Peachy.
Isn’t that just peachy.
Brancati let this wonderfully eloquent silence run for a while.
“So, no matter. You are not involved. And these two, they were rifiuti della società! I am happy they are so much punished. Venice is a better place. Italy is better. Of course, should the man who did this thing let himself do it again, then perhaps the police will not think it such a fine thing. But if he does not do it again, at least not in Italy, then I think, if the Venice police find this man, they will buy him a big dinner. Maybe at Carovita, eh?”
That was a polite Italian warning, Micah. Hear it.
“Yes. I hope this man would take that advice to heart.”
“You do?”
“I know I would, if I were in his shoes.”
“D’accordo? And this song, ‘People,’ it is still in your head?”
“I’ll put something else in it.”
Maybe a bullet.
“You know this musical?”
“Hello, Dolly? Never saw it.”
“That’s what this man said also. Last night. That it was from Hello, Dolly. But my wife tells me it is from a play called Funny Girl.”
Dalton managed not to groan out loud. Barely.
“Is it? Well there you go.”
“Yes. There we go. Well, about Mr. Naumann we do have news. You sure you are okay to talk. You are well?”
“Yes. Peachy. I’m peachy. What is it?”
He’d actually said “peachy” out loud.
Twice.
“Coroner? Is that your word? The coroner?”
“Yes.”
“His report is in. The preliminary. No blood work. The brain was very inflamed. It seems there had been some sort of colpo apoplettico — I do not know the English words—”
“A stroke, you mean?”
“Yes. A stroke. But the doctor says that such a stroke as this could have had the effect of creating a very strong derangement of the senses. The doctor is telling us that Mr. Naumann died as a result of this stroke.”
“Directly, you mean?”
Brancati said nothing for a moment. Dalton got the impression that he had put his hand over the phone and was talking to someone else in the room.
“No. Not directly. He also examined the heart, which was not in good shape. Mr. Naumann had signs of previous minor heart attacks and some of the atrial walls had atrophied. He was not a healthy man. So the stress of — how to say — the brain attack, this placed a fatal strain on his heart.”
“So he did die of a heart attack? After all?”
“Yes. I hope this puts your mind at ease.”
“What about the… the damage he did? To himself?”
Brancati sighed. In his mind Dalton could see him shrugging.
“We can never know. In his last moments he was in a terrible place and his death was horrible. I wish never to die as he did. But we may at least say that he did not commit suicide. This death was not a murder either. So there we have it. Natural causes. A tragedy, but sadly, also a part of life. You will come to Cortona? We can release the body to you.”
Dalton picked up the flask and unscrewed the lid, but he did not drink. He sat there thinking about the man in black and his emerald-green spider and what Naumann had said — about Laura.
But none of that was real.
It was all a nightmare, born of too much booze. And of course the side effects of a bite from some sort of poisonous spider. Maybe even from the soul sickness that comes on you after you’ve let your red dog run and serious damage has been done because of it.
But it was over now.
This was another day. The spider hadn’t killed him. The ghost of Porter Naumann had not appeared in his room. When he thought it over in the cold light of day, everything that Naumann’s ghost had told him was something he either already knew or already suspected. And that would certainly include the warning about Laura.
Except the bit about Gavro’s vengeful family. And even that could have come up from somewhere deep in his own guilty mind.
“Yes,” he said, watching the afternoon sunlight play on the tall tangled vines of the moonflower plant, its large blue-white flowers closed tight again, huge white cocoons that seemed to glow with a ghostly interior fire. “I’ll be in Cortona tonight.”
It took Dalton two hours to clean up the suite: the bathroom looked as if he’d staged a cockfight in it, and the Italian linen bedspread was a total loss. He took some more time to clean himself up well enough that when he walked out the door he wouldn’t frighten the horses.
He put the ominous little cigarillo pack, still bound up with several elastics, into the breast pocket of his dress shirt. Everything else, the ivory-handled switchblade he’d taken from Gavro, the silver flask, the bloody towels, and his Beretta, went into his briefcase. He closed the lid and locked it with superstitious care. Naumann’s bags — including everything Dalton had been wearing the day before, which, in view of Brancati’s deeply implausible insouciance about the Milan and Gavro affair, were better out of the forensic reach of the local authorities — were standing by the door, tagged for Dalton’s London address and due to be FedEx’d by the hotel bellman later this afternoon.
His own luggage consisted of his briefcase and one battered alligator-skin suitcase. He did one last walk-through of the company suite, including the balcony, looking for any remaining sign of the previous night’s excesses. Other than the bloody bedspread, in reparation for which he peeled off another three hundred euros and dropped them in a soap dish beside the daily twenty-euro tip for the maid, the room looked pretty much as it should.
He stood in the middle of the living room and spent a moment thinking about last night’s dream and what Naumann’s ghost had said about Laura. In his mind’s eye he saw Laura sitting on a blue wooden chair in a white room bathed in golden light. She was wearing a pastel pink dress belted at the waist. Barefoot, her short red hair carefully combed, her pale face scrubbed, without makeup, she stared fixedly into emptiness. Cradled in her upturned hands was a small rounded form wrapped in an emerald green blanket. Overhead a ceiling fan with huge palm fronds for blades whisked through the salt-scented air and a sea wind stirred the white linen curtains.
He held the image for as long as he could and then shut it down and locked it away in an iron cage at the back of his skull. There was nothing he could do for Laura. She had left him long ago, had traveled as far away from him as it was possible to go. He picked up his luggage and his briefcase and turned his back on the room and on everything that had happened in it last night.
On his way out he stopped in front of the long mirror by the door and examined himself — navy pinstripe over a crisp white shirt, a pale gold silk tie knotted over a gold collar pin, a long blue cashmere coat and shiny black wingtips. Black leather gloves to hide the wound on the back of his left hand. Shaved, scented, combed, and pressed. He looked like death. He slipped on a pair of tortoiseshell gold-trimmed sunglasses and considered his reflection. A verse ran through his mind, an old Dorothy Parker rhyme:
His bags were in check and he was ready for a five o’clock water taxi ride to the Piazzale Roma, where his rented Alfa waited for him. Dalton stepped a tad warily out the doors of the Savoia & Jolanda and into the pale afternoon sun, expecting a shriek of recognition from a chorus of traumatized backpackers. No one even looked his way.