Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  That had been an hour ago, the last twenty minutes of which they spent winding their way along the shore of Lake Como, jammed in between the water’s edge and the sharply rising hills. With the fuel gauge needle now well into the red, Luke finally said, “If we don’t stop soon, we’re going to find ourselves stranded in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Okay,” Pippi conceded. “The next town.”

  It was called Bellano, as was the stately old hotel, swathed in Virginia creeper, that they found down near the small port. The proprietor’s wife, a woman with a no-nonsense manner, perked right up when they opted for the most expensive room available. They had just missed the last orders for dinner, but if they could be back downstairs within ten minutes, there was every chance she could persuade the chef to throw something together for them. She requested their passports for registration, then sent them upstairs with a key.

  It wasn’t Luke’s first-ever meal in Italy—that, presumably, had been at his mother’s breast—but it felt as though it was. The veal escalope in a tuna and caper sauce threatened an unfortunate collision of tastes but turned out to be a revelation. Pippi hailed it as the best vitello tonnato she’d ever had—a verdict based on several trips she had made to Italy with her family over the years. They had never seen Venice, though.

  “I bet you can’t wait,” said Luke.

  Pippi had grown worryingly withdrawn over the past couple of hours, and it was good to see her smile.

  “Oh, yes, Venice never disappoints. Everyone says it.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry, I do this sometimes—disappear. Johan hated it.”

  “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes you are. You’re going to the car to get the gun.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary?”

  “Borodin told me we had to have a gun with us always.”

  He recalled the two of them talking away intently in front of the chalet while he washed his hands in the trough. “What else did he say?”

  “I’ll tell you one day,” came her enigmatic reply.

  When Luke returned with the Browning to their room upstairs, Pippi was in the bathroom, and her clothes lay neatly folded on the small divan between the French windows. The double bed, he noted, was easily large enough to accommodate them both without any awkwardness. He slid the gun beneath the mattress and wandered out onto the balcony for a cigarette.

  A sickle moon cast a silver trail across the lake toward him. This way, it seemed to say, but it was the wrong way: westward, whereas Venice lay far behind him to the east. A tinkle of laughter drifted up from a nearby bar, bringing with it a stab of sadness. He didn’t begrudge them their merriment, though he wondered whether he would ever again be able to give himself over to such unbridled jollity.

  The gates of hell.

  Borodin’s words had struck him as melodramatic at the time, but some hard truths were buried away in them. The people set on his destruction could not be reasoned with or bought off. They were also more numerous and more experienced in such matters than he. If he was ever to be safe again, he must not only meet them on their own ground, he had to match them and then kill them—all of them. His time in the Northern Territory had taught him to think in terms of risks and probabilities. When you flew a sortie, you existed in a constant state of reckoning, weighing the factors in your favor and those against, and something told him that this particular mission held out little hope of success.

  He wasn’t aware of Pippi until she materialized beside him, barefoot in the cream satin nightgown she had bought in Bern.

  He tilted his head at the view. “Another night, another European lake.”

  It was hard to believe that this time yesterday they had been overlooking the dark waters of Lake Luzern. So much had happened in the meantime; so much had changed.

  “Tomorrow, the sea,” she said.

  She shivered in the chill night air, then plucked the cigarette from between his fingers and raised it to her lips.

  “Pippi, listen, I have to go on; I don’t have a choice. But you do. I know someone in Paris who can help you get far away from all this, out of Europe.”

  It wasn’t the first time he had thought of Fernando since seeing his friend knocked unconscious by the would-be assassin in L’Hirondelle.

  “You don’t speak Italian,” she pointed out.

  “I’ll get by.”

  “You don’t want my help?”

  He hesitated before replying. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Pippi.”

  “Ignore it. You have to believe. Only if you believe …” She trailed off. “I’m staying.” She handed him back the cigarette and headed inside.

  He wasn’t ready for bed yet, so he ran himself a bath. Sister Agnes had always warned him that going to bed with wet hair was a sure way to a sore throat, but he let his head slide beneath the surface anyway. For a moment, it felt like a baptism, a rebirth. Vincenzo Albrizzi, the stolen boy. Did he have brothers and sisters? Would his parents know him by sight, as Borodin had? What was his grandfather’s name? Vittorio? Yes. Was he still alive? And his grandmother? And what of the rest of his family—uncles, aunts, cousins? The answers lay not even a day’s travel away.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, he found Pippi buried beneath the covers on her side of the bed. He wound his wristwatch, turned off the bedside lamp, and slipped between the sheets. He assumed at first that she was already asleep, but it soon became clear that the deep, regular breathing was that of a person fighting back tears.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” she replied. “Just hold me.”

  She was lying on her side, facing away from him, and when he draped an arm around her, she gripped his hand and pressed it to her midriff. They lay there in the darkness, their heads cradled by the same pillow.

  “I thought I’d feel better,” she said. “But I don’t.”

  “You took a man’s life. You’re not supposed to feel better, never mind whatever he did to Johan.”

  She lay in silence a while before saying, “He was going to kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe that’s why I feel bad. I didn’t do it for Johan; I did it for you.”

