“Something that doesn’t fit with Porter’s life. I’ll know it.”
Brancati’s face showed a stony kind of amusement.
“Anomalous? Perhaps. But when you know it, will you tell me?”
“You have my word on it.”
“The word of a banker is not the word of a soldier.”
Brancati’s hard eyes were on him, but Dalton had nothing to say.
3
Dalton was sitting at the sunlit café outside the Savoia & Jolanda, his coat pulled tight against a biting wind off the Adriatic, a glass of vino bianco at his left hand and a Toscano cigarillo in his right, watching a long-legged, tight-skirted, black-haired young tour guide striding briskly east along the stone quay of the Riva. The girl was holding aloft a large plastic daisy taped to the end of a pool cue. She had a gaggle of elderly Hindu tourists waddling along behind her and absolutely mystical thighs. Dalton, who hadn’t had sex in years, watched her passing with cool clinical detachment. No doubt they were headed for the Piazza San Marco, where they would pose with verminous pigeons on their heads and more verminous pigeons on their outstretched arms. Beyond the shuffling column of tourists the great basin of Saint Mark was busy with droning work boats and burbling mahogany cruisers. A lemon-yellow sun glittered on the churning surface of the green water, filling the basin with a clean, pure light. Across the basin the Palladian façade of San Giorgio Maggiore glowed with the pale pastel tints of fall in Venice. Rain was gathering in the east. Winter was coming in low out of the rising sun; he could feel its breath on the side of his neck. The tour guide was using a bullhorn to bellow something brightly misinformative about the Bridge of Sighs when the cell phone on the linen-covered tabletop shrilled at him.
“Micah Dalton.”
“Micah. Stallworth. What did you get?”
Jack Stallworth, the section chief of Dalton’s Cleaners Unit out of Langley. Stallworth was a great intelligence tactician, but he was also a short, sharp, bullet-headed hard-nosed razorback hog with all the languid charm of a quick knee to the jaw.
“Jack. Lovely to hear from you. How are you?”
“Forget that butterscotch bullshit, Micah. How bad is it?”
“I went through his rooms before they got there.”
“I know that. And…?”
“And we’re okay. I sent you a memo.”
“I got the memo. I need reassurances. No company stuff? No records, papers — nothing that caught your attention?”
“You have something specific in mind, Jack?”
“No. Specific? Hell no. Specific! Why ask me that?”
“No reason. You sound worried. Anything I should know?”
“No. Not a thing. But you’re sure he’s clean. You didn’t miss anything? You went through it all and nothing stood out?”
“Naumann was a pro, Jack.”
“Yeah. He was. And you went in low? If they figure out you went through his room before his body was found? That’s heat, Micah. Heavy heat.”
“You mean serious. Or major. Not heavy.”
“Serious what? Major what?”
“You can’t have heavy heat.”
“Don’t jerk me around, Micah, I’m not in the mood.”
“If I’d been made, Brancati wouldn’t have let me leave Cortona.”
“What about this hostel Naumann stayed in? In Cortona? The Strega?”
“I tried to get a look at it again last night. They’ve got two cops on the entrance. I can’t get anywhere near it until they release it.”
“And when will that be?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
“You in Venice now?”
“Yes.”
“Why not wait in Cortona?”
“Brancati. The cop. He wanted me to go. I went.”
“Why did he want you to get out of Cortona?”
“I made the mistake of asking him if I could help out.”
There was plenty of dead air in his earpiece now, so he managed a quick pull at his wineglass. He even had time to light another cigarette.
“You did what?”
“Yeah. I know. Thing is, he’s going to lay this down as a drug-related accidental death. I think partly so Naumann can get into Heaven.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He asked me if Naumann was a Christian.”
“He was an Episcopalian. They don’t believe in God. If it wasn’t a suicide, then what are they calling it?”
“Death by misadventure. An accidental overdose or some sort of psychotic episode. They’re going to look for a brain lesion too.”
“They’re doing an autopsy, they’re gonna see those old bullet holes in Naumann. And I hear he got marked up pretty good last year in Syria.”
“Brancati’s already seen that stuff. Naumann was pretty much naked at the scene. Brancati was military too. He even made Naumann’s Air Assault tattoo. So all in all we’re lucky he’s playing it for a simple OD.”
“Okay. No murder. Drug overdose. What’s wrong with that?”
“Naumann didn’t do drugs,” said Dalton with a resigned sigh.
“As far as you know. Anyway, what do you care? Your job is to clean up after our field guys. Not figure out what the hell happened to make them go out on the high side. We lose field guys to drugs or suicide all the time, and when we do, we send in a cleaner. We’ve already looked into the backstory and nobody here thinks that anybody in our game had a reason to kill him. Turn him, maybe. Or pay him off. But taking him out in the way you saw? No, it wasn’t company business. You stick to cleaning, Micah. That’s what you do. Field operators lead complicated lives. Now and then they lose it and take themselves out. Naumann’s domestic life was a swamp. I’ve heard all about his zombie-bitch daughters. And you knew he had prostate surgery two years ago?”
“Prostate surgery! The guy was fifty-two!”
“Didn’t tell you that, did he? Welcome to my world. It was real invasive. You know what that means. Guy like Naumann, no sex. He’d hate living like that.”
“I thought it was some kind of kidney thing.”
“Well it wasn’t. Only way I knew was Personnel sent me his medical claim for a signature. It’s not the kind of thing guys bring up over a beer. So he’s maybe looking at wearing a diaper for the rest of his life and his dick might as well be a sock full of sand for all the good it’s gonna do him. Plus his marriage was in the tank. I’d say he had some reasons for taking himself out. You know, Micah, sometimes a thing can be true even if I think it. I have the tiniest feeling one of my people died from enemy action, I’ll send in the metal-meets-the-meat boys. That’s why you’re a cleaner. That’s your job.”
“Don’t you want to know why it happened?”
“Repeat after me: ‘I’m a cleaner. That’s my job.’”
“Where were you all this time? I called in sixteen hours ago.”
“On the Hill having a séance with some PUNTS. People of Utterly No Tactical Significance. They’re not at all amused about Naumann. So how the hell did he die?”
“You want it in the clear?”
“Just draw me some pictures in the air.”
While Dalton was giving Jack Stallworth the gruesome essentials, a red-cheeked waiter-boy in a fur-lined jacket arrived radiating sulk. Dalton lifted his glass and winked at the boy, who stalked away to get another bottle, trailing sotto voce imprecations like willow leaves in autumn.
“You drinking again, Micah? It’s eleven o’clock where you are.”
“What time is it where you are?”