“About Cora?”
Brancati waved that aside with the gesture of a man dispersing a cloud of cigar smoke, which seemed to remind him of his Toscanos. He patted his uniform tunic, his harness creaking, and extracted a rumpled pack of cigars, offering one to Dalton as a reflex and then jerking the pack away as Dalton reached for it.
“No. No cigar for you! Your intentions about Cora will be what I tell you they are. They are to have nothing to do with her. You know this is true.”
“Yes,” said Dalton, eyeing the pocket into which Brancati had shoved his Toscanos. “I do. I would like to tell her so myself.”
Brancati nodded as he set his cigar burning with a heavy gold lighter and drew the smoke in deep, exhaling a blue swirling cloud.
“We have not found her yet, you know.”
“Found who? Cora?”
“No. The girl who stabbed you.”
“How do you know who to look for?”
Brancati puffed out his cheeks and glared at Dalton.
“But the description you gave—”
“I gave a description? To whom? When?”
“In the ambulance. To the medic. A young blond girl, short hair, a hard, red mouth, one of the marathoners. Number five-five-nine. You don’t remember this?”
“No. Some of it. Not much.”
“Well, there was video of the runners, taken by a news channel, as they came into the piazza. We were able to identify a girl wearing that number. Even a photograph. We have placed a watch on every ferry, all the ports, the airport, the Giudecca—everywhere.”
He drew a small photo out of his breast pocket and handed it to Dalton. In the shot, a blowup of a camera capture, was the blurred and foreshortened image of a young woman, in a crowd of other runners, her top and shorts soaked, the number 559 plastered to her sexless, bony body, her white face harsh with strain, as she worked her way through a crowd on a wooden bridge across the Grand Canal. The girl had an underfed and somewhat-feral look, with the cheekbones and color of a Slav or a Swede.
“It is her?” asked Brancati.
“I think so. What about the marathon number? She must have given a name.”
“No. No name. The number was made up; the shirt, a fake. She must have joined the runners at some point. There were six thousand of them, wandering all over Venice in the hours before the race began. She may already be out of Venice, but, as I say, we keep the watch very close. If she is here, we will find her. Of course, you, being an idiot, made it very easy for
them
to find
you.
Back at Mr. Naumann’s old rooms in the Savoia.”
“The company had resources in Naumann’s suite. A Ruger, and cash, and some travel documents. I needed to get at them. The concierge is a friend. He let me in without registering. I had watched the hotel for hours before I surfaced. No one was on it. I figured, because it was so obvious, it would be the last place they’d expect me to show up.”
“We are speaking of
they
as if we knew who they were. Do you know who is this
they?”
“In my case, Clandestine Services.”
“Yes, Clandestine Services of the CIA . . . the Special Action men. When we met, a month ago, you were much caressed by the Agency, and now, I see, not so much. I wonder why this is so. But we will come to that. For now, for what immediately concerns me as an official of the Carabinieri, we have the attempted murder of an American visitor and the suspect an elusive blonde. So, now is the time to speak.”
Dalton stared up at Brancati for a time, his mind working. In this brief, tense interlude, Sister Beatrice found it convenient to arrive with a broad silver tray piled high with cakes and biscotti and a china bowl full of soup
—straciatella.
There was even a pot of coffee, along with a series of colored pills that she insisted Signor Dalton take while she watched him.
She also glared so ferociously at Major Brancati that, sighing theatrically, he went into the bathroom and flushed his cigar down the toilet. Then he emerged, appropriating three of Dalton’s biscotti, flopping himself down on Dalton’s bed and waiting with clear impatience until Sister Beatrice drifted back out of the room on her squeaking rubber shoes.
She paused at the door to send an over-the-shoulder farewell glance at Dalton freighted with an earthly warmth that struck both men as rather more carnal than was quite right in a nursing sister, even an Italian one. Brancati managed to allow Dalton to eat almost half of his soup, and they both took long sips of what turned out to be
caffè corretto—
coffee with Sambuca—before Brancati, sitting up on the side of the bed and leaning forward, returned with his usual force to the lines of inquiry before them.
“So
. . . aspetto . . .
talk to me! Explain.”
Dalton, sighing, said, “What do you want to know?”
“You have been stabbed. The weapon was a medieval Venetian assassin’s blade. We have examined the fragments taken from your body. The knife was an antique, over three hundred years old, obtained by theft from a museum of Murano glass in the Ghetto. It was valued by its owner at over six thousand euros. Quite a price to pay for an object that is to be stuck with great force and no reasonable hope of recovery into a man’s vitals. This act from beginning to end was . . . cinematic. Implausible. So unlikely that it suggests someone wishing to
appear
Venetian, which raises the possibility that the killers are not, as you say in America,
from around here.”
“Have you thought about the Serbs?”
“Yes,” said Brancati. “Your little dancing lesson on the Quay of Slavs. This has occurred to me, I admit.”
This was reference to a late-night collision near the Palazzo Ducale between Dalton and two Serbian thugs from Trieste—Milan and Gavro—an attempted mugging that Dalton, feeling the effects of at least two bottles of Bollinger, had resented so extremely that he had kicked Milan into a state of quadriplegia and pounded the hapless Gavro into a permanent coma.
