The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  “You’re too close to all this,” he continued. “So am I, in a way. Emily, on the other hand, has an admirable and cold indifference. We would both do well to listen.” He glanced at her, a warm glance, one that almost made her feel guilty. “Her advice is aimed at both of us. Whatever you may feel.”

  “And that advice is what exactly?” Michele grumbled.

  She knew the right reply instinctively. “For Hugo? To walk away. Right out of this room without even thinking about going through with this contract, even on the conditions sitting on the table right now. The survey of the island is incomplete and probably corrupt. I don’t need access to the bank accounts of some of the people involved here to understand that most of the reports are down to bribery, not fact. The state of the foundations, of the construction, the iron, the wood, the entire fabric of the palazzo . . . Hugo’s writing a blank cheque for everything, and without at least two months spent on proper, independent surveys, I can’t begin to calculate what the possible cost of putting that place straight might be.”

  “It’s sound!” Michele yelled. “Besides, he’s squared the reconstruction costs with his friends in the regions. It’s public money that gets spent, not his.”

  “That’s irrelevant. The place is a wreck,” she went on. “Had the fire in the fornace gone on for another fifteen minutes, we might not have a property to be discussing right now. Which could have been for the better. You didn’t start that yourself, did you?”

  The man slammed his fist on the table. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

  “Just a thought,” she continued. “It could have made sense. Your island is a shell. Rotten, empty, just waiting to collapse. And without Hugo, it will, too. You need his money. You don’t have time for alternatives.”

  She looked at the brother. “Tell him, Gabriele. You work in those buildings. He just sits in the house trying to cook the books. Tell him the truth. It’s time someone did.”

  The younger brother shuffled in his seat, refusing to look at anything but the papers on the table.

  “Well?” Michele demanded.

  “It’s bad,” Gabriele said quietly. “Worse than you know, Michele. The place is falling down. Sometimes I’d work and I’d wonder how long it would last. What might happen if we got another storm. It’s . . .”

  He stared at the images of the palazzo in front of him, the place restored to some kind of glory, the restaurant tables on the extended quayside, the boats bringing in the tourists to the hotel.

  “It’s time to put an end to this. We can’t go on anymore. Not without Uriel. Not without money.”

  “I sign for the family,” Michele snapped. “That was agreed. It’s down on paper.”

  “That’s agreed,” Gabriele concurred.

  “And if I don’t sign,” the older brother continued, pointing an angry finger in Massiter’s face, “we all go down with this particular ship. You. Us. Those crooks in the city. Everyone.”

  “Everyone?” Massiter echoed, laughing. “I don’t think so. I’ve a talent for walking away from train wrecks. Hadn’t you noticed? Of course, if you really want to risk taking others with you . . .”

  Massiter stared the man down. They both knew how unwise such a course of action would be.

  Michele Arcangelo scowled and was silent.

  Emily Deacon packed away her pen and notepad. “I’ve got nothing else to add here, Hugo,” she declared. “If you want to go ahead with this nonsense, then do so. Just don’t wave the bill in my face when it all goes wrong.”

  “Leave us some dignity,” Michele snarled. “A place to work? A place to sell? Is that too much to ask?”

  “Not at all,” Massiter answered. “I’ve an industrial unit near Piazzale Roma. It’s modern. Efficient. Take it. I’ve some retail outlets in the Strada Nuova too. Have one of those.”

  Michele winced at the very name of the street. Emily knew the long drag from the station to San Marco, a parade of cheap tourist shops selling overpriced junk to gullible visitors.

  “You can pass off anything as genuine there,” Massiter went on. “Take them, Michele. Rent-free for a decade. You can sell your little souvenirs there.”

  “The Strada Nuova . . .” Michele let loose a short string of Venetian curses. “So I’m to be a shopkeeper now?”

