Jigsaw (54 page)

She walked to the Campo San Rocco, where already journalists and cameramen were gathering. Armed soldiers thronged the square. The reporters, the TV analysts, the commentators, the cameramen – they strained to get closer to the Scuola. Here and there angry words were traded; a soldier seized the camera of a particularly persistent photographer and threw it on the ground, where it shattered.

Alyssia Baranova had to show her identity card to an armed guard before she was allowed access to the doorway of the building, a sombre place corroded by fog and damp in winter and heat in summer.

It was exactly two o'clock.

The interior of the building, the gloomy main hall, was chilly, despite the body heat generated by the milling security personnel. She understood that the preservation of the Tintorettos depended on the temperature. Too much heat might crack or damage them. She passed through a metal-detector, had her ID card scrutinized by a silver-haired Russian security agent in an Italian double-breasted suit, who smiled at her. She understood: this was the one. This was the one who had cleared the way for her. There were going to be no obstructions, the machine had been lubricated.

She entered the hall. A long table had been placed in the centre, ten chairs on either side. All around her Russian security people, thirty men and women, scanned the walls with electronic sweeping devices. They were thorough: walls, the floor, the chairs, the table, everything. Perched on long aluminium stepladders, agents examined the ceiling. There were lengths of thick black electric cable across the floor. Portable consoles, attached to the electronic devices, depicted graphs, like those machines you saw measuring heartbeats in hospitals.

She raised her face, looked up at the paintings, which meant nothing to her; there was no artistic appreciation in Alyssia Baranova's character.
The Adoration of the Magi. The Circumcision
. The mystic nature of the works was lost to her. Their dark colours, enlivened here and there by flecks of red and gold, didn't touch her.

Somebody approached her, fussing, worried, mumbling, a small man with rimless glasses, seemingly the curator. ‘I do not approve, I do not approve,' he was saying as he rushed back and forth, making sure that nobody actually laid a hand on any of the art. ‘Clumsy people, such clumsy people, what do they care that this is all so
priceless?
Why did they choose
this
place when they could have chosen so many others? Politicians. Pah. Pah. They think the world revolves around them.'

Alyssia Baranova, pretending not to understand, moved away from him. She attached herself to the security personnel, buried herself among them, pretending to be officious, looking this way and that with an expression of grave concern. She melted into the crowd; perfect camouflage. She had the ability to appear busy, to look fussed, under pressure.

‘Are you new?'

Alyssia Baranova turned. The woman who'd asked the question was in her middle thirties, prettified by too much lipstick and rouge. She had a rather stern expression.

‘I haven't seen you before,' the woman remarked.

Alyssia smiled in a quiet way. ‘I was brought in at the last moment,' she said.

‘That accent,' the woman said. ‘Are you from Leningrad?'

‘I lived there for a time. But my parents moved around.' Alyssia shrugged. She hadn't expected conversation. Her Russian, which she hadn't used in a long time, was still fluent.

The woman glanced at the silver-haired man in the doorway, then turned her face back to Alyssia, and her expression was one of knowing slyness. ‘I think I see.'

‘See what?' Alyssia felt a very slight alteration of her heart. ‘What do you see?'

‘You're one of his latest,' the woman said.

Alyssia shook her head. ‘Whose latest?'

‘My dear. He picks us up and drops us when he feels like it. It's nothing to be ashamed about. You're Budenny's new playmate.'

Why deny it? Just go along with it all. ‘I didn't think anyone knew,' she said coyly.

The woman laid a hand on Alyssia's arm. ‘His appetites are enormous. Everybody knows that,' and she laughed, although the sound was dry and brittle and perhaps even a little envious. ‘Good luck. You'll need it.'

Alyssia moved away, walking to the rear of the grey stone hall. There she turned and looked in the direction of the man called Budenny, who was gazing back at her across the big room. Was that a wink, that flutter of eyelid? Budenny had turned his face away from her now. She felt like an excited participant in a clandestine love affair. Should she blush?

