by Camilla Monk
A broken cry made it past the lump in my throat. “March. March!”
From where he stood, maybe he could already see the soccer zombie. I’m not sure. He yelled for me to stay down, but his voice was covered by a loud bang. The coffin burst open in an eruption of white, icy smoke. An actual soccer ball went flying in the air, along with the top of the casket, and I caught a flash of red spinning toward the sky. I heard Alex bark some kind of order; I didn’t wait to find out what it was. The gas surrounding us was stinging my eyes, burning my lungs, and I could no longer see March. I ran blindly toward the church, to seek refuge and get a better view of the place.
Once at the steps, a hand clasped around my wrist and hauled me all the way behind one of the doors, to safety. Stiles. I glanced up at him, and he responded with a quick nod of reassurance. I squeezed his arm; I hadn’t lost my new Facebook friend after all. Absolute chaos ensued. People fled the place with panicked shrieks, gunshots echoed through the mist that was now enveloping March and Alex. Bright-red dots danced madly, seeking a proper target. Several shots were fired into the coffin, causing a limp, pasty-white arm to jerk up and dangle out of the wooden box.
Once the white cloud had dissipated, I realized that this apocalypse had been provoked by an extinguisher, which had exploded inside the unfortunate soccer fan’s coffin. Whether this tasteless prank had anything to do with us, I had no idea, but it’d changed the game. Alex now stood in the middle of the place with several guys holding assault rifles or guns. He did glance at the church’s doors, but he had more pressing concerns: March was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t far though—as the men looked around, swiping the area with their laser pointers, one of them collapsed without warning, hit in the knee.
The group scattered behind the fountain and the tables of the trattoria. Shielded behind a corner of the building, Alex was beyond himself with rage. His voice boomed in Stiles’s earpiece so loud I could hear it. “Fucking find him!”
I gripped Stiles’s arm harder. “I swear we had nothing to do with what happened to that plane! Alex, he’s—”
“I can’t let you go,” he said, his southern drawl enveloping each word. He shook his head, conflict obvious in his pale blue eyes. “But I’ll do what I can to make sure they treat you well.”
Two other gunshots tore the silence, taking out one of the guys positioned around the fountain. He fell to the ground, hit in the leg and arm. Then, nothing, just the howl of a police siren in the distance. The block was enclosed by canals. They’d be here soon. Stiles and I stood still, entirely focused on the remaining agents spreading around the place to either find March or escape.
Did you know that eardrum degeneration starts in your twenties and will first affect high frequencies and progress throughout adulthood until you lose your ability to hear low frequencies as well toward the age of sixty? What I’m getting at is that me being fifteen years younger than Stiles is probably why I registered the soft clatter of soles on the marble before he did. I spun around. In the shadows of the deserted transept, a man stood, wearing a three-piece suit and shiny brogues. But mostly carrying a gun. Stiles turned too, a second too late. I saw the glint of metal and the outline of a suppressor.
“Stiles! Watch out!”
He was much heavier than me, so I rammed into him with all my strength. He lost his balance, staggered back and caught himself on a prayer kneeler. The round of bullets missed him by a hair, smashing into the marble with a crackling sound. Stiles struggled back to his feet to aim at the ghost. He fired once; at the same time, our attacker breezed past me to finish him. A powerful kick sent the gun flying from Stiles’s hand; it bounced on the floor and landed spinning a few feet away. He managed to get up on his knees, only to be kicked again, this time in the chest. When he hit the floor, he was breathing heavily and seemed disoriented.
I wouldn’t have thought I had it in me to do something like that—spurred by pure adrenaline, I latched on to the shadow with a battle cry, grabbing the back of his jacket to stop him any way I could. The distraction sort of worked, but it also backfired fast. I barely had the time to inhale a familiar scent of wood and spice before the man contorted to brush me away as if I were nothing but lint. I landed on my ass with a yelp. I looked up in terror at the face that was now outlined by the light coming from the doors. Through shimmering dust, I saw a short, graying beard and hazel eyes that could have been mine . . . only a little more golden.
