Teresa Lupo rounded the staircase and saw the open door to the large, handsome room where they were all gathered. The warm yellow light of the sun streamed through those curious windows she’d noticed from outside. Hugo Massiter, a man she’d only seen twice, once on a launch in the Grand Canal, once in the palazzo next door, stood in the centre of the room looking as if he owned everything around him already. The bricks, the mortar, but most of all the people.
“Nic . . .” she said, but no one was listening, no one was doing anything but look at the boatman, who shuffled stupidly, like an idiot, ahead of her, clutching the bundle of kindling in his arms.
It was the oldest Arcangelo who spoke first. Michele got out of his seat, one good eye flashing hatred and fury, emotions, she thought, that had been looking for somewhere to escape long before this poor, dumb native wandered into the room.
“What are you doing, you idiot?” Michele bellowed. “What are you doing?”
There was a brief quiet lull. It felt like being in the eye of a storm.
“I thought you’d need firewood,” the boatman said in a dull, detached brogue as coarse as his clothing. “They told me you’d still be working, Signor Michele. If you work, you need help.”
The couple she’d seen in handcuffs were there, trying to hold one another, trying to form some sort of bulwark against everything that surrounded them.
“Go, Piero,” the young man said, half choking on the words. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
“Do?” the boatman wondered.
The young woman was sobbing, hating something about the sight of the boatman. Or fearing it, perhaps.
“Piero,” she pleaded. “Listen to me! Go!”
Michele Arcangelo walked up to the man, slapped him as hard as he could, twice across the face, front of hand, back of hand, screaming, with so much force Teresa could feel the hatred welling up from the man as he raged in front of them.
“Matto! Matto! Matto! Get out of here!”
But he didn’t flinch. He was looking at the Englishman now. Massiter stood there, amused, arms folded, feet apart, the stance of a victor.
Nic, she said or whispered or simply thought, Teresa Lupo wasn’t quite sure.
“Signor Massiter,” the boatman said in a calm, thoughtful voice, one that seemed more assured, and rather more intelligent, than she’d expected.
“You know my name?” The Englishman beamed. “I’m flattered.”
“I know your name,” he said, nodding. Then he turned to look at the couple.
“Another Scacchi warned us about you, long ago. You cannot run from the Devil, he said. The Devil always finds you. Or you find him.”
“Piero, Piero!”
It was Gianni Peroni, working his way towards the boatman now, with the kind of swift, certain intent she’d come to recognise. The big cop could wrestle a man down in an instant if the sweet talk didn’t work.
“No one moves,” the boatman said, and released the bundle of kindling, let the twigs fall noisily onto the polished floor and the shining table, sending Michele Arcangelo into a paroxysm of screaming, foulmouthed wrath once more. Until . . .
“Nic,” Teresa said, and heard her own voice faintly over the sudden silence.
“No one moves.”
They froze. Not one of them—not Nic, not Peroni, or even Luca Zecchini—felt like trying to steal a finger towards the pistols in their jackets. Something in the man’s face told them this would be a very bad idea indeed.
In the boatman’s hands, held with a lazy, knowing grace, was a long, old shotgun, double-barrelled, as worn and used as the man himself. A man who now punched the weapon into Hugo Massiter’s chest, propelled him viciously to the great bowed window, sending him back so hard the Englishman’s head cracked against the glass, shattering it with a sudden, piercing crash.
Hugo Massiter howled in pain and shock.
“No,” a female voice said, and Teresa was unsure where the sound came from, the handcuffed woman, Raffaella Arcangelo, or her own dry throat.
“What do you want?” Massiter roared, raising a hand to his head, looking in astonishment and shock at the blood some hidden wound at the back of his scalp deposited on his fingers. “What insanity is this?”
“I want nothing,” the boatman replied quietly, calm, unworried.
Massiter’s face contorted with fury.
“Venetians! Venetians! Name your price and be done with it. A man like me has bought the likes of you all before. I’ll buy you all again, twice over, if that’s what it takes.”
Piero Scacchi didn’t flinch, didn’t take his eyes off the pompous Englishman trapped against the gleaming glass. “You make two mistakes,” he said. “One: I am not a Venetian. Two: you are not a man.”
The gun jerked, the room filled with its terrible roar. Hugo Massiter’s torso rose in the air, flew back against the stains of the bull’s-eye windows, and was caught there by a second explosion, one that ripped his chest apart, thrust him out of the room altogether, out into the open air where, for one brief moment, he appeared suspended in a sea of whirling shards, a dying man flailing in a cloud of glass that reflected his agony as it tore his shattered body to blood and bone.
Then he was gone, and from the unseen quay below came a mounting communal murmur, more animal than human, a buzzing, humming storm cloud of fright, punctuated by the growing rattle of screams.
She was half aware of one other event too. Peroni had finally reached the boatman, held him at the fractured windows, with just enough strength to stop him from following his victim out into the golden evening before finally, more through the man’s own lassitude than Peroni’s considerable force, grappling him to the floor.
“It didn’t match, Nic,” Teresa Lupo whispered, finally able to get the words out of her mouth though she knew no one else could hear. “It didn’t match at all.”
IT WAS THE SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, LATE AFTERNOON under a sun losing its power. An unseasonable hint of chill, the coming death of summer, lurked within the breeze rising from the Adriatic. It chased across the grey waves, buffeting their faces as they waited on the edge of the graveyard on San Michele. Funerals always made Leo Falcone uncomfortable, though he’d been to many over the years. Now he was trapped inside a wheelchair, reliant on others in a way he found disturbing, a way that reminded him of a younger Nic Costa, once stricken in much the same fashion. There was no easy form of escape, no excuse to put work before personal matters. Nothing but the relentless internal reflection that had been dogging him for a week or more.
“Leo?” Raffaella asked. “Are you ready? Michele was too stingy to pay for private transport back. The boat service stops soon. We don’t want to miss it.”
“A minute,” he said, recalling the coffin going into the fresh ochre earth beyond the line of cedars that separated them from the plots. “I was thinking.”
There’d been so much time for that lately. Fresh thinking. Old thinking, the kind that had happened before he awoke and which still remained in his head, clear and unwilling to go away. The question, as Leo Falcone understood only too well, was what to do with those dark, unsettling reflections.
When Uriel Arcangelo went into the ground, a temporary sojourn, like every San Michele corpse, to be removed a decade hence to make way for more dead, his interment had been watched by just five personal mourners. The three Arcangeli, newly enriched by Hugo Massiter’s purchase of their island, Falcone, and the lawyer who had handled the family estate. The black-suited, quietly officious men of the funeral company outnumbered family. It seemed apposite somehow. The Arcangeli never ceased to be outsiders, even in death.