“Singapore?”
“Yes. And Italy can serve as our Malaysia.”
The same words, uttered in a Venetian coffeehouse, might have seemed a little ridiculous. But on this train rattling across the darkling plains of Central Texas, all things seemed possible.
“Why isn’t she wearing a wedding ring?” Saskia asked, when she had a moment together with Willem, Amelia, and Fenna. They were in Saskia’s private chamber at the back of the Money Car. Fenna was putting on Face Three, more suitable for evening. So Saskia wasn’t free to look around—she had her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling so that Fenna could get at the lower lids—but even so she could sense Willem and Amelia exchanging a look.
“It’s a perfectly normal question,” Saskia insisted. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Fenna snickered, and she knew she had protested a little too much.
“She is so fuckable. Definitely a top though,” Fenna observed. Saskia couldn’t roll her eyes without incurring Fenna’s wrath, but she did heave a sigh. But then Fenna’s phone buzzed and she actually stepped away to check it. Saskia was on her way to being shocked by this unprofessional behavior when she got a look at Fenna’s face and saw the love light in her eyes. Jules was sending her selfies.
“It’s thought that Cornelia’s husband is now out of the picture,” Amelia said, watching Fenna in a bemused way.
“What does that mean?” Saskia asked.
“Early onset dementia. Possibly other issues as well.”
“Where is he?”
“Family palazzo on an island in the Adriatic.”
“Because of course they would have one of those,” Saskia said.
“One of those islands that was part of the Venetian Empire back in the day,” Willem added.
“He hasn’t been seen in public in two years,” Amelia said, “and even then he was showing visible symptoms.”
“I get the picture,” Saskia said. “To repeat Willem’s question: How many people like them are there?”
“Not many,” Amelia said. “Look, our initial background check was focused on Michiel. And he does come from an old Venetian family. They were named to the nobility in 1019.”
“Jesus, that is old!”
“No it isn’t.”
“It just gets better,” Willem said.
“We’re learning more now about Cornelia’s family.”
“The one she married into?”
“No, those were Greeks who came to Venice after the Fall of Constantinople.”
“Recent arrivals then!” Saskia cracked.
Amelia continued, “Yeah. Cornelia can trace her personal ancestry back to one of the founding families of Venice.”
“What does that even mean?”
Willem said, “Literally one of the Roman families who rowed boats out into the Lagoon to get away from Attila the Hun.”
“And they were old then,” Amelia said. “They knew Julius Caesar.”
Saskia could only shake her head and laugh silently.
She finally managed to catch Fenna’s eye. “Am I to go to dinner with only one eye done?”
By way of an answer, Fenna shyly turned her phone around. It was a photo of Jules in a wet suit. Enough said! Even the usually stoic Amelia gasped. He was in sunlight, in a RHIB. He’d just got out of the brown waters of the lower Brazos and was triumphantly holding up a waterlogged document in a picture frame. Mounted in its center was a large silver coin.
“It would be inappropriate for me to make any comment” was all Willem could say. He was talking about Jules, of course. Not the artifact he was holding up.
“His cousins all refer to him as the Family Jules,” Fenna said. “It’s a joke, you see, based on a slang expression—”
“That will do,” Saskia said. “Where were we?”
“Cornelia’s weird old family,” Willem said, reluctantly averting his gaze. “To answer your question: there aren’t many like her. But that’s not the real question. You want to know about this phenomenon of well-heeled covert Venetian nationalists whipped up into a frenzy over sea level rise. It appears that there are just a few.”
“But they are rich as fuck,” Amelia said, “and they have their backs to the wall. I’ll try to learn more.”
The reason for Face Three was yet another in a series of planned social events, this one bringing together a dozen people around a dining table that had been set up in the middle of the Beer Car. Dress was more formal; T.R. wore cowboy boots that were black and shiny. Veronica was well turned out, though slightly off her game as she didn’t know how to impedance-match with the likes of Cornelia. Easier to be comfortable with was Daia Chand, the wife of the lord mayor. While high-wattage in her own right (Oxford Ph.D., noted television presenter), she didn’t mind slipping into the role of “plus one of prominent bigwig.”
Saskia wasn’t sure who her plus one ought to be. She wanted to give Willem a break; he had earned it, and he needed to be fresh tomorrow. She was tempted to ask Rufus, but she suspected he’d be miserably uncomfortable in that company. In the end she asked Alastair. As it turned out, Mark Furlong had been added to the roster to fill out the table (since the Venetians numbered three) and so he and Alastair could mind-meld about risk analysis if they wanted and leave the rest of the guests to talk about normal-people things.
> Possible third target identified.
> Who is he?
> She
Saskia texted with Lotte as she was making her way up the aisle of the Tree Car. Response was nigh instantaneous, with a demand for a picture.
> My darling, there is absolutely no way that you are getting a picture.
> Aww!
> I hope you sleep well. Going into a fancy dinner.
> I hope you don’t sleep AT ALL
Lotte shot back, followed by a train of emojis that started with a wink and escalated from there. Saskia was so rattled by some of what she saw that she found herself suddenly in the middle of the party in the Beer Car, where Sylvester, uncharacteristically, was regaling (there was no other word for it) Bob, Daia, Cornelia, and T.R. with some kind of narration about sand pirates.
“It’s simple maths,” he insisted to a skeptical-looking lord mayor. “Just to maintain the land area we already have, we need to dump a certain amount of sand into the water to keep up with sea level rise. To create even more reclaimed land, as our friends in the Netherlands do”—this a way of welcoming Saskia into the conversation—“we must deposit more sand yet. We don’t have our own sand mines, so we must buy it. There’s a market for it, like any other commodity. But we found that when the price went up—because of our purchasing activities—sand piracy skyrocketed.”
“How does one pirate sand?” Daia asked, as if she’d always wanted to know this. “I’ve heard of more conventional ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’ piracy but—?”
“You pull up alongside some island with a barge and just go to work with hoses. It’s like a big watery vacuum cleaner. The barge fills up and the island gets smaller.”
“And these islands are where?”
“That, of course, is the problem, Dr. Chand. If the plan is to sell the sand to Singapore, why then the profits are higher the closer the island is to that market. So it started in nearby coastal areas of Malaysia and Indonesia and spread to Vietnam and the Philippines.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Daia Chand, “but am I to gather that there are people living on these islands that are being vacuumed up and barged to Singapore!?” Her face was showing the correct balance of amusement and moral outrage.
Dr. Eshma spoke up. She was Sylvester’s plus one. Until now, Saskia had seen very little of her. “That would be very bold. People got wise to this quite early and drove the pirates off.”
“And bully for them!”
“The pirates are a little cleverer than that,” Sylvester said. “They go to uninhabited islands, take a little here, a little there. However, even this has bad consequences for fisheries that the local people depend on. So for a while it was quite a bad state of affairs, to be quite honest. But Singapore heard the complaints from these neighboring countries and instituted new purchasing schemes to confound the sand pirates.”