Staring out over the grey lagoon, her vision blurred by tears, she found her mind wrestling with so many strands of thought. Memories and regrets mingled with practicalities, funeral details, people who had to be told. The family had been spared death for so long. Not a single close member had left them since their father had passed away. And even he hadn’t really departed. The room where Angelo took his last breath was still empty. She swept it every day, making the bed, changing the pressed white sheets once a week, because that was what Michele wanted, how the capo said matters should stand. A photograph of their mother, an attractive, worn-looking woman, stood over the head, by a small crucifix. She had died when Raffaella was tiny. For her daughter she always remained somehow unreal, a person who never quite existed, except, perhaps, as a comment on those who survived her, a question mark asking why they were enjoying the gift of life when the woman who gave them it was gone.
They hadn’t thought about the grave, not in a long time. There’d been so many other dark, pressing issues to worry about. And now the blackness had arrived on the back of the night sirocco and taken two souls with such sudden brutal cruelty.
There was a sound at the door. Michele bustled in, followed, as always, by Gabriele, and Raffaella found, to her surprise, that she now saw both of them differently. Michele was twelve years older than she. In a way, he’d always been an adult and now he looked his age, more so than she’d ever noticed before. Uriel’s death had made her conscious of the Arcangeli’s shared mortality, something they’d all sought to hide over the years. It was as if the event had drawn away a veil that had stood between them, and in doing so revealed distance, not the closeness she would have hoped for.
A minor stroke had creased the right side of Michele’s face. Now, with his greying hair slicked back and pomaded, leaving a silver widow’s peak in the middle, he looked like a man entering the final part of the journey of existence, sooner than he should. He was less than medium height, with a slight build, an unimpressive man to look at, she thought, until he spoke, and in that voice, a powerful monotone, switching from Veneto to Italian, French to English or German, lay an authority none could mistake. And now he was old. Old and bewildered and angry.
He sat down at the polished table, banged a fist on the surface, hard enough to send the china briefly flying, then, without another word, gulped at the coffee she’d provided before tearing at a cornetto.
Gabriele joined him and reached for some coffee and pastries too.
Raffaella wiped her face with the sleeve of her old cotton shirt, took one last look at the lagoon, then made her way to the seat opposite them, facing both across the bright, gleaming wood. The Arcangeli ate together. They always would.
She waited. After he’d done with the coffee and the pastries, Michele fixed her with his one good eye.
“More police will be here soon. They’ll want to talk to everyone again. Same damn questions. Poking their long, sharp noses in where no one wants them.”
“Michele . . .” she said softly, hoping her voice did not sound as if she wished to contradict him. “The police have to be involved. What do you expect? Uriel. Poor Bella . . .”
“Poor Bella!” he barked back at her, spitting flakes of cornetto. “That woman’s been nothing but trouble since she came here. One more mouth to feed and nothing in return. Poor Bella! What about us?”
Gabriele, two years younger than Michele, though the gap seemed larger, stared at his plate and gently tore his food into strips, silent, unwilling to become involved.
“They’re dead,” Raffaella answered quietly. “Both of them. Whatever happened they deserve some respect.”
Michele put down his coffee cup and glared at her. She was unable to stop herself from stealing a glance at the portrait above them. Michele was their father sometimes. It was hard to separate the two of them.
“We all know what happened,” he said bluntly. “The sooner it’s put down in black and white on paper, the sooner we return to what matters. The business.”
“Michele . . .”
Just the look on his face silenced her. There’d never been physical contact within the Arcangeli. Not even when Angelo was alive. This was not through choice. Force had simply never been needed, not when the fierceness of a cold, heartless eye could stun any of them into submission.
“We will not fail, Raffaella. I will not allow that to happen.”
He brushed the crumbs off his lap with a brisk hand, then stood up. Gabriele, to her disgust, was rushing down his food and coffee in order to do the same.
“Where on earth are you going?” she asked.
“To test the fires,” Michele replied. “To connect the gas. To see how soon we can get the foundry up and running. I’ll bring in others from the outside if need be. The insurance money will surely pay for it.”
“Do you know that?” she demanded.
“Nothing’s insurmountable. We’ll hire some furnace space elsewhere if it’s necessary. What’s a fire in this business? It used to happen all the time.”
He was so single-minded. He really believed this was all there was to consider.
Gabriele finally found the strength to speak. “We’ll lose a day or two, Michele. That at least. Don’t fool yourself.”
“A day, a day,” sniffed the older man, waving an arm. “What’s a day?”
“It’s a day in which we fail to make something no one wishes to buy,” Raffaella said sourly, hating the bitter tone inside her voice the moment she heard it. This was a kind of heresy. The one taboo subject barred from discussion beneath the eye that gazed constantly out onto the lagoon.
Both men turned to regard her with undisguised aversion.
“It’s true,” she insisted, determined not to be bullied into silence. “The longer you two fools stay away from that place, the longer the money lasts. If you make nothing, Michele, we don’t have to pay anyone for raw materials, do we?”
“We don’t pay anyone as it is,” he retorted unpleasantly. “Leave business to men. It’s not for you.”
She felt the red heat of anger rise in her head, a foreign emotion, one that had been placed there by tragedy and refused to go away.
“So what’s a woman to do in this position? To bury our brother and his wife? Where? And with what?”
Michele nodded at the window. “You know where Uriel belongs. The island. For now anyway. The Braccis can deal with the other one. She’s their problem. She should have stayed that way all along.”
Her voice rose to a screech. She couldn’t help it. “We can’t afford San Michele!” she yelled at him, unable to control her emotions. “Undertakers want money. Not promises. We’re not good for credit anymore. Don’t you understand?”
He had the demeanour of the patriarch. At that moment he might have been his father. Michele Arcangelo walked over to one of the cabinets and took out the most precious item left. It was a sixteenth-century water bowl in the form of a galley, a beautiful piece, the hull of the vessel in clear glass, the rigging in blue. On its side was the seal of the Tre Mori furnace, a guarantee that it would fetch a good price anywhere. They’d owned it forever, or so it seemed to her. Angelo, in particular, had adored the work, which was why it had remained unsold thus far.
Michele turned the precious object in his hand, admiring it with one sharp, professional eye.
“Then bury him with this,” he said, with not a trace of emotion.
IT ONLY TOOK A COUPLE OF MINUTES TO HEAR RANDAZZO’S story. After that, the three cops from Rome looked at each other and wondered what they’d done to deserve this one. Venice had police aplenty. Any of the locals could have taken on the case, done what the miserable commissario wanted, signed off the report, then returned to guiding tourists back to their cruise ships. There was, Costa knew, some reason why Randazzo had picked three temporary strangers in the little Questura in Castello for this job. He wondered whether they were going to hear it. And one more thing bothered him. Hugo Massiter’s name was familiar somehow. He just couldn’t put a finger on how he knew it.