Dries?
I scrambled up and kicked him in the shin so hard I hurt my toes. “Don’t you dare kill Stiles!”
11
The Lady-Killer
“Yes, Paola, I’ll break society’s rules for another taste of you! Call me your stepfather if you want, but it won’t stop me from loving you!”
La Passione Dei Cuori, episode 827
“He’s down. Not worth killing.”
Dries and I had been reunited for less than thirty seconds, and yet, watching him sneer at Stiles’s fruitless attempt to get on his feet, I was already mentally starting a dick-move counter. Shitting all over a persistent adversary who also happened to be a really sweet guy: +1.
Outside the church, more gunshots echoed. Alex’s little chess game with March wasn’t over. I pointed to the fountain, next to which one of Alex’s men held his thigh with a grimace of pain. “March is still out there!”
Dries shrugged and adjusted a golden cufflink, half concealed by a gray sleeve. “I gave him an extinguisher and a soccer ball; he’ll be fine. He’ll keep that little piece of shit busy for us.”
“But . . .” Did he mean Alex? Did Dries know he was the one behind this manhunt?
Before I could ask, he was already pulling me away toward a small door behind the altar. “Little Island, I’d love to sit down for a chat, but I’m afraid we have to take our leave.”
He was right. Outside, the sound of boots smacking the pavement was getting closer. Alex had sent someone to check on me and Stiles. I ran behind him as he led us out of the church, across a bridge, and into an exiguous alley whose decrepit walls I doubted ever saw any sunlight.
“Where are we going?”
He slowed down to hustle me into a covered walkway made of stone arches running along a shallow canal. “I never answer that kind of question.”
“But, March! How will he find us?”
“I’ll leave him some bread crumbs. He deserves a little whipping; it’ll do him good.”
“Seriously? He came all the way here to help your sorry ass!”
Dries snorted. “And he brought you with him.”
“Because I asked him to—”
A loud splash and the screams of a group of tourists interrupted our dispute. A chubby teen had fallen into the water, shoved out of the way by three men running toward us. One of them, wearing a black hoodie and conspicuous sunglasses, pulled out a gun. On TV, they always make it look easy to shoot people while running, but it’s actually tricky. I’m sure that guy was well trained, but all he accomplished was scaring the crap out of me and making me run even faster when bullets shattered windows and stone carvings behind us.
We were almost at a bridge linking two islets, where tourists gathered, attracted by the windows of a supermarket. The gunshots scattered them like pigeons, leaving free range to our pursuers. This time Dries turned back. He didn’t entertain the same kind of qualms March had about shooting CIA agents. He raised his gun, pulled the trigger, and the man closest to us, hoodie-glasses, fell like a rag doll, hit between the eyes. Our pursuers dealt swift retribution: limestone fragments exploded all around us as we crossed the bridge. Something brushed my hip, leaving a burning sensation in its wake. My heart faltered. I’d been shot. No. Almost. In any case, I could still move. A little blood seeped through my T-shirt, but I was even more scared to look than to stop running.
We’d reached the other side, but I could see no escape route, save for a large street with nowhere to hide.
“We’re going down!”
What?
Dries pulled me to him, wrapped his arm around my waist . . . and threw us over the bridge. I expected water; I met the hard pavement of a short pier and his chest, which cushioned my fall to some extent. Above us, one of the two men yelled to his colleague to follow us down there. I staggered up, and finally saw what Dries had seen. On one of the buildings, a door opening to the canal had been left ajar. We barreled inside and climbed up a series of musty stairs leading to the roof.
The footsteps smacking the wood weren’t far behind us. Dries shot the lock of an iron door and dragged me across the roof under a rickety pergola. When I figured out where this was headed, my legs froze. “No, I’m not . . . I can’t!”
“Island, I don’t have time for this,” he growled.
