by David Hewson
The dog sat upright, a taut black triangle by the ladder down to the boat, whimpering in gratitude for the man’s return.
“Home,” Scacchi muttered, and scooped up the animal in his arms, burying his head in its damp, smoky fur, wondering whether it was smoke or something else that brought tears to his eyes.
THE TWO MEN STOOD OUTSIDE SANTA LUCIA STATION, shielding their eyes against the bright sun, watching the constant commotion on the crammed and busy channel close to the head of the Grand Canal. It was close to eight in the morning and Venice’s brief rush hour was under way. Commuters poured in from the buses from Mestre and beyond, now discharging their loads across the water in Piazzale Roma. Vaporetti challenged one another for the next available landing jetty. Water taxis revved their diesels trying to impress the foreigners they were about to fleece. And an endless flow of lesser vessels—private dinghies, commercial barges, skiffs carrying flowers and vegetables, the low slender shape of the occasional gondola—fought to weave their way through the flotilla of traffic. Behind them a train clattered across the bridge from the mainland, terra firma, its rattle carrying across to the canal with a resonant, unnatural force.
Light and noise. Those, Nic Costa thought, would be the overriding impressions he’d take home with him to Rome once this tour of duty was done. Both seemed amplified in this city on the water, where everything was brighter than on land, every sound seemed to cause some distant echo among the warrens of tightly packed buildings crowded together over the constant wash of the lagoon.
The sirocco had expired overnight. Even at this early hour, high summer was upon the city, airless, humid and dank with the sweat of puzzled tourists trying to work out how to navigate the foreign metropolis in which they found themselves.
Gianni Peroni finished his small panino, stuffed with soft, raw prosciutto, and was about to jettison the paper bag it came in towards the canal when Costa’s disapproving frown stopped him. Instead, he thrust it into his pocket and cast a backwards glance at the steps of the forecourt where a couple of shady-looking characters were exchanging money.
“Why do you think stations always attract dirtbags?” he wondered. “I mean, half these people wouldn’t look out of place around Termini. In Rome it makes sense. Almost. But here?”
Nic Costa thought his partner was right, up to a point. He and Peroni had spent almost nine months in Venice now. It was exile of a kind, a form of punishment for an act of internal disobedience too subtle for conventional discipline. In truth their stay had almost been a holiday. Venice was so unlike Rome. Everyday crime here meant minor pickpockets, drunks and petty drugs. Even the layabouts around Santa Lucia bore only a passing resemblance to the hard-core hoods who made a crooked living around Rome’s main railroad station, and Gianni Peroni knew it. Still, Costa couldn’t throw off his natural sense of caution. In spite of appearances, Venice wasn’t some backwater paradise where a couple of cops, now in uniform because that too was part of their sentence, could allow their minds to wander for long. They’d been treated with too much suspicion and resentment in the little neighbourhood station in Castello for either of them to be comfortable. There was more too. The melancholy torpor of the lagoon was deceptive. Costa had heard snippets of the gossip going round the station. There were no big crimes filling the columns of the newspapers, but that didn’t mean there were no big criminals. Life was never black and white in Italy but, in the lagoon light, water, sky and buildings sometimes resembled the conjoined universe of doubt Turner depicted in those canvases of the city Costa had admired at the temporary Accademia exhibition earlier in the summer. Something about the place both disturbed and interested him. Venice reminded him of a bad yet familiar relative, dangerous to know, difficult to let go.
He looked his partner up and down. Peroni and uniforms didn’t fit. The blue trousers and shirt hung baggily on the older man’s big frame. And, as always, Peroni was bending the rules just to make a point. On his hefty flat feet were a pair of sneakers, black leather sneakers, true, and ones that were, on this occasion, shiny from the rare application of polish. It wasn’t so long since Costa had been a rookie Rome street cop who donned a uniform every day. But Gianni Peroni hadn’t pulled on the blue for almost three decades. He wasn’t going to go back in rank and time without a protest.
Costa considered those huge feet again, squeezed tightly into a couple of expensive-looking Reeboks.
