A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘Mr Gallo? My name is Delgado. I work for a tour company in the Borgo. You won’t have heard of us. I have an urgent problem. Are you busy?’

  ‘Very.’ It was a stock answer. There was always this ritual with the last-minute customers. You had to make them feel very grateful – and very generous.

  ‘Ah. I’m sorry. Perhaps some other time then.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was unavailable,’ Gallo snapped. ‘Just busy.’

  ‘But we need someone right now. I’ve been let down badly by one of the agencies. We have a party of very important people due to visit Ostia. I must find a translator for them within the hour.’

  ‘What’s the gig?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘What kind of tour? What am I supposed to talk about?’

  ‘Late imperial finds. The harbour. Nothing too detailed.’

  Gallo smiled for the first time that day. ‘Hey. I can go into as much detail as you want. I worked on that at Harvard.’

  The man hesitated. ‘So I heard. Then you’re free?’

  Gallo knew when a sap was rolling over. ‘Let me be honest with you. I’ve got some personal business. If I’m going to cancel it’s got to be double time. Six hundred dollars for the day.’

  The voice on the end of the line hesitated. ‘That’s a lot of money.’

  He could only say no, Gallo reasoned. There was just one more day of filming anyway. The crew had paid him in advance. He didn’t normally jerk people around but on this occasion it would be a pleasure.

  ‘Take it or leave it.’

  ‘Can I pick you up in thirty minutes? Where will you be?’

  ‘At the bar of the Osteria Capri. In Labicana, the Colosseum end.’

  ‘Drinking coffee?’

  ‘Drinking coffee,’ he replied, puzzled. Had people been talking?

  ‘I’ll be there,’ the man said and cut the call, before Gallo even had time to ask how they’d recognize each other.

  He walked over to the crew. They were back to filming now. Campion was holding up a piece of broken pottery and speculating on whether it was an imperial wine goblet which Nero himself had once gripped.

  Gallo stepped straight into the scene and prised the shard of unglazed brown ceramic from Campion’s fingers.

  ‘Let me interrupt this pile of fancy with a fact,’ Gallo said, smiling for the camera. ‘Nero lived here two, three years at most before he had his slave kill him to stop the Romans tearing him apart limb from limb. Emperors weren’t into Mediterranean peasant chic. They ate off fancy plates. They drank from fancy glasses. This is stuff that never got out of the kitchen. This is stuff a slave would have been ashamed to own. You have excavated imperial Roman Tupperware, my man. Now don’t you tell those good people out there otherwise.’

  Jay Gallo felt good. Maybe he would fit in a quick beer before the agency man turned up. It could hardly do any harm.

  The producer, a small woman with a malevolent dark face, stabbed him in the arm with a podgy finger. ‘You’re fired, mister,’ she hissed.

  ‘Oh calamitous day.’ Gallo chuckled and set off down the hill, so happy he began to whistle.

  There was time for two beers before the man arrived. Gallo had a pleasant smile on his face. He could do a good job when he felt like this. Everybody loved him.

  They went outside and left in a long, black Mercedes. Gallo noticed when he climbed in that it had Vatican number plates, which seemed very odd indeed.

  TEN

  The mob of damp hacks clustered around the door looking grumpy, determined and somewhat ridiculous.

  Luca Rossi scowled in their direction. ‘I cannot believe I fell for this.’

  ‘It was a deal. Remember?’

  ‘The deal was I came here. Well, I’ve done that. Now you go in and talk to the woman on your own. She can’t stand the sight of me anyway. You’ll likely get more out of her.’

  ‘You’re going drinking again?’

  ‘Ha, ha. There’s one of these reporters I know. He’s been useful in the past. We need to talk. Sometimes they know stuff that’s never come anywhere near us. OK?’

  Costa shrugged. He wondered if Rossi was being entirely honest with him. There had been times in the Rinaldis’ apartment when the big man seemed to be engrossed, puzzled, though he never said a word afterwards. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘And then I’ll make my own way back. Don’t worry about me. We can talk again at dinner.’

  Costa very much wished to get out of this arrangement. ‘She’s got the hots for you, Uncle Luca. There can be no other explanation. I’d just cramp your style.’

  The big man seemed offended. ‘Crazy Teresa’s not so bad-looking. A man could do worse.’

  ‘I just don’t want to deflect attention away from you, me being young, slim and attractive and all.’

  Rossi put out a big hand and patted him on the cheek, not so gently. ‘It’s a new place in Testaccio. Caligula. Thirteen Alberoni. Eight o’clock. Don’t be late. I’m paying.’

  ‘Great.’

  Then Rossi was gone into the crowd, pushing his way through, exchanging a glance with one individual Costa thought he recognized. Soon there’d be a beer round the corner, he guessed. Maybe there was something to talk about. It still seemed a slim option. He remembered Falcone and thought: look for a simpler explanation. The big man just didn’t want to see Sara Farnese. That was all.

