131. Gondola

Our gondolier didn’t speak English either, but that wasn’t important. It’s more about the sights than the sounds in Venice, although someone was singing something somewhere, which echoed off the sides of the narrow canals and made me feel like I was in one of those old films. And Lenore beside me—how romantic! It would have been more romantic if Burbank wasn’t there sitting across from us, but if Burbank hadn’t been there, we would have never gotten the last piece of the alien communicator.

So we’re sat there taking in the city and the gondolier interrupts us by pointing at the sky and gibbering away. I turned to look at what he was pointing at, half expecting to see a UFO, but there was nothing there. “Yeah, that’s a cloud,” I said. “You probably don’t get a lot of those around here.” Burbank told me to shut up and started making complicated hand gestures at the man. I didn’t know what they were on about, but they seemed to understand each other vaguely.

After a few minutes of this DIY-European-Sign-Language gesticulation, Burbank turned to us and said that the man had been looking for me because he was told to give me a battery. I asked why, and he said for the communicator we were supposed to be assembling.

The gondolier took out his mobile phone. I didn’t think it was very professional for an age-old occupation like gondolier to be carrying around a phone, but who knows what’s in their rule books. He opened the back to reveal a sliver of battery hiding behind the phone’s real battery. He gave the sliver to Burbank, who wrapped it in his handkerchief and folded it away into his pocket for safe keeping. Lenore was completely lost in the goings on, so I told her Burbank’s smuggling stolen army intelligence into the States. It’s saner than the truth.