and they could just as easily have been sent from his Venetian apartment as from Reykjavik. Was there even any Aron? Or was that something else he’d made up?
A moan came from beside her. Orlando.
He signaled her to come closer and removed the tape from her mouth with his bound hands, then she did the same for him.
“You okay, Olivia?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Okay in this instance meant “not dead.” “How about you?” she asked.
“Hell of a headache. Anyone else here?”
“I don’t know. The high-water sirens woke me. What’s going on?”
“I think we’ve been kidnapped. They know you’re Alessandro’s girlfriend.”
“But I’m not. Katarina—”
“Just a distraction. I doubt very much that she’s alive. I think that was just to get Alessandro out of town. But there is something I don’t understand. They were waiting for us. How did they know we’d be there?”
“My cousin Marco texted me and asked me to go by his apartment to check the water levels.”
“Your cousin Marco? Happy Spiders Marco? But isn’t he in Iceland? I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either.”
She told him about the text she’d sent and the plague doctor looking at his phone.
“Why would your cousin kidnap you?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, recalling what Claudia had said about him: An impractical, unrealistic dreamer and a disaster in the making. I only hope for your sake he’s paying his taxes.
Was he paying his taxes? Was he in serious debt? She thought of the palazzo worth millions of euros. The art, the antiques. Her missed student loan payment. Had he orchestrated the kidnapping of his own cousin to get himself out of financial trouble?
No, it didn’t make sense. He’d only just found out she was seeing Alessandro, and she had seen the plague doctor on her first day in Venice.
The trapdoor in the ceiling creaked open, and footsteps approached.
She closed her eyes, hoping that whoever it was thought she was still unconscious. It was the only thing she could think of doing. Beside her, Orlando was quiet.
“Olivia? Are you awake?” It was Marco. There was no mistaking it. It wasn’t a theory anymore. It really was Marco. She’d been kidnapped by her beloved cousin!
She opened her eyes and found herself looking into his. At least he wasn’t wearing that hideous mask. Even in the dim light of the room, she could see he looked terrible, his eyes underlined with dark circles. His cheeks were hollow and covered by an unfashionable amount of stubble. It was a shocking transformation.
“How could you—” she started.
“Shhh! We have to be quiet,” he said, glancing toward the trapdoor. “They don’t know I’m down here talking to you. I’m so sorry, but I didn’t have a choice . . .”
Olivia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You always have a choice,” she whispered. “I’m your cousin. I love you. How could you do this to me?”
“If I didn’t, they were going to the police about the drugs—”
“The drugs? You put the drugs in my suitcase? Is that why you invited me to Venice, so you could use me as a drug mule?”
“No, of course not. And it wasn’t supposed to go like this. It was supposed to be simple. I just needed you to take the suitcase to New York and—”
“And if I got caught? Like I did? Honestly, Marco, haven’t we watched enough thrillers to know it’s never that simple? How many times have we watched Fargo together? I can’t believe you could be so stupid!”
“I’m so sorry.” Marco’s hands were shaking, and she could see that his nails, once so finely manicured, were chewed ragged. “I got in over my head. I didn’t pay all the taxes due from Happy Spiders the first year—they were so much higher than I expected. And I already had the offer in on the palazzo, and for that I had to pay all kinds of taxes and extra fees I wasn’t expecting. Then there was still the Toronto condo and its monthly fees. At first, I wasn’t worried, because Happy Spiders was doing so well. But then the app market got flooded with games, and sales started to drop. I missed payments on the taxes I owed. And I didn’t dare let Silvio know I couldn’t make the investment in the company he expected . . .”
Olivia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Claudia—her uptight, obnoxious,
holier-than-thou sister—had been completely right about him.
Beside her, Orlando hadn’t said a word; she assumed he was probably committing all this to memory.
Marco went on, clearly hoping she’d take pity on him once she knew everything. “Dino overheard me on the phone one day, trying to talk myself out of a mess I was in with the bank. He told me he had a proposition for me. At first, I wouldn’t go along with it. I said I couldn’t set you up like that, but Dino told me he’d been doing this for years and never been caught. There was almost zero risk. Then Vanessa was—”
“Did you kill her?” Her cousin was all the things her sister had said and more, but a killer?
