by Ewan, Chris
‘You think she helped to switch the briefcases?’ I asked.
‘I checked with the casino,’ he told me. ‘John was paid in cash. The notes were packed inside an attaché case – provided gratis.’
‘An identical scenario.’
Alfred nodded. ‘It’s beginning to look as if I was fortunate not to win tonight, wouldn’t you say?’
THIRTY-FOUR
I’d just about had my fill of talking. There we were, sitting in a hotel room, joining together the dots of what had happened and why, and meanwhile events were moving on without us. It was 1.15 a.m. The blackjack tournament would be over by now, and if things had played out as we suspected, Graziella and her bedraggled companion would be divvying up their winnings. More to the point, the police would have interviewed Count Borelli and there was a good chance they’d be looking for me in connection with his abduction. Now, Venice undoubtedly has its appeals, but one thing I couldn’t ignore was how cramped the place happened to be. Once my description and identity were made public, there was no way I could possibly linger. That gave me until morning to move around freely – say ten o’clock at the latest. It was beginning to look as if I wouldn’t be enjoying much sleep.
Snatching up the telephone on the side cabinet, I dialled an outside line and punched in Pierre’s number. I suppose I should have asked Alfred’s permission before hiking his hotel bill with an international call, but given the circumstances, I thought my behaviour might be excused. We had plenty of theories and a good deal of speculation, but what I needed were answers.
The phone buzzed and buzzed again. It repeated the pattern. I checked the time on my watch, then remembered that I already knew how late it was. The phone rang on, without urgency, like a soporific heartbeat.
‘Who are you calling?’ Victoria asked.
‘Hush,’ I said, and turned my back on her, covering my free ear for good measure. I don’t know why – there was nothing to listen to but the ring tone.
The phone droned on before cutting out without being answered. I knew for a fact that Pierre had an answer machine that he used when he was away from his apartment – mainly because I’d once broken into his place and seen it. I redialled and listened to the droning some more.
‘Pick up,’ I said. ‘Come on. Pick up.’
And then he did. And promptly dropped the phone. There was a crackle and a thud. Some low-level cursing.
‘Allo?’ The voice was drowsy and curt, spiked with resentment.
‘Pierre, it’s Charlie. I realise it’s late, and I’m sorry for calling, but I’m in trouble. I need to know if you’ve learned anything about the girl.’
‘Charlie?’ he asked, sounding vague. ‘Is this you?’
‘Yes, Pierre. Wake up. Please. I need to know if you’ve spoken to anyone about the woman in Venice – the burglar.’
Pierre mumbled to himself in French. I doubted very much it was complimentary. Then I heard a second voice. A man, calling to him from somewhere far off in his apartment.
‘Listen, I’m sorry if you have company,’ I told him. ‘We can keep this quick.’
‘I was sleeping, yes?’
‘I got that impression. But the girl – did your contacts know anything?’
He made a noise like a child blowing a raspberry. It was followed by the rustle of paper.
‘Pierre?’
‘It is here somewhere, yes? Please. Be patient.’
‘You don’t just remember?’
‘I have an address, understand?’
I raised my palm to my face, grinding the heel into my eye. I wondered how long the information had been in Pierre’s possession, and why he hadn’t called me sooner. Then I reminded myself that I hadn’t called him, either. My fault.
‘Here, I have it.’
I heard the noise of a scrap of paper being torn from a notepad. I looked to my left and right, then spied a pad and a biro, both of them branded with the name of Alfred’s hotel.
‘Go ahead.’
And so he did. And halfway through scribbling down the address I had to refrain from smacking myself upside the head.
‘It’s okay. I know it,’ I said, feeling my body sag.
‘My friend tells me it is an old bookshop, yes? This girl, her uncle owns it. They live in the apartment above.’
