Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  They knew that here they could find back issues of the main daily newspaper, the Gazzetta di Venezia, because Pippi had gotten Foscolo to phone ahead from the hotel. Of the two librarians on duty behind the counter, it was the man—bald, tall, thin as a pipe cleaner—who rose from his seat to attend to them. Luke’s knowledge of Italian was limited to a few words and phrases, but he knew exactly what Pippi was saying, because she had spelled it out to him in the water taxi. She was an author, working on a novel set in Venice a couple of years before the war, and needed access to some newspapers of the time for her research.

  She filled out a request slip for the months of December 1911 through March 1912, and they withdrew to one of the long oak desks to wait. The librarian appeared several minutes later, wheeling a steel trolley laden with four large, bound volumes.

  They started with January 1912. Luke had been left on the front steps of St. Theresa’s on the evening of the fourteenth, so they could assume he had been abducted in Venice shortly before that date. It seemed unlikely that Gotal would have spent any more time than absolutely necessary in the company of the small child he had decided not to kill, which probably equated to a few days’ travel from Italy to England.

  In reality, it had taken him five days.

  “This is it,” said Pippi.

  The front page of the Gazzetta for January 9 was dominated by news of the abduction of Vincenzo Albrizzi. Luke watched in nervous anticipation as Pippi ran her finger down the columns of text. “It happened at the Rialto fish market,” she said eventually. “You were taken from your pram when your nanny wasn’t looking. The market was ‘molto affollato’—very crowded. Nobody saw anything. You were there, and then you weren’t.”

  “Sshhhh.”

  At the adjacent desk, a middle-aged woman with a kindly face raised a finger to her lips and pointed at a sign on the wall: silenzio, it commanded in gold capitals. Pippi tilted her head in apology, then reached into her bag and took out the pad of paper she had cadged from Foscolo.

  All Luke could do was watch and try to make sense of the notes she wrote in her angular German hand. By the end of January, the story had dropped off the front page, and when Pippi turned her attention to February, Luke took himself off to the lobby to smoke a cigarette. He gazed through the glass doors at the people outside, going about their lives. A young boy raced past, whipping a wooden hoop with a stick, pursued by a pack of his friends.

  Pippi kept at it until the ting of a handbell announced closing time. As they were leaving, she deviated toward the counter, murmuring “I’ll see what else I can find out. Wait here.”

  She quizzed the tall librarian for several minutes before rejoining Luke.

  “I need a drink,” she announced.

  They found an unprepossessing little bar around the corner and took a table at the back, well away from the street. They both ordered beers, and Pippi also asked for a cognac. She filled Luke in on her findings: the futile search for a tall man in a gray overcoat who had been spotted near the fish market, boarding a boat with a baby in his arms; the endless pleas from the family for Vincenzo’s safe return; the false sightings over the following weeks; the police lines of inquiry, which had finally petered out.

  “There’s something else,” she said. She hadn’t touched her cognac, and she now slid the glass toward him. “Drink it.”

  He saw the distress in her eyes, and a sudden spasm of dread gripped his insides. “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s no good way to say this … Your parents are dead.”

  He tried to make sense of the words. “Dead?”

  She nodded grimly.

  “How do you know?”

  “The librarian.”

  “Maybe he’s wrong.”

  Pippi didn’t reply immediately. “Maybe.”

  He reached for the brandy and took a slow sip. For as long as he could remember, he had hoped while not daring to hope, believed while doubting. Then, just as it seemed it might actually come to pass, the dream was dashed. It would never happen. He would never meet them. Never embrace them.

  Pippi took his hands in hers. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No,” she said. “No, it isn’t.”

  He watched their fingers mesh together.

  “Did he say how they died?”

  “Your father during the war. Your mother later. An accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “Sailing.”

  “She drowned?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He threw back the rest of the brandy in one throat-singeing gulp.

  “You’re not alone,” said Pippi. “I’m here.”

  “I know.”

  Her eyes bored into him. “But do you know why I’m here?”

  “I can think of ten good reasons why you shouldn’t be.”

  “Only ten?”

  He gave a weak smile. “I’ll be all right,” he said.

  “I know you will.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dottore Sanzogno was a short, dapper man and a creature of habit. He followed precisely the same routine when closing up the clinic at the end of every day.

  He sat at his desk and smoked his first and only cigarette of the day. He then rose and crossed to the sink in the corner of his office and rinsed his hands with alcohol. Filling the zinc watering can that lived beneath the sink, he wandered through to the reception area and watered the two maidenhair ferns and the aspidistra. When he had finished, he returned to his office, checked that all the windows were closed and bolted, then gathered up his leather bag and left the room, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.

  His last act before heading home was to go over tomorrow’s appointments, testing himself on the names of the animals and their owners.

