The Venetian Judgment by David Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

do not believe in coincidences, do we?”

    “How did it get there?”

    Brancati made a face, raised his hands.

    “When I find out, someone will be unhappy. Open it.”

    Dalton popped the catch. Inside, nesting in a lining of old emerald green silk, was a long, slender stainless-steel hand tool with a rubber handgrip at one end and a small sharp disk of some dark material at the other, held in place by a tiny axle.

    He picked it up, hefted it carefully, his heart shifting beats.

    “Do you know what that is?” asked Brancati.

    “Yes,” said Dalton, the skin along his neck and shoulders tightening and his face becoming hard and set. “It’s a glass cutter.”

    “There is a maker’s mark on the underside. Do you see it?”

    Dalton held it up to the fire, saw the letters H&R stamped on the shaft.

    “And does a glass cutter with these markings mean something to you?

    “Yes,” said Dalton, already miles away, seeing the rabbit hole opening up under his feet, a blue vein beginning to throb at his temple, “it does.”

SAVANNAH

THE MANSION ON FORSYTH

    On a misty but luminous sunlit December afternoon in Savannah, at around the same time that Dalton and Brancati were contemplating a glass-cutting tool by the dying light of a cedarwood fire, a woman named Briony Keating was introduced to a tanned and muscular young man with short blue-black hair, prematurely gray at the temples, and a general air of contained aggression that brought the word duelist to mind. The young man had a fine-boned, hawkish face, with wide-set and direct topaz-brown eyes.

    This introduction took place in the muted elegance of the Lobby Bar in the Mansion on Forsyth, across the street from the famous park where the Old South had once cadence-drilled the flower of her doomed youth. The man radiated intelligence and sly wit, and had a charming if rather predatory smile. Briony Keating, who, at the age of sixty-two, was a seasoned and cynical judge of men, felt his wolfish smile as a kind of warming glow in her lower belly. Aware of a rising heartbeat and a certain shortness of breath, she decided that while his navy blue pinstripe could be Hugo Boss and his flawless white shirt might be from Pink’s, his morals were straight off the Serengeti.

    He didn’t feel gay to her, and she had wonderful antennae for nuances of sexual identity, but she could not rule it out completely, at least not without further investigation. His name, according to Briony Keating’s friend, a Bryn Mawr classmate named Thalia Bowering, was Jules Duhamel.

    When introduced, sensing a kind of subtle arrogance in him, Briony considered the young man coolly for a long moment without response, allowing the silence to last just enough to create a certain uneasy tension.

    The noisy chatter of the women all around pressed in, the ping-ping-ting of ice tinkling in cut-crystal glasses, the boy at the piano leaning over the keys with his limp blond hair in his eyes and his pale face set as he worked his way through the “Moonlight Sonata” . . . at last, Briony Keating offered her hand, which Mr. Jules Duhamel took gently in a strong but brief grip, bowing slightly as he did so. His skin felt smooth and warm and dry, and made her think of a stallion’s neck. He spoke with a slight accent, not French, someplace much farther east than that . . . Slovenian? Montenegrin?

    Was Jules Duhamel, obviously French, not his real name? Interesting. His voice was pitched low, but not at all forced, a natural baritone purr.

    “Miss Bowering has been telling me—”

    “Please, call me Tally,” said Miss Bowering, who was short and blunt and had something of the look of Ayn Rand about her. She was aware of this, and even wore her thick black hair cut short. Her attention, openly sexual, was fixed on the young man. She sent Briony a brief, telling look— I saw him first, and isn’t he a killer? —and then broke away as Mr. Duhamel bowed again, offering a quick flash of his