The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  Dalton held it up to the fire, saw the letters H&R stamped on the shaft.

  “And does a glass cutter with these markings mean something to you?

  “Yes,” said Dalton, already miles away, seeing the rabbit hole opening up under his feet, a blue vein beginning to throb at his temple, “it does.”

  SAVANNAH

  THE MANSION ON FORSYTH

  On a misty but luminous sunlit December afternoon in Savannah, at around the same time that Dalton and Brancati were contemplating a glass-cutting tool by the dying light of a cedarwood fire, a woman named Briony Keating was introduced to a tanned and muscular young man with short blue-black hair, prematurely gray at the temples, and a general air of contained aggression that brought the word duelist to mind. The young man had a fine-boned, hawkish face, with wide-set and direct topaz-brown eyes.

  This introduction took place in the muted elegance of the Lobby Bar in the Mansion on Forsyth, across the street from the famous park where the Old South had once cadence-drilled the flower of her doomed youth. The man radiated intelligence and sly wit, and had a charming if rather predatory smile. Briony Keating, who, at the age of sixty-two, was a seasoned and cynical judge of men, felt his wolfish smile as a kind of warming glow in her lower belly. Aware of a rising heartbeat and a certain shortness of breath, she decided that while his navy blue pinstripe could be Hugo Boss and his flawless white shirt might be from Pink’s, his morals were straight off the Serengeti.

  He didn’t feel gay to her, and she had wonderful antennae for nuances of sexual identity, but she could not rule it out completely, at least not without further investigation. His name, according to Briony Keating’s friend, a Bryn Mawr classmate named Thalia Bowering, was Jules Duhamel.

  When introduced, sensing a kind of subtle arrogance in him, Briony considered the young man coolly for a long moment without response, allowing the silence to last just enough to create a certain uneasy tension.

  The noisy chatter of the women all around pressed in, the ping-ping-ting of ice tinkling in cut-crystal glasses, the boy at the piano leaning over the keys with his limp blond hair in his eyes and his pale face set as he worked his way through the “Moonlight Sonata” . . . at last, Briony Keating offered her hand, which Mr. Jules Duhamel took gently in a strong but brief grip, bowing slightly as he did so. His skin felt smooth and warm and dry, and made her think of a stallion’s neck. He spoke with a slight accent, not French, someplace much farther east than that . . . Slovenian? Montenegrin?

  Was Jules Duhamel, obviously French, not his real name? Interesting. His voice was pitched low, but not at all forced, a natural baritone purr.

  “Miss Bowering has been telling me—”

  “Please, call me Tally,” said Miss Bowering, who was short and blunt and had something of the look of Ayn Rand about her. She was aware of this, and even wore her thick black hair cut short. Her attention, openly sexual, was fixed on the young man. She sent Briony a brief, telling look—I saw him first, and isn’t he a killer?—and then broke away as Mr. Duhamel bowed again, offering a quick flash of his perfect teeth. He had two rather prominent canines, which seemed to fit his predatory image nicely.

  “Yes . . . Tally . . . has been telling me that you were schoolmates together? At . . . Bryn Mawr? I don’t know it, I’m afraid—”

  “A girls’ school, in Pennsylvania,” said Briony, trying to throw it away, but Tally would have none of that.

  “We were Brecons together,” she cut in, her voice trying for a sultry whisper but ending in a dry cough. Briony glanced at her, a look of concern flickering across her well-defined WASP face, her hazel eyes sharp. Tally, a chain-smoker, had mild emphysema. When Briony looked back at Mr. Duhamel, she found him studying her exposed throat with a kind of vampiric intensity and resisted the impulse to lift a hand to cover her neck.

  No, she was better than that. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her head, brushed her long silvery hair back from her high, clear forehead, and hooked a heavy lock of it behind her left ear, where a large diamond earring caught the random glare of a halogen spot and sent prisms of rainbow light dancing across her slightly too tight jawline. Duhamel watched her do this with obvious approval and gave her a sly, conspiratorial smile, as Tally Bowering caught her breath and began again.

  “Brecon . . . is a residence there . . . at Bryn Mawr, I mean.”