“It’s a health thing,” Peroni complained. “Don’t start. I’ve done more damn walking in this place than I managed in an entire lifetime back home. It’s downright cruel.”
“We don’t have squad cars . . .”
“They could’ve let us drive a boat!”
This had been a source of grievance for Peroni ever since they arrived. Gianfranco Randazzo, the surly Castello commissario, had, perhaps with some justification, reasoned that there was no point in putting a couple of visitors through the complex and intensive training course required for a lagoon licence. That had condemned both of them to the streets, public transport or begging a lift from one of the local cops.
“The argument’s lost, Gianni. We’re almost through here. What use would a boat licence be back home? Also, I don’t think drive is quite the right word.”
“That,” Peroni insisted, waving a big, fat finger in Costa’s face, “is not the point. We should have been on an equal footing. Not treated like outsiders. Foreigners even.”
Foreigners. Yet, in a sense, that was what they were. Venice was so different, a place that constantly went out of its way to make them feel like strangers flitting through a bright, two-dimensional landscape that was never quite real. The locals even dropped into the lagoon dialect, a strange, glottal tongue largely impenetrable to ordinary Italians, whenever they felt like a little privacy. Costa had learned a little of the language. Sometimes it was easy to guess—Mèrkore for Mercoledì, Wednesday. Sometimes it sounded like a Balkan tongue, Croat perhaps. Today, for the Venetians, was Xòbia, a day that began with a letter utterly foreign to true Italian.
This hadn’t been the exile they expected. Leo Falcone, the inspector who joined them in their subtle disgrace, had been seconded to some art theft squad in Verona not long after they arrived. On the street, apart from a couple of arrests for robbery, their time in Venice had been without much incident, for which both men were grateful. Yet they were never quite comfortable, and there were two excellent reasons, two omissions from their lives which would shortly be rectified.
There was a louder clatter from the tracks beyond the station. Costa looked at his watch. The fast train from Rome was on time. Emily Deacon and Teresa Lupo would now be sitting on it, anticipating a two-week holiday beginning that very night. It had all been planned. Earlier in the month, as a surprise, he’d paid a small fortune for a couple of tickets for La Fenice the following evening. Tonight Peroni had booked a quiet table for the four of them at his favourite restaurant, a place the big man loved, and was loved in return by the two sisters behind the bar, who fed him extra cicchetti as if he were a stray canine newly wandered through the door. Emily and Teresa had planned to be regular visitors during the men’s temporary banishment. It hadn’t worked out like that. Teresa’s workload in the Rome morgue never seemed to diminish. Emily had found herself immersed in academic life the moment she started working on her master’s in architecture at the school in Trastevere. Matching their free time with that of two street cops who always seemed to get the worst shifts around hadn’t proved easy. Costa had seen Emily just three times in the past six months, even though she was now living in his own farmhouse off the Appian Way. But now they were free. Two weeks’ leave beginning at the end of the day, and two police apartments in the narrow working-class backstreets of Castello, far from tourist-land, to use as a base.
Peroni was eyeing him and Costa knew, on the instant, he was reading his thoughts. The two of them had been partners for eighteen months. More than that, they’d been friends.
The big man looked down at his black t
rainers, shuffled his shoulders as a sign he was about to move, then laughed.
“It’s a good feeling, huh?” he asked.
Before Costa could answer, he found he was facing Peroni’s back. The big man was heading towards the station doors with that sudden burst of speed that always took people by surprise.
“You know,” Costa said, catching up, “perhaps I could get another two tickets for La Fenice tomorrow. Teresa might like it.”
Peroni glanced back at him, appalled. The long, modern train was drawing up at the final platform.
“Opera?”
Costa scanned the platform. They were there, just visible in a sea of bodies, half running in spite of their hefty shoulder bags, like a couple of schoolgirls on a trip to somewhere new. He wished to God he weren’t working just then. He wished he weren’t wearing a stupid uniform, doggedly prepared to spend one last day trudging the streets of Venice, helping lost tourists find their way back to the waterfront, glancing at his watch to see how long until the end of his shift.
