The Venetian Judgment Page 19

  “Aren’t you just the maddest, baddest dog in town. What’s your name?”

  “Kiss my ass,” he said in a guttural, Slavic snarl.

  “Really? All one word or do you hyphenate? Levka, did the other two have cells?”

  Levka shook his head.

  “No. Got two wallets and some money, also watches,” he said, holding up a wad of euros, two cheap leather cases, and what looked like a pair of Soviet-era military watches.

  “Then I’ll bet Kissmyass here has a phone. Search him.”

  Dalton stepped clear, keeping the muzzle of the Beretta trained on the man’s left eye while Levka did such a thorough hands-on search of his body that Dalton felt he ought to buy the guy flowers afterward.

  Levka came up with a wallet, some crumpled papers, stripped the guy’s watch off his wrist—like the other two, a black-faced Russian army timepiece with Cyrillic markings.

  Levka finished with a comprehensive grope around down in the guy’s shorts that Dalton wouldn’t have performed for an oatmeal cookie and a long, wet kiss from Charlotte Rampling. Levka’s face changed—No wonder, thought Dalton—and he came out with a tiny black flip phone.

  “Man, you should go boil your hands, Levka.”

  Levka gave him a queasy look, nodding.

  “Is that phone on?”

  Levka opened it.

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “See when he made the last call on it.”

  Levka thumbed a few tabs.

  “Minute and half, boss.”

  “How long was the call?”

  “Says seventeen seconds.”

  Top Kick’s face was getting a bit tight, but he still wasn’t talking.

  “You understand English?” asked Dalton.

  “Dah,” he said, making it sound like a goat coughing up a turnip.

  “Who’d you call?”

  Kissmyass bared his teeth. He had some periodontal issues.

  “Motherfucking Teresa.”

  “Levka, what number did he call?”

  “Ahh . . . two-one-two, two-eight-eight, eight-five-one-five.”

  “Find out who has that number.”

  “Okay, boss. Ahh, like . . . how?”

  “Call the operator. Tell her you are trying to reach your daughter, she called from that number, upset, got cut off, now you’re worried sick.”

  “I not that damned good in Turk talk, boss.”

  “Do your best.”

  Levka hit a number, put the phone to his ear, and moved back out onto the fantail deck. Dalton could hear him talking, a burst of rapid-fire chatter with a panicky edge, some silence, and then more chatter.

  Dalton and Kissmyass stared at each other all through this, each man deciding that he really did not like the other one and that maybe one day he could kill him. Levka was back in a couple of minutes, his face shining.

  “Got it. Beyoglu Trading. Dizayn Tower, on Masayak AyazagĞa.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Here, boss, in Istanbul. Europe side, across the Galata Bridge. Right next to Diamond of Istanbul.”

  “That pointy blue-glass thing in the north, looks like a skating trophy?”

  Levka worked it through, realized Dalton was right, and nodded.

  “Okay. Can you drive this boat?”

  Levka looked around, took it in.

  “Fancy-pantsy, but is still boat.”

  “Any pelicans out there on the mole?”

  “Pelicans? All over Istanbul, boss. Garbage birds.”

  “Okay. Does that cell have a GPS function?”

  Levka’s face went blank, and then bright red as he realized he hadn’t thought of that possibility. He studied the cell screen, found the little GPS icon and the + indicator beside it.

  He shot Kissmyass a look of injured reproach.

  “Yes, boss. Has fucking GPS turned on right now.”

  “Leave it on. Find some plastic wrap, seal the thing up tight, and toss it to a pelican. That might buy us some time. Then cast loose and get us rolling. I have a feeling Mother Teresa is on the way and she’s not coming in happy.”

  “What about this one?”

  “Kissmyass and I are going to get to know each other a little better.”

  “Bite me,” said Kissmyass.

  Dalton beamed down upon him like the newly risen Christ, only blond and not quite so loving, with a bullet scar on one cheek and no intention at all of turning the other.

