The Lizard's Bite

by David Hewson

  “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.

  GIANNI 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 recognise
d 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.

  NIC . . .”

  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.”

  Bracci’s left arm was tight round her throat. Raffaella Arcangelo’s hands hung loose by her sides.

  “Too damn late, you bastard!” Bracci’s voice was a tortured howl. This man was not going to understand logic. Costa tried to recall all the tricks a cop could use in these situations. And the golden rule: Keep it calm.

  “Talk to me, Aldo,” he said. “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want you off my back. I want . . .”

  The man was close to tears, desperate, and Costa understood why. What had emerged on Murano that afternoon was irreversible.

  “I want my fucking life back,” Bracci babbled, as miserable as hell.

  Costa nodded, theatrically, making sure the wretched man understood. “I’m sorry about what happened. We just went round to talk to you because we had to. It’s the job. We talk to everyone.”

  Bracci’s wild, drunken eyes rolled. “You fuck up everyone? With these stories? You go round dredging up old dirt and scattering it round the streets like dog shit?”

  “No. That shouldn’t have happened. I apologise.”

  “Some good that does me! So where am I supposed to go now, smart-ass? Home?”

  In that narrow, malodorous street, with an angry face peering out from every window. Aldo Bracci’s life was finished. Costa understood that as well as Bracci did. This was what made Bracci so dangerous.

  “Tell me what you want,” he urged.

  Spittle flew from Bracci’s mouth as he laughed. The laugh turned into a long choking cough. His shoulders heaved. He looked like a man who didn’t care about anything, least of all himself.

  Quietly, patiently, Costa persisted. “You came here for a reason. If I knew what that was . . .”

  The glassy, drunk eyes glared at him. “If you knew what that was . . .”

  The gun rose again. Bracci was looking around, scanning the crowd, looking for someone, not finding the face he sought.

  Bracci jerked back his arm, fired again, straight into the chandelier above him, despatching a shower of tiny glass shards into the room. The crowd was screaming again, falling back, crushing against the temporary tables, sending the plates of delicate canapés and the glasses of sparkling wine crashing on the stone floor.

  Costa didn’t move. He looked at Bracci, resolute, determined to see this through. Two shots. Six chambers. If they were full when the man entered the room, there were just four left now. Not that any of them needed to be used.

  “Put the gun down, Aldo,” Costa repeated. “Let Raffaella go. Then we’ll walk outside, talk this through. I’ll take you anywhere you want. On the mainland. You name the place.”

  The dead eyes blinked. “Anywhere?”

  “Anywhere you . . .”

  Costa halted. A black figure was scuttling through the crowd, quickly, something in its hand.

  “No!” Costa bellowed.

  Gianfranco Randazzo was striding into the space Bracci had made, black pistol in hand, firing already, straight at them, like a madman, almost random in his fury.

  Costa leapt forward, diving, tearing at Raffaella’s gown, dragging her to the floor, out of Bracci’s grip. The unsteady figure above them didn’t know where to turn. To his disappearing hostage, or to face the hot random rain spitting at him from Randazzo’s weapon.

  A red tear opened up in Bracci’s shoulder. A sudden spurt of blood fell warm on Costa’s face. Bracci shrieked. The gun jerked in his hand, twice, firing nowhere in particular.

  The screams came from all around them, hoarse, terrified cries uttered by a cast of fake actors snatched abruptly into a cold and dangerous reality. Commissario Randazzo, in his fine black suit, was now casually walking up to the stumbling shattered figure of Bracci, taking aim at the man’s head, like a backstreet executioner, letting loose one final shot into the man’s scalp.

  Bracci’s torso jerked back under the force of the bullet. The gun fell out of his dead hand, clattering to the marble floor, spent, its damage done.

  Costa recoiled at the sharp, bitter smell of gunfire, then watched in disgust as Randazzo performed one final act, kicking the twitching corpse in the back, sending it rolling onto its side. Bracci’s cheap cotton work jacket, the same he’d worn in his tawdry little furnace, flapped open to reveal the wounded man’s bloodied chest.

