The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “Yes.”

  “I am told that both men are near death. One is in a coma.”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “And did you know what you were doing? When you did this? Was it your intention? To hurt them? To kill them, if you could? Perhaps you were drunk? You drink a great deal, I think. Is this why you did it?”

  “No. I wasn’t drunk. I knew exactly what I was doing.”

  Dalton offered up no extenuations. He had done similar things to many other men in a state of stone-cold sobriety. He fully intended to destroy Milan and Gavro, and he had gone about it with every bit of skill he could summon. Of excuses, he had none to offer. She closed her eyes again and accepted this in silence, showing no desire to communicate with him. He had the impression of being interviewed by someone who was not physically present, a remote spiritual force.

  As much as he wished he could say something reassuring, some-

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  thing to help her think better of him, he held his silence, aware that there was really nothing to be said. “Micah, the men who came to my apartment, the men who stab

  bed my friend Domenico, do you know who they were?” “No. But I’m going to find out.” “And when you find them ...?” “I’ll kill them.” “I see. And the man. The old Indian. Do you know who he is?” “Not yet.” “His real name is not Sweetwater?” “It may be. I don’t think so.” “And whoever this Sweetwater is, you will look for him too?” “Yes.” “And when you find him you will kill him also?” “Yes.” “Is this what you do?” “No.” “No? What do you do, then?” “I’m called a cleaner.” “A ‘cleaner’? What do you clean?” “When something goes wrong in the company I work for, they

  send me out to fix it. No. Not to fix it. To clean up the mess.” “Was Mr. Naumann this kind of mess?” “Yes. He was.” “Major Brancati says you work for the CIA. Is this true?” “I work for the American government.” “This is the same thing. With you the lie is like a heartbeat. Are

  you still seeing the ghost of this Mr. Naumann?” “Yes.” “When did you last see him?” “A moment ago. Out in the hall.” “He is not in here? With us?”

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  “No.” “That is strange. What else do you see?” “Nothing. Everything is normal. Except for the ghost.” “Can you do anything to make him go away?” “I think that when I stay calm, when I concentrate on what is

  real, then he goes away. I was in London and he wasn’t there.” “Why did you go to London?” “It was business.” “What kind of business?” Dalton told her the essentials of it, enough to make her under

  stand the thing without illusions, no more. When he was through, her face was extremely pale and it took a time for her breathing to slow down again. Her hands, which had been tightly linked, her fingers white, became loose and she touched her forehead with her left hand, brushing away a lock of her hair.

  “And the man who did this, this was the same man in my apart

  ment? Mr....Mr. Sweetwater.” “I have no proof yet. But I suspect it is, yes.” “Then I suppose someone should kill him.” “I intend to.” “This ghost who follows you. This means you are sick, Micah. It

  means that the drug this man has put in your brain has damaged you. There is treatment for this. I know the very best people. If you hope to find him, first you have to be cured. You can accomplish nothing until this is done. You are in great danger. You may have visions, hallucinations. Fugues. You cannot ignore this, no matter how much you want to. You must be treated. Cured.”

  “If I wait, Sweetwater is gone. So are the men who attacked you.”

  “I shot one, you know. In the cheek. The expression on his face was wonderful. Wonderful. Shock. Horror. Fear. I made him afraid that he would die. I do wish that I had killed him.”

  “Perhaps you did.”

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  “No. I broke his cheekbone only. He took my father’s pistoletta away from me. Father had it from the war. For a moment I thought the pig would shoot me, but then Domenico was shouting at the door and they ran away. Domenico was stabbed in the chest; he was bleeding. He is here in the hospital. They say he is in critical condition. I went to see him, but he is in surgery now. This is the world you live in, Micah? This is what you do?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “And no matter what happens, you will go on doing it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Until you find this Sweetwater? And the two men from Trieste?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not quite sane, Micah. Do you know that?”