  “Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

  GARRISON

  It was long after sunrise by the time they had exhausted each other. Briony lay beside him, her chest heaving, her eyes shining in the half-light of a cloud-veiled sun pouring in through the windows. She turned to him.

  “Jules, I have to open it.”

  “In the fullness of time, sweet. Let it wait.”

  She shook her head, sighed, and sat up, reaching for her robe. He rolled out of the bed and stood, looking down at her. In the normal course of his affairs, women were not his first choice, nor even his second, but she had been splendid, and now it was coming to an end. He felt the first electric stirrings of the more unusual aspects of his libido.

  “I’ll put some coffee on.”

  “No,” she said. “For this, I’ll need some champagne and orange juice.”

  They went down together. In the winter the old stone house was always dim, the leaded-glass casement windows and the trees blocking all but the setting sun in the evening. Duhamel turned on some lights and this time opened some champagne: it seemed right to celebrate the end of an affair and the beginning of a much more intimate understanding between them.

  He poured her a flute and set it beside her, enjoying the way the halogen light played with the bubbles in the glass, sending little fireflies darting over the countertop and hovering on her cheek. He didn’t bother with the orange juice, and she didn’t seem to care.

  She sipped the champagne, set it back down, looked up at him once, and then slipped the memory chip into the reader on the side of his laptop. It took a few minutes for the decryption program to unlock the MPEG on the chip. Since Briony suspected that the tape was very likely programmed to erase itself after one play, she also set up her digital camera on a tabletop tripod beside the screen, switching it to MPEG so she could at least have a record of the video. Duhamel, watching this, raised his appreciation of her skills another couple of notches. When the video finally started to run, Briony wished it had taken a week to load.

  Duhamel took a chair on the other side of the bar where he could not see the laptop screen. He felt that this would make Briony more comfortable. It didn’t matter to him. He had already seen the footage.

  He sipped at his champagne and watched Briony’s face change as the first few frames began to run. It was like watching a time-lapse documentary of a magnolia dying. He resisted the temptation to get his own camera and take a shot of the metamorphosis, sensing that Briony might find that a bit callous. There’d be time for the recording of metamorphoses later.

  He was a connoisseur of change. He had once read a monograph by a doctor who had been present at the execution of a prisoner in Paris who had been sentenced to the guillotine. The doctor had retrieved the severed head immediately after the falling blade sliced it from the body, placed it upright on a block, and sharply called out the man’s name. The eyes, at first unfocused, became much sharper, the pupils dilated, the eyeballs moved, and the doctor was completely convinced that the man was responding to his name. The doctor let a minute pass, during which the eyes slowly became unfocused again. He then called the man’s name, seeing the eyes sharpen, turn again to seek him out, and settle on him: the doctor knew that the man was looking at him, seeing him, was fully aware of him.

  Five minutes passed in this way, and then the light of this awareness drained away from the eyes, they glazed over, and the severed head responded to nothing after that.

  Duhamel had watched many people die what he sincerely hoped was an ex
cruciating death, but he had never tried this intriguing experiment with a severed head.

  It would be interesting, professionally, to sever a head from a victim, place it in a position so that the person could see her severed body, and then to take a film of the encounter, concentrating mainly on her eyes, zooming in very close to catch whatever was in there.

  Someday, perhaps. Maybe with this one. She has a strong mind and a very powerful life force. Compared to her, Mildred Durant had been a firefly, snuffed out after a dying flutter, her departure much too fast to really savor.

  But Briony Keating was of another order entirely. If anyone could stay alive through such an experiment, no matter how briefly, and then show him what she was going through, the realization of that ultimate horror that would be in her eyes as he leaned in close to inhale and become her final horror, it would be this splendid woman.

  He felt his blood rising up, his breathing changing, and he looked down at his glass to hide his eyes in case she looked across at him at that moment. If she did, she would see what he was.

  He was finding it hard to stay inside this Duhamel carcass. More and more, the need would intrude, the impatience, the tectonic-plate shifting he could feel deep inside, the building pressure to . . . surface, like a great white rising up from the deep.

