The Venetian Judgment Read Online Free Page A

shot. His head was pounding, and his shoulders still ached from the effort of breaking Zorin’s tree-trunk neck. Yet he was, as previously mentioned, still inconveniently alive. After he finished with Belajic, there was only a bottle of Bollinger, and maybe the Ruger as a chaser.

    He reached the doors of the chapel and stood on the threshold, staring down the long nave to the wooden altar on the far end of an open expanse of marble tiles. The chapel, which seemed as ancient as a pharaoh’s tomb, smelled of sandalwood and candle wax and six hundred years of complicated Venetian piety. There was an ornate triptych above the altar, framed in intricately carved cypress wood, possibly by one of Tiepolo’s students, taking a serious stab at the Stabat Mater.

    The wing panels of the triptych were utterly dreadful, mud-toned, deadeyed cartoon figures marinating in pious self-esteem: probably some medieval merchants making their play for immortality and being badly let down by a journeyman artist. These panels were likely added years after the main panel, which was quite good, a vigorous swirl of jewel tones in ruby, emerald, lapis lazuli, and fire opal, and for once the Virgin, haloed in gold leaf, didn’t look like a sanctimonious old shrew—you could feel the maternal grief coming off her in waves as they took her ruined son off the cross. Naked, as gray as a slab of raw fish, Christ nevertheless had the build of an NFL linebacker and looked as if He would have been able to twist Zorin’s head off with one hand.

    Doric columns marched down the nave of the chapel on either side, and the interior was cast in shadow, half lit by the candles burning on the altar. The pillars seemed to move, in fact, as the flames flickered in the wind from the open doors.

    A squat, bent, almost gnomelike figure, neither old nor young, with a round, bald head and a hawklike nose, broken, then badly repaired, was standing at the far end of the nave, his once-powerful arms held low, his twisted hands clasped together over his belly in a kind of sinewy Gordian knot. His black eyes, as hard and sharp as a crow’s, were fixed on Dalton.

    Mirko Belajic was slumped on the floor behind him, his back up against the Communion rail, his thick legs sprawled out across the green-and-white marble tiles, his Briony topcoat in a heap at his side. In the glimmer of the candles, Dalton could see a sheen of sweat on Belajic’s fat cheeks and the rapid rising and falling of his chest. His shirt had been pulled back from the bullet wound in his chest. Someone, presumably the gnomelike figure at the foot of the altar, had put a makeshift compression bandage over the entrance wound. There was, of course, no exit wound.

    That was the whole idea with the Ruger .22.

    Dalton looked down at the Ruger in the bloody glove on his right hand, did a brief press check, drew in a long breath, let it out slowly, and began to cross the long, bare expanse of marble, the soft leather of his shoes soundless against the floor, his eyes scanning the clerestories above the rows of pillars on either side of the nave, the choir loft at the back of the nave, the lady chapel to the right of the main altar, the modest reliquary to the left, even the confessionals, low and huddled wooden huts hard up against the stone walls.

    It felt as if they were alone, but he kept the Ruger ready, his attention now centering on the bent figure waiting patiently for him at the altar rail. He knew the man well, and the man knew him, although neither of them spoke until they were a few feet apart.

    “Micah,” said Issadore Galan, his voice a soft croak, “you are hurt.”

    Dalton smiled at Galan, whose presence here, although inconvenient, could not have been a surprise. Issadore Galan was Major Alessio Brancati’s security chief, essentially the intelligence arm of Brancati’s Carabinieri detachment for Venice, Siena, Cortona, and Florence.

    Once a member of the Mossad, Galan had come by his