GONDOS—Chapter 9!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos,” serialized every Wednesday and Thursday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
A flashback chronicled Millie’s childhood, as she and Guy traveled to the Everglades to test-drive and retrieve her grandfather’s old inventions: high-tech, gondola-like watercraft Millie grew up riding. Guy—deeming them perfect for doing battle with the creatures in Venice—promptly rechristened them “gondos.”
Plus, Benny Baldwin arrived from Philadelphia to join the team…
Alessia Barbarigo strode through Venice’s luxury shopping district in a form-fitting burgundy pantsuit and Balenciaga coat, savoring a cup of lemon sorbetto in defiance of the cold.
After a long day in her government office, Barbarigo was happy to be swept along by the evening passeggiata: the couples, families and friend-groups strolling up and down the thoroughfare to window-shop and banter. She blazed confidently among them, turning a few heads when she passed.
Barbarigo was the Magistrate of the Waters, an administrative position first established by the Venetian Republic in the 14th Century. The Magistrate was responsible for the health of the lagoon, making sure—through vigilant ecological management and periodic, grand-scale engineering projects like building berms and digging new canals—that the lagoon wasn’t gradually absorbed into the ocean or silt up into a mosquito-clogged, malaria-ridden swamp. It was the Magistrate’s job, in short, to negotiate a kind of détente with nature on behalf of the Venetian people.
For centuries, the Magistrate of the Waters was one of the most prestigious posts in the Republic’s government. But over time, the job was folded into a modernizing bureaucracy, becoming just another public servant, overworked and underpaid. One year earlier, during the final phases of the AquaStop’s construction, the presiding Magistrate had been indicted by Italian authorities in a wide-ranging corruption crackdown. Barbarigo was appointed as his successor to earn back the public trust.
She was a canny choice. Barbarigo was a proud Venetian and the daughter of a gondolier—and a distant descendent, in fact, of the Doge who’d gifted the city its first gondolas nearly a thousand years ago. She held both a law degree and a master’s in political science, having returned to university in her late thirties.
More importantly, she was beloved. At age 19, Barbarigo had catapulted to fame as an Italian popstar whose sultry, mischievous image adorned countless bedroom walls and mechanic’s garages around the country. Her breakout hit, in 1989, was a cover of David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes.” The verses were rewritten in Italian into a cheeky anthem of young female lust, while the choruses were sung in Barbarigo’s heavily accented English. The music video showed her teasing and caressing members of Venice’s football squad as she danced through their locker room in a referee’s shirt tied into a croptop.
She was, in late middle-age, even more alluring; time and life had endowed her with irresistible poise. Her appointment as Magistrate of the Waters instantly helped get the seawall project back on track. She was a glamorous technocrat. She drew people to her and excelled at her job.
“Pronto,” she now said, answering her phone as she strolled.
A friend had set her up on a date for later that evening but was calling to report that the man had bowed out. He was just like all the other ones, the friend told Barbarigo apologetically—too intimidated to date an accomplished woman like her. Pathetic. This one hadn’t even had the courage to call her himself.
“I understand,” Barbarigo said. She betrayed no woundedness or vulnerability whatsoever. But she got off phone quickly, before she might.
She looked around. She had crossed into the Castello district by now, halfway to the restaurant where she and the man had arranged to meet. She happened to be around the corner from ELAINE’s headquarters, she realized. With the circumstances of the Rialto collapse still nagging at her, she decided to stop in unannounced.
This was her unquestioned right as Magistrate of the Waters. And besides, it always cheered her up to spar with that blowhard American, Lopez—like a cat batting at a ball of twine.
Barbarigo tossed the remaining half of her sorbetto into a rubbish bin, turned on her Christian Louboutin heel and made a beeline for the company’s front door.
Barbarigo was no fool. She knew the Rialto story was a smokescreen. And she knew that Lopez knew that she knew it, too.
An explosion of cooking oil? That bologna’s pretty fatty, as Barbarigo’s mother used to say.
