The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  She wondered about the details of the deal. They could be important. “Were you really that close to the edge?”

  “Damn right,” he moaned. “More than anyone knows. I still am until I have the Arcangeli’s signature on the contract. Though I don’t expect that to be a problem now. Tomorrow night. Six o’clock. It’s done. A little ceremony in that beautiful dining room of theirs. Which will be my dining room afterwards.”

  “I thought the Arcangeli were going to keep part of the house. You’d live in the apartment.”

  He snorted. “You didn’t really believe that, did you? Does the master live in the servants’ accommodation? I think not. There are a few changes to the contract that Michele has yet to comprehend. But he will. When I buy that island, it’s mine. No strings. No caveats. I can do what I like. A hotel. An apartment block. Stores.”

  “And the Arcangeli?”

  He looked at her, disappointed. “They’ll have capital. They need this deal badly. Their debts are now impossible to ignore.”

  Nic had told her exactly what he’d come to see as the Arcangeli’s real concern. They wanted a second chance to continue to make glass, a way to keep their art.

  “A livelihood. A working foundry, where they feel they belong. I thought that was important to them.”

  “It’s important to Michele. Uriel never gave a damn. Gabriele does as he’s told. The sister’s neither here nor there. They can take the cash. Open a bar. Dream their dreams. Do what the hell they like. Provided . . .”

  He licked his lips. There were still some doubts here.

  “Provided what?”

  “Nothing you need worry about,” he replied curtly. “There’s a little . . . tidying necessary before tomorrow night. But I’m a tidy man. I can deal with that. No lawyer can throw a spanner in the works. It was messier than I’d expected, but that happens.”

  “And after tomorrow night?”

  He grinned. The broad, coarse gesture changed his face, made his features exaggerated, ugly.

  “After that I prosper! More than ever. The auction business is as flat as this damn lagoon, but property . . . That island’s worth ten times what I’m paying them. I can get any number of backers to redevelop that place just by picking up the phone. So could the Arcangeli if they hadn’t been so arrogant. There’s only one industry here now and that’s cramming as many gullible tourists into the streets as possible and fleecing them blind. No one wants glass. No one wants art, not real art anyway. The Arcangeli never learned that lesson. They tried to fool themselves it was different for them. It isn’t.”

  “They wanted to keep a little pride in themselves,” she objected.

  “That’s the first thing that goes out the window,” he retorted. “The leisure industry . . .” Massiter pulled a pained face as he pronounced the word in the American style . . . lee-sure. “ . . . has no place for self-worth. It’s money and money alone. Bring ’em in, send ’em home poorer, then get some more patsies to take their place.”

  He waved a hand back at the city, then poured himself another glass and relaxed back onto the leather seats.

  “That’s all Venice has left these days,” he continued, clearly enjoying the lifting resonance of his own voice. “This isn’t a real place anymore. It’s just a trickle-down town, somewhere people are either dropping crumbs or picking them up. The young know it, which is why they’re fleeing to the mainland. Can you blame them? Who wants to live in a museum? In twenty years there’ll scarcely be a real Venetian left. The smart ones will have gone to earn real money elsewhere. The trash will be working in some vacuum-cleaner factory in Mestre, glad they own a car and can bring home the shopping in that instead of lugging it through the streets. Venice is just an old dead whore who manages to fetch a price on what’s left of her looks. Anyone who forgets that is just an idiot romantic. And romantics lose perspective in the end. It can cost them everything.”

  He called to the man in the white uniform, working the wheel in the open cabin up front. “No speeding, Dimitri. Let’s make a leisurely time of it across the lagoon.”

  The roar of the engine dimmed to a steady drone. Hugo flicked a switch by the side of the drinks cabinet. A spotless canvas roof began to unfurl itself from beneath the upper deck, stretching along the runners of the main cabin, hiding them from the burnished sky. After a second or two, all she could see was the grey line of the lagoon moving steadily past the narrow side windows, the occasional floating gull, and the nets of the few fishermen still working the waters.

