The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “Yes. Often. He drinks too much.”

  “Roll him in a carpet and bring him with us.”

  Levka held Dalton’s look for a moment longer.

  “A suggest I make, okay? No shooting.”

  Dalton nodded. “Go on.”

  “Is balcony out there? Three hundred feet to rocks. Storm all night too. In morning, maybe no body anywhere.”

  “Fine. Do it.”

  They watched as Levka did just that. He must have been telling the truth about carrying Kuldic home drunk, because he managed to get the other man up off the floor and into a fireman’s carry, although the effort made his face turn blue and he staggered under the body’s deadweight all the way out to the balcony. Kuldic went over the edge without a psalm, dropping into the wind and the eternal Aegean with only a slight flutter from his coat.

  For a time, Levka stood there, staring down at the dim churning of the distant surf, at the jagged rocks along the shoreline. Dalton came up behind him, looked down at the black water, saw nothing at all. The wind sighed and moaned, the surf boomed, and the air was full of salt tang. There was music from a nearby bar and a faint scent of frying fish.

  “Okay,” said Dalton, “let’s clean the place up and go.”

  Levka looked at Dalton, his expression altering.

  “Look, Ami, I dead man. So why I have to go somewhere else only for to die anyway. You shoot me now, okay? I go down there with Uncle Gavel. Be quick, yes? Easier for both of us.”

  Dalton raised the pistol.

  Levka crossed himself and closed his eyes, waited for the bullet. Dalton, for reasons he could not work out, was not fully committed to squeezing the trigger on this odd little soldier of fortune.

  Levka, sensing a hesitation, spoke up.

  “Wait, Ami, I got idea.”

  Dalton held the pistol on Levka’s face.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “You kill me, you got two dead bodies down on the rocks, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two bodies harder to disappear than one. Even for great big sea.”

  “Possibly.”

  “So instead of kill me, you hire me.”

  “Hire you?”

  Levka shrugged, actually managed a smile.

  “I got no job here now. You hire me, I work for you. You man who kills much, got that look, no offense. So maybe you make more bodies later. With handy service of Dobri Levka, you don’t have to bust big fat dead men around place all by self, ruin good suits like you got.”

  The kid had a point.

  He was a lunatic, but he had a point.

  “I killed your godfather. Your uncle. Croats believe in the vendetta. Sooner or later, you’ll have to try to kill me.”

  “Look, is true. But Gavel, he kind of jerk, you know. Mean drunk. Also, filthy habits—”

  “I don’t think we want to hear about that.”

  “Look, okay, Uncle Gavel dead. Lots of guys dead. Vendetta for all dead guys, life too short. I not in favor of vendetta. In favor of live Dobri Levka. Okeydokey?”

  “Can I trust you?”

  Levka looked hurt, stiffened, straightened his shoulders.

  “I am soldier. Like you, I think. My word good. Only nobody want me back home. I am nitko nema čovjeka u zemlji. You understand?”

  Dalton shook his head.

  “I think,” said Mandy from the open doors, the yellow light behind her pouring out onto the windblown terrace, “I think he’s saying he’s a no man in no-man’s-land. At least, I think so.”

  Levka nodded, grinned, showing a set of teeth that belonged on a mongrel dog on the other side of a chain-link fence.

  “Yes! Miss is right. I am no man. You hire me, I am your man.”

  “I can’t use you,” said Dalton.

  “Yes. Yes, can use me! For once, I can lift heavy stuff, like old dead Uncle Gavel. For twice, I speak Greek, Turkey too—okeydokey?—a little bit Ukraine. And, for thirds, maybe I can finds you Gray Man.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “He finds me. So we go backward to Kerch, find him, yes?”

