The Lizard's Bite

TERESA LUPO SAT AT THE BATTERED TABLE FEELING cold and stupid. They’d been all over the island. Hours of searching, calling, hoping. Now they were back where they always started: Piero Scacchi’s deserted and depressing picnic area. And for what?

For a dog. An animal that thought it could swim the breadth of the lagoon to escape the madness on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Only, if it survived, to find its master missing, missing for a long time, it seemed to her. There were, as far as the papers appeared to know, no extenuating circumstances, no mitigation Scacchi could plead. A matto from the lagoon had shot dead one of the city’s leading citizens at the moment of his apotheosis, with half of Venice’s prosecco-swilling glitterati looking on. It was impudent. Downright bad taste. Scacchi, being a lunatic from the edge of the lagoon, would be lucky to see fresh air in less than ten years, however much the young couple, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, pleaded on his behalf. At least they seemed to have escaped prosecution. Teresa was glad about that. They looked like people who’d suffered, unjustly for the most part. From what she’d read they’d never recover what they’d lost. Massiter’s lawyers had seen to that. But no one seemed much interested in activating the warrants that had been issued for their arrest. That would upturn too many old stones long settled into the dirt, with plenty of unwanted creatures lurking underneath. The pair were, at least, free to start their lives anew.

“Dog! Dog! Xerxes!”

Peroni was muddied up to his knees from wandering through the fields and the marshy land, bellowing for the animal. She wondered what he expected might happen. Would the creature suddenly march out of the lush grass wilderness at the lagoon’s edge, wagging its tail?

He did some more yelling, then came and sat down opposite, grim-faced, cross with himself.

She patted his big hand. “Gianni. It’s been more than a week. If he survived the water—and that’s a big if—he could have starved to death here. We know the locals haven’t been feeding him . . . .”

They’d talked to plenty. Farmer and fisherman alike, none of whom looked as if they’d be much inclined to provide for anything that wasn’t part of their own household. Nobody had even seen a small black spaniel, thin and hungry-looking, lost, puzzled why the little shack where it lived was deserted, day after day. Nobody, if she was honest with herself, much cared. Except for Gianni Peroni, who hoped to care enough to make up for everyone else.

“He’s here,” Peroni insisted. “I just know it.”

“Here we go. Instinct again. Be realistic, will you? The poor thing probably drowned.”

“No! You don’t know dogs. Spaniels love the water. He could swim to the city and back if he wanted.”

“Now that I find hard to believe.”

“Believe it,” he said, then turned to the reedy little rio nearby and starting shouting again, bellowing the dog’s name over and over.

She waited for him to pause for breath, then held his hand more tightly. “Has it never occurred to you, dog person that you are, that the blasted things sometimes only come when called by someone they know?”

“That’s not true! We had a dog when I was a kid. He came for anyone who knew his name.”

She thought about this. “What was he called?”

“Guido!”

“Fine. Listen to a little animal psychology. Dogs rely on syllables. Clearly differentiated chunks of language. Guido—Gwee-doh—is an excellent name because it has two very identifiable syllables, the ideal number for something with a brain the size of a modest potato. Furthermore, these syllables are separated—and this is important—by a hard consonant, one pronounced when you move the middle of your tongue downwards, away from the roof of your mouth.”

He glared at her. “I don’t think dogs understand hard consonants.”

“You’re wrong. Don’t ask how I know this—it was a very long time ago—but they do. A dog with a good name like Guido knows when it’s being called, even by a complete stranger. Whether the thing obeys is another matter, of course.”

“This is going somewhere?” he demanded.

“Straight to the point. Guido is good. Xerxes—think about it when you say it, Zer-ke-sees—is terrible. No hard consonant. Three messy syllables. The dog will have heard it over and over again from Piero and understood what it meant from the repetition and the intonation of his master’s voice. From anyone else it just sounds like mush. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes! So what do I do?”

