The Lizard's Bite

by David Hewson

  “That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation,” Teresa reminded herself. “You just have to find it, girl.”

  Here. Stuck in a tiny police apartment in Venice, with nothing but a laptop computer for company. She thought about what she’d be doing if this had dropped on her desk back in Rome. Scouring the Net for clues? Surely. But more than that, she’d be sharing the problem. And she knew with whom.

  Teresa Lupo pulled out her mobile phone, reprimanded herself for a few brief milliseconds with the admonition that her absence was a holiday for her staff also, then dialled Silvio Di Capua’s private number.

  “Pronto,” yawned a bored voice on the other end, one which immediately jerked into alert suspicion once Silvio realised who was on the line.

  “No!” he declared straight off. “I won’t do it. I’m ending this call now. You’re supposed to be on holiday, for God’s sake. Go fake a tan or something. Leave me alone.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do a damn thing, Silvio! I was just calling in to see how you are.”

  “So I can’t do the job, huh? Give me a break. Do you think I don’t recognise that wheedling tone in your voice? I won’t play. You can’t make me.”

  “Of course you can do the job! I wouldn’t have gone away and left you in charge if I thought otherwise.”

  “Then what? I’m not getting involved. It’s bad enough you dumping me in the crap when you’re here working. I’m not having it when you’re supposed to be on vacation. Hear me, Teresa. The answer is no. No, no, no, no, no . . .”

  There was an image of a charred corpse on the screen: Buffalo, New York, 1973. No obvious explanation. The man smoked. The man drank. So did millions of other people, all of whom managed to work their way to the grave without turning into life-size spent matchsticks.

  She smiled. Silvio was giving in already.

  “You’re not busy then?”

  “Says who? I’m sorting out paperwork you should have done months ago. I’m dealing with a couple of interdepartmental liaison meetings—”

  “My . . .” she cooed. “That sounds fun. Are there whiteboards and stuff? Have they given you one of those laser pens? Do you get to use big words and acronyms?”

  “You will never understand management—”

  “I am management,” she interrupted. “So let me—what’s the management word for it?—let me cascade something down to you, dear heart. When you want to say no, you say you’re too busy. Not, screw you, I won’t do it. Understood?”

  There was a brief silence on the line. The roar of defeat.

  “Just because I don’t have much in the way of corpses doesn’t mean I’m not occupied.”

  “No corpses means no fun, Silvio. Admit it. I know when my little man is bored. You sounded bored when you picked up the phone. I’ve got a corpse. I’ve got a cure for that boredom. If you want to hear it.”

  “No!” he insisted.

  “Fine. In that case I’ll hang up . . . .”

  “Do that! Go have a holiday!”

  “Your word is my command. I am about to put down the phone. Or, more accurately, my finger is wandering towards the off button. Do you really want me to press it?”

  “Yes!”

  “Fine. It’s done. I shall say just two words before doing so.”

  A pause was required. Silvio always rose to histrionics.

  “Spontaneous. And combustion.”

  Teresa cut him dead, placed her mobile on the desk and began to count to ten. It rang on three. She let it chirrup five times before answering sweetly, “Hello?”

  “I detest you with every fibre in my body. You are evil. This is so unfair. You can’t treat people like this!”

  “Spontaneous combustion, Silvio. I have a corpse here—well, part of a corpse—and a Venetian pathologist, albeit one who’s a couple of hundred years old himself, who’s determined to write that finding on the death certificate. So what do you think?”

  “I think it’s a little early in the day to start drinking. Go sober up, woman. See the sights. Catch a boat somewhere.”

  “No kidding. It’s all there. I have photos. I have reports. I have all manner of material I could send you if you’d like. Provided it doesn’t interrupt your whiteboarding, that is. I mean, I expect my people to have priorities.”

  He hesitated before replying, wary. “Two points,” he responded. “I will believe in spontaneous combustion the day I come to accept the existence of werewolves. Second, you’re in Venice. Where you are just another dumb tourist, Teresa. Not someone with the authority to go investigating weird deaths, whatever the crazy locals believe. Most people tread in crap accidentally. You seem to like crossing the street to do it. This is a habit I deplore.”

  “I was asked to take a look! OK?”

