The Lizard's Bite (30 page)

An Alitalia jet whined overhead, making its descent into the airport that lurked at the distant water’s edge, forever growing, eating away a little more of the wild marshland each year. Emily waited for the roar of its engines to subside, then took the fluted glass, tasted the chilled vintage Dom Pérignon, telling herself that she would drink one glass and one glass alone, then leaned back, letting her blonde hair reach into the slipstream created by the vessel’s gathering speed, aware that Hugo couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Where are we going exactly? I’m used to getting directions.”

“You can leave the directions to me. We’re going to the Locanda Cipriani. Torcello. You’ve never been?”

She’d heard of the place. Hemingway had written much of
Across the River and into the Trees
there, in between duck hunts and drinking sessions. She’d read the book as a teenager, while going through her Hemingway phase. It was the unlikely story of a romance between a dying middle-aged American colonel, scarred by the war, and a young, beautiful Italian countess. A love that was returned. She hadn’t needed to dip into the biographies to understand that Hemingway had been telling his own story, recounting the growing fears and disappointments of age, trying to convince himself they could be balanced, if not countered entirely, by the presence of a teenager who was willing to have sex with him in a gondola at night. It was a lecherous old man’s fantasy, and the tragedy was that Hemingway hoped in vain to conceal that fact from everyone, most of all himself.

“Tell me about Laura Conti,” she said. Hugo had spent the afternoon away from the yacht, locked in a series of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers, advisers and the Arcangeli brothers. This was the first real opportunity she’d had to start pushing some questions his way. “I’m the curious type.”

Hugo raised his glass. “And I’m the indiscreet type, as I told you. Except…”

He glanced towards the low island in the distance and then his watch. “Dinner at the Locanda. It’s been such a long time. And now there’s so much to celebrate.”

“Except what?”

His smile fell for a second. He stared at her with a sudden, brutish frankness. “Intimacies require intimacy. I’m no fool, Emily.”

She placed the glass, two-thirds full, on the polished walnut table that sat between them. Massiter’s temporary home had been a place of some interest for her. The yacht’s crew, mainly men, with women for waiting and cleaning duties alone, were either Croatian or, in the case of the menials, Filipino. There was a small locked office on the lowest floor, down a narrow set of stairs, beneath the eight cabins, the largest of which — Massiter’s — occupied the prow. The vessel was, he said, rented, a necessary evil between selling his last apartment on the Grand Canal to raise funds for the Isola degli Arcangeli project and moving into his new home there. He wasn’t happy in the yacht, though its opaque smoked windows kept out the curious glances of the tourists on the broad and busy waterfront leading from the Doge’s Palace to the Arsenale. There had to be a reason he would have chosen a home like this, and that, surely, lay in the small office. She recalled the locked room in the apartment he had built for himself in the palace on the island. He had a fondness for small, dark places in which to hide things. It was simply a question of penetrating them.

“I told you last night. Nic and I had a fight. I needed somewhere to stay, Hugo. Don’t read more into it than that.”

She thought about Nic, who by now should have cleared the little apartment in Castello. He and Peroni had found some expensive temporary accommodation, two bedrooms, one little kitchen, in one of the narrow streets in working-class Castello, squeezed between the Via Garibaldi and the Biennale Gardens. There would be no free police apartment in Venice again. No secret moments in the tiny bed squeezed between the door and the window that gave out onto a pink-washed street crisscrossed with washing lines. And instead, what? She’d seen the expression on Nic’s face when he left. It was grim and determined and utterly single-minded. Nic needed to bring Massiter to justice, for Leo’s sake. There was a debt lurking there, demanding repayment. Without that, she wondered how he could ever be easy with himself.

“People who need somewhere to stay generally take their custom to hotels,” Massiter said. “You came to me. Why, Emily?”

She was uncertain how to handle him. Hugo Massiter was a mix of contradictions: wily in the ways of the world, yet almost innocent when it came to anything that touched his ego.

“I thought that was what you wanted. I was curious to see if I was right.”

He was watching her avidly, judging, avaricious too. “Does he know you’re with me?”

“No…”

She reached for the glass and drained it in two quick gulps, not even fighting the temptation. He was there with a refill the moment it left her lips. It was all a question of confidence. That was what the men in Langley said. A matter of building trust. Of lies and skilled deceit.

“Is it important?” she asked. “I knew I wasn’t going to get the door slammed in my face. Or did you really think I could be your architect?”

This amused him. “Why not? If it doesn’t work, I’ll find someone else. I’ve got the money now and money solves everything. Or at least I
will
have the money once I sign with the Arcangeli. After that… the island’s perfect, just the thing I need to get me back on my feet.”

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.”

T
HEY 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.