The Lizard's Bite

ALBERTO TOSI DISLIKED PUBLIC OCCASIONS. ESPECIALLY one where the host had assembled an entire orchestra, placed it on a podium, and ordered it to play background music to the chink of glasses and the banter of idiots. Music deserved better than that. Had Anna not proved so enthusiastic—insisted was, perhaps a better word—the old pathologist would have spent this hot high-summer evening on the terrace of his large apartment home on Sant’ Elena, the quiet, somewhat geriatric island beyond the Biennale Gardens and Castello, enjoying a spritz and the breeze off the lagoon.

Instead he was on the Isola degli Arcangeli, watching a couple of hundred members of the city’s finest prepare to stuff their faces from table after table of rich delicacies supplied, doubtless at great expense, by the Cipriani, and all to mark . . . what? Tosi was unsure of the answer. To honour their own splendour in all probability. This was, he had soon come to judge, an unpleasantly narcissistic gathering.

Anna, to his disappointment, was part of the show. She was now dressed in a rather short skirt and shiny red silk blouse, the skimpiest clothing her grandfather had ever seen her wear. The John Lennon spectacles were replaced by contact lenses, which gave her a rather glassy-eyed look, Tosi thought, not that it stopped the men despatching inquisitive, admiring glances in her direction.

Had he cared, Tosi, in his old dark work suit, might have felt himself underdressed. Everyone else seemed to be as fixated with their appearance as Anna was. Dinner jackets and evening dresses flitted around him in a constant swirl. Half the splendid, chattering dining rooms of Venice would be empty this night. Their owners had gathered on the Arcangeli’s sad little island to raise their glasses to its supposed rebirth and, more importantly, Tosi felt, to the Englishman who had breathed new life back into the venture. A man who was about to become a kind of modern Doge, honorary lord of the city, in all but title, a grandee elevated by his peers in a symbiotic process—one in which gratitude was both given and received—Tosi was coming to understand only too well.

He’d watched the way Massiter strutted through his audience. A puffed-up peacock of a man, quite unlike most of the upper-class English Tosi had known over the years. At one point he’d wished for the courage to walk up to this newly crowned faux-aristocrat, to point out that sometimes the Venetians tore down the princes they had so warmly elected only a little while before. A screeching mob had cut the throat of Orso Ipato, the first Doge. Marino Faliero had been summarily beheaded by his fellow nobles, and at the age of seventy. Not that creatures like Massiter knew or cared about history. It was a subject for old men these days, though that was not the reason Tosi failed to make the point to his unwanted host. Respect and fear went hand in hand in circles such as these, a fact the old pathologist never let slip from his sharp and capacious memory.

Sometimes he wondered what Venice would be like fifty years hence. He was grateful he wouldn’t be around to witness the transformation. The streets would echo to the gabbled tones of English and Russian and Chinese, anything but the gritty vowels of the Veneto that Tosi still liked to speak at home on Sant’ Elena. The place would be an international zone entirely, run by foreigners for foreigners, with only dependent locals still around to hunt for crumbs.

Alberto Tosi believed he was a civilised man, one who had long understood that the world always changed. But sometimes, when he read the local newspaper and the latest plans to bring ever more hordes of tourists into an already over-choked city, he was unable to shake off the impression that progress was merely an illusion, a catchword designed to disguise the cruel trick being played upon the many by the few.

There was precious little space for self-respect in this new Venice, a quality Tosi regarded as essential, a badge of pride to be worn by everyone, from the man who made your coffee in the morning, carefully working the valves and pipes of his Gaggia machine, to an ageing city pathologist who was still more than a little disgruntled about being railroaded around by the authorities when it suited them. Without self-respect, one was simply a wage slave for the faceless figures who seemed to own everything, control everything, pulling the city’s strings from inside their banks and accountants’ offices. Tosi had no problems with the idea of a society divided by class, provided each level had its own reason to survive. This new world unjustly divided its occupants into winners and losers, the few and the many, making a pretence of egalitarianism when, in truth, it was more close and tight and viciously elitist than the ancient regime it sought to supplant with its new cabal of rogues.

Massiter, a master rogue, as all knew and none dared say, played this game like a maestro. The Arcangeli had always been discerning about those they allowed beyond the outstretched arm of their iron angel and its torch, which now burned more brightly than ever. The Englishman decreed that the gates to the island be open, for the first time Alberto Tosi could remember. This evening anyone in Venice was welcome to walk through to admire Massiter’s coronation.

Few, beyond Massiter’s large and growing circle of hangers-on and succubi, seemed to have bothered. Tosi knew what the locals on Murano were like. They hated newcomers. They’d loathed the Arcangeli for decades. Nothing, not money, not influence, would make them feel warm towards Hugo Massiter. This was an adventure beyond them, the arrival of the first speck of canker from across the water that would, one day, consume their impoverished little island and spit out in its place the same gaudy, transient hoopla found everywhere else in the city.

Tosi tasted his weak, badly made spritz and scowled. Then he saw a familiar figure approaching, one who generated both admiration and a little worry.

Anna followed the direction of his gaze. Teresa Lupo, the Roman pathologist, was striding towards them with a deliberate, determined gait.

“I’ll see you later,” the girl muttered. He watched her depart in a flash of bright red silk, gone to where the young were gathered, next to the drinks table manned by serious, white-shirted waiters, working beneath the fiery torch of the iron angel. This was only Alberto Tosi’s second time on the Isola degli Arcangeli. The first had been almost fifty years before, at some grand gathering to which his own father had somehow managed to wangle an invitation. Those were different days, with different people, two decades before the accident that closed the palazzo to the public for good. But even by then the island’s fortunes had changed. Angelo Arcangelo was dead, and he took his dream with him to a temporary grave on San Michele across the water.

