Carmody's Run

by Bill Pronzini

  As he came running through the gate, a tall youth materialized from the darkness in front of him, lured by the excitement. Carmody didn’t want his face seen; he lowered his shoulder, sent the kid sprawling against the garden wall. He ran to the first corner, turned it into another street, ran another block, turned a second corner and came out in a campiello with a small stone statue in its center.

  He ducked around the statue, went into an alley on the opposite side of the square. With his back against the alley wall, he watched the campiello to see if he had pursuit. No one came into it. He stayed where he was for a couple of minutes, catching his breath, shivering inside his wet clothing. Then he moved deeper into the blackness, set his bag down, worked the catches to open it.

  Rita, he was thinking, it had to have been Rita.

  Besides Piombo and himself—and Piombo could be trusted—the woman and Lucarelli were the only ones who knew about the San Spirito house. And she’d gone back into the house, out of harm’s way, just seconds before the shooting started. And the shooter? Lucarelli’s rival, Gambresca, or somebody sent by him. She’d found some way to tip Gambresca. For money, or hatred, or revenge, or a combination of all three. Money was part of Gambresca’s motive, for sure: the shooter had taken the time to fish the three suitcases out of the launch, so he had to have known what one of them contained.

  But why had they done it that way? Why not just put a knifein Lucarelli at the house and walk out with the money? Or tip Gambresca days sooner? They’d been living on San Spirito for more than a week. Maybe she wasn’t up to the job of cold-blooded murder herself, or maybe it had taken her all this time to work up the courage for a double-cross, or maybe Lucarelli had had the money hidden in a place only he knew about. Whatever the reason, it was incidental.

  Rita and Gambresca—they were what mattered.

  While all of this was going through his mind Carmody changed clothes in the darkness. The sodden things went into the suitcase, rolled into a towel. The Beretta went into the pocket of the Madras jacket he now wore.

  He left the alley, hunted around until he found a tavern. Inside, locked in the toilet, he broke down the Beretta and cleaned and oiled it with materials from the false bottom of his bag. When he was satisfied that it was in working order he went out into the bar proper and drank two cognacs to get the taste of the canal water out of his mouth.

  There was a telephone on the rear wall. Carmody called Della Robbia’s number. As soon as he heard the Italian’s voice he said, “Carmody. Bad trouble. The whole thing’s blown.”

  Silence for a couple of seconds. Then Della Robbia said, “What happened, signor?”

  “We were ambushed. The man I was taking out is dead. So’s your launch driver. One man waiting for us in a boat with a machine pistol—maybe a backup. It was too dark to see much.”

  “Gacchio!”

  “Yeah. A big pile of shit.”

  “You are all right, Signor Carmody?”

  “No physical wounds,” Carmody said bitterly. He was holding the phone receiver as if it were the shooter’s neck. “Listen, I need you and your connections. The man I was taking out was Renzo Lucarelli. You know him?”

  “Lucarelli? Yes... yes, of course.”

  “He had a woman, Rita, who was supposed to go with us. But she ducked off just before we got hit. I think she’s a Judas.”

  “Why would she—?”

  Carmody said, “I don’t have all the answers yet—that’s what I need you for. You know anything about this Rita?”

  “Very little, signor. Almost nothing.”

  “How about a rival of Lucarelli’s named Gambresca?”

  “A bad one,” Della Robbia said. “You believe Gambresca was involved in the shooting?”

  “That’s how it looks. You know where I can find him?”

  “A moment, Signor Carmody, I must think. Yes. He owns a wholesale produce company on Campo Oroglia. It is said he lives above it.”

  “All right,” Carmody said. “Find out what you can about the woman. She may be with Gambresca, she may not be. I want her, Della Robbia, and I want her before she can get out of Venice. Lucarelli is the first client I ever lost and I won’t stand still for it.”

  “I will do what I can,” Della Robbia said. “Where are you? Where can I—?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Carmody told him and rang off.

