Sleuths

Blood Money

Carmody spent the morning at Bacino di Borechi, checking out the boat and captain Della Robbia had hired for the run south to Sardinia. The boat was forty-two feet and twenty years old — the Piraeus, flying a Greek flag. She was scabrous and salt-scarred, her fittings flecked with rust, but she seemed seaworthy and she had an immaculate power-plant: a twin-screw GMC diesel, well-tuned and shiny clean.

The captain looked all right too. He was an Australian named Vickers, who had been in Venice for a couple of years and who had handled some other smuggling jobs for Della Robbia, one involving a boatload of illegal aliens from Albania. Della Robbia said he was the best man available and he probably was. Sardinia would be a piece of cake compared to getting into Albanian waters and then out again safely with forty-three passengers.

From the bacino Carmody took a water taxi to St. Mark’s Square. Della Robbia hadn’t shown up yet at the open-air cafe on the Piazzeta. Carmody took a table, ordered a cup of cappuccino. It was a warm, windy September day, and the square was jammed with tourists, vendors, freelance artists, the ever-present pigeons. On the wide fronting basin, into which emptied Venice’s two major canals, the Grand and the Giudecca, gondolas and water taxis, passenger ferries and small commercial craft maneuvered in bright confusion. The sun turned the placid water a glinting silver, gave it a mercurial aspect.

Cities were just cities to Carmody — places to be and to work in and to leave again — but Venice intruded on his consciousness more than most. For one thing, you didn’t have to worry about traffic problems because it had no automobiles. It was built on a hundred little islands interconnected by a hundred and fifty bridges, and you got from place to place on foot through narrow, winding interior streets or by water taxi and ferry. The pocked, sagging look of most of the ancient buildings was due to the fact that the city was sinking at the rate of five inches per century; the look and smell of the four hundred canals was the result of pollution. It was a seedy, charming, ugly, beautiful, dangerous, amiable city — one Carmody understood, and felt at ease in, and worked well in.

He had been sitting there for fifteen minutes when Della Robbia came hurrying between the two red granite obelisks that marked the beginning of the Piazzeta. Dark, craggy-featured, in his middle thirties, wearing a light gray suit and a pair of fat sunglasses, Della Robbia looked exactly like what he was: a minor Italian gangster. That worked in his favor more often than not. Because he looked like a thug, a lot of people figured he wasn’t one.

When Della Robbia sat down Carmody said, “You make the arrangements for the launch?”

“Just as you instructed, Signor Carmody.”

“What did you tell the driver?”

“Only that he is to pick up a passenger, transport him to an address he will be given, pick up additional passengers, and then proceed to a boat in the Lagoon.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Enough to understand simple directions.”

“You’re sure he can be trusted?”

“Assolutamente, Signor.”

“He’ll be ready to go tonight?”

“Any time you wish.”

“The way it looks now,” Carmody said, “we can do it tonight. I went to see Vickers and his boat this morning. I’m satisfied.”

“I was certain you would be.”

Carmody lit one of his thin, black cigars. “I’ll call you later and let you know what time the launch driver is to pick me up. Where do I meet him?”

“The Rio de Fontego, at the foot of Via Giordano,” Della Robbia said. “A quiet place without much water traffic, so you can be sure you are not followed.”

“How far is the Rio de Fontego from my hotel?”

“Ten minutes by water taxi.”

“All right, good.”

“There are other arrangements to be made?”

“No. I’ll handle the rest of it. But stay where I can reach you the rest of the day.”

Della Robbia said, “Va bene,” and got to his feet. “A safe journey, Signor Carmody.” He lifted his hand in a salute and moved off across the Piazzeta, disappeared into the crowd of tourists and pigeons in front of the Ducal Palace.

Carmody finished his cigar, walked away from St. Marks along the Grand Canal quay. He found a stop for water taxis, rode in one to the Rio de Fontego. It turned out to be near the arched Rialto Bridge, in the approximate center of the city. Via Giordano was a quiet street lined with old houses and a few small shops that would be shuttered after dark. From the seawall at the foot of the street he could see for some distance both ways along the canal and back along Via Giordano. Della Robbia had chosen well. Carmody hadn’t expected otherwise, but he hadn’t had any prior dealings with the Italian and he was a careful man besides.

He got back into the water taxi and went to keep his appointment with Renzo Lucarelli.

Lucarelli was forty-two years old, thick-necked and wolf-eyed. Until recently he’d sported a luxuriant black military mustache that made him look more like an Italian Army colonel than a criminal on the run. Carmody had had him shave it off for his new identity and passport photo. Lucarelli missed the mustache; he kept fingering his upper lip self-consciously, as if he felt conspicuous without it.

