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nodded. ‘Things go from bad to worse here. There is anger, impatience, people grow restless because the political process takes so long. Meantime, the killing goes on.’ His voice had become serious.
    â€˜I’ll do everything in my power, Nofometo.’
    â€˜Don’t you always?’
    â€˜Always,’ said Barron. St Tobias , he thought.
    VENICE
    Barron slept on the private Lear jet that took him to Marco Polo Airport. He boarded a motor-launch named Desdemona which ferried him toward the Grand Canal. In Venice he felt more at home than anywhere else in the world – of which he owned a considerable amount, including property in Telluride, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, and Coral Gables. He collected apartments and houses the way some men are driven to accumulate butterflies, rare coins, or women. He stood alongside the driver of the launch, a squat Venetian called Alberto, and he sniffed the night air, which was cold – especially after Durban – and smelled faintly of old herring. A pale moon was visible in the sky, illuminating the palaces in their splendid clutter along the banks.
    Alberto said, ‘Welcome home, Signor Barron. You will find nothing changed. Venice. Does she ever change?’
    Tobias Barron said only that he was glad to be back. He wore a black cashmere coat over his white suit, and a black silk scarf knotted at his neck. Gulls, disturbed by the engine of the launch, flew out of the vaporetto stations and winged toward the moon like large moths mesmerized by light. Barron gazed at the lit structures that leaned against the water, admiring as he always did the sheer persistence of beauty, the way grandeur prevailed against floods of pollution.
    The imagination of men, he thought. It encompassed creation and destruction; he found no paradox in this. The same inscrutable organ that could build was also able to destroy with equal facility. The human heart was a chamber in which dark and light might coexist.
    He drew his scarf a little tighter at his neck. Venice was icy, cold to its soul. The Desdemona left the Grand Canal, steering into quieter waters, passing under low bridges. There were lights from cafés and trattorias. Lovers stood on a bridge and watched the launch pass under them. Laundry flapped against the sides of crumbling houses. Discarded plastic bottles that had once contained acqua minerale were agitated in the quiet wake of the boat and shuddered in pale white eddies. The smell here was stronger than it had been on the Grand Canal, danker, greener, as if just beneath the water fish were mysteriously decomposing.
    â€˜We have arrived,’ Alberto said. He moored the launch and made sure in his fussy fashion that Signor Barron disembarked without hindrance. Then he gathered together Barron’s suitcases and stacked them on the dock where another man waited, Schialli, a taciturn fellow who had been Barron’s servant for years. Schialli, like Alberto, was armed; both men carried automatic pistols. It was a sorry fact, Barron thought, that he had made a number of enemies, that his rivals were ambitiously bloodthirsty.
    Schialli and Alberto gathered the luggage and walked alongside Barron down a narrow thoroughfare called Calle dei Avocati, where at number 3720 Barron owned a house. He used only the upper two floors, converted into a large apartment; the rest of the place, although sumptuously decorated, was usually unoccupied.
    Schialli, who always made a great business of the heavy keys, rattling them with a show of importance, unlocked the big door, which was sixteenth century and adorned by the carved heads of angry lions. The three men entered a flagstoned foyer, then stepped into an elevator. Schialli pressed a button, and the lift rose with a quiet cranking sound.
    â€˜Is the woman here?’ Barron asked when the elevator stopped.
    â€˜She is,’ said Schialli, with a slight inclination of his head.
    Barron got out of the elevator, followed