  “Feel bad for Johan if you must, but not for me. I’m still breathing because of you.”

  She had saved his life, there was little doubt about that. Kapitän Wilke could have been there for only one reason, and there was only one way he could have known where to find them. Erwin must have told him. Erwin must have listened in on their conversation in the barn, for that was the only time Luke had mentioned Café Glück to Pippi.

  Borodin was the one who had led them to this deduction while quizzing them in the car, concluding also that the tall man who had put a bullet in him had to be an accomplice of Wilke, because it simply wasn’t possible that he was one of Petrovic’s people. As for the person who had then dispatched that man before he could fire again, Borodin couldn’t say. He had been reeling backward at the time, falling. He had heard a single shot and assumed it was Andrej who had fired.

  Luke had let the matter lie, making no mention of Cordell Oaks. Now he was beginning to wonder whether his mind was playing tricks on him. What had he really seen? A gun? No, just a blur of movement, a faceless figure raising his arm as he hurried from the café. And when he had looked again a few seconds later, it was to glimpse the back of a bulky man turning into an alleyway. At the time, his brain had told him it was Cordell Oaks, but now he wasn’t so sure. What earthly explanation could there be for a kind but rather dull American he’d met on a train popping up out of nowhere to save his bacon?

  Whatever the truth of it, death had come for him twice in Hirschenplatz, and twice he had cheated it by the skin of his teeth. He thought about that, and he thought about the prayer he had made to Sister Agnes in the church
an hour before, asking for her help and protection.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  There wasn’t much about the creeping curse of old age that Vittorio didn’t accept with equanimity: the stiffening of the joints and sinews, the loose skin and the sagging flesh, the unreliable memory, flatulence, and fading eyesight.

  What he did begrudge, though, was the loss of a solid lump of sweet, deep sleep every night. There were times when he wondered whether he’d slept at all, or simply blanked out momentarily. He had come to think of it as his body’s way of telling him that time was short and he really couldn’t afford to spend too many of the precious hours remaining to him dead to the world, since before long he would be, for good.

  This was the reason he no longer tossed and twisted in his bed, waiting impatiently for the first sounds of the household stirring below him, choosing instead to rise and dress and creep down the staircase from his apartment on the top floor of the palazzo, past two generations of his progeny. From late November to late February, he went out into the world on foot, picking his way through the muffled, fog-shrouded thoroughfares of the city. For the rest of the year, weather permitting, he took the boat out—not Benedetto’s fancy Riva (heaven forbid) or even the long, low launch he had shipped back from Spalato all those years ago, but the clinker-built skiff with the skinny Evinrude outboard, which the staff used for running simple errands.

  So much of his life was prescribed—everything from board meetings to fund-raising dinners for some festival or other—that he had learned to treasure his dawn jaunts as a welcome escape from the demands of his position. Elena had once described him as a “sociable loner,” and there was a good deal of truth in her observation. While he delighted in the company of his friends (and even some of his enemies), he had always had a solitary streak.

  In keeping with the humble skiff, he always dressed modestly for these solitary excursions. Today he opted for baggy khaki shorts, espadrilles, a white shirt, and his old cotton fishing hat, frayed at the edges. As ever, he was curious to see where his fancy would lead him. He never settled on a course until he had cleared the stone archway of the dank boathouse in the bowels of the palazzo.

  A light chop worried the surface of the Grand Canal, and he bobbed there for a moment, the motor idling. Maybe a loop north through Cannaregio? It had been a while. He could take in the Ghetto Nuovo, yes, then maybe stretch his legs in Parco Savorgnan. The large roof terrace of his apartment was thick with potted shrubs and even boasted a vine-shrouded pergola, but there was nothing quite like the feeling of real trees towering over you—an all-too-rare experience in Venice.

  The first sign of life in the stirring city came as he putt-putted along Rio di Santa Fosca. A young boy hurried over the low bridge up ahead with a tin pail of milk swinging from his hand, caught between the slap he would get if he spilled any and the one he would get if he was late getting home. And for a moment, it seemed to Vittorio that an invisible hand had reached out and turned the wheel of time back several centuries.

  No matter where his nose led him, no matter where he sipped his first coffee of the day, his second was always at Aldo’s caffè beside the Rialto fish market. Here he sat at the small tables crowded out front, trading gossip with the fishmongers while their underlings prepared the stalls and—shick-shick-shick—reduced great blocks of blue ice to white chips with vicious-looking picks.

  He felt honored to have been accepted by such men, for they were some of the finest he had ever encountered: sly, irreverent, quick-witted, and brimming with uncommon wisdom. No subject was off-limits, no opinion too outrageous, provided you could defend it with humor. It had taken him a while to learn the rules, to adjust himself to their speed, to accept that his role in the group was that of a whipping boy for all the injustices perpetrated against the common man by him and his kind.

  Any respect they showed him had been earned over the years, except in one quarter. They had never questioned his appearance at the market six mornings a week, which suggested they knew the reason for it and had decided among themselves to stay silent on the subject.

