David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“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.