Marco shook his head vigorously. “No. It was Benito. He shot her and put her body in a dumpster on Murano, not realizing it belonged to the Zucaro studio. After you were caught with the drugs and disappeared, I thought you’d been killed too. Benito killed Katarina, you know.”
“But Dino said Alessandro’s wife was alive and living in the United States . . .”
“She’s not—that’s another woman. He just said that to get Alessandro out of the way so he could arrange your kidnapping.” Orlando’s suspicions were right. Where was Alessandro now?
“When you texted me from Alessandro’s the day after you were caught at the airport with the drugs to say you were okay,” Marco continued, “I was relieved and told Dino’s lawyer that Dino had better stay away from you because you were dating a cop named Alessandro Rossi. That was when I found out Alessandro was a billionaire and that Dino was involved in the death of his wife. So Dino made his immunity deal with the cops and arranged your kidnapping. If I helped him, I got half of the ten million he’s asking for your ransom. If not, he’d turn me in with Benito and the rest of the gang.”
“And you agreed?”
“I had to. I didn’t have any other choice. I needed the five million. Besides, I would have gone to prison.”
“So you risk my life? I can’t believe this. I’m your family. I admired you. I loved you. I would never do anything to hurt you. I wouldn’t take a quarter from your coffee table without asking.”
Marco was crying now.
She felt no pity for him. “And so all those texts from Iceland about meeting Aron—you made all that up while you were watching my every move?”
He nodded, tears running down his cheeks.
Somehow that seemed worst of all. It was so pathetic—he’d made up a love affair with the man of his dreams while ruining her own.
“And by the way,” she asked, “where did you get the violet glass beads you gave me for Christmas?”
“Dino.” Marco’s voice was barely a whisper.
“You gave me a murdered woman’s stolen glass art? How low is that?”
She didn’t expect an answer, and Marco didn’t give her one.
Having suddenly run out of adrenaline to fuel her anger, she felt exhausted. Her head pounded, and she was back to being scared.
Now that it was quiet, she heard water lapping against the door that led to the street. The acqua alta was starting.
Orlando broke the silence. “Okay, so what now?” he asked Marco. “Why are you here alone? Where are the rest, what do they have planned, and who are they? If you help us out now, I’ll see you don’t end up in prison for the rest of your life.”
“The others are upstairs. Three of Dino’s cousins from Albania. It’s a family business. They told Alessandro to call by midnight.”
“How did they think he was going to get the ransom money if he went to the States?”
“They knew he wouldn’t get that far with the fog.”
“What time is it now?”
“Almost eleven thirty.”
“And he hasn’t called?”
Marco shook his head.
“And what happens if he doesn’t call?”
Marco let out a stifled sob. “I don’t know.”
Olivia knew he was lying.
Marco shakily rose to his feet. He looked like an old man.
“I’m going to the police now,” Marco said, wiping away tears with his sleeve. “If the others come down, tell them you haven’t seen me. They took my cell, but there’s a security guard at the Customs House. I’ll get him to call.”
“Where are we?” Orlando asked.
“We’re in an empty palazzo across from Olivia’s apartment.”
“You’d been watching my apartment ever since I arrived?” Olivia asked.
Marco looked down at his feet.
“Why?”
“To keep an eye on you, and I think Dino wanted to test me to see if I’d really go through with it.”
“Glad you didn’t let them down,” she said sarcastically.
“I better put the tape back over your mouths,” he said apologetically.
That done, he turned and went to the street door, but cried out the moment it opened. He staggered back through the doorway, his head banging against the frame, while behind him entered a large man.
“Thought you might try something like this,” the man growled as he bound Marco hand and foot. “Going to call the police, were you? Always knew you couldn’t be trusted.” Olivia recognized his voice as belonging to one of her attackers.
“You might want to get off the floor and hop over to one of those benches,” he said to Olivia as he taped Marco’s mouth. “The water’s rising, and we want your last half hour on earth to be comfortable. It doesn’t look like your boyfriend’s going to call. Seems like we overestimated how much he wanted you back.”
Forming the shape of a gun with his hand, he put his finger to her temple.
“Pow,” he said with a laugh. “See you soon.”