The Venetian Judgment Page 6

  The Dan Wesson, sent on by Brancati in a diplomatic pouch to an Alitalia luggage booth at Gatwick that doubled as a dead drop for Italian couriers, was a reassuring but damned uncomfortable eight pounds in a leather shoulder holster that was spoiling the drape of his third-best navy blue pinstripe, but the trench coat he had inherited from Porter Naumann provided a kind of George Smiley-style English cover.

  It was also, thankfully, waterproof and warm. He had, a few hours ago, been thrown a little off balance when he found three gold-tipped cigarette butts in the left-hand pocket of the coat. He’d been wearing this same topcoat that last night in Venice, when he and Porter Naumann had shared some of Naumann’s Sobranie Cocktails in the Piazza San Marco. If the encounter with Naumann’s ghost had been an hallucination from start to finish, where in hell did these cigarette butts come from?

  It was an existential conundrum he didn’t care to contemplate. Guinness was a great antidote to existential conundrums, so he had a few, and waited, and the hours passed, and the rain fell in steady wind-driven sheets, and the passersby made their molelike way back and forth in the driving rain, with their collars up and their heads down, grimly enduring the rising damp and the ague-inducing chills of a dreary English winter that was making the venerable old town seem like one huge concentration camp smacked down in the middle of a swamp. In other words, utter dank misery, relieved every now and then by flashes of dismal gloom.

  THEN CAME THIS DAY, the late afternoon of the third day, and the last day Dalton was willing to sit here like a drowning duck: he was considering other more risky tactics to get this game in play, whatever it was, while poking listlessly at something gray and gristly called “bubble and squeak.” He suspected that the title of the dish came from the family names of the first two Norway rats who had found themselves included in the recipe. The publican, who had made him two days back as some sort of high-priced PI working the adultery business, suddenly loomed up at the gates of the booth, brushing back his Hitler mustache with one tobacco-stained finger and offering Dalton a cell phone on a battered tin tray.

  “’Ere’s a caller fer yer,” he said in a thick Midlands accent, neither wasting words nor having any to waste. Dalton looked at the phone, and then up at the blunt, fistlike face of the publican, who had a large flat nose that might have been shaped with a mallet and small brown eyes like raisins shoved into a suet pie.

  “For me?”

  The publican shuffled his hobnails, rearranged his pen wiper again.

  “Th’all be a Mr. Pownall?”

  Dalton thought it over and then nodded.

  “Lef ’ti fer yer, din’t she? Ba the wif,” he said, or may have said.

  “The cell phone? It was left here by . . .”

  The look on the man’s face said, as clearly as if written on his brow, And I already told yer that, din’t I, you daft berk.

  “Gimme a quid, she did, sed’if yed cum ba, I’m to old’er phone, privylike, till she call. And ’ere’s yer ’ere, the na, and ’ere’s ’er callin’, yus?”

  “Ah? The wife? My wife?”

  The publican, who may have reached the conclusion that Dalton was either deaf or retarded, tried to clarify the issue by saying all the same things all over again, only much louder, which was a tremendous help of course.

  But he finished with a description that stayed with Dalton for weeks afterward: “Tall bint, wif lorly garms? Very queenly like? Any gate, she’s on t’line ’ere now, sor, as I ha’ pressed the t’ingy.”

  “She’s on the line right now?” he said, taking the cell phone and putting it to his ear. The publican nodded and took himself off right sprightly, shaking his round, bumpy head and muttering darkly to himself.

  “I heard that,” said Mandy Pownall. “He called me a bint!”

  “True, but he said you had ‘lorly garms’ and was very ‘queenly like.’ ”

  “You got the package.”

  “Obviously. What took you so long?”

  “Someone had to hold the fort while you were moping around in Venice like a lovesick lemur. I gather you’re still at that dreadful pub?”

  “Actually, I’ve grown very fond of it. I can’t bring myself to leave.”

  “You’re probably stuck to the bench. Wait there.”

