The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  “Why are we here?” Falcone demanded. “Why are we in some fancy private boat, going God knows where? And who the hell are you anyway?”

  Randazzo glowered at the three men opposite him. “Falcone . . .” the commissario warned. “You’re not in Rome now. I want some respect here.”

  “They’re reasonable questions,” the Englishman objected. “I’d be surprised if he didn’t want to know. Disappointed, frankly. We don’t want idiots for this job, now, do we?”

  Peroni issued a low grunt of disapproval, then demanded, “So what do you want?”

  Massiter leaned back on the old brown leather, let his arm wander over to the tiny fridge built into the cabinet at the end of the seats, and withdrew a small bottle of Pellegrino, misty with ice.

  “Help yourself,” he beckoned.

  “We’re waiting,” Falcone insisted.

  The Englishman took a long gulp, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his silk shirt. They rounded the corner of the island, past the giant boatyards and docks, the football stadium and the odd collection of workers’ houses that no one, not even the police, paid much attention to. Murano now rose on the low, bright horizon, a spiky forest of chimneys and cranes rising up from the grey blue of the lagoon, beyond the cemetery island of San Michele, with its pale brick exterior wall, like that of a private castle, topped by a green fringe of cedar points.

  “What we want,” Hugo Massiter said, “is to stop this poor old city sinking any further into its own shit. If we can.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, then tossed the empty water bottle out of the open window, into the grey, foaming wake of the speeding vessel.

  “And that, gentlemen, very much depends on you.”

  ANGELO ARCANGELO HAD CREATED THE ISLAND HIMSELF, designed every last detail, intent on raising an everlasting masterpiece from the rubble he’d bought for a pittance. Everything was new, everything unique, cast in shapes that seemed impossible. The island was a testament to the power and beauty of glass, and by implication the Arcangeli themselves. On three separate plots, Angelo set out his stall for an admiring world to see. The palazzo was ninety percent leaded crystal, ten percent black iron and timber, a towering, organic beacon of light, with three curving roofs, the centre higher than the rest, rising more than twenty metres above the quayside. Behind the entrance doors the skeleton of a gigantic palm tree Angelo had imported from Sicily still lurked, its corpse now awaiting Hugo Massiter’s restorers, who had their own ideas, ones that Angelo would never have countenanced. To the right, seen from the water, stood the foundry, an elegant artisans’ workplace, fronted by four of the longest windows in Venice. They reached to the low, sloping roof, large enough to accommodate the crowds who would press their noses against the glass, wondering at the marvels being wrought by the Arcangeli’s maestri inside. And in the final third of the frontage, on the other side of the palazzo, stood Ca’ degli Arcangeli, the family home, ten apartments on three floors, with kitchens and bathrooms, offices and space to house meetings, receptions, banquets . . . . Angelo had begun his life’s project as a testament to the dynasty he was creating. By the time he died he knew the truth: that the island was an impossibility. Too expensive to maintain in the face of a public whose tastes for glass were fickle and shifting. Too complex and unwieldy to be managed by the children who followed him.

  Some of the beauty remained, though. Most of all in the family temple, the shrine to the clan that was the focus of the palazzo: an airy, cavernous dining room that occupied much of the first-floor frontage, filled by the constant light of the lagoon, with uninterrupted views past the Murano lighthouse, out to San Michele and the Fondamente Nuove waterfront. He’d made the glass with his own hands, labouring for almost a year to produce an astonishing, multi-windowed eyelid over the waterfront, some panes clear, some distorting bull’s-eyes with myriad stains, all pulled together into a massive, curving viewpoint that dominated the building’s façade.

