The Lizard's Bite

by David Hewson

  “What’s your name?” she asked in Italian.

  The girl’s eyes flickered, fearful. Emily repeated the question in English.

  “Flora,” she replied, still nervous.

  “It doesn’t matter that you don’t speak Italian.”

  “Supposed to.”

  She didn’t like talking. Massiter preferred his female servants to keep quiet.

  “Says who?”

  The girl glanced backwards, to where the men would normally be. “Them.”

  Emily wondered what the Croatians were like when they were on their own with these women. It wasn’t hard to guess.

  “I could teach you some words. If you like.”

  “Not right.”

  The girl knew her place. And this was, Emily realised, the wrong tack, not that she relished the only alternative.

  “Mr. Massiter’s not happy with the state of his office,” she said severely.

  The girl looked shocked. “I cleaned it! Last night!”

  “I don’t care. He’s not happy. If he fires you here . . .”

  Flora put down the plates. She was trembling so much she was close to dropping them.

  “You won’t get home, will you?” Emily continued. “You’d just be destitute there. No money. No friends. What happens to girls like that, do you think, Flora? Can you imagine?”

  “I . . . keep trying.”

  She was close to tears. Emily hated this.

  “Come with me,” she ordered. “Maybe we can get you a second chance.”

  They went downstairs, three short flights, until they came to the secure metal door of Massiter’s lair.

  “Well?” Emily asked, crossly.

  Flora fumbled with the chain of keys on her belt, found the right one, and opened the lock. Emily marched in, straight to the desk by the small porthole window, where a big laptop computer sat. Then she swept a finger across the table, which was spotless, waved her hand in Flora’s face and yelled, “See this?”

  “I see noth—”

  “Not good enough. None of this is good enough. You’re not good enough. I’m going to be in here for fifteen minutes. I’m going to make this place dirty in ways you couldn’t even begin to guess. Then when I go, you come back in. You clean up. You do it properly. If I like what I see, I say nothing to Mr. Massiter. Nothing to the Croatians. It’s forgotten. If not . . .”

  The girl was sobbing. Emily felt awful and knew she couldn’t let go now. You did what you had to.

  “Out!” she barked, and slammed the metal door behind the girl as she fled.

  The computer was an expensive one with a wide screen, shut down, tethered to the desk with a security cable. She couldn’t imagine Massiter letting anyone near it.

  She took out the little plug-in memory pod she’d kept with her from her days in the FBI, pushed it into the slot, then turned on the machine, praying for a break. Smart people encrypted their entire PCs. Smart people were in the minority, however. The FBI pod was something any hacker could run up himself for a few dollars of flash memory and a couple of downloads from the Net. On a machine that hadn’t been specifically set up to prevent its operation, the thing convinced the computer to boot from its operating system, not the normal one. Then it scanned every last directory on the hard drive and presented them naked to the intruder.

  This was the kind of geek stuff they’d trained her in. There was nothing elegant involved. Just command lines and obscure instructions, techspeak she’d committed to memory.

  Massiter’s computer was just as she’d expected: secure as long as it remained in control, defenceless the moment she managed to boot it from her little device. Emily watched the familiar routine happen just as it should, watched her little pod take control. Then she scanned the directories, found the one Massiter had created for his personal account, copied the contents of the documents folder, before scouring the drive for his e-mail files and copying them. Finally she looked up the cache on his Internet browser, caught all the temporary files, and captured them too. In under two minutes she had, she thought, recovered every possible piece of information relating to Hugo Massiter’s documents, messages and the places he’d visited online. In the U.S. she’d have committed several federal offences already, not that the FBI would have minded too much, under the circumstances. In Italy . . . She didn’t even want to think about the legal implications. There wasn’t time. Nic needed help.

  Reminding herself how that fact kept haunting her, she took the pod out of the notebook, pocketed it, shut the machine down, and spread a few stray documents around the place.

  It was the perfect hack. Undetectable and comprehensive, a textbook piece of work.

