I Spy (4 page)

Heart in his mouth, Trey searched the crowds for the person the boy might have been signalling to, at the same time trying to move away and lose himself in the forest of people. He’d been
targeted. They thought he looked like an easy mark (he’d show them!) and they were going to rob him, or worse, once they discovered he had no money – and for all he knew there were
enough of them to already have every escape route sewn up tight. On top of which he did not have a whole heap of options open to him. He could stand his ground and fight, hoping that someone would
step in and help him, or he could run.

Trey caught the glint of polished, sharpened steel in the boy’s hand, and he ran.

Head down and heart thumping he dived into the crowds and pushed blindly past whoever was in his way, aware that this was
not
winning him any friends, but in no mood to care. He wanted to
look behind him to see if he was being followed, but he was too worried that there might be someone in front of him that he really needed to avoid. Then, out of the corner of his eye, to his right,
he saw a flash of red and realized the boy with the knife had somehow manage to snake his way through the crush and was closing in on him like a fox on a chicken.

Trey veered left, wondering if now was the time
he
should begin squawking “
HELP!
” at the top of his voice, and then found that he’d broken clear of the crowds
(which, although they’d slowed him down, had also provided some protection) and was now out in the open. A snap to catch. Spotting a narrow street that kind of looked
vaguely
familiar,
Trey pelted for it, cursing the fact that getting his penknife out of his pocket
and
running as fast as he could over these ancient and very uneven flagstones was just not possible.

He was fast, but his pursuers were faster, hungrier, more desperate...and, as it turned out, there were three of them, and they knew their way round Venice a whole lot better than he did. Trey
had figured he’d at least two people right on his tail, but he had no idea there would be a third waiting for him halfway down the almost passage-like street he’d run into.

He was trapped!

Skidding to a halt the moment he saw the third figure barring his way, Trey glanced over his shoulder to see Red Shirt and his friend sauntering towards him. No need to run now that their quarry
had nowhere to go. And then there he was, surrounded, with Red Shirt right in front of him, a thin, humourless smile drawn across his face; up close Trey could see that the boy’s teeth were
bad, his clothes worn, his hands dirty and fingernails bitten. He was just some street-poor kid, like the ones back home in Chicago, from round Maxwell Street and Addams, parts of town he knew only
by reputation. But before Trey could start to feel sorry for the boy he jabbed a finger hard in his chest.

“
Dammi tuoi i soldi
.” The boy rubbed two fingers against a thumb. “
Dollari, ragazzo – ora!
”

The boy wanted money, that much was obvious, and he was demanding it – with menace – which Trey did not appreciate one bit. He jabbed back.

“Beat it, palooka!”

Silence, as a slightly confused look passed across Red Shirt’s face...and then, as the boy sneered, the silence was broken by a metallic
TCH-KK!
and Trey found himself going
cross-eyed as he stared at the needle-sharp point of a switchblade. He had, in his anger, forgotten about the knife.

“
Cretino...
”

Trent Gripp would not have stood for this kind of treatment, but like he always said, there were times when acting brave was the height of foolishness, and to his mind this was beginning to look
like one of them. The trouble was, having already acted the hard-boiled tough guy, no matter what he did now he was going to be in deep trouble because when this joker started to cut up rough,
things were going to get bloody. And the blood was going to be his...

“E’scuse me, you have trouble, kid?”

Trey whirled round without thinking and was amazed to see a man in a dark suit and grey fedora, standing a few feet away with both hands in his trouser pockets...a man with a heavy accent, a
pencil mustache and smoking a yellow cigarette. Signor Giovedi! Before he had a moment to say anything, like “Watch out – he’s got a knife!”, Trey saw Signor Giovedi slowly
unbutton his double-breasted suit jacket and let it swing open to reveal...the butt of a pistol.

“
Lasciatelo anddre, ragazzi.
” Signor Giovedi jerked his thumb for Red Shirt and his friends to leave, and be quick about it.

“
Perché, che dice?
”

“Why?
Ho una pistola – va bene?
”

Trey felt like a pawn in a very dangerous game of chess, stuck in the middle of the board and unable to move because there was a knife still hovering far too close to his face for comfort.

“I thin’ you should be ready to move, my small fren’.”

“Me?” Trey hated the fact that his voice had sounded like a mouse’s squeak.

Signor Giovedi didn’t answer, instead he took his right hand out of his suit pocket and let go a fistful of copper and silver coins. They went everywhere, bouncing off the ground like
metal rain, flashing as they spun like miniature tops. The sudden gesture, the noise, the fact that this man had thrown away
money
as if it was rubbish, distracted Red Shirt and his friends
long enough for Signor Giovedi to grab Trey’s arm, hauling him away and back out into the
piazza
.

Trey was lost for words as he stared at Signor Giovedi, taking a moment to realize that his beautiful companion was standing next to him. She was observing him with an
unnerving
Mona Lisa
smile on her face (although he had to say the rest of her looked nothing like the picture his father had dragged him to the Louvre in Paris to see). What on
earth
was going on? Had he been right all along and this man really had been following him and his father...and if so, why take such a risk, even if he had got a gun (and exactly
why
did he have a
gun?). Questions tumbled around his head, unable to find a way out of his mouth.

“You hunky-dory now?” Signor Giovedi lit a cigarette.

“You ask me, this kid is the picture of lost, César.”

The possible Signora Giovedi was chewing gum and spoke with a raw Brooklyn accent, pronouncing the name as Say-zar; she did not, Trey thought, talk anything like the way she looked, but after
what he’d been through
any
American accent was posi-lutely fine by him.

“You lost, kid?” she queried. “Not that I’m surprised in a place like this...they got streets here narrower than a Mexican gunslinger’s tie, right,
César?”

César nodded. “E’zactly,
amore mio
...narrow streets. Where you got to be,
amico
? Where you stay?”

“The Excelsior.”

“Very chi-chi.” The woman raised one finely-plucked eyebrow.

“
Molto
,” agreed César. “Less go,
ragazzo
, we take you there...”

Trey hung back, torn between having no idea what to do and really wanting to be taken back to the hotel. Any of the private eyes in
Black Ace
would, no doubt about it, trust their
instincts...but those instincts would also be backed up by the fact that those PIs were packing heat, just like Signor Giovedi was. And what kind of person wandered round on
holiday
with a
gun in a shoulder holster?

“You coming or what, kid?” the woman asked, blowing a large, bright pink bubble.

Quite why the sight convinced Trey it would be okay to go with them he didn’t know, but it did.

Which was how, after being treated to a large vanilla ice cream, covered in
real
milk chocolate shavings, and an orange fizzy drink, Trey found himself in a water taxi,
being delivered back to the Hotel Excelsior by César and Isabella Giovedi – as unlikely a pair of rescuers as it was possible to imagine.

César was in business (and although he never specified the business of what, Trey thought he had a pretty good idea that it was probably as legit as a nine dollar note), and Izzy, as she
liked to be called, offered that she had been in the business of show, as she put it, before the two of them had met and married. César did say that he came from Naples, and he was taking his
wife on a grand European tour, explaining in great detail that although Izzy was also Italian she had been born in New York. But he never said one word about what Trey thought of as The Incident,
and neither did he explain how come they’d just
happened
to be there or why he’d stepped in to help. While Trey was desperate to ask, he thought that maybe it would be better if
he just accepted what had taken place and left it at that; frankly, he was
so
glad to still be in one piece that he was prepared to believe whatever he was told.

César and Izzy had waltzed into the Excelsior and taken him right up to the manager’s office, where César explained about Trey getting lost and he and his wife finding him;
he did not, to Trey’s great relief, go into too much detail. The manager, acting as if this sort of thing was a daily occurrence, replied that he would make sure every effort was made to
contact Mr. MacIntyre and inform him of his son’s safe return. All the while Trey stood in the middle of the proceedings feeling like he had to be asleep and dreaming as it was all so
weird
.

