Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2)

Chapter Seventeen

My annoyance with Taverner might have eased up by the time we got to Venice if it hadn’t been for the house. I was expecting a typical Venetian property, tall and narrow, with worn brick or sooty ochre plaster—something nondescript that would blend in with the neighbors. Instead, we got a miniature palazzo, or close enough as made no difference. It was three stories and as wide as it was tall, washed in dark rose paint. The ground floor had stout oak doors that looked like they’d been there since Savonarola was pitching bonfires in Florence, but the windows on the floors above were elegantly framed in dark green trim. A set of French doors led onto a tiny balcony that was dripping in vines. Here and there a few early pink blossoms shoved their heads above the window boxes.

I scanned the building for security. No cameras, just the heavy wooden doors and metal bars at the windows. They were laid in a decorative pattern of running squares, but they’d keep intruders out as long as they weren’t rusted through. We’d have to station doorbell cameras at strategic spots. No problem—I hadn’t expected state-of-the-art security from a VRBO. What I had expected was discretion. The house was easily the prettiest in the Campo Santa Margherita, and I didn’t like it. Pretty got you noticed.

The others weren’t bothered. Helen was busy throwing open the shutters to let in the afternoon light while Mary Alice was chattering with Signora Bevilacqua as our hostess pointed out the features of the apartment in rapid-fire Italian. She was older than the pyramids, Signora Bevilacqua, with a flame-red wig and a face powdered to a dead white, punctuated by a thick pair of false eyelashes and a slash of cherry pink lipstick. She wore vintage Chanel which she probably bought from Coco herself back in the day, and she had pearls in her ears the size of ripe grapes.

“The wi-fi, sometimes she works, sometimes she does not,” the signora said. The Venetian dialect looks like Italian on paper, but to the ear it sounds like a different language. Where Italian is staccato, Venetian is curvy and lyrical. It is musical if you like your music Baroque. Mary Alice seemed to be understanding about one word in twelve, but with hand gestures and facial expressions, she was catching the gist. They discussed the hot water situation—unpredictable at best—and where to buy the best bread. The signora produced a list with her recommendations and turned to plant two cherry kisses on Taverner’s cheeks.

I turned away. “Let’s get unpacked and set up. It’s going to be a long night.”

—

Mary Alice and Akiko bagged the largest bedroom at the back of the house while Nat and Helen took smaller private singles on the floor above, and Minka grabbed the tiny maid’s room behind the kitchen. That left a double for Taverner and me to share. It was just above the salon and had the same view of the campo. Shutters had been thrown open and I could hear kids knocking around a soccer ball as the afternoon waned. Taverner was smart enough to make himself scarce while I unpacked. He headed for the kitchen, banging and chopping and stirring as I threw my stuff into a wardrobe that looked as old as the house and went back downstairs with a notebook.

Akiko eyed it. “Keeping it old-school. I approve.”

“I think better when I can doodle,” I told her. I also think better when I can smoke, so I took a chair near the open windows and put my lighter to good use. I flicked the ashes into a handy potted plant until Mary Alice pursed her lips and brought me a saucer to use as an ashtray. I jotted a few questions for research, then marked them out, feeling an itch I couldn’t scratch.

“What?” Mary Alice asked. She has always been the most in tune with my moods and the least likely to judge them.

I blew out a mouthful of smoke. “We’re on the run again with no real clue as to how to find the woman who wants us dead. Helen is barely speaking to me because I got her house burned down. I am sharing a room with a man I am currently annoyed with, and I killed a man in front of his teddy bear.”

“Which of those things is a now problem?”

“Finding Galina,” I said promptly.

“I might have an idea,” she replied. I gave her a hopeful look, but she made a vague gesture with her hand. “Later. What’s going on with you and Taverner?”

I shrugged. “The same stuff we’ve been fighting over for forty years. I won’t let my guard down, blah blah. Commitment issues. Blah.”

“He’s not wrong,” she says, and it’s a testimony to how much I love her that I didn’t punch her right in the mouth.

Instead, I gave her a warning look. “Mary Alice.”

“Seriously, Billie. I don’t understand what your problem is right now. He’s been helpful so far. He’s kept us fed and he’s the one who figured out the clue in Pasha’s diary. You should be thanking that man with home cooking and blow jobs, but instead you’re pouting like a teenage girl left home on prom night.”

“Taverner and I haven’t worked together in a long time,” I reminded her. “And I don’t like mixing business and pleasure. I never did.”

“What are you so afraid of?”

