The Lizard's Bite

ALDO BRACCI WAS A SQUAT, SOUR-FACED MAN AROUND fifty, with a bald head and narrow, beady eyes. He worked out of a tiny office on the ground floor of the family furnace almost a kilometre from the Isola degli Arcangeli, down a dark narrow ramo near the museum. It was a world away from the Murano the tourists saw. Dismal, malodorous passages ran up from the canal, high-walled on both sides, too slender to take more than a couple of pedestrians at a time. The rank aroma of foundry smoke and spent gas hung in the air. There was no artifice, no pretension in the workaday premises around the Bracci furnace. These were people desperate to earn a living out of that daily dance with molten glass and the blazing fire. Bracci, in his dusty blue overalls, looked more hungry than most. The chaos in the little office—invoices and bills everywhere—and the meagreness of the works told their own story. These were minnows, a class beneath the grand names found close to the vaporetti stops. Individuals who lived in the margins left by the big players, hoping to find some crumbs falling between the cracks.

Bracci cast a weary eye over a dated-looking vase newly out of the workshop, cursed in impenetrable Venetian, then walked over to the office and placed it in a pile marked “Seconds.” The two cops waited in their seats, wondering, Costa feeling a little edgy after downing three coffees in succession as they trawled the bars for gossip before approaching Aldo Bracci. They had followed Falcone’s orders to the letter. They’d eaten a couple of plates of pasta in a small, unimpressive restaurant. To Costa’s surprise it had been a smart move. People hereabouts weren’t naturally talkative. Until you mentioned the magic name, Arcangelo. Then a picture began to emerge, both of the family and of Murano itself, a place with little time for newcomers who failed to appreciate their place.

“Kids,” Bracci cursed. “You teach them and then they just piss off somewhere chasing money. There’s no loyalty in this business anymore. No craft. It’s just cash, cash, cash.”

“At least you’ve got staff,” Peroni noted. “More than I saw at your late brother-in-law’s place.”

Bracci’s cold eyes glowered at them. “Men like to be paid from time to time. Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Costa replied. “Is this a convenient time to talk, sir? We don’t wish to intrude on your grief.”

Not that there seemed much of that, Costa thought. Bracci was as brisk and unmoved as the Arcangeli, though in a different way. There was a sign on the door of the furnace when they arrived, one that announced “Closed for mourning.” It was only when they persisted that they realised the place was working, behind shuttered windows, perhaps not wanting the world outside to know.

“Grief,” Bracci repeated. “Bella got a morning of grief. When you people finally allow us to bury her she’ll get some more. Not that it makes much difference to her now, does it? We don’t overdo the ceremonies. You’re outsiders. You won’t understand.”

Costa and Peroni looked at one another. Neither was sure how to conduct this interview. Bracci didn’t look like the bereaved brother. Nor did he seem entirely detached either.

“Are the Arcangeli outsiders?” Costa asked.

Bracci stifled a grim laugh. “What do you think? You’ve met them?”

Peroni shook his head. “They’ve been here fifty, sixty years or something? How long does it take?”

“It was 1952,” Bracci corrected him. “That arrogant old bastard sold his boatyard in Chioggia and took on that wreck of an island, thinking he could teach us all a lesson or two.”

“Did he?” Costa asked.

The man wriggled on the old, battered leather chair at the desk. “For a while. Angelo Arcangelo was a different breed. Not like those kids of his at all. He treated them so hard they never learned how to stand on their own two feet. Stupid. Angelo knew how to make money, though. He knew how to sweet-talk all those rich foreigners. To say to them, ‘Look, see this! It’s how they made it three centuries ago! Burnt seaweed and pebbles. A furnace burning wood. It’s perfect! Think what it’ll be worth twenty years from now!’ Or to get some so-called modern artist to come up with some designs he could pretend were some kind of masterpiece or something. Except . . .”

He reached down into the desk drawers and pulled out a small box that rattled as he lifted it. “Fashions change. You change with them or one day no one rings the bell.”

He scattered the contents of the box on the table. They were tiny trinkets, gaudily coloured. Fake cartoon characters. Mickey Mouse. Homer Simpson. Donald Duck. Only just recognisable. They were junk, and Bracci knew it.

