The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  Dalton nodded. She moved away, a dry rustle of her habit and her rubber shoes squeaking on the stone floor, and then she was back with a tall glass filled with ice water, an angled straw; she put a hand under his back and lifted him—she was quite strong. Dalton pulled at the water and felt its cooling rush down his throat. She lowered him gently back.

  “There . . . you should go to sleep again, now.”

  Sleep.

  Sleep and dreams, and Father Jacopo with his surgical fingers.

  “No. I’ve slept enough. Too much. I need to sit up.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I am.”

  She gave the request her professional consideration for a time while Dalton lay there and tried to pull himself fully into the here and now. He knew the Arsenal, the big military citadel next to the old naval basin in the eastern end of Venice. It belonged to the Carabinieri, the military police. It was off-limits to civilians. It was also sometimes used as a secret prison for high-security detainees. Was he now one of them?

  If he was in the hands of the Carabinieri, then it was likely that they would have already notified the Agency in Langley. Keepers would be here now, out in the hall, waiting for him to come out of the sedation. He was as good as in shackles, on his way back to Langley. Or he might never reach it. The sister’s expression changed as she saw a series of strong emotions run across his face. Her words indicated that she was more than just a nurse and that she knew at least something about his situation.

  “You are under the protection of Major Brancati, Signor Dalton. You must not be afraid. I am Sister Beatrice, the Director of the clinic here. No guard is waiting in the hall. No one is coming for you today. Here. Let me help you to sit.”

  She managed to get him more or less upright, stacking pillows behind him for support. The room rolled only a little as she did this, and the nausea stayed under control, but he was weak . . . boneless. He could barely hold the glass she handed to him. She stepped back again, folding her hands across her waist, her face in repose and considering.

  “Are you hungry? Some soup, I think, would be possible now.”

  “Yes,” said Dalton, feeling the emptiness in his belly.

  “You are in pain. Would you like something for it?”

  “Yes. No, no I would not. No morphine. But soup, yes, please.”

  He could not afford to be drugged any longer. If the price of being awake and ready for what was coming was to be in pain, it was a reasonable exchange. He glanced around the room and saw a large leather chair, some sort of narrow wooden armoire, doors open, with nothing inside it but a blue terry-cloth bathrobe and a pair of thin cloth slippers. A half-open door in the end wall that probably led to a bathroom. There were no guards in the room. There could be guards in the hall, in spite of the sister’s assurances, but in here there was also a window.

  So anything was possible, if he was awake and ready for his chance. Sister Beatrice saw the direction of his thoughts and gave him a conspirator’s smile, but all she said was, “Major Brancati is now here. He has been waiting for you to wake up. He has been called. Are you ready to see him?”

  “Yes,” he said, pulling in a deep breath and riding out the consequences with as blank an expression as he could manage. “Of course.”

  She nodded, leaned over to straighten his sheets, and to push his long blond hair back from his forehead, letting her fingers move through his hair with a less-than-virginal touch. Then she turned and glided out of the room.

  As soon as the door closed, Dalton pulled back the sheets and tried to get out of the bed. He got his feet down onto the stone floor, feeling faint, braced himself, and pushed himself to his feet, swaying, seeing the room go pale as a mist rose up in his vision.

  He was wearing some sort of striped pajama bottom and nothing else. A broad surcingle of pale blue gauze was wrapped tightly around his lower torso. He touched his belly with caution, feeling for the stitches underneath, and found a row of them, perhaps eight inches long, running from his hip almost to the middle of his belly. He stood upright with an effort and tried to walk, found that it was just possible to attempt a few uncertain steps in a kind of old man’s shuffle. The door to the bathroom was half open, a tin shower stall visible beyond it. It cost him a great deal to cover the eight feet between the bed and the bathroom, but he managed it, closing the door and leaning his hands against the broad ceramic sink, with its rust-stained drain, while he gathered himself. He looked at his reflection in the stainless steel mirror; dark rings under his pale, colorless eyes, his cheeks sunken, long hair in limp, greasy strands.

  He badly needed a shower and a shave, and he was very aware of the fact that a light breeze could knock him down, but he was still alive, and if the Company was trying to get to him, they hadn’t done it yet.

  He shuffled carefully to the barred window and looked out at a long canal that ran northward between low stone walls, the Canale delle Galeazze, the surface of its placid gray waters pebbled with a light rain that made it look like a sheet of hammered tin. Shreds of mist drifted across the canal. The wind off the Adriatic carried the smell of fish, a hint of garlic, and the graveyard reek of Venice in the fall. Just visible out in the sea mist was the low tomb-filled cemetery island called Isola di San Michele. The bars of the little window were thick and set deep into the stone casement.

  The distance from the bathroom window to the roof of the buildings below looked to be about forty feet, with nothing but sheer stone wall between the casement and the roof. He reached up and tugged at one of the bars; he might as well have been trying to pull the sword from the stone. He heard the sound of amused laughter and turned to see Alessio Brancati, a major of the Carabinieri, wearing his formal navy blues, boots gleaming black, his leather harness shining, a holstered Beretta at his hip, leaning against the doorway, his dark, craggy face wearing a sardonic grin, his piratical leer set off by a black mustache, his strong yellow teeth showing.

  “Awake for only a minute and already you are plotting, Micah.”

  Dalton could not help but return the smile, although his satisfaction at seeing Brancati again was, under the circumstances, rather muted.

  “Alessio . . .” Dalton swayed a little, and Brancati’s expression changed to grim concern. He stepped forward and took Dalton’s right arm in an iron grip. He smelled strongly of the same Toscano cigars that he had been smoking when they first met in the little courtyard of the church of San Niccolò in Cortona, where an old verger named Paolo had found the bloody remnants of Dalton’s friend Porter Naumann huddled by the gates. Brancati was the officer in charge of the murder investigation, and, although his part in it had remained in Italy, he had been an unlikely ally in the pursuit of Naumann’s killer during the following days, a chase that had taken Dalton from Venice to London, to Washington, D.C., and finally to a violent collision in a stand of cottonwood trees by the Little Apishapa River, in southeastern Colorado.

  Brancati led Dalton gently across to the wooden chair and helped him down into it, making odd little soothing sounds as if he were leading a lame horse. When Dalton was safely settled, Brancati went across to the wooden armoire, retrieved the threadbare blue robe, and arranged it with rough but careful hands across Dalton’s shoulders. Then he stepped back and looked down at him with an expression on his strong Tuscan face that was a curious amalgam of sympathy, strong official disapproval, and residual affection.

  “Cretino!” he said, not unkindly. “You came back. Perché?”

  Dalton opened his mouth to answer, but Brancati raised his hand, palm out, shaking his head. “No need. You came back for her. And now look at you. Stuck like a bistecca, and all the Americans in an uproar. This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. And you have placed her in danger too. You are a professional, a trained man. And yet you do this?”

  “I just wanted to . . .”

  Dalton’s voice trailed off, bitterly aware that there was nothing to be said in his defense. Brancati nodded once, as if satisfie
d that on this point at least—on Dalton’s state of sentimental idiocy—there was to be no argument.

  “Yes. No defense. At least you still have your honor. She has been here many times. Not ten hours ago, she sat in that chair, love struck, with a face as white as Palladio’s paint box.”

  “Cora?”

  Brancati shrugged and made a hard face, his hands upraised.

  “There is no reason in it. I tried to reason. No chance. She is down below now, waiting. Sister Beatrice, who is a romantic, called her at the Museo Civico. At least she has accepted having a guard, so there is that to be grateful for. It is not much, but I will take it. Now, I have to ask you, what are your intentions?”

  “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.”