by Mark Mills
Luke dropped into a crouch at the base of the wall, his back to the brick, fingers groping in the dirt and closing around a pebble. He wouldn’t fire unless he had to, and he waited until the man was almost on top of him before tossing the stone into the grass. He struck as the man was turning toward the sound.
The pistol butt hit the side of the man’s skull with a sickening thud, and he dropped like a felled ox, landing facedown in the grass. Luke recovered the pistol from his limp fingers and tucked it into the back of his waistband.
Petrovic had drifted out of sight around the side of the church, but now he returned. He gave a short whistle. Luke replied with the same.
“Let’s go,” Petrovic hissed in French.
Luke stayed silent.
“Jestin.”
A name they had been given by Borodin: Petrovic’s accomplice in Zurich. A man to be feared.
This was Luke’s last thought before his feet were kicked out from under him. He hit the ground hard and found his wrist seized in an iron grip, taking the gun out of play. Another hand closed around his windpipe. Had Jestin been at his best, Luke might not have been able to yank the fingers from his throat and roll away. He couldn’t break the grip on his wrist, though, and as he struggled to his feet, he hauled a groggy Jestin with him.
Twisting, he slammed the other man against the wall of the building and pulled free, but before he could set himself to fire, Jestin charged, seizing him in a bear hug and driving him backward, backward … until the ground mysteriously vanished from beneath his feet.
He was vaguely aware of the gun slipping from his fingers as they fell, and Jestin was still attached to him when they hit the water hard. Maybe it was the impact, another blow to the head, but the fight went out of Jestin momentarily—long enough for Luke to twist free. Treading water, he reached behind him, fumbling urgently for the gun in his waistband. Too urgently. He had it, and then it was gone, through his fingers and sinking away.
Jestin lashed out, landing a weak punch on his jaw, then grabbed at his hair. Luke seized him by the shoulders and forced his head beneath the surface. As he did so, he saw the figure standing on the bank, looking down at them. Hauling Jestin back to the surface, Luke swiveled to use him as a shield. Petrovic wouldn’t risk firing unless he had a clean shot.
He was wrong. The man clearly put little value in the life of his accomplice, for he started firing—muted reports, silenced.
Jestin twitched and gasped and flailed as the first bullets struck his back. He clawed at Luke, for anything to hold on to; then his head jerked to the side and he fell still. Luke held him up as protection just long enough to take a lungful of air and slip beneath the surface.
He kicked out, swimming alongside the building, where Petrovic couldn’t follow him. He swam until his lungs were bursting, then swam some more. He surfaced as silently as possible, sucking in air and taking his bearings. On three sides, the building enclosed an open yard that ran down to the water’s edge.
A bullet slapped into the water beside his head. He sank away and struck out, his hands soon finding firm ground beneath him: a ramp running into the water from the yard. He groped his way up it, surfaced, and scrabbled ashore.
Panting, he pinched the water from his eyes and forced himself to his feet. A boatyard. Dark shapes raised on trestles. Gondolas. The heady smell of paint or varnish in the air. Some oars, too long and unwieldy to serve as weapons, leaning against a wall. The workshop doors securely padlocked. Several pairs of overalls hanging from wooden pegs. Everything neat and ordered, no convenient piles of lumber lying around. Think. Any moment now, Petrovic would be coming through that door in the wall, the one with the light leaking through the cracks.
Lighting. Outside. It meant a brief advantage—a second or two while his pursuer’s eyes adjusted to the starlit gloom of the yard. It meant Luke had to strike immediately and decisively. Sliding one of the oars beneath the workshop door, he snapped it in two, leaving himself with a club some four feet long. He then removed the overalls from the wooden pegs—all but one pair, which he rehung by the shoulders before bundling up another pair into a ball that would do for a head. Even if his makeshift scarecrow in the shadows didn’t fool Petrovic, it might be enough to draw his eye, to distract him just long enough.
Though he was anticipating it, the bullet that blew out the door lock still caught him by surprise. Petrovic entered the yard warily, then spun and fired twice at the overalls. Stepping from the shadows, Luke brought the club down on the gun hand. The weapon clattered to the ground, and as Petrovic instinctively lunged for it, Luke swung again, going for the left shoulder, where Borodin had run him through with the sword cane.
Petrovic bellowed and rolled away, fleeing on hands and knees, unable to stand for all the blows raining down on him. Blind, raging, Luke broke off only to kick out, going for the ribs.
Petrovic made a few feeble attempts to seize the club or get to his feet, but it was useless. He ended up at the water’s edge, spent, hunched in a ball. “Please. Stop.”
Luke swung the club. “Did Sister Agnes ask you to stop?” Another blow. “Did she?” Another. “Did she?” Three more blows in quick succession—two across the shoulders, one to the head. “How does it feel?” Another blow to the head.
Petrovic now lay limp and unresisting at his feet. Luke backed away and sank to his knees, heart thumping wildly. He had yet to shed a tear for Sister Agnes, but they came now. He wept for what she had been and for what he had become because of her. He also wept for what men like Petrovic had turned him into, and for what he was about to do, and for what Agnes would think of him if she was up there somewhere looking down on him.
