The Echelon Vendetta (6 page)
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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.
A girl called to him from out of the crowd of kids crowded together in the dark, drunkenly, with a petulant edge, demanding a
fucking
cigarette,
man.
He ignored them and walked on through the piazzetta. The slender red-brick tower of the campanile rose
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three hundred feet into the Venetian night beside him. Beyond it the heartbreaking sweep of the Piazza San Marco opened up before him, possibly the most beautiful open space in the world: a huge three-sided cloistered square of oddly Moorish design, with the bizarre monstrosity of the basilica holding down the open end.
The piazza was filled with music and light. Florian’s was still open, as it had been since the late 1700s: he walked across the cobbles toward the old café tucked in under the portico on the southern side of the square. In spite of the cool, damp evening a little quartet was playing Ravel’s “Bolero” under a pink silk marquee set up in front of the restaurant. Dalton took a chair to one side of the marquee and waved to an alert waiter who quickly brought him a half bottle of
vino bianco de la casa
(the hell with port). He lit up another one of his cigarillos and sat back to listen.
It was his view that there were few moments in a man’s life, and lately this included sex, that could equal an evening at Florian’s, listening to a spirited and skillful quartet play “Bolero,” and he dedicated his pleasure in it to the memory of Porter Naumann.
“Bolero” came to its fiery conclusion, followed in its turn by “The Moonlight Sonata,” an étude of Liszt’s, and then one of Chopin’s piano sonatas. Through it all Dalton sat alone and watched the crowds swell and peak and dwindle away while the stars turned in the sky above the luminous walls of the square. As the time passed, so did much of his bitterness and anger.
One of the many marvelous gifts of
vino bianco
was the perspective and detachment it could provide: Naumann was dead, a bad death, and something would have to be done about it. If Naumann had been killed, then whoever did it was going to die in a memorable and instructive way, because that was how their game was played. But Stallworth was right. Company business
was
inherently risky, and many of the field operatives suffered from acute stress. Although
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most of the Agency’s field work was little more than skilled forensic accounting in the service of the War on Terror, some of the people doing it cracked in truly spectacular ways.
It was in the nature of their game.
But the curiosity remained, undimmed by the wine. Dalton was still possessed by an intense desire to know what
exactly
had happened to his friend in the last hours of his life, what unknown forces drove him to his terrible death in the courtyard of San Nicolò. At midnight an immense bronze bell sounded once, its deep vibrating tone echoing from the walls and rooftops all around the piazza. The violins ceased, the people stopped moving, and all the pale white faces turned toward the campanile like a field of flowers bending in a wind. The huge bronze bell began to ring the twelve tones of midnight, as it had for over six hundred years. The waiters started to pick up the chairs and collect their bills. The people in the square began to melt away into the alleyways and shadows as the great bell tolled and the echoes rang and reverberated across the rooftops of Venice. Soon the square was almost empty. The soft lights inside Florian’s flicked off one by one. Dalton got to his feet, gathered up his cigarillos, left a generous stack of euros, drained his glass, stretched, and walked, a little unsteadily, through the piazzetta, in and out of the shadows that lay all around the old Ducal Palace.
He opened the old man’s pack of Toscanos, gently turned the slender brown tube with the gold tip between the thumb and index finger of his right hand for a few seconds. What the hell, he decided, lighting it up with his Zippo. He drew the smoke in deep, let it out in a luxurious cloud, snapped the lid shut, and shoved the pack it into the pocket of his trench coat.
Wrapped in a blissful cloud of wine and smoke, Chopin playing sweetly in his memory, Dalton strolled idly along the covered cloister that ran down the Florian side of the piazza. The cigarillo was a perfect coda to an evening of such sublime beauty. He stopped for a
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time, one shoulder up against a pillar, and looked out at the plaza, admiring the way the moonlight bathed the farther wall and how it played with the stonework and the shadows. He found himself
seeing
it as he had never seen it before. Above the three-tiered windowed wall the night sky pulsed with light and he felt himself drawn upward into it, as if he were suddenly weightless.
He finished the cigarillo, stubbed the butt out on the pillar, and put it in his pocket. He turned, with regret, away from the perfection of the plaza at night, crossed over to the covered archways of the Palazzo Ducale, and walked in a strangely swelling sensory daze through its dark cloistered walkway, heading, perhaps a bit vaguely, in the general direction of his hotel.
As he reached the turning of the cloister, he became aware of two large figures standing in the shadows. They stepped forward as he approached, blocking his path, two black shapes silhouetted against the amber lights on the churning water of Saint Mark’s Basin.
“
Scusi,
marigold,” said one. “You have smokes?”
The man’s accent was mainly gutter Croatian with a touch of Trieste in it. His partner, who was moving to block Dalton’s path to the open courtyard, said nothing, but he said it in a way that implied he was fully on board with the evening’s program. He had something long and sharp-looking in his right hand, which he was holding slightly away from his body. The bitter stink of strong Moroccan dope came off the men like heat from a radiator.
Mugged,
thought Dalton, suddenly earthbound and sobering fast.
How embarrassing.
Mugged
like Patsy from Peoria, Stallworth would say.
Dalton looked at the two men, both now moving to block him in, and deep inside his brain a scaled green thing turned over in the primeval muck of his subconscious and opened one slitted yellow eye. He backed deeper inside the covered archway and got his shoulders up against the damp stone walls. The two men stepped into a shaft
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of moonlight under the Moorish arch. The silent one raised his long thin blade, turning it in the moon glow.
“You speak English, marigold?” said the other. “Give us cigarettes. I smell them on you. Give.”
In the moonlight coming over the big man’s shoulder Dalton could see the side of his face. Little beads of sweat glittered on an unshaven and sunken cheek. His eyes were two black holes and he had his right hand in the pocket of a puffy down jacket. Both men were wearing jeans and heavy boots. Shit-kicker boots, Stallworth would have called them. Jack liked those hard-boiled forties names.
Dalton looked briefly to his left and saw piles of clothes and backpacks stacked up under the arch, and several shadowy figures slouching against the Doges’ walls. Tiny red sparks glowed in the darkness, and grass smoke rose up and curled in the shaft of moonlight, along with more of that tinny nasal whining that passes for pop music in the modern world.
Dalton’s self-contained silence was either puzzling or irritating the two men in front of him. They still hadn’t quite decided what to do with him. Ordinarily he would have tried to talk his way out of something like this, because choosing the other method of dealing with this sort of thing always made his life more complicated, and he wasn’t in the mood for that.
Actually, he was in an uncharacteristically
peaceful
place, and he
liked
being there. He liked being there so much that he found himself getting angry with these two assholes for breaking his mood. It had been a
fine
mood. And now, just like that, it was gone.
“No,” said Dalton, his anger rising up. “I don’t speak English. And I don’t smoke. So how about you two just fuck right off ?”
“Hey, Milan! Don’t let the faggot punk you out,” said a girl, her voice slurred and languorous. “Make him give us some cigarettes.”
“You are faggot?” asked Milan, in a tone of polite inquiry.
Dalton was wondering what to do with these two guys. They
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