GONDOS—Chapter 14!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos.” For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
Millie, Guy, Alessandro and Theo gathered in Lopez’s office and devised a plan: If they let Venice flood during the upcoming storm, and managed to herd and contain the skeefs in Piazza San Marco, they could then reopen the AquaStop and wait for the tide to go out again, beaching all the creatures in the square.
They’d just finished refining this strategy when Lopez arrived—fuming and seemingly unhinged…
Russell Lopez was losing it—because he was on the verge of losing everything.
In the aftermath of the Guggenheim debacle, he’d been propelled immediately into the maelstrom of deliberations by those various government officials, all while simultaneously backchanneling with one or two or twelve of their staffers individually via text.
But as the hours wore on, Lopez realized he was talking less and less in those encrypted video meetings. And soon, he was hardly being acknowledged at all. He found he could even hustle back to his apartment long enough to change shirts and stress-eat several handfuls of ultra-processed energy bites (he had them flown in,) albeit with two separate conference calls running in parallel on two different Bluetooths, one in each ear.
Over the last decade in Venice, Lopez had grown accustomed, whenever a problem arose, to patting Italian authorities patronizingly on the head and telling them, in so many words, not to do their jobs—that ELAINE would handle everything. But by sun up, the man’s power was being sapped. Whatever moves were about to be made to combat the creatures could catastrophically affect the physical infrastructure and reputation of ELAINE’s AquaStop—and therefore, the financial future of the company and, well, of Lopez himself.
But all decision-making was happening at some stratospheric level so far above Russell Lopez’s head that those machinations had become too distant, too blurry, for him to track. Even the Magistrate of the Waters—whom he’d regarded as a laughing-stock herself—had stopped returning his texts.
The walk back to ELAINE’S headquarters from Lopez’s apartment was only half a kilometer. But the city’s narrow, snaking calles, infuriating to pedestrians even in ordinary times, were now hopelessly choked. The trip took him thirty minutes. Foot-traffic somehow pushed forward without moving, like an impacted tooth.
These were the throngs of befuddled, low-information tourists hastening to flee the city, and the smaller throng of those who had no intention of leaving—the Venetians—making their rounds to stock up on food, supplies and wine. The former moved in a barely sedated panic—and glared at the latter, who kept stopping to greet the familiar faces who wound up packed in beside them. Among the locals, a kind of breezy solidarity was building. And this found expression in—and was, in turn, amplified by—complaning together about the nutty foreigners smooshed in around them: Why in such a rush?
From the moment Lopez had stepped onto the street—compacting into this crowd like one nameless morsel of ground meat extruded into a sausage casing—he could feel his fragile emotional state deteriorating further, and fast.
For a time, in his left ear, he had a call going with ELAINE’s CEO, who’d asked to be briefed and updated personally. “I know, ma’am,” Lopez told her, his face brushing the back of someone’s coat. And: “No, it’s not at all clear what will happen now.” And: “Yes, that would be very bad for us.” And—this line he used many times, as many times as he could in the micro-beats between her florid reprimands: “Yes, I’m working on regaining control.”
By the time Lopez arrived at his office—his office; at last, his one indisputable domain—and found Guy and Millie and Alessandro kibbitzing around his desk, he was moist and foul-smelling, physically and psychically over-taxed, and rapidly uncoupling from all executive functioning. He was a world-renown manager, a keynoter of management symposiums in Dubai and Gstaad, but the universe was now crassly conspiring to keep him from managing the most consequential crisis of his lifetime. He was—he could feel it—barely managing.
Then, as he walked in, the scientist—that woman—had the nerve to tell him: “Oh good, you’re here. We need you to flood the city.”
And Lopez, boiling over, screamed.
Guy stepped from behind the desk like a human shield, attempting to deflect the torrent of profanity surging out of Lopez’s mouth—attempting to explain.
