The Lizard's Bite (44 page)

“Leo?” Raffaella asked. “Are you ready? Michele was too stingy to pay for private transport back. The boat service stops soon. We don’t want to miss it.”

“A minute,” he said, recalling the coffin going into the fresh ochre earth beyond the line of cedars that separated them from the plots. “I was thinking.”

There’d been so much time for that lately. Fresh thinking. Old thinking, the kind that had happened before he awoke and which still remained in his head, clear and unwilling to go away. The question, as Leo Falcone understood only too well, was what to do with those dark, unsettling reflections.

When Uriel Arcangelo went into the ground, a temporary sojourn, like every San Michele corpse, to be removed a decade hence to make way for more dead, his interment had been watched by just five personal mourners. The three Arcangeli, newly enriched by Hugo Massiter’s purchase of their island, Falcone, and the lawyer who had handled the family estate. The black-suited, quietly officious men of the funeral company outnumbered family. It seemed apposite somehow. The Arcangeli never ceased to be outsiders, even in death.

At least Uriel had received a more proper end than Massiter. The Englishman’s power had vanished the moment his body shattered on the island’s worn paving stones, scattering the crowds, sending them screaming. When Massiter died some spell was broken. Venice was acutely aware of social status. The city’s burghers escaped discovery of their illicit financial transactions. The Arcangeli found their own money problems transformed, escaping from poverty to comparative riches overnight. The future of the island remained as much in doubt as before, but it was now someone else’s problem, an architectural curio left in legal limbo, owned by the estate of a man with no known relatives, no apparent heirs. Already there were mutterings in the local press about a campaign to take it into public ownership. A hotel and an apartment block would one day rise on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Falcone felt certain of this. The way the family, even Michele, acquiesced to the notion after Massiter’s demise indicated, surely, that its days as a struggling glass enterprise were past.

All the same, he found it remarkable how little the name of Hugo Massiter entered into any conversation or public discussion. After the initial flurry of publicity about the arrest of Piero Scacchi on a charge of murder, the story had swiftly died away. The previous day there had been a brief paragraph on an inside page of one newspaper revealing that Massiter’s body had been flown to England for a private burial paid for by his estate, an event that would, Falcone suspected, be watched by lawyers and accountants, if anyone at all. For Venice, at that point, in some final solitary ceremony, the issue of culpability would be closed, interred alongside the ravaged flesh and bone of Hugo Massiter. No one had been brought to account for the killing of Gianfranco Randazzo, which was, the papers now hinted, the result of a gangland row over an extortion racket in which the late commissario had been involved. No one, it seemed, much remembered the deaths of Aldo Bracci, or Uriel and Bella Arcangelo. Venice had a capacity for forgetfulness which Leo Falcone almost envied.

He forced himself to concentrate on the present, and gazed at her with that slow, selfish hunger allowed to a man confined to a wheelchair. Raffaella Arcangelo looked serene, complete somehow, in mourning. She wore a long black dress, expensively cut, and a thin woollen jacket against the cutting breeze. Her hair had been styled by a professional, probably for the first time in years, he guessed, and now curved into her attractive, scarcely lined face. She had the appearance of an intelligent and elegant college professor, something, it occurred to Falcone, she could perhaps have been had the island not dragged her home from Paris out of financial necessity.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

She smiled, a little shyly. “It’s taken a long time for you to frame that question, Leo.”

There was no reproach in her soft voice, though perhaps he deserved some.

He glowered at the wheelchair, unintentionally. “I’m sorry. My mind’s been on other things.”

“Of course,” she replied. “I was being thoughtless. You deserve some indulgences.”

He didn’t believe that to be true. His injuries
were
temporary, something to be overcome, not resented. Besides… “Forget about me, Raffaella. I was interested in you. What will happen now?”

She glanced at Michele and Gabriele. Her brothers were already on the jetty, waiting for the next boat.

“They have their share of Massiter’s money. I have mine. They have the property he wrote into the contract too. The offer of premises. A shop, not one in the best part of town, but now they have the funds to change that. They’ll try to make glass again. I don’t think anything can stop them.”

