The Lizard's Bite (25 page)

“We’re aware of that, sir,” Costa replied, toasting the commissario. In spite of Peroni’s protests it was good stuff, better than the weak fizz he usually found in the Veneto. “Right now we’re off duty. Right now we can do what the hell we like.”

Randazzo scowled. The man seemed tense, more unhappy than usual. “So what’s new? I suppose I ought to be grateful. At least I get a break from the complaints. You know we hardly ever need to send a man to Murano. It’s that kind of place. Now I’ve got three out there. Doing nothing but push back the crowds. Why didn’t you just take Bracci into custody?”

“On what grounds?” Peroni asked, intrigued.

“That’s for you to invent,” Randazzo snapped. “Do I have to tell you everything?”

The commissario glanced at Teresa Lupo. Her presence made him uneasy somehow, a fact she wasn’t likely to miss.

“I suppose you had a good day too,” he mumbled. “Poking your nose in our business. I should have been told about that trip to Tosi. Before it happened.”

“Tosi phoned you?” she asked, surprised.

“Of course! He works for me.”

“Lucky man,” Teresa Lupo said pleasantly, then turned her back on him and rejoined Peroni.

Randazzo prodded Costa in the chest. “There are limits,” he said, “to what I will take from you three.”

Nic Costa wasn’t interested in pursuing this conversation. Randazzo was a small man. Massiter’s man, if Costa understood the situation correctly. He was here because he’d been told to be here. The grumpy, sour-faced commissario could entertain himself. Besides, he’d spotted Emily. She was over on the far side of the room, a dreamlike figure in white, free of Massiter, getting an energetic chat-up line from some idiot dressed up like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat.

Nic Costa nodded at Randazzo. “I genuinely believe that to be true, sir. If you’ll excuse me.”

Then, with a mild shoulder charge, a toned-down version of the play from his rugby days, Costa was through the costumed scrum, pushing them aside with a stream of muttered apologies, determined she wouldn’t get away.

He picked up two fresh glasses of
prosecco
from a bewigged waiter in blue silk and backed his way through the throng to find her.

Emily laughed, a warm, entrancing sound, and took her glass.

His eyes roved over the white, white angel costume, the perfect feathered wings. “I brought your clothes. You asked me. And this…”

He took the tiny bouquet of bloodred
peperoncini
from Piero Scacchi’s smallholding out of his pocket.

“Doesn’t seem much, in these surroundings.”

Emily placed the waxy peppers carefully in the feathers of her right wing, where they stood like some strange, symmetrical wound.

“It’s the loveliest thing I’ve seen all day,” she told him.

There was a wicked radiance in her eyes. This was all a game. A tease, maybe.

“Don’t you like it?” Emily Deacon revolved once, like an ethereal model, just for his eyes.

“No.”

“Nic!”

He scowled. “I like it. Where on earth did you get it?”

“Hugo ordered it from some costumier in the city. It was his idea.”

“I bet. Did he have any others?”

She blinked. “I suspect so,” she answered frankly. “I learned quite a lot about Hugo Massiter today.”

“Does any of it help?”

“I don’t know.”

She ducked backwards, behind one of the slender iron columns that ran in a line close to each edge of the hall, supporting the balcony above. There were crowds above them, scores of people, their feet clattering on the ironwork. The place seemed too delicate to be real. Her bright, sharp eyes scanned the mob to make sure no one was listening. The lively sound of the orchestra, now working its way through the spring section of the Seasons, rang behind them.

“Probably not,” she disclosed quietly. “I learned that he’s obsessed with Laura Conti. The woman who almost ruined him, if you remember.”

Costa nodded. The story of Laura Conti and Daniel Forster wouldn’t go away.

“He doesn’t look the romantic type to me. He’s rich. The kind of man who could have pretty much any woman he feels like.”

“I can’t believe you said that!” she complained. “Do you really think it’s only about the money?”

“No! I meant… He’s not married. He seems a solitary type, not someone to enter into a long-term relationship. I rather thought men like that attracted a certain kind of woman.”

“That’s a retraction of a sort, I suppose. How about this as an explanation? The reason Hugo’s obsessed with Laura Conti is precisely because she’s
not
that kind of woman. She’s someone who actually said no to him. Or perhaps said maybe, and then no, which would be even worse.”