  “My world is not quite sane either. I am sorry for bringing it to your door. I regret it very much. I would undo it if I could.”

  Cora made a weak but strongly dismissive gesture that Dalton found deeply wounding. “You regret very much, do you? I think you are a man who bears his regrets lightly, perhaps from having so many of them, and all of them hard-earned, so that you are used to them, the way other men grow used to a limp or the aftereffects of a wasting disease. Yet this does not stop you from collecting more of them. Without a strong desire to repair your way of living, your regrets are una bagattella. Flightless birds. You are attracted to me?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “And I am attracted to you.”

  Dalton’s chest became tight and he began to speak. She raised a hand to stop him.

  “But to what am I attracted? A spy? An agent of the American CIA? What right do you have to be drawn to me? You are not your own man. You are bought and paid for. You are not a free man. I think you also have a wife.”

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  “Yes. I do.”

  “And yet you tell me that you are attracted to me ? You betray your wife; then you invite me to share in your dishonor.”

  “My wife and I are . . . estranged.”

  “I see. Then of course you will tell me about the icicle?”

  Dalton sat back in the chair. It groaned under his weight in a way that reflected the heavy stone he carried in his own heart. He was silent for a long time. Finally, he spoke. “No. I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I... can’t.”

  “You refuse, you mean?”

  He leaned forward, moving closer to her. “Yes. No. I won’t because I can’t.”

  She sat up then, and swayed unsteadily for a moment, placing her head in her hands, wiping them across her eyes, brushing her hair back. She moved her legs and sat up on the side of the bed, taking one of his hands in both of hers, an act of gentle mercy that cut his heart in two.

  She reached out and touched his right cheek, a delicate brushing touch using only her fingertips. He could smell her perfume and the scent of her body. Her eyes were dark and he found it hard to look into them. She leaned forward and pulled him closer and kissed him, softly, gently, her lips brushing his, her warm breath in his face, her body very close. Then she pulled back and let go of his hands and stood up, looking down at him.

  “Good bye, Micah.”

  Dalton stood up and she did not move away from him. He could feel the warmth of her body. Her scent was a cloud of spice and lemons all around him and he could still feel the moisture of her lips on his, her sweet taste. He reached out for her and she let him pull her into his body. He held her for a time, gently but with strength,

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  feeling her heart beating under his ribs, the rise and fall of her

  breasts against his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, into the softness of her neck.

  She pushed him away and looked up at him, shook her head.

  “So long as you are false, Micah, you will always be sorry.”

  “SHE SAID THAT, DID SHE?” drawled Brancati, pushing a much-depleted plate of gnocchi arrabbiata away, his other hand hovering above his empty glass. He rapped twice on the little round table. Their waiter appeared, bowing, leaning in through the draperies of their little cubicl
e, his face beaming, red from the kitchen stoves, his hands folded in front of his spinnaker-size belly. Music from the outer rooms floated in over his shoulder. “Amarcord,” by Nino Rota.

  Brancati ordered a second decanter of wine and some frizzante, along with a bottle of sambuca, before turning back to Dalton’s gloomy face in the candlelight as the waiter bustled off.

  “Yes. I can’t blame her for it.”

  “Basta! You are morose, Micah. You are tired. In the morning—”

  “I won’t be here in the morning.”

  Brancati waved that away with a glass. The wine came back, a crystal decanter, frosted, dripping on the pink linen tablecloth, and a bottle of sambuca, with two small thick glasses.

  The waiter withdrew, bowing, mumbling, and Brancati refilled their glasses, so much wine that the surface of the liquid swelled a millimeter above the rims and trembled there, candlelight glimmering in a bright circle around the surface.

  “Now you must drink,” said Brancati, smiling at him. “If you can bring it to your lips without spilling, you will have your heart’s desire.”

  Dalton tried, failed, the wine falling like little flame-shaped drops

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  in the candlelight. Brancati laughed, reached for his own glass, brought it to his lips without a tremor, and sipped at it. Then he set it down and leaned back in his chair, wiping his mustache with a pink linen napkin.

