The Florentine Exchange

by Dayle A Dermatis

  She made a miniscule gesture with her glass. “I believe cats to be spirits come to earth.”

  “A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through,” he said, finishing the Jules Verne quote and thus confirming himself as her contact.

  He was a tall black man, handsome despite the acne scars pitting his cheeks. Or perhaps because of; they gave his face character.

  They both spoke Italian, but his had the slightest of French accents beneath.

  “You’re not who I expected,” he said. His expression didn’t change, but she heard the thread of suspicion in his voice.

  Shit. Antonia should have let her handler know Libby would be making the exchange, allowing the information to pass through the appropriate channels.

  Maybe there hadn’t been time.

  Then again, the second flash drive put Antonia under suspicion in a major way.

  Libby had to decide what to do, and fast.

  Antonia had the taxi driver drop her off a block and a half away from Casa Martelli. She would have done that in any instance, to disguise her true destination and to give her time to see if she’d been followed. But Casa Martelli was sandwiched in between shops, the entire block of buildings snugging up against each other as if expecting a siege. The only way to the back door was through narrow alleys twisting between those buildings, accessible one street over.

  The air cooled a few degrees in the high-walled alleys where the slanted rays of the sun didn’t reach. Pigeons cooed in the recesses in the bricks high above as the street noise faded the deeper she went.

  Antonia knocked at the back door of Casa Martelli. She had to wait several minutes before someone answered, a harried-looking man who opened the door with an exasperated “What?” in Italian.

  Well, dammit. She’d gotten the white button-down and black skirt right, but the waitstaff uniforms for this function apparently also included red vests.

  If you were dressed similarly enough, were pretty (or handsome) without being overly so, and had a tray of drinks or delectable-looking morsels, nobody noticed you weren’t in the exact uniform of the rest of the waitstaff.

  Now, she could either stay with her initial plan of sweet-talking her way in, claiming to be a member of the staff who had gotten lost (and forgotten her vest), or she could go with Plan B.

  She’d stick out like a sore thumb without the vest. Plan B it was.

  She spoke softly, indicating her throat as if to imply she had laryngitis, and used a mix of broken Italian and English.

  The waiter leaned close to hear her.

  She jammed the syringe into his neck.

  His eyes widened and he gave a short bark of surprise, but thankfully nobody heard. The drug didn’t knock him out immediately, but made him both woozy and pliable as it entered his bloodstream. Antonia was able to support him, stumbling, around the corner of the alley, where he finally collapsed. Good. Another member of the waitstaff stepping outside for a cigarette wouldn’t see him.

  He wouldn’t come to until she was well gone, and he’d have a spot of amnesia covering a few hours before his attack.

  It took a few moments to roll him this way and that so she could strip the vest off him. It was far too big for her, but she grabbed a few safety pins from her tote and nipped in the seams, which helped.

  She pulled a plastic trash bag from her tote and stuffed the tote into it, setting the bag in the small pile of trash already by the back door. She’d do what she needed to do and be back before anyone cleared away the garbage.

  Then she slipped inside, grabbed a tray of bacon-wrapped figs, and popped one in her mouth. The bacon had been soaked in maple syrup, and the taste was incredible.

  Tray in hand, she entered the cocktail party.

  Libby tapped the gold-and-pearl pin at her shoulder, activating the sound cancelling that would pick the ambient music—a string quartet in the next room—rather than their conversation.

  “I think my partner has been compromised,” she said to her contact. “She sent me here in her place. Check the information on the drive carefully. She tried to replace it, but I found what I believe is the original, which I’m giving to you.”

  “Why don’t you give me both?” he asked.

  Fair question. “I need proof about what she’s done.”

  He nodded slowly, and reached into his pocket, presumably to retrieve the drive he’d exchange for hers.

  She’d turned from the frescoed wall once he’d arrived, keeping a casual eye on the room. She saw Antonia, dressed as waitstaff in an ill-fitting red vest, a black wig not disguise enough. She froze.

  “She’s here,” she murmured. “I have to go. We’ll reschedule the drop. I'm sorry.”

  He was already scanning the crowd, but Libby was gone, ducking left and then right through the partygoers, losing herself in the small crowd. It wasn’t easy at her height, but most people had imbibed at least one drink, and she’d learned how to hunch, to make herself less obvious.

  Her heart pounded in her throat. Antonia must have discovered the missing thumb drive faster than Libby had expected.

  If Antonia wanted that drive, she’d stop at nothing to get it. Libby was sure of that. Antonia might be a casual slob, might take her duties lightly, but she had an undercurrent of steeliness that she’d tried to hide from Libby.

  Unbeknownst to Antonia, she’d failed at that.

  Libby threw her ticket at the coat check attendant and forced herself not to grab her own bag, but let the attendant hand it to her. She had to not be too obvious, too memorable. That meant people would pay attention. Remember her.

  She ducked into the ladies room, locked the door, and yanked things out of her shopping bag.

  A few moments later, she exited the back door—the waitstaff were too busy to notice her, even as unassuming as she was.