Hours earlier, Lopez had wondered if he’d even see Guy Rondack again; he would have forgiven the mercenary if he’d simply skipped town after blowing it so badly at the Guggenheim last night. And now, finding Rondack here, he might have expected some measure of remorse from the man—even an apology. But no. Instead, Rondack was right in his face, outlining some elaborate plan to trap the animals in Piazza San Marco, to herd them there using some kind of singing, which Lopez—his mind and mouth still firing wildly as Guy tried to talk over him—could only comprehend as a kind of ludicrous hypnosis or sorcery. And this magic singing would apparently be performed by the gondolier standing at Rondack’s side.
“Who are you?” Lopez finally snapped at the Italian, interrupting his own tirade long enough to fumble with his nicotine gum.
Alessandro puffed out his chest. “I am the fuck Alessandro Munari, gondolier.”
Millie said, “Can you please calm down so we can go over this plan?”
Lopez glared at her with contempt. In his mind, it was easy to blame this despicable woman for the entire debacle—not rationally, and not because she actually bore responsibility for bringing those monsters to Venice, but because she was the one who’d discovered that the company was responsible, and who’d revealed this to Lopez in the conference room that afternoon with such sanctimony, such thinly veiled spite.
Now, he screamed at all of them: “There’s no fucking way I’m standing down the AquaStop and flooding this city.” Lopez turned to guy. “Don’t you get it? I thought you were smarter than this. No, truthfully, I thought you were dumber than this. I don’t need you coming up with any more plans. You’re just a weapon, Guy—a dumb, deadly weapon that I decide where to aim.”
Guy wanted to clobber Lopez. His right hand clenched into a fist at his side. But then he felt Millie’s hand swish in a gentle circle on his back to calm him down. His fist relaxed.
One of Russell’s phones dinged. They wanted him again! He stuffed in an earpiece and said, with sudden crispness and aplomb, “Russell Lopez, ELAINE Corporation”—announcing himself for another conference call.
Then, immediately turning unhinged again, he shouted: “I hired you to kill those things, Guy. Your job was to clean up ELAINE’s mess before anyone figured out that it was our mess.” He pressed the earbud. “I’m on mute, by the way… Anyway, you failed, Guy. Maybe it turned out to be an impossible job, fine, but you failed. And now you’re asking me to sabotage our own technology, right when every eyeball on this planet is going to be focused on Venice, right when our competitors are waiting to pounce…? You’re out of your shrunken little mind, my man.”
“But those animals will destroy everything you built,” Millie told him. “And those people”—she pointed to his phone—“are most likely going to wind up destroying it, too. The Americans aren’t ruling out air strikes. Like, bombs!”
Lopez’s whole body seemed to convulse out of an overload of exasperation—all four limbs shivered and flapped. “Like, bombs!” he mimicked her in a whine. “You think I don’t know that? The conversations happening are, frankly, nuts. I keep telling them: we’ve got half a billion dollars of infrastructure inside this city that needs to be protected. And that’s besides the wall: sluice gates, pumps, berms—all that stuff. But no one’s listening to me anymore. Rome bent over hours ago. Even they got completely steamrolled.”
In Lopez’s telling, various militaries were now haggling for control, and the ideas on the table were increasingly blunt: helicopters, warships, missiles, booby-trapping the lagoon with undersea mines. Everything the Magistrate had told Alessandro last night was true.
There was, however, a small faction pitching poison, Lopez explained—and he was still praying this tactic might win out. “I keep telling them, I have it all set up. There’s a chemical manufacturer in Padua, all ready to go. A few thousand gallons of something called Aspect H. Hypo… trichlocyclic… I don’t know—it’s an acid. Nitric acid? Highly concentrated. They use it to clear fat build-ups from city sewer systems. I keep saying, use this poison! It’ll just burn them up and dissolve them! But no one’s listening. This is the cleanest way, I keep saying: dump this Aspect H in the water and kill them all.”
“But you’d annihilate the entire ecosystem!” Millie shouted.
“You’re not listening to me either!” Russell screamed. “The ecosystem is not my concern. This is bigger than Venice. You realize we’re weeks away from getting our final approvals for the AquaStop? If we can hold this together, that wall out there—ELAINE’S technology—will suddenly be proof-of-concept for every other coastal city on Earth. Sea-level rise is a $45 trillion global threat, and we’re going to be selling the only proven solution to it. And actually….”
