The Venetian Judgment (6 page)

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Authors: David Stone

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“
Micah, che cosa fai? Tu sei pazzo!
Use the door, like a gentleman!”
The voice belonged to Alessio Brancati, the Carabinieri major. As expected. The next time Dalton saw Porter Naumann’s ghost,
he
was going to be the one getting all ectoplasmic on somebody’s sorry ass. Dalton, feeling like a complete mook, slipped over the edge and dropped softly onto the balcony, ripping some of the fresh stitches in his side as he landed.
Straightening, trying not to wince, he saw Brancati sitting in one of the leather wingbacks in front of the fire, his feet on the hearth fender, the firelight playing on the shiny black leather of his riding boots and on the thin red stripe running up the leg of his navy blue riding breeches. His white shirt was unbuttoned, his uniform tunic and black Sam Browne draped over one wing of the chair. He had a cigar in one hand and a flute of Dalton’s Bollinger in the other, his seamed and rough-cut face cracked in a broad, toothy grin under his salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache.
Brancati, in his mid-fifties, had deep-brown eyes and a ready smile and the general air of a man who was willing to be favorably impressed. He was also a hardhanded and ruthless soldier-cop who had recently designed and executed, with an assist from Dalton, a wildly illegal and entirely covert Carabinieri war against a Serbian gang that had left their leadership dead and their few remaining foot soldiers lining up for anxiety therapy in exotic Third World hellholes with neither indoor toilets nor an extradition treaty with Italy. Brancati had, for reasons buried in their joint past as soldiers and spies, made Dalton’s survival a matter of personal interest.
He stood as Dalton came into the light, still holding the Dan Wesson at his side. When he got a better look at Dalton by the light of the wood fire, his expression changed, and all his jovial humor fled in a flash of sudden anger.
“
Bocca al lupo!
Issadore said you were not badly hurt.”
Dalton put the revolver down on a small side table and sat down in the other wing chair, leaning back into it with a long, uneven sigh.
“They patched me up. I’ll do, Alessio. I’ll do. I could use a drink.”
Brancati shook himself out of his shock and stepped across to the granite-topped bar that filled one side of the main room, tugging the Bollinger out of an ice-filled silver bucket and carefully filling one of the tall crystal flutes to the brim. He brought it over to Dalton like a man carrying nitro, put it into Dalton’s slightly unsteady hand, and stood over him while Dalton put the flute to his lips, his powerful arms folded across his chest.
“So,” he said, with grim emphasis, after Dalton had drained half the flute, “now our private war is
finito
, yes? No more of ”—he lifted his arms, taking in the room, the city, the
situation,
in one encompassing Italian
abracco
—“your personal
vendette
?”
Dalton sat forward, eased off his tattered blue topcoat, and sat back again. His turtleneck had been sliced open where Zorin’s blade had reached him, and fresh white bandages showed through the rent. His face was bandaged and taped. He could feel the stitches in it when he drank, and his entire left cheek from jawline to temple was turning into a Mark Rothko tone poem in bloody blues, smoky blacks, and lurid purples. He was looking forward to a hot bath and a deep, dreamless sleep.
“How did Galan get onto it? I thought I was flying under his radar.”
Brancati delivered himself of a kind of eloquent snorting huff and went back to his wingback, poking an iron into the fire with some suppressed anger. The fire flared up and made a gargoyle of his fine Italian profile.
“Galan’s radar is impossible to get under. He knows more about me than my wife and daughters. Sometimes I think he knows too much of everything. If he was ever turned—”
“Not him, Alessio. Not ever. He has no . . . handles.”
Still staring into the fire, Brancati said “Seriously, Micah. This thing tonight, it
cannot
ever happen again. The Prefect must be . . . handled. I cannot handle him if you cannot handle . . . you.
Capisce?
”
“I know that, Alessio. And I apologize for . . . the inconvenience.”
“Hah,” he said, with a wry grin. “Five dead men is to you an
inconvenience
? Anyway, it is done. Over. Now we have . . .”
His face set again, the smile fleeting and gone.
“. . . I think, Micah, you will have to leave Venice. For a time, anyway.”
“Yes. I know that too. Galan explained . . . the situation. He also said something about events? Developments? That you would explain?”
Brancati stopped churning up the flames, sat back and let the fire glow and the champagne ease him into a better humor. He glanced across at Dalton, a sidelong look.
“In a moment. You are . . . in a better place . . . now?”
Dalton caught all the levels in the question and gave the matter some careful thought. Brancati had a right to the truth.
“Actually, yes. I think so. Makes no sense, but there it is.” Brancati nodded, as if his instincts had been confirmed.
“I too find this. There is always this . . . tranquillity? After action, yes?”
“Maybe. I ran into Porter Naumann, on the way back.”
Brancati’s expression remained carefully neutral. He and Dalton had met during the major’s investigation of Porter Naumann’s death, which had caused something of a sensation in the superstitious population of Cortona. There had been some talk of a walking demon in a red skin, and one of the elder citizens, a chapel verger, had claimed to have seen Porter Naumann’s ghost standing on the Via Santa Margherita, near the Piazza Garibaldi, every evening for a full year before the murder actually occurred. The tale was regularly recounted around the
bacari,
growing more lurid with each telling.
“You are still . . . seeing him?”
“Now and then.”
“And he is . . . the same?”
“Since you saw him? God no. He’s got himself all put back together. You’d like him. He makes the
bella figura
—”
“
Si, per un cancrenato!
I was hoping this
cancrenato
would go away.”
“He will.”
“Grazie a Dio,”
said Brancati, more as a prayer than a belief. It was always possible that this volatile young American was insane, but for Brancati, who knew the man’s whole story, a barrier of mild insanity was a sensible response to the experiences he had lived through.