  Dalton had an image of Sergeant Keraklis at the bottom of the empty swimming pool at the side of the hotel. Dalton’s interview with him had been brief. It had been Dalton’s plan to lock him up, deal with the goons, and crack him wide open later to see what he knew. But Keraklis, panicking, had started to scream, and that had to stop. Keraklis was more fragile than he looked. So he was now dead. And without him, there was no direct way to drill back up the chain. Dalton lowered the gun. The Croat had nerve—he’d give him that much. And he hadn’t begged or whined or sniveled, which took sand.

  “How much?”

  “What?”

  “How much to hire you? What’s your rate?”

  Levka broke into a huge grin, and it seemed for a moment as if he would try to hug Dalton, then he looked down at his soaking pants.

  “Maybe for now,” he said tentatively, “new suit?”

  GARRISON

  There was a swinging gate made of cavalry lances down at the end of the long treed lane that led to Briony’s house, and every weekday at around four in the afternoon a square red, blue, and white van would pull up to the gate and place the daily mail in the large brass cartridge box that Briony’s grandfather had set out as a mailbox.

  This day was no different. The truck ground its way up the gravel path and lurched to a stop and a gangly kid, wearing the uniform of the United States Postal Service about as badly as it could be worn, stuffed a large sheaf of letters bound with a blue rubber band in the box. As he had each day since he had arrived, Duhamel resisted the temptation to wander down and look at the mail, under the pretext of saving her the walk. It wasn’t necessary. When the letter he was waiting for arrived, he would know. In the meantime, he played his part in their quiet country life, doing much of the cooking and all of the shopping in the absence of her housekeeper. It was a principle of his that a houseguest should always make life easier by his presence until his time came to . . . become more clear.

  Each day at noon, Briony would emerge from the gatehouse, where she kept her “office.” She would work a solid five hours without a break, during which time, she had tactfully informed him, she would rather be left alone to do her “annotating,” part of a much larger work undertaken by the academy—she never called it West Point—that would one day become a six-volume tactical history of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899 and the years of guerrilla insurgency that followed it.

  Dry old stuff, she said with a smile, but worth doing well.

  Each morning, she would emerge after work and wander around the house and the grounds until she found Duhamel. Usually, she would come upon him taking pictures: views of the Hudson, panoramas of the blue mountains in the far distance, detailed studies of the way a knotted burl of tree bark had slowly, over a hundred years, worked its way into, around, and through a section of wrought-iron fence.

  Briony liked the young man’s intense and solemn dedication to this work and often stood a little distance away so she could watch him without disturbing him. She had a great affection for him. Their fires were still burning, although now they were more warming than searing, and although she was something of a solitary type she was enjoying this transient period of domestic calm.

  She was under no illusions that they would still be together in the spring, although she found that life with this strange man had a kind of taut stillness to it, a kind of meditative calm, which seemed to come from someplace inside the essentially unknowable recesses of his soul. He was smart, funny, well read, loving, gentle, inventively sensual, and a closed book to her.

  That was part of his appeal. She was old enough to appreciate that it is not in “the bright arrival planned, but in the dreams men dream along the way, they find the Golden Road to Samarkand.” In other words, with men the journey is always better than the arrival.

  Today, the weather was sharp and cold, and the light so clear that the
bare black branches of the oaks looked etched into the crystal blue sky. Ice had formed in long, gliding, spear-shaped islands on the broad brown back of the river bend, and in the evergreen trees along the far shore a murder of crows had taken up residence, their harsh cries ringing faintly in the air. Duhamel had taken to lighting a fire in the great room every day at noon, and a white plume of smoke was curling from the chimney, its scent drifting across the lawn, biting and spicy. Duhamel, kneeling in the dry grass, focusing in tight on a piece of birch bark, looked up at her as she crossed the lawn and came to him, his dark face breaking into a delighted smile, as he always did when they met at the end of her day.

  “ ‘Home is the hunter’ . . . ?”

  “ ‘Home from the hills,’ ” she said, finishing their little exchange. “Care for a drink? I’m utterly parched.”

  He got up and took her arm in his.

  “I took the liberty of opening one of your Montrachets. I hope you don’t mind.”

