by David Hewson
He’d watched the way Massiter strutted through his audience. A puffed-up peacock of a man, quite unlike most of the upper-class English Tosi had known over the years. At one point he’d wished for the courage to walk up to this newly crowned faux-aristocrat, to point out that sometimes the Venetians tore down the princes they had so warmly elected only a little while before. A screeching mob had cut the throat of Orso Ipato, the first Doge. Marino Faliero had been summarily beheaded by his fellow nobles, and at the age of seventy. Not that creatures like Massiter knew or cared about history. It was a subject for old men these days, though that was not the reason Tosi failed to make the point to his unwanted host. Respect and fear went hand in hand in circles such as these, a fact the old pathologist never let slip from his sharp and capacious memory.
Sometimes he wondered what Venice would be like fifty years hence. He was grateful he wouldn’t be around to witness the transformation. The streets would echo to the gabbled tones of English and Russian and Chinese, anything but the gritty vowels of the Veneto that Tosi still liked to speak at home on Sant’ Elena. The place would be an international zone entirely, run by foreigners for foreigners, with only dependent locals still around to hunt for crumbs.
Alberto Tosi believed he was a civilised man, one who had long understood that the world always changed. But sometimes, when he read the local newspaper and the latest plans to bring ever more hordes of tourists into an already over-choked city, he was unable to shake off the impression that progress was merely an illusion, a catchword designed to disguise the cruel trick being played upon the many by the few.
There was precious little space for self-respect in this new Venice, a quality Tosi regarded as essential, a badge of pride to be worn by everyone, from the man who made your coffee in the morning, carefully working the valves and pipes of his Gaggia machine, to an ageing city pathologist who was still more than a little disgruntled about being railroaded around by the authorities when it suited them. Without self-respect, one was simply a wage slave for the faceless figures who seemed to own everything, control everything, pulling the city’s strings from inside their banks and accountants’ offices. Tosi had no problems with the idea of a society divided by class, provided each level had its own reason to survive. This new world unjustly divided its occupants into winners and losers, the few and the many, making a pretence of egalitarianism when, in truth, it was more close and tight and viciously elitist than the ancient regime it sought to supplant with its new cabal of rogues.
Massiter, a master rogue, as all knew and none dared say, played this game like a maestro. The Arcangeli had always been discerning about those they allowed beyond the outstretched arm of their iron angel and its torch, which now burned more brightly than ever. The Englishman decreed that the gates to the island be open, for the first time Alberto Tosi could remember. This evening anyone in Venice was welcome to walk through to admire Massiter’s coronation.
Few, beyond Massiter’s large and growing circle of hangers-on and succubi, seemed to have bothered. Tosi knew what the locals on Murano were like. They hated newcomers. They’d loathed the Arcangeli for decades. Nothing, not money, not influence, would make them feel warm towards Hugo Massiter. This was an adventure beyond them, the arrival of the first speck of canker from across the water that would, one day, consume their impoverished little island and spit out in its place the same gaudy, transient hoopla found everywhere else in the city.
Tosi tasted his weak, badly made spritz and scowled. Then he saw a familiar figure approaching, one who generated both admiration and a little worry.
Anna followed the direction of his gaze. Teresa Lupo, the Roman pathologist, was striding towards them with a deliberate, determined gait.
“I’ll see you later,” the girl muttered. He watched her depart in a flash of bright red silk, gone to where the young were gathered, next to the drinks table manned by serious, white-shirted waiters, working beneath the fiery torch of the iron angel. This was only Alberto Tosi’s second time on the Isola degli Arcangeli. The first had been almost fifty years before, at some grand gathering to which his own father had somehow managed to wangle an invitation. Those were different days, with different people, two decades before the accident that closed the palazzo to the public for good. But even by then the island’s fortunes had changed. Angelo Arcangelo was dead, and he took his dream with him to a temporary grave on San Michele across the water.
He was ruminating on this fact when his attention was drawn by Teresa Lupo’s bright, cheery face.