  But he was a professional—and the men he was working for were at least as dangerous as he was, having been at this kind of thing longer than he had been on the planet—and he intended to survive this brief commission and go back to being wildly wealthy and free to move in the upper world.

  So he would wait a while longer. As Les Juifs used to say, the few of them who were left, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

  Watching Briony’s face, and to calm himself, he tried to imagine what Briony might be feeling, sitting there, watching her son making clumsy, handless love in a squalid hostel room across the bay from the Souda naval station. From the way her pupils had narrowed, she wasn’t at all happy. But she didn’t look away.

  A very powerful mind.

  Full of promise.

  ON HER SIDE of the screen, Briony Keating wasn’t really taking in what she was seeing. According to the buffer indicator, the MPEG had another ten minutes to run, so she contrived to unfocus enough to stay calm while she waited for what she feared was coming.

  She looked around the edges of the image, taking it all in, trying to get an idea where this was happening. It was clearly a surveillance film, taken by a hidden camera, from an angle someplace near the ceiling, in a corner of the room or perhaps behind a ventilation grille, in a position to see the whole sordid little room. The film had been taken in color, but the only light in the room was a yellow glow from a small lamp on a table by the bed, so the image quality was poor—grainy, blurred, indistinct—but clear enough that there could be no mistake about the identity of the two people tangled up in the sweaty sheets.

  The bed was a single, old, with a pale yellow wrought-iron bedstead—it creaked rhythmically as Morgan and his companion approached the crescendo—and the furniture in the room was spare and functional, the sort of shabby chic you would find in cheap back-packer hostels all around the Mediterranean. Thin gauze curtains drifted like cigarette smoke in a faint breeze blowing in from a pair of open glass doors that led out to some kind of balcony. A section of old wooden railing could be seen, painted in bright primary colors, and beyond it a row of streetlamps, pale globes with light mist around them, that sickly, energy-efficient, blue-tinted corpse light that was making European public spaces from the Piazza San Marco to Hagia Sophia look like Hell’s Waiting Room.

  Briony had the impression that somewhere beyond the streetlamps there was an ocean, perhaps because of the mist or the distant dim sighing sound in the background that could be surf breaking on rocks. The quilt that had slipped off the bed earlier in the encounter had a bold floral pattern that looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and the picture above the bedstead was a gaudy amateur gouache depicting a harborful of fishing boats silhouetted in black against a lurid orange-and-pink sunset sky that had never occurred in real life anywhere on this planet.

  There was a dresser on the far wall, with candles still flickering but dangerously low, two bottles of what looked like Metaxa, empty, on top. Clothes were scattered on the floor, the classic farcical sequence of jeans, skirt, blouse, socks, panties, indicating a mad stumble-dance to bed. If the sounds being produced were any indication, things were moving toward a brisk and, for Briony, and probably for the girl, a far-too-prolonged conclusion.

  God help her, she thought, as Morgan hammered away at the poor thing as if she were a block of marble he was trying to pound into something human, his head raised and his neck-muscle cords standing out. He could use some lessons from a grown woman, she thought, thinking of a turtle she once watched on an island in the South Pacific, neck stretched out in the same reptilian way, mouth open and eyes blank as he humped away at a female turtle braced on a hot flat rock.

  This was just . . . punishment.

  She could see the girl’s face—she was fierce and dark, and had a fan of wild fake blond hair spread out on the pillow under her head. Her black eyes were fixed, almost snakelike, on Morgan’s throat, which he was presenting to her in the way victims are said to offer themselves to vampires. It came to Briony that the girl was exactly that, some sort of snake, and the phrase honey trap came floating up from somewhere in her dormant professional self.

  Before the final moment came, the scene jumped—a hard, jarring cut—and now the couple were lying side by side in the bed, sharing a small, twisted hand-rolled object that was probably what the younger generation was now calling a “spliff.”

  She realized that the previous scene had been included by whoever had sent this chip only in a spirit of sadistic aggression. There had been no need to subject Briony to the sordid experience of watching her young son make bad love to a Greek tart.

