“What do you think Monkey Business is?” she asked Renzo.
“Look inside and see,” he said distractedly. “If you must.”
Teo did so. A foul stench of aged dung filled the room. “Sorry!”
Teo turned to see Renzo looking his usual immaculate self, fully dressed in the clothes he had brought in the satchel.
After some hesitation the children licked their sticky fingers clean, and the taste was delicious, like caramel-chocolate-lime-strawberry. Even better, the tiredness of their broken night slipped right away from them. They felt ready for anything. Teo decanted a little into a small bottle to take away. “You never know.…”
“We should pay,” fretted Renzo.
At this, Lussa’s face smiled on the front of The Key to the Secret City. Out from between the pages dropped a coin. Renzo picked it up and showed Teo the date—1867, thirty-two years ago. He shrugged and left the coin on the counter.
A happy idea crossed Teo’s mind: “Let’s take the rest of the Treacle to the hospital! For the children!”
As they walked out of the Two Tousled Mermaids, all the candles promptly extinguished themselves, and the door latched itself with a click.
The hospital was close by. Renzo carried in the majolica jar and deposited it with the night-porter, who turned out to be a second cousin.
“So you’ll give it to the children’s doctor, Mauro? Tell him it will help the children with the fever,” Renzo urged. “Tell him not to tell anyone where he got it.”
Teo, standing quietly and invisibly beside him, was lost in dismal thoughts.
As they walked back outside, she said abruptly, “You know it will come to a battle, Renzo? The mermaids against Bajamonte Tiepolo and the Creature.”
“The gondoliers will defend the city too!” asserted Renzo defiantly.
“Il Traditore’s army are ghosts. How can the gondoliers fight an enemy they can’t see?”
“All the gondoliers’ children can row their gondolas.”
“Could you get them all together?”
“Of course, we are around three hundred. But what would we do then?”
“The mermaids will have to help us with that part of the plan.”
“Will they feed us? I am dying of hunger.”
Teo was pulling the book out of her pinafore. “Probably some curried pumpkin curds and spicy seaweed ice-cream. Oh dear!”
Lussa’s face on the cover looked a little hurt. Then she smiled and waved towards the inside of the book. Teo opened it up on an advertisement for hot chocolate at the Orientale café on the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Renzo smiled. “My third cousin does the dawn shift there. His wife says he’s a bit of a lad himself—he won’t give me away for being out at this hour.”
At the café, Renzo ordered a huge four a.m. breakfast of buns and hot chocolate.
“That’s enough for two!” grinned Renzo’s handsome cousin. “What have you been up to, young man? On the house.”
The buns were all gone, but Renzo was still blushing when the early editions arrived with a thud. It’s all over for Venice! Venice: dreadful death of a city. Without knowing anything about Bajamonte Tiepolo, journalists were writing Venice’s obituary in grandiloquent phrases.
Teo wanted to shout, “She’s not dead yet! Give her a chance, you vultures!”
To change the subject, she told Renzo about the changes in her hotel, drawing the new windows on a paper napkin. He explained, “Teo, those are stilted arches, from the Byzantine period, from Bajamonte Tiepolo’s time!”
A line of writing appeared in the foam on the top of her hot chocolate:
AND FROM ITS RUINS THE RAZED HOUSE RISES.
“We have to get to the Archives!” Teo exclaimed. “What time does it open?”
“Not for a couple of hours yet. So we could have another breakfast.”
“I’m glad you’re better,” she said shyly. It must be something about the rich foamy drink, she told herself, that was making the room spin gently around.
And that was the last good cup of hot chocolate that anyone had in Venice.
early morning, June 11, 1899
That very morning something terrible happened to the bakers of the city. All over town Venetians woke up, washed, dressed and hurried to their favorite bars for their coffee or hot chocolate and their sweet brioches, their almond cakes and Margherita biscuits to dip in their frothy hot drinks.
And everyone had a dreadful surprise.