“You’re a little late for the crime scene, Alberto,” she declared with a brisk, sardonic smile.
He laughed and, for a moment, a rebel part of him wondered whether a lively Roman pathologist on the cusp of middle age could possibly be interested in an ancient widower with little to offer but the same shared interests.
“Which one?” he asked. “This place has so many. Those poor people in the furnace. That Bracci character. Your own inspector. How is he, by the way?”
“Much better,” she replied. “But dreaming for now.”
“Dreaming is a talent to cultivate. Particularly tonight.” He finished his glass and took a second off one of the starchy waiters drifting by. Tosi scowled at the crowd. “I wonder how many dreams these little lives encompass. They’re all too busy counting their money or running through their wardrobes.”
“Perhaps they’re here for the thrill,” she said with a cryptic glee. There was a cunning glint in her eye, one he didn’t quite trust. “To be so near the smell of blood.”
“In Rome they may play those childish games, perhaps. This is just Venice, Teresa. A small and simple city, where we lead small and simple lives.”
She scanned the glittering crowd. “I don’t think they’d like that description.”
“I don’t think their opinion counts for much,” he answered, unable to suppress the bitterness in his voice. “There’s scarcely a real Venetian here.”
“What about him?”
She was pointing down to the quayside where an old, rather shabby boat, with an equally shabby man at the wheel, was docking near the warehouse. A small mountain of grey material occupied part of its meagre hold, alongside a pile of firewood, thin twigs, meagre kindling, the kind they used out in the little shacks of the lagoon. In the bow lay a small black dog, seemingly asleep.
The sight puzzled Tosi. Then he saw the Sant’ Erasmo marking on the stern.
“He’s just a matto making a delivery. Wood and ash, by the looks of things. They use them in the furnace. Not for much longer from what I hear . . .”
She wasn’t listening, which disappointed Tosi, a man not averse to gossip, of which there was plenty at the moment. Instead, Teresa Lupo was on the phone, anxious for some news, disappointed when she seemed not to receive it.
Her eyes had moved to the house. Some figures were walking towards the front door, watched by the shabby boatman. These were the type of men Tosi recognised. Plain-clothed police officers, from elsewhere, not Venice, since Albert Tosi prided himself on the fact that he knew by sight every last person on the city force.
They had two people with them, a man and a woman, dressed in poor rural clothes, like the shabby boatman. Two people who were handcuffed, hands to the front, a cruel and unnecessary action, Tosi thought, since neither showed any sign of resistance.
Teresa turned away and stared at the furnace. It looked like new. The stonework had been cleaned. The long show windows were shiny and spotless. Soon the trinket sellers would arrive, Tosi guessed. Everyone knew what Massiter was like. He wouldn’t allow glassmaking on such valuable real estate for long.
“Did you really sign Uriel’s death off as spontaneous combustion?” she asked, apparently out of the blue.
“No,” he answered with a coy, sly reticence.
“Why not?”
“You made me think better of it. Sometimes we have a tendency to overanalyse. A man burns to death in a furnace consumed by fire. There
are unexplained details, but in the end I remained unconvinced by Anna’s efforts. She’s a good girl. A little too enthusiastic at times. The young rely on their imagination too much. Age teaches one to rely on hard fact.”
She was regarding him closely, looking for some emotion, it seemed.
“It could have made things awkward too,” she suggested. “An unusual finding such as that would have attracted attention. Invited others to look, perhaps.”
“I agree,” he said, and raised his glass. “To the unexplained!”
She was, he was coming to believe, a very attractive woman. Not physically, but in her personality. A difficult woman, though. One he would not wish to be around for long.
Teresa Lupo had an important point to make too. He could see that from the sudden serious look in her face.
“I hope you don’t mind me talking shop,” she went on.
“Not at all. Let me do the same. What about that material I gave you? Have you a report back from your magic machine in Rome?”
“No,” she replied grumpily.
“Ah.” He hoped there was some expression of sympathy on his face.
“Those samples you gave me were contaminated when we got them,” she complained. “You should kick a few family backsides in that lab of yours in Mestre.”
