“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.