The Lizard's Bite

THE WEATHER HAD LOST ITS TEMPER. IT WAS A WARM, bright evening, with a sweet salty breeze blowing in from the Adriatic. In Verona, Costa and Peroni were slowly working their way into the confidences of a small specialist Carabinieri team, praying the scraps of information they owned would persuade Luca Zecchini and his colleagues to first order a search of Randazzo’s house, and then pull in the man himself for questioning. In a small apartment in Castello, Teresa Lupo and her assistant Silvio Di Capua now pored over the results of the first tests they’d run on the meagre material they’d found, scanning arcane reports and charts on Costa’s notebook computer, puzzled by the results coming in from the private labs they were using, both in Mestre and Rome, to try to extract some answers from the sparse debris and clothing they had. And in the Ospedale Civile the unconscious Leo Falcone, unaware of Raffaella Arcangelo by his bed, continued to dream, locked in a private world, part fantasy, part remembrance, a place he feared to leave, not knowing what would take its place.

“Leo,” said a voice from outside his world, a female voice, warm, attractive, one that possessed a name, though it escaped him at that moment, since he was the child-Leo, not his older self. “Please.”

The mechanism on the wall whirred. The cuckoo’s artificial bellows roared, the old chime tolled.

“I need you to live,” she pleaded. “Leo . . .”

As if it were a matter of choice. Both Leos—the child and the man—knew nothing was quite that simple. In order to live, he had to look, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Ever.