The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “Was she killed here?”

  “No. She has no blood in her body at all. If she had been killed here, the sand would be thick with it.”

  While Brancati considered this, Galan shifted his attention to Dalton.

  “Good evening, Micah,” he said.

  “Issadore.”

  Galan looked back at the officials standing around the crime scene tent, judging the distance. Then he turned back to Dalton, speaking softly.

  “Did you enjoy your talk with Signorina Pownall?”

  “I did. Thank you for arranging it.”

  “Have you reached a decision?”

  Brancati was now looking at him as well, his face in shadow. Dalton had assumed that the private room at Florian’s had been bugged for the purpose, and the manner of these two confirmed it. They had heard the entire conversation. Dalton had no objection. These men were not his enemies.

  “Yes. I’ll go. If Brancati here will let me.”

  Brancati made a noise but said nothing. Galan kept his eyes on Dalton. “And she will go with you? Signorina Pownall?”

  “Yes.”

  Brancati sighed again and looked out to sea. He could not let it go and finally rounded on Dalton, his baritone purr now more of a growl.

  “You put yourself in their hands, my friend.”

  “You said I should try to come in from the cold, Alessio.”

  “Hah! A silly novel. What do I know? And what about Miss Vasari?”

  “You’ve made it plain she’s safer without me. I agree.”

  “She did not go to Firenze, Micah. She stays here for you. To be with you for a time. So you have a responsibility. To her. She will not . . . sever this bond with you. Whatever it is. Whatever the risk. She made this clear to me while you were meeting with Miss Pownall. I argued. I threatened—”

  “Cora? That must have been interesting.”

  Brancati bared his teeth, a flash of white in the dark.

  “Yes. She does not threaten well.”

  “That has been my experience.”

  Another long silence, with the rising wind stirring the palms in a dry rustle and the sand hissing at their feet. A bat flittered around their heads and was suddenly gone. When Dalton spoke again, his tone was heavy.

  “So. I have to go to Singapore, then. If we’re ever going to have any kind of a life together, I have to go.”

  Brancati put a hand on Dalton’s shoulder.

  “Why, Micah? Stay here, in Venice. I would find good work for you, important work. You could be a help to Italy. We have enemies too.”

  “And Gospic? Will he leave us alone?”

  Lujac’s belly muscles tightened a bit, as he sat at the long lens. He reached out and touched a button marked RICORDA.

  “How will your mission to Singapore protect Cora from Branco Gospic?” asked Brancati, and, in the shadows, Dalton could see Galan’s head nodding in assent.

  “If I succeed, Cather will help me with Gospic.”

  “Hah! We can protect you from Gospic. Better than your CIA. You don’t need Cather.”

  “No? Will you send a man to kill Gospic, then, Alessio?”

  Galan’s harsh croak came out of the shadow.

  “Signores. This is not the place. And the Carabinieri are not assassins.”

  “No,” said Dalton. “But I am.”

  Dalton held Brancati’s look. Brancati moved his head in the dark, his hands rising up, a yellow flame sparking as he held the lighter to a cigar. The tip glowed red. A sea wind shredded the smoke and tore it inland into the palm line by the shuttered ospedale. There was nothing else to be said. Galan looked at Dalton for a time, his black eyes still, and then he sighed.

  “Well, I suppose we must ask you to look, Micah.”

  Brancati offered Dalton a cigar, which Dalton took, lighting it with difficulty—the wind was turning into a light gale, and little whirlwinds of dusty sand were skittering in the sidelong light from the arc lamps. Beyond the shoals, the Adriatic churned and tossed, and little flickers of pale light danced across the foaming chop. The sky was black, starless, filled with invisible motion, as the clouds rolled in from Montenegro. Brancati and Dalton pulled their collars up as they reached the little tent. The three guards stepped aside, pulling the old man in the yellow slicker away with them.

