The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  None of these issues would now be addressed. The tragedies of the Isola degli Arcangeli were, for the city, closed the moment Randazzo’s bullet shattered Aldo Bracci’s skull. Leo Falcone was simply what a certain kind of military man would call “collateral damage,” and all to crown Hugo Massiter king of the city.

  They had looked at each other that night, listened to Nic carefully picking his way through the known facts, feeling a certainty grow inside them, one that didn’t need to be said aloud to be understood. To the Venetians they were strangers, all of them. They’d be excluded from what swift tidying up of the facts would now ensue. If Nic was right—and it soon turned out he was—they’d be squeezed out of the Questura too, kept away from any stray difficult facts.

  Which was, if only the Venetians understood it, the stupidest thing the city could do. They didn’t know Costa and Peroni. They didn’t understand what kind of men they were. How the two would spend days, weeks, trying to peer beneath the wrapping of that carefully presented, utterly fictitious case Venice was presenting to the world, picking at the seams until everything fell apart.

  Facts, Nic said at the time, acting out a fair impersonation of Falcone at his best.

  Who benefited from what happened that night?

  Hugo Massiter and his cronies in the council. And the Arcangeli, too, since they finally got the money they so desperately needed, even if it came with strings.

  Who had a motive to kill Bella and Uriel?

  There lay the lacunae. Uriel Arcangelo, from what they understood, was keen on the deal with Massiter. His death created difficult and expensive legal problems. But some motive existed. It needed to be found, and to do that, Nic said, they must follow Leo’s rules. You mixed things up a little. You piled on the pressure. You got nosy and difficult and kept on chasing down the lies.

  And you imagined.

  Bella was carrying Massiter’s child, and trying to blackmail the Englishman into keeping her, something Massiter couldn’t allow, even if her death complicated his business matters.

  So Massiter, or one of his henchmen, killed Bella, doctored Uriel’s apron in some way a man with no sense of smell could never notice, sent him into the boiling hot foundry with a key that couldn’t work, couldn’t take him away from the scene of a crime that seemed, to the lazy, so obvious. Then fought to pin the blame for everything on Aldo Bracci, a man they murdered in public, in a way that seemed to confirm his guilt.

  Teresa Lupo mistrusted the imagination deeply, instinctively. She was a scientist. She was aware of how dangerous it was to produce a theory first, then search for the facts to support it. But watching Nic that night, seeing the fury and determination on his face, understanding for the first time how close he’d grown to Falcone since the death of his own father, Teresa realized she’d do anything in her power to help him. This wasn’t the Nic Costa she’d first come to know and admire when he was a green detective in the Rome Questura, a little lost in the centro storico, the kind of peripheral figure who looked as if he might not last out the year. Events had changed him. Leo Falcone and Gianni Peroni had changed him, and been changed in return too. And part of that change reflected on each of these three very different, now very close, men. It was inconceivable that Nic and Gianni would walk away from this event. Inconceivable that she wouldn’t throw in her lot with them.

  And Emily . . .

  AFTER FOUR DAYS extracting every last scrap of information they could from the Questura, before they got ordered on paid leave, the men left Venice, desperate to try to rustle up a few allies. Emily was gone too, on a different kind of mission, one that filled Teresa with deep misgivings because she understood how well a former FBI agent was trained for that kind of work, and the ruthless, selfless determination Emily was likely to adopt in pursuing it.

  Now she was left alone, clear about her own role. To find forensic evidence, to nail down some facts that linked Hugo Massiter with Bella and Uriel Arcangelo, could, perhaps, place him in the fornace that terrible night. More than anything, they needed to provide some sort of motive for why he would endanger his own business plans by murdering the pair of them in the first place.