  He came over and sat next to her, then, in a swift, earnest gesture, kissed the naked skin of her shoulder. She thought of Hemingway’s ghost, dreaming about finding an escape from the steady progression of the years with a young girl, locked together in a gondola rocking on the greasy lagoon waves.

  “The question of intimacy will not go away,” Hugo murmured in her ear, his hand playing gently across her left breast.

  The soft leather seats, the lapping of the lagoon against the hull . . . she fought to chase the images of what might be from her mind.

  Then Emily shuffled herself away from his grasp, hung her head, determined to make sure she got this right, because Hugo Massiter was no fool.

  “Not yet,” she murmured. “I’m not ready, Hugo. I’m sorry.”

  “When?” he asked, a brute flatness in his voice.

  “What is this?” she snapped. “Are we making appointments?”

  “You came to me,” he reminded her.

  “Perhaps you should turn the boat around. I need some space.”

  “Space.”

  He went back to the other side of the cabin, flicked the switch, waited for the canvas roof to withdraw back into the hull, then barked at the boatman in a rattle of indecipherable Venetian dialect.

  The boat picked up speed, the nose jerked skywards again.

  “Of course,” he murmured.

  A flicker of alarm sounded in her head. Something was wrong. Maybe she was a bad actor. Maybe . . .

  His phone rang. Massiter went forward to the open wheelhouse, out of earshot.

  Emily tried to picture herself in the classroom at Langley. They’d had that all-important conversation just a couple of times, handled it briefly, professionally, not quite looking one another in the eye. Hoping, she understood, it would never come to be asked in anger.

  How far would you go to get something vital, something you—or one close to you—desperately needed?

  Would you torture a man to stop a bomb blowing up in a school? Would you murder someone to keep a hostage from dying?

  There were no easy answers. Except when it came to personal matters. If it had a chance of success, would you hand over something that couldn’t hurt, not physically, something most of us gave away for free anyway, sometimes to people we never loved, to strangers even?

  They’d all said yes to that one. It seemed selfish, somehow, to countenance any other outcome.

  She thought of Falcone, of Nic, Peroni, and Teresa, and the conversation the four of them had had that night on the terrace of the hospital, when all their doubts began to solidify into something that promised to turn into hard fact. It seemed so easy then to look each other in the eye and swear they’d not let the Venetians bury this particular case. Not when Leo Falcone lay somewhere between life and death in a bright white room overlooking the lagoon, in a place she could now see in the distance, rising and falling with the swell of the waves.

  Massiter’s low voice was indecipherable. In another lifetime she’d have had the devices that could penetrate his phone’s electronic heart, recorded every whispered word he said. Now there was nothing but her own personal talents. Nothing beyond her fingertips. She hadn’t heard a word.

  He ended the call and came back to the cabin to sit across from her.

  “You never stop, do you?” she commented.

  “Never slow down, never grow old. You must allow me the odd fantasy.” He looked grey and deadly serious at that moment. “I was,”
he added, “doing a little of what our builder friends call ‘making good.’”

  The cold eyes roved over her. “Tidiness is a virtue, Emily. And I like to think of myself as a virtuous man.”

  THEY ENTERED THE HOUSE AT NINE O’CLOCK THE FOLLOWING morning. It was in a quiet, shady residential street behind Gran Viale, the main shopping drag of the Lido, which ran from the vaporetto stop in a long straight line to the other side of the narrow island and the beaches, stretching out in front of the white whalelike colossus of the Grand Hotel des Bains. It was a weekday. Only a trickle of youngsters were heading for the sea, towels and swimsuits in their hands. Overhead the occasional small plane buzzed on the final approach to the little general aviation airport that sat at the northern tip of the Lido.

