He didn’t have an easy answer. Then his phone rang inside his jacket pocket, a noise so loud it made each of them jump.
Costa took the call, watched by them, closely. Peroni was on the line. Nic listened, said little in reply, then put the phone away. They must have seen the expression on his face.
“Bad news?” she wondered.
“I thought we had another witness,” Costa said. “One who could bring Massiter down if I failed to find you.”
“And . . . ?” she asked hopefully.
There was no point in lying.
“He’s dead. No witnesses. I can surmise. We’ve been able to do that a lot. But proof . . .”
She took the empty glass from him, came back with it full, looked at his head, patted the blood there with a tissue.
“Are you beginning to understand?” Laura Conti asked him.
“Not really,” Costa admitted. “Tell me.”
“It’s very simple,” she replied. “You can’t win, and by the time you realise that, it’s too late, because he already has you. The moment you get close to Massiter you’re lost.”
Costa thought of Emily, and the risk she’d undertaken, willingly, of her own volition, though he could have prevented it.
“Too late for that,” he muttered.
Laura Conti stared at him with sad, dark eyes. “In that case, I pity you,” she said.
“I won’t back down from this man,” Costa said. “Nor should you. He was responsible for the deaths of people you knew. Piero’s cousin and his companion. He killed those police officers. He ruined you. I thought . . .”
Costa hesitated. He was getting nowhere.
“What?” Forster asked. “That we’d want revenge? What good would revenge do us? We just want to survive.”
“Nothing more,” the woman added. “You can’t ask us to throw that away.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. As I said, we can protect you.”
“The way you protected your witness?” she demanded sharply. “Please. We know this man better than you. Go now. Leave us alone. Tomorrow we’ll be gone. You won’t tell anyone we’re here, will you? There are no secrets in Venice. Not for long.”
Forster was eyeing the gun again.
“You’re sure of this?” Costa asked.
They both nodded. There was nothing left he could use, no coercion, no persuasion.
“We’re sure,” she said.
He nodded. “In that case it’s important you listen to me. In a few hours, Massiter will sign a business contract. A very large one. A contract which will seal his position in the city and beyond. Once that’s done, no one will dare touch him. Not on a local level. Not a regional one. Not even the national authorities, I believe, because . . .” Meeting this pair, seeing the fear in their eyes, brought home to him the scale of the step Massiter was taking. “ . . . he will have such power over so many people. After that, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to go against him.”
Daniel Forster swore bitterly under his breath.
“I’ll tell no one of your whereabouts,” Costa promised. “All the same, it would, perhaps, be prudent to think of going as far away as possible. And don’t tell anyone where you are. Certainly not Piero. You’ll just extend the risk to him further. If I can help in some way . . .”
“I could have killed him, you know,” Forster said. His eyes glinted in the gloom of the shack. “Once before.”
“Why didn’t you?” Costa asked.
The young Englishman stared at the gun, a look on his face that was both hatred and regret.
“Because I was a fool.”
PIERO SCACCHI HAD SPENT HALF OF HIS LIFE ON THE water. Instinctively, without a moment’s analysis, he knew what that lurching, shifting power slapping at the Sophia’s ancient, battered planking signified. Change was on the way. Another storm perhaps, or the return of the sirocco, sweeping its way up from the south, its belly gorged with dust. Summer never died easily in the lagoon. It fought and screamed in protest at the coming cold. September was now two days away. The heat would remain for a month or more. But the fire and anger in the season’s belly would recede as estate turned to autunno, the cooling, dwindling days followed, finally, by winter’s clear, icy calm. That was the time Scacchi loved more than anything, when the grapes sat fermenting in the Slovenian oak barrels he’d owned for years, when duck and snipe were on the wing and Xerxes felt ready to enter any marshland, any amount of slush and ice and mud, to find the prey newly fallen from the same bright, cloudless sky that must have sat over the littoral islands a millennium before.
But change was everywhere, unavoidable, a fact that had to be accepted. Now money would be an issue again, just when he least needed it. He had one final load of wood and seaweed ash, bought for a pittance from a farmer in Le Vignole, the islet just southwest of Sant’ Erasmo. This would be delivered to the Arcangeli as agreed, and then Piero Scacchi would work for the family no more. Whatever happened, an island owned by Hugo Massiter was a place he could not countenance entering. The memories of the past still burned, when he allowed them. Not out of some desire for revenge. That was an emotion Piero Scacchi found utterly remote. What had happened five years before—the death of his cousin, the exile of Daniel Forster and Laura Conti—belonged to a series of conjoined tragedies he had no intention of revisiting. For Scacchi, it was important to live in the present, a present he could feel comfortable with, if not control entirely.
The dog now lay in the front of the boat, its black head over the prow, enjoying the salt tang blowing into its nostrils. Scacchi couldn’t see its sharp, dark eyes, but he knew where they’d be looking. In the flat margin between the land and the sky, the territory where the pair of them had hunted for years. Sometimes he envied the animal. In matters of importance it was wise, all-knowing. No creature escaped its eyes, ears or nose. No possibility for advancement—be it food or pleasure or adoration—was ever missed on those rare occasions a visitor came to call. It was a being that lived within its own world, satisfied, unsullied by ambition, as unconcerned about tomorrow as the idiots in the city.
The future was a place Piero Scacchi couldn’t help but confront from time to time, finding it to be a bleak and empty place, one with no easy decisions, no safe places to hide.
They’d been in the shack he’d built for them two years now and no one had noticed, no one beyond the island. This was longer than any of them had intended. They—and Piero included himself here—had to find the money for some kind of escape. Some way of fleeing Venice for good. Hugo Massiter was back forever now. Piero Scacchi saw it in the way people spoke his name, the awe and fear the sound of those very English vowels brought to their eyes.
His dead cousin had said many memorable things. He had had a way with words Piero could never match. One snatch of conversation struck Piero Scacchi in particular, though only afterwards, when Massiter was supposedly gone from Venice, Daniel in jail, and Laura safely hidden away in the Lido.
It was on the Sophia that fateful summer, before the storm clouds descended upon them, the boat ambling across the lagoon from a picnic on Sant’ Erasmo, Xerxes at the tiller, his delicate jaws steering them safe back to Venice with the leather leash Piero had made to allow the dog to navigate from time to time.
There were just a few sentences, ones that came back into Piero’s head now with the kind of clarity that only came from a glass too many of his good, well-oaked red, gulped from the plastic lemonade bottle he kept in the tool compartment for emergencies.
In his mind’s eye he could still see the two of them, alive, ridiculously happy, so full of joy with each other they thought, perhaps, these days would never end. Scacchi, poor dead Scacchi, Piero’s cousin, was waving a withered finger in Daniel Forster’s face for some reason, trying to close down an argument he thought no one else had overheard.