‘I might have guessed.’ And really, I suppose I should have done. Living above the bookbinding business would have made it easy for her to set things up with the mobile phone inside the safe. It explained how she’d been able to watch me as I broke in and how she’d spotted the police coming. And there was something else too. The shopkeeper had struck me as nervy when we’d first visited the store. If he was really Graziella’s uncle and he had even the vaguest inkling of the kind of things she got up to, then his caginess made sense. ‘Anything else?’
While I waited for Pierre to respond, I reached my hand out towards the bed, where I’d dumped my coat. Victoria’s pigskin document wallet was there, and I unzipped it and scanned the goodies it contained.
‘Only that my contact says that she is good, yes?’ Pierre said. ‘Maybe the best in Venice. I am thinking, Charlie, perhaps you give her my name? Tell her to call me sometime?’
‘You want to hire her?’ I asked, stuffing the lipstick-cum-pepper spray into my pocket. ‘Christ, Pierre, she stole from me. She’s dangerous.’
He yawned. ‘She is a thief, no? They are not all nice people like you, Charlie.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Now, I can go?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, casting my eyes over the equipment that remained, ‘you can go. And thanks Pierre. I’ll see if I can find a copy of her resumé for you.’
Venice suited black and white. It appeared that way in the postcards I’d nabbed from the news stand in Campo Santo Stefano and had scattered around my desk in the hope of inspiring myself. The cards featured scenes of neglected alleyways and lonesome canals, empty piazzas lit by ornate streetlamps, emaciated cats prowling beneath grand statues of winged lions, and macabre displays of blank Carnevale masks. It was the city I found myself in now, hurrying through the small hours of the night, my coat collar up and my footsteps chasing me across rain-slicked flagstones obscured by low, twisted ribbons of mist.
Homes were shuttered, businesses in darkness, there was not a person to be seen. Vaporous rain cloaked the yellow electric light coming from the streetlamps, clinging to my face, and the foggy waters barely glistened beneath the stooped bridges I crossed. In the shadows, rodents skittered among the plastic bags of litter that had been left out for collection, wary of the felines that prowled the streets.
I knew just how they felt.
Thinking helped. It offered me some sense of control. So did smoking. I sparked a cigarette and ran through those things that Alfred had told me, asking myself how much could be true.
Had the bomb really been intended to arm Borelli instead of killing him? At first, I’d thought the idea made no sense whatsoever, but now I wasn’t so sure. There was Alfred’s story of what had happened in Monte Carlo, for one thing, but my change of heart also had something to do with the Count himself. Looking back, he hadn’t behaved like a man who’d believed his life was in peril. After the explosion, he’d remained in his palazzo, and the following evening, he’d been prepared to spend the night in public at the casino. Hardly the actions of a man aiming to protect himself.
On top of that, kidnapping him had been surprisingly easy. I was a complete beginner but I’d managed to pull it off. More to the point, Graziella had told me that he’d refused the offer of police protection. Was that because he didn’t want the authorities to ask awkward questions?
I didn’t know for certain, but I thought it possible. It would certainly explain his attitude after we’d kidnapped him. He’d treated us with contempt, mocking our understanding of the situation, and perhaps now I knew why.
Then something else occurred to me. Borelli had accused us of working for somebody. It
was our accents that had made him think as much. What was it he’d said? Something about the man being a clever opponent, and how I sounded just like him.
Could he have been talking about Alfred? If Victoria’s father was somebody he’d had on his mind, someone he’d monitored during the tournament as a potential threat, then the fact we were both English might have struck him as an obvious connection. Especially if he had some idea of Alfred’s background – his particular expertise with casino games and the likelihood of him making it to the final tournament table. It had been easy enough for Alfred to find out about Borelli from his contacts in the gaming world, so what was to prevent the Count from doing the same thing? And once he knew of Alfred’s murkier side, was it really such a stretch for Borelli to think that Alfred might stoop so low as to kidnap him to prevent him from winning?
