The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “What can we do? We have no one to send in his place. We have not enough time! We have to let him work.”

  “Do you wish what is happening to Maya to stop?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Then you will go to America and control your man.”

  Anton shook his head.

  “You don’t know him. At Kerch, he could be controlled. But now that he is in America, we have no choice—”

  “You will go to America. You will either control him until he completes his mission or we will give Maya to the Chronic Ward.”

  “God, she’s a child . . . a child. We are not this kind of people—”

  “We are you, Anton, and you are us. You will go to America and control this man, and when his work is done you will kill him or we will give Maya to the men in the Chronic Ward. What is your answer?”

  Forrest, watching this, had slowly straightened up. What the hell was Piotr thinking? Anton was no fieldman. Was there no one else?

  No, there was no one else because the agent in place would kill anyone else who contacted him and then abort the mission. That was the rule. You only spoke to your controller. And Antonijas Palenz was this man’s controller.

  “Yes,” said Anton after a long, breathing silence, “I will go.”

  “Good. You will not go alone. Bukovac will go with you.”

  Anton’s face sagged and his eyes widened.

  “I would . . . rather not work with Bukovac. He is . . . extreme.”

  “Yes. That is why he will go with you. To be extreme.”

  SANTORINI, THE AEGEAN SEA

  THE PORTO FIRA SUITES

  Insistent knocking on the door of their room brought Mandy into the hallway, her throat tight, her heart racing, her arms folded, her face composed. “Who is it?”

  “Police. Please, open door.”

  “Is Sergeant Keraklis there?”

  “He is in car. You are to come down. Please, open.”

  The voice was low, almost a whisper, but packed with tension. Mandy went to the security peephole and looked through. Two men—one short, stocky, with long curly brown hair and the furtive air of a fallen priest, the other large, blunt, with a hog’s face made for glaring—both in rumpled brown suits and open-necked, greasy white shirts, were standing shoulder to shoulder staring back at her. The large man, older, clearly the one in charge, sported the standard-issue large black handlebar mustache favored by cops and thugs all over the eastern Med.

  “Please show me some ID,” said Mandy, her heart rate bumping up a bit. She took a few careful breaths to get her adrenaline back down and forced herself to move slowly, to wait for the moment, to let the thing play out. The large older man lifted up a battered black wallet, flipped it open, and plastered it forcefully against the peephole. It was impossible to read it, and the man knew that. He jerked it away, then leaned in to bang with the side of his fist against the door, shaking it in the frame.

  “Please to open, miss. We are police.”

  Mandy slipped the chain off, cracked the door, and stepped back as the two men pushed their way through the door and into the hall, the big man brushing past Mandy and rushing on into the main rooms of the suite, the other standing in front of her, a diffident smile on his face but still blocking both her view and her retreat from the hall. Shorter than Mandy, the younger man stared into her face with obvious appreciation, close enough for her to feel the heat off his unwashed body and to smell the reek of Turkish cigarettes on his suit jacket. His partner was back in the hall in a few seconds, his hambone face now knotted like a fist.

  “Where is Mr. Pearson?”

  “I have no idea. He went out a few minutes ago. What is your name?”

  The man looked surprised at the coolness of her question.

  “I am Pappas. Where is Pearson? He was told—”

  “‘Told’? No one told us anything at all. He went out. He’ll be back. You may wait in your car or out in the hall. Now you will leave my rooms.”

  Pappas’s expression went through some changes as he struggled to hold his temper in the face of Mandy’s chilly self-containment. Before he could speak, the younger man, who had an air of weary resignation, stepped in.

  “I am Corporal Nouri. This is Sergeant Pappas. We wait here. Please sit, Miss Pearson.”

  Mandy considered telling him to insert and twist but did not.

  “Suit yourselves. I do not invite you to sit down.”

  She swept past both men and went into the main room. The windows were open to a starless windy night, and the sound of the sea rose and fell slowly. The air was heavy with spices from some nearby kitchen, and under that the salt tang of sea air. Mandy picked a book off the table, settled into a chair by the open glass doors that led out onto the terrace, crossed one ankle over the other, and proceeded to ignore the men standing in the middle of the room, both looking uneasy, both shifting their weight from foot to foot.