“That would get to him?” he asked.

“It would get to most men, wouldn’t it?”

There was something here he still didn’t understand. And it got in the way too.

“As Falcone reminds me constantly,” Costa went on, “Daniel Forster and Laura Conti aren’t part of this case. What about the Arcangeli? What’s his relationship with them?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know any more than you do. He likes women. Perhaps he was Bella’s secret lover. It wouldn’t surprise me. You have to appreciate something. Women matter to him.”

“I’d gathered that.”

“No,” she said with a sigh. “This isn’t about me. It’s… universal. Hugo’s the kind of individual who sees women as a challenge. Scalps for his hunting belt. It’s not about love. Or sex even. It’s about possession. He’s more charming than most, but that’s what he’s like, and he’s very good at it too.”

Costa found the words just slipped out, unbidden. “Does he want you for a scalp?”

“Probably,” she answered without hesitation. “But I don’t feel flattered. Men like Hugo want women the way others want cars. It’s all about ownership, Nic. I rather imagine that once he’s sat in the driving seat, so to speak, the attraction wears off. But with Laura Conti, it didn’t, for some reason. That’s what’s bugging him still. It doesn’t make sense to him. It doesn’t fit in his neat, nicely ordered world, which is a place where he’s very much in control.” She took a sip of the
prosecco
, smiled. “And it won’t go away. Bella, on the other hand, did. That’s as much as I know.”

“I guess that’s a kind of definition of love. The not-going-away part.”

“I guess.”

Her blue eyes were on him. When he saw her like this, lovely inside the stupid, radiant dress, with the stain of the
peperoncini
by her shoulder, he wondered why he ever doubted the bond between them.

“I think I’ve had enough of this masquerade, Nic. Shall we go?”

Costa’s eyes swept the room, the silk and the satin, the wigs and the pale, powdered faces. “You’d leave these people for a little police apartment in Castello?”

“No,” she answered with a wry smile. “I’d leave them for you, idiot.”

Nic Costa laughed. That was one more talent she possessed. Then he took one last glance around him. Leo Falcone was talking earnestly to Commissario Randazzo now, free of the black-clad, shy form of Raffaella Arcangelo, whose elder brother, now next to Falcone, still held the unknown woman in conversation, an avaricious expression on his maimed face. Close by, Peroni and Teresa were embroiled in an animated discussion by the side of an attendant whose food tray they were pillaging.

His eyes roved to the nodding waters, the moored boats, the stone jetty. There was someone there. The last person Nic Costa expected to see was walking into the Palazzo degli Arcangeli at that moment.

G
IANNI PERONI POSSESSED AN ARMOURY OF TALENTS for infuriation. At that moment, surrounded by costumed buffoons, slightly giddy on three rapid glasses of good
prosecco
, alongside untold canapés of lobster and
bresaola
, Teresa Lupo truly believed he was entering upon fresh ground in his ability to drive her crazy.

“Don’t worry about it,” Peroni said again. “It’ll be OK. We’ll see another doctor. There’s a witch back home near Siena. Well, I say
witch
. It’s more kind of folk remedies and stuff…”

“Gianni!” she barked, loud enough to send the harlequin next to her trotting off hastily for somewhere a little less noisy. “Are you listening to a single word I say? This isn’t a question of finding the right doctor. Or some country quack from one of your hick villages. It’s human anatomy. Physics. Not some kind of magic.”

“That’s what you said about spontaneous combustion,” Peroni reminded her. “Until you started looking.”

Her head whirled. Sometimes she felt like thumping his big chest with both fists. “No. It’s not like it at all. What I said was true. Spontaneous combustion, the way people think of it,
doesn’t
exist. But maybe something we interpret as it does. That is
not
what I am talking about here.”

“Severe tubal occlusion.”

Notch up one more trick for the fury machine. Peroni’s pronunciation was perfect, even if he didn’t understand the first thing about what the condition was.

“Which means?” she demanded.

“Which means we look for some other solution. If that’s what you want…”

“Christ! Let me put this in layman’s terms. The wiring’s burnt out. The plumbing’s fucked. I am a freak—”

“If you were a freak they wouldn’t have a name for it—”

“Shut up and listen, will you?”