  He tried to find out from the bartender how to get to the nearest canal that had water taxi service. The bartender didn’t speak English. None of the drinkers spoke English. Carmody’s Italian was weak; it took him five long, impatient minutes to get directions that made sense.

  When he went out again into the night he was running.

  There was nobody home at Gambresca’s.

  Carmody stepped out from under the doorway arch, looked up once more at the sign running across the top of the warehouse. It said A. Gambresca in broad black lettering, and below that: Campo Oroglia 24. His gaze moved higher, to the dark windows strung along the second floor front. No sign of life. He had been there for several minutes, ringing bells and making noise like a drunk, his fingers restless on the Beretta in his jacket pocket. There hadn’t been any response.

  Carmody looked at his watch. Almost one-thirty. He crossed the square to enter the same street by which he’d arrived, his steps echoing hollowly in the late-night stillness. The fury inside him boiled like water in a kettle.

  What now? Another call to Della Robbia. And if Della Robbia hadn’t found out anything? The waiting game, like it or not. He would pick a vantage point somewhere on Campo Oroglia, and he would sit there all night if necessary, until Gambresca showed up.

  In the lobby of a small hotel nearby he gave a sleepy night clerk a thousand-lira note for the use of his telephone. Della Robbia answered immediately.

  Carmody said, “Well?”

  “I have learned something, but perhaps it means little or nothing.”

  “I’ll decide that. What is it?”

  “The woman has an uncle, a man named Salviati, who owns a squero—a boatyard for the repair and construction of gondolas. The uncle is said to have smuggled contraband and has two boats of high speed at his disposal. It is possible the woman has gone there.”

  Carmody gave it some thought. Yes, possible. Assuming it was the money that had driven her to sell out Lucarelli; she might have already got her payoff and then headed for her uncle’s—a place to hide or a way to leave the city, either one. She’d need someone she could trust, and Gambresca might not be that someone. Another possibility was that she’d gone to the uncle straight from San Spirito, to wait for Gambresca or one of Gambresca’s people to bring her blood money.

  He asked, “Where is this place, this squero?”

  “On Rio degli Zecchini.”

  “So I can get there by water taxi.”

  “If you can find one at this hour.”

  “I can find one,” Carmody said.

  From where he stood in the shadows across the Rio degli Zecchini, Carmody could see the vague shapes of gondolas, some whole and some skeletal, in the squero’s low-fenced rear yard. Set back fifty feet from the canal was a two-story, wood-and-brick building that looked as if it had been built in the time of the Doges; it was completely dark. Most of the surrounding buildings were warehouses and the area was deserted. No light showed anywhere except for a pale streetlamp atop a canal bridge nearby.

  Carmody put his suitcase into a wall niche, took out the Beretta, held it cupped low against his right leg as he walked to the bridge. On the opposite seawall he stood listening for a time. A ship’s horn bayed mournfully on the Lagoon; the canal water, rumpled by the wind, lapped at the seawall. There were no sounds of any kind from the squero.

  The place’s rear entrance was a wooden gate set into a three-sided frame of two-by-fours; the fourth side was the wall of the adjacent building. On the canal side, and on top, the beams sprouted tangles of barbed wire like a fungal growth. Carmody had had experience with barbed wire
before, but he still cut the palm of his left hand in two places when he swung around the frame. The sharp sting of the cuts heaped fuel on his rage.

  Moving quickly, he made his way across the yard. The gondolas—long, slender, flat-bottomed, with tapered and upswept prow and stern—were laid out in rows, on davits, in stacks of two and three; they had a ghostly look in the darkness, like giant bones in a graveyard. They also camouflaged his run to the far corner of the building, in case anybody happened to be looking out.

  Jalousied shutters were lowered across the double-doored entrance; there were no fronting windows. Carmody edged around the corner, along the side wall. An elongated window halfway down showed him nothing of the interior, just a solid screen of blackness.

