by Tom Savage
“We must leave you here,” Mario told her. “My daughter has just gone into labor, and they have taken her to the hospital. I must take this one there to be with her.” He indicated Paolo, who was still barking into the phone in Italian. “She is not having an easy time, my Lili, so we should be there with her. I’m sorry we must run off like this, but—”
“Yes, of course,” Nora said. “Go. Call us and let us know how she’s doing. We’ll be at the pensione until tomorrow morning.”
“But then you leave for New York, so this is farewell. I want to say how much I’ve enjoyed this job. Paolo enjoyed it too, but he is in no position to tell you that at the moment. He is talking to my wife and his mother; they are with Lili in the hospital.” He quickly shook hands with Patch, Frances, and Nora. “Let us know how it turns out with Ms. Rostova, and please find us whenever you are in Venice. Arrivederci e buona fortuna!” He took his son-in-law by the arm and led him away.
“Addio! Thank you for everything,” Nora called after them, and Mario waved. Nora watched them go, sad that their departure had been so abrupt and hoping the best for Paolo and Lili.
“And then there were three,” she said, turning to her American companions. “Let’s go—this snow is only going to get worse, I think. Do you suppose Pia would mind if we raided her refrigerator?”
“If there’s any of that fettuccine left over from dinner, I’ll risk it,” Patch said, and they laughed. They crossed the square and set off toward the pensione. The snow made the freezing temperature even worse, and they walked at a fast pace. The alleys they passed were empty; all of Venice was staying indoors tonight, and Nora didn’t blame them. An eerie silence surrounded them as they walked, so the sudden noises behind them were immediately apparent to her. Nora heard the hollow, wet, electronic echo of footsteps when they turned into Calle Frezzeria, the avenue before Calle Vallaresso and the little side vialetto of the pensione. They’d be there soon. Still…
She turned to look back the way they’d come, but the sounds abruptly stopped. The calle behind them was empty, as far as she could see in the swirling snow and the dim light from the streetlamps. She faced forward and continued, and she heard the sounds again. Patch and Frances flanked her, but a glance at their faces told her they hadn’t noticed it.
Or so she thought. After a few more steps, Patch leaned toward her and whispered, “Someone’s following us.”
“I know,” Nora whispered.
“A tall, wide-shouldered woman,” Frances supplied. “Fur hat, dark wool coat, jeans, boots, about thirty feet behind us. She ducked into a doorway when you turned around just now.”
Nora and Patch stared over at Frances as they walked. Nora was about to ask her if she was clairvoyant when she saw the little compact mirror in her gloved hand. Frances had managed to slip the compact out of her purse without the others noticing. Now she discreetly held it up between her body and Nora’s and glanced at it.
“She’s still there, hugging the walls at the side of the alley. I can barely see her in the shadows.” She dropped the mirror back in her purse.
They continued on their way, never breaking stride. As they entered Calle Vallaresso, Nora was still trying to figure out what to do. Patch saved her further trouble.
“You two play along with me,” he whispered, “then start walking again, okay?”
Both women nodded, but Nora wondered what he had in mind. They walked a few more yards, and the echo continued behind them. When they reached a particularly dark space between streetlamps near a side alley, Patch halted them.
“Well, I’m off, ladies,” he fairly shouted in the quiet alley. “I promised Paolo and Mario I’d buy the first round, so don’t wait up for me. Catch ya later!” He leaned over and pecked Nora’s cheek, then peeled away and sauntered off down the side alley.
“Good night!” they called after him. Nora took Frances’s arm, and the two women continued walking south. Okay, Nora thought, what now? Distraction, of course. Keep the woman’s attention on them. She squeezed Frances’s arm.
“I love The Seagull, don’t you?” Nora announced in her loudest stage voice. “And it’s so great to see it in Russian!”
