The Lizard's Bite (17 page)

His eyes wandered down to the water again. Then he was looking intently at her again.

“Let me tell you something about Venice. Something I should have learned years ago. It’s not the crooks you need worry about. They’re ten a penny and easy to spot a mile off. It’s the innocents. They’re the ones who kill you in the end. And here we are. Years later. Me wondering if I’m about to do the same again.”

“I’m sorry?” she said, confused.

“Remember Swift,” Massiter murmured.

“‘A flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em.
And so proceed
ad infinitum.’

“My fleas are gathering, young Emily. Unless I can pull off some rather clever tricks over the next few days, everything, this place included, will go down with the ship. What the hell. Fleeing the police on some trumped-up murder charges is one thing. But going bankrupt — my God… Do I need another drink or what?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t think you do.”

He touched his forehead with his index finger, a deft salute of obedience. Hugo Massiter certainly had a way about him.

“I need this charade to look good tonight. There are influential people coming. Tell me the truth now. What will they think of me with all this
junk
my young architect friend downstairs has introduced?”

She shrugged. “Depends who they are.”

“People with taste. Some of them. People with money. Power. If they knew the state of my bank account, they’d never step through the door. You won’t tell them, will you?”

“I won’t even tell my police friend.”

Massiter smiled. “Oh, that’s fine. He knows. But I’m pleased you’re both discreet. I’m not, as you see, which is why I depend so much on discretion in others.”

“I was thinking…” He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Thinking what?”

“Wondering really. If I turned this building over to you. As a project, say. You might even get paid something in the end. What would you do?”

Emily Deacon laughed, then sipped her wine. “Panic.”

“I don’t believe that,” Massiter replied, serious all of a sudden. “Not for a moment. I mean it. What would you suggest?”

She’d been thinking about that all along, as a highly perceptive man like Massiter doubtless knew. The building was, in a sense, unfinished. It was just waiting for the final touches of someone’s imagination.

The answer was so obvious. She was amazed Massiter hadn’t seen it for himself. Emily glanced back at the plain apartment behind them, a place brimming with reserved taste.

“Do what you did here. Live with what you have. Make it habitable. Make it
real
.”

Massiter was chortling. “
It’s not finished
! There are interior walls half built. There are parts that simply make no sense.”

“Any more than those velvet drapes and fake Titians they’re putting in downstairs? A half-finished masterpiece is better than a completed monstrosity any day. Please…”

He put his hand over his mouth, thinking. “How’s your Italian?”

“Better than yours. I’ve lived here for most of my life.”

“So have I!” he objected. “Well, a good part, anyway.”

“You’ve spent your time talking. I spent mine listening.”

He was no fool, though, she thought. Perhaps it was the prospect of putting off creditors. Perhaps — she’d seen the glint in Hugo Massiter’s eye, she knew a man who liked women — it was something else altogether.

“You’d need to talk this time, my dear,” he pointed out. “You’d need to tell a bunch of thieving Venetian builders what to do, and spot when they’re rooking me. Think you’re up to it?”

She drained her glass and placed it firmly on the table. The air below was alive with the curse of workmen, doing what the hell they liked, she suspected.

“I haven’t applied for the job.”

Massiter didn’t even notice her objection. “And we’d need to dream up some ruse to allow me to fire that idiot down there. I can’t just get rid of him. He’s too well connected for that.”

There she was one step ahead.

“Did you order real marble for those dreadful tables by the door? Or fake?”

Massiter bristled. “I didn’t order anything. They were the idiot’s idea. And I do not
deal
in fakes.”

“They’re veneer. Marble layered on wood. It’s obvious if you look at the edges. I doubt it’s the only problem—”

“It’s enough,” Massiter interrupted, suddenly furious, getting to his feet. “Follow me, please.”

He stormed downstairs at high speed, yelling for the architect, “Andrea!
Andrea
!”

They finally found the man lounging on a dire purple velvet sofa next to the dead palm tree. He was smoking a cigarette, watching a couple of sweating workers attempt to fix the phony marble tops with tubes of cement.