  The younger man—Nouri—looked at Pappas and tapped his watch. Pappas took out a small police radio and pressed the talk button, said something unintelligible that included the name Keraklis. The radio hissed and popped, and then the sound of Sergeant Keraklis’s voice came back. Pappas listened, his face blank, then he said what Mandy assumed to be Greek for “Okay, roger that,” and put the radio away.

  “Miss, Sergeant Keraklis coming now.”

  Mandy looked up from the book, raised an eyebrow.

  “Isn’t that peachy,” said Mandy, going back to her book, leaning into the pool of light from a tall, heavy-looking brass reading lamp on the table beside her. Pappas frowned at her tone but said nothing more.

  In a few moments, there was a firm knock at the door. Nouri looked at Pappas, who gave him a curt nod. Nouri shuffled off down the hall. Mandy heard the door latch turn. Pappas took a position in front of Mandy, staring down at the top of her head and breathing heavily in order to convey to her the depth of his disapproval, so he missed Corporal Nouri backing into the room with the muzzle of his pistol—a butt-ugly Croatian semiauto HS95—pressed up against Pappas’s forehead and Dalton’s glare burning a hole in his left eye. Mandy set the book down and smiled up at Pappas just as Dalton shoved Nouri into the middle of the room.

  Nouri hit the coffee table and went over it backward, scattering flowers and shards of pottery. Pappas went for his own pistol, getting it halfway out of his belt holster before Mandy kicked him just behind the left knee and, as he fell, struck him very hard across the skull with the heavy reading lamp that had been on the table next to her. The lamp hit Pappas across the base of his skull with a disconcerting crunching sound, and the lightbulb blew out. Apparently, so did Pappas.

  He continued his journey earthward without further comment and landed on his face and upper body, bounced once on the tiles, and lay still, blood seeping slowly through a large rent in the skin over the back of his head and turning his black hair a sodden purple.

  Something about the way he went down and the way he was sprawled sent a ripple of nausea through Mandy’s body. She knelt down beside him and put a finger on his carotid artery. She stayed that way for a while, and then she stood up again, her face now gray, a vein at her temple pounding.

  She caught Dalton’s glance, shook her head very slightly just once, her lips pressed tight. Dalton’s glance flicked away again, his face impassive, holding the blue-steel HS pistol fixed on a point between Nouri’s suddenly very large black eyes.

  “Why do you both have Croatian pistols,” he asked in a flat tone.

  Nouri blinked up at him, his face working.

  “What?”

  “Greek cops carry Beretta 92s. This HS is a piece of Croatian shit. No self-respecting Greek cop would use something like this for a doorstop. Therefore, you are not a Greek cop. What are you?”

  Nouri tried to find something forceful to say, failed.

  “Where is Keraklis?” he managed, in a bleat.

  “Resting. Dorothy, please dig his ID out and toss it over.” />
  Mandy, making a face, stepped over the body of Sergeant Pappas, bent down, and dug into the sour recesses of Nouri’s sticky wardrobe with obvious reluctance, coming up with a limp black ID case that she flipped over to Dalton, who caught it with his off hand, glanced briefly at it, and then went back to Nouri.

  “This ID is also a piece of shit. What are you?”

  Nouri rallied a bit, shook his head as if trying to clear it.

  “Fuck you, Ami. You no nice guy. Go shoot me.”

  “Dorothy?”

  Mandy trembled once, and then steeled herself. She had an idea what was coming. They had discussed this element in detail. There were two ways to interrogate people: the slow, gradual deconstruction of the prisoner or a short, sharp demonstration of readiness to kill. The speed with which things got deadly in this business was a little unnerving. On the other hand, she was ninety percent certain that Pappas was already dead. This made it a little easier for her, but not much.

  “Yes?”

  “If this kid doesn’t answer my next question, put a couple of rounds into the back of that man’s head.”

  Nouri, on the floor, jerked his head around, stared at her for a second, saw the pallor of her skin, the tightness in her body.

