GONDOS—Chapter 13!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos.” For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
Following the very public bloodbath at the Battle of the Biennale, outside governments swept in, bent on putting an end to the crisis with maximum force and unconcerned with any collateral damage to Venice.
Meanwhile, the Magistrate of the Waters met with Alessandro and revealed the secret history of the gondoliers. They are, in fact, an ancient paramilitary force whose protocols for exterminating these same creatures have been encoded into Venetian culture for centuries, hidden in plain sight.
Armed with this knowledge—and the gondos—Alessandro and Millie wondered if, together, they had all the tools they needed to stage one last offensive and do away with the schifosi once and for all…
Confusion reigned.
By daybreak the following morning, the scrum of government entities and international bodies grappling with the crisis in Venice still hadn’t finalized a plan of attack. After several hours of negotiating, grandstanding, table-pounding and backchanneling, they also hadn’t disclosed the danger to the public—officially, at least.
Venice’s mayor, after swiftly cordoning off the Guggenheim, had gone rogue and given a vaguely worded and dazzlingly implausible explanation to a local reporter (his sister-in-law) describing the incident at the museum the previous night as a hazardous-materials spill.
This story was quickly quashed by the Americans, who spent the next hour surreptitiously pushing their own narrative—terrorism—via speculative dog whistles by proxies on cable TV.
But that story, in turn, was combated by the European Union, which, feeling the specter of terrorism was racist and overly incendiary, launched a furtive misinformation campaign of its own: an unofficial surrogate appeared on Sky News, blaming the situation at the Guggenheim entirely on the artist Raoul—who’d not only drilled a hole straight through the museum’s foundation, after all, thus destabilizing the structure, but also (some people were saying) staged an unlicensed pyrotechnic display on the terrace that had gone catastrophically wrong.
On it went, for several hours: cover stories blooming and withering and blooming again like morning glories. At no point in the authorities’ endless, encrypted video conferences had anyone proposed telling the public the truth. The bellicose admirals and under-secretaries in charge took for granted that the reality they were facing—rampaging, mutant sea monsters—couldn’t possibly be explained. And if it could be explained, it would not be readily believed. And if it were readily believed, everyone who believed it would lose their fucking minds.
Two shakey TikToks and some blurry photos of the attack at the Guggenheim were circulating online—and so far being dismissed out-of-hand as either a viral marketing campaign for…something, or as part of Raoul’s art. But everyone understood it was only a matter of time until networks picked up those images and tracked down one or two of the half-dozen survivors.
The cat was out of the bag. The horses had left the barn. The skeefs were on the Internet.
As Venice began to stir, each of the governments’ many cover stories persisted on the ground, taking on lives of their own. Rumors were repeated, exaggerated, and occasionally mashed together, Mad Libs-like, into composite cataclysms. (Raoul was a secret terrorist who’d released hazardous materials, for example.)
Meanwhile, another massive storm was approaching. And these reports, at least, were definitive and clear. The meteorological atmosphere over western Europe was freakishly enraged and would soon throw another tantrum right above Venice: historically high tides, storm surges, brutal winds and many inches of rain.
All of this to say, an implacable air of severity was descending on the city that morning—too much for the ordinary tourist to bear. Waking up inside this nebula of conflicting, semi-cogent, ominous information—opening the shutters of their hotel room windows to see heavily armed carabinieri and military boats patrolling the canals outside—many visitors assessed the situation over their morning cappuccinos and simply concluded: To hell with it. Time to leave town.
By 8 AM, an ad-hoc evacuation was underway. This caught the authorities off guard, who had planned to announce their own evacuation orders at noon. Not entirely prepared to explain themselves, the government nevertheless seized the opportunity to begin locking the city down. When finally—nearly six hours after the carnage at the Guggenheim—a first official statement was released, it merely cited “confirmed reports of spontaneous zoological instability within the city of Venice.”
Vaporetti and water buses began running in only one direction: back to the mainland. Severe-looking barricades were positioned across the long, low-lying causeway known as Via della Libertà, the only overground route connecting the rest of Italy to the city center.
