The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “I’m checking out the pool,” she said, with an edge. “Who are you?”

  The boy shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets, and began to walk along the edge of the pool. Nikki glanced at the ladder, feeling suddenly vulnerable. She looked down to what she had thought of as the shallow end of the pool. The edge was at least ten feet off the bottom. Essentially, she was in a bear pit. She walked quickly over to the ladder and put her hand on it. The boy was standing next to it, but he had his back turned to her, his attention somewhere else.

  “She is in the pool, Father.”

  A voice, in the distance, coming closer, an old man’s voice.

  “I know, I know.”

  Nikki began to climb up the ladder, looked up and saw that an old man was now standing beside the little boy, his hand resting on the boy’s head, a stiletto of a man with an air of dissipated elegance, blue-lipped, of indeterminate age, wearing a beautifully tailored gray silk suit. His face was like a skull and his lidded eyes had a pale glitter.

  “You are the lady from America?” he said, in a voice like a dry branch scraping against a window in the dead of winter.

  “Yes. I . . . I was checking the pool out.”

  The boy found this amusing. He was missing teeth in the front of his mouth. His laugh was high and sharp, a yelp, like a jackal or a fox. The old man smiled down at her, and patted the boy’s cheek, letting his fingertips slide along the boy’s skin in a way that seemed more sensual than paternal.

  Nikki found that she disliked him extremely.

  “Where’s Antonia?” she asked.

  The boy showed his teeth.

  “She is in the house.”

  “May I ask, who are you?” she said, as she began to climb the ladder. The old man said something in Croatian or Serbian to the boy. He stepped to the top of the ladder and put his hands on it. Nikki’s stomach tightened, but the boy only stood there, staring down at her with a look on his face that might have, on an older boy, been a sexual leer. She pulled the top of her blouse tighter, and began to climb again. When she got to the top, the boy held his hand out and helped her onto the deck, his lips half open, his eyes moving over her body in a way that made her feel like kicking him. The old man waited a little way away, his hands at his side, his expression cool.

  “I am the owner of the house,” the gray man said, in an accent Nikki could not quite recognize. Croatian or Serbian. “This is my stepson, Vladimir. You are Miss Nikki Turrin, I am told.”

  Nikki turned to look at him.

  “I was under the impression that the house was owned by a corporation.”

  “Were you?” said the gray man, walking a little behind her. They reached the glass doors. Nikki saw Antonia Baretto standing at the long kitchen counter, staring through the glass at her. Her face was bone white and her expression fixed. Three small boys stood in a semicircle around her, looking up. Nikki pushed the doors aside and came into the large, empty dining area, her shoes clicking on the intricate parquet flooring.

  Antonia’s eyes followed her as she came across the room. The little boys had turned around and were staring at Nikki. They looked like brothers, small, pinched faces and the same dead-brown eyes. They were all dressed like schoolboys, in slacks and shiny black shoes and baggy white shirts. They had sallow skin and looked underfed and hungry. They all had the same air of leering contempt mixed with a kind of greasy adolescent sensuality. It was clear from the expression on Antonia’s face that she did not like them very much either.

  “Nikki, this man is the owner of the villa,” she said, in a tight voice. “I did not expect him to be here.”

  “No, she did not,” said the gray man. “But when I heard you had come all the way from Maryland, I decided I wanted to meet you.”

  Nikki looked around at the little boys, wondering why they were here and why they were not in school. The gray man seemed to sense this.

  “These little boys are my . . . pupilla . . . I am their guardian.”

  Nikki tried a disarming smile on the boys. They looked back, unblinking,reminding her of stray dogs, watchers, devoid of any emotion other than a vaguely predatory air. They gave her the crawling creeps, actually. She looked over at Antonia and saw her feelings mirrored there.

  “Are you all right, Antonia?”

  She nodded once—a sharp, jerking motion—her hands tight around her purse. Her cell phone lay on the counter in front of her, open. The gray man came and stood beside her, staring across the counter at Nikki.