“Absolutely!” Frances bellowed. “It’s like I was seeing it for the first time! Those Russian actors are just wonderful, and they sure know how to—”
She was cut off by a woman’s shrill cry from behind them. The two women whirled around, peering through the snowflakes. Nora could barely see in the gloom, but there were definitely two large figures back there, engaged in a violent wrestling match. She heard the sound of a blow, followed by another cry of pain, and one of the two figures crumpled to the pavement. Nora was already running up the alley toward the action, and Frances was right beside her, reaching into her purse again as she ran and pulling out what sounded like a jangling ring of keys. Keys? Nora thought. What the hell does she expect to do with—
They nearly collided with Patch, who stood over the other figure with a gun in his hand, staring down. It was the woman from this very calle yesterday afternoon, the Amazon who’d chased Nora through the mask shop into Piazza San Marco. She was on her knees, her fur hat on the ground beside her, moaning and rubbing the side of her neck with her gloved hand.
“She pulled this on me when I came up behind her,” Patch said, holding out the weapon. “I guess I chopped her.”
“I guess you did.” Nora took the gun from him. It was a .38 semiautomatic pistol similar to the one she’d once used in Blue City, a long-ago TV cop show in which she’d played a bank robber. More recently, in England and France, she’d handled a weapon very much like it. Her husband’s Beretta, the one she’d practiced with at the target range, was similar as well. She ejected the chambered round, then detached the magazine and showed it to Patch. “Check her pockets; she’ll have a spare one of these somewhere.”
Patch frisked the moaning woman, pulling a second clip from her coat. “Cool! How did you know that?”
“I’ll give you three guesses. How badly did you hurt her? Can she talk?” She leaned down to the woman. “Do you speak English?”
The Amazon replied by snarling, reaching up her left hand to grab Nora’s hair, and rearing back with her right arm to deliver a knockout punch to Nora’s face. The blow never arrived. Nora felt a wrenching pain as her hair was yanked, then she heard a soft hiss. The woman shrieked and let go of Nora, covering her face with her hands and falling flat on the ground. Patch grabbed Nora from behind, pulling her away from the writhing figure.
Frances was leaning over the woman, her right arm extended, the key ring clutched in her fist, her left hand shielding her face. Nora got a whiff of something pungent and began to cough. Frances stepped back, holding the key ring up for Nora to see. In lieu of an ornament, a small plastic aerosol canister dangled from the chain.
“I never thought I’d have to use this on a woman,” she said.
Nora stared. “How in the world did you get that past airport security?”
“They didn’t notice it, so I didn’t enlighten them. Someone’s coming. We’d better get out of here.”
Nora heard footsteps and voices from the direction of the opera house. She pocketed the two magazines and the single loose round, and then dropped the empty pistol beside the woman, who was still moaning and rubbing her eyes. Nora leaned down and said, “I hope you understand English. Tell your employers to stop bothering us. We’re journalists; we have a right to report the news, and I have closed-circuit video of you stealing my producer’s notes from my room today. If you ever come near us again, I’ll give the video to my friends in the Russian Federation, and you’ll be on your way to Siberia. We don’t know what happened to Galina Rostova or where she is, and we’re going back to America tomorrow morning, so leave us alone!”
The voices were coming closer; Nora saw figures in the snowfall, a man and a woman. Without a word, they walked away from the Russian agent, down Calle Vallaresso to the familiar side alley. Nora glanced at her
watch: midnight. The snow was heavier than before, and it was beginning to stick to the ground. As they rounded the corner into the vialetto, they heard a woman’s piercing scream. They continued in silence to the glass door of Pensione Bella. In the distance, a lone polizia whistle sounded a blast, followed by shouts and running footsteps. Patch rapped on the glass, and Pia arrived to unlock the door.
“Home again, home again,” Frances said, and they went inside, locking the door behind them.
Chapter 27
It was a boy. Later, Nora would recall the joyous phone call from Mario at one o’clock in the morning as the brightest moment of the Venice enterprise. The baby was big, healthy, and loud, and his parents had named him Mario. His grandfather wept while relating this to the Americans, then excused himself so he could wake up everyone else in Venice.
