The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “Certainly not Pearson, at least.”

  “Yes, certainly not Pearson. I think they were acting as private citizens—they showed you no official ID, never implied that they were American intelligence officers?”

  Sofouli nodded.

  “I think—my Agency thinks—that they were acting as private citizens, and that they were trying to confirm the death of a man named Kirik Lujac and that you confirmed this for them. Is that correct?”

  Sofouli looked out the window for a time. They were rolling down the main street of Fira now, the convoy making a left turn toward the Porto Fira Suites, far out on a promontory overlooking the Aegean.

  “I think first we will look at the evidence and then we will talk. Come, let me show you the room where they stayed.”

  Although the suite was now the domain of a Greek forensic unit—an area by an overturned table in the front room had been marked off with blue plastic tape—Nikki thought the room itself was quite beautiful, clean and spare and very Zen, with a wonderful view over the glittering blue basin to the dark islands in the western seas. The room smelled of disinfectant and cigarette smoke and the salt-and-seaweed bite of the Aegean. A chilly wind ruffled the gauzy curtains, bringing with it the smell of garlic and flowers.

  “Here,” said Sofouli, indicating the area marked off by blue tape,

  “we found traces of blood and brain matter. The victim, Gavel Kuldic, was killed here—three shots into the back of his head as he lay facedown on the floor—and these marks of shoe heels here . . . and here . . . indicate that the man was then picked up and carried out here . . .”

  Sofouli led her onto a broad stone terrace jutting out over the cliffs that sloped away steeply to the white ribbon of surf far below them. The air was full of clear evening light, and Nikki felt that she was standing on the edge of the ancient world, like Penelope scanning the sea for Ulysses year after endless year. Sofouli let her take it in, and then gently caught her attention.

  “Down there, where you see the blue tape, we found his body, much broken and battered. There was a storm yesterday, as you may have heard—”

  “Who killed him? Sergeant Keraklis?”

  Sofouli shook his head slowly.

  “No. We believe that Sergeant Keraklis was killed before this man. We found his body this morning, in the swimming pool at the side of the hotel. His neck had been broken.”

  Nikki fell silent, thinking that this kind of senseless killing did not fit with her impressions of either Micah Dalton or Mandy Pownall. If she was right, then neither Dalton nor Mandy Pownall did these killings, or the killings were not senseless.

  “Why do you think Sergeant Keraklis was killed, Captain?”

  Sofouli stood beside her at the railing, staring down into the surging breakers, listening to the eternal roar of the sea and the wind.

  “I think Keraklis may have started something he could not deal with. I think it had to do with this Kirik Lujac fellow. I knew that man—”

  “Lujac?”

  “Yes. He came here often, in the high season mainly, but sometimes, as he did last month, in the off-season. He owned a large Riva motor cruiser, one of the most beautiful boats ever to moor off Santorini, but he was not a beautiful man. Physically, he was perfection itself, a Greek god, but he was . . . not liked by the people of the town even though he spent a great deal of money here. He was . . . He gave the impression of being, inside, a spider and not a man. When it seemed that he had been killed by one of his own kind, no one in Santorini was very unhappy. Not even the boys who go all over the Aegean trading their bodies for the high life, not even these parasites missed him. Lujac was a predator, I think, and although he did nothing in Santorini to which I could object, I have reports of him from places like Kotor and Budva and Venice that are not so good to hear.”

  He was silent then, still looking out over the water.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, Miss Turrin?”

  “You found a body in the water a month or so ago?”

  “Yes. Well, not I. A fisherman saw him, and we sent one of our boats across the lagoon to investigate.”

  “Who did you send?”

  Sofouli gave her a sideways look.

  “Sergeant Keraklis.”

  “I see. These stories about Lujac, from Kotor and Budva, did they involve possible murders?”

  “Yes. And they had other . . . elements.”

  “‘Elements’?”

  “Yes. I will not tell a young woman these stories.”

  “I understand. May I tell you one?”

  Sofouli looked at her.

  “Should we sit?”

