The Lizard's Bite

COSTA WAS MULLING OVER HIS PARTNER’S RHETORICAL question: Why did they always get the bum deal? Because he’d defied Leo Falcone, that’s why. Pushing Scacchi for what he knew about the missing Daniel Forster and Laura Conti had been an act of direct rebellion. Falcone was too preoccupied with the case to make much of it. But both Costa and Peroni knew there’d be a price, and when they got to the Isola degli Arcangeli they discovered what it was. Falcone was keeping the sweet part—the house and Raffaella Arcangelo—all for himself.

All the same, Costa didn’t feel a single pang of regret. It would have been remiss to have left Sant’ Erasmo without tackling Scacchi about the missing pair. And those postcards the farmer had shown were, it seemed to him, distinctly odd. No one printed their own name. Certainly not a student from Oxford. Scacchi said he worked as an illicit ferryman for people who didn’t want to pay the price of official water taxis. The cards could have been posted by anyone. Some Alitalia steward he took to the airport from time to time, and who he’d asked for a little souvenir of his travels, signed in a particular way. But why?

Ordinarily, Costa would have mulled the idea over with Falcone and Peroni. Now, it seemed pointless. Both were fixated on the Arcangeli, keen to see this case closed, then engineer their escape from the lagoon. Nic felt the same way. In principle, anyway. Watching Falcone stride off for the mansion, with its glistening eye looming out over the lagoon, leaving them to the smoke stink of the foundry and the two surly brothers, he almost wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

Almost.

The face was at the great glass window again: calm, attractive, sensitive.

“I am going to get a look inside that place before we leave for good,” Costa swore.

Peroni huffed and puffed. “In that case maybe you’d better do what Leo says. You know he hates being crossed.”

But Falcone was wrong. Venice wasn’t some backwater unworthy of their metropolitan talents. Costa sometimes wondered whether they weren’t the ones being duped all along. Doing Randazzo’s bidding. Being forced to see matters the way the Venetians liked.

Falcone was at the window with her now, listening, nodding. Interested, Costa thought, and that was new too. The two brothers were working away inside the foundry, close to the furnace, Gabriele welding, Michele cutting pipe, as if they hadn’t even noticed their presence.

Costa watched Gabriele extinguishing the lance, waited for the sound of the gas to die down, walked over to the man, took the long metal implement out of his hand and placed it on the floor.

“Enough,” he said with a deliberate gruffness. “And you.”

He turned on Michele, who was grappling with some joint work, trying to wrestle a tangle of metal into submission. “Put that thing down and talk to us. If we don’t get some cooperation here, I will, I swear, arrest the pair of you and continue this at the Questura.”

Michele kept on straining away at the job, giving him just a single, filthy glance with the ruined side of his face.

“One call, garzone,” the old man spat back at Nic. “That’s all it takes and you’re out of here.”

Costa walked up close. “I am not your boy. Understand something. If we move off this case and someone else has to pick up the pieces, you lose time. That means no deal with this Englishman who’s looking to save your skin. Screw around with us all you like, but don’t think it won’t come at a price.”

That, finally, got both brothers listening.

“What the hell do you know about our private business?” Michele demanded.

Peroni burst out laughing. “Private? What’s your definition of the word private around here? We walked up and down Murano yesterday, talking to people who can’t wait to gossip about you and your problems. Your dirty linen gets washed in public on a daily basis. Do you really not know that?”

They didn’t, it struck Costa, and that, in itself, was interesting. The Arcangeli really were still outsiders, even after all these years.

“You can talk here. Or you can talk in the Questura,” he repeated.

“We don’t have time for this crap,” the elder brother snarled.

“You get even less time if we have to haul you over to Castello,” Peroni pointed out.

Michele grunted. Then he walked out into the sunshine, lit a cigarette, and perched on one of the bollards on the quay, watching the water stretching between the island and San Michele.

“Ten minutes,” he said, in that grating cold voice that was starting to get to Costa. “Then you can go bore the hell out of someone else.”