The Venetian Judgment (42 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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“Yes, all right, I submit.”
His eyes widened and he grinned ferociously at her.
“Then you are under my protective arrest. Now we go, yes?”
Nikki looked back at Gul then, saw latent malice, and much worse.
“Now we go, yes.”
“And while we go, Nikki, we talk, yes? About films, and the stealing of boats and helicopters?”
“I can’t tell you everything.”
“No,” he said, turning her with a gentle hand on her shoulder, heading toward the elevator at a quick trot, “but you will tell me enough for me to keep my job, yes?”
The doors of the elevator were sliding shut, slicing off the black glare of Melik Gul. It was full of a soft light, and music was coming from a speaker overhead, something snaky and sinuous, with drums and cymbals under a melody carried by a silvery clarinet.
The floor quickly dropped away under her feet, as she stood looking across at Captain Sofouli, who was smiling at her with a certain possessive air. Nikki realized she was suddenly feeling quite unsteady.
KERCH
THE
SUBITO
When it became light, Dalton backed the
Subito
off the
Shark
’s wake, slowing down, until the
Shark
was just a notch on the horizon. Although the day began clear, the sea remained blue-black, stretching out all around them, the surface almost mirrorlike, brushed here and there by the feather touch of light winds that ruffled the surface as they passed over it.
Dalton locked the ship’s throttles when the red blip of the
Shark
steadied at six miles out, the limit of their radar unless they extended the retractable radar mast, which would likely draw the attention of the man driving the trawler.
There they stayed, as the miles slipped by the cutwater, and the day grew older and the light changed from clear to a sullen yellow haze, the stink of steel mills and coal plants drifting from the Russian coast, now coming in closer with every mile, a barren landscape of rock and bony bare hills matted with dirty scrub grass.
Sometime after midday, Levka had noticed a rainbow swirling in the black water as the light increased, pointing it out to Dalton as they cruised north. It seemed to be trailing out directly in the wake of the
Shark
.
“Look like gasoline, boss. Maybe you hit her fuel line?”
Dalton remembered punching a few large holes in the trawler’s stern in that firefight back in Sariyer. Maybe Levka was right, although they were running just a little outside one of the busiest ship channels in Eastern Europe, and perhaps the filthiest. The debris on the surface did not bear close inspection and the hull of the
Subito
was streaked with oily slime.
As the light changed and the evening drew on, they saw that they were now part of a gathering flotilla of ships, all bearing down on the narrow funnel-like passage of Kerch—from an old Slav word for
throat
—a narrow, meandering strait that snaked up between low hills and rolling grasslands. To the west was the Ukraine, now independent, and, to the east, Russia, a growing threat.
Beyond the Kerch Strait lay the shallow, heavily polluted Sea of Azov, bordered on the west by the Ukrainian shoreline—low barrier islands and sand dunes, the largest being the Arrow of Arabat, and on the east by the long, jagged Russian shoreline with a shallow bay cutting inward to the city of Azov.
Unlike Istanbul and the Bosphorus, there was no trace of fable and romance in the Kerch Strait. The land was low and sullen and treeless, and over it hung the grimy miasma of coal smoke and industrial pollution. The water under the hull was filthy and black and streaked with yellow foam, studded with garbage from the tankers and freighters closing in all around them, and the dank sea air reeked of dumped bilgewater and raw sewage leaking from or deliberately pumped out of rusted-out keels.
The groan and rumble and mutter of heavy shipping was all around them now, as if they were traveling north with a herd of elephants—massive tankers rumbling into view, freighters with angular cranes sticking up like gibbets, stumpy containerships riding dangerously low in the dirty water—all coming in, closing up into a packed mass, heading for the mouth of the strait.
Dalton picked a careful way through the shipping lanes, keeping the black notch of the trawler fixed in the bowsprit of the
Subito
as if he were aiming a pistol at a target. To his right, on the starboard side, an oil tanker flying a Liberian flag, her sides streaked with rust and grime, boomed massively close, as a row of bored Muslim sailors stared down at the
Subito,
her clean lines and gleaming brass as out of place here as a stiletto in a toolbox.
In a while, they could see on the far western horizon a single black pillar, set out on a sloping headland. Levka, shading his eyes from the sideways slant of the pale match-head sun, pointed it out.
“That is Obelisk of Glory, on Mithridate Hill. Kerch is there.”
Mandy was standing at the navigator’s station, studying a chart of Kerch Harbor.
“There’s a customs house, by this central mole here”—she touched the tip of a pencil to an image of a long rectangular dock reaching out into the sickle-shaped harbor. “We can dock there. Levka can show our papers—”
“We have
papers
?” said Levka.
“Yes. While I was at the Sumahan, I had the concierge fax our passports and the boat registry to Kerch—”
“The boat registry?” asked Dalton. She gave him a look.
“You can do a lot with Microsoft Office and a color printer,” said Mandy. “What? Did you think I spent my whole morning rolling about in the bubbles with that—”
“No, I didn’t,” said Dalton, interrupting her. “Great work.”
Levka looked dubious.
“You think will pass for customs at Kerch? Ukrainians very tricksy about Russians coming across the channel. Pricky—”
“
Prickly,
do you mean?” put in Mandy.
“Prickly, yes.”
“What’s the fee,” asked Dalton, “for docking at Kerch?”
Levka considered this.
“One American dollar, about six hryvnia . . . Maybe two hundred hryvnia.”
“What happens if we offer a thousand?”
“In American dollars or hryvnia?”
“U.S. dollars.”
Levka’s worried look went away.
“I think then all will be okeydokey, boss.”
Mandy was looking at Dalton, who was staring out to sea, watching the shoreline of Kerch slowly filling up the western horizon.
“I’ve been thinking, Micah, about that film . . .”
Dalton glanced over at Levka, who blinked back, open and innocent, slightly confused. Mandy followed his look, shrugged.
“In for a penny. Levka, I want to show you something.”
“Okeydokey, Miss Boss,” he said, coming over to the multifunction screen to stand next to Mandy.
She noticed that since he had come into their service he was taking much better care of himself. She had bought him some clothes at the Sumahan: slacks, jeans, boat shoes, some sweaters, socks and underwear, a big yellow squall jacket, even a pair of Prada sunglasses.
He was also showered and shaved, and he smelled of soap and cigarettes. He looked years younger, and seemed to have filled out a bit as well, looking less vulpine and now more like a well-fed black Lab.
Mandy slipped the MPEG in, hit PLAY.
Levka watched for a moment, and then his face went a little pale.
“That’s him. Peter. S
iva Čovjek
. The Gray Man.”
“We thought it might be,” said Mandy. “Listen to what he says in a moment . . . something about a clinic . . . Here it comes.”
They reached the part where the fat man was speaking about the target, whoever she was. Levka was watching the screen, his face rapt.
“Of course you will be
with
her. You read the personality analysis
,
the psychologists in Marksa Plaz confirmed this
,
you saw the films—her husband’s betrayal hurt her deeply
. S
he is a
physical
creature
.
Her husband said she was
insatiable
.”
Mandy reached out, shut the MPEG off.
“Did any of that mean anything to you, Dobri?” she asked.
Levka said nothing for a time. She could see the agile mind working under the mop of black hair, behind the soft-brown eyes, the pale cheeks. He was a soldier of fortune, she knew, but it was a risk worth taking.
So far, he had been true and straight, tracking the
Shark
even while she had slept the night away . . . sadly, quite alone.
“Only this name,” he said after a while, “Marksa Plaz.”
“Marksa Plaz,” she said, leaning in a little, “what does it mean?”
“There is street in Kerch, called Karla Marksa Plaz—Karl Marx Place—there is
. . . Big clinic, big hospital for teaching students to be doctors. Also is . . . crazy place? Like big hotel only with bars.”
“A lunatic asylum?”
Levka nodded vigorously.
“Yes, lunatic asylum. One time, Uncle Gavel and me, we go to throw stones at bars, makes people all go crazy inside. Good fun.”
Levka seemed to catch the shift in her mood, looked a little ashamed of himself for a fleeting second, then brightened.
“Oh, but we both big rolling drunk at time. Meaning no harm, eh?”
Dalton, at the helm, stiffened, checked the radar screen
“They’ve stopped,” he said. “The
Shark.
It’s dead in the water.”
 
