He slipped an envelope out of his shirt pocket and laid it down on the table with a certain air, a flourish, as if to say, “Voilà!”
Dalton opened the envelope and tipped its contents out onto the table; six grainy color photos, each one showing a barred gate and a short section of hallway. In the first shot, the doorway, the gate barred, nothing showing. In the second, a shadow on the outside steps, as if from a streetlight. In the third, a black figure, shapeless, apparently surrounded by a black cloud. In the fourth, a black cloud filling the picture almost to the edges, and bars of white static, as if from an electrical interference on the power line. In the fifth, the cloud still, and the static fuzz, but both receding, shrinking, and the short section of the hallway reappearing around the edges. In the sixth, the black cloud is gone, the hallway is empty, but the barred gate stands wide open.
“Where was this taken?” asked Dalton, staring at the succession of images with a ripple of superstitious dread playing around the edges of his mind. The pictures seemed to show a shapeless form, almost a ghost, filling the frame, gliding through the frames, fading away.
“I listened to you, back in Cortona. I spoke with the desk clerk at the Strega, on Via Janelli, talked to him myself. He finally admitted that he had fallen asleep for a while. It came on very suddenly. He grew sleepy, put his head down. He may have been drugged somehow. This was at ten in the evening. At five minutes after ten, this dark figure appears at the door. The black cloud grows, and the static, the white noise as it were, and then it passes, and when it is gone, the gate is open. The gate is on a spring and very gradually it closes again. A while later the blatta girls in the next room hear two voices coming from Mr. Naumann’s room. Not really voices. More like one voice and another sound, rather like bees droning. Then a crash and a fire alarm goes off and then… niente. Silence. An hour later, Mr. Naumann leaves the hostel—”
“Did the camera show that?”
“The clerk saw nothing. The camera stopped working. The rest of the night it showed only black. As if the eye had been burned out.”
“What kind of camera was it? Digital or magnetic tape?”
“Magnetic. A VHS tape. You know something about this?”
“I’ve heard… rumors. At MIT they were working on a cloaking device. It puts out a jamming signal capable of doing this kind of thing to a video camera. It overloads the sensors with cross-spectrum broadband waves. It effects thermal imaging, infrared and ultraviolet sensors. The sensors react to this cloaking device almost as if it were a solar flare. It works on certain types of digital cameras as well. All you would see in the screen is a black formless cloud, and sometimes bars of electrical interference. People tend to think there’s something wrong, some malfunction in the camera.”
“Such a masking device, this would not be available to everyone? You could not buy it at your friendly Barracca della Radio in Boston?”
“No. This is very high level. State-of-the-art countersurveillance. Strictly covert operations at the federal level.”
Brancati scooped up the photos and slipped them back into the envelope, his face closed, inward.
“Would this Sweetwater person have access to such a device?”
“I can’t see how. But then I don’t know who he really is.”
“From whom would he get such a device?”
“I don’t know. This is all just speculation.”
“Perhaps from your own Agency?”
“This technology — if we have it, so could others.”
“You think some other agency may be working this man?”
“I have no idea. Do you have access to the EU passport logs?”
“Yes. Of course. For all the good that does. Now that we have all this open-border European Union nonsense, an intruder can slip into some lawless piratical country like—”
“Like Croatia?”
“Yes. Like Croatia, and then simply walk across into Italy at Trieste. Or come ashore on a boat. A fast boat.”
He stopped, considering, turning over the Croatian element in his mind. Dalton was ahead of him, but not at all of the same view. Naumann’s death, the murder of his family, terrible though they were, had no obvious connection to Croatian drug cartels.
No obvious connection.
“What about the Croatian end of this. I don’t want these guys… what were their names?”
“One was called Radko. The other one she did not hear.”
“I don’t want these guys going after Cora again. Is there anything you can do?”
“Have you ever tried to put a cat in a hatbox, Micah?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“I know the Vasari family. They are not the people who go into the hatboxes. Her grandfather was an airman. Very brave. He was murdered by a Fascist assassin during Il Duce’s little adventure in Abyssinia. Cora will insist on being left alone. However, I will place some watchers on her.”
“Thank you.
“What will you do? Now?”
“About the Croatians?”
“No. That is my business. I must insist on that. The Croatians you will leave to me. In Split there is a man named Branco Gospic — you remember him?”
“Yes. You told me about him. He runs a crime syndicate. Gavro’s family, the Princips, they’re connected to this Gospic character?”
“Yes. By blood. And by guilt. By debts. So Branco Gospic is the doorway to this. I will go after him. I give you my word that everything will be done to protect her. I ask about this Sweetwater fellow. You think he is connected to these Gospic people?”
“I have no reason to think it. But I can’t rule it out.”
“You have been back to London. Was it to look for him?”
“No. I think he had already been there.”
Brancati sensed the meaning, raising an eyebrow. “No. More killing?”
Dalton told him everything, the complete report, not the edited version he had told Cora. Brancati asked one or two technical questions, but in the main he just sat there quietly and absorbed the data, entirely a cop at this moment. When Dalton had finished, Brancati was silent for a while.
“Such viciousness… it makes me wonder. Do you believe this butchery was done before the death — perhaps the murder — of your friend Mr. Naumann?”
“Yes. Forensics indicated that the time of death was around the fourth of October. Porter was in Venice at the time.”
“So your friend died three days later?”
“Yes.”
“And, as we saw, in a great state of emotion. Of horror.”
“Yes.”
“Such a state of horror that might be caused by images of the brutal torture and murder of your entire family.”
“Porter wasn’t a man to collapse under that kind of challenge.”
“Not in his right mind, of course not. But suppose he was under the influence of some terrible drug — a drug that magnified all of his fears, his horror — would that not drive him to such an end?”
“Yes,” said Dalton, thinking about icicles. “Yes. Quite easily.”
“So we may be justified in thinking that whoever killed Mr. Naumann’s family did so partly to have such terrible images to present to the husband, the father, at a time and place of this man’s choosing.”
“Such as a hostel in Cortona?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“This kind of planning, this sustained malevolence, this can only be for one of two things, Micah. For the joy of inflicting pain. Or for vengeance.”
“I think it’s both. So do you. It’s a vendetta.”
“Yes. Like the Croatians have against you. But you do not think this man has any connection to Gavro and Milan, to the Croatians?”
“I didn’t. Now I’m not sure. I’m also worried about this connection with Carovita. I went there on Saturday night and I saw this Indian having a meal there, alone, at a table in the back. And I spoke to an old woman the next day, who told me where to find him. The fact that the people who ran the—”