Bracci’s comments rang a bell in Costa’s head. He’d read several histories of Venice during all those long empty evenings on his own. One of them had gone into detail about the glass industry on the island, which had been placed there from the thirteenth century, moved on the Doge’s orders because of the constant fires it caused in Venice itself. There was a brotherhood on the island, a closed, almost Masonic organisation that swore its members to secrecy, and threatened dire consequences to any who gave away its techniques to those outside.
“Bella knew about glass?” Costa asked.
Bracci nodded vigorously. “She was as good with a furnace as any man out there. Not that a woman was supposed to do that work. The Arcangeli thought different. She never used to talk about it much but they let her in there a lot. She had her own clothes. Her own apron. Bella made Uriel a better omo de note than he deserved to be. And look what she got in return!”
Thrust into the Arcangeli’s vast anachronism of a furnace, Costa thought. For no apparent reason.
“Did it ever occur to you that your sister could be in danger?” Peroni wondered.
“Bella?” Bracci laughed. “You never knew her. Bella was in fear of no one. Certainly not that husband of hers.”
“Someone killed her,” Costa said severely, and instantly regretted it. There was thunder in Bracci’s face, an ugly, rapid response that perhaps betrayed more about the man than he intended.
“Don’t fucking patronise me, sonny!” Bracci bellowed. “It’s your job to work out what went on there, isn’t it? If I knew Uriel was going to kill her, he’d have been the one in that furnace. But I didn’t.” The man’s dead, tired face turned thoughtful for a brief moment. “You want the truth?” he asked. “It still seems crazy to me. But that’s Bella’s bad luck and my bad judgment. Now do you have any more stupid questions? Or can a man get on with his work around here?”
Work. That was all Murano seemed interested in. Not two strange, inexplicable deaths. Just money, the daily spectacle of fires and mutable gobbets of glass visible through so many workshop doorways, beacons trying to attract the diminishing numbers of passersby, lure them into the darkness and loosen their purses.
“You could tell us whether you have a set of keys to the Arcangelo place,” Costa asked, undeterred. “And where you were around two this morning.”
Bracci stood up, stormed across the room and held open the door into the alley outside.
“Get out!” he barked.
Neither of the policemen moved.
“They’re simple questions,” Peroni observed. “I don’t think they should interfere with your grief.”
Bracci glared furiously at both of them. The door to the workshop opened. The two sons stood there, big and menacing, both eyeing Gianni Peroni, recognising him as the greater threat. There was violence inside this particular clan, Costa thought. Something he never detected within the Arcangeli at all.
The cops didn’t move. Peroni gave the sons his best battered grin and said, “Just two questions, Bracci. Then we’re gone.”
The older man shot a vicious, bitter look at his offspring, mad their presence hadn’t done the job. “No! I don’t have a set of keys. Why the hell should I? And last night? Ask them. We were all here. I was the omo de note. These two were helping. Or . . .” He shot a bitter glance at the box of seconds. “ . . . trying anyway. We do what’s necessary around here. We work. We earn.”
“All night?” Costa wondered.
Enzo stepped forward. He had his father’s sour face, now covered in soot and sweat. A big, powerful man, Costa thought. The tattoos were something to do with music. Heavy metal. Thrash. Images of swords and skulls, thick strokes, the kind that must have hurt.
“All night,” Fredo said halfheartedly, glancing at the other two to see if he was doing the right thing. “The three of us. We can vouch for each other.”
“That’s what families do best,” Peroni said gently.
Enzo picked up a rag and wiped the soot and grease from his large hands. Then he looked them over and asked, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
Peroni smiled again. “You noticed?”
“Yeah,” Enzo grunted, walked over to the seconds box, withdrew the flawed vase, and slammed it into the side of the table, exposing a line of jagged sharp glassy teeth.
He didn’t wave the thing in their direction. He didn’t need to.
“A word of advice,” he said. “Go careful out there. It gets dark sooner than you think.”
ENZO BRACCI WAS WRONG. NIGHT FELL SLOWLY ON Venice, the way it did at the end of every clear, fine day, with a sunset so lovely it seemed unreal, a magical hour of golden glory that trapped the city on the water in radiant amber. Leo Falcone watched it from the busy vaporetto terminus at Piazzale Roma, wondering about what he’d just seen in the simple city morgue, what he’d heard, from a pathologist who was so unlike Teresa Lupo it was difficult to imagine the man was in the same profession at all. Alberto Tosi was seventy if he was a day, a tall, stiff individual of the old school, more meticulous in his manners than his work, if Falcone had read him correctly. A man of ideas too. He didn’t possess Teresa Lupo’s down-to-earth practicality, though he was well enough read to have mentioned some of her cases when Falcone revealed he was on attachment from Rome. And that, with the formal news Tosi had imparted, raised possibilities too. Along with the meagre report on Hugo Massiter that Falcone had read in the central Questura, watched, he had noted, with a degree of curiosity by the archives officer in charge of the place.
The inspector glanced at his watch, wondered, with some foreboding, what kind of restaurant Gianni Peroni would find so compelling he ate there four or five times a week, then walked down the jetty, out to the boat stop, and waited for the fast service, straight to San Zaccaria.
RAFFAELLA ARCANGELO WATCHED the dying golden light too, acknowledging the familiar sight at the window of the kitchen in the dusty, crumbling mansion by the water. She was untouched by any sense of wonder. This was one more unexpected side effect of sudden loss. She was thinking of herself, of her life on this little island, home for nearly half a century apart from that brief period at college in Paris when, foolishly, she believed she might escape Murano and the hard, unrelenting grip of her family. But those were dreams, and the Arcangeli never put much store in anything they couldn’t see and touch, buy and sell. Which was why she was about to do what she always did at this time of night: make a meal, on this occasion simple penne pasta and tomato sauce. Some salad too. And fruit. She didn’t have the time or money for better.