  This was what he was doing, seated in Ginevra’s chair at the reception desk, when the doorbell rang. He ignored it at first. The bell kept ringing, though, and he rose irritably from the chair, crossed to the door, and unlocked it.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closed—”

  The man pushed past him, forcing him back inside and kicking the door shut with his heel.

  “Excuse me—” said Dottore Sanzogno.

  He received a slap across the cheek. Not hard, more shocking than anything else, just enough to silence him.

  “Shut up.” The man produced a gun from his jacket pocket.

  “Please, I have a family.”

  “Then you also have a simple choice to make. You can go home to them with enough money to treat them all to gifts, or you can not go home at all.”

  Fluent Italian, but a thick accent. A foreigner.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I have a knife wound in my shoulder. It’s bad.”

  There was also bruising around his left eye, behind the sunglasses.

  “Then you need a surgeon, not a vet. The hospital’s not far.”

  “What I need,” said the man, “is someone who can stitch me up and keep his mouth shut afterwards. Do you think you can do that?”

  Dottore Sanzogno nodded. “Yes, yes, I know I can.”

  Petrovic rapped out the code on the door of their hotel room: three knocks, then one, then two more. A key turned in the lock, and the door swung open to reveal Jestin in his undershorts.

  “Very attractive.”

  “I was trying to catch up on some sleep, but this heat …”

  Petrovic locked the door behind him and shed his jacket.

  “Did you kill him?” asked Jestin.

  “The vet? No. We may need him again, although that now looks unlikely.”

  “Oh?”

  Petrovic removed the sunglasses and examined his eye in the wardrobe mirror. “Borodin is dead.” It felt good to observe his refl
ection while uttering the words.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It looks like he was the one who took a bullet in Zurich.”

  “That’s great news.”

  It was indeed. Petrovic was only sorry that he couldn’t take any credit for it, after the humiliation of being so comprehensively outwitted. “He was found in Switzerland, near the Italian border, so Hamilton’s on his own now.”

  “You’re forgetting the others. The girl and the policeman.”

  “Whoever they are, they came through Borodin, which means Hamilton’s problems aren’t theirs. I think we can discount them.”

  Jestin lit a cigarette. “Isn’t it about time you told me what his problems are?”

  Petrovic had purposely been economical with the facts, fearing that if Jestin knew the full scale and scope of the affair, he might, rightly, begin to question his own odds of survival once he’d served his purpose.

  “The details aren’t important. He helped Borodin betray the organization. Our job is to find him and kill him, then go home.”

  Jestin blew a plume of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. “And just how are we supposed to find him, stuck in this damned hotel room?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Petrovic. “We’ll be the first to know when he surfaces.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The shock of hearing that his parents were dead had given way to a curious lassitude during the taxi trip back to the hotel, followed by a leaden fatigue the moment they had crossed the threshold of their room.

  Luke now lay on his back across the bed while Pippi showered. He glanced at the bedside table. His cigarette had burned away untouched, to a neat trail of milky ashes. He thought about lighting another, then realized he had left both cigarettes and lighter on the dressing table. Even those few steps seemed too great an exertion, and he turned his thoughts back to the South Sea Islands.

  They had been a fascination of his since childhood, when he stumbled across a traveler’s account of Tahiti in an old copy of Good Words in his father’s study. If ever there was a time to go there, to lose oneself on the far side of the planet, it was now.

  Pippi appeared from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, her wet hair combed back off her face. She came and sat beside him on the bed.

  “I don’t think I can go on.”

  “We’ll talk about it over dinner,” she said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Of course you are. We haven’t eaten since Bergamo.”

  She was right: they’d had one small pastry to go with their morning coffee at the station café.

  “I’ll ask Foscolo if he knows a quiet place.”

  The humble osteria wasn’t quiet, but it was remote, well away from the main tourist trails, deep in Dorsoduro.

  A bowl of deep-fried baby squid was followed by another, then another carafe of white wine to go with the platter of various grilled fishes they had ordered as their main course. Luke felt the wine working its way through his system, loosening his limbs, his synapses, his tongue.

  Having rediscovered his appetite and then his voice, he told Pippi about the vision that had come to him earlier: a life of ease in the South Seas, a bungalow among the palms just back from the beach, and a colorful boat bobbing in a turquoise bay. He knew what she would say: that if they ran now, they would always be running, always afraid, never quite free. He was wrong. Her argument was more convincing than that.

  “They will use your family and your friends to find you. Even if you have not told them where you are, they will be in danger. Can you do that to them?”

  He didn’t reply; he didn’t need to.

  “Borodin was right,” she continued. “We must finish it here, and for that we need your family. You have a grandfather, an uncle, nephews, nieces. They have a right to know you are alive.”

  “We can’t just walk in there. Petrovic will be waiting for us.”

  “Then we find another way to contact them. I have an idea.”

  Luke peered at her over his wineglass. “Have you always been so capable, so logical?”

