The Venetian Judgment (19 page)

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Authors: David Stone

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“ ‘Home is the hunter’ . . . ?”

“ ‘Home from the hills,’ ” she said, finishing their little exchange. “Care for a drink? I’m utterly parched.”

He got up and took her arm in his.

“I took the liberty of opening one of your Montrachets. I hope you don’t mind.”

It intrigued Briony that Duhamel’s oddly ambiguous French-Montenegrin accent had slowly diminished and now he spoke colloquial American with only a slight trace of something foreign in it. He was rather like a chameleon, she thought, a very charming chameleon.

“Lovely. What year?”

“I think it was an ’eighty-five.”

“Before you were born, then?”

Duhamel smiled but did not rise to the taunt. They made their way around the house, and he waited at the front door while Briony walked down the drive to get the day’s mail. Each day when she did this, a shiver of anticipation, vivid and sexual, would begin to burn inside him.
Perhaps today,
he thought to himself, lighting a cigarette, one of Briony’s menthols, long and slender and tart, like the woman herself.
Perhaps today.

In a few minutes, she was back, carrying the sheaf of letters bound with its blue rubber band, smiling so openly at him as she came up the stone steps, her silver hair shining, her eyes bright, lips and nails as red as taillight glass, so magnificent in brown leather boots and tight jeans and a vivid red fox coat in all the tones of autumn that he felt a strange sense of gratitude to whatever pagan god that made him that, no matter how beautiful it might be, he was born without the weaknesses that forced other people to care about any living thing.

She got to the top of the stairs, already leafing through the mail, and he led her through the open door and down to the long granite bar in the kitchen, where he had already set out the Montrachet and two glasses. She sat down at one of the tall barstools and spread the mail out in a fan, chattering away at him about something or other. He found it hard to listen attentively because there was a letter in the pile that had the kind of look he had been told to expect.

She glanced at it as she accepted a glass of wine, they touched glasses together gently, savoring the ethereal
ping
of the crystal, and then, as she always did, she began to go through the mail, her head down, her bell of silvery hair shining in the downlight, her fine long-fingered hands moving gracefully as she slit each envelope open with an old K-Bar knife that had the letters USMC etched into its blade.

“Bills . . . bills . . . Here’s one from Tally . . . You remember her? . . . She’s asking if I ever heard from you after the reunion . . . I’ll say no . . . Should I say no? . . . Yes, I should say no . . .”

“Perhaps we could send her a picture?”

“Jules! Don’t even think about it. You’re a . . . degenerate.”

“Am I?”

“Absolutely. And may you never change. What’s this . . . ?”

She picked up a letter—blue, with a London postmark, the address done in a spidery handwriting in turquoise ink—stopped, held it in her hands for a time without looking up. A stillness came over her, and she seemed to have stopped breathing. Duhamel put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him.

“It’s a letter . . . from an old friend.”

“You do not want to open it?”

She looked back at the letter in her hands, hesitated, and then opened it gently without using the knife. There was a fine linen card inside, which she pulled out and opened. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a couple standing in front of a fireplace, the man very tall and slender and elegant in the mess kit of an officer in the Blues and Royals, a legendary British cavalry regiment, and, on his arm, a chic woman with fine features, wearing a formal gown, her hair in a Veronica Lake fall, lovely, soft eyes, but a firm, ripe mouth and a set to her features that suggested determination and force.

“How regal,” said Duhamel, looking at the photo. “Who are they?”

Briony said nothing for a time, her silence filled with some strong emotion. She opened the card, and in the same spidery script, copperplate but weak and thready, was the greeting:

Dearest Briony,
Thinking of you as always this Christmas.
My very best to Morgan and to Cassie as well.
All my love, Mildred

After a long silence, Briony spoke, her voice a strained whisper.

“This is from my friend Millie Durant. She . . . died . . . a few days ago . . . just before Christmas.”

“She was an old friend?”

“Very . . . A truly lovely woman.”

“I’m very sorry, Briony,” he said, touching her hair, caressing it, seeing in his mind the last few minutes of Mildred Durant’s life. It hit him with a shock that if he had been a little less careful, he might have sent Briony some of those very same shots, taken as Mildred approached her ultimate boundaries.

He was aware that he was becoming aroused at the memory of that exquisite afternoon in Mildred’s eccentric little flat on Bywater Street in Chelsea. The sound of the traffic on King’s Road had been a muted whisper in that solid old building. She had a copy of this very same picture on the night table beside her bed.

Duhamel had a clear memory of drops of her blood running down the picture’s glass like the rain that had been running down the ancient leaded-glass windows in her front room. The flat had smelled of a coal fire, fresh flowers, old-fashioned floral perfume, and burned toast. At the end, she had lashed out at him, but he caught her hand.

“Are you all right, Jules? You look . . . odd.”

He gathered himself.

“I’m sorry. The photo on the front reminded me of my parents.”

“Your parents? Yes, you never talk about them, do you? And you never talk about yourself at all.”

“Really? I suppose I bore myself. I know all my stories and none of them are very clever. This letter is from London. Did she live there?”

“Not until the last years. She was from Maryland, actually. Worked as a”—Briony caught herself, tried to cover it—“clerk, I think. Some kind of war work, I guess. In those days, everyone was doing war work.”

“How did you come to meet?”

She recruited me
was on the tip of her tongue.