Many of the regularly scheduled busloads of tourists kept arriving at the foot of the causeway however, only to be halted by young soldiers in uniform staffing the blockade. Clearly these men were in over their heads, some of them so wispy and jittery that they appeared to be teenagers. They could only relay to those arriving the same mixed messages they’d been given by their superiors—and were rewarded with shouting and a repertoire of profane hand gestures. And yet, once the thwarted tourists had stood around arguing long enough to notice the persistent tide of other tourists hurriedly exiting the city, their own persistence waned. They, too, turned tail and scrammed.
Only the tourists were leaving. The locals were staying put. (The Magistrate of the Waters had predicted exactly this at some point during the governments’ all-night planning sessions: “Venetians are confident, resilient and accustomed already to living in an unstable environment. Few will flee. They are ready for a fight,” Barbarigo had managed to interject, somewhat woozily. And then, having said her piece, she remained staunchly upright at the edge of her chair, expecting some reaction—some respect. But the conversation immediately moved on.)
And so, the net effect that morning was a kind of restoration: Venice being gradually flushed of its outsiders and returned to its residents—some of whom watched, with satisfaction or even mild mirth, as the disoriented visitors struggled to find their way out as the city frayed into dysfunction around them.
On the Grand Canal, foreigners dribbled from the doorway of the Gritti Palace and, finding no one to handle their cumbersome luggage, dragged it themselves to the gondolier station out front—only to find that post deserted. The boats, still sheathed in their black covers from the night before, knocked together in the tide like sleeping geese.
There was not a single gondolier on the water that morning. They’d all been summoned to an emergency all-hands meeting by their capo, Dino Simonetti.
By nine o’clock, Bar Forcolaio was overstuffed with apprehensive young men in striped sweaters. Rumors moved through the slender spaces between them. The barkeeps could not pass around the espressos fast enough.
Dino had downed three himself before the gondoliers had even arrived, plus a shot of grappa, while tucked into a corner table rehearsing his speech in a whisper. It took some real thought: how to explain certain circumstances which, after all these years, finally had to be explained.
Now, Dino grunted as he hoisted his aging body up onto the bar and rose awkwardly to his feet.
“Ragazzi,” he began. “All your lives, you’ve been told that you are this republic’s first guardians and sentinels. Tonight, in desperation, Venice calls on you in that capacity. It calls on all of you, just as it called on your ancestors, to confront a heinous danger in our canals—and at considerable risk.” He paused for a long moment. “You will be risking your lives.”
Clenched jaws, murmuring, even a bit of wheezing. The barometric pressure inside the bar shot up.
Dino sighed.
They were innocents, he realized: still little boys. Their obnoxiousness, their arrogance, their womanizing—it was all a garish suit of armor, built up over this softness inside.
“Wait!” A panicked in the crowd. “Where’s Alessandro? He was making yarn last night!”
“Alessandro is safe,” Dino said, holding out his hands to settle the young men. “And he will be leading you into this battle tonight. He is finalizing those plans right now and will be here shortly to explain them. But ragazzi,” the old man said, “there is so much I must tell you first. May I begin?”
“Hey, wake up,” Millie said. “Time to go to work.”
This was a few hours earlier; the sun still hadn’t risen. Millie and Alessandro had just met Guy at ELAINE headquarters and, arriving together at the third-floor reception area outside Russell’s office, found a rumpled body asleep on the couch.
It was Theo—the operations manager Millie had first encountered at ELAINE’s command center. He’d apparently crashed there after the failed operation last night. A McDonald’s bag lay sideways across his chest. The dregs of a strawberry shake had slowly seeped across his denim shirt.
Otherwise, the floor was empty. Everyone monitoring the Guggenheim mission in the command center last night had dejectedly scuttled home once it had gone wrong. But Theo was slow to get up from his workstation, chastened by some indistinct feeling of culpability or shame.
