The Echelon Vendetta Read online

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  “Don’t you want to know why it happened?” “Repeat after me: ‘I’m a cleaner. That’s my job.’ ” “Where were you all this time? I called in sixteen hours ago.” “On the Hill having a séance with some punts. People of Utterly

  No Tactical Significance. They’re not at all amused about Naumann.

  So how the hell did he die?” “You want it in the clear?” “Just draw me some pictures in the air.” While Dalton was giving Jack Stallworth the gruesome essentials,

  a red-cheeked waiter-boy in a fur-lined jacket arrived radiating sulk. Dalton lifted his glass and winked at the boy, who stalked away to get another bottle, trailing sotto voce imprecations like willow leaves in autumn.

  “You drinking again, Micah? It’s eleven o’clock where you are.” “What time is it where you are?” “That’s not the point. Are you drinking again?” “Again implies that at some point I stopped. And I sure as hell

  would be if you’d quit asking me questions. Every time I get the glass up to my lips you ask me something else. The crux is, what you should be asking is, why am I drinking. You didn’t see him. I did.”

  “Toughen up. You were in the Horn.” “That was a straight-up interdiction. This was different.” “Are you saying Naumann committed suicide by ripping his own

  throat out with his bare hands?” “No. I’m not. Brancati thinks he died from a heart attack.” “And what are you saying?” Fur Boy swept in, plunked the bottle down hard. Dalton handed

  him a fifty-euro tip and waved off a newborn Fur Boy with a gladsome eye and birdsong in his shriveled black heart while he thought about his answer.

  “I think it’s possible that some kind of drug was a minor factor.” “You mean like one was slipped to him?”

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  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  “This is what I like to hear from my cleaners. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ It gives me a warm glow.” Stallworth paused here.

  Dalton, who knew his man well, wasn’t surprised to hear what came next.

  “I tell you kid, if some kind of drug was a factor in this, and I’m not saying it was, but if, and it was something freaky enough to derail a seasoned pro like Porter Naumann, man, I’d love to know what it was. I mean, the company could use something like that.”

  “You asking me to find out?”

  More hissing dead air from the cell phone. Maybe Stallworth’s heavy breathing in the background. Office noises in the distance.

  Finally...

  “If I let you poke around in this a little more—and I mean if—I want your word you’re not going to take it any further than finding out whether or not Naumann had any kind of unknown psychotropic drug in his system.”

  “Then all I have to do is wait; Brancati will tell me that as soon as he knows. Was Naumann doing anything for us that would make somebody want to see him dead?”

  “We looked into it. I mean really looked. He and Mandy Pownall were keeping an eye on investment patterns, looking for indications of insider trading, money laundering that might be connected to al Qaeda operations, or the people who fund them. Hard work? Yes. Boring? Massively. Lethal? No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Damn sure. Whatever happened to Porter, I’m morally certain that it wasn’t connected to what he was doing at Burke and Single. Sometimes things are as simple as they look.”

  “Okay then. On your head, if you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not. What next?”

  “Well, the Carabinieri will do the toxicology. I’ll get the report

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  from Brancati. I was wondering, while I’m waiting around, let me at least do a workup on his room at the Strega. Walk his last walk. See if something stands out. What harm can it do?”

  More pensive silence from Stallworth’s end of the line. He came back in a petulant mood. “With you I never know until it blows my ears off. Somebody has to go to London and hold hands with Joanne. It ought to be you.”

  “Has anyone talked to her lately?”

  “Sally says she’s been pretty silent. Not a call for four days, and she’s not answering her voice mail. My take is she figures Naumann’s gone off on a bit of a bender. He’s done it before.”

  “She’s going to call in soon. What are we going to tell her?”

  “The truth. He had a heart attack.”

  “Joanne’s got money and muscle. What if she digs in a little? Asks for another autopsy, for example?”

  “You’re the cleaner. Make sure she doesn’t.”