They were at the big table in the kitchen when Mario called, finishing the leftovers Pia had warmed for them and washing the pasta down with wine. Nora thought she’d have no trouble sleeping tonight, after the tension of the failed plan followed by Chekhov in Russian followed by rich food and drink. She lingered at the table, enjoying the company she’d lose tomorrow, and then they all went upstairs to pack before bed. Frances and Patch would be on the early flight to New York, and Nora would go to the airport with them, appear to board the plane, and slip away unnoticed. The idea was to make anyone tracking her movements think she’d left Italy with her friends.
When the knocking at her door woke her, Nora thought at first that it must be the middle of the night; it was pitch dark in the room. She staggered groggily from the bed, fumbling into her bathrobe and over to the door. Her friends stood there, wide awake and fully dressed.
“Looks like you’re stuck with us,” Patch said.
Nora blinked in the light of the hallway, trying to focus. “What time is it? Wait—did you say stuck?”
“It’s eight-thirty,” Frances said. “We let you sleep awhile longer when we heard the news. But it changes our plans, so we’d better discuss it. We’ll be in the dining room. Join us when you’re ready.”
“Okay,” Nora said, and they headed for the stairs. “Wait, what changes our plans? What’s happened?”
“Open your curtains and have a look,” Frances called back.
Nora shut the door and went over to the nearest window, pulling the cord to part the drapes. She stared, gasping. The window was completely white; she couldn’t see anything beyond it. She showered and dressed in what she always called theater time and rushed downstairs. Pia was placing hot cereal, fresh pastries, fruit, and coffee on the round table in the corner when Nora arrived. Then she went into the kitchen and came back with her husband’s laptop. She set it up on the table and streamed a local TV station for them. The three Americans sat together on one side of the table, facing the empty room, watching the morning news in Italian. With the pictures and footage provided, they barely needed a translation, but Frances provided one.
“The airport, the trains, the Autostrada A4—everything’s closed until further notice. They’re also dealing with several power outages. They think they’ll have the roads cleared and the trains running in a matter of hours, but the airport, not so much. Twenty-eight inches of snow since midnight. Milan, Switzerland, Austria, Marseille, Lyon, Paris, London—they’re all snowed in, too. It’s as far south as Florence and north as far as Scotland. Rome’s okay, but you can’t get there from here. They’re hoping to have flights at Marco Polo resume by Monday—but that’s only if there isn’t more snow.”
“Monday,” Nora said. “That’s two days. Okay, what do you two want to do?”
“Well,” Patch said, “I’ve been thinking about it. We can’t stay here, that’s for sure, and we can’t leave Venice at the moment, so I’m thinking we should tag along with you. If that’s okay.”
Nora shook her head. “I don’t like that idea—I mean, I’d love to keep you two around, but it could be dangerous. I don’t know what Jeff and I will be dealing with in the next day or two, and I don’t want to get you involved any more than—”
“Any more than what?” Patch interjected. “Any more than me hitting a woman and Frances giving her a faceful of Mace? That lady was about to shoot me, Nora—I’d say we’re already involved up to our necks. And you might be able to use us. Since we can’t go anywhere anyway, I think we should all stick together.”
Nora looked from him to Frances, hoping the older woman would be the voice of reason and talk him out of his rash idea. Frances merely looked at Nora and jerked a thumb at Patch.
“What he said,” she said.
“Cool,” Patch said.
And that was that. Nora pulled her cell from her pocket to call her husband, but all she got was a message on the readout: Niente Segnale. When Pia arrived with more coffee, Nora asked, “Is your landline working?”
Pia blinked. “Landline? Scusi, I don’t know what this—”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I mean, your main telephone. My telefonino is dead because of the storm.”