Only then—as everyone else sulked awkwardly out of the room—had he truly realized how muh he’d been compartmentalizing the atrocities unfolding on those screens. Sitting there in his ergonomic chair over the past few days, it had felt to Theo like they’d all been watching a summer blockbuster together or playing a video game. He blamed Lopez for that—the tone he’d set. But now, they’d all just watched a few hundred people die—real people, people as real as him. Theo couldn’t shake it. He’d had to eat himself to sleep.
“You look terrible,” Guy told him as the young man startled awake.
Guy turned and took a second to look Millie and Alessandro up and down too; he hadn’t noticed how ragged they both looked when he’d met them downstairs: Millie, in a fraying cardigan with a tattered t-shirt with Jane Goodall’s portrait on it; her hair clumpy and wild, her eyes puffy and bloodshot from sleeplessness and wine. And Alessandro, still wearing his gondolier uniform, stiff from the silty canal water that had dried into the fabric overnight.
“You all look terrible,” Guy said, opening Lopez’s office and flipping on the lights. He’d taken a sixty-second shower, quickly shaved, and changed into a fresh black sweater and jeans. “Like a pack of Garbage Pail Kids.”
He made himself at home in Lopez’s big leather chair and looked over the desk at Millie and Alessandro again. “Okay, tell us what you’ve got.”
Millie began to lay out the facts—scrupulously and slowly, as though presenting a scientific paper, glancing at Alessandro to check that she was relaying the specifics of that history faithfully: The skeefs. The gondoliers. The black and white stripes. The strange command their voices held over the creatures—all the protocols for herding the schifosi through Venice when it flooded and facilitating their slaughter.
“So the upshot,” she said, “is that we have a way to control them now—or to move them, at least. And another storm is on its way tonight. If we allow the city flood, we can drive them into Piazza San Marco, just like the gondoliers used to. And since the piazza is basically just a big rectangle…”
“A trapezoid,” Alessandro corrected; the buildings that formed the northern and southern boundaries of the square were not exactly parallel.
Millie rolled her eyes. “Ok, still: it’s an empty space, surrounded by buildings on four sides. It’s a container. A barrel. So, we let the city flood, and Alessandro and his men wrangle all those fish out of the canals and lead them into this barrel and then…..”—she locked eyes with Guy for effect: “You and I shoot the fish in the barrel. We kill them all.”
Guy’s eyes drooped away from hers. He was hesitating. It wasn’t the reaction Millie was expecting.
“I can’t,” he said bluntly. “I don’t think it’s possible.”
“But we’re not talking about stabbing them with spears anymore. We have the gondos.”
“The gondos aren’t enough, Millie,” Guy shot back. “It’d be like a cage match in that piazza. We could defend ourselves, sure—and we’d bring some of them down. But relying on me and you to exterminate every last one of them? Look, a good plan leaves nothing to chance. It’s like a machine: a plan is a way of engineering reality into a machine that will flawlessly produce the one result you want every time you run it. Last night we saw the reality we’re up against. I don’t know about you, but I got a real good look at that reality while it was kicking our ass. While it killed my friend. Your plan isn’t engaging with that reality. So it’s not really a plan. We need to be smarter this time. More strategic. Less….”
Cocky? He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Less like Guy Rondack.
The blind confidence Guy had carried into the canals last night had softened. He’d underestimated the skeefs, been overwhelmed, and it was Benny who’d ultimately paid the price. Millie noticed that Guy’s voice seemed to break, just slightly, when he’d said the words “my friend.”
Clearly, Guy was now reckoning with the limitations of his own power: a human hammer questioning whether every problem truly was a nail. It was odd for Millie to watch, the quiet pathos of it: this burly soldier of fortune biting his lip, muddied by humility.
But it was kind of attractive, too.
“Think,” Guy said. “What tools do we have? How can we leverage them?”
“Okay, we herd them together and lead them out to sea,” Millie said. She was trying to salvage as much momentum as possible.
“Won’t they just come back the next day?” Theo said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. He’d gathered up his bag of dinner and was giving it another go.
“Also,” Alessandro added, “I do not think we gondoliers could control those animals in the open ocean. The environment is too big—too much chaos. In the canals, they are contained.”
