The Venetian Judgment (43 page)

Read The Venetian Judgment Online

Authors: David Stone

Levka, standing next to Dalton with Dalton’s Beretta behind his back, leaned out of the cabin, using a bullhorn to call across to the man in the stern.
“
? Are you in trouble?”
“Dah,”
said the man in the stern, then in English: “We are out of gas. Have you any to spare?”
Dalton whispered to Levka,“Ask him if he wants a tow.”
“Do you want a tow?” asked Levka. “Kerch is only a few miles.”
The man in the stern frowned and shook his head.
“No. No tow. Only gas.”
Levka leaned back inside, spoke softly to Dalton.
“He thinks of the salvage law. We tow him, we own his boat.”
In the meantime, the man standing on the bow had been staring hard at the
Subito.
Although a lot grubbier than she had been back at Ataköy Marina, she was still a slim, trim boat, and much too pretty for these waters. He called out to the man in the stern, a rapid flow of Russian. The man in the stern turned and said something back to him.
The other man—younger, with a dark face and a black beard—dropped down through a forward hatch in the trawler’s bow and was gone. Dalton braced himself, setting a hip against the door: this shotgun kicked like a cart horse. Levka had the Beretta out and down by his right side now, his expression open and cheerful.
At the wheel, Mandy was listening to the marine channel.
“Dalton, I think somebody on that boat is calling Kerch.”
“How can you tell?”
“Somebody just got on Channel 22. He’s speaking in Russian, I think, but I just heard the name
Subito
.”
Dalton moved up next to Levka.
“Ask him if he wants us to throw him a line.”
Levka put the bullhorn up, and at the same time the older man in the stern ducked back into the wheelhouse.
“Boss, I don’t—”
The old man popped out of the cabin again, something blunt and metallic in his hand, and leveled it at the pilothouse of the
Subito.
Dalton stepped quickly out of the door and fired three rapid rounds with the shotgun, three tremendous cracking booms, the muzzle flash lighting up the water between them. The bearded man disappeared behind the transom. There was a short, crackling fizz, and a fountain of red fire shot up from the stern boards.
“Flare,” said Levka. “He fired a flare!”
Mandy hit reverse, pushed the throttles to high, and the
Subito
began to back up, waves crashing over her low stern. The trawler was on fire now. They could see the dark man running out onto the bow, carrying that big Russian .50. Levka leaned out of the window, put a couple of rounds into the man at a hundred feet, and he fell backward into the water. Mandy turned the ship, the
Subito
wallowing in the turbulent wake, as the trawler blew up in a flower of red oily smoke, chips of wood, chunks of meat and metal, rising up on a column of roiling fire into the twilit sky. The explosion lit up the black water all around and put a red glow on Mandy’s face as she stared back at the wreckage, some of it still on fire as it hissed and spattered down a few yards short of the bow.
Levka pointed off to port, at a low black hull speeding toward them, a blue light flashing at the peak. Even at a half mile, they could hear the
whoop-whoop-whoop
of its siren.
“Are we in Russian water,” put in Mandy, “or in Ukrainian?”
“Ukrainian, I hope,” said Levka, a very worried look on his face.
“Micah,” asked Mandy, “whose side are the Ukrainians on?”
“Ours, last time I looked. Levka, can you see a flag on that boat?”
Levka got the binoculars, trained them on the sleek gray arrowhead flying toward them across the water. They could hear its engines now, a deep, drumming vibration. Levka put the glasses down, sighing.
“Blue over yellow. Is Ukrainian.”
“Well,” said Dalton into the silence that followed, “I think this concludes the covert part of our journey. Levka, break us out a U.S. flag.”
 
 
 
THE CLINIC
at Karla Marksa Plaz, known as
—Kerch Psychiatric Hospital—was a ghastly holdover from the Soviet occupation, a crumbling concrete box painted in garish sky blue and sulfurous yellow. The narrow street it sat in was lit by harsh blue globes that cast a pale light over the façade of the building.
Dalton and Mandy Pownall had come to finish this job. Levka was back at the customs house, seeing to the berthing of the
Subito,
keeping one eye on the seaside bar a few hundred yards south of the entrance to the Mithridate Staircase, the Double Eagle. Levka had expressed his intention to finish the day there, with a final double-vodka toast to poor Uncle Gavel, no offendings, and the capricious fortunes of war.
The young Ukrainian captain—his name was Bogdan Davit, and he seemed to consider the unexpected arrival of a shipload of CIA agents on the shores of this grubby little town to be a career-making opportunity to show his quality—stood next to Dalton, shaking his handsome young head as he pointed his swagger stick at the ragged iron awning drooping down over the entrance, lit by a sickly fluorescent glow that seemed to come from nowhere in particular like an emanation from a crypt.
“This is private, not open to public. Russians come over for the cure from vodka. Money comes from all private donation. Russian money, so I am told. I have not been inside, but I hear they have many sick-in-the-head types. But they have closed the place, it looks like, and when we called nobody answered. Come, we will go in and see what is to see.”
Captain Davit nodded to a couple of officers waiting nearby, saying something in Ukrainian that neither Dalton nor Mandy could quite understand. They followed the little group as they crossed the deserted street, Davit reaching out when they stood before the fingerprint-covered greasy glass of the main doors to press the after-hours bell in its slot beside the entrance. They could hear the buzzing whine of the alarm echoing around the lobby. A bald head popped out from around a corner, wild-eyed, toothless. The body attached to it then tottered out from the corner and stood there in the hall, an elderly male, naked, grossly fouled, sucking his thumbs, both of them shoved together into his grinning mouth.
“Oh Jesus,” said Captain Davit in Ukrainian, but Dalton and Mandy knew what he was saying because, under the circumstances, what else was there to say?
 
 
 
THE STAFF HAD FLOWN.
Someone from the docks said a boat had come in from the Russian side of the strait and taken fifteen people, including a large fat man with purple lips, off the customs dock, heading out to sea at around three in the afternoon. Pursuit at this point was pointless. It was a matter for diplomatic negotiations with the Russians.
Whatever might happen later, the facts in front of them were that the entire staff of the clinic was gone, baby, gone, and the inmates had to be rounded up, chased down and collared or dragged blubbering from closets and toilet stalls on all five floors of the clinic; in the end almost fifty people, including about nine men from a locked-down section with a sign on it that read, in large red letters:
.
“Chronic Ward,” explained Captain Davit, watching with distaste and a trace of nausea as the ambulance people and a few unlucky junior cops went through the filthy ward, looking under tables and through unspeakable washrooms—looking, in the end, not so much for inmates as for survivors.
Mandy and Dalton trailed through, Mandy with a cloth held against her face, Dalton smoking a Balkan Sobranie, his expression cold and stony. A young medic came running up to Captain Davit, her broad, sweet face contorted in horror. Davit listened for a time, and then turned to look at Dalton and Mandy, his young face as hard as Dalton’s now.
“In the basement. We must look. Please come.”
In the basement—a medieval horror of crumbling concrete pillars, rubbish, rags, rusted-out medical gear, old moldering beds, huge laundry machines, a row of dryers large enough to tumble-dry a moose, dripping walls, and an appalling stench that seemed to stir up under the dragging foot like a pale green cloud—at the far end, under a low tangle of copper tubes, rags hanging from them like Spanish moss from a live oak, lay two bodies:
One male—a young man, with a military crew cut, a U.S. Navy tattoo on his left biceps, his hands tied behind him, his face a ruin. It had been beaten in with a lead pipe, which lay beside him, as if thrown down by the killer as he turned away. Droplets of blood, still red and still damp, sprayed out in every direction from the shattered remnants of the boy’s skull.

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