David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

None of these issues would now be addressed. The tragedies of the Isola degli Arcangeli were, for the city, closed the moment Randazzo’s bullet shattered Aldo Bracci’s skull. Leo Falcone was simply what a certain kind of military man would call “collateral damage,” and all to crown Hugo Massiter king of the city.

They had looked at each other that night, listened to Nic carefully picking his way through the known facts, feeling a certainty grow inside them, one that didn’t need to be said aloud to be understood. To the Venetians they were strangers, all of them. They’d be excluded from what swift tidying up of the facts would now ensue. If Nic was right—and it soon turned out he was—they’d be squeezed out of the Questura too, kept away from any stray difficult facts.

Which was, if only the Venetians understood it, the stupidest thing the city could do. They didn’t know Costa and Peroni. They didn’t understand what kind of men they were. How the two would spend days, weeks, trying to peer beneath the wrapping of that carefully presented, utterly fictitious case Venice was presenting to the world, picking at the seams until everything fell apart.

Facts, Nic said at the time, acting out a fair impersonation of Falcone at his best.

Who benefited from what happened that night?

Hugo Massiter and his cronies in the council. And the Arcangeli, too, since they finally got the money they so desperately needed, even if it came with strings.

Who had a motive to kill Bella and Uriel?

There lay the lacunae. Uriel Arcangelo, from what they understood, was keen on the deal with Massiter. His death created difficult and expensive legal problems. But some motive existed. It needed to be found, and to do that, Nic said, they must follow Leo’s rules. You mixed things up a little. You piled on the pressure. You got nosy and difficult and kept on chasing down the lies.

And you imagined.

Bella was carrying Massiter’s child, and trying to blackmail the Englishman into keeping her, something Massiter couldn’t allow, even if her death complicated his business matters.

So Massiter, or one of his henchmen, killed Bella, doctored Uriel’s apron in some way a man with no sense of smell could never notice, sent him into the boiling hot foundry with a key that couldn’t work, couldn’t take him away from the scene of a crime that seemed, to the lazy, so obvious. Then fought to pin the blame for everything on Aldo Bracci, a man they murdered in public, in a way that seemed to confirm his guilt.

Teresa Lupo mistrusted the imagination deeply, instinctively. She was a scientist. She was aware of how dangerous it was to produce a theory first, then search for the facts to support it. But watching Nic that night, seeing the fury and determination on his face, understanding for the first time how close he’d grown to Falcone since the death of his own father, Teresa realized she’d do anything in her power to help him. This wasn’t the Nic Costa she’d first come to know and admire when he was a green detective in the Rome Questura, a little lost in the centro storico, the kind of peripheral figure who looked as if he might not last out the year. Events had changed him. Leo Falcone and Gianni Peroni had changed him, and been changed in return too. And part of that change reflected on each of these three very different, now very close, men. It was inconceivable that Nic and Gianni would walk away from this event. Inconceivable that she wouldn’t throw in her lot with them.

And Emily . . .

AFTER FOUR DAYS extracting every last scrap of information they could from the Questura, before they got ordered on paid leave, the men left Venice, desperate to try to rustle up a few allies. Emily was gone too, on a different kind of mission, one that filled Teresa with deep misgivings because she understood how well a former FBI agent was trained for that kind of work, and the ruthless, selfless determination Emily was likely to adopt in pursuing it.

Now she was left alone, clear about her own role. To find forensic evidence, to nail down some facts that linked Hugo Massiter with Bella and Uriel Arcangelo, could, perhaps, place him in the fornace that terrible night. More than anything, they needed to provide some sort of motive for why he would endanger his own business plans by murdering the pair of them in the first place.

She looked at the woman sitting by Falcone’s bed, upright, alert, as if she truly expected Leo would wake up any second, smile and ask for a coffee and a couple of biscotti. Teresa Lupo felt a pang of guilt. She wasn’t alone at all. Raffaella Arcangelo had waited at Falcone’s bedside eighteen or more hours a day since he’d arrived. And by the third day Teresa had, without asking Peroni or anyone else, plucked up the courage to bring her into their confidence, just a little, just enough so that a favour was hard to refuse. Raffaella was a good, straightforward woman. She admired Leo Falcone, seeing clearly in him something that Teresa could only glimpse in the misty distance. She was an Arcangelo too, close to what had happened. She had access to the house and all the materials they needed to try to work some magic.

Teresa gazed down at the carrier bag of objects, each secure in a plastic envelope, which the two of them had assembled from the mansion and the furnace that morning while Michele and Gabriele were away, talking to the lawyers about Massiter’s impending acquisition. Most important of all, some items from Bella and Uriel’s bathroom that would provide DNA.

One of the devices attached to the unconscious Leo Falcone made a kind of beeping noise, then went silent. Wires and meters, CRT displays and drips. Machines designed to keep a human being alive.

“There’s no need to stay around,” Raffaella Arcangelo said in her calm, clear voice, shaking Teresa out of her reverie. “I thought you had things you needed to do.”

“N-n-no . . .” she stuttered, surprised at being brought back into the real world.

Raffaella was in the position she’d come to adopt by the bed. Stiff-backed in the hard hospital chair next to Falcone, a book in her hand. A woman’s book, Teresa noticed. An intelligent romantic tale that all the papers had been writing about of late. It seemed to her that Raffaella Arcangelo had grown a little spinsterish before her time.

“Nor do you,” Teresa observed quietly.

“I know. But I can comfort myself with the thought that it’s just selfish. There’s nothing left for me to do on the island today. Michele’s locked in with the lawyers again. Gabriele too. Once that’s over . . .”

She’d reached some kind of a decision, Teresa felt. One that had, perhaps, eased some long-felt burden.

“Once that’s over I’m leaving. It’s not . . .” She glanced at the prone Falcone. “ . . . what happened. It’s just a decision I should have made years ago. Now there’ll be a little money. Perhaps I’ll go back to Paris. I liked it there. I was a student, briefly. Unless I can be of some help to Leo.”

Teresa Lupo never looked over her shoulder. There was too much in the way of personal wreckage back there. And for Raffaella? Just a few dim memories. Faded, like old watercolours. It seemed a terrible time to start chasing them.

“This is an unusual thing for the likes of me to say,” Teresa observed, “but I’d advise against making any rash decisions.”

She shook her head. “It’s not rash. I’ve wanted to leave for years. I just felt tied to that stupid island. To Michele’s ridiculous dreams. He thinks he’s some kind of a hero. Sticking to the old ways. Trying to keep some ancient craft alive when the rest of them turn out junk for the tourists. It’s a delusion. I’ve lived here all my life and I can see what Venice is becoming. A graveyard. A beautiful one, I’ll admit, but a graveyard nevertheless. It drains the life out of you in the end. That’s happened with Michele already, and he’ll stay here ignoring that fact until it consumes him. I won’t.” Her bright eyes glittered with defiance. “I won’t . Once I’ve seen Leo back on his feet . . .”