  Then she went back upstairs, found Flora and said, “Do it.”

  She followed the trembling girl as she rushed into the office, watched her work feverishly to clear up the junk Emily had scattered around the space, tidy what she could in a room that was as clean as anyone could reasonably expect.

  “Enough,” Emily declared when the girl was finished, wishing she could stop hating herself for this charade. “Now lock this place up. Don’t ever let me find it in this state again. Then we never say a word about this. Not to anyone. Understood?”

  Flora nodded, scared witless, eyes glassy and damp.

  “It’s OK?”

  “Yes. It’s OK. Everything’s OK. I’ll tell Mr. Massiter you’ve been extra good this morning. Don’t worry about anything. Just . . .”

  You couldn’t let the act slip. They hammered that into your head at every last opportunity.

  “Just keep this a secret between the two of us. Unless you want to be out on the street.”

  When they went back upstairs the Croatians were still nowhere to be seen. Tidying up, Massiter had said. Emily could only guess at what he meant.

  Evidence.

  YOU COLLECTED all you could. You heaped it up in one big, big pile. And you hoped to God some small piece would give you what you wanted.

  She called Teresa, arranged to meet for a coffee in the place they knew in the Ramo Pescaria, a little alley that led from this glossily artificial tourist world into a semblance of real Italy in the backstreets of Castello. Then she walked into Massiter’s private cabin: a long room, with a dining table and chairs, a TV set, an expensive hi-fi system and a drinks cabinet. The bedroom ran next to it, occupying a good tenmetre length of the starboard side of the vessel. She walked in. Flora had been in here already. Fresh orchids stood in vases on each side of the king-size bed, which was now made up with clean white sheets, perfectly pressed, folded tightly to the divan.

  Emily closed the door behind her, locked it, then tore off the sheets as quickly as she could, throwing them to the floor, fighting to get down to the mattress.

  They were there, beneath the final slipcover, as she’d expected. It was standard training to look for them in any investigation of a personal nature. Dark, dried stains, rings and rings of them, halfway up the mattress, always a little to one side because something in the way human beings mated meant they always happened this way.

  She took a small penknife out of her pocket, knelt on the mattress, and, with great care, worked the blade around each dried puddle of human secretion. It wasn’t just semen. They taught them that at Langley. There was, in most cases, vaginal fluid too, and with the magic of DNA that could be all the lucky breaks you needed rolled into one, a fixed, unshakable line that led back to the women who’d been here. Every rape case she’d worked on had examined this possibility. There was good reason to think it could help them now too.

  There were sixteen in all, each a small circle of fabric which she stashed in a supermarket carrier bag. She left the fainter ones. It seemed inconceivable they’d have sufficient material left in their indistinct stain to make them usable in time. Then she took one last look at the mattress and heaved it over, so the “wrong” side, which was clean and free of stains, was uppermost, put the slipcover back on, and lazily made the bed. That was another order sh
e could bark at Flora on the way out. By the time Massiter discovered the damage—if he ever did—it would be unimportant anyway.

  Ten minutes later, over a strong double macchiato, she passed the bag to Teresa Lupo, who looked at her, worried, short for words. Emily couldn’t remember a time when the two of them had been like this, uneasy in one another’s company, unable to make even a scrap of small talk.

  She handed over the memory pod.

  “Tell the Carabinieri I didn’t have a chance to look at them but I don’t think Massiter’s smart enough to have encrypted anything. He doesn’t seem that sophisticated when it comes to computers. Also I suspect he feels he’s inviolate when he’s in that little room of his. I’ll take another look around later.”

  She checked herself. Overconfidence was a habitual mistake in the business she was trying to relearn. In truth, Hugo Massiter seemed to regard himself as inviolate most of the time.

  “Will do.” Teresa nodded. “Are you OK?”

  “Fine. And you? Any news from Nic?”

  “They’re getting somewhere, I think. He sounded positive. They’re leaving the Carabinieri to it for a while. Chasing something else.”