“Ah. Let me see.” Pia took off for the lobby, with Nora right behind her. Nora had spoken to Pia and her mother before going to the opera house last night, explaining that the woman who’d searched her room was sent by a business rival of Jeff’s electronics firm who was looking for sensitive sales documents. Signora Luchese and her daughter had accepted this, because they’d always been told that Jeffrey Baron worked in the electronics industry; that had been his official cover since he’d first joined the Company many years ago. This morning, Pia hadn’t questioned Nora’s urgent need for a telephone. At the front desk now, she raised the receiver and listened, then told Nora, “Yes, it is working.”
Nora tried Jeff’s cell number, only to get a recorded message in Italian. His phone was out, too. She turned to Pia. “Do you have a phone book? A—a guida del telefono for Venice?”
Pia pulled a surprisingly thin, dog-eared volume out from under the counter. The brevity of the phone book served to remind Nora that Venice only had about 60,000 permanent residents on its central island—the rest of its 272,000 people were scattered on other islands and the mainland. This book was clearly a local directory.
“Grazie,” Nora said, taking the book from Pia, who went back to the dining room as Nora looked up the number. It took her a couple of false starts—she tried S for Santa and M for Maria Magdalena before getting lucky with C for Convento—but she couldn’t risk having Pia do it. She didn’t want the Luchese family to know where they were going, in case the Amazon or her associates arrived asking questions. Of course, there’d be a record of the call with the phone company, but Nora doubted that the Russians had access to that. She hoped not, anyway.
She heard five rings, then a woman answered. Nora said, “Buongiorno. Jeffrey Baron, per favore. Questo è sua moglie.”
“Momento, Signora Baron.”
He must have been waiting near the landline for her call, because he was on the phone immediately. “Hey, Pal.”
“Can you believe this weather?” Nora said. “How’s our friend holding up?”
“Like a cat in a washing machine. She thinks this is a nice place to visit, but she doesn’t want to get into the habit. That’s the best nun joke I know, except for the one about the nun falling down the staircase. She really wants to get out of here.”
“Yes,” Nora said. “If you’ve been telling her your nun jokes, I can understand that. Listen, we have to get to you. Can you contact our gondolier and have him pick us up at the usual place?”
“Us?”
“Yes, us. I have the lady and the young man with me. They couldn’t leave Venice, and they can’t stay here. We had a run-in with the future world heavyweight champion last night, and our comrades might be looking for us.”
Jeff groaned. “I’m about to say a bad word.”
“Please don’t. Just send the gondolier.”
“I can’t, Pal,” he said. “His cell is probably dead too, but even if it isn’t, it mak
es no difference—the canals are swollen; they’re overflowing. No water traffic except police and emergency boats until further notice.”
Nora said, “Now I’m about to say a bad word. Ask them to prepare two more rooms. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“How will you get here?” he asked.
“Leave that to me. You just keep our friend happy until we get there—but not too happy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ll tell you later. Bye.”
She hung up and went back into the dining room, thinking. The call had unsettled her, and for a reason only she would understand. She knew Jeff as well as she knew herself. He was usually blithe, presenting a carefree attitude no matter the situation, but he tended to drop the act when he was alone with her—except when he was nervous. She remembered his joking last night in her bedroom, and she replayed this phone call in her mind: silly comments about nuns. Her husband was worried, and this worried her.
But now she knew she must hide her anxiety; she had to take charge. The others looked at her expectantly. Nora smiled and resumed her seat.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do…”
Chapter 28
“You walked?” Jeff cried.
“As you see,” Nora told him. She dropped her suitcase on the marble floor of the guesthouse’s lobby and unhitched her shoulder bag. “And here we are.”
They’d waited until after lunch to make the journey. The trek north through the snowy landscape of Venice was less than a mile, but it had taken nearly an hour. Navigating the thick drifts in alleys and on bridges wasn’t as difficult as Nora had expected, but they’d been weighed down by the luggage. She’d decided not to leave their possessions behind at Pensione Bella. Either they’d have to go back for them later, which would be time-consuming, or they’d have to impose on the Luchese family to ship four suitcases plus bulky camera equipment to the States. No; the luggage had to go with them before they left Venice.
