“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?”