The Venetian Judgment Read Free

his light Italian slippers leaving black sickle-shaped ribbons in the powdery snow. Dalton let him gain some distance, let him think he was going to—

    Dalton froze in midstep, lifted his haggard face to the knife-edged moon, his head cocked to one side, thin lips tight, looking much like a raptor as he did so. There was a muted rumble in the air, a soft, churning mutter: a boat, some kind of launch, in one of the canals, and it was close. He looked back across the open square of the Campo Bellavite and saw Belajic stumble into the darkened archway that hid the doors of the chapel of San Maurizio.

    And stay there.

    Going to ground, thought Dalton.

    He was expecting this boat.

    Dalton listened intently to the sound of the cruiser’s engines, deciding that it was too deep and steady for one of the Venice police boats, and not pockety-pockety enough for one of those late-night water gypsies. It had to be private. He was trying to guess which canal it was running in—there were three small canals running off the Grand Canal at this point, just across from the domes of Santa Maria della Salute. He lifted his mind up, tried to see Venice as if from the air, picturing the way the narrow waterways threaded through the tightly packed maze of hotels and villas and overhanging archways of the San Marco district.

    Belajic had stopped running when he reached the chapel gates. The last bridge he had crossed was a narrow walkway over the Albero canal. They were now in the tangled medieval warrens just behind the Gritti . . . and the sound of the boat’s engine was getting louder. Dalton stood still, holding his breath, listening so hard it was making his neck hurt.

    After a moment, he got a fix: the engine sound was coming from the direction of Teatro La Fenice. Dalton slipped into a lane on his right and ran softly up the alley behind San Giglio chapel. The dark bulk of the ancient theater loomed up on his right. The sound of the boat’s engine was growing louder, coming, he was pretty certain, from the wide canal that ran east to west beside the theater.

    Dalton reached the small square by the Calligari, where the Rio Fenice opened up into a kind of broad, shallow pool that, in the high season, would reflect the illuminated façade of the theater. Now, in late December, it was a quadrangle of still black water with a thin dusting of melting snowfall.

    The vibrato burble of the boat engine was carrying clear across the lagoon, but there was no light nor movement. Dalton stepped back into a recessed doorway and waited. The snow sifted silently down in the moonlight. He could feel his heart working steadily in his chest, see his breath in a cold blue cloud in the chilly air in front of him. He went inward for a time, as he always did just before a fight.

    He may have been afraid, or bitter, or sad, or a combination of all three: he wasn’t sure he gave a damn either way. In the main, what he was feeling was a kind of dark anticipation, an early tremor of that corrosive joy that violent action always delivered: the formal strikecounterstrike of hand-to-hand killing, the aesthetic fulfillment in a well-placed skull shot, the my-work-here-is-through feeling of professional satisfaction when you stood over a dead man who, a few seconds ago, had been trying his hardest to kill you.

    Dalton had killed many men back in the Fifth Special Forces, and later on for the Company, and most of them had deserved it, some less so, which he had often tried to regret.

    On the subject of regrets, with some luck tonight, if these guys were any good at all, from some unexpected angle there’d come a bright muzzle flash, he’d feel a numbing impact, then the sound of a gunshot and that nauseating flood of vertigo, pain too, of course, he’d been shot before—“a pang, soon passing,” some optimistic fool of an unshot poet had once said—and then the cobblestones coming up at his face like the pitted surface of an onrushing moon: in brief, a