As the sun slowly rose above the buildings at his back, the streets ahead of him became narrower, for lines of little houses and shops had been built down the middle of the old wide streets, and in some cases even the resulting ways had been split by rows of food and drink and fortune-telling and peepshow tents, so that no wagon nor even a very fat person could maneuver through. Some of the food tents and liquor vendors were doing business, but most of Venice had only gone to bed a couple of hours ago.
Closer to the sea the ways became uneven as alleys zigzagged sharply to circumnavigate collapsed buildings, or rose and fell where makeshift bridges had been flung up over gaps in the undercut pavement, and it became hard to keep moving west—it was as though the city itself were trying to prevent him from getting to the waterfront. At last, though, nearer to noon than dawn, Rivas edged his way cautiously out along a tilted, swaying fire escape and, crouching to look under the remains of some ancient gable that had broken free of its original mooring and was now jammed precariously between two roof edges, he saw the surging, wrinkled darkness of the sea. He shuffled along his perch, trying to keep the sea in sight, and climbed through an arched doorway that was in the slow process of becoming a window as the masonry settled away below it.
On the other side he got to his feet and looked around– and realized that he'd stumbled onto what appeared to be a long established scavenger's roost. He was on a gently slanting rooftop with a fancy wrought iron railing along the seaward edge but not even a length of twine to stop a person from walking off the north or south edges; a number of the men on the roof had turned toward the arch as he'd clambered through it, and were now looking at him with a variety of expressions: alarm, anger, speculation and boredom. One man near Rivas seemed to be about to launch a kite that had a spread fish-net for a tail, most of the ones by the railing held fishing poles or binoculars, several were just sleeping in the sun, and one white-haired old fellow scampered to the north edge of the roof, crouched and then disappeared below the edge—presumably down a ladder– when Rivas entered.
«What do you want, hombre ?» asked one lean old man whose yellowish beard, as Rivas saw when the man stood up and drew a knife, hung all the way to his belt.
Rivas grinned. «Just want to look at the ocean—and maybe find somebody to help me drink this.» He pulled the bottle of tequila out of his pouch.
The tension relaxed a little. The old man put his knife away, stepped forward and grudgingly took the bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and, holding the cork like a fat cigar, he sniffed the clear liquor. Evidently satisfied, he spat the cork over the rail and said, «Okay. But if you're in Blood—»
«Or birdy girls,» added a young man with fine blond hair curling like golden smoke around his head.
«—Then you'll find you've made a mistake coming here,» the old man finished.
«Not me,» Rivas assured everyone. «I'm just a . . . a birdwatcher.»
«What?» exclaimed the man with the kite.
«He's kidding, Jeremiah,» said the yellow-bearded man. He tilted the bottle to his mouth, and bubbles gurgled up in it. «Well,» he said when he'd lowered it again, «your credentials are in order, sir.» He handed the bottle to someone else.
Rivas walked down the slope of the roof to the rail, but its moorings were so corroded-looking that he didn't lean on it. Glancing left, right, and down, he saw why these men had chosen this place for their eyrie; there was deep water a hundred feet below for fishing, and since they were above most of the surrounding structures the rooftop commanded a wide view of the sea. Holding the rail carefully and glancing to his right, Rivas felt his already fluttery stomach become even colder, for he realized that the white building way off there, looking like a cutaway section of a nautilus shell with long-stemmed mushrooms growing all over it, was Deviant's Palace. He looked away quickly, not wanting to let these men guess that his business had to do with that place.
Gradually all the rooftop businessmen resumed their activities, and as the bottle made the rounds the glances turned on Rivas became less suspicious. The man with the net-bearing kite got the thing up into the air and then began skipping back and forth across the rooftop and whistling peculiarly. Another man was watching the course of one particular rowboat and making notes in a little book, and one of the men with binoculars had found something in a nearby window that absorbed him totally. The blond young man kept looking around worriedly, as though he was supposed to have met someone here a while ago. Rivas just watched the ocean.
He saw any number of boats—a trio of broad ones with tall structures on their decks, a refitted ferryboat apparently operating as a seagoing bar and grill, and many fishing boats clustered around the dark blue patch of ocean where lay the submarine pit known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, dropping nets on long lines to haul up the mutant phosphorescent fish that were so highly prized in some circles—but none of them was obviously the sort he was watching for, and it occurred to him that he'd never gotten any kind of good look at the vessel that had brought him up from Irvine. At least a couple of these boats he'd seen today could have been the same one, or a duplicate.
The anxious young man with the curly hair peered through the arch where Rivas had entered, then went to the north edge of the roof and looked down. At last he turned back to the company and asked, «Did any of you hear the old man I was with say where he was going?»
«No, kid,» said the yellow-bearded man drunkenly. «Fact I din hear 'm say anything atall.»
Far off to his left, just on the horizon, Rivas could see some ponderous vessel approaching. The sun had just begun to fall away from the meridian, and he had to squint against the flickering needles of reflected sunlight.
It was some kind of barge, with strange cowls and fins all over it. There were masts and rigged sails, but Rivas felt certain that it was the boat he'd been watching for. Now all he had to do was note where it docked.
The boy leaned out over the north edge. «Hey?» he yelled. Rivas was just about to ask one of the men if he could borrow his binoculars when the boy added, «Lollypop?»
Chapter 9
Rivas forced himself to do nothing more than look over at the boy, who was still peering around worriedly. He tried to remember what the old man who had left when he'd arrived had looked like. Jeez, he thought. Not too tall, white hair—could have been the same guy. And he didn't let me see his face, though he must have seen mine. And the kid here warned me that I'd better not be after birdy girls.
I'd better assume it's the same guy—and leave here fast, now.
As he backed away from the railing, trying to seem casual, he caught another glimpse of the barge out on the sea, and he thought he saw a row of dangling ropes along its side.
And then something tore across the top of his head so hard that he was flung forward across the railing, which broke loose at one end and swung out away from the rooftop like an outward-opening door, and then bent downward as the hinge end buckled.
With his legs more than his hands Rivas clung, sideways and nearly upside down, to what had been the railing and was now an ill-moored ladder swinging over an abyss. He'd heard the screams as at least two of the other men had tumbled away toward the sea so far below, and a couple of yards above him he could see one other man clinging to the penduluming railing; and beyond the kicking legs of that man he could see the rage-contorted face of old Lollypop himself, who was jigging wrathfully along the edge of the roof, trying to get off a second shot at Rivas with a slingshot he'd no doubt bought in memory of dear dead Nigel.