Joseph Kanon - Alibi

“Cavallini was shot?” I said.

“I hope so.”

“What happened?”

She indicated Moretti. “They shot him before we could get him off the train. They must have had orders. ‘If anything happens, shoot him first.’ ”

“How bad is it?”

“He’s bleeding. Not an artery, he’d be dead, but we have to get him to a doctor. He won’t make it like this.”

“When’s the pickup boat?”

She shrugged. “The link that broke. He should have been here long ago. We have to assume he’s not coming.”

“But he knew where to get you. If they break him, they’ll come here.”

“He won’t break.”

“Everybody breaks, Rosa,” I said, angry. “We have to get the boy out of here.”

She glared at me, then nodded. “Then we use your boat.”

“My boat?”

“You have to take us.”

“That was always the plan, wasn’t it?” Claudia said angrily from the doorway. “There was never any other boat.” Her voice quivering, edging toward hysteria.

“Does it matter?” Rosa said to me. “He’ll die.”

“Oh, my god,” Claudia said, “the blood, it’s all over. We have to clean it up. Before anyone sees.” She knelt and began to wipe the stone floor.

“Yes, it matters. I have to know how much time we have. Was there another boat?” I had raised my voice, almost shouting.

“Yes.”

“So, no time. Let’s get going. First him. Let me see the wound.” I took Claudia by the shoulders and held her until they stopped shaking. “You all right? Can you do this?”

“Me? Don’t you remember? I’m good at it,” she said, her voice catching. I shot her a look, then glanced down at Rosa, but Rosa was busy now, peeling off the soaked cloth. “Here, I brought some brandy. This is peroxide. For the wound.”

“That’ll kill him,” I said. “Maybe we should chance it. Bullet’s still in anyway. That’s where the real infection-”

“No, we don’t chance it,” Rosa said, taking the bottle.

“I’ll get another towel,” Claudia said, eager to leave.

Rosa gave Moretti some of the brandy, sitting him up so he wouldn’t choke, and I saw that he wasn’t unconscious, just scared and quiet, keeping his eyes closed against the pain. Shock had drained his face pale, making him look even younger, so that the stubble of beard from his days in jail seemed out of place, ink from another sketch.

“This is going to hurt,” Rosa said, pouring some of the peroxide on a towel.

He nodded and clenched his teeth, playing patient, and then the towel touched him, a searing shock, and he screamed, a yelp that raced out of the room and down the canal. Rosa clamped a hand over his mouth to muffle the scream, making him fight for air, his body writhing, so that when she finally took it away he was panting, exhausted from it, the way a seizure subsides into twitches.

Claudia raced back into the room. “Are you crazy?” she said, not really to anyone. Then she saw Moretti’s face. “They’ll hear,” she said softly. “You’ll give us all away.” She took the peroxide back from Rosa and handed her a towel. “Put this on him. Where is the doctor? How far?”

“Far,” Rosa said.

“There’s no time for that,” Claudia snapped. “Tell us where.”

“The Lido.”

“The Lido?” Claudia said. “With the police in the lagoon? What do we say if they stop us? ‘Oh, just something we picked up.’ You want to go there, go alone. Don’t kill us too.”

“I don’t know anything about boats.” She looked down at Moretti.

“Then call an ambulance. Take him to the hospital.”

“They already shot him once. You think they’ll stop now?”

Claudia bit her lip, thinking. “Can you take a bullet out? In the war, they did that. No doctors. You were a partisan. You-”

Rosa shook her head. “It’s too deep. He needs a doctor. Instruments.”

“All right. We can call an ambulance from the Zattere-we can carry him that far. No one will know.”

“About you.”

“Yes, about us. Do you want everyone caught? At least he can live. He’ll be safe there, in the hospital.”

“Was your father safe there?”

Claudia looked away, then went back to the floor, scrubbing it clean, doing something.

“Why the Lido?” I said.

“There’s a car there. They won’t know about it.”

“The next link?”

“We can get to Jesolo. There’s a doctor I know.”

“If he’s still alive,” I said, watching Moretti, who was breathing heavily, in a series of grunts.

“You can’t involve us in this,” Claudia said. “What can we say? They’ll think we were part of it, attacking police. There, it’s gone. What do we do with the towel?” She held it out to me.

Rosa looked up at me. “We can’t take him to the hospital. You know that. There is an obligation here.”

I glanced around the room, thinking. The police were on the water, not searching the calles. Could he walk? Mimi’s wasn’t far, a few deserted blocks away. But how could we take him there? Anywhere?

“Were you followed here?” I said.

Rosa shook her head. “No.”

“So only the pickup boat knows you’re still here.”

“Yes.”

“The police’ll be on the lagoon.”

“Maybe not so many,” she said, bargaining. “They can’t stay out all night. They have to think we went to Maestre. No one will think of the Lido, it’s the wrong way. That was the plan.”

“Yes, and look how well it’s worked,” Claudia said.

“He’s here, isn’t he? If we can get to the Lido, we can get him away.” She turned to me. “They’re not looking for your boat.”

I took in the canal steps, the boat tied to its mooring pole, barely moving in the calm water. If they were keeping watch nearby, they’d be in the Giudecca channel, not the other end. Nobody in his right mind would head for the Grand Canal, all lights and vaporetti and tourist gondolas. The way to Maestre, the mainland, was up the channel to Piazzale Roma and the bridge. That would be the way to escape, not out toward the lagoon and the open sea. Rosa was right-they wouldn’t think of the Lido. The trick would be getting past Venice itself, the curve of bright lights around the basin, without even a shadow to hide behind. A long trip in any case, too long for someone with a stomach wound, groaning between channel markers. And now they’d be hours late.

“What if he didn’t wait, the driver?”

“There’s no one. Just the car.”

“And you’re going to drive?”

“I can drive a car.”

“But not a boat,” I said to myself, then looked at her. “It’s not going to work, Rosa. You have to give him up.”

“He’s not guilty,” Claudia said. “If there’s a trial-”

“It’s too late for that,” Rosa said. “A policeman was killed.”

“How do you know? You didn’t know if Cavallini was shot.”

“I didn’t shoot Cavallini,” she said calmly.

In the silence that followed you could hear the creaking of moored boats in the canal.

“Anybody see you?” I said quietly.

Rosa shrugged. “It was dark. Maybe. Maybe they saw him,” she said, looking down at Moretti. “You understand? They don’t need a trial for Maglione anymore. Now they have this.”

I said nothing, my eyes darting around the room again-the hanging gondola, the paving stones, nothing changed, feeling as trapped and anxious as that night. Only the water. The calle entrance was impossible-someone would see, and where would we carry him? Gianni had been dead, something you could slip over the side. Moretti would have to be taken all the way, loaded into the car. If he survived the trip. And if he didn’t? I saw us pitching him into the water, a macabre repetition, everything happening all over again.