“This isn’t the consulate.”
Delaney smirked. “No kidding.”
One of the more hilarious dilemmas presented by the city of Venice: If you need to take someone(s) into custody, you can’t just bundle them into a car and drive them away. You can hop a vaporetto, and in a pinch you can rent a gondola and pole your suspects/prisoners away, but it’s not especially intimidating.
Instead, Tall and Small had marched them, on foot, for several blocks until they reached …
“No. No. Nooooooo!”
… the church of San Basso.
“We had to get all the way inside before you knew where you were?”
“I was half-asleep last time!” he yelped. “And we came in by a different door.” Rake was looking around the hall as they walked along a narrow corridor leading to the offices. “Jesus, what is this?”
“Phones.” The short one—Delaney didn’t remember the name from his ID and didn’t much care—held out a proprietary hand. They’d stopped just short of a closed door and clearly weren’t going farther until the niceties were observed. Delaney took her time as she carefully pulled it from her pocket and handed it over. Passive-aggressive tart, as Donna would have pointed out with a smirk. Rake took even more time, possibly because he had trouble bitching and digging out his phone simultaneously, which culminated in the tall one all but snatching the thing out of Rake’s hand.
Amateurs. Should have taken them right away.
“You stay put, okay?” Delaney said to Lillith, who had been with them the entire way, sometimes holding her hand and sometimes Rake’s. The child had obediently taken one of the chairs outside the office and was idly looking around and swinging her feet back and forth. Small and Tall were clearly relieved she’d stopped with the tornado sirenesque yowls, and they had no interest in damaging the child’s equilibrium, which could result in frightened hysterics or, worse, more yowling. “You stay out here and we’ll be just inside, talking to his boss and straightening everything out. See? We can all see you through the windows.”
“How do you know what we’re going to do?” Small asked, having the hilarious nerve to look affronted.
“Because you’ve got no imagination.” Delaney opened the office door and gestured for Rake and Tall to enter. “Not a single one of you.”
“Non tieni la porta per me,” Tall grumbled, trailing her in. “Ti tengo la porta per te.” Then, louder: “Mr. Kovac, you wanted to talk to these people.” Then, unnecessarily: “Here they are.”
Kovac nodded and tossed him a small hammer, the kind with a head you could unscrew and replace with any number of screwdriver heads; the handle was decorated with small pastel flowers for that extra surreal touch.* Small and Tall took turns destroying Rake’s and Delaney’s phones and, judging from their grunts of exertion and wide smiles, quite enjoyed themselves. Delaney took a step closer and slightly in front of Rake, in case the hammer was going to be utilized in even less pleasant ways.
“Hey! Knock it off, dickheads!” Rake yelped, because his survival instincts were for shit. “Do you have any idea how hard I had to work for that thing? The debasing tasks I had to perform? I don’t even want to think about them, but being here is bringing it all back.”
Tall let out a disbelieving snort, which paired nicely with Delaney’s eye roll.
“All right,” Kovac said with a mild American accent. He was short—Delaney could see that although he was seated, he was like one of those crash-test dummies with no legs—announced his baldness with a bad comb-over, and his eyes blinked slowly behind rimless glasses. He looked like an insurance adjuster, which, she supposed, was valuable in his line of work. “Let’s get to this. Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Rake asked.
Kovac sighed. “Jesus. Really? You’re gonna make me do the threats and intimidation thing, and then rough you up a little? Can’t we just get to the part where you put my mind at ease and we all go back to our lives?”
“No one’s making you do anything,” Delaney said.
“So you’re definitely not cops,” Rake said, nodding. “Or from the consulate. I’m pretty sure.”
Delaney smothered a giggle. “What tipped you off first? I told you when they rolled up, you shouldn’t have assumed you knew what it was about. They don’t care about your al fresco park sex almost a decade ago.”
“Why not?” Rake threw up his hands. “Everyone else does! If you knew it wasn’t a legit arrest, why are you here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be here? What, I’m gonna let you and Lillith ride off—well, walk off—into the literal sunset? Besides, you’re looking at this all wrong. It’s good they’re not cops. Better than if they were cops, actually.”
“What? Why?”
“They have no lawful authority, for starters.”
“Excuse me.” From Kovac, in the tone of a man forced to watch a tennis match he didn’t care about. “This is my meeting.”
“We don’t have it,” Delaney told him. “We’ve never had it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Donna’s been dead for months. It would have turned up by now,” she pointed out. Then, colder: “I would have paid you a visit by now.”
“And again I say bullshit. That dim quim wouldn’t have dropped off the grid without giving you what she had.”
“Dim…”
“Oh boy,” Rake muttered.