“I can get some schoolkid in here turning out fifty of those an hour. I pay him four euros. I sell them for fifty euros to some huckster near the station. He passes them on for four, maybe five a pop to the idiot tourists who want to take home some genuine Murano glass. Which is what they got too. No arguments there. Do you think the Arcangeli are going to stoop that low?”

That wasn’t their business, Costa thought, and said so.

“So what is their business, smart guy?” Bracci asked. “Let me tell you. They work in a museum. That stupid old furnace, ten times bigger than they need. They got no modern equipment, nothing that saves time or money. They use all these old recipes and designs. It takes them four times longer than the rest of us to make something that, for most of the world out there, looks exactly the same. You think they’re going to get four times the price? No. Not even double. Not even the same price sometimes, because this is old stuff they’re selling. Designs that went out years ago. With flaws, because the old ways give you flaws and no one buys the fact they’re really features, not anymore. You know what the Arcangelo business is? Going bust, that’s what. And if it weren’t for Bella I wouldn’t care a damn. Except now she’s gone, so as far as I’m concerned the Arcangeli can go screw themselves. Go sell the whole damn place to that Englishman and turn it into an amusement park or something. Who gives a shit?”

“The Englishman?” Costa asked blithely.

“Oh, come on!” Bracci spat back. “It’s an open secret they’ve been trying to screw a deal out of him. It’d be done by now if the old man hadn’t set up so many covenants on it the lawyers are getting rich trying to deal with them all. Mind you . . .” Bracci raised a finger to make his point. “ . . . what the Englishman wants, the Englishman gets. I wouldn’t want to jerk him around for a moment. Too many important friends. And if he buys that island . . .”

“What?” Peroni demanded.

Bracci scowled. “Then he’s made. You could put up anything there. A hotel. Some kind of shopping mall like they have on terra firma. If the Arcangeli had any sense they’d just put the whole place out onto the open market. They’d make a fortune. Except they want to keep on making glass. Stupid.”

Costa found this perception of Massiter interesting. The Englishman was a man of substance already. With the island in his grasp, he would become even more important.

“How do you feel about the idea of an English neighbour?” he asked Bracci.

“Wonderful. But at least we’d have just the one asshole to contend with. Is there something serious you want to ask me? Because if there isn’t . . .” He looked at the pile of glass cartoon characters on the desk, then gently scooped them back into the box.

“Tell me about the Bracci family. Parents. Brothers. Sisters.”

“I’m the brother.” He kicked open the door to the furnace. Two men in their twenties, thickset and surly, glared back at them by the side of an oven a tenth the size of the Arcangeli’s. One had close-cropped hair. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing a set of old deep-blue tattoos on each arm. The other was a touch slimmer, with longer hair, a little less aggressive-looking, but not much.

“Enzo.”

Tattoos nodded.

“Fredo. These are my sons,” Aldo Bracci said. “The staff here too, most of the time. Their mother pissed off to Padova with some insurance clerk years back. Better off without the bitch.”

“Yeah.” Enzo Bracci nodded, then glowered at his brother, waited for him to go back to work before closing the door on them.

“Nobody else?” Peroni wondered.

“It was just me and Bella. I think my dad kind of stretched some of the rules about being a Catholic, if you get my meaning. Not that there’s anyone around to ask anymore. There’s been Braccis here for five hundred years. Go take a look in the church if you don’t believe me. The old man spawned the two of us and that’s enough to make sure we won’t disappear. My boys will do the same. As for Bella . . . She was the one who decided to marry into that bunch of jumped-up peasants. That was her problem. Besides . . .”

Aldo Bracci suddenly looked displeased with himself, a rare event, Costa guessed. It was as if he’d decided he’d gone too far.

“Yes?” Peroni prodded.

“It was a bad idea all along,” Bracci said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I never really understood it. Uriel wasn’t the greatest catch in the sea. Bella was pretty. A looker. She could have done better. It was almost as if . . .” He grimaced. “This was after my dad was gone. He’d never have allowed it. I almost thought it was an arranged marriage, somehow. Bella and Uriel just sprung it on us and I wasn’t going to get into some vendetta to stop them. Besides, it was Michele who kept pushing. To begin with, I thought he was the one who was really after her. But he was just too damned old. It was all money anyway. I guess Michele thought maybe we could save him. Bella was from a glass family. She knew things. Production techniques. Little secrets we don’t share outside the island. I used to think that what Michele really wanted was to get his hands on those. But she never let them see her working. She just did it at dead of night, no one around. At least, that’s what she said. Good job too. If they’d been found stealing, they’d have been dead in Murano. Finished. What we’ve got is ours. It doesn’t go elsewhere. Least of all to a bunch of boatmen.”