  “You are in love with this signorina? She is your heart’s desire?”

  “In love? No. I admire her. She is so—”

  “Italian! Yes. If one leads a good life and dies well, God allows you to come back as an Italian, if only so that you can know the true meaning of remorse, and of virtue also. I too admire that woman, I too desire her, and I have three daughters and a wife and a mother and a mother-in-law, so I do not need to have another woman in my life, no more than a man needs more angry bees in his bathroom. Do you have three daughters and a wife and a mother-in-law, Micah?”

  This cut right home, sliced right through his defenses.

  “Yes. I mean, I did. One, that is. My daughter died. As a baby.”

  Brancati, horrified, saw that he had put a finger into an open wound.

  Dalton held up a hand, offering an unsteady smile. “It was long ago.”

  “I am sorry. Forgive me.”

  “It was hard, yes. My wife never recovered from it.”

  “You are...”

  “We do not talk.”

  Brancati shook his head, sadness welling up in his face. He was a sentimental man, thought Dalton. His feelings ran close to the surface.

  “This often happens. I see this as a policeman. Many families do not survive a great tragedy, the loss of a child, a loved one. The survivors blame themselves. Blame each other. This is why I hate the bad ones so much. The ripples run out from a crime, run out through time and life together. There is no recovery, no complete forgetting.

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  The victims are always changed. Nothing is ever the same again, and in this strange new place the old ties, the old bonds of love and friendship, they wear thin, they fail. You do not blame ...?”

  “I blame no one but myself.”

  “Yes. I see that.” He lapsed into an uneasy silence, staring at Dalton over the rim of his wineglass. He sighed, set the glass down. “You will permit me to be... scortese ...impolite?”

  “Please.”

  “First, a question. Your rooms at the Savoia e Jolanda. The day you leave, yesterday, the maid tells us that you scrub the floors of the bathroom. The walls. The mirrors. The sink. Until they shine. This you never do before. Neither did Mr. Naumann, when he lived there. This is not something most men do at any time. Not in fine hotels, certainly. Then you take the linen towels away with you. Also you leave three hundred euros and a fifty-euro tip and a note apologizing for the bedcover, the missing towels, that they are stained from a very bad shaving cut, that you wish to repay for it. But there is no blood on the bedcover. Hearing this, our people used ultraviolet to look for blood in your rooms, but there was nothing, a few drops only.”

  He hesitated, shot Dalton a wary look, slightly ashamed.

  “There is also some evidence that someone was in the room with you that night. Guests in the next suite heard voices—”

  “Voices? More than one?”

  “They could not say. Only that it seemed to them that a conversation was going on, the back and forth, pauses. More talking.”

  “Maybe I had a woman in the room.”

  Brancati smiled, tolerant, amused. Unbelieving.

  “There was no . . . no sign of that. The maids always know. Also, in the wastebasket there were several ripped covers—for bandages— and the entire box of medical supplies was empty. When you paid for the room the desk clerk saw that your left wrist had a big bandage

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  on it, and under the black glove there was a swelling, as if your hand was injured and you had wrapped it up. Yet I look at your hand here”—reaching out and touching his left hand with a fingertip— “and there is no injury at all. So here is the question—the impolite question. Your state of mind that night, it seems a little disordered. You imagine blood, but are not wounded. You converse, with no one in the room. You see a bloody bedcover where there is no blood. You clean where there is no stain. Is this because of the fight with Milan and Gavro?”

  “Partly. The rest was fatigue. Too much to drink. Far too much.”

  “You drank before you met with Milan and Gavro?”

  “Yes. And much more afterward.”

  “You were drunk, then, when you fought them?”

  “I see where this is going. I wish I could go there with you. I can’t. I had no excuse. I would have done the same on black coffee.”