Nothing short of bankruptcy, he thought.

“And you?” he asked.

She turned to face him, frank, wise, concerned. “I don’t know. What do you suggest?”

The question threw him. “You can do what you want, surely?”

“I can,” she replied, nodding. “For the first time in my life. And yet… I don’t know. I’ve spent so long trying to hold the family together on that damned island. Now it’s gone. I’m free. The trouble is freedom doesn’t feel quite how I expected.”

The boat had arrived. Her brothers were getting ready to board, not even bothering to look back.

“Let’s catch the next one, shall we?” she said, watching them. “They don’t need me anymore. Or that’s what they think.” A thought occurred to her. “I could travel, I suppose.”

“Will you?”

She was staring at him again, a look that made Leo Falcone restless, unsure of himself. “Probably not. I…” This seemed difficult for her to say. “I’ve been trying something new,” she confessed. “Thinking about myself for a change. Not them. Not the island.”

“You make it sound a crime. It isn’t.”

“I know that. But it still prompts awkward thoughts.”

Her dark eyes seemed torn between watching for his reactions and being afraid of what he might notice. “I realise now that I’ve never been wanted. That’s all. Never on the island. There was nothing there for any of us but duty. Not love. None of us ever had that, even in the beginning, I think. We were part of Angelo’s dream, a dream that was about him alone. About making the Arcangelo name immortal somehow. He was a stupid, cruel old man. I know I shouldn’t say that of my own father, but it’s true. He was willing to sacrifice our lives for his. And look where it got us. Michele and Gabriele still chasing some phantom. Me an old maid.”

He had to laugh. It was such a ludicrous idea. “I don’t think anyone would describe you as that.”

“I wasn’t talking about how people saw me,” she said immediately. “I was talking about how I view myself.” She hesitated. “I want to be wanted, Leo. I want to be loved. Just for me. Nothing else at all. Now
that’s
selfish.”

He grimaced. “I’ve never been much of an expert at love,” he confessed.

“That makes two of us,” she said.

There was a faint hue on her cheek. Makeup perhaps. Or the hint of a blush.

“You’ll need help,” she pointed out. “You may not like that idea but it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ve never seen much of Rome. I certainly don’t want to stay here. We could just call it friendship. Nothing more. Unless… People change with time. Who knows?”

It was a temptation, more enticing than any Hugo Massiter could ever have thrown on the table.

But the child’s screams rang around his head.

“You could go back to university,” he suggested. “You said you loved Paris.”

“I did,” she answered, blushing openly now, worried, perhaps, she’d overstepped the mark. “Not now. University is for the young, I think.”

“But what a person learns…” he mused. “That stays with you. All your life.”

It was criminology in his case. Leo Falcone had never been in any doubt about his own future career.

“You studied chemistry, I believe?” he asked.

The question took her by surprise. “Did I tell you that?”

He spoke to the child inside him, then waited, satisfied by its sudden silence.

“No,” Leo Falcone said. “I checked. It’s easy to discover facts about people. The difficulty lies in understanding what they mean.”

She gazed down at him, puzzled, a little annoyed perhaps by the way he’d turned the direction of the conversation.

“You have so much spare time at the moment, Leo. I’m flattered you should spend some of it on me.”

“Was it an easy career choice? I can’t quite see you as a chemist.”

“I was an Arcangelo,” she said. “We were all supposed to be a part of my father’s plan. I would have preferred to have studied literature. He was implacably opposed, naturally. What use are books or poetry when you’re staring into a furnace?”

“You were a good student, I imagine. A conscientious one. A talented one too.”

She nodded, flattered. “I’d like to think so. But I never completed my degree. Paris was expensive. The money wasn’t there. Why are we discussing this? Is it relevant?”

“I think I know how your brother died,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”

She stared at him, mournful, disappointed. “Haven’t we given the grave enough of our time today?”

“It won’t take long.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “But if we’re to speak about the dead, let’s at least allow them to hear for themselves.”

Before he could protest, she took hold of the wheelchair handles and propelled him back toward the graveyard, beyond the line of cedars, rapidly reaching Uriel’s plot, with its too-white marble headstone.

