The Devil

by Nadia Dalbuono

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispered. Then, ‘Definitely a suicide?’ He sensed that the CSI had come up behind him.

  ‘No, he choked on a peanut.’ It was Manetti’s voice this time. He must have just arrived.

  Scamarcio took a step closer to the corpse. The priest’s eyes had rolled back in his head, and his tongue was hanging out as they always did with hangings. Scamarcio averted his eyes back to the body. The young man was in good shape. There was a dense band of muscle running across his stomach, and his thighs were honed and solid. Scamarcio studied the arms: the biceps, the thick wrists missing a watch. He exited the bathroom. The young CSI was scratching his chin and looking at Manetti, a worried expression on his face.

  ‘Before you say anything, it’s not that we think you can’t do your job. It’s just that Scamarcio can’t go anywhere without me,’ said Manetti, opening his case and searching for something among the tweezers and scalpels and thin rolls of plastic. ‘Call it puppy love or whatever, but he needs me to hold his hand.’

  Scamarcio wondered if Manetti had been dragged away from somewhere he really wanted to be. Probably a Thai massage parlour, if the rumours were anything to go by. ‘I’m just aiming for continuity in the case, that’s all.’

  ‘No worries,’ said the young CSI, looking embarrassed. ‘I’m easy.’

  ‘You’re about the only thing on this case that is,’ sighed Scamarcio.

  Manetti took his kit into the bathroom and started whistling. It sounded like the theme tune from one of the Bond films.

  ‘He could just have asked me for my notes,’ murmured the young CSI.

  ‘I guess he prefers to do it his way.’

  Scamarcio turned to the two attending officers. What with the mortuary team, the CSIs, him, and Manetti, the hotel room was getting pretty crowded, and the smell was intensifying. ‘What time were you guys called?’

  ‘Eight-fifteen. The vic had asked for a 7.00 am wake-up call, and when he didn’t respond, reception sent someone up. They told us he’d been quite insistent about the call — said he had an important meeting — so they thought they should double check.’

  ‘Right,’ said Scamarcio, pulling out his notebook and flicking to a blank page. ‘When did he check in?’

  ‘Last night,’ answered the officer, scrolling down his notes with his finger, ‘10.00 pm.’

  ‘They notice anything odd about him at reception?’

  The officer scratched behind an ear. ‘Not that they mentioned. Maybe you should have a word.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will. Any visitors to his room?’

  ‘None that they noticed.’

  ‘CCTV on all the floors?’

  The young officer glanced up, anxious, his cheeks red, then he looked back down at his notes. His finger had stopped moving.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ask them,’ said Scamarcio. ‘Anything else of note?’

  ‘The name on his ID …’

  ‘Where is the ID?’

  ‘It’s already bagged,’ said the chief CSI, pointing to the bed. ‘With the others, over there.’

  Scamarcio saw a stack of plastic forensic zip-locks in a large case. He walked over and spotted the ID near the top. When he examined it, the name and photo confirmed it was Meinero. He rifled through the bags underneath. He saw bubble gum, metro tickets, some coins, and some jewellery — it looked like a gold cross on a chain, a watch, and a ring.

  Scamarcio turned back to the officer, the ID still in his hand. ‘Why did you mention the ID? It seems hunky dory to me.’

  ‘But that’s not the name he checked in with.’

  ‘Oh? What name did he give?’

  The officer glanced back at his notebook. ‘Amato. Piero Amato.’

  ‘Who was on shift last night?’ Scamarcio asked the manager at reception, a clean-shaven guy in his forties without a hair on his head. ‘Would they still be at work?’

  ‘No. Your officers have already spoken to them by telephone, but we can ask them to come in if you want. We had two staff manning reception when Mr Amato arrived.’

  ‘Get them here straight away,’ said Scamarcio, struggling to believe that the officers hadn’t already requested this. ‘Did Mr Amato have to show ID?’

  ‘Of course, all our guests are required to do so.’

