The Lizard's Bite

IN THE DAZZLING LIGHT OF THE LAGOON MORNING, THE police launch sped across the shining expanse of water that separated Venice from Sant’ Erasmo. Nic Costa sat up front, enjoying the breeze, trying to extract some local information out of Goldoni, the Venetian cop who was their boatman for the day, and thinking about the avid, enthusiastic way Emily had read the report on Hugo Massiter over breakfast, wondering if it was right for her to become involved. Her enthusiasm was, in part, fired by his own interest in the Englishman, which might well be misplaced. Dragging her into his obsession made him uneasy.

Even so, hindsight was pointless. Almost as pointless as trying to get Goldoni talking. The Venetian cop seemed to know the unseen channels of this inland sea by heart, never referring to a chart or a dial, just pointing the vessel in the direction of the Adriatic, setting the speed to cruise, changing tack when necessary, and picking at a pack of cigarettes throughout. Costa didn’t even know how he understood where to head on the wide expanse of low countryside now looming ahead of them. Sant’ Erasmo, in spite of its size, had no resident police presence, Goldoni had said. Most of the locals—the matti, the crazies—rarely used their cars to go elsewhere, so there were few traffic issues. There was just one bar and a couple of restaurants. Tourists were tolerated but never fleeced. There was nothing to occupy a cop on the vast, flat green farmland, though it covered a larger surface area than Venice itself. Just fields and fields of fruits and vegetables—artichokes and peppers, rocket and grapes—and a small flotilla of battered craft to ferry them to the Rialto markets each day.

They were close enough now to allow Costa to make out a few rusting vehicles, clearly unfit for the road, lumbering along the bright margin between land and sky. He cast a glance back into the cabin. Falcone was there, leaning back in his seat, eyes closed, looking asleep. It was that kind of morning: hot, hazy and airless, a time for lassitude. Peroni was quietly scanning the report he should have read the night before. Costa looked at Goldoni, a man not much older than he, chewing on a fast-expiring cigarette in the face of the sea breeze.

“Have you heard of Hugo Massiter?” he asked. “He’s an Englishman.”

Goldoni sucked hard, then launched the butt of his cigarette overboard and gave him a jaundiced stare.

“Heard of him,” he said simply.

This was the battle they always faced with the locals. Extracting information was like pulling teeth, even with men who were supposed to be part of the same team.

“Good or bad?” Costa asked.

Goldoni smiled, a quick, fetching smile, with precious little sincerity in it. He reminded Costa of the gondoliers who chatted up the teenage girls back in the city, knowing they would never have the money to pay the fare, hoping there’d be a different kind of reward if the pursuit went on long enough. He looked more like them than a cop.

“Good guy,” Goldoni replied. “Knows all the right people. What else is there to say?”

Maybe nothing, Costa thought. That was what the report claimed, and he was inclined to believe it for two reasons. First, if it was wrong, Venice had acquiesced to more than a simple bending of the rules. It had allowed murder—callous, cold bloodshed, which included the deaths of two police officers—to go unpunished. And second, because of Emily’s objections. She had an American insistence on precision and certainty and applied it instinctively to the web of half-facts and rumours that the report repeated. There was, he knew, nothing concrete there, certainly nothing that could begin to justify any further police investigation. Just shadows in an old, dusty mirror. Idle talk which probably drifted in the wake of any rich and successful man who made mistakes, and enemies, during his career.

The file was the summary of a curious case that had occurred five years earlier. Among Massiter’s many charitable interventions in the city was a biennial summer music school at La Pietà, the church connected with Vivaldi on the Riva degli Schiavoni not far from the Doge’s Palace. During the last event—Massiter ceased them after this particular incident, on understandable grounds—he’d paid for the debut of a work by an unknown English composer, a student from Oxford, Daniel Forster. This was, Massiter later told officers, an unwise adventure into new territory. His own expertise lay in antiques—sculpture, painting, objets d’art. He knew nothing about music, but had been taken in by the apparently guileless and gifted Forster. What transpired was tragedy. Forster was no composer but a fraud who had stolen an unknown historical manuscript from the house of the retired antiquarian where he was staying. Anxious to keep the deception quiet, the young Englishman had conspired with the old man’s housekeeper, one Laura Conti, to murder the collector and his American companion. As the police began to see through their deceit, the pair had then killed two officers from the main Questura at Piazzale Roma, one of them a woman leading the investigation.

