GONDOS—Chapter 5!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos,” serialized every Wednesday and Thursday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
At Bar Forcolaio, the crisis of masculinity roiling the gondolier profession became apparent. And, under a portrait of the Magistrate of the Waters, Alessandro watched a mutilated gondolier mutter “schifosi” before he died.
Meanwhile, ELAINE chief Russell Lopez dispatched Oscar and Carla to the base of the AquaStop to capture the Object. But the operation went sideways—fast.
Millie couldn’t tell if anyone one else in the command center saw what she’d just seen: Oscar’s torso going slack in one of the lower monitors and, in an instant, being dragged out of sight.
Now, in one of the adjacent video feeds, Carla’s bodycam wrenched toward the water. She was leaning over the side of the Zodiac, searching for any sign him. The footage was jerky and frantic; Millie couldn’t take in the whole scenario at once—until Carla suddenly jumped back in alarm.
Something had breached the surface and lunged at her—a slick-looking, gray shape that disappeared as quickly as it rose. The Object wasn’t an object. It was alive.
“Jesus,” Lopez said. Theo, manning the command center’s console, clicked like crazy, repositioning other cameras to try to bring it back into view.
Carla was vomiting on the floor of the boat now, too afraid to lean back over the side. The water had turned turbulent around her. It sloshed onto the lens of her bodycam, which was also speckled with her puke. She hustled to start the Zodiac’s motor and go.
“What’s happening?” Lopez shouted. “Carla, where’s Oscar?”
“That thing got him!” she screamed over the radio. “It’s dragging him away!” She was watching the dive float attached to Oscar’s waist—a fluorescent orange balloon on the surface—race away from her, toward the city center.
Millie had assumed Carla was starting up the Zodiac to flee the danger. But she was chasing it, determined to rescue her boss.
“Minchia, it’s fast!” Carla said.
Just then, in the command center, Kristen clasped her hand over her mouth. Without a word, she turned limply away from something she’d seen on the monitors and rested her forehead on the wall where she and Millie were leaning—hyperventilating, trying to slow her breath.
Elsewhere in the room, someone issued a quiet, drawn-out Fuuuuck.
Oscar had reappeared in one of the underwater cameras—this time on the command center’s largest, central screen. The top edge of his head materialized first, drifting in at a diagonal from the bottom left corner of the frame.
Soon, his eyes appeared—the sad eyes Millie had watched so attentively at the bar that night. They were locked open in eternal astonishment now, motionless under his scuba mask.
His mouth came next, straight and expressionless, with a rivulet of blood draining from one corner. The mouthpiece of his oxygen tank had slipped free. The black tube swayed uselessly beside his face like a tendril of kelp.
Slowly, Oscar’s body kept rising through the frame, floating as though he were in orbit, in space. His neck. His shoulders under his wetsuit. His chest.
But then, instead of his stomach: nothing.
The middle of Oscar was gouged out. There was a hole at the center of his torso: a horrendous, ragged, flesh-ringed oval that began at his abdomen and—slowly, slowly, as more of him was revealed on screen—stretched well past his waist. So much of Oscar was missing that, when his legs finally coasted into view, they could only dangle off what remained of his hips like streamers or tuxedo tails.
Millie wanted to look away but couldn’t. The hole was nothing—an absence. Still, it was too much. She was looking straight through Oscar. His body was a window, framing the infinite sea behind him.
It took a moment for everyone in the command center to grasp what they were staring at. It took even longer to realize that this meant the dive float around Oscar’s waist—the one Carla was now chasing—wasn’t attached to Oscar’s waist anymore. Or rather, that the part of Oscar’s waist it was attached to wasn’t attached to Oscar. The creature was swimming away with only a small piece of him in its possession.
“I can catch it! I’m going to catch it!” Carla screamed into the radio, obliviously.
No one wanted to tell her. No one knew what to say.
“It’s dragging him straight to the Grand Canal!”