She made herself busy, going down on her knees, examining woodwork with her fingertips, scrutinizing it with a professional air, checking for anything the electronic sweepers might have missed – although, of course, they would have missed nothing. Her fingers encountered the ledge Barron had told her about, dark wood, shadowy, ancient.
You can't miss it. You go there after the electronic boys have worked the area
.

She coughed, took a handkerchief from her pocket, raised it to her lips. She sneaked the small cylindrical object from the folds of the handkerchief and stuck it under the ledge, deftly pressing it in place with a short length of tape. The sweepers had already worked this spot; they wouldn't be back. She stood upright, moving away from the taped object. She made her way across the room, passed close to
The Assumption of the Virgin
and then walked toward the doorway. Budenny looked at her – but it was difficult to read his expression. One eyebrow raised, he inclined his head toward her.

‘You're the one with the head cold,' he said.

Barron had told her to expect this remark. ‘Yes,' she answered.

‘It's the season. Go back to your hotel. Take it easy.'

‘I will. Thank you.'

He dismissed her with a languid gesture of a hand. She walked out of the Scuola. She crossed the Campo San Rocco, pushing past soldiers and journalists. When she was free of the area, she looked at her watch. Two-thirty. Her work was done. She went over the Rialto and decided to stroll across the Piazza di San Marco. Perhaps she'd even stop for coffee at the Florian in the archways. Then she'd go back to Barron's apartment on Calle dei Avocati, and the fiction that was Alyssia Baranova would cease to exist.

THIRTY-SIX

VENICE

F
RANK
P
AGAN AND
K
ATHERINE
C
AIRNEY ARRIVED AT
M
ARCO
P
OLO
Airport at four o'clock and walked through the terminal, where a large contingent of local police wandered vigilantly around. They were looking, Pagan knew, for the kinds of weirdos, fruitcakes, axe-grinders, fringe radicals and conspiracy theorists who tended to congregate where prominent politicians appeared – the sort of people cops tended to lock up for the night just as a precautionary measure.

At the dock they boarded a launch headed for the city. In Rome, where they'd been obliged to spend time in the terminal waiting for the connecting flight, the sky had been gloomily overcast; here, in Venice, the sunlight was unexpected, almost caustic. Pagan observed the other passengers aboard the launch – a pair of ruddy backpacking Finns who looked impossibly healthy; a loud Englishman, armed with high-powered binoculars, who spoke at his timorous wife as if language were more a barrage of missiles than a means of communication.
By God, I remember coming here with Duffy, what a time we had of it in those days, got to know Venice like the back of my bloody hand
.

Pagan stepped on to the deck. The girl came after him. Despite sun, there was no trace of warmth. He shivered, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and thought that this might have been romantic in other circumstances – the glories of Venice, an attractive girl at your side. But not now.

As the launch approached the Grand Canal, where sunlight picked at the threadbare fabric of the waterside palaces, he thought of Barron, tried to
imagine
his way inside a man about whom he knew practically nothing. He turned to look at the girl, who had found in her bag a pair of amber-tinted glasses that made her appear remote and sullen.

‘Is Barron likely to have protection?' he asked without looking at her. ‘Guns. Bodyguards.'

She shrugged. ‘I guess that's something you'll have to find out for yourself, Pagan.'

He gripped her arm. ‘Try again.'

She smiled coldly at him, shaking her arm free. She was, he noticed, a little wary of him; her expression was that of somebody in unpredictable company. ‘I only ever visited him in Florida. I didn't notice any gunmen hanging around. He had a cook and a maid. I don't remember anything else. Maybe he's got a whole goddam arsenal in Venice. How would I know?'

He gazed along the banks of the Grand Canal, seeing wind-tossed banners here and there. His Italian was almost non-existent, but he understood the sense of the proclamations. Gurenko was being officially welcomed to the city. More, he'd been given the freedom of Venice, whatever that honour meant. Venice Greets Gurenko.

Pagan's uneasiness, which had dogged him on the flight from Marseille to Rome, and hounded him on the leg to Venice, persisted as he stared at the flapping banners under which pedestrians strolled innocently in sunlight. It was almost as if he could smell in the air the gathering scent of disaster the way you might sense thunder in the distance before you heard it. He pushed the sensation into the back of his mind, a useful cellar where bottled notions sometimes fermented over time. But now they kept bubbling instantly back at him: Gurenko, the photographs in the newspaper at Marseille Airport. If Carlotta was here, if she could blow up a London Underground train, what did another body matter?

