Transition

14

I think I have to leave. I cannot stay here. Or maybe I can. I’m not sure.

It is comfortable here. All is not perfect; I still worry that somebody might try to violate me again, and there remains the disturbing incident with the broad-shouldered lady doctor and her dolls, when things seemed to slip aside from reality and it felt like I could only escape through fainting, but, even so, my existence here is relatively calm and unthreatened. Maybe I should stay.

I am trying to spend less time asleep or snoozing or just with my eyes closed. I am trying to discover more about where I am: about this society and the clinic and about myself. This has met with mixed results so far. However, I feel it is necessary no matter whether I stay here or leave. If I stay I need to know where it is that I am staying, so that I am prepared for what may happen. (Suppose I am only here for as long as some sickness fund or medical insurance settlement lasts and then get thrown out regardless, for example.) If I am to leave then I need to know into what sort of world I would be venturing.

So I have, albeit reluctantly, especially at first, been spending more time in the day room, watching television with the slack-jaws, droolers, mumblers, random shouters and nappy-wearers who inhabit the place. (There are one or two of its denizens who are not irredeemable, but they are very much in the minority.) It is amazing, though, how little one can glean from the sort of broadcasts these people choose to watch. I have tried finding news or current-affairs channels, but this always causes protests, even from the true slack-jaws who you’d have sworn might as well have been sitting watching a turnip rather than a functioning television.

They like cartoons, mostly. They will watch programmes with lots of shouting and movement and colour, but anything that might actually engage the brain’s higher functions, beyond the sort of stimulus on a par with a chain of plastic toys stretched across an infant’s cot or pram, that they cannot cope with. I have learned a little more of the local language, that’s about all. I persist only because the very distracting nature of the programmes sometimes lets my higher functions disengage more easily from the here and now, freeing me to think.

I asked for and was given a radio to use in my room. That was better. I am still struggling to understand more than about a quarter of what is said – less when people talk too fast – but I have worked out that this is a mostly peaceful world and that this is a relatively benign, egalitarian society – my care here will continue indefinitely, paid for by the state – and that I am here because I suffered some sort of breakdown which left me in a catatonic condition for a month. The medical staff think I must still be suffering from a mixture of amnesia and delusion, or that I am just plain putting it on, pretending to be crazy to escape… well, whatever it was I felt the need to escape.

I have been back to the ward of sleeping men, in daylight. Nobody tried to stop me. It is an ordinary ward, after all. The men were mostly awake – a few were snoozing, but not all – and there were chairs by the bedsides, and there were flowers and Get Well Soon cards on the bedside cabinets, and there was even a family – what I took to be a wife, sad and sallow-faced with two small, silent children – visiting one of the patients. The two adults were talking quietly. Some of the other men, sitting up in bed, looked at me as I stood at the doors of the ward, staring in. I met their level, mildly inquisitive gazes, felt foolish, and turned and walked away down the echoing corridor, relieved and disappointed at once.

My name still means nothing to me. Kel. Mr Kel. Mr P. Kel. Mr Pohley Kel. Nothing. It means nothing to me – well, beyond that it feels the wrong way round somehow. Still, it seems that I am stuck with it and I suppose it will do as well as any other.

I was a crane driver, they tell me. I worked in one of those tower cranes they use to build tall buildings and other large structures. This is a job of some skill and responsibility, and one that you’d want someone quite sane and sensible doing, so I probably couldn’t just walk back into it. But it occurs to me that it is also a job that somebody who did not very much like interacting with other people might choose, and one that might allow the imagination to roam free and unfettered above the city and the site, so long as the mechanics of the job got done safely.

I lived alone, a loner, both in my home life and up there in the sky, swinging loads around from place to place while the people below scurried like ants and I took instructions from disembodied voices crackling over the radio. No family, no close friends (hence no visitors, save a foreman from the firm while I was still catatonic, apparently – anyway, the whole building team has moved to another city now). I’m told I rented a small flat from the city council which has now been allocated to somebody else. My possessions, such as they may be, are in storage until I claim them.

But I remember nothing of that life.

Rather I was a dangerous, skilled, swashbuckling hero, a remorseful but utterly deadly assassin, a thinking person’s hooligan and later (or perhaps just potentially) a mover and shaker, high-flying, fast-tracked, in a vast and burgeoning shadow-organisation spreading secretly under our banal existence like some fabulously bright and intricate mosaic long buried unglimpsed beneath a humble hearth.