She was confident she’d learn the whole truth eventually but, frankly, did not feel great pressure to scramble around busting heads to produce it right now, so long as Lopez could assure her in so many words that he had the situation under control: that there had been nothing like a bomb or a terrorist plot; nothing that would ultimately get Barbarigo flayed by the press, deposed in a court proceeding, mocked, fired or otherwise disgraced. And Lopez had been just convincing enough when she’d hauled him into her office the other morning—lying through his gritted, freakishly white American teeth.
The destruction of the Rialto had devastated Barbarigo, naturally. She had countless happy memories of her father rowing them under it as a child in his gondola, and she’d wept that first morning when she saw the ruin for herself. But her job demanded she be a realist and a tactician, not a whimpering nostalgic—that she stay focused on the big picture of what she and ELAINE were attempting to build in Venice and the existential threat it was meant counteract. She thought of herself like Atlas, holding the city aloft on her shoulders as the floodwaters rose.
That said, of course she couldn’t put the mystery of the bridge collapse out of her mind. And more importantly, she couldn’t afford any more catastrophic surprises. You could tickle Atlas a little—annoy him, make him flinch. But if something came along that shoved him off balance, everything crashed down.
“Once again, your favorite government official comes to visit!” Barbarigo sang, striding into Lopez’s office. He looked exhausted and unkempt, eating some abhorrent American-style approximation of dinner at his cluttered desk and watching NFL highlights on his laptop.
“Magistrate! Alessia, bonasera,” he said.
“BUO-nasera,” she said, correcting his pronunciation. (This was an ongoing problem.)
“What brings you in?”
“Just passing by on my way to a dinner date,” she lied.
They made a meager effort at chitchat, then Barbarigo improvised a way to pivot to the Rialto. An idea had come to her, she told him: auctioning off fragments of the broken marble to raise money for local charities. But could that be misconstrued as crass or irreverent? What did Lopez think?
“It sounds nice to me,” he said. He glanced back at his football.
Barbarigo waited a beat. But he wasn’t biting. She told him, “I love our chats. They are.…” She struggled to find the English phrase. “It’s like, here are our words, on the surface of the water.” She lifted a palm, flat at the level of her eyes. “But here’s where we play, under the surface.” She placed her other hand far beneath the first, at the level of her waist. “We communicate in the depths.”
“Correct,” Lopez said.
“But come to the surface with me for a moment. Closing weekend of the Biennale begins tomorrow.” The international art fair was one of the crown jewels of the city’s annual social calendar, alongside Carnivale and the Venice Film Festival. “Events are already happening. People are already here.”
“I’m pretty sure I saw the guy from R.E.M. on the street this afternoon!” Lopez interrupted. “It was cool! Did you ever meet him, back when you were—”
Barbarigo glared at him—a look of labored expressionlessness. “You are an intelligent man, and you understand what I’m asking,” she said.
“I do.”
“Life is chaos. Shit happens.”
“It definitely does,” Lopez said.
“But sometimes very big shit is happening, and it can not be stopped. This would be a bad time to confront one of those unstoppable shits. If there was a shit happening that you could not handle, Russell, you would need to speak up so that someone else could.”
Lopez brushed crumbs off his hands and fished out a piece of nicotine gum. He was in over his head. But he might have one last opportunity to keep the Magistrate from knowing it—if he played this correctly. If he doubled-down. If he blitzed.
“Okay, it’s possible we had a problem,” he said. “It’s possible. But we’ve brought in specialists who are already solving it. Here . . . ”
He showed her his laptop, muting the football and clicking to another tab. It was a black-and-white video feed from what looked like a garage, at an ELAINE R&D facility on the mainland, nearby. A man in a Phillies jersey and a welding mask was working on some large and unidentifiable piece of equipment, showering sparks everywhere—a fountain of flame.
“What am I looking at?” the Magistrate asked.
Lopez smiled. He wasn’t going to explain it. “Let’s just say, this is how we’re holding in the shit.”
He watched the Magistrate watch the screen with intensity and fascination. What he was showing her was so cryptic as to be meaningless—but, he was getting the impression, it was just enough to give her permission to feel reassured. Lopez allowed himself a small, self-satisfied smile and closed the deal: “Go enjoy your dinner date, Alessia. Bonasera.”