  “What if she wants an open casket?”

  “Can’t he be prettied up a bit?”

  “Jack, you buy him a steel casket and weld the lid shut unless you want to see the funeral guests puking into the flowerpots. Haven’t we got anybody in London Center who could do this up right?”

  “Mandy Pownall. She knows the family pretty well. I guess we could send her.”

  “She’ll need a case of Cristal and some major meds.”

  “She’ll have them.”

  “And a couple of handlers for the girls. They’re a treat.”

  “I’ve never met them.”

  “Good decision. Now, how about it?”

  While Stallworth was working out the many ways in which he could come to bitterly regret saying yes, Dalton poured some more wine into the glass and watched the tour guide girl coming back along the Riva. Her thighs remained wonderfully mystical and now

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  her hapless Hindu tourists were liberally dappled with variegated tones of pigeon shit. She had the kind of look on her strong young face that said My work here is through.

  “All right. I admit I’d like to know what kind of drug could make a pro like Naumann go batshit. We’d have a tactical interest in something like that. Go to Cortona. Toss his room at the Strega. And make sure you get a clean copy of the toxicology report. Not just a verbal description. And see to it that they don’t lose the tissue and blood samples. If you can, have them handed over to you before you leave. Tell Brancati that Naumann’s insurance policy requires an independent medical exam before they can release any funds to the family. And Micah, hear me on this—”

  “I live to serve, Jack.”

  “Whatever you get—anything at all that looks weird to you, anything that catches your eye—it comes straight to me. Person to person. No messages. No e-mail. Verbal report to me direct. Got that?”

  “What about Sally?”

  “Not even her. No reflection. But that’s the way it is. Got that?”

  “How could I miss it?”

  “I know it sounds hinky. But this comes from the Vicar himself.”

  “A policy thing?”

  “He said it was. If Deacon Cather farts, farting becomes policy.”

  “Is Cather personally interested in Naumann?”

  “No. It’s a general order. Cleaners talk only to their handlers.”

  “Has he asked about Naumann?”

  “Yes. He’ll see the synopsis once you file your report. He sits on the Losses board. But we’re losing a lot of field guys these days, thanks to our lovely little War on Terror. Just do what you can. Make sure there’s nothing I have to worry about. File it direct to me, every detail you get, no matter how pointless. Send it by diplomatic courier, sealed, paper only, no copies, and my eyes only.”

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  “This directive from the Vicar too?”

  “Like I said. It’s policy. Then go back to London and take it easy for a while. You follow?”

  “About the hostel, I can’t get into it until tomorrow.”

  “So do it tomorrow. Tonight, stay out of trouble.”

  “I’m in Venice. It’s an island. What can I do on an island?”

  “Cuba was an island too, and look what you did there. Gotta go.”

  “Jack . . . ask Mandy Pownall to be gentle with Joanne. She was once something to write your
mommy about.”

  “My mommy died in a knife fight. They buried her in an oil drum.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically.”

  “Well don’t.”

  THAT EVENING, against Stallworth’s better judgment, Dalton went for a stroll. Venice was cool but not cold, with a few early stars glittering in a cobalt sky, and the canals were, mercifully, reeking only a little. Dalton wandered aimlessly along the ins and outs of the Riva with the eventual goal of a dinner at Ristorante Carovita. He smoked a couple of Toscanos on the way to sharpen his appetite, idly harassed a mime who was pretending to be a white marble statue, and bought a little ruby-colored Murano glass heart to send to Laura. It was their tenth anniversary next week. Maybe she’d remember who he was if she got a ruby glass heart from Italy. Probably not, and the bitter awareness of this hopeless delusion burned him a little as he crossed the canal bridge and came down to the little lantern-lit courtyard café under the awning, where he elected to dine alone in a tiny corner table at the back. He ordered a bottle of Bollinger in honor of Porter Naumann, wherever he was and however he may have gotten there. Now cracks a noble heart, and flights of angels sing him to his rest.