  It intrigued Briony that Duhamel’s oddly ambiguous French-Montenegrin accent had slowly diminished and now he spoke colloquial American with only a slight trace of something foreign in it. He was rather like a chameleon, she thought, a very charming chameleon.

  “Lovely. What year?”

  “I think it was an ’eighty-five.”

  “Before you were born, then?”

  Duhamel smiled but did not rise to the taunt. They made their way around the house, and he waited at the front door while Briony walked down the drive to get the day’s mail. Each day when she did this, a shiver of anticipation, vivid and sexual, would begin to burn inside him. Perhaps today, he thought to himself, lighting a cigarette, one of Briony’s menthols, long and slender and tart, like the woman herself. Perhaps today.

  In a few minutes, she was back, carrying the sheaf of letters bound with its blue rubber band, smiling so openly at him as she came up the stone steps, her silver hair shining, her eyes bright, lips and nails as red as taillight glass, so magnificent in brown leather boots and tight jeans and a vivid red fox coat in all the tones of autumn that he felt a strange sense of gratitude to whatever pagan god that made him that, no matter how beautiful it might be, he was born without the weaknesses that forced other people to care about any living thing.

  She got to the top of the stairs, already leafing through the mail, and he led her through the open door and down to the long granite bar in the kitchen, where he had already set out the Montrachet and two glasses. She sat down at one of the tall barstools and spread the mail out in a fan, chattering away at him about something or other. He found it hard to listen attentively because there was a letter in the pile that had the kind of look he had been told to expect.

  She glanced at it as she accepted a glass of wine, they touched glasses together gently, savoring the ethereal ping of the crystal, and then, as she always did, she began to go through the mail, her head down, her bell of silvery hair shining in the downlight, her fine long-fingered hands moving gracefully as she slit each envelope open with an old K-Bar knife that had the letters USMC etched into its blade.

  “Bills . . . bills . . . Here’s one from Tally . . . You remember her? . . . She’s asking if I ever heard from you after the reunion . . . I’ll say no . . . Should I say no? . . . Yes, I should say no . . .”

  “Perhaps we could send her a picture?”

  “Jules! Don’t even think about it. You’re a . . . degenerate.”

  “Am I?”

  “Absolutely. And may you never change. What’s this . . . ?”

  She picked up a letter—blue, with a London postmark, the address done in a spidery handwriting in turquoise ink—stopped, held it in her hands for a time without looking up. A stillness came over her, and she seemed to have stopped breathing. Duhamel put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him.

  “It’s a letter . . . from an old friend.”

  “You do not want to open it?”

  She looked back at the letter in her hands, hesitated, and then opened it gently without using the knife. There was a fine linen card inside, which she pulled out and opened. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a couple standing in front of a fireplace, the man very tall and slender and elegant in the mess kit of an officer in the Blues and Royals, a legendary British cavalry regiment, and, on his arm, a chic woman with fine features, wearing a formal gown, her hair in a Veronica Lake fall, lovely, soft eyes, but a firm, ripe mouth and a set to her features that suggested determination and force.

  “How regal,” said Duhamel, looking at the photo. “Who are they?”

  Briony said nothing for a time, her silence filled with some strong emotion. She opened the card, and in the same spidery script, copperplate but weak and thready, was the greeting:

  Dearest Briony,

  Thinking of you as always this Christmas.

  My very best to Morgan and to Cassie as well.

  All my love, Mildred

  After a long silence, Briony spoke, her voice a strained whisper.

  “This is from my friend Millie Durant. She . . . died . . . a few days ago . . . just before Christmas.”

  “She was an old friend?”

  “Very . . . A truly lovely woman.”

  “I’m very sorry, Briony,” he said, touching her hair, caressing it, seeing in his mind the last few minutes of Mildred Durant’s life. It hit him with a shock that if he had been a little less careful, he might have sent Briony some of those very same shots, taken as Mildred approached her ultimate boundaries.