  He always left before the market opened for business, and he never left empty-handed. Today he picked out a plump, glum-looking pesce San Pietro, which he would fry up later for his lunch. He was expected to attend a screening at the film festival out on the Lido, followed by lunch at the Excelsior, but he knew already that he would call in sick with some affliction or other of the elderly. Hemorrhoids should do the trick; they had worked well enough for him in the past, not that he would know a hemorrhoid from a hoe handle, and not that it really mattered. Benedetto and Giovanna would be far happier mingling with the great and the good without having to worry about him.

  Giovanna, he knew, had come to view him as something of an encumbrance, an irritant, over the past year, ever since he turned up in a lounge suit and open-necked shirt for a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the Fenice. His defense at the time, that his flouting of convention was a conscious tribute to the rebellious spirit of the great avant-garde composer, had raised an amused chuckle from Benedetto and a deprecating grimace from Giovanna.

  It was strange to find himself, at the age of seventy-seven, being treated like an errant child by his daughter-in-law—though not quite as strange as discovering that he rather relished the dynamic for the sport it offered. He would switch a couple of paintings around in the drawing room when she was out for the day, or rearrange some furniture in the library, or speak ill of her beloved Mussolini to his grandchildren over dinner, or fill the villa out at Asolo with a mob of his more disreputable friends on a weekend.

  It wasn’t personal: what Giovanna lacked in humor she made up for with her boundless energy and Teutonic efficiency. He supposed that the gentle needling was his way of saying that although he had taken himself off to the top floor, conceding control of the palazzo to her and Benedetto, he was still a resident with rights. He was still the head of the family.

  The sun was creeping over the rooftops, and the water traffic was beginning to build, when he set off on the final leg of his journey. He aimed the skiff at the inconspicuous mouth of Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli, directly across the Grand Canal from the fish market. The narrow waterway didn’t offer much in the way of sights before it finally debouched into the lagoon, and he never knew quite what to expect when he hit the open water. Experience had taught him that the short hop over to the Isola di San Michele could be deceptively perilous. A sudden wind could whip up an angry chop in a matter of moments, or a surging cross-current might build out of nowhere, rendering the Evinrude’s paltry three horsepower all but useless.

  After a number of close calls over the years, he had learned to forgo the pleasure of his daily pilgrimage when conditions seemed uncertain. After all, there was no urgency. It wasn’t as though Elena was going anywhere. Today, though, he had nothing to fear from the lazy swell and the warm breeze cats-pawing the glassy surface. Within minutes, the high brick walls of the cemetery island were looming over him, rising foursquare from the water like the ramparts of some ancient sea fort.

  Money had bought him many things, not least of all the key to one of the three tall wrought-iron doors set in the grand gateway that faced the city. As a rule, it was reserved for funerals, for the delivery of the dead, and he should really have made the tour of the island and docked in the small port beside the church. But that would have meant the distraction of other people, even at this early hour, when all he wanted was to be alone with his thoughts … alone with Elena. He tied up, then reached for the single white rose he had snipped from the bush on his roof terrace earlier. Clambering awkwardly over the gunwale, he set off up the wide marble steps, just as he had five years ago when following her coffin.

  She lay a short distance from the gate in one of the large square plots laid out in a grid and separated from each other by dark ranks of lofty cypresses. It was a simple grave with a plain white marble to
p stone, and a headstone with space enough for his name when he finally joined her.

  “Good morning, my darling.”

  He took the drooping rose—yellow yesterday—from the slender glass vase.

  “It looks set to be another fine day.”

  He slipped the white rose into the vase and settled down on the top stone, absently brushing aside a couple of stray leaves with his fingertips.

  “I bought a pesce San Pietro for my lunch. I think I’ll have it with a tomato salad, the way we used to. The tomatoes on the terrace are particularly sweet this year. All this sun, I suppose.”

  Mostly, he spoke a lot of nonsense to her, though not always. She was sometimes the touchstone against which he tested his deepest concerns. He didn’t believe she could hear him, but until you were dead there was no way of knowing what lay on the other side, and he was happy to natter away on the off chance she was listening.

  He had done the same with his father, reduced at the end to a vacant shell of a man. Dottore Zorzi had advised him that the auditory sense was the last to fade away, and in the final weeks Vittorio had held his father’s liver-spotted hand and talked about the old days and all the good times they had shared. He sometimes wondered if he hadn’t bored the old boy to death.

  Elena had been taken early, but she had at least been spared the cruel decline. No guttering candle flame for her, slowly drowning in its own pool of wax. Hers was snuffed out in an instant by a sudden gust. He had woken one morning to find her lying still and cold beside him in their bed. Her heart? An aneurysm in the brain? It made no difference. She was gone, and he had not permitted them to desecrate her body in search of a medical explanation that would have brought no meaningful satisfaction.

  He still found it absurd that she had been taken before him: she who had shown him how to keep on living when all he had wanted to do was wither away. She had taught him that the black hole he carried within him was a part of him now and always would be. There was no point in pretending otherwise. He had to face it, as one would a wild beast that wanted you for its lunch. To run was foolish, fatal. You had to look it calmly and squarely in the eye and stare it down. Only then would it turn tail and slink off into the undergrowth.