  “That’s good.” She glanced at the carrier bag. “Some of that’s old. Do you think we might have Bella there?”

  “We’ve got good lab facilities. Silvio found them. Costing a fortune but this is the private sector. I can get results faster than I could back home. It’s amazing what money can do.”

  “It surely is.”

  The thought had been nagging her all along. “And you’ve DNA for Bella?”

  Teresa nodded vigorously. “From the house. It’s unmistakable.”

  “And anything else? If there were other women?”

  She shrugged. “It would be handy to have a database of every last woman of screwable age in Venice, of course. That would speed things up no end. But for now I guess we’ll just have to try to factor them out. It would only tell us about his habits, of course. Bella’s the only other sample we’ve got.”

  Emily Deacon thought about this. Actions had consequences. None of them knew what they would be at that moment. She’d been taught to think ahead, to put markers in place that could be recovered later, used to prove who you were, what you’d done.

  She took a clean tissue out of her pocket, put it to her mouth and carefully deposited a ball of saliva there. Then she held the tissue out in front of her.

  “Give me an evidence bag. Then you can factor out that.”

  TOURISTS RARELY STUMBLED ON SAN FRANCISCO DELLA Vigna. The church lay in a small campo close by the Celestia vaporetto stop, just a couple of minutes away from the hospital. But even Gianfranco Randazzo, who had never set foot in the place, and regarded this backwater of Castello as a quartiere well beneath his standing, was surprised by what lay behind Palladio’s severe white frontage. This was a Franciscan monastery still, more than five hundred years after its foundation. Beyond the gloomy interior, with its Lombardo sculpture cycle and canvases by Veronese and Bellini, lay a connected pair of quiet cloisters formed by two storeys of cells and offices. It was a community that seemed to come from another world, one untouched by the pressures of modern life. Doves flitted through the bars of shade made by the angular lines of columns. Flowers grew around the statue of Saint Francis that stood in the sun at the centre of the first cloister, opposite the cell they’d allocated him. Here, during the brief moments he was alone in the tiny bare room or seated in the shade of the colonnades, was a kind of peace, some guarantee of anonymity. The Questura had left him with no choice in the matter anyway. Someone had been pulling strings to keep him out of the way. He would remain in San Francisco della Vigna until the internal investigation, which he’d been promised would deliver nothing more than an admonition, was complete.

  The worst part was the company. Two Questura jokers, Lavazzi and Malipiero, men he’d learned to despise over the years for their laziness and casual insolence, were deputed to be close by most of the time during the day, and were replaced by a changing cycle of equally dull drones each evening. Now, with Randazzo unable to pull rank, their efforts at insubordination took new directions. Randazzo had grown tired of their vicious personal cracks after just a couple of hours. The prospect of a long stay in the monastery with these two was inconceivable. He would, before long, go over their heads and demand some new companions. But not just yet, because Gianfranco Randazzo had, in his days inside the monastery, failed to answer satisfactorily a question that had been haunting him since he’d been forced into this temporary exile. Were this duo here to keep him safe from the outside world? Or did the miserable pair really see themselves as jailers, ordered to keep him close in case Randazzo felt like fleeing?

  The last was ridiculous. Randazzo was aware of how many important men, Massiter above all, he had served that night in the palazzo. It was inconceivable such men wouldn’t repay the favour. Venice ran on rules, private, unwritten rules, but rigid ones nevertheless. Without rules, the place would descend into chaos. And one rule was inviolate. Debts were repaid in the end, always.

  Malipiero had just spent an hour or more complaining about the fact that the Franciscans didn’t have a single TV set in the place.

  Randazzo looked at him and asked, “Why don’t you try reading?”

  “Huh!”

  He looked as if the very idea itself were poisonous. Randazzo had managed to get through a couple of books in his time in the cell. Dry volumes on some arcane aspects of Italian law that he’d made a note to read once they told him what was happening. The books made him feel better, and contained some awkward truths he could throw back at a few city men should they need reminding of what he was owed. This entire episode was a necessary diversion in his career. He appreciated that. It didn’t mean he couldn’t profit from the experience.