  She made a sweeping gesture, taking in the gathering of well-dressed and obviously wealthy women, all of a certain age, scattered about the sunlit atrium with the reflecting pool, revealing as she did so the slightly crepey flesh at the underside of her upper arm, looking, for a moment, shopworn, even jaded, as if she was being observed without the affection she genuinely deserved. With her face turned away as she spoke, Tally missed the glitter of distaste that flashed in Duhamel’s lambent brown eyes.

  Briony Keating did not.

  Tally came back, gasped a bit, and rushed on: “This is actually our reunion class of ’sixty-seven—Bree was our valedictorian—she went on to do something very clever for the government, didn’t you, Bree? She’s very close about it, if you want to know. I think she was a spy. Although everyone who goes to Bryn Mawr is expected to do something very clever afterward.”

  Briony, who disliked being called Bree, gave Tally a tolerant smile, waiting for Duhamel to begin some “continental” charade of polite disbelief about her age, but Duhamel only smiled again and shook his head.

  “And now you are in Savannah, Miss Keating? Do you live here?”

  “No. God no. Too claustrophobic.”

  “Really? Such a pretty town too. Draped in age, like the moss in the live oaks, yet somehow timeless. Why do you find it . . . ?”

  “Claustrophobic? Well, you should remember that Spanish moss is a parasite. It would kill the oaks, if they let it. Savannah is a small town, with all that implies. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone talks about everyone else. The main entertainment around here is a kind of desultory adultery, if you’ll forgive the rhyme, with adultery’s faithful handmaiden, vulgar melodrama, following close behind. They have a school of the arts here—a ghastly ‘avant-garde’ sort of postcolonial snake pit. Odd combination of smug and venomous, as the radical left always are. You’ll have to drop by. Yesterday they did something called ‘GlobalWorming,’ which consisted of a lot of unattractive naked young people with tattoos and body piercings writhing around on a plastic sheet covered in motor oil to protest something or other perfectly ghastly that ExxonMobil was doing out there in the Third World.”

  “It was olive oil!” Tally put in. “It wasn’t really motor oil.”

  “Please,” said Briony with a drawl. “They looked like huge uncooked prawns, rolling about in the grease like that. Dreadfully earnest, the young. Utter bores.”

  “And you did not . . . protest . . . when you were at Bryn Mawr?”

  “Oh hell yes. Protest was part of the Core Curriculum. Along with Good Works. We were all such intense little socialists then, sitting on piles of Grandaddy’s money and cursing capitalism like Tartars. Tally here was one of the first Brecons to protest the Vietnam War, weren’t you, Tally?”

  “Yes. It was a disgraceful imperialist adventure. Bree was all for it.”

  “What? In favor of the Vietnam War?”

  “Yes, I was,” said Briony. “Daddy was in the Army. It gave you a different view. If there were any imperialists in that war, they were all Russians. After Americans win their wars, all they leave behind is their dead. Anyway, all that’s a complete bore. And we were having such fun slanging the art school—”

  “I know this art school,” said Duhamel, giving her an impish smile. “They have invited me here to Savannah in the first place.”

  Briony was not discomfited in the slightest, seemed genuinely delighted.

  “Really? Well, you’ll see what I mean, then, won’t you? Poor man. And what was your specific crime?”

  “I’m here to discuss a possible photo exhibition later in the sp
ring.”

  “Dear God, what is it? ‘Toward a Deconstruction of Dystopia: Panoramas of Open-Pit Slag Heaps’? That sort of dreadfully urgent stuff?”

  “Not really,” said Duhamel, clearly enjoying himself. “It’s a collection of photographs, taken of older women. I’m something of a collector—”

  “Of older women?” said Tally, cutting in. “Well, you’ve come to the mother lode today, Mr. Duhamel. Doddering Old Bats and Crotchety Crones piled up to the roof beams. Place is crawling with them. What’s your slide show called? Not ‘Toward a Deconstruction of Dystopia,’ I hope?”

  “Not at all. The theme is the ‘Odalisque in Autumn.’ ”

  “Is it?” said Briony. “How very Ingres. What sort of photos are they?”

  “Black-and-white, made with a special gel film. They’ve been compared to Karsh or Hurrell by people who should know better.”

  “Are they erotic?” said Tally with a tone.

  “That depends on the woman in the picture. If she is, so is the shot.”

  “You find older women erotic?” said Briony.