He was ruminating on this fact when his attention was drawn by Teresa Lupo’s bright, cheery face.

“You’re a little late for the crime scene, Alberto,” she declared with a brisk, sardonic smile.

He laughed and, for a moment, a rebel part of him wondered whether a lively Roman pathologist on the cusp of middle age could possibly be interested in an ancient widower with little to offer but the same shared interests.

“Which one?” he asked. “This place has so many. Those poor people in the furnace. That Bracci character. Your own inspector. How is he, by the way?”

“Much better,” she replied. “But dreaming for now.”

“Dreaming is a talent to cultivate. Particularly tonight.” He finished his glass and took a second off one of the starchy waiters drifting by. Tosi scowled at the crowd. “I wonder how many dreams these little lives encompass. They’re all too busy counting their money or running through their wardrobes.”

“Perhaps they’re here for the thrill,” she said with a cryptic glee. There was a cunning glint in her eye, one he didn’t quite trust. “To be so near the smell of blood.”

“In Rome they may play those childish games, perhaps. This is just Venice, Teresa. A small and simple city, where we lead small and simple lives.”

She scanned the glittering crowd. “I don’t think they’d like that description.”

“I don’t think their opinion counts for much,” he answered, unable to suppress the bitterness in his voice. “There’s scarcely a real Venetian here.”

“What about him?”

She was pointing down to the quayside where an old, rather shabby boat, with an equally shabby man at the wheel, was docking near the warehouse. A small mountain of grey material occupied part of its meagre hold, alongside a pile of firewood, thin twigs, meagre kindling, the kind they used out in the little shacks of the lagoon. In the bow lay a small black dog, seemingly asleep.

The sight puzzled Tosi. Then he saw the Sant’ Erasmo marking on the stern.

“He’s just a matto making a delivery. Wood and ash, by the looks of things. They use them in the furnace. Not for much longer from what I hear . . .”

She wasn’t listening, which disappointed Tosi, a man not averse to gossip, of which there was plenty at the moment. Instead, Teresa Lupo was on the phone, anxious for some news, disappointed when she seemed not to receive it.

Her eyes had moved to the house. Some figures were walking towards the front door, watched by the shabby boatman. These were the type of men Tosi recognised. Plain-clothed police officers, from elsewhere, not Venice, since Albert Tosi prided himself on the fact that he knew by sight every last person on the city force.

They had two people with them, a man and a woman, dressed in poor rural clothes, like the shabby boatman. Two people who were handcuffed, hands to the front, a cruel and unnecessary action, Tosi thought, since neither showed any sign of resistance.

Teresa turned away and stared at the furnace. It looked like new. The stonework had been cleaned. The long show windows were shiny and spotless. Soon the trinket sellers would arrive, Tosi guessed. Everyone knew what Massiter was like. He wouldn’t allow glassmaking on such valuable real estate for long.

“Did you really sign Uriel’s death off as spontaneous combustion?” she asked, apparently out of the blue.

“No,” he answered with a coy, sly reticence.

“Why not?”

“You made me think better of it. Sometimes we have a tendency to overanalyse. A man burns to death in a furnace consumed by fire. There are unexplained details, but in the end I remained unconvinced by Anna’s efforts. She’s a good girl. A little too enthusiastic at times. The young rely on their imagination too much. Age teaches one to rely on hard fact.”

She was regarding him closely, looking for some emotion, it seemed.

“It could have made things awkward too,” she suggested. “An unusual finding such as that would have attracted attention. Invited others to look, perhaps.”

“I agree,” he said, and raised his glass. “To the unexplained!”

She was, he was coming to believe, a very attractive woman. Not physically, but in her personality. A difficult woman, though. One he would not wish to be around for long.

Teresa Lupo had an important point to make too. He could see that from the sudden serious look in her face.

“I hope you don’t mind me talking shop,” she went on.

“Not at all. Let me do the same. What about that material I gave you? Have you a report back from your magic machine in Rome?”

“No,” she replied grumpily.

“Ah.” He hoped there was some expression of sympathy on his face.

“Those samples you gave me were contaminated when we got them,” she complained. “You should kick a few family backsides in that lab of yours in Mestre.”

He laughed, unsure of her point. “Contaminated with what?”

She paused, as if she were hunting for the name, then said, “Ketone.”

Alberto Tosi pulled a pained face. Some of the chemicals they had to work with these days . . .

“Horrible stuff. Toxic. Highly flammable too, though very good at its job.”

He sighed. Sometimes you had to tell the truth. There really was no point in beating about the bush.

“I must confess something, Teresa. The samples I gave you were just that. Samples. The lab in Mestre did nothing to them. Nothing. As I endeavoured to explain when we first met, this was a closed case. There seemed no reason. What you had was what came straight from the foundry over there.”

She stared at him, astonished, and, it seemed to Tosi, more than a little worried too. “You did nothing to clean away the foam?” she asked.

“Not a thing. Why should we?”

Teresa Lupo was gazing at him with an expression of frank amazement. Alberto Tosi felt lost, unable to offer any comment that would make a difference.

“Then Uriel was murdered,” she said softly, almost to herself. “And I know how,” she added, then excused herself and began to stride towards the house, pushing through the crowd, punching her phone as she went.