Bracci’s comments rang a bell in Costa’s head. He’d read several histories of Venice during all those long empty evenings on his own. One of them had gone into detail about the glass industry on the island, which had been placed there from the thirteenth century, moved on the Doge’s orders because of the constant fires it caused in Venice itself. There was a brotherhood on the island, a closed, almost Masonic organisation that swore its members to secrecy, and threatened dire consequences to any who gave away its techniques to those outside.

“Bella knew about glass?” Costa asked.

Bracci nodded vigorously. “She was as good with a furnace as any man out there. Not that a woman was supposed to do that work. The Arcangeli thought different. She never used to talk about it much but they let her in there a lot. She had her own clothes. Her own apron. Bella made Uriel a better omo de note than he deserved to be. And look what she got in return!”

Thrust into the Arcangeli’s vast anachronism of a furnace, Costa thought. For no apparent reason.

“Did it ever occur to you that your sister could be in danger?” Peroni wondered.

“Bella?” Bracci laughed. “You never knew her. Bella was in fear of no one. Certainly not that husband of hers.”

“Someone killed her,” Costa said severely, and instantly regretted it. There was thunder in Bracci’s face, an ugly, rapid response that perhaps betrayed more about the man than he intended.

“Don’t fucking patronise me, sonny!” Bracci bellowed. “It’s your job to work out what went on there, isn’t it? If I knew Uriel was going to kill her, he’d have been the one in that furnace. But I didn’t.” The man’s dead, tired face turned thoughtful for a brief moment. “You want the truth?” he asked. “It still seems crazy to me. But that’s Bella’s bad luck and my bad judgment. Now do you have any more stupid questions? Or can a man get on with his work around here?”

Work. That was all Murano seemed interested in. Not two strange, inexplicable deaths. Just money, the daily spectacle of fires and mutable gobbets of glass visible through so many workshop doorways, beacons trying to attract the diminishing numbers of passersby, lure them into the darkness and loosen their purses.

“You could tell us whether you have a set of keys to the Arcangelo place,” Costa asked, undeterred. “And where you were around two this morning.”

Bracci stood up, stormed across the room and held open the door into the alley outside.

“Get out!” he barked.

Neither of the policemen moved.

“They’re simple questions,” Peroni observed. “I don’t think they should interfere with your grief.”

Bracci glared furiously at both of them. The door to the workshop opened. The two sons stood there, big and menacing, both eyeing Gianni Peroni, recognising him as the greater threat. There was violence inside this particular clan, Costa thought. Something he never detected within the Arcangeli at all.

The cops didn’t move. Peroni gave the sons his best battered grin and said, “Just two questions, Bracci. Then we’re gone.”

The older man shot a vicious, bitter look at his offspring, mad their presence hadn’t done the job. “No! I don’t have a set of keys. Why the hell should I? And last night? Ask them. We were all here. I was the omo de note. These two were helping. Or . . .” He shot a bitter glance at the box of seconds. “ . . . trying anyway. We do what’s necessary around here. We work. We earn.”

“All night?” Costa wondered.

Enzo stepped forward. He had his father’s sour face, now covered in soot and sweat. A big, powerful man, Costa thought. The tattoos were something to do with music. Heavy metal. Thrash. Images of swords and skulls, thick strokes, the kind that must have hurt.

“All night,” Fredo said halfheartedly, glancing at the other two to see if he was doing the right thing. “The three of us. We can vouch for each other.”

“That’s what families do best,” Peroni said gently.

Enzo picked up a rag and wiped the soot and grease from his large hands. Then he looked them over and asked, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Peroni smiled again. “You noticed?”

“Yeah,” Enzo grunted, walked over to the seconds box, withdrew the flawed vase, and slammed it into the side of the table, exposing a line of jagged sharp glassy teeth.

He didn’t wave the thing in their direction. He didn’t need to.

“A word of advice,” he said. “Go careful out there. It gets dark sooner than you think.”