The Lizard's Bite

by David Hewson

  “I asked Teresa to bring the shirt to me. It appeared to me that the monogram was hand-stitched, which would be unusual for a man who would buy his shirts in bulk, even from the best of tailors. Also the cut was poor. More the kind of thing Uriel would have worn than a wealthy Englishman.”

  She continued to look at him, bemused, saying nothing.

  “You stitched the letters on Uriel’s bloodied shirt yourself when you saw the way Nic’s mind was working. If the blame was to shift from Bracci, you needed to ensure it went to Massiter, though not in time to ruin the contract, naturally. Forensic could clarify all this . . .”

  “You’re a man in a wheelchair, Leo. Not an inspector in charge of a murder inquiry. Badly cut shirts? Hand-stitched letters? Do you think anyone will listen to these ramblings except me?”

  He wasn’t sure he cared anymore.

  “I was pleased by this discovery,” Falcone went on. “Had the shirt really been Massiter’s it could only have meant you’d stolen it beforehand, with the idea of killing Bella in mind. That what I was dealing with was a matter of forethought, not some desperate improvisation after the fact. I was very glad not to be wrong on that matter.”

  Raffaella Arcangelo waited, watching his discomfort at having to make such a personal confession. “Men never consider these things, do they? Washing. Cleaning. Sewing. All the dreary work. All the drudgery. It just happens somewhere else, performed by unseen hands. None of my brothers noticed. Not even Uriel, who was the nearest to being a true human being among them. I was simply one more element in the mechanism of that household. Like a machine or some menial from outside.”

  “You sound as if you hated them,” he said, surprised.

  She sighed and glanced at the line of cedars separating them from the pale brick perimeter wall and the lagoon. The trees rustled in the growing breeze stirred by the coming change in the season.

  “Sometimes I did. Not often. Mostly I felt nothing. Nothing at all. I was the woman. I had to sit there listening to Michele dream up his ridiculous, harebrained schemes to make us rich again. I had to watch Gabriele turn out glass that would never sell when, with a few changes, with an ear that listened to the outside world, we could have made a little money at least.”

  “Michele thought that was the job of the capo.”

  “Quite! And a woman’s never going to fill those shoes, is she?”

  “I’m sorry.” Falcone was genuinely shocked. “I rather imagined there were simpler issues here.”

  He hesitated to go on but the bafflement in her face made it impossible to remain silent.

  “I wondered if Bella was Massiter’s only conquest in the household. Whether perhaps jealousy was involved.”

  She laughed out loud, then let her face fall in her hands. When she returned to look at him there were tears in her eyes, tears of mirth and amazement.

  “You thought I would sleep with that creature, Leo? Oh my . . . How could you be so blind? And you’re such an observant man in so many other matters! You really do astonish me sometimes.”

  Yet it had been easy to be blind. There had been a small fire of jealousy sparking the condition. Leo Falcone understood that. Feelings complicated everything, and had done throughout.

  “I’ve never slept with anyone,” she said. “I’m a forty-seven-year-old virgin who has spent her entire life chastely wed to a single belief. That the Arcangeli are the greatest glassmakers in the world, and we must simply wait, like insects trapped in amber, until the rest of you come around to acknowledging that fact. Which was never going to happen, and none of them realised it but me. Whatever Hugo Massiter offered us for the island . . .”—her brown eyes suddenly blazed at him—“ . . . we would take. I wasn’t going to see that last opportunity go to waste. Certainly not over a little slut like Bella, who’d sleep with anything, then call back with her price afterwards.”

  “She told you about the pregnancy?”

  “Of course she did! Are you listening to a single word I say? I was the menial. The servant who washed and cooked and cleaned, while Bella put in her hour or two in the furnace every other night and slept her way round Venice the rest of the time. She told me because it didn’t matter. All that pressure she was putting on Massiter. Threatening to bring the sale down around his head. She believed Michele’s dreams, that Massiter needed us more than we needed him. The woman was too stupid to understand that what she was really jeopardising was our own future.”

  “You could have convinced her.”

  “You’re still not listening,” she replied with a sudden unexpected bitterness. “Servants convince no one. If Bella had died as she should, we would all have been better off. As it was . . . Yes! I sent Bracci that note and the keys. I expected he’d make a fool of himself in public, nothing more, and if he took the blame, so be it. Or it could be Massiter, if Nic wished to persist with his obsession. Provided we had his money first.”

