The Echelon Vendetta (10 page)

“I know it. I hate it.”

“I too hate this song. Once it gets into your head, it flies around and around. You cannot get it out. Now it is in my head. Right now. Like a wasp.”

“I know. Now it’s in
mine.
Thanks for that.”

That made Brancati laugh. “Ha! Now you know! We share this, eh? Anyway, this ugly thing, this very terrible fight, so close to you. I worry about you.”

“Well, I appreciate that. But it wasn’t me. I’m fine.”

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“But you
were
in the piazza last night.”

It wasn’t a question. Had he paid cash or used his AmEx card? He couldn’t recall. Too much wine. He recalled Naumann’s warning, from a company field-training session in Munich many years ago.

Tell as much of the truth as you can get away with, kid.

“Yes. I had a drink at Florian’s.”

“Of course. I remember your friend loved to do that. I thought you would go, as a remembrance. A drink for your old friend. And you stayed until the tocsin rang? From the Campanile?”

“No. I left early. I was still pretty shaken up.” “About Mr. Naumann?” “Yes. Do you have any news about him?” “And you are okay? You had no
avventura
last night?” “No. Just a drink and then to bed.” “Really? Good. Because, you know, I am a little worried for this

man who did this thing. To defend oneself is a man’s right. To dance and sing ‘People’ while kicking a man so hard he becomes a cripple is different. A man who could do such a thing, perhaps he has some sickness. In his heart.”

“Couldn’t agree more. But I didn’t see a thing. Sorry not to help.” “Also, there is the family of these men.” Family? This was nuts. Guys like that didn’t have families. They multi

plied on the underside of toilet tanks in flophouse latrines. “Family? I don’t understand.” “You would not think it, but it seems that the one in the coma,

his name was Gavro Princip. He is the youngest son of a large Serbian crime family. Very famous. Do you remember the name Gavrilo Princip, perhaps?”

He did. It rang a distant chime. But he couldn’t— “His great-great-uncle was the man who shot the Archduke Ferdinand. In Sarajevo. They say he started the First World War. It

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is a matter of much pride, so I am told, in parts of Serbia. Even today, he is seen as a hero. Anyway, his family, the Princips, they are now part of a crime organization run by a very bad man named Branco Gospic, who lives in Split, and the Branco Gospic organization, they make money in mysterious ways and are well known to the police, as the saying goes. So although Gavro Princip is a thief, still he is connected to the Branco Gospic family, and it is very likely that Branco Gospic will take what has happened to Gavro as an affront, an insult. As a matter for vendetta. Such things are taken very seriously in Serbia and Croatia. Look at the Bosnian War. The
lex talionis,
you know this?”

Peachy.

Isn’t that just peachy.

Brancati let this wonderfully eloquent silence run for a while.

“So, no matter.
You
are not involved. And these two, they were
rifiuti della società
! I am happy they are so much punished. Venice is a better place. Italy is better. Of course, should the man who did this thing let himself do it again, then perhaps the police will not think it such a fine thing. But if he does
not
do it again, at least not in Italy, then I think, if the Venice police find this man, they will buy him a big dinner. Maybe at Carovita, eh?”

That was a polite Italian warning, Micah. Hear it.

“Yes. I hope this man would take that advice to heart.”

“You do?”

“I know I would, if I were in his shoes.”

“
D’accordo?
And this song, ‘People,’ it is still in your head?”

“I’ll put something else in it.”

Maybe a bullet.

“You know this musical?”

“
Hello, Dolly
? Never saw it.”

“That’s what this man said also. Last night. That it was from
Hello, Dolly.
But my wife tells me it is from a play called
Funny Girl.
”

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Dalton managed not to groan out loud. Barely.

“Is it? Well there you go.”

“Yes. There we go. Well, about Mr. Naumann we do have news. You sure you are okay to talk. You are well?”

“Yes. Peachy. I’m peachy. What is it?”

He’d actually said “peachy” out loud.

Twice.

“Coroner? Is that your word? The coroner?”

“Yes.”

“His report is in. The preliminary. No blood work. The brain was very inflamed. It seems there had been some sort of
colpo apoplettico
— I do not know the English words—”

“A stroke, you mean?”

“Yes. A stroke. But the doctor says that such a stroke as this could have had the effect of creating a very strong derangement of the senses. The doctor is telling us that Mr. Naumann died as a result of this stroke.”

“Directly, you mean?”

Brancati said nothing for a moment. Dalton got the impression that he had put his hand over the phone and was talking to someone else in the room.

“No. Not directly. He also examined the heart, which was not in good shape. Mr. Naumann had signs of previous minor heart attacks and some of the atrial walls had atrophied. He was not a healthy man. So the stress of—how to say—the brain attack, this placed a fatal strain on his heart.”

“So he did die of a heart attack? After all?”

“Yes. I hope this puts your mind at ease.”

“What about the . . . the damage he did? To himself ?”

Brancati sighed. In his mind Dalton could see him shrugging.

“We can never know. In his last moments he was in a terrible place and his death was horrible. I wish never to die as he did. But

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we may at least say that he did not commit suicide. This death was not a murder either. So there we have it. Natural causes. A tragedy, but sadly, also a part of life. You will come to Cortona? We can release the body to you.”

Dalton picked up the flask and unscrewed the lid, but he did not drink. He sat there thinking about the man in black and his emerald-green spider and what Naumann had said—about Laura.

But none of that was real.

It was all a nightmare, born of too much booze. And of course the side effects of a bite from some sort of poisonous spider. Maybe even from the soul sickness that comes on you after you’ve let your red dog run and serious damage has been done because of it.

But it was over now.

This was another day. The spider
hadn’t
killed him. The ghost of Porter Naumann had
not
appeared in his room. When he thought it over in the cold light of day, everything that Naumann’s ghost had told him was something he either already knew or already suspected. And that would certainly include the warning about Laura.