  “Micah—I may call you Micah? Yes? Thank you. And you will call me Tessio, like my sons do. Micah, I do not know you very well. What I do know I begin to like. You do not seem to be un uomo cattivo, a man who enjoys hurting people. Do you not feel that what happened with Milan and Gavro—that maybe you should find something else to do for a while? I mean no offense. But I admit...”

  “What I did offended you?”

  “Not offended, no. How to say . . . it troubles me. Now that I know you a little better, I would say—with respect—it is not a natural thing for any man to sing Broadway songs and quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream while he kicks a man into a coma. If I told you this story about another man, what would you advise him to do?”

  “Take a year off. Seek professional help.”

  “Yes. This would be the advice of a true friend. And will you?”

  Brancati’s tone was light; his question was dead serious. Dalton stared down at his glass, at the back of his left hand, resisting the urge to tell this man everything that had happened in the room, the

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  emerald green spider, the bloody wound in his hand that was not

  there, above all the terrible persistence of these hallucinations. Cora was right. He needed medical help. “Yes. I will. When this is over.” Brancati studied Dalton’s face, looking for evasion, for equivoca

  tion, and decided after a time that Dalton was telling the truth, at least that he believed what he was saying to Brancati right now. Whether in the cold light of morning he maintained that resolve was an issue only Dalton himself could confront, and in the end what Dalton did about Dalton’s demons was none of Brancati’s business. He had his own, far too many, and would not care—in fact would savagely resent having them evoked, called up from the pit, by a stranger, even a benevolent one, even over fine white wine and a marvelous sambuca.

  “Good. Enough. I intrude. Forgive me. Well, so you really were a soldier,” he said, pouring some more sambuca into a glass, changing the subject without much tact but with charming determination. “I recognized this right away. I said so, did I not? And how, where, did you soldier?”

  “Arm
y. Special Forces, for a while. Then Intelligence.” “With your American Defense Intelligence Agency?” “Yes. Before that I was a G2.” Brancati’s polite expression showed no understanding of the

  phrase. Dalton realized that Brancati was too polite to ask. “In our army, S2 mean an officer assigned to Intelligence. And

  G2 means that same thing, only at the Brigade level.” “Brigade-level Intelligence? And you saw action?” “Yes. Some. Syria. The Philippines. And I was in the Horn.” Brancati took this in, his eyes widening slightly. “When?” Dalton picked up his glass, sipped at it, looking at the candles,

  thinking about the Horn, about little fires in the black African night,

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  stiffening corpses, knives in the moonlight, the feel of a man’s face in your left hand, his beard rasping against your palm, the steel in your right hand vibrating as the blade cuts so deep into the throat that it grates against the man’s spine. The gasping, the weakening convulsions, fresh blood on your forearm, warm as coffee.

  “Ten years ago.”

  “During the Janjaweed Rising?”

  “Unofficially, yes.” A short answer, and as such a palpable hint, which Brancati deliberately ignored, his expression hardening.

  “We were there too. My brigade. With the UN. An armored brigade of the Centauro Division. Under that Canadian general. We lost fourteen men. Taken as prisoners, abandoned by—by that Canadian—then butchered like veal calves.”

  “In Kismayo?”

  Brancati had a blind look, his mind in the past.

  “I was in that sector,” said Dalton. “Your relief column got turned away.”

  “Sent back,” said Brancati. “By that . . . clerk.”

  “You were supposed to have a safe passage. That unit, I mean.”

  “Ha! Guaranteed by that Canadian. His ‘guarantee’ was as empty as his huge square head. No matter. No consequences for him. He wrote a book and became a big man at the United Nations. He goes on television to weep about how difficult it all was for him, how much he suffers from the nightmares, from the guilt, although he insists that he himself did all that courage could do. No. His guilt is at one remove, he is only remotely guilty. For this the Canadian government calls him a great hero of their people. He sits in their government even now, smoking cigars, granting interviews.”