  She looked at the woman sitting by Falcone’s bed, upright, alert, as if she truly expected Leo would wake up any second, smile and ask for a coffee and a couple of biscotti. Teresa Lupo felt a pang of guilt. She wasn’t alone at all. Raffaella Arcangelo had waited at Falcone’s bedside eighteen or more hours a day since he’d arrived. And by the third day Teresa had, without asking Peroni or anyone else, plucked up the courage to bring her into their confidence, just a little, just enough so that a favour was hard to refuse. Raffaella was a good, straightforward woman. She admired Leo Falcone, seeing clearly in him something that Teresa could only glimpse in the misty distance. She was an Arcangelo too, close to what had happened. She had access to the house and all the materials they needed to try to work some magic.

  Teresa gazed down at the carrier bag of objects, each secure in a plastic envelope, which the two of them had assembled from the mansion and the furnace that morning while Michele and Gabriele were away, talking to the lawyers about Massiter’s impending acquisition. Most important of all, some items from Bella and Uriel’s bathroom that would provide DNA.

  One of the devices attached to the unconscious Leo Falcone made a kind of beeping noise, then went silent. Wires and meters, CRT displays and drips. Machines designed to keep a human being alive.

  “There’s no need to stay around,” Raffaella Arcangelo said in her calm, clear voice, shaking Teresa out of her reverie. “I thought you had things you needed to do.”

  “N-n-no . . .” she stuttered, surprised at being brought back into the real world.

  Raffaella was in the position she’d come to adopt by the bed. Stiff-backed in the hard hospital chair next to Falcone, a book in her hand. A woman’s book, Teresa noticed. An intelligent romantic tale that all the papers had been writing about of late. It seemed to her that Raffaella Arcangelo had grown a little spinsterish before her time.

  “Nor do you,” Teresa observed quietly.

  “I know. But I can comfort myself with the thought that it’s just selfish. There’s nothing left for me to do on the island today. Michele’s locked in with the lawyers again. Gabriele too. Once that’s over . . .”

  She’d reached some kind of a decision, Teresa felt. One that had, perhaps, eased some long-felt burden.

  “Once that’s over I’m leaving. It’s not . . .” She glanced at the prone Falcone. “ . . . what happened. It’s just a decision I should have made years ago. Now there’ll be a little money. Perhaps I’ll go back to Paris. I liked it there. I was a student, briefly. Unless I can be of some help to Leo.”

  Teresa Lupo never looked over her shoulder. There was too much in the way of personal wreckage back there. And for Raffaella? Just a few dim memories. Faded, like old watercolours. It seemed a terrible time to start chasing them.

  “This is an unusual thing for the likes of me to say,” Teresa observed, “but I’d advise against making any rash decisions.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not rash. I’ve wanted to leave for years. I just felt tied to that stupid island. To Michele’s ridiculous dreams. He thinks he’s some kind of a hero. Sticking to the old ways. Trying to keep some ancient craft alive when the rest of them turn out junk for the tourists. It’s a delusion. I’ve lived here all my life and I can see what Venice is becoming. A graveyard. A beautiful one, I’ll admit, but a graveyard nevertheless. It drains the life out of you in the end. That’s happened with Michele already, and he’ll stay here ignoring that fact until it consumes him. I won’t.” Her bright eyes glittered with defiance. “I won’t. Once I’ve seen Leo back on his feet . . .”

  There was a question there, one Teresa didn’t feel able to answer at that moment.

  “Once I’ve lost that burden from my conscience,” Raffaella continued, “I’m gone.”

  Teresa groaned, pulled up a chair by the bed, and took
her hands. “Listen, please. What happened wasn’t your fault. What—”

  “I was the one Bracci was threatening! If I hadn’t been stupid enough to let him get hold of me—”

  “Then he would have grabbed hold of someone else. And Leo and Nic and Gianni would have done exactly what they did. Don’t fool yourself. They’d have done it for anyone.”

  Raffaella stared at the still figure beneath the single white sheet. “He will recover, won’t he? That friend of yours seemed optimistic.”

  She couldn’t lie. “There’s a chance. There’s a chance he won’t. The brain’s a curious organ. Pino knows more about it than anyone I’ve ever met. All the same . . .”

  Raffaella Arcangelo leaned forward, earnest, suddenly intense, less in control of herself than at any time Teresa had witnessed. “He will recover. I know it. And if there’s any justice in this world, someone will pay for all this bloodshed too.”

