Hellbent

3 Everything He Held Dear

Venice was a beautiful city. But like many beauties, she was temperamental.

Furious weather kept the tourists inside. Rain hammered the canals, wore at the ancient stone, bit the cheeks of the few brave enough to venture out. The storm washed the color from everything, turning the Floating City into a medley of dull grays.

Nearing the Ponte di Rialto, Jim Harville spotted the man tailing him. A black man in a raincoat, bent into the punishing wind a ways back. He was skilled — were it not for the weather-thinned foot traffic, Harville never would have picked him up. It had been several years since he’d operated, and his skills were rusty. But habits like these were never entirely forgotten.

Harville hiked up the broad stone steps of the bridge, the Grand Canal surging furiously below. He reached the portico at the top and cast a glance back.

Across the distance the men locked eyes.

A gust of wind howled through the ancient mazework of alleys, ruffling the shop canopies, making Harville stagger.

When he regained his footing and looked back up, the man was sprinting at him.

It was a strange thing so many years later to witness aggression this naked.

Instinct put a charge into Harville, and he ran. Vanishing up a tight street, he took a hairpin left between two abandoned palazzos and shot across a cobblestone square. He had no weapon. The man pursuing him was younger and fitter. Harville’s only advantage was that he knew the city’s complex topography as well as he knew the contours of his wife’s back, the olive skin he traced lovingly each night as she drifted off to sleep.

He shouldered through a boutique door, overturned a display table of carnival masks, barged through a rear door into an alley. Already he felt a burning in his legs. Giovanna liked to joke that she kept him young for fifty, but even so, retirement had left him soft.

He careened out onto a calle at the water’s edge. Across the canal a good distance north, his pursuer appeared, skidding out from between two buildings.

The man saw him. He flung his arms back, and his jacket slid off gracefully, as if tugged by invisible strings. Rain matted his white T-shirt to his torso, his dark skin showing through, the grooved muscles visible even at this distance.

The man’s eyes dropped to the choppy water. And then he bounded across, Froggering from pier to trash barge and onward, leaving two moored gondolas rocking in his wake.

Dread struck Harville’s stomach like a swallowed stone. He registered a single thought.

Orphan.

The man was on Harville’s side of the canal now, but propitiously, a wide intersecting waterway provided a barrier between them. As Harville began his retreat, the man vaulted over an embankment, rolled across a boat prow, and sprang up the side of a building, finding hand-and footholds on downspouts and window shutters. Even as he went vertical, his momentum barely slowed.

That particular brand of obstacle-course discipline — parkouring — had come into popularity after Harville’s training, and he couldn’t help but watch with a touch of awe now.

The man hauled himself through a third-story window, scaring a chinless woman smoking a cigarette back onto her heels. An instant later the man flew out of a neighboring window on Harville’s side of the waterway.

Harville had lost precious seconds.

He reversed, splashing through a puddle, and bolted. The narrow passages and alleys unfolded endlessly, a match for the thoughts racing in his head — Giovanna’s openmouthed laugh, their freestanding bathtub on the cracked marble floor, bedside candles mapping yellow light onto the walls of their humble apartment. Without a conscious thought, he was running away from home, leading his pursuer farther from everything he held dear.

He sensed footfalls quickening behind him. Columns flickered past, lending the rain a strobe effect as he raced along the arcade bordering Piazza San Marco. The piazza was flooded, the angry Adriatic surging up the drains, blanketing the stones with two feet of water.

Quite a sight to see the great square empty.

Harville was winded.

He stumbled out into the piazza, sloshing through floodwater. St. Mark’s Basilica tilted back and forth with each jarring step. The mighty clock tower rose to the north, the two bronze figures, one old, one young, standing their sentinels’ watch on either side of the massive bell, waiting to memorialize the passing of another hour.

Harville wouldn’t make it across the square into the warren of alleys across. He was bracing himself to turn and face when the round punched through his shoulder blade and spit specks of lung through the exit wound as it cleared his chest.

He went down onto his knees, his hands vanishing to the elbows in water. He stared dumbly at his fingers below, rippling like fish.

The voice from behind him was as easygoing as a voice could be. “Orphan J. A pleasure.”

Harville coughed blood, crimson flecks riding the froth.

“Jack Johns,” the man said. “He was your handler. Way back when.”

“I don’t know that name.” Harville was surprised that he could still form words.

“Oh. You mistook me. That wasn’t a question. We haven’t gotten to the questions yet.” The man’s tone was conversational. Good-natured even.

Harville’s arms trembled. He stared down at the eddies, the stone, his hands. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his face out of the water.

At some point it had stopped raining. The air had a stunned stillness, holding its breath in case the storm decided to come back.

The man asked, “What are your current protocols when you contact Jack Johns?”

Harville wheezed with each breath. “I don’t know that name.”

The man crouched beside him. In his hand was a creased photograph. It showed Adelina nestled in Giovanna’s arms, feeding. She was still wearing her pink knit cap from the hospital.

Harville felt air leaking through the hole in his chest.

He told the man what he wanted to know.

The man rose and stood behind him.

The water stirred around Harville. He closed his eyes.

He said, “I had a dream that I was normal.”

The man said, “And it cost you everything.”

The pistol’s report lifted a flight of pigeons off the giant domes of the basilica.

As the man pocketed his pistol and forged his way through the floodwater, the hour sounded. High on the clock tower, the two bronze forms, one old, one young, struck the bell they’d been ringing across these worn stones for five centuries and counting.