I remain convinced that this calm, unambitious, self-satisfied, unspectacular little world is not all there is. There exists a greater reality beyond this dull immediacy and I have been part of it – an important part – and will return to it. I was betrayed, or at least persecuted, and I fell and nearly perished, but I escaped – as of course I would, being who and what I am – and now I am hiding here, waiting, biding my time. So I need to prepare, and work out whether I should do nothing but wait here patiently, or take matters into my own hands and strike out purposefully.

There is much to be done.

Between the plane trees and belvederes of Aspherje, on this clear midsummer early morning, the dawn-glittering Dome of the Mists rises splendidly over the University of Practical Talents like a vast gold thinking cap. Below, amongst the statues and the rills of the Philosophy Faculty rooftop park, walks the Lady Bisquitine, escorted.

From the vantage point of a terrace a few metres higher and fifty metres away, Madame d’Ortolan, with Mr Kleist at her side, watches the little party as it meanders closer. From a distance, Bisquitine looks quite normal, just a pretty plump blonde in a rather old-fashioned long white dress, attended by four gentlemen and a lady-in-waiting.

“There are other people we might employ, ma’am,” Kleist says.

He has been waiting to say this. He might have said it a dozen times in the last day, but has held his tongue. She has been waiting for him to say it.

“I know,” she tells him, still watching the sauntering progress of the little group. Bisquitine does not appear to have noticed her yet. Her escort – handlers and guards – should have noticed them, if they are doing their job, but they show no sign either. Madame d’Ortolan takes two steps back on the pink stones, only just keeping the approaching figure in sight. “How are Gongova and Jildeep?”

Kleist ignores the question because he knows it is rhetorical, a comment rather than a request for information. “There are others besides, before we need to resort to this… thing.”

“Indeed there are. But it will all take time, no matter what we do, and the next team we send, if we do not use our little blonde friend here, will be seen as just another incremental escalation. He will probably be expecting that. We need to send him somebody who will come as a deeply unpleasant surprise.”

“I am in no doubt that her deployment will produce a deeply unpleasant surprise or two.”

Madame d’Ortolan still doesn’t look at him, still keeps her attention focused on the distant white figure. “Possibly on our own side as well, you mean.”

“That was what I wished to imply.”

“Message received, Mr Kleist.” Madame d’Ortolan squints, tips her head fractionally. “You know, I’m not sure I’ve seen her in sunlight before,” she says, so quietly that Mr Kleist is not certain that she even means him to hear.

He supposes that what she says it true. They have seen the creature in laboratories, strapped to things like dentists’ chairs, confined in small rubberised cages or tied to hospital beds, sometimes weeping, sometimes hysterical, more lately in states of humming, unconcerned calm, or babbling nonsense, but always surrounded by muttering technicians wielding clipboards, electrodes and meters, and rarely with a window even in sight, always in artificial light. And always, until now, physically restrained.

It has not always been pleasant to watch, but the girl’s powers – evident from birth but beyond control – have been heightened and honed over time. Weaponised, you might say. Personally he thinks a little less time might have been devoted to raising those abilities to their present admittedly formidable heights and a little more to making them easier to predict and control, but Bisquitine, in her present form, is very much Madame d’Ortolan’s creation, and such timidity – as she would see it – is not Madame d’Ortolan’s way.

“Hmm,” Madame d’Ortolan says. “She looks as though she has a touch of the mongrel about her, in this light.” She looks at Mr Kleist. “Don’t you think?”

Mr Kleist makes the motion of looking. “I couldn’t say, ma’am.”

Madame d’Ortolan turns to look at the distant group again. She nods, shallowly. “An octoroon, or thereabouts, I’d say.”

There is a pause, then a sigh before Mr Kleist says, “Well, in any event, ma’am, if you truly are decided on this course, we should waste no further time.”

Madame d’Ortolan flashes him a look, then relents, shoulders falling. “You’re right. I’m procrastinating.” She nods at the steps leading down from the terrace. “We must seize the day,” she observes, patting her blouse frills flat against her jacket lapels. A flower, gelded by Mr Kleist, lies limp upon her jacket breast. “And the nettle.”

