The Venetian Judgment (18 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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“Do you know why Keraklis wanted us dead?”
“I . . . it got something to do with a Russian. Todorovich.”
“Marcus Todorovich?”
“Yes, I think this is his name.”
“Where is Marcus Todorovich?”
“I think he is in Istanbul. Keraklis says we are to get his boat, me and . . .”
Levka glanced over at the dead body again and swallowed hard.
“Do you live on Santorini?”
“No. Last month, we were in Kerch, in Ukraine. No work for us, now war is over in Kosovo. We can’t go home because they’re hunting all of us. For war crimes. Which I never do. We are looking for maybe work on fishing boat or in big coal plant there. We are in bar by the docks. Double Eagle. A man shows up one day, says he has work for good old soldiers. Says he is a good Croat. He knew man we knew.”
“What man?”
Levka shrugged.
“He say his name is Peter. No last name. Not Croat. I think Russian, or maybe Ukrainian.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like . . . nothing. Like everything. We called him S
iva Čovjek
. Gray Man. He is maybe six feet, not big, not small. Big belly like Buddha. Soft, fat hands. Fingers like sausage. Old. Bald. Has small eyes, black, sharp like a bird, but big red lips, like big fat worms. He is man hard to remember later, you know? Voice is soft like girl. He gives us money, sends us here, to Santorini, to work for Sergeant Keraklis.”
“Did Sofouli know about you?”
“Sofouli knows we are here. We are no trouble, stay away from girls, stay quiet. We speak Greek pretty good, so Keraklis tells him we are fishermen, faraway cousin to him. We maybe get work in tourist time. We no trouble, he does not care.”
“You said Keraklis called the big boss. Is that Gray Man?”
Levka shrugged again, looked over at Gavel Kuldic’s body, and then back to Dalton. “Maybe Peter is big boss. Only Keraklis know this.”
“Keraklis told you to kill us?”
Levka looked pained, swallowed with difficulty, then nodded.
“And what about our bodies. This is an island. Mostly rock.”
“We are to take you off island. Keraklis knows Sofouli doesn’t want any trouble. No dead tourists all over. You gone is okeydokey with him.”
“Take us off how?”
Levka shrugged.
“In boat maybe. Or maybe in helicopter. Sofouli have one.”
“What kind of chopper?”
“I . . . I saw them in Kosovo, in the war.
Jastreb crno.
Black-bird?”
“A
Blackhawk
? Not a chance. The Hellenic Air Force flies Super Pumas. Or those crappy little Bell 47s. There’s no way in hell there’s a Blackhawk on Santorini.”
Levka nodded vigorously.
“But
is
Blackhawk. I know from Kosovo. Believe me, I know. You getting shoot at by one, make big picture in mind, no foolings.”
“Whose is it?”
“Got markings: UNPROFOR? Old machine. UN logo. Big red cross on both sides. Twenty years, maybe. Keraklis thinks Sofouli keep it for to sell someone.”
“You’re telling me that Sofouli has an old United Nations medevac Blackhawk for his personal use?”
“Not for personal. Sofouli in private business, buy and sell guns and ammo and radios to Bulgaria people, also to Romanians. Big black market for Turkey. This one come in three weeks ago. Sits there, tied down under big camo tarp. Nobody know how to fly. Kind of beat-up. Paint pretty bad. But is Blackhawk, okeydokey. Full up of gas.”
“How do you know?”
“Keraklis show us.”
“Does it have external tanks?”
“Like big bombs with points? Stick out from bottom, at sides?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Were they full?”
Levka shook his head.
“Do not know. Who can tell?”
“What about Keraklis, could he fly it?”
Levka made wry face, shook his head.
“Keraklis cannot drive fucking Škoda. Maybe Sofouli?”
“Get up,” said Dalton, stepping back.
