“You were a good student, I imagine. A conscientious one. A talented one too.”
She nodded, flattered. “I’d like to think so. But I never completed my degree. Paris was expensive. The money wasn’t there. Why are we discussing this? Is it relevant?”
“I think I know how your brother died,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”
She stared at him, mournful, disappointed. “Haven’t we given the grave enough of our time today?”
“It won’t take long.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “But if we’re to speak about the dead, let’s at least allow them to hear for themselves.”
Before he could protest, she took hold of the wheelchair handles and propelled him back toward the graveyard, beyond the line of cedars, rapidly reaching Uriel’s plot, with its too-white marble headstone.
The place was deserted. There was not so much as a single grave-digger working on one of the neat brown plots. Falcone recalled what she had said about the vaporetti. The service stopped at the end of the afternoon. The cemetery island had no need of night visitors.
TERESA LUPO SAT AT THE BATTERED TABLE FEELING cold and stupid. They’d been all over the island. Hours of searching, calling, hoping. Now they were back where they always started: Piero Scacchi’s deserted and depressing picnic area. And for what?
For a dog. An animal that thought it could swim the breadth of the lagoon to escape the madness on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Only, if it survived, to find its master missing, missing for a long time, it seemed to her. There were, as far as the papers appeared to know, no extenuating circumstances, no mitigation Scacchi could plead. A matto from the lagoon had shot dead one of the city’s leading citizens at the moment of his apotheosis, with half of Venice’s prosecco-swilling glitterati looking on. It was impudent. Downright bad taste. Scacchi, being a lunatic from the edge of the lagoon, would be lucky to see fresh air in less than ten years, however much the young couple, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, pleaded on his behalf. At least they seemed to have escaped prosecution. Teresa was glad about that. They looked like people who’d suffered, unjustly for the most part. From what she’d read they’d never recover what they’d lost. Massiter’s lawyers had seen to that. But no one seemed much interested in activating the warrants that had been issued for their arrest. That would upturn too many old stones long settled into the dirt, with plenty of unwanted creatures lurking underneath. The pair were, at least, free to start their lives anew.
“Dog! Dog! Xerxes!”
Peroni was muddied up to his knees from wandering through the fields and the marshy land, bellowing for the animal. She wondered what he expected might happen. Would the creature suddenly march out of the lush grass wilderness at the lagoon’s edge, wagging its tail?
He did some more yelling, then came and sat down opposite, grim-faced, cross with himself.
She patted his big hand. “Gianni. It’s been more than a week. If he survived the water—and that’s a big if—he could have starved to death here. We know the locals haven’t been feeding him . . . .”
They’d talked to plenty. Farmer and fisherman alike, none of whom looked as if they’d be much inclined to provide for anything that wasn’t part of their own household. Nobody had even seen a small black spaniel, thin and hungry-looking, lost, puzzled why the little shack where it lived was deserted, day after day. Nobody, if she was honest with herself, much cared. Except for Gianni Peroni, who hoped to care enough to make up for everyone else.
“He’s here,” Peroni insisted. “I just know it.”
“Here we go. Instinct again. Be realistic, will you? The poor thing probably drowned.”
“No! You don’t know dogs. Spaniels love the water. He could swim to the city and back if he wanted.”
“Now that I find hard to believe.”
“Believe it,” he said, then turned to the reedy little rio nearby and starting shouting again, bellowing the dog’s name over and over.
She waited for him to pause for breath, then held his hand more tightly. “Has it never occurred to you, dog person that you are, that the blasted things sometimes only come when called by someone they know?”
“That’s not true! We had a dog when I was a kid. He came for anyone who knew his name.”
She thought about this. “What was he called?”
“Guido!”
“Fine. Listen to a little animal psychology. Dogs rely on syllables. Clearly differentiated chunks of language. Guido—Gwee-doh—is an excellent name because it has two very identifiable syllables, the ideal number for something with a brain the size of a modest potato. Furthermore, these syllables are separated—and this is important—by a hard consonant, one pronounced when you move the middle of your tongue downwards, away from the roof of your mouth.”
He glared at her. “I don’t think dogs understand hard consonants.”
“You’re wrong. Don’t ask how I know this—it was a very long time ago—but they do. A dog with a good name like Guido knows when it’s being called, even by a complete stranger. Whether the thing obeys is another matter, of course.”
“This is going somewhere?” he demanded.
“Straight to the point. Guido is good. Xerxes—think about it when you say it, Zer-ke-sees—is terrible. No hard consonant. Three messy syllables. The dog will have heard it over and over again from Piero and understood what it meant from the repetition and the intonation of his master’s voice. From anyone else it just sounds like mush. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes! So what do I do?”
“You come home with me. Then tomorrow we go back to Rome and attempt to resume lives which are as close to normality as our dysfunctional personalities will allow.”
“And the dog?”
She let go of his hand and wagged a finger in his face instead. “You can’t save everything, Gianni. It’s just not possible. At some stage you—and Nic, and Falcone—have to accept that there are casualties in this world. Besides, even if by some miracle you do find it, what the hell do you do next?”
She saw the guilty, furtive expression in his face and suddenly wished she’d never asked that question. A man who habitually rescued things always knew a place to put them afterwards.
“No. Don’t tell me. It’s the cousin in Tuscany again, isn’t it?”
“Not quite,” he answered, and pulled some crumpled papers out of his jacket, placed them on the table and smoothed them out. One was a faxed memo from the Questura in Rome. The second was a couple of sheets containing bad colour photos of a little farmhouse, not much bigger than Piero Scacchi’s shack, the kind of papers you got from a property agency.
“I was meaning to bring this up. They’ve offered us a career break. Me, Nic, Falcone. Career breaks are very much the in thing in Rome just now. Refreshes the mind. Or something like that.”
She’d heard they’d been going the rounds, usually in the direction of people the boss class didn’t know what to do with. The very idea filled her with suspicion.
“This would be the we-don’t-get-to-pay-you-any-money-but-you-piss-off-and-stay-out-of-our-hair kind of career break?”
“The job’s still there if you want it,” he said. “You just disappear. Six months. A year. More if you like.” He paused, licking his lips. “Maybe forever. My cousin Mauro’s got this spare farm of his. Pigs. He can’t sell it. I could get it for free for a while. See if I can make a go of things.”