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conjoined universe of doubt Turner depicted in those canvases of the city Costa had admired at the temporary Accademia exhibition earlier in the summer. Something about the place both disturbed and interested him. Venice reminded him of a bad yet familiar relative, dangerous to know, difficult to let go.
    He looked his partner up and down. Peroni and uniforms didn’t fit. The blue trousers and shirt hung baggily on the older man’s big frame. And, as always, Peroni was bending the rules just to make a point. On his hefty flat feet were a pair of sneakers, black leather sneakers, true, and ones that were, on this occasion, shiny from the rare application of polish. It wasn’t so long since Costa had been a rookie Rome street cop who donned a uniform every day. But Gianni Peroni hadn’t pulled on the blue for almost three decades. He wasn’t going to go back in rank and time without a protest.
    Costa considered those huge feet again, squeezed tightly into a couple of expensive-looking Reeboks.
    “It’s a health thing,” Peroni complained. “Don’t start. I’ve done more damn walking in this place than I managed in an entire lifetime back home. It’s downright cruel.”
    “We don’t have squad cars…”
    “They could’ve let us drive a boat!”
    This had been a source of grievance for Peroni ever since they arrived. Gianfranco Randazzo, the surly Castello commissario, had, perhaps with some justification, reasoned that there was no point in putting a couple of visitors through the complex and intensive training course required for a lagoon licence. That had condemned both of them to the streets, public transport or begging a lift from one of the local cops.
    “The argument’s lost, Gianni. We’re almost through here. What use would a boat licence be back home? Also, I don’t think
drive
is quite the right word.”
    “That,” Peroni insisted, waving a big, fat finger in Costa’s face, “is not the point. We should have been on an equal footing. Not treated like outsiders. Foreigners even.”
    Foreigners
. Yet, in a sense, that was what they were. Venice was
so
different, a place that constantly went out of its way to make them feel like strangers flitting through a bright, two-dimensional landscape that was never quite real. The locals even dropped into the lagoon dialect, a strange, glottal tongue largely impenetrable to ordinary Italians, whenever they felt like a little privacy. Costa had learned a little of the language. Sometimes it was easy to guess —
Mèrkore
for Mercoledì, Wednesday. Sometimes it sounded like a Balkan tongue, Croat perhaps. Today, for the Venetians, was
Xòbia
, a day that began with a letter utterly foreign to true Italian.
    This hadn’t been the exile they expected. Leo Falcone, the inspector who joined them in their subtle disgrace, had been seconded to some art theft squad in Verona not long after they arrived. On the street, apart from a couple of arrests for robbery, their time in Venice had been without much incident, for which both men were grateful. Yet they were never quite comfortable, and there were two excellent reasons, two omissions from their lives which would shortly be rectified.
    There was a louder clatter from the tracks beyond the station. Costa looked at his watch. The fast train from Rome was on time. Emily Deacon and Teresa Lupo would now be sitting on it, anticipating a two-week holiday beginning that very night. It had all been planned. Earlier in the month, as a surprise, he’d paid a small fortune for a couple of tickets for La Fenice the following evening. Tonight Peroni had booked a quiet table for the four of them at his favourite restaurant, a place the big man loved, and was loved in return by the two sisters behind the bar, who fed him extra
cicchetti
as if he were a stray canine newly wandered through the door. Emily and Teresa had planned to be regular visitors during the men’s temporary banishment. It hadn’t worked out like that.