Guy said, “So we trap them in the piazza and…detonate a bomb.”
“Too destructive,” Millie said. “It would damage too much of the city. That’s what we’re avoiding here.”
“Trap them in the piazza and drown them,” Alessandro said.
“Drown a fish?” Theo asked, laughing.
Guy glowered at him. He was being snotty. And his mouth was full. It was gross.
Everyone was silent.
Millie: “Actually, wait.”
Guy: “Yeah, hold on a second.”
The two looked at each other, as though stalking the same epiphany, wondering if they should pounce.
“What if we do the opposite of drown them?” Millie said.
“Un-drown the fish!” Alessandro said—though he had no idea, truly, what that could mean.
“The city will have to be flooded for this to work, right?” Millie told them. “Which can only happen if ELAINE doesn’t close the seawall. Because, in the Venice of the twenty-first century, we don’t leave anything to chance. We say when the tide comes in—"
“And we decide when the tide goes out,” Guy said.
“Right. So we lower the wall, let the city flood—then close the wall again, trapping all that water inside.”
“The flood would be ours now,” Guy said. “The water—we’d control it.”
“And so, once the animals were all together in the piazza, we could keep them there until the tide changed, then open the AquaStop again.” She was talking much faster now, almost losing her breath.
“The water would empty out of the city, out of the lagoon and back to sea,” Alessandro said, catching on.
“Exactly,” Millie said. “It would drain right out from under the skeefs. Suddenly, the piazza is dry land again. They’d be beached!”
Theo said, “It would be like pulling the drain plug in a bathtub. Or flushing a toilet.”
“Exactly,” Millie said again.
She looked at everyone eagerly. They were all quiet, visualizing the sequence of events in their heads—privately running the experiment, not quite ready to commit.
Finally, Guy nodded with satisfaction and said: “Glug, glug, glug, shitheads.”
“Fine, but…” It was Theo—he was enjoying being the naysayer a little too much again. “Won’t they just swim back to the ocean when the piazza starts draining? Plus, how would you hold them there in the first place while you wait for the tide to change—before you can even re-open the wall?”
“We block the exits,” Millie said. “We trap them in the square.”
“Okay, how?” Theo said.
Everyone looked at Guy. “Tell me more about the battlespace,” he said.
No one knew what that meant.
“The piazza,” he said, slightly annoyed. “What’s it like?”
“Piazza San Marco,” Alessandro began. “An architectural marvel. The iconic centerpiece of our city and among the most awe-inspiring panoramas in Europe. Napoleon once called it….” He was doing his tour-guide spiel, encyclopedic and proud.
As he spoke, Millie got up and pulled a frame off the wall of Lopez’s office. It was a hand-drawn architectural map of the piazza, dated 1522. The schematic depicted the buildings around all four sides of the perimeter and the broad, empty space they ecnlosed.
She laid it sideways on Lopez’s desk and held up her hand to block the fluorescent lighting overhead; a harsh glare off the glass of the frame was making it hard to see.
“One sec,” Guy said. He took a bronze award off Lopez’s bookshelf behind them and slammed it into the frame a few times, shattering the glass completely. Then he shook the shards onto the carpet and put the bare map back down. “Much better.” He looked at Alessandro: “Continue.”
“Okay, as you can see, the piazza is in fact a very large trapezoid…”
Millie rolled her eyes again.
“…but we will call it a ‘rectangle,’ okay? This rectangle is approximately 180 meters long and 70 meters wide. It is bordered here, on the eastern side, by the Basilica of course.” Alessandro tapped the Basilica of San Marco that ran along the right edge of the map, the sprawling Church of St. Mark—Venice’s most recognizable structure. “Then you have these two procuratie—like, historic apartment buildings—that form the north and south sides of the piazza. And the Museo Correa on the western side. This open space in the middle, walled in by the buildings, is a herringbone patterned pavement, re-laid in 1496 by Venetian architect Andrea Tirali. Interestingly, one of the women who cleans this office building, Giulia, is a direct descendent of Tirali. She is also my friend Paolo’s wife, which is how I know this. Paolo once explained—”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Guy said. “Where are the entrances and exits—where the skeefs could escape? Where are we vulnerable?”
