The smile he returned to Dalton was genuine; he and Dalton and Alessio Brancati’s Carabinieri had just come through a short, sharp war with the Serbian Mafia and, in the main, had won. Dalton, once a CIA Cleaner whose job had been to police up the blood and ruin left by other CIA agents, now exiled by an internal conflict in the Agency, was still waiting for the official call back to Langley that had been promised to him by Deacon Cather, the Deputy Director of Clandestine Services. That call had never come, and waiting for it, Galan believed, was killing the young man.
Dalton touched his cheek, came away with blood on the tips of his glove. A wave of fatigue swept through him, and his vision blurred for a moment.
“Issadore,” he said, shaking his head to clear it. “How are you? You look well.”
Galan gave him an oddly Italianate shrug, raised his hands.
“You have had a busy night, Micah.”
“Almost through,” said Dalton, feeling Mirko Belajic’s eyes on him.
Galan turned and looked down at Belajic, came back to Dalton.
“I have called the water ambulance. They will see to you as well.”
Dalton shook his head.
“Not necessary, but thanks. Now, Issadore, I need you to step away.”
Galan lifted his hands. He had no weapon, at least no visible one.
“Micah, you cannot continue in this—”
“Ask him where are my men,” Belajic said in a breath-starved whisper. Dalton looked down at him, his pale eyes glittering in the candlelight.
“How many did you have?” asked Dalton. Belajic hesitated, looking crafty, but the black hole in the Ruger’s muzzle made it hard to dissemble.
“Four. All I had left.”
“I killed every one who came at me.”
Belajic stared up at him, his wet cheeks glistening.
“All? Even
Zorin
?”
“If he was out there, Mirko, he’s dead.”
“Zorin . . .” said Belajic, more to himself than anyone and in a tone of shocked wonder, “he was a . . .
golem
. Even you . . . could not kill . . .
him
. How did he die?”
“I broke his neck.”
Belajic shook his head.
“A . . . black lie . . . No one man could—”
Dalton lifted the Ruger, pointed it at Belajic’s forehead.
“You can talk it over with him in Hell.”
Galan stepped into the line of fire.
Dalton sighed, slumped, gave him a look.
“You know what this
thing
is,” he said in a soft voice, meaning the old man on the floor and the snail-slime trail of violence that stretched out behind him for all the long years of his predatory life. Galan nodded.
“Sure. He is . . . a waste. I am here, Micah. I am here for you.” He hesitated, and then went on. “For Cora Vasari too, maybe.”
Dalton winced at the name.
“Cora’s in Anacapri. Her family has her in the villa there. I’ve tried to reach her. Everything I send drops into a well. But I can still finish . . . this.”
“It is
already
finished. And how do you know she doesn’t answer? Her family has her isolated. Your messages may not arrive, nor hers leave.”
“Issadore, all that’s over. Please step aside. If I leave him, he’ll just come back at me. Maybe try for Cora again. You know the rule.”
“You will not kill him, Micah. You will not kill anyone else in my Venice tonight. Maybe you are tired of Venice. Maybe also Venice is tired of you. Venice makes crazy the people she gets tired of. Or she kills them. Anyway, you have done enough to yourself tonight. Your mind is out of order. Too much drinking. Too much hating. I know where you hope to take this. You hope to die. Like you are on a train. I am here to stop your train. Give me the Ruger and go sit down. You are about to fall where you stand.”
Galan’s face was rocky. The light behind him was shimmering, going in and out of focus. The pain in Dalton’s cheek was intense. More than anything else, he wanted to sleep.
“Dah,”
Belajic hissed, “kill me . . .
Krokodil
. . . and be done.”
The Ruger came up again. Dalton stepped to the left. Galan matched the move, closed in suddenly and grabbed the muzzle of the Ruger in his leathery paw, pressed it against his own chest.
“Pull,” he said. “Maybe you do me a favor.”
“No,” said Dalton, “I won’t.”
“I know,” said Galan, taking the Ruger gently away. “Now, go sit.”
Belajic started to wheeze. It took a while for the others to realize he was laughing. Dalton ignored him. Belajic was dead to him. He walked over to the verger’s chair and collapsed into it. Galan looked at Dalton for a while and then turned away and put a bullet into Mirko Belajic’s left eye. This seemed to come as a shock to Belajic, who found himself in Hell a few seconds later.
Dalton looked at Galan, who shrugged.
“You were right, about killing him,” he said. “He would have sent someone for Cora just for payback. These honor killings have no ending. But Venice is my city and I decide who to kill. Not you.”
There was a commotion at the door, the sound of boots and the creak of gear. Low, competent voices and the crackle of radio handsets.
“The medics are here, Micah.”
“Bugger the medics. I have nowhere to go.”
“Yes, you do. You will go back to the Savoia.”
“Yes? And do what there?”
“I will send a man to help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Pack.”
“I’m leaving?”
“It seems that you will have to. Even now, events overtake us. Brancati will explain—”
“Explain what?”
Galan shook his head, his expression becoming fixed.
“No. There is a . . . development. He will lay it out. It is too deep for me. Also, Brancati can protect you from a great deal, but the Prefect will not let you make Venice an arena for what is the term, three letters, I think, in your American army?”
“CQB? Close Quarter Battle?”
“Yes, that is it. Or do I mean MOUT?”
“What about . . . tonight? The bodies?”
Galan smiled.
“Venice swallows bodies up like pythons eat rats. By morning, there will be no sign these men ever lived. And they were the last of Gospic’s people. So now hear me, Micah: our private war with Branco Gospic is truly over, yes? And you must go back to the hotel and gather your clothes.”