As Kleist and Madame d’Ortolan approach, it becomes clear that the Lady Bisquitine has been collecting insects, snails and little lumps of soil from the flower beds, and eating some of them. The rest she deposits in a drawstring posy purse hanging from her waist. Her pretty little face, surrounded by a nimbus of bouncily blonde curls and kept clean and minimally made-up by her forever fussing lady-in-waiting, sports brown streaks at the corners of her mouth until the lady-in-waiting – a thin, black-dressed figure who moves like a stalking bird – wets a handkerchief with her mouth and, tutting, cleans the lips of her charge.

Bisquitine stands still, staring at Madame d’Ortolan open-mouthed. Her face looks provisionally blank, as though she is a young child confronted with something new and surprising and is trying to decide whether to put back her head and laugh, or burst out crying. Two of her attendants, robust young men in a special uniform of dark grey and maroon, armed with automatic pistols and electric shock guns, touch their caps to acknowledge the approach of the older and more senior woman. The other two are more slight in comparison, informally dressed, and look bored. Both nod, all the same. The lady-in-waiting curtsies.

“Bisquitine, my dear,” Madame d’Ortolan says, stopping a couple of metres away and smiling at her. She never knows quite what to do with her hands when she meets Bisquitine. To touch her, of course, could be dangerous. “How are you? You look well!”

The Lady Bisquitine continues to stare at Madame d’Ortolan. Then she looks absolutely delighted, her already pretty face splits in a guileless smile and in a clear, bell-like, childish voice she sings:

“Ugby Dugby bought a new ball, Ugby Dugby played not at all. Ugby Dugby went for a spin, Ugby Dugby couldn’t get in!” She nods proudly, once, for emphasis and then sits down where she stands, the skirts of her white brocade gown pooling around her like spilled milk. With her tongue out of the side of her mouth, she takes a beetle out of her posy bag and starts to pull its wing casings open, letting them click back while the protesting insect buzzes and jerks in her chubby, grubby fingers.

One of the bored, skinny attendants looks at Madame d’Ortolan and sighs. “Sorry, ma’am. Bit worse than usual recently.” He shrugs, gazes down at Bisquitine, who has pulled one of the wing casings off entirely and is studying the wing inside, cross-eyed with concentration. The young man smiles uncertainly at Madame d’Ortolan. He appears to be vicariously embarrassed.

“But still,” Madame d’Ortolan says, “potent, yes? Proficient. Capable.”

The other skinny young man blows out his cheeks and shakes his head. “Oh, be under no illusions, ma’am,” he says, “the lady’s skills remain undiminished, oh yes.” He is squinting in the sunlight, rather as Mr Kleist is doing.

The first young man rolls his eyes. “We’ve had to stop her flitting half a dozen times since breakfast, ma’am.” He shakes his head.

Bisquitine pulls the beetle’s other wing casing off and puts it between her teeth, tasting it. She makes a sour face and spits the wing casing out onto the path, then leans over to let some spit dribble from her hanging-open lips. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve, grunting.

Madame d’Ortolan looks measuredly at the lady-in-waiting. “Mrs Siankung, isn’t it?”

“Ma’am.” She curtsies again.

“We have need of the Lady Bisquitine’s services and unique talents.”

Mrs Siankung swallows. “Now, ma’am?”

“Now.”

“This is… more training, evaluation, yes?”

“No, it is profoundly not.”

“I see, ma’am.”

The lady-in-waiting, Kleist thinks, looks surprised. One might even say startled. And possibly also more than a little afraid.

The beetle is vibrating its wings noisily in a vain attempt to escape. Its large hornlike mouth parts, spasming in frantic pincering movements, connect with one of Bisquitine’s fingers and nip. Bisquitine winces, frowns severely at the creature and then pops it whole into her mouth and starts to eat, grimacing only a little. There are crunching noises.

Something very fucking weird happens as I sit there in the main kitchen of the Palazzo Chirezzia, the spoonful of peas poised in front of my mouth. I get the most transitory glimpse of something like a vast explosion – it looks frozen at first, then I plunge into it or it whirls out to meet me and I can see its surface is a boiling mass – then I’m like some particle in a cloud chamber battered by Brownian motion, trilling down through an infinitude of worlds all riffling past too fast to see properly or count and then wham, I’m here, except I seem to have bounced part-way back out of where I really am, because I swear I can see myself sitting there in the kitchen.