He peered at the map spread open on the table, laid a thick forefinger on an X marked on the Venice Lagoon. “This boat, this Piraeus, will meet the launch here?” he asked.

Carmody said, “That’s right.”

“But we can be seen from the Quartiere.”

“Who’s going to see us?”

“Gambresca has many eyes. So does the carabinieri—”

“Gambresca can’t have any idea when or how you’re leaving Venice; neither can the government. And there’s nothing along the Quartiere except warehouses and anchored freighters. Even if we’re seen, nobody’s going to question the transfer. Launches take passengers out to private vessels all the time. I know, I checked it.”

“But a little farther out on the Lagoon...”

“Listen,” Carmody said, “we want to stay in the shipping roads. Any farther out and we’re inviting the attention you’re so worried about. Besides, the quicker we get onto the Piraeus and out of the Lagoon, the better.”

Lucarelli stroked his barren upper lip. “You are certain of this man Vickers?”

“Della Robbia vouches for him. And I’ll be along to see that he’s no problem.”

“I do not like putting my life in the hands of men I have never met.”

“Yes? You’ve only known me four days.”

“I have known of your great reputation for many years,” Lucarelli said, and fingered his naked lip again. “The Piraeus is old and rusty, you said. Suppose something happens to her engines before we reach Sardinia? She might even sink in a sudden squall—”

“For Christ’s sake, Lucarelli, I told you the boat was all right. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing? How do you figure I got that reputation of mine? Now stop fussing like an old woman and quit asking questions I’ve already answered.”

Lucarelli gestured apologetically. “It is only that I am nervous, Signor Carmody. I meant no offense.” He lifted the glass at his elbow, drank off the last of the red wine it contained. Then he glanced over to where his woman sat paging through a magazine. “Rita, another glass of wine.”

She stood immediately, came to the table. She was tall and plump and huge-breasted, with thick black hair pulled back tight from her forehead and fastened with a jeweled barrette; Carmody thought she’d have made a fine Rueben’s nude. He preferred slender, less top-heavy women himself.

Her expression was neutral but her eyes betrayed her unease. She was not bearing up under the waiting any better than Lucarelli.

Lucarelli gave her his glass, then said to Carmody, “You will have some wine now, Signor Carmody?”

“No. And you’d better go easy on that stuff yourself. If we go tonight I don’t want you drunk or anywhere near it.”

“Then it will be tonight?”

“Everything’s set for it. I don’t see any reason for holding off another day.”

“Good. Ah, good.”

Rita poured Lucarelli’s glass full of Chianti, brought it back to him, went over and sat down again with her magazine. She hadn’t said a word since Carmody’s arrival twenty minutes ago.

The room they were in was the main parlor of a crumbling building perched on the edge of Rio San Spirito, in a northeastern sector not far from Laguna Morta and the island that served as the city cemetery. A poor neighborhood; and a poor house that had water-stained wallpaper, rococo lighting fixtures tarnished by age, and a lingering odor of damp decay mixed with the fish-and-garbage reek of the canal outside. It was a long way from the walled palace-house Lucarelli claimed to have occupied on Lido Island before the fat little world he’d created for himself had collapsed.

Lucarelli was, or had been, a smuggler and black-marketeer who dealt in the lucrative commodity of cigarettes. The Italian government owned a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of all tobacco products, and imposed a high duty on the import of American and English brands. Since most Italians preferred the imported to the raw homemade variety, and the demand grew greater every year, tons of contraband cigarettes were smuggled annually into the country. Lucarelli’s operation, independent of syndicate ties, had been one of the largest in the northern provinces. He’d had cigarettes coming into Venice across the gulf from Trieste and down from Switzerland, and a fleet of trucks and men to distribute them throughout Italy.

But then the Guardia de Finanza, the agents of the ministry that ran the monopoly for the government, had made a series of raids that left Lucarelli’s operation hurting and vulnerable. And one of the other cigarette smugglers in the city, a long-time rival of Lucarelli’s named Gambresca, had seen his chance and ordered two unsuccessful attempts on Lucarelli’s life with the Guardia de Finanza and the local carabinieri preparing to make an arrest on one side, and Gambresca and his group devouring what was left of Lucarelli’s empire on the other, Lucarelli had been forced to abandon his palace-house and most of his possessions and to go into hiding. The woman, Rita, his mistress of several years, was the only person he’d taken with him.

If he hadn’t waited so long he would have been able to get out of Italy on his own; he’d amassed a fortune in smuggling profits, most of which he’d brought with him in cash. But with the heat on from both sides, he’d been afraid to trust former friends and allies and afraid to chance any known escape routes. So, out of desperation, he’d gotten word to Guiseppe Piombo, Carmody’s Italian contact in Rome. It was costing him $25,000 for Carmody’s services, and it was cheap at the price. Lucarelli knew it too. If Carmody had been a gouger, he could have asked and gotten twice as much.

