The Good Thief's Guide to Venice (32 page)

Hmm. Decisions, decisions. Stay still and avoid being shot, or go down in history as a have-a-go hero with a gory hole where his pulmonary artery used to be?

Shockingly, I chose option A.

And I hazard to say, I could have lived quite comfortably with my decision. But then Borelli decided to give his parting speech. All baddies have them, I suppose, and it seemed that he was no exception. Of course, it would have helped if he’d slipped into heavily accented English, or if some snappy subtitles had magically appeared so that I was able to understand his words, but the truth is the vast majority of what he said was a complete mystery to me. Except for one thing. He spat a short sentence and gestured flamboyantly with the gun, pointing down through the floor to the bookshop far below, and fixed a nasty snarl on his face.

Graziella crumpled. Her knees went from under her and she fell into Beardy, clutching at his camel-hair overcoat and wailing quite disturbingly. She buried her head behind his wide back, as if trying to shield herself from the Count’s words.

It didn’t work. If anything, it just seemed to encourage him. He kept up his talk, seeming to revel in the pain he was administering, and meanwhile he mimed something. The mime was quite clear. Picture the briefcase as a man’s head. Picture the gun as, well, a gun. Now watch him press the gun against the briefcase – see him dry-fire the pistol. The bastard even made a plosive noise with his lips.

Language barrier aside, it was perfectly clear to me that Graziella’s uncle hadn’t shot himself. Borelli had done it for him. And judging by the perverse delight he seemed to take in sharing the news, he wasn’t the least bit sorry about it, either.

Now, on reflection, I can’t say that I was conscious of my motivation having changed. But something definitely shifted inside me, especially when I looked at Graziella and saw the snivelling mess she’d become. She was curled into a ball, gripping hold of Beardy’s trouser leg, banging her head against the cupboard door beneath the sink. And yes, I might have been coward enough to dither over the role I should have been playing, but right at that moment, my emotions took over and I watched with some amazement as I dug a hand inside my pocket, flicked off the lid of the pepper spray with my thumbnail and surged up from the floor.

The surprise helped, and I had plenty of time to depress the aerosol. Sadly, what I lacked was an opportunity to check my aim. No, the outlet wasn’t pointing towards me, but it wasn’t pointing towards Borelli, either. I blitzed the wall between us, coating it with a dirty brown smear, and before I was able to correct my mistake, Borelli’s face twisted in anger and distaste, and he swiped down fast with the gun, knocking the canister from my fingers.

On instinct, I grabbed for his wrist with both hands. He tried to tear himself free, cursing me in extravagant, full-blooded Italian, but I knew what letting go would mean and I held on for all I was worth. I felt the muscles of his hand flex. His trigger finger curled.
Pfft
. There was a flash of light and a bullet went high,
thunking
into the ceiling with a shower of plaster dust. Beardy ducked for cover, his bad leg giving way like the rotten foundations of a collapsing warehouse.

The Count’s hand jerked backwards with the recoil. He was fighting to bring his arm down while I strained to force it up. It would have helped if I could have snatched a hand free and punched him in the face, but I didn’t have the strength. It was a different story for him, and he seemed to have a similar idea. Bumping me with his hip, he swung with his free arm and the briefcase came around in a fast arc, heading for my kidney. I raised my leg and took the blow on my thigh. He cursed me some more and swung back for a second go, and meanwhile I stamped down on his toe. Bad idea. The move worked, but he keeled sideways.
Pfft
. The second bullet went lower,
pinging
off a kitchen tile. If Beardy hadn’t been crouching already, it would have punctured his abdomen.

I wrenched Borelli’s arm up, forcing the gun towards the ceiling, and we lost our footing and toppled over onto the floor. The Count was on top of me, rolling around fitfully, using his elbows and his weight to crush the air from my lungs and the hooded sweater to smother my face. It was beginning to work. I couldn’t inhale. I felt my grip loosen a fraction, and he was just seconds from having the gun all to himself when Beardy pushed himself up with a mighty groan and came lumbering across the room, kicking the Count in the temple and tearing the weapon from us with all the ease of an adult confiscating a toy from a pair of brawling kids.

I skittered clear of Borelli, who was clutching his head and moaning groggily, and rested on my back, panting for a moment. The moment was short. Before I could do anything more, Beardy stomped around me, aimed down at the Count and squirted two carefree rounds into his bucking chest.

Borelli didn’t cry and clutch at his wounds. He didn’t yell out in pain. He lay prone. Unmoving. Dead.

Beardy swivelled, lungs heaving, and kicked the pepper spray away into a distant corner of the room with a twitch of his bad leg. Then he aligned the gun with my forehead, stifled a yawn, and presented me with the opportunity for a brief spell of introspection.

When I’m writing about Michael Faulks, I like to exploit what I think of as his
key moments of awareness
. Every now and again, I move the action inside his head so that my readers can listen to him think, hear him tick. And if I do this often enough, and at the right instances, then when Faulks faces a major test, he’ll experience a
key moment of awareness
where he begins to understand something fundamentally important about himself.

Now, I don’t like to crow, but I believe that having a gun turned on me, especially a gun that had been nonchalantly discharged to kill a man lying a few feet away, could be said to qualify as just such a challenge. And what was I aware of? Absolutely nothing. My mind was a complete blank. I didn’t see my life pass before me. I didn’t ask forgiveness for my sins. All I did was squint through the ache in my head and stare into the gaping hole at the end of the gun muzzle, unsure if it was the last thing I’d ever see.

I did, though, still retain my sense of hearing, and it was this precious gift that enabled me to listen as Graziella said something in French from a voice that was hoarse and scratchy, but which carried an unmistakable note of urgency. My French might have been limited, but it was better than my Italian, and I got the impression she was telling Beardy not to shoot.

I saw his meaty hand shift around the butt as he adjusted his grip. I wet my lip and risked glancing up. His eyes didn’t lock with my own – they were focussed on the area of my chest where my heart was beating a jaunty melody I like to call flat out fear.

‘Remi,’ Graziella said. At last, I had his name. I can’t say I took much consolation from it.
‘Pose ton arme.’
Put the gun down. Funny how my French was improving. Who knew, maybe if he ever got round to shooting me, I’d die fluent?
‘Pose ton arme,’
she repeated, and to my everlasting relief, he shrugged, scratched his beard, and did just that.

The gun hung limply at his side, looking like a miniature replica inside his large fist, and I allowed myself the luxury of drawing a breath. I even went so far as to prop myself up on my elbows and blow a gust of air towards my brow. Talk about a
key moment of awareness
. I was beginning to wonder if there was a chance I might live.

Despite his bulk, Remi was no slouch. I’d barely had time to appreciate my good fortune before he’d manhandled Graziella onto a folding kitchen chair, fitted her limp hand around the gun and arranged her arm so that her elbow was resting on the table and she was pointing the pistol at me. Once he was satisfied with her aim, he nodded to himself and hobbled through to the bathroom, returning moments later with a bundle of towels and the white shower curtain that he’d torn from the rail. By now, he was whistling a carefree tune, and it seemed to occupy him while he used the towels to pack the Count’s chest wounds, then rolled him in the shower curtain until he was thoroughly cocooned. If he was fazed by the nature of the housekeeping task he’d set himself, he didn’t show it. I knew people who found vacuuming more stressful.

Graziella appeared to be somewhere else entirely. She didn’t pay attention to what Remi was doing, and she didn’t react when he gathered up the attaché briefcase and set it down on the floor between her feet. He stopped whistling for a moment to watch her, as if uncertain if she could be relied upon, and then he squinted along the barrel of the gun towards me again. Finally content, he murmured a quick instruction into her ear, rustled her hair, then heaved the shrink-wrapped corpse up onto his capacious shoulder like a man lifting a giant vacuum-packed fish fillet, and staggered blithely out of the room to the accompaniment of his own breezy theme tune.

His uneven footsteps on the spiral stairs gradually faded to nothing, leaving us in silence. I glanced at the dark stain on the floor where Borelli’s body had been, then at a discharged shell from one of the bullets that had killed him, then at Graziella. Her eyes were black swirls, the corners very pink against her colourless skin, her lips forming a perfect circle almost as inert as the gun muzzle.

I counted off two minutes on the kitchen clock behind her shoulder. Then three.

‘Mind if I sit down with you?’ I asked.

There was a twinge in the muscles of her cheek. Not the surest sign of consent, but I got the impression it was all I was going to get.

‘I’ll move slowly,’ I told her. ‘If you want me to stop at any point, you just say.’ No response. ‘Okay, here I come.’

I’d seen plants grow quicker. It seemed to take forever until I was upright, followed by an eternity until I was close to the chair. I’d left my penlight resting on the floor. Didn’t want her to think I might try to use it as a weapon. ‘I’m sitting down now,’ I told her.

Blankly, she watched me do just that. If she was impressed by my commentary or my athleticism, she didn’t say. She did, though, lower her arm and rest the gun sideways on the table, close to the glass ashtray and on top of a clutch of playing cards, her finger hooked lightly around the trigger.

‘Cigarette?’ I asked.

I parted the jacket I had on, revealing the lining, and used my gloved fingers to very delicately remove my cigarettes from the inside pocket. I tapped one out, eased it into the corner of my mouth and sparked it with my lighter. I took a swift draw, then offered it across to her.

Her pupils flickered, snagged by the lit end, and she reached out mechanically with her left hand, keeping her right free for the gun.

‘Where’s he going?’ I asked, lighting a cigarette of my own. ‘Remi, I mean.’

She shrugged and took an unsteady drag. Her hand was shaking, much like my own. So much for the pair of hardened criminals.

‘I’m guessing he’s disposing of the body,’ I said. ‘Strikes me as the type of character who’s done this kind of thing before.’

She exhaled fumes through her crinkled lips, fogging her face.

‘Where’s he taking Borelli? A canal? The lagoon?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Her voice sounded distant and feeble, like a whisper from deep inside an underground bunker. I didn’t mind. I was just glad to hear it.

‘Huh,’ I said. ‘What if someone sees him?’

She shrugged. ‘It is late.’

I nodded as if that made complete sense, then raised my cigarette to my mouth. She was right about the time. The clock behind her said that it was close to three o’clock. I couldn’t remember passing anyone on my way to the bookshop. Perhaps Remi would be just as fortunate.

‘I’m sorry about your uncle,’ I said, sighing smoke towards the ceiling.

She pinched her cigarette between her finger and thumb and made a jerky stabbing motion with the lit end, squinting at me like a darts player lining up a throw. ‘You did not kill him,’ she said.

‘Your uncle?’

She peered hard at me and shook her head, as if clearing her mind of the numbness that had gripped her. ‘Borelli. I told you he must die. That he was dangerous.’

‘You don’t say.’ I raised my palm to the back of my skull and tested the spot that was aching the most. My glove came away sticky with blood. The wound felt ragged and worryingly deep. I had visions of brain matter clotting my hair. Sometimes, a writer’s imagination can be a real burden.

Graziella hadn’t asked me how I’d ended up in her apartment along with Borelli. Perhaps she assumed he’d got the better of me and had marched me here after I’d confessed everything to him. That would make sense, I supposed, but the truth wasn’t nearly so kind. We’d given him Graziella’s name. We’d told him she’d wanted him dead. And once he’d escaped from my building, he’d come here to claim his revenge, first by killing her uncle and then by waiting for her to return from the casino.

The explanation seemed to fit. True, I could be missing a few steps, but Borelli was no longer around to tell me where I’d gone wrong. My attempt to save his life by kidnapping him had backfired spectacularly, and I couldn’t ignore that I was culpable for at least some of what had followed.

‘I’m no assassin,’ I told Graziella, wiping my glove on my trousers. ‘Not like Remi.’

That seemed to amuse her. A half-smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. I waited for more, but she wasn’t about to offer an explanation.

‘
Okay
,’ I said, tamping the ash on the end of my cigarette. ‘So I don’t know as much as I might like. But how about this? I’d say there’s a fair chance Remi comes from Monte Carlo.’

All right, it was a guess, but it was an educated one. The guy spoke French. It looked as if Graziella had teamed up with him against Borelli. They’d worked together to scam the casino of the money in the briefcase down by her feet. It was practically the same routine she’d run with the Count against Alfred’s friends. Only this time the target had been different.

Graziella’s head pivoted to one side. Her pupils contracted. I had her interest. Now all that remained was to slot all the puzzle pieces into the appropriate holes. Hmm. If only Victoria was with me.