Katerina went down to her room to change into her warmest clothes in a far more cheerful frame of mind. Yes. Lord Calenti would be just the man to set such a trap.
* * *
The cheerfulness lasted until she was out on the dark water, battling the wind and the waves. Deliveries, she’d shifted to the daytime. But collections from Captain Della Tomasso were always at night, always before moonrise, and always off Guidecca. Della Tomasso was definitely a fence, definitely a messenger for spies, a smuggler . . . and their lifeline. He was a careful, taciturn man. And they owned his ship.
She hit a wave amidships, and it splashed and slopped over the gunwale. It was a good idea keeping the relationship between the illegal cargoes that Captain Della Tomasso carried and the Casa Montescue as far apart as possible. The old devil would load a legal cargo of salt, beeswax, and hides at the Montescue warehouse not seventy-five yards from Kat’s bedroom tomorrow morning. Of course his coaster would be clean as a whistle while the Capi di Contrada were about at the warehouse. Of course they couldn’t chance passing incriminating parcels to-and-fro there. But Kat wished to hell—by her half-frozen hands—that she could meet him somewhere closer to the Casa.
Chapter 37
Old habits woke Marco with the first hint of dawn—he’d been so exhausted otherwise that he’d have managed to sleep through to the afternoon. He’d spent a good part of the night with his teeth chattering hard enough to splinter, until exhaustion put him to sleep for another hour or so. He stuck his head out from under the hideout, still shivering, and peered around in the gray light. No fog this morning, though the sky was going to be overcast. He pulled his head back in, and checked his clothes where he’d put them under his bottom blanket. As he’d hoped, they were reasonably dry, water driven out by the heat of his body. He beat the worst of the dried mud out of them, and pulled them on, wrapped a blanket around himself, pulled his cotte on over it all, and crawled back out into the day.
He hopped from the edge of his raft onto the edge of the islet—which was an exposed and weathered ledge of rock, and a lot more solid than many a landing back in town. He wriggled his way in to the center of the islet, having to carefully pull his blanket and clothing loose when branches snagged them, lest he leave tell-tale bits of yarn behind, or rip holes in clothing he didn’t have the wherewithal to repair. He was looking for a place where he would be well hidden by the reeds and rushes—at least hidden from the casual observer. He finally found a dry spot, one well padded by the accumulation of many years of dead reeds, and made himself a little hollow to sit in. He reckoned it would do well enough; he hunched down into the hollow, hugged his knees to his chest, and settled down to the unpleasant task of confronting everything he wanted to avoid thinking about.
Take it one step at a time—
All this time, he’d been casually saying to himself: “Caesare will kill me for this.” Looking at the mess he’d made of things in the cold light of dawn, and soberly recollecting his own lecture to Benito—might he?
He might, Marco thought reluctantly. And be justified. If Casa Dorma take offense . . . he could hand Petro Dorma my head, and get himself out of it. I’ve made myself into a pretty expensive liability.
But would he? Marco looked at it from all the angles he could think of, and finally decided that he probably wouldn’t. Aldanto never did get that drastic without having several reasons for doing it. To be brutally frank, Aldanto was too much of a professional to waste anything, even the time and effort it would take to dispose of a stupid child.
And Maria would probably get upset if Aldanto actually killed Marco. For all that the girl doted on her lover, and had the usual canaler’s tough outlook on life, Marco didn’t think that she really approved of Caesare’s . . . profession. And he thought that, underneath the temper, she was actually quite fond of him and Benito.