The thump came up through the soles of Salvu's boots before his ears caught it — a fat, wrong sound, more felt than heard, the kind a heart makes when it skips.
Then the windows of the kamra tan-nar turned orange.
"Karmenu!" Salvu was running before he'd decided to, the dawn still grey over Fort St Angelo, the Grand Harbour flat as poured lead behind him. Smoke was already crawling out under the steel door of Shed Three, the shed they weren't supposed to enter without the master, the shed where the saint's kaxxa infernali was being readied for tomorrow night. "Karmenu, ġesù — Karmenu!"
The smell hit him first when he hauled the door open: gunpowder, sharp and peppery, and beneath it something he refused to name, something like roast pork left too long. His eyes streamed. Scorched petards lay scattered across the concrete like spilled cigars, their paper casings split and smouldering, and a low haze hung at chest height so that for a moment Salvu saw nothing but the work table, the brass scales, the saint's banner on the wall — Viva San Duminku — and then he looked down.
Karmenu Spiteri lay half under the workbench, on his back, one arm flung above his head as though he'd reached for something. His apron was burned through in a black star across the chest. The skin of his face was untouched. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, and he looked — Salvu would say this later, again and again, to anyone who'd buy him a drink — he looked surprised. Not afraid. Surprised.
Salvu got him by the apron straps and dragged, and the body came too easily, the way a thing comes when nothing in it is helping you anymore.
Outside, the bells of St Lawrence began to ring the Angelus, slow and golden over the alleys hung with their festa banners, and a man started to scream that wasn't Salvu, and then was.
Inspector Nazju Felċ smelled the harbour before he smelled the death — diesel and salt and the bilge-stink of the marina, the smell of his demotion. Six months ago he'd had Sliema and a corner office. Now he had Birgu and a Renault that wouldn't start in the damp.
He stood in the doorway of Shed Three with a cigarette he hadn't lit, watching the volunteers mill about in the yard like wasps from a stamped nest, and felt the old reluctance settle on him like dust. Don't care. Don't look. Caring is how they get their hooks in you. That had been the lesson of the corruption case — the one where he'd done everything right and watched the file dissolve, watched a magistrate's nephew walk, watched his own name go into the papers as the careless one. The lesson was: in a country of four hundred thousand people where everyone was someone's cousin, justice was a word you said at funerals.
"Inspector?" Sergeant Rita Bonnici was already inside, crouched by the body, latex gloves on, notebook out, eyes bright as a gull's. Twenty-six, pressed uniform, the lanyard of her ID looped twice because regulations said so. "The festa committee secretary is outside. He's saying accidental ignition. Stray spark, friction, the heat — it happens with the older composition, the chlorate mixes. He wants the medical examiner to —"
"He wants." Felċ came in, breathing through his mouth. The haze had thinned. Morning light fell grey through the high window and laid itself across Karmenu Spiteri's burned apron. "Does the festa committee secretary do my job now, Bonnici?"
"No, sir. I only —"
"Then he wants the way I want lunch. Quietly." He crouched. His knees complained. He was fifty-one and felt seventy in the cold months.
The body told him things, the way bodies did when you stopped flinching from them. The burn was a star, blackened at the centre, radiating out across the chest — but the edges were too clean. He'd seen men who'd died in the kamra tan-nar; everyone in the harbour district had. When a real charge went up in your hands you didn't get a tidy star on your apron. You got a room redecorated with you. You lost the hand, the arm, the face. Karmenu had his face. Karmenu had both hands, the fingers stained yellow-brown with a half-century of black powder, the nails intact.
"This burn killed him?" Felċ said, not really to Bonnici.
"The committee says —"
"I heard what the committee says." He leaned close. The peppery reek was strongest here, but under it, faintly, was something he knew and couldn't place — sweetish, chemical, not gunpowder. He filed it away. "A petard cooks off in your apron, you don't lie down tidy under your own workbench, Sergeant. You go through the wall."
Bonnici's pen stopped. To her credit, she didn't argue. She looked again at the body the way he'd told her, the way you had to learn — not at the wound but around it — and he watched the certainty go out of her face and something better come in. Doubt.
"Then the burn is..." she started.
"Dressing." Felċ stood, knees cracking. "Window dressing." He turned a slow circle. The brass scales. The racks of finished petards, colour-coded with chalk. The big set-piece frame leaning against the far wall, the kaxxa for tomorrow that would never now be fired — or would be, he thought sourly, because nothing stopped a Maltese festa, not weather, not death, not God Himself. And on the work table, an oblong of dust slightly cleaner than the rest, rectangular, the size of a ledger.
He pointed. "What goes there?"
Bonnici followed his finger. "Sir?"
"Something was there. Until recently. Ask the running man outside — the one who found him. Salvu something."
