The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  A girl called to him from out of the crowd of kids crowded together in the dark, drunkenly, with a petulant edge, demanding a fucking cigarette, man. He ignored them and walked on through the piazzetta. The slender red-brick tower of the campanile rose

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  three hundred feet into the Venetian night beside him. Beyond it the heartbreaking sweep of the Piazza San Marco opened up before him, possibly the most beautiful open space in the world: a huge three-sided cloistered square of oddly Moorish design, with the bizarre monstrosity of the basilica holding down the open end.

  The piazza was filled with music and light. Florian’s was still open, as it had been since the late 1700s: he walked across the cobbles toward the old café tucked in under the portico on the southern side of the square. In spite of the cool, damp evening a little quartet was playing Ravel’s “Bolero” under a pink silk marquee set up in front of the restaurant. Dalton took a chair to one side of the marquee and waved to an alert waiter who quickly brought him a half bottle of vino bianco de la casa (the hell with port). He lit up another one of his cigarillos and sat back to listen.

  It was his view that there were few moments in a man’s life, and lately this included sex, that could equal an evening at Florian’s, listening to a spirited and skillful quartet play “Bolero,” and he dedicated his pleasure in it to the memory of Porter Naumann.

  “Bolero” came to its fiery conclusion, followed in its turn by “The Moonlight Sonata,” an étude of Liszt’s, and then one of Chopin’s piano sonatas. Through it all Dalton sat alone and watched the crowds swell and peak and dwindle away while the stars turned in the sky above the luminous walls of the square. As the time passed, so did much of his bitterness and anger.

  One of the many marvelous gifts of vino bianco was the perspective and detachment it could provide: Naumann was dead, a bad death, and something would have to be done about it. If Naumann had been killed, then whoever did it was going to die in a memorable and instructive way, because that was how their game was played. But Stallworth was right. Company business was inherently risky, and many of the field operatives suffered from acute stress. Although

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  most of the Agency’s field work was little more than skilled forensic accounting in the service of the War on Terror, some of the people doing it cracked in truly spectacular ways.

  It was in the nature of their game.

  But the curiosity remained, undimmed by the wine. Dalton was still possessed by an intense desire to know what exactly had happened to his friend in the last hours of his life, what unknown forces drove him to his terrible death in the courtyard of San Nicolò. At midnight an immense bronze bell sounded once, its deep vibrating tone echoing from the walls and rooftops all around the piazza. The violins ceased, the people stopped moving, and all the pale white faces turned toward the campanile like a field of flowers bending in a wind. The huge bronze bell began to ring the twelve tones of midnight, as it had for over six hundred years. The waiters started to pick up the chairs and collect their bills. The people in the square began to melt away into the alleyways and shadows as the great bell tolled and the echoes rang and reverberated across the rooftops of Venice. Soon the square was almost empty. The soft lights inside Florian’s flicked off one by one. Dalton got to his feet, gathered up his cigarillos, left a generous stack of euros, drained his glass, stretched, and walked, a little unsteadily, through the piazzetta, in and out of the shadows that lay all around the old Ducal Palace.

  He opened the old man’s pack of Toscanos, gently turned the slender brown tube with the gold tip between the thumb and index finger of his right hand for a few seconds. What the hell, he decided, lighting it up with his Zippo. He drew the smoke in deep, let it out in a luxurious cloud, snapped the lid shut, and shoved the pack it into the pocket of his trench coat.

  Wrapped in a blissful cloud of wine and smoke, Chopin playing sweetly in his memory, Dalton strolled idly along the covered cloister that ran down the Florian side of the piazza. The cigarillo was a perfect coda to an evening of such sublime beauty. He stopped for a

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  time, one shoulder up against a pillar, and looked out at the plaza, admiring the way the moonlight bathed the farther wall and how it played with the stonework and the shadows. He found himself seeing it as he had never seen it before. Above the three-tiered windowed wall the night sky pulsed with light and he felt himself drawn upward into it, as if he were suddenly weightless.

