The Lizard's Bite

TOURISTS RARELY STUMBLED ON SAN FRANCISCO DELLA Vigna. The church lay in a small campo close by the Celestia vaporetto stop, just a couple of minutes away from the hospital. But even Gianfranco Randazzo, who had never set foot in the place, and regarded this backwater of Castello as a quartiere well beneath his standing, was surprised by what lay behind Palladio’s severe white frontage. This was a Franciscan monastery still, more than five hundred years after its foundation. Beyond the gloomy interior, with its Lombardo sculpture cycle and canvases by Veronese and Bellini, lay a connected pair of quiet cloisters formed by two storeys of cells and offices. It was a community that seemed to come from another world, one untouched by the pressures of modern life. Doves flitted through the bars of shade made by the angular lines of columns. Flowers grew around the statue of Saint Francis that stood in the sun at the centre of the first cloister, opposite the cell they’d allocated him. Here, during the brief moments he was alone in the tiny bare room or seated in the shade of the colonnades, was a kind of peace, some guarantee of anonymity. The Questura had left him with no choice in the matter anyway. Someone had been pulling strings to keep him out of the way. He would remain in San Francisco della Vigna until the internal investigation, which he’d been promised would deliver nothing more than an admonition, was complete.

The worst part was the company. Two Questura jokers, Lavazzi and Malipiero, men he’d learned to despise over the years for their laziness and casual insolence, were deputed to be close by most of the time during the day, and were replaced by a changing cycle of equally dull drones each evening. Now, with Randazzo unable to pull rank, their efforts at insubordination took new directions. Randazzo had grown tired of their vicious personal cracks after just a couple of hours. The prospect of a long stay in the monastery with these two was inconceivable. He would, before long, go over their heads and demand some new companions. But not just yet, because Gianfranco Randazzo had, in his days inside the monastery, failed to answer satisfactorily a question that had been haunting him since he’d been forced into this temporary exile. Were this duo here to keep him safe from the outside world? Or did the miserable pair really see themselves as jailers, ordered to keep him close in case Randazzo felt like fleeing?

The last was ridiculous. Randazzo was aware of how many important men, Massiter above all, he had served that night in the palazzo. It was inconceivable such men wouldn’t repay the favour. Venice ran on rules, private, unwritten rules, but rigid ones nevertheless. Without rules, the place would descend into chaos. And one rule was inviolate. Debts were repaid in the end, always.

Malipiero had just spent an hour or more complaining about the fact that the Franciscans didn’t have a single TV set in the place.

Randazzo looked at him and asked, “Why don’t you try reading?”

“Huh!”

He looked as if the very idea itself were poisonous. Randazzo had managed to get through a couple of books in his time in the cell. Dry volumes on some arcane aspects of Italian law that he’d made a note to read once they told him what was happening. The books made him feel better, and contained some awkward truths he could throw back at a few city men should they need reminding of what he was owed. This entire episode was a necessary diversion in his career. He appreciated that. It didn’t mean he couldn’t profit from the experience.

“Books can help you get on,” he told Malipiero.

“Helped you a lot,” Lavazzi sneered.

The two men—Lavazzi and Malipiero—looked remarkably alike, almost like brothers. Both were around thirty-five, a little on the short side, running to fat, their corpulent frames now squeezed inside cheap dark blue suits. They were the kind of men who ruined a decent commissario’s statistics, until he turned on them, kicked them back out on the streets with orders to get some work done. Then the petty crooks didn’t stop coming through the door, guilty and innocent, until Lavazzi and Malipiero got bored again and returned to drifting from bar to bar, bumming beers and panini.

“Why don’t you two just go for a walk?” Randazzo suggested. “It’s ridiculous being here all the time.”

“Those Bracci brothers are very pissed off,” Lavazzi replied. “You blew away their old man, in front of all those people. Can you blame them?”

Randazzo felt his temper begin to flare. “I put down an animal who’d taken a woman hostage and was waving a weapon about. It was prudent. If I’d done nothing, who knows what would have happened?”

Malipiero waved a sweaty palm at him. “Don’t want to hear. Don’t want to know. This is not for us to judge. We’ve just been told to stick with you and that’s what we do. I can’t believe a man of your rank would suggest we disobey orders.”

“Incredible,” Lavazzi replied, shaking his head. “Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to. No discipline. That’s the problem.”

“This is boring . . .” Randazzo began.

“You’re telling me!” Lavazzi yelled.

The face of a monk, bald, tanned, friendly, with the cowl around his neck, appeared at the open window. The man put a single finger to his lips and hissed, “Ssshhhh . . .”

Lavazzi waited for him to disappear, then swore quietly, stared at Randazzo and said, “We’re all fucking bored. OK? Saying it just makes things worse. Besides . . .”

He looked at his watch. It was getting close to midday. Lunchtime. These two never missed the opportunity to stuff their faces, usually for free, Randazzo guessed. Guard duty hadn’t stopped them disappearing for an hour around this time every day, coming back with a rosy glow and some pasta sauce on their chops. All Gianfranco Randazzo had to eat was the plain, dull fare of the monks.

“We could go out for lunch,” the commissario suggested.

“You paying?” Malipiero asked immediately.

“If you like,” Randazzo replied. It would be worth it. Also, if he was picking up the bill, he could order them to sit at another table and get some decent privacy for himself.

The two men glanced at each other. Randazzo’s spirits rose. A good meal, a couple of glasses of wine . . . There was a little restaurant he knew in the Campo Arsenale, home cooking in the shadow of the great golden gateway, close to the four lions every Venetian knew were looted from Athens in one of the republic’s raiding adventures way back when. It was hard to walk anywhere in Venice without seeing something that had been purloined over the centuries. The city took what it wanted, when it wanted. Randazzo had learned that lesson as a boy.

He could see the greed glinting in the guards’ faces. A part of him wished he could persuade the pair to turn their backs on a visit from Chieko too, though he wondered what the rules of the monastery would be about allowing women into this bright little oasis nestling near the gasworks in Castello. That could be . . . entrancing if it worked.

Then he remembered Massiter crowing about her in that stupid apartment of his inside the glass palace and the way he’d ignored her ever since.

“Well?” he growled. “I don’t have all day.”

“Really?” Lavazzi laughed. “Wait there. I’ll go make a call and check. Maybe . . .”—he glanced at his partner, an expression there Randazzo didn’t understand—“ . . . it’s not such a bad idea after all.”

Malipiero went quiet when his partner was gone. He was, Randazzo judged, the lesser of the pair.

“Who do you two keep calling all the time?” Randazzo demanded, cross for no real reason, wishing his temper would stay in place for once. “Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Those are Questura phones. I get to see the bills when they come in. If you’re running up private business on my account, you’ll get to know about it.”

The man kept staring at his fat, grubby hands, whistling some stupid pop tune that was on the radio all the time. That was, Randazzo thought, the closest he could get to entertainment.

Then Malipiero stopped, glowered at him, and said, “You know, I wish you’d make up your mind. Are you the upstanding honest guy here? Or just like the rest of us? It gets confusing for simpletons like me.”

“Don’t be so fucking impertinent!” Randazzo yelled.

The face came back to the window, offended this time, as close to cross as a monk could get.

“Gentlemen,” the man said, “if you don’t behave correctly here, I shall have to ask you to leave. We are accommodating. We are, however, only human.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Malipiero grumbled, waving him down. “Go say a prayer or something. We’ll leave a little change in the box by the door.”

The monk disappeared, a worldly epithet echoing gently in his wake.

“You just leave one long line of satisfied customers everywhere you go,” Randazzo observed.

The whistling began again, until Lavazzi returned, grinning, carrying something in a plastic bag.

“You’re on,” he said. “We’re clear to go out for two hours. Then it’s back in your cell, Commissario. Hope you brought plenty of money with you.”

“Enough,” Randazzo murmured, staring at the bag.

“Oh yeah,” Lavazzi added, still smirking like a teenager. “That was the condition. You’ve got to go out in kind of a disguise.”

He reached into the bag and took out the contents. It was a brown monk’s habit, complete with dressing gown–style belt.

“With that bald head you’re going to look the part,” the cop declared.

Maybe it was another of the pair’s jokes. Maybe someone back at the Questura really did think he ought to be discreet. Randazzo decided he didn’t care. He was going to have an hour in the outside world, with some real wine, not that piss the monks drank, some real food, in the dining room, at a quiet, shady table, while Lavazzi and Malipiero sat on the pavement in the sun, sweating.

Randazzo picked up the habit.

“Do I get some privacy?” he asked. “To change?”

“There you go again, Commissario,” Malipiero said. “Asking us to break the rules. It’s OK. Really. We’ll just stay and watch.”