Of course, if even half of that was really so, and Borelli truly had been planning to use the bomb, then I had no explanation for why Graziella had returned to my apartment and tasked me with killing the poor sod, and I had a feeling that an answer to that particular riddle would be hard to come by. Still, nothing’s impossible, right? I had a shot at figuring it out. Granted, it was a long shot, but at least it was something. And besides, if I failed to get to the bottom of what was happening, I hoped there might be some consolation. My copy of The Maltese Falcon had to be somewhere, and if there was any justice in the world (or even in Venice for that matter) I didn’t think it was too unreasonable to hope that I might find it inside Graziella’s home.
My cigarette was almost finished. So was my walk. It would have been pleasant to take a detour through Piazza San Marco, to enjoy the feel of having the entire place to myself. It would have been even nicer to console myself with the idea that I could enjoy the experience another night. That seemed unlikely now. I’d spent more than a year in the city and I still felt like I’d barely scratched the surface. It was somewhere I would have liked to have stayed longer, a place where I’d felt that perhaps I could set down roots for the first time in a long while. All of that was impossible now. Robbed from me despite my attempts to go straight. It didn’t strike me as very fair. Nothing did. I was feeling melancholy and bitter. I wanted revenge.
Calle Fiubera was as deserted as every place else. I approached the bookbinding business with slow, careful steps, and glanced inside through the metal shutter. I flicked my cigarette away and reached out a hand. The shutter was bolted, the door locked behind it. I knew I could get in that way, but experience had taught me I could also be seen.
Stepping back, I craned my neck and scanned the building. The wall sloped outwards, leaning over me. There were three windows immediately above the shop, offering a clear view of my position. The one on the right was lit from the inside.
I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do. The light might be shining down on somebody who happened to be sitting there waiting for me with a shotgun across their lap. Or it could be illuminating an empty room. Another time, in different circumstances, I would have left and returned the following evening in the hope the light would be gone. Tonight, I didn’t have that luxury. I couldn’t afford a delay. But I could try a different approach.
My memory wasn’t as good as I would have liked, and it took ten minutes of searching around to find the alleyway that led to the back entrance of the shop. I wasn’t even sure I had the right location until I switched on my penlight and pointed the beam towards the bottom of the door. It was discoloured with damp. I remembered the water that had soaked my feet. Right place.
Stretching a pair of my customised plastic gloves over my hands, I crouched down and assessed the lock. It was nothing special, a piece of cake compared to the security measures at the front. I removed the necessary tools from my spectacles case and picked it open with less trouble than it takes to pick my nose. That should have been it, really – job over – but I was struggling to open the door. The dampness had warped the wood, and I remembered how the door had snagged on the frame the last time I’d used it. There was no handle to hold on to. If I’d had a key, I could have turned it in the lock and pulled hard on the thing, but my pick was too flimsy.
I tried grunting and gurning for a while, but it didn’t have the desired effect. Neither did kicking the wall in frustration. I went back to my tools and searched around. I didn’t have room for a sledgehammer in my spectacles case, and in my experience, it did give the game away somewhat. Luckily, though, I carried a screwdriver with a blade that was thin enough to squeeze into the slight gap above the top of the door. Leaning on it hurt my bad fingers in a way I could have done without but I couldn’t think of an alternative. Pain it was. Considerable pain. I kept the lock open with my pick and levered the door with my screwdriver. There was a good deal of scuffing and squeaking and slipping, and then the door swung outwards with a slurping-sucking noise.
The screwdriver fell to the floor and I buried my screaming fingers beneath my armpit, stomping my feet on the ground. Then I gathered my composure, stepped inside the flooded corridor and had a stab at walking on water.
THIRTY-FIVE
The water had risen since my previous visit. It covered my shoes and soaked into my socks and the hems of my borrowed tuxedo trousers. The cold snaked up my legs, tightening my calf muscles. I waded forward, trying to make as little noise as possible, my movements stiff and constrained, as if I was wearing callipers. The place smelled of damp and mould, like a deep-sea cave.