  Carmody paused, peering toward the back. A high wall marked the rear boundary of the squero but it was set several feet beyond the building, forming a narrow passageway. He went there and into the passage; picked his way through a carpeting of refuse, looking for another window. Midway along he found one with louvered shutters closed across it. He squinted upward through one of the canted louvers.

  Light.

  Movement.

  Carmody bent lower so he could see more of the room inside. It was an office of sorts, with a cluttered desk on which a gooseneck lamp burned, two wooden chairs, a table piled with charts and pamphlets, a filing cabinet with a rusted fan on top.

  And the woman, Rita.

  She stood to one side of the desk, in profile, nervously watching the closed door opposite the window. Her arms were folded across her heavy breasts, as if she were cold; her face was drawn, bloodless. Between her lips was a filter-tipped cigarette that she smoked in short, deep drags.

  Carmody glided back the way he’d come, stopped before the unshuttered window at the front part of the building. It was the kind that opened inward on a pair of hinges, with a simple slip catch locking it to the frame. He went to work with the broad flat blade of his Swiss Army knife. After two minutes he put the tips of his fingers against the dirty glass, cautiously pushed the window open.

  The interior smelled of paint and linseed oil and dampness. Carmody climbed over the sill, stood motionless on a rough concrete floor. He could see where the door to the office was by a strip of light at its bottom. He could also make out a lathe, a drill press, a table saw, several wood forms, all massed up in the blackness—an obstacle course for him to get through without making any noise.

  Slowly, feeling in front of him with his left hand, he moved toward the strip of light. He had to detour twice, the second time abruptly to keep from colliding with a sawhorse. When he reached the door he stopped to listen. She was quiet in there, and since she’d been watching the door minutes earlier, it figured that she was still watching it. He had no way of knowing whether or not she was armed. He hadn’t seen a gun, but he’d only had a limited view of the office.

  He wrapped his left hand around the knob, twisted it, then threw his left shoulder against the door. The latch was open; the door banged against the table inside, dislodging papers. The woman let out a shriek and stumbled away from the desk, one hand going to her mouth. Her eyes were like buttons about to pop from too much pressure.

  Carmody got to her in three long strides, caught her dark hair in his free hand, spun her around and sat her down hard in one of the chairs. Then he knelt in front of her, his angry face less than six inches from hers, and laid the Beretta’s muzzle against her cheek.

  He could see that she wanted to scream again, but nothing came out when she opened her mouth. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets. Carmody slapped her twice, hard. The blows refocused her vision, brought her out of the faint before she had really gone into it.

  She stared at him with a mixture of shock and terror. “Signor Carmody...”

  “That’s right—alive and well.”

  “But you... I believed...”

  “I know what you believed,” he said thinly. “But I was luckier than Lucarelli and the boat driver. Where’s the money? And where’s Gambresca?”

  “Gambresca! That stronzolo,he was the one...”

  “You ought to know, you sold us out to him.”

  She blinked. “I do not understand.”

  “The hell you don’t understand.”

  “I was so afraid,”she whispered. She was trembling now. “I did not wish to die. This is why I run away. Please, I know nothing about Gambresca.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you didn’t set up that ambush?”

  “Ambush?”

  “The boat, the shooting.”

  “No! How could I? You cannot think—”

  “Why did you run back to the house just before the shooting started?”

  “My cosmeticos, I forget them.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I tell the truth! Renzo was my man, we go away together, you cannot think I want him to die!”

  “Somebody wanted him to die,” Carmody said. “Somebody tipped Gambresca. And you and Lucarelli were the only ones besides me and my man in Rome who knew where the hideaway was. You did it for the money, right? For a cut of the run-out money?”

  “No, no, no! I did not, I would not...”

  She was shaking her head, forgetting the gun at her cheek; Carmody pulled the Beretta back a little. It was quiet in the office just then—and in that quiet he heard the faint sound of a footfall in the darkness out front.