I stared at the ledge on the adjacent building, a good twenty feet above the ground. It was easily accessible—just one big step—but that building could be what, five hundred years old? The stones could have become a pile of giant wafers by now! I wasn’t given a choice. Dries gripped my arm hard enough to leave a bruise and yanked me toward the empty space between the two buildings. I wobbled forward with a gasp, and all that was left to do was take the jump or fall. It must have been no more than three feet, but it felt like a hundred. I looked down and caught a glimpse of the street below: the sight of a green trash can knotted my insides like a Brazilian bracelet.
“Almost there,” he said in what I understood to be his best attempt at a reassuring tone, but it still came out a little gruff.
I pressed my body against the sun-warmed wall, unable to look elsewhere, and especially not at the ten-inch-wide ledge on which I now stood. My hand found Dries’s, and my fingers dug into his palm as we took the few steps needed to reach the nearest open window. He helped me over the railing of a wrought iron balcony and, like a pair of nosy cats looking to their next misdeed, we slipped into an empty kitchen. Dries immediately closed the window behind us and drew its lace curtain. Through the gauzy fabric, we watched as, on the opposite roof, two figures burst through the door we’d left open, searching for any sign of our presence. One of them pressed a finger to his ear, perhaps receiving new orders. We moved away from the window. I followed Dries, shivers coursing through me as I tiptoed—well, broke, really—into a stranger’s home.
It was an old Venetian apartment, one of those places where time stands still. The green mosaic tiling on the floor and faded yellow of the furniture suggested that the clock had stopped ticking sometime during the midsixties. Half covered by the loud hum of a rusty fridge, the sound of a television echoed through the walls. Dries brought a finger to his lips and pointed to the kitchen door leading to a long corridor. There, countless paintings and photos served to conceal faded, flowery wallpaper. As we treaded on the parqueted floor with excruciating care, it struck me that even at his age, Dries retained the same sort of inexplicable feline grace I had witnessed in March. He must have weighed twice as much as I did, yet he moved like a shadow. My chest tightened unpleasantly at the thought of all the people he must have killed, sneaking up on them in the same fashion.
The background noise of hurried Italian speech mingled with the dramatic sigh of violins was getting louder. A soap opera was airing, and a good one, I reckoned. Dries held his hand midair to stop me. A pair of French doors opened to a living room. I could make out kitschy furniture covered with lace doilies and a burgundy couch. Dries’s finger curled around the gun’s trigger. For the first time, I noticed the inscription engraved in the long black barrel. I wouldn’t allow this. We would not shoot an elderly person with a Desert Eagle. I placed my hand on his, shaking my head with an imploring look.
Under his silvery beard, the corner of his mouth twitched. He took a deliberate step forward; I dove to stop him, and we found ourselves standing in an awkward position in front of the French doors, no longer hidden.
The couch was in fact empty, and someone in there was even quieter than a Lion. An old lady wearing a mauve robe over a long nightshirt stood in the middle of the living room, staring back at us. Now, if I had seen a guy like Dries pop in my hallway, holding a big semiautomatic and wearing a three-piece suit, my first thought would have been Mafioso and the second one Oh my God. Call the police! That woman? She didn’t seem to mind, and I was willing to bet that my heart was beating faster than hers at the moment.
She kind of ignored me, looking Dries up and down instead. He straightened and dusted his jacket as if this were an ordinary encounter. “Scusami,” he whispered in a husky, almost seductive tone, bringing his forefinger to his lips like he had done to silence me.
My jaw hit the floor when she responded with the hint of a shy smile. Was this all it took, even in such a situation? An old-school playboy vibe, an admittedly good suit, and shazam? What kind of mojo was that?
I’d have asked for some details, but the shrill buzz of her doorbell killed the moment. Dries’s eyes narrowed. He waved with his gun for our sort-of-hostage to go answer. As she did so, we retreated to the farthest corner of her living room and hid behind a mahogany hutch. By the time her fingers touched the lock, the buzzing had been replaced by impatient knocking. I was still waiting for her to freak out, but I guess I was the only chicken—well, chick—in this apartment. She opened the door and greeted her visitor with a tone of regal superiority, regardless of the fact that she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. A man spoke in broken Italian with a thick English accent. My pulse revved. They weren’t stupid after all—they’d figured that the fastest way to escape the roof of the adjacent building was to jump onto the ledge of this one.