She didn’t really expect me to answer that. She knew better. Instead, she waited while I took another long drag on my cigarette and stubbed it out carefully on the saucer she’d brought.

I sat back in my chair and looked at her until she cracked with a sigh. “Fine. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Our hunch to come here was right. I found her boy.”

She tapped on her phone before handing it over. I scrolled the site she’d pulled up. It was the official site of the Gran Teatro La Fenice, the tiny jewel box of a theatre that housed Venice’s opera company. It was over the top, a pink velvet confection with gilded frosting. I’d been there once, a lifetime ago, when I was scouting a target. I’d sat through an excruciating Die Meistersinger but I’d enjoyed the people watching.

“I always thought it looks like a Baroque bordello,” I said, passing the phone back. “What did you find out?”

She tapped again. “I have been scrolling the calendar. Next week they are mounting Faust by Gounod.”

“Never heard it,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you haven’t. You’re still listening to Cher on the original vinyl.” Mary Alice played viola in an amateur chamber orchestra and loved anything written before 1900. I preferred Southern swamp rock and Fleetwood Mac. She went on. “It’s not a bad work if you like your opera a little on the avant-garde side. But I am bringing it to your attention because I have scoured the cast lists for every performance of every opera, and I found something quite interesting.” She paused for dramatic effect. “It’s the story of Faust’s bargain with the devil. And the role of Valentin, brother of the heroine, Marguerite, is being sung by—drumroll, please—the very baritone we’ve been looking for. Wolfgang Praetorius.”

“Damn,” I murmured, impressed.

Mary Alice cocked her head. “Now go make up with your boyfriend. It smells like dinner is ready and I could eat a cactus, I’m so hungry.”

—

By unspoken agreement, we didn’t discuss the case until dinner was finished. It would have been a crime to tarnish that meal with work talk. Taverner had leaned in hard to the local produce, whipping up a pitch-black squid ink risotto to follow fried sweet and sour sardines and a pot of salt cod paté with piles of grilled bread he’d rubbed with garlic and green olive oil. He served a heavy Sicilian white wine with it but he watered it to keep us sharp. For dessert there was a bowl of cherries bobbing in ice water alongside tiny cups of mint tea. Because he was also an assassin—and a smart-ass—there was also a box of pastries from Malvestio. Just like Auntie Evgenia liked.

I raised an eyebrow at the box. “You’ve been busy,” I said to Taverner.

He smiled expansively. “I thought a little recon wouldn’t go amiss.” I didn’t say anything, just helped myself to a handful of cherries, popping each one into my mouth and sucking off the flesh before I spit the pit into my hand.

“I think that was a very good idea, Taverner,” Helen said in a tone that was a shade too bright. Like family, we had fallen back into our old roles and Helen’s was pourer of oil on troubled waters. I didn’t miss the fact that she’d chosen Taverner’s side though.

“Billie doesn’t,” Natalie said as she grabbed a pastry. Her role was brat.

Even with his mouth shut, Taverner could annoy me. He just smiled over his teacup and kept quiet.

“Smug isn’t a pretty color on you,” I murmured in his direction.

He turned the smile up a notch. “I cooked. You can wash up. I’m going for a walk.” He pitched a dish towel in my direction and eased out the door. Silence lay heavy in the room after he went.

“It’s been forty years,” Natalie said. “Are you still doing this?” She waved her hands to indicate where Taverner had been sitting.

“Do you really want to talk about relationships?” I asked sweetly. “Because if I’m aiming at you, I’ve got a lot of bullets in my bandolier.” She flipped me off, but there wasn’t much she could say for herself after three divorces and a string of disastrous love affairs from Hong Kong to Helsinki.

Mary Alice clapped her hands. “Girls. Enough. Now, we have a potential lead on where to find Galina.” She explained her hunch about La Fenice to Helen and Natalie who looked suitably impressed.

Minka’s phone buzzed and she frowned as she studied it. “Something bad has happened.”

I took the phone and scrolled through the article she’d pulled up. Mary Alice came to read over my shoulder.

It was just a few lines from a Swiss newspaper. It had been written in German, but a name jumped out at me. Evgenia Dashkova.

“How did you find this?” Nat asked.

“I set search engine alerts for everybody involved in this business,” Minka explained. “That just posted.”

I read fast, translating as I went.

“What am I looking at?” Mary Alice asked.

“An obituary,” I told her. “Aunt Evgenia is dead.”

