‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said.
She inclined her head to one side, red locks hanging unnaturally straight. Apparently, she wasn’t in a hurry to execute me.
‘Why me?’
She blinked. Looked almost dazed. ‘There is no reason.’
‘None?’
‘I hoped maybe you would be better. If you listened to me, and did as I told you, I did not think it was so bad for you. You could have taken something from the vault, yes?’
‘But you told me not to.’
She raised her eyebrows. Okay, it was a stupid point. She’d told me not to open the case, too.
‘I’d still have been involved in killing a man,’ I told her. ‘I mean, that had to be the idea, right?’
She barely nodded, but it was enough that she didn’t deny it. I suppose that should have come as no surprise, but it still shocked me to know that I’d almost carried out all the steps of an assassination. God knows how I would have reacted if my greed and curiosity hadn’t got the better of me.
‘So what made you think I wouldn’t go to the police?’ I asked. ‘Were you always planning on coming back here to kill me?’
Her face tangled. I didn’t know if I should trust my eyes, but she appeared perplexed. Saddened, too.
‘Kill you?’ she said, as though testing the words on her tongue. ‘But this is not so.’
‘It isn’t? Then how do you explain
that
.’ I jutted my chin at her gun.
‘Ah,’ she said, as if we’d finally broken through a stubborn language barrier. ‘But this is for you, yes?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘When I am gone.’ She nodded. ‘I leave it for you.’
‘Why? Are you expecting me to shoot myself?’ Now true, I was feeling a touch sheepish about what I’d done to Count Borelli’s home, but it was something I thought I could live with.
‘Idiot. It is so you can kill him.’
My eyes widened and my skin began to tingle. I was starting to feel uncommonly warm. Obviously, it was just me, because Graziella appeared ice-cool and unruffled.
‘Who’s
him
?’ I asked, although I really would have preferred not to know.
‘The Count.’
My voice had become small all of a sudden. ‘But why would I do that?’
She began to smile, coyly at first. ‘There is your book for one thing. But also,’ she said, the grin breaking for good and revealing perfect teeth beneath innocent eyes, ‘there is your friend. Across the hall from you, yes? If you do not do this … well.’
‘Well?’ I gulped.
She shrugged, as if helpless, then lifted the gun to her temple and faked pulling the trigger. ‘Poof,’ she said, meanwhile unfurling her hand on the opposite side of her head, as if her brain had just exploded from her skull. Something fell from her grip. A light, brownish substance floated down to my bedcovers like a feather. I peered at it. A clump of hair. Nutty, with the odd blondish fibre. It looked very much like Victoria’s shade.
Oh boy. So I wasn’t the only one who’d slept far too deeply. Apparently, Victoria had dozed through an impromptu trim.
I was beginning to suspect Graziella was a little unstable. It wasn’t simply her willingness to turn a loaded gun on herself to emphasise a point, it was also the way she thought it was perfectly acceptable to break into people’s homes to cut their hair or demand that they murder someone on her behalf. I was pretty sure that wasn’t normal behaviour. Mind you,
normal
was becoming a distant memory to me – it had already been a mighty eventful few days, and I had a funny feeling that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
‘Don’t bring her into this,’ I said, pointing at the sample of Victoria’s tresses. You’ll have to forgive me the line. This wasn’t a time for originality – I needed the message to be clear.
‘But it will not be necessary,’ Graziella announced, sounding like she was completing a basic sum, ‘if you kill him.’
‘To be perfectly honest, I’d really rather not.’ There was a twinge in the muscles around her eyes, like a response to mild pain, and I found myself having to explain my reluctance to commit premeditated murder. ‘Look, I’ve done some bad things in my time, it’s true. I used to be a burglar, you know that, and I was pretty good, even if I do say so myself. But I’m no hit man. I’m not in the habit of killing people. It’s just not something that I
do
.’
It had seemed like a reasonable argument to me, but judging from Graziella’s flustered reaction, it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. She fidgeted on the bed, scratching her neck with her nails, clearly frustrated with me. I just wasn’t
getting
it.
‘But he is a bad man,’ she said.
‘What does that even mean?’
‘He has done terrible things.’
‘Such as?’