  Pippi smiled and spread her hands. “I’m German.”

  She insisted on taking a circuitous route back to the hotel, looping through the maze of deserted streets, alleyways, and canals that lay to the south. Luke guessed what she was doing: getting to know the lay of the land in case they were forced to make a rapid escape. Night had fallen, so they broke their rule and walked together, protected by the darkness. Every so often, they stopped on a bridge to stare into the black chasm of a canal, or paused to look up at the moon-washed facade of a building—sights, Luke couldn’t help thinking, that he would have known intimately if only his life had been allowed to run its natural course. This was his city, but even as he searched for a sense of his other self within it, he knew that he would always be a stranger here.

  Back at the hotel, they brushed their teeth and changed for bed, and before they took their places on the bowed mattress, Pippi jammed the back of the dressing table chair beneath the door handle. Last night he had a reason to hold her. He wished he had one now. The intimacy of lying entwined together for a few precious hours had cut right through the trials of the past days.

  “Do you think Borodin knew?” he asked. “About my parents?”

  “It’s possible.”

  It was the first time they had spoken of Borodin in almost twenty-four hours. They had talked around him but never actually uttered his name, almost as if doing so would curse his chances. Or maybe it was simpler than that: maybe they didn’t wish to be reminded how lost they were without him.

  “I think he did,” said Luke. “I think he knew but couldn’t bring himself to say it.”

  “You can’t blame him.”

  “I don’t. How can I blame him for anything? He saved my life three times.”

  “Three?”

  “Not counting the times he could have killed me in Paris but decided not to.” He twisted to face her. “And then there’s you in Zurich. And Gotal twenty-five years ago. I shouldn’t be alive. Why am I?”

  “Because you’re innocent.”

  “That means nothing. So was Agnes.”

  “You’re right. You’re lucky.” They were facing each other now, and she gently laid her hand on his cheek. “This is a precious thing and I’m going to protect it.”

  “Why, Pippi? Why are you still here?”

  “Meersburg, of course. You went back for the children.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “But you did it anyway. I saw you. I saw the man in the middle of you. That’s why I’m here.”

  She shifted a little closer, so close that when she next spoke, he felt her breath on his face like a soft caress.

  “If you still want to go to Tahiti when this is over, I’ll go with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a danger we’ll grow bored.”

  “Not with each other. And we’ll get very good at swimming and fishing and sailing.”

  “I once read that the Tahitians ride the waves on wooden boards for fun.”

  “Then we’ll try that, too.”

  The words came out as a whisper, and a moment later he felt the soft, searching pressure of her lips on his.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Luke woke to see Pippi fully clothed and seated at the dressing table, brushing her hair. She caught sight of him in the mirror and smiled.

  “How do I look?”

  “Overdressed. Come back to bed.”

  “It’s late.”

  He groped for his wristwatch on the bedside table. “Nine thirty isn’t late.”

  She rose to her feet and approached the bed. “We have to be at the library at eleven.”

  “We will be. I promise.”

/>   He reached out a hand to her. She took it but refused to be drawn down beside him.

  “Have you already forgotten how good it was?”

  There was a delicate, quizzical edge to her smile. “No.”

  Releasing his hand, she unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor. She undressed slowly, without embarrassment, allowing his eyes to roam over her. He had explored every curve and contour of her body, and yet he had never seen her naked before, not in the light.

  “My God, you’re beautiful.”

  She drew back the sheet and lay down beside him.

  A bell was chiming midday as they hurried across Campo San Polo toward the library.

  “It’s your fault,” said Pippi.

  “I take full responsibility.”

  It had been an inspired idea on Pippi’s part. They required a go-between, someone who could safely and discreetly approach Luke’s family on their behalf. Who better than someone who sat right at the heart of the story? Bianca Rubelli, his old nanny, the unfortunate young woman who had taken him to the Rialto fish market the morning he was snatched. They knew from the newspaper reports that she had been twenty-one years old at the time, which meant she was in her midforties now, so probably still alive, and, with any luck, still living in Venice.

  Pippi had put the lanky librarian onto it yesterday, and the obliging fellow had hit pay dirt. That was evident even as they entered the reading room. Spotting them approaching the counter, he gave a broad smile and waved a piece of paper above his head.

  Bianca had never left the city, and although the librarian had been unable to dig up a home address for her, he had the name and address of her workplace: a laundry. He marked it for them on their map. It lay north and west of where they currently were, some fifteen minutes on foot.

  Pippi led the way, with Luke following at a distance, enjoying the sight of her up ahead: the long stride, the lazy sway of hips—details that chimed with a new resonance now. He wondered whether she had given herself to him to pep him up and prepare him for battle. If so, it had worked. There was a new steel in him, even an eagerness to get the thing done, to carry the fight to the men who had robbed him of the life that was rightfully his.