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the end of the seats, and withdrew a small bottle of Pellegrino, misty with ice.
    “Help yourself,” he beckoned.
    “We’re waiting,” Falcone insisted.
    The Englishman took a long gulp, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his silk shirt. They rounded the corner of the island, past the giant boatyards and docks, the football stadium and the odd collection of workers’ houses that no one, not even the police, paid much attention to. Murano now rose on the low, bright horizon, a spiky forest of chimneys and cranes rising up from the grey blue of the lagoon, beyond the cemetery island of San Michele, with its pale brick exterior wall, like that of a private castle, topped by a green fringe of cedar points.
    “What we want,” Hugo Massiter said, “is to stop this poor old city sinking any further into its own shit. If we can.”
    He leaned back, closed his eyes, then tossed the empty water bottle out of the open window, into the grey, foaming wake of the speeding vessel.
    “And that, gentlemen, very much depends on you.”
     
7
     
    A NGELO ARCANGELO HAD CREATED THE ISLAND HIMSELF, designed every last detail, intent on raising an everlasting masterpiece from the rubble he’d bought for a pittance. Everything was new, everything unique, cast in shapes that seemed impossible. The island was a testament to the power and beauty of glass, and by implication the Arcangeli themselves. On three separate plots, Angelo set out his stall for an admiring world to see. The palazzo was ninety percent leaded crystal, ten percent black iron and timber, a towering, organic beacon of light, with three curving roofs, the centre higher than the rest, rising more than twenty metres above the quayside. Behind the entrance doors the skeleton of a gigantic palm tree Angelo had imported from Sicily still lurked, its corpse now awaiting Hugo Massiter’s restorers, who had their own ideas, ones that Angelo would never have countenanced. To the right, seen from the water, stood the foundry, an elegant artisans’ workplace, fronted by four of the longest windows in Venice. They reached to the low, sloping roof, large enough to accommodate the crowds who would press their noses against the glass, wondering at the marvels being wrought by the Arcangeli’s maestri inside. And in the final third of the frontage, on the other side of the palazzo, stood Ca’ degli Arcangeli, the family home, ten apartments on three floors, with kitchens and bathrooms, offices and space to house meetings, receptions, banquets… . Angelo had begun his life’s project as a testament to the dynasty he was creating. By the time he died he knew the truth: that the island was an impossibility. Too expensive to maintain in the face of a public whose tastes for glass were fickle and shifting. Too complex and unwieldy to be managed by the children who followed him.
    Some of the beauty remained, though. Most of all in the family temple, the shrine to the clan that was the focus of the palazzo: an airy, cavernous dining room that occupied much of the first-floor frontage, filled by the constant light of the lagoon, with uninterrupted views past the Murano lighthouse, out to San Michele and the Fondamente Nuove waterfront. He’d made the glass with his own hands, labouring for almost a year to produce an astonishing, multi-windowed eyelid over the waterfront, some panes clear, some distorting bull’s-eyes with myriad stains, all pulled together into a massive, curving viewpoint that dominated the building’s façade.
    Angelo had told everyone he wanted to emulate the captain’s room of some medieval Venetian war galley, a nod back towards the Arcangeli’s boat-building past, though the
squero
in Chioggia had turned out nothing fancier than fishing barques that never went beyond the Adriatic. His face, stern, demanding, with some hard, unrelenting love inside it too, still stared down at them all from the large portrait that hung over the marble Doric fireplace