  Teresa Lupo blinked, trying to take all this in. She’d assumed Raffaella shared the opinion of the world at large. That Aldo Bracci, a man found with Bella’s keys in his pocket, a man once accused of sleeping with his own sister, was responsible for the two deaths in the fornace, and had met a deserved fate. There’d even been a letter in the local paper, La Nuova, suggesting Commissario Randazzo deserved a promotion, not suspension, for putting Bracci down like an animal that night.

  Raffaella gently removed Teresa’s hand from hers. “I’m not a fool,” she said. “I know why you’re asking for these things. Leo confided in me. If he could speak now, he’d confirm that. I know why you’re looking at Bella’s belongings. You’re not part of any official police investigation. You want the man who really did this to Leo. I want the man who did this to Leo and to my brother. And to poor Bella.” The dark, earnest eyes gazed at her, pleading. “I tried to help Leo,” Raffaella continued. “And I failed. I won’t fail again. I promise. I owe him that.”

  “This is not . . .” Teresa’s thoughts were on Silvio Di Capua, who’d called in sick at the morgue in Rome, flown to Venice the night before, and was now organising some private lab arrangements with a handful of specialist companies, places that could handle the material she needed to send them. “ . . . a conversation we should be having, Raffaella. There are risks.”

  “What risks? They can fire you. And your police friends. What can they do to me?”

  Teresa thought about some of the background material Nic and Gianni had managed to extract from the Questura’s computers before getting thrown out. There were more than mere careers at stake. Hugo Massiter had all the makings of a big-time political animal. If he’d been Italian, he could have got himself a seat in Parliament and looked very comfortable there. Massiter had connections, real criminal connections. And not with the old Italian guard either. The Englishman favoured the new Mafia, men from the Balkans who rarely felt bound by old-fashioned codes of honour.

  “Tell me what you require,” Raffaella insisted. “I don’t need to know the details.”

  It was, Teresa thought, worth a shot. And it would drag Raffaella away from this quiet, bright room, where the air conditioning still didn’t keep out the salty tang of the lagoon and the horns of the passing traffic. That would be a result in itself. The woman needed to remind herself there was a living world beyond these four white walls.

  “Someone else was on the island that night,” Teresa said. “Not Aldo Bracci. Someone who had a reason to speak to Bella, we think. Someone . . .”

  It was difficult to decide how far to go. She trusted this woman. She just didn’t want to get her involved too deeply. It would be wrong, too, to put ideas into her head. Although they’d done that for themselves. Perhaps her objections were ridiculous.

  “I can’t say any more,” she admitted apologetically. “If you could look again, that would help. Anything unusual. Anything at all . . .”

  Raffaella nodded. “Of course.”

  Teresa glanced at the still figure in the bed, wishing he’d do something. Cough. Snore. Any damn thing.

  “He will recover,” Raffaella declared. “I know it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  A thought occurred to her. “Did Bracci say anything that night? When he had hold of you?”

  “Just drunken nonsense. I didn’t understand any of it.”

  Nonsense took on an importance of its own when it came from a man with a gun.

  “What kind of thing?”

  The dark eyes gazed at her, sad, resolute. “I can’t be sure but I thought he said, just once, ‘Where’s the Englishman?’ There were several Englishmen there that night. Massiter. Some of his lawyers. Some of the city’s art people. It probably doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Probably.”

  How many Englishmen did Aldo Bracci know? Teresa wondered. Bracci didn’t move in art and legal circles. It had to be Massiter surely, not that a half-heard comment sounded much like evidence to her.

  She took Raffaella’s hands again and asked, “This is just a wild guess, but do you think it’s possible Hugo Massiter and Bella were having an affair?”

  “No!” A sudden smile broke Raffaella’s face. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Why? He looks like a ladies’ man to me.”

  “Bella! Bella?” Raffaella looked aghast at the idea. “I mean this as no disrespect to her, but I think a man like him would set his sights a little higher. If the gossip’s right, he doesn’t sleep with the poor. I don’t think he needs to, does he?”

