The Echelon Vendetta (11 page)

“Yes. Mr. Pellerossa. Do you know where he lives?”

Her black eyes flickered to the entrance and followed a young woman who looked as though she could be the doe-eyed girl’s sister as she walked through the café toward the kitchen. When she was gone the old woman’s eyes moved back to Dalton and stayed there, as full of low cunning and evil intentions as the eyes of a gull.

“His name is not Pellerossa
. Pellerossa
is what he
is.
Why do you want him?”

“I have something of his. I wish to return it.”

“Is it money? You can leave it here. He will come back.”

“When?”

A shrug, her leathery neck contracting, her tendons bulging out.

“I do not know. Soon.”

“I have to leave. I wish to see him before I go.”

Her eyes settled on the euros in Dalton’s gloved hand. Rested there. Dalton stripped off two twenties. She did not look up but the signal was clear. He peeled off two more. The fifth one did the trick. She showed him her tooth—a fine sharp tooth and it would have looked even more fetching if it had not been all alone in her blood-red gums. Her tongue moved inside her open mouth, a blind white snake-head. She held her hand out, and Dalton placed the euros in her upturned palm. Her fingers folded over the crisp new bills like

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the valves of a Venus flytrap, and with a papery crackle the money disappeared. She stuffed it into the innards of her black dress and looked up at him again.

“How do you know him?”

“I don’t.”

This answer amused her. She bared her tooth at him again and touched it with her white snakelike tongue. Dalton had the idea she was tasting his scent. It was an unsettling concept.

“He is not Italian. He is from America. This is between you.”

“Thanks for the advice. Do you know where he is now?”

She reached under the counter and pulled out a large cloth-bound book. It was the
Missa Solemnis,
tattered and ancient, with the leaves falling out. She laid it down on the folded napkins and opened it up.

Her talonlike finger moved down the open page until she reached a passage. She turned the book around so that Dalton could read it, keeping her blackened nail on the spot. It was the ordinary for the Giorno dei Morti, the Feast of all Souls.

She tapped it twice, staring up at him. Dalton looked at it for a while, trying to understand. She seemed unwilling to speak the words. Finally she sighed and frowned at him and then she spoke in an impatient whisper.

“In the Dorsoduro. Near this church. In the Calle dei Morti.
Numero quindici.
Number fifteen.”

She pulled the book away, closed it slowly, and went back to her folding. The thing was done, her manner said.

Dalton was almost at the door when he heard her calling to him. He turned around. She raised a clawed hand and tapped the side of her skull with a blackened nail.

“Il Pellerossa. Ha dei grilli per il capo. Capisce? Guardatevi dal vecchio, scolaro.”

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Dalton understood some of it. She was telling him to be... careful? Gentle? To be gentle with the old man? And she was calling Dalton
scolaro,
a schoolboy. The rest was gibberish to him.

He bowed his thanks to her and walked back out into the sunlight. He was halfway through the Campo San Stefano and headed for the bridge over the Grand Canal that led into the residential district of the Dorsoduro when he finally worked out the translation of
grilli per il capo.
She was telling him that the old man named Pellerossa had maggots in his head. And
guardatevi dal vecchio
didn’t mean be
gentle
with guy. It meant
beware
of him.

THE DORSODURO NEIGHBORHOOD
was a warren of narrow lanes and back alleys on the far side of the Grand Canal. The workers and waiters and laborers and gondoliers, the people who kept the Grand Guignol theatrics of Venezia up and running for the tourists, lived down here in this maze of ancient stone alleys, along with the students and backpackers and eco-vagrants who could not afford the grand hotels along the canal or the villas behind San Marco.

The Calle dei Morti was at the far eastern end of the Dorsoduro. It was a tiny medieval laneway off the broad boardwalk. The waterway was used by freighters and cruise ships that docked along the Giudecca across the bay. The boardwalk was essentially deserted. The temperature had dropped in the hour it had taken Dalton to reach the turning of the alleyway, and a wind with a knife edge to it was blowing scraps of paper up the lane as he walked slowly along the street, looking for number fifteen.