And I can see the whole palace. In three dimensions. It’s like the entire building is made of glass: roof tiles, stones, beams and floorboards, carpets, wall coverings, furniture and even the piles that the whole place rests on – ancient warped tree trunks, densely packed, twisted into the mud metres and metres beneath. I’m aware that all the components are there and I can still tell what colour each is and see the patterns on things like the Persian rugs scattered through the building, but at the same time I can see through everything. I can see the immediate surroundings, too: the buildings flanking the palazzo, also facing the Grand Canal, the small canal to one side, the calles on the two other sides, plus I have a vague impression of the rest of the city, but the fabric of the palace itself is patently where all my attention is focused.

Who the fuck is doing this? Am I doing this? It looked like I zoomed in from the outside of the whole meta-reality there, pinpointing in to this world, this city, this building right here and now, all in under a second. I’ve talked to the top brain boys and girls at the Transitionary Theory department in the Speditionary Faculty and what I saw looked like what they imagine in their heads all the time but have great difficulty explaining. But it honestly felt like I was seeing it properly, truly, for real.

I inspect my newly revealed panorama and discover that I am not alone in the palace. There are some people entering from a boat moored at the private jetty and what looks like another team bursting in through the front doors. I can even see the air movements: the draught I felt a moment ago came from the canal-jetty doors. Then that detail disappears. Two teams, six people each. They each have a team member capable of damping down the capacity to transition anywhere near them. I’m already within both volumes of affect. More personnel: there are another four people guarding the ways out of the palace, and two more in a second launch holding station in the Grand Canal just off the palace.

How did-?

I was out for nearly two hours after I performed my odd, inadvertent flit from the room with the chair and the quietly spoken man and his sticky tape. Two hours; I had no idea I had been out so long. I also have no idea how I know this so certainly now, but I do. Anyway, the point is that they’ve had plenty of time to prepare.

I wonder if my call to Ade, in London, pinpointed me. The thought has barely formed in my mind when I know that it didn’t; using the phone from the supposedly deserted palace only confirmed what they already knew.

Both teams are splitting up, four members of each jogging and running through the palace in a clearly predetermined pattern, heading for every part of it. Two people in each team stay together, near where they entered. They’re communicating by some form of digital radio, encrypted. The transition-damping fields – in both cases coming from one of the two people in each team who stayed near their point of entry, I can see now – stop them using any techniques exclusive to us. The comms equipment will be local, just below the latest military spec in this world, to reduce the awkward-questions factor if they encounter any local officialdom.

One of the men near the front doors, the one not responsible for the damping effect, is called Jildeep. He is operations commanding officer as well as team leader. The woman standing near the jetty doors with the other blocker is called Gongova. She is Jildeep’s deputy and second in command. Oh, and lover. Interesting but probably not relevant.

Somebody from Gongova’s team will burst into the kitchen where I am in about eight seconds. She is called Tobbing. Like the rest she has some tracking ability. She will know that I’m the one they’re all looking for possibly even before she sees me; she only needs to get to within about four metres of a transitioner to sense them. My, how high-powered this all is. I should feel flattered.

Would you apply such a serious concentration of resources just to grab one off-message transitioner? I suppose you would, if the “you” involved meant you were Madame d’Ortolan, you were trying to dispose of everybody on the Central Council who disagreed with you – probably with the intention of mounting an utterly illegal and completely unprecedented coup – and the first assassin sent to accomplish this dubious mission (I assumed I was the first, anyway) promptly made a start at bumping off the people on the Council whom you regarded as your allies. You could see how that might make her cross.

But now I have this weird new power to add to the bizarre over-real flashbacks I’d been experiencing recently, not to mention the still-lingering suspicion that I’d flitted without the benefit of septus the wonder drug. All somewhat confusing, but highly interesting too.

I wonder, can I use my strange new sense to my advantage? I mean, you’d imagine.

How can this turn out? What can happen next?

The view of the palace splits suddenly into a blurring stack of further palaces, each subtly different.

I can concentrate on any one I wish to inspect. Ah. They’re alternative paths, different futures, the most likely quite clear, the less and less likely more and more blurred until they’re just snow, pointless. I look at them each in turn. The people in them – the members of the two teams searching the palace – are moving very slowly now, I notice, which is handy. Ms Tobbing is very close to the kitchen door, all the same. I can hear a slow, heavy thud back in what we’ll have to call physical reality. That’ll be one of her footsteps, that will. I can hear the echoes of the previous one still resounding.