Millie looked over at Lopez. He was squeezing the bridge of his nose above his glasses, squeezing his eyes shut. He pulled the pack of nicotine gum from the inside pocket of his blazer again but, finding it empty, crumpled it in one hand and chucked it across the room.
Turning solemnly to the staffers behind him, he said, “Get me the Magistrate of the Waters.”
Everyone scurried, fumbling with their phones.
“No, wait! Get me Guy Rondack.”
Before Millie knew what was happening, Kristen ushered her out of the room.
The first one he named was Whiskers. He didn’t put any thought into it—the name just came out. The cat was splayed on the doorstep of the AirBnB, basking in a shaft of sunlight, and he said something like, “Excuse me, Whiskers” while stepping over it, inside.
After that, he named another cat Hawkeye because, he noticed, Hawkeye liked to sit in the lemon tree every afternoon and peer down into the courtyard, like a bird of prey. And Skippy was Skippy because her fur was the precise shade of peanut-butter brown.
Marty was named after Martin Scorsese. The long wisps of white and black fur above the eyes reminded him of the film director’s disobedient eyebrows. And when Marty got pregnant, he decided it didn’t matter, because Marty worked as a girl’s name too.
Federico Fellini was the second cat he named after a film director. Though he pronounced it “Federico Feline-ee,” because that made him laugh.
From then on, as more feral cats assembled on the property—bounding on and off the rock walls around the patio, or swirling excitedly around him like a living whirlpool when he emerged with a bag of food—he found it easiest to keep doling out Hollywood names, because that’s what he knew best.
It was amusing to him: to have a cat named Keanu, cats named Pam Greer and Dolph Lundgren and Uma, to see one kicking and flipping in mid-air and call it Jackie Chan. When Dwayne the Cat Johnson—also female, it turned out—gave birth to a litter of kittens, and only two survived, he named the survivors the Hemsworths, Liam and Chris.
This was how Guy Rondack occupied himself during his stay on the island of Sifnos. He’d come to Sifnos to… why was he there? To decompress. To switch it up. To explore other sides of himself, as his sister Greta put it, when she showed up at his Los Angeles home on his 40th birthday with a plane ticket and photos of this cliffside villa in Greece. To relax, Greta kept saying. A place to relax.
It would never have occurred to Guy Rondack to relax. He’d served twelve years as a Special Ops pilot, then started bounding around the world all over again as a private contractor. But Greta was insistent. He knew she worried about him, that she wanted him to “build a more meaningful, more fully integrated relationship with himself.” (Greta was a psychologist.) Handing him her gift, she said: “Go sit on a cliff, Guy, look at the ocean and feel your feelings. It’s two weeks. The world won’t stop spinning without you here to push it for two weeks.”
This offended Guy. He knew exactly who he was. He was an ox, a nose against a grindstone; a protector, a problem-solver, a strategist, a spy. He could be a flamethrower and a fire extinguisher, depending on the situation; a cannonball blasting through walls, or a slim, sharp object, frictionlessly picking locks.
Most of all, Guy Rondack was a fighter.
Shot down over Syria, he’d never stopped sneering at the poor, teenaged Jihadist assigned to rip out his teeth. In Kuala Lumpur, he’d climbed 30 stories up the side of a multinational computing firm’s headquarters to swipe IP for a competitor.
He’d flushed pirates off an oil rig in the Niger Delta. He’d vaulted out of the shadows at an Ibiza nightclub and snapped the arm of a would-be kidnapper just as the man reached for the billionaire’s daughter who Rondack was hired to protect.
This was Guy Rondack’s essence: he would always find a way, find his moment, find the right tool for the job.
That said, the house on Sifnos did look pretty amazing. And Guy had been hankering for some time and space to get a new project off the ground:
He wanted to write a movie.
For the last two years, Guy had been taking consulting gigs in Hollywood—training Zendaya to pass as a fighter pilot, or ensuring the terrorist standoff that Channing Tatum was infiltrating at a Peruvian hydroelectric dam didn’t come off like bullshit.
