The Lizard's Bite

IT WAS THE SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, LATE AFTERNOON under a sun losing its power. An unseasonable hint of chill, the coming death of summer, lurked within the breeze rising from the Adriatic. It chased across the grey waves, buffeting their faces as they waited on the edge of the graveyard on San Michele. Funerals always made Leo Falcone uncomfortable, though he’d been to many over the years. Now he was trapped inside a wheelchair, reliant on others in a way he found disturbing, a way that reminded him of a younger Nic Costa, once stricken in much the same fashion. There was no easy form of escape, no excuse to put work before personal matters. Nothing but the relentless internal reflection that had been dogging him for a week or more.

“Leo?” Raffaella asked. “Are you ready? Michele was too stingy to pay for private transport back. The boat service stops soon. We don’t want to miss it.”

“A minute,” he said, recalling the coffin going into the fresh ochre earth beyond the line of cedars that separated them from the plots. “I was thinking.”

There’d been so much time for that lately. Fresh thinking. Old thinking, the kind that had happened before he awoke and which still remained in his head, clear and unwilling to go away. The question, as Leo Falcone understood only too well, was what to do with those dark, unsettling reflections.

When Uriel Arcangelo went into the ground, a temporary sojourn, like every San Michele corpse, to be removed a decade hence to make way for more dead, his interment had been watched by just five personal mourners. The three Arcangeli, newly enriched by Hugo Massiter’s purchase of their island, Falcone, and the lawyer who had handled the family estate. The black-suited, quietly officious men of the funeral company outnumbered family. It seemed apposite somehow. The Arcangeli never ceased to be outsiders, even in death.

At least Uriel had received a more proper end than Massiter. The Englishman’s power had vanished the moment his body shattered on the island’s worn paving stones, scattering the crowds, sending them screaming. When Massiter died some spell was broken. Venice was acutely aware of social status. The city’s burghers escaped discovery of their illicit financial transactions. The Arcangeli found their own money problems transformed, escaping from poverty to comparative riches overnight. The future of the island remained as much in doubt as before, but it was now someone else’s problem, an architectural curio left in legal limbo, owned by the estate of a man with no known relatives, no apparent heirs. Already there were mutterings in the local press about a campaign to take it into public ownership. A hotel and an apartment block would one day rise on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Falcone felt certain of this. The way the family, even Michele, acquiesced to the notion after Massiter’s demise indicated, surely, that its days as a struggling glass enterprise were past.

All the same, he found it remarkable how little the name of Hugo Massiter entered into any conversation or public discussion. After the initial flurry of publicity about the arrest of Piero Scacchi on a charge of murder, the story had swiftly died away. The previous day there had been a brief paragraph on an inside page of one newspaper revealing that Massiter’s body had been flown to England for a private burial paid for by his estate, an event that would, Falcone suspected, be watched by lawyers and accountants, if anyone at all. For Venice, at that point, in some final solitary ceremony, the issue of culpability would be closed, interred alongside the ravaged flesh and bone of Hugo Massiter. No one had been brought to account for the killing of Gianfranco Randazzo, which was, the papers now hinted, the result of a gangland row over an extortion racket in which the late commissario had been involved. No one, it seemed, much remembered the deaths of Aldo Bracci, or Uriel and Bella Arcangelo. Venice had a capacity for forgetfulness which Leo Falcone almost envied.

He forced himself to concentrate on the present, and gazed at her with that slow, selfish hunger allowed to a man confined to a wheelchair. Raffaella Arcangelo looked serene, complete somehow, in mourning. She wore a long black dress, expensively cut, and a thin woollen jacket against the cutting breeze. Her hair had been styled by a professional, probably for the first time in years, he guessed, and now curved into her attractive, scarcely lined face. She had the appearance of an intelligent and elegant college professor, something, it occurred to Falcone, she could perhaps have been had the island not dragged her home from Paris out of financial necessity.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

She smiled, a little shyly. “It’s taken a long time for you to frame that question, Leo.”

There was no reproach in her soft voice, though perhaps he deserved some.

He glowered at the wheelchair, unintentionally. “I’m sorry. My mind’s been on other things.”

“Of course,” she replied. “I was being thoughtless. You deserve some indulgences.”

He didn’t believe that to be true. His injuries were temporary, something to be overcome, not resented. Besides . . . “Forget about me, Raffaella. I was interested in you. What will happen now?”

She glanced at Michele and Gabriele. Her brothers were already on the jetty, waiting for the next boat.