  He finished the cigarillo, stubbed the butt out on the pillar, and put it in his pocket. He turned, with regret, away from the perfection of the plaza at night, crossed over to the covered archways of the Palazzo Ducale, and walked in a strangely swelling sensory daze through its dark cloistered walkway, heading, perhaps a bit vaguely, in the general direction of his hotel.

  As he reached the turning of the cloister, he became aware of two large figures standing in the shadows. They stepped forward as he approached, blocking his path, two black shapes silhouetted against the amber lights on the churning water of Saint Mark’s Basin.

  “Scusi, marigold,” said one. “You have smokes?”

  The man’s accent was mainly gutter Croatian with a touch of Trieste in it. His partner, who was moving to block Dalton’s path to the open courtyard, said nothing, but he said it in a way that implied he was fully on board with the evening’s program. He had something long and sharp-looking in his right hand, which he was holding slightly away from his body. The bitter stink of strong Moroccan dope came off the men like heat from a radiator. Mugged, thought Dalton, suddenly earthbound and sobering fast.

  How embarrassing.

  Mugged like Patsy from Peoria, Stallworth would say.

  Dalton looked at the two men, both now moving to block him in, and deep inside his brain a scaled green thing turned over in the primeval muck of his subconscious and opened one slitted yellow eye. He backed deeper inside the covered archway and got his shoulders up against the damp stone walls. The two men stepped into a shaft

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  of moonlight under the Moorish arch. The silent one raised his long thin blade, turning it in the moon glow.

  “You speak English, marigold?” said the other. “Give us cigarettes. I smell them on you. Give.”

  In the moonlight coming over the big man’s shoulder Dalton could see the side of his face. Little beads of sweat glittered on an unshaven and sunken cheek. His eyes were two black holes and he had his right hand in the pocket of a puffy down jacket. Both men were wearing jeans and heavy boots. Shit-kicker boots, Stallworth would have called them. Jack liked those hard-boiled forties names.

  Dalton looked briefly to his left and saw piles of clothes and backpacks stacked up under the arch, and several shadowy figures slouching against the Doges’ walls. Tiny red sparks glowed in the darkness, and grass smoke rose up and curled in the shaft of moonlight, along with more of that tinny nasal whining that passes for pop music in the modern world.

  Dalton’s self-contained silence was either puzzling or irritating the two men in front of him. They still hadn’t quite decided what to do with him. Ordinarily he would have tried to talk his way out of something like this, because choosing the other method of dealing with this sort of thing always made his life more complicated, and he wasn’t in the mood for that.

  Actually, he was in an uncharacteristically peaceful place, and he liked being there. He liked being there so much that he found himself getting angry with these two assholes for breaking his mood. It had been a fine mood. And now, just like that, it was gone.

  “No,” said Dalton, his anger rising up. “I don’t speak English. And I don’t smoke. So how about you two just fuck right off ?”

  “Hey, Milan! Don’t let the faggot punk you out,” said a girl, her voice slurred and languorous. “Make him give us some cigarettes.”

  “You are faggot?” asked Milan, in a tone of polite inquiry.

 
; Dalton was wondering what to do with these two guys. They

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  weren’t kids, that was certain; Milan was perhaps in his mid-twenties. His partner was in the shadows but he looked big and solid enough to be a grown man. Dalton had a vision of the kind of lives these two were leading as clearly as if it were a film being shown on the inside of his skull: they stole, they beat people, they screwed the girls. They lived like hyenas. How many people had they terrified in just this way? How many young gay men had they kicked to a bloody ruin just for fun? These two were like stones—

  No, like turds. Huge hairy balls of steaming fresh dung, dropped by the careless frigate bird of fate into the sparkling pool of life, and whenever they hurt someone, the ripples of everlasting grief would run outward to infinity.

  Dalton, sighing, knew these men for what they were. This is what they did. They had done this all last year and for all the years before that. They would do this sort of thing next year, and the year after that. If Dalton let them.