She went. Felċ was alone with Karmenu Spiteri, il-kaptan tan-nar, the master of fire, the most decorated pyrotechnist in the south of the island, the man who'd made the harbour bloom every August for fifty years. Felċ had watched his shells himself as a boy, lying on the bastion walls with his father, the colours going up and the boom coming back off Fort St Angelo a half-second late, the whole town saying aaah as one animal.
He crouched once more. Almost gently, he lifted the dead man's right hand. The fingers were still half-curled. And there, looped twice around the index finger, was a length of black quick-match fuse — the fast stuff, the stuff that carried fire shed to shed in a blink.
It hadn't burned.
Felċ frowned. He drew it straight. The fuse had a clean end, square, bright. Not the frayed black char of fuse that had done its job. The other end too.
Cut. Both ends cut, with something sharp, and tied off in a small neat knot around the finger as if — as if someone had placed it there. Or as if the old man, dying, had wanted his last act to point at the thing that killed him.
A cut fuse. A staged burn. A missing book.
The cigarette in Felċ's mouth had gone soft from his breath. He took it out and looked at it and felt, against every instinct he'd spent six months sharpening, the old terrible thing waking up in his chest.
Interest.
"Ċ'mon," he muttered, to himself, to the dead man, to the case. "Not me. Find someone else."
The Angelus had stopped. In the silence the harbour ticked and lapped, and somewhere up in the town a brass band began, ragged, to rehearse a march for the saint.
Forty metres away, and eleven up, Dr Lina Azzopardi heard the explosion as a tremor in the scaffold under her knees.
She was high in the apse of St Lawrence, where the morning didn't reach yet, working by the cold blue of an LED lamp clipped to the pole beside her. Below and behind, the church held its breath in the dimness — gilt and marble and the great titular paintings going up into shadow, the air thick with the particular smell of an old Maltese church: beeswax, cold stone, the ghost of yesterday's incense, and under all of it the faint mineral breath of the limestone itself, the soft globigerina the whole island was carved from, sweating its centuries.
Her hands were on the saint.
The statue of St Dominic stood in his niche to her left, lifted from his pedestal and braced for her, seven feet of polychrome and gilt, the founder of the Order in his black-and-white habit with the lily and the book, his painted face turned up in that expression the old carvers managed and nobody could manage now — sorrow and certainty at once. Tomorrow night six men would carry him on their shoulders through the candlelit streets and the whole of Birgu would weep and shout for him. Today he was hers. Hers to clean, to consolidate, to make ready.
The tremor came up through her knees and she gasped and grabbed the saint's plinth, heart slamming, certain the scaffold was going. It steadied. Far off, through the high windows, she heard shouting. A man's voice, cracking. Then more voices, the particular pitch of an emergency, running feet on stone somewhere down by the marina.
"What in the —" She let go of the saint, embarrassed at having grabbed him, and crossed herself out of reflex she'd thought she'd outgrown. The lamp swung where her shoulder had knocked it, and its blue light slid across the back wall of the niche.
And stopped her cold.
She'd been three weeks on this church. She knew its skin better than her own by now — the 1740s plaster, the nineteenth-century repairs, the brown bloom of damp in the north corner, the way the eighteenth-century mason had floated his finish coat so thin you could read the trowel strokes. She knew it the way the diocese paid her to know it, which was: completely, and without imagination, because imagination was the enemy of restoration. You preserve what you inherit. You do not invent. Her professor had said it; her father, who'd gilded half the altars in the south before his hands shook too badly, had said it; she believed it the way she believed in load-bearing walls.
The back wall of St Dominic's niche was wrong.
A patch of it — perhaps the size of a hymnal, low and to the right where the statue's body normally hid it — was a different plaster. Smoother. Whiter. The render around it was three hundred years old and breathed the slow grey of age; this patch was flat and dead and new, troweled in by a hand that had matched the level but not the soul of the original. Recent. Years, not centuries. Set against the rest it sang out to her now like a wrong note in a hymn.
"That's not in the file," she said aloud, to the saint, to the empty church. Her voice came back to her small under the great dome.
She knew the diocesan condition reports. She knew the 1962 survey, the 1989 conservation, the parish's own ledger of every repair since the war, copied out in the spider hand of a long-dead sacristan. There was no recorded intervention behind the niche. None. A church did not patch its own apse and forget to write it down. A parish that wrote down the cost of every candle did not forget to write this down.
Unless it was not meant to be written down.
She reached out and laid two fingers flat against the patch. It was cool, like all the wall, but it had a different grain under her skin — sealed, almost slick, where the old plaster was porous and kissed the warmth out of your fingertip. Someone had skimmed it with a fine modern finish and tried, not quite hard enough, to make it disappear.