Some dumb commuter in a shiny suit bumped into him and muttered a curse. The Venetians were even worse in a crowd than the Romans. There was a steady stream coming off the busy platforms. He’d followed Peroni’s bulky form and stumbled straight into their path. The big man didn’t care who got pushed and shoved out of the way. By the time Costa fought through, Peroni had his arms around Teresa Lupo in a bear hug, was slapping wet kisses on her full, pink cheeks, ignoring the flap of her arms on his back, a gesture that didn’t really convince as a protest at all.
Costa watched the pair of them and shook his head, wondering, as he often did these days, who exactly was the junior partner in this relationship.
His mind was still on them when Emily broke into his line of vision, peering at him, amusement and pleasure in her smart, querulous face. Her hair was longer, a lively natural shade of gold. Her eyes shone with that brightness that seemed to look straight through him. She was now utterly unlike the serious, single-minded FBI agent he’d first met, a lifetime before.
Emily smiled: lovely white teeth, perfect pink lips, a face that now seemed burned on his memory, unforgettable, a part of him. She wore jeans and a simple cream shirt, the V-neck displaying a new tan. Hugging the bag to her shoulder, she looked like a student embarked on her first long trip abroad.
“I was looking for directions, Officer,” she said quietly, almost meekly, not a touch of her native American audible through the measured, easy Italian.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked, a little awkward in the unfamiliar blue costume, wishing he had Gianni Peroni’s lack of self-awareness, and that he could forget he was a cop standing in a crowded railway station, slap in the middle of rush hour.
Emily Deacon ran one slim index finger down the front of his jacket. “You’re the man in the uniform. You tell me.”
Costa glanced at the photo machine by the platform, took a deep breath, wondering if anyone would notice, then led her inside and pulled the curtain. The booth was tiny and smelled of cigarette smoke. Emily’s eyes glittered at him in the faint light.
“Such discretion,” she whispered, clutching him. “I think this calls for evidence.”
Her coins fell into the slot as he wrapped his arms around her slim, soft body. The flashes started firing the instant they kissed.
“Nic!”
The bursts of bright light stopped. Costa found his breath again. He wondered what was wrong. Emily looked flushed, embarrassed.
“What is it?” he asked, half wondering if there weren’t some way he could bunk off duty for the day.
“Company,” she murmured, and flashed a glance at the curtains.
Leo Falcone stood there, holding the grimy fabric open. A half-sardonic smile ran across the inspector’s thin-lipped mouth, denoting some amusement that had never been there in the man a couple of years ago, when he’d been just another hard-bitten boss in Rome.
“I was under the impression you were in Verona,” Costa said hastily, remembering to add, “Sir.”
“I was under the impression you were out looking for criminals,” Falcone replied, not unpleasantly.
Costa stepped outside the booth. Peroni was there, Teresa by his side, a look of suspicious bewilderment on his face. Commissario Randazzo stood by the platform, rocking back and forth on his shiny shoes, looking every inch the businessman in a smart grey suit. Next to him was a curious-looking individual in his fifties. He was of medium build, quite fit and strong, and had an aristocratic northern face, clean-shaven, with cheeks that were red, from sunburn or bad habits. Handsome once, Costa decided, but in that forced, artificial way that movie stars possessed, the kind of beauty that looked better from a distance. The man wore bright blue slacks and a perfectly pressed white shirt with a bright red scarf at the neck. He was balding, and trying to slow things by brushing the remaining wisps of fine, fair hair across his tanned scalp. A foreigner, Costa thought immediately. English perhaps. With money and a story behind him.
“Is there something wrong?” Costa asked, to no one in particular.
It was Randazzo who answered, and Costa found himself unable to shake the impression that the commissario was, somehow, measuring each word to make sure the individual next to him approved.
“Not at all,” Randazzo said, in the dry, dour tone of voice that belonged to a certain type of Venetian. “You’ve been chosen. All three of you. Congratulations.”
“For what?” Peroni demanded.