This had happened over a month ago, during the early days of Dalton’s pursuit of Porter Naumann’s killer; an unrelated off-ramp in the investigation that had nevertheless resulted in the arrival in Venice a while later of two Serbian enforcers in the employ of one Branco Gospic, a Serbian warlord based in Split, and, as it happened, a close relative to the now-comatose Gavro. The enforcers, Radko No Last Name Given and an unidentified male accomplice, had traced Dalton’s movements to Cora Vasari’s town house in the Dorsoduro district of Venice, where they had broken in by force and terrified the woman for a few moments before she was able to produce a pistol—her grandfather’s, a famous flier assassinated by one of Mussolini’sagents during Il Duce’s adventure in Abyssinia. Cora shot Radko in the face, which ended the ugly interview at her villa but not, quite likely, the grudge between Dalton and Gavro’s Serbian godfather, Branco Gospic.
“You think Gospic sent the girl?”
“It’s a theory. I would be more in love with it if Mr. Gospic and his associates were the only people expressing an interest in your location.”
“What does that mean?” said Dalton, knowing damn well.
“Now we come to it, my friend. The Agency. Your fall from grace. What happened in America? You found Mr. Naumann’s killer; this we have been told?”
“Yes.”
“And did it end there? In Colorado?”
“There were complications.”
This obviously came as no shock to Brancati, as his wry smile indicated.
“Complications,”
he said, savoring the word. “I begin to see that
complications
follow in your wake as seabirds follow the fishing fleet. Do you wish to enlarge on these
complications?”
Dalton lifted his hands, winced, and shook his head, his face hardening.
“Alessio, I can’t. I can’t tell you a damn thing.”
Brancati shook his head sadly.
“If you wish my cooperation, Micah, you have no choice.”
“I
can
tell you that the Company wants to find me. I can tell you that they have a good reason to find me. I know that sounds . . .”
“Cinematic?”
Dalton laughed in spite of his pain.
“Yes. Cinematic. But it’s true.”
Brancati’s face became a little stonier, showing Dalton the hard man he had seen before, the soldier-spy under the courtly façade.
“These are difficult times, Micah. This terror war, the forces at play in Europe now. These jihadis are a virus in the blood of the West. Wherever they are found, they must be exterminated. They are a death cult. There is no reasoning with them. Even the Dutch and the French have stiffened themselves. You cannot have a
truce
with such people. It is a cold war, and, like the Cold War, we are forced to descend to brutal tactics, even when we have a strong distaste for it. Methods are used now that Il Duce would have liked, and even good men are stained by what must be done. I cannot give comfort to someone who has become an enemy of his own country.”
“I’m not an enemy of my country. Or of the Agency.”
“Then why are you running from your own men?”
Dalton studied Brancati’s face and saw no room for games in his cold, dark glare. Hell, he deserved at least a sense of what was at play in his own city, if only for his own safety.
“Okay. I can give you the situation, but I can’t tell you what the central matter really is, other than to say that it relates to a Company operation. Run out of Clandestine Services, under Deacon Cather.”
“A . . .
black op,
is that how you say it?”
“Yes. A black operation.”
“And you can’t tell me the name of this . . . op?”
“No.”
“No? Then maybe I tell you. Was it something called Orpheus?”
Dalton’s face seemed to harden up, close down, like concrete setting. Which of course told Brancati, a trained interrogator, all he needed to know.
“I see that it was,” said Brancati, not without sympathy.
“It was called that, yes. I suppose I talked . . .”
“I’m considering the application of morphine in all our future interrogations. So much happier for all concerned than a beating. Everyone smiling. Dreamy. Much happy talk.”
“What did I say . . . about Orpheus?”
“Everything! Like a chattering cuckoo. I know all, Micah.
Tutti.”
Dalton looked at the man for a while, his breathing constricted, and then he remembered that Brancati was also a cop.
“Like hell you do. I don’t believe you.”
Brancati held a sharpened glare for a while and then broke into a grin.
“No, of course you don’t. But you
did
say the name. So now that we know the name, will you tell me what is behind the name?”
“I can’t, Alessio.”
“Okay.
Allora.
Whatever Orpheus is, is it a threat to any Italians?”
“No. Not at all. It’s not a threat to
any
civilian anywhere. It’s not even something I
disapprove
of. I don’t think you would either. My problem is, I found out about it. It was handed to me by . . . a dead friend—”
“Mr. Naumann?”
“Yes. But indirectly. Through an intermediary.”
“And the intermediary . . . ?”
“His secretary. In London. A woman named Mandy Pownall. She was also his lover, I suspect. But now that I know about Orpheus, it can’t be unknown, and it’s quite plausible that some men connected to the operation will do whatever is necessary to make sure I don’t talk.”
“Are you likely to talk?”
“Hell no.”
“Then say so. Tell the Company. What did Le Carré say . . . ‘come in from the cold’? Reassure them. You’re a trusted man, a proven man.”
What Brancati was saying made sense. Maybe it was still possible to come in from the cold. In the CIA, the tricky bit about being a prodigal son returning was surviving your welcome-home party. In the meantime, Brancati’s restless mind had run on to his own official concerns.
“Micah, what you cannot tell me about Orpheus—this thing that’s apparently fatal to know—would it cause the CIA to send someone to kill you in Venice?”
“Possibly.”
“Like this blond girl?”
“Possibly. But I don’t see them using a stolen glass blade to do it in the first place. If the Company wants you dead, most of the time it happens so quietly that no one ever thinks of it as a murder. We don’t like attention. This stabbing, right out in the open, in front of thousands of witnesses, it looks more like a revenge thing, a
demonstration,
a point of honor. It just doesn’t
feel
like an Agency stunt.”
“Yes. I agree. Which brings us back to our Serbian friends. About the CIA, I should tell you that we have unofficial inquiries from the Americans here. At the Consulate. And in London. They wish to know if you are here, in Venice. Even in the Arsenal. They are being very aggressive.”