The Echelon Vendetta (7 page)

weren’t kids, that was certain; Milan was perhaps in his mid-twenties. His partner was in the shadows but he looked big and solid enough to be a grown man. Dalton had a vision of the kind of lives these two were leading as clearly as if it were a film being shown on the inside of his skull: they stole, they beat people, they screwed the girls. They lived like hyenas. How many people had they terrified in just this way? How many young gay men had they kicked to a bloody ruin just for fun? These two were like stones—

No, like turds. Huge hairy balls of steaming fresh dung, dropped by the careless frigate bird of fate into the sparkling pool of life, and whenever they hurt someone, the ripples of everlasting grief would run outward to infinity.

Dalton, sighing, knew these men for what they were. This is what they did. They had done this all last year and for all the years before that. They would do this sort of thing next year, and the year after that. If Dalton let them.

Stallworth’s voice replayed in his mind.
No trouble, Micah.

“Answer, boy,” said Milan, his temper flaring. “You are faggot?”

“We prefer
gay,
” drawled Dalton. “This your toy boy?”

Milan glanced at the other man and snorted.

“Hey, Gavro. Queer boy here, I think he like you.”

As far as Dalton could make it out, Gavro told Milan, in idiomatic Serbo-Croatian, to engage in reciprocal oral congress with a ruminant quadruped of the goat persuasion, by their standards such an Oscar Wildean quip that Milan put his head back to let out a braying hoot. Dalton took this opportunity to kick Milan solidly in the nuts in the approved manner, which requires you to visualize your upper arch—
not
the tip of your shoe (which hurts like hell, by the way) but the
flat
of the upper arch, the way dropkickers do, to
visualize
your foot passing completely
through
the recipient’s crotch to an imaginary point a foot above and beyond it. This follow-through method allows the full kinetic energy of the kicker’s blow

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to be passed efficiently to the meatier parts of the kickee’s crotch, with truly gratifying—at least to the impartial observer—results.

In this particular case Milan rose upward off the ground a couple of feet and balanced for a moment like an Olympic gymnast on Dal-ton’s outstretched leg while he emitted a kind of teakettle squeal through his clenched teeth before tumbling off Dalton’s foot and forming himself into the skewered-shrimp position that one traditionally assumes after one has been forcefully booted in the nuts.

Gavro, unfazed, came in silent and fast with his knife in a sweeping throat-level sideways slash from left to right that would have opened up Dalton’s neck like the lid of a Pez dispenser if Dalton had not stepped inside the arc of the attack, catching Gavro’s knife arm with his left hand while using the butt of his right hand and the full force of his body from the toes up to deliver a sharp rising blow to Gavro’s upper lip and nose that, if executed properly, shatters the bone and cartilage of the nose with sufficient force to drive the whole detached mass of bone chips, splinters, and cartilage right through the nares and pharynx and deep into the brain. The blow is designed to be fatal, and Dalton
meant
it to be fatal.

Gavro went reeling backward, his limp body hitting the Doge’s cobblestones like a burlap sack full of fresh guts. Dalton stepped lightly around Gavro’s limp body, stooping to pick up the weapon Gavro had been carrying, which turned out to be a very expensive Serbian switchblade with a wonderfully carved ivory hilt, which he slipped into the pocket of his trench coat. He walked over and stared down at Milan’s white sweating face and his wide blinking eyes gleaming in the moonlight, fully aware of the profound silence that was coming from the huddled masses under the cloister. He crouched down beside Milan and asked Milan in a kind of whispering purr what his favorite show tune was.

Milan, distracted by some pressing internal issues, stared up at him. Dalton asked the question again, this time in his best Alan Rickman

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drawl: “What’s your
favorite
show tune, Milan? We marigolds just

love
show tunes. Come
on,
bunnykins. Won’t you tell me yours?”

“Fuck ...you... faggot.”