  “Yes,” said Nikki, “we should sit.”

  Nikki told him what she knew of Lujac’s time in Singapore and of his connection with a Croatian syndicate boss named Branco Gospic and what he did to a young Muslim police corporal in a hotel room in Changi Village in eastern Singapore, including the sending of graphic digital pictures. Sofouli listened patiently, interrupting only to clarify a detail here and a sequence there. Nikki could see that he was inferring far more than she was saying and guessing the connections pretty well, but she set that aside, finishing with a detailed description of what had been done to an elderly woman in London just a few days ago. When she had finished, Sofouli sat back in the deck chair overlooking the sea, and, offering her one first, lit up a long black cigarette and drew the smoke in with a thoughtful expression.

  He leaned forward, set his elbows on his knees, and looked sideways at her, his sharp eyes glinting in the afternoon sun.

  “And you think this . . . killer of a woman in London . . . you think this might be Kiki Lujac?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. To ask you.”

  “It has been officially decided that the body we found in the water was the body of Kirik Lujac,” he said with an air of finality.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know, officially. What about unofficially?” He frowned, drew on the cigarette, blew out a wavering plume through pursed lips.

  “I begin to think—”

  His cell phone rang, a high, chattering beep. He took it out, spoke a few words in Greek, paused for a while, his face changing as he listened to a tinny voice on the other end. He said another few words in Greek—they sounded like a command—and then he shut the phone off and looked across at Nikki as if making a decision about her.

  “What is your . . . brief . . . in this matter, Miss Turrin?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, your orders . . . from your boss . . . what are they?”

  “To come to Santorini, talk to you, confirm Kiki Lujac’s death, then to go back to America.”

  “I see. And if we cannot confirm Kiki Lujac’s death?”

  “I would have to consult with my boss.”

  “You would go back to America to do this?”

  “No, I would talk to him . . . What’s going on, Captain? What was that call about?”

  “My missing Blackhawk . . . they have found it.”

  “I see. Where?”

  “In Istanbul. I am to go and consult with the Turks.”

  “You’re leaving now?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling hugely at her. “Our Super Puma is returning. It will be here in an hour. We leave at once.”

  He reached out, set his bear paw on her hand, leaned in.

  “I think our courses run side by side for a time. You ask me if I still think Kiki Lujac is dead. I begin to think not. Perhaps we can find out something in Istanbul. Do you wish to come along?”

  She stared at the man, thinking about the AD of RA’s clear instructions: “All I want you to do is put this Lujac theory to bed and then come back here, and we go on with our quiet little lives. Could you do that and only that?”

  If she took his instructions literally, then she could say with some degree of honesty—Not much, said her conscience—that “this Lujac theory” was still in play, and that by going to Istanbul with Sofoul
i she was only extending her mandate a little in order to complete the mission . . . Furthermore . . . Well, to cut to the chase, she was in a Hellenic Air Force Super Puma and heading for Istanbul a few minutes later.

  ISTANBUL

  ÇENGELKÖY, THE ASIAN SIDE OF THE BOSPHORUS

  The Dizayn Tower was a slab-sided, black-striped monolith set down in the middle of a square mile of office towers and banks and business plazas that had sprung up in the last five years on a hilltop at Istanbul’s northern limits, all of it now shining in the evening sun. The sector was dominated by the immense curved-glass spear tip of the Diamond of Istanbul, at a thousand feet the tallest building in this part of the world. A biting cold wind was slicing through the open ground in between the buildings, and Dalton was chilled through and through by the time he got into the lobby of the Dizayn Tower. A young black-haired, brown-eyed Turkish girl in a guard’s uniform was sitting behind a tall, bunkerlike desk, and she watched him as he came across the polished granite floor.

  “Yes, sir, how may I help?”

  “I’m looking for Beyoglu Trading. Suite 5500?”

  She looked down at something behind the desk wall, frowned.

  “There is no Beyoglu Trading listed, sir.”

