“I’d gathered that.”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “This isn’t about me. It’s . . . universal. Hugo’s the kind of individual who sees women as a challenge. Scalps for his hunting belt. It’s not about love. Or sex even. It’s about possession. He’s more charming than most, but that’s what he’s like, and he’s very good at it too.”
Costa found the words just slipped out, unbidden. “Does he want you for a scalp?”
“Probably,” she answered without hesitation. “But I don’t feel flattered. Men like Hugo want women the way others want cars. It’s all about ownership, Nic. I rather imagine that once he’s sat in the driving seat, so to speak, the attraction wears off. But with Laura Conti, it didn’t, for some reason. That’s what’s bugging him still. It doesn’t make sense to him. It doesn’t fit in his neat, nicely ordered world, which is a place where he’s very much in control.” She took a sip of the prosecco, smiled. “And it won’t go away. Bella, on the other hand, did. That’s as much as I know.”
“I guess that’s a kind of definition of love. The not-going-away part.”
“I guess.”
Her blue eyes were on him. When he saw her like this, lovely inside the stupid, radiant dress, with the stain of the peperoncini by her shoulder, he wondered why he ever doubted the bond between them.
“I think I’ve had enough of this masquerade, Nic. Shall we go?”
Costa’s eyes swept the room, the silk and the satin, the wigs and the pale, powdered faces. “You’d leave these people for a little police apartment in Castello?”
“No,” she answered with a wry smile. “I’d leave them for you, idiot.”
Nic Costa laughed. That was one more talent she possessed. Then he took one last glance around him. Leo Falcone was talking earnestly to Commissario Randazzo now, free of the black-clad, shy form of Raffaella Arcangelo, whose elder brother, now next to Falcone, still held the unknown woman in conversation, an avaricious expression on his maimed face. Close by, Peroni and Teresa were embroiled in an animated discussion by the side of an attendant whose food tray they were pillaging.
His eyes roved to the nodding waters, the moored boats, the stone jetty. There was someone there. The last person Nic Costa expected to see was walking into the Palazzo degli Arcangeli at that moment.
GIANNI PERONI POSSESSED AN ARMOURY OF TALENTS for infuriation. At that moment, surrounded by costumed buffoons, slightly giddy on three rapid glasses of good prosecco, alongside untold canapés of lobster and bresaola, Teresa Lupo truly believed he was entering upon fresh ground in his ability to drive her crazy.
“Don’t worry about it,” Peroni said again. “It’ll be OK. We’ll see another doctor. There’s a witch back home near Siena. Well, I say witch. It’s more kind of folk remedies and stuff . . .”
“Gianni!” she barked, loud enough to send the harlequin next to her trotting off hastily for somewhere a little less noisy. “Are you listening to a single word I say? This isn’t a question of finding the right doctor. Or some country quack from one of your hick villages. It’s human anatomy. Physics. Not some kind of magic.”
“That’s what you said about spontaneous combustion,” Peroni reminded her. “Until you started looking.”
Her head whirled. Sometimes she felt like thumping his big chest with both fists. “No. It’s not like it at all. What I said was true. Spontaneous combustion, the way people think of it, doesn’t exist. But maybe something we interpret as it does. That is not what I am talking about here.”
“Severe tubal occlusion.”
Notch up one more trick for the fury machine. Peroni’s pronunciation was perfect, even if he didn’t understand the first thing about what the condition was.
“Which means?” she demanded.
“Which means we look for some other solution. If that’s what you want . . .”
“Christ! Let me put this in layman’s terms. The wiring’s burnt out. The plumbing’s fucked. I am a freak—”
“If you were a freak they wouldn’t have a name for it—”
“Shut up and listen, will you?”
He wasn’t smiling. Or rather, he was, but in that wan, “just tell me what to do” way that always made her feel helpless.
“I’m listening.”
She wished it were somewhere less noisy. Less public. It had been a mistake to bring up the subject when she did. But the prosecco prompted her to get the thing over and done with. She had to get the news off her chest somehow. Keeping it tight inside herself did no good at all.
“I can’t have children,” she said slowly. “That will never change. You can fool yourself otherwise if you like, but I won’t, Gianni. I can’t. It just makes things . . . worse.”
Teresa Lupo was aware there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, just in time for Peroni’s arms to come round her frame in a powerful, firm embrace.
“Does it matter?” she whispered into the side of his head, half wondering what all these people around them were making of the spectacle.
“Of course it matters,” he murmured.
She snivelled on his chest, then looked up into his battered face. “But I want children, Gianni.”
“And I want what you want. And we both don’t get this, together.”
Together.
Just as Emily had said, on the waterfront, the day before, both of them dog-tired, watching the dazzle on the water, picking at ice cream.
Together was what counted. Together was what would count for Emily and Nic too, one day. Teresa Lupo felt that in her bones. It was a fact, a solid, unmistakable piece of the future slowly emerging into the present, struggling to take shape.
She glanced across the room. Emily was alone, a solitary white figure standing out against the pale old stonework of the hall, abandoned by Nic again for some reason, one Teresa wished she knew so she could beat him around the head with it and say, Look, for God’s sake! People like this don’t walk into your life—anyone’s life—every day.
Cops and love, she thought. What a mixture. What a . . .
The room exploded with a deafening, deadly roar, an explosion that rang off the fragile glass walls, echoing with an odd, resonant timbre, mocking, shaking them all.
This was a sound she was coming to recognise. One that people like Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had introduced into her life. A single metallic scream, so loud she could feel her eardrums shrink under its violent volume.
“Gianni—” she murmured.
But the big man was gone already, punching his way through the overdressed mob, heading for an area of space that was opening up near the doorway, one that was getting larger by the second as all the costumed fools, the harlequins and the plague doctors, the medieval whores and the court ladies, suddenly got smart, remembered what century they were living in, and recognised the angry howl of a weapon.
“Get out of my damn way,” Teresa spat at some moron in black and white, flailing her arms, not wanting to think about what she’d see.
A man with a gun. There was always a man with a gun.
Both Nic and Leo Falcone were facing him down already, refusing to be cowed, standing to confront the madman who hid behind his hostage, a woman she recognised as the terrified Raffaella Arcangelo, trembling and pale in her black widow’s gown.