  She peered at the grave, with its fresh earth and the raw headstone with the newly carved name. “When she came back to the house, I killed her. Then I went to bed and slept. What else was there to do? Poor Uriel never could get anything right. He was always walking into the wrong room, picking up the wrong piece of equipment. I saved him so many times. I couldn’t be there every minute of the day.”

  She put out a slender hand to the white marble and traced his name with a long index finger.

  “Do they haunt me?” she asked. “Not anymore. Life is a series of decisions. Some good. Some bad. Most irreversible. I’m not going to look back, Leo. There’s nothing there to see. Uriel’s death was a tragic accident. The rest of them were criminals of a kind, with no great fondness for humanity. My main regret . . .”—her hand moved away from the headstone, and stretched out to touch his own—“ . . . is what happened to you. It was so undeserved, and for such a selfless act. I regret that bitterly. When I saw the state Bracci was in, that he had the weapon, I tried to stop him. You saw what happened.”

  Her fingers tightened on his hand, her eyes peered into his.

  “And you tried to protect me, Leo. I told you how desperately sorry I was so many times in that hospital. When I looked at you and didn’t know whether I’d ever see that spark in your face again. Now that could have broken me. Nothing else. I almost resented that, you know. I thought I was too old and too worn down to be touched by anything. You proved me wrong.”

  He shook his head. “And all the broken lives?” he asked.

  “Which ones?” she replied quickly. “Mine? My brothers’? Bracci’s, for God’s sake? Don’t presume to judge there. What about the lives you and your stubbornness have broken? Young Nic, who put his relationship with that lovely American in jeopardy because he thought something you valued, some distant, hazy notion of justice, was more precious than a simple human emotion like love? And you? Doesn’t it seem somewhat ironic that my only real regret in all this concerns what happened to you? And that is the very last thing on your own mind?”

  “I do what I do!”

  She stood up and pulled his jacket collar more tightly over his shirt. The wind was rising. The evening was closing in. Cold nights were surely on the way, weeks before their time.

  “So what happens now, Inspector Falcone?” she demanded. “You have a woman here who is willing to look after you for a while, and God knows you’re a man who needs caring for. Shouldn’t we both be a little selfish for once?”

  “This isn’t about you or me. It’s about the law . . .”

  “Damn the law! What law stopped Hugo Massiter being what he was? What law do all those bent politicians and crooked policemen feel they’re beholden to? Play the martyr if you must, but at least find a better cause than that.”

  He felt lost for words. Tired, too. That happened a lot lately. He was an invalid, however much he fought the idea.

  She took out her mobile phone. “I’ll have to call for one of those taxi thieves now. It’s just as well I have a little money at last.”

  “We h
aven’t finished!” he objected.

  Raffaella looked at him, her face full of sympathy and affection. Leo Falcone felt lost. Venice was, he realised, beyond him, and always had been. It was simply his own arrogance that had tried to persuade him otherwise.

  “As far as this matter’s concerned, we have, Leo,” she said firmly. “I’m taking you back to the hospital now. Next week we will begin to make arrangements for moving you to Rome. I hope you’ll want me to come, but that’s entirely up to you.”

  “Get me out of here sooner,” he said, almost without thinking. “I’ve had enough of this place.”

  She smiled, then, before he could object, leaned down and kissed his cheek. Leo Falcone felt her soft lips brush against his skin, damp, warm, inviting, and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d been embraced by a woman.

  “You’re not alone in that,” she said. “But this is finished, Leo. What we’ve discussed here I will never talk about again. Never, do you understand? The world is for the living, not the dead.”

  “But . . .”

  A single slender finger came and fell upon his lips. “But nothing. That is the arrangement. Should you break it . . . should you be so rash as to drag me into a police station someday and try to raise these matters again, I will, I swear, do something you’ll come to regret.”

  He waited.

  “I’ll confess, Leo,” she said sweetly, taking hold of the wheelchair, propelling him towards the exit. “And that’s a promise.”

  GIANNI PERONI STOOD BY THE LITTLE RIO, SAYING THE g-word over and over, pointing the empty leaden weapon at the evening sky. Perhaps it was the gun. Or the possibility of change. Whatever the cause, Teresa Lupo, watching him, felt that her senses were preternaturally alert. She could hear every last mosquito whirring busily in the reeds, the croak of frogs, the discordant squawk of squabbling gulls, and, so soft they scarcely mattered, the occasional ghostly plaint of a far-off city vaporetto.

