by David Stone
“So he did die of a heart attack? After all?”
“Yes. I hope this puts your mind at ease.”
“What about the . . . the damage he did? To himself ?”
Brancati sighed. In his mind Dalton could see him shrugging.
“We can never know. In his last moments he was in a terrible place and his death was horrible. I wish never to die as he did. But
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we may at least say that he did not commit suicide. This death was not a murder either. So there we have it. Natural causes. A tragedy, but sadly, also a part of life. You will come to Cortona? We can release the body to you.”
Dalton picked up the flask and unscrewed the lid, but he did not drink. He sat there thinking about the man in black and his emerald-green spider and what Naumann had said—about Laura.
But none of that was real.
It was all a nightmare, born of too much booze. And of course the side effects of a bite from some sort of poisonous spider. Maybe even from the soul sickness that comes on you after you’ve let your red dog run and serious damage has been done because of it.
But it was over now.
This was another day. The spider hadn’t killed him. The ghost of Porter Naumann had not appeared in his room. When he thought it over in the cold light of day, everything that Naumann’s ghost had told him was something he either already knew or already suspected. And that would certainly include the warning about Laura.
Except the bit about Gavro’s vengeful family. And even that could have come up from somewhere deep in his own guilty mind.
“Yes,” he said, watching the afternoon sunlight play on the tall tangled vines of the moonflower plant, its large blue-white flowers closed tight again, huge white cocoons that seemed to glow with a ghostly interior fire. “I’ll be in Cortona tonight.”
IT TOOK DALTON two hours to clean up the suite: the bathroom looked as if he’d staged a cockfight in it, and the Italian linen bedspread was a total loss. He took some more time to clean himself up well enough that when he walked out the door he wouldn’t frighten the horses.
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He put the ominous little cigarillo pack, still bound up with several elastics, into the breast pocket of his dress shirt. Everything else, the ivory-handled switchblade he’d taken from Gavro, the silver flask, the bloody towels, and his Beretta, went into his briefcase. He closed the lid and locked it with superstitious care. Naumann’s bags—including everything Dalton had been wearing the day before, which, in view of Brancati’s deeply implausible insouciance about the Milan and Gavro affair, were better out of the forensic reach of the local authorities—were standing by the door, tagged for Dalton’s London address and due to be FedEx’d by the hotel bellman later this afternoon.
His own luggage consisted of his briefcase and one battered alligator-skin suitcase. He did one last walk-through of the company suite, including the balcony, looking for any remaining sign of the previous night’s excesses. Other than the bloody bedspread, in reparation for which he peeled off another three hundred euros and dropped them in a soap dish beside the daily twenty-euro tip for the maid, the room looked pretty much as it should.
He stood in the middle of the living room and spent a moment thinking about last night’s dream and what Naumann’s ghost had said about Laura. In his mind’s eye he saw Laura sitting on a blue wooden chair in a white room bathed in golden light. She was wearing a pastel pink dress belted at the waist. Barefoot, her short red hair carefully combed, her pale face scrubbed, without makeup, she stared fixedly into emptiness. Cradled in her upturned hands was a small rounded form wrapped in an emerald green blanket. Overhead a ceiling fan with huge palm fronds for blades whisked through the salt-scented air and a sea wind stirred the white linen curtains.
He held the image for as long as he could and then shut it down and locked it away in an iron cage at the back of his skull. There was nothing he could do for Laura. She had left him long ago, had trav
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eled as far away from him as it was possible to go. He picked up his luggage and his briefcase and turned his back on the room and on everything that had happened in it last night.