It was Piombo who had brought in Gino Della Robbia. Carmody needed a man in Venice who knew the city, knew people both reliable and close-mouthed, and Piombo said Della Robbia was that man. The recommendation was good enough for Carmody, but he still hadn’t entrusted Della Robbia with Lucarelli’s name, the location of the San Spirito house, or any except essential details. No one other than Piombo had that information. The fewer people who knew, the less chance there was of something screwing up.

Della Robbia had proved capable, and now all the details were set. They would take Vickers’ boat straight down the Adriatic and into the Mediterranean, then swing around Sicily and go up to the southern coast of Sardinia to the port of Cagliari. Lucarelli wanted to live in an Italian speaking area, and the rich man’s playground of Sardinia was a good place to get lost if you had enough money, a new name, and a new background that would stand up to any but the sharpest scrutiny. Carmody had made arrangements for a villa outside Cagliari and a set of forged papers that included a marriage license and new passports. After they reached Sicily, what happened to Lucarelli and his mistress was up to them.

Lucarelli drank from his fresh glass of wine, worked his upper lip over, looked at the map again. “What time do we leave tonight?” he asked.

“I’ll meet the launch at ten,” Carmody told him. “It shouldn’t take more than half an hour to get here, so we’ll figure on ten-thirty as the pick-up time. Another half-hour to get to the Piraeus. We’ll be on our way out of the Lagoon not much after eleven.”

“We wear dark clothing?”

“That’s right. But keep it simple — and not all black. We don’t want to look like a commando team.”

“Just as you say, signor.”

Carmody got to his feet, refolded the map, put it away inside his jacket. “If anything comes up that you should know about, I’ll notify you. Otherwise be ready at ten thirty.”

Lucarelli nodded.

From the chair across the room, Rita spoke for the first time. “I cannot stay in this house another night. This waiting... it makes me crazy.”

“Tonight, dulce mia,” Lucarelli said to her. “The plans will not change. Tonight we leave, Saturday we are on Sardinia. Yes, Signor Carmody?”

“That’s how it shapes up,” Carmody said. “Just hang loose. And remember what I said about the wine. If you’re even half-drunk when I get here, we don’t go.”

In his room at the Saviola, a renovated sixteenth-century palace that was one of the more comfortable hotels along the Grand Canal, Carmody called Della Robbia. “It’s tonight,” he said. “Get in touch with Vickers, tell him to be three hundred yards off the Quartieri Vergini, opposite the clock tower, at least twenty minutes before eleven.”

“Si, Signor Carmody.”

“And tell your launch driver to pick me up at ten sharp, just where you told him. Make sure he understands ten sharp.”

“It will be done.”

“Call me if there are any problems.”

“There will be no problems.”

“I hope not. As soon as I’m paid in full, I’ll wire your money to you care of Piombo.”

“Bene,” Della Robbia said.

Carmody lay back on the bed with one of his cigars and waited for it to be time to move out.

In the shadows at the foot of Via Giordano, Carmody stood looking for the launch. The night was dark, moonless, hushed except for the faint pulsing sounds of water traffic on the Grand Canal. An occasional black gondola glided past on the Rio di Fontego a few feet away, but the area was as deserted as he’d estimated it would be. It was just ten o’clock.

He wore dark trousers, a dark shirt, his Beretta in its half-holster under his jacket. His bag rested at his feet; he had checked out of the Saviola two hours ago. Supper had killed an hour and a quarter, and he’d spent the rest of the time in a water taxi and on foot from the Rialto Bridge.

He looked at his watch again — 10:01 — and when he lowered his arm he heard the muffled throb of a boat engine. Seconds later the launch, small and radio-equipped like the water taxis, came along the rio and drifted over to the seawall. The man behind the wheel starboard called softly, “Signor?”

Carmody looked back along Via Giordano, saw nothing to worry him, and came out of the shadows. He descended the three steps cut into the seawall, boarded the launch, stowed his bag under the front seat. The driver — bearded, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck — kept his eyes on the canal, waiting for instructions.

Carmody said, “Rio San Spirito. Number fifty-two. Can you find it?”

“San Spirito? Yes, I know it.”

“Let’s go then.”

The darkness was thick in the narrow canals through which they maneuvered; half the time the red-and-green running lights on the launch was the only illumination. Most of the ancient, decaying buildings along the rio were dark. Even the occupied ones had shutters drawn across their oblong windows that allowed little light to escape. Carmody watched astern, but the only other crafts were an occasional taxi or a wraithlike gondola gliding into or out of one of the maze of waterways. The silence, broken only by the throb of the launch’s inboard, was as heavy as the odor of garbage and salt water.