He dragged the sodden sleeve of his jacket across his eyes and rose to his feet. He had kicked the gun away when the beating began, and he found it eventually, wedged between the wall and a wooden barrel. Steeling himself for the task, he recalled Borodin’s words of warning: that Petrovic would never stop, that he would keep on coming, no matter what.
But Petrovic was no longer there, not where he had been just moments before, in the shallows at the top of the ramp, prone and motionless.
Luke waded down the ramp until the water was at his chest, but all he saw were a few whorls and eddies breaking the silvered surface of the canal.
It was only as he neared the hotel that Luke realized he was limping. The toes of his right foot were stiffening up, sprained, or possibly broken, by the barefoot kicking in the boatyard. He had recovered his shoes from the park, and with his jacket slung over his shoulder, and his hand in his pocket, closed around the gun, he hoped he cut an inconspicuous figure as he strode into Campo San Barnaba.
In front of the café, a waiter was stacking chairs near a table of diehards looking to stretch the night out. Foscolo had warned them that they might have to ring the bell if they got back late, but the hotel door was unlocked. The lobby was deserted, and there was an empty space where their key should have been on the rack behind the counter. There was no way of knowing whether Petrovic had been the man in their room—the man Jestin had waved at while crossing the square. Although it seemed likely, Luke nonetheless crept cautiously up the staircase.
He waited at the door of their room, listening for sounds of movement inside. Satisfied, he eased the door open a crack and flicked on the electric light. He waited again before finally entering, and what he saw made him recoil.
He knew immediately from the pale yellow shirt that the man sprawled facedown on the floor at the end of the bed was Foscolo. He closed the door behind him, skirted the body, and checked the bathroom. Foscolo’s throat had been slit. The pool of blood lacquering the floorboards suggested there was no hope of finding a pulse, but he checked all the same. Foscolo’s wrist felt cool beneath his fingertips.
What had happened? There was no point in speculating. He needed to get what he had come for and get out. The room had been thor
oughly searched. Drawers were open, clothes scattered about the place. The wardrobe had been moved, suggesting someone had searched beneath it. It was a good job he had thought better of it as a hiding place. The ceiling light was an opaque bowl of dark-green glass, suspended by three lengths of chain, and he could just make out the shadows of the money and their passports.
He stripped off his damp clothes, dried himself with a towel from the bathroom, and got dressed. He packed a suitcase with a change of clothes for each of them, shoes for Pippi, their toiletry bags, the field glasses, and the camera.
Stopping on the way out, he crouched and laid a hand on Foscolo’s head.
“I’m sorry.”
So many dead. Some innocent, some not so innocent, but all of them dead because of him. He was the wellspring from which so much blood had flowed. Would Gotal have spared him twenty-five years ago had he known what the true cost of his compassion would be?
He stole silently down the staircase and was descending the final flight to the lobby when he heard someone enter the hotel. He backtracked, withdrawing to the shadows of the landing. From here, he had a partial view of the reception counter. A man approached it, but it was only as he leaned over the counter, reaching for the register, that Luke caught sight of his face. There was no mistaking him, not this time. It was Cordell Oaks, the American.
Luke backed away from the banister, retreating along the corridor that led to the first-floor rooms. Halfway along was a tall wooden linen press, and he slipped behind it, turning the suitcase on end so it didn’t protrude. The blood was pulsing so loudly in his ears that he had to strain to hear the footsteps. They paused briefly on the landing before carrying on up the staircase.
Thirty seconds later, he was hurrying across Campo San Barnaba. He didn’t look back until he reached the relative safety of the footbridge beyond the church. The light in their room was on.
Chapter Forty
Vittorio hadn’t slept for three hours straight in years. Then again, it was years since he had put away half a bottle of whiskey in one sitting.
He had woken in the early hours of the morning to find himself sprawled on the sofa, an empty glass still in his hand, and had lain there in the darkness with his headache for another hour, replaying the events of the evening. After a hot bath and two cups of tarry black coffee, he had dressed, snipped a rose from a bush on his terrace, and crept silently from the top of the palazzo to the boathouse at its very bottom. Not since Elena had left him so suddenly had he needed her more than he did now.
It was a good hour until sunrise, and the skiff rose and fell on an unseen swell as soon as he was clear of the canal. The effect was so calming, so hypnotic, that he slowed to a crawl, savoring the lazy pulse beneath him and the creeping twilight above. The dark, shapeless mass of Isola di San Michele lay before him like a ship of the dead, and he knew in that moment that he would not be landing there.
“Forgive me, my darling,” he said, “but I think I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.”
He twisted the throttle and turned the skiff to the south.
The monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore had long been a sorry neighbor to Palladio’s magnificent church. A military garrison for much of the past century, it now stood abandoned and boarded up, its stonework crumbling, its gardens and cloistered courtyards overgrown.
On Fredo’s initiative, one small section of it had been renovated, and this was where he now lived, in a large ground-floor apartment giving onto what had once been the monks’ vegetable garden. His dream was to see the whole complex restored to its former glory before he died. But there were some within the patriarch’s inner circle for whom it was not a priority, and the best he had been able to do was stop the rot by seeing that the roofs were kept in good repair.
