Read The Venetian Judgment Online
Authors: David Stone
The Venetian Judgment (13 page)
Mandy, sighing theatrically, plucked the book from his hand, looked at the text through red-rimmed eyes.
“It doesn’t say any of that anywhere, you hound. And I, a dying woman.”
“I was summarizing,” said Dalton primly, “giving you the essentials. Are you going to be okay? You look a bit . . . puce? Or do I mean ecru?”
Mandy went back to staring out at the churning whitecapped ocean.
“God, look at all that angry water. And Athens, what a bloody mess. It looked like a huge ashtray with a cheap model of a Greek temple stuck in the middle. This
cannot
be the real Aegean.”
cannot
be the real Aegean.”
“This is the winter, Mandy, as you may have noticed, and this is what the Aegean is like in the winter. You should see Venice right now: it looks like an Art Nouveau ice-cube tray. It’s all in the timing. If you showed up at the Royal Opera House at four in the morning on a bank holiday, you wouldn’t expect to see the Bolshoi leaping about the place, would you? Your nose needs some attention, by the way.”
Mandy, searching her purse for a tissue, said something unladylike, and the woman in the seat ahead of them turned around to give her a stern look, which resulted in Mandy saying something unladylike to her as well. After a bit of a row, in which she gave as good as she got, Mandy got up and went staggering off in the direction of the τoυαλέτα. She was still in there when the bell went off for the final approach, at which time an unsuspecting flight attendant made what would have been
her
final approach toward Mandy’s locked bathroom door had Dalton not headed her off.
her
final approach toward Mandy’s locked bathroom door had Dalton not headed her off.
“But she needs to come out,” said the young Greek girl. “It’s not safe.”
“And it’s not safe to go in there after her,” said Dalton. “Really!”
The girl, a stumpy brownish little thing with close-set black eyes who looked to be about eleven, made a pouty hall-monitor face and went off to put Mandy’s name down in the
Great Big Book of Very Naughty Passengers
.
Great Big Book of Very Naughty Passengers
.
They were on the ground a few minutes later, Mandy wrapped in Dalton’s trench coat and Dalton still in his third-best navy blue pinstripe, fighting the wind and the sleet and their luggage across the stony terrain that led to the low neoclassical pile that marked the spot where one day, God willing, a real airport would get built.
There was a thin vulturine man standing by a large black Škoda, a limp hand-rolled cigarette in his blue lips, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his military fatigue jacket, his collar up, watching with interest as they made their way across the tarmac. When they reached him, he straightened up and bobbed his head, simultaneously spitting the cigarette into the wind and offering a gloved hand to Mandy, who had come to a halt and was looking at the little man as if he were a village yobbo here to see about the drains.
“I am Sergeant Valentin Keraklis, Deputy Prefect of the Port Police.”
Dalton redirected the man’s hand away from Mandy’s midsection and shook it firmly, first once and then once again, fixing the man with a look.
“Thank you for meeting us, Sergeant. I’m William Pearson. May I present my wife, Mrs. Dorothy Pearson?”
Sergeant Keraklis, who may have needed glasses, was squinting at Mandy with a myopic grimace that Dalton realized was probably his best seductive smile. It wasn’t working, but Mandy took his hand anyway.
“Lovely to meet you, Sergeant.”
“Well,” said Keraklis, reeling as a gust of wet wind came in off the whitecapped expanse of the Aegean, “you are not seeing Santorini at her best, I am afraid. I am to take you to your hotel, if you please. You are at the Porto Fira Suites, are you not? The best place in Fira, I promise. Much is closed as this is the off-season, as you can see. Captain Sofouli has set aside the rest of the afternoon for your requests, if that is convenient.”
“That’s terrific,” said Dalton, stuffing their bags into the trunk of the Škoda and easing a still-queasy Mandy into the rear seat. The Škoda smelled of stale Turkish tobacco and Sergeant Keraklis in roughly equal proportions. Mandy rolled the window down and tried not to breathe any more than absolutely required.