What made the headlines even bigger, though, was Massiter’s involvement. If the report was to be believed, Daniel Forster was so subtle in his engineering of the fraud that he succeeded in making Massiter appear a party to it too. After the death of the two police officers, Forster was taken into custody. He managed to convince officers that he was guilty of the deception, but not the murders. He served a short sentence and was released, only to take up immediately with Laura Conti, living as man and wife on the profits of the music he’d never written, and a book he produced about the affair.

Massiter, meanwhile, retired—fled seemed a more apposite word to Costa—to America and consulted his lawyers at length. After more than two years in exile he’d acted, filing a wealth of evidence to counter the claims in Forster’s book, which he was able to remove from the shelves on the grounds of libel. A protracted series of legal cases followed, with Massiter’s lawyers winning victory after victory in the courts, paving the way for his return, and finally winning a reopening of the original investigation into Forster and his lover. Before that could be concluded, the couple vanished. Massiter was able to return to Venice a vindicated man. Two warrants for the fugitives’ arrest remained on file, not that anyone in the Questura seemed much interested in pursuing them. The closing piece in the report was some unsourced piece of police intelligence indicating the pair had gone on the run first to Asia, then possibly to South America, and a note, signed by Commissario Randazzo no less, who must have been working at the main Questura at the time, stating that it would be a waste of police money to expend resources chasing Forster and Conti.

Hugo Massiter was, in the eyes of the Venetian police, an innocent man who’d been badly wronged by false accusations, and spent heavily to refute them. Could this explain the city’s desire to placate him? Some innate sense of guilt? Costa thought this unconvincing. All the same, it was an interesting story. He found himself wishing he could read more about this particular case. Or better, spend a few hours in the company of the missing Daniel Forster and Laura Conti. The couple had a substantial talent, it seemed to him, to create such a successful alternative version of their crimes, one that fooled a good few people before collapsing under the weight of Massiter’s legal team. But all that would be a luxury. It was difficult to see how what had happened five years before had any bearing whatsoever on the problems of the Arcangeli. Apart from one curious, doubtless coincidental fact. The dead antiquarian who’d been murdered by Daniel Forster, who then tried to pin the blame on Massiter, was called Scacchi, cousin to the same Sant’ Erasmo farmer they were now about to visit, the last man to see Uriel Arcangelo alive.

Venice was a small place, Costa reminded himself. Families interlocked in many different ways over the years. This was, surely, nothing but coincidence, though one worthy of scrutiny before they set it aside.

He climbed back down into the boat and watched Peroni finishing the last of the report. Falcone still appeared to be slumbering.

“What do you make of it?” Costa asked softly as his partner turned the final page.

Peroni frowned. “I was brought up to believe there was never smoke without fire. This Englishman moves in some queer circles, Nic. Although he seemed quite pleasant to me, I must admit.”

“The company you keep doesn’t make you a murderer,” Falcone interjected without moving so much as an eyelid. “It just tells us he’s very well connected.”

“Four people died,” Costa objected. “Two of them were police officers.”

Falcone opened his eyes and gave him an icy glance. “It’s not our case. Not unless it has some relevance to the Arcangeli. Which I doubt.”

“Then why give us the report to read?” Peroni wondered.

Falcone seemed disappointed by the question. “Because I like my men to be informed! And to know with whom they’re dealing. Massiter is a man of substance who has very successfully dismissed a series of very severe allegations. As far as the authorities are concerned—as far as we’re concerned—he’s spotlessly clean and always has been. He’s also probably a little short of ready cash at the moment, after years of paying out for lawyers.”

“He said that himself,” Peroni pointed out.