  Her shapeless black dress was padded so she looked heavier, and she hunched her shoulders. She’d changed her shoes to black, soft-soled laceups, one of which had a pebble in it to throw her gait off, make her limp slightly. Half of her hair was shoved under a big straw hat that obscured her face; the other half straggled down, giving the impression that her hair was thinner than it was.

  The rest of her belongings, including the high-end shopping bag, were stuff in a generic woven-string market bag.

  All of it told the casual eye: I’m old. I’m nobody. I’m an average, unassuming Italian matriarch headed home to make dinner.

  It was only a ten-minute walk to the Arno River, but she took a good forty minutes, wandering down alleys and side streets, alert to any sign of a tail.

  Libby was good—Antonia would give her that much. It didn’t surprise Antonia; Libby surely would have taken her training seriously, focused on doing everything right.

  Unfortunately for Libby, Antonia had put a tracking software on her phone ages ago. If Libby ever found it, Antonia would have said it was a test to see how fast Libby found it. She hadn’t thus far.

  So as soon as Antonia figured out where Libby was going, she abandoned trying to track her through the streets and doubled back.

  She knew how to get there first.

  Libby was stepping onto Ponte Vecchio, one of the most famous bridges in the world.

  Dating back to the Middle Ages, the stone bridge over the Arno River was lined with shops along each side. Originally butcher shops, they now housed primarily jewelry shops catering to the tourists.

  Tourists who were still crowding the bridge on this balmy summer evening, taking advantage of the later shopping hours. Now that the sun had set, the air had cooled, soft on Antonia’s face.

  Libby would have to fight her way through that throng…but there was another way across the Ponte Vecchio.

  In the sixteenth century, Cosimo de Medici had ordered built an enclosed corridor along the top of the shops to ease his passage between his palace and the town hall. About ten years ago, the Vasari Corridor had been opened for public tours. Then, last year, it had been close
d again for maintenance.

  Antonia knew where the entrance was on this side of the river.

  Either Libby intended to lose herself in the crowd—in which case Antonia would be waiting for her on the other side—or Libby knew of another entrance to the corridor—in which case Antonia would meet her inside.

  And if Libby doubled back, the tracking software would let Antonia know. She could be at either end before Libby.

  Then she could get the damn thumb drive back, hopefully the drive from their contact as well, and be on her way to her money and freedom.

  She wasn’t going to let by-the-rules Libby ruin everything for her.

  Libby cut her way through the crowd, occasionally murmuring, “Scusami. Scusami, grazie.” People paid her little mind, barely glanced at her. Her hip hurt, thanks to the pebble that made her limp. She was dearly looking forward to fixing that problem.

  It was no doubt the least of her problems.

  But she was close to her goal, and she hadn’t spotted a tail. She hunched a little shorter, continuing to make her height less conspicuous and give the impression of age. Her soft-soled shoes made no sound on the stone bridge, not that footsteps would be audible above the sounds of chattering tourists.

  About a quarter of the way down, she ducked into a shop between the glass cases that bordered the door. She nodded at the shop clerk, and asked, in Italian, for Mondavian gold.

  Something that didn’t exist.

  The man nodded in recognition and drew her to the back of the shop as if to show her what she sought. Once the shop was empty, she slipped through the door into the back storage area.

  Then it was a simple matter of sliding a shelving unit sideways, unlocking the door behind it, sliding the shelf back after she’d entered the tiny room, and squeezing into a corner so she could swing the door back shut and lock it again.

  She’d paid the shopkeepers handsomely for this, after poring over schematics of the Ponte Vecchio and the Vasari Corridor—private schematics she’d also paid handsomely for the privilege of viewing.

  The room she was now in was little more than a wide square chimney with ancient iron hand- and footholds affixed into the stone, leading up. The only light was from a tiny bit that bled around the door from the shop’s storage room, but Libby had done this once with a flashlight in her teeth, and didn’t need more practice than that.

  She climbed the ladder, counting the rungs to know when she’d reached the top. Then, she unlocked the door there and entered a storage closet, and from there stepped into the Vasari Corridor.

  The floor was brick-red tiles in a herringbone pattern; the walls were pale cream. No paintings hung on the walls now, as they did when the passageway was open for tours. The evenly spaced windows high on the outer wall didn’t provide light now at night, but a series of pale emergency lights along the wall near the floor, each about a foot long with a molded opaque white cover, gave a little illumination.

  Just enough to see the hulking outlines of the scaffolding, the piles of materials, the locked toolboxes.

  Antonia had impressed upon her the importance of stashing a go-bag somewhere in the city, in case she had to leave quickly but couldn’t get back to the apartment. The train station lockers made sense, because it made it easy to leave by public transportation. Antonia probably had a bag stashed there, too.

  Libby seriously doubted Antonia knew she had this one.

  She popped open the front casing one of the small modern light fixtures near the floor and used the folds of her skirt to protect her fingers as she removed the hot bulb. Then she carefully unscrewed the fixture, and reached behind to find the small canvas bag she’d left there.

  Passport, money, a burner phone. The bare essentials for an escape, in case she was compromised and in danger, and the American Embassy wasn’t an option.

  She shoved it into her string bag, then removed her shoe and shook out the offending pebble. She didn’t bother to replace the light. So what if someone came across it tomorrow? She’d be long gone.