“A very important task,” the stranger interjected, in good Italian though with an obvious English accent. “I think,” he added, turning to Randazzo, “the uniforms . . .”
He stabbed a long index finger at the two men in blue. “Best they go, Gianfranco.”
Randazzo nodded obediently.
Nic Costa turned to Emily. She was slipping the photos from the machine into her bag, discreetly, as if they were somehow objects of shame.
“My name is Hugo Massiter,” the Englishman declared, and extended a long, pale hand to each of them in turn, pausing to imbue his smile with a little extra warmth when he took Emily’s outstretched fingers. “Let me offer you a ride.”
IT WAS MORE THAN A BOAT. IT WAS A FLOATING LIMOUSINE. The deck was polished walnut, gleaming under the sun, with a helmsman in a white uniform at the open wheel. The five of them sat in the covered cabin behind, on plush antique brown leather seats, Randazzo and Massiter on one side, both smoking. The three Romans opposite remained silent, each of them, Costa thought, more than a touch apprehensive, and in Peroni’s case downright furious.
“I’m sorry if we interrupted something,” Massiter said as the vessel eased out from the waterfront, out towards the dockyards and Murano. It had taken just over fifteen minutes to get from the station to the jetty close to the Giardini vaporetto stop. From there Costa and Peroni had led the two women to the police apartments, in a narrow street of cottages hung with washing and painted in bright, peeling shades of blue and ochre. There’d been scant time to change and explain to them the household arrangements. Randazzo was outside, glancing constantly at his watch, waiting to hurry back to the waterfront.
“We have two weeks’ leave booked,” Peroni grumbled. “Signed for. On the line. As of tonight.”
“You’re still on duty now, aren’t you?” Randazzo snapped back.
Costa reflected on the fact that he’d heard the commissario utter more words that morning than at any time in the past nine months. Nothing the stiff, sour-faced man had said so far, though, explained why Falcone had been recalled from Verona, and why they’d been dragged from normal street duties and pulled out of uniform, all for the apparent benefit of this odd foreigner, who was now staring at Randazzo with a look that spoke of disapproval and a kind of ownership.
“That’s no way to talk if we’re to get these chaps on our side,” Massiter complained to the commissario. “Look. I’m sorry about this. If there were an alternative, we’d be taking it. Also, I owe you all something b
y way of compensation. It’s best we get to know one another a little. Tomorrow night. There’s a reception at what I trust will one day be my gallery. Meet and greet. Keep some potential backers sweet. You get the idea. The place is still undergoing restoration, but in Venice what isn’t? You will come, I hope, all three of you. With your dates.”
Peroni and Falcone looked at each other, said nothing, then looked at Costa. He sighed. He got the message.
“I’ve seats for La Fenice,” he replied. “But thanks anyway.”
Massiter’s eyebrows rose. “You have the tickets with you?”
Costa pulled the envelope from La Fenice out of his jacket pocket. They were the most expensive tickets he’d ever bought.
“Hmmm.” Massiter frowned at the pair of biglietti, topped by the house’s phoenix crest. “I can’t say I know that part of the house. But I suspect you’d need binoculars. That is if there isn’t a pillar in the way. I’ve a company box. One of the best there is. Eight people. Bring along some friends. Any time you like.”
Peroni coughed hard into his fist and gave Costa a terrified glance.
“Just let me know the dates.”
“I’m not sure . . .” Costa objected.
“This week’s sold out entirely, you know,” Massiter continued, scarcely listening. “I’ve a contact who can get you twice what you paid for these. Here . . .”
He reached into the pocket of his slacks, took out a fold of money set inside a silver clip, withdrew a couple of two-hundred-euro notes, reached over and let them fall in Costa’s lap, then took the tickets for himself.
“I don’t mind running the risk. If they fetch more, I’ll pass it on.”
Costa said nothing, waiting for one of the two men next to him to intervene.
“Good,” Massiter went on. “Tomorrow it is. Seven p.m. Nothing fancy. Just some decent food and drink. A little music. It’ll be pleasant to have some real human beings there instead of the usual hangers-on. And—”