The Lizard's Bite

PIERO SCACCHI HAD SPENT HALF OF HIS LIFE ON THE water. Instinctively, without a moment’s analysis, he knew what that lurching, shifting power slapping at the Sophia’s ancient, battered planking signified. Change was on the way. Another storm perhaps, or the return of the sirocco, sweeping its way up from the south, its belly gorged with dust. Summer never died easily in the lagoon. It fought and screamed in protest at the coming cold. September was now two days away. The heat would remain for a month or more. But the fire and anger in the season’s belly would recede as estate turned to autunno, the cooling, dwindling days followed, finally, by winter’s clear, icy calm. That was the time Scacchi loved more than anything, when the grapes sat fermenting in the Slovenian oak barrels he’d owned for years, when duck and snipe were on the wing and Xerxes felt ready to enter any marshland, any amount of slush and ice and mud, to find the prey newly fallen from the same bright, cloudless sky that must have sat over the littoral islands a millennium before.

But change was everywhere, unavoidable, a fact that had to be accepted. Now money would be an issue again, just when he least needed it. He had one final load of wood and seaweed ash, bought for a pittance from a farmer in Le Vignole, the islet just southwest of Sant’ Erasmo. This would be delivered to the Arcangeli as agreed, and then Piero Scacchi would work for the family no more. Whatever happened, an island owned by Hugo Massiter was a place he could not countenance entering. The memories of the past still burned, when he allowed them. Not out of some desire for revenge. That was an emotion Piero Scacchi found utterly remote. What had happened five years before—the death of his cousin, the exile of Daniel Forster and Laura Conti—belonged to a series of conjoined tragedies he had no intention of revisiting. For Scacchi, it was important to live in the present, a present he could feel comfortable with, if not control entirely.

The dog now lay in the front of the boat, its black head over the prow, enjoying the salt tang blowing into its nostrils. Scacchi couldn’t see its sharp, dark eyes, but he knew where they’d be looking. In the flat margin between the land and the sky, the territory where the pair of them had hunted for years. Sometimes he envied the animal. In matters of importance it was wise, all-knowing. No creature escaped its eyes, ears or nose. No possibility for advancement—be it food or pleasure or adoration—was ever missed on those rare occasions a visitor came to call. It was a being that lived within its own world, satisfied, unsullied by ambition, as unconcerned about tomorrow as the idiots in the city.

The future was a place Piero Scacchi couldn’t help but confront from time to time, finding it to be a bleak and empty place, one with no easy decisions, no safe places to hide.

They’d been in the shack he’d built for them two years now and no one had noticed, no one beyond the island. This was longer than any of them had intended. They—and Piero included himself here—had to find the money for some kind of escape. Some way of fleeing Venice for good. Hugo Massiter was back forever now. Piero Scacchi saw it in the way people spoke his name, the awe and fear the sound of those very English vowels brought to their eyes.

His dead cousin had said many memorable things. He had had a way with words Piero could never match. One snatch of conversation struck Piero Scacchi in particular, though only afterwards, when Massiter was supposedly gone from Venice, Daniel in jail, and Laura safely hidden away in the Lido.

It was on the Sophia that fateful summer, before the storm clouds descended upon them, the boat ambling across the lagoon from a picnic on Sant’ Erasmo, Xerxes at the tiller, his delicate jaws steering them safe back to Venice with the leather leash Piero had made to allow the dog to navigate from time to time.

There were just a few sentences, ones that came back into Piero’s head now with the kind of clarity that only came from a glass too many of his good, well-oaked red, gulped from the plastic lemonade bottle he kept in the tool compartment for emergencies.

In his mind’s eye he could still see the two of them, alive, ridiculously happy, so full of joy with each other they thought, perhaps, these days would never end. Scacchi, poor dead Scacchi, Piero’s cousin, was waving a withered finger in Daniel Forster’s face for some reason, trying to close down an argument he thought no one else had overheard.

“You cannot outrun the Devil,” the old man had declared sternly. “Never!”

“I know,” Daniel had replied with a lazy, half-drunk smile. “I’ve heard that one. You can’t run from the Devil because he can always run more quickly than you can.”

“That is the kind of stupid, trite, predictable nonsense I would expect to hear from a television set, were I to own such a thing,” Scacchi announced. “I am . . . disappointed.”

Scacchi had a way of making disappointment sound like a cardinal sin. Daniel had taken the tongue-lashing in his stride. He was no longer some naive young English student by then, but Scacchi’s creation. A man of the world. The Venetian world.

“Then what?” Daniel had demanded.

“You cannot outrun the Devil,” Scacchi raised his glass in time to the bobbing of the lagoon, “because it is impossible to outrun oneself. He is both a part of you and part of something else too. But without that hold on your own soul, which you, Daniel, must offer up yourself, he’s nothing. Merely a predator in the night. The boogeyman, as the Americans would say it. A creature worthy of terrifying children, nothing more. Therefore . . .”