His attention swerved; it seemed like he was listening to something on the conference call, but in fact he was just thinking, playing that scenario forward in his head. “This Aspect H would wipe out the whole ecosystem—including that algae you said mutated the animals in the first place. After that, we could just redo the environmental impact study. By the time the dust settled and people started asking questions, there wouldn’t be any evidence left in the water. No one would know what the AquaStop actually did.”
“I’d still know,” Millie said.
Until now there’d been something slightly pathetic about Russel’s fury, something comical about the derangement overtaking him. But all of a sudden he seemed steelier, calculating, sinister. He looked straight at Millie and said: “Yeah, I guess you would be the only one who knew the truth.”
Theo returned from the bathroom. Quickly sizing up the situation from the doorway, he turned to Lopez, feigning befuddlement, and said, “Uh, good morning? What’s going on in here, boss?” Then he made a beeline for the map that Guy had smashed open on Lopez’s desk and whined, cloyingly, “Oh no. I loved this map. It’s an original, I think.”
The landline on Lopez’s desk started ringing, multiple lines at once.
“Get out of my office!” he said again, shooing Guy, Millie and Alessandro away. “Just get out. The adults are working the problem.” This implied that he was one of those adults—an assertion which, as he regained his composure, now sounded slightly more convincing. “Get out of my building and get out of my city. If you’re smart, you’ll all disappear into some other ruined corner of the earth and make sure I don’t hear squat from you again.”
Millie and Alessandro both glanced at Guy, who shot Lopez a searing look but then made his way to the door. Alessandro followed, pausing in front of Lopez long enough to tell him, “It’s not your city,” and spit on his shoe on they way out.
Millie remained at the desk a moment. She was sneering at Theo, who was still performatively grieving over the artwork, leaning down close, pretending to examine the parchment for damage.
But then Theo raised an eyebrow at her—a quick, furtive, conspiratorial flicker of something between them—and gave her a little shove in the ribs toward the door.
She waited until the three of them were in the elevator, then reached into the pocket of her wool shirt and found it: a scrap of the map with Theo’s cell number scrawled on it.
“The plan’s still on,” Millie told Guy and Alessandro.
“What?”
“We can do this ourselves.”
She held up the parchment to show them Theo’s note on the back:
“High tide peaks @ 2:40 AM. I’ll handle the wall.”
The first thunderclap rung out just after midnight. Then another, and another after that. A smudgy rumbling in the distance grew into throbbing booms—and then a clatter so ferocious, so close, that it shook the window casement that Millie was leaning against, keeping watch.
She and Guy had positioned themselves in the cupola of the Basilica di Santa Maria Della Salute—a perfect lookout tower two hundred feet above Venice, right at the mouth of the Grand Canal. From the small, leaden-glass window in the rectory, Millie had a panoramic view of the city—vulnerable and still—while Guy sat against the opposite wall on a wooden stool, whittling a burl of alder, pausing every so often to hone his blade.
They had spent the afternoon at the warehouse in Marghera, relentlessly rehashing the plan. They’d performed last-minute maintenance checks on the gondos. They’d painted the vehicles black. They’d used electrical tape to outfit their silver flight suits with black stripes.
Meanwhile, at Bar Forcolaio, Alessandro had prepped his people with similar tenacity, drilling the gondoliers again and again. Only once the sun went down did he release them to go home to eat a good dinner, be with their families, parents and grandparents—virtually none of whom had followed orders to evacuate and were, with increasing uneasiness, hunkered down, waiting to see what happened next.
Now, Millie watched from the church tower as the storm piled in.
So far, Theo had delivered, disguising his takeover of the AquaStop’s controls under a series of cascading equipment failures. Lopez had stood right behind his workstation in the command center the entire time, pacing and fuming at everyone in the room to figure out what was happening—to fix it, to fix it right away, to get that seawall up in advance of the storm. Around 12:30, Theo sent Millie an encrypted text: “Dude’s losing his mind. Wish you were here to see it.”