  TECHNICALLY, Dalton did as he was told and waited. Tactically, he did what he was trained to do and moved to a location across the street, a glass-walled bus stop with large red-lettered signs that warned people who boarded the buses that if they didn’t take care, they would eventually find themselves at the Old Street tube station, and then where would they be, eh?

  After about a half hour, he came on point, as a squat black London cab squelched to a halt by the entrance to the Stag at Bay. He noted the number in case it was one of the Agency’s car-pool units, which it was not. The cab, as the most humble cocoons often do, delivered itself of a real Mayfair butterfly.

  First came the brolly, a long, slender black tube that shot up out of the cab’s interior and blossomed like a time-lapse film of a wet black flower opening, followed immediately by the lady herself, recorded in Burke’s and the Almanac de Gotha as Cynthia Magdalene deLacey Evans Pownall, but known around Sloane Street and Berkeley Square more simply as Mandy.

  Today, she was long, lean, and damn-your-eyes elegant in a shimmering black capelike raincoat and high black boots. Long black gloves, of course. The coat, unbuttoned and flaring in a gust of wind, revealed a long, formfitting knit dress in a smoky charcoal hue, the mock turtleneck rising up her graceful neck. At her throat was a strand of large black pearls. The dress clung to her thoroughbred body all the way down, perhaps out of sheer sensual delight, suggesting, to the observant male eye, that she may have been wearing nothing at all under it.

  Mandy hesitated at the curb, cool, composed, with none of Cora’s earthy fire, a pale English rose compared to Cora’s dark blue dahlia, her long silvery hair flying in the rain-sodden wind, her expression intense as she scanned the terrain, fixing quickly on Dalton’s figure inside the bus stop.

  In spite of her striking presence, Mandy Pownall had managed to adapt to the cloak of obscurity and the reflexive diffidence of an active field officer. None of which was at all in evidence this afternoon.

  She had been Porter Naumann’s lover and friend, as well as the central pillar of Burke and Single, the London banking house they ran for the Agency. After his murder and the aftermath, she had been drawn into a more active role in the field operations of London Station.

  They sent her to Maidenhill and Camp Peary to pick up the essentials of basic tradecraft, and she now worked at London Station, under the lecherous eye of the reptilian Anthony Crane, too fond of the Americans to be accepted by the Brits as one of them and too British to be fully trusted by Langley. Her tradecraft, once uncertain, had improved to the point that she had gotten out of the cab in a driving rain and immediately spotted Dalton, right where she expected him to be.

  “Bloody hell,” she called out to him, “I’m drowning here, you sod.”

  Dalton crossed the street while she watched him, her broad smile changing into a disapproving frown as she got a better look at his face.

  When he reached her, she shook her head slowly, touched the wound in his cheek, and then ran her hand around his neck, pulled him down to her, and kissed him gently on the lips. A delicate, sensual touch, breathing him in and surrounding him with her scent, something spicy, with citrus and sandalwood in it.

  The fact that they had not been—and, if Dalton could hold out, would not ever be—lovers was a touchy issue between them, since Mandy officially disapproved of heroic fidelity, and she particularly disapproved of heroic fidelity to fragile Italian crybabies who couldn’t take a simple bullet to the head without getting all pouty and running off to hide out at Daddy’s villa in Capri. She released him, stepping back to take him in, her gray eyes troubled.

  “I heard you were coming apart. I didn’t believe it. Now I do.”

  “I’m
happy for you. Maybe we can dilate on that theme inside,” he said, taking her arm and leading her back to his booth at the rear of the pub. The barman came over, perhaps just to get a second look at her “lorly garms,” and went away again to fetch her a pot of tea and a mug. When he had come back and gone again, Dalton reached into his pocket and took out the glass cutter.

  “I take it there’s some kind of trouble with these people?”

  Mandy flinched at the open display of the glass cutter, took it, and put it in her purse, snapping the latch with a certain dramatic emphasis.