Piero recalled the way the old man drew himself up on the hard bench of the Sophia, determined to make this last point stick.

“ . . . in order to conquer the Devil, you must first conquer yourself, Daniel. Which is the hardest, the bravest, encounter of them all.”

He was a cunning and pompous old bastard. Piero had known that all along, and feared his cousin a little at times. But the old man had a certain insight into the way a man’s mind worked too. That conversation had troubled Piero Scacchi for years now. What Scacchi was suggesting seemed both true and horrible. That those who dealt with a creature like Massiter in part brought their fates upon themselves. That there were no black and white certainties, good and bad, right and wrong. Only shades of grey, tipped one way or the other by the actions of those who, all along, supposed themselves to be the innocent, wronged parties in the proceedings.

Piero regarded himself as a simple, honest man. He never expected anything he didn’t earn. He never looked for another to shoulder his private or public burdens. He sought a quiet life in a world he sometimes scarcely liked to think about. Though he was reluctant to admit it, this was, in part, a kind of cowardice, a craving for simplicity as a bulwark against the difficult, complex world beyond Sant’ Erasmo. Elsewhere men and women moved to more intricate rhythms, feeding off one another out of laziness and greed, then going home, sleeping soundly at night, confident that their actions could be justified because that, from their perspective, was the way of things.

He fought no such battles. He hoped that helping Laura and Daniel hide was a kind of bravery. Sometimes, though, he wondered if he was merely disguising another act of cowardice—he couldn’t, in truth, regard fleeing the Devil in any other way.

He glanced back at the low mass of his own island now emerging as he rounded the Le Vignole shoreline. The crooked makeshift jetty of home sat there in the distance, calling to him, waiting for Scacchi and the dog to return and make the place whole. This was where he belonged. He and those like him. Not Daniel Forster. Not Laura. Both were victims in a drama that was partly of their own making. That didn’t lessen his sympathy for them. In a way it made him more determined to help, since they seemed blind to their own culpability. They had been robbed of their existences by Hugo Massiter too, just as much as old Scacchi. More, if he was honest with himself, since they continued to live and be haunted by the day they fell into Massiter’s grasp. Piero Scacchi had understood, from an early age, that, to a good man, the damaged deserved assistance from the whole. It was a duty he’d never questioned, not when his mother began to lose first her health, then her sanity. Life was such a brief, irreplaceable gift, and death so dark and empty and terrible, that he was happy to do whatever he could to improve affairs for those whom he pitied.

He kept looking at the jetty, thinking now of other visitors. The odd bunch of police officers, one short, young and enthusiastic, one old and ugly and wise. And the third Roman, the inspector, who had a darkness in his bright, intelligent eyes that Piero Scacchi recognised the instant he saw it.

That man had danced with the Devil, though a part of him had yet to face up to the fact.

A little giddy from the wine, Piero found his gaze wandering, across the lagoon, to the city waterfront, and that long monotonous stretch of tall buildings running from Celestia to the Fondamente Nuove. He read the papers avidly each day. It was important to be informed. They carried much on the rise of Hugo Massiter, and how the Englishman had great plans for the Isola degli Arcangeli. They carried a little, though not too much, about the aftermath of the tragedy in the palazzo, an event he might have witnessed had he not delivered his cargo that evening, then made himself scarce as quickly as possible, anxious to get away from the peacocks and painted ladies pouring onto the island.

The troubled inspector now lay somewhere in that complex of buildings on the distant waterfront. Piero wondered whether the man had met his own personal demons in his sleep, and which of them would win if such a confrontation occurred.

“A man cannot outrun himself,” he said, aware of a slight slur in his voice, one that came from a plastic cup too many of the heady dark wine he’d extracted from the previous year’s crop of Sangiovese, Oselata and Corvina vines that grew like tortured serpents in the dark earth by the sea.

Everything moves to meet its fate, he thought. All that changed was the pace, the speed at which one closed upon the final meeting.

His head swam. He wanted to give the dog another chance at the tiller, to point the vessel across the lagoon at the distant island, with its iron angel, for the last time, a burden he would never have to inflict upon Xerxes again.

Then something caught his attention. A water taxi, long, sleek and polished, rounding his corner of Sant’ Erasmo, opening up its powerful engines, lifting its nose above the grey lagoon, speeding back towards the city.

No one ever used those boats on the island. They didn’t have the money. They didn’t have the need.

Puzzled, he thought about the Sophia’s decrepit, puny engine, so weak it could scarcely keep up with the trash boats that trundled garbage from the city to dump on some distant destination at the lagoon’s periphery.

He watched the water taxi’s silhouette diminishing with speed in the distance, and wished he could match a quarter of its speed. Piero Scacchi knew he had to see the Isola degli Arcangeli one more time, and then be done with the place for good.