“And this Randazzo would be stupid enough to keep illicit material around in his own home?” Zecchini demanded.
Peroni let loose a low grunt of a laugh. “Honest answer, Luca? Yes. As far as he’s concerned, they’re just gifts. Trophies. From some rich and very influential Englishman. Maybe he didn’t even know how deeply he was involved until it was too late. When he saw shooting Bracci as a way out. A debt repaid. Massiter off the hook for the murders, and a clear way through for him to buy the island. Two birds with one stone. Neat, don’t you think?”
Zecchini couldn’t argue there. It was neat, if it was true.
“And maybe,” Costa added, “Massiter liked to give the commissario stolen objects just to cement the bond. So that if Randazzo did turn awkward, he’d have some extra hold on him.”
These two were smart. Zecchini recalled a case where the Carabinieri suspected Massiter had played a very similar trick on a magistrate called to investigate a minion of his, caught bringing in contraband through Trieste.
“I could do these things,” he acknowledged. “But why? What do I get in return?”
“Massiter,” Costa answered quietly. “We get you details of transactions, perhaps. Or storage locations. Routes. Vessels. An inventory of objects. We don’t care who puts this man in jail. You. Us. The DIA if they like. He just has to go.”
“Like cancer,” Peroni echoed.
Zecchini laughed. The authorities had been trying to get that information for years. No one talked about Hugo Massiter. No one had the nerve.
“Now you’re playing games with me,” he said, and looked at his cold food, wondering when he’d feel minded to sit at an outside table at Sergio’s again. “Let’s just have a couple of beers, huh? Then say a few prayers for Leo. I don’t think there’s many doing that.”
They didn’t budge. Luca Zecchini looked at this odd, stubborn pair and thought again about some of the stories Leo Falcone had told him. Stories he hadn’t quite believed at that time. No one could be that unbending, that resolute about seeing an issue through to the bitter end.
Then it dawned.
“You’ve access from inside?” Zecchini murmured, amazed, and more than a little disconcerted.
Costa and Peroni glanced at each other and didn’t say a word.
Luca Zecchini tried to think what that meant. Just the effort sent a shiver down his spine. If the Carabinieri’s meagre intelligence was right, Massiter now relied solely on the Balkan gangs for street-level muscle, men who were loyal to the end, did what they were told as long as the money kept coming, and never broke the code of loyalty and silence. It was inconceivable one of them would betray their capo. There was too much at stake. The punishment, if one was discovered, would be unimaginable. He’d seen the results of a gang punishment killing in Florence. It would have turned the stomach of the toughest of Italian mobsters.
“You’ve put someone in?” he asked, incredulous, and got no pleasure at all in seeing the dismay on their faces when his words connected.
“Jesus,” he murmured, then ordered three beers, a big one for himself. “I hope to God you know what you’re doing.”
Costa reached into his pocket, pulled out a mobile phone, and replied, “We hope so too. Now will you make that call?”
THE WEATHER HAD LOST ITS TEMPER. IT WAS A WARM, bright evening, with a sweet salty breeze blowing in from the Adriatic. In Verona, Costa and Peroni were slowly working their way into the confidences of a small specialist Carabinieri team, praying the scraps of information they owned would persuade Luca Zecchini and his colleagues to first order a search of Randazzo’s house, and then pull in the man himself for questioning. In a small apartment in Castello, Teresa Lupo and her assistant Silvio Di Capua now pored over the results of the first tests they’d run on the meagre material they’d found, scanning arcane reports and charts on Costa’s notebook computer, puzzled by the results coming in from the private labs they were using, both in Mestre and Rome, to try to extract some answers from the sparse debris and clothing they had. And in the Ospedale Civile the unconscious Leo Falcone, unaware of Raffaella Arcangelo by his bed, continued to dream, locked in a private world, part fantasy, part remembrance, a place he feared to leave, not knowing what would take its place.
“Leo,” said a voice from outside his world, a female voice, warm, attractive, one that possessed a name, though it escaped him at that moment, since he was the child-Leo, not his older self. “Please.”
The mechanism on the wall whirred. The cuckoo’s artificial bellows roared, the old chime tolled.
“I need you to live,” she pleaded. “Leo . . .”
As if it were a matter of choice. Both Leos—the child and the man—knew nothing was quite that simple. In order to live, he had to look, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Ever.
AS LEO FALCONE DREAMED, SOME UNCONSCIOUS PART of him listening to his own inner voices and the caring tones of Raffaella Arcangelo penetrating from the world beyond, a sleek white speedboat crossed the wide canal between the hospital and San Michele, its varnished wooden prow aimed towards the open northern lagoon. The bright day was dying now, the last of the sun turning the water into a lake of burnt gold. Hugo Massiter sat in the back of the vessel opening a bottle of vintage champagne with a familiar ease. Emily Deacon remained opposite on the soft calfskin seats, weary after a fruitless day spent on the private yacht moored by the Riva degli Schiavoni, trying to recall more details of her training back in Langley.
An Alitalia jet whined overhead, making its descent into the airport that lurked at the distant water’s edge, forever growing, eating away a little more of the wild marshland each year. Emily waited for the roar of its engines to subside, then took the fluted glass, tasted the chilled vintage Dom Pérignon, telling herself that she would drink one glass and one glass alone, then leaned back, letting her blonde hair reach into the slipstream created by the vessel’s gathering speed, aware that Hugo couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Where are we going exactly? I’m used to getting directions.”
“You can leave the directions to me. We’re going to the Locanda Cipriani. Torcello. You’ve never been?”
She’d heard of the place. Hemingway had written much of Across the River and into the Trees there, in between duck hunts and drinking sessions. She’d read the book as a teenager, while going through her Hemingway phase. It was the unlikely story of a romance between a dying middle-aged American colonel, scarred by the war, and a young, beautiful Italian countess. A love that was returned. She hadn’t needed to dip into the biographies to understand that Hemingway had been telling his own story, recounting the growing fears and disappointments of age, trying to convince himself they could be balanced, if not countered entirely, by the presence of a teenager who was willing to have sex with him in a gondola at night. It was a lecherous old man’s fantasy, and the tragedy was that Hemingway hoped in vain to conceal that fact from everyone, most of all himself.
“Tell me about Laura Conti,” she said. Hugo had spent the afternoon away from the yacht, locked in a series of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers, advisers and the Arcangeli brothers. This was the first real opportunity she’d had to start pushing some questions his way. “I’m the curious type.”
Hugo raised his glass. “And I’m the indiscreet type, as I told you. Except . . .”
He glanced towards the low island in the distance and then his watch. “Dinner at the Locanda. It’s been such a long time. And now there’s so much to celebrate.”