The fat sun-darkened man who had been sitting in one of the other chairs, and who had thrown himself to the floor when the shooting started, now yelled at Carmody from behind an ancient daybed, “Look out! The front door!”
Carmody’s reaction was instantaneous: he whirled to his left, down and around into a shooter’s crouch. The blond man stood in the doorway, the mate to Nicole’s Luger in his hand, blood streaming down from a cut on his forehead. He fired once, wildly, just before Carmody shot him in the upper body. This time, when he fell back onto the porch, he stayed down and didn’t move.
Carmody straightened slowly, letting breath out between his teeth, and looked over at Nicole. She was crouched against the wall, hating him with her eyes. He put her gun into one jacket pocket, went onto the porch and picked up the blond man’s weapon and put that into the other jacket pocket.
The fat man came out from behind the daybed as Carmody walked back inside. His moonface was slick with sweat. He said, “He’s dead? You killed him?”
“No. He’ll live if he gets medical attention.”
That disappointed the fat man. With good reason, Carmody thought. There were marks on his face, arms, neck: beaten on and burned with cigarettes, among other indignities. Carmody watched him turn blazing eyes on the woman, call her a vicious name in French, take a step toward her with his hands clenched. He stopped him halfway by catching hold of his shoulder.
“She’s not worth the trouble. Leave her alone.”
The fat man took a shuddering breath, relaxed a little. His pained eyes focused on Carmody without recognition. “Who are you?”
“Carmody.”
“Mon Dieu! But how—?”
“We’ll get to that. You’re Tobiere, right? The real Paul Tobiere?”
Convulsive nod. “They were going to kill me. Nicole and that... that fils de putain.”
“I figured as much. Who is he — the blond?”
“His name is Chagal,” Tobiere said. “One of Nicole’s filthy lovers.”
Carmody said, “They were trying to pass him off as you, to take advantage of your arrangement with me.” He didn’t add that they must have known of his particular code of ethics, that he couldn’t be bought off and that any kind of double-dealing was anathema to him. One hint that the real Tobiere had been robbed and murdered and he’d have called off the deal immediately.
“I was a fool to trust her,” Tobiere said. “But I believed she cared for me; I believed—”
“Gochon! Je t’emmerge, à pied, à cheval et en voiture!”
Carmody said, “Shut up, Nicole.” His tone said he didn’t want any arguments. She didn’t give him any.
“How did you know to come here?” the fat man asked.
Carmody told him how he’d followed Nicole and Chagal from the Casbah.
“But what made you suspect Chagal was not me?”
“Several things. She seemed to be running the show, not him; that didn’t jibe with what Achmed told me. Neither did the way he acted. Achmed said you were frightened and anxious after what happened to you en route from the Sudan. Chagal wasn’t either one. Then there was the fact that you lived in the Sudan for years, came here through the Libyan Desert. No man can spend time in that kind of desert country without picking up a black tan like you have, or at least some sun color. Chagal is pale — no tan, no burn. He’s been nowhere near Sudan or the Libyan Desert. Not long out of France, probably.”
Tobiere nodded. “I owe you my life, m’sieu.”
“I’ll settle for ten percent of those gems,” Carmody said. “Where are they? You didn’t tell Nicole and Chagal or you’d be dead already.”
“No, but I... I think I would have.” He shuddered. “The things they did to me... the things they threatened to do...”
“Never mind that. The gems, Tobiere. Are they here?”
“Nearby. Shall I get them?”
“We’ll both go get them. If they’re as advertised, you’ll be on a boat for France by midnight.”
“Nicole? You will kill her before we leave here?”
“I’m not an assassin,” Carmody said.
“But they were going to kill me...”
“They’ve got each other, her and Chagal, and they’ve got Algiers. That’s worse than being dead. That’s a living hell.”
He took Tobiere’s arm and prodded him out into the breathless North African twilight.
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?”