The sweetness in every item of food and drink had been replaced by a mouth-curdling bitterness. Instead of custard cream, the brioches were packed with a nauseating, smelly ointment. The Margherita biscuits tasted of crusty old socks. The almond cakes were solid lumps of nastiness. All over Venice, there was an indignant noise coming out of all the cafés: people screaming and spitting out their breakfasts.
No one could understand it.
Somewhat faded after just four hours sleep, Renzo and Teo met, as arranged, at their usual bar at San Giacomo dell’Orio. But the owner had closed up, and put up his sign that said, CHIUSO PER LUTTO—the words normally used for a death in the family.
Renzo had already heard the story from every café between Giudecca and Castello. He told Teo, “This is the work of Bajamonte Tiepolo. The woman who dropped the mortar-and-pestle on Il Traditore’s head—she was a baker’s wife. And Bajamonte Tiepolo swore he would one day be revenged on the Venetian bakers. That’s bad enough, but the worrying thing is that it means that his powers are growing. A little while ago he couldn’t do a curse like that.”
Teo added, “And of course the only sweet thing left in Venice is the Baja-Menta ice-cream. Everyone will be rushing to buy that when word gets out.”
“What do we do first? Tell the mermaids about the ice-cream or go to the Archives?”
“The Archives are only open during the day.…”
As they hurried through the white-hot streets towards the Archives, Teo was aware of something strange in the shadows falling along the stone pavements. It was the chimneys of Venice … they were all growing to the same shape, the stones and terracotta twisting and turning until each chimney stack resembled … the crest of Bajamonte Tiepolo.
“Look!” She pointed up. The chimneys loomed like sinister, massive soldiers.
“And of course, the mayor will say it’s just another Biennale art joke!”
“Biennale?”
“It’s our international modern art show, happens every two years,” explained Renzo proudly. “It’s just about to start. Biennale artists are famous for quirky ideas.”
“Yes,” said Teo ironically. “You can always rely on our mayor.”
An unnerving thought struck her: “Renzo, is it possible, do you think, that the Mayor might be on Bajamonte Tiepolo’s side?”
“Not really. But I think he will pretend this isn’t happening until the last minute. And then simply hand over power to Il Traditore, out of sheer weakness and fear.”
Renzo pointed to a vast building on the other side of the church. “That’s the Archives over there. They say there are ten miles of shelves in there!”
Teo’s neck prickled then, for all around the Archives, on every rooftop, on each chimney, stood a huge magòga. She whispered, “Lussa said he’d mount guards outside the premises.”
Renzo warned, “Don’t look at them. Don’t show that we are aware. Remember, Lussa also said they would not be expecting ‘Mere Children.’ ”
The gulls watched Teo and Renzo enter the building, as they watched everyone who went in and out, with their glassy, cold eyes.
Teo’s shoulders tensed. What if they were not allowed inside the door? The Archives was a place for serious scholars. Even if Renzo talked them in, how could they find what they needed? Then the delicious smell of old books enfolded her. She felt calmer, and even optimistic. If there was anywhere in the world where Teo belonged, it was a library.
In the lobby, a clerk looked enquiringly at Renzo. “Young, ar
en’t you? All new Readers are subject to an interview with Signorina Grigiogatta.” He pointed in the direction of a massive door studded with black nails.
When Renzo tapped, a voice purred out, “Enterrr.”
Teo flinched. Two vast Brustolons flanked the portals of the room.
A woman dressed all in gray was standing over an enormous desk. She had gray spectacles, behind which round green eyes did not blink. Her face was heavily made up with thick white cosmetic cream. She wore white gloves all the way up to her elbows. Her skirt was long, covering the tops of her elegant black boots. She moved gracefully to the front of the desk, the ballerina effect slightly compromised by the fact that she was at the same time hastily stuffing something back into the hem of her skirt.
She took off her spectacles. The woman’s eyes were extraordinarily beautiful: almond-shaped and slightly slanted upwards. But the effect was intimidating.
“Children! We don’t often have children here. Children don’t like booksss, in our experience, and they leave their dirrrty little fingerprintsss all over them.”