He wasn’t smiling. Or rather, he was, but in that wan, “just tell me what to do” way that always made her feel helpless.

“I’m listening.”

She wished it were somewhere less noisy. Less public. It had been a mistake to bring up the subject when she did. But the
prosecco
prompted her to get the thing over and done with. She had to get the news off her chest somehow. Keeping it tight inside herself did no good at all.

“I can’t have children,” she said slowly. “That will never change. You can fool yourself otherwise if you like, but I won’t, Gianni. I can’t. It just makes things… worse.”

Teresa Lupo was aware there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, just in time for Peroni’s arms to come round her frame in a powerful, firm embrace.

“Does it matter?” she whispered into the side of his head, half wondering what all these people around them were making of the spectacle.

“Of course it matters,” he murmured.

She snivelled on his chest, then looked up into his battered face. “But I
want
children, Gianni.”

“And I want what you want. And we both don’t get this, together.”

Together.

Just as Emily had said, on the waterfront, the day before, both of them dog-tired, watching the dazzle on the water, picking at ice cream.

Together was what counted. Together was what would count for Emily and Nic too, one day. Teresa Lupo felt that in her bones. It was a fact, a solid, unmistakable piece of the future slowly emerging into the present, struggling to take shape.

She glanced across the room. Emily was alone, a solitary white figure standing out against the pale old stonework of the hall, abandoned by Nic again for some reason, one Teresa wished she knew so she could beat him around the head with it and say,
Look, for God’s sake! People like this don’t walk into your life — anyone’s life — every day
.

Cops and love, she thought. What a mixture. What a…

The room exploded with a deafening, deadly roar, an explosion that rang off the fragile glass walls, echoing with an odd, resonant timbre, mocking, shaking them all.

This was a sound she was coming to recognise. One that people like Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had introduced into her life. A single metallic scream, so loud she could feel her eardrums shrink under its violent volume.

“Gianni—” she murmured.

But the big man was gone already, punching his way through the overdressed mob, heading for an area of space that was opening up near the doorway, one that was getting larger by the second as all the costumed fools, the harlequins and the plague doctors, the medieval whores and the court ladies, suddenly got smart, remembered what century they were living in, and recognised the angry howl of a weapon.

“Get out of my damn way,” Teresa spat at some moron in black and white, flailing her arms, not wanting to think about what she’d see.

A man with a gun. There was always a man with a gun.

Both Nic and Leo Falcone were facing him down already, refusing to be cowed, standing to confront the madman who hid behind his hostage, a woman she recognised as the terrified Raffaella Arcangelo, trembling and pale in her black widow’s gown.

N
IC…”

He listened to the inspector’s warning voice carefully, not taking his eyes off Aldo Bracci for a moment. The man was dead drunk, scarcely able to stand. A stupid, unwanted trick of the memory meant Costa recognised the weapon in his hand. It was an old Luigi Franchi RF-83 revolver, a .38 special with six cylinders, just under a kilo in weight, obsolete, unreliable, the kind of crap they took off small-time street hoods in Rome, thugs who couldn’t shoot straight to save their lives. Not that it mattered. What was important was that this was a firearm, a small harbinger of death housed in ugly black metal.

“This is my call, Nic,” Falcone murmured. “Get back. That’s an order.”

They were just a few metres from Bracci and Raffaella, in the still-bright yellow sun of the dying evening, beneath the wasted brilliance of a vast Murano chandelier suspended from the rusting iron gallery above.

“He’s drunk. He only knows you from this afternoon and that didn’t go well at all,” Costa said quietly. “Bracci just sees you as part of this problem. I came before. Give me a chance.”

“Nic…” There was a stern, desperate note in Falcone’s voice.

“No, sir,” Costa declared, and stepped in front of the inspector, held out his arms, wide, hands open, showing he had nothing with which to threaten the furious-looking Aldo Bracci, who cowered behind Raffaella, shaking with fear and rage.

“Put the gun down, Aldo,” Costa said in a firm, even voice. “Put it down, let the woman go. Then we can talk this through. No one gets hurt. Nothing goes any further. It’s all going to be OK. I promise.”