  The idea seemed even crazier when she let him into the first-floor apartment. She wore a dark-red cotton shirt and faded-blue designer jeans. Her hair was now tied back behind her neck. Her large and intelligent green eyes had a deep, shining lustre that was new to him. She was about his height and just as slender. She moved with a controlled grace as if she thought everything through first.

  The apartment was decorated with a degree of taste Nic Costa associated with the wealthy middle-aged: reproduction wooden furniture, a polished dining table at the centre, and paintings everywhere, landscapes, medieval portraits and some more modern, abstract works that still seemed to fit. The walls were lined with the kind of heavy wallpaper you saw in expensive hotels. And books, shelf upon shelf of books, all hardbacks, some leather-bound. There was no TV set, only a very pricey-looking stereo system and a pile of classical CDs next to it. None of this made sense to him. The designer jeans and her own magnetic looks apart, it was as if this woman – who could be no more than thirty – was living the life of a rich spinster in her fifties.

  He indicated towards the crowd, now out of sight beyond the window.

  ‘There are laws about harassment, you know. If you want me to do something I can call the municipal police.’

  She sat down in a stylish high armchair that looked uncomfortable. ‘They’ll go away, won’t they? I still don’t understand what they want.’

  They wanted a picture of her. He knew that. They wanted to splash her beauty all over the front pages and say: here’s the woman some university professor went crazy over, killing himself, his wife and her boyfriend, all for some approximation of love.

  He fell into a low sofa feeling awkward and out of place in these surroundings. ‘They want your photograph. They want you.’

  ‘Then they’ll have a long wait. I’m getting my groceries delivered. The man downstairs brings them to me. I’m not going back to the university until this nonsense is over. They can camp out there for a week if they like. They’ll still get nothing.’

  That was easy to say, he thought. She didn’t understand how soon you wore down under this constant attention, and how that was all part of their game.

  ‘You never told me your name.’

  ‘Costa. Nic Costa.’

  ‘What do you want, Mr Costa?’

  He pulled out a notebook. ‘Just some simple, basic paperwork. If that’s OK. Personal details.’

  ‘Very well.’

  In an efficient five minutes Sara Farnese told him all the bare facts. They shared the same age. She was twenty-seven, a little younger than he th
ought, held both Italian and English passports, thanks to the nationalities of her respective late parents, and was a middle-ranking professor at the university. Her affair with Rinaldi had lasted no more than a few weeks. She had not, as far as she was aware, mentioned Hugh Fairchild’s visit in Rinaldi’s earshot, though it was possible this had happened. Nor was she aware of Rinaldi’s money or drug problems, both of which came as some – genuine, he thought – surprise to her.

  She cited from memory the source of the quotation about the blood of the martyrs but was unsure what relevance it had. Just for interest, Costa read her back the full version of the doggerel about St Ives as Falcone had explained it that morning.

  ‘So it’s just a riddle?’ she asked, bemused.

  ‘You’re not reaching for a calculator.’

  ‘Why would I? Isn’t the answer obvious? There’s one man going to St Ives. The rest are going the other way.’

  He began to understand Rossi’s discomfiture in the presence of this woman. She was too smart, too cool, too distanced. She made him feel small and stupid, not by any deliberate act on her part but simply from her presence, her way of speaking. This was, he thought, accidental. Some curious air of loneliness hung around her too and it was evident in this antiseptic, overdecorated place she called home.

  ‘Did Professor Rinaldi know many people in the Vatican?’

  ‘He knew the ones we all knew. The academics. The people who controlled access to the library.’

  ‘You need a ticket to get in there, surely? Something that gets you through the private gates without having to queue with the tourists?’

  She opened a small blue leather handbag that sat by the chair, one that was, like everything else in the room, too mature for her. Sara Farnese sifted through the contents and pulled out a laminated card. It bore her name and a photograph.

  ‘Of course. The library has more sources on early Christianity than anywhere else in the world. That’s why I came to Rome.’

  Costa looked closely at the card. ‘But this is for access to the Vatican itself. Not the library.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said a little hesitantly, ‘one needs to look at items that are stored elsewhere. This saves time.’

  He didn’t know anyone outside Vatican staff who owned one of these things. ‘And Stefano had a card too?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He was waiting for it to come through. Perhaps that’s why there was such a fuss when he forced his way in. If he’d had a card there would have been no problem.’

  It made no sense. She had been at the university three years and owned one of these precious things. Rinaldi, who had been in the department for more than twenty, had to wait in line with the queues of Japanese.

  ‘Why didn’t he have one? If it was essential?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. We worked in the same department but not on the same courses. Perhaps he felt it wasn’t so necessary. You can get a lot of material online these days. I prefer to look at the source. It feels more proper somehow.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he feel the same way?’

  ‘I told you,’ she replied a little testily. ‘I don’t know. