Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  How could Fredo have been so foolish, so trusting? Fredo of all people? How, for that matter, had he become involved at all? It was a shocking lapse of judgment by a man who should have known better.

  Mention of the Karamans had thrown him at first, stirring up memories long since overlaid, though not forgotten. He had never actually met the brothers. One of them was once pointed out to him in the streets of Spalato: not tall, but solid as a stump, and with a prodigious mustache. He knew that they were spoken of in hushed tones, but so were many other men who worked the wrong side of the law in those days. Unremarkable both in appearance and reputation. And now?

  Had he not stuck to his resolution to have nothing more to do with Dalmatia, he might know what became of the two brothers. It was a situation easily rectified. He had a number of people in Venice he could rely on to dig out the information discreetly.

  He pulled himself up short. His thoughts were leading him off down a dead-end road. It had to have been the Sicilians. That much had become clear during their first trip to the island, when, under the pretense of traveling to Rome on business, he and Alessandro had headed for Palermo instead. Their contact there, a venal little rogue called Bruccoleri, had spoken of rumors, taken their money, and sent them home with a promise to be in touch soon.

  Less than a month later, they were back in Sicily, near the port of Trapani this time, on their way to meet with a man who claimed to have hard knowledge of Vincenzo’s abduction. Bruccoleri drove them along dusty roads, deep into the hills back from the coast. Dusk was giving way to night when they finally reached their destination, an isolated farm surrounded by olive groves. A car stood empty out front, but as they pulled up beside it, four men materialized from the shadows. It was immediately clear that something had gone badly wrong, for Bruccoleri began pleading for clemency. This earned him a slap across the face and a threat of worse to come if he didn’t shut up.

  They were marched across rocky ground, past twisted olive trees, until they arrived at a deep ravine. Here they were made to kneel in the dirt, one man standing behind each of them, while the fourth offered them a choice. If they left the island first thing in the morning, they would live. If they ever returned to Sicily, they would die. There would be no second chance. Moreover, if anyone else came snooping on their behalf, whether policeman or layman, a visit would be paid to Venice, and an unfortunate accident would befall one or the other of their wives.

  Alessandro begged for news of Vincenzo—something, anything—but was told simply, even politely, to come to terms with his loss. When he wouldn’t shut up, the man placed the muzzle of his pistol between Vittorio’s eyes and asked Alessandro if he wished to lose his father as well.

  With silence restored, the man then came and stood before Bruccoleri. “You are alive only because they need someone to drive them back to Palermo. Take your family and go far away. I suggest America. You have two days to arrange it.”

  Knowing where the answers lay—within reach yet beyond it—had been the most terrible curse. Having traveled to Sicily in secret, he and Alessandro had then been bound together in silence, for no good could possibly come of sharing their discoveries. Many years later, long after Alessandro and Marta had left them, Elena said to Vittorio, quite out of the blue, while they were reading in bed one night: “I know there is something you have never told me, and I don’t want to know what it is.”

  “Why not?” he had asked, opening the door a crack for her.

  “Because I also know you did everything you could.”

  But she had been wrong. If he had only been shrewder, more courageous, things might well have turned out differently.

  He drained his glass and wandered back to the table for a refill.

  Before tonight, he had never mentioned the Sicilians to anyone other than Alessandro. He had done so for impact, to silence the Englishman’s lies, to expose him for the fraud he was and to watch his face fall.

  He took a seat at the table. A moth was engaged in its death dance around the candle flame.

  “It was the Sicilians.”

  But even as he said it, he could see how the Karaman brothers might be made to fit alongside them.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The offer came as they were leaving the restaurant: a lift back to their hotel in Monsignor Ruspoli’s motorboat. It was tied up nearby, long and sleek, its wooden decks varnished to a high shine. More befitting a man of means than a man of God, Luke couldn’t help thinking as he and Pippi settled into the leather seat at the back of the cockpit. The engine came to life with a low rumble.

  The monsignor didn’t attempt to engage them in conversation as he guided the boat through the network of dark waterways. There was nothing more to be said. They had talked the matter to a standstill over dinner, staying late in the hope that Vittorio Albrizzi might return. Well, he hadn’t, and there was no reason to believe he ever would, other than the monsignor’s words of reassurance.

  The desolating news of Borodin’s death pointed up the wild disparity between a stranger with nothing to gain from helping them out, and Luke’s grandfather, who had nothing to lose from hearing them out. To have gotten this far only to be shunned by his own flesh and blood had emptied Luke out, leaving a dirty residue of defiance and anger.

  “I’ve had it. I want to go,” he said to Pippi.

  “I understand.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  They were sitting shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. She kissed him softly on the cheek. “Let’s see.”

  Thank God for her soothing presence. They had spent much of the afternoon at Bianca’s apartment, with Pippi acting as translator. The three of them had sat together on the sofa, Bianca in the middle, the photograph album on her lap.