  Angelo had told everyone he wanted to emulate the captain’s room of some medieval Venetian war galley, a nod back towards the Arcangeli’s boat-building past, though the squero in Chioggia had turned out nothing fancier than fishing barques that never went beyond the Adriatic. His face, stern, demanding, with some hard, unrelenting love inside it too, still stared down at them all from the large portrait that hung over the marble Doric fireplace opposite what all of them knew simply as the occhio, the eye. In the sixties, when the Isola degli Arcangeli was in its heyday, artists would gather here. Raffaella still recalled some: Igor Stravinsky patting her daughter’s head fondly, then patiently listening to her run through the scale of C on the old Steinway. Ezra Pound, a dark, morose man, sitting in the corner of the room, saying nothing, clutching a glass. Both now lay beneath the earth on San Michele across the water, among the privileged handful allowed to stay beyond the strict decade allotted to any who now wished to follow.

  For all the fame of their visitors, it was her father’s presence that continued to haunt the place. This was where the clan would gather three times each day, to eat, to talk, to plot the future. Over the long years—forty-seven since Raffaella had come into the world—they’d organised liaisons and alliances, planned marriages and, on one painful occasion, a divorce. Held some kind of board meeting too, from time to time, not that the foundry ran along conventional lines, or was ever a business open to the voice of more than one man. There was always a capo. First Angelo, then Michele, the eldest, whose name meant “like God,” as he knew only too well.

  She’d researched a little history in her spare time later, when she’d been recalled home from her too-brief studies in Paris to work in the family business as its finances began to falter. The supposed history was, like so much to do with the Arcangeli, a myth. The republic’s galleys never had that kind of ornate, impractical windowed platform at the house’s stern. Venice was Venice, single-minded, sensible always. Warships were made to carry cannon, not a complex panoply of handcrafted windows, tessellated like the bulging, multicoloured eye of a fly. Angelo Arcangelo had exaggerated, invented, as he always did. Beauty forgave everything, in his view, and the curious, bulbous addition to his house was extraordinarily beautiful. His daughter now sat in the embrace of the long bend of the cushioned bench built into the windows’ base, her fingers touching the familiar fading red velvet, her eyes wandering around the room.

  Outside she could hear the firemen working by the quay, grumbling, shifting their machines and their heavy hoses, loading what they no longer needed back onto their boats. The bright morning air seeped in through the shuttered windows. It stank of smothered smoke. She knew that, if she looked, there would be a handful of policemen shuffling their feet by the foundry entrance, bored behind the yellow tape they’d erected.

  Raffaella wondered when she would pluck up the courage to leave this room and face the world outside. Among the many myths they’d propagated within the clan these last few years was the idea that this room, with its eye over the lagoon, was a place where the power of the Arcangeli remained intact, untouched by the troubles gathering around their small island home. While the rest of the Isola crumbled and gathered dust, this place remained pristine, swept daily by her own hand now the servants were gone. Polished, cared for, it remained a symbol of what they once were, perhaps could be again. This was where she served breakfast, lunch and dinner, good plain Murano food, cornetti from the bakery round the corner, fat bigoli pasta with thick red sauce made from anchovies and Sant’ Erasmo tomatoes. Meat for supper, though not necessarily the best. And fish sometimes, if she could find it at the right price. This was where, she had come to believe, they could retreat forever.

  Staring out over the grey lagoon, her vision blurred by tears, she found her mind wrestling with so many strands of thought. Memories and regrets mingled with practicalities, funeral details, people who had to be told. The family had been spared death for so long. Not a single close member had left them since their father had passed away. And even he
hadn’t really departed. The room where Angelo took his last breath was still empty. She swept it every day, making the bed, changing the pressed white sheets once a week, because that was what Michele wanted, how the capo said matters should stand. A photograph of their mother, an attractive, worn-looking woman, stood over the head, by a small crucifix. She had died when Raffaella was tiny. For her daughter she always remained somehow unreal, a person who never quite existed, except, perhaps, as a comment on those who survived her, a question mark asking why they were enjoying the gift of life when the woman who gave them it was gone.

  They hadn’t thought about the grave, not in a long time. There’d been so many other dark, pressing issues to worry about. And now the blackness had arrived on the back of the night sirocco and taken two souls with such sudden brutal cruelty.

