The Lizard's Bite

by David Hewson

  Peroni didn’t seem too happy with that last observation. Maybe the older man understood just how perilous it could be to play games like these. It was time, Zecchini realised, to come to the point.

  “Then let me put it plainly. Hugo Massiter is a man of extreme influence and importance, more so by the day, from what I read in the papers. Once he becomes the owner of that island, he becomes virtually untouchable. I live here. Everyone in the Veneto follows what happens in Venice, because that’s the place the money goes. Very large sums of money that bind the giver and the receiver in ways you people in Rome can’t imagine. When that deal’s done, Hugo Massiter becomes something different. Part of the establishment. You’d need written permission from the Quirinale Palace just to talk to him about a parking ticket after that. And now—”

  “Now what?” Peroni interrupted.

  “Now he’s just a very powerful crook with some friends who ought to know better. If you screw around with him, he will, surely, come looking for his revenge. This is not idle speculation. I’ve watched careers destroyed trying to take down that man. I’m not much inclined to invite the same fate.”

  Costa’s eye, bright, alert, inquisitive, caught his. “You know him personally?” the young policeman asked.

  “No details. I’m just giving you the big picture. Massiter’s a man who’s wriggled out of our grasp many times in the past, then turned up smiling with not an etto of blame on him. You’d need a motive—”

  “Got it,” Peroni interjected. “This deal he had with the Arcangeli. He needed it closed down.”

  “So why did he kill the brother and his wife?” Zecchini demanded. “What’s the point of that?”

  “It’s personal,” Costa said. “He got Bella pregnant. She was putting pressure on him. He killed her, then set Uriel up for the blame.”

  “You can prove some of this?”

  “We’ll get there,” Costa insisted.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that! Suspicions fall off that man like dead skin. We’ve tried to screw Massiter for art smuggling in the past. Many, many times. You people thought you had him for murder five years ago. Instead . . .”

  This wasn’t just about guilt. It was about proof, and the ability to see through the judicial process. They all knew that—police, Carabinieri, and the armies of lawyers who had, over the years, been assembled on both sides too.

  Costa was unmoved. Luca Zecchini tried hard to remember more of what Falcone had said about these two men. Of their honesty, their disregard for their own safety when it came to a case that mattered.

  “Leo’s my friend as well,” he added. “I don’t think he’d want you to put your necks on the line for him. Not just on a hunch. Not like this.”

  “Is that what you think this is? A hunch?” Costa seemed disappointed. “Some personal vendetta on Leo’s behalf?”

  “It seems—”

  “No! We’ve looked at the records, Maggiore. And those are just ours. God knows what’s there on your side. Hugo Massiter is a cancer in Venice. He’s everywhere. In the government. In the city. Alongside all the organised crime that’s coming in from across the Adriatic.”

  The two of them must have seen the expression on his face.

  “You’d be amazed the stuff we managed to dig up before they threw us out of the Questura. We called a friend in the DIA too,” Peroni said. “We know about the Serbians and the Croats. How he plays them off against one another. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  Zecchini groaned. No one talked to the anti-Mafia people unless they were desperate. “This isn’t your field,” he warned. “Leave it alone.”

  Costa fed him a sour glance. “So you don’t want him?”

  Zecchini couldn’t miss the taunting tone in his voice. “I’d give my right arm to arraign that bastard on anything. But we’ve been there before and we failed. That makes it harder to go back again, to get the lawyers nodding the case through, unless it’s more watertight than anything we’ve had before. And mark my words. What we’ve been able to throw at him in the past was good. He should have been in jail ten times over. Would have been too, if it weren’t for his friends.”

  “If the case is good enough,” Costa objected, “even his friends will abandon him.”

  “Really?” He couldn’t believe they could be that naive. “Well, here’s something else I discovered. Every time we lose, he gets stronger. I’d need something very special just to get the authorities to read a file on Hugo Massiter right now. Once he’s signed that contract, and all those millions of public money are behind him, all those grateful politicians in his debt . . .”