  ‘Do you have a photocopy of the ID?’

  ‘Yes, I showed it to your officers. One second, please.’

  Scamarcio took a moment to glance around the lobby. It was a three-star hotel and didn’t seem to deserve a higher ranking. The beige faux-leather sofas looked worn and dirty, and the carpet was a couple of decades out of fashion.

  The manager came back with the photocopy and handed it to Scamarcio. The photo was of the young priest, no doubt about it. But the name did indeed read ‘Piero Amato’. The date of birth matched that of Priest Meinero. Why was Meinero using this fake ID with the surname of his superior, and where was that fake ID now?

  ‘Do you have CCTV?’ Scamarcio asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘On all the floors?’

  ‘Just the lobby.’

  Scamarcio found himself wishing that the priest had chosen the Marriott.

  ‘Can I have a look at your footage for last night, around the time Mr Amato checked in?’

  The manager led him into a back room and tapped the keyboard of a desktop computer. The footage was already up on screen, and Scamarcio guessed he’d been scrolling through it, knowing he’d be asked. ‘This should be it. That’s him, isn’t it?’ said the manager, looking pleased with himself.

  Scamarcio leaned in closer. ‘That’s him,’ he whispered as he took in the scene. The priest was facing the desk. His brown hair looked tousled by the wind, and his robes were obscured by a thick patterned scarf and heavy black overcoat. He was rubbing the small of his back and placing something on the ground to his right — a large suitcase. Where was this young priest of the Vatican heading with such a heavy bag, and what was he doing checking into a nondescript hotel on the wrong side of town?

  The check-in process passed quickly, and, after a couple of minutes, the priest left the desk and headed for the elevator. After that, all trace of him disappeared. They fast-forwarded through the footage, slowing it down if anyone entered the lobby. Scamarcio observed a couple of drunken tourists (English, according to the manager) staggering their way to the lifts, a Japanese family stopping to examine some leaflets from a table near the sofa, and an elderly gentleman (Polish, according to the manager) approaching reception. They watched the Polish gentleman for several minutes, but it seemed he just wanted to make chit-chat with the pretty girl on shift. After that, the lobby was empty for half an hour — from 11.30 pm till 12.00 am according to the time stamp — until the pretty receptionist and her male colleague disappeared into the back room for a moment. They’d only been gone for a few seconds when a figure, medium height, wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a long winter coat quickly crossed the lobby and headed straight to the lift. Within seconds, the two receptionists were back at their posts, none the wiser. Scamarcio spooled through the footage, waiting for the figure to reappear. But the hours passed, and there was no sign of him/her. ‘Is there any other way to leave the hotel?’ he asked.

  The manager looked up from the screen, his eyes slightly glazed over. ‘You could go down to the basement, that leads onto a parking garage. But the garage is locked at midnight. I don’t see how anyone could have got out from there. And it was a fourth-floor room, so they could hardly have jumped out the window.’

  ‘Any CCTV down in the garage?’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t working last night. I’ve called in a repairman, but they can’t get here till tomorrow.’

  ‘What time did it go down?’

  ‘Around 8.00 pm, I think.’

  Why couldn’t it be simple for once? thought Scamarcio as he
lit his fifth fag of the morning.

  Scamarcio felt quite nervous as he approached the mortuary. The chances of running into Aurelia were high, and the chances that she now knew about the baby, even higher.

  He stubbed out his Marlboro on a broken paving slab and breathed out slowly. The two hotel receptionists from the night before had proven less than useless; he’d have got more from the shabby pot plant on their desk. The missing CCTV in the garage was still eating away at him. When did he ever get what he needed? The odds always seemed to work in the other direction. He stopped halfway up the steps. Shit. That’s it.