  There was a sound at the door. Michele bustled in, followed, as always, by Gabriele, and Raffaella found, to her surprise, that she now saw both of them differently. Michele was twelve years older than she. In a way, he’d always been an adult and now he looked his age, more so than she’d ever noticed before. Uriel’s death had made her conscious of the Arcangeli’s shared mortality, something they’d all sought to hide over the years. It was as if the event had drawn away a veil that had stood between them, and in doing so revealed distance, not the closeness she would have hoped for.

  A minor stroke had creased the right side of Michele’s face. Now, with his greying hair slicked back and pomaded, leaving a silver widow’s peak in the middle, he looked like a man entering the final part of the journey of existence, sooner than he should. He was less than medium height, with a slight build, an unimpressive man to look at, she thought, until he spoke, and in that voice, a powerful monotone, switching from Veneto to Italian, French to English or German, lay an authority none could mistake. And now he was old. Old and bewildered and angry.

  He sat down at the polished table, banged a fist on the surface, hard enough to send the china briefly flying, then, without another word, gulped at the coffee she’d provided before tearing at a cornetto.

  Gabriele joined him and reached for some coffee and pastries too.

  Raffaella wiped her face with the sleeve of her old cotton shirt, took one last look at the lagoon, then made her way to the seat opposite them, facing both across the bright, gleaming wood. The Arcangeli ate together. They always would.

  She waited. After he’d done with the coffee and the pastries, Michele fixed her with his one good eye.

  “More police will be here soon. They’ll want to talk to everyone again. Same damn questions. Poking their long, sharp noses in where no one wants them.”

  “Michele . . .” she said softly, hoping her voice did not sound as if she wished to contradict him. “The police have to be involved. What do you expect? Uriel. Poor Bella . . .”

  “Poor Bella!” he barked back at her, spitting flakes of cornetto. “That woman’s been nothing but trouble since she came here. One more mouth to feed and nothing in return. Poor Bella! What about us?”

  Gabriele, two years younger than Michele, though the gap seemed larger, stared at his plate and gently tore his food into strips, silent, unwilling to become involved.

  “They’re dead,” Raffaella answered quietly. “Both of them. Whatever happened they deserve some respect.”

  Michele put down his coffee cup and glared at her. She was unable to stop herself from stealing a glance at the portrait above them. Michele was their father sometimes. It was hard to separate the two of them.

  “We all know what happened,” he said bluntly. “The sooner it’s put down in black and white on paper, the sooner we return to what matters. The business.”

  “Michele . . .”

  Just the look on his face silenced her. There’d never been physical contact within the Arcangeli. Not even when Angelo was alive. This was not through choice. Force had simply never been needed, not when the fierceness of a cold, heartless eye could stun any of them into submission.

  “We will not fail, Raffaella. I will not allow that to happen.”

  He brushed the crumbs off his lap with a brisk hand, then stood up. Gabriele, to her disgust, was rushing down his food and coffee in order to do the same.

  “Where on earth are you going?” she asked.

  “To test the fires,” Michele replied. “To connect the gas. To see how soon we can get the foundry up and running. I’ll bring in others from the outside if need be. The insurance money will surely pay for it.”

  “Do you know that?” she demanded.

  “Nothing’s insurmountable. We’ll hire some furnace space elsewhere if it’s necessary. What’s a fire in this business? It used to happen all the time.”

  He was so single-minded. He really believed this was all there was to consider.

  Gabriele finally found the strength to speak. “We’ll lose a day or two, Michele. That at least. Don’t fool yourself.”

  “A day, a day,” sniffed the older man, waving an arm. “What’s a day?”

  “It’s a day in which we fail to make something no one wishes to buy,” Raffaella said sourly, hating the bitter tone inside her voice the moment she heard it. This was a kind of heresy. The one taboo subject barred from discussion beneath the eye that gazed constantly out onto the lagoon.

  Both men turned to regard her with undisguised aversion.

  “It’s true,” she insisted, determined not to be bullied into silence. “The longer you two fools stay away from that place, the longer the money lasts. If you make nothing, Michele, we don’t have to pay anyone for raw materials, do we?”