  They stepped into the hard, yellow light and looked down in silence at the dead woman sprawled on her belly in the sand. She was naked, young, her short blond hair, which had dried in the sea wind, fluttered around her face like cold, white flames. Her head was turned to the left, and her eyes were open, opaque, staring, her blue lips half open. She wore an expression of mild surprise, as if her death had come naturally to her, like an ending she had long foreseen. Her skin was pale blue and veined with purple. She looked as if she might have been carved from marble. Galan stepped delicately into the crime scene and crouched beside her head, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He reached out and took her jaw, lifting her head so Dalton could see her face clearly.

  “Is it her?” he asked, not looking at Dalton.

  Dalton bent down to consider her, looking at the thin blue lips, the slightly Slavic cast to her features. He had a flash of red lips twisted in a curse as he stood against the pillared rail near the Bridge of Sighs.

  “Yes. It’s her.”

  “You’re sure,” said Brancati, standing a bit apart. He had three daughters, all young and pretty, as this young girl had been not so long ago.

  “I am,” said Dalton. “She’s the one.”

  Galan, grunting, pointed to her wrists, where two rings of raw, abraded skin showed around them.

  “She was bound, here, with some sort of thin line. We will look for fibers, but with the action of the water . . .” Here, he shrugged. “You see the striations here?” He indicated what looked like stretch marks in the skin, running upward along her forearms. “They make me think she was dragged in the water—through the water—perhaps behind a boat. The bruising meant that she was probably alive, if not conscious, when she went into the water.”

  “If she drowned,” put in Brancati, “what happened to her blood?”

  Galan sighed and looked into the dark where the guards waited. “Carlo, come here. Turn her over.”

  One of the Carabinieri soldiers came into the light, a fixed expression of mild disgust on his young face, slipping on a pair of surgical gloves. He knelt down and gently lifted the girl. She was as limp as seaweed, as if all of her bones had been crushed. The boy rolled her onto her back and placed her arms by her sides, as if preparing her for a bath. She had been opened from her navel to just above her pubic bone. The wound gaped wide, and loops of yellow-and-blue intestine, coated with beach sand, slid wetly from the cut.

  “She had been cut—like this—before she went into the water. She could have lived for quite a while. Many do, even with such a wound.”

  Dalton, looking down at the ruin of her body, had a vision of Porter Naumann’s body—belly opened like this—leaning against the heavy wooden doors of an old Roman church in Cortona. He looked away and saw Naumann’s ghost, standing in the outer darkness, a shadow against the line of stunted palms, his hands at his sides, wearing a long blue overcoat, his collar turned up against the wind off the sea, his white face staring back at Dalton, his pale eyes bright with pinpricks of reflected light.

  Naumann showed his teeth in a cold, dry smile, lifted a hand, making a broad, sweeping gesture that took in the beach and the police and the ruined woman in the sand at Dalton’s feet. His words to Dalton—in Dalton’s dream of Cortona, as he lay bleeding from this girl’s knife on the steps of the Basilica—came to him as a dry whisper, in his skull:

  Grief is coming, Micah. More than you know.

  Galan, with difficulty, got to his feet, indicating with a gesture that the young officer should cover the woman with a sheet. The cloth, rippling in the growing onshore wind, had to be held down with beach stones. After they were in place, Dalton thought she looked like
a moth pinned to a card. Brancati drew on the last of his cigar and threw the butt away. It arced into the night, a tiny fireball trailing red sparks.

  “So, Gospic killed her,” he said, watching the butt smolder.

  “For failing?” said Dalton.

  “And as an example. ‘Pour encourager les autres.’ ”

  “So, he’ll send someone else.”

  “This killing would suggest he already has.”

  The three men looked at the dead woman on the beach for a time.

  “Issadore, I have a question,” said Dalton. “Why here?”

  Galan shrugged, looking around.

  “Why anywhere? The sea does not explain itself.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance she was deliberately placed here?”

  Galan fell silent. Dalton, who knew his man, waited.

  “Of course. Anything can be proposed. It is not impossible. But what would be the advantage?”

  “Yes. Why here?” asked Brancati, this time into the wind itself.

  Dalton turned slowly, scanning the beach, the palms, and then looking out to sea, into the black vault full of rushing wind and roiling water. Seven hundred yards out to sea, Lujac, watching closely, saw the expression on Dalton’s face, the directed intensity of his glare as he searched the darkness beyond the beach lights. Lujac felt the look like the heat from a flame.