If she was here …

They disembarked some yards from the Rialto, wandered along the bank. He had picked up a tourist map at the airport and was trying to study it, shielding it with his body from the wind. What he saw was a twisted network of streets and waterways. Unknown cities always dislocated him, even when they were laid out in a comprehensible way – but he couldn't figure out the logic of Venice. He glanced down at the surface of the canal, where barges loaded with fruits and vegetables skimmed past, the mosquito-like buzz of
vaporetti
, the laboured motions of
sandoli
. Then he concentrated again on the map, running a fingertip over it.

‘I've found the street,' he said finally. ‘We have to cross the Rialto and head for San Marco.' The wind flapped at the map, blowing it awkwardly back against his face.

‘You're in charge, Pagan. Lead the way.'

They walked a few yards, reached the Campo della Pescaria where the street ran with the blood and slime of gutted fish from the seafood market. The entrails of squid, squashed prawns, mullet bones, scraps of eel, discarded eyes – these were cast aside and pilfered by cats. He and the girl moved cautiously past unidentifiable pink organs, mounds of wrinkled fish skins, scales. Somebody was hosing these relics aside and the air was filled with the decayed scent of a long-dead ocean.

They crossed the Rialto, and entered a maze of streets and alleys, some of which opened quite unexpectedly into startling squares. Pagan had a sense of wandering through cramped tunnels that led to boxes. It was, he supposed, apt – this awareness of a maze, of going blindly, of not knowing if the direction he was following would turn out to be correct. He could be perfectly wrong: the picture taken of Carlotta and Barron was years old, after all. There might no longer be any relationship between the pair – but why then had Barron sent down the execution order? The murder of Pagan made no sense unless it was examined in the context of his being a menace, a threat to whatever Barron was involved in …

They came to San Marco, where nuns led a procession of school kids across the square and tourists snapped photographs of the basilica and the campanile. In the failing coppery light the piazza had an ephemeral quality. Pigeons floated and fluttered, people strolled under the darkening archways, artists sold their insipid water-colours.

In the centre of the vast square he paused, glanced at the girl, saw dying sunlight strike the lenses of her glasses. A curious breathlessness affected him, as if everything conspired in this place to induce a contrary sense of peacefulness. He imagined drawing the girl toward him and kissing her on the forehead and plunging into the warm welcome of amnesia. How convenient it would be, he thought, to forget the reason he'd come to this city, to set aside the girl's treachery, and take her to a little
pensione
with a high cracked ceiling and peeling cornices and a big brass bed that creaked to the act of love.

A wind came up, sloughing across the square, blowing papers and breadcrumbs and discarded tourist leaflets – and the banality of these objects snapped him out of his reverie. He listened to the flap of flags and the crackle of bunting and his frame of mind was replaced by an unfocused sense of urgency.

He thought of Gurenko again. If he were assassinated – what would the consequences be? For starters, chaos.
Chaos
. The fragile Russia whose factions Gurenko barely managed to hold together would come instantly unglued, and voracious vultures would bicker over the corpse, hardliners as well as reformers, the old strife between change and familiar sterile stability – even civil war.

Pagan, sensing the origins of a headache, a throbbing pain behind his eyes, zigzagging lines coursing across his perceptions, heard Streik's voice again.
Peace is bad for business
. Bad for business – if your business happened to be weapons of death.

And that was William J. Caan's line of work. It was the basis of his fortune.

He thought he had it just then, the fine connections, the loose pieces that formed the picture. You created a line that led from Caan and The Undertakers to Carlotta, and in the centre of that line you placed the middleman, Tobias Barron, who had commissioned Carlotta to kill Bryce Harcourt, who perhaps didn't like what he was involved in, who was scared like Streik, and maybe ready to blow the whistle … He thought he had it, but it was elusive even yet, because if there was no association between Carlotta and Barron there was nothing.