Milan seemed to be struggling to find one of those Noël Coward lines that would bring the house down but in the end he had to settle for a throat-clearing gargle followed by an attempt to spit in Dalton’s face that ended up with a bloody gob of it running down his own cheek. Dalton waited for a polite interval to see if Milan had anything illuminating to add.
“Okay,” he said, straightening up. “Let me get that for you.”
Dalton gauged his angle and then kicked Milan very hard in the center of his face, getting a wonderful follow-through that snapped Milan’s head back on his neck with a meaty crack. Where it stuck, still and fixed, its skull-to-shoulder angle now slightly wrong. Something inside Milan came flowing out in a rushing gush.
Dalton stepped daintily back, surveyed the scene with the air of a satisfied choreographer, and, turning to address the stunned kids in the cloister, bowed deeply:
“If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear…”
He paused, searching his memory for the line, and then, the Shakespearean spirit coming back in a sudden flow, he continued in a stronger voice that echoed around the piazza: “And so good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.”
No response from the audience. Everybody’s a critic these days. He bowed again, straightened, pivoted neatly on his right heel, his long coat flaring out, and strode with quiet dignity, stage left, out of the piazzetta, his heels striking hard and his footsteps echoing around the square. Silence, nothing but silence, followed him all the way back to his hotel along the quay.
Reaction set in fast and he was weaving and a little breathless and trying not to throw up by the time he reached the brassbound doors of his hotel. He stopped there, leaning against the entrance, his breath coming in short painful gasps. Beyond the edge of the quay the basin of Saint Mark was a black bowl marked here and there with a flickering sliver of light. Far across the bay, floodlights illuminated the impassive façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. From the eaves of the hotel next door a gargoyle with the face of a lizard stared down at him, cold and unblinking.
After his world stopped spinning and he got his breathing under control, he pushed his way into the hotel lobby, raised a hand to the old bellman slumped behind the rosewood desk, and rode up in the narrow mirrored elevator to the top floor. He fumbled at the lock and eventually unlocked the door into what had been Naumann’s company suite, a lush and well-appointed room with a wide and inviting carved wooden bed, an antique desk with a Venetian candelabrum on it, and sliding glass doors that led out to a small balcony overlooking the basin. The room had been cleaned and dressed, and Naumann’s luggage was still there at the side of his bed. Dalton figured the maid had been in, because there were fresh flowers in a tall clay cylinder standing on the dresser, a towering viny tangle with several huge white flowers, all of them as tightly closed as butterfly cocoons.
Dalton, for whom the land of plants was an undiscovered bourne, ignored them while he poured himself a glass of wine and passed on through to the balcony, where he pulled a wrought-iron stool up to the ledge and sat down on it with his back against the wall, looking out across the basin.
He pulled the pack of cigarillos out of his pocket and, with a hand that trembled only a little, held the case up to the pale light of the balcony lantern. He flipped the lid and pulled out one of the few remaining cigarillos. It looked and felt and smelled in every way wonderful. He put it to his lips, lit it with his Zippo.
The smoke poured down into his lungs and spread a comforting warmth through his body. He leaned on the flower basket — gardenias? lupins? rutabagas? — and looked down at the almost-deserted quay.
A single white-robed figure was wandering past the equestrian statue of Garibaldi. Not a ghost; the mime he had teased earlier in the day, on his way home now, heading for the vaporetto station in front of the hotel. Dalton looked up and saw the stars of the Milky Way like a shell-pink veil waving in a sea breeze blowing in from an infinite black ocean. The city smelled of sea salt and garlic and sewage and damp stone: human corruption and the bittersweet joy of still being alive. It was a night that Porter would have savored: the superb little orchestra at Florian’s, the vino bianco, the cigarillos, but it was too damn late for all that and too damn bad. Porter Naumann was dead now and would never see another evening in Venice.
He sighed, saw his glass was empty, and went back into the room to get some more wine, brushing past the floral display on the dresser; he was a little disconcerted when he saw that the large white flowers were now in the process of spreading their petals wide open.
Moonflowers.
The name came up from somewhere in his memory. Moonflowers. He had heard that name before, recently, it seemed; they were a kind of morning glory, weren’t they? Jack Stallworth was a fanatical plant guy. Maybe Jack had talked about moonflowers at some point. Dalton brushed by them and plucked another bottle of prosecco out of the minibar beside the dresser, popped the cork, and went back out to the balcony.
He sat back down on the stool and breathed in the night air, pulling it down deep, smelling something new in the breeze, a sharp tangy scent a little bit like eucalyptus. There was a stirring tickle on the back of his left hand. He looked down to see a large emerald green spider resting there.
He jerked his hand reflexively and as he did so he felt the spider bite him, like a spike being driven deep into the back of his hand.
Stricken with mindless horror, he dropped the pack and stumbled backward across the balcony, slapping at his clothes and wiping his forearms vigorously, his breath coming in short sharp rasps and his heart pounding. The stinging pain in his left hand was building into a fire that seemed to blaze upward through the veins in his left forearm. He stumbled into the bathroom of the suite and ripped his shirtsleeve up to his biceps. Under the blue-white light over the sink he watched as a thin red network of inflamed veins slowly spread upward toward his elbow. The flesh of his wrist was getting puffy. He turned his hand over and saw a large red welt about the size of a silver dollar on the back of his left hand. In the center of this welt there were two tiny dots of red blood welling up.
He fumbled at his waist, pulling his thin leather belt out of the loops. He wrapped the belt around his left arm just above the elbow joint and pulled the belt as tight as he could. He watched as the thin red lines grew upward on the underside of his forearm. The pain, a hot flooding rush that burned him down to the bone, was now replaced by an icy chill. He realized he was gasping for air.
He tried to calm himself, thought about antidotes: he had been trained in jungle survival. What kind of spider was emerald green and had a bite this powerful? What kind of venom had this rapid effect? Would he go into anaphylactic shock?
Realizing that hyperventilating would only speed the poison, if that’s what it was, he tried to calm himself, tried to think clearly. He looked up and saw his face in the mirror, wet with sweat, his skin blue-white in the fluorescent light, his pale-blue eyes staring back at him; the face of a fool who might die if he didn’t do something very effective right now. He opened the door to the cabinet above the sink and fumbled through the toiletries, found a pair of stainless-steel scissors that glittered in the cold light.
He put his left hand down on the edge of the sink and sliced into the blackened welt on the back of his hand, ripping at the wound until he had it flayed opened like a red flower that gushed out bluish blood. He could see the pink cords of the exposed tendons in his hand and the blood drained from his head. He swayed at the sink, his knees shaking.