  “I find older women interesting. Often that is also very erotic.”

  “And young women?” asked Briony, probing.

  “I find young women—what is the word?—like a young bug. Larval?”

  Tally laughed at that, with a bit of a smoker’s bray but real. Briony liked his answer too and warmed to the man, in spite of that fleeting contemptuous flicker in his brown eyes when he had looked at Tally.

  “Well, I’d be intrigued to hear your take on the town after a few days. The whole place reeks of that Women’s Institute sort of pious decay. Everyone in Savannah thinks of herself as . . . what is the word, Tally?”

  Tally, not happy to have Briony getting all of Mr. Duhamel’s attention, provided the word louche with a bit of a pout. Briony was on a tear, which was unusual for her. Her normal manner, when out and about in a crowd, was to stand resolutely alone in a corner with a glass of single malt and her trademark what-fresh-hell-is-this? expression firmly in place.

  Briony Keating, thought Tally, was . . . interested.

  “Louche. Thank you, sweet. Where, in actual fact, they’re about as racy and decadent as the DAR. And they have mean mouths. The only way not to get slandered in this town is to never miss a dinner party. Everyone feels they have to burn as brightly as . . . fireflies. One gets terribly tired.”

  “Bree, I’ve got to . . . you know?”

  Have a smoke

  “Of course, Tally, you do that.”

  “Will you still be here?”

  Briony looked at Duhamel and then back at Tally.

  “Of course! Where would we go?”

  Tally, who knew Briony pretty well, gave Jules Duhamel a slow, sly smile meant to convey the possible advantages to Mr. Duhamel of waiting for her swift return, patted Briony on the arm, and made her way through the pressing crowd, passing from shadow to light and back into shadow again as the crowd swallowed her up. Beethoven had come at last to the end of his lunar reverie, and now the young piano player was sitting at the bar, his black tie undone and his rented dinner jacket draped carefully on the back of the stool, watching the elderly barman construct a large vodka martini.

  The walls seemed suddenly to close in, and the low, genial conversations of these dear familiar women now hit her ear like a flock of farm geese objecting to a stranger. Duhamel seemed aware of this alteration in her mood. Without appearing to withdraw from the group, he led her to a more private corner, by the long, wood-paneled walkway that led to the lounge.

  “Do you have . . . commitments, after this event?”

  “Nothing in particular,” she said, her throat tightening. “Tally and some of the Brecons are talking about a dinner cruise on the river, but I don’t do boats anymore. And you?”

  To her mild surprise, he looked at his watch—an antique Breguet—and sighed. “Now that I have met you, I wish I did not. But I have to go to this . . . avant-garde snake pit . . . to meet with the director. This I am told will be over by six. After that, there is to be some sort of dinner with the committee.”

  “You poor devil. Drink, quietly but steadily. It’s your only hope.”

  “But I am, I admit, feeling rather tired. Jet-lagged?”

  “You’ve just arrived from some exotic shore, have you?”

  “From London only, I’m afraid. Are you staying with friends?”

  “No. I’m here, at the Forsyth. I leave tomorrow. For New York.”

  “Manhattan? You live there? How exciting.”

  “No. I have a little place on the Hudson River, a few miles north. I work at the academy, actually. It’s pretty close.”

  “The academy?”

  “The military academy, I mean. West Point?”

  He smiled, really one of his best, and Briony, who was already feeling a kind of erotic vertigo, found herself falling right into it, eyes wide open.

  “West Point? I am amazed. Where you are this dangerous spy?”

  “Where I am this dangerous librarian.”

  “What a shame. I so wanted to meet a spy. Well, I have to go, whether I wish to or not. Please give my regrets to Miss Bowering. Perhaps we will meet in the bar, later?”

  “Not a chance. I’ll be in my room, dead to the world.”

  “I see. You are alone, then? Your husband . . . ?”

  “Off in Odessa, I hear, fumbling away at his poxy Ukrainian pierogi.”

  “Pierogi?”

  Briony’s smile had deep and bitter roots, from the pain he saw in it.

  “It’s some kind of doughnut, I think. Dylan picked her up in a chat room, so they tell me. Poor girl. Instead of a rich American, she got my needle-dicked husband, who, thanks to my lawyer, is also virtually penniless.”