They bounced and jounced over the rocky, twisting saddleback roads that climbed up the bony spine of Santorini, revealing with each S-curve another sprawling vista of the storm-tossed seas that had given Ulysses so much trouble. The island seemed to have absorbed so much history that it was cracking under the weight of it, but Dalton found the wintry desolation perversely attractive. Fira itself, the capital, spreading itself out across the top of the caldera wall, was a postcard-perfect example of a picturesque Grecian town, overflowing with jumbled-up villas and odd little shops and crowded blocks of apartments, all of it fluttering with awnings and curtains and, madly, ornamental vines of every color, some of them carrying blossoms even in this vile weather. There were few people out in the streets, but Dalton recalled that the entire population of the Greek isles was less than ten million in the off-season—it spiked to thirty million in July.
Sergeant Keraklis delivered them to the portico, helped with the bags, grimaced at Mandy once again with a similar effect, and puttered off back to the station after securing Dalton’s promise to come no sooner than was necessary, and repeating that Captain Sofouli was looking forward to meeting him.
The Porto Fira Suites turned out to be a rambling all-white Art Deco pile perched helter-skelter on top of the spikiest of the jagged peaks that rimmed the caldera wall. In the summer, the views from its flowered terraces and stepped gardens would have been stunning.
After doing a sweep for bugs and cameras and finding none, as he expected, he got Mandy more or less undressed, halting, with some regret, at the outer limits of decency, taking a moment to consider the enduring enigma of women’s lingerie, namely, that the more expensive it was, the less there was of it, and that Mandy’s must therefore be worth its weight in rubies.
She was still feeling perfectly ghastly but, with a bleating protest, finally settled into the king-sized bed in their open, airy, and again, somehow, in this bitter season, flower-strewn rooms. She lay there, still in her Ophelia/Camille mode, staring glumly out the window.
Dalton, following her look, thought that the view across the windswept bay to the ragged islands of Thirasia and Nea Kameni had a grand North Atlantic wildness to it. And the sea really was “wine-dark,” just as Homer had described it.
Mandy summoned herself and took his hand, holding him in place.
“What if he just simply believes you and lets it go at that?”
“We’ll think of something else.”
“What if he’s a complete berk?”
“You read his record. He got the Santorini assignment as a reward for ten years with their antiterrorist squads. He goes back as far as the colonels. If he survived the sixties in Greece, he’s no berk.”
“You do understand that we could end this evening in a cell?”
“I have no intention of letting that happen. You’d look lousy in handcuffs.”
“What could you do to prevent it? Where could we run to? We’re on an island.”
“I’ll do something clever and daring and dazzle you senseless. Remember, fortune favors the brave. Isn’t that your family motto?”
“No. Our family motto is
Cogito sumere potum alterum
.”
Cogito sumere potum alterum
.”
“Which means?”
“I think I’ll have another drink.”
“Very witty, I’m sure. Would you like one now?”
“Maybe when you get back . . .
if
you get back. Now, kiss me and go.”
if
you get back. Now, kiss me and go.”
He pulled a soft crazy-quilt blanket up over Mandy’s body, kissed her gently on her forehead. She smiled weakly and pushed her way deeper into the pillow. He went out into the main room, furnished in spare but well-done blond woods and Art Deco glass and floored in muted mosaic tiles, where he deciphered the phone instructions and called the front desk for a cab.
His command of the modern Greek language was limited to a few lines from
Shirley Valentine
and the last name of Archbishop Makarios. Fortunately, most of the island spoke serviceable English. He brewed up some coffeelike liquid that seemed to have been derived from coal tar. Oddly, it was excellent. He threw some water on his face, put a fresh bandage on his cheek, changed into a new suit of clothes—tobacco browns and tans, in honor of Porter Naumann’s current winter ensemble, but without the emerald green socks—and looked in on Mandy, who was sound asleep. He was standing, trench coat belted, under the broad portico of the Porto Fira a few minutes later when his cab arrived.
Shirley Valentine
and the last name of Archbishop Makarios. Fortunately, most of the island spoke serviceable English. He brewed up some coffeelike liquid that seemed to have been derived from coal tar. Oddly, it was excellent. He threw some water on his face, put a fresh bandage on his cheek, changed into a new suit of clothes—tobacco browns and tans, in honor of Porter Naumann’s current winter ensemble, but without the emerald green socks—and looked in on Mandy, who was sound asleep. He was standing, trench coat belted, under the broad portico of the Porto Fira a few minutes later when his cab arrived.