  What if it wasn’t just bad luck? He’d had a case last year where the CCTV had been deliberately tampered with. It had been a professional hit, and professionals always planned ahead. Was it the same deal here? But who knew the priest would be staying at that hotel, and how could they know? Was it perhaps a place he used frequently? The staff hadn’t mentioned it, but Scamarcio hadn’t asked — an oversight. He pulled his mobile from his pocket and scrolled through his recent calls for the number of the hotel.

  ‘We’d never seen him before,’ said the manager, sounding disappointed not to be able to help. ‘I was pretty sure we hadn’t, but I also consulted our records, and there was nothing there.’

  ‘But which names were you checking?’

  ‘I searched for both names you gave me: the name he checked in with, Piero Amato, and the other name, Alberto Meinero.’

  ‘And nothing for either of them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Scamarcio struggled to sound polite. He thanked the manager, then hung up. He was about to make another call when a male voice shouted his name.

  Dr Giangrande was standing in the hallway, holding open the swing doors, his white overalls flapping in the breeze.

  ‘I’ve got something, come see.’ Giangrande rarely looked excited, and Scamarcio felt his unease stir again. He followed the chief pathologist through to the suite, trying unsuccessfully not to inhale the heady clash of bleach and body fluids. Despite the hours Scamarcio had spent here, the smell still shocked him every time.

  Meinero’s corpse was lying on the autopsy table with his torso cut open, his intestines pushed to one side to reveal the abdominal cavity. The stench was overpowering. Scamarcio swallowed and closed his eyes. When he reopened them, Giangrande was looking at him impatiently. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘I had polpette …’

  ‘The first thing you need to know is that this was no suicide.’

  ‘He was hanging from the shower fitting. There was a noose.’

  ‘He was put there after.’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘After he’d had a massive heart attack.’

  Scamarcio was shaking his head, although he knew Giangrande was never wrong. ‘What was he — twenty-four, twenty-five? Was he sick?’

  ‘No. He’d ingested a large quantity of a drug that can cause cardiac arrest if taken in too high a dose.’

  Scamarcio frowned. ‘But why would he do that? Did he make a mistake — get the dose wrong?’

  ‘I suspect that he didn’t even know he’d taken it. I found the drug mixed up with a brioche in his stomach. It had been ground down, and I’m inclined to think that it had been hidden. The victim probably had no idea he’d ingested it.’

  Scamarcio threw his arms open. ‘What the fuck? Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘You’ve been a policeman long enough to know why someone might want to do that.’

  ‘For God’s sake, there are easier ways to kill a man.’

  ‘If you know what you’re doing, it’s not that difficult.’

  ‘Yeah, but you have to get it into the brioche, and then make sure he eats it. And then where does the hanging fit into it?’

  Giangrande looked at him as if he were simple. ‘Well … I’d hazard a guess that perhaps they wanted to make it look like a suicide …’

  Scamarcio let the sarcasm pass. ‘Yeah, but they must have known we’d do an autopsy?’

  Giangrande scratched his head. ‘Yes. And we were meant to conclude that the drug had nothing to do with his death. And maybe that’s what I would have written, had I not taken the trouble to send it for analysis.’ Giangrande looked momentarily sheepish. ‘On the fast track.’

  ‘The fast track? Garramone has practically banned that.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve been around long enough to know when something might crack a case open.’

  ‘Did he sign off on it?’

  ‘I … may have faked his signature.’

  ‘You what?’

  Giangrande dismissed the worry with a wave. ‘The lab just called me to say that the separate chemical components I found only appear together in one product.’

  ‘And what product would that be?’

  ‘It’s called Tamazol, and it was banned from sale five years ago because it was shown to cause cardiac arrest, as I said, if taken in too high a dose.’

  ‘What was it used for?’

  ‘Erectile dysfunction.’

  ‘What??’

  ‘You heard me.’ Garramone paused. ‘You know, certain elements of organised crime in this city have been known to use contraband drugs to kill.’

  It was all too much. Scamarcio felt disorientated. ‘I’m not sure how they’d figure in this.’ He paused. ‘This is getting crazy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ sighed Garramone. ‘It’s a weird one, I’ll grant you that.’