  Duhamel looked a little off balance then, but he recovered.

  “Ah, then, of course, your children . . . ?”

  “My son’s in . . . the military. I’m not sure where he is right now. And my daughter? We are currently not on amiable ground. We do not speak.”

  “No. What a shame.”

  “Not really. We have agreed to disagree on the subject of her father. She takes the view that I am too controlling, and I take the view that he’s a whoremongering, poodle-faking parasite who crossed me once too often.”

  Duhamel’s expression went through a number of changes, all of which were hard to read. “Would it be . . . terribly offensive . . . if I were to ask—?”

  Briony fixed him with a look, but gently, smiling carefully at him.

  “I would find it terribly offensive to be gossiped about . . . Jules.”

  His face hardened imperceptibly, just enough to show his edges.

  “I do not . . . gossip . . . Briony.”

  That brief glitter of cold, hard steel under the velvet did it.

  She was gone, she thought.

  Quite gone.

  “Room 511, then. Around nine. Don’t be seen.”

  Duhamel bowed again, a brief inclination, his eyes never leaving hers. He turned to walk away then, and she called after him, in a throaty whisper.

  “Jules . . .”

  He stopped, turned, his expression once again unreadable.

  “Yes, Briony?”

  “If you wish,” she said, “you may bring your camera.”

  LONDON

  SHOREDITCH

  The only factory left in England where stainless-steel hand tools such as the glass cutter bearing the mark H&R were still being made was a tumbledown redbrick Dickensian sprawl scattered liberally about the landscape along Myrtle Walk. There, Dalton found the ancestral digs of the venerable old firm of Higgins and Robeling, resting in the hulking shadow of Hackney Community College. This was far out in the wilds of Shoreditch; for the uninitiated, Shoreditch is to Belgravia as lime green Crocs are to a pair of Cole Haan slippers.

  Dalton set himself up in an improvised OP at one of the local “eateries” provided for the sustenance of the unhappy inmate
s of Hackney Community College, a dark, dim, dank pit of a place called the Stag at Bay; they even had a large copy of the Landseer etching framed above the bar. It was one of those prefabricated Olde Tyme Pubs that had at one time spread out across the globe to inflict the unique consequences of authentic English cuisine upon an unsuspecting world and which had now, like Pomeranian vetch weed, come full circle to sprout themselves all over suburban London.

  He took up his regular position in a booth at the back of the place with lines of sight to every entrance, front and rear, as well as decent coverage of the showroom of the Higgins and Robeling factory across the street. He ordered his usual, a Guinness and a steak-and-kidney pie. This was his third day trailing a wing on the London watch. He settled in with a sigh to watch the rain sheeting down across the phony Tudor glasswork that fronted the pub.

  It was after three on a rainy late-December Friday. The old year, laden with grave new alarms in the Far East and on the turbulent borders of Russia, was stumbling toward a well-earned grave in this Sargasso season of the Holy Days, the post-Christmas week. A bank of clouds, as low, damp, and utterly depressing as the underside of the Battersea Bridge, had arrived from the Channel a few days ago and spread itself out across London, the Home Counties, and all the way up the Thames Valley.

  Once it got nicely settled in, all comfy-cozy like, it went right to work lashing down a dirty bone-chilling, heartbreaking half sleet, half rain all over the place for days and days and days on end, with no sign of letting up until long after Hogmanay, if ever.

  The façade of the Higgins and Robeling shop had once been cheerfully decked out in green-and-red bunting enlivened by several threadbare strings of blinking Christmas lights, but days of unrelenting rain had reduced this brave display to a limp network of moldy gray-green rags and a few plucky pin lights that twinkled on regardless, through the mist and fog, in the best traditions of Old Blighty.

  Dalton had checked in, as T. Coward, Purveyor of Stainless-Steel Polishing Systems, Lorne Park, Ontario, Canada, at a small boutique hotel called Blakes, just off the Old Brompton Road. He was staying away from his Agency flat in Wilton Row until the game that was being played grew clearer, although he had his theories. He had also made no attempt to contact either the offices of Burke and Single on Threadneedle Street or the Agency safe house in Marylebone, and he never even went near the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, not to mention his favorite local, the Grenadier, around the corner from his flat in Belgravia.