Except the bit about Gavro’s vengeful family. And even that could have come up from somewhere deep in his own guilty mind.

“Yes,” he said, watching the afternoon sunlight play on the tall tangled vines of the moonflower plant, its large blue-white flowers closed tight again, huge white cocoons that seemed to glow with a ghostly interior fire. “I’ll be in Cortona tonight.”

IT TOOK DALTON
two hours to clean up the suite: the bathroom looked as if he’d staged a cockfight in it, and the Italian linen bedspread was a total loss. He took some more time to clean himself up well enough that when he walked out the door he wouldn’t frighten the horses.

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He put the ominous little cigarillo pack, still bound up with several elastics, into the breast pocket of his dress shirt. Everything else, the ivory-handled switchblade he’d taken from Gavro, the silver flask, the bloody towels, and his Beretta, went into his briefcase. He closed the lid and locked it with superstitious care. Naumann’s bags—including everything Dalton had been wearing the day before, which, in view of Brancati’s deeply implausible insouciance about the Milan and Gavro affair, were better out of the forensic reach of the local authorities—were standing by the door, tagged for Dalton’s London address and due to be FedEx’d by the hotel bellman later this afternoon.

His own luggage consisted of his briefcase and one battered alligator-skin suitcase. He did one last walk-through of the company suite, including the balcony, looking for any remaining sign of the previous night’s excesses. Other than the bloody bedspread, in reparation for which he peeled off another three hundred euros and dropped them in a soap dish beside the daily twenty-euro tip for the maid, the room looked pretty much as it should.

He stood in the middle of the living room and spent a moment thinking about last night’s dream and what Naumann’s ghost had said about Laura. In his mind’s eye he saw Laura sitting on a blue wooden chair in a white room bathed in golden light. She was wearing a pastel pink dress belted at the waist. Barefoot, her short red hair carefully combed, her pale face scrubbed, without makeup, she stared fixedly into emptiness. Cradled in her upturned hands was a small rounded form wrapped in an emerald green blanket. Overhead a ceiling fan with huge palm fronds for blades whisked through the salt-scented air and a sea wind stirred the white linen curtains.

He held the image for as long as he could and then shut it down and locked it away in an iron cage at the back of his skull. There was nothing he could do for Laura. She had left him long ago, had trav

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eled as far away from him as it was possible to go. He picked up his luggage and his briefcase and turned his back on the room and on everything that had happened in it last night.

On his way out he stopped in front of the long mirror by the door and examined himself—navy pinstripe over a crisp white shirt, a pale gold silk tie knotted over a gold collar pin, a long blue cashmere coat and shiny black wingtips. Black leather gloves to hide the wound on the back of his left hand. Shaved, scented, combed, and pressed. He looked like death. He slipped on a pair of tortoiseshell gold-trimmed sunglasses and considered his reflection. A verse ran through his mind, an old Dorothy Parker rhyme:

Life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.

His bags were in check and he was ready for a five o’clock water taxi ride to the Piazzale Roma, where his rented Alfa waited for him. Dalton stepped a tad warily out the doors of the Savoia & Jolanda and into the pale afternoon sun, expecting a shriek of recognition from a chorus of traumatized backpackers. No one even looked his way.

It was business as usual for the quay of the slaves, and he saw the same black-haired mystical-thighed tour guide striding past, this time trailing a litter of Chinese tourists slated for today’s Ordeal by Pigeon over in the piazza. He flipped his collar up, straightened his sunglasses, turned hard left, and headed briskly away from the San Marco, on his way to Ristorante Carovita.

To satisfy his curiosity.

Nothing more.

A little side trip to look into the small matter of an emerald green

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spider, perhaps to discuss the events of the night with the spider’s careless owner. Maybe even to
return
the spider. Then on to Cortona to pick up the threads of what had been beginning to feel like his
former
life for a while there last night.

The café was open when he got there, with a few tourists and regulars sitting out under the awning and a damp salt wind blowing in from the distant palm-fringed line of the Lido beaches. The doe-eyed girl was nowhere around. Seated behind the counter inside, barricaded behind a heap of linen napkins waiting to be folded, was a parrot-faced old crone with evil black eyes, her fingers and hands bent and twisted into talons. She glanced up from her work as he came into the café and a look passed swiftly across her face, an unmistakable flicker of wary recognition. She looked like a sable basilisk and he was for a time torn between using his boyish charm, of which he had far less than he imagined, or calling in an exorcist.

Dalton opted for charm.

“Buongiorno, zia! Come sta?”

“I speak English.”

“What a happy coincidence, my dear lady. So do I.”

This brought a noncommittal grunt and she went back to her folding. Dalton looked at the thin greasy gray hair plastered across her skull for a while and decided that boyish charm was not this old bat’s weak point. He looked around the café and saw that all of to-day’s business was out under the awning. They were more or less alone. He leaned forward, placing his hands on her laundry. She stopped folding and looked up at him, her flat black eyes cold.

“
Zia,
I am looking for a customer who comes here.”

She said nothing but now a light was in her eyes, an acquisitive glitter rather like a gold coin in a shallow pond of black water. Dalton pulled out his wallet and extracted a sheaf of euros. She focused on them for a moment and then looked up at him again, her face closing like a fist.

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“Who do you want?”

“He’s an older man, very big, very strong. He has long silver-gray hair—down to here,” said Dalton, touching his left shoulder. “He wears a black coat like a cape and the long boots of an American cowboy—”

Her hard eyes narrowed at this. Dalton searched for the Italian.

“Come vaccaro. Capisce?”

“Pellerossa,”
she said, her voice harsh and rustling in her throat like dead leaves in a gutter. It wasn’t a question.