Read Online Gun Metal Heart by Dana Haynes - Free Book Online Page A

small offshore bank. But the edifice remained undisturbed and elegant, and the hotel’s nine large en suite rooms and five-star kitchen provided old-world elegance and style.
    It also was out of the way, down a twisted alley to the south of the Ponte Vecchio, the famed pedestrian bridge with its hobbit-sized jewelry hutches and maddening throngs of tourists. You’d never stumble on it by accident.
    *   *   *
    The owners of the Criterion de Medici had decided the economic doldrums were coming to an end and it was time to expand. The New Zealand conglomerate bought a three-story building adjacent to the hotel. It, too, had been an outbuilding for the old Pitti Palace, part of the livery and stables for the royal court. The place was old and unsafe. Interior work had begun and the face of the building had been surgically removed, exposing the rooms within. The entire façade was covered in a kind of cheesecloth, a square slate-gray shroud, three stories tall, that blocked off the potentially dangerous construction from guests entering and leaving the Criterion.
    The result was to create one beautifully restored, seventeenth-century façade adjacent to a grim and grimy scrim, making the old livery building look like the Ghost of Architecture Past.
    It also made for half a dozen extremely easy routes into and out of the upscale hotel, all of which bypassed the lobby.
    *   *   *
    Daria wanted a gelato and Diego bought. He got himself a coffee to go, American style. This was something new for Italy, Daria noted. Even two years ago one would never have seen a lidded coffee cup with a cardboard sleeve. She decided she wouldn’t get violent about it until a Starbucks popped up in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
    Diego waved the cup forward and to their right. “Place is just over the bridge. Near the palace.”
    Daria took a long lick of stracciatella and her eyes fluttered in near-sexual bliss. “Near the palace? Risky,” she said. “City police, state police, and private security from the national registry of historic places.”
    Diego nodded.
    Daria reached into the tiny backpack over her left shoulder and withdrew a sheet of printer paper that she had folded twice.
    â€œI looked up your Hotel Criterion, last night. Posh. Not many rooms.”
    They were about a third of the way over the ancient Ponte Vecchio. Normally going was tough across the bridge, which was more narrow than the streets on either end. People parted naturally to give the Mexican his space. Daria found it easy going by drifting in Diego’s wake, riding his fear factor.
    A portable wooden stage had been set up, off near the edge of the bridge, for street buskers. In this case, a man in a ratty Uncle Sam costume and three girls in red, white, and blue. Uncle Sam held out a top hat for donations.
    â€œ My country ’tis of thee,” the girls sang sweetly. They wore pigtails. They sounded like Americans. Most of those donating coins looked like Americans, too. “ Sweet land of liberty…!”
    Daria had stopped walking. She watched them.
    Diego sipped his coffee, his eyes shaded by the hat. “A year ago, you were living in the U.S. You looked happy.”
    â€œI don’t much want to talk about that.”
    He nodded.
    Daria snapped herself out of her reverie. “Now I’ll have that song stuck in my head. Lovely.”
    â€œHotel’s just ahead.” He deftly changed topic, and Daria wrapped her arm in his.
    â€œWhile I was living in the States, I had a side business as a translator. I stayed at a dozen boutique hotels like this. They’re pretty much of a kind. I can find my way around inside all right.”
    Diego let it drop. “Guzman and me dogged this engineer for five days. Between here and an industrial plant out near San Jacopo.”
    Daria licked ice cream off her knuckle. “East of here on the Arno.”
    â€œYeah. They