The Lizard's Bite (39 page)

“No,” Zecchini told Peroni. “This one’s on me. Best find your partner too. We need to talk.”

W
HEN HE CAME TO, DANIEL FORSTER WAS STILL THERE, gun by his side, barrel not quite in Costa’s face. Costa raised his fingers to the site of the blow. There was blood there. He winced.

“A little of the English comes back in your voice when you’re angry,” he observed.

Daniel Forster glared at him. “You deserved it.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Mr. Forster. Can I get up? Would it be too much to ask for some water?”

Laura Conti spoke to him rapidly in English, something Costa couldn’t catch, then she went to the sink and came back with a glass. Costa dragged himself off the floor and took the water, gulping at it gratefully.

“You won’t do anything stupid, Daniel,” she said firmly. “I mean that.”

Costa found himself shocked by the man’s appearance. Daniel Forster was a cultivated man. Now he looked lost, broken, damaged. It was Laura Conti who was protecting him, it seemed. Not the other way round.

“Hear me out…” Costa began.

The shotgun waved in front of him again.

“Shut up! We’ve planned, you know. We can be out of here in an hour. There are boats. There are people who’ll help us. We’ll be gone before they even find your corpse.”

The woman put her hand firmly on the weapon. “No, Daniel. I won’t permit it.”

“I’m not who you think,” Costa said, gingerly reaching into his jacket and offering the ID card there. “I’m a police officer. I’m here to ask you to help us do what we should have done years ago. Put Hugo Massiter in jail.”

Forster looked astonished. Then he laughed. It wasn’t an encouraging sound.

“Listen to him, Daniel!” Laura Conti snapped. “Give him a chance.”

“A chance for the police to put Hugo in jail?” Forster asked. “How many chances do they want?”

“Just one good one,” Costa replied immediately. “You can give it to us.”

It was the woman who answered. She fixed him with sad, resigned eyes and said, “No. That’s not possible. We can’t help you. In any way. I’m sorry.”

“Do you just want to stay in hiding for the rest of your lives? Being people you’re not? Keeping out of the way?”

“And staying alive,” Daniel Forster said glumly. He scanned the room, clearly hating what he saw. “Even like this.”

“I promise you won’t be in danger,” Costa added quickly. “We can provide protection. Whatever you need.”

Forster laughed again. There was a little less harshness in the young Englishman’s voice this time. Nic Costa saw a glimpse of the man he must once have been.

“We had what we needed once before,” he said with a sigh. “A home. Money. Our freedom. Most of all, each other. Massiter came back from the dead somehow and stole everything but the last.”

He put down the weapon, clutched the woman around the waist briefly, kissed her cheek, then looked across at Costa again, his face stony with determination.

“He won’t take that away too,” he added.

“But this isn’t who you are,” Costa objected, watching the way the woman closed her eyes when Forster embraced her, the shared pain there when she reopened them.

She looked at the ID card more closely. “Hugo Massiter stole who we were years ago, Agente Costa,” she told him. “What kind of a life do you think we’d go back to?”

He didn’t have an easy answer. Then his phone rang inside his jacket pocket, a noise so loud it made each of them jump.

Costa took the call, watched by them, closely. Peroni was on the line. Nic listened, said little in reply, then put the phone away. They must have seen the expression on his face.

“Bad news?” she wondered.

“I thought we had another witness,” Costa said. “One who could bring Massiter down if I failed to find you.”

“And… ?” she asked hopefully.

There was no point in lying.

“He’s dead. No witnesses. I can surmise. We’ve been able to do that a lot. But proof…”

She took the empty glass from him, came back with it full, looked at his head, patted the blood there with a tissue.

“Are you beginning to understand?” Laura Conti asked him.

“Not really,” Costa admitted. “Tell me.”

“It’s very simple,” she replied. “You can’t win, and by the time you realise that, it’s too late, because he already has you. The moment you get close to Massiter you’re lost.”

Costa thought of Emily, and the risk she’d undertaken, willingly, of her own volition, though he could have prevented it.

“Too late for that,” he muttered.

Laura Conti stared at him with sad, dark eyes. “In that case, I pity you,” she said.

“I won’t back down from this man,” Costa said. “Nor should you. He was responsible for the deaths of people you knew. Piero’s cousin and his companion. He killed those police officers. He ruined you. I thought…”

Costa hesitated. He was getting nowhere.

“What?” Forster asked. “That we’d want revenge? What good would revenge do us? We just want to survive.”

“Nothing more,” the woman added. “You can’t ask us to throw that away.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. As I said, we can protect you.”

“The way you protected your witness?” she demanded sharply. “Please. We know this man better than you. Go now. Leave us alone. Tomorrow we’ll be gone. You won’t tell anyone we’re here, will you? There are no secrets in Venice. Not for long.”

Forster was eyeing the gun again.

“You’re sure of this?” Costa asked.

They both nodded. There was nothing left he could use, no coercion, no persuasion.

“We’re sure,” she said.

He nodded. “In that case it’s important you listen to me. In a few hours, Massiter will sign a business contract. A very large one. A contract which will seal his position in the city and beyond. Once that’s done, no one will dare touch him. Not on a local level. Not a regional one. Not even the national authorities, I believe, because…” Meeting this pair, seeing the fear in their eyes, brought home to him the scale of the step Massiter was taking. “… he will have such power over so many people. After that, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to go against him.”

Daniel Forster swore bitterly under his breath.

“I’ll tell no one of your whereabouts,” Costa promised. “All the same, it would, perhaps, be prudent to think of going as far away as possible. And don’t tell anyone where you are. Certainly not Piero. You’ll just extend the risk to him further. If I can help in some way…”

“I could have killed him, you know,” Forster said. His eyes glinted in the gloom of the shack. “Once before.”

“Why didn’t you?” Costa asked.

The young Englishman stared at the gun, a look on his face that was both hatred and regret.

“Because I was a fool.”

P
IERO 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.