by David Hewson
The Lizard's Bite
( Nic Costa - 4 )
David Hewson
On an August night on a small island near Venice, a fire explodes in a glassmaking shop. When help arrives, two people are dead, a rich Englishman is implicated, and investigators from Rome are assigned a case no one wants them to solve....In this spellbinding new novel featuring Detective Nic Costa, author David Hewson weaves together the rich fabric of Europe’s most beguiling city with a riveting tale of passion, corruption, and the poisonous bite of betrayal.
On their private island, the Arcangelo family defy the world: living in a decaying palazzo, making glass in a terrifying, archaic furnace, watching their absurd exhibition hall sink into disrepair. But now the world is coming to their dying outpost in a crumbling corner of a Venice that tourists never see. Police boats and vaporetti bring investigators, curiosity seekers, and one man who plans to own the property himself. With two family members consumed by the foundry fire, both mystery and opportunity have been bared to the bone.
On special assignment from Rome, Detective Nic Costa, along with his partner, his boss, and a dogged pathologist named Teresa Lupo, is getting in the way of progress, Venetian-style. They know that Uriel Arcangelo and his wife were murdered. They know that a predatory Englishman must be a suspect, as is the family of the murdered woman. And while everyone wants the Roman cops to give up and go home, they can’t–because a matter of desire, death, and lies has just turned murderously on one of them....
A tale as bewitching as its lush backdrop, The Lizard’s Bite is an astounding alchemy of superb writing, vibrant atmosphere, and sheer, gripping suspense.
I N THE SHIFTING DARKNESS OF THE VESSEL’S BOWELS, low over the undulating black water, the animal waited, trembling. The man, the much-loved man, his master, worked around him, puzzled by the creature’s fear, clucking sounds of consolation, not noticing events on the quayside above. Men possessed, the animal understood, a weaker, coarser form of consciousness. Sometimes it seemed men scarcely noticed the presence of blood at all . . . .
FOR AN INSTANT the black breath of the sirocco eased. The Isola degli Arcangeli—small, solitary, shining in the brief glimpse of moonlight—was still. Then the night wind returned, more fierce and relentless than before. The fragile frame of the grandiose palazzo shook beneath the onslaught. Shards of brittle glass tumbled from the shutters half-finished by the restoration men only the day before. Close by, clouds of sandy dust raked the golden stone of the Arcangeli’s mansion, hammering at the ornate windows arching out over the lagoon. On the other side of the palazzo, in the foundry, once the mother lode of the Arcangeli clan’s fortunes, the blast chased down the single funnel chimney, probing for some weakness, like a giant from the world beyond breathing into a fragile paper bag, rattling the rickety high doors, bending the misshapen glass roof with its brittle span of supporting ancient timbers.
The high-summer gale from the Sahara had been over the city for three days now. Dry choking dust lurked in its belly, working its way into the crevices of the fornace, disturbing the precious process, looking for something clean and bright and perfect to despoil. The daily yield of good glass, which had never been on target of late, was as low as he could remember. The disturbance was everywhere. Dust devils swirled over canals and chased each other in and out of the island’s constricted alleys. Beyond Murano, across the lagoon, in Venice proper, churning black water fetched by the wind now lapped insistently over the stonework at the edge of the Piazza San Marco.
The August storm took away the month’s familiar enervating heat and put something alien in its place. Even now, at just after two in the morning, under the frank gaze of a full moon stained rusty by the storm, the lagoon seemed breathless, starved of oxygen. He wasn’t the only one awake, panting in the dry heat. Beyond the Isola degli Arcangeli lay an entire city choking on the sirocco’s sand-filled wheezings. He listened to the storm’s anger as it threw itself upon the fragile shell of the foundry. The wind’s sighs seemed to vibrate to the rhythm of the deep, smoky gasps of the hulking primitive furnace in front of him.