  It had been done to please the sender, and to force himself into a kind of sleazy partnership with her, the beginning of an extortionate seduction, as these things always are. Briony braced herself for what was now to come, and was not in any way disappointed.

  This was the whole idea, after all.

  There must have been a mike somewhere close to the bed. Under the bedside table. Shoved up that little bitch’s . . . Well, somewhere close, because the sound now dialed up, and Briony could hear their pillow talk—low, breathy, spaced out between long, luxuriating pulls on the twisted cigarette. Morgan was talking about his job at the base, his boyish voice dry and hoarse and a little drugged by whatever was in the cigarette.

  “No, like, Crete’s boring as shit, actually . . . I mean, except for you . . . But if I stay in for five years, we can get stateside, maybe Walter Reed—”

  “You wouldn’t never leave me, would you?”

  This required a kiss, of course, and some muffled saccharine exchanges that Briony was thankful the mike could not pick up. The girl rolled away and plucked a glass from the floor beside the bed, drank some of the liquid, passed it over to Morgan, who drained it, making a face.

  “Christ, Melina, what’s in that? It tastes like vinegar.”

  “It’s raki, I think . . . But you get paid so bad in the Navy . . . What about your mother? Couldn’t she get you a job in the government somewhere?”

  “Sure, she’s got all sorts of pull . . . if we’re married. She’d insist on that, Melina—”

  “So would I, Morgan. I’m not whore—”

  “I know . . . I think Mom would like you—”

  “She work for a library?”

  Morgan laughed, sucked on the joint again, held it for a full thirty seconds, blowing it out through pursed lips.

  “Oh yeah, she’s a librarian. That’s what she tells people . . .” Melina made a pouty face, crossing her arms over her breasts.

  “I don’t see how librarian could help me go to America—”

  “You’re marrying an American! And she’s not jus
t this librarian, anyway. She’s, like, this superspy—”

  “Like Brangelina?”

  “Who? No, not Brangelina. She’s more like this secret-code breaker—”

  Melina pushed him almost out of the bed, apparently angry.

  “You always tell me bullshit, Morgan. You are big bullshitter, like all Navy boys. I think I should throw you out and take another boy.”

  “I’m not a bullshitter. It’s true. She works for this big spy agency—”

  “Sure. With Matt Damon and James Bond.”

  “No, it’s like the CIA, only more secret . . . Really, I’m not lying.”

  “Bullshitter.”

  “No, listen”—another long pull, passing it between them—“you ever hear of the”—Morgan made a comic show of looking around the room, even under the bed, and then, in a stage whisper, as Briony’s heart sank within her chest, said—“the NSA?”

  “The Ennessay? What is this Ennessay?”

  “Not Ennessay. NSA. In Maryland. She works there. Or used to, before they moved her up to West Point—”

  The girl Melina reacted to that.

  “West Point? West Point is where Army teaches soldiers, isn’t it? I saw a film once about this West Point. She truly is librarian there?”

  “That’s her cover . . . Well, look, the thing is, she has lots of pull, and—”

  Briony watched as what she was expecting to happen happened. From the camera angle, it was hard to see where the men came from, but there was a loud bang as the door to the room was kicked open and the room filled with big, fast-moving armed men in cheap suits, screaming at Morgan and Melina in English, with Southern accents, loud cop voices braying at them—“Military Police. Do not fuckin’ move. Military Police”—while Morgan and the girl lay in frozen shock on top of their tangled sheets.

  Another jump cut.

  Morgan, now dressed, limp, haggard, exhausted, pale, sitting in a bare wooden chair in a bare, windowless room, with a U.S. flag on its staff in the corner and a picture of the President on the wall beside it, a table littered with coffee cups, an ashtray filled with butts, smoke hanging blue in the air. Two large men in shirtsleeves, military brush cuts, their backs to the camera, one standing and one sitting in a wooden chair and tilting it backward, his size-twelve shoes on the table, his beefy arms folded behind his neck, speaking softly to Morgan in a lazy Texas bass.