“Massiter! Massiter! So much noise. I try to think. Please…”

He was a skeletal creature in his twenties, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, open at the neck. A ridiculously ornate moustache was trying to establish itself on his upper lip.

“Problems,” Massiter said, picking up a massive club hammer from the floor.

The architect splayed his hands. “What problems? Are you mad?”

Massiter swung the hammer in a rapid, powerful arc and brought it down hard on the shining black surface. The two men who’d been working on it took two steps back, yelling obscenities. The “marble” split instantly in two, revealing the shattered edges of cheap pale plywood between.

“I’m mad now,” Massiter declared. “I’m
bloody
mad.”

Andrea got up and started slapping one of the workmen round the head, swearing at him in a vivid burst of Veneto.

“No games!” Massiter bellowed. “I’ve had enough of that. You can clear out of here now. And tell your uncle he can shove his bill up his arse.”

“Screw you!” Andrea yelled. “You can’t come here and do whatever you like.”

The Englishman passed the huge hammer from one hand to the other and gave it a good swing. Andrea thought better of things and began to slink off for the door, his workers following on behind.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Massiter shouted at them.

The men stopped in their tracks, worried, a little scared.

“Emily? Tell them.”

It was absurd. It was also highly amusing. They were staring at her, mute aggression in their faces, daring her to speak. Italian builders didn’t take orders from women. Especially not foreign ones.

She gave her instructions briskly, in the kind of language they would understand.

“You’ve got a choice. You can crawl off home now and whistle for your money. Or you can take every last piece of this crap out of here and find me some paint. White paint.
Good
white paint. Matte only. And lots of brushes. Plus some fabric for hangings. White again. This is the island of the archangels. Angels like white.”

The workers looked at each other. They said nothing.

Massiter laughed discreetly, then leaned toward Emily.

“A silent Venetian is a defeated Venetian, my dear,” he murmured in her ear, his breath warm and familiar, sweet with the aroma of wine. “Well done.”

C
OSTA WAS MULLING OVER HIS PARTNER’S RHETORICAL question:
Why did they always get the bum deal
? Because he’d defied Leo Falcone, that’s why. Pushing Scacchi for what he knew about the missing Daniel Forster and Laura Conti had been an act of direct rebellion. Falcone was too preoccupied with the case to make much of it. But both Costa and Peroni knew there’d be a price, and when they got to the Isola degli Arcangeli they discovered what it was. Falcone was keeping the sweet part — the house and Raffaella Arcangelo — all for himself.

All the same, Costa didn’t feel a single pang of regret. It would have been remiss to have left Sant’ Erasmo without tackling Scacchi about the missing pair. And those postcards the farmer had shown were, it seemed to him, distinctly odd. No one printed their own name. Certainly not a student from Oxford. Scacchi said he worked as an illicit ferryman for people who didn’t want to pay the price of official water taxis. The cards could have been posted by anyone. Some Alitalia steward he took to the airport from time to time, and who he’d asked for a little souvenir of his travels, signed in a particular way. But why?

Ordinarily, Costa would have mulled the idea over with Falcone and Peroni. Now, it seemed pointless. Both were fixated on the Arcangeli, keen to see this case closed, then engineer their escape from the lagoon. Nic felt the same way. In principle, anyway. Watching Falcone stride off for the mansion, with its glistening eye looming out over the lagoon, leaving them to the smoke stink of the foundry and the two surly brothers, he almost wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

Almost.

The face was at the great glass window again: calm, attractive, sensitive.

“I
am
going to get a look inside that place before we leave for good,” Costa swore.

Peroni huffed and puffed. “In that case maybe you’d better do what Leo says. You know he hates being crossed.”

But Falcone
was
wrong. Venice wasn’t some backwater unworthy of their metropolitan talents. Costa sometimes wondered whether they weren’t the ones being duped all along. Doing Randazzo’s bidding. Being forced to see matters the way the Venetians liked.

Falcone was at the window with her now, listening, nodding. Interested, Costa thought, and that was new too. The two brothers were working away inside the foundry, close to the furnace, Gabriele welding, Michele cutting pipe, as if they hadn’t even noticed their presence.