“She was an alumna. At Bryn Mawr. She sat on the board of re-gents. For a while, I was her liaison with the student assembly. She took a liking to me, I guess . . . After I graduated, she sort of took me on as project. I was a little wild—”

“Briony, not
you
?”

“And she found a way for me to put that to use.”

“As a librarian, Briony?” said Duhamel, teasingly, but she did not rise to the taunt. A darkness had settled on her, and she seemed to be almost completely closed to him. He let her drift, sipping the wine.

Darkness had come down outside as well, and a wind had risen up off the river valley, bringing a fine, cutting snow from the mountains in the west. The old house ticked and groaned like a ship settling into a long voyage. The rest of the house was dark and sunk in the gloom of a northern winter afternoon, except for the dying flicker of the wood fire in the great room.

After a time spent in what must have been a very sad place—he could only guess, from the expression on her face and the way she suddenly looked her age in the half-light coming from the halogens overhead, dark shadows where her eyes should be, her cheeks lined—she finally shook herself and set the letter aside, picking up a long business-style envelope, heavy navy blue paper with little flecks of gold in it, obviously expensive, no return address, and sent, according to the stamps, from Crete.

Duhamel felt his chest begin to tighten as Briony turned it in the light, studying it. It was perfectly flat and had no distinguishing marks. The handwriting, in black ink, was coarse and heavy.

Mrs. B. Keating
15000 Bear Mountain Beacon Hwy.
Garrison, New York
USA 10524

“From Crete?” asked Duhamel, keeping his voice steady.

“It was franked there, anyway,” said Briony, thinking that NAS Souda was a lot closer to Crete than Garrison was. This letter could be from Morgan, although the writing was in no way like his.

“You don’t know the handwriting?” he asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you going to open it?”

She didn’t answer. Unmarked envelopes from foreign places with unrecognizable handwriting and no return address triggered her professional caution, especially in light of what had happened to Millie Durant in London. She set it down on the counter, walked over to the kitchen drawer, and, to Duhamel’s surprise, took out a small digital camera, came back over, and took several shots of the envelope, front and back, turning it each time not with her hand but with the blade of the K-Bar knife. Duhamel, watching her, realized she might not be as easy to deal with as Mildred Durant had been.

“You are nervous . . . about this letter?”

She smiled, waved it away as nothing, but continued dealing with the envelope as if it might contain an explosive.

“The Unabomber, I guess,” she said by way of explanation, which for Duhamel explained nothing. Still, he nodded, looked grave.

“Do you want me to open it for you?”

She looked at him, frowning, laughed shortly, and handed him the knife. “Yes, you open it. If it blows your hand off, I’ll have film.”

She was smiling but serious. Using the tip of the blade, she edged the envelope across the countertop toward him and stepped back a few paces.

“What if I am killed?” he asked, smiling at her.

“I’ll have my favorite bits pickled and bury the rest of you in the garden. You did love the view across the river. Go on.”

She raised the digital camera, pressed MPEG, and waited.

“You are not a good person,” said Duhamel, still smiling.

“You should hear what my ex-husband thinks.”

Duhamel took a fork out of the silverware drawer, pinned the envelope to the counter with it, and carefully inserted the sharp tip of the K-Bar into the narrow opening at the end of the flap, thinking
Anton, have you decided to punish me for what I did in London?
, which was not out of the question. He had, as he liked to think of it, exceeded his mandate somewhat.

He slipped the blade in and slowly drew it along the edge of the envelope. Nothing happened—no flash of white light, no rising cloud of white powder—nothing at all.

Sighing a little, he used the knife and the fork to tip the envelope up. A blank rectangle of white paper the size and shape of a business card slipped out onto the granite. Taped to the middle of the card was a small black plastic square, very thin. Along one edge of the square ran a row of tiny gold bars. It was a memory chip, with no maker’s mark of any kind.

Briony kept the digital camera focused on him as he slipped the tip of the K-Bar under the chip, carefully pried it up, and held it out to the camera on the end of the knife. She clicked the button, then stopped filming and stepped in closer.

“It’s a memory chip,” he said, keeping his voice level.

“So it is,” said Briony. “What do we do with it?”

“I have my laptop. It has a reader.”

“What if the chip is full of viruses?”

“You didn’t worry about that when I put my chip in your reader.”

She looked at him, laughed, and let her breath out in a rush.

“Well, yours was a much bigger chip. Okay, let’s go stick this in your machine and see what happens.”

Duhamel’s machine was in the great room, next to a large leather wingback chair that had become his by default. It was next to the fire, beneath a lovely old Art Nouveau lamp that Duhamel, with his thief ’s eye, had pegged as an original Gallé.

They flipped his laptop open, inserted the chip in the card-reader slot, and waited for the program to open it up. A few seconds later, the screen went black and then dark blue, and they were looking at a single string of numbers in red and a cursor icon blinking beside it.

408 508 091

Briony stared at the numbers in silence, her expression closed and wary. Duhamel watched her for a while.

“Well,” he said, “I have no idea. Is it a password?”

“No,” said Briony with a chill, “it isn’t.”

“What is it, then?”

She was quiet for a while longer.

“Maybe I should take this into my office.”

She was talking more to herself than to him.

“Why? How does that help?”

She looked at him steadily, working it through.

“Jules . . . I don’t know what . . . to do with you.”