“… quim?” Delaney wanted to pace—well, she wanted to break Kovac’s nose, blacken his eyes, and then really go to work on him—but time and place, time and place. Unfortunately, there wasn’t room to pace; the windowless office was only about six feet by five, and other than the wooden desk and two chairs filched from the kitchen, the only furniture in the room were multiple heavy bookshelves crammed with any number of heavy old tomes. “D’you want to get down to business, or do you have more insults to run through first?”
“I can do both. And I’m not sure you’re getting it, sunshine. I have to know what Donna Alvah had and where it was, because I fucking hate prison, and while I don’t mind having my guys smack you around a bit, I don’t want to kill you.”
“Also because you hate prison,” Rake guessed.
“You got it,” Kovac replied, smiling like Rake was the prize pupil who correctly guessed the capital of Serbia.*
Delaney leaned back against the bookshelves and shook her head. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know what she did with the flash drive. Hell, I didn’t know what she’d done with her daughter for way too long. If it hasn’t surfaced yet, you’re probably in the clear.”
“‘Probably’ isn’t gonna do it for me. ‘Probably’ means there’s still a chance I’ll get pinched again. And at my age, I’ve got no interest in making new friends on my knees.”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s an age thing,” Rake began.
Delaney shrugged, cutting him off. “I don’t know what to tell you, Kovac. She left me a letter. And that’s it. That was always it: two pages, single-spaced.”
“A letter.”
“Yep.”
“In code?”
“No, in English. But it’s not the smoking gun, Kovac. And if it was—well. Like I said. You wouldn’t have had to spend the last week having your people skulk around. The cops would have knocked on your door, or I would have. Oh—and what happened to the A and B teams?” she added, jerking her thumb toward Tall and Small. “Why are you using subs?”
“I like how you’re asking me that, as if you don’t know the answer. They were on your boy toy until Lake Como.”
“Hey! I’m a man toy.”
“Then somebody kicked the shit out of them, and they lost him.”
“Aw.”
“The B team picked him up again outside the hotel that first morning, and then someone stole their wallets, led ’em on a merry chase, and called the cops and reported a pickpocket. Who brings their righteous ID along when they know they’re gonna be up to some shady shit?” Kovac lamented.
“Right?” Delaney said. “Amateur hour. What I’ve been saying.”
“And whoever this was also planted a dozen other wallets on them. Dumbasses are still in jail. I’m sure as shit not bailing them out.”
Yes, loading the bad guys with stolen property was slick. Teresa’s latest stray, the nimble-fingered teen Lillith and Rake would have recognized as the Roma Gypsy who lent them his phone that first day, was quite the talent. And when the cops get a call from one of the more affluent areas in the tourist quarter, they show up in a hurry. The whole thing had taken less than twenty minutes.
“Wait, that’s why you ducked out on Lillith and me? You spotted a tail?” Rake was, to her surprise, getting into fret mode. “Jeez, Delaney, I wish you’d said something.”
She spread her hands. “Where would I have even begun?”
“You could’ve been hurt.”
“Oh, please.”
“Hello? My meeting, remember? So then I remembered this isn’t a goddamned spy-caper movie, so I put guys here at San Basso—I figured you’d have your eye on the place. In a way, the story started here. And on a practical note, your hotel’s a quick walk from here.” He shrugged. “So.”
“So you spotted us again.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is when you got a little desperate. And a lot stupid.”
“Whoa.” Kovac put his hands up as if (false hope) he was being arrested. “My guy was just supposed to ask the little girl about the flash drive.”
“You were gonna take my kid?” Rake demanded. He’d gone from listening to the exchange with a slightly disbelieving look on his face to taking two steps, slamming his hands palms down on the desk, and glaring straight into Kovac’s eyes. “Your grubby brigade of fucksticks was gonna snatch my daughter?”
“I told you, he was only supposed to talk to her.” This in the tone of a man mildly inconvenienced by a waiter bringing the wrong order, instead of facing off with six feet three inches and 195 pounds of irked Tarbell. “But you put an end to that quick enough.”
“If you ever come near my—”
“Yeah, yeah, vengeance will be yours. Hell, vengeance was yours. The guy you upchucked all over has been sick as fuck ever since.”
“Good. When it comes to gastroenteritis, I like to share the wealth.” Rake straightened and stepped back from the desk. “And there’s plenty more where that came from if you guys get any other moronic ideas.”
“It’s his superpower!” Delaney said brightly.
“Consider me horrified.” Then, to Delaney: “So, sunshine. About this letter—”
“She only talked about the flash drive. There weren’t any instructions on how to find it or what to do with it.”
“So what’s the point? Why bother writing anything?” Kovac asked, scowling.
“You are a sociopath, aren’t you?”
“That’s what my therapist says,” he admitted.
“I’d try to explain why a letter that doesn’t lead to figurative buried treasure is worth writing, but you wouldn’t get it.”
“Do it anyway.”