Alessandro pressed his finger to the top right corner of the map, where two separate, wide thoroughfares entered the square. “One challenge will be these two grand openings on the eastern side.”
“So we build barricades across them,” Millie said. “Super-fortified ones.”
“No,” Guy said. “We’ll need those entry points clear at first, so we can herd the animals in. And any barrier we’d install on the fly, to shut those doors behind us, would be provisional. The skeefs could burst right through.”
“Install us,” Alessandro said. “The gondolieri. We will be your barrier.”
“What, you’re going to sing at them?” Guy tried to say it politely.
“Yes,” Alessandro said. “If the plan is working at that point—if we have succeeded in taking the schifosi into the piazza—it will be because our singing works.”
“He’s right,” Millie told Guy. “The gondoliers can do it. And you and I will be there to back them up, to shoot any animals that get out of line.”
“With your macho-man, American gondolas,” Alessandro said wryly. “Yes, it is important for you to be there, keeping them together, and to prevent the animals from wrecking the architecture in the square.”
“So, problem solved?” Millie said. She looked at Guy, who thought a moment longer, then nodded. “We use the gondoliers to block the exits.”
Millie took a handful of limp french fries from Theo’s McDonald’s bag and placed two, like barricades, across the gaps they’d been discussing: one across the thoroughfare that passed through the base of the piazza’s clock tower, and a longer one to close off the other opening at that corner of the square—the empty space between the basilica and Bar Americano.
The fries stained the parchment with grease.
“These are meant to be me and my friends?” Alessandro asked. “These potato objects?”
Guy said, “How wide are these entrances, exactly?”
“I’m one step ahead of you,” said Theo, flipping open his laptop.
“Trust me. You’re not,” said Guy.
“Well, I’m making measurements on ELAINE’S satellite maps. This one’s nine meters wide and this one’s fourteen.”
“And how wide is a gondola?”
“One-point-four-four meters. Precisely.” Alessandro said.
“Okay, so this french fry is seven guys, side by side,” Guy said. “And this one’s ten guys.”
“Triple it,” Alessandro told him. He lined up several more french fries on the map. “We will form three rows of gondolieri at each of those entrances, lined up behind each other. This way, we increase the strength. We increase the volume of our voices. We become something solid.”
“But what about this huge opening down here?” Theo asked.
He was looking directly below where they’d been focusing on the map, to the bottom right corner of the piazza. There, the buildings that bordered Piazza San Marco didn’t even come close to touching. Instead, the piazza opened into another long, narrower rectangle that stretched perpendicularly, due south, until it finally hit the Grand Canal. On the illustration, that narrower space was labeled: “Piazzetta San Marco.”
“Yes, the piazzetta,” Alessandro explained. “That zone is fifty meters across. Very large. It could be very difficult to defend.”
“And look,” Guy said. “I’m guessing that’s where all the water will start rushing as soon as we reopen the wall and pull the plug.” He ran his fingertip straight down the length of the piazzetta to where it met the Grand Canal. Then he flicked his finger along the canal toward the sea, then off the map entirely—into thin air.
“It’s true,” Alessandro said. “The floodwaters always recede through the piazzetta—emptying through the bottom of the square into the Grand Canal.”
“That area’s like the drain pipe under the bathtub,” Guy said.
“Their escape route,” said Millie.
“That’s definitely our biggest vulnerability,” Guy said. “If we can’t hold them there, we’ll just wind up watching them all rush by us as the piazza empties. So for starters, let’s say….”
He plunged his hand into Theo’s bag and came out with a big fistful of french fries and dropped them on the map, right there, in a sloping pile. Then he stared at the map, taking it all in.
“Theo, how long are we talking about having to hold the animals there anyway, for the piazza to dry out?”
Theo bit at a fingernail as his eyes darted back and forth across the screen of his laptop, scanning the radar maps and ELAINE’s proprietary weather models.
“Well, that depends on how much water winds up in the piazza in the first place. And jeez, this storm is looking exceptionally bad.”