A few weeks earlier, on the set of one big-budget action film, Guy found himself waiting out a rainstorm in the crafts services tent with the movie’s two screenwriters—two mousy, bespectacled young men from Montreal. They wore beat-up sneakers and ball caps with no insignias. They ate the snacks indiscriminately and spilled coffee on themselves. They tripped over lighting cables, complained about the heat and insects and, at one point, literally tugged out tufts of their hair as they agonized over last-minute notes to their script. “I can’t even,” one of the little men kept saying, and it struck Guy as a pointed, comprehensive confession: This man truly couldn’t. Whatever it might be, he simply could not.
In short, Guy did not respect them. They didn’t even seem to know that much about action movies. This script was just a paycheck for them, they said. They were working on novels.
It made Guy wonder: He’d spent his whole life transforming into a finely honed instrument to neutralize the unexpected, to resolve suspense, to stamp out surprise. Even as a small kid, he was a brawler; he’d earned the nickname The Fist in sixth grade.
But maybe there was more to him. What would it feel like to write an adventure story instead of being the hero of one?
“Lots of screenwriters say the hardest part of writing is just putting your butt in the seat,” Channing Tatum later told Guy on a hike. (They’d become friends.) And suddenly, it made intuitive sense to Guy: writing was just a matter of willpower. It was probably a lot like working out.
And so, the next morning, when Greta showed up on his doorstep, tooting one of those insufferable birthday party kazoos, swiping through pictures of this villa on Sifnos on her phone, Guy’s attention went straight to the mahogany desk and expensive office chair in one room, and the window in front of it, overlooking the sea.
That’s the seat I’m going to put my butt in, Guy thought.
“I accept,” he told his sister. “Thank you. When do I leave?”
“Really?” Greta burst out, the birthday horn sagging from her surprised mouth. “I was expecting you to fight me on this.”
“Fighting isn’t all I do,” Guy said.
He’d been on Sifnos five days now. Each morning, he sat and worked on his screenplay. It was about a former special-ops commander with a gambling addiction, hired by a drug cartel to go undercover as a paparazzi photographer in Los Angeles in order to surveil a rival drug cartel—only to be hunted down by terrorists from his past.
This was Guy’s second idea. He’d abandoned his first idea at the beginning of Day 2.
The work was slow-going. Dialogue was hard to write. His mind wandered. He lost track of his characters’ names.
He found some genuine momentum for a few hours with his third idea—only to realize, in a demoralizing flash, that it was essentially The Bourne Ultimatum, but with a girl.
But Guy did not lose his resolve. Writing was proving torturous, but so was torture, and he’d endured that. He decided the mahogany desk was too constrictive and austere an environment—not the right vibe. He started working at the table on the patio instead, among the feral cats.
The problem was, his body wanted to move—to lift, shove, kick, or tear something down, to persist against some physical resistance instead of whatever this was, this repellent energy pushing back at him from the blank document on his screen. His body craved speed.
He watched the feral cats frolic and spar. He watched the clouds. He took up whittling—to keep his hands moving while his eyes stared at his screen. He was whittling that morning when a video call came through.
“We’ve got a situation.” It was Russell Lopez—perspiring, grimacing, rubbing his hands through his hair. “Oscar is dead.”
Guy more or less tuned out as Lopez started, haltingly, to explain.
What if you were just a fist? What if you tried to turn inward, to get beneath your hard exterior, only to discover there was only more of the same solidity? Some people were built like Russian dolls: a multiplicity of selves that revealed themselves layer by layer. Guy Rondack was a uniform block.
“I’ll be there in four hours,” Guy told Lopez.
He closed the laptop while Lopez was still talking, slipped the computer into the bag at his feet, then set about saying goodbye to the cats. He scratched and rubbed a few heads. He clicked his tongue and called for the ones that weren’t around. “Charlize! Norris! Wahlberg!”