  “You never saw any sign of it? He had that apartment next door.”

  She waved away the notion with a firm hand. “During the day only. Michele insists on that. And Bella never went near the place. There are workmen around constantly. A man like Massiter would show some discretion, surely.”

  “Then somewhere else? He’s got this boat, hasn’t he?”

  “So they say. I still . . . it feels wrong.”

  Teresa glanced at the unconscious Leo Falcone. “He always has some smart comment for these situations. Something that sends you back to look at what you had and try to see it in a new light. It rarely works. But then it doesn’t need to that often.”

  Raffaella was struggling to come up with something. This was, Teresa’s instincts told her, a bad way to extract information from people.

  “She left the island quite a lot during the day,” Raffaella suggested. “I assumed she was visiting friends. Or shopping. Bella never seemed short of a little money recently for some reason.”

  “Then she could have visited his boat?”

  “I suppose so.” She looked doubtful. “I’m sorry. This is all a little beyond me. Perhaps you’re right. Is that what an affair would be like? Fitting in a few minutes in bed during the occasional afternoon? It seems so feeble. So sad. But then I’m not an expert. Relationships . . .”

  “Join the club,” Teresa agreed, when the other woman failed to continue. “Love is a mystery to me too.”

  “But I thought you’d found it?”

  Raffaella had seen her and Peroni several times in the hospital. Perhaps it showed.

  “I think I have. I just don’t know how I got there.”

  Raffaella Arcangelo nodded.

  Teresa liked this woman. A lot. That was all the more reason to get her away from Leo’s bedside.

  “L’amore è cieco,” Raffaella said softly, beautifully.

  Love is blind.

  THE IDEA THAT LEO FALCONE HAD BEEN SERIOUSLY INJURED by anything more than bad luck offended Luca Zecchini’s sense of fairness. To make matters both more complicated and more interesting, the state police inspector’s two men had mentioned a name that pricked so many bad memories from the not-so-distant past it ruined Zecchini’s appetite completely.

  “You seem remarkably sure about the guilty party, if I may say so,” he observed when the two cops from Rome had finished. “I heard Leo was the victim of an unfortunate accident. Sometimes these things are best left alone.”

  “Until the next acc
ident? And, yes, we’re sure.” Costa looked tougher, more determined than Zecchini had expected from Falcone’s description.

  “I’ve followed this in the papers, Nic. They all say the lunatic the commissario shot was responsible for those murders. That part of the case is closed. All they’ve got to do now is deal with their own. Are you telling me there’s more? That Leo was shot deliberately?”

  “No,” Peroni conceded, and Zecchini found, to his shame, that a small part of him regretted the fact there would be no easy way to send them packing with their fantasies. “It was an accident,” the big Roman cop continued. “But killing Aldo Bracci wasn’t. Randazzo was improvising there. Trying to do his paymaster a favour.”

  The two of them stared at him, expectant.

  “Even if you’re correct, gentlemen,” Zecchini answered, “what can I do? This is a case for the police. Not us. We don’t intervene in each other’s affairs. It would be unheard of. I couldn’t contemplate that.”

  “We’re not asking you to cross any lines,” Costa said quickly. “This falls squarely in your existing responsibilities. Art theft. Smuggling.”

  Luca Zecchini doubted that greatly.

  “You know,” he replied, “perhaps you should be wondering what Leo would be doing in these circumstances. He’s a practical man. He’d know when he was beaten. You’re off duty for the time being. You don’t have the right to question people. To investigate anyone, least of all someone of this man’s standing. Also, I always found Leo to be reluctant, meticulously reluctant, to reach hard decisions in advance of hard evidence.”

  Costa pushed away his plate. He’d hardly picked at his food. “We’ve asked ourselves that question. We’ll have hard evidence too. I don’t want to mislead you, Luca. There are other lines of attack open to us. The Arcangeli case, which is far from closed. And the charges Massiter skipped away from five years ago.” He glanced at Peroni. “Plus we may have some forensic too.”