“ ‘Fuck You, Faggot’? Don’t know it. Now
I
really like ‘People
.
’ You know, from
Hello, Dolly
? Barbra sings it. It goes something like this.”

Dalton straightened up, set himself.

“People”
—he slammed a vicious boot into Milan’s sagging belly— “
People
who need
people.
” With each
people
Milan got another brutal kick in the guts, Dalton moving around the man writhing on the ground like a dancer, singing the chorus aloud, puffing hard with each blow, “are the luckiest
people
in the world—”

“Hey, man,” a slightly strangled male voice called from out of the darkened cloister. “Leave ’im alone, okay? He’s fuckin’ done!”

Dalton stopped, looked down at Milan, who was curled up in a ball and chuffing like a cow about to calve. Tears were running down his cheeks and his mouth was full of blood.

“
Are
you ‘fuckin’ done,’ Milan? Or do you have a comment?”

Milan seemed to be struggling to find one of those Noe
^..
l Coward lines that would bring the house down but in the end he had to settle for a throat-clearing gargle followed by an attempt to spit in Dal-ton’s face that ended up with a bloody gob of it running down his own cheek. Dalton waited for a polite interval to see if Milan had anything illuminating to add.

“Okay,” he said, straightening up. “Let me get that for you.”

Dalton gauged his angle and then kicked Milan very hard in the center of his face, getting a wonderful follow-through that snapped Milan’s head back on his neck with a meaty crack. Where it stuck, still and fixed, its skull-to-shoulder angle now slightly
wrong.
Something inside Milan came flowing out in a rushing gush.

Dalton stepped daintily back, surveyed the scene with the air of a satisfied choreographer, and, turning to address the stunned kids in the cloister, bowed deeply:

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“If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear...”

He paused, searching his memory for the line, and then, the Shakespearean spirit coming back in a sudden flow, he continued in a stronger voice that echoed around the piazza: “And so good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.”

No response from the audience. Everybody’s a critic these days. He bowed again, straightened, pivoted neatly on his right heel, his long coat flaring out, and strode with quiet dignity, stage left, out of the piazzetta, his heels striking hard and his footsteps echoing around the square. Silence, nothing but silence, followed him all the way back to his hotel along the quay.

Reaction set in fast and he was weaving and a little breathless and trying not to throw up by the time he reached the brassbound doors of his hotel. He stopped there, leaning against the entrance, his breath coming in short painful gasps. Beyond the edge of the quay the basin of Saint Mark was a black bowl marked here and there with a flickering sliver of light. Far across the bay, floodlights illuminated the impassive façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. From the eaves of the hotel next door a gargoyle with the face of a lizard stared down at him, cold and unblinking.

AFTER HIS WORLD STOPPED
spinning and he got his breathing under control, he pushed his way into the hotel lobby, raised a hand to the old bellman slumped behind the rosewood desk, and rode up in the narrow mirrored elevator to the top floor. He fumbled at the lock and eventually unlocked the door into what had been Naumann’s company suite, a lush and well-appointed room with a wide and inviting carved wooden bed, an antique desk with a Venetian candelabrum on it, and sliding glass doors that led out to a small balcony

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overlooking the basin. The room had been cleaned and dressed, and Naumann’s luggage was still there at the side of his bed. Dalton figured the maid had been in, because there were fresh flowers in a tall clay cylinder standing on the dresser, a towering viny tangle with several huge white flowers, all of them as tightly closed as butterfly cocoons.

Dalton, for whom the land of plants was an undiscovered bourne, ignored them while he poured himself a glass of wine and passed on through to the balcony, where he pulled a wrought-iron stool up to the ledge and sat down on it with his back against the wall, looking out across the basin.

He pulled the pack of cigarillos out of his pocket and, with a hand that trembled only a little, held the case up to the pale light of the balcony lantern. He flipped the lid and pulled out one of the few remaining cigarillos. It looked and felt and smelled in every way wonderful. He put it to his lips, lit it with his Zippo.