  “Who by?” he demanded.

  “Falcone.”

  “Oh shit. You’re not telling me you’re riding the range with the Three Musketeers again?”

  “I ride the range with one of them a lot, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Peroni’s presence still bugged Silvio somewhat. Her assistant hadn’t lost the hots for her completely.

  “I was using a metaphor. Let me put it plainly. Are you out of your mind?”

  Maybe, she thought. If she really was considering the weird science stuff the Tosis were pushing her way.

  “So what’s your objection to spontaneous combustion?” she asked.

  “The same objection I have to reincarnation. Or alchemy. It’s nonsense.”

  A tiny light went on in her brain. There were times when she wanted to hug Silvio. His small accidental insights could be just what she needed to trigger her own imagination.

  “Without alchemy there’d be no chemistry,” she remarked. “You’re a chemist yourself, along with all those other talents. You ought to know that.”

  Silvio swore quietly down the phone. She was spot on. Alchemy may have begun with quacks, but it soon became science under another name. And weren’t glassmakers like the Arcangeli alchemists of a kind too, sharing the same common bonds of secrets and substances, changing the shape of the natural world, bending it to their will?

  “What I’m saying,” she persisted, “is that I’m beginning to believe this man really did die in a way that can be interpreted as spontaneous combustion. The question is: What does that actually mean? How could it happen?”

  “Get their forensic people on it!” he objected. “That’s why they’re there.”

  She recalled how Falcone had slyly got her intrigued. It was a superb trick.

  “But they’re not as good as you, Silvio. You’ve worked forensic and pathology. They’re slow. They’re unimaginative. This is Venice. They’re wet behind the ears when it comes to real crime. It’s just the tourist police out here,” she continued, steeling herself to what she understood to be a big lie. “Trust me.”

  “I know what’s coming. You’re gunning for resources. We get audited, remember? We have to assign work to cases. How am I supposed to hide all that from the managers?”

  Teresa prodded at the keyboard, loading up the Tosis’ documents and photos, adding in a few of her own.

  “I’m sending you something to read,” she said, despatching the lot off to Silvio’s private address. “Go through it. Then get back to me with a way we can go forward with this. You’ve got till tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow! For fu—”

  He was still cursing, with a florid ingenuity, when she hung up.

  ALCHEMY. CHEMISTRY. ANALYSIS. There was a big black hole in the Tosis’ findings, one that hadn’t been looked into closely enough because everything had to be signed off in a rush, and by another branch of the Tosi family, who probably didn’t bother to get too involved either. But without some scrupulous work there, Uriel Arcangelo’s death would remain a mystery, would nag her with its unproven possibilities and hidden corners. People didn’t just catch fire from the inside out without a reason. Not in her world. It was important to make this clear.
r />   It was important to remember the medical details too. Bella’s pregnancy was doubtless the news that would start punching Falcone’s buttons. But it was Uriel who interested Teresa. Uriel with his lousy sense of smell. If someone had soaked his apron in lighter fluid, would he have noticed?

  There was a prerequisite and it was a lot to ask. If any other pathologist had made the same request of her, she’d have sent them away with a sound ear-thrashing. All the same . . . Alberto Tosi was a gentleman.

  It took ten minutes to track him down. The man, to her amazement, was taking coffee and cake in a café, not poring over what little evidence he had, trying to wring some answers out of it.

  “Doctor!” Tosi said cheerfully.

  “Please call me Teresa,” she replied. “If I may call you Alberto.”

  “Of course!”

  It was best to be direct, to act as if this were a normal request, one that could scarcely be refused.

  “I need Mestre to send a sample from Uriel’s apron and clothing. And a piece of timber from the floor where he was found. The burned part. Nothing large. I need these sent overnight by courier to my lab in Rome.”

  She recalled how technology impressed him. “They have a new machine there,” she lied. “Sort of a spectroscope on steroids. We borrowed the thing from the FBI to see if it’s worth buying. I doubt we’ll throw up anything you haven’t uncovered yourself, of course, but it would be extremely useful if we could test some material from the fire.”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “This is most unusual. Surely . . .”

  “We only have the machine until Wednesday, Alberto. You know what Americans are like. I’m probably breaking the law just telling you this. Naturally, I’m not trying to interfere with your work. It’s just the best opportunity I have to evaluate this particular toy.”

