Venetian Holiday: A Novel

Kate Fujimori was a lustrous shadow in cat-burglar black. She crouched low on her haunches and scanned the medieval alleyway several stories beneath her. It was early morning in Venice's Dorsoduro district, just before daybreak. A light drizzle had begun to fall.

Kate glided with relative ease among the thickets of chimney pots and satellite television dishes that cluttered the terra-cotta rooftops of the old quarter of San Sebastian. Leaping, she moved through the air in her sleek skin suit like a whisper. When she alighted on the peaked roof of a neighboring palazzo, it was with the self-assurance of a gymnast.

Poised there with the city sleeping below her, Kate was a lithe silhouette against the chalk-white dome of Santa Maria della Salute, the baroque church that stood at the mouth of Venice's Canalazzo. The dome rose over the rooftops and canals of San Sebastian, a ghostly moon drifting up out of the waters of the San Marco Basin.

Kate steadied herself on the narrow ridge of tiling. Her breathing was even and controlled as she prepared to traverse the narrow path before her. She extended a single foot, placed the sole of her Boreal climbing shoe gingerly on the back of an earthen tile, and nearly toppled.

The terra-cotta dislodged beneath her step. It clattered away down the sheer slope of the roof and crashed noisily into a gutter. Kate's breathing caught in her throat. Steady, she reminded herself, her pulse racing. Nearly lost it there.

Somewhere below, a neighborhood dog barked and barked.

"Kate? Kate?" The familiar voice crackled in her ear-mounted Motorola headset.

Kate sighed. "I'm fine, Freddy," she said. "Lost my footing, that's all."

She paused to chalk her fingers in the climber's pouch that hung at her hip. She would be making her descent shortly. "Heck of a view from up here," she said. "Freddy, do you remember the last time you and I stole a fabulously expensive art treasure from romantic Venice? You wore black, I believe." She stretched out her arm, which was slender and visibly toned under the black sheen of her skin suit. "Come to think of it," she said, grinning, "I wore black, too--and Bellini's Madonna was dressed in stars."

"Wasn't me."

"No?"

"You're thinking of Antwerp. The painter was Flemish, not Venetian. And the lady wasn't a virgin, she was a still life. A plate of cheese and dried fruit, to be precise."

"Ah," Kate said, feigning nostalgia. "Romantic Antwerp. You did wear black, though, yes? Just like always?"

Freddy's static reply made her wince. "Stick to the protocol, Kate. Our window is closing fast. As it stands, you're a minute and twenty-three seconds behind schedule. A minute twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six--"

"Okay, okay. Geez." Kate smiled into the microboom of her cellular headset. She said, "Where are you now? Quickly. I have to know."

"You know I can't tell you that."

Kate pouted. "Why not? Just this once, why can't you?" She finished Freddy's terse reply even before it came crackling into her ear bud. "Oh, I forgot," she said. "The protocol."

In the rarified society of Western Europe's criminal elite, Freddy Doloreux was famous for his so-called protocol, which was ironclad. It dictated, among other things, that contact among parties to a crime should be kept to an absolute minimum. Operatives entered and left the country separately, and their access to information was governed by the need to know.

Kate hadn't seen the technician face-to-face since Sagaponack, last summer. Freddy was staying at a beach house belonging to one of the "male paychecks" he had a habit of picking up along the way. He specialized in the museums of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, but he adored the Hamptons and vacationed there whenever he could. The meeting was a brief but cordial one. She paid him his advance--a considerable sum even for someone of Freddy's stellar reputation--and in turn Freddy presented her with the barest sketch of his plans for the Venice job.

The exchange took place in the restaurant of an old hotel off the Montauk Highway outside of town. A charming old hag owns the place now, a casualty of the Upper West Side, she recalled him saying as he sipped a vanilla ice cream float through a straw, his forearm resting on the duffel bag packed with untraceable currency that Kate had given him.

She hadn't the slightest idea where Freddy was right now. Close by, to be sure, holed up somewhere in the Dorsoduro with his battery of mobile phones and laptop computers. That was the way it worked. The less the client knew, the more secure the operation was for everyone involved, most importantly himself. Freddy Doloreux was a trusting soul up to a point, Kate knew, but he never ruled out the possibility of the double cross, even by close friends like her. Friendship among thieves was provisional at best.