Vittorio tied up next to Fredo’s sleek black motor launch in the tiny harbor sandwiched between the back of the monastery and the expanse of overgrown woodland that made up the rest of the island. From here, it was a short walk to the monsignor’s front door.
He was reaching for the knocker a third time when the door swung open. Fredo stood before him in his nightshirt, tousled and bleary-eyed.
“I thought it might be you,” he said wearily.
“The Karamans used the Sicilians as bagmen, couriers, to throw us off the scent.”
“It seems likely.”
“Is he here, Fredo?”
“No.”
“But you know where he is?” He could hear the note of desperation in his own voice.
“Yes, don’t worry.” Fredo drew him inside and closed the door. “I’ll get Mother Ignatia to put some clothes on and make us coffee.”
Mother Ignatia was a woman of colossal faith and calamitous appearance.
“Don’t make me laugh,” said Vittorio.
Fredo laid a hand on his shoulder, guiding him toward the living room. “Why not? You should be happy. You will be when you hear what I have to tell you.”
“Do you really think it’s him?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“What have I done, Fredo?”
“Nothing that can’t be rectified, you old fool.”
Luke woke with a start, eyes wide in fear. Someone was standing over him, reaching for him …
Pippi, in her satin nightdress.
Cold panic giving way to relief. Light now bleeding through the slats of the shutters in Bianca’s living room. The gun lay beside him on the sofa, which he had turned so that it faced the front door.
“I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong,” said Pippi.
“But what if I’m not?”
Apart from Bianca, who was well above suspicion, Monsignor Ruspoli was the only person who had known they were staying at the Hotel San Barnaba. They had told him in this very room, soon after meeting him for the first time. It seemed implausible that they had somehow fallen into the clutches of a senior Venetian prelate with connections to the Karaman brothers, but Luke felt entitled to indulge his paranoia. After encountering Cordell Oaks at the hotel, anything was possible.
He hadn’t mentioned Oaks to Pippi. There was nothing to gain from adding to her fear and confusion. All that mattered now was getting through the night and leaving the city with their lives.
Pippi settled down beside him on the sofa, tucking her feet beneath her and laying her head against his shoulder. He planted a kiss on her forehead.
“Go back to bed.”
“No, I want be with you.”
“That’s nice.”
“And I don’t want you shooting Bianca’s brother when he gets here.”
Fredo suggested that they take the skiff in tow behind his launch.
“It’ll slow us down.”
“Not by much.”
“I just want to get there, Fredo. Can we please just hurry?”
Fredo obliged. They flew across the channel north of the island, the launch finally coming off the plane only as they entered the mouth of the Grand Canal. Vittorio felt almost intoxicated with anticipation as they turned into Rio de San Barnaba. He sobered up fast when he saw a police launch and a water ambulance docked beside the campo.
“Dear God,” he muttered.
His worst fears were confirmed even before they had tied up. A small crowd was gathered in front of the Hotel San Barnaba.
“Wait here,” said Fredo.
“I can’t.”
“I’m telling you to stay.”
He did, watching in dumb horror as Fredo crossed the square and addressed himself to a carabiniere keeping a small crowd of the curious at bay. A body came out of the hotel, on a stretcher carried by two medics. It was covered from head to toe by a blanket, which meant only one thing.
“No …” groaned Vittorio.
Before he knew it, he had scrambled ashore and was
hurrying toward the hotel. He saw Fredo step forward and fold back the blanket; he saw him make the sign of the cross over the corpse; and he saw some in the crowd take their lead from the monsignor and cross themselves. Fredo covered the face, then turned and caught Vittorio’s eye.
Was that a shake of the head? What did it mean? No, he’s not alive?
Fredo caught him by the elbow and steered him away, back toward the boat. “It’s not him.”
Had he heard right?
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the concierge. He was murdered, his throat slit.”
To celebrate such news was inappropriate, and Vittorio’s elation was tempered with a twinge of guilt. “Is there any sign of them?”
“No, but I have an idea where they might be.”
“Where?”
“If we’re not too late.”
The last time Vittorio had seen Bianca, she was a young woman. The person who opened the door to them had dark hair threaded with deep, gray lines around her mouth, and eyes as hard as gemstones.
“Bianca, this is—”
“I know who it is, Monsignor.”
“And do you know why we’re here?”
She didn’t reply to the question. Instead, she turned her unforgiving gaze on Vittorio and asked, “Where were you when he needed you?”
“I know, I know …”
“Where were you when I needed you?”
Vittorio felt his cheeks flush at the memory. He had not only accused Bianca to her face of colluding in Vincenzo’s abduction, he had then denounced her to the police, who had taken her into custody and questioned her for several days.
“Bianca, God requires us to forgive.”
“Oh, I forgave him a long time ago, Monsignor. I just needed to say it.”
“Are they here?” asked Fredo.
“You just missed them. You’ll have to hurry.”
Chapter Forty-One