  “There’s a great future in shopkeeping hereabouts,” Massiter said. “More so than in making glass trinkets no one wants to buy. These are luxurious times only for those who can afford it. None of us can pick and choose anymore. I was content to live off an auction house once. Now I need to develop a little property, extend my range of friends. Only a fool thinks the world must change around him. We all have to find our own way. Listen to your own brother.”

  Gabriele Arcangelo glowered at Massiter. “I’d like some dignity too,” he remarked.

  “Then take it,” Massiter said severely. “Don’t test my generosity. A place to make your glass. A place to try to sell it. Free for ten years. Either that or ruin.” He leaned forward, emphasising the point. “Utter ruin. Perhaps jail for you, Michele. Or worse.”

  The older man shook his head, full of regret. “I should never have allowed you through the door that day. I could have found others . . .”

  “But you did!” Massiter replied with sudden spirit. “You invited me, if you recall. I only go where I’m welcome. I thought you understood that. And now . . .”

  He withdrew a pen from his monogrammed shirt pocket. A large, gold Parker. He slid it across the table.

  “You can use this in front of the mayor. Pretend it’s yours. Keep it after. Just one thing . . .”

  Michele glared at the shining pen. “What?”

  “Don’t linger once the place is mine,” Hugo Massiter said, with a deprecating smile.

  BY THE TIME GIANNI PERONI ROUNDED THE PIAZZA BY the Arsenale gates, uniformed state police officers were erecting tape barriers to keep out the curious, and stealing snatched glances at the corpse still visible by the stone lion, leaking blood onto the stones.

  Shattered face uppermost, dead eyes staring at the blazing sun, Gianfranco Randazzo didn’t look any more content with the world in death than he had in life. Nor had it been an easy departure. Peroni was sufficiently familiar with gunshot wounds to recognise that it had been a particularly cruel killing. The commissario had been wounded several times in the legs and torso, then crawled from the overturned restaurant tables nearby, leaving a trail of gore, before suffering a final shot to the head, presumably while still on the ground.

  Peroni knew a hit when he saw one. Randazzo had been taken out with a savage, single-minded deliberation, and it was clear from the way the uniforms and a couple of plainclothes men were acting, more like disconcerted street cleaners than busy cops, none of the commissario’s killers had stayed around long enough to be apprehended.

  Zecchini and his officers finally caught up with him, breathless, wide-eyed at the carnage in front of them.

  “I suppose I don’t need to ask,” the Carabinieri major murmured, sweating hard, gasping to get some thin afternoon air into his lungs.

  “Correct,” Peroni replied, eyeing a couple of plainclothes he recognised who were hanging around near the restaurant looking shifty, taking furtive sips at two small beers they’d secreted on the tables there.

  “This is crazy,” Zecchini complained. “Those shots weren’t more than a few minutes ago. How’d they get here so fast?”

  Peroni had run through that one already. “The local Questura’s just round the corner. I imagine they would have heard.”

  All the same, it was pretty swift work.

  The monk had pulled a disgusted face when he talked about the men who’d been assigned to Randazzo. Peroni felt the same way when he ran into this pair in the Questura.

  “Also, unless I’m mistaken, they were supposed to stop something like this from happening. Hey! Lavazzi!”

  One of them turned. The man looked scared.

  “A word, please.” />
  Lavazzi didn’t move, just stayed there, clutching his beer, looking around for help.

  The plainclothes man who was placing a plastic sheet over the corpse swore malevolently, finished the job, then strode over to meet them. Peroni dimly recognised him: one of the faceless people inside the main Piazzale Roma Questura, a local commissario who never so much as gave them a second glance all the time they worked in Venice.

  “You people really should find better ways to spend your time. Now.” He spoke with a flat, monotonous northern accent that wasn’t local, or welcoming.

  Zecchini reached into his jacket and flashed his badge.

  “Carabinieri,” he said, nodding at the sheet on the ground. “We’ve got a warrant to interview this man.”

