It was too early, and far too depressing, to go to bed.
A glass of port, or two, at Florian’s in the piazza, if there were seats available, just to balance the champagne, and then a stroll around the campo to clear his head, until the bells rang in the campanile at midnight. He would do what Naumann had liked to do on an evening just like this. What he would have done if he weren’t busy lying buck-naked on an autopsy table somewhere in Cortona.
He crossed the bridge canal and stopped to look at the Bridge of Sighs, the covered stone arch that linked the Palazzo Ducale with the old bargello where the Doge’s thugs liked to take their political enemies apart with heated tongs — this was why the bridge was called the Bridge of Sighs. He leaned against the railing, looking out at the basin and the lights playing on the church of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water, and spent a few moments idly wondering about the counter girl’s reluctance to talk about the guy in the black coat.
Probably a cultural thing. Venetians protected their own. For that matter, so did New Yorkers and Bostonians. It was possible that the man was a family friend, an uncle or a cousin, or perhaps a public figure whose privacy needed protecting. The guy did have a vaguely religious aura. He could have been a local bishop.
If the local bishops wore Southwestern jewelry and had hands like an open-pit miner. Dalton raised the old man’s cigar pack to throw it into the canal, changed his mind, put it back in his pocket, and walked on past the Moorish walls of the palazzo Ducale. He turned right into the piazzetta that led to the Basilica of Saint Mark. There were dark shapes under the cloistered archway that ran along the palazzo walls; the smell of marijuana and the tinny buzz of Middle Eastern music snaked outward from the shadowy dark.
A girl called to him from out of the crowd of kids crowded together in the dark, drunkenly, with a petulant edge, demanding a fucking cigarette, man. He ignored them and walked on through the piazzetta. The slender red-brick tower of the campanile rose three hundred feet into the Venetian night beside him. Beyond it the heartbreaking sweep of the Piazza San Marco opened up before him, possibly the most beautiful open space in the world: a huge three-sided cloistered square of oddly Moorish design, with the bizarre monstrosity of the basilica holding down the open end.
The piazza was filled with music and light. Florian’s was still open, as it had been since the late 1700s: he walked across the cobbles toward the old café tucked in under the portico on the southern side of the square. In spite of the cool, damp evening a little quartet was playing Ravel’s “Bolero” under a pink silk marquee set up in front of the restaurant. Dalton took a chair to one side of the marquee and waved to an alert waiter who quickly brought him a half bottle of vino bianco de la casa (the hell with port). He lit up another one of his cigarillos and sat back to listen.
It was his view that there were few moments in a man’s life, and lately this included sex, that could equal an evening at Florian’s, listening to a spirited and skillful quartet play “Bolero,” and he dedicated his pleasure in it to the memory of Porter Naumann.
“Bolero” came to its fiery conclusion, followed in its turn by “The Moonlight Sonata,” an étude of Liszt’s, and then one of Chopin’s piano sonatas. Through it all Dalton sat alone and watched the crowds swell and peak and dwindle away while the stars turned in the sky above the luminous walls of the square. As the time passed, so did much of his bitterness and anger.
One of the many marvelous gifts of vino bianco was the perspective and detachment it could provide: Naumann was dead, a bad death, and something would have to be done about it. If Naumann had been killed, then whoever did it was going to die in a memorable and instructive way, because that was how their game was played. But Stallworth was right. Company business was inherently risky, and many of the field operatives suffered from acute stress. Although most of the Agency’s field work was little more than skilled forensic accounting in the service of the War on Terror, some of the people doing it cracked in truly spectacular ways.
It was in the nature of their game.
But the curiosity remained, undimmed by the wine. Dalton was still possessed by an intense desire to know what exactly had happened to his friend in the last hours of his life, what unknown forces drove him to his terrible death in the courtyard of San Nicolò. At midnight an immense bronze bell sounded once, its deep vibrating tone echoing from the walls and rooftops all around the piazza. The violins ceased, the people stopped moving, and all the pale white faces turned toward the campanile like a field of flowers bending in a wind. The huge bronze bell began to ring the twelve tones of midnight, as it had for over six hundred years. The waiters started to pick up the chairs and collect their bills. The people in the square began to melt away into the alleyways and shadows as the great bell tolled and the echoes rang and reverberated across the rooftops of Venice. Soon the square was almost empty. The soft lights inside Florian’s flicked off one by one. Dalton got to his feet, gathered up his cigarillos, left a generous stack of euros, drained his glass, stretched, and walked, a little unsteadily, through the piazzetta, in and out of the shadows that lay all around the old Ducal Palace.
He opened the old man’s pack of Toscanos, gently turned the slender brown tube with the gold tip between the thumb and index finger of his right hand for a few seconds. What the hell, he decided, lighting it up with his Zippo. He drew the smoke in deep, let it out in a luxurious cloud, snapped the lid shut, and shoved the pack it into the pocket of his trench coat.
Wrapped in a blissful cloud of wine and smoke, Chopin playing sweetly in his memory, Dalton strolled idly along the covered cloister that ran down the Florian side of the piazza. The cigarillo was a perfect coda to an evening of such sublime beauty. He stopped for a time, one shoulder up against a pillar, and looked out at the plaza, admiring the way the moonlight bathed the farther wall and how it played with the stonework and the shadows. He found himself seeing it as he had never seen it before. Above the three-tiered windowed wall the night sky pulsed with light and he felt himself drawn upward into it, as if he were suddenly weightless.
He finished the cigarillo, stubbed the butt out on the pillar, and put it in his pocket. He turned, with regret, away from the perfection of the plaza at night, crossed over to the covered archways of the Palazzo Ducale, and walked in a strangely swelling sensory daze through its dark cloistered walkway, heading, perhaps a bit vaguely, in the general direction of his hotel.
As he reached the turning of the cloister, he became aware of two large figures standing in the shadows. They stepped forward as he approached, blocking his path, two black shapes silhouetted against the amber lights on the churning water of Saint Mark’s Basin.
“Scusi, marigold,” said one. “You have smokes?”
The man’s accent was mainly gutter Croatian with a touch of Trieste in it. His partner, who was moving to block Dalton’s path to the open courtyard, said nothing, but he said it in a way that implied he was fully on board with the evening’s program. He had something long and sharp-looking in his right hand, which he was holding slightly away from his body. The bitter stink of strong Moroccan dope came off the men like heat from a radiator. Mugged, thought Dalton, suddenly earthbound and sobering fast.