  “Books can help you get on,” he told Malipiero.

  “Helped you a lot,” Lavazzi sneered.

  The two men—Lavazzi and Malipiero—looked remarkably alike, almost like brothers. Both were around thirty-five, a little on the short side, running to fat, their corpulent frames now squeezed inside cheap dark blue suits. They were the kind of men who ruined a decent commissario’s statistics, until he turned on them, kicked them back out on the streets with orders to get some work done. Then the petty crooks didn’t stop coming through the door, guilty and innocent, until Lavazzi and Malipiero got bored again and returned to drifting from bar to bar, bumming beers and panini.

  “Why don’t you two just go for a walk?” Randazzo suggested. “It’s ridiculous being here all the time.”

  “Those Bracci brothers are very pissed off,” Lavazzi replied. “You blew away their old man, in front of all those people. Can you blame them?”

  Randazzo felt his temper begin to flare. “I put down an animal who’d taken a woman hostage and was waving a weapon about. It was prudent. If I’d done nothing, who knows what would have happened?”

  Malipiero waved a sweaty palm at him. “Don’t want to hear. Don’t want to know. This is not for us to judge. We’ve just been told to stick with you and that’s what we do. I can’t believe a man of your rank would suggest we disobey orders.”

  “Incredible,” Lavazzi replied, shaking his head. “Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to. No discipline. That’s the problem.”

  “This is boring . . .” Randazzo began.

  “You’re telling me!” Lavazzi yelled.

  The face of a monk, bald, tanned, friendly, with the cowl around his neck, appeared at the open window. The man put a single finger to his lips and hissed, “Ssshhhh . . .”

  Lavazzi waited for him to disappear, then swore quietly, stared at Randazzo and said, “We’re all fucking bored. OK? Saying it just makes things worse. Besides . . .”

  He looked at his watch. It was getting close to midday. Lunchtime. These two never missed the opportunity to stuff their faces, usually for free, Randazzo guessed. Guard duty hadn’t stopped them disappe
aring for an hour around this time every day, coming back with a rosy glow and some pasta sauce on their chops. All Gianfranco Randazzo had to eat was the plain, dull fare of the monks.

  “We could go out for lunch,” the commissario suggested.

  “You paying?” Malipiero asked immediately.

  “If you like,” Randazzo replied. It would be worth it. Also, if he was picking up the bill, he could order them to sit at another table and get some decent privacy for himself.

  The two men glanced at each other. Randazzo’s spirits rose. A good meal, a couple of glasses of wine . . . There was a little restaurant he knew in the Campo Arsenale, home cooking in the shadow of the great golden gateway, close to the four lions every Venetian knew were looted from Athens in one of the republic’s raiding adventures way back when. It was hard to walk anywhere in Venice without seeing something that had been purloined over the centuries. The city took what it wanted, when it wanted. Randazzo had learned that lesson as a boy.

  He could see the greed glinting in the guards’ faces. A part of him wished he could persuade the pair to turn their backs on a visit from Chieko too, though he wondered what the rules of the monastery would be about allowing women into this bright little oasis nestling near the gasworks in Castello. That could be . . . entrancing if it worked.

  Then he remembered Massiter crowing about her in that stupid apartment of his inside the glass palace and the way he’d ignored her ever since.

  “Well?” he growled. “I don’t have all day.”

  “Really?” Lavazzi laughed. “Wait there. I’ll go make a call and check. Maybe . . .”—he glanced at his partner, an expression there Randazzo didn’t understand—“ . . . it’s not such a bad idea after all.”

  Malipiero went quiet when his partner was gone. He was, Randazzo judged, the lesser of the pair.

  “Who do you two keep calling all the time?” Randazzo demanded, cross for no real reason, wishing his temper would stay in place for once. “Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Those are Questura phones. I get to see the bills when they come in. If you’re running up private business on my account, you’ll get to know about it.”