 
 
THEY WERE WITHIN
a hundred yards of the
Shark
in thirty minutes.
It was wallowing in the swell, tossing in the wake of a huge tanker that had skimmed past her, a canyon wall of steel racing by at thirty knots, her props as big as windmills, the tormented sea at her towering stern a boiling cauldron.
Twilight was coming down fast, a cloak of indigo settling down on the brown slopes and the black water, lights winking on all along the Ukrainian shore, and the gathering glitter of thirty or forty ships closing in on the narrow strait. A single gull soared high overhead, calling and crying. The huge old trawler was bobbing in the wake and drifting rudderless, awash, pitching crazily over the swells. Two men in greasy knit sweaters and rubber overalls were visible, one standing on the bow with a checkered distress flag, the other—older, grizzled, with a white beard and small blue eyes narrowed in the sidelong light—in the stern, staring out at the
Subito,
as Mandy brought her within hailing distance.
Dalton stood just inside the pilothouse door, the oversized shotgun in his hands, his eyes fixed on the old man in the stern.
When they were within a hundred feet, Mandy backed the engines and brought the
Subito
to a standstill, her wake rolling outward, waves lapping at the mud-stained hull of the fishing trawler.
The name on the stern—
—was almost completely obscured by a coating of fish scales and mold and fuel oil, but the holes Dalton had blown into the stern boards, four of them in a ragged line a few inches above the water, were clearly visible. Patched, badly, but visible.

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