The Magistrate did not correct his pronunciation this time. She seemed speechless, thrown.
“Very well,” she finally muttered, pulling her coat closed to leave. “If you feel you have your arms around the situation...”
As soon as she was gone, Lopez did a little fist pump under his desk and exhaled in relief.
But this was hubris. What Lopez hadn’t noticed was that, at some point, the Magistrate’s gaze had drifted infinitesimally from the video, and she’d been stunned into silence by the sight of something else on his desk—a portion of the charcoal drawing Guy Rondack’s artist had done, poking out under a stack of other papers:
Half a body and many arms.
Barbarigo was already dialing when she exited the building downstairs. “They’ve returned,” she said into her phone.
“Are you sure?”
“No, not completely. But I’d like to be sure, Dino, and you are my first guardians and sentinels. I need your best person making yarn tonight.”
“We serve at your pleasure, Comandante,” the gondolier captain said.
Benny Baldwin had entered a flow state. As he modified and armed the gondos, he did not speak or look up from his work at all. The sound of his welding torch reverberated off the concrete walls of the warehouse, gushing like a waterfall.
A few dozen enormous bags of flour were stacked in one corner of the space like a barricade. While Benny worked, Millie climbed atop them and tried to catch some sleep.
Guy, meanwhile, was intermittently busy, lugging in and organized the armored plates, firearms and engine parts that kept arriving on astonishing short-order from ELAINE. It all made Benny giddy; he was not accustomed to having such resources at his disposal. It was like Guy had brought his broke, college-student brother to a fancy restaurant and told him to order whatever he liked.
Guy Rondack, meanwhile, wasn’t accustomed to being anyone’s assistant. And he definitely wasn’t accustomed to waiting around. As Millie lay there, she watched Guy brood and pace, do pushups, then pullups on a piece of rebar jutting out of the wall. He meditated. He did more pushups. He meditated again.
“This is hard for you, huh?” Millie finally said.
He hadn’t realized she was still awake. “I keep thinking…” he said. “In an action movie, this would be the part they’d do as a montage. We’d haul the gondos in here, and a song would start playing while Benny worked. And when the song was over, the gondos would be ready to go.”
“Totally,” Millie said. “It would be a psych-up song. Eighties metal. But instead . . . . ”
“Instead, we’re forced to live through it in real-time.” Guy sounded wistful. Even sad. It was the most emotionally vulnerable Millie had ever seen him. He looked down glumly and added: “No montage.”
After another couple of hours Benny announced, “Done,” and threw his helmet down with a flourish.
The three gondos were propped up on truck tires in a line at the center of the room. He’d run armored plates of carbotitanium along the sides and mounted two large, semi-automatic weapons on either side of the throttle, just in front of where the pilot would stand.
“I ran the trigger through that same rod for the throttle,” he explained. “So you can fire with the hand you’re shifting with. And you rotate this top part to aim.”
Guy stepped up on one of the gondos. He clutched the long, metal throttle at chest height in front of him with his right hand. He grabbed the rudder rod behind him with his left. He mimed shifting and steering, leaning his body forward and back, side to side, getting a feel for the machine. Then he ducked down quickly, as though in a fire fight, and fluttered his right index finger over the trigger.
Benny made a sound: Pew pew pew.
Guy flashed him a look.
“What?” Benny said.
“Pew pew pew? That would be lasers.” Guy said.
“Why are you busting my balls, Rondack?” Benny said.
But Guy continued to stare at him, waiting.
“Rat-a-tat-tat,” Benny finally said, slowly, rolling his eyes: You happy now?
Guy nodded.
“I’m not going to lie,” Benny explained. “The old man is some kind of wizard, the way he engineered these things.” He banged on the neck of the gondo with his fist—the long, flexible chain of couplings that extended ahead of the pilot. “He engineered a graceful machine. All I did was toughen them up.”
“It’s weird to see guns on them,” Millie said. She hadn’t anticipated how uneasy it would make her. Even if Cooper had initially built them as war machines, those vehicles were the centerpiece of her only carefree childhood memories.