“Exactly,” Falcone agreed amiably. “Which is one reason to believe he’s telling us the truth. Now we know what he is, let’s just concentrate on the case we do have. I ran Piero Scacchi’s name through the station records. Not a thing, except for some noncommittal interview when his cousin got killed. About all that reveals is the fact the two of them apparently weren’t close enough for the old man to leave Piero anything in his will. Everything went to Forster. It was probably forged. Is there an officer on the island we could pump?”

Costa shook his head. “Not a soul. Apparently Sant’ Erasmo doesn’t merit a police presence.”

Peroni laughed. “You’re kidding me. This place is huge.”

“Yes,” Costa agreed. “But the population’s just a couple of hundred people. I guess there’s no point.”

“My kind of town,” Peroni said.

“We’ll have to make up our own minds then.” Falcone looked disappointed. “Here’s one other piece of information I got out of records this morning, while you two were taking breakfast in bed. Bella’s brother has a record.”

Costa thought of Aldo Bracci, miserable as sin, in his grubby little factory, getting eaten up by poverty and resentment.

“I would be lying if I said I was surprised,” Peroni observed.

“So what’s your guess?” Falcone asked. “Thieving? Violence?”

“Either,” the big man answered. “Or both.”

Falcone pulled himself upright. It was a struggle. He looked old under the bright lagoon sun, somehow. Nic Costa couldn’t help but wonder whether the cunning inspector, a man who’d taught him more about police work than anyone he knew, was his customary self.

“Both,” Falcone declared. “And one more. A long time ago, so much it may be quite irrelevant.”

The two cops waited. A semblance of doubt was buzzing around Falcone’s head, like some unwanted, unrecognised insect wondering whether to bite.

“Aldo Bracci got interviewed for sexually assaulting his sister. When he was nineteen and Bella was four years younger. It never went anywhere. Cases like that rarely did in those days. But the file suggests it was the real thing. With at least some acquiescence on Bella’s part. It was a neighbour who filed the report, not someone from the family.”

“Nice family,” Peroni grumbled.

“But is it anything more than that?” Costa asked.

“We don’t know,” Falcone admitted. “But think about this. Bracci would surely have had access to Bella’s keys. He’d have known that island. His only alibi is in the family. The opportunity’s there. Bella and Aldo could have conspired to kill Uriel. Then Aldo turned on her. But why?”

He frowned and stared towards the island. The launch was heading for a rickety old jetty fronting a dusty path that led to a small farmhouse. They were still on the Venice side of Sant’ Erasmo, but far from any other sign of habitation. Costa could just make out the familiar yellow sign of a vaporetto jetty near a low church and some houses a good kilometre or more north. Then there was the sound of a dog’s bark, a lively, amusing sound, not the aggressive threat one might have expected out in this backwater.

Peroni leapt off the boat first, with surprising agility given his bulk. Costa followed him. Falcone ordered Goldoni to wait with the vessel until they returned.

A black spaniel was bounding down the path, wagging its tail. Peroni, always a sucker for animals, bent and chucked the creature under the muzzle, beaming into its dark, watery eyes.

“What a dog,” he sighed, admiration written all over his ugly face. “They’ve got ones like this back home. Not pets, mind. Working dogs. Hunting dogs. Those dogs could find anything, anywhere.”

“Shame it doesn’t do police work,” Falcone sniffed, keeping a safe distance between himself and the animal.

A man was walking down the path now, someone just a little less heavy than Peroni, a few years younger too. He wore a torn white shirt and grubby black trousers. He had a full head of black, slightly greasy hair, a round, expressionless face, and, in his left hand, a shotgun, broken, held loose and low as if it were a familiar item, one as happy in his grip as a household tool.

“Piero Scacchi?” Costa asked.

Peroni was still clucking over the dog, stroking its sleek black head with a gigantic, gentle hand.

“That’s me,” the man said. He could see they were looking at the gun. “It’s duck season soon. I was cleaning it.”

He nodded at Peroni, surprised by the dog’s warm welcome.

“He likes you.”

Costa flashed the card. “Police.”

Piero Scacchi scowled down at the animal.

“And I thought I’d taught you well,” he told it.