Below her, the church door banged open and an old woman came hurrying in, black-shawled, fumbling holy water, gasping a prayer — and behind her another, and then Dun Ġużepp's young curate half-running up the side aisle with his phone already to his ear, saying iva, iva, ħdejn il-marina, il-pulizija ġejjin — yes, yes, by the marina, the police are coming.
"Lina!" The curate spotted her up in the apse, his face white. "Lina, come down — Karmenu, il-kaptan, there's been — in the kamra tan-nar — he's dead, they're saying he's dead —"
The word reached her and the patch of plaster under her fingers seemed suddenly to grow warm, or her fingers did, and she snatched her hand back as though the wall had bitten.
Karmenu Spiteri. Dead this morning. And here, hidden behind the very saint Karmenu had made fireworks for these fifty years, a wound in the wall nobody had written down.
She told herself there was no connection. She told herself it the way you tell a child there's nothing under the bed, knowing your own voice doesn't believe it.
"I'm coming," she called, and her voice shook, and she did not, she noticed, take her eyes off the patch.
By eight the yard of the kamra tan-nar was full of men who had no business being there and one man who had every right and didn't want it.
Felċ stood with his back to the harbour and let the festa committee secretary talk himself dry. The man's name was Grech; he had a comb-over surrendering to the wind and a lanyard like Bonnici's and the particular sweat of someone whose calendar is more sacred than his conscience.
"— and you understand, Inspector, the brioxos are baked, the band clubs have hired, the emigrants have flown in from Australia, from Canada, people who saved for years — and the licence for the aerials, the harbour clearance, all of it timed to the minute. If word goes out that the kamra is a — a crime scene —" Grech said the word as though it dirtied his mouth — "you'll have ten thousand people and nowhere for them to go. Karmenu would want the festa to —"
"Karmenu," Felċ said mildly, "is on his back under his own bench with a hole burned in him and a fuse tied to his finger, Sur Grech, so I find it hard to know what Karmenu wants this morning."
Grech blinked. "An accident. Surely — these old men, the old chemistries, the chlorate, everyone knows it's dangerous, every few years we lose one, God rest them —" He crossed himself, fast, a man crossing a road. "It's tragic. It's an accident. The medical examiner will confirm —"
"The medical examiner," Felċ said, "will tell me what I already know, which is that this burn didn't kill him." He watched that land. It landed badly. Grech's eyes went to the shed, to the men in the yard, to the harbour, anywhere but Felċ. "So before you sell me an accident, tell me this. Where's the logbook?"
"The — what logbook?"
"Every kamra tan-nar in Malta keeps one. The law says so — you of all people should know what the law says. Chemical inventory, batch dates, who comes, who goes. There's a clean rectangle on his work table where a heavy book sat until very recently. It's not on the table. It's not on the shelf. Salvu the dragger says Karmenu wrote in it every single morning of his life, and it was there last night. Where is it now?"
Silence. The harbour lapped. Up in the town the band had got the march right at last and the melody came down over the rooftops, bright and brassy and grotesquely cheerful, Viva San Duminku, while a man lay dead below.
It was Bonnici who broke it. She came out of the shed peeling off a glove, and her young face had the look Felċ was starting to like — the look of someone who'd stopped reciting and started seeing.
"Sir." She drew him a few steps aside, lowering her voice, but not so low that he missed the tremor of it. "The logbook. Salvu confirms it. Gone. But there's more." She turned the pages of her notebook with quick fingers. "Karmenu's been selling. The fireworks contracts — the festa supply, the cross-village commissions, even his licence shares. Three of them in the last month. To rival masters. Men he hated. Men he'd never sell to in a hundred years."
"A dying man tidying his affairs," Felċ said. But it sat wrong.
"That's not the strange part." Bonnici looked up, and lowered her voice still further, so that he had to lean in and caught the clean smell of her hair against the gunpowder and diesel of the morning. "Two days ago Karmenu went to the parish house. He demanded to see Dun Ġużepp. Salvu drove him. He said the old man was — these are Salvu's words, sir — he was shaking, not from sickness, from being angry, or afraid. And when he came out he told Salvu —" she checked the page, careful, official, getting it exact — "he told Salvu: 'It's time. I'm going to say it out loud, even if the whole festa falls on my head.'"
Felċ went very still.
Behind him the harbour heaved its grey breath. Above him the band played for the saint. And forty metres away, eleven metres up, a woman he had not yet met was standing in front of a wall that had no business being new, in a church where, fifty years ago, a young pyrotechnist had been going to say it out loud — and had died, instead, the morning before he could.
Felċ took the soft cigarette from his mouth and crushed it slowly in his fist.
"Say what out loud," he murmured. Not a question. A door, opening onto a dark he could already feel coming up cold around his ankles. "Say what."