The Lizard's Bite

AN OLD MONASTERY, HIDDEN INSIDE A CHURCH BY THE gasworks in Castello, no more than three minutes on foot from where Peroni and Nic had been staying for the last eight months. Neither of them had a clue it existed. For anyone trying to hunt down Gianfranco Randazzo, this was surely the last place to look. They would never have found it if Peroni hadn’t called in one last favour from Cornaro, the one officer in the Castello Questura who hadn’t treated the pair of them like lepers.

Gianni Peroni smiled at the pleasant monk in the brown habit who had greeted them, baffled, and seemingly incapable of anything that might pass as assistance.

“We need to speak to Commissario Randazzo,” Zecchini said again, his face beginning to grow red with exasperation. “Now, please.”

“This is a police matter. And a Carabinieri one too,” Peroni added.

The monk shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Then it must be very important indeed. But I was told Signor Randazzo was not to be disturbed. He is here, as I understood it, for the sake of his health. A man of a nervous disposition . . .”

That seemed to be pushing things a little far, even for an unworldly monk.

“He’s on his own?” Peroni asked.

“No. Normally there are men with him.” The monk frowned and, for a moment, looked like someone who inhabited the world Peroni knew. “Two ugly men in particular. Police officers, I believe. Not the kind of people we get in here very often. That part puzzles me, I admit. But we’re here to do service. Not to ask questions.”

“Who’s in charge in this place?” Zecchini demanded.

“No one at the moment. Administratively we are in what one might term an interregnum.”

As someone down at the Questura doubtless knew, Peroni thought.

“Father,” he said, and saw from the look on the man’s face that he had somehow picked the wrong word, “it’s important we talk to Randazzo.”

“We have a warrant.” Zecchini brandished a piece of paper.

The monk stared at the document. “A warrant? What’s that?”

“It’s a piece of paper that says you’ll damn well bring him to us whether you like it or not!” Zecchini yelled.

The curses he added rang around the bright, sunlit cloister, sending a flutter of doves scattering for the cloudless sky.

But nothing dented the monk’s composure. He simply folded his arms and kept on smiling, silent. Peroni couldn’t stop himself from casting a sour glance at the Carabinieri major.

“We don’t want to search a monastery,” he told the monk calmly. “And I’m sure you don’t want that either. There would be so many officers. So much disruption. And noise.”

The monk didn’t like noise. Peroni had watched the way his nose wrinkled when the volume of Zecchini’s voice rose.

“No one wants noise,” the big cop added, craftily.

The monk laughed, and Gianni Peroni was surprised to realise the man was laughing at them. And that there was precious little between a smile and sneer on his face.

“He’s not here. They went out for lunch. And no . . .”—the answer came before the question—“I don’t know where and I don’t care. This is a small and quiet community, gentlemen. When we’re asked to help the city, we do so, without asking questions. We trust our betters. Do you?”

Zecchini scowled at him, then asked, “Gone for good?”

The monk’s arms opened, the hands raised in a gesture of futility. “We’re neither a prison nor a hotel. I can help you no more. I can . . .”

Gianni Peroni couldn’t take his eyes off the doves. They’d assembled again around the foot of the statue of Saint Francis. It was a great place to hide a man. So good it seemed odd Randazzo felt moved to leave it, if only for a meal.

Then, as he watched, the birds began to lift again, a whirling fury of grey and white feathers, rising, racing in every direction, mindless, terrified.

Four, maybe five, shots rang out from somewhere beyond the monastery’s quiet walls, bounced off its bright, clean terra-cotta and echoed around the small, perfect square, threading their way through the colonnades.

Luca Zecchini had his gun in his hand in an instant. The monk gaped at the weapon, both shocked and angered by its visible presence.

“Where?” Zecchini yelled.

Gianni Peroni wasn’t going to wait for this little charade to play itself out. Bawling out some scared, unworldly monk who’d never heard a gunshot in his small, protected life wasn’t going to find them Gianfranco Randazzo. Peroni marched his big frame back into the outside world, thought about what he knew of this area, and where a police commissario with a taste for good food might want to eat. There weren’t many options. Then he began to run, aware, after just a few long strides, of Zecchini and his men playing catch-up in his wake.