It was not quite ten-thirty when the driver brought them into the black mouth of another canal and said, “San Spirito, signor.”

Carmody looked for familiar landmarks, found one. “Fifty-two is the first building on the near side of that bridge ahead.”

The driver cut power, eased the launch in close to the unbroken line of brick-and-cement walls on the right. When they neared the small arched bridge Carmody pointed out the landing platform beyond number fifty-two. The launch drifted up to it. Carmody waited until the driver held steady, then jumped onto the platform.

“Wait here,” he said to the driver. “And keep the engine running.”

The canal door to Lucarelli’s building was at the near end of the seawall, set into the right-angled corner between the rio and a high garden wall made of brick. Carmody went there, used a corroded brass knocker.

“Carmody. Open up.”

There was the sound of a bolt being shot, then a key turning in the old-fashioned latch. The door edged inward. Carmody went inside, and Lucarelli was standing three feet away with a pistol in his hand. The muzzle dipped when Carmody stopped and stared at him. He said nervously, “All is well, Signor Carmody?”

Carmody took a close look at him. Lucarelli’s breath smelled of wine but he was sober enough. Barely.

He said, “Put that gun away,” and moved down the hallway into the room where they had talked that afternoon. Three large leather suitcases sat on the floor next to the table. Carmody thought that the biggest of them would contain Lucarelli’s run-out money, from which he’d be paid when they reached Sardinia.

The woman, Rita, stood next to the suitcases. She said, “We are leaving now?” in her thickly accented English. She was even twitchier than she had been earlier; she couldn’t seem to keep her hands still.

“We’re leaving,” Carmody told her.

Lucarelli came into the room plucking at his bare upper lip. The pistol was tucked away in his clothing. He and Rita gathered up the suitcases so Carmody could keep his hands free. He went ahead of them to the door, looked out. The launch sat silently against the platform, the driver waiting at the wheel; as much of San Spirito as he could see was deserted. Carmody stepped out, motioned to Lucarelli and the woman. While the suitcases were being handed into the launch, he stood apart and shifted his gaze back and forth along the canal.

The woman said suddenly in Italian, “My cosmetic case. I left it inside.” Her voice seemed high and shrill in the stillness. She moved away, back toward the still-open door to the building.

“Wait, Rita...” Lucarelli began, but she had her back to him, almost to the door now.

And in that moment Carmody sensed, rather than saw, the first movement in the shadows beyond the bridge.

The muscles in his neck and shoulders went tight. He swept his jacket back, slid the Beretta out of its holster. The shadows seemed to separate, like an amoeba reproducing, and a formless shape slipped away from the seawall, coming under the bridge. There was the faint pulsation of a boat engine.

Carmody shouted, “Lucarelli! Get down!”

He dropped to one knee, sighted at the moving shape of the boat as it drew nearer, fired twice. One of the bullets broke glass somewhere on the boat; the other missed wide, hit the cement wall across the canal. Then a man-shape reared up at the wheel, and the night erupted in bright chattering flashes. Bullets sprayed the platform, the launch.

None of them hit Carmody because he was already in the canal.

The water was chill, as black and thick as ink; he could taste the pollution of it, the foulness of oil and garbage. He kicked straight down, at an angle across the narrow width of the rio. The Beretta was still in his hand; he shoved it inside the waistband of his trousers before struggling out of his jacket. Swimming blind, groping ahead of him for the wall on the far side, the pressure mounting in his lungs... and then his fingers came in contact with the rough surface. He crawled upward along it and poked his head out of the water, dragging air through his mouth, looking back.

The ambush boat had drawn alongside the launch. The dark form of the shooter was hurriedly transferring

Lucarelli’s suitcases into his own craft, his other hand still clutching a bulky machine pistol. A long way off, somebody was yelling. There was intermittent light along the canal now, but not enough for Carmody to tell if the boat held just the one man or if there was a back-up as well.

The shooter pulled the last suitcase aboard. Turning, he saw Carmody along the far wall. Carmody dove deep as the machine pistol came up and began to chatter again; none of the slugs touched him. Near the bottom he kicked back across the canal to the other side.

Above him, he heard the boat’s engine grow loud; the water churned. The shooter wasn’t wasting any more time. He didn’t want to be seen and he didn’t want to risk running into a police boat. By the time Carmody crawled up along the seawall and surfaced again, the ambush boat was a dark blob just swinging out of San Spirito into another canal.

There were more lights showing in nearby buildings, people with their heads stuck out between partially opened shutters. Carmody swam to the launch, caught the port gunwale, hauled himself up and inside.

