“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.”
“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 before 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.”
“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 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 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.