The Lizard's Bite (20 page)

The old man was eyeing him with open, mute aggression.

“What’s the big deal anyway?” he demanded. “All the papers are saying what happened. A man knocks off his wife. Doesn’t happen much around here. Unless you know otherwise.”

“We’re from Rome,” Peroni said pleasantly, then turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door to keep an eye on the Arcangeli brothers, who were still in deep discussion on the quay. “We’ve got shit for brains, my partner and me, in case you hadn’t noticed. Do you know something? We don’t have a damn clue about what happens around here. I don’t even know why Uriel would
want
to kill his wife. Do you?”

The two workmen shuffled awkwardly on their feet. Both said nothing.

“You’re local,” Costa added, accusingly. “Two people, your own people, are dead. Aren’t you even interested?”

“He wasn’t one of ours,” the elder grumbled. “No one ever said that. People here mind their business. You should try it.”

“Does that make him less of a man?” Costa asked.

“You didn’t know him. You don’t know any of them. You wouldn’t understand.”

“But Bella was one of yours. The Braccis have been here for years.”

The son spat on the dry, dusty ground and said, simply, “Braccis.”

Peroni gave Costa the look. It was clear they weren’t liked either. And Nic Costa knew there was no point in trying to find out why. Talking to these two was as futile as throwing questions at the Arcangeli.

The men were looking behind him.

“Now
she
,” the younger one said, a note of respect in his voice, “is different.”

Costa turned. He saw Raffaella Arcangelo striding towards her brothers, heading across the narrow wharf at a determined pace, anger in her eyes. Falcone followed behind.

“Michele!” the woman yelled. “
Michele
!”

It was one of those public events you couldn’t not watch. The carpenters were all eyes, taking in everything.

“You should check those doors are done. They look a little flimsy to me,” Costa ordered them.

“Stick to police work, sonny,” the old man bit back. “We’re taking a break.”

Then the pair ambled over towards the group by the water, just close enough to hear every word of the furious family confrontation developing under the burning sun. A noisy one, too, not without interest, though best played out, Costa judged, indoors.

He went up to Falcone and whispered in the inspector’s ear. “Sir… This shouldn’t be happening. Not here. It’s too public.”

“Let’s see,” Falcone murmured.

Costa nodded towards the pair of eavesdropping carpenters. “We’ve company…”

“Forget about the company.”

Costa glanced at Peroni and knew his partner was thinking the same thing. This was the old Falcone routine, the one they hadn’t seen since they left Rome. The trick the inspector used from time to time, of letting a situation come to a head, letting the emotions run out, then seeing where they led. Sometimes Costa couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t like letting a couple of cars crash just to see who was the worst driver.

And something was different here. Falcone had an interest in this woman, one that went beyond the professional. It was implicit, in the hungry way he was watching her, that she intrigued Leo Falcone.

What ensued was a bitter, full-on domestic fight among the Arcangeli, beneath the flickering flame of their iron namesake, an event that went, in some way, to the very heart of this peculiar family. It was as if Raffaella had been waiting for years to throw this kind of fury in the direction of her eldest brother, and with it all the accusations she’d been harbouring. Of lies. Of deceit. Of a failure to protect the family’s interests. The tide had burst and Costa wondered if any of them, Raffaella or Michele, understood how difficult it would be to return to their previous state of mutual acceptance once the storm had subsided.

Michele stood there, arms crossed, watching her, saying nothing, that frozen side of his face turned towards her anger, as if it were some kind of shield to protect him from the fiery stream of words that tumbled from his sister’s mouth.

“You knew,” she said, finally. “You knew Bella was pregnant. She didn’t tell Uriel. She didn’t tell me. But she came to you. And you did
nothing
.”

The dead eye glinted back at her like flawed glass, run through with some streak of impurity.

“Say something,” she spat at him. “Speak, Michele! It’s not like you to be lost for words.”

The dead side of his face turned away from her. He gazed at the hazy waterline, the little island of San Michele and the city in the distance, then returned to confront her again, good side visible.