  He was aware that he was becoming aroused at the memory of that exquisite afternoon in Mildred’s eccentric little flat on Bywater Street in Chelsea. The sound of the traffic on King’s Road had been a muted whisper in that solid old building. She had a copy of this very same picture on the night table beside her bed.

  Duhamel had a clear memory of drops of her blood running down the picture’s glass like the rain that had been running down the ancient leaded-glass windows in her front room. The flat had smelled of a coal fire, fresh flowers, old-fashioned floral perfume, and burned toast. At the end, she had lashed out at him, but he caught her hand.

  “Are you all right, Jules? You look . . . odd.”

  He gathered himself.

  “I’m sorry. The photo on the front reminded me of my parents.”

  “Your parents? Yes, you never talk about them, do you? And you never talk about yourself at all.”

  “Really? I suppose I bore myself. I know all my stories and none of them are very clever. This letter is from London. Did she live there?”

  “Not until the last years. She was from Maryland, actually. Worked as a”—Briony caught herself, tried to cover it—“clerk, I think. Some kind of war work, I guess. In those days, everyone was doing war work.”

  “How did you come to meet?”

  She recruited me was on the tip of her tongue.

  “She was an alumna. At Bryn Mawr. She sat on the board of re-gents. For a while, I was her liaison with the student assembly. She took a liking to me, I guess . . . After I graduated, she sort of took me on as project. I was a little wild—”

  “Briony, not you?”

  “And she found a way for me to put that to use.”

  “As a librarian, Briony?” said Duhamel, teasingly, but she did not rise to the taunt. A darkness had settled on her, and she seemed to be almost completely closed to him. He let her drift, sipping the wine.

  Darkness had come down outside as well, and a wind had risen up off the river valley, bringing a fine, cutting snow from the mountains in the west. The old house ticked and groaned like a ship settling into a long voyage. The rest of the house was dark and sunk in the gloom of a northern winter afternoon, except for the dying flicker of the wood fire in the great room.

  After a time spent in what must have been a very sad place—he could only guess, from the expression on her face and the way she suddenly looked her age in the half-light coming from the halogens overhead, dark shadows where her
eyes should be, her cheeks lined—she finally shook herself and set the letter aside, picking up a long business-style envelope, heavy navy blue paper with little flecks of gold in it, obviously expensive, no return address, and sent, according to the stamps, from Crete.

  Duhamel felt his chest begin to tighten as Briony turned it in the light, studying it. It was perfectly flat and had no distinguishing marks. The handwriting, in black ink, was coarse and heavy.

  Mrs. B. Keating

  15000 Bear Mountain Beacon Hwy.

  Garrison, New York

  USA 10524

  “From Crete?” asked Duhamel, keeping his voice steady.

  “It was franked there, anyway,” said Briony, thinking that NAS Souda was a lot closer to Crete than Garrison was. This letter could be from Morgan, although the writing was in no way like his.

  “You don’t know the handwriting?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Are you going to open it?”

  She didn’t answer. Unmarked envelopes from foreign places with unrecognizable handwriting and no return address triggered her professional caution, especially in light of what had happened to Millie Durant in London. She set it down on the counter, walked over to the kitchen drawer, and, to Duhamel’s surprise, took out a small digital camera, came back over, and took several shots of the envelope, front and back, turning it each time not with her hand but with the blade of the K-Bar knife. Duhamel, watching her, realized she might not be as easy to deal with as Mildred Durant had been.

  “You are nervous . . . about this letter?”

  She smiled, waved it away as nothing, but continued dealing with the envelope as if it might contain an explosive.

  “The Unabomber, I guess,” she said by way of explanation, which for Duhamel explained nothing. Still, he nodded, looked grave.

  “Do you want me to open it for you?”

  She looked at him, frowning, laughed shortly, and handed him the knife. “Yes, you open it. If it blows your hand off, I’ll have film.”

  She was smiling but serious. Using the tip of the blade, she edged the envelope across the countertop toward him and stepped back a few paces.