He laughed, unsure of her point. “Contaminated with what?”
She paused, as if she were hunting for the name, then said, “Ketone.”
Alberto Tosi pulled a pained face. Some of the chemicals they had to work with these days . . .
“Horrible stuff. Toxic. Highly flammable too, though very good at its job.”
He sighed. Sometimes you had to tell the truth. There really was no point in beating about the bush.
“I must confess something, Teresa. The samples I gave you were just that. Samples. The lab in Mestre did nothing to them. Nothing. As I endeavoured to explain when we first met, this was a closed case. There seemed no reason. What you had was what came straight from the foundry over there.”
She stared at him, astonished, and, it seemed to Tosi, more than a little worried too. “You did nothing to clean away the foam?” she asked.
“Not a thing. Why should we?”
Teresa Lupo was gazing at him with an expression of frank amazement. Alberto Tosi felt lost, unable to offer any comment that would make a difference.
“Then Uriel was murdered,” she said softly, almost to herself. “And I know how,” she added, then excused herself and began to stride towards the house, pushing through the crowd, punching her phone as she went.
HUGO MASSITER STOOD IN FRONT OF THE OCCHIO, the bulging glass eye, surveying the expanse of the lagoon. The three remaining Arcangeli sat in silence at the old family table, surrounded on both sides by lawyers. His. Theirs. Not that the difference mattered. Massiter knew the legal profession better than any fading Murano dynasty. There were, in his view, two kinds of lawyers. Those seeking agreement. And those seeking delay. In his time he’d used both. But only the former had been brought into the negotiations over the island, for him and, with a quiet, subtle stealth, for the Arcangeli too. In truth, a satisfactory conclusion—by which he meant a conclusion satisfactory to him—had never been in doubt.
He cast a cynical glance at the crowd below. Suits and evening dresses, caparisoned cattle come for the free food and drink and the chance to touch the new emperor’s robe. It seemed an age now since the evening of the carnival gala and the death in the palazzo next door. People like these had short memories. As long as the Massiter name was on the way up, they’d be happy clinging to his coattails, hurrahing all the way. Nothing mattered but money and success. With those, a man could act as he liked. As his nature told him.
Then he caught a commotion in the crowd by the door, saw Emily Deacon fighting to push her way through, a fixed, anxious look on her attractive face, and recalled, briefly, the night before, trying to isolate what feelings he had from the practical issues uppermost in his mind. It had been a night of disappointment, if he were honest with himself. He enjoyed only two kinds of women: the averse and the enthusiastic. Either way you got a little fight, which was necessary to his pleasure. Emily fulfilled neither requirement. She was a woman of duty, and duty always bored him.
Nevertheless, he’d hear her out. There’d be some interest there.
Beaming, he turned away from the shining window and its glorious view, turned his smile on the room, even the miserable, mute Michele, with his dead eye and frozen cheek, and boomed, “Oh my! Such long faces! Why? You all have your snouts deep in the Massiter trough now. You’re rich. Millions, Michele. And . . .” He walked round, behind the man, briefly placed a patronising, magisterial hand on his shoulder, keeping it firmly there even as Michele flinched. “ . . . that little lockup in the city, a shop to sell your trinkets to the hoi polloi. What more could a Murano man ask?”
“Don’t push me,” Michele muttered.
Massiter strode to the head of the table—the master’s position—then sat in the high-backed chair there, surveying them, judging them. Miserable Michele. Lost Gabriele. And the woman, Raffaella, who seemed willing to go along with whatever humiliating solution Massiter could extract, provided the family survived, an intact bundle of visible misery.
“I’m only pushing you towards wealth,” Massiter said with half a yawn. “Which hereabouts equates with happiness, naturally. Just a small thank-you wouldn’t be out of place. And here’s one more piece of generosity . . .”
He nodded at the huge portrait over the fireplace. Angelo Arcangelo, the dead patriarch, glowering at them all, his old, incisive eyes full of some harsh and bitter judgment.