He found it at the corner, where the
calle
turned into a wider canyonlike lane. He stopped in front of a battered ironbound wooden door set deep into a stucco-covered three-story house no wider than ten feet. Three narrow slitted windows with rusted iron bars rose upward above the door, one above the other. The eaves hung over

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the street, supported by old hand-hewn beams. In the middle of the door was a heavy lion’s-head knocker.

Dalton lifted it up and struck the wooden door twice. On the second blow the door popped open about an inch. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open slowly, revealing a narrow flight of worn stone stairs rising into a gloomy darkness. Motes of dust floated in the cold sunlight. There was a scent in the air.

Something familiar. Cigarillos. Toscanos.

Not fresh, but present, drifting in the dead air like a miasma. Under the tobacco scent was the smell of unwashed clothes and dried sweat. Dalton leaned in to look up the stairwell. Beyond it there was only shadow.

Inside the door there was a dented bronze mailbox with three compartments. Two of them had names scrawled in pencil on scraps of paper: Alessandra Vasari had Numero Zero, and someone named Domenico Zitti had Numero Due.

The third compartment, Numero Tre, had no name card at all.

Dalton looked through the bronze grillwork and saw a thick sheaf of letters for Alessandra Vasari, many of them with American stamps. It appeared that no one was writing to the entity known as Domenico Zitti, at least not this week.

The third one, the unmarked one, was empty as well.

He gave up on the mail and went slowly up the narrow stairs, painfully aware of what a vulnerable position he was in as he climbed them, trapped by the pressing stone walls on either side, nowhere to go if somebody appeared at the top of the stairs with ugly intentions.

He reached the landing and saw that the stairs made a one-eighty-degree turn and continued to the second floor. There was light at the top of the second landing, a narrow bar of pale sunlight coming through the first of the slit windows. On this landing there was no light, only a hallway that ran about fifteen feet, ending in blackness.

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He felt along the edge of the wall and found an old light switch. He twisted it and a dim glow appeared at the far end of the hall, coming from a light fixture set into the wall by the door to what Dalton assumed was Appartamento Tre. The floorboards creaked as he came down the hall, and the scent of Toscano cigarillos grew stronger. For reasons he could neither explain nor overcome, the skin on his belly and across his back tightened as he got to the door.

Standing in front of the heavy nail-studded barrier, he listened for a while. Although the door was thick and well set into a stone jamb, some sort of sound was coming through the planks. He put an ear up against the wood. It smelled of old paint and turpentine and cedar. What was coming through the thick planks was a low droning. No, a low muttering sound, rhythmic and oddly musical, but not quite music.

It was a sound that suggested speech, a kind of language, in that it had intonations and pauses, callings and responses, almost like a prayer or a chant.

But it was neither a voice nor an instrument; it was a sound unlike anything Dalton had ever heard. He stepped back, breaking contact with the door, put a hand up on the wood, and felt the beat of the sound like a muffled drum.

Maggots, the old lady said.

The man had maggots in his head.

He made a fist of his hand and pounded on the door four times, hard enough to shake dust out of the frame around the door. It silted down like fine sand and drifted in the glow of the pale light on the wall. Nothing. He pounded again, harder, leaving his fist on the door at the end of the last stroke. While he was standing there he remembered what Brancati had told him, about other guests in the Strega hostel and the strange moaning they had heard coming from Naumann’s room. Was this the same sound? Dalton gave the latch a wrenching turn. The door was locked tight.

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He pounded on the door again, his anger rising up. “Open the door! It’s the police. Open up the door!”

Nothing.

He put his ear against the door and the sound came vibrating through the wooden planks. He jerked his head away, feeling suddenly dizzy and slightly nauseous, as if the floor had begun to rise up under his feet.

“Excuse me. Can I help you?”

He wheeled around, his balance a little off, and steadied himself on the wall. A woman was standing at the far end of the hallway, surrounded by a pale glow, her face in darkness but a shining aura of light in her hair.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m—”

“Are you the police? I heard you calling.”

Dalton gathered himself together and came down the narrow hallway toward the woman, pasting a cardboard smile on his face.

“Not exactly. I’m with the American consulate.”

“I heard you say you were police.”

There was intelligence in her voice, and suspicion. Her accent was aristocratic Roman, her diction precise and careful.

“Yes. I did say that. I’m in a semiofficial position. I guess saying ‘police’ helps with the language barrier. I’m more of an investigator.”