Children! Not “child”! Teo realized with a shiver that this unusual woman could see her. Renzo, clearly sharing her anxiety, motioned to Teo to keep quiet.
The script that floated above the woman’s head was not like anything Teo had seen before. She could not make out the words. It looked like scratch marks in sand, not human writing at all. And her accent was slightly foreign, with a little burr on the consonants, as if she was from the East, or beyond.
Teo cast her eyes down on the desk, reading upside down the letter on top of Signorina Grigiogatta’s pile of correspondence. With a start, she made out the words “Bajamonte Tiepolo …”
Renzo asserted bravely, “Signorina, we love books. And our hands are clean. We’re working on a school project about Venetian history, and we want to see some of the real historical documents.…”
“Oh, ‘we want,’ do we?” Signorina Grigiogatta raised an eyebrow.
“Forgive me. We should very much like, if at all possible, to see them. In fact, we are also working on a—a—historical origami project, and we want to see how all the old letters and documents were folded up. Everyone wanted to do this project but we two were given the honor because we were voted the best students in the class. The hardest workers. Best at origami. We are very serious. If you please.”
Teo privately thought Renzo was laying it on rather thick here. Historical origami project! So this was the famous Venetian charm? It sounded a little oily to her.
“Indeed,” purred the Gray Lady, “And how verrry hard you are working now to impresss me.”
Teo found the lady’s smugness quite maddening. Ignoring Renzo’s warning glare, she asked boldly, “And have we succeeded?”
The Gray Lady wrinkled her small nose at the sound of Teo’s Naples accent, as if there was a bad smell in the room. “Frrrankly, my dear, no, not really, not yet.”
Renzo assumed a benevolent tone. “Yes, my companion is a poor Napoletana. The victim of a pitiably vulgar education. My school has founded a charity to help students from less fortunate areas. This girl has been forced to study in badly-stocked libraries in Naples, and now the authorities want her to have an opportunity to study in the … in the …”
“Yesss?” asked the Gray Lady, licking her lips with a small pink tongue.
“The cream of libraries!” exclaimed Renzo triumphantly.
“Oh, indeed, the verrry crrream of libraries,” declared Signorina Grigiogatta.
There was a long pause, during which the Gray Lady attended scrupulously to her cuffs, her hem and her very pointed nails. This she did by sharpening them casually on the outthrust arm of yet another Brustolon behind her desk. Teo winced.
“Well,” wheedled Renzo, in the end. “May we look? Please?”
“Well, I don’t see any harrrm, I suppose,” pronounced the Gray Lady. “Run along. Make sure you leave before closing time. You wouldn’t want to be locked in here at night. The mayor has not given us fundsss for a night watchman’s wages, so there would be no one here to let you out, no matterrr how much you mewed.”
“Mewed?” asked Teo.
“Howled, crrried for help,” said the Gray Lady, stiffly.
Renzo bowed like a courtier in front of a queen. “We shall not forget your graciousness, Signorina Grigiogatta,” he asserted humbly, with his head on one side.
Out in the corridor, Teo whispered, “Do you think she’s a ghost? Is she in-the-Cold? Or in-the-Slaughterhouse? Do you think she guessed what we are up to? You know she had a letter about Bajamonte Tiepolo on her desk?”
“How do you …? Oh, never mind. What did her voice look like?”
“Well, not quite … human.”
Renzo fretted, “And it’s uncanny that she could see you when you’re supposed to be between-the-Linings. And that she talked about us getting locked in at night—as if she could read our minds.”
For getting locked in at night was just what they had decided to do. Their plan was to creep back to the Archives when all the scholars had gone home. Then they could hunt through the shelves in private.
After leafing politely through a few boxes of files that the clerks brought Renzo, and making some paper models, the children made separate reconnoitering trips to the rear of the building. Ranks of Brustolons lined the corridors, filling them with the smell of varnish. They were useful for hiding behind, as it turned out. It was Renzo who found a suitable window at the back. Returning to the desk, he sent Teo to unfasten it.