“Of course I knew!” he yelled. “I’m
supposed
to know these things, aren’t I? That’s what I do around here. Take on all your problems and fix them. Because God knows you can’t do that for yourselves. Not you. Not him…” Michele nodded towards Gabriele, who stood silent, watching the water. “Not poor dead Uriel most of all. What do you think he’d have done if I’d told him? Huh? If I’d said his wife had got herself knocked up? And who by? Her own stinking brother. What do you think Uriel would have made of that?”

Raffaella was staring at him, gasping for breath. Unable to speak.

“You’re sure of that?” Falcone asked him. “About the brother? She told you?”

“She didn’t need to tell me,” Michele replied mournfully. “We all knew what went on between them… .”

“That was years ago,” Costa said. “There’s no evidence it happened recently.”

“Ask her!” Michele barked, pointing at his sister. “She heard them. She knew. She never dared tell Uriel either.”

Raffaella shook her head. Tears were beginning to stream down her cheeks. “I only said it was a possibility. It could all have been a mistake. Perhaps it wasn’t Aldo.”

“Then whose brat was it?” Michele demanded. “Not Uriel’s, that’s for sure. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She’d still have come to me to sort out the whole damn thing. And I’d still have done it. I’d fixed for her to get rid of it. Today, in case you’re interested. Paid in advance. I don’t suppose I’ll get
that
back from the clinic.”

“We had the right to know,” she insisted.

“She didn’t seem to think so,” Michele declared, exasperated. Costa stared into his face. There could have been the making of tears in that single living eye. “I didn’t want this, Raffaella. I didn’t want
any
of this but it’s what God gave me and I can’t walk away. I’m sorry. I’m deeply, deeply…”

The old grey face went into his hands. Costa watched Michele’s shoulders begin to heave, heard the choked sob come, just once, from his hidden mouth.

“Michele, Michele,” she murmured, then clutched her brother tightly, whispered some unheard words into his ear. The two of them stood there locked together on the waterfront, watched avidly by three cops and a couple of Murano carpenters who had an expression on their smug faces Nic Costa didn’t like at all. And Gabriele, who sat down on the kerb edge of the quay now, eyes on the water still, looking like a lost child.

“I said this was a matter to be conducted indoors,” Costa reminded Falcone with undisguised bitterness.

To his surprise, Falcone nodded, looking repentant. He couldn’t take his eyes off the distraught Raffaella, clutching her brother.

“I heard you, Nic. I’m sorry. I keep trying to apply the rules I use in Rome. It just doesn’t work here, does it? Jesus…”

The carpenters were slinking towards the bridge, back to town. Father and son, for sure. They had that closeness Nic had seen on so many Murano faces, a tight, conspiratorial intimacy that formed a barrier to the world outside.

“No matter,” Falcone grumbled. “It’s out of the bag now. I want to see this Bracci character. I need to know what he looks like.”

Peroni nodded at the departing pair. “We’re going to have to hurry if we want to be first,” the big cop observed.

Falcone sniffed. He looked tired. Unsettled. The heat was getting to all of them, Costa thought. This was all supposed to be so easy.

“We’ll wait,” the inspector ordered, watching Raffaella Arcangelo detach herself from her brother, tears staining her cheeks. “I owe someone an apology.”

Costa wondered about that. Falcone rarely said sorry. It wasn’t in the nature of the man. Then the phone began to vibrate in his jacket. He took it out and heard Emily’s excited voice on the line. He walked away, intent on keeping this conversation, at least, private.

“Nic?”

“Hi. How are things?”

“Fine. You sound down. Is everything OK?”

“Not so great, to be honest.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I have a favour to ask. Can you meet me at the party tonight? And bring my clothes? The evening dress and everything. I laid them out on the bed. No creases, please.”

He couldn’t get a grip on what she was saying. “I don’t understand.”

“You wanted me to get close to him,” she replied, a note of reproach in her voice. “I’ve been working in the palazzo most of the day. I won’t be finished in time to go back to the apartment. It’s amazing here. Where are you?”

Automatically, his eyes went up to the vast glass palace next door. The sun was so bright all he saw was its fiery reflection. He was just a minute’s walk away from her. Watching the Arcangeli try to pick up the pieces of a bitter row, wondering what would happen to the Braccis now that Bella’s secret was about to go public.