  “Why not put a notice in The Guardian? You hapless wretch.”

  “It’s a glass cutter, Mandy. Not a dagger dripping blood. Don’t be such a dramatist. I take it there’s a problem with the Glass Cutters?”

  Mandy sipped at the tea, made a face, and set it down.

  “Utter swill,” she said.

  “And such small portions?”

  “You know the Glass Cutters? What they do?”

  “I know the essentials.”

  “Dangerous work, theirs, would you say? Lots of wear and tear?”

  “The Glass Cutters? God no. Mind work, but not . . . why?”

  “Well, my lad,” she said, sipping at her tea, “you may want to revise that view, since they seem to be dying like . . .”

  “Flies?”

  “Such a cliché,” she said, making a face, “but there it is.”

  “But many of them are . . . getting on, aren’t they?”

  “Old age has its burdens, I agree,” she said, giving him a look over the rim of her cup, “but being tortured to death is not usually one of them. Not in England, at any rate, although I admit that the National Health does all it can.”

  NEW YORK STATE

  GARRISON, THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY

  Briony Keating’s “little place on the Hudson” reminded Jules Duhamel of Berchtesgaden, although Hitler, who had the Bavarian taste for vulgar excess, would never have built such a Lutheran home: it was a square, slightly stolid stone fortress done in the Federal style, with six bedrooms, maids’ quarters, a large book-lined study, an honest working kitchen. Its best feature was a long stone-walled, low-beamed living room that took up all of the home’s riverside view.

  This open, light-filled, masculine space was filled with old saddle-leather couches and armchairs grouped around a large cut-stone fireplace, with a wall of antique sash windows on either side. A collection of Civil War weapons took up most of one wall, and six rather good oil paintings of the Adirondacks took up another.

  The house overlooked the rolling Hudson River valley and the low blue mountains far to the west. It also had a small stone carriage house, built in the same Federal style, that had once been a stable. This was where Briony Keating kept her private office. He had not been shown this office. Yet.

  The home rested on a shelflike outcropping of land that had been extensively planted a long time ago, so the entire three-acre estate now stood in a grove of ancient oaks and wind-twisted jack pines. The house was set squarely down in the middle of a rolling park that led to a steep drop into the broad brown Hudson River, which swirled massively in a long, lazy bend below the edge. All of this was tinted pale amber by the patina of old money that seemed to lie upon it like the soft winter light that bathed it every afternoon.

  The house had been built by Briony’s great-great-grandfather, a West Point man, she explained, who served with John Buford’s cavalry, and had been severely wounded in the first day at Gettysburg. It seemed to be important to her, so he was careful to appear interested.

  Duhamel had no idea who John Buford was, and he was a little vague on the details of the American Civil War, although he suspected that Gettysburg was somewhere in Pennsylvania. But he had always been good at looking as if he were listening, and getting Briony to speak freely about her life was important to him.

  He listened attentively and with every appearance of intense interest as she explained that the house had originally been built on the site of an old riverside inn that had been a stop on the famous Underground Railway, the route escaping slaves from the South had taken to reach Canada. Really, said Jules Duhamel, how fascinating. Was the railway really underground?

  But he hadn’t said that out loud, and he listened with counterfeit attention—his mind wandering a bit as he took in one priceless antique after another—the landscape in the study would need some verification, but it could be an original Lauren Harris—she even took him down to the basement to show him what looked like a massive cast-iron boiler set into a wall of fieldstone but which actually turned out to be the concealed gateway to an underground tunnel running from the main building across to the carriage house. She launched into some tiresome narrative connected to a tunnel collapse at some point and the shocking costs involved in opening it up again. Her voice faded into a kind of soothing background murmur . . . Slaves . . . Pinkerton men . . . An escape to the carriage house by moonlight . . . Even a secret speaking tube that ran from the tunnel up to the kitchen.