She paced to the corner of my room, then turned with her arms folded across her chest, the gun hanging down beneath the crook of her left elbow. Maybe she was slow, I told myself. Maybe she was a terrible shot. If I rushed her I might have a chance.
Before I thought any more of it, she stamped her foot into the ground and made a huffing noise, like a toddler brewing a tantrum. Her fake hair jiggled with a plastic rustle.
‘I cannot tell you what he has done,’ she whined. ‘But you must believe me.’
Believe her. Oh, well sure, I was perfectly prepared to do that. I mean, what possible reason could I have not to trust her?
‘Then go to the police,’ I said. ‘Talk to them. If what you say is true, and the things he’s responsible for are so awful, they can arrest him.’
‘But this will not work.’
‘And why’s that?’
She tightened her free hand into a fist. ‘Because of who he is. They will not care. They will not help me.’
‘Then why should I?’
‘Many people want him to die. Powerful people. If you do not do this, they will be angry with you.’
‘What people? Do you work for them?’
She chose not to answer me, preferring to bite down on her knuckle instead. She gnawed at her flesh as if she planned to strip it to the bone.
‘Because if they hired you,’ I went on, ‘I imagine they’ll be more inclined to be angry with you than me. And if that’s the case, I don’t see why their feelings should trouble me unduly.’
She stared hard, eyes full of white, nostrils pinched, as though she hoped to convince me by force of will alone. When I failed to succumb, she raised her chin and closed one eye, then straightened the arm with the gun in it and aimed directly at my head. ‘Then I
will
kill you,’ she said. ‘I have to. You make it so. And afterwards, I will kill your friend. Believe me, I will do it.’
She certainly looked as though she was capable of carrying out her threat. I didn’t think there was much she wasn’t capable of. Her hand wasn’t even trembling. In every mystery novel I’d ever written, when a woman held a gun on Michael Faulks, her arm
definitely
trembled. But Graziella? Not a quiver.
‘That’s hardly fair,’ I told her, which, I confess, was more than a touch weak.
‘But what can I do? I cannot allow you to live. You will warn him.’
‘Nuh uh.’ I pretended to zip my lips closed. ‘I won’t say a word.’ And besides, I thought, the explosion that had ripped through his home had probably given him an inkling that he’d ticked somebody off just a smidgen.
‘But I cannot take this risk.’ Her face was pinched. Determined. ‘You must understand this, yes?’
Actually – much as I didn’t want to – I could see what she was driving at. True, she appeared to be quite unhinged, but she made a sound point. If I agreed to shoot the guy, I’d be more than a little reluctant to come clean to anyone. But my hapless involvement in a bombing was a much less powerful motivating factor. There was no way she could rely on me keeping my mouth shut – unless she forcibly shut it for good.
‘Wait a minute,’ I told her. ‘Let me think about what you’re asking.’
I didn’t need time to think. I needed time to pack, time to get myself and Victoria as far away from Venice as possible, to a place where my beauty sleep wouldn’t be interrupted by attractive sociopaths in the dead of night and where demands for me to kill rich, titled Italians were but a distant memory. A couple of hours, nothing more. There would be flights leaving Marco Polo airport from six o’clock or so, and trains departing Santa Lucia station to destinations right across Europe. I could be on any one of them, to any place I cared. Anywhere other than here would do.
‘Well.’ She gazed hard at me, with an impatient heft of her gun. ‘What is your decision?’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said, hastily now. ‘I’ll kill him.’
‘
Grande
,’ she said, her face brightening and her finger slipping free of the trigger. ‘This makes me very happy. I did not want to shoot you.’
She lowered her weapon and nodded at me, almost as if we were comrades-in-arms and I’d just distinguished myself on the battlefield. Hard to believe I’d indulged myself with fantasies about this woman. Unstable was an understatement. She was more volatile than the plastic explosives inside the attaché case she’d given me.
‘You must kill him today,’ she told me.
‘Not a problem. I’m your man.’
‘He must be dead by nine o’clock this evening. No later.’
‘Terrific. I’m great at meeting deadlines. Just ask my agent.’
‘I will leave you the gun.’
‘Wonderful. You want to pass it over now?’