  He looked at the wasted food. Zecchini had expected more of them. Maybe he’d be on the date with Gina after all that night. He wasn’t going to stick out his neck over some amateur, unauthorised probe into someone who always managed to slip out of their grasp.

  “And I regret to say I don’t have a single piece of evidence to help you,” he added with a scowl. “I wish I had. It’s all spent. Useless. There’s nothing close that’s fresh. If it was there, I’d be nailing this man tomorrow. Leo or no Leo.”

  They had something to say, and it made them uncomfortable. A part of Luca Zecchini was beginning to wish he’d stayed in Milan.

  Costa took a sip of his mineral water.

  “You asked us what Leo would be doing in these circumstances. Let me tell you. He’d be turning on the heat. He’d be making moves that put Massiter in an uncomfortable position. A place where he was likely to make mistakes from which we could profit.”

  Zecchini had seen enough of the police inspector’s methods to understand this was probably an accurate interpretation. He still didn’t see where it got them.

  “Two lone cops on enforced vacation aren’t going to be putting the heat on anyone,” he objected.

  Peroni smiled. “No, Luca. But you could. You could pick up the phone, call the Questura in Venice and ask if they’d mind letting you talk to Commissario Randazzo for a bit. Just to see if he knew anything about art theft.”

  Zecchini snorted. This was absurd.

  “I’m serious,” Peroni persisted, giving him a quick, icy look that Zecchini didn’t like at all. “We’ve taken a peek inside Randazzo’s house in the Lido. It’s empty. He’s gone. The wife’s gone. It’s an expensive place for someone on his salary. And all kinds of fancy stuff in there. Paintings. Ceramics. Silverware. We sort of found the door open . . .”

  “No!” Zecchini waved his hand in the big man’s face, demanding silence. “I don’t want to hear this. Breaking into houses. Jesus . . . Are you insane?”

  “You could just make a call,” Costa repeated. “Ask for a simple interview. See how they respond. You could also run up a search warrant on his place. You’ll find something there. Look.”

  Costa reached into his shoulder bag and took out a folder of photos. They showed antiques and paintings inside an airy, elegant house filled with potted plants and small palms, not the sort of place most police officers favoured.

  “There are a couple of Serbian icons in there,” Costa observed. “Genuine, I think. Probably fifteenth century.”

  “And this Randazzo would be stupid enough to keep illicit material around in his own home?” Zecchini demanded.

  Peroni let loose a low grunt of a laugh. “Honest answer, Luca? Yes. As far as he’s concerned, they’re just gifts. Trophies. From some rich and very influential Englishman. Maybe he didn’t even know how deeply he was involved until it was too late. When he saw shooting Bracci as a way out. A debt repaid. Massiter off the hook for the murders, and a clear way through for him to buy the island. Two birds with one stone. Neat, don’t you think?”

  Zecchini couldn’t argue there. It was neat, if it was true.

  “And maybe,” Costa added, “Massiter liked to give the commissario stolen objects just to cement the bond. So that if Randazzo did turn awkward, he’d have some extra hold on him.”

  These two were smart. Zecchini
recalled a case where the Carabinieri suspected Massiter had played a very similar trick on a magistrate called to investigate a minion of his, caught bringing in contraband through Trieste.

  “I could do these things,” he acknowledged. “But why? What do I get in return?”

  “Massiter,” Costa answered quietly. “We get you details of transactions, perhaps. Or storage locations. Routes. Vessels. An inventory of objects. We don’t care who puts this man in jail. You. Us. The DIA if they like. He just has to go.”

  “Like cancer,” Peroni echoed.

  Zecchini laughed. The authorities had been trying to get that information for years. No one talked about Hugo Massiter. No one had the nerve.

  “Now you’re playing games with me,” he said, and looked at his cold food, wondering when he’d feel minded to sit at an outside table at Sergio’s again. “Let’s just have a couple of beers, huh? Then say a few prayers for Leo. I don’t think there’s many doing that.”