  Then, nearby, something subtler. Crawling, squirming, hiding all the time, an animal that lurked in the undergrowth, watching him, waiting, trying to decode what its senses revealed.

  She sat at the picnic table, eyeing the papers with the little farm’s photos uppermost, determined not to peek at the details, since she knew they’d simply discourage her. It was a small, run-down place. A world away from the bustle of the centro storico. A possibility for them. She put it no higher than that.

  Peroni barked the g-word again. Still the animal didn’t come.

  She considered the situation. The last boat back to the city went in half an hour. She’d no intention of staying in Piero Scacchi’s shack for the night. There really was no alternative.

  “I take it back,” she declared, throwing the box of shells, which, grinning at her, he caught in one gigantic hand. “Give the dog what it wants. If you can, that is.”

  Peroni cocked his head. A single glinting eye winked at her. She was surprised, and also a little dismayed, to see the way he was able to grab a couple of cartridges from the box, drop the rest, then rattle two into the gun without even having to look, snapping the weapon shut with a certain, loud clatter.

  “If I can?” he asked. “I’m a country boy. Born and bred. You should never forget that.”

  “So, country boy . . .” she started to say, when what he did made everything unnecessary.

  “Dog!” he barked with a fresh, commanding insistence.

  Within the space of a few seconds a feathery shape emerged from the reeds, its lithe body rising like a bullet, chased on its way by what sounded like a rough, sharp bark. Peroni swung the gun. A single, now familiar, sound rent the peace of the lagoon. Teresa watched in shocked admiration, and a little wonder, as the bundle of feathers turned in on itself, rolled into a ball, then tumbled into some prickly thicket on the far side of the rio.

  A black shape chased through the water after it, half swimming, half leaping, disappearing into the vegetation for a moment before emerging with a triumphant, energetic swagger, something soft held tight in its jaws.

  Gianni Peroni broke the gun, dropped the two cartridges, one spent, one live, on the ground, held the weapon over his arm, then extended his open hand across the rio.

  “Good dog,” he declared loudly. “Good dog. Now come.”

  Piero Scacchi’s spaniel emerged from the reeds carrying the dead bird, marching towards him, full of pride and expectation.

  Fur matted and dishevelled, it looked as skinny as an abandoned orphan. Xerxes walked up to Peroni, dropped its prize at his feet, then sat, a tired black triangle wagging a short stumpy tail uncertainly, eyes never leaving his face, rapt in the man’s approval.

  Teresa Lupo watched the two of them admiring each other and said nothing.

  Eventually Peroni looked up at her, patting that small black head, his face as serious as she’d ever known it.

  “You don’t want to go, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, without hesitation. “Not yet anyway.”

  Not when the possibility became real. It wasn’t cowardice either. Something told Teresa that dreams were meant to be hunted down on home territory, not chased in some neverland around an unknown corner.

  It was a sweet dog all the same. Quite unsuited for the city, where it would be terrified by the noise and the traffic and the commotion.

  “Laila would love him,” she added. The girl was another of Peroni’s rescues, too, a bright, recovering teenager out on a farm in Tuscany, someone who’d adore the animal, given half a chance.

  “I know,” Peroni agreed, with a swiftness that made her realise this thought had been with him all along. He didn’t look disappointed at all. He was good at hiding his feelings. She knew that.

  Quietly, stealthily, Gianni Peroni slipped an old leather leash round the dog’s neck, then held it firmly, with affection.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  About the Author

  DAVID HEWSON is the author of seven novels. Formerly a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times, he lives in Kent, England, where he is at work on his next thriller, The Seventh Sacrament.

  ALSO BY DAVID HEWSON

  A Season for the Dead

  The Villa of Mysteries

  Lucifer’s Shadow

  The Sacred Cut

  THE LIZARD’S BITE

  A Delacorte Book / November 2006

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2006 by David Hewson

  Title page photograph by Khin Yee Teoh

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hewson, David

  The lizard’s bite/David Hewson

  p. cm.

  1. Police—Italy—Venice—Fiction. 2. Venice (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6058.E96 L59 2006 2006044479

  823/.914 22

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33642-6

  v3.0