  “Sadly, it seems you came a little late.” Some medics had turned up. They were running a gurney along the paving stones, looking as if they were ready to move the body. Peroni thought of what had happened on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Everything got taken care of so very, very quickly.

  “You should wait until your pathologist arrives,” he said. “At least look as if you’re trying.”

  The anonymous commissario came close and gave him an ugly look. He was a short man with a walrus moustache and black, lifeless eyes.

  “Shut up, Peroni,” he replied. “This is our business, not yours. And we are trying, by the way. In ways we never had to until you and your Roman buddies turned up. What is it with you people? That this kind of crap just follows you around?”

  Peroni wondered how long he’d have to stay in Venice before he broke the habit of a lifetime and started punching people.

  “Like you said, Commissario,” he replied calmly. “This is your business. It was your business long before we happened to come along. I’m sure it will be that way long after we’re gone. Look to your own rotten apples. Not to us.”

  “You’re gone now!” the officer bellowed, livid. “You’re no longer attached to this Questura. If you start poking your ugly nose in where it doesn’t belong, I’ll throw you in a cell. Understood?” Then he glanced at Zecchini. “The same goes for you. This is a state police case, nothing to worry the Carabinieri.”

  “We have a warrant!” Zecchini said again, taking the papers out of his pocket.

  “You can’t serve a warrant on a dead man!” the commissario yelled.

  “They can ask why the hell he’s dead,” Peroni interjected, “when you were supposed to have men protecting him. Or is that not a question anyone’s supposed to raise outside your little circle of friends?”

  Peroni felt a little guilty about that last crack. The Questura wasn’t above a little petty corruption. He didn’t doubt that. But some general collusion in the assassination of a colleague, even one as little loved as Gianfranco Randazzo, was just a step too far.

  “Look,” he continued, fighting to sound amenable, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I’m just saying, maybe we can help.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  This man was scared too, Peroni suddenly realised. He probably didn’t even know why. All he knew was that he had to keep everything tight and organised and secret until someone else made the decision about what to do next.

  “I’m just saying this,” Peroni answered. “You’ve got a dead colleague on your hands now. A man who was under suspension. A man for whom the Carabinieri had a warrant on the grounds of art smuggling.”

  This last information made the moustache twitch a little. The man’s name came back to Gianni Peroni.

  “Commissario Grassi. Why are we arguing? I know your accent. You’re Milanese. Not from here. The Venetians don’t give a shit about you any more than they do about me. We’re all expendable. Maggiore Zecchini here too. If the carpet turns out to be too small to sweep all this mess under, who do you think gets the blame? The Venetians? Or the likes of us?”

  Peroni watched the reaction on the man’s face and reflected upon the plain fact that a craven man could be as little use as a crooked one.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Peroni? They all said you people were nuts. This is a crime on my watch. It gets investigated by me, the way I say.”

  “You’ve got a dead commissario. You’ve got two murders on that weird island out there. And some corpse in the morgue put there by this man . . .”

  He nodded at the gurney. To his disbelief, they really were lifting Zecchini’s body and placing it on the stretcher.

  “Do you honestly think no one outside Venice is going to be watching all this and wondering?”

  Grassi thought it over. “Wondering what?”

  It was Zecchini who answered. “Wondering whether it isn’t, perhaps, time that someone from elsewhere came and took a look at what’s been going on here. People are starting to talk, Commissario. It gets hard to stop after a while. Sometimes a man has to think of his own career. And let’s face it . . .”

  Zecchini shrugged. He looked a little more confident again. Peroni was glad to see that. Some awkward grain of doubt had been bugging the Carabinieri man ever since Costa had pushed him into this game.

  “We’re here,” the major added. “Doesn’t that give you something to think about?”

  “Lots,” Grassi agreed, nodding. “But principally this: You’re here to interview a dead man. Peroni’s here because he’s an idiot who can’t keep his ugly nose out of something that doesn’t concern him. Neither of you have any right or reason to occupy my time. Furthermore, if you do that, I will, I promise, become very, very pissed off indeed.”