Half loved, half hated, the leviathan stood at the heart of the solitary room, roaring as the wind’s blasts fought their way down its crumbling brick chimney and raked their scorching breath across its embers. He didn’t need to look at the temperature gauge to see the fire was too intense. The hemisphere of the interior was approaching a white, incandescent heat too painfully bright to look at. In its maw the costly crock of nascent slow-mix glass, ground cogoli pebbles from Istria and the soda ash of burnt seaweed, just as a Murano maestro would have demanded five centuries before, would be churning uncertainly, part of a mystery he directed but never quite controlled.
An hour before, nothing was out of the ordinary. Then, when he’d gone back to the empty office for a while, sunk a couple of glasses of grappa, trying to make the night go more quickly, Bella had called, demanding he examine the fiery beast before his time. She had given no reason, only vague forebodings. And she wasn’t there either, once he’d splashed his face in the office washroom, gargled some water around his mouth to disguise the stink of alcohol. He’d found one of the double doors ajar, walked in, closed it behind him and met nothing. The island seemed empty, dead. There was only one other worker around, Piero, the lowly garzone, who had turned up unexpectedly on his night off and was now shifting wood and ash from his boat outside.
He shook his head, wishing the effects of the drink would disappear. The furnace was always difficult. The archaic use of both wood and gas, part of the Arcangeli’s secret process, made sure of that. But nothing now made sense. As he watched, the grunting, groaning monster roared again beneath the shifting bulk of the fenestrated roof, then exhaled in concert with the wind.
Uriel.
One—or both—seemed to whisper his name, taunting him. His father had called Uriel that for a reason. The Arcangeli were always different even when, before his time, they were just a bunch of bourgeois boatbuilders maintaining the last worthwhile squero in Chioggia. Growing up as a child in Murano, he was aware of the distance, always. You never met a Bracci or a Bullo who had to bear such a burden. They’d have been teased, without mercy, every single day in the plain, hard school by the church. Uriel Arcangelo was never mocked. Never befriended either, not even when he took one of them for a wife.
Maybe, the grappa said, laughing at the back of his brain, they knew what the name meant.
Fire of God. Angel of terror.
It was just another of his father’s cruel little jokes, to make every one of his four children an angel twice over, each with their set role. Michele to succeed him as capo. Gabriele to be the strong man by the furnace, the maestro with the pipe, seeing that the clan prospered. Or not. Raffaella to intercede when matters went too far, to bring a woman’s sense to their deliberations, to heal. And Uriel. The hardest, the loneliest of vocations. Uriel the magician, the alchemist, the family’s omo de note, the Venetian’s whispered, almost fearful name for a man of the night, keeper of the secrets, which had been passed on from the small black book that used to live in Angelo’s jacket pocket, kept from the curious gaze of outsiders.
Uriel closed his eyes, felt the heat of the furnace scorch his skin, recalling those last days, with Angelo fading towards death in the master bedroom of the mansion next to the damned palazzo, the money pit that had consumed them over the years. The image of that final night would never leave him. How the old man had ordered the rest of them out, made him, little more than a boy just out of his teens, read the notebook, study its ancient recipes, commit those secrets to memory. Uriel had obeyed, as always. So well that Angelo Arcangelo had called a servant and burned the book in front of his eyes, just ash and fla
mes fed by lighter fuel in an ancient pisspot, as his father laughed, not kindly either, for this was a test. The Arcangeli would be tested, always.
By midnight, his family at his side, Angelo Arcangelo was dead, a pale, stiff cadaver on the white sheets of the antique four-poster where each of them had been conceived. In Uriel’s head the scene was as real, as cruelly vivid now, thirty years after, as it was that night. And the codes lay secure in his head still. Living, shifting potions of arsenic and lead, antimony and feldspar, each betokening a shape or a colour that would form within the substance of the raw crude fritta growing in the belly of the furnace, then metamorphose into something beautiful when the next magician, Gabriele the maestro, with his steely arms, his bellows for lungs, his pincers and his pipe, worked the sinuous, writhing form in the morning. This was how the Arcangeli tried to put food on the table, not by building bragozzi barques for Chioggia fishing clans. Magic made the Arcangeli money, kept them alive. But magic was a harsh and temperamental mistress, demanding, sometimes reluctant to perform. Now more than ever.