  “Signorina Baretto tells me that you have come from America to look at my villa. I am honored. It is true that a corporation owns it, but, I must say with humility, that I own the corporation. My name is Stefan Groz.”

  Nikki smiled but did not offer her hand. The name was spoken with a degree of formality, as if he expected her to know who he was. She did not, but the atmosphere in the house was vibrating with tension, a tension that he had brought with him, he and his little coyotes, but she could not understand what the tension arose from. Even Antonia looked remote, her expression blank and her eyes wary.

  “Tell me, Miss Turrin,” said Groz, “how you learned of the house?”

  “My family is from here. I have always wanted to buy a home here. So, I always look at the listings. I saw this house. I called Antonia—”

  “Yes. She told me that on the phone. From Annapolis Junction, in Maryland. Is that where you live, Miss Turrin?”

  “Yes. But how—”

  “How odd that you seem to live in a Starbucks coffee shop? The price for this villa is rather high. You must be very wealthy.”

  “My family has some money.”

  “Yes. They must. You were interested in the pool, I see. You have a little testing kit, so my boy tells me. You are concerned about the pool water? Mold, perhaps?”

  “Yes. Well, no . . . There were . . . issues about it. The pool.”

  Groz nodded his head, his eyes never moving from Nikki’s face.

  “Yes. The sad history of the pool. Everyone knows about it. I can understand why you were worried. Such a terrible thing. Of course, I have had the pool area bleached and chemically sprayed and power-washed. There would be no trace of the virus—”

  “Antonia said the problem was a bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus. That’s not a virus; it’s a bacteria.”

  A flicker of annoyance crossed his face.

  “You are correct. At any rate, the testing kit . . . I am curious about it. Would you be so kind as to show it to me?”

  That was the end of that, as far as Nikki was concerned.

  “Look, to be honest, I really don’t like your attitude and your questions, and I think I’m not going to buy this place after all. Antonia, perhaps you could take me back to the airport?”

  Antonia nodded, her face gaining some color as she saw a chance to get away from this bloodless old man and his terrible little homunculi. She reached for her cell phone, but Groz placed his hand on top of hers and held her there. She closed her eyes. A tremble ran through her slender body. Now the malice in the man was out in the open. When she opened them again, her eyes were bright with fear.

  “Before you go, can you indulge me? Do you know what interesting place is not very far from Annapolis Junction, Miss Turrin? A place called Fort Meade. Fort Meade is said to be the home of the famous National Security Agency. Do you know this place?”

  “Everyone knows about it. Antonia—”

  Groz reached quickly across and pulled her purse from her hand. He turned it upside down and poured the contents onto the countertop. There, amid the clutter of makeup and credit cards and airplane tickets, lay the HazMat kit, a small, rectangular box made of clear plastic.

  A label on the front of it said:

  HAZARDOUS MATERIAL

  If Found Do Not Open / Return To:

  Environmental Matrix, 2260 Laurel Way

  Annapolis Junction, Maryland

  Groz picked it up and looked at the various swabs and scrapings that Nikki
had collected. He set it down carefully and looked back at Nikki, saying nothing, apparently waiting for her reaction. There was a short, sharp sound, like something punching through glass, followed by a distant, rolling crack. She blinked. When she opened her eyes again, Stefan Groz was standing in front of her, a look of intense puzzlement on his narrow face. There was a small red hole in the middle of his shirt, about an inch below the folds of ancient skin around his throat. He reached up and touched the hole, pulled away a fingertip coated with blood, and then he looked back at Nikki. His mouth opened, as if he were trying to share with her his confusion about this strange phenomenon. Then the glitter went out of his eyes. He seemed to see something of great interest in the middle distance, was still for a moment, and then dropped down below the countertop like an empty suit. The boys backed away from his body and were now staring up at Nikki as if she had somehow killed the old man with a magic spell. The boy in the silk suit—Vladimir— reached into his pocket and pulled out a little silver pistol. There was another sharp crack and a hole appeared in the middle of his forehead, snapping his skull backward, sending him sliding across the bloody tiles, coming to a stop at the feet of a figure standing in darkness at the end of the hall.

