The Kaisho (11 page)

Lillehammer sat staring at what Croaker had done to his previously indestructible briefcase. “I think I’ll have that second beer now, thank you very much,” he said softly.

Lillehammer sat nursing his beer for the longest time. Croaker was aware of the sun moving across the cabin’s cowling, the light changing as the wind shifted. Storm coming, he thought, scenting the phosphorus in the air. But we still have time. For what? He waited patiently for Lillehammer to tell him why he had come.

The chop had picked up, and the boat was bobbing quite a bit on its tether. Croaker felt distinctly unwell, and he got up abruptly, went out of the cabin. He bent over the rail on the opposite side of the boat where the young ensigns still stood watch and vomited over the side.

“Sorry about that,” Lillehammer said when he returned. “I’m afraid those pills haven’t quite been perfected yet, either.”

“Do me a favor and next time keep that shit to yourself,” Croaker said, and rinsed his mouth out with beer. “I’d rather deal with the slight headache.”

“I quite understand. My apologies.”

“De nada.”

Lillehammer put down his beer, came close to him, and said quietly, “Does the name Dominic Goldoni mean anything to you?”

“Sure. Mob boss, sang his brains out so that the feds took out two of his leading rivals, lock, stock, and barrel. For that, they didn’t fry him. They put him into WITSEC. From which sanctuary, so I have heard, he’s been running his entire East Coast machine through his brother-in-law, the respected attorney Anthony DeCamillo, also known as Tony D., among his friends. I also hear that Goldoni’s remaining chief rival, the Clam Man—”

“You mean Caesare Leonforte.”

“That’s right. Bad Clams, they call him. Anyway, I understand that the Clam Man is thinking of taking fate by the throat, making the move he’s been itching to make on Goldoni’s territory.”

Lillehammer nodded. “Commendable. You have details not known to the general public. However, the connection between Goldoni and Anthony DeCamillo, a well-renowned legit lawyer, cannot in any way be proved. I know. WITSEC has tried.” He squinted at Croaker, the effect of which was to intensify further the focus of his extraordinary eyes. “I see you have kept up your contacts.”

“Some of them. Others, I can no longer afford.”

Lillehammer made that awful smile again. “I fancy your humor, Mr. Croaker. Dry and distinct, like a fine wine.”

“But not half as complex,” Croaker said, giving in to the man’s nuttiness.

Lillehammer’s smile broadened, and now Croaker could see the tiny crosshatch lines of the stitching on the pale scars. It had been a hurried job, perhaps in a red zone somewhere far away from the high-tech civilization that had provided Croaker with his remarkable prosthesis. But the fact that the scars were on
both
sides of Lillehammer’s mouth ruled out an accident or a wound taken in the pursuit of a clandestine enemy. Rather, they seemed the deliberate hallmark of the torturer—there was a sadism implicit in what the incisions had tried to do as well as explicit in the scars themselves.

“I wouldn’t talk, so they tried to make my silence permanent,” Lillehammer said as if reading Croaker’s mind. Of course, that wasn’t true; he had merely seen the direction of Croaker’s scrutiny. “I suppose they could have slit my throat and been done with it, but that was not their way. I had frustrated them, and they wanted me to live with what they would do to me. They tried to sever the muscles that worked my lips. As it happened, they failed. I count myself fortunate.”

Croaker was about to ask him who
they
were, when he realized it really didn’t matter. And perhaps in his day he had encountered as many of
them
as had Lillehammer. It appeared as if he and this Brit might have a great deal in common.

Lillehammer fingered his upper lip. “Pity I can’t grow a mustache. Whatever they did to me killed the hair follicles here.”

He shrugged. “Well.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “We’d better get down to it. The wind’s swung round and is picking up. As it is, we’ll have a bumpy ride home.” He peered through one of the cabin windows, where the brace of sailboats had turned and were running for the shelter of Marco Island. No other boats seemed to be around. “Back to Dominic Goldoni. Your intelligence is spot on, as far as it goes. Fact is, yesterday, Goldoni inexplicably and overtly broke his covenant with the federal government of the United States.”

“What did he do?”