Angelo had passed on his secrets with a cunning, certain deliberation. The memory of his father’s face in those last moments—skull-like, grinning, knowing—stayed with Uriel always, taunting, awaiting the time when Angelo’s son would fail, as every omo de note did because theirs was an imprecise art, one which could be destroyed by an extra milligram of soda or a slight shift in the searing 1400-degree heat of flaming wood and gas. Even so, Uriel had memorised the formulae, repeating them constantly, burning them into his synapses, swearing that a day would come when he would find the courage to defeat the demon of his father’s last admonition: Never write these down, or the foreigners will steal from you. He was still waiting. Just the thought now, long after his father had turned to dust, made him sweat all the more heavily beneath the heavy tan furnace apron he wore over an old, tattered cotton suit.
That time would come. Until it did, the litany of recipes would race through his brain unbidden, unwanted, when he woke up, head throbbing from drink, in the blazing light of their apartment in the mansion. On those rare occasions he wrestled with Bella on the old, creaky brass bed, trying to find some other kind of secret in his wife’s hot, taut body, wondering why this was now the only way they could converse.
“Bella,” he murmured to himself, and was shocked how aged and dry his own voice sounded. Uriel Arcangelo was forty-seven. A lifetime of working nights in the furnace, the cursed, beloved furnace, feeling the fire break the veins of his hardening cheeks, gave him the complexion and the dull, depressed outlook of an old man.
“What is this?” he now yelled angrily to no one. He heard only the furnace’s animal roar in return.
He understood this fiery beast better than any man. He’d grown up with it, fought for hours to control its tantrums and its sulks. He knew its many moods: none better than the long, torpid hours in which it refused to come to temperature. It had never overheated before. The fabric of decrepit iron and brick was too insubstantial, leaked out too much expensive energy through its cracked pores.
A thought entered Uriel Arcangelo’s head. He’d been burned many times in the furnace. Once he nearly lost an eye. His hearing was bad, his sense of smell ruined. But there’d never been a blaze. A real blaze, the kind that had put rival furnaces out of business. That meant the Arcangeli were lax when it came to precautions. They’d never followed the fire department’s orders to the letter. It was always cheaper to send round the bribe than carry out the repairs.
The hose was outside, attached to the exterior wall of the foundry, a curling snake of dusty pipe. There wasn’t even so much as an extinguisher close by.
Uriel coughed. There was smoke in the miasma issuing from the furnace, a foreign smell too. Not thinking, doing this because it was, simply, what came naturally, he took out the flask of grappa, knocked back a swig, clumsily, aware that a dribble of the harsh liquid had spilled down his front, staining the bib of his brown apron.
She’d know. She’d sniff and she’d look at him, that Bracci look, the cruel grimace of hatred and despair that spoiled her features so often these days.
A noise emerged from the heart of the furnace. It was a sound that Uriel had never heard before, not from gas or wood or glass. A soft, organic explosion sent a shower of sparks flying out of the structure’s angry orange mouth. The lights danced in dusty reflections across the ceiling. The sirocco roared and shook the foundry as if it were a dried seed head shaking in the wind.
Uriel Arcangelo took out his own set of keys, walked back and placed the right one in the old mortise, just in case he needed to make a quick exit.
The furnace needed help. Perhaps it was more than one man could manage. If that was the case, he had, at least, a swift route of escape, out to the quay and the house beyond the palazzo, where the rest of them now slept, unaware of this strange event shaping just a few metres away on their private island.
THEY CALLED PIERO SCACCHI THE GARZONE DE NOTE, but in truth he was no boy at all. Scacchi was forty-three, a hulk of a man with the build and demeanour of the peasant farmer he was during the day, out on the low, green pastures of Sant’ Erasmo, the farming island of the lagoon that provided Venice with fresh vegetables throughout the year. These days, his hard-won crops of artichokes, Treviso radicchio, and bright red bunches of peperoncini were insufficient. So, some months before, reluctantly accepting there was no alternative, he had approached the Arcangeli, spoken to the boss of the clan, Michele, and offered his labour at a rate he knew would be hard to refuse.