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  Dalton’s mood, which had been dark and oppressed during the late afternoon, brightened somewhat, as it always did after the sun went down, a transformation not unrelated to his third glass of Bolly. He even tried for happy. Not that he got there. He never did these days. Happy was for FNGs, what the company called Fucking New Guys.

  But he realized that he was looking forward to going back to Cortona and doing something useful, even if only as a diversion. Another round of Bolly and the image of Naumann in death that had been floating in front of his eyes for the last thirty-six hours began to recede. Easing back in his chair, he took a more active interest in his surroundings.

  There were very few other people in the room, and the place had the look of a dinner party after the hosts have cleaned the ashtrays and put the cat out and are now standing at the wide-open front door in their pajamas and slippers, looking grumpy. Venice was winding down like a clockwork circus, and Dalton watched the six other diners scattered around the room with his usual level of semiprofessional interest: two slender Italian girls in cashmere twin sets and flowered skirts leaning in close to whisper over their vongole with their hair falling down around their silky cheeks and their ankles demurely crossed; an elderly man in a well-cut suit that had fit him perfectly thirty years ago, having a plate of sole and staring mournfully across his table at an empty chair that looked as if it should have been filled with a loving wife but wasn’t. An American couple who had the love-stuffed look of newlyweds on a six-city budget tour.

  And a big broad-shouldered stiff-backed man with shoulder-length, silky-gray hair sitting at a table-for-one with his back to the room, smoking a Toscano cigarillo; it seemed that everyone in Venice was smoking Toscanos this season. His strong-looking leathery hands were laid out on either side of an open book. The man had his head

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  down, and seemed to be reading it intently. Something in the look and carriage of this man reminded Dalton of Father Jacopo.

  The man’s silvery hair was hanging down his cheek, hiding his face, but the skin on the man’s hands was dark, tanned almost a mahogany color, veined and ridged and gnarled, the hands of a man who had spent his long life using them to hammer, bend, and break. He wore a heavy turquoise-and-silver bracelet on his left wrist and a solid silver ring on the middle finger of his right hand.

  An American, thought Dalton. From the Southwest, or California. Maybe a rancher or a cattleman. There was as well some other quality in his upright frame that suggested strength, vigor— even menace. Dalton made a point of marking the man down— shiny dark-green lizard-skin boots, tipped with silver, black jeans, a long black trench coat that looked pricey. He wore it the way Venetians do, over the shoulders like a cloak. One ear was poking through the man’s long silver hair, a smallish ear, pasted flat to the skull, like a seal’s ear. Piercing the lobe was a silver earring in the shape of a crescent floating above an iron cross, an oddly Islamic crescent moon for a man who looked so much like an American cowboy. Or perhaps an Indian? Navajo? Lakota?

  He realized he was intrigued by the guy and waited patiently for the man’s waiter to arrive, which would require the man to look up so Dalton could see his face. This never happened.

  No one in the restaurant paid the slightest attention to the man in all the time that Dalton was there—no waiter approached, no guest smiled at him on her way to the washroom—so when Dalton stood up and walked carefully to the little hallway at the front of the café to pay for his vitello al limone and the two bottles of Bollinger that he had somehow managed to consume, he made it a point to leave his pack of Toscanos and his gold Zippo on the table so he could go back for them and try to get a better look.

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  While he was dealing with the bill and the doe-eyed heavy-breasted but mathematically challenged young girl behind the counter, he realized that not only had the old man not moved once during the last hour, he had not turned a page of the book on the table in front of him. Dalton handed a sheaf of euros to the girl and said, “Mi scusi, signorina. I forgot my cigarettes.”

  But when he got back to the main room the man was gone. His table was a blank, the plates taken away, as if no one had ever been there. All that remained on the table was a pack of Toscano cigarillos. Dalton picked them up, flipped the lid. The pack was still half-full. He closed the lid, dropped it on the table, and walked down the rear hallway, where he found an open door that led out into an alleyway, and from there to a walkway that ran into darkness far along the canal.