“He got himself killed, is what he did.”

“Dominic Goldoni dead,” Croaker mused almost to himself. “Seems impossible.”

“Not only got himself killed, but did so in a manner that has got the best people at WITSEC totally freaked out.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“Well, now, that depends,” Lillehammer said, “on whether you agree to work with me on this.”

Croaker thought a moment. “Why the hell would you want me? You’re obviously a fed very high up in the bureaucratic organization. You’ve got zillions of candidates to choose from who are younger, trained in the latest techniques.” He swept his right hand toward the antisurveil-lance case. “I mean, I had no idea that kind of hardware existed.”

Lillehammer shook his head. “Don’t give me the old war-horse routine, it won’t hold with me. I found your name in our computers. You worked with Nicholas Linnear some years ago when he was recruited by C. Gordon Minck, who was then head of Red Station, our Soviet Affairs bureau. You and Linnear ferreted out a very nasty mole in Minck’s henhouse.” He frowned. “The truth is I can’t trust anyone back home, not until I’ve discovered how someone got to Dominic Goldoni, a man supposedly tucked away from all harm.

“Frankly, I need help. Goldoni had strict orders not to call anyone from his house where the line could be tapped at the other end, and never to meet with someone without his WITSEC handler’s knowledge. So how did this happen? WITSEC’s record of protecting its inductees who obeyed the rules was, until this incident, absolute.”

“So somebody got to him someway.”

Lillehammer looked away for a long moment. Then his head came back and his piercing blue eyes fixed on Croaker’s face. “The way I see it, someone inside, someone he trusted, betrayed him. I’m telling you his security was one hundred percent as long as he didn’t break the WITSEC rules.”

Croaker turned the problem around in his mind awhile before he said, “It’s clear you need help, but I doubt it’s from me. I’m a maverick. I never was much good at memorizing the rule book. I go my own way.”

Lillehammer looked him square in the face. “Just answer this question: Are you intrigued enough to be my field man—or would you rather continue your quiet existence chauffeuring beer-guzzling businessmen around this pond?”

Croaker laughed. “You
do
have a way with words, Mr. Lillehammer.”

“Call me Will.”

Croaker looked down at the extended right hand before taking it in his and squeezing it. “Why do I feel like Ishmael about to sign on the
Pequod?”

Lillehammer let out a heartfelt belly laugh, and this time his grotesque scars disappeared in the folds of his tanned face. “I’m going to enjoy our association, Lew. May I call you Lew? It will be for the last time, because our operation names have been set for all nonsecure communication—which, under the circumstances, means
everything.
Ishmael, meet Ahab. We’re going to make one crackerjack team!”

But when the Coast Guard cutter had taken the mysterious Ahab away, Croaker remained at sea, waiting for the sun to go down and wondering what the hell he was doing getting involved with the feds again. He had a week’s charter beginning tomorrow morning with Maracay, the Venezuelan magnate who Croaker entertained three or four hundred times a year. Maracay had made his enormous fortune from the land, dragging iron and diamonds from it in profusion. He was a gregarious man of immense appetites, an excellent fisherman, a big spender, and a generous tipper. Not to mention the harem of eager young women he brought with him whom he was more than willing to share.

Croaker felt the sun on his back as he bent over the side of
Captain Sumo.
He spotted some flotsam riding at the waterline and, fetching a boat hook, pulled it away from the hull. Maybe the boat needed a good scraping.

Right,
he told himself.
Think about everything but Alix.
Maybe Lillehammer’s offer had been the catalyst but he felt a sick, hollow sensation inside him as keenly as if he had not eaten in days. The truth was he missed Alix. And he resented her leaving him here, marooned on a diet of seawater and booze while she jetted off to her glamorous former life in the glittering capitals of the Western world. What other choice had he had? But now…

He could see her face, burnished by the flamboyant Florida sunset as they stood just outside the Miami International airport terminal. Neither of them had wanted to say goodbye.

What exactly do you think you’re doing here?
she had said softly.
You don’t even like this life anymore.