The smoke poured down into his lungs and spread a comforting warmth through his body. He leaned on the flower basket—gardenias? lupins? rutabagas?—and looked down at the almost-deserted quay.

A single white-robed figure was wandering past the equestrian statue of Garibaldi. Not a ghost; the mime he had teased earlier in the day, on his way home now, heading for the vaporetto station in front of the hotel. Dalton looked up and saw the stars of the Milky Way like a shell-pink veil waving in a sea breeze blowing in from an infinite black ocean. The city smelled of sea salt and garlic and sewage and damp stone: human corruption and the bittersweet joy of still being alive. It was a night that Porter would have savored: the superb little orchestra at Florian’s, the
vino bianco,
the cigarillos, but it was too damn late for all that and too damn bad. Porter Naumann was dead now and would never see another evening in Venice.

He sighed, saw his glass was empty, and went back into the room to get some more wine, brushing past the floral display on the dresser;

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he was a little disconcerted when he saw that the large white flowers were now in the process of spreading their petals wide open.

Moonflowers.

The name came up from somewhere in his memory.
Moonflowers.
He had heard that name before, recently, it seemed; they were a kind of morning glory, weren’t they? Jack Stallworth was a fanatical plant guy. Maybe Jack had talked about moonflowers at some point. Dalton brushed by them and plucked another bottle of
prosecco
out of the minibar beside the dresser, popped the cork, and went back out to the balcony.

He sat back down on the stool and breathed in the night air, pulling it down deep, smelling something new in the breeze, a sharp tangy scent a little bit like eucalyptus. There was a stirring tickle on the back of his left hand. He looked down to see a large emerald green spider resting there.

He jerked his hand reflexively and as he did so he felt the spider bite him, like a spike being driven
deep
into the back of his hand.

Stricken with mindless horror, he dropped the pack and stumbled backward across the balcony, slapping at his clothes and wiping his forearms vigorously, his breath coming in short sharp rasps and his heart pounding. The stinging pain in his left hand was building into a fire that seemed to blaze upward through the veins in his left forearm. He stumbled into the bathroom of the suite and ripped his shirtsleeve up to his biceps. Under the blue-white light over the sink he watched as a thin red network of inflamed veins slowly spread upward toward his elbow. The flesh of his wrist was getting puffy. He turned his hand over and saw a large red welt about the size of a silver dollar on the back of his left hand. In the center of this welt there were two tiny dots of red blood welling up.

He fumbled at his waist, pulling his thin leather belt out of the loops. He wrapped the belt around his left arm just above the elbow joint and pulled the belt as tight as he could. He watched as the thin

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red lines grew upward on the underside of his forearm. The pain, a hot flooding rush that burned him down to the bone, was now replaced by an icy chill. He realized he was gasping for air.

He tried to calm himself, thought about antidotes: he had been trained in jungle survival. What kind of spider was emerald green and had a bite this powerful? What kind of venom had this rapid effect? Would he go into anaphylactic shock?

Realizing that hyperventilating would only speed the poison, if that’s what it was, he tried to calm himself, tried to think clearly. He looked up and saw his face in the mirror, wet with sweat, his skin blue-white in the fluorescent light, his pale-blue eyes staring back at him; the face of a fool who might die if he didn’t do something very effective right now. He opened the door to the cabinet above the sink and fumbled through the toiletries, found a pair of stainless-steel scissors that glittered in the cold light.

He put his left hand down on the edge of the sink and sliced into the blackened welt on the back of his hand, ripping at the wound until he had it flayed opened like a red flower that gushed out bluish blood. He could see the pink cords of the exposed tendons in his hand and the blood drained from his head. He swayed at the sink, his knees shaking.

He threw the bloody scissors clattering into the sink and fumbled through the bottles and cans in the cabinet until he found a spray bottle of lime-scented cologne. He doused the open wound again and again with the cool liquid, ignoring the pain that spread through his hand.