  Calm, unmoved by the continuing pandemonium around him, Randazzo stared down at his victim, seeing something. He crouched by the body, flicked the jacket back onto the torso.

  The commissario reached into the side pocket and coolly removed a set of keys, joined together by a single ring, marked by a yellow sash.

  “Was this what you were looking for?” Randazzo called. “Well, Falcone? Falcone?”

  Costa was helping the weeping Raffaella Arcangelo to her feet. His arms shook. His brain was fighting to make sense of what he’d seen.

  “Are these her keys?” Randazzo bellowed, scrabbling through the dead man’s pockets as the commotion around them grew.

  Furious, Costa took two steps towards him, glared at the emotionless man in the black suit, now stained with Aldo Bracci’s blood, then wrested the gun from his hand.

  “Consider yourself under arrest. Sir. I’ll see you in jail for this.”

  Randazzo laughed in his face. “What? Are you serious? You people are way out of your depth here. You have been all along.”

  A single long howl, louder than the rest and familiar in a way that made Costa’s blood run cold, silenced the commissario. Randazzo turned his attention to the back of the room, and was suddenly silent, the colour draining from his cheeks, an expression of unexpected dread frozen on his face.

  Nic Costa had his back to the racket. All the same he could recognise that voice, that deep, furious bellow of despair.

  It was Teresa Lupo and somewhere inside the torrent of wordless anger streaming from her throat he heard his name.

  Two stray bullets had screamed into a room
full of people, Aldo Bracci’s final gifts to a world he felt had abandoned him.

  Nic Costa knew what that meant. Knew too, somehow, what he’d see when he summoned enough courage to turn around and look for himself.

  It could have been a painting. Something by Caravaggio—half deep shadow, half washed in the buttery rays of the dying sun.

  Peroni was a taut foetal ball on the ground, rocking, silent. Teresa knelt beside him, fighting to do something, anything, with the rags in her hands, struggling to staunch the sea of red that grew like a flood tide from the figure on the hard, cold floor.

  Leo Falcone lay motionless, his head in Emily Deacon’s lap, his tan face staring back at them, eyes unfocussed, mouth gaping open, blood streaming gently from his lips, falling onto her white, white wings.

  IT WAS 1961, A COLD SUMMER IN THE VALLE D’AOSTA. Bone-chilling mountain mists hung around the family chalet outside Pré-Saint-Didier in the Little St. Bernard Pass. A week had passed without sight of the rising bulk of Mont Blanc, separating this last wild piece of northern Italy from France and Switzerland, an aloof rocky giant, crowned with snow. The child, just turned seven, had felt lost without some view of the mountain. It was a consolation, during these long, lonely summer interludes, a kind of company for him. And that was the year—the very year, some odd external voice reminded him—when he needed company more than ever. The boy Leo was aware of himself, seated at the long, old wooden table, so roughly made it looked as if it had been shaped with an axe. Alone in the familiar living room. Yet not alone.

  You never did look, the voice said. An old voice, familiar too.

  I never wanted to.

  It was, he somehow realised, himself speaking. Years older. Wiser too, perhaps. And sad. The child didn’t believe in ghosts. His father, a practical, unemotional accountant who handled money for many of the larger northern corporations, would have no room for such nonsense. He’d thrown away some of the books Leo brought home from boarding school. They were too fanciful, he said. Apt to give a child the wrong ideas. Arturo Falcone was, as he never failed to remind his son Leo, a self-made man. He’d risen out of the misery and chaos of World War II, putting himself through college working at night as a barman and waiter. Everything in little Leo Falcone’s life came from this odd, distant man, a father on paper only, a distant figure, seen only in the holidays, when he’d retire to a chair with a newspaper and a glass, to bury himself deep in his own thoughts. Leo was an only child, which made the gratitude he felt he owed his father for any attention whatsoever both more deserved, and more difficult to deliver.