Two minutes later—108 seconds, precisely—Guy was speeding away from the villa for good.
He’d abandoned his whittling on the table. He’d gotten quite good. Emerging from that gnarled olivewood burl was a perfect clenched fist.
Millie was alone in the corner of a bar around the corner from headquarters, ordering a fourth glass of wine to settle herself—to chase the image of Oscar’s body out of her head—when Kristen texted, calling her back to ELAINE.
She was shown to a third-floor conference room, where Lopez stood with his back to the door at one end of a long antique wooden table, barking into his Bluetooth headset and running his fingers absent-mindedly through the ornate carvings on the wall. A woman sat at the table, staring in the opposite direction, staring into space.
“Good, good,” Lopez said, ending his call. He turned and motioned for Millie to have a seat. “Kristen says you’re a marine biologist.”
“Toxicologist,” Millie said. She was relieved to hear the words pour from her mouth fluidly—proof to herself that she wasn’t drunk. “I’m doing the water-quality portion of the environmental impact study.”
“That’s fine,” Lopez said, uninterested. “Well first, let me say, I wish you hadn’t seen what you saw before….”
“Thank you.”
“...but you did see it, so unfortunately you’re on the inside of this thing now.”
He slid a laptop to her. There were a dozen open windows: spreadsheets and pie charts; an Economist article about the AquaStop; Lopez’s calendar; and, front and center, an email draft with the subject line “Severe fucking problem.”
“Sorry,” Lopez said. He grabbed it back and closed tabs. “We could only pull one decent image from Carla’s bodycam footage. This is Carla by the way.” He gestured to the silent woman. She was the one who’d chased after Oscar’s dive float in the Zodiac that afternoon, Millie realized—for god knows how long. Carla barely looked up.
Lopez put the laptop back in front of Millie. “So, that’s it,” he said.
A dull, purplish-gray protrusion—rubbery, rough and severely out of focus—filled most of the frame. It was hard initially for Milie to separate its edges from the Venice skyline on the horizon behind it. But shapes slowly differentiated themselves. The composition snapped into place. This thing, whatever it was, was hanging over the edge of the Zodiac, reaching into the boat.
“That’s a shark?” Millie said. Because…wasn’t it a shark that killed Oscar? This had been her assumption. She knew the urban legends about great whites infiltrating Venice weren’t true, but Oscar had been far out in the lagoon, near the edge of the Adriatic. It wasn’t crazy to imagine a shark there. And what else could have torn that hole through his midsection?
“It’s not a shark!” Carla suddenly shrieked. She was furious, or maybe still in shock.
“It’s okay,” Lopez told Carla. “We know it’s not a shark.” He turned to Millie: “Carla is insistent that it’s not a shark. Carla has seen sharks before.”
“It’s not a shark,” Carla said again.
“So,” Lopez continued, “if I were to put it in science terms for you, I’d say: shark is not a valid hypothesis.” He suggested to Carla that she go home for the day. She apologized for losing her cool and left.
“That’s the one thing the poor woman kept saying,” Lopez now told Millie. “‘It’s not a shark.’ But everything happened too fast to get a visual. She said it moved like light: almost like it was flicking on in one place, then reappearing somewhere else. It was that fast. But her descriptions are all contradictions and non-sequiturs. She said it was like a sea lion, but an octopus, too. She compared it to a lamprey. Do you know what a lamprey is? Is that Italian?”
Millie started answering but Lopez kept going.
“Look, I feel terrible for this woman, but she’s useless,” he said. “She said it had a head like a wolf. And tentacles. That’s one of the tentacles in this picture, I guess.”
He stared at Millie intently, smacking his nicotine gum. He was done speaking, it seemed. Was she still supposed to explain lampreys?
“So…?” Lopez said.
“Yeah,” Millie said. “That’s awful. I hope Carla’s going to be ok.”
“Yes,” Lopez said—he’d forgotten to express sympathy for the woman. “So what are you thinking?”