“Micah, about leaving Venice . . .”
“Yes. These . . . events? Galan said you would explain?”
“Not yet. In a moment. No, I was thinking of Cora.”
“Then stop. There’s nothing left to do. Her people have her—”
“I know. Hidden away in Capri. But she is no
fanciulla
. She’s older than you are, a grown woman, and a professor at the university in Florence—”
“Psicologia.”
“Yes. And also a witness involved in the trial of the man who shot her.”
“Radko’s still alive?”
“Yes. For the most part.”
Radko Borins had, in his attempt to kill Cora Vasari in the courtyard of the Uffizi, also managed to kill two of Brancati’s men assigned to her protection detail. Radko Borins had the bad luck to be taken alive by a man whose ancestors once controlled the prison next to the Palazzo Ducale. They had walked many men across the covered Bridge of Sighs who had never been seen again by their loved ones. Radko Borins had been made to suffer.
“How does that affect Cora?”
“I could have her . . . what is the word?
Summoned?
”
“Issue a
subpoena,
you mean. Force her family to deliver her?”
“Yes. She is almost recovered now. She would want to see you.”
Brancati spoke with less than total conviction, since there was no way of knowing what Cora was actually thinking, but, in the absence of a reply in any other form, her silence was eloquent. And reasonable. Her connection with Dalton had nearly killed her. Twice.
“No,” said Dalton after a time, “let it go. She’s safer that way.”
“Can you? Let her go?”
“I already have.”
Neither man called the lie. What was the point?
They sat in silence for a while, watching the fire burn down.
Brancati sighed, leaned forward, set his flute on the hearth fender, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a small, rectangular black lacquer box, about eight inches long, intricately inlaid with pale green jade and tied with red silk ribbon. He handed it to Dalton.
“This was found sitting on my desk last Monday morning—”
“On
your
desk?” said Dalton, turning the box. Shimmers of amber light rippled along its sides.
“Yes,” said Brancati, clearly upset. His office was on the top floor of the Arsenal, deep in the heart of Italy’s military and
spionaggio
establishment—in these years of terror war, a difficult place to reach.
“Last Monday, you said? That was three days ago.”
“Yes. It took a while for us to figure out that it was meant for you.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Do you not recognize it? It used to have a cigarette holder in it.”
Dalton held it in his hand, thinking. Then it came to him.
“Mandy Pownall. She’s an aide at Burke and Single. In London. She’s Agency. You’ve met her. I was with her in Singapore, when she got this. As a gift from an SID agent named Sergeant Ong Bo. The cigarette holder inside it was a trap. They tried to say it was drug paraphernalia.”
Brancati nodded.
“I remember you telling us the story. Galan looked for tobacco residue in the liner, just to confirm. It is there. There could not be two such as this. And besides, we do not believe in coincidences, do we?”
“How did it get there?”
Brancati made a face, raised his hands.
“When I find out, someone will be unhappy. Open it.”
Dalton popped the catch. Inside, nesting in a lining of old emerald green silk, was a long, slender stainless-steel hand tool with a rubber handgrip at one end and a small sharp disk of some dark material at the other, held in place by a tiny axle.
He picked it up, hefted it carefully, his heart shifting beats.
“Do you know what that is?” asked Brancati.
“Yes,” said Dalton, the skin along his neck and shoulders tightening and his face becoming hard and set. “It’s a glass cutter.”
“There is a maker’s mark on the underside. Do you see it?”
Dalton held it up to the fire, saw the letters H&R stamped on the shaft.
“And does a glass cutter with these markings mean something to you?
“Yes,” said Dalton, already miles away, seeing the rabbit hole opening up under his feet, a blue vein beginning to throb at his temple, “it does.”
SAVANNAH
THE MANSION ON FORSYTH
On a misty but luminous sunlit December afternoon in Savannah, at around the same time that Dalton and Brancati were contemplating a glass-cutting tool by the dying light of a cedarwood fire, a woman named Briony Keating was introduced to a tanned and muscular young man with short blue-black hair, prematurely gray at the temples, and a general air of contained aggression that brought the word
duelist
to mind. The young man had a fine-boned, hawkish face, with wide-set and direct topaz-brown eyes.
This introduction took place in the muted elegance of the Lobby Bar in the Mansion on Forsyth, across the street from the famous park where the Old South had once cadence-drilled the flower of her doomed youth. The man radiated intelligence and sly wit, and had a charming if rather predatory smile. Briony Keating, who, at the age of sixty-two, was a seasoned and cynical judge of men, felt his wolfish smile as a kind of warming glow in her lower belly. Aware of a rising heartbeat and a certain shortness of breath, she decided that while his navy blue pinstripe could be Hugo Boss and his flawless white shirt might be from Pink’s, his morals were straight off the Serengeti.
He didn’t feel gay to her, and she had wonderful antennae for nuances of sexual identity, but she could not rule it out completely, at least not without further investigation. His name, according to Briony Keating’s friend, a Bryn Mawr classmate named Thalia Bowering, was Jules Duhamel.
When introduced, sensing a kind of subtle arrogance in him, Briony considered the young man coolly for a long moment without response, allowing the silence to last just enough to create a certain uneasy tension.
The noisy chatter of the women all around pressed in, the
ping-ping-ting
of ice tinkling in cut-crystal glasses, the boy at the piano leaning over the keys with his limp blond hair in his eyes and his pale face set as he worked his way through the “Moonlight Sonata” . . . at last, Briony Keating offered her hand, which Mr. Jules Duhamel took gently in a strong but brief grip, bowing slightly as he did so. His skin felt smooth and warm and dry, and made her think of a stallion’s neck. He spoke with a slight accent, not French, someplace much farther east than that . . . Slovenian? Montenegrin?

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