Scorpia

floating, surrounded by water on all four sides. A grand hotel or a tiny restaurant. Even the shops were works of art, their windows framing exotic masks, brilliantly coloured glass vases, dried pasta and antiques. It was a museum, maybe, yet one that was truly alive.
    But Alex understood what Tom was feeling. After four days, even he was beginning to think he’d had enough.
    Enough statues, enough churches, enough mosaics. And enough tourists all crammed together beneath a sweltering September sun. Like Tom, he was beginning to feel overcooked.
    And what about Scorpia?
    The trouble was, he had absolutely no idea what Yassen Gregorovich had meant by his last words. Scorpia could be a person. Alex had looked in the phone book and found no fewer than fourteen people with that name living in and around Venice. It could be a business. Or it could be a single building. Scuole were homes set up for poor people. La Scala was an opera house in Milan. But Scorpia didn’t seem to be anything. No signs pointed to it—no streets were named after it.
    It was only now he was here, nearing the end of the trip, that Alex began to see it had been hopeless from the start. If Yassen had told him the truth, the two men—he and John Rider—had been hired killers. Had they worked for Scorpia? If so, Scorpia would be very carefully concealed … perhaps inside one of these old palaces. Alex looked again at the staircase that Mr Grey was describing. How was he to know that these steps didn’t lead to Scorpia? Scorpia could be anywhere. It could be everywhere. And after four days in Venice, Alex was nowhere.
    “We’re going to walk back down the Frezzeria towards the main square,” Mr Grey announced. “We can eat our sandwiches there and after lunch we’ll visit St Mark’s Basilica.”
    “Oh great!” Tom exclaimed. “Another church!”

    They set off, a dozen English schoolchildren, with Mr Grey and Miss Bedfordshire in front, talking animatedly together. Alex and Tom trailed at the back, both of them gloomy. There was one day left, and, as Tom had made clear, that was one day too many. He was, as he put it, all cultured out. But he wasn’t returning to London with the rest of the group. He had an older brother living in Naples and he was going to spend the last few days of the summer holidays with him. For Alex the end of the visit would mean failure. He would go home, the autumn term would begin, and…
    And that was when he saw it, a flash of silver as the sun reflected off something at the edge of his vision. He turned his head. There was nothing. A canal leading away. Another canal crossing it. A single motor cruiser sliding beneath a bridge. The usual façade of ancient brown walls dotted with wooden shutters. A church dome rising above the red roof tiles. He had imagined it.
    But then the cruiser began to turn, and that was when he spotted it a second time and knew it was really there: a silver scorpion decorating the side of the boat, pinned to the wooden bow. Alex stared as it swung into the second canal. It wasn’t a gondola or a chugging public vaporetto, but a sleek, private launch—all polished teak, curtained windows and leather seats. There were two crew members in immaculate white jackets and shorts, one at the wheel, the other serving a drink to the only passenger. This was a woman, sitting bolt upright, looking straight ahead. Alex only had time to glimpse black hair, an upturned nose, a face with no expression.
    Then the motor launch completed its turn and disappeared from sight.
    A scorpion decorating a motor launch.
    Scorpia.
    It was the most slender of connections but suddenly Alex was determined to find out where the boat was going.
    It was almost as if the silver scorpion had been sent to guide him to whatever it was he was meant to find.
    And there was something else. The stillness of the woman. How was it possible to be carried through this amazing city without registering some emotion, without at least moving your head from left to right? Alex thought of Yassen Gregorovich. He would have been the same. He and this woman were two of a kind.
    Alex turned to Tom. “Cover for me,” he said urgently.
    “What now?” Tom asked.
    “Tell them I wasn’t feeling well. Say I’ve gone back to the hotel.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “I’ll tell you later.”
    With that Alex was gone, ducking between an antiques shop and a café up the narrowest of alleyways, trying to follow the direction of the