“What do you mean?”
“The creature!” His frustration was plain. “I called you up here to identify it.”
Millie almost laughed. For the first time, she really looked at Lopez—looked him up and down. He seemed to her untouchable, a particular apex species of global capitalism that she’d never before encountered at such close range. He reads those business books at airport bookstores, she thought to herself. And now this imminently respectable member of the elite was telling Millie… what? That his Director of Corporate Security and Risk Management was attacked by a sea monster?
“I work with microorganisms,” Millie told him.
“Take a guess. Between us. Because, based on where Carla last saw it heading, this thing’s probably somewhere in the canals right now.”
Millie caught up to what was happening: Lopez didn’t want to call in an actual expert from the outside. He planned to keep this under wraps. There was apparently truth to the conspiratorial feeling around Venice that ELAINE did whatever it wanted, that it ran the city as much as the government did, that there was an unspoken agreement between the company and the Italians that many issues would be resolved more satisfactorily and efficiently if ELAINE went ahead and handled them themselves.
Millie stared at the image again, scrabbling for any information. Slowly, the wide shape lurching into the Zodiac revealed itself to be several shapes, actually: three thick cylinders, curled in parallel, like strands of spaghetti rolled around a fork.
“Well, you said ‘tentacle’ before. But even that seems up for debate,” Millie said. “If you look closely, it’s three separate things. Those could actually be cerata. Cerata are like tentacles, but they function differently. They’re arms, but also part of an organism’s respiratory and digestive systems. Nudibranchs, for example, have cerata up and down their backs, and some species of nudibranchs—if they eat a poisonous prey animal, like a sea anemone—can filter the toxins from the prey’s body into the tips of their cerata and sequester it there safely. And—this is truly awesome—they can even shoot that same poison back at another organism later, if they’re attacked.”
“So this thing that got Oscar is a nudibranch?” Lopez said.
“It’s not a nudibranch.”
“What the fuck is a nudibranch anyway?”
“It’s a type of sea slug. But this definitely isn’t a nudibranch. My only point is, those might be cerata, like a nudibranch’s cerata. And that could be one clue as to what these animals are. But my real point is how little we can know from this one, terrible picture.” Millie was silent for a moment. Then she added, “It has to be a shark, right?”
“It’s not a shark,” Lopez snapped. He was losing patience. “I think nudibranch is our best option right now. We’re going with nudibranch.”
“It’s absolutely not a nudibranch.”
“For now, it is.”
“Well nudibranchs are three inches long, so…”
“All of them?” Lopez shot back. “Are you sure?”
What was Millie sure of anymore? As a scientist, she knew, you hacked away to establish certain facts and planted your feet atop them for a while. But beyond those little beachheads of truth, the unknown still extended in all directions. And you couldn’t possibly know the shape it takes or its ultimate size—whether that solid ground you’re standing on was a continent or a pebble.
The scale of what you don’t know is one of the things you never know.
“My real answer? I have no idea what that is,” Millie finally told Lopez. “Science helps us understand what is. What’s possible is a different question.”
Just then, the door to the conference room swung open and a tall, muscular man in a bomber jacket took one confident step inside, set down a duffle bag and shook Lopez’s hand.
“Hell yes, that was fast,” Lopez said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “This is Guy Rondack,” he told Millie—but not remembering Millie’s name, he could not complete the introduction.
“We were just looking at this photo of the….” Lopez still didn’t know what to call the creature.
Millie watched Guy Rondack’s mouth curl into a smile.
“The thing I’m here to shoot in the head,” he said.
…in CHAPTER 6!
He scrambled to restart the boat. Behind him, a plume of something putrid splattered out of the canal.
His propeller had sliced through part of the creature, spraying bloody globules of flesh into the air. And now his motor stalled, jammed up by the rest of the animal, which shook the boat again, undeterred.
Guy was stuck.
He reached for the firearm holstered to his leg.
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