It was common knowledge the Arcangeli were short of money. The pittance they bargained him down to was insignificant, even when paid in cash to circumvent the taxmen. But it was simple work, with flexible hours: picking up wood and ash from farmers and small suppliers dotted around the lagoon, transporting it to the family’s private island that hung off the southern edge of Murano like a tear about to fall. It entailed a little moving, a little cleaning, and the occasional illegal disposal of rubbish. The work kept Piero Scacchi on the water, a place both he and his dog liked, far away from Venice with its dark alleys and darker human beings. He’d grown up in the lagoon, on the farm his mother had bequeathed to him a decade before. When Scacchi was there, or in his boat, he felt he was home, safe from the city and its dangers.
Like him, the Arcangeli were different, but this bond never seemed to bring them closer. The family was insular, silent, in a way which Scacchi found sad and, at times, almost sinister. In spite of his solitary life, or perhaps because of it, he was a talkative man, outgoing, fond of a drink and a joke with his peers. He never sailed home from the early morning market trips to the Rialto entirely sober. Piero Scacchi knew how to be sociable when it suited him. These talents were entirely wasted once the Sophia navigated beneath the narrow iron bridge that linked the private island the clan called the Isola degli Arcangeli—an artificial name Piero found pretentious—and moored at the small jetty between the palazzo and the house, Ca’ degli Arcangeli, where they lived, rattling around like pebbles in its echoing, dusty corridors.
The family’s story was well known. They’d come from Chioggia under the reign of their late father, taken over the glass business, tried to turn back the clock and persuade a dubious world that it was worth paying double—or more—for a mix of traditional and experimental work that seemed out of place alongside the rest of Murano’s predictably gaudy offerings. The early years of novelty and success, under Angelo Arcangelo, were long past. Rumour had it the Arcangeli would go bankrupt soon or be bought out by someone with half a business brain. Then Piero Scacchi would be looking for more work on the side again. Unless there was a sudden rise in the market price of peperoncini. Or some other kind of miracle.
He pulled his collar tighter around his neck to keep out the dusty wind, then groaned at the sight of the animal. It was lying pressed flat to the planks of the motor launch, face buried beneath its soft, long black ears, quivering.
“Don’t look
so miserable. We’ll be home soon.”
The creature hated the foundry. He’d called the dog Xerxes because it was the master, the general of the lone and desolate places they hunted together. The stink of the furnace, the smoke, the roar of the flames above . . . everything now seemed designed to instil foreboding into its keen, incisive black head. Out on the island, or in the marshland of the lagoon, hunting for ducks downed by Scacchi’s ever-accurate shotgun, the dog was in its element, fearlessly launching itself into chill brown sludge to retrieve the still-warm body of some wildfowl lost to view in the marram grass and tamarisk trees of the islets. Here it cowered constantly. Scacchi would have left it at the farm if only the dog would allow it. Just the sound of the boat’s asthmatic engine was enough to send it into raptures. Animals had little understanding of consequences. For Xerxes, every action was a prelude to possible delight, whatever past experience dictated to the contrary. Scacchi envied the spaniel that.
“Xerxes . . .” he said, then heard a sound, a strange, febrile hissing, followed by what appeared to be a human cry, and found, for a brief moment, he shared the creature’s fears.
He turned to look at the iron footbridge, one of Angelo Arcangelo’s most profligate follies, a grand design in miniature, crossing no more than thirty metres of water using a single pier, reached on each side by identical, ornate cantilevers. The short central span was built artificially high on the southern side, close to the lighthouse by the vaporetto stop and the jetty where Scacchi was moored. Here it was surmounted by a skeletal extended angel with rusting upright wings a good five metres high, the entire sculpture constructed of wrought iron. It looked like a tortured spirit trapped in metal. Electrical fairy lights outlined the figure. Its right arm was extended and held a torch which stabbed high into the air, a real gas flame burning vividly at its head, fed constantly from the foundry’s own methane system, day in, day out, in memory of the old man.
