Dalton’s mood, which had been dark and oppressed during the late afternoon, brightened somewhat, as it always did after the sun went down, a transformation not unrelated to his third glass of Bolly. He even tried for happy. Not that he got there. He never did these days. Happy was for FNGs, what the company called Fucking New Guys.
But he realized that he was looking forward to going back to Cortona and doing something useful, even if only as a diversion. Another round of Bolly and the image of Naumann in death that had been floating in front of his eyes for the last thirty-six hours began to recede. Easing back in his chair, he took a more active interest in his surroundings.
There were very few other people in the room, and the place had the look of a dinner party after the hosts have cleaned the ashtrays and put the cat out and are now standing at the wide-open front door in their pajamas and slippers, looking grumpy. Venice was winding down like a clockwork circus, and Dalton watched the six other diners scattered around the room with his usual level of semi-professional interest: two slender Italian girls in cashmere twin sets and flowered skirts leaning in close to whisper over their vongole with their hair falling down around their silky cheeks and their ankles demurely crossed; an elderly man in a well-cut suit that had fit him perfectly thirty years ago, having a plate of sole and staring mournfully across his table at an empty chair that looked as if it should have been filled with a loving wife but wasn’t. An American couple who had the love-stuffed look of newlyweds on a six-city budget tour.
And a big broad-shouldered stiff-backed man with shoulder-length, silky-gray hair sitting at a table-for-one with his back to the room, smoking a Toscano cigarillo; it seemed that everyone in Venice was smoking Toscanos this season. His strong-looking leathery hands were laid out on either side of an open book. The man had his head down, and seemed to be reading it intently. Something in the look and carriage of this man reminded Dalton of Father Jacopo.
The man’s silvery hair was hanging down his cheek, hiding his face, but the skin on the man’s hands was dark, tanned almost a mahogany color, veined and ridged and gnarled, the hands of a man who had spent his long life using them to hammer, bend, and break. He wore a heavy turquoise-and-silver bracelet on his left wrist and a solid silver ring on the middle finger of his right hand.
An American, thought Dalton. From the Southwest, or California. Maybe a rancher or a cattleman. There was as well some other quality in his upright frame that suggested strength, vigor — even menace. Dalton made a point of marking the man down — shiny dark-green lizard-skin boots, tipped with silver, black jeans, a long black trench coat that looked pricey. He wore it the way Venetians do, over the shoulders like a cloak. One ear was poking through the man’s long silver hair, a smallish ear, pasted flat to the skull, like a seal’s ear. Piercing the lobe was a silver earring in the shape of a crescent floating above an iron cross, an oddly Islamic crescent moon for a man who looked so much like an American cowboy. Or perhaps an Indian? Navajo? Lakota?
He realized he was intrigued by the guy and waited patiently for the man’s waiter to arrive, which would require the man to look up so Dalton could see his face. This never happened.
No one in the restaurant paid the slightest attention to the man in all the time that Dalton was there — no waiter approached, no guest smiled at him on her way to the washroom — so when Dalton stood up and walked carefully to the little hallway at the front of the café to pay for his vitello al limone and the two bottles of Bollinger that he had somehow managed to consume, he made it a point to leave his pack of Toscanos and his gold Zippo on the table so he could go back for them and try to get a better look.
While he was dealing with the bill and the doe-eyed heavy-breasted but mathematically challenged young girl behind the counter, he realized that not only had the old man not moved once during the last hour, he had not turned a page of the book on the table in front of him. Dalton handed a sheaf of euros to the girl and said, “Mi scusi, signorina. I forgot my cigarettes.”
But when he got back to the main room the man was gone. His table was a blank, the plates taken away, as if no one had ever been there. All that remained on the table was a pack of Toscano cigarillos. Dalton picked them up, flipped the lid. The pack was still half-full. He closed the lid, dropped it on the table, and walked down the rear hallway, where he found an open door that led out into an alleyway, and from there to a walkway that ran into darkness far along the canal.
In the distance he heard the sound of boots on stones echoing down the twisted lanes. He stood and listened until the striding sound of steel-capped cowboy boots faded away and then he went back into the café, picked his own Toscanos and his Zippo off his table, and considered the pack the man had left behind for a moment, finally picking it up as well and putting it in his suit coat pocket. He returned to the till, where the girl was still holding his change, her soft brown eyes troubled.
“Mi perdoni, signorina.”
She looked at him, her full lips open, her expression blank. “Sì, signore.”
“L’uomo in nero—”
“I speak English bad, sir. Sorry.”
“The man in black? With the long gray hair?”
Her face changed. She shook her head. “Mi dispiace, signore. Non capisco.”
Dalton held up his pack of Toscano cigarillos.
“He was smoking these. An old gray man. Do you know him?”
She put the glass shell with his change down in front of him, shook her head, and stepped back away from the till, folding her arms.
“Non parlo…”
“The man in black who was sitting alone. At the back—”
She looked toward the rear of the café, and then back at Dalton. “There is no one there.”
“The man who was there. We all saw him. Do you know him?”
“No. I do not.”
“Would the owner…?”
“He is gone.”
“The owner?”
“Yes. The owner is gone too.”
“Is the man a regular? The man in black?”
She was through talking; that was clear from her face. The gates were closing as he watched her. She tightened her lips, made a slight bow, and said, “There is no one there, sir. Mi scusi. Buonanotte.”
Dalton walked back along the Riva degli Schiavoni — the quay of the slaves — pausing in front of his hotel to briefly consider and happily reject the idea of doing what Stallworth had specifically ordered him to do: go home and stay there.
The hotel café was closed, all the tables stacked up under the green awning. Out in the basin an empty vaporetto was chugging slowly into the distance, an oblong of yellow light far out on the water. The black gondolas along the Danieli docks were shrouded in blue and chained to their poles, where they bobbed and bumped in the wavelets that ran in ripples across the face of the quay. In the distance he heard the hollow echo of music: violins and the mellow snake-charm piping of a clarinet. He crushed his cigarillo into the stones and turned away from the hotel.