Lucarelli hadn’t reacted quickly enough; he lay dead in the stern, stitched across the abdomen with enough bullets to nearly cut him in two. The driver had been shot twice in the throat. The launch’s deck was slick with blood.

Stop worrying, Lucarelli, I’ll get you safely to Sardinia. I’ve never lost a client yet. Leave everything to me...

Impotent rage made Carmody’s head ache malignantly. He looked under the front seat, saw that his own suitcase was still there. He pushed it onto the platform, climbed up after it, ran with it to the door of number fifty-two. Inside, he went through the three downstairs rooms and two upstairs, checked inside the bathroom and the closets.

The house was empty.

The woman, Rita, was gone.

Carmody went out a side door into a garden grown wild with wisteria and oleander. The windows of an adjacent building looked down into it, and a fat man in an undershirt stood framed in one, shouting querulously. Three big chestnut trees grew in the garden’s center; Carmody stayed in their shadow until he found a gate opening onto one of the narrow interior streets.

As he came running through the gate, a tall youth materialized from the darkness in front of him, lured by the excitement. Carmody didn’t want his face seen; he lowered his shoulder, sent the kid sprawling against the garden wall. He ran to the first corner, turned it into another street, ran another block, turned a second corner and came out in a campiello with a small stone statue in its center.

He ducked around the statue, went into an alley on the opposite side of the square. With his back against the alley wall, he watched the campiello to see if he had pursuit. No one came into it. He stayed where he was for a couple of minutes, catching his breath, shivering inside his wet clothing. Then he moved deeper into the blackness, set his bag down, worked the catches to open it.

Rita, he was thinking, it had to have been Rita.

Besides Piombo and himself — and Piombo could be trusted — the woman and Lucarelli were the only ones who knew about the San Spirito house. And she’d gone back into the house, out of harm’s way, just seconds before the shooting started. And the shooter? Lucarelli’s rival, Gambresca, or somebody sent by him. She’d found some way to tip Gambresca. For money, or hatred, or revenge, or a combination of all three. Money was part of Gambresca’s motive, for sure: the shooter had taken the time to fish the three suitcases out of the launch, so he had to have known what one of them contained.

But why had they done it that way? Why not just put a knife in Lucarelli at the house and walk out with the money? Or tip Gambresca days sooner? They’d been living on San Spirito for more than a week. Maybe she wasn’t up to the job of cold-blooded murder herself, or maybe it had taken her all this time to work up the courage for a double-cross, or maybe Lucarelli had had the money hidden in a place only he knew about. Whatever the reason, it was incidental.

Rita and Gambresca — they were what mattered.

While all of this was going through his mind Carmody changed clothes in the darkness. The sodden things went into the suitcase, rolled into a towel. The Beretta went into the pocket of the Madras jacket he now wore.

He left the alley, hunted around until he found a tavern. Inside, locked in the toilet, he broke down the Beretta and cleaned and oiled it with materials from the false bottom of his bag. When he was satisfied that it was in working order he went out into the bar proper and drank two cognacs to get the taste of the canal water out of his mouth.

There was a telephone on the rear wall. Carmody called Della Robbia’s number. As soon as he heard the Italian’s voice he said, “Carmody. Bad trouble. The whole thing’s blown.”

Silence for a couple of seconds. Then Della Robbia said, “What happened, signor?”

“We were ambushed. The man I was taking out is dead. So’s your launch driver. One man waiting for us in a boat with a machine pistol — maybe a backup. It was too dark to see much.”

“Gacchio!”

“Yeah. A big pile of shit.”

“You are all right, Signor Carmody?”

“No physical wounds,” Carmody said bitterly. He was holding the phone receiver as if it were the shooter’s neck. “Listen, I need you and your connections. The man I was taking out was Renzo Lucarelli. You know him?”

“Lucarelli? Yes... yes, of course.”

“He had a woman, Rita, who was supposed to go with us. But she ducked off just before we got hit. I think she’s a Judas.”

“Why would she—?”

Carmody said, “I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what I need you for. You know anything about this Rita?”

“Very little, signor. Almost nothing.”

“How about a rival of Lucarelli’s named Gambresca?”

“A bad one,” Della Robbia said. “You believe Gambresca was involved in the shooting?”

“That’s how it looks. You know where I can find him?”

“A moment, Signor Carmody, I must think. Yes. He owns a wholesale produce company on Campo Oroglia. It is said he lives above it.”

“All right,” Carmody said. “Find out what you can about the woman. She may be with Gambresca, she may not be. I want her, Della Robbia, and I want her before she can get out of Venice. Lucarelli is the first client I ever lost and I won’t stand still for it.”

“I will do what I can,” Della Robbia said. “Where are you? Where can I—?”

“I’ll be in touch,” Carmody told him and rang off.

He tried to find out from the bartender how to get to the nearest canal that had water taxi service. The bartender didn’t speak English. None of the drinkers spoke English. Carmody’s Italian was weak; it took him five long, impatient minutes to get directions that made sense.

When he went out again into the night he was running.

There was nobody home at Gambresca’s.

Carmody stepped out from under the doorway arch, looked up once more at the sign running across the top of the warehouse. It said A. Gambresca in broad black lettering, and below that: Campo Oroglia 24. His gaze moved higher, to the dark windows strung along the second floor front. No sign of life. He had been there for several minutes, ringing bells and making noise like a drunk, his fingers restless on the Beretta in his jacket pocket. There hadn’t been any response.

Carmody looked at his watch. Almost one-thirty. He crossed the square to enter the same street by which he’d arrived, his steps echoing hollowly in the late-night stillness. The fury inside him boiled like water in a kettle.

What now? Another call to Della Robbia. And if Della Robbia hadn’t found out anything? The waiting game, like it or not. He would pick a vantage point somewhere on Campo Oroglia, and he would sit there all night if necessary, until Gambresca showed up.

In the lobby of a small hotel nearby he gave a sleepy night clerk a thousand-lire note for the use of his telephone. Della Robbia answered immediately.

Carmody said, “Well?”

“I have learned something, but perhaps it means little or nothing.”

“I’ll decide that. What is it?”

“The woman has an uncle, a man named Salviati, who owns a squero — a boatyard for the repair and construction of gondolas. The uncle is said to have smuggled contraband and has two boats of high speed at his disposal. It is possible the woman has gone there.”

Carmody gave it some thought. Yes, possible. Assuming it was the money that had driven her to sell out Lucarelli, she might have already got her payoff and then headed for her uncle’s — a place to hide or a way to leave the city, either one. She’d need someone she could trust, and Gambresca might not be that someone. Another possibility was that she’d gone to the uncle straight from San Spirito, to wait for Gambresca or one of Gambresca’s people to bring her blood money.

He asked, “Where is this place, this squero?”

“On Rio degli Zecchini.”

“So I can get there by water taxi.”

“If you can find one at this hour.”

“I can find one,” Carmody said.

From where he stood in the shadows across the Rio degli Zecchini, Carmody could see the vague shapes of gondolas, some whole and some skeletal, in the squero’s low-fenced rear yard. Set back fifty feet from the canal was a two-story, wood-and-brick building that looked as if it had been built in the time of the Doges; it was completely dark. Most of the surrounding buildings were warehouses and the area was deserted. No light showed anywhere except for a pale streetlamp atop a canal bridge nearby.

Carmody put his suitcase into a wall niche, took out the Beretta, held it cupped low against his right leg as he walked to the bridge. On the opposite seawall he stood listening for a time. A ship’s horn bayed mournfully on the Lagoon; the canal water, rumpled by the wind, lapped at the seawall. There were no sounds of any kind from the squero.

The place’s rear entrance was a wooden gate set into a three-sided frame of two-by-fours; the fourth side was the wall of the adjacent building. On the canal side, and on top, the beams sprouted tangles of barbed wire like a fungoid growth. Carmody had had experience with barbed wire before, but he still cut the palm of his left hand in two places when he swung around the frame. The sharp sting of the cuts heaped fuel on his rage.

Moving quickly, he made his way across the yard. The gondolas — long, slender, flat-bottomed, with tapered and upswept prow and stern — were laid out in rows, on davits, in stacks of two and three; they had a ghostly look in the darkness, like giant bones in a graveyard. They also camouflaged his run to the far corner of the building, in case anybody happened to be looking out.

Jalousied shutters were lowered across the double-doored entrance; there were no fronting windows. Carmody edged around the corner, along the side wall. An elongated window halfway down showed him nothing of the interior, just a solid screen of blackness.

Carmody paused, peering toward the back. A high wall marked the rear boundary of the squero but it was set several feet beyond the building, forming a narrow passageway. He went there and into the passage; picked his way through a carpeting of refuse, looking for another window. Midway along he found one with louvered shutters closed across it. He squinted upward through one of the canted louvers.

Light.

Movement.

Carmody bent lower so he could see more of the room inside. It was an office of sorts, with a cluttered desk on which a gooseneck lamp burned, two wooden chairs, a table piled with charts and pamphlets, a filing cabinet with a rusted fan on top.

And the woman, Rita.

She stood to one side of the desk, in profile, nervously watching the closed door opposite the window. Her arms were folded across her heavy breasts, as if she were cold; her face was drawn, bloodless. Between her lips was a filter-tipped cigarette that she smoked in short, deep drags.