  “That is your father …”

  So young. His mother, too. Both of them younger than he was now. And so happy holding him, a featureless blob of a newborn in a frilly white bonnet. His mother’s dark, wide-set eyes, the same eyes that had been staring back at him from mirrors all his life; even he could see that. And something familiar in the curl of his father’s smile.

  Or had he been searching for signs? He had searched for them earlier in the lean, hawklike features of Vittorio Albrizzi and detected nothing to match the quivers of familiarity stirred up by those old sepia photographs. And yet, his grandfather had surely sensed something in him. Why else had he leaned across and introduced himself? For a happy moment, the monsignor’s stratagem of seating them at the next table appeared to have worked, only to backfire badly.

  Luke slipped an arm around Pippi’s shoulder and rummaged for comfort in the other discoveries of that day: Bianca’s amazement on hearing that he had become a pilot, for he had shown an early fascination with birds—the reason, in fact, that she had taken him to the Rialto market that morning, to watch the gulls feasting on fish scraps … Her tears on recalling the horror of his abduction and its aftermath, the sympathy of some no consolation at all, the vilification of others hurtful but fair enough to her way of thinking, for she had failed in her simple duty of care, a victim of her own vanity, distracted by the attentions of a young man working at one of the stalls … His birthday, known at last—March 4, 1911, only eight days off the one assigned to him by the nuns at St. Theresa’s … The birth itself a long and difficult one, his mother’s slender build not suited to bringing children into the world … More tears as Bianca told of hearing the news that his father had died in battle, a tragedy doubled before the year was out by the death of his mother, a keen and competent sailor but no match for the fierce squall that had capsized her boat near the island of Poveglia, her body never recovered.

  These thoughts were cut short by their arrival at Campo San Barnaba. Monsignor Ruspoli killed the motor and held the boat against the quayside while they disembarked. He suggested they stay put at the hotel in the morning—not just for safety’s sake, but so he could contac
t them as soon as he had news.

  “Have faith,” he urged.

  “Easily said,” Luke replied.

  “Think of Bianca. Three times a day she went to the Frari to pray. How many candles is that?” He paused briefly to make the calculation. “More than twenty-five thousand. But it is the last one she will remember—the one that made the difference. There is always hope.”

  They stood and watched him leave, waiting until the running lights had faded into the darkness.

  One of the two cafés on the square was still open. Luke suggested a nightcap, but Pippi was ready for bed. They were halfway across the square when she steered him toward the café.

  “Changed your mind?”

  “Someone has been in our room,” she replied tightly. “No, don’t look.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I closed all the shutters. One of them is open—not much, a bit.”

  They took an empty table at the café, Pippi positioning herself so she had a view of the hotel frontage behind him.

  “The bathroom window.”

  “Maybe it was the maid.”

  “I told her not to clean the room.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” Pippi replied irritably.

  “So we would know.”

  A waiter loomed over them. They both ordered coffee and lit cigarettes.

  “I think we’re being watched,” said Pippi.

  “From up there?”

  “Up there, down here, I don’t know.”

  “Let’s assume you’re right. It costs us nothing to be cautious.”

  “What do we do?” she said.

  “We drink our coffee and we figure out a way to test your theory.”

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best they could come up with by the time they’d settled the bill. They strolled toward the hotel, but instead of going in, they walked on past. The far corner of the square was lost in a slab of dark shadow, and only once it had swallowed them up did they glance behind them.

  Several people were milling around the square. One of them, a short and solidly built man, wasn’t exactly hurrying after them, but he was heading with purpose in their direction.

  “What do you think?”

  Before Pippi could reply, the man raised his hand toward the hotel and gesticulated.

  “Oh, Christ, you were right,” said Luke. It would take a man in a hurry no more than about thirty or forty seconds to descend to the street from their room.

  “How did they find us?” said Pippi.

  “I don’t know. Keep walking. Don’t run. Not yet.”

  A narrow street, poorly lit, struck out from the corner of the square along the south wall of the church. Up ahead on the right was a narrow passageway, but before they reached it, they heard furtive footfalls, picking up pace, closing from behind.

  “Go,” said Luke, pulling the pistol from the back of his waistband.

  It was a short sprint to the turning, some twenty or thirty yards, and as they rounded the corner, Luke saw with relief that the passageway was as black as a tomb. Unfortunately, the stone footbridge spanning the canal at the far end of it was illuminated, which meant they would be perfectly silhouetted against the light for anyone in pursuit.

  “Faster,” he called to Pippi.

  “My shoes.”

  “No time.”

  They were bounding over the bridge when something rent the air beside Luke’s head and slapped into the building on the far side of the canal, sending out a shower of stone chips.

  No warning. No report. A silenced weapon.

  The passageway beyond the bridge was also unlit, as was the small square, more of a courtyard, that lay at the end of it. “This way,” Pippi hissed, slowing to slip off her shoes before tearing off into the darkness.