  “No. You play a game—”

  Mandy picked a pillow up off the chair, knelt down beside Sergeant Pappas, placed the pillow over the back of the man’s head, pressed the muzzle of the pistol up against the pillow, and looked back up at Dalton expectantly.

  Nouri looked at her and then back up at Dalton.

  “Once more,” said Dalton. “What are you?”

  Nouri opened his mouth, closed it, and looked around the room for an exit strategy and came up with nothing that didn’t involve being dead.

  “Who the fuck you people? You CIA?”

  “Wrong answer,” said Dalton, looking briefly at Mandy

  “No . . . wait . . .”

  Mandy, still kneeling, resisting the urge to turn her face away and close her eyes, squeezed the trigger—once, twice, three times—a series of muffled cracks. Pappas’s body jerked with each impact. There was hardly any blood, just leakage from the exit wounds, which meant his heart had already stopped. Mandy began to have more confidence in the idea that she had just executed a dead man.

  The pillow was smoldering, a thin column of white smoke rising. Mandy got up, dumped a pitcher of water on it, and went across to the window, still holding the pistol, her face bone white and her gun hand shaking. Nouri’s breathing was short and shallow, and his skin was wet. A urine stain was spreading out from his crotch. He stared up at Dalton, hyperventilating now, his black eyes huge.

  “Who are you?”

  “Last time,” said Dalton. “I don’t need you. I can get all this from Keraklis.”

  “No. You kill me, anyway. And I talk, they kill me.”

  Dalton’s face looked like a mask, and his pale eyes were in shadow. Mandy wasn’t looking at him now, which was just as well since what was in his face was not something she would have wanted to remember later.

  “I’ll try again. What are you?”

  Nouri’s eyes were red as he looked up at Dalton. What he saw there was his sudden death.

  “We are”—he looked to be struggling for the English word—“we are—how you say?—za nayam?”

  “For hire?”

  “Dah, for hire. He, him—the one you killed—he is my godfather, Uncle Gavel Kuldic. I am—my real name is—Dobri Levka—”

  “You’re Croatian?”

  “Yes. Both of us. We are from Legrad, near border from Hungary.”

  “You work for Branco Gospic?”

  Levka’s face went convincingly blank.

  “Who—”

  “Never mind. Why are you here? In this room?”

  Levka went inward, working it through, then brightened.

  “Sergeant Keraklis call us. Said you ask about this body they find, supposed to be your son. But the boss—”

  “Who?”

  “Captain Sofouli—Keraklis boss—he think you are not . . . kosher? He tells Keraklis to check you up.”

  “Where is Sofouli now?”

  Levka made a face, lifted his shoulders.

  “He has woman. He goes to dinner with her, then bim-bim-boom ?”

  “Dinner where?”

  “I don’t know. He made a call, I think, to Franco’s Bar? After that, he is gone with his woman.”

  Dalton looked at Mandy, who nodded.

  He went back to Levka.

  “Is Sofouli part of this?”

  “Sofouli? No. He is”—Levka made a gesture of dismissal—“how you say?—bored too much. Once he was a big-time terror cop. Now like retired. He likes his girls, his big dinner, his bim-bim-boom. So long as Keraklis takes care, he is okeydokey. Keraklis tells him he look into it, then he calls big boss somewhere—”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Kerch, maybe. We are just to be muscle. After he talks to boss, he calls us and says we are to take you two out of hotel.”

  “Take us where?”

  Levka looked a little greener now. He licked his dry lips, looked down at his hands, and then across to Mandy.

  “Look, is business only. No personal thing.”

  Dalton and Mandy exchanged a look, and Mandy’s face got some color back into it. There is cold-blooded killing, and then there is killing a killer. The difference is often small, but it is important to the one doing the killing.

  “Do you know why Keraklis wanted us dead?”

  “I . . . it got something to do with a Russian. Todorovich.”

  “Marcus Todorovich?”

  “Yes, I think this is his name.”

  “Where is Marcus Todorovich?”

  “I think he is in Istanbul. Keraklis says we are to get his boat, me and . . .”