  This figure came forward into the light, a bent old man in a rumpled brown suit and heavy cordovan brogues. He looked down at the body of Stefan Groz and, briefly, at the child who had also been shot, and then at the other boys, who had backed away into a corner of the kitchen and were staring up at the man as if he had just materialized out of the parquet tiles. The man sighed, reached down and plucked the little pistol out of the boy’s hand, studied it for a moment, and then set it down on the counter next to the pistol Groz had dropped. He looked at Nikki and Antonia, shook his head, and softly said: “Una giocattolo, a toy. Tal demenza.”

  Then he sighed again, lifted a handset, and spoke into it:

  “E morte, Carlo. Due. Grazie. Venga.”

  He put the radio away and came over to the counter, leaning his hands on it and breathing deeply, as if he had run some distance, which he had. His rough skin was lined and seamed and his features seemed to have been crowded into the center of his face. His hands were bent, gnarled, as if his fingers had been broken long ago, but there was kindness in his weathered face, although in the eyes there was an essential coldness.

  He turned around and smiled at Antonia Baretto and then at Nikki.

  “I am Issadore Galan, of the Carabinieri. I apologize for . . . for this,” he said, making a gesture that took in the kitchen, the carnage, the entire ugly encounter, “but we have monitored the phones of Stefan Groz for some time. He is the subject of a very large operation —one of the subjects, at least—but we have not until now been able to have him come to Italy and, because our judges are idiots and the Montenegrin judges are criminals, we could not obtain permission to go to Budva or to attempt to extradite him. Signorina Baretto, we heard you on his phone, saying a woman was coming from America to look at the place, and we became interested. So—che fortuna— we watch as he crosses the border with Slovenia and drives to Muggia. He becomes aggressive, seizes your purse . . . We intervene. Signorina Turrin, may I ask who is your employer? Is it by any chance the National Security Agency?”

  Nikki hesitated, uncertain what she should do.

  Galan saw this and shook his head sadly.

  “We are not the enemy, signorina. But I think that you and I, we may have the same enemy.”

  Nikki studied his face for a while. Men in navy blue tactical uniforms bearing the crest of the Carabinieri arrived and began to police up the scene. Galan waited patiently, his expression full of sadness and sympathy. After a while, she told him everything she knew about 2654 Salina Muggia Vecchia and nothing at all about the NSA, which he seemed to not only understand but to accept as, for her, the right decision, if not the only possible decision.

  38

  Sam Ratulangi Airport, Manado, northern Sulawesi

  They flew through the night, a thousand miles northeast from Kuta, crossing the coral atolls and volcanic islands of the Celebes Sea on a warm, cloudless tropical night under a blade-thin moon that cast a rippled golden light on the open water far below their wings. The islands were black shadows marked here and there with tiny constellations of pale lights; remote villages deep in the coconut palm jungles, fishing ports, now and then the brighter clusters of open copper and tin mines. Dalton was at the wheel, his left hand burning with pain, a round, blue open sore in the middle of it. His hand was wrapped in ice that Fyke would change every hour or so from a bucket in the galley, sprinkling the bite with hydrogen peroxide while the bandage was off. Dalton was loaded up on extra-strength Advils, popping them like cinnamon hearts. Neither man had much to say. They sat there, side by side, in the cockpit and watched the forward horizon rolling toward them at five hundred miles an hour, the four turbofan jets at the tail making a muted, whistling roar.

  They had left Mandy Pownall in an emergency-ward bed back at Madame Suharto Municipal Hospital, Delia Lopez at her side. The doctors at the hospital had confirmed the bite of a brown recluse spider—not too difficult, since they had the venomous little bitch in a bottle—agreed that it had very likely been asleep inside the silk scarf—they were common in closets and around clothing—and had done all the usual things—ice, painkillers, monitoring her vitals and her renal functions. She had been awake and talking, the pain under control, still pale and tight with anxiety, when Dalton kissed her good-bye.

