The Lizard's Bite

THEY ENTERED THE HOUSE AT NINE O’CLOCK THE FOLLOWING morning. It was in a quiet, shady residential street behind Gran Viale, the main shopping drag of the Lido, which ran from the vaporetto stop in a long straight line to the other side of the narrow island and the beaches, stretching out in front of the white whalelike colossus of the Grand Hotel des Bains. It was a weekday. Only a trickle of youngsters were heading for the sea, towels and swimsuits in their hands. Overhead the occasional small plane buzzed on the final approach to the little general aviation airport that sat at the northern tip of the Lido.

Luca Zecchini, a man with an eye for property, reckoned the place, a small mansion in what was known on the Lido as “liberty style,” all curlicues, outdoor steps and fancy windows, was worth a good million euros or more. Nic Costa didn’t feel moved to argue. They needed some luck. It was now nine-thirty in the morning. Nic had heard nothing of importance from Teresa Lupo, nothing at all from Emily, and only received the briefest of messages from the hospital to say that Falcone’s condition was unchanged. The one hard piece of news he had received came from Raffaella Arcangelo, via Teresa. The legal complications of the contract for the sale to Massiter had been resolved. There would be a brief signing ceremony that evening at six. Or so Hugo Massiter hoped.

The previous afternoon Zecchini and his men had worked hard to squeeze a warrant out of a Verona magistrate, one chosen for his discretion, since no one wanted details of the planned raid leaked. If they were lucky, the objects in Randazzo’s home would prove interesting enough for Zecchini to demand an interview with the commissario himself, who was being kept discreetly out of view by the Venice Questura. From that point on they could, he hoped, begin to put the squeeze on Massiter. If Teresa did come up with something, all the better. Costa’s theory was that, once Massiter was in custody on one charge, it would be easier to instigate a rolling set of investigations against him—over the Arcangeli deaths and, if he could just find the right breakthrough, in connection with the stalled investigation involving Daniel Forster and Laura Conti too. Maybe they wouldn’t get the personal pleasure of sending the man down. But once the momentum was there, it would, surely, be impossible for Massiter to wriggle off the line.

If . . . they could assemble enough material to make an arrest before Massiter claimed ownership of the island. Once the Arcangeli’s names were on that piece of paper, they would not simply be hunting one man. They’d be challenging the entire hierarchy of the city, men who’d staked their reputations on clinching a deal to secure the future of the Isola degli Arcangeli—and sweep its recent murky financial past under the carpet. That made everything so much harder, perhaps too hard for a man like Luca Zecchini, who’d already stuck his neck on the block more than Costa expected. Power mattered in Venice. Costa understood that, and so, too, did Zecchini. Every failed attempt to tackle Massiter seemed to leave the Englishman more in control than before. They had little time to start the ball rolling, and few clear ideas on where Massiter’s weak point might emerge.

There were now eight Carabinieri officers in the grey, unmarked van, all armed, all good men, Nic thought. Zecchini had assembled only the ones he trusted most. They’d committed themselves to Venice for the entire day. And they didn’t intend to go home empty-handed.

Hunched on the seat opposite Costa and Peroni, Zecchini eyed the two cops.

“Decision time, gentlemen,” he said. “There’s still room to get out of this. We could just walk away.”

“Leave us the warrant then,” Costa replied immediately. “Whatever happens, we’re going in.”

Zecchini shrugged his shoulders. “I hope Leo appreciates this one day.” He patted the man next to him on the shoulder. “Avanti!”

IT WAS A BRISK, professional operation. In the space of four minutes they ascertained the house was empty, removed the front door, and were inside, wandering the big, airy rooms, admiring a residence that was surely beyond the scope of most senior police officers. Randazzo liked paintings. That surprised Nic Costa, though he couldn’t help but wonder if it was really the commissario’s wife’s taste they were seeing here in the selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canvases, a handful of old religious icons and set upon set of antique Japanese prints.

Luca Zecchini walked around examining what was there with a professional eye, taking photos, referring from time to time to some visual database he kept on a little palmtop computer in his jacket pocket. He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t look happy. Peroni was shooting Costa concerned glances. This wasn’t their only opening, but it was, the two men had assumed, their best.

“Luca,” Costa said when they’d been around every room on the ground floor, with the Carabinieri man shaking his head constantly. “What have we got?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Maybe something. Maybe not. If I’m going to pull this guy in today, I need something positive. I can’t just do it on suspicion. Even if this is illegal, it’s minor stuff, the kind of things you’d buy from an antiques fair. Nothing terribly valuable. If we try to nail the bastard on this alone, he’ll just feign ignorance. Say he bought it at some sale somewhere. It’s going to be hard to prove otherwise.”

“What about the icons?” Costa asked. “Don’t you think they’re Serbian?”

“Sure. But what does that tell us? Without positive identification, without proof of provenance, all we’ve got are suspicions. There’s nothing here that raises any flags. When I get back to Verona, maybe. But that’s going to take time. Don’t get me wrong. I can work on the paintings. I just . . .” He was trying to soften the blow. “I can’t give you anything straightaway. Sorry.”

Peroni was scratching his head. “It wasn’t just paintings,” the big cop objected. “That may be all you saw two days ago, Nic. But there was more. Weird stuff.”

Plenty of weird stuff, Costa thought, when he looked at the shelves. Oriental ceramics. Cloisonné vases and screens. Randazzo’s home was a mishmash of styles, regions and eras that denoted a couple of uncertain tastes.

“The weirdest,” Peroni said, “was in there.”

He was pointing to a glass cabinet hidden in a corner near the fireplace, something Costa had never noticed.

Peroni walked over, opened the doors and returned with a small, very old statue. A squat, grinning figure in worn stone, seated cross-legged with a beaded necklace and an expression halfway between a Buddha’s and a satyr’s.

“It sort of stuck in my mind,” Peroni explained, pointing to the huge erection which rose between the creature’s legs.

Luca Zecchini took the object from him, turning it in his hands. Then the Carabinieri major gave the statue back to Peroni, pulled the palmtop out of his pocket and began to punch the buttons. In just a couple of seconds he stopped, grinned at both of them, then turned the little screen round for them to see. It was a photo of something that looked very like Randazzo’s object.

“Babylonian,” he said. “Seen a few like this since Iraq fell.”

“It’s the one in the picture?” Peroni asked.

“No. But it’s close enough.”

“Valuable?”

Zecchini nodded. “In a roundabout way. These things are what passes for hard currency in the drug trade. We’re doing pretty well working on cross-border money laundering. It’s not easy to move big amounts of cash around the world anymore. You get asked awkward questions when you try to bank it.”

“So you ship valuable antiques instead,” Costa said. “They’re easier to smuggle. And when they get to the other end, someone turns them into money and pays off the debt.”

“Exactly,” Zecchini agreed, seemingly impressed by Costa’s knowledge. “These things were household gods. Every worthwhile specimen was either in a private collection or Iraq’s museums. There’s so much stuff leaking out of Baghdad, all of it through criminal channels, we’re under strict instructions to report every last piece we come across.”

One of those little planes interrupted the conversation, buzzing low overhead. They had to wait for it to go away before anyone could speak.

“So it’s good?” Peroni asked.

Zecchini pulled out his mobile phone. “It’s a start. Commissario Randazzo and I need to meet. Are you coming along?”

Costa shook his head, then glanced at his partner. “Gianni, you go. I’ve something to do.”

Peroni didn’t look too pleased. “Anyone I know? I don’t like being kept in the dark.”

“Just a couple of ghosts,” Costa replied, nodding towards the window and the blue sky beyond. “And maybe not even that.”