  The decision hung in the balance.

  “If I buy the thing, you’re welcome to come and play with it in the future,” she promised.

  Teresa heard the clink of a coffee cup, tried to imagine the glint of excitement in the old pathologist’s eyes.

  “This machine. What does it do?” Alberto Tosi asked, breathless.

  “It’s a kind of . . .”

  Shit, she thought. Why did he have to ask a question like that, just when she least expected it?

  “ . . . magic,” she stuttered. “You wait and see.”

  IT WAS INFURIATING. EVERY QUESTION HE AND PERONI threw at the Arcangeli brothers got bounced back with a curt, unassailable reply. The brothers weren’t even surly enough to be called evasive. Maybe they really did have nothing new to tell. Costa finally got sick of Michele’s cigarette smoke, excused himself and decided to take another run around the foundry. The brothers and their workmen had been busy. He could see now that they would, indeed, be back in production before long. New pipe work gleamed around the patched-up furnace.

  He walked idly around the interior, thinking, doing what Falcone would have advised: trying to imagine himself into the scene. Uriel Arcangelo, alone with the fire and the molten crucible of glass that lay alongside his wife’s blazing body, turning to dust in the flames.

  Practical matters.

  They counted, Falcone said.

  Costa tried to work out what else they could have missed the previous day. It was impossible to tell. The floor was swept clean. Any shred of unseen evidence that had lurked there before was now surely gone. The picture the island—perhaps the entire city—wanted to present to them, of a guilty Uriel trapped to die by the side of his victim, still stood in place.

  Costa wandered over to the carpenters and stared at the new doors. They didn’t look good enough to last more than a couple of cold lagoon winters. The Arcangeli’s workmen were on a different scale from those Massiter was employing on the palace along the quay. These were odd-job men, trying to come up with a quick fix. From what he’d seen of the previous doors, these simply followed the same design: a pair of thick wooden slabs, almost four metres high, joined in the middle by a heavy mortise lock, and attached to the original ancient hinges, which were so solid they had remained when the firemen first entered, swinging their axes.

  The new doors were ajar now. Behind, on the quay, Costa could hear Michele and Gabriele Arcangelo talking to each other about when to restart the furnace, about glass, chemicals and recipes, times and temperatures, like two cooks trying to agree on some arcane recipe.

  Peroni wandered over, grumbling, then smiled at the locals. The two carpenters looked like father and son, both squat men, the elder with a beard. Murano seemed to run on families.

  “Nice day,” Peroni said with a grin. “You boys finished here?”

  “Finished what we’ve been told to do,” the father said.

  “So they’re back in business?” Costa asked.

  “They were in business before?” the son replied, extracting a brief chuckle from his old man.

  The two men watched, smoking, idle, as Costa walked up and pushed both doors, gently. Each went back on its hinges smoothly, and stayed open.

  “You’d think there’d be springs,” Peroni commented. “To make sure they’d stay closed. If that was my place, I’d have springs. Too many lazy bastards in this world leaving doors wide open. And all those secrets inside.”

  “You’d think,” the father agreed curtly. “We replace like for like, just as the insurance people say.”

  “Is it really a secret?” Peroni wondered. “Making glass, I mean?”

  “We don’t make glass.”

  Costa tried each door lightly. The left one fell into place, as it should. The right stopped marginally short. A tiny amount, so little that most people wouldn’t have noticed. Nevertheless, they hadn’t been like this when Piero Scacchi arrived. Someone had to have closed the right hand door deliberately. It couldn’t have fallen shut by itself. Except . . .

  The revelation sparked in his head with a blinding clarity. Uriel couldn’t have unlocked the door. His key didn’t work. It must have either been open, slightly ajar as it was now, or someone had let him in.

  He pulled the door shut. The lock was automatic. Which meant that, had Uriel let himself in through the open door then closed it behind him, he was effectively trapped in the room. It seemed a neat ruse. Uriel would be bound to visit the furnace to work. Once he was inside, there was no easy way out. Costa made a mental note to pass this on to Falcone. It could be useful information, and he wanted to make a point: that the door and the lock puzzled him too.

  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.