“Outside the
fornace
but I don’t think we’ll be here long. Is there anything else you need?”

“Just you,” she replied sweetly. “And some time. I’ve got news.”

Costa listened to her confident tones with unease. She was supposed to talk to Massiter, nothing more. But it wasn’t in her nature to hold back, not when some prize lay in her grasp.

“Good or bad?”

“Maybe neither. But it’s instructive either way. Got to go now…”

The line went dead. Nic Costa glanced again at the gleaming palazzo along the quay. Emily was in there somewhere, out of reach.

S
HE PUT DOWN THE PHONE AND LOOKED AROUND THE small storage room at the back of Hugo Massiter’s apartment, built directly against the windowless brick wall that formed the entire rear of the palace, a supporting buttress of ugly clay that visitors were never meant to notice. Nor was anyone meant to be witness to what lay before her now: bundles of letters tied together with string, piles of photo albums, document boxes all bearing the label of the same private detective agency based in New York, a name she knew, a solid, expensive firm that worked only for the most discerning of clients. Hugo had excused himself as soon as she’d issued orders for the new work. Lunch, he said. Then a meeting, returning around four. Emily had borrowed overalls to work alongside the teams of carpenters, plasterers and painters turning the bare exhibition space into the location for a Venetian ball, made sure they understood what they were doing, and come to the conclusion that they were, under direction, good enough for the job. Then, when she was satisfied Hugo wasn’t about to return suddenly, she went upstairs to the apartment and tried to remember the lessons she’d received at the Academy in Quantico, in what now seemed another lifetime. Searching homes without leaving a trace was an art, one she’d almost mastered because she possessed what it took: care, a good memory and a feeling for the personality of the person into whose life she was intruding. Hugo Massiter was a careful, lonely, insular man, one capable of hard decisions without much regret, but scarred, too, by some event in his past.

The room was beyond the large, elegant kitchen, locked. She’d finally found the key in a small terra-cotta bowl next to the shiny new cooking range. In private homes there was always a key, her instructors had told her. Usually in an obvious place.

Behind the door lay a treasure trove of material on a single occurrence in Hugo Massiter’s life: the disproved allegations of murder she’d read about at Nic’s that morning. And two people: Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, in whom he had placed his trust.

Her hand fell automatically on the detective agency reports. These were filings of sightings of the fugitives after Forster and Conti fled Venice. Or so the authors claimed. Emily was sufficiently familiar with intelligence reports to read between the lines. There was a grey area between rumour and fact in most of them. Hugo’s money seemed to be buying much of the former and little of the latter. The reports talked of the couple’s presence in various parts of the world — Africa, Asia and South America — but gave not a shred of hard supporting evidence. Photos, handwriting, phone conversations… all the artefacts that helped shore up vague suspicions were noticeably absent. The final letter from the agency was curt to the point of rudeness. Hugo’s correspondence with them was absent but it was clear he had been questioning both the cost and the effectiveness of the operation. He’d tasked the agency with finding Daniel Forster and Laura Conti. They hadn’t even managed to prove the pair still existed. The contract had come to an end some six months before, with the promise of litigation over unpaid fees.

Emily closed the file, wondering what it told her. Hugo desperately needed to track down two people who had almost put him in jail. Why? He didn’t need them for his own security. The authorities now accepted he’d been wrongly accused. What motive could there be apart from revenge? Except… Hugo Massiter was vain, ambitious, unquestionably ruthless in business matters. But he had a firm sense of self-knowledge. He was acutely aware of what kind of man he was. Revenge would surely have seemed petty to him, an unnecessary reminder of a pain still waiting to heal.

This impression was only confirmed by what she saw in the photo albums. They consisted of formal pictures from the series of music schools Hugo had sponsored in La Pietà over the years. Rows and rows of teenagers, all in smart black evening dress, some clutching fiddles and violas, smiling behind Hugo, who stood proudly to the front. And, in the final year, another figure. Someone who could only be the young, seemingly ingenuous Daniel Forster, next to his patron, a priceless music score in hand, one he had claimed for his own.