The astounding thing is, she nearly did exactly that. I saw her visibly relax and even take a step towards me before thinking better of it.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, the wig swaying so much that some of the hairs caught in her mouth. ‘I will leave it for you. You have a post box, yes? I saw this.’ She was right about that. There were three letterboxes built into the wall beside the front door. One for each apartment. ‘I will put the gun inside as I go. This too,’ she added, patting her trouser pocket with the stun gun in it.
‘What if I decide not to shoot him?’ She looked at me blankly. Obviously the eventuality hadn’t occurred to her. ‘I don’t know where the gun came from,’ I explained. ‘Other people may have been shot with it.’
‘It is not so.’
‘So you say. But what if I use my hands?’ I asked, miming strangling someone. ‘Or a knife.’ This time, I mimed a stabbing action.
She considered the matter, poking her tongue into the side of her cheek. ‘As long as he is dead, I do not care.’
‘What if he suffers?’
‘This does not concern me.’
Wow. She really was something. Either the Count was every bit as evil as she’d claimed, or she was colder than I’d imagined.
She moved for the door, but I wasn’t done just yet.
‘One last thing. If I do this, are you going to return my book?’
‘
Si
,’ she told me, her voice clipped. ‘It will be my pleasure.’
Pleasure or not, I wasn’t sure that I believed her, and I was quite certain that I didn’t trust her. Tossing aside my bedcovers, I threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, yanked on my baseball trainers and hopped through to the hallway. Victoria was sleeping soundly, her duvet rising and falling with her breaths. She didn’t appear to be hurt in any way. In fact, she seemed entirely at ease.
Graziella had left the door to my apartment ajar and I could hear footfall on the steps outside. While I waited for her to leave, I glanced up at the alarm sensor in the corner of the ceiling. No sign of it. Turned out the contraption was on the ground, its plastic casing crushed, wires spewed out. Not the most sophisticated way of disarming a sensor, I grant you, but surprisingly effective all the same.
I heard the clang of something heavy being dropped inside one of the metal post boxes downstairs. Reaching for my nylon sports coat, I took the stairs two at a time, feeding my arms through my sleeves as I went.
She was hurrying along the pavement in the direction of the Grand Canal by the time I lurched outside. No boat this time around. It was cold and dark, but visibility was good, the result of a cloudless night and a full moon. Her red wig was impossible to miss, shining like a beacon in the black, and the rapid beat of her footsteps echoed off the stone walls and still waters of the Fondamenta Venier.
I was going to have to take a chance and follow her. Until now, she’d been the one in control, not just anticipating my moves, but planning them for me. Contrary to what you may be thinking, I’m not a complete idiot, and I had one or two moves of my own. By tracking her, I hoped to get some kind of leverage. Perhaps she’d lead me to the people she’d claimed wanted Count Borelli dead. If I could identify them, or gather some kind of evidence on them, it might give me enough ammunition to excuse myself from the role of assassin, or even go to the authorities or the press. Then again, she might be heading home, and if things were really working in my favour, I could find myself with an opportunity to break in to her place and go hunting for my copy of
The Maltese Falcon
.
While I waited to step out from my cover, I asked myself if I should bring the gun along for protection, but then I realised that in my hurry to get out of my apartment I hadn’t collected my keys or my picks. Going back for them would take too long, and reaching a hand through the letterbox wasn’t possible without a severe mutation. Pursuing Graziella unarmed was certainly a risk, but given the position she’d put me in and the threats she’d made, I feared that losing her altogether could be worse.
I hovered beyond the cone of light from a nearby streetlamp until she turned left at Palazzo Cini, then closed the door to my building on the latch and broke into a half-skip, half-tiptoe affair that transported me to the end of the street as swiftly and as quietly as possible. Flattening myself against the grimy brickwork, I craned my neck around the corner. A flash of red rounded the end of the street and I scurried after it, bent-double, for some reason, as if I was ducking beneath covering fire.
The craft shops and art galleries, sunglass outlets and neighbourhood
tabacchi
that I’d passed countless times during the day were concealed behind shutters and iron bars. Up ahead, the Accademia di Belle Arti loomed before me, the lower half of its stone exterior shrouded in scaffolding and plywood boards that doubled as makeshift advertising hoardings. I used them for shelter as I crept towards the Accademia Bridge.