  Luca Zecchini, a man with an eye for property, reckoned the place, a small mansion in what was known on the Lido as “liberty style,” all curlicues, outdoor steps and fancy windows, was worth a good million euros or more. Nic Costa didn’t feel moved to argue. They needed some luck. It was now nine-thirty in the morning. Nic had heard nothing of importance from Teresa Lupo, nothing at all from Emily, and only received the briefest of messages from the hospital to say that Falcone’s condition was unchanged. The one hard piece of news he had received came from Raffaella Arcangelo, via Teresa. The legal complications of the contract for the sale to Massiter had been resolved. There would be a brief signing ceremony that evening at six. Or so Hugo Massiter hoped.

  The previous afternoon Zecchini and his men had worked hard to squeeze a warrant out of a Verona magistrate, one chosen for his discretion, since no one wanted details of the planned raid leaked. If they were lucky, the objects in Randazzo’s home would prove interesting enough for Zecchini to demand an interview with the commissario himself, who was being kept discreetly out of view by the Venice Questura. From that point on they could, he hoped, begin to put the squeeze on Massiter. If Teresa did come up with something, all the better. Costa’s theory was that, once Massiter was in custody on one charge, it would be easier to instigate a rolling set of investigations against him—over the Arcangeli deaths and, if he could just find the right breakthrough, in connection with the stalled investigation involving Daniel Forster and Laura Conti too. Maybe they wouldn’t get the personal pleasure of sending the man down. But once the momentum was there, it would, surely, be impossible for Massiter to wriggle off the line.

  If . . . they could assemble enough material to make an arrest before Massiter claimed ownership of the island. Once the Arcangeli’s names were on that piece of paper, they would not simply be hunting one man. They’d be challenging the entire hierarchy of the city, men who’d staked their reputations on clinching a deal to secure the future of the Isola degli Arcangeli—and sweep its recent murky financial past under the carpet. That made everything so much harder, perhaps too hard for a man like Luca Zecchini, who’d already stuck his neck on the block more than Costa expected. Power mattered in Venice. Costa understood that, and so, too, did Zecchini. Every failed attempt to tackle Massiter seemed to leave the Englishman more in control than before. They had little time to start the ball rolling, and few clear ideas on where Massiter’s weak point might emerge.

  There were now eight Carabinieri officers in the grey, unmarked van, all armed, all good men, Nic thought. Zecchini had assembled only the ones he trusted most. They’d committed themselves to Venice for the entire day. And they didn’t intend to go home empty-handed.

  Hunched on the seat opposite Costa and Peroni, Zecchini eyed the two cops.

  “Decision time, gentlemen,” he said. “There’s still room to get out of this. We could just walk away.”

  “Leave us the warrant then,” Costa replied immediately. “Whatever happens, we’re going in.”

  Zecchini shrugged his shoulders. “I hope Leo appreciates this one day.” He patted the man next to him on the shoulder. “Avanti!”

  IT WAS A BRISK, professional operation. In the space of four minutes they ascertained the house was empty, removed the front door, and were inside, wandering the big, airy rooms, admiring a residence that was surely beyond the scope of most senior police officers. Randazzo liked paintings. That surprised Nic Costa, though he couldn’t help but wonder if it was really the commissario’s wife’s taste they were seeing here in the selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canvases, a handful of old religious icons and set upon set of antique Japanese prints.

  Luca Zecchini walked around examining what was there with a professional eye, taking photos, referring from time to time to some visual database he kept on a little palmtop computer in his jacket pocket. He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t look happy. Peroni was shooting Costa concerned glances. This wasn’t their only opening, but it was, the two men had assumed, their best.

  “Luca,” Costa said when they’d been around every room on the ground floor, with the Carabinieri man shaking his head constantly. “What have we got?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “Maybe something. Maybe not. If I’m going to pull this guy in today, I need something positive. I can’t just do it on suspicion. Even if this is illegal, it’s minor stuff, the kind of things you’d buy from an antiques fair. Nothing terribly valuable. If we try to nail the bastard on this alone, he’ll just feign ignorance. Say he bought it at some sale somewhere. It’s going to be hard to prove otherwise.”

  “What about the icons?” Costa asked. “Don’t you think they’re Serbian?”