Levka did not want to get up but he did, slowly, like a corpse rising, which in a way he was. He straightened his suit jacket and looked down at his soaking crotch, a fleeting spasm of self-loathing crossing his face. He stood in the middle of the room, a forlorn presence, waiting for a bullet. He stared into the middle distance, went inward. He was a feckless and unlucky man, thought Dalton, watching Levka steel himself for death, but he was no coward. Dalton shifted the muzzle of the Croatian pistol, indicating the body of his cousin. “Can you carry him?”
Levka seemed to come back from another place. He blinked, looked down at Pappas, and then back at Dalton.
“Yes. Often. He drinks too much.”
“Roll him in a carpet and bring him with us.”
Levka held Dalton’s look for a moment longer.
“A suggest I make, okay? No shooting.”
Dalton nodded. “Go on.”
“Is balcony out there? Three hundred feet to rocks. Storm all night too. In morning, maybe no body anywhere.”
“Fine. Do it.”
They watched as Levka did just that. He must have been telling the truth about carrying Kuldic home drunk, because he managed to get the other man up off the floor and into a fireman’s carry, although the effort made his face turn blue and he staggered under the body’s deadweight all the way out to the balcony. Kuldic went over the edge without a psalm, dropping into the wind and the eternal Aegean with only a slight flutter from his coat.
For a time, Levka stood there, staring down at the dim churning of the distant surf, at the jagged rocks along the shoreline. Dalton came up behind him, looked down at the black water, saw nothing at all. The wind sighed and moaned, the surf boomed, and the air was full of salt tang. There was music from a nearby bar and a faint scent of frying fish.
“Okay,” said Dalton, “let’s clean the place up and go.”
Levka looked at Dalton, his expression altering.
“Look, Ami, I dead man. So why I have to go somewhere else only for to die anyway. You shoot me now, okay? I go down there with Uncle Gavel. Be quick, yes? Easier for both of us.”
Dalton raised the pistol.
Levka crossed himself and closed his eyes, waited for the bullet. Dalton, for reasons he could not work out, was not fully committed to squeezing the trigger on this odd little soldier of fortune.
Levka, sensing a hesitation, spoke up.
“Wait, Ami, I got idea.”
Dalton held the pistol on Levka’s face.
“What is it?” he said.
“You kill me, you got two dead bodies down on the rocks, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Two bodies harder to disappear than one. Even for great big sea.”
“Possibly.”
“So instead of kill me, you hire me.”
“
Hire
you?”
Levka shrugged, actually managed a smile.
“I got no job here now. You hire me, I work for you. You man who kills much, got that look, no offense. So maybe you make more bodies later. With handy service of Dobri Levka, you don’t have to bust big fat dead men around place all by self, ruin good suits like you got.”
The kid had a point.
He was a lunatic, but he had a point.
“I killed your godfather. Your uncle. Croats believe in the vendetta. Sooner or later, you’ll have to try to kill me.”
“Look, is true. But Gavel, he kind of jerk, you know. Mean drunk. Also, filthy habits—”
“I don’t think we want to hear about that.”
“Look, okay, Uncle Gavel dead. Lots of guys dead. Vendetta for all dead guys, life too short. I not in favor of vendetta. In favor of live Dobri Levka. Okeydokey?”
“Can I trust you?”
Levka looked hurt, stiffened, straightened his shoulders.
“I am
soldier
. Like you, I think. My word good. Only nobody want me back home. I am
nitko nema čovjeka u zemlji.
You understand?”
Dalton shook his head.
“I think,” said Mandy from the open doors, the yellow light behind her pouring out onto the windblown terrace, “I think he’s saying he’s a no man in no-man’s-land. At least, I think so.”
Levka nodded, grinned, showing a set of teeth that belonged on a mongrel dog on the other side of a chain-link fence.
“Yes! Miss is right. I am no man. You hire me, I am
your
man.”
“I can’t use you,” said Dalton.
“Yes. Yes, can use me! For once, I can lift heavy stuff, like old dead Uncle Gavel. For twice, I speak Greek, Turkey too—okeydokey?—a little bit Ukraine. And, for thirds, maybe I can finds you Gray Man.”