  The gurney wheels squeaked across the paving stones. They really were removing the corpse.

  “So you’ve got some suspects for this, Commissario?” Peroni asked wryly.

  “Good police officers make enemies all the time,” Grassi answered, then gave him a withering look. “Lousy ones too, sometimes. Best you remember that.”

  With that, Grassi turned on his heels and went back to the gurney and the corpse, back to barking routine orders at the SOCOs who stood around lazily putting on their bunny suits like men wishing they could bunk off for the day.

  Zecchini watched him go, shaking his head. “I need a beer,” he moaned. “Anyone care to join me?”

  “I’m buying,” Peroni said.

  The Carabinieri man turned and gave him some kind of look Peroni didn’t quite understand. Furtive maybe. Or just filled with some impending guilt.

  “No,” Zecchini told Peroni. “This one’s on me. Best find your partner too. We need to talk.”

  WHEN HE CAME TO, DANIEL FORSTER WAS STILL THERE, gun by his side, barrel not quite in Costa’s face. Costa raised his fingers to the site of the blow. There was blood there. He winced.

  “A little of the English comes back in your voice when you’re angry,” he observed.

  Daniel Forster glared at him. “You deserved it.”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions, Mr. Forster. Can I get up? Would it be too much to ask for some water?”

  Laura Conti spoke to him rapidly in English, something Costa couldn’t catch, then she went to the sink and came back with a glass. Costa dragged himself off the floor and took the water, gulping at it gratefully.

  “You won’t do anything stupid, Daniel,” she said firmly. “I mean that.”

  Costa found himself shocked by the man’s appearance. Daniel Forster was a cultivated man. Now he looked lost, broken, damaged. It was Laura Conti who was protecting him, it seemed. Not the other way round.

  “Hear me out . . .” Costa began.

  The shotgun waved in front of him again.

  “Shut up! We’ve planned, you know. We can be out of here in an hour. There are boats. There are people who’ll help us. We’ll be gone before they even find your corpse.”

  The woman put her hand firmly on the weapon. “No, Daniel. I won’t permit it.”

  “I’m not who you think,” Costa said, gingerly reaching into his jacket and offering the ID card there. “I’m a police officer. I’m here to ask
you to help us do what we should have done years ago. Put Hugo Massiter in jail.”

  Forster looked astonished. Then he laughed. It wasn’t an encouraging sound.

  “Listen to him, Daniel!” Laura Conti snapped. “Give him a chance.”

  “A chance for the police to put Hugo in jail?” Forster asked. “How many chances do they want?”

  “Just one good one,” Costa replied immediately. “You can give it to us.”

  It was the woman who answered. She fixed him with sad, resigned eyes and said, “No. That’s not possible. We can’t help you. In any way. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you just want to stay in hiding for the rest of your lives? Being people you’re not? Keeping out of the way?”

  “And staying alive,” Daniel Forster said glumly. He scanned the room, clearly hating what he saw. “Even like this.”

  “I promise you won’t be in danger,” Costa added quickly. “We can provide protection. Whatever you need.”

  Forster laughed again. There was a little less harshness in the young Englishman’s voice this time. Nic Costa saw a glimpse of the man he must once have been.

  “We had what we needed once before,” he said with a sigh. “A home. Money. Our freedom. Most of all, each other. Massiter came back from the dead somehow and stole everything but the last.”

  He put down the weapon, clutched the woman around the waist briefly, kissed her cheek, then looked across at Costa again, his face stony with determination.

  “He won’t take that away too,” he added.

  “But this isn’t who you are,” Costa objected, watching the way the woman closed her eyes when Forster embraced her, the shared pain there when she reopened them.

  She looked at the ID card more closely. “Hugo Massiter stole who we were years ago, Agente Costa,” she told him. “What kind of a life do you think we’d go back to?”