The rain finally started—all at once, a fantastic wall of water. Millie’s view of Venice through the church window smeared.
Guy stood up slowly, brushed wood shavings off his flight suit, re-tied his boots and said, “Almost time.” Then he sat back down and resumed his whittling.
The high water came.
The lagoon infiltrated the city, pushing forward, upward, spreading laterally—warily at first, like an animal slinking out of its cage, having forgotten how to be wild. Then, it flowed more recklessly—with abandon, with force.
The canal rats emerged, shrieking and fearful, racing from every crevice of the drowning city. From the window, Millie watched puddles expand across the pavement. Then, the puddles widened into lakes. And the lakes met the edges of the swollen canals to form a single, glassy table of water—water instead of land.
“I think it’s time,” she said impatiently. “We should close the wall.”
Without looking up from his whittling, Guy said: “Not yet.”
More water came—an unrelenting procession of water, sloshing into the bases of buildings, lapping at the masonry as though it were a meal, as though the water were hungry to tear the architecture apart and consume it. Bigger waves punched at boats and battered them until they gradually broke away from wherever they’d been tied—until they joined the water, tossing around with ferocious freedom and little sense.
Again, Millie looked at Guy.
“Not yet,” he said.
The water kept rising—its surface black in certain places now, stained with the diesel fuel and grime it was scouring from the city’s surface as it spread. These waves advanced like shadows. They swept away trash cans, then canal-side souvenir stands—knocking their bottoms out from under them with swift, repeated kicks.
Millie’s eyes began to fill with water too. It had been her idea, but now she was losing her conviction. Were they really going to drown this beautiful city in order to save it?
“Now,” she pleaded with Guy. “Tell Theo now.”
“Not yet,” he said.
They were interrupted by a violent flash of blue light.
The flood knocked out the city’s power. Venice went dark.
The water was entering buildings now, entering homes—overwhelming electrical boxes and frying transformers. It pushed open the glittering doorways of fine hotels and rushed inside, erasing carpeting and floorboards, mosaics and marble floors. And when the water reemerged from these residential spaces, it bore great rafts of flotsam and sent it coursing through the city: papers, articles of clothing, upholstered cushions, chairs. Works of art joggled facedown on the surface of the water: portraits of ancestors who had lived and died by the water and were now being carried away.
Everywhere it went, the water got what it wanted. A vendetta was being exacted: the pent-up energy of many centuries, released.
Soon, there were four-and-a-half feet of water in Piazza San Marco. Then six feet—and more pushing in every second.
But still no sign of the skeefs.
Theo’s voice clicked in on the radio. ELAINE’S generators had kicked on in the command center. He was whispering, hunched at his terminal. “Uh,” he said, “This is getting a little insane. Tell me when.”
Millie looked at Guy, nearly undone by her desperation. “Now?”
This time, without a word, Guy stood up and joined her at the window, peering out.
Down below, directly in front of the church tower, a fancy water taxi had been shaken free from its moorings and seized by the tide. The boat looked beautiful. Its polished orange wood was gleaming, floodlit by a beam of light from the tremendous full moon that was, just then, breaking through the clouds.
The boat drifted ethereally, all alone at the precise center of the canal.
Then, as Guy looked out, the boat suddenly spun around like the hand of a frantic clock. It had been plowed into at one end by some terrible burst of energy in the tide.
And then Guy saw them, like a flood within a flood: a screaming stampede jumbled under the surface, surging into Venice and off in all directions through the mouth of the Grand Canal.
There was a crack of thunder. And a burst of white lightning overhead revealed them: hundreds this time—their hideous, twisting shapes in the waves.
Like a hail of bullets, like splattering paint, so many creatures spread through the water so quickly that, it seemed to Guy, the canal itself became a solid object.
“Get in the gondos,” he said. “Now.”
…in Chapter 15!
Alessandro raised his megaphone toward the gondoliers and shouted: “Gondolieri! Ecco ci la corrente!”
Here comes the current!
And the men sprung into action, moving with well-rehearsed precision—and without ever ceasing to sing.
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