Looking carefully, comparing and searching, I think I can see what to do. It’s a little problematic, but I can’t spot a humane alternative.

Turning the seat to face the open doorway, I sit back and put my hands up.

Ms Tobbing spins across the doorway, legs spread and slightly bent, gun levelled. Dark blue trouser suit, hair bunned. That’s all I have time to confirm before she Tasers me and I end up on the floor, jerking and spasming. It’s more painful and distressing than I imagined. I almost wish I’d chosen a different route through those futures, but the others were even bloodier. Not that I’ll expect any thanks, of course.

The rest arrive mob-handed seconds after Ms Tobbing stops zapping me and Dr Jildeep himself administers a syringe full of tranquilliser. I dare say they thought of including something supposed to stop me transitioning too, but those drugs can be permanently damaging and they’ll want me intact.

Wait. This path leads to me killing most of them. Another set of futures bursts into my mind, one of the areas or volumes I couldn’t see into clearly a minute earlier, but which – now that I’m closer to them – have become more distinct. Can I do what this implies I can do? Seriously? I’m slipping away here; I need to decide fast. If I just think in through here-

Ms Tobbing spins across the doorway, legs spread and slightly bent, gun levelled. Dark blue trouser suit, hair bunned. Combined earpiece and microphone. Nice blue blouse. That’s all I have time to confirm before she fires the Taser at me. I’ve used the five seconds and the high-def clarity of my X-ray-specs vision of the palace to pull open a drawer, grab a long boxed roll of aluminium foil and – knowing exactly the trajectory that the Taser’s two little barbs are going to take – feel them whack into it, letting the gun’s charge go zapping down the wires to discharge harmlessly into the foil. My other hand is wrapped in a kitchen towel taken from the same drawer; I use it to grab the wires connecting the barbs to the gun and yank them hard, pulling the still-in-the-course-of-being-surprised Ms Tobbing towards me before she can think to let go of the Taser.

Well, now we find out if the future-path vision thing is going to work or not. According to what I’ve just visualised this looks almost easy.

My hand closes round Ms Tobbing’s right wrist.

I sneeze suddenly, explosively.

My old self stares at me blankly.

Hmm. One of my more handsome incarnations. Though now with snot hanging from his nose. But not even a “Gesundheit.” Really.

I let go of the Taser’s trigger and the gun stops firing uselessly into the packet of foil, now fallen to the floor where I – he – was standing a moment ago. I prise his fingers off my wrist. He smiles vaguely, then shakes his head, his expression changes profoundly and he starts talking loudly in what I think is Slovenian (I have English, German, French, Italian, Mandarin). I use the gun to smack him under the jaw, shutting the kitchen door on him as he’s still staggering backwards.

“Tobbing,” I tell the radio as I turn back down the corridor, letting the expended Taser cartridge fall to the floor and digging a new one out of a pocket to snap onto the gun. “Just dropped an unidentified civilian in the kitchen.”

“Civilian? You sure?” Jildeep’s voice says. “There isn’t supposed to be anybody else here.”

“Well, I’m sure.”

“You still with him?”

“No, I’m heading-”

“Stay with him! Stay – get back there!”

“Oh, forget it,” I mutter.

Sneeze.

No, still no “Gesundheit.”

Same as before except this time I don’t use the radio, I just start jogging down the corridor. There’s some chatter about somebody hearing a Taser go off, but when I’m asked I say I heard nothing. Being a woman is interesting. Moving feels different; broader hips, I suppose, and altered weight distribution. Breasts move very slightly with each pace, but constrained. Sports bra.

Two corners, two corridors and one door later I’m at the entrance to the jetty, cracking the door. I can see Gongova and the blocker – a weedy-looking guy smoking a cigarette with a look of intense concentration. I Taser him and he falls into the waters by the side of the moored launch. Gongova starts, turns, her hand goes for a gun inside her jacket, then she relaxes again and stands there, the gun held loosely in her hand, pointing straight down at the jetty’s timbers. When Jildeep gets here to see what’s been going on she’s going to shoot him in the groin for cheating on her with Tobbing (this is even true, so not entirely all my own work). Appalled at what she has done she will then sit down and sob until this is all over. Which will be in about two and a half minutes.

The weedy blocker guy will drag himself out of the canal coughing dirty water in about a minute, but he won’t be blocking anything for a while and in the meantime the side of the palace he was covering is open.