They had put in a call for more coffee—their fourth in six hours. This time, the small Italian woman ELAINE kept sending arrived pushing a cart with a Nespresso machine and stacks of tiny white demitasse cups so they could make it themselves. She was plugging in the machine when Benny walked over to take a look. “Aw, you’re killing me with this teensy tea-party shit,” he whined. “I want, like, a twenty-four ounce from Dunkin’. Three creams, six sugars. A Styrofoam cup the size of my arm.”
The woman smiled placidly. She did not understand a word.
Benny fingered the little cups disappointedly, then reached for his backpack on the floor and took out half of a Jersey Mike’s sub. He’d bought the sandwich in Florida more than twenty-four hours earlier. Grease had bled through the paper it was wrapped in. The kaiser roll was wet and spongy. It smelled like dog food, plus a potent blast of cheese.
“Meatball sub,” he said to the Italian woman, taking a big bite. The woman recoiled, as though he were eating a rat. “What?” Benny said. “It’s Italian!”
The woman laughed and shivered and waved her hand in front of her nose. “Fa schifo! “Tutti i cibbi americani—sono proprio per voi, i schifosi.” she said.
Millie jolted up. “Wait, what did you say?”
“Schifosi,” she said again and pointed at the three of them. Then she put her finger near her mouth and made a retching sound.
“Schifosi?” Millie said.
The woman kept pulling the same comically disgusted face and retching, acting it out. She reached deep for an English word to clarify. Any English word. “Yuck!” she finally said.
Millie’s eyes went wide. “Thank you,” she told the woman, ushering her out. “The coffee is perfetto. I’m sorry about my friend. Very tired. Molto stanco. No sleep. Grazie.”
The woman nodded empathetically as Millie all but pushed her out the door. Before leaving, she patted Millie on the shoulder in a grandmotherly way that said You work too hard—even though she had no clue what these ridiculous Americans were working on.
“I think that’s what these animals are!” Millie told Guy and Benny once the woman was gone. Millie relayed the legend that the gondolier had told her a few days earlier: the horrible monsters that migrate into the canals. “Lots of myths are just primitive attempts at natural history—proto-scientific ways to explain the natural world. Like how anthropologists theorize that dragons were Chinese culture’s way of making sense of the dinosaur bones they kept finding.”
Benny mimed his head exploding.
“These creatures in the lagoon are probably be the real-life version of that Ventian legend—mutating rapidly along with the mutated algae,” Millie went on. “The disgusting ones. Schifosi.”
“Skeefoski.” Guy said.
“Skee-FO-si,” Millie corrected.
Guy looked irritated. “I don’t have to pronounce it right to kill it.”
He picked up a can of Benny’s spray paint and crossed the room to the stacks of flour. He painted a wide, solid black circle on the side: a giant eye.
Suddenly, the long barricade of flour sacks transformed into one of the animals: its long, fat flank breaching out of the floor, as though the cracked concrete were the surface of a canal.
Guy shook the can. He started spraying again.
When he was done, the word “SKEEF” was scrawled across it. Millie watched him stand back to look at it, then kick it hard.
“See if this fits,” Benny told her, dumping a reflective, silver flight suit in her arms.
Millie stared at the thing, stunned.
“So we can see each other better in the dark,” Benny explained.
“I’m not going with you,” she said.
Benny laughed. “My ass you aren’t.”
“You two are…” Millie faltered. “What do I even call you? Mercenaries? I’m a marine toxicologist.”
“There’s a problem out there,” Guy told her. “You can help solve it.”
“But that’s just it,” Millie said. “I don’t solve problems. I document problems. I collect data. That’s all.”
“Well, this is your chance to step up,” Guy said. “Find some courage.”
“Courage?” Millie scolded him. “This planet is disintegrating—and it’s all intertwined. You try to fix part of it and you set off chains of other, unpredictable causes and effects. Eventually, if you’re smart, you realize that the best thing you can do—the most courageous thing—is nothing: stop feeding energy into that system, stop adding to the disorder. You guys are warriors. You’re built differently. And maybe we need warriors, too. But I’m a scientist. I’m tired of fighting.”