I flashed my torch. The light danced across the surface of the water, exposing the bare wall ahead. I edged towards it with my gloved hands outstretched, creating small waves in front of me, until my fingers scraped brick. I listened for a moment, and when I was sure I was alone, I tried the beam again. Heavy droplets fell from a pipe above my head, striking the rippled water with a loud plop. I touched one of the tarpaulin-covered boxes to my side. The cardboard was soaked through and soft as mulch. It came away in my hand and stuck to my glove like confetti.
Angling my torch inside the box, I saw stacks of paper. I tried another box. Same thing. I didn’t think the paper would be any good – it’d be as waterlogged as the cardboard – and I was certain it wasn’t worth investigating any further.
I moved on, the water becoming gradually shallower until I was able to see the leather uppers of my shoes again. Stepping to one side, the sodden carpet squelching underfoot, I opened the unmarked door that led into the shop.
A strong aroma of smoke hit me, the scent so pungent that I whirled around, afraid the shopkeeper was sitting there in the dark. I couldn’t see him, but his pipe was resting in an ashtray on his desk. I felt the bowl – you don’t write a stack of crime fiction without picking up on tricks like that – and found a trace of warmth. That explained the smell.
He must have been working late. My torch revealed a leather-bound volume on his desk, and a needle and thread on top of it. I lifted the cover. Something in Italian. Not my book.
The safe was locked tight, but when I got down on my knees, gripped my penlight between my teeth and tricked it open, I found nothing new. After closing and locking the door, I straightened and walked my fingers along the shelves of books, then rummaged through the desk drawers. No joy. I sighed and gave some thought to stuffing some of the pricier volumes down inside my coat, but I didn’t make the move. The bindings were fancy, the workmanship impressive, but I wasn’t convinced that they’d hold the same value outside Venice, and I didn’t want to risk dropping them as I moved upstairs.
Moving upstairs was just what I had in mind when I happened to glance over towards the paper and stationery on the other side of the shop. There was something out of place, down on the floor behind a display unit. Was it a book? A small box? It seemed about the right size.
I squinted, trying to make out the object in the darkness, then gave up and aimed my torch beam.
Hell. Now why did I have to go and do a stupid thing like that?
The item was a shoe. Tan leather, scuffed around
the toe and heel. It was attached to an ankle, sheathed in a fawn-coloured sock. That was all I could see. The rest was concealed behind the display unit, at least until the pale, splayed fingers of a hand emerged from the other side.
I would have liked to have walked away from it. I would have liked it very much. And if I was the ruthless thief I should have been, I would have done just that. But I had character flaws just like the next guy, and one of them was that I was just simple-minded enough to go and take a look.
I chose the end with the foot. Smart choice. The hard terrazzo floor was dry. The area around the head was a different story. Blood. A lot of it. Pooled around his face and shoulders, collecting between the spread fingers of his outstretched hand, getting in under the nails. It looked like someone had emptied a paint tin over him. Maybe two tins. The blood glistened in the light from my torch, shimmering like cranberry juice.
His face was side-on, lips parted and resting in the bloody puddle as if he planned to slurp his way back to life. His right arm was folded beneath his chest, elbow protruding on an awkward angle, with his hand hidden.
I checked the shop window behind me. Nobody watching.
Stepping carefully over his rag-doll legs, water dripping from the soles of my shoes and the bottom of my trousers, I crouched down by his torso and took a closer look. His eye was swollen, bugged out of his head as if he was as shocked to see me as I was to find him. He looked dead – unquestionably so – but I’d made mistakes in the past and I intended to learn from them. I needed to turn the head but I didn’t rate the idea of touching him, even through my gloves. A pot of pencils was resting on the stand above me. I plucked one free and poked the end with the rubber eraser inside his mouth, wedging it against his cheek. I tugged. His face turned and turned and then . . .
Crap.
I let go of the pencil and fell onto my backside. Pushed myself away across the floor until I bumped hard into a shelf of notepads. I sat there for a while, swearing under my breath as if I was uttering some kind of magic chant that might just be capable of erasing the terrible image that wouldn’t go away.