  The hackles raised on his neck. He came up off his knee, turning, and when he did that he saw the vague shape of a man appear next to the drill press out there, just beyond the outspill of light from the desk lamp. In the man’s hand was a familiar, deadly shape.

  Carmody threw himself to one side, pushing Rita and the chair over backwards. She screamed again but the sound of it was lost in the stuttering roar of the machine pistol. A slug ripped through the tail of Carmody’s jacket, burned across one buttock. Then the gooseneck lamp flew off the desk, shattered, and the office went dark except for bright flashes from the pistol’s muzzle.

  Carmody managed to get the desk between himself and the doorway. He could hear the rap, rap, rap of the bullets digging into the desk, into the wall above him, as the shooter raked the office with another burst. He twisted his body into the kneehole. He could see out on the other side, but without the muzzle flashes the darkness was too thick for him to locate the shooter. The air stank of burnt gunpowder; the silence had an electric quality. Carmody listened, knowing that the shooter was listening too.

  The silence seemed to gain magnitude until it was almost deafening. Either the shooter didn’t know where the overhead lights were or he didn’t want to take the chance of putting them on. But with the amount of slugs he’d pumped into the office, he had to be thinking that he was the only one left alive. If he’d opened up with that two seconds earlier he’d have been right. Pretty soon there was a series of scuffling sounds out beyond the doorway. Carmody still didn’t move. They were the kinds of sounds somebody makes when he’s pretending to leave a place, trying to be clever. The shooter was still out there, waiting. Making up his mind. Another couple of minutes crawled away. The quiet was so intense it was like a humming in Carmody’s ears. Then there was a nearly inaudible sliding sound: the shooter was moving again. Not going away this time. Coming back into the office.

  Carmody steadied the Beretta on his left arm.

  Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then there was another faint, whispery footfall. And another, not more than ten feet away and almost directly ahead—

  Carmody emptied most of the Beretta’s clip on a line waist-high and two feet wide.

  There was a half-strangled Italian oath; a moment later Carmody heard the metallic clatter of the pistol on concrete, the sound of a body falling heavily. He stayed where he was, listening. A scrabbling movement, a low moan... nothing.

  It was another couple of minutes before he was satisfied. He crawled out of the kneehole, got to his feet, moved at an angle to the door. He put his pencil flash on, just fo
r an instant, stepping aside as he did so. Then the tension went out of him and he put the light on again, left it on.

  The shooter was lying half in and half out of the office doorway, the MAC-10 alongside him. Face down, not moving. Carmody turned him over with the toe of one shoe, shined the light on his face—on the dead, staring eyes.

  Gino Della Robbia.

  Carmody swore softly. He wasn’t surprised; nothing surprised him anymore. But that didn’t make Della Robbia’s treachery any easier to take.

  He swung the light to the rear of the office, located Rita with it. At first he thought she was dead too because she lay crumpled and still But when he went over there and knelt beside her, he saw that she was breathing. Blood glistened on the side of her head: scalp wound. He didn’t see any others. She was lucky. They both were—damned lucky.

  He found the switch for the overheads, flipped it on. Then he picked Rita up and sat her in a chair. The movement brought her out of it. For a couple of minutes she was disoriented, hysterical; he slapped her face, got her calmed down. Then she saw Della Robbia and that almost set her off again.

  When she could talk she said, “Gino? It was Gino who killed Renzo?”

  “And tried to kill me,” Carmody said. “Twice.”

  “But I do not understand...”

  “It’s simple enough. Gambresca had nothing to do with the ambush, just like you had nothing to do with it. Della Robbia, nobody else. For the money. He didn’t know how much there was but he did know that it would be plenty—enough to take the risks he took.”

  She shook her head, winced, sat still.

  Carmody said, “You went to him tonight after the ambush, didn’t you? Heard me mention his name to Lucarelli, remembered it, looked up his address and went to him.”

  “Yes. I believed you and Renzo were both dead. I had nowhere else to go.”

  “And he got you to come here.”