After saying a loud and quite embarrassing
Arriverderci!
– Izzy planting a kiss on
both
his cheeks – Trey went up to the suite to wait for his father. Who, if Trey was
any judge, was not going to be best pleased with how the day had turned out. Once he’d washed off Izzy’s lipstick he went out onto the balcony; the red Macchi M.52 had gone, as
he’d feared it would have, and a boat was now moored where it had been when he’d left the hotel in the morning.

It had been a strange day – a
lot
more exciting than he’d ever imagined it would be – plus, in the process of getting lost and being found, the story of The Man With the
Pencil Mustache had gotten even
more
mysterious. He didn’t want to believe his rescuers had been lying to him, but wasn’t it really a bit too much of a coincidence that they
should be right there when he needed them? If that kind of thing ever happened in one of his stories he always thought the writer was taking the easy way out and not being very original. There was
now no doubt in his mind that there was
definitely
more to this than met the eye. But exactly what was completely beyond him.

T
he next day Trey’s punishment for getting himself lost turned out to be going back with The Formidable Aurelia to every
single
one of
the places he’d missed seeing the previous day. All on his own, while his father stayed at the hotel. No doubt working.

He was beginning to wonder why on earth his pop had ever brought him on this trip if all he was going to do was act like he was in the office
all
the time; while none of his friends ever
spent
that
much time with their fathers, except Morty Sorgenson, because Mr. Sorgenson was a lot older and had retired, he had thought that, being as how they were on holiday, it might have
been different. It would be nice to get to know each other better, like he felt he knew his gramps. But then he did spend a lot of time with Gramps – or, more correctly, his gramps found the
time to spend a lot of time with him. Trey often spent some of his holidays on the ranch Gramps had outside Topeka.

Trey’s trip turned out to be more torture than punishment as he spent the whole, entire day being bludgeoned at high-volume with a continuous barrage of “information of interest to
the touristic person”, followed by questions to see that he’d been paying attention.

It seemed to Trey as if Signorina Sanpietro hardly paused for breath from the moment they left the hotel until she delivered him to the station at 15.30 precisely, where his father was waiting
to get back on board the Orient Express. Next major stop Belgrade, capital city of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which Trey thought had to be the longest name for a country
ever
, and with the added attraction of being somewhere The Formidable Aurelia wasn’t.

Thankfully the stop was too short and too late in the day to actually do anything remotely cultural, but long enough for Trey’s father to send a telegram back to the Chicago office and
give him a lecture about the city and its environs (“Belgrade lies on the Danube, son – which is, at over 1,700 miles from start to finish, Europe’s second longest river”)
and for him to write his mother a postcard. Then, according to Trey’s pocket compass – the one that had been in his other jacket the day before, when he’d really needed it –
the train began to travel in a more south-easterly direction as it made its way towards the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.

The fact that this happened to be one of the oldest cities in Europe was somewhat less fascinating to Trey than that it was also his mother’s name, except she spelled it Sophia. On the
other hand, the news that the country’s Tsar, Boris III, had escaped assassination not once but
twice
in the last couple of years – and that the Tsar’s actual name was
Boris Klemens Robert Maria Pius Ludwig Stanislaus Xaver Saxe-Coburg Gotha – was the kind of information that you
could
call enlightening and well worth knowing.

It was, though, a pretty dull journey as his father had made it quite clear that he must not, under any circumstances, bother anyone. Which meant that he was banned from investigating who and
what was on the train (you never knew, the Giovedis might be on board...). People, his father pointed out, did not want the company of an over-imaginative boy. Trey did not believe this was true,
but the veto had been imposed and he could tell by the look on his father’s face that it was not about to be lifted any time soon...

It was at seven o’clock in the morning, two boring days after they’d left Venice, when the train finally pulled into Constantinople’s Sirkeci Terminal. The
station was on the western side of the city (“...where the Orient casts its eye at Europe across the straits of the Bosphorus, son!”). It all sounded mighty romantic, as his gramps
would put it, but the reality came as something of a shock.