  “We don’t pay anyone as it is,” he retorted unpleasantly. “Leave business to men. It’s not for you.”

  She felt the red heat of anger rise in her head, a foreign emotion, one that had been placed there by tragedy and refused to go away.

  “So what’s a woman to do in this position? To bury our brother and his wife? Where? And with what?”

  Michele nodded at the window. “You know where Uriel belongs. The island. For now anyway. The Braccis can deal with the other one. She’s their problem. She should have stayed that way all along.”

  Her voice rose to a screech. She couldn’t help it. “We can’t afford San Michele!” she yelled at him, unable to control her emotions. “Undertakers want money. Not promises. We’re not good for credit anymore. Don’t you understand?”

  He had the demeanour of the patriarch. At that moment he might have been his father. Michele Arcangelo walked over to one of the cabinets and took out the most precious item left. It was a sixteenth-century water bowl in the form of a galley, a beautiful piece, the hull of the vessel in clear glass, the rigging in blue. On its side was the seal of the Tre Mori furnace, a guarantee that it would fetch a good price anywhere. They’d owned it forever, or so it seemed to her. Angelo, in particular, had adored the work, which was why it had remained unsold thus far.

  Michele turned the precious object in his hand, admiring it with one sharp, professional eye.

  “Then bury him with this,” he said, with not a trace of emotion.

  IT ONLY TOOK A COUPLE OF MINUTES TO HEAR RANDAZZO’S story. After that, the three cops from Rome looked at each other and wondered what they’d done to deserve this one. Venice had police aplenty. Any of the locals could have taken on the case, done what the miserable commissario wanted, signed off the report, then returned to guiding tourists back to their cruise ships. There was, Costa knew, some reason why Randazzo had picked three temporary strangers in the little Questura in Castello for this job. He wondered whether they were going to hear it. And one more thing bothered him. Hugo Massiter’s name was familiar somehow. He just couldn’t put a finger on how he knew it.

  Falcone nodded when the narrative was done, then asked, “So you’re sure this is what happened? There can’t be any other explanation?”

  Randazzo waved a hand at the approaching jetty. Costa could smell the smoke from the island. The firefighters’ vessels clustered a
round the blackened quayside, near the still-smouldering outline of what looked like a large, once elegant industrial building. A narrow white tapering chimney emerged from its shattered and smoke-stained glass roof. To its left stood an extraordinary glass structure, like a gigantic hothouse designed by a madman, patched with scaffolding and ladders. On the other side was a stone palace, not unlike the Doge’s, but with an extraordinary eyelike bubble of glass protruding from an upper floor. These odd architect’s fantasies sat alone on a small island, next to a squat lighthouse by a vaporetto stop marked “Murano Faro.” Only a narrow metal bridge joined the property to Murano proper. It was surmounted by the iron figure of an angel, like an icon beckoning to visitors. A silver-haired man was working at its base, his face red with anger as he fought with a writhing serpent’s nest of cables.

  “See for yourself,” the commissario told them. “The Arcangeli are the only people who live here. It’s locked at night.”

  He gazed into their faces, trying to make sure they understood that what he said next was pivotal to his argument. “The room where they were found was locked from the inside. There’s no other access. Except through the windows, and the labourer said they were intact until the fire blew them out.”

  “How do you know he’s telling the truth?” Peroni wondered.

  Randazzo snorted, amused. “So what’s the alternative? This character somehow let himself in, killed both Uriel Arcangelo and his wife, then locked the door, went out through the fire, went back in and made out he was trying to rescue the man he’d just killed. Why?”

  “And the one who’s dead? He’s supposed to have a motive for killing his wife?” Costa asked.

  “It’s there somewhere. You’ll find it. We all know the statistics. Families kill one another first. That would be your instinct anyway, wouldn’t it?”

  “You can’t convict someone on statistics,” Falcone said carefully. “Or instinct. I don’t mean any disrespect, sir, but I think we’ve more experience of murder inquiries than you. Rome’s that kind of place.”