The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “Lucky me.”

  “Yes. Lucky you. You’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and convince yourself this was all some kind of fever dream. Then you’ll go on about your business for Stallworth and the Agency. You shouldn’t. None of that shit really matters.”

  “No. And precisely what shit does matter?” “You need to go see Laura.” “Laura? That’s why you’re here? Jesus. You banged on that tin

  drum way too much while you were still alive. Give it a rest.”

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  “No. Laura is what this is all about. You have to make amends.” “Amends? Since when did you start using words like ‘amends’? There must be a thesaurus in Hell.”

  “I always tailored my vocabulary for my listeners. With you I had to stick with words of one syllable or less. We were talking about Laura. You need to make things right with her while you’re still alive. Which, by the way, means you’ve got maybe three weeks. Max.”

  “Three weeks! I’m going to die in three weeks?” “Don’t whine, Micah. It makes your face go all pouty. Everybody

  dies. Even whiskey-soaked little fruitcakes like you.” “I’m going to die? How am I going to die?” Naumann took another long pull at the cognac flask and then

  stared off into the middle distance. Dalton found the wait quite trying. Finally, Naumann leaned forward, handed the flask back to Dalton.

  “I’m not really sure. It’s kind of a Magic Eight Ball thing. Reply hazy—ask again later. I’m getting the idea I’m not allowed to affect outcomes. We’re not licensed to do fate. How about you just consider me ...Man, what’s the word?”

  “An omen?” “Yes! An omen. I’m an omen!” “An omen? Of what?” “I’m an omen of you needing to change your fucked-up life be

  fore some massive cosmic doom gets all biblical on your ass.” “The details, Porter. The details!” “There you go. The devil is in the details. Who said that?” “Goethe. And I think it was God who was in the details. We were

  talking about how I’m going to die in three weeks.” “That’s beside the point.” “Very few people would consider their impending doom beside

  the point, Porter.” “It’s not all about you, kid. Laura’s in a bad place. Go see her.”

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  “Forgive me, my friend, but she’s in a very nice place, as a matter of fact. Maintained at great personal expense, by the way. And unlike you, I am not richer than Agamemnon’s broker. Anyway, I would think being newly dead would take up a lot of your attention, Porter. Why this obsession with somebody else’s wife?”

  Naumann stood up and walked toward the doors that led out to the balcony. Dalton could see the streetlight shining through Naumann’s body. Naumann turned at the doors and looked back over his shoulder at Dalton. He looked like an image painted on fog.

  “To get the answer, you must survive the question.”

  “Oh, Christ, Porter. To-get-the-answer-you-must-survive-the-question. Don’t go all Yoda on me now. What answer? What question?”

  Naumann shook his head slowly, fading away as he did.

  “Wait, Porter. Wait. What do we tell Joanne? Your kids?”

  “Thanks, kid, but no one can help my family now.”

  Then there was nothing but the wind off the sea flowing through the curtains and in the distance the soft tolling of a cathedral bell ringing in the new day. Micah cradled his arm and put his head back on the pillow and...

  ...A LEMON-COLORED LIGHT glaring through his closed lids woke him up several hours, possibly years, later. He raised himself onto an elbow, his head pounding dully, his throat parched. He looked blearily around, trying to piece himself back together after what he dimly recalled was, even by his own exacting standards, a truly Olympian binge. He was relieved to find that he was lying, fully clothed, heart dutifully beating, lungs right on the job, still very much alive, on his bed in Naumann’s old suite at the Savoia & Jolanda.

  The sun, a pale wintry one, was shining in through the billowing

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  curtains next to the open balcony doors. He raised his hands to shade his eyes from the glare and stopped as the memories of the night before came back in force, and along with them a very pressing question: Where was that emerald-green spider?

  He rolled quickly off the bed and got to his feet, staggered into the center of the room, and stared wildly around, his flesh crawling. Where was it? Under the dresser? In the bed?

  Sweet Jesus, not in the bed.