  “Can you tell me what firm is in Suite 5500, then?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, her intelligent brown eyes flickering over his rather casual outfit. The Turks take business pretty seriously and dress for it as well as anyone in New York or London.

  “Yes, sir, it’s the Russian Inter-Asian Trade and Commerce Bureau. But I see they are closed for the day, I am afraid.”

  Dalton, sensing her vague disapproval of his casual look, did not ask to go up anyway. He put on a politely blank expression.

  “That’s odd. Do they usually close midweek?”

  “No, sir. According to the note here, they just closed the office this morning. A sudden illness, it says. They’ll probably be open tomorrow.”

  Dalton thanked her, and walked off toward a flight of stairs that, according to the signs, led down to a concourse with shops and restaurants. The escalator brought him into a large subterranean mall, filled with upscale shops and restaurants, crowded with office workers and shoppers.

  He found a store selling trench coats and bought a long blue woolen topcoat and a navy blue silk scarf with white polka dots, along with a short brown quilted ski vest and a brown woolen watch cap. As he was paying, he saw exactly what he had been hoping to see: a “tail,” a middle-aged round brown man with a doughy face and aggressively ordinary sunglasses, milling aimlessly around a newsstand and looking everywhere but at Dalton.

  He seemed to be alone, but Dalton decided to put him through the paces to make sure. He stepped into a changing booth, stuffed the blue topcoat in the bag, put on the brown watch cap and the quilted vest, and walked quickly out into the mall heading for the escalator. After a moment of confusion, the tail folded a newspaper under his arm and followed him, keeping a distance of about fifty feet, angling slightly away as if he were going to a different area of the mall.

  Dalton stopped at the foot of the escalator, patting his pockets and shaking his head, and then turned around and headed back the way he had come. The tail nearly broke an ankle making a hard right turn back toward the newsstand, keeping his back to Dalton as Dalton passed by less than twenty feet away. There was a walk-through coffee shop at the far end of the mall, and Dalton headed straight there.

  The mall was a hard place to tail anyone since it was literally a hall of mirrors, plate glass, and highly reflective plastic everywhere you looked. Dalton could see the tail reflected in a shopwindow.

  By now, Dalton was reasonably certain that the man was working alone, which could mean these people were not professionals, since a single-handed tail is nearly impossible to maintain without getting burned or losing the target, or it could mean that Dalton was drilling back up their chain of command so fast and so effectively that their organization was still off balance, struggling to get on top of the game. Time to up the stakes, then.

  Dalton bought his coffee, stopped at a turn in the hallway to sip some, looking around for a doorway or a storage room as he did so. There was a sign indicating washrooms on the wall and an arrow pointing down a corridor. Dalton threw the cup into a trash can, hesitated as if he were unsure of his next move, and then strolled down the corridor in the direction of the washrooms. The women’s washroom door came up first and then the men’s. Dalton slipped into the women’s—empty, he hoped, or at least the open area seemed to be clear. He heard a rapid squeak of rubbery soles going down the corridor, stopping outside the men’s room.

  He took off the watch cap and the vest, stuffed them in a garbage can, and slipped into his long blue topcoat. He cracked the door, looked up and down the corridor, came out into the hall, ran to the end of it, and managed to get back out into the mall, almost fifty feet away, mixing in with the crowds, when the brown man popped out of the corridor, his face a little red, looking this way and that, obviously agitated. Dalton, his back to the man, watched the man’s reflection in a sheet of plastic covering a map of the concourse. The man looked right at him and then moved on, scanning the crowd.

  The man came out into the main concourse, stood for a moment, looking unsettled, his head going this way and that, seeing no one in a woolen cap and a brown vest, and then he pulled out a cell phone, punched in some numbers, his stubby legs working hard as he crossed an acre of gleaming granite heading for an escalator.

  Dalton came out of the hall, slipping his blue topcoat off and folding it over his arm to change his appearance again. He picked a newspaper out of the trash—The New Anatolian, as it turned out, the headline once again in bright red letters, STOLEN GREEK BLACKHAWK FOUND; he didn’t have time to read the rest—and held it out in front of him as he walked but kept his eyes on the round brown man.

