She didn’t look convinced. “If I were Leo Falcone,” she said primly, “I’d say you were trying to make your suspicions fit your facts. Bracci and Bella were playing those games thirty years ago, weren’t they?”
“Something like that,” Costa confirmed.
“I’m no expert in incest or sexual abuse. But I am a woman. I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t fit. Why would they turn back the clock? Most people in that situation would want to put the past behind them. Never remember for one moment all the stupid nonsense they got up to when they were kids. They wouldn’t want to take those memories out of the box and bring them back to life. What are the stats for incest among people in their forties, outside the boondocks?”
“This is the boondocks,” Peroni grumbled.
“Is it?” Costa asked. “It’s a closed community. I don’t think that’s the same thing.”
“I agree,” Teresa said firmly. “This place is too urban. Someone would surely have known if it had started again. Something would surely have happened.”
Peroni poked his head around the side of the boat. The familiar yellow sign of the Faro floating jetty was bobbing up and down on the water ahead. And something new: two bright blue neon signs had been erected on the little island next door. One, over the foundry, shone above the fresh glass and woodwork, announcing Fornace. The second was five times its size and spanned the entire entrance of the palace in a large semicircle.
“The Palazzo degli Arcangeli,” Peroni read, squinting at the sign in the distance. “Something did happen, if you recall.”
“I know, but . . .”
She wasn’t going to start an argument. Costa understood her point all the same.
The vaporetto lurched to a sudden halt. Its klaxon sounded. Loud, furious voices issued from the cabin ahead. It was one of those rare incidents of a dispute on the lagoon. Two vessels cutting in front of one another, trying to fight for domination of the busy waves.
Nic Costa stuck out his head to see what was going on. Piero Scacchi’s grubby motorboat was edging out from the jetty by the furnace, the black, taut shape of Xerxes seated amidships, in front of the figure of his master, working the helm. The vessel carried no obvious cargo. He could have made some kind of delivery, perhaps to help restart the furnace.
Scacchi fought his way past the stalled vaporetto, ignoring the curses coming from the cabin, then turned up the feeble motor, raising the vessel to what Costa guessed must have been its maximum speed. He looked glad to be leaving Murano, pointing the nose of his little craft straight for Sant’ Erasmo.
“Hey!” Peroni yelled. “Piero!”
His voice was lost in the roar of the vaporetto’s engine. Probably just as well, Costa thought. Piero Scacchi was a player in these proceedings too. He lived in a place where the country habits Teresa ruled out in Murano were, perhaps, not entirely unknown. And he was privy, surely, to information on Hugo Massiter. Costa was unable to keep from poking at the story of Massiter’s brush with the law five years earlier, and those two disappeared characters in that episode, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti. He wondered what they would have to say in response to Massiter’s version of those events. All the more so now, since Emily seemed destined to spend some time in the Englishman’s presence.
A sound—distant, delightful—drifted across the still evening air. From the open doors of the palace came the lilting notes of a small orchestra, the violins foremost, music that, to Costa’s largely uneducated ear, sounded like Vivaldi. He strained to see beyond the boat stop, towards the private island. White banners now festooned the iron bridge and the arms of the skeletal angel. Beyond, by the long, narrow jetty outside the palace, one never used before when Costa had visited the island, a long line of private water taxies was queuing to unload its human cargo. They were all in carnival costume: Renaissance, Baroque, English Elizabethan. The women stood waiting to disembark in bright, shining, full-length dresses, silk, damask and velvet, mantles around their shoulders, fans flickering, feathered hats pointing skywards. The men were equally varied: fake noblemen, pirates, soldiers, others dressed as commedia dell’arte figures, Harlequin in patchwork with his trademark stick, the plague doctor with his long, vicious beak, Pulcinella in sugarloaf hat and white baggy costume.
“Oh my God,” Teresa murmured. “It’s Leo.”
Falcone’s unmistakable lean, erect figure was indeed visible on the jetty. He was wearing a restrained dark uniform, like that of an old-fashioned military officer. Lines of gold braid stood on his shoulders. Colourful medals adorned his chest.
“The bastard,” Teresa complained. “He knew it was fancy dress all along.”
Raffaella Arcangelo stood next to him, in mourning still. Her medieval-style ankle-length dress was solid, dull black. At its high neckline an ornate lace collar, again the colour of night, allowed only a glimpse of the pale flesh beneath. Her long hair was tied back, parted in the middle, held by a pearl-studded band.
“Now that,” Teresa added, “looks like a couple.”
Peroni eyed the starry crowd mournfully, then jerked his old, rather shiny tie tight to his thick neck, hoping, perhaps, the crooked knot would hide the missing button on his shirt.
“Thank you, Leo,” the big man moaned. “Thanks a million.”
Teresa gave him a straight look. “What’s your beef? You’re wearing a tie. For you that is fancy dress.”
“But . . .”
“But if you knew,” she continued, “you’d never have come. Would you?”
There was another figure on the jetty now. She was walking out onto the bare stone jetty in a long, piercingly bright white gown, a set of swan-feather wings on her back, the perfect, golden-haired angel, poised outside the shining glass palace, her outline dancing in the faintly malodorous heat like a figure from a dream.
Emily Deacon looked immensely happy, fulfilled. At home on the terrace of this palazzo, a place where Costa knew he could never feel at ease. Accompanying her was Hugo Massiter, wearing the costume of a key figure from the commedia dell’arte. Il Capitano, the boastful, violent soldier, a bundle of arrogance hidden inside a naval officer’s blue uniform, a fake sword by his side, owner of a painted mask with a long phallic nose which now sat on Massiter’s shoulder, its expression veering between covetousness and cowardice.
Something flickered inside Nic Costa’s head: a memory from school. Of all those old theatre stories, one in particular. About the Captain and how he kidnapped the lovely Isabella, the inamorata, the innocent and beautiful woman in love who never needed to hide behind a mask or, if Costa recalled correctly, saw much behind the masks of others either.
THE INTERIOR OF THE PALAZZO DEGLI ARCANGELI WAS breathtaking. Banks of orchids and roses massed in fragrant lines at the hall’s edges. Broad white ribbons ran in festoons from the wood and metal superstructure of the building, meeting to form a crown around the trunk of the fossilised palm tree at its centre. The three rising semicircles of glass now glittered with the winking eyes of hundreds of tiny floodlights set over the crowd below, a field of anonymous actors playing such old, old parts Costa had to delve deep into his childhood to remember their names. At the rear, on a low podium, the small orchestra was sawing away, still audible over the chatter of three hundred people, enough to make up several commedia dell’arte troupes.