On his way out he stopped in front of the long mirror by the door and examined himself—navy pinstripe over a crisp white shirt, a pale gold silk tie knotted over a gold collar pin, a long blue cashmere coat and shiny black wingtips. Black leather gloves to hide the wound on the back of his left hand. Shaved, scented, combed, and pressed. He looked like death. He slipped on a pair of tortoiseshell gold-trimmed sunglasses and considered his reflection. A verse ran through his mind, an old Dorothy Parker rhyme:
Life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
His bags were in check and he was ready for a five o’clock water taxi ride to the Piazzale Roma, where his rented Alfa waited for him. Dalton stepped a tad warily out the doors of the Savoia & Jolanda and into the pale afternoon sun, expecting a shriek of recognition from a chorus of traumatized backpackers. No one even looked his way.
It was business as usual for the quay of the slaves, and he saw the same black-haired mystical-thighed tour guide striding past, this time trailing a litter of Chinese tourists slated for today’s Ordeal by Pigeon over in the piazza. He flipped his collar up, straightened his sunglasses, turned hard left, and headed briskly away from the San Marco, on his way to Ristorante Carovita.
To satisfy his curiosity.
Nothing more.
A little side trip to look into the small matter of an emerald green
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spider, perhaps to discuss the events of the night with the spider’s careless owner. Maybe even to return the spider. Then on to Cortona to pick up the threads of what had been beginning to feel like his former life for a while there last night.
The café was open when he got there, with a few tourists and regulars sitting out under the awning and a damp salt wind blowing in from the distant palm-fringed line of the Lido beaches. The doe-eyed girl was nowhere around. Seated behind the counter inside, barricaded behind a heap of linen napkins waiting to be folded, was a parrot-faced old crone with evil black eyes, her fingers and hands bent and twisted into talons. She glanced up from her work as he came into the café and a look passed swiftly across her face, an unmistakable flicker of wary recognition. She looked like a sable basilisk and he was for a time torn between using his boyish charm, of which he had far less than he imagined, or calling in an exorcist.
Dalton opted for charm.
“Buongiorno, zia! Come sta?”
“I speak English.”
“What a happy coincidence, my dear lady. So do I.”
This brought a noncommittal grunt and she went back to her folding. Dalton looked at the thin greasy gray hair plastered across her skull for a while and decided that boyish charm was not this old bat’s weak point. He looked around the café and saw that all of to-day’s business was out under the awning. They were more or less alone. He leaned forward, placing his hands on her laundry. She stopped folding and looked up at him, her flat black eyes cold.
“Zia, I am looking for a customer who comes here.”
She said nothing but now a light was in her eyes, an acquisitive glitter rather like a gold coin in a shallow pond of black water. Dalton pulled out his wallet and extracted a sheaf of euros. She focused on them for a moment and then looked up at him again, her face closing like a fist.
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“Who do you want?”
“He’s an older man, very big, very strong. He has long silver-gray hair—down to here,” said Dalton, touching his left shoulder. “He wears a black coat like a cape and the long boots of an American cowboy—”
Her hard eyes narrowed at this. Dalton searched for the Italian.
“Come vaccaro. Capi
sce?”
“Pellerossa,” she said, her voice harsh and rustling in her throat like dead leaves in a gutter. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Mr. Pellerossa. Do you know where he lives?”
Her black eyes flickered to the entrance and followed a young woman who looked as though she could be the doe-eyed girl’s sister as she walked through the café toward the kitchen. When she was gone the old woman’s eyes moved back to Dalton and stayed there, as full of low cunning and evil intentions as the eyes of a gull.
“His name is not Pellerossa. Pellerossa is what he is. Why do you want him?”
“I have something of his. I wish to return it.”
“Is it money? You can leave it here. He will come back.”
“When?”
A shrug, her leathery neck contracting, her tendons bulging out.
“I do not know. Soon.”
“I have to leave. I wish to see him before I go.”
Her eyes settled on the euros in Dalton’s gloved hand. Rested there. Dalton stripped off two twenties. She did not look up but the signal was clear. He peeled off two more. The fifth one did the trick. She showed him her tooth—a fine sharp tooth and it would have looked even more fetching if it had not been all alone in her blood-red gums. Her tongue moved inside her open mouth, a blind white snake-head. She held her hand out, and Dalton placed the euros in her upturned palm. Her fingers folded over the crisp new bills like
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the valves of a Venus flytrap, and with a papery crackle the money disappeared. She stuffed it into the innards of her black dress and looked up at him again.