  A young intern in the hall told Dalton and Fyke, with a worried look back toward the door to her room, that he did not expect but could not rule out extensive renal damage, and, if the wound on her breast became necrotic, there could be a large spreading sore, the dead tissue would have to be excised—there was the possibility of terrible scarring, a need for extensive cosmetic surgery—and, although in this case it seemed unlikely, there was always some danger, with a bite this close to the central nervous system, of coma. And death.

  Dalton listened to this painful talk of scarring and a coma and death about yet another woman whom he loved and reached the private conclusion that he was in a hell of his own devising, doomed to atone for all the damage he had ever done in this world; and, if Porter Naumann’s experience was any indicator, there was worse to come in the next.

  Fyke, sensing his mood, stopped at a hawker stand on the way back to Ngurah Rai Airport and bought three bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin, because sometimes all you can do about the everyday wounds of life is to resort to multiple applications of internal anesthetic and hope for a better day tomorrow. Now they were airborne and inbound to Sam Ratulangi there were eight hundred miles of rearview mirror separating them from the recent past. Dalton got a radio call from the air traffic controller at Sam Ratulangi, gave him his numbers, and settled back into the pilot seat, his face shadowed and uplit by the instrument lights. The JetStar drove through some turbulence, the airframe shaking, rattling the glasses on the tray at Fyke’s feet. He leaned down, lifted up the bottle of Bombay Sapphire, looking quizzically at Dalton.

  “One for the ditch, Mikey?”

  “How many have I had so far?”

  Fyke considered the bottle.

  “Three. Small ones.”

  “And you?”

  “Three. Large ones.”

  “I could use some coffee. We’ll be on the ground in thirty minutes.”

  “The field is open?”

  “They have a night crew for emergencies. I told them we were having trouble with the GCA radar. They’ll light up the field for us.”

  “Okay . . . Not true, is it? About the GCA?”

  “No. It’s fine. Coffee?”

  “Coming up.”

  Fyke was back in a couple of minutes. Right at the edge of the forward horizon, dark against a field of stars, was a large, low black mass, with a small cluster of lights, in a concave curve around the edge of a broad seacoast. Fyke handed Dalton a cup of rich black coffee and strapped himself back into
the copilot’s chair.

  “Manado?”

  “That’s my hope.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mandy was telling me about this ghost you’ve been seeing.”

  “Has she? Our Mandy has a little problem with discretion.”

  “Was it a secret? She didn’t think so. You told Delia about it. Seeing a ghost. This Porter Naumann fellow. Did I know him?”

  “He knew you. He worked out of London Station, but you were with Tony Crane. Porter and Mandy created Burke and Single.”

  “Burke and Single? That’s one of ours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew. And how did Porter Naumann become a ghost?”

  “He died. That’s pretty much a prerequisite.”

  “Don’t be flip, Mikey. You know what I’m asking.”

  “Don’t you already know the answer?”

  “I’ve been making a few educated guesses. It has something to do with how you’re no longer working for the CIA.”

  “We’re working for the CIA right now, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah. But it feels like freelancing, doesn’t it? But, then, it always did. Nobody like us ever really belongs to the Agency. We’re all part-timers and casual labor, as far as the Agency is concerned, unless you’re Deacon Cather. My point is, what happened to Porter Naumann, was it your fault?”

  “No. Not that part of it, anyway.”

  “But you then set out to do something ghastly to whoever killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in the doing of that, other people got hurt. This lady in Venice?”

  “Yes. Indirectly.”

  “But the mainspring, the core of it, you didn’t start all that, did you? You just did what you could do along the way. How’s Porter doing now?”

  “Last time we talked, he was trapped in Cortona. He couldn’t leave. And there were things he was seeing in the street; looked like black smoke in the shape of . . . demons, I guess. Coming up out of the stones, and they were hissing at him. He was worried.”

  “Jesus. I don’t blame him. I’d pee myself. He told you all this?”