The room was silent. Millie realized she’d risen onto her tip-toes as she spoke, slightly puffed up with rectitude.
Then Guy said: “You’re tired of fighting? And fighting for you, Millie, is... what? Filling a vial with water? Writing a report? I believe that you’re tired, Millie, but what you’ve been doing isn’t fighting,” Guy said. “This is fighting.”
He leapt onto the gondo again and clamped his finger over the trigger.
There was a deafening riot of gunfire and a spasm of bright, fiery light.
The sacks of flour across the room—the “skeef” Guy had painted on—pulsed and shivered under the hail of bullets.
Millie plugged her ears and turned away. Benny grinned. The weapon could fire 750 rounds a minute, and Guy kept at it for a long, long while to make his point.
A white plume of flour burst into the air and kept expanding. Rivers of flour poured onto the floor.
Finally, when it was over, Guy stepped off the gondo and, brushing past Millie, said, “You’re a better pilot than both of us—and we’ve got three of these vehicles. I expect you’ll be on one when we leave in an hour.”
Then, to Benny: “And find a way to put some silencers on those. We’re trying to be discreet.”
They coasted away from the warehouse on their gondos just after midnight, crossing the open water toward Venice in a slack formation with Guy at the head.
Millie had agreed to go. But not because of Guy. She told herself she wanted to see this creature with her own eyes. She told herself she was not there to fight or kill anything; she was only there to study it, after it was dead.
They entered the slumbering city near the train station, as tourists do, then banked left, northward, into a maze of narrow, intersecting canals. The only sound was the sloshing of their wakes against the marble foundations alongside the canals. Little pedestrian bridges materialized out of the dark in front of them. They had to hunch their bodies as their gondos streamed underneath.
The three of them had barely spoken over their radios as they traveled, and now Millie and Benny both looked to Guy, not knowing how, exactly, they were supposed to proceed.
“Are they...?” Benny said. “How do we know if they’re here?”
Guy had a plan, of course. As the canals split into jagged forks, he began dispatching the three of them in different directions, splitting them up to patrol those progressively narrower passages and smoke the creatures out. “Keep looping back to stay in visual contact,” he said.
From time to time, without warning, the gondos would get spit out of those arterial canals and reconvene. Their sudden reappearances surprised each other. Benny started calling these twisting alleyways “warp zones.” “I’ll take this warp zone over here,” he’d say, and peel off.
“Keep the chatter down,” Guy scolded.
He sent Millie on a hard right, under a bridge and into a sliver of water with high stucco walls on either side. Eventually, she came upon a strange, neoclassical house with tall white pillars, jutting into the canal at a conspicuous angle, oriented differently from every other building. Millie drifted to a stop to read a small plaque near the doorway: Qui furono le case di Marco Polo. Marco Polo’s house, she guessed.
Just then, something shattered her attention. She whipped her head around.
What was it? Not a sound. A feeling—an eerie awareness, an ethereal alarm.
A sharp commotion suddenly kicked up in the canal ahead of her gondo.
Millie dropped to her knees just as a small flock of quacking ducks, spooked out of the water, scuttled out of the darkness in front of her. They flapped frantically through the corridor of the canal, passing just a few inches over her head. Then they rose over the rooftops and disappeared.
Looking up, Millie saw other flocks of birds, lifting out of the city everywhere and flying off.
She got back onto her feet and was about to put her gondo into gear when she heard a faint rumbling—a rush of water, far away.
“Are you guys hearing that?” she radioed.
The noise barreled forward, getting louder—thrumming like a train.
“They’re here,” Rondack said.
…in Chapter 10!
“Stand back,” a Brazilian fitness influencer shouted, approaching the hole in the floor. “It’s clogged.”
Everyone seemed relieved that someone was taking command.
The man took off his blazer, unbuttoned one sleeve of his shirt and performatively rolled it up to reveal his craggy forearm. He laid flat on his stomach next to the hole. Then, pressing one cheek against the floor, he reached as far down as he could into the water, wriggling his arm to feel for any blockage. Then, he let out a ghastly yowl and shot to his feet.
His arm was gone—severed just below the shoulder.
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