Carmody glided back the way he’d come, stopped before the unshuttered window at the front part of the building. It was the kind that opened inward on a pair of hinges, with a simple slip catch locking it to the frame. He went to work with the broad flat blade of his Swiss Army knife. After two minutes he put the tips of his fingers against the dirty glass, cautiously pushed the window open.

The interior smelled of paint and linseed oil and dampness. Carmody climbed over the sill, stood motionless on a rough concrete floor. He could see where the door to the office was by a strip of light at its bottom. He could also make out a lathe, a drill press, a table saw, several wood forms, all massed up in the blackness — an obstacle course for him to get through without making any noise.

Slowly, feeling in front of him with his left hand, he moved toward the strip of light. He had to detour twice, the second time abruptly to keep from colliding with a sawhorse. When he reached the door he stopped to listen. She was quiet in there, and since she’d been watching the door minutes earlier, it figured that she was still watching it. He had no way of knowing whether or not she was armed. He hadn’t seen a gun, but he’d only had a limited view of the office.

He wrapped his left hand around the knob, twisted it, then threw his left shoulder against the door. The latch was open; the door banged against the table inside, dislodging papers. The woman let out a shriek and stumbled away from the desk, one hand going to her mouth. Her eyes were like buttons about to pop from too much pressure.

Carmody got to her in three long strides, caught her dark hair in his free hand, spun her around and sat her down hard in one of the chairs. Then he knelt in front of her, his angry face less than six inches from hers, and laid the Beretta’s muzzle against her cheek.

He could see that she wanted to scream again, but nothing came out when she opened her mouth. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets. Carmody slapped her twice, hard. The blows refocused her vision, brought her out of the faint before she had really gone into it.

She stared at him with a mixture of shock and terror. “Signor Carmody...”

“That’s right — alive and well.”

“But you... I believed...”

“I know what you believed,” he said thinly. “But I was luckier than Lucarelli and the boat driver. Where’s the money? And where’s Gambresca?”

“Gambresca! That stronzolo,he was the one...”

“You ought to know, you sold us out to him.”

She blinked. “I do not understand.”

“The hell you don’t understand.”

“I was so afraid,” she whispered. She was trembling now. “I did not wish to die. This is why I run away. Please, I know nothing about Gambresca.”

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t set up that ambush?”

“Ambush?”

“The boat, the shooting.”

“No! How could I? You cannot think—”

“Why did you run back to the house just before the shooting started?”

“My cosmeticos, I forget them.”

“Sure you did.”

“I tell the truth! Renzo was my man, we go away together, you cannot think I want him to die!”

“Somebody wanted him to die,” Carmody said. “Somebody tipped Gambresca. And you and Lucarelli were the only ones besides me and my man in Rome who knew where the hideaway was. You did it for the money, right? For a cut of the run-out money?”

“No, no, no! I did not, I would not...”

She was shaking her head, forgetting the gun at her cheek; Carmody pulled the Beretta back a little. It was quiet in the office just then — and in that quiet he heard the faint sound of a footfall in the darkness out front.

The hackles raised on his neck. He came up off his knee, turning, and when he did that he saw the vague shape of a man appear next to the drill press out there, just beyond the outspill of light from the desk lamp. In the man’s hand was a familiar, deadly shape.

Carmody threw himself to one side, pushing Rita and the chair over backwards. She screamed again but the sound of it was lost in the stuttering roar of the machine pistol. A slug ripped through the tail of Carmody’s jacket, burned across one buttock. Then the gooseneck lamp flew off the desk, shattered, and the office went dark except for bright flashes from the pistol’s muzzle.

Carmody managed to get the desk between himself and the doorway. He could hear the rap, rap, rap of the bullets digging into the desk, into the wall above him, as the shooter raked the office with another burst. He twisted his body into the kneehole. He could see out on the other side, but without the muzzle flashes the darkness was too thick for him to locate the shooter. The air stank of burnt gunpowder; the silence had an electric quality. Carmody listened, knowing that the shooter was listening too.

The silence seemed to gain magnitude until it was almost deafening. Either the shooter didn’t know where the overhead lights were or he didn’t want to take the chance of putting them on. But with the amount of slugs he’d pumped into the office, he had to be thinking that he was the only one left alive. If he’d opened up with that MAC-10 two seconds earlier he’d have been right.

Pretty soon there was a series of scuffling sounds out beyond the doorway. Carmody still didn’t move. They were the kinds of sounds somebody makes when he’s pretending to leave a place, trying to be clever. The shooter was still out there, waiting. Making up his mind.