  Stallworth’s voice replayed in his mind. No trouble, Micah.

  “Answer, boy,” said Milan, his temper flaring. “You are faggot?”

  “We prefer gay,” drawled Dalton. “This your toy boy?”

  Milan glanced at the other man and snorted.

  “Hey, Gavro. Queer boy here, I think he like you.”

  As far as Dalton could make it out, Gavro told Milan, in idiomatic Serbo-Croatian, to engage in reciprocal oral congress with a ruminant quadruped of the goat persuasion, by their standards such an Oscar Wildean quip that Milan put his head back to let out a braying hoot. Dalton took this opportunity to kick Milan solidly in the nuts in the approved manner, which requires you to visualize your upper arch—not the tip of your shoe (which hurts like hell, by the way) but the flat of the upper arch, the way dropkickers do, to visualize your foot passing completely through the recipient’s crotch to an imaginary point a foot above and beyond it. This follow-through method allows the full kinetic energy of the kicker’s blow

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  to be passed efficiently to the meatier parts of the kickee’s crotch, with truly gratifying—at least to the impartial observer—results.

  In this particular case Milan rose upward off the ground a couple of feet and balanced for a moment like an Olympic gymnast on Dal-ton’s outstretched leg while he emitted a kind of teakettle squeal through his clenched teeth before tumbling off Dalton’s foot and forming himself into the skewered-shrimp position that one traditionally assumes after one has been forcefully booted in the nuts.

  Gavro, unfazed, came in silent and fast with his knife in a sweeping throat-level sideways slash from left to right that would have opened up Dalton’s neck like the lid of a Pez dispenser if Dalton had not stepped inside the arc of the attack, catching Gavro’s knife arm with his left hand while using the butt of his right hand and the full force of his body from the toes up to deliver a sharp rising blow to Gavro’s upper lip and nose that, if executed properly, shatters the bone and cartilage of the nose with sufficient force to drive the whole detached mass of bone chips, splinters, and cartilage right through the nares and pharynx and deep into the brain. The blow is designed to be fatal, and Dalton meant it to be fatal.

  Gavro went reeling backward, his limp body hitting the Doge’s cobblestones like a burlap sack full of fresh guts. Dalton stepped lightly around Gavro’s limp body, stooping to pick up the weapon Gavro had been carrying, which turned out to be a very expensive Serbian switchblade with a wonderfully carved ivory hilt, which he slipped into the pocket of his trench coat. He walked over and stared down at Milan’s white sweating face and his wide blinking eyes gleaming in the moonlight, fully aware of the profound silence that was coming from the huddled masses under the cloister. He crouched down beside Milan and asked Milan in a kind of whispering purr what his favorite show tune was.

  Milan, distracted by some pressing internal issues, stared up at him. Dalton asked the question again, this time in his best Alan Rickman

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  drawl: “What’s your favorite show tune, Milan? We marigolds just

  love show tunes. Come on, bunnykins. Won’t you tell me yours?”

  “Fuck ...you... faggot.”

  “ ‘Fuck You, Faggot’? Don’t know it. Now I really like ‘People.’ You know, from Hello, Dolly ? Barbra sings it. It goes something like this.”

  Dalton straightened up, set himself.

  “People”—he slammed a vicious boot into Milan’s sagging belly— “People who need people.” With each people Milan got another brutal kick in the guts, Dalton moving around the man writhing on the ground like a dancer, singing the chorus aloud, puffing hard with each blow, “are the luckiest people in the world—”

  “Hey, man,” a slightly strangled male voice called from out of the darkened cloister. “Leave ’im alone, okay? He’s fuckin’ done!”

  Dalton stopped, looked down at Milan, who was curled up in a ball and chuffing like a cow about to calve. Tears were running down his cheeks and his mouth was full of blood.

  “Are you ‘fuckin’ done,’ Milan? Or do you have a comment?”

