Zecchini took a mouthful of his pork rib. It was cold. The meal was ruined, and he rather guessed it could only get worse.
“We came with a gift,” Costa said. “Or rather a prize.”
“It’s going to cost me?” Zecchini asked.
Costa watched the waiter return with their food, then watched the man leave.
“Nothing comes for free,” he said. “But, if we’re right, if we get lucky . . . with your help. It’s a prize I think you’d like very much.”
Luca Zecchini listened to the two of them. It only took a minute to realise the last thing he’d be doing that evening would be watching Il Trovatore in the company of the delightful Gina.
IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN A DECADE SINCE TERESA LUPO had abandoned medicine for what she saw as the more challenging world of working in a police morgue. Now she felt lost in a hospital. The Ospedale Civile of Venice seemed more like an entire quarter of the city than a medical institution. It ran through a warren of historic buildings, modern accretions, and storeys of blocks that seemed like apartments, until emerging on the bare lagoon waterfront between Fondamente Nuove and Celestia. Teresa couldn’t help but notice the institution sat bang opposite another staging post on the journey of life, the cemetery island of San Michele, whose brick walls blocked—happily, she thought—the view over to the Isola degli Arcangeli on Murano. The Venetians never did like to make more effort than was absolutely necessary.
Three things happened the night Leo Falcone was hurried to the Ospedale Civile in a speeding water ambulance, siren wailing, blue light echoing in the rapidly descending darkness.
First, she remembered how to yell at medics, good medics, people who were patently competent at their job, but just didn’t understand the small matter of priorities. A man with a head wound as bad as the one Falcone had suffered wasn’t in need of much analysis. He was a corpse in the making, screaming silently for someone to freeze the clock and keep him alive until a specialist could be got on the scene to work out if there was any way forward from this mess.
Second, she discovered she’d do anything to stop Leo Falcone from dying. Theoretically, she didn’t want anyone to die, ever, even if that put her out of a job. But this wasn’t about theory. Whatever had happened between her and Falcone in the past, she now had some unexpected bond with this strange, distant, frequently arrogant man whose stricken body had been wheeled through the corridors of the Ospedale Civile at speed, navigating its spider’s web of corridors on a journey, it seemed to her, to nowhere.
And third, she found out that she, and her Roman police pathologist’s card, still carried clout. When they got Falcone into pre-op and found that Venice’s one and only neurosurgeon was on holiday in the Maldives, Teresa simply screeched at them to do what they could to staunch the bleeding, then wait for orders.
There was some luck in the world. Maybe a God even. Pino Ferrante had been at medical school with her all those years ago. All the way over in the racing ambulance ferry dashing across the lagoon, she had been remembering his hands, which were the most beautiful she’d ever seen on a man: long and fine and elegant, like something from a drawing by Dürer. Healing hands, that much was obvious too when he’d completed the training and entered the outside world of medical practice. Pino was now a prosperous neurology consultant in his native Bologna, little more than sixty minutes away if he still drove a car the way he used to. And he was at home when she called, breathless, pleading.
Less than three hours later Falcone was in the operating room, with Pino’s gentle, firm fingers trying to perform wonders she could only guess at, while the four of them, two colleagues-cum-friends, two women who’d found themselves dragged unwittingly into this wounded man’s life, waited on the terrace by the waterfront, swatting midges in the sticky night air, drinking endless plastic cups of bad coffee, asking themselves all manner of questions about the strange burst of violence that had torn through the Arcangeli’s palazzo, and Hugo Massiter’s party, that evening.
Then finally, reaching a decision, one found in anger and a mute, shared hunger for some semblance of justice. One that didn’t require much effort, if they were honest with themselves. Or much discussion, because discussion just got in the way of what was needed.
There were facts before them, Nic said. Staring them in the face, taunting. Gianfranco Randazzo worked for Hugo Massiter. That had been obvious all along. Randazzo had murdered Bracci to close down the case—and Massiter’s deal—wounding Leo Falcone, possibly fatally, along the way.
It was meant to be a neat, tidy package, one that no one was trying to untie, to try to see what might lie inside. Venice would, Nic predicted accurately, be determined to swallow the story Randazzo gave them of that night, even though there were so many questions. Why had the drunken Bracci come to Hugh Massiter’s in the first place? What exactly had he hoped to achieve by taking Raffaella hostage while searching among the masks and the commedia dell’arte costumes for the man he wanted, who was Massiter, Nic said, surely? And why the hell would he bring along a handy piece of evidence, the keys with their telltale ribbon, just to complete the story?
None of these issues would now be addressed. The tragedies of the Isola degli Arcangeli were, for the city, closed the moment Randazzo’s bullet shattered Aldo Bracci’s skull. Leo Falcone was simply what a certain kind of military man would call “collateral damage,” and all to crown Hugo Massiter king of the city.
They had looked at each other that night, listened to Nic carefully picking his way through the known facts, feeling a certainty grow inside them, one that didn’t need to be said aloud to be understood. To the Venetians they were strangers, all of them. They’d be excluded from what swift tidying up of the facts would now ensue. If Nic was right—and it soon turned out he was—they’d be squeezed out of the Questura too, kept away from any stray difficult facts.
Which was, if only the Venetians understood it, the stupidest thing the city could do. They didn’t know Costa and Peroni. They didn’t understand what kind of men they were. How the two would spend days, weeks, trying to peer beneath the wrapping of that carefully presented, utterly fictitious case Venice was presenting to the world, picking at the seams until everything fell apart.
Facts, Nic said at the time, acting out a fair impersonation of Falcone at his best.
Who benefited from what happened that night?
Hugo Massiter and his cronies in the council. And the Arcangeli, too, since they finally got the money they so desperately needed, even if it came with strings.
Who had a motive to kill Bella and Uriel?
There lay the lacunae. Uriel Arcangelo, from what they understood, was keen on the deal with Massiter. His death created difficult and expensive legal problems. But some motive existed. It needed to be found, and to do that, Nic said, they must follow Leo’s rules. You mixed things up a little. You piled on the pressure. You got nosy and difficult and kept on chasing down the lies.
And you imagined.
Bella was carrying Massiter’s child, and trying to blackmail the Englishman into keeping her, something Massiter couldn’t allow, even if her death complicated his business matters.
So Massiter, or one of his henchmen, killed Bella, doctored Uriel’s apron in some way a man with no sense of smell could never notice, sent him into the boiling hot foundry with a key that couldn’t work, couldn’t take him away from the scene of a crime that seemed, to the lazy, so obvious. Then fought to pin the blame for everything on Aldo Bracci, a man they murdered in public, in a way that seemed to confirm his guilt.