Another couple of minutes crawled away. The quiet was so intense it was like a humming in Carmody’s ears. Then there was a nearly inaudible sliding sound: the shooter was moving again. Not going away this time. Coming back into the office.

Carmody steadied the Beretta on his left arm.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then there was another faint, whispery footfall. And another, not more than ten feet away and almost directly ahead—

Carmody emptied most of the Beretta’s clip on a line waist-high and two feet wide.

There was a half-strangled Italian oath; a moment later Carmody heard the metallic clatter of the pistol on concrete, the sound of a body falling heavily. He stayed where he was, listening. A scrabbling movement, a low moan... nothing.

It was another couple of minutes before he was satisfied. He crawled out of the kneehole, got to his feet, moved at an angle to the door. He put his pencil flash on, just for an instant, stepping aside as he did so. Then the tension went out of him and he put the light on again, left it on.

The shooter was lying half in and half out of the office doorway, the MAC-10 alongside him. Face down, not moving. Carmody turned him over with the toe of one shoe, shined the light on his face — on the dead, staring eyes.

Gino Della Robbia.

Carmody swore softly. He wasn’t surprised; nothing surprised him anymore. But that didn’t make Della Robbia’s treachery any easier to take.

He swung the light to the rear of the office, located Rita with it. At first he thought she was dead too because she lay crumpled and still But when he went over there and knelt beside her, he saw that she was breathing Blood glistened on the side of her head: scalp wound. He didn’t see any others. She was lucky. They both were — damned lucky.

He found the switch for the overheads, flipped it on. Then he picked Rita up and sat her in a chair. The movement brought her out of it. For a couple of minutes she was disoriented, hysterical; he slapped her face, got her calmed down. Then she saw Della Robbia and that almost set her off again.

When she could talk she said, “Gino? It was Gino who killed Renzo?”

“And tried to kill me,” Carmody said. “Twice.”

“But I do not understand...”

“It’s simple enough. Gambresca had nothing to do with the ambush, just like you had nothing to do with it. Della Robbia, nobody else. For the money. He didn’t know how much there was but he did know that it would be plenty — enough to take the risks he took.”

She shook her head, winced, sat still.

Carmody said, “You went to him tonight after the ambush, didn’t you? Heard me mention his name to Lucarelli, remembered it, looked up his address and went to him.”

“Yes. I believed you and Renzo were both dead. I had nowhere else to go.”

“And he got you to come here.”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say to you?”

“That this was the squero of a friend. That I should wait here. He gave me a key.”

“Wait for what?”

“For him to come. He said he would help me leave Venezia.”

Carmody nodded. He was thinking that Della Robbia must have been in a hell of a sweat when he got home from San Spirito and one of the men he thought he’d killed called him on the phone — the one man he should have made sure died first. If he could have found out where Carmody was, he’d have gone there to finish the job. But Carmody hadn’t told him and Della Robbia had been afraid to force the issue. So he’d sweated some more and waited for the next call. Then Rita had showed up and he’d thought of this squero — the perfect set-up for another ambush. Except that this time he’d been the one who got caught in it.

One question remained: How had Della Robbia found out where Lucarelli’s hideout was? Piombo wouldn’t have told him. The launch hadn’t been followed tonight; Carmody had made sure of that. And he hadn’t been followed on any of the previous trips he’d made to Rio San Spirito.

Only one possible answer — one that Carmody should have thought of at the Rio di Fontego tonight. By overlooking the possibility, he had gotten Lucarelli killed and almost lost his own life. Unforgiveable. He would never forget this mistake, and he would never make another like it again.

The answer, the oversight, was that the launch had been equipped with a shortwave radio. Della Robbia must have bribed the driver to open the microphone just before he picked Carmody up, so that when Carmody told him where they were going, Della Robbia had heard the address on a radio on his own boat tuned to the same band. Easy enough then to take a different and quicker route to San Spirito, hide and wait.

Carmody prodded Rita onto her feet, led her through the building and outside. The area was still deserted. It would take a while to find transportation at this hour, but that was a minor inconvenience.

Rita said, “Where are we going, Signor Carmody?”

“Della Robbia’s house. Odds are that’s where the money is.”

“You will keep it all for yourself? The money?”

“No. It’s yours — you’ve earned the right to it. All I want is the fee Lucarelli and I agreed on.”

“You... you mean this?”

“I mean it,” Carmody said. “This too: If you still want to go to Sardinia, I’ll take you there. I don’t like to leave a job unfinished.”

“Yes, I want to go. Oh yes.”

“It might take another day or two to rearrange things but I’ll find a safe place for you to wait. It won’t be too bad.”

She looked at him with her large dark eyes. “No,” she said, “I do not think it will be bad at all.”