It was business as usual for the quay of the slaves, and he saw the same black-haired mystical-thighed tour guide striding past, this time trailing a litter of Chinese tourists slated for today’s Ordeal by Pigeon over in the piazza. He flipped his collar up, straightened his sunglasses, turned hard left, and headed briskly away from the San Marco, on his way to Ristorante Carovita.
To satisfy his curiosity.
Nothing more.
A little side trip to look into the small matter of an emerald green spider, perhaps to discuss the events of the night with the spider’s careless owner. Maybe even to return the spider. Then on to Cortona to pick up the threads of what had been beginning to feel like his former life for a while there last night.
The café was open when he got there, with a few tourists and regulars sitting out under the awning and a damp salt wind blowing in from the distant palm-fringed line of the Lido beaches. The doe-eyed girl was nowhere around. Seated behind the counter inside, barricaded behind a heap of linen napkins waiting to be folded, was a parrot-faced old crone with evil black eyes, her fingers and hands bent and twisted into talons. She glanced up from her work as he came into the café and a look passed swiftly across her face, an unmistakable flicker of wary recognition. She looked like a sable basilisk and he was for a time torn between using his boyish charm, of which he had far less than he imagined, or calling in an exorcist.
Dalton opted for charm.
“Buongiorno, zia! Come sta?”
“I speak English.”
“What a happy coincidence, my dear lady. So do I.”
This brought a noncommittal grunt and she went back to her folding. Dalton looked at the thin greasy gray hair plastered across her skull for a while and decided that boyish charm was not this old bat’s weak point. He looked around the café and saw that all of today’s business was out under the awning. They were more or less alone. He leaned forward, placing his hands on her laundry. She stopped folding and looked up at him, her flat black eyes cold.
“Zia, I am looking for a customer who comes here.”
She said nothing but now a light was in her eyes, an acquisitive glitter rather like a gold coin in a shallow pond of black water. Dalton pulled out his wallet and extracted a sheaf of euros. She focused on them for a moment and then looked up at him again, her face closing like a fist.
“Who do you want?”
“He’s an older man, very big, very strong. He has long silver-gray hair — down to here,” said Dalton, touching his left shoulder. “He wears a black coat like a cape and the long boots of an American cowboy—”
Her hard eyes narrowed at this. Dalton searched for the Italian.
“Come vaccaro. Capisce?”
“Pellerossa,” she said, her voice harsh and rustling in her throat like dead leaves in a gutter. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Mr. Pellerossa. Do you know where he lives?”
Her black eyes flickered to the entrance and followed a young woman who looked as though she could be the doe-eyed girl’s sister as she walked through the café toward the kitchen. When she was gone the old woman’s eyes moved back to Dalton and stayed there, as full of low cunning and evil intentions as the eyes of a gull.
“His name is not Pellerossa. Pellerossa is what he is. Why do you want him?”
“I have something of his. I wish to return it.”
“Is it money? You can leave it here. He will come back.”
“When?”
A shrug, her leathery neck contracting, her tendons bulging out.
“I do not know. Soon.”
“I have to leave. I wish to see him before I go.”
Her eyes settled on the euros in Dalton’s gloved hand. Rested there. Dalton stripped off two twenties. She did not look up but the signal was clear. He peeled off two more. The fifth one did the trick. She showed him her tooth — a fine sharp tooth and it would have looked even more fetching if it had not been all alone in her blood-red gums. Her tongue moved inside her open mouth, a blind white snake-head. She held her hand out, and Dalton placed the euros in her upturned palm. Her fingers folded over the crisp new bills like the valves of a Venus flytrap, and with a papery crackle the money disappeared. She stuffed it into the innards of her black dress and looked up at him again.
“How do you know him?”
“I don’t.”
This answer amused her. She bared her tooth at him again and touched it with her white snakelike tongue. Dalton had the idea she was tasting his scent. It was an unsettling concept.
“He is not Italian. He is from America. This is between you.”
“Thanks for the advice. Do you know where he is now?”
She reached under the counter and pulled out a large cloth-bound book. It was the Missa Solemnis, tattered and ancient, with the leaves falling out. She laid it down on the folded napkins and opened it up.
Her talonlike finger moved down the open page until she reached a passage. She turned the book around so that Dalton could read it, keeping her blackened nail on the spot. It was the ordinary for the Giorno dei Morti, the Feast of all Souls.
She tapped it twice, staring up at him. Dalton looked at it for a while, trying to understand. She seemed unwilling to speak the words. Finally she sighed and frowned at him and then she spoke in an impatient whisper.
“In the Dorsoduro. Near this church. In the Calle dei Morti. Numero quindici. Number fifteen.”
She pulled the book away, closed it slowly, and went back to her folding. The thing was done, her manner said.
Dalton was almost at the door when he heard her calling to him. He turned around. She raised a clawed hand and tapped the side of her skull with a blackened nail.
“Il Pellerossa. Ha dei grilli per il capo. Capisce? Guardatevi dal vecchio, scolaro.”
Dalton understood some of it. She was telling him to be… careful? Gentle? To be gentle with the old man? And she was calling Dalton scolaro, a schoolboy. The rest was gibberish to him.
He bowed his thanks to her and walked back out into the sunlight. He was halfway through the Campo San Stefano and headed for the bridge over the Grand Canal that led into the residential district of the Dorsoduro when he finally worked out the translation of grilli per il capo. She was telling him that the old man named Pellerossa had maggots in his head. And guardatevi dal vecchio didn’t mean be gentle with guy. It meant beware of him.
The Dorsoduro neighborhood was a warren of narrow lanes and back alleys on the far side of the Grand Canal. The workers and waiters and laborers and gondoliers, the people who kept the Grand Guignol theatrics of Venezia up and running for the tourists, lived down here in this maze of ancient stone alleys, along with the students and backpackers and eco-vagrants who could not afford the grand hotels along the canal or the villas behind San Marco.
The Calle dei Morti was at the far eastern end of the Dorsoduro. It was a tiny medieval laneway off the broad boardwalk. The waterway was used by freighters and cruise ships that docked along the Giudecca across the bay. The boardwalk was essentially deserted. The temperature had dropped in the hour it had taken Dalton to reach the turning of the alleyway, and a wind with a knife edge to it was blowing scraps of paper up the lane as he walked slowly along the street, looking for number fifteen.
He found it at the corner, where the calle turned into a wider canyonlike lane. He stopped in front of a battered ironbound wooden door set deep into a stucco-covered three-story house no wider than ten feet. Three narrow slitted windows with rusted iron bars rose upward above the door, one above the other. The eaves hung over the street, supported by old hand-hewn beams. In the middle of the door was a heavy lion’s-head knocker.