“Where am I going? Can’t go back to the U.S.”
Galan shook his head slowly, sadly.
“The decision is not mine, it belongs to you, and other parties, and when you know you would be wise to tell no one, not even me. You have some money?”
“Oh yes,” said Dalton, through a weary, humorless grin. “Thousands. Everything left over from the thing with the
Mingo Dubai
. Langley never asked for it back. I guess they just wanted me to go, and stay gone.”
“Then, Micah, as much as it saddens me, that is what you should do.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Go, and stay gone.”
AFTER THE
medics had more or less stitched him back together—with his shirt off, Dalton’s scarred and bullet-pocked body looked like an aerial map of Antietam—a corporal of the Carabinieri, a rangy young Venetian with the features of an assassin and the air of a kindly priest, helped Dalton to his feet and walked him down the steps of the chapel, clearly meaning to see him all the way back to the Savoia e Yolanda on the other side of the piazza, down along the Quay of Slavs, two bridges east of the Palazzo Ducale.
Dalton stopped to gather himself in the campo outside the chapel, taking a deep but careful breath, looking up at the sky. The clouds were shredding apart in a rising wind off the Adriatic, and the snow had stopped falling. The moon pierced the tip of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco. The air was sharp and cold and burned in his lungs like chilled grappa. Far in the east, over the black cliffs of Montenegro on the far side of the Adriatic, the indigo sky was shading into a pale pink glow.
“What is your name?” he asked the young corporal.
The lad stiffened into a formal parade brace.
“Sono Corporale Orinaldo Zargozzo, Commendatore!”
he barked. Being assigned to walk the Crocodile home was a signal honor. Dalton’s role in the defeat of the Gospic
sindacato
in Venice was spoken of in whispers all over the service, but it was also making him nervous.
He had just finished watching the medics clean up what was left of a man named Zorin Vinzcik, found dead in an alcove near the Calligari steps across from La Fenice. It had taken three men to get the corpse on a gurney. The head had been twisted so far around that the body seemed to be looking back over its own shoulder.
The Crocodile was perhaps a touch over six feet, broad in the shoulders, but otherwise built like a horseman, lean and supple, with an air of latent menace, yes, but no match for a creature like Zorin Vinzcik, who reminded him of a rhino he had seen in a zoo in Palermo many years ago.
“Corporale Zargozzo, may I trouble you for a favor?”
“D’accordo! Certamente, Commendatore.”
“May I walk home alone?”
The soldier’s face was all confusion, unease, regret.
“Mai . . . Il Signore Galan—”
“I promise you, I will go home and pack. But this will be my last night in Venice for a long time. I’d like to walk it alone.
Con permesso?
”
Corporal Zargozzo gave it some thought. The Crocodile was clearly in some sort of bad place in his heart, and Galan, who obviously valued him, had been forceful on the necessity of seeing him safely to his hotel.
On the other hand, there was the dead rhino.
“Please. Tell Issadore I
insisted
. He will understand.”
After a moment, the corporal nodded, his dark face conflicted. Dalton offered his hand, they shook, and he turned to walk away. He had gone a few steps when the corporal called out to him. Dalton stopped and looked back at the boy, silhouetted in the warm light pouring from the chapel.
“Signore Dalton, mi perdoni?”
“Yes?”
“Con la grazia di Dio, Commendatore, un giorno, Lei ritornerà a Venezia.”
“Will I?”
The young man nodded again, smiled hugely, snapped off a razor-edged salute, spun on a heel, and walked away. Dalton saw him up the steps of the church and then turned back to the darkened streets of Venice.
He made his way back through the Calle 22. Someone had already cleaned Belajic’s bloody handprints off the security shutters covering the Cartier store—“Like pythons eat rats,” Galan had said—and, in the Calle de L’Ascensione, there was no sign that a careless Albanian bodyguard had caught a .22 slug in the temple just outside the west gate of the piazza.
Dalton stepped through the arch and into the most beautiful open space on the planet, the serene perfection of the Piazza San Marco; flanked on three sides by the ordered cloisters and three-part harmonies of the Museo Civico and the Procurates, paved in intricate cobblestones, closed at the eastern end by the Moorish domes of the Basilica, all of this dominated by the redbrick spire of the Campanile. To Dalton, the square of Saint Mark’s in Venice always seemed to float in a timeless present, as if the whole murderous planet, with all its centrifugal cruelty and whirling insanity, was spinning like a well-balanced top on this one utterly still point.
The floodwaters had subsided during the night, but there were still pools standing in the cobblestones, and they reflected the stars just beginning to show through rents in the cloud cover.
Dalton stepped his careful way around the standing pools, heading for the turn next to the Palazzo Ducale and the short walk along the Riva degli Schiavoni to his suite at the Savoia. His mind was clear, and for some strange reason he felt more at peace with himself than he had in many weeks.
Perhaps he found killing therapeutic. Maybe he should do a paper on it for Cora Vasari, who was a professor of psychology at the university in Florence. On the other hand, maybe not.
When he came abreast of the shuttered windows of Florian’s Café, he was suddenly aware of a dark figure seated at a table just beneath the archway. He reached for his Ruger, realizing as he did so that Galan, a prudent man, had kept it in his pocket. There was a motion, a dry click.
Dalton waited for the bullet, thinking that it was typical of whatever old Norse gods ruled him that he would finally get himself shot once he had decided not to die. A flaring yellow light rose up to a blue cylinder: someone was lighting a cigarette in the dark.
The glow of the lighter flame lit up the craggy face and cold blue eyes of Porter Naumann, killed in Cortona some weeks ago and left in a chapel doorway off the Via Janelli to be ripped apart by the village dogs.