What I’m doing here is conventionally impossible. You can’t transition into the mind of somebody who can themselves flit, or indeed has ever flitted, even with help. The target individual has to be unAware. As long as they are in that sense innocent and virginal, they’re completely vulnerable; as soon as they’ve completed a single transition, even an assisted one, even one where they’ve simply been taken along for the ride, they’re immune. There would appear to be no exceptions to this rule and it has become so accepted that the Concern has never thought to prepare its agents against the possibility of somebody exercising this ability against them. So I can flit from mind to mind here and cause any internal mayhem I want with seeming impunity.

I still don’t feel I can transition to a different reality altogether and so escape completely – at least not without an incentive so immediate and powerful that I’d rather not subject myself to the experience in the first place – but if this new ability is the trade-off, I’ll happily accept it.

In other words I still need septus, unless I’m feeling feeling very brave or especially desperate, but that shouldn’t be a problem here; these guys ought to be loaded with it. I’d rather have the stuff in the box which Adrian is bringing from London, because it’s Mrs Mulverhill’s finest, untainted with the contaminants that make it easy to trace the flitter, but I’ll take these guys’ supply just in case.

Two of the people searching the upper floors realise they’ve always loved each other and have wasted far too much time already; they fall to fucking on a hallway floor. Another stares fascinated at his own reflection in a bathroom mirror, like he’s never seen himself before. Another loses herself in the depths of a – to be fair – fabulously patterned Persian rug – a Kashan, I’d guess – while another decides to take off all his clothes and dive into the Grand Canal from the roof. The guy at the controls of the launch on the canal sees this, decides he’s in love with the world and vows never to use an internal combustion engine ever again. He takes the keys out of the ignition and drops them into the milky-green waves with a wistful smile. The other guy in the launch just falls into a deep and peaceful sleep. One of the people guarding the calles is absolutely convinced he’s just seen his years-dead father walk past and takes off after him. The rest are still covered by the second blocker, but by the time Jildeep’s even half worked out what’s going on I’ve arrived at the entrance hall and Tasered him as well. Dr Jildeep escapes, skittering down a narrow service corridor – it was him or the blocker with the Taser – but that’s okay.

I’m in Jildeep’s mind now and discovering something galling (I mean apart from the fact he wanted to shoot me in the legs just there, even though his orders forbade this). None of these people have any septus on them. They’re in here clean, just in case I do overpower one of them and take their supply from them and disappear. They were thinking about a conventional physical whack over the back of the head rather than my rather more subtle consciousness manipulation, but the same precautionary principle defeats either, which is irritating.

They’ll be approached by somebody unknown to them after the operation’s over and get their supplies that way. Ha! These poor fuckers are here on faith and are going to have to stand around waiting for the Man. That’s too bad for them and, as it turns out, for me. So I still need to rendezvous with my Londoner mate Ade after all. This cuts back my options significantly, but even a fairly deep rummage through Dr Jildeep’s mind finds nothing that can help the situation. I suppose I could stay inside one of their minds for longer than I was intending to, but long before their supplier arrives they’ll have the blockers up and functioning again, or – if I disable these two blockers permanently – they’ll bring in new ones and I’ll be trapped at best. More likely by far a good blocker will spot the wrong ’un in their midst like a badly bruised thumb and I’ll be caught.

Whatever; with the second blocker down nobody has the power to stop me and there’s no point interfering with anybody else. I’m free to go.

A man – an unremarkable man, about thirty, black hair, medium build – sitting at the stern of a passing vaporetto bound for Santa Lucia sees a naked man run along the dark roof of an impressive white and black palazzo on the western side of the Canalasso. Along with the rest of the passengers – now turning to each other, muttering, saying things like “Oh, my goodness” and “Eh? Cosa?” and so on – he turns to watch as the man throws himself from the roof and hurtles into the water just in front of a water taxi, which swerves and goes astern to rescue him, even though he does seem rather intent on swimming down the canal towards San Marco. Nearby, a man in an idling launch turns off the engine and casually drops the keys overboard.

The unremarkable man at the stern of the passing vaporetto looks surprised for a few moments, then sneezes.

(Italian, English, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Mandarin.)

Mavis Bocklite, a genial pensioner from Baxley, Georgia, USA, who is sitting across from him, says, “Bless you, sir.”

Finally! I smile and nod. “Grazie, signora.”