  They didn’t budge. Luca Zecchini looked at this odd, stubborn pair and thought again about some of the stories Leo Falcone had told him. Stories he hadn’t quite believed at that time. No one could be that unbending, that resolute about seeing an issue through to the bitter end.

  Then it dawned.

  “You’ve access from inside?” Zecchini murmured, amazed, and more than a little disconcerted.

  Costa and Peroni glanced at each other and didn’t say a word.

  Luca Zecchini tried to think what that meant. Just the effort sent a shiver down his spine. If the Carabinieri’s meagre intelligence was right, Massiter now relied solely on the Balkan gangs for street-level muscle, men who were loyal to the end, did what they were told as long as the money kept coming, and never broke the code of loyalty and silence. It was inconceivable one of them would betray their capo. There was too much at stake. The punishment, if one was discovered, would be unimaginable. He’d seen the results of a gang punishment killing in Florence. It would have turned the stomach of the toughest of Italian mobsters.

  “You’ve put someone in?” he asked, incredulous, and got no pleasure at all in seeing the dismay on their faces when his words connected.

  “Jesus,” he murmured, then ordered three beers, a big one for himself. “I hope to God you know what you’re doing.”

  Costa reached into his pocket, pulled out a mobile phone, and replied, “We hope so too. Now will you make that call?”

  THE WEATHER HAD LOST ITS TEMPER. IT WAS A WARM, bright evening, with a sweet salty breeze blowing in from the Adriatic. In Verona, Costa and Peroni were slowly working their way into the confidences of a small specialist Carabinieri team, praying the scraps of information they owned would persuade Luca Zecchini and his colleagues to first order a search of Randazzo’s house, and then pull in the man himself for questioning. In a small apartment in Castello, Teresa Lupo and her assistant Silvio Di Capua now pored over the results of the first tests they’d run on the meagre material they’d found, scanning arcane reports and charts on Costa’s notebook computer, puzzled by the results coming in from the private labs they were using, both in Mestre and Rome, to try to extract some answers from the sparse debris and clothing they had. And in the Ospedale Civile the unconscious Leo Falcone, unaware of Raffaella Arcangelo by his bed, continued to dream, locked in a private world, part fantasy, part remembrance, a place he feared to leave, not knowing what would take its place.

  “Leo,” said a voice from outside his world, a female voice, warm, attractive, one that possessed a name, though it escaped him at that moment, since he was the child-Leo, not his older self. “Please.”

  The mechanism on the wall whirred. The cuckoo’s artificial bellows roared, the old chime tolled.

  “I need you to live,” she pleaded. “Leo . . .”

  As if it were a matter of choice. Both Leos—the child and the man—knew nothing was quite that simple. In order to live, he had to look, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Ever.

  AS LEO FALCONE DREAMED, SOME UNCONSCIOUS PART of him listening to his own inner voices and the caring tones of Raffaella Arcangelo penetrating from the world beyond, a sleek white speedboat crossed the wide canal between the hospital and San Michele, its varnished wooden prow aimed towards the open northern lagoon. The bright day was dying now, the last of the sun turning the water into a lake of burnt gold. Hugo Massiter sat in the back of the vessel opening a bottle of vintage champagne with a familiar ease. Emily Deacon remained opposite on the soft calfskin seats, weary after a fruitless day spent on the private yacht moored by the Riva degli Schiavoni, trying to recall more details of her training back in Langley.

  An Alitalia jet whined overhead, making its descent into the airport that lurked at the distant water’s edge, forever growing, eating away a little more of the wild marshland each year. Emily waited for the roar of its engines to subside, then took the fluted glass, tasted the chilled vintage Dom Pérignon, telling herself that she would drink one glass and one glass alone, then leaned back, letting her blonde hair reach into the slipstream created by the vessel’s gathering speed, aware that Hugo couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Where are we going exactly? I’m used to getting directions.”

  “You can leave the directions to me. We’re going to the Locanda Cipriani. Torcello. You’ve never been?”