  Duhamel abhorred tunnels of any kind—wouldn’t ride the London Tube or the Paris Metro at gunpoint—and this one was little better than a dank, dark hole-in-the-wall, lined in clotted moss and dripping stones, and it stank of the grave. Briony went on and on, rather too much of this for his taste, but at any rate the house—particularly the treasures it contained—were quite appealing. He felt that things were going wonderfully well so far, and he had to admit that the house was a perfect place to bring a lover. It was made even more private by the fact that Briony had sent her aging housekeeper back to Charleston for the holidays and they were perfectly alone.

  If memory served, and there were times when he felt it was badly failing him along with everything else, they had made love all day and every day in practically every open, flat, and reasonably soft space the house provided, and in one or two of the knobbier corners as well.

  While this was not strictly true, he recalled some interludes where champagne from Briony’s cellars may have been involved, this was how it seemed to him, caught in the eye of this sexual storm called Briony Keating. It was as if Briony had just discovered sex and was determined to get her master’s in it by the end of the first week. As for Duhamel, he simply held on for dear life and hoped she wouldn’t snap off anything he really needed.

  This afternoon, as the pale winter light was fading into the west and the deep cold was rising out of the gorge, they were sitting, naked under fox furs, on an Adirondack-style couch padded with plaid cushions, breathing a little heavily after their exertions and sharing a bottle of claret, when the phone rang. They were about four days and three nights into the New York State part of their affair, and so far Briony had been ignoring phone calls, e-mails, letters, and any other kind of message from the outer world.

  But this time she sighed, and gathered some of the furs around her, rising, showing him a flash of her lovely body. She padded across the flagstones and went in through the sliding-glass doors that led into the living room. As she went, Jules Duhamel noted that, unlike the other times this phone had rung, the ringtone was different, as if the caller’s number had a special identifying code.

  He gathered the silky furs in close, drank some more of the claret, and savored the view across the river. America truly was a lovely country, and here he was, like a blade, deep in the beating heart of it.

  LONDON

  THE STAG AT BAY, SHOREDITCH

  “Tortured to death?” said Dalton, not really believing Mandy, who could be cinematic if it amused her.

  “Yes,” she said, without a trace of lightness, her expression suddenly grave. “Tortured. They’re saying it’s a robbery gone wrong, but there are complicating factors . . . I think something is very wrong with the Agency . . . Look, Micah, I want you to read something, but don’t touch anything.”

  She took an envelope out of an inside pocket, turned it upside down, and let the papers inside it slip out onto the table. Dalton leaned forward to re
ad them:

  CASE NINETEEN WORKING GROUP

  URGENT SURGE QUERY all resources concerning VENONA-SUBSET and GLASS CUTTER activities in-house or by neighbors and cousins emphasis on any link to VENONA 95 decrypt “UNIDENTIFIED COVER DESIGNATION 19” in VENONA 8/7/1953 ISSUED 10/9/74 (attached) Report assembly classified UMBRA and EYES/DIAL. Final summary to be conveyed by recipient direct to this sender. No information concerning this audit is to be communicated in ANY FORMAT to D. Cather DD-OPS-NCS pending final audit review by POTUS/DNI/NSC. ENTITIES BREACHING THIS DIRECTIVE WILL BE SEQUESTERED FORMALLY SANCTIONED AND TERMINATED WITH PREJUDICE.

  EYES/DIAL MARIAH VALE IR/AUDITS/HQ

  Dalton read all three pages quickly, and then again much more slowly. When he had finished, Mandy used one of the pub’s stir sticks to get the papers safely back into the envelope. “They’re reactive-dye-marked and touch-sensitive. I have to get all this back into Pinky’s lockbox by tomorrow.”

  “They’re isolating Cather ? Why in hell?”

  “Not just him. Vale has a short list, but he’s on it.”

  “Who else is on it?”

  “I can’t get at that. Given the inference that if the other people on it are all in Cather’s age range in order to have any connection with the original Venona cable intercepts, there can’t be more than five or six at the outside.”