  Within thirty seconds, he had slipped his cables—leaving the anchors rooted to the seabed—and the Subito was heading slowly out into the oncoming swells, making just enough speed to keep a headway against the storm. The Subito was almost a thousand yards out when a thin lance of hard-white light stabbed out into the darkness, raking the ocean from horizon to horizon, moving in jerks and fits, cutting crazily back and forth across the water, a tube of glowing pale fire shot through with hard, clear crystals of driving rain. The beam glanced across the stern of the Subito—the man behind the searchlight caught a flash of bright gold as the light reflected from the brass letters on her stern—the beam flashed by and on into the empty dark—then back with a jerk, as if hunting for that flash of gold.

  But there was nothing there. Only the black eternity of the sea and the storm racing inland across the water.

  “What about the radar?” asked Brancati, seated beside Rafael, the cutter’s pilot. Rafael indicated the screen, the broad front of storm cloud.

  “There are returns, as you can see,” he said, indicating a number of small red blips, uneven and faint. “But some are buoys, and this one is a fishing boat called the Sospiri, and we have already talked to the captain. These others, they may be boats, or just a flock of birds. This storm is making it very hard to read the returns. Do you want to put a chopper up? Or we can go look for ourselves.”

  Brancati considered the radar screen, watching the storm mass swelling, thinking it through.

  “No. I don’t want to lose a chopper—or a patrol boat—in that mess.”

  “There was that flash of gold.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe a fish leaping?”

  Brancati stared out into the darkness and said nothing. He felt Dalton at his back and turned to look at him.

  “What do you think, Micah?”

  Dalton closed his eyes for a moment, as a wave of fatigue moved over him. His wound was throbbing, and his pulse was too rapid.

  “I think I need some sleep,” he said, smiling thinly. Brancati studied his gaunt face in the dim red light of the ship cabin and then spoke softly to Rafael in Italian. The patrol boat dropped him off at the Quay of Slavs thirty minutes later. He came into the lobby of the Hotel Savoia and was met by two young Carabinieri guards, who had been playing chess on one of the low wooden tables in the lobby. They rose as he came in through the cut-glass doors, straightening their tunics and blinking with fatigue. It was two in the morning. The small hotel was filled with silence and shadows. Dalton nodded to the two men, who saluted him in return, and then he went on through to the elevator and pressed the number 5.

  Cora was in the suite, wearing a cream satin slip, sitting in one of the gilt chairs and smoking a turquoise Balkan Sobranie Cocktail, her long black hair undone, her legs crossed, her bare feet in tiny satin shoes. An unopened bottle of Bollinger stood in an ice-filled silver chalice on the floor beside her long, bare legs. The room smelled of smoke and her rich spicy scent, Eau de Sud, by Annick Goutal. There was music drifting in the background, the Duet from Lakmé. Her perfume filled his mind. She had been wearing that scent when he first met her, on the darkened stairwell of her little villa in the Dorsoduro. It had stayed with him ever since, always present, always a goad, desire without any hope. She rose as he came into the room and crossed to meet him. He opened his mouth to speak, but she put her fingertip on his upper lip and shook her head slowly, her hazel eyes wide and her full lips soft, her breath moist and smoky and warm.

  “Don’t talk, Micah,” she said, leaning into him. “Not yet.”

  10

  Thai Airways International Airlines, Flight 919, inbound to Singapore

  The 747 was thirty-six thousand feet above the South China Sea, chasing an opal moon through an indigo sky. The ocean far beneath the wing was a savannah of golden light. There was an island—Dalton had no idea which one—passing under the starboard wing; it looked like a black leaf veined in tiny yellow lights, floating on a pond. The first-class cabin was half empty, and the other five passengers—a Buddhist monk in saffron robes; a pair of Japanese businessmen, snoring, point and counterpoint, in their private booth; an attenuated Chinese woman of indeterminate age, with dead-white skin and an expression of general ill will, who tossed and twitched and muttered in her sleep; and a large pink man with a sculpted goatee and a wrinkled white linen suit—all of them gave every impression of travelers wrapped in oblivious sleep.