“How can you do that?”
“He finds me. So we go backward to Kerch, find him, yes?”
Dalton had an image of Sergeant Keraklis at the bottom of the empty swimming pool at the side of the hotel. Dalton’s interview with him had been brief. It had been Dalton’s plan to lock him up, deal with the goons, and crack him wide open later to see what he knew. But Keraklis, panicking, had started to scream, and that had to stop. Keraklis was more fragile than he looked. So he was now dead. And without him, there was no direct way to drill back up the chain. Dalton lowered the gun. The Croat had nerve—he’d give him that much. And he hadn’t begged or whined or sniveled, which took sand.
“How much?”
“What?”
“How much to hire you? What’s your rate?”
Levka broke into a huge grin, and it seemed for a moment as if he would try to hug Dalton, then he looked down at his soaking pants.
“Maybe for now,” he said tentatively, “new suit?”
GARRISON
There was a swinging gate made of cavalry lances down at the end of the long treed lane that led to Briony’s house, and every weekday at around four in the afternoon a square red, blue, and white van would pull up to the gate and place the daily mail in the large brass cartridge box that Briony’s grandfather had set out as a mailbox.
This day was no different. The truck ground its way up the gravel path and lurched to a stop and a gangly kid, wearing the uniform of the United States Postal Service about as badly as it could be worn, stuffed a large sheaf of letters bound with a blue rubber band in the box. As he had each day since he had arrived, Duhamel resisted the temptation to wander down and look at the mail, under the pretext of saving her the walk. It wasn’t necessary. When the letter he was waiting for arrived, he would know. In the meantime, he played his part in their quiet country life, doing much of the cooking and all of the shopping in the absence of her housekeeper. It was a principle of his that a houseguest should always make life easier by his presence until his time came to . . . become more clear.
Each day at noon, Briony would emerge from the gatehouse, where she kept her “office.” She would work a solid five hours without a break, during which time, she had tactfully informed him, she would rather be left alone to do her “annotating,” part of a much larger work undertaken by the academy—she never called it West Point—that would one day become a six-volume tactical history of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899 and the years of guerrilla insurgency that followed it.
Dry old stuff, she said with a smile, but worth doing well.
Each morning, she would emerge after work and wander around the house and the grounds until she found Duhamel. Usually, she would come upon him taking pictures: views of the Hudson, panoramas of the blue mountains in the far distance, detailed studies of the way a knotted burl of tree bark had slowly, over a hundred years, worked its way into, around, and through a section of wrought-iron fence.
Briony liked the young man’s intense and solemn dedication to this work and often stood a little distance away so she could watch him without disturbing him. She had a great affection for him. Their fires were still burning, although now they were more warming than searing, and although she was something of a solitary type she was enjoying this transient period of domestic calm.
She was under no illusions that they would still be together in the spring, although she found that life with this strange man had a kind of taut stillness to it, a kind of meditative calm, which seemed to come from someplace inside the essentially unknowable recesses of his soul. He was smart, funny, well read, loving, gentle, inventively sensual, and a closed book to her.
That was part of his appeal. She was old enough to appreciate that it is not in “the bright arrival planned, but in the dreams men dream along the way, they find the Golden Road to Samarkand.” In other words, with men the journey is always better than the arrival.
Today, the weather was sharp and cold, and the light so clear that the bare black branches of the oaks looked etched into the crystal blue sky. Ice had formed in long, gliding, spear-shaped islands on the broad brown back of the river bend, and in the evergreen trees along the far shore a murder of crows had taken up residence, their harsh cries ringing faintly in the air. Duhamel had taken to lighting a fire in the great room every day at noon, and a white plume of smoke was curling from the chimney, its scent drifting across the lawn, biting and spicy. Duhamel, kneeling in the dry grass, focusing in tight on a piece of birch bark, looked up at her as she crossed the lawn and came to him, his dark face breaking into a delighted smile, as he always did when they met at the end of her day.

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