  Milan seemed to be struggling to find one of those Noe..l Coward lines that would bring the house down but in the end he had to settle for a throat-clearing gargle followed by an attempt to spit in Dal-ton’s face that ended up with a bloody gob of it running down his own cheek. Dalton waited for a polite interval to see if Milan had anything illuminating to add.

  “Okay,” he said, straightening up. “Let me get that for you.”

  Dalton gauged his angle and then kicked Milan very hard in the center of his face, getting a wonderful follow-through that snapped Milan’s head back on his neck with a meaty crack. Where it stuck, still and fixed, its skull-to-shoulder angle now slightly wrong. Something inside Milan came flowing out in a rushing gush.

  Dalton stepped daintily back, surveyed the scene with the air of a satisfied choreographer, and, turning to address the stunned kids in the cloister, bowed deeply:

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  “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear...”

  He paused, searching his memory for the line, and then, the Shakespearean spirit coming back in a sudden flow, he continued in a stronger voice that echoed around the piazza: “And so good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.”

  No response from the audience. Everybody’s a critic these days. He bowed again, straightened, pivoted neatly on his right heel, his long coat flaring out, and strode with quiet dignity, stage left, out of the piazzetta, his heels striking hard and his footsteps echoing around the square. Silence, nothing but silence, followed him all the way back to his hotel along the quay.

  Reaction set in fast and he was weaving and a little breathless and trying not to throw up by the time he reached the brassbound doors of his hotel. He stopped there, leaning against the entrance, his breath coming in short painful gasps. Beyond the edge of the quay the basin of Saint Mark was a black bowl marked here and there with a flickering sliver of light. Far across the bay, floodlights illuminated the impassive façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. From the eaves of the hotel next door a gargoyle with the face of a lizard stared down at him, cold and unblinking.

  AFTER HIS WORLD STOPPED spinning and he got his breathing under control, he pushed his way into the hotel lobby, raised a hand to the old bellman slumped behind the rosewood desk, and rode up in the narrow mirrored elevator to the top floor. He fumbled at the lock and eventually unlocked the door into what had been Naumann’s company suite, a lush and well-appointed room with a wide and inviting carved wooden bed, an antique desk with a Venetian candelabrum on it, and sliding glass doors that led out to a small balcony

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  overlooking the basin. The room had been cleaned and dressed, and Naumann’s luggage
was still there at the side of his bed. Dalton figured the maid had been in, because there were fresh flowers in a tall clay cylinder standing on the dresser, a towering viny tangle with several huge white flowers, all of them as tightly closed as butterfly cocoons.

  Dalton, for whom the land of plants was an undiscovered bourne, ignored them while he poured himself a glass of wine and passed on through to the balcony, where he pulled a wrought-iron stool up to the ledge and sat down on it with his back against the wall, looking out across the basin.

  He pulled the pack of cigarillos out of his pocket and, with a hand that trembled only a little, held the case up to the pale light of the balcony lantern. He flipped the lid and pulled out one of the few remaining cigarillos. It looked and felt and smelled in every way wonderful. He put it to his lips, lit it with his Zippo.

  The smoke poured down into his lungs and spread a comforting warmth through his body. He leaned on the flower basket—gardenias? lupins? rutabagas?—and looked down at the almost-deserted quay.

  A single white-robed figure was wandering past the equestrian statue of Garibaldi. Not a ghost; the mime he had teased earlier in the day, on his way home now, heading for the vaporetto station in front of the hotel. Dalton looked up and saw the stars of the Milky Way like a shell-pink veil waving in a sea breeze blowing in from an infinite black ocean. The city smelled of sea salt and garlic and sewage and damp stone: human corruption and the bittersweet joy of still being alive. It was a night that Porter would have savored: the superb little orchestra at Florian’s, the vino bianco, the cigarillos, but it was too damn late for all that and too damn bad. Porter Naumann was dead now and would never see another evening in Venice.

  He sighed, saw his glass was empty, and went back into the room to get some more wine, brushing past the floral display on the dresser;

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  he was a little disconcerted when he saw that the large white flowers were now in the process of spreading their petals wide open.