The Venetian Judgment (31 page)

Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment

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Covering the slopes in between, like tumbled clay bricks, were miles and miles of tightly compressed houses and flats and shops, pressed into every nook, and all crammed tight together under the palms and fig trees, then pinned in place by the black hairnet tangle of overhead power lines.

If not for the spearheads of the sultan’s towers and the needle-sharp minarets that pierced the skyline everywhere you looked, and the romantic veil of coal smoke and sea fog that lay over it all as the day ended, Istanbul might have been any one of a hundred overcrowded Third World hellholes like Kowloon or Port Said or Valparaiso.

Levka, at the helm of the
Subito,
was enjoying the kaleidoscopic panoramas of Istanbul immensely, sitting at ease inside the lemon-oil-scented cabin. With all this shimmering mahogany and highly polished brass, the cabin reminded him of the mandolin his mother used to play for him back in Legrad.

If he were a man given to reflection, which he was not, he might have stopped to ponder the capricious currents of life that could take you in just twenty-four hours from the brink of a grubby little death, in pee-soaked pants on a hotel balcony in Santorini, to sitting here with a glass of tea in one hand and the wheel of a million-euro yacht in the other.

Although for Dobri Levka life was sweet, for Kissmyass and his one surviving colleague, whom Levka had christened Numbnuts, life was considerably less so.

The third man, Vladimir Krikotas, according to the ID they found on his body, had succumbed to his severe cranial fracture and its consequent massive subdural hematoma, slipping into a stertorous coma and later being consigned, not quite dead, to the loving embrace of the Sea of Marmara, slipping quietly over the starboard side with a short quote from Dalton about “the sea giving up her dead” and the ship’s spare Danforth to see him quickly to the bottom of the bay.

Levka had, a while ago, tuned the radio in to a local station that specialized in a kind of “techno-arabesk” music, a sinuous North African threnody, accompanied by driving
djembe
drumming and the tinkling clash of finger cymbals. This music served two purposes: it nicely caught the exotic flavor of this contradictory town, part Asian hellhole and part hashish-induced illusion, and it helped drown out the sounds Levka was expecting shortly from the galley, where Dalton was about to begin what Levka, based on his brief but compelling experience with the man, was reasonably certain would be an aggressive and bloody interrogation.

Down in the galley, Dalton, fresh from his shower, shaved, and, wearing a navy blue V-neck sweater he had found in the closet off the forward stateroom that went very well with his navy pin-striped pants, had both men, trussed and naked, sitting side by side on a section of the plastic sheeting they had used to cover the
Subito
back at the Ataköy Marina.

Neither man looked very happy about this, but neither was saying much about it, Kissmyass because he was a snake-mean bastard and Numbnuts because he had a mouthful of bloody teeth.

Dalton, sipping carefully at his cup of steaming black coffee, had gone through all the items Levka had taken from the men and had learned a few useful things, starting with the fact that Kissmyass was not actually Kissmyass’s real name, although he would forever be Kissmyass to Micah Dalton. His real name was Anatoly Viktor Bakunin, and, according to his international driver’s license, he was born in Krasnodar, Russia, in 1962. His profession was listed as “shipping facilitator.”

He had a bank card issued by Credit Suisse, and a credit card from there, and five hundred odd in greasy euros. In his back pocket, Levka had found a wad of crumpled receipts from various bars and hotels in and around Aksaray, Istanbul’s red-light district, and one for a bar called the Double Eagle, in the Ukrainian port town of Kerch. The other man, the younger one, had an ID in the name of Vassily Kishmayev.

Kerch, Dalton recalled, was where Dobri Levka and his late uncle Gavel Kuldic had first been approached by the Gray Man. Therefore, Dalton surmised, being a highly trained CIA officer, that this receipt was a
clue
. To exactly what, he wasn’t sure.

He looked over at Kissmyass, who was watching Dalton go through his things with a level of adrenalized resentment so extreme that Dalton feared for the poor man’s endocrine system.

“Hey, Kissmyass, says here you were at a bar in Kerch on the nineteenth of December. Place called the Double Eagle. What were you doing there? I mean, aside from getting utterly gored on vodka gimlets?”

Kissmyass said something in Russian that cannot be accurately translated into English, Russian colloquialisms being a bountiful trove indeed for the dedicated cultural etymologist. Dalton, not being a dedicated cultural etymologist, stood up and dumped his entire cup of steaming hot coffee on Kissmyass’s genitalia, with gratifying results. Next to him, Numbnuts writhed away from the splatter, his brown eyes bugged out, and so much raw horror in his young face that Dalton actually felt a twinge of pity for him. Up in the pilothouse, Levka, wincing, turned the volume up another notch on his techno-arabesk.

Dalton walked back over to the stove, refilled his cup, sat down again, and looked over at his captives with a thoughtful expression on his rough-cut face, his lips thinned, a pale witch light in his almost colorless eyes.

“Know what I think, lads? I think I could spend all bloody day scalding your naughty bits and chopping off your extremities and all I’d get for my troubles would be a pair of perfectly good Allan Edmonds ruined and a galley covered in spit and spatter. You two are a pair of grunts, is what I think. I used to be a grunt, so I know whereof I speak. You’re muscle—not very good muscle—and taking you down was like me winning the hundred-yard dash at the Special Olympics. Not much of a challenge, is what I’m trying to say. Anyway, grunts you are and grunts you shall remain. Question is, what do I do with you? Do I dump you into the Bosphorus, wrapped in heavy chains, like your friend Vladimir? Or do I ask you, as officers and gentlemen, to hand over your sabers and retire from the field of honor, swearing sacred oaths to fight no more forever? It’s a quandary, isn’t it? Kissmyass, you following any of this?”

Silence from Kissmyass.