  Levka glanced over at the dead body again and swallowed hard.

  “Do you live on Santorini?”

  “No. Last month, we were in Kerch, in Ukraine. No work for us, now war is over in Kosovo. We can’t go home because they’re hunting all of us. For war crimes. Which I never do. We are looking for maybe work on fishing boat or in big coal plant there. We are in bar by the docks. Double Eagle. A man shows up one day, says he has work for good old soldiers. Says he is a good Croat. He knew man we knew.”

  “What man?”

  Levka shrugged.

  “He say his name is Peter. No last name. Not Croat. I think Russian, or maybe Ukrainian.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like . . . nothing. Like everything. We called him Siva Čovjek. Gray Man. He is maybe six feet, not big, not small. Big belly like Buddha. Soft, fat hands. Fingers like sausage. Old. Bald. Has small eyes, black, sharp like a bird, but big red lips, like big fat worms. He is man hard to remember later, you know? Voice is soft like girl. He gives us money, sends us here, to Santorini, to work for Sergeant Keraklis.”

  “Did Sofouli know about you?”

  “Sofouli knows we are here. We are no trouble, stay away from girls, stay quiet. We speak Greek pretty good, so Keraklis tells him we are fishermen, faraway cousin to him. We maybe get work in tourist time. We no trouble, he does not care.”

  “You said Keraklis called the big boss. Is that Gray Man?”

  Levka shrugged again, looked over at Gavel Kuldic’s body, and then back to Dalton. “Maybe Peter is big boss. Only Keraklis know this.”

  “Keraklis told you to kill us?”

  Levka looked pained, swallowed with difficulty, then nodded.

  “And what about our bodies. This is an island. Mostly rock.”

  “We are to take you off island. Keraklis knows Sofouli doesn’t want any trouble. No dead tourists all over. You gone is okeydokey with him.”

  “Take us off how?”

  Levka shrugged.

  “In boat maybe. Or maybe in helicopter. Sofouli have one.”

  “What kind of chopper?”

  “I . . . I s
aw them in Kosovo, in the war. Jastreb crno. Black-bird?”

  “A Blackhawk? Not a chance. The Hellenic Air Force flies Super Pumas. Or those crappy little Bell 47s. There’s no way in hell there’s a Blackhawk on Santorini.”

  Levka nodded vigorously.

  “But is Blackhawk. I know from Kosovo. Believe me, I know. You getting shoot at by one, make big picture in mind, no foolings.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Got markings: UNPROFOR? Old machine. UN logo. Big red cross on both sides. Twenty years, maybe. Keraklis thinks Sofouli keep it for to sell someone.”

  “You’re telling me that Sofouli has an old United Nations medevac Blackhawk for his personal use?”

  “Not for personal. Sofouli in private business, buy and sell guns and ammo and radios to Bulgaria people, also to Romanians. Big black market for Turkey. This one come in three weeks ago. Sits there, tied down under big camo tarp. Nobody know how to fly. Kind of beat-up. Paint pretty bad. But is Blackhawk, okeydokey. Full up of gas.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Keraklis show us.”

  “Does it have external tanks?”

  “Like big bombs with points? Stick out from bottom, at sides?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Were they full?”

  Levka shook his head.

  “Do not know. Who can tell?”

  “What about Keraklis, could he fly it?”

  Levka made wry face, shook his head.

  “Keraklis cannot drive fucking Škoda. Maybe Sofouli?”

  “Get up,” said Dalton, stepping back.

  Levka did not want to get up but he did, slowly, like a corpse rising, which in a way he was. He straightened his suit jacket and looked down at his soaking crotch, a fleeting spasm of self-loathing crossing his face. He stood in the middle of the room, a forlorn presence, waiting for a bullet. He stared into the middle distance, went inward. He was a feckless and unlucky man, thought Dalton, watching Levka steel himself for death, but he was no coward. Dalton shifted the muzzle of the Croatian pistol, indicating the body of his cousin. “Can you carry him?”

  Levka seemed to come back from another place. He blinked, looked down at Pappas, and then back at Dalton.