The Bonaparte Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

church.
    Inside, the place had the same sweet, musty smell he recalled from two days ago, when he and Gurt arrived to be fitted for the costumes she had reserved by e-mail months before. Somehow using electronics to visit an event that had its roots in the Shrove Tuesday celebration of the republic’s 1162 victory over the patriarch of Aquileia seemed anachronistic. The older Lang got, the more that word came up.
    The shopkeeper, himself in Carnevale costume, examined the set of hangers Gurt handed him, his eyes going to a ragged tear in the bodice of the copy of the seventeenth-century costume. He tsk-tsked when he noted Lang’s hat was missing. The nose Lang had had to purchase, it being not reusable “for sanitary reasons,” the first time he recalled ever hearing that phrase used in connection with anything Venetian.
    Reluctantly, Lang agreed to the deduction of a hundred and fifty euros from his deposit.
    “Rip-off!” Lang growled as they left. “The damn hat couldn’t have cost more than fifteen, twenty bucks and it will take less than that to sew up the tear in your costume.”
    The store’s door had hardly closed behind them when the merchant began punching numbers into his cell phone as he read them from a slip of paper. “The clown costume you wanted to rent?” he asked in English. “It has been returned. Yes, just this moment . . .”
    As Gurt and Lang crossed the Piazza San Marco, she said, “We do not have to meet the plane until this afternoon. We have time to terminate.”
    As a native of Germany, Gurt’s grasp of the American idiom was less than perfect.
    Lang groaned inwardly at the prospect of another church. He had viewed all of the martyred saints, ascending virgins and bleeding crucifixions he wanted.
    “Time to kill.”
    “How would you ‘kill’ time? It does not live.”
    “We haven’t ridden the vaporetto . . . water bus,” Lang said, hoping to foreclose additional exposure to religious art by changing the subject. “It’s a great way to see the city.”
    “Why not a gondola?”
    Lang remembered the last time he had been in one of the romantic if expensive boats. He had been here with Dawn, his first wife. He had met her while still employed with the Agency, one of the few careers open to a liberal-arts graduate. He had anticipated all the excitement of a James Bond film. As is often the case, experience did not meet expectations. It wasn’t even close. Instead of the Operations Division, he had been assigned to Intelligence, where his duties consisted not of slinking about the capitals of Eastern Europe and seducing the beautiful female agents of the opposition but of reading newspapers and monitoring TV broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain from a dingy suite of offices across the street from the Frankfurt rail station. There he had met Gurt and had had a brief affair that terminated when she was transferred to another station.
    Then he had met Dawn and married her. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it became clear that opportunities and advancement inside the Agency would be limited. Lang resigned and went to law school while Dawn worked. After his practice of defending white-collar criminals began to flourish, he had taken his wife to Italy as a very small reward for her labors.
    She had fallen in love with Venice. Where Lang saw fetid, malodorous canals, she saw romantic waterways. When Lang pointed out that the persistently higher tides had encrusted the lower parts of most buildings with a salty layer of slime, she regarded it as a sign of antiquity. She even endured, if not enjoyed, the endless hawking of the glass merchants in their efforts to persuade tourists to take a “free” trip to their factories on the island of Murano, a place from which no one returned—not until purchasing at least one set of the artfully colored Venetian glass.
    Lang supposed the set of six pale blue martini stem glasses had perished along with his other possessions when his