  She’d heard of the place. Hemingway had written much of Across the River and into the Trees there, in between duck hunts and drinking sessions. She’d read the book as a teenager, while going through her Hemingway phase. It was the unlikely story of a romance between a dying middle-aged American colonel, scarred by the war, and a young, beautiful Italian countess. A love that was returned. She hadn’t needed to dip into the biographies to understand that Hemingway had been telling his own story, recounting the growing fears and disappointments of age, trying to convince himself they could be balanced, if not countered entirely, by the presence of a teenager who was willing to have sex with him in a gondola at night. It was a lecherous old man’s fantasy, and the tragedy was that Hemingway hoped in vain to conceal that fact from everyone, most of all himself.

  “Tell me about Laura Conti,” she said. Hugo had spent the afternoon away from the yacht, locked in a series of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers, advisers and the Arcangeli brothers. This was the first real opportunity she’d had to start pushing some questions his way. “I’m the curious type.”

  Hugo raised his glass. “And I’m the indiscreet type, as I told you. Except . . .”

  He glanced towards the low island in the distance and then his watch. “Dinner at the Locanda. It’s been such a long time. And now there’s so much to celebrate.”

  “Except what?”

  His smile fell for a second. He stared at her with a sudden, brutish frankness. “Intimacies require intimacy. I’m no fool, Emily.”

  She placed the glass, two-thirds full, on the polished walnut table that sat between them. Massiter’s temporary home had been a place of some interest for her. The yacht’s crew, mainly men, with women for waiting and cleaning duties alone, were either Croatian or, in the case of the menials, Filipino. There was a small locked office on the lowest floor, down a narrow set of stairs, beneath the eight cabins, the largest of which—Massiter’s—occupied the prow. The vessel was, he said, rented, a necessary evil between selling his last apartment on the Grand Canal to raise funds for the Isola degli Arcangeli project and moving into his new home there. He wasn’t happy in the yacht, though its opaque smoked windows kept out the curious glances of the tourists on the broad and busy waterfront leading from the Doge’s Palace to the Arsenale. There had to be a reason he would have chosen a home like this, and that, surely, lay in the small office. She recalled the locked room in the apartment he had built for himself in the palace on the island. He had a fondness for small, dark places in which to hide things. It was simply a question of penetrating them.

  “I told you last night. Nic and I had a fight. I needed somewhere to stay,
Hugo. Don’t read more into it than that.”

  She thought about Nic, who by now should have cleared the little apartment in Castello. He and Peroni had found some expensive temporary accommodation, two bedrooms, one little kitchen, in one of the narrow streets in working-class Castello, squeezed between the Via Garibaldi and the Biennale Gardens. There would be no free police apartment in Venice again. No secret moments in the tiny bed squeezed between the door and the window that gave out onto a pink-washed street crisscrossed with washing lines. And instead, what? She’d seen the expression on Nic’s face when he left. It was grim and determined and utterly single-minded. Nic needed to bring Massiter to justice, for Leo’s sake. There was a debt lurking there, demanding repayment. Without that, she wondered how he could ever be easy with himself.

  “People who need somewhere to stay generally take their custom to hotels,” Massiter said. “You came to me. Why, Emily?”

  She was uncertain how to handle him. Hugo Massiter was a mix of contradictions: wily in the ways of the world, yet almost innocent when it came to anything that touched his ego.

  “I thought that was what you wanted. I was curious to see if I was right.”

  He was watching her avidly, judging, avaricious too. “Does he know you’re with me?”

  “No . . .”

  She reached for the glass and drained it in two quick gulps, not even fighting the temptation. He was there with a refill the moment it left her lips. It was all a question of confidence. That was what the men in Langley said. A matter of building trust. Of lies and skilled deceit.

  “Is it important?” she asked. “I knew I wasn’t going to get the door slammed in my face. Or did you really think I could be your architect?”

  This amused him. “Why not? If it doesn’t work, I’ll find someone else. I’ve got the money now and money solves everything. Or at least I will have the money once I sign with the Arcangeli. After that . . . the island’s perfect, just the thing I need to get me back on my feet.”