“How do you know him?”
“I don’t.”
This answer amused her. She bared her tooth at him again and touched it with her white snakelike tongue. Dalton had the idea she was tasting his scent. It was an unsettling concept.
“He is not Italian. He is from America. This is between you.”
“Thanks for the advice. Do you know where he is now?”
She reached under the counter and pulled out a large cloth-bound book. It was the Missa Solemnis, tattered and ancient, with the leaves falling out. She laid it down on the folded napkins and opened it up.
Her talonlike finger moved down the open page until she reached a passage. She turned the book around so that Dalton could read it, keeping her blackened nail on the spot. It was the ordinary for the Giorno dei Morti, the Feast of all Souls.
She tapped it twice, staring up at him. Dalton looked at it for a while, trying to understand. She seemed unwilling to speak the words. Finally she sighed and frowned at him and then she spoke in an impatient whisper.
“In the Dorsoduro. Near this church. In the Calle dei Morti. Numero quindici. Number fifteen.”
She pulled the book away, closed it slowly, and went back to her folding. The thing was done, her manner said.
Dalton was almost at the door when he heard her calling to him. He turned around. She raised a clawed hand and tapped the side of her skull with a blackened nail.
“Il Pellerossa. Ha dei grilli per il capo. Capisce? Guardatevi dal vecchio, scolaro.”
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Dalton understood some of it. She was telling him to be... careful? Gentle? To be gentle with the old man? And she was calling Dalton scolaro, a schoolboy. The rest was gibberish to him.
He bowed his thanks to her and walked back out into the sunlight. He was halfway through the Campo San Stefano and headed for the bridge over the Grand Canal that led into the residential district of the Dorsoduro when he finally worked out the translation of grilli per il capo. She was telling him that the old man named Pellerossa had maggots in his head. And guardatevi dal vecchio didn’t mean be gentle with guy. It meant beware of him.
THE DORSODURO NEIGHBORHOOD was a warren of narrow lanes and back alleys on the far side of the Grand Canal. The workers and waiters and laborers and gondoliers, the people who kept the Grand Guignol theatrics of Venezia up and running for the tourists, lived down here in this maze of ancient stone alleys, along with the students and backpackers and eco-vagrants who could not afford the grand hotels along the canal or the villas behind San Marco.
The Calle dei Morti was at the far eastern end of the Dorsoduro. It was a tiny medieval laneway off the broad boardwalk. The waterway was used by freighters and cruise ships that docked along the Giudecca across the bay. The boardwalk was essentially deserted. The temperature had dropped in the hour it had taken Dalton to reach the turning of the alleyway, and a wind with a knife edge to it was blowing scraps of paper up the lane as he walked slowly along the street, looking for number fifteen.
He found it at the corner, where the calle turned into a wider canyonlike lane. He stopped in front of a battered ironbound wooden door set deep into a stucco-covered three-story house no wider than ten feet. Three narrow slitted windows with rusted iron bars rose upward above the door, one above the other. The eaves hung over
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the street, supported by old hand-hewn beams. In the middle of the door was a heavy lion’s-head knocker.
Dalton lifted it up and struck the wooden door twice. On the second blow the door popped open about an inch. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open slowly, revealing a narrow flight of worn stone stairs rising into a gloomy darkness. Motes of dust floated in the cold sunlight. There was a scent in the air.
Something familiar. Cigarillos. Toscanos.
Not fresh, but present, drifting in the dead air like a miasma. Under the tobacco scent was the smell of unwashed clothes and dried sweat. Dalton leaned in to look up the stairwell. Beyond it there was only shadow.
