The Venetian Judgment Read online

  “Everybody’s telling me so, anyway. Last time I saw you, you were stuck in Cortona, and these evil-ass smoke demons were rising up out of the stones to hiss at you.”

  Naumann shuddered at the memory.

  “Hey, don’t joke about that, Micah. Naming calls. Seriously. I’ve seen it happen. Those are some very bad dudes.”

  “So what happened?”

  He shrugged, drew on the cigarette, the tip flaring like a firefly in the shadows of Florian’s portico.

  “Buggered if I know. One afternoon, they all just . . . scarpered. Had something to do with eucalyptus, I think.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “Ask? Ask who?”

  Dalton raised his eyes skyward in a parody of reverent piety.

  “Who, Him?” said Naumann. “Hell, over on this side God’s as hard to pin down as Barack Obama’s ears. Ask me, He’s kind of like that big head in the Wizard of Oz. Real power’s behind the curtain. Probably some saber-toothed power broad like Nancy Pelosi, wears a pearl-gray pantsuit and stiletto heels, a pair of killer ta-tas, has a smile so cold bourbon freezes on her lips.”

  “You think Nancy Pelosi has killer ta-tas?”

  “Hey, you haven’t seen her naked. I have.”

  While Dalton worked that through, Naumann moved on.

  “So, about leaving Venice, what are you gonna do?”

  “About what?”

  “Like I said, you’re getting the heave. About time, by the way, you ask me. Tourists will be back in April, and they’ll be tripping over your roadkill all around town. Probably find something moldering away in a gondola. You’re gonna need some kind of work, Micah. Left to your own devices, you go all wobbly and your wheels come off. You ever hear from Deacon Cather?”

  Dalton shrugged, as if the name meant nothing.

  Naumann, who knew his man, didn’t buy it.

  “So, no call? Not a peep? Ungrateful bastard. Typical Cather. Dried-up old Jesuit, but slick as a pickerel’s pecker. Always reminded me of Sir Francis Walsingham—”

  “Who?”

  “Queen Elizabeth I’s security guy. Eighty-sixed Mary, Queen of Scots, in one of the first confusion ops? Do you read, Micah? Improve yourself?”

  “Nope. Reading hurts my head.”

  “After all we did for the Agency? That Serbian thing in Chicago—”

  “We? I didn’t notice you prancing about the place.”

  Naumann looked hurt.

  “Micah, I’m always there. You just don’t see me, unless you’re totally fucked up. I’m sort of . . . hovering. And, for the record, I don’t prance.”

  Dalton yawned again, mightily this time, drew in the last of the cigarette, stubbed it out on the stones beside the table, pocketed what was left of the butt out of habit, pushed his chair back. Naumann tipped his chair against the walls of Florian’s, brought his legs up, crossed his ankles, set his nicely shod feet on the table, and lit himself another Sobranie. The move exposed a couple of inches of his emerald green socks.

  “You not coming?” said Dalton, who could have used the company. “I think there’s a couple of Bollys in the minibar.”

  On another level, he was painfully aware of how heroically deranged a man had to be if he was asking a dead man’s ghost to come back to the hotel for a nightcap. Naumann shook his head.

  “Not this time. You really going back to the Savoia?”

  Dalton looked around the piazza, back at Naumann.

  “Where else? Florian’s doesn’t open for another six hours.”

  Naumann gave Dalton the once-over, as if trying to make up his mind.

  “Well, I got something for you to chew on, smarty-pants. You go back to your room, there’s a surprise waiting there for you.”

  Dalton was silent for a time.

  “Galan said something about . . . developments. Events. Who is it?”

  “You tell me, smart guy.”

  “Oh no. None of that shit. You’re the one thinks he’s real. Give.”

  “That, my lad,” said Naumann, “is for me to know and you to find out. Anyway, if I’m right, then you have to admit I’m a real ghost and not some bit of undigested peyote bud stuck, God forbid, in your colon.”

  Naumann was starting to fade.

  “Where you going?”

  “Me? I’m gonna cut right along to the next time I see you.”

  “Where’s that? When is that?”

  “From my side of the mirror, Grasshopper, all those kind of questions sorta run together.”

  “You haven’t got a clue, do you?”

  “Want a hint?”

  “Sure. Yes. Give me a hint.”

  “Okay. You’ll be in a hurry. Literally.”

  “I just love it when you go all Delphic on me. One last time. Who’s in the room? I’ll bet it’s just Brancati, dropping by to say ciao.”

  “Like I said, that’s for me to know and you to—”

  “It’s Brancati, and you’re still not telling me anything I don’t know.”

  “Micah,” said Naumann, now almost gone, “you don’t know so damn much I hardly know where to start. Watch your back. There’s more going on than you think. Change is coming. See you around.”

  DALTON’S SUITE at the Savoia e Yolanda was on the top floor of what had once been a private villa for a lesser scion of the Sforza family, now a high-end boutique hotel. Dalton had three rooms and a small balcony on the top floor, with a view across Saint Mark’s Basin to the island of the Giudecca and the Palladian façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. Although Dalton had an Agency flat in London, around the corner from Porter Naumann’s old place in Belgravia, this had been as close to a steady home as Dalton had known since his marriage had ended, in tragedy, ten years ago.

  Now it looked like just another trap, and he was approaching it that way, coming into the hotel through a delivery door at the rear. He had rigged the lock weeks ago and no one had noticed. Climbing the service stairs all the way up to the third floor, he walked down the service hall to a maid’s closet, where he had taken the further precaution of concealing a fallback piece behind a stone slab: a stainless-steel Dan Wesson revolver chambered for .44 Magnum rounds. A hand cannon, but he loved it.

  He left the steel briefcase. It contained his alternate ID, a weak but serviceable throwaway cover as a Canadian with the unlikely name of Tom Coward who specialized in stainless-steel polishing systems. The ID would at least get him out of Europe. There was also twenty grand in mixed and nonsequential euros, another ten grand in U.S. dollars, and a small but heavy Crown Royal bag filled with .999 pure Canadian gold wafers. These days he was living on what was left over from the Agency’s operating advance during the Chicago thing, almost a half million dollars in a bank in Zurich. This was his get-out-of-town stash. If he needed all this later, it would still be there. If he got killed in the next few minutes, some workman doing a reno twenty years from now would have himself a lovely morning.

  The Savoia had a roof-garden café, shuttered and winterized now, but it could still be reached by stepping out onto an old iron grid on the fifth floor that held a refrigeration unit. Using the unit, he was able to boost himself onto the sloping red-tiled roof. The footing was tricky glare ice, and the tiles had a tendency to give way under his step, but he got himself across to the front of the hotel, where he lay down and eased his way to the lip of the roof just above the balcony of his suite.

  The balcony was set back into the building but open to the sky above, perhaps five feet deep by ten feet wide, with a small marble table and a couple of garden chairs. The French doors that opened onto it were ajar, and a soft light poured out from the living room, along with an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor and the spicy scent of Toscano cigars. A voice called from inside the room, a baritone purr with a Tuscan lilt.

  “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 Nau
mann’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?”