He had vehemently denied it, but she was right, of course. Thinking now about Maracay and his floating whorehouse, Croaker understood what she had been trying to tell him. He had come here because he had seen one too many corpses, had ventured down one too many mean streets. He had smelled the stink of corruption, power, inhumanity all around him and he had been sick unto death. So he had dropped out, migrated south… only to find another kind of death.

He loved Alix but what could he do, marry her and take her away from the life she loved, or marry her and endure the long separations her work would demand of them? Neither was a tolerable solution so he had let her go and had remained here among the sea grape and the decaying palms.

He turned the boathook, watched the flotsam disentangle itself, purl away in the water, a dark stain upon the sunlit water.
If I stay here a day longer,
he thought,
I’ll feel as useless as that piece of flotsam.

He put the boathook away, climbed into the cabin and pulled up anchor. Then he throttled up and, turning about, headed back to Marco Island. His blood had begun to sing. It felt good to have a purpose again, to be caught up in mystery and intrigue, to have a murder to solve.

To hell with babysitting the rich and spoiled,
he thought.
Time to get back into life.

Beneath the bloated red sun of late-autumn afternoon, Venice lay domed and crowded in a shimmering pool of green and gold.

Nicholas had never been to Venice before, and he was unsure what to expect. It was a rotting city, sinking like Atlantis into the lagoons which surrounded it like the sheltering arms of the ancient earth mother. The putrefaction of centuries clung to the stuccoed walls of its palazzos, perfumed the air, and within the dense, dank maze of the city one lost all sense of direction.

These dark and disturbing reflections Nicholas had heard from people who had come, seen, and departed unmoved and vowing in the unrelenting crowds and the stifling heat of summer never to return.

How unfortunate these people were. This was his first thought, instinctive and unbidden, as he rode a spotless
motoscafo
across the lagoon toward a city that seemed to rest not on bedrock and silt but on nothing less ephemeral than dreams.

He rode up top with the captain, and he was obliged to draw closed his padded whiskey-colored suede jacket against the stiff, chilly breeze. As the launch plied its way at high speed across the gunmetal water, the city appeared to create itself out of seawater and cloud, rising from a low, nacreous mist that swam in amorphous schools across the water.

Above, the vast bowl of the sky, a breathtaking blue so lucid it seemed infinite, reflected at its lowest reaches the splendid golden domes and umber towers that seemed to have been magically preserved from the time of the Arabian Nights.

The vibration of the
motoscafo’s
powerful engine changed, deepening to a liquid gurgle as the craft hit the outer limits to the inner lagoon and, taking a long sweeping curve along the high wooden poles that served as channel markers as they had for centuries, commenced a slow, almost ritualistic final approach through the belly of the city into the Grand Canal.

Now, they swung around the point of the San Giorgio Maggiore, and dead ahead he was greeted by the sight of the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute, pale and magnificent, over which the oblate sun, ruddy as dried blood, was slowly settling like a great winged steed whose day of racing was done.

Nicholas felt the small hairs at the back of his neck stir, and he was electrified by an image of himself striding across a cobblestone
piazzetta.
He was dressed in high black leather boots, long black cloak, and a kind of mask that covered his face from his nose to his hairline. On his head he wore a stiff felt tricornered hat. Far above him, flags he could not recognize cracked and fluttered, and he knew without understanding that it was a time of war. He had the distinct sensation that he was coming home.

He blinked, as if having been blinded by the huge autumn sun. The
motoscafo
had turned again, and he was now face-to-face with the Piazzetta di San Marco, with the Doges’ Palace on the right. To his left rose the statues of the magisterial Venetian winged lion and of St. Theodore, the city’s patron saint. His sensation of déjà vu was so strong that for a moment he staggered, and he grabbed the cowling of the mahogany and brass hatch cover in order to keep himself from stumbling down the companionway. This was the
piazzetta
in his vision, and though he knew that it had been of a time long gone, still the unmistakable scent of war was in the air.

II Palazzo di Maschere Veneziane was approximately midway between the Punta della Dogana, where the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute rose in burnished splendor, and the Campo della Carità, where sat the Galleria dell’ Accademia at the far end of the fairy-tale confection of its wooden bridge.