Inside the door there was a dented bronze mailbox with three compartments. Two of them had names scrawled in pencil on scraps of paper: Alessandra Vasari had Numero Zero, and someone named Domenico Zitti had Numero Due.
The third compartment, Numero Tre, had no name card at all.
Dalton looked through the bronze grillwork and saw a thick sheaf of letters for Alessandra Vasari, many of them with American stamps. It appeared that no one was writing to the entity known as Domenico Zitti, at least not this week.
The third one, the unmarked one, was empty as well.
He gave up on the mail and went slowly up the narrow stairs, painfully aware of what a vulnerable position he was in as he climbed them, trapped by the pressing stone walls on either side, nowhere to go if somebody appeared at the top of the stairs with ugly intentions.
He reached the landing and saw that the stairs made a one-eighty-degree turn and continued to the second floor. There was light at the top of the second landing, a narrow bar of pale sunlight coming through the first of the slit windows. On this landing there was no light, only a hallway that ran about fifteen feet, ending in blackness.
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He felt along the edge of the wall and found an old light switch. He twisted it and a dim glow appeared at the far end of the hall, coming from a light fixture set into the wall by the door to what Dalton assumed was Appartamento Tre. The floorboards creaked as he came down the hall, and the scent of Toscano cigarillos grew stronger. For reasons he could neither explain nor overcome, the skin on his belly and across his back tightened as he got to the door.
Standing in front of the heavy nail-studded barrier, he listened for a while. Although the door was thick and well set into a stone jamb, some sort of sound was coming through the planks. He put an ear up against the wood. It smelled of old paint and turpentine and cedar. What was coming through the thick planks was a low droning. No, a low muttering sound, rhythmic and oddly musical, but not quite music.
It was a sound that suggested speech, a kind of language, in that it had intonations and pauses, callings and responses, almost like a prayer or a chant.
But it was neither a voice nor an instrument; it was a sound unlike anything Dalton had ever heard. He stepped back, breaking contact with the door, put a hand up on the wood, and felt the beat of
the sound like a muffled drum.
Maggots, the old lady said.
The man had maggots in his head.
He made a fist of his hand and pounded on the door four times, hard enough to shake dust out of the frame around the door. It silted down like fine sand and drifted in the glow of the pale light on the wall. Nothing. He pounded again, harder, leaving his fist on the door at the end of the last stroke. While he was standing there he remembered what Brancati had told him, about other guests in the Strega hostel and the strange moaning they had heard coming from Naumann’s room. Was this the same sound? Dalton gave the latch a wrenching turn. The door was locked tight.
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He pounded on the door again, his anger rising up. “Open the door! It’s the police. Open up the door!”
Nothing.
He put his ear against the door and the sound came vibrating through the wooden planks. He jerked his head away, feeling suddenly dizzy and slightly nauseous, as if the floor had begun to rise up under his feet.
“Excuse me. Can I help you?”
He wheeled around, his balance a little off, and steadied himself on the wall. A woman was standing at the far end of the hallway, surrounded by a pale glow, her face in darkness but a shining aura of light in her hair.
“No, I’m sorry. I’m—”
“Are you the police? I heard you calling.”
Dalton gathered himself together and came down the narrow hallway toward the woman, pasting a cardboard smile on his face.
“Not exactly. I’m with the American consulate.”
“I heard you say you were police.”
There was intelligence in her voice, and suspicion. Her accent was aristocratic Roman, her diction precise and careful.
“Yes. I did say that. I’m in a semiofficial position. I guess saying ‘police’ helps with the language barrier. I’m more of an investigator.”
He reached the end of the hall and the woman backed away into the light flowing up the stairwell from the street door he had left open. She was tall, almost as tall as he, with long black hair in a severe cut, prominent cheekbones, and full scarlet lips. She was wearing a pale green cashmere top under a matching long-sleeved cardigan. Short black leather skirt; fine long, well-turned legs; and expensive Italian shoes, the stiletto type, in no way intended for walking.