“You come home with me. Then tomorrow we go back to Rome and attempt to resume lives which are as close to normality as our dysfunctional personalities will allow.”

“And the dog?”

She let go of his hand and wagged a finger in his face instead. “You can’t save everything, Gianni. It’s just not possible. At some stage you—and Nic, and Falcone—have to accept that there are casualties in this world. Besides, even if by some miracle you do find it, what the hell do you do next?”

She saw the guilty, furtive expression in his face and suddenly wished she’d never asked that question. A man who habitually rescued things always knew a place to put them afterwards.

“No. Don’t tell me. It’s the cousin in Tuscany again, isn’t it?”

“Not quite,” he answered, and pulled some crumpled papers out of his jacket, placed them on the table and smoothed them out. One was a faxed memo from the Questura in Rome. The second was a couple of sheets containing bad colour photos of a little farmhouse, not much bigger than Piero Scacchi’s shack, the kind of papers you got from a property agency.

“I was meaning to bring this up. They’ve offered us a career break. Me, Nic, Falcone. Career breaks are very much the in thing in Rome just now. Refreshes the mind. Or something like that.”

She’d heard they’d been going the rounds, usually in the direction of people the boss class didn’t know what to do with. The very idea filled her with suspicion.

“This would be the we-don’t-get-to-pay-you-any-money-but-you-piss-off-and-stay-out-of-our-hair kind of career break?”

“The job’s still there if you want it,” he said. “You just disappear. Six months. A year. More if you like.” He paused, licking his lips. “Maybe forever. My cousin Mauro’s got this spare farm of his. Pigs. He can’t sell it. I could get it for free for a while. See if I can make a go of things.”

She took a deep breath. “You’re leaving me? For pigs?”

“No!” he objected, shocked by the accusation. “I’d only go if you could get a career break too. Wouldn’t be hard. I know a few people . . .”

“Read my lips. I am not raising pigs.”

“They need doctors everywhere,” he said, shrugging. “You could get a job at the surgery in town. They’re nice people.”

“You checked this?”

“Kind of. But not in a committed sort of way. Not . . .”

He sighed and squeezed her fingers. Fat fingers. They were both very alike in some ways, he and she.

“I thought perhaps it was time to try something different. Leo’s going to be out of it for a few months. Nic’s got ideas too.”

No bodies. No morgue. No budgets. She could rent out the apartment. She could go back to dealing with living people for a while. There were attractions. The trouble was it would take a kind of courage she was unsure she possessed.

“It was just a thought . . . . I should have discussed it with you before I asked for these papers,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

“If it worked, Gianni, you know what it would mean? We might never go back. No more Rome. No more Questura. No corpses. No fun.”

“This has been fun?”

“Sometimes. We got one another out of it, didn’t we?”

“Well, yes, but . . .”

“But what? We’re good at this. All of us. It’s just that you three don’t know when to stop. You just walk straight in and take it all head-on. This habit must cease.”

“Maybe we don’t know any other way.”

“Then perhaps it’s time to learn!”

He didn’t object. Peroni was always willing to consider alternatives. It was another of the unpredictable qualities that got to her.

“And if I do that we can both go on a career break?”

She looked into his battered face. “Is that what you really want?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “What do you think?”

“I think we should find the dog.”

“You said he was dead!”

“He probably is. But try this thinking-round-problems idea. You haven’t asked the right question. Even though you know and, more to the point, I know it, since you’ve told me every last thing about the animal already.”

He sat there, mute, puzzled.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Teresa Lupo got up and set off for the little shack. She doubted it would be locked. She doubted Piero Scacchi was a man who failed to keep a backup for anything that was important to him.

Gianni Peroni waited obediently at the table, watching her return, enlightenment dawning in his eyes.

When she came back, she placed the old, grubby shotgun in front of him, and kept the box of cartridges she’d found on her side of the table.

“Don’t kill anything on my account,” she said.