The place was deserted. There was not so much as a single grave-digger working on one of the neat brown plots. Falcone recalled what she had said about the vaporetti. The service stopped at the end of the afternoon. The cemetery island had no need of night visitors.

T
ERESA LUPO SAT AT THE BATTERED TABLE FEELING cold and stupid. They’d been all over the island. Hours of searching, calling, hoping. Now they were back where they always started: Piero Scacchi’s deserted and depressing picnic area. And for what?

For a dog. An animal that thought it could swim the breadth of the lagoon to escape the madness on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Only, if it survived, to find its master missing, missing for a long time, it seemed to her. There were, as far as the papers appeared to know, no extenuating circumstances, no mitigation Scacchi could plead. A
matto
from the lagoon had shot dead one of the city’s leading citizens at the moment of his apotheosis, with half of Venice’s
prosecco
-swilling glitterati looking on. It was impudent. Downright bad taste. Scacchi, being a lunatic from the edge of the lagoon, would be lucky to see fresh air in less than ten years, however much the young couple, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, pleaded on his behalf. At least they seemed to have escaped prosecution. Teresa was glad about that. They looked like people who’d suffered, unjustly for the most part. From what she’d read they’d never recover what they’d lost. Massiter’s lawyers had seen to that. But no one seemed much interested in activating the warrants that had been issued for their arrest. That would upturn too many old stones long settled into the dirt, with plenty of unwanted creatures lurking underneath. The pair were, at least, free to start their lives anew.

“Dog!
Dog
! Xerxes!”

Peroni was muddied up to his knees from wandering through the fields and the marshy land, bellowing for the animal. She wondered what he expected might happen. Would the creature suddenly march out of the lush grass wilderness at the lagoon’s edge, wagging its tail?

He did some more yelling, then came and sat down opposite, grim-faced, cross with himself.

She patted his big hand. “Gianni. It’s been more than a week. If he survived the water — and that’s a big if — he could have starved to death here. We know the locals haven’t been feeding him… .”

They’d talked to plenty. Farmer and fisherman alike, none of whom looked as if they’d be much inclined to provide for anything that wasn’t part of their own household. Nobody had even seen a small black spaniel, thin and hungry-looking, lost, puzzled why the little shack where it lived was deserted, day after day. Nobody, if she was honest with herself, much cared. Except for Gianni Peroni, who hoped to care enough to make up for everyone else.

“He’s here,” Peroni insisted. “I just know it.”

“Here we go. Instinct again. Be realistic, will you? The poor thing probably drowned.”

“No! You don’t know dogs. Spaniels love the water. He could swim to the city and back if he wanted.”

“Now
that
I find hard to believe.”

“Believe it,” he said, then turned to the reedy little
rio
nearby and starting shouting again, bellowing the dog’s name over and over.

She waited for him to pause for breath, then held his hand more tightly. “Has it never occurred to you, dog person that you are, that the blasted things sometimes only come when called by someone they know?”

“That’s not true! We had a dog when I was a kid. He came for anyone who knew his name.”

She thought about this. “What was he called?”

“Guido!”

“Fine. Listen to a little animal psychology. Dogs rely on syllables. Clearly differentiated chunks of language. Guido —
Gwee-doh
— is an excellent name because it has two very identifiable syllables, the ideal number for something with a brain the size of a modest potato. Furthermore, these syllables are separated — and this is important — by a hard consonant, one pronounced when you move the middle of your tongue downwards, away from the roof of your mouth.”

He glared at her. “I don’t think dogs understand hard consonants.”

“You’re wrong. Don’t ask how I know this — it was a very long time ago — but they do. A dog with a good name like Guido knows when it’s being called, even by a complete stranger. Whether the thing
obeys
is another matter, of course.”

“This is going somewhere?” he demanded.

“Straight to the point.
Guido
is good.
Xerxes
— think about it when you say it,
Zer-ke-sees
— is terrible. No hard consonant. Three messy syllables. The dog will have heard it over and over again from Piero and understood what it meant from the repetition and the intonation of his master’s voice. From anyone else it just sounds like mush. Do I make myself clear?”