With her palm Kate cleared the rainwater from her face and breathed deeply to settle herself. She sprinted across the narrow rooftop easily. No problemo. At the edge she peered down the front façade of the palazzo, an ungracious gaol-like structure with wrought-iron cages on all the windows. It was known to locals as Il Porto, the Door, from the days when the building served as a currency exchange for seafaring merchants during Venice's zenith in the Middle Ages. Now its façade was dressed up with bright banners and tapestries that advertised the modern-art exhibit inside.

The palazzo stood only a few city blocks away from the Guggenheim collection housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Peggy Guggenheim's former home on the bank of the Grand Canal. The new owner of Il Porto was a cattle heiress from Montana, lately of San Sebastian.

Determined to attain status at any price, it seemed, the vulgar American had established her own modern-art collection right here in Peg's backyard.

The rain was intensifying now. Kate's hands were adequately prepped with climber's chalk, but in this inhospitable drizzle the descent would be a dicey one at best. She swung her legs out over the precipice, followed by her supple hips. Lowering herself halfway down the side, she anchored herself to the masonry using the tips of her Boreals.

"I'm headed in," Kate said into the ear-mounted gadget.

"Fabulous," came the sarcastic reply.

Kate touched the ring on the fine gold chain that she wore around her neck beneath the high-performance fabric of her skin suit.

Paul Fujimori, her husband--on paper they were still married, anyway--had been her mentor as well as the love of her life. The ring had once belonged to a society lady from Manhasset, Long Island. It appeared on the lady's hand in a portrait by John Singer Sargent. Paul stole the ring from the same house in which the portrait hung. He slipped it onto Kate's finger on their wedding day.

How long had she been split from him now? A year?

She raised the ring to her lips, kissed it for luck.

Old habits die hard.

But there was more to it than that, wasn't there? The old loves that bind. They don't release you so easily. For her part, she wasn't ready to be released from the past just yet. Very nearly, she told herself. But not yet. Not just yet.

"Kate, hon?"

The electronic voice testily cleared its throat in her ear. She glanced at the digital counter strapped to her forearm. The illuminated seconds and microseconds were ticking away relentlessly. Kate said, "I'm going . . . I'm going."

She scaled down the masonry wall with the brilliant exhibit tapestries ballooning gently around her. She attained a ledge and sprinted its length, trying to make up lost time. She climbed out onto a flat tar paper subroof and flattened herself against the cool metal of an industrial air-conditioning unit. She sighted the skylight and made for it, gave the lid a yank, and felt a wave of relief as the rubber seal broke and the steel-enforced glass hatch lifted open on its rusted levers.

Freddy is good. Very good. The contact he made on the inside, whoever he is, has done his job.

Kate climbed into the skylight and lowered the lid back down. With a gloved hand she locked it behind her. Silently, she dropped down onto the floor of the modern-art museum's fourth-floor administrative offices. She made for a supply closet around the corner. Freddy had told her she would find it there, conveniently left unlocked by his mystery helper on the inside--some custodian, maybe, happy enough for the extra pocket money and perfectly willing to keep his questions to himself.

In the closet, Kate found the leather pouch she was promised. She unzipped it. Everything was there, including the guard's uniform that she hastily slipped on over her dampened skin suit. The outfit would buy her about a minute once she was on the gallery floor. If all went as planned, the costume would get her past the surveillance cameras. She would walk right up to the painting. Then she would have just under thirty seconds to cut it from its frame.

The pouch also contained everything she would need to safely exit the country. Three different passports with three different identities for as many border crossings. A change of clothes. Train tickets. Contact numbers and assorted currency. That was how it worked between Kate and the technician. She assumed the risk while he looked after the details, right down to foreign exchange rates and shifts in the weather. Provided nothing got botched in the next handful of minutes, Kate expected to be out of Venice by noon. She would be across the Pyrenees by nightfall.

I'm glad you're my friend, Freddy, Kate thought to herself as she pulled the guard's hat low over her eyes and emerged from the supply clo...