The office of the Port Police—the only constabulary on the island—was on Fira Martiou Street, the main drag. The building itself was a cement-block structure with barred windows, a Third World police bunker of the type Dalton had seen all over the world. The interior was lined in patched plaster and stucco, lit by a bank of fluorescents that made the duty officer behind the counter look like a three-day-old corpse: another wiry, vulturine fellow—Keraklis’s brother? The officer got to his feet as Dalton came in through the glass doors.
“Mr. Pearson? Captain Sofouli is waiting for you.”
He led Dalton down a narrow, half-painted hallway to an office in the rear, a large enclosed space marked off by rippled-glass panels. The door was open, and the space it defined was pretty much completely taken up by Captain Sofouli himself.
Crisp and correct in British Army-style black-and-tans, complete with a polished Sam Browne and a big Beretta in a worn leather holster, he looked as if he could have been Alessio Brancati’s older and very much larger brother, a heavy-bodied, sallow-skinned man with sharp Grecian features, shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, and a grip that was like getting your hand caught in the trunk of a Buick.
His smile was careful, a cop’s smile, and he offered Dalton—aka Mr. William Pearson—a coffee, which Dalton accepted. He asked for Dalton’s—Pearson’s—ID and passport, flipped through the pages, and handed the papers back. They sipped at their cups—small, delicate, Turkish, with a complex Moroccan motif—while the wind howled and banged the shutters. Sofouli set his cup down, made an apologetic face, and handed Dalton a clipboard with a single sheet of paper on it.
“If you would, Mr. Pearson, fill this out for me. It is just a formality. Name, home address, and a way you can be reached while you are in Greece. Also your passport number, as you can see there.”
He offered Dalton a pencil, which Dalton accepted, but the lead cracked as he began to use it. Sofouli looked about for a replacement, but Dalton pulled a cheap ballpoint pen from his own pocket and used it to fill out the form. Then he slipped the pen under the clip and handed the form back to Sofouli, who scanned it briefly and set the board aside, leaning back into his chair and hooking his hands over his belly.
“So, I am sorry to hear the business that brings you here. You have lost your son, I am informed.”
“Yes,” said Dalton, “I brought some recent photos,” setting the cup down on the edge of the captain’s desk and drawing a set of snapshots out of his breast pocket. Sofouli took them in his thick-fingered hand and spread them out on the green leather pad that covered his desk. He put on a pair of reading glasses and looked down at the shots, five colored photos of a sunny-looking young American boy in his mid-twenties, taken alone and with friends, at some seaside resort that looked vaguely Adriatic. The boy was olive-skinned and had long dark hair, bright green eyes.
Mandy had selected the shots from a file of over sixty thousand facial types on file at the Agency, searching the characteristics based on known photographs of Kiki Lujac, of which there were none to be had, not even on Google—Mandy noted this decidedly odd phenomenon at the time—so she guesstimated the essentials of his height, size, and weight, according to his Montenegrin medical papers.
The boy in the shots was a real person, last name Pearson, who had actually disappeared from Ravenna last August. The details of his disappearance had dictated the structure of their cover as his parents, a real family called Pearson; it was a good short-term cover, stronger than a snap cover but not a real legend, which would be fully supported by a team of other Agency staffers ready to take verification calls and back up the fieldman in any way they could.
Mandy had called their cover “NOX,” which was Agency jargon for “Nonofficial Cover.” It would not hold up under a suspicious and thorough vetting by a hostile agent. It should hold up with Sofouli, however, long enough to get Dalton through the interview, which was all they really needed.
And as long as Sofouli hadn’t already made a call to the real Pear-sons, who, Mandy had determined, were incommunicado at a beach house on the Oregon coast, still mourning the loss of their son. Using their genuine loss this way was cruel, mean, despicable, horrid, and effective. The whole idea was to look plausible, and then, on a second look, not so much.
“He is a very handsome lad,” said Sofouli with sympathy.
“Thank you. His name is Luke. Short for ‘Lucas.’ ”
“These shots, where were they taken?”
“He was in Ravenna, on the Adriatic. You can see the old
castello
in the background there.”
castello
in the background there.”
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