  He reached down to tear off the coverlet and stopped, gaping at his left hand. It was a mass of dried blood and crisscross wounds. There was a large gaping wound on the back of his hand, crusted with blood. He looked down at the bed where he had been lying. Blood was smeared all over the Italian linen. His shirtsleeve was ripped all the way to the shoulder and caked in blood. His briefcase was lying open at the bottom of the bed, his silver flask beside it. And next to that his service Beretta, with the slide locked back and the magazine safely removed. Beside the magazine a single brass nine-mil round lay glinting in the sunlight. Which meant that last night he’d been playing with a loaded gun while stoned out of his mind.

  Oh, yeah. Wait one. There was more. Much more.

  Last night, dear Micah, you either killed or seriously damaged two Serbo-Croatian thugs in the Piazza San Marco. And that image brought back the hallucination of Porter Naumann, sitting in that chair—the chair that was still right where Naumann had put it, next to Dalton’s bed so he and Naumann could have a drink and a fatherly chat. A drink and a fatherly chat with the mutilated corpse of Porter Naumann, if he wanted to press a tiresome point.

  He shoved these grim realizations aside for later consideration— which meant hopefully never—and went back to the critical issue here. The last time he’d seen the spider—if there really was a spider— it had been out on the balcony.

  He stepped around the chair, giving it a wide berth, and crossed

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  the carpet to the balcony. The cigarillo pack was lying where he had thrown it in a panic last night, on the stone floor of the balcony, up against the flower stand, next to a burned-down stub of cigar. The lid of the Toscano pack was half-open. To Dalton it loomed as wide and terrible as the gates of Mordor. Some cloudy recollection from a film on the Discovery channel surfaced then.

  Spider’s nest, don’t they?

  He went back into the suite and picked up a copy of Venezia magazine, rolled it into a tube, and stepped lightly back out onto the balcony. Standing motionless next to the door, his head aching brutally and his mouth painfully dry, he stared out across the busy lagoon for a moment and decided it was time to get the hell out of Venice before it killed him.

  He looked around the narrow space, checking all the cracks and nooks and corners with painstaking care, then he knelt down in front of the half-open pack of Toscanos. He reached out and tapped the lid lightly and then drew quickly back, the tube raised, ready to turn whatever the hell came scuttling out of it into a dark-green inkblot. Silence. Nothing stirred. He looked around the floor of the balcony again. If the spider was hiding anywhere in the crevices, he was doing a stand-up Seal Team job of it. The Toscano pack lay there in the weak fall sunlight, surrounded by what seemed to Dalton an unnatural stillness and an unreal glow.

  With the rolled-up magazine in his left hand, he gently pushed the cigarillo pack up against the balcony wall, fixed it there, and pressed the lid tightly shut. Holding his breath, he reached out, picked the pack up in his right hand, and stepped backward out of the balcony, carrying the packet as if it were a block of plastique. He set it upright on top of the little neoclassical escritoire next to the plasma-screen television, pulled what he was still thinking of as Naumann’s chair over, and sat down in front of it.

  Holding the pack in his damaged left hand, he pulled out his

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  Zippo, flipped it on, and held it over the top of the pack as
he thumbed the lid back. Skin rippling, holding his breath, he leaned forward and stared down into the container. Black shadows played around the six remaining cigars as he moved the lighter around. When the glow of the flame caught a shimmer of emerald fur in one corner of the pack, and then two tiny red glitters sparkling at the bottom of the pack, he jumped a yard and let out a castrato’s shriek. The spider raised two of its legs and waggled them defensively in the light of the flame, and then scuttled backward into the shelter of the cigarillos.

  It was real.

  And it was right there.

