The Lizard's Bite

THERE WAS A MOB OF DINNER JACKETS AND EVENING gowns all around her, a heavy brew of accents fighting for attention over the music. Teresa Lupo wanted to yell at them to shut their quacking mouths. Silvio had got through with a result, one that was early for some reason she couldn’t hear over the din. What Alberto Tosi had said kept running round her head too, not making any sense at all, not in the neatly aligned series of facts and suspicions they’d been chasing so hard these past few days.

She stood on the steps of Ca’ degli Angeli, aware that Peroni and Nic had gone ahead with the rest of them, trying to separate Silvio’s tinny squeaking in her ear from the racket all around her.

Then a waiter drifted into view, proffered a silver platter of canapés in her face. She gave him a desperate glance.

“Do me a favour. I just got a call to say my uncle died. I need a little quiet. Can you move these people along?”

The waiter’s flat, unemotional face suddenly flickered with sympathy. “Signora! I am so sorry. Of course.”

He was busy in a flash, shooing with a white-gloved hand, shushing them into a semblance of silence.

Finally, she could listen again to Silvio’s babbling and hear what he was saying, making a mental note to herself as she did that it really was time to sit down with her assistant and teach him not to get overexcited at tense moments.

“Silvio, Silvio . . . Calm down.”

A heavy shoulder in grubby black brushed against hers. Instinctively she pulled back, aware this was the boatman, who didn’t appear too clean from afar, or too bright from close up. He was covered in muck and ash, and holding a long bundle of kindling twigs tightly, both arms underneath the wood, striding into the entrance of the house, towards the broad marble stairs, intent on something, a fixed, hurt expression on his face.

Then she listened to Silvio one last time, relieved that he finally managed to say what he meant to.

Quick decisions. She both hated and adored them. She dropped the phone back in her pocket and followed in the steps of the boatman, trying to avoid the chunks of twig that marked his path, thinking, desperately trying to find some way through what she knew.

Teresa Lupo rounded the staircase and saw the open door to the large, handsome room where they were all gathered. The warm yellow light of the sun streamed through those curious windows she’d noticed from outside. Hugo Massiter, a man she’d only seen twice, once on a launch in the Grand Canal, once in the palazzo next door, stood in the centre of the room looking as if he owned everything around him already. The bricks, the mortar, but most of all the people.

“Nic . . .” she said, but no one was listening, no one was doing anything but look at the boatman, who shuffled stupidly, like an idiot, ahead of her, clutching the bundle of kindling in his arms.

It was the oldest Arcangelo who spoke first. Michele got out of his seat, one good eye flashing hatred and fury, emotions, she thought, that had been looking for somewhere to escape long before this poor, dumb native wandered into the room.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” Michele bellowed. “What are you doing?”

There was a brief quiet lull. It felt like being in the eye of a storm.

“I thought you’d need firewood,” the boatman said in a dull, detached brogue as coarse as his clothing. “They told me you’d still be working, Signor Michele. If you work, you need help.”

The couple she’d seen in handcuffs were there, trying to hold one another, trying to form some sort of bulwark against everything that surrounded them.

“Go, Piero,” the young man said, half choking on the words. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

“Do?” the boatman wondered.

The young woman was sobbing, hating something about the sight of the boatman. Or fearing it, perhaps.

“Piero,” she pleaded. “Listen to me! Go!”

Michele Arcangelo walked up to the man, slapped him as hard as he could, twice across the face, front of hand, back of hand, screaming, with so much force Teresa could feel the hatred welling up from the man as he raged in front of them.

“Matto! Matto! Matto! Get out of here!”

But he didn’t flinch. He was looking at the Englishman now. Massiter stood there, amused, arms folded, feet apart, the stance of a victor.

Nic, she said or whispered or simply thought, Teresa Lupo wasn’t quite sure.

“Signor Massiter,” the boatman said in a calm, thoughtful voice, one that seemed more assured, and rather more intelligent, than she’d expected.

“You know my name?” The Englishman beamed. “I’m flattered.”

“I know your name,” he said, nodding. Then he turned to look at the couple.

“Another Scacchi warned us about you, long ago. You cannot run from the Devil, he said. The Devil always finds you. Or you find him.”

“Piero, Piero!”

It was Gianni Peroni, working his way towards the boatman now, with the kind of swift, certain intent she’d come to recognise. The big cop could wrestle a man down in an instant if the sweet talk didn’t work.

“No one moves,” the boatman said, and released the bundle of kindling, let the twigs fall noisily onto the polished floor and the shining table, sending Michele Arcangelo into a paroxysm of screaming, foulmouthed wrath once more. Until . . .

“Nic,” Teresa said, and heard her own voice faintly over the sudden silence.

“No one moves.”

They froze. Not one of them—not Nic, not Peroni, or even Luca Zecchini—felt like trying to steal a finger towards the pistols in their jackets. Something in the man’s face told them this would be a very bad idea indeed.

In the boatman’s hands, held with a lazy, knowing grace, was a long, old shotgun, double-barrelled, as worn and used as the man himself. A man who now punched the weapon into Hugo Massiter’s chest, propelled him viciously to the great bowed window, sending him back so hard the Englishman’s head cracked against the glass, shattering it with a sudden, piercing crash.

Hugo Massiter howled in pain and shock.

“No,” a female voice said, and Teresa was unsure where the sound came from, the handcuffed woman, Raffaella Arcangelo, or her own dry throat.

“What do you want?” Massiter roared, raising a hand to his head, looking in astonishment and shock at the blood some hidden wound at the back of his scalp deposited on his fingers. “What insanity is this?”

“I want nothing,” the boatman replied quietly, calm, unworried.

Massiter’s face contorted with fury.

“Venetians! Venetians! Name your price and be done with it. A man like me has bought the likes of you all before. I’ll buy you all again, twice over, if that’s what it takes.”

Piero Scacchi didn’t flinch, didn’t take his eyes off the pompous Englishman trapped against the gleaming glass. “You make two mistakes,” he said. “One: I am not a Venetian. Two: you are not a man.”

The gun jerked, the room filled with its terrible roar. Hugo Massiter’s torso rose in the air, flew back against the stains of the bull’s-eye windows, and was caught there by a second explosion, one that ripped his chest apart, thrust him out of the room altogether, out into the open air where, for one brief moment, he appeared suspended in a sea of whirling shards, a dying man flailing in a cloud of glass that reflected his agony as it tore his shattered body to blood and bone.

Then he was gone, and from the unseen quay below came a mounting communal murmur, more animal than human, a buzzing, humming storm cloud of fright, punctuated by the growing rattle of screams.

She was half aware of one other event too. Peroni had finally reached the boatman, held him at the fractured windows, with just enough strength to stop him from following his victim out into the golden evening before finally, more through the man’s own lassitude than Peroni’s considerable force, grappling him to the floor.

“It didn’t match, Nic,” Teresa Lupo whispered, finally able to get the words out of her mouth though she knew no one else could hear. “It didn’t match at all.”