  The Thai flight attendant, a chinabone girl in glimmering red-and-orange silks, was sitting stiffly at her post by the forward bulkhead, head down, long black hair falling around her face, reading a Manga novel by the light of a pencil-thin halogen. The darkened cabin was full of the faint music of orchestral strings that floated over the underlying roar of the airplane’s jet engines and the shriek of the wind over its wings. The cabin rocked gently in mild turbulence, rising and falling. Beside him, in their isolated sleeping pair, Mandy Pownall lay back on the reclined daybed and stared out at the ocean below them, her pale hands crossed over her lap.

  “Why don’t you sleep?” said Dalton, in a low whisper.

  She turned her face to him, her eyes shadowed in the downlight from a reading lamp over Dalton’s head.

  “Why don’t you?” she said, giving him a slow smile. She looked at her wrist, realized that her watch was in her carry-on. “What time is it?”

  “A little after four in the morning.”

  “God,” she said, bringing her chairback up. “We’ve been flying for simply weeks. I’d open a vein for a cigarette. What day is it?”

  “We crossed the date line. It’s Sunday, I think.”

  “Thank God, we’re not doing Narita. I hate that airport.”

  “So do I. Have you ever been to Singapore?”

  Mandy closed her eyes and looked for a moment like a noblewoman’s marble effigy on a medieval tomb. Then she opened them again, and that pale inner light she had shone out.

  “Once. Years ago.”

  “Business?”

  “They said so, but all I accomplished was a near-fatal hangover and a persistent gastrointestinal infestation that nearly killed me. I hate the Singaporeans. Especially the officials. They’re the most sanctimonious, pettifogging, utter and total fucking bores on this entire planet. Except for the Canadians. When was the last time you were there?”

  “Years back. After the Horn.”

  “Cleaning, dare I ask?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone I knew?”

  “Do you remember Sidney Vansittart?”

  “That nasty old bugger! How could I not? He squatte
d on the Sorting Desk at London Station for simply eons, dealing out chaos and calumny measure for measure. Stringy old bird, rather like a syphilitic pelican. Damp, bulgy little eyes, like poached eggs. Story ran, he was going to the prostitute bars on the Patpong Road in Bangkok, ordering up squeaky little ten-year-olds by the bushel basket. Last I heard, he was taken up by the Thai police for disrespecting a Buddha. Tony Crane was his section head then. Caught holy hell for letting the old pederast out of the country at all. Never saw him again after that. Tony said he’d caught AIDS and died in some Southeast Asian cesspool.”

  “Well, he died in a toilet, at any rate.”

  Mandy gave him a look.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “You’re still waters, aren’t you, dear boy. Porter always said so.”

  “Still and shallow. How awake are you?”

  Something in his tone caught her ear. She looked at him for a moment and then pressed the CALL bell. The Thai girl floated over and hovered by their booth in attentive silence, her black eyes wide. Mandy ordered two G&T’s—Bombay Sapphire, please—which appeared a moment later, frosted over, with thin lemon slices and the ice still cracking. She lifted hers and touched the rim of his glass with a silvery ping.

  “To business, then?”

  “Please.”

  “And I was so hoping to hear all about your sultry Venetian.”

  “A genuine interest in another woman’s character is unlike you.”

  “Screw her character. I only want to know the really salacious bits. How was she in bed? Was she worth the punctured liver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? Tell me all!”

  “I just did.”

  Mandy made a face.

  “God, I wish someone would take a shiv in the googlies for me.”

  “I’ll see what I can arrange.”

  “You really intend to discuss this here?”

  “Rather here than in the rotunda at Changi.”

  Mandy lifted her head, peered around the dim cabin with a theatrical flair, and then leaned in close to Dalton, placing her right hand on his wrist and filling up his personal space with her perfume and the delightful sensual radiance of a mature and seasoned woman. She was, Dalton had always known, a reflexive and eternal flirt, although— he hoped—quite selective.