  She leaned against the wall. She’d wait a bit, just to make sure no one had followed her onto the Ponte Vecchio below.

  Then she heard a noise down the corridor. A metallic hum, as if someone had brushed against scaffolding, then stopped the vibration with their hand on the piping.

  Not breathing, Libby slowly, silently reached for her gun, and hid it in the folds of her skirt.

  Antonia—or someone—had found her after all.

  Antonia crept forward, barefoot, her shoes in her tote. The bare, enclosed corridor would amplify footsteps. She’d barely brushed against the scaffolding, and caught it a moment after it hummed, but she still cursed herself, cursed her eyes that hadn’t fully adjusted to the dim emergency lights.

  Couldn’t be helped now.

  She was rushing too much. Picking the lock without being seen had taken longer than she’d expected. The noises she’d heard up ahead must be Libby.

  She was so over this. Over Florence, over Libby, over the job.

  That was no reason to get sloppy, though.

  So she changed her tactic and walked up to Libby as if she owned the damn place.

  “What are you doing hiding in here, Libby?” she asked. “This isn’t part of the drop.”

  Libby was on her feet, standing next to the net shopping bag she’d been carrying. Her hand was half-hidden in the folds of her skirt. Probably concealing her gun.

  She wouldn’t shoot unless she had to, though. Libby’s training was solid, and she followed rules. Antonia could use that to her advantage, if it came to it.

  “I ended up with two thumb drives,” Libby said. “That was weird, so I knew something was up. I thought it would be safer to lie low and monitor the situation.”

  Antonia mentally rolled her eyes. “You panicked. And your disguise wasn’t nearly good enough: I picked you out right away.”

  “So why’d it take you so long to get to me?” Libby asked.

  “I was monitoring you,” Antonia said. “This was a test.”

  Libby shook her head. “If this was a test, then call HQ and have them confirm it.”

  Well, it had been worth a try.

  “Just give me the thumb drive, Libby.”

  “I don’t have it,” Libby said. “I made the exchange.”

  “Then give me the drive you received.”

  “I don’t have it on me.”

  “Then take me to it,” Antonia said. “Just give me one of the drives—one of the real drives—and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “You haven’t been following me around Florence just to get the drive and let me go,” Libby said.

  “Okay, then,” Antonia said amiably, because she’d long guessed it was going to come to this. “Then I’ll shoot you and take the drive.”

  She saw Libby’s hand move in the folds of her skirt.

  Two painfully loud reports, almost simultaneous, slammed through the corridor.

  Libby’s ears rang, aching from the gunshot. But she was alive, somehow. She’d brought her gun out, but Antonia had been faster….

  Now, as Antonia spun and crumpled to the ground, crimson blossoming on the front of her white button-down blouse, Libby stared in shock at the tall black man who’d come up behind Antonia. Her contact from the cocktail party.

  “How did you…?” She automatically spoke in Italian.

  He shrugged as he stepped forward, sliding his gun under his jacket. “When I saw your partner leave after you, I followed her. She didn’t expect a tail, so she never noticed. Sloppy.”

  Libby’s cheek stung. She touched it, and in the dim light saw plaster dust and a smear of blood. Antonia’s shot had just missed Libby’s head, ricocheting off the plaster wall. Some of the plaster must have grazed her.

  “But why?” Libby asked the man, her mind spinning through possible scenarios. Her heart was slowing to normal, thanks to her training.

  “You said she might be compromised, and I was concerned for you
r safety. I don’t leave fellow agents behind.”

  Libby knelt beside Antonia’s body. Antonia’s gun had fallen next to her hand, half under her lifeless form. She leaned closer, peering at her. “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What?” the other agent asked, squatting down on the other side of the body.

  Libby shot him in the head with Antonia’s gun.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, only half-meaning it. His damn gallantry had ruined everything. He’d expect her to come with him, sort things out together, be her backup when she gave her report—and she didn’t have time for any of that. Her cover was blown here, and he was the only witness. She had to get away before anyone else in the American agency came looking for her or Antonia.

  Libby eased the gun, which she’d held in the fabric of her skirt to avoid leaving prints, into Antonia’s hand. Let them sort out who’d killed who, the hows and the whys of it.

  As for Antonia… Libby sniffed as she checked the woman’s pockets for anything useful—or incriminating. Antonia wasn’t much better than a child playing at spycraft. She’d fallen so easily for Libby’s ruses: the pretense of following rules, the neatness, the good humor.

  Of course, they all had. She’d found it amusing to go through all the training a second time in a new country, passing herself off as an American, never quite doing things perfectly so she didn’t stand out, didn’t look suspicious. Learning a few secrets along the way.

  Her assignment had been to stay deeply imbedded in the American system, but this incident changed things.

  It was time to go home.

  Elizaveta Papanova was going home, out of the sticky humidity and back to the crisp, chill air of her beloved Russia….

  At least until her next assignment.

  About the Author

  Dayle A. Dermatis is the author or coauthor of many novels (including snarky urban fantasy Ghosted) and more than a hundred short stories in multiple genres appearing in such venues as Fiction River, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and DAW Books.