  He snapped the lid shut and kept his right hand on the lid while he fumbled around with his left in the desk drawer until he found some elastics. He wrapped the box around and around with them until it looked like a shredded baseball, rattled the box viciously several times just for some payback, and set the pack down hard on the desktop. He leaned back into the chair, blew out a long ragged breath, and closed his eyes. Sixty silent seconds passed and then a shrill metallic howl like a dental drill shot up from somewhere in the room and struck him right between the eyes, lodging itself in his brain like a crossbow bolt. He staggered across the room. The awful skull-cracking whine was coming from somewhere around the bed.

  No. Under it.

  He dropped to his knees beside the bed and fumbled around blindly until he got his hands on his cell phone, which he scooped up, punching the Send key savagely.

  “Yes! Hello! For Chrissake hello!”

  “Mr. Dalton?” An Italian voice, a woodwind baritone.

  “Major Brancati?”

  “Yes. I catch you at a wrong time maybe?”

  “No. Not at all. Absolutely great.”

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  He lowered the cell phone to check the time. It was a little after one in the afternoon. He’d been asleep for . . . he had no idea. Hours.

  “I did not wake you, Mr. Dalton?” “No. I just got out of the shower, that’s all.” “Good. You are well, I hope?” “Yes. Yes I am. I’m absolutely fine.” He managed to shut himself up before he said “peachy” or “top

  hole.” He wasn’t at all fine, but that was his own fault. He pulled himself together and shoved the nightmare of the past several hours back into the darker recesses of his mind, where it had no doubt come from in the first place. He sat down on the bed and shook the flask, a little reassured by the gurgle of leftover cognac.

  “Good,” said Brancati. “I was worried about you.” “About me? Why?” “There was trouble in the Piazza San Marco last night.” Dalton’s hangover went away in a buzzing of wasp wings. His

  mind was painfully clear at this moment. He tried not to show it. “What kind of trouble?” “You did not see it? Hear the police boats?” “I was in bed. Sound asleep. What happened?” “Two men were badly injured. In some kind of fight.” Dalton could not repress the next question. “How badly in

  jured?”

  “One is in a coma. They think he will come out one day. His face has been greatly disfigured and he will need much plastic surgery. The other one lives too but has no feeling in his body. His spine has been broken. Near the neck. He will not walk anymore.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” Brancati laughed, not persuasively. “Do not be. They were garbage. Serbs and Croats, from Trieste.” “How did it happen?”

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  “Well, that is why I was worried about you. Because this fight was just around the corner from your hotel there. Also because the witnesses—”

  Dalton’s recollection of the evening came into sharper focus.

  “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.”

  “—there were several of them. Turisti. Backpackers. They describe the man who did this thing. The girls they lie a great deal but the Venice police think that these two Croats, they tried to—how do you say?”

  Never finish a cop’s sentence. It’s a trick.

  Dalton finished it anyway.

  “Mug?”

  “Yes! To mug this man, and he resisted them.”

  Brancati’s tone contained an element that Dalton finally pinned down. Satisfaction.

  “Was he hurt?”

  “We do not know. But the girls, they give a description. And the description is of a man very much like you. Tall. Strong. Long blond hair. Well dressed. He was a good fighter, they say.”

  “That’s every Italian man in Venice.”

  “They say he had an American accent. And he sang and danced while he did this. He sang ‘People.’ You know this tune?”

  “I know it. I hate it.”

  “I too hate this song. Once it gets into your head, it flies around and around. You cannot get it out. Now it is in my head. Right now. Like a wasp.”

  “I know. Now it’s in mine. Thanks for that.”

  That made Brancati laugh. “Ha! Now you know! We share this, eh? Anyway, this ugly thing, this very terrible fight, so close to you. I worry about you.”

  “Well, I appreciate that. But it wasn’t me. I’m fine.”

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  “But you were in the piazza last night.”

  It wasn’t a question. Had he paid cash or used his AmEx card? He couldn’t recall. Too much wine. He recalled Naumann’s warning, from a company field-training session in Munich many years ago.

  Tell as much of the truth as you can get away with, kid.

  “Yes. I had a drink at Florian’s.”