“Close it, but not really,” he urged. “So it looks closed.”
That mission accomplished, Renzo made a great ceremony of leaving the place so that every possible guard noticed him depart.
“I wouldn’t want to get locked in here,” he said loudly. To Teo, he whispered, “See you tonight.”
Back at the hotel, it was too painful for Teo to watch her parents toy with their food in the dining room. She lifted a bowl of fruit and a tall jug of orange juice, and carried them up to her room. She drained the jug and wolfed down the fruit. She didn’t bother to take off her clothes, waiting fully dressed and wide awake on top of the covers until sunset. Before the moon was high in the sky, Teo was out of bed, pulling the fish-kite out of the back of her armoire.
Down in his courtyard Renzo was already waiting, his face tense and pale. They walked in silence through the deserted city, towards the Archives. Their fish-kites floated above them, casting a comforting bluish light.
They were in luck. No one had discovered the open window. The children hauled themselves inside and clapped their hands to extinguish the fish.
Even in the sinister moonlight, Teo loved the Archives: that beckoning scent of old books, and the tweedy smell of old scholars, and the tall shelves making order of the chaos of all Venetian knowledge.
“When I grow up,” she thought, “I want to work somewhere like this.”
The stolen jug of orange juice had its effect on Teo. Noticing the door marked Ladies, she waved Renzo on and slipped inside. Teo dared not turn on a light, so she felt her way around. She was washing her hands when she heard footsteps coming in her direction. They were not Renzo’s—too light. In fact, they pattered like two pairs of delicate feet.
No one should be in the library now! Signorina Grigiogatta had said there was not even a nightwatchman. Trembling, Teo hid in one of the cubicles.
The door creaked slowly open.
Teo drew in her breath.
late at night, June 11, 1899
It was the Gray Lady.
Signorina Grigiogatta did not light the lamp. She looked in the mirror, seeming quite at ease in the moonlight. She licked her wrists and ran them over her face. And then she bent her head and licked each of her shoulders.
Lastly, she pulled a long gray tail out from under her petticoat and licked it thoroughly, and then tucked it back into her voluminous skirt. She turned her attention to her fingers. Long glinting nails like little scimi
tars popped out. She curved her fingers around and they retracted. Then she drew a large satin purse from her handbag and reapplied a thick layer of white cosmetic paint to her face. Finally, she left.
Outside the ladies’, Teo heard a curious sound, as if the graceful Gray Lady had fallen lightly to the ground. Perhaps she had dropped something? When the Gray Lady started walking there seemed to be enough footsteps for two light pairs of feet.
When the Gray Lady’s many footsteps had faded away, Teo rushed out to tell Renzo about the furry tail and curious behavior.
“Where is she now?” asked Renzo.
“I think she went back to her office. I heard the door shut down there.”
“Perhaps she’s just working late.”
The children tried to put Signorina Grigiogatta out of their minds. Lighting up their fish-kites, they roamed up and down the corridors.
The trouble was, clever as they’d been to get into the Archives, they had not really thought about how to find what they wanted. This was made all the more difficult because they didn’t have any idea what it would look like. The mermaids had warned that the Almanac might even be disguised as something other than a book.
“But,” reasoned Teo, “it must be rather like a book, or it couldn’t be in the Archives, could it? Not without sticking out a mile.”
They went hunting along the shelves till they found the department for the fourteenth century. The Tiepolo boxes were sealed with fearsome padlocks and labels inscribed Most Secret and Non Toccare, Pena La Morte, “Don’t Touch on Pain of Death.”
The children clambered up the shelves on a pair of library ladders and forced open one of the locks with a corner of The Key to the Secret City. The lid of the box rose up with a groan like somebody dying.
“Watch out!” yelled Renzo, as dozens of sheets of parchment flew out and formed themselves into arrowheads, with points sharp as needles.
The parchment arrows wheeled around in formation, like a flock of white bats. Then they swung into the direction of Renzo and Teo, gathering speed for an attack. The children cried out as sharp paper cut their ears, their eyelids and mouths.