Costa watched Gabriele extinguishing the lance, waited for the sound of the gas to die down, walked over to the man, took the long metal implement out of his hand and placed it on the floor.

“Enough,” he said with a deliberate gruffness. “And you.”

He turned on Michele, who was grappling with some joint work, trying to wrestle a tangle of metal into submission. “Put that thing down and talk to us. If we don’t get some cooperation here, I
will
, I swear, arrest the pair of you and continue this at the Questura.”

Michele kept on straining away at the job, giving him just a single, filthy glance with the ruined side of his face.

“One call,
garzone
,” the old man spat back at Nic. “That’s all it takes and you’re out of here.”

Costa walked up close. “I am not your boy. Understand something. If we move off this case and someone else has to pick up the pieces, you lose time. That means no deal with this Englishman who’s looking to save your skin. Screw around with us all you like, but don’t think it won’t come at a price.”

That, finally, got both brothers listening.

“What the hell do you know about our private business?” Michele demanded.

Peroni burst out laughing. “Private? What’s your definition of the word
private
around here? We walked up and down Murano yesterday, talking to people who can’t wait to gossip about you and your problems. Your dirty linen gets washed in public on a daily basis. Do you really not know that?”

They didn’t, it struck Costa, and that, in itself, was interesting. The Arcangeli really were still outsiders, even after all these years.

“You can talk here. Or you can talk in the Questura,” he repeated.

“We don’t have time for this crap,” the elder brother snarled.

“You get even less time if we have to haul you over to Castello,” Peroni pointed out.

Michele grunted. Then he walked out into the sunshine, lit a cigarette, and perched on one of the bollards on the quay, watching the water stretching between the island and San Michele.

“Ten minutes,” he said, in that grating cold voice that was starting to get to Costa. “Then you can go bore the hell out of someone else.”

L
EO FALCONE STOOD WITH RAFFAELLA ARCANGELO IN the glass gallery. Both watched the scene developing below, two brothers, two cops, talking underneath the sputtering torch of the iron angel on the bridge, not that far from the pair of carpenters who were still slowly putting the front of the
fornace
back together.

“I told you there’d be no problem in the end,” Raffaella said. “They’re not unhelpful. Just preoccupied. And they’ve nothing new to say. You do understand that, Leo, don’t you?”

She was wearing better clothes today, he thought. A smartly pressed white silk shirt and black trousers. A little makeup and two small, delicate earrings, crystal naturally.

Falcone had taken the call from Teresa Lupo just after he’d left Costa and Peroni grumbling their way to the men downstairs, chastened by his reprimand for the way the younger detective had stepped out of line with Piero Scacchi. He was heartened to hear the interest and determination in Teresa’s voice, however. Something would, he thought, get resolved as a result. Even so, the nature of Uriel’s death remained puzzling. He was unable, too, to decide whether the news of Bella’s pregnancy clarified matters or simply made them more opaque. The answers to these problems lay in small details, snatches of conversation, tentative, private relationships. Falcone preferred dealing with crooks. He knew he was somewhat out of his territory in these waters, though he was determined the locals, and Randazzo in particular, wouldn’t notice.

“You promised to tell me what you know,” Raffaella reminded him.

He sipped the weak Earl Grey tea she’d brought. It was an affectation, a pleasant one. There were many in this overlarge, slightly pretentious home of which the Arcangeli filled barely a quarter.

“I said there would be limits,” he replied.

“I understand that, Leo. So tell me something within those limits.”

“Within those limits there’s precious little to say. What possible motive could Uriel have? What happened to Bella’s keys? You’ve still not found them?”

She hesitated, a fleeting look of reserve on her face. “No. I’ve looked again. Everywhere.”

In another case, one properly resourced, with strong backing from above, Falcone knew he’d be doing all the searching himself. Under Randazzo’s curious restrictions this was, if not impossible, quite difficult. Besides, he trusted Raffaella Arcangelo. She knew this rambling mansion better than they did. If there was anything to be uncovered here, she would surely find it. All the same…