Dries’s finger curled around the trigger. I listened, petrified, as the old woman lied with surprising ease, claiming that she had no idea what Alex’s goon was talking about and even going so far as to berate him for his lack of manners. A slew of angry accusations rolled off of her tongue, while in the living room, playboy Massimo had just revealed to innocent nurse Paola that Giorgio, her three-year-old little brother, was in fact his own son! He had donated to a sperm bank, and Paola’s evil mother had plotted to be inseminated with his swimmers in a bid to force Massimo to love her and raise the child with her. But now Paola too was pregnant with Massimo’s child, and with these shocking revelations, she found herself expecting her own stepsister!
In the hallway, a shrill yell informed us that shit had gotten real. “Sciò! Vai via di qua!” Shoo! Get out of here!
The man did make a feeble attempt to question the old lady further, but before he was able to put together a comprehensible sentence, the door slammed in his face strong enough to make the walls tremble.
We left our hiding spot as she marched back into her living room and readjusted her robe. She planted herself in front of Dries, sizing him up again. Waiting for something. He flashed her a smile that I regret to say could only be described as carnal, revealing the same gap tooth I had inherited from him. He then bowed with flourish. The killing move was administered under the form of a long, mildly upsetting baise-mains, complete with some mandatory eye contact at the end. I couldn’t help but wonder how many women had fallen for his shtick since my mother.
The lady eventually snatched her hand back, but the flush in her cheeks didn’t lie: Dries had scored. Hard. She trotted back to her couch and patted the cushions with an inviting smile. I briefly feared this situation would degenerate into something I did not want to witness, but that wasn’t the point—we just needed to make sure those guys looking for us would be gone before we could sneak out of her apartment. Also, I think she really wanted to watch the remaining five minutes of her episode of La Passione dei Cuori with Dries. I was so torrenting this series as soon as I got home.
“We need to find March!” I repeated for approximately the tenth time as we made our way through the crowd on the Rialto Bridge. Drowning in a sea of backpacks, I could barely discern the white limestone arches sandwiching each side of the oldest bridge crossing the Grand Canal. Not that there would have been much to see—the whole place was just an en
dless stream of shops selling plastic gondolas and glittery carnival masks.
Dries snorted, looking almost offended by my insistence. “I sent him a rendezvous point; what more do you want me to do?”
“Check if he’s fricking alive!”
“I’d forgotten you were so difficult. Just like your mother.”
I bit back an insult. “Oh, I’m sorry; you don’t care about March? Then why don’t you tell me what was in that case you gave to Bashir instead?”
Surprise flashed across his face, but he quickly regained his composure. “What would you do with that information?”
How could he not see? I massaged my forehead forcefully, fighting the waves of pain crashing in my skull after our wild chase. “Nothing. I’ll do nothing, Dries . . . It just . . . It matters to me if you killed six hundred innocent people.”
“I didn’t. The case contained a pair of plastinated testicles, since it matters to you.”
My arms dropped at my sides. “Plast . . . what the hell?”
He made an evasive gesture with his hand. “Some cultures attach more importance than others to the purity of a daughter.” He gave me a pointed look. “I was personally solicited to help rectify a situation.”
Rectify . . . March sometimes used that same word. Like when he’d admitted to having once shot someone in the knees with expanding bullets in his wild days. I wanted to believe that the guy had it coming because he was a gangster, but sometimes I feared I was living a lie. Would it similarly comfort me to know whether Dries’s victim was still alive? What if he was dead? Was it a case of avenging rape, or had Dries crushed a pure love like Sanchez cutting out the heart of his girlfriend’s lover before her very eyes in License to Kill?—he was really one of the worst James Bond villains. Jerk totally deserved to die in the end.