“They have their share of Massiter’s money. I have mine. They have the property he wrote into the contract too. The offer of premises. A shop, not one in the best part of town, but now they have the funds to change that. They’ll try to make glass again. I don’t think anything can stop them.”

Nothing short of bankruptcy, he thought.

“And you?” he asked.

She turned to face him, frank, wise, concerned. “I don’t know. What do you suggest?”

The question threw him. “You can do what you want, surely?”

“I can,” she replied, nodding. “For the first time in my life. And yet . . . I don’t know. I’ve spent so long trying to hold the family together on that damned island. Now it’s gone. I’m free. The trouble is freedom doesn’t feel quite how I expected.”

The boat had arrived. Her brothers were getting ready to board, not even bothering to look back.

“Let’s catch the next one, shall we?” she said, watching them. “They don’t need me anymore. Or that’s what they think.” A thought occurred to her. “I could travel, I suppose.”

“Will you?”

She was staring at him again, a look that made Leo Falcone restless, unsure of himself. “Probably not. I . . .” This seemed difficult for her to say. “I’ve been trying something new,” she confessed. “Thinking about myself for a change. Not them. Not the island.”

“You make it sound a crime. It isn’t.”

“I know that. But it still prompts awkward thoughts.”

Her dark eyes seemed torn between watching for his reactions and being afraid of what he might notice. “I realise now that I’ve never been wanted. That’s all. Never on the island. There was nothing there for any of us but duty. Not love. None of us ever had that, even in the beginning, I think. We were part of Angelo’s dream, a dream that was about him alone. About making the Arcangelo name immortal somehow. He was a stupid, cruel old man. I know I shouldn’t say that of my own father, but it’s true. He was willing to sacrifice our lives for his. And look where it got us. Michele and Gabriele still chasing some phantom. Me an old maid.”

He had to laugh. It was such a ludicrous idea. “I don’t think anyone would describe you as that.”

“I wasn’t talking about how people saw me,” she said immediately. “I was talking about how I view myself.” She hesitated. “I want to be wanted, Leo. I want to be loved. Just for me. Nothing else at all. Now that’s selfish.”

He grimaced. “I’ve never been much of an expert at love,” he confessed.

“That makes two of us,” she said.

There was a faint hue on her cheek. Makeup perhaps. Or the hint of a blush.

“You’ll need help,” she pointed out. “You may not like that idea but it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ve never seen much of Rome. I certainly don’t want to stay here. We could just call it friendship. Nothing more. Unless . . . People change with time. Who knows?”

It was a temptation, more enticing than any Hugo Massiter could ever have thrown on the table.

But the child’s screams rang around his head.

“You could go back to university,” he suggested. “You said you loved Paris.”

“I did,” she answered, blushing openly now, worried, perhaps, she’d overstepped the mark. “Not now. University is for the young, I think.”

“But what a person learns . . .” he mused. “That stays with you. All your life.”

It was criminology in his case. Leo Falcone had never been in any doubt about his own future career.

“You studied chemistry, I believe?” he asked.

The question took her by surprise. “Did I tell you that?”

He spoke to the child inside him, then waited, satisfied by its sudden silence.

“No,” Leo Falcone said. “I checked. It’s easy to discover facts about people. The difficulty lies in understanding what they mean.”

She gazed down at him, puzzled, a little annoyed perhaps by the way he’d turned the direction of the conversation.

“You have so much spare time at the moment, Leo. I’m flattered you should spend some of it on me.”

“Was it an easy career choice? I can’t quite see you as a chemist.”

“I was an Arcangelo,” she said. “We were all supposed to be a part of my father’s plan. I would have preferred to have studied literature. He was implacably opposed, naturally. What use are books or poetry when you’re staring into a furnace?”

“You were a good student, I imagine. A conscientious one. A talented one too.”

She nodded, flattered. “I’d like to think so. But I never completed my degree. Paris was expensive. The money wasn’t there. Why are we discussing this? Is it relevant?”

“I think I know how your brother died,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”

She stared at him, mournful, disappointed. “Haven’t we given the grave enough of our time today?”

“It won’t take long.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “But if we’re to speak about the dead, let’s at least allow them to hear for themselves.”

Before he could protest, she took hold of the wheelchair handles and propelled him back toward the graveyard, beyond the line of cedars, rapidly reaching Uriel’s plot, with its too-white marble headstone.

The place was deserted. There was not so much as a single grave-digger working on one of the neat brown plots. Falcone recalled what she had said about the vaporetti. The service stopped at the end of the afternoon. The cemetery island had no need of night visitors.