“We have a warrant!” Zecchini said again, taking the papers out of his pocket.
“You can’t serve a warrant on a dead man!” the commissario yelled.
“They can ask why the hell he’s dead,” Peroni interjected, “when you were supposed to have men protecting him. Or is that not a question anyone’s supposed to raise outside your little circle of friends?”
Peroni felt a little guilty about that last crack. The Questura wasn’t above a little petty corruption. He didn’t doubt that. But some general collusion in the assassination of a colleague, even one as little loved as Gianfranco Randazzo, was just a step too far.
“Look,” he continued, fighting to sound amenable, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I’m just saying, maybe we can help.”
“I don’t want your help.”
This man was scared too, Peroni suddenly realised. He probably didn’t even know why. All he knew was that he had to keep everything tight and organised and secret until someone else made the decision about what to do next.
“I’m just saying this,” Peroni answered. “You’ve got a dead colleague on your hands now. A man who was under suspension. A man for whom the Carabinieri had a warrant on the grounds of art smuggling.”
This last information made the moustache twitch a little. The man’s name came back to Gianni Peroni.
“Commissario Grassi. Why are we arguing? I know your accent. You’re Milanese. Not from here. The Venetians don’t give a shit about you any more than they do about me. We’re all expendable. Maggiore Zecchini here too. If the carpet turns out to be too small to sweep all this mess under, who do you think gets the blame? The Venetians? Or the likes of us?”
Peroni watched the reaction on the man’s face and reflected upon the plain fact that a craven man could be as little use as a crooked one.
“What the hell are you talking about, Peroni? They all said you people were nuts. This is a crime on my watch. It gets investigated by me, the way I say.”
“You’ve got a dead commissario. You’ve got two murders on that weird island out there. And some corpse in the morgue put there by this man . . .”
He nodded at the gurney. To his disbelief, they really were lifting Zecchini’s body and placing it on the stretcher.
“Do you honestly think no one outside Venice is going to be watching all this and wondering?”
Grassi thought it over. “Wondering what?”
It was Zecchini who answered. “Wondering whether it isn’t, perhaps, time that someone from elsewhere came and took a look at what’s been going on here. People are starting to talk, Commissario. It gets hard to stop after a while. Sometimes a man has to think of his own career. And let’s face it . . .”
Zecchini shrugged. He looked a little more confident again. Peroni was glad to see that. Some awkward grain of doubt had been bugging the Carabinieri man ever since Costa had pushed him into this game.
“We’re here,” the major added. “Doesn’t that give you something to think about?”
“Lots,” Grassi agreed, nodding. “But principally this: You’re here to interview a dead man. Peroni’s here because he’s an idiot who can’t keep his ugly nose out of something that doesn’t concern him. Neither of you have any right or reason to occupy my time. Furthermore, if you do that, I will, I promise, become very, very pissed off indeed.”
The gurney wheels squeaked across the paving stones. They really were removing the corpse.
“So you’ve got some suspects for this, Commissario?” Peroni asked wryly.
“Good police officers make enemies all the time,” Grassi answered, then gave him a withering look. “Lousy ones too, sometimes. Best you remember that.”
With that, Grassi turned on his heels and went back to the gurney and the corpse, back to barking routine orders at the SOCOs who stood around lazily putting on their bunny suits like men wishing they could bunk off for the day.
Zecchini watched him go, shaking his head. “I need a beer,” he moaned. “Anyone care to join me?”
“I’m buying,” Peroni said.
The Carabinieri man turned and gave him some kind of look Peroni didn’t quite understand. Furtive maybe. Or just filled with some impending guilt.
“No,” Zecchini told Peroni. “This one’s on me. Best find your partner too. We need to talk.”
WHEN HE CAME TO, DANIEL FORSTER WAS STILL THERE, gun by his side, barrel not quite in Costa’s face. Costa raised his fingers to the site of the blow. There was blood there. He winced.
“A little of the English comes back in your voice when you’re angry,” he observed.
Daniel Forster glared at him. “You deserved it.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Mr. Forster. Can I get up? Would it be too much to ask for some water?”
Laura Conti spoke to him rapidly in English, something Costa couldn’t catch, then she went to the sink and came back with a glass. Costa dragged himself off the floor and took the water, gulping at it gratefully.
“You won’t do anything stupid, Daniel,” she said firmly. “I mean that.”
Costa found himself shocked by the man’s appearance. Daniel Forster was a cultivated man. Now he looked lost, broken, damaged. It was Laura Conti who was protecting him, it seemed. Not the other way round.
“Hear me out . . .” Costa began.
The shotgun waved in front of him again.
“Shut up! We’ve planned, you know. We can be out of here in an hour. There are boats. There are people who’ll help us. We’ll be gone before they even find your corpse.”
The woman put her hand firmly on the weapon. “No, Daniel. I won’t permit it.”
“I’m not who you think,” Costa said, gingerly reaching into his jacket and offering the ID card there. “I’m a police officer. I’m here to ask you to help us do what we should have done years ago. Put Hugo Massiter in jail.”
Forster looked astonished. Then he laughed. It wasn’t an encouraging sound.
“Listen to him, Daniel!” Laura Conti snapped. “Give him a chance.”
“A chance for the police to put Hugo in jail?” Forster asked. “How many chances do they want?”
“Just one good one,” Costa replied immediately. “You can give it to us.”
It was the woman who answered. She fixed him with sad, resigned eyes and said, “No. That’s not possible. We can’t help you. In any way. I’m sorry.”
“Do you just want to stay in hiding for the rest of your lives? Being people you’re not? Keeping out of the way?”
“And staying alive,” Daniel Forster said glumly. He scanned the room, clearly hating what he saw. “Even like this.”
“I promise you won’t be in danger,” Costa added quickly. “We can provide protection. Whatever you need.”
Forster laughed again. There was a little less harshness in the young Englishman’s voice this time. Nic Costa saw a glimpse of the man he must once have been.
“We had what we needed once before,” he said with a sigh. “A home. Money. Our freedom. Most of all, each other. Massiter came back from the dead somehow and stole everything but the last.”
He put down the weapon, clutched the woman around the waist briefly, kissed her cheek, then looked across at Costa again, his face stony with determination.
“He won’t take that away too,” he added.
“But this isn’t who you are,” Costa objected, watching the way the woman closed her eyes when Forster embraced her, the shared pain there when she reopened them.
She looked at the ID card more closely. “Hugo Massiter stole who we were years ago, Agente Costa,” she told him. “What kind of a life do you think we’d go back to?”