  To flee was natural—they were the hunted, the ones with a price on their heads. But even as they lost themselves in the warren of alleyways and canals, more certain with every turn that they were no longer being followed, a creeping sense of futility came over Luke. The two things they required in order to run truly free—passports and money—lay back at the hotel, a place they could no longer go.

  Borodin hadn’t just foreseen it, he had spelled it out to them in no uncertain terms: they had to be ready to end the thing here in Venice, whatever it required. Luke made this point to Pippi when her seemingly tireless legs finally required a rest and they slunk into the shadows to recover their breath.

  “God knows how they found us, but they’ll find us again if we don’t do this now.”

  “I don’t know,” Pippi whispered.

  “You want to keep running in circles until we bump into them?”

  “No.”

  “So we wait for them to come to us.”

  “Here?”

  It was as good a place as any: a small, darkened square where three thoroughfares converged. Better still, the modest palazzo to their right was fronted by a narrow garden: two tall palms and a thicket of bushes set back beyond a low wall topped by railings.

  “It’s the first place I would look.”

  “Good,” said Luke. “Let them.”

  The windows were shuttered and there was no sign of light within, but they still behaved as though the palazzo was occupied. Teasing open the arched iron gate, they buried themselves away in the bushes as quietly as possible.

  It wasn’t long before a couple passed through the square. The man said something; the woman laughed. Happy, carefree, heading home to bed, not skulking in a stranger’s shrubbery, gun in hand, ready to kill if the opportunity presented itself. A few minutes later, a shadowy figure appeared near the well at the heart of the square and broke wind—not just once, but five or six times. This impressive arpeggio was followed by the momentary flaring of a match, which revealed a man lighting a cigarette, and a small dog on a leash.

  The dog growled, then barked.

  “Zitto,” the man chided. But the animal refused to be silenced. Maybe it had spotted the momentary gleam of their eyes in the foliage when the match was struck, or maybe it simply smelled their presence. In any event, it soon became clear that they were the source of its agitation. His interest piqued, the man allowed himself to be drawn toward the palazzo, the dog straining so hard against the leash that its breathing came in rasps.

  Not good, not good at all, Luke was thinking, when shutters swung open behind them, and they found themselves bathed in a pool of electric light.

  “Time to go,” he said to Pippi, rising from the bushes.

  There was a lot of shouting, both from the woman in the nightdress at the palazzo’s second-floor window and from the man with the dog. Pippi’s apologies in Italian did nothing to quell the ruckus echoing around the square as they hurried from the front garden to the alleyway that had led them here.

  They had traveled almost no distance along it when Pippi gripped Luke’s arm, holding him back. Sounds in the darkness up ahead: feet pounding on flagstones, people running this way, drawn by the commotion. They turned and sprinted back the way they had come, skirting the well in the middle of the square and disappearing into the mouth of another passageway.

  It veered to the right, straightening out for a long stretch before depositing them by the oil-black waters of a canal. They stopped just long enough to hear the footfalls behind them, then bore left along the wide path that ran beside the canal. It was lit at intervals, and the third time Luke threw a glance over his shoulder, he saw two men, some distance back but definitely in pursuit, arms and legs pumping.

  “It’s them. Faster.”

  “I can’t,” gasped Pippi.

  There were no turnings on the left, and the only bridge was far ahead. It was a straight foot chase out in the open, and only a matter of time before the two men started taking potshots at
them.

  Just shy of the bridge, the buildings on the left gave way to a church square. Another glance behind him. A quick calculation. They would have to slow to cross the bridge, presenting a target as they did.

  He grasped Pippi’s hand. “This way.”

  They cut left across the square and were racing for the opposite corner when Luke saw his opportunity. Except for one long, low building, the far side of the square was open, bordered by a canal, its bank trimmed with a tiny patch of park: grass, a few trees, and little more.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll meet you at Bianca’s.”

  To her credit, Pippi didn’t question him or even break stride. Luke cut into the small park beside the canal, searching for shadows. It was a near thing—a mere second or two between Pippi disappearing around the corner of the church and the two men hurtling into the square. He heard rather than saw them from his hiding place, pressed up against the wall of the building that abutted the park.

  They didn’t come into view until they had reached the middle of the square, where they slowed to a walk, reading the lay of the land. Luke willed them to linger. Every second they delayed played in Pippi’s favor, allowing her to distance herself from the danger. The church was dimly lit, and the stucco facade threw off just enough light for him to identify the taller of the two men as Petrovic.

  His heart quickened at the prospect of avenging Sister Agnes’ murder. Had he been ten yards nearer the target, he might have fired and taken his chances with the other man. But they were hurrying off now toward the side of the church.

  He slipped off his shoes and socks. If he was going to surprise them from behind, he needed to move in silence. He saw Petrovic stop and peer down at the canal, at the boats moored stern to prow all the way back to where Luke was hidden. What was Petrovic thinking—that they had tucked themselves away in one? A muffled command sounded, and the smaller man began working his way back along the canal, into the park.