After we’d passed the phone around and everyone had had a chance to read the obit, we debated the timing of Aunt Evgenia’s death. There wasn’t much dissent. We were all pretty much in agreement that it was too coincidental. Besides which, I had seen her just a few days before.

“She was older than Moses’s grandmother, but she looked good,” I said. “Healthy enough under the circumstances.”

“Old people do just drop dead sometimes,” Akiko said hopefully. I understood her inclination to chalk it up to natural causes. It was a hell of a lot less scary than the alternative. “I mean, why would Galina kill her own aunt?”

“Because she knew we’d been to see her,” I said gently.

Mary Alice filled in the rest. “Galina would have been afraid that Aunt Evgenia gave us information that Galina didn’t want us to have.”

“Like the fact that she’s actually alive,” Natalie put in.

“But you still don’t know ,” Akiko began.

I held up my hand. “We know.” I read aloud from the obituary. “?‘Evgenia Feodorovna Dashkova is survived by her niece—Lilian Flanders of Mount Desert, Maine, in the United States.’?”

“That bitch ,” Mary Alice said.

Akiko looked puzzled. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Lilian Flanders is the name of the agent Galina killed before we killed her brother,” Nat explained.

“And obituaries are sent to the newspapers by family members,” I added. “By making reference to Lilian, Galina is definitely sending a message. We know she’s alive and she knows that we know.”

“And she wants us to know that she knows that we know,” Natalie put in.

“Natalie, this is not the time to be a smart-ass,” Mary Alice said shortly.

“I can’t think of a better one,” I said. Natalie blew me a kiss.

“So, what’s the plan?” Helen asked. “Stake out the opera house until Galina shows up?”

“That could take days, maybe weeks,” Mary Alice said, looking around the table. “That’s a long time—too long.” We all knew what she was getting at. The longer we spent surveilling Galina, the likelier it was she’d spot us. If that happened, it was only a matter of time before she managed to kill us—or worse, Akiko or Taverner or Minka. Avoiding collateral damage was the Museum’s first rule and one we took seriously.

“We have to draw her out,” Helen said. “But how?”

We were silent for a while, each of us ruminating in our own way. Natalie folded her napkin into a series of animals—the rabbit was my particular favorite—while Helen arranged the condiment bowls and salt and pepper into rigid rows. Mary Alice scribbled in her notebook, jotting ideas and scratching them out just as quickly. Akiko busied herself doing the dishes, and Minka headed to her room, probably to play video games. I went to the window to light a cigarette and blow smoke out into the campo. Night had fallen and the little boys with their soccer balls had been summoned to dinner. The bars and restaurants were gently buzzing with customers wrapped up against the chill, settled under glowing heaters and enjoying their Aperol spritzes.

“Wolfgang,” I said suddenly. I stubbed out my cigarette and came back to the table.

“I thought of that too,” Mary Alice said as Akiko joined us, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “But how?”

“We blackmail him into helping us.”

Nat let out a sharp bark of laughter. “We’re killers, not blackmailers.”

“So?” I raised a brow at her. I never could manage it as well as Taverner, but I’d been practicing.

“We’d have to get information on him in order to blackmail him,” Mary Alice said. “How do we even know there are skeletons rattling around in his closet? He might be clean.”

“There are two kinds of blackmail,” I reminded her. “The kind where you’ve got something nasty to hide and you pay to keep it secret.”

“And the other?” Akiko asked.

“The kind where you’re forced to do something because of the consequences if you don’t.”

“I think that’s technically extortion,” Natalie said, frowning.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Schuyler,” I replied.

“It’s a step down,” Helen said slowly. “It feels grubby.”

“It is grubby,” I told her. “But it’s also efficient. Every day we lose waiting around to find Galina is another day we’re in danger. All of us,” I said with a meaningful nod towards Akiko. She looked startled, and reached for Mary Alice’s hand. I went on. “Galina’s been calling the shots up until now. I say we take charge and play offense for a while.”

“It is better than waiting around,” Natalie agreed.

Helen still looked dubious. “I’m not sure I like the idea of threatening a bystander with violence.”

“Violence? Jesus, Helen, I’m not talking about pistol-whipping the guy,” I told her. “I only meant we should scare him.” I held up Natalie’s phone with Aunt Evgenia’s obituary still front and center. “We show him this and let him know what his girlfriend is capable of.”

She considered this. “We would have to find him,” Helen said, but I could tell her objections were faltering. “It could still take a while.”

“A day or so is all we need,” I promised.

“Well, then,” Natalie said, raising her glass. “To our first foray into extortion.”