He and Numbnuts exchanged a look.

Finally, Numbnuts spoke, apparently for both of them.

“Fuck you, Yank. You do what you have to do.”

“So that’s it? Death and glory, and let’s hear it for Mother Russia?”

Both men shut their mouths, let their heads fall back against the cupboard, and closed their eyes. A little blood was running down Numbnuts’s cheek, and although Dalton had reset and bandaged Kissmyass’s fractured thumb, the fact remained that he was right now leaning back on it and it had to hurt like hell. They may not have been great contenders but they weren’t whiners, not by a long shot. Tough little buggers.

Dalton was quiet for a while, considering the two men sitting on the floor. Dalton did not know it, since he had never seen it, but he was wearing his killing face. Most of those who
had
seen it were dead. Mandy Pownall had glimpsed it only once and had never forgotten it. The simple truth was that Dalton was bone tired of killing second-stringers and hapless grunts.

But there was no way he could just . . . release them.

He stood up, looked down at the two men, and pulled out his Beretta. Hearing him move, they opened their eyes, went a little pale but said nothing.

Dalton checked out the backstop behind their heads, not wanting to blow a round into a fuel line or out through the hull. He decided to put the round straight down through the tops of their heads, let the center mass take the freight. He moved over to Kissmyass, put the muzzle hard up against the dome of his skull.

“Hold on there, buttercup—”

He spun around on a heel and saw Porter Naumann lounging on the leather couch across from the galley counter looking quite pleased with himself. He was wearing blue jeans, deck shoes without socks, and a shell-pink crewneck cashmere sweater. At least, it looked like cashmere.

“What the hell are you doing here?” said Dalton, ignoring the stares of the two men on the galley floor. This was understandable, since, from their perspective, he was talking to a couch.

Naumann shrugged, offered a lopsided grin.

“Didn’t I say I was going to run right along to the next time? Well, this
is
the next time. Got here just in time too.”

“Porter, I’m always delighted to see you, you know that—”

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying. I just wanted to chat for a bit.”

“You can see I’m sort of busy?”

Naumann leaned out and took a look at the men, shook his head.

“I see that. You planning to shoot them, are you?”

“I was toying with the idea.”

“But you’re not
happy
about it, are you?”

“All due respect, Porter, this is not the time for some of your half-baked postmortem psychoanalytical heebie-jeebies. How about we—”

“I just don’t think you should cap a guy if your heart isn’t in it.”

“You didn’t say that in Venice, and I’d just capped five guys.”

“Three. Zorin, you ripped his head off. And Galan popped Belajic.”

“Okay, three—”

“Remember what Zorin said while you were doing it?”

“No, I was a little distracted at the time, what with trying to not get killed and all.”

“He said,
‘Aspetta, Krokodil
. . .
per Dio
. . . A
spetta.’
”

“Okay, maybe he did.”

“That means ‘Wait, Crocodile . . . for God’s sake . . . Wait.’ He was begging you not to kill him.
Begging
. That didn’t
bother
you? A teensy?”

Dalton shook his head.

“Not at the time. If I lost that fight, was he gonna give
me
a break?”

Naumann shrugged, running a hand across the flat of his stomach, stroking the cashmere in an idle way.

“Maybe it didn’t bug you
then
. Seems to be bugging you
now
. If you were okay with it, you’d have lit up these mooks ten minutes ago—”

“These mooks a special case, are they? Massacre of the innocents? Calling for divine intervention?”

Naumann looked over at the men again, considering.

“Nah, I’ve read their files. They’re rotten rotters through and through. World is a better place, you cap them off. If they live through this, so I hear, they go on to perform pernicious prodigies of predaceous persiflage—”

“What the hell is ‘persiflage’?”

“Hey, I’m freewheeling here. Point is, instead of capping them off, you’re standing around blowing the gaff with a dead man. Think about it.”

“For chrissakes, Porter—”

Naumann lifted his hands, palms out, smiled gently at him.

“All I’m saying, Micah . . . All I’m saying is, it’s your call. See you.”

And he was gone. Dalton stood blinking at the couch for a while and then turned around and looked down at the prisoners, both of whom were staring up at him, their expressions a mixture of dread and puzzlement.

“How about you two? Anything to add?”

It seemed, from their continued silence, that they did not.

Dalton stared at them for a while, then tucked the Beretta away and left the galley. He found Levka up in the pilot cabin, listening to very loud music and staring fixedly out at the Bosphorus. They were within a half mile of the Bosphorus Bridge and even at that distance the air was full of the roar and rumble and clang of the traffic streaming across it. Levka sat up straighter, offered Dalton one of his own Sobranies.

Dalton took it, lit up, and stood for a moment watching the river traffic churning and chugging all around them, the tree-filled eastern shoreline gliding by on their starboard side, the little island with the Maiden’s Tower on it slipping sternward.

The
Subito
’s long, sleek bow rose and fell gracefully on the crosscutting chop. Sunlight sparkled on the blue water. Gulls and terns and herons and pelicans wheeled and shrieked in the chilly air. The stench and burn of diesel fuel thickened as they got closer to the smoky haze drifting down from the bridge deck.

“You hear from Mandy yet?” he asked.

“Yes, boss. She have house all ready. Maybe half mile up from Sumahan Hotel. Big white house with pillars all along the dock, she says. Red-tiled roof. Green awnings. She say we can’t miss it.”

“Got a boathouse big enough for this barge?”

“Boss, is no barge, is like swan. Best boat in whole world!”

“I apologize. Big enough, anyway?”

“Yes, sir, sixty feet. Has big electric door comes down.”

Dalton nodded, thinking about the two men down in the galley.

Levka seemed to follow his thoughts.

“So, what to do with Kissmyass and Numbnuts, yes?”