  “Of course. I remember your friend loved to do that. I thought you would go, as a remembrance. A drink for your old friend. And you stayed until the tocsin rang? From the Campanile?”

  “No. I left early. I was still pretty shaken up.” “About Mr. Naumann?” “Yes. Do you have any news about him?” “And you are okay? You had no avventura last night?” “No. Just a drink and then to bed.” “Really? Good. Because, you know, I am a little worried for this

  man who did this thing. To defend oneself is a man’s right. To dance and sing ‘People’ while kicking a man so hard he becomes a cripple is different. A man who could do such a thing, perhaps he has some sickness. In his heart.”

  “Couldn’t agree more. But I didn’t see a thing. Sorry not to help.” “Also, there is the family of these men.” Family? This was nuts. Guys like that didn’t have families. They multi

  plied on the underside of toilet tanks in flophouse latrines. “Family? I don’t understand.” “You would not think it, but it seems that the one in the coma,

  his name was Gavro Princip. He is the youngest son of a large Serbian crime family. Very famous. Do you remember the name Gavrilo Princip, perhaps?”

  He did. It rang a distant chime. But he couldn’t— “His great-great-uncle was the man who shot the Archduke Ferdinand. In Sarajevo. They say he started the First World War. It

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  is a matter of much pride, so I am told, in parts of Serbia. Even today, he is seen as a hero. Anyway, his family, the Princips, they are now part of a crime organization run by a very bad man named Branco Gospic, who lives in Split, and the Branco Gospic organization, they make money in mysterious ways and are well known to the police, as the saying goes. So although Gavro Princip is a thief, still he is connected to the Branco Gospic family, and it is very likely that Branco Gospic will take what has happened to Gavro as an affront, an insult. As a matter for vendetta. Such things are taken very seriously in Serbia and Croatia. Look at the Bosnian War. The lex talionis, you know this?”

  Peachy.

  Isn’t that just peachy.

  Brancati let this wonderfully eloquent silence run for a while.

  “So, no matter. You are not involved. And these two, they were rifiuti della società! I am happy they are so much punished. Venice is a better place. Italy is better. Of course, should the man who did this thing let himself do it again, then perhaps the police will not think it such a fine thing. But if he does not do it again, at
least not in Italy, then I think, if the Venice police find this man, they will buy him a big dinner. Maybe at Carovita, eh?”

  That was a polite Italian warning, Micah. Hear it.

  “Yes. I hope this man would take that advice to heart.”

  “You do?”

  “I know I would, if I were in his shoes.”

  “D’accordo? And this song, ‘People,’ it is still in your head?”

  “I’ll put something else in it.”

  Maybe a bullet.

  “You know this musical?”

  “Hello, Dolly ? Never saw it.”

  “That’s what this man said also. Last night. That it was from Hello, Dolly. But my wife tells me it is from a play called Funny Girl.”

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  Dalton managed not to groan out loud. Barely.

  “Is it? Well there you go.”

  “Yes. There we go. Well, about Mr. Naumann we do have news. You sure you are okay to talk. You are well?”

  “Yes. Peachy. I’m peachy. What is it?”

  He’d actually said “peachy” out loud.

  Twice.

  “Coroner? Is that your word? The coroner?”

  “Yes.”

  “His report is in. The preliminary. No blood work. The brain was very inflamed. It seems there had been some sort of colpo apoplettico— I do not know the English words—”

  “A stroke, you mean?”

  “Yes. A stroke. But the doctor says that such a stroke as this could have had the effect of creating a very strong derangement of the senses. The doctor is telling us that Mr. Naumann died as a result of this stroke.”

  “Directly, you mean?”

  Brancati said nothing for a moment. Dalton got the impression that he had put his hand over the phone and was talking to someone else in the room.

  “No. Not directly. He also examined the heart, which was not in good shape. Mr. Naumann had signs of previous minor heart attacks and some of the atrial walls had atrophied. He was not a healthy man. So the stress of—how to say—the brain attack, this placed a fatal strain on his heart.”