  In the distance he heard the sound of boots on stones echoing down the twisted lanes. He stood and listened until the striding sound of steel-capped cowboy boots faded away and then he went back into the café, picked his own Toscanos and his Zippo off his table, and considered the pack the man had left behind for a moment, finally picking it up as well and putting it in his suit coat pocket. He returned to the till, where the girl was still holding his change, her soft brown eyes troubled.

  “Mi perdoni, signorina.”

  She looked at him, her full lips open, her expression blank. “Sì, signore.”

  “L’uomo in nero—”

  “I speak English bad, sir. Sorry.” “The man in black? With the long gray hair?” Her face changed. She shook her head. “Mi dispiace, signore. Non

  capisco.”

  Dalton held up his pack of Toscano cigarillos.

  “He was smoking these. An old gray man. Do you know him?”

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  She put the glass shell with his change down in front of him, shook her head, and stepped back away from the till, folding her arms.

  “Non parlo...”

  “The man in black who was sitting alone. At the back—”

  She looked toward the rear of the café, and then back at Dalton. “There is no one there.”

  “The man who was there. We all saw him. Do you know him?”

  “No. I do not.”

  “Would the owner ...?”

  “He is gone.”

  “The owner?”

  “Yes. The owner is gone too.”

  “Is the man a regular? The man in black?”

  She was through talking; that was clear from her face. The gates were closing as he watched her. She tightened her lips, made a slight bow, and said, “There is no one there, sir. Mi scusi. Buonanotte.”

  DALTON WALKED BACK ALONG the Riva degli Schiavoni—the quay of the slaves—pausing in front of his hotel to briefly consider and happily reject the idea of doing what Stallworth had specifically ordered him to do: go home and stay there.

  The hotel café was closed, all the tables stacked up under the green awning. Out in the basin an empty vaporetto was chugging slowly into the distance, an oblong of yellow light far out on
the water. The black gondolas along the Danieli docks were shrouded in blue and chained to their poles, where they bobbed and bumped in the wavelets that ran in ripples across the face of the quay. In the distance he heard the hollow echo of music: violins and the mellow snake-charm piping of a clarinet. He crushed his cigarillo into the stones and turned away from the hotel.

  It was too early, and far too depressing, to go to bed.

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  A glass of port, or two, at Florian’s in the piazza, if there were seats available, just to balance the champagne, and then a stroll around the campo to clear his head, until the bells rang in the campanile at midnight. He would do what Naumann had liked to do on an evening just like this. What he would have done if he weren’t busy lying buck-naked on an autopsy table somewhere in Cortona.

  He crossed the bridge canal and stopped to look at the Bridge of Sighs, the covered stone arch that linked the Palazzo Ducale with the old bargello where the Doge’s thugs liked to take their political enemies apart with heated tongs—this was why the bridge was called the Bridge of Sighs. He leaned against the railing, looking out at the basin and the lights playing on the church of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water, and spent a few moments idly wondering about the counter girl’s reluctance to talk about the guy in the black coat.

  Probably a cultural thing. Venetians protected their own. For that matter, so did New Yorkers and Bostonians. It was possible that the man was a family friend, an uncle or a cousin, or perhaps a public figure whose privacy needed protecting. The guy did have a vaguely religious aura. He could have been a local bishop.

  If the local bishops wore Southwestern jewelry and had hands like an open-pit miner. Dalton raised the old man’s cigar pack to throw it into the canal, changed his mind, put it back in his pocket, and walked on past the Moorish walls of the palazzo Ducale. He turned right into the piazzetta that led to the Basilica of Saint Mark. There were dark shapes under the cloistered archway that ran along the palazzo walls; the smell of marijuana and the tinny buzz of Middle Eastern music snaked outward from the shadowy dark.