  The tail reached the escalator, stopping at the foot of it, the cell still at his ear, as he turned to look back across the concourse, his head moving as he scanned the crowd again. Dalton got himself mixed in with a group of office workers queueing up at a sandwich shop and watched the tail through a glass wall. The tail hovered there for a time, still on his cell, and then he turned and went up the escalator toward the main entrance.

  Dalton hung back, giving the man time to reach the top, and then came up the escalator two stairs at a time, reaching the top just in time to see the brown man pushing through the revolving doors and out onto the windy open plaza. There, he met a second person, this time a woman, short, also round, black hair in a severe bob, wearing a long black coat, a large black bag hanging from her shoulder. She and the round brown man spoke for about thirty seconds, and then she made a gesture, cutting off something he was trying to say with a sideways slice that convinced Dalton she was in charge.

  The brown man, slumping slightly, nodded, and came back in through the revolving doors, heading straight for the escalator again, failing to see Dalton standing by the elevator bank.

  Dalton watched the woman in black as she crossed the plaza and walked down a flight of wide concrete stairs, where she stood for a time, obviously waiting for a cab, her head turning this way and that, trying to spot one in the streaming traffic.

  The cold wind ripped at her coat, and she pulled the collar up to shield herself from it, which also shielded her from Dalton as he came out of the Dizayn Tower. Again he slipped on the blue topcoat and moved quickly across the open plaza toward her.

  At that point, she saw a bright yellow Honda taxi and stepped out into the street to flag it down. The cab darted out of the stream like a carp going for a water bug and came to a rubber-burning halt at the curb. The woman leaned into the open passenger window, talking to the driver in an agitated manner. Dalton had heard that riding in a cab in Istanbul was a risky proposition and required clear agreement about destinations and routes and fares and tips before you let the cab pull away with you inside it.

  In a moment, the deal wa
s sealed, and she tugged open the door, slipped in, and to her surprise found that she not only had a very handsome blond man slipping into the cab beside her but also had the muzzle of a pistol shoved into the side of her rib cage.

  Dalton leaned in close as the cab took off with a roar, lancing back into the traffic, the young Turkish driver oblivious, listening to some talk radio station and chattering happily into a cell phone.

  Dalton nuzzled her ear—she smelled of cigarette smoke and burned coffee, and, from the skin on her cheek and neck, was older than she looked, in her forties at least, with a blunt face and wearing too much makeup, the unvarying black of her hair coming straight from a bottle—and he hissed into her throat, “Twitch, and I’ll kill you.”

  He felt her body tense, rammed the pistol in tight. She sagged against the seat back, took off her sunglasses, and looked straight ahead, her eyes wide, her breathing short and rapid, her skin turning bone white under the thick coating of makeup.

  Dalton kept the pistol where it was and used his free hand to lift the black bag at her feet off the floor. He dumped it out on her lap, a little landslide of feminine accessories: a set of keys on a large plastic ring, a pack of Gauloise cigarettes, a cheap plastic lighter with a skating scene on it, an orange fake-leather wallet with a mix of currencies in it—euros, lira, even some Ukrainian gravniks—a stubby little black semiauto pistol, a Russian-made PSM, a Nokia cell phone, turned on but without a GPS function that he could see, and a couple of used tissues. She looked straight ahead as he went through her things, and he could feel her heart pounding through the muzzle of his Beretta. She was clearly terrified, which told him she was probably not Moscow Center KGB or even GRU, unless they’d lost a lot of their game since the Great Collapse, which seemed unlikely.

  He flipped open the orange wallet, riffled through the cards, dug out an ID with her picture on it that said she was Gretel Pinskoya, lived in Saint Petersburg, and was an attaché of something called the “Russian Inter-Asian Trade and Commerce Bureau.”

  Dalton flipped her things back into the bag, keeping the nasty little PSM pistol, the keys, and the phone, dropped the bag back at her feet, and took a moment to see where they were going.