“You can take that with you when you go,” the Englishman added. “Bad art offends me. I don’t want those hideous features staring down at my guests.”
There was a silence, broken only by the cough of one of Massiter’s lawyers.
“Guests?” Raffaella asked finally.
“Guests.”
It was good to tell them now.
“Not that it’s any business of yours anymore. In a year I’ll have a hotel here, and a restaurant that will put the Cipriani to shame. In two years, a gallery to steal the glory from the Guggenheim. A modest, refined shopping mall for immodest, unrefined shoppers. Suites. Apartments. Facilities. That’s what the modern world’s about, Michele. A flash of transient joy for the masses before you move them on their way. Not . . .” He scowled, couldn’t help it. He hated to see lost opportunities, even those missed by men he could exploit. “ . . . trying to squeeze a grubby living out of glass just because that’s how it always was.”
Michele Arcangelo stared at his reflection in the old polished table, for the last time.
“Gloating is an unattractive trait, Signor Massiter,” Raffaella Arcangelo said with a quiet, firm certainty.
“I’m an unattractive man,” Massiter replied immediately. “More people might notice if they weren’t so blinded by their own avarice.”
There was a noise at the door.
“Visitors,” he said. “Open the door, Gabriele. There’s a good chap.”
The brother didn’t demur for a moment, didn’t notice Michele’s vile, muttered curse. He let in Emily Deacon, by her side the young policeman, the one she’d pretended she’d abandoned, an act that never fooled Massiter for a moment. Both looked uncertain of themselves. A little afraid, perhaps.
Massiter was on his feet in an instant, striding over to Emily, kissing her quickly on the cheek, pumping the man’s hand for a second.
“This won’t be unpleasant, will it?” he asked meekly. “Please don’t spoil my day.”
“Why should it be unpleasant?” she replied.
He shrugged, looking at the little cop. “I’m sorry this brief interlude between Emily and myself turned into a personal matter, Agente Costa. It was regrettable. And . . .” He smiled to ensure they understood. “Pointless too. Those items she took from my yacht this morning . . .”
; Massiter recalled the details the men had beaten out of the servant before throwing her out onto the street. It seemed a decidedly amateurish effort on Emily’s part. She had disappointed him there too.
“They’re of no use to you,” he went on. “Even in Italy there are such things as rules of evidence. You can’t try to obtain incriminating detail on a man by asking a pretty young woman to hunt for it in his bed.”
He watched the pain flicker on Costa’s face, relishing the sight. “Ah. I’m sorry. You didn’t know. Or rather, you knew, but preferred not to acknowledge the fact. Self-delusion is a habit to avoid. Particularly in a police officer.”
He glanced at his watch, then back towards the party outside. The music had begun. Massiter had chosen the piece himself. It was the very concerto that had nearly put him in jail five years before, when he’d paid for its first production on the pretext that Daniel Forster was its composer. Massiter had no great fondness for the work, or any other music for that matter. There was no money in music, no fame either, not of the kind he needed. His choice had been designed simply to make a point. That, if he wished, he could now do anything he liked.
“This is a social occasion,” he continued, noticing a new individual had now entered the room, one unknown to him, a senior-looking figure in a dark suit. “Kindly have done with it. Why are you here?”
“We’ve brought you a gift, Hugo,” Emily said, eyes glittering. “Something you’ve wanted for years.”
He laughed. “Really?”
Massiter’s right hand described a circle round the room, round the glass eye over the lagoon, the city beyond. “What gift could the likes of you possibly have for me?”
Then he saw them and fell silent, mind racing, unable to believe his eyes.
They looked dirty. Peasant clothes. Peasant features. Too long in the sun, too much brutal physical work. For a few reflective seconds Hugo Massiter asked himself what kind of terror he must have instilled in Laura Conti and Daniel Forster, to have made them inflict such an obvious punishment on themselves. Then his normal sense of composure returned, and with it a growing realisation of triumph, of total triumph, a transcendental victory greater than any even he could have imagined on such a day.