He reached the end of the hall and the woman backed away into the light flowing up the stairwell from the street door he had left open. She was tall, almost as tall as he, with long black hair in a severe cut, prominent cheekbones, and full scarlet lips. She was wearing a pale green cashmere top under a matching long-sleeved cardigan. Short black leather skirt; fine long, well-turned legs; and expensive Italian shoes, the stiletto type, in no way intended for walking.

She was full-figured (the word “luscious” came to him) and she smelled of single-malt scotch, a fine peaty scent. Also of cigarettes, and under these spicy aromas a familiar perfume that he dimly recalled

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but could not place. She was looking at him, directly and without

emotion, a closed and guarded look.

“Do you have some identification?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Dalton reached into his coat and extracted a slim blue leather folio with the seal of the United States on the cover. He flipped it open so that she could read it in the light. Next to an embossed holographic seal of the U.S. State Department there was a picture of him taken a few years ago, when he still had an Army haircut, and beside that his name and station: Micah Dalton/Consular Security Division.

She read it carefully and took her time comparing the photo with the man standing in front of her. Dalton let her take all the time she needed. If she didn’t like this ID, he had four others just as impressive in his briefcase.

Finally she snapped the folio shut, handed it back to him.

“There is no one in that room. He left a day ago.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

She looked sharply at him, and then smiled. “I am Alessandra Vasari. I own the building.”

Her voice was low, with a rich vibrato, and it had the husky undertones of a smoker. Dalton made her age at forty, perhaps younger. She had no rings on her fingers. No jewelry of any kind, for that matter. But to Dalton’s experienced eye she had that indefinable aura of very old money.

In spite of his dislike (face it, his envy) of old money, not to mention his throbbing headache and a general feeling that he had spent the last forty-eight hours poisoning himself with licorice-flavored cough syrup, he felt a mild resurgence of his long-extinct libido.

If Signora Vasari reciprocated any of this animal emotion, she was concealing it beautifully.

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“May I ask who
was
living here?”

Wrong question.

He saw the suspicion flaring up in her hazel-brown eyes.

“Don’t you know?”

Time to get official.

He altered his tone, hardened it.

“Ma’am, this inquiry has to do with matters of state. I’m following up on a request from an agency in Washington, D.C. We have an interest in the man who was living in this room. Under what name was he registered?”

That backed her off a bit.

“We do not ‘register’ guests. I rent out the rooms to people who seem reliable and honest. On a monthly basis. I have been told this man’s name was Mr. Sweetwater. I believe he was an American Indian. What name were you looking for?”

“Pellerossa?”

She smiled thinly at that. “
Pellerossa
just means ‘red skin’ in Italian. Or, I suppose, Red Indian. I wish to know why are you interested in Mr. Sweetwater?”

She placed a slight ironic emphasis on the word “interested.” Signora Vasari didn’t approve of him. Either she didn’t like authority figures or she didn’t like Americans. Probably both, he decided. And seeing her dislike of him so manifestly apparent made Dalton think a little more carefully about this...
escapade
would be how Stallworth would put it, and not with a loving heart. This “innocent little side trip” to the Dorsoduro.

He had already used a solid State Department jacket with this stunningly delicious but intimidating woman, and if she got curious and followed up with the Consulate, the word would get back to Stallworth faster than a French soldier could throw away his rifle. The resulting cell-phone séance with Stallworth would go roughly as follows:

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Jack: You used what?
Dalton: My consular ID, but—
Jack: So you could find some fucking Indian?
Dalton: Yes, but—
Jack: And this was company business how?
Dalton: The guy had this spider in his cigarette case and—
Jack: A spider?
Dalton: Right, a huge honking emerald green spider—
Jack: I asked you how this connects with Naumann!
Dalton: Well this Indian, he was eating at the same restaurant—
Jack: What restaurant?
Dalton: The restaurant where Porter used to eat. Carovita—
Jack: Hold the line for a moment, will ya? Don’t go away now.

Three minutes later there’d be a knock on the door of his hotel room, and when he opened it there’d be these two no-neck ex-Marines from the company’s Meat Hook Squad reaching for him, and then everything would go black. This was what he was risking right now and the burning question was...
Why
?