The model showed a monstrous high tide, compounded by historic amounts of rainfall and pummeling winds—the Sirocco winds, which shot toward Venice from North Africa every fall. Gusts would reach 145 km an hour at their peak. “The king tide and the rain are going to put a lot of extra water in the lagoon,” Theo explained, “and then these winds are going to shove that water straight into the city. The canals will be overwhelmed.”
“How much?” Millie said.
“If we don’t raise the AquaStop…? The model projects”—he kept clattering his keyboard—"peak flooding of 251 centimeters.”
“That’s more than eight feet!” Millie said.
“Okay, so you keep the wall down and let that water in, then eventually raise the wall to lock it in place. And then, after we get the skeefs into the piazza, you open the wall again,” Guy said, reviewing the scenario, almost more to himself. “But once you do that—once you flush the toilet, Theo—how long will it take for those eight feet of water to drain out of the piazza?”
“Well...” He was running more calculations. “Once the high tide peaks and starts flowing out instead, the water will move pretty quickly as soon as the AquaStop open and the pressure is released. You’ll see the current—it’ll be strong. It really will be like a toilet flushing.” Theo punched a few more keys: “Sixty-two minutes.”
“An hour?!” Millie blurted. “We’ll be battling those animals for an hour?”
The expansive look of worry that overcame Alessandro’s face was so poignant and guileless and pure that he suddenly looked thirty years younger, like a child.
“I thought that was pretty fast,” Theo said. “It takes twenty-eight minutes just for the AquaStop to open fully.”
“Holding them that long isn’t impossible,” Guy said.
This tepid expression of optimism—or at least of something that wasn’t pessimism—was enough. All at once, the four of them started talking over each other. They brainstormed, bickered, revised and refined their ideas to wrangle the animals, trap them in the piazza, and keep them contained. They got invigorated and discouraged and invigorated all over again.
After a long while, they arrived at what felt like—just maybe—a detailed and feasible plan. They began talking through every variable, every contingency, every blind spot, every flaw. They went around the room, each rattling off his or her role in that intricate scheme, step by step, rehearsing it aloud to troubleshoot and stress-test it.
When they were finished, they fell into another heavy silence—until a deep gurgling noise sounded from the depths of Theo’s gut.
“It’s the McDonald’s,” he said and hustled out of the room.
This left Guy, Millie and Alessandro standing around the desk—eying the map, eyeing the french fry barricades, eyeing each other, sizing up their odds.
After a while, Rondack issued the verdict they’d each been summoning the courage to reach him or herself: “It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s a credible one. And it’s well thought out. We go with it.”
And that’s when Russell Lopez walked in.
Something had happened to Lopez. He looked absolutely exhausted, absolutely wrecked, and now found these three people in his office, having apparently broken in: that lughead Rondack, sitting smugly behind his desk; that uppity, unkempt millennial scientist woman sitting on his desk, wearing a scuzzy t-shirt with chimps on it, looking like some kind of homeless zookeeper; and standing next to the two of them… a gondolier? An actual goddamn gondolier! In the whole gondolier get-up—the striped shirt, the scarf—like a cartoon character on a pizza box or a ridiculous male stripper.
It was too much for Lopez. It sent him over the edge. All he could do was emit an exasperated whimper—a frail quavering that communicated, unmistakably, Oh for fuck’s sake, what now?
That is, until Millie told him, obliviously, with a note of happy delirium even: “Oh good, you’re here. We need you to flood the city”—at which point, Russell Lopez essentially detonated, bursting into a ferocious, semi-deranged and nonsensical soliloquy, generating all manner of sounds which weren’t exactly language until, feeling an impulse to simply rush at the three of them and reach for the gun in his desk, he narrowly found the presence of mind to first scream two words:
“Get out!”
…in Chapter 14!
Until now, there’d been something slightly pathetic about Russel’s fury, something comic about the derangement overtaking him. But all of a sudden he seemed steelier, calculating, sinister. He looked straight at Millie and said: “You’re right. You would be the only one left who knew the truth.”
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