  “Sure. But what does that tell us? Without positive identification, without proof of provenance, all we’ve got are suspicions. There’s nothing here that raises any flags. When I get back to Verona, maybe. But that’s going to take time. Don’t get me wrong. I can work on the paintings. I just . . .” He was trying to soften the blow. “I can’t give you anything straightaway. Sorry.”

  Peroni was scratching his head. “It wasn’t just paintings,” the big cop objected. “That may be all you saw two days ago, Nic. But there was more. Weird stuff.”

  Plenty of weird stuff, Costa thought, when he looked at the shelves. Oriental ceramics. Cloisonné vases and screens. Randazzo’s home was a mishmash of styles, regions and eras that denoted a couple of uncertain tastes.

  “The weirdest,” Peroni said, “was in there.”

  He was pointing to a glass cabinet hidden in a corner near the fireplace, something Costa had never noticed.

  Peroni walked over, opened the doors and returned with a small, very old statue. A squat, grinning figure in worn stone, seated cross-legged with a beaded necklace and an expression halfway between a Buddha’s and a satyr’s.

  “It sort of stuck in my mind,” Peroni explained, pointing to the huge erection which rose between the creature’s legs.

  Luca Zecchini took the object from him, turning it in his hands. Then the Carabinieri major gave the statue back to Peroni, pulled the palmtop out of his pocket and began to punch the buttons. In just a couple of seconds he stopped, grinned at both of them, then turned the little screen round for them to see. It was a photo of something that looked very like Randazzo’s object.

  “Babylonian,” he said. “Seen a few like this since Iraq fell.”

  “It’s the one in the picture?” Peroni asked.

  “No. But it’s close enough.”

  “Valuable?”

  Zecchini nodded. “In a roundabout way. These things are what passes for hard currency in the drug trade. We’re doing pretty well working on cross-border money laundering. It’s not easy to move big amounts of cash around the world anymore. You get asked awkward questions when you try to bank it.”

  “So you ship valuable antiques instead,” Costa said. “They’re easier to smuggle. And when they get to the other end, someone turns them into money and pays off the debt.”

  “Exactly,” Zecchini agreed, seemingly impressed by Costa’s knowledge. “These things were household gods. Every worthwhile specimen was either in a private collection or Iraq’s museums. There’s so muc
h stuff leaking out of Baghdad, all of it through criminal channels, we’re under strict instructions to report every last piece we come across.”

  One of those little planes interrupted the conversation, buzzing low overhead. They had to wait for it to go away before anyone could speak.

  “So it’s good?” Peroni asked.

  Zecchini pulled out his mobile phone. “It’s a start. Commissario Randazzo and I need to meet. Are you coming along?”

  Costa shook his head, then glanced at his partner. “Gianni, you go. I’ve something to do.”

  Peroni didn’t look too pleased. “Anyone I know? I don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  “Just a couple of ghosts,” Costa replied, nodding towards the window and the blue sky beyond. “And maybe not even that.”

  AS THE CARABINIERI WENT THROUGH COMMISSARIO Randazzo’s personal belongings in a mansion too big for a policeman, Emily Deacon sat on the deck of Hugo Massiter’s launch, picking at the remains of a late breakfast, shielded from the gaze of the tourists on the waterfront behind thick, smoked glass. She had waited for this opportunity. Massiter had left the vessel to revisit his lawyers, and declared he wouldn’t be returning until the afternoon. She could, he said, drop by if she wanted. It was an invitation she left open. There was work to do. The Croatian gangsters seemed to have departed en masse too. Now it was just her and the three Filipino women who cleaned and cooked and served, then retired to their quarters to await orders.

  Evidence.

  That was what Nic needed, needed it desperately. In any form she could find.

  She stood up, brushed the crumbs of the morning cornetto off her tee-shirt, then rang for one of the Filipinos to come to clear up.

  It was the youngest who arrived from the galley, dressed in white, dark hair tied back in a bun. A girl who looked no more than eighteen. Emily watched her with the unconcerned disdain she imagined was expected in the circumstances.

  “What’s your name?” she asked in Italian.