  Back at his desk, Scamarcio turned off his computer screen and rested his head in his hands. He had a headache that was moving up from the troublesome joint in his neck. The squad room was quiet, but the low hum of the coffee machine, the slow tick of the wall clock, and the distant clackety-clack of reports being typed still felt too loud. He pulled out a notepad from his desk drawer and closed his eyes.

  As a child, he’d had difficulty with maths. His teacher, Mrs Guzzi, had always maintained that it wasn’t a problem of competence, but confidence. He’d fly into a panic if he felt like he might not know the answer, and then the numbers would blur on the page, until he could no longer see his way to the solution. Mrs Guzzi had taught him to stay calm, take a breath, and work it through: step by step, digit by digit. It had taken him a while to adopt the strategy, but once he had, the numbers no longer danced, and he eventually found himself at the top of the class. She’d been a lovely woman, Mrs Guzzi. But then her son was murdered in the wars of the eighties, and no one ever saw her again. She never left the house. He remembered someone saying that she’d died that day along with her boy, and only an empty shell remained.

  He opened his eyes and started writing down what he knew so far about the case. Then he made a list of the questions that needed answers, including the angles and suspects each question related to.

  When he’d finished, he had three A4 sheets full of writing, but he felt better.

  Distilled down to its essence, at the heart of his inquiry were two possible suspects: the politician’s son, Castelnuovo, and Cardinal Amato or someone with links to Amato. As improbable as it seemed, Amato had to remain a suspect because he’d been one of the last people to see Andrea Borghese alive, one of the cardinal’s assistants was dead, and the cardinal’s name had been used on the fake ID found with Meinero’s body. Until these questions were clarified, Scamarcio could not eliminate the old man from his enquiries. Besides, on a non-factual, purely instinctual level, the dramatic change in Amato’s behaviour on the DVD still troubled Scamarcio. It had demonstrated that the cardinal was capable of more than Scamarcio had first assumed.

  Top of Scamarcio’s to-do list was a return to the Vatican. He needed to find out as much as he could about Meinero and his life or secret life. He wondered how far Sartori had come with his own enquiries. There was no sign of him in the office, and when Scamarcio dialled his mobile, it rang out. Frustrate
d, he called Negruzzo in Tech, hoping that he’d got somewhere with the other passwords.

  ‘It’s a ballbreaker,’ murmured Negruzzo through a mouthful of food. ‘I’ve drawn a blank with brute-force attempts, so I’m going to have to try something else.’

  ‘Is that significant, that you’re having to work so hard?’

  ‘Hmm, yes and no, yes and no.’

  ‘Well, which is it?’

  ‘It’s tricky. It could just be that your vic came up with a highly unorthodox password … or he’s popped something in the system to defeat us.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be able to spot that?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Christ, I thought computers were supposed to be straightforward.’

  Negruzzo sighed. ‘Scamarcio, it’s not really about computers. It’s coding, encryption, algorithms and maths we’re dealing with. In some ways, it’s a dark art.’

  Scamarcio wanted to hurl his phone across the room. ‘Well, when you finally see the light, let me know.’ He hung up, immediately feeling guilty. Negruzzo was trying his best, and Scamarcio knew it. It was just that everything felt so bloody slow. He needed to see movement.

  For some reason Chief Inspector Cafaro seemed in a good mood. The fact that he was happy worried Scamarcio. He suspected that it might signal some kind of problem coming his way.

  ‘You’re very cheerful, given the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘The murder of Father Meinero. I thought it might be weighing heavily on your mind.’

  Cafaro set down his cup of coffee and blinked. ‘Meinero is dead?’

  Scamarcio filled him in on the details he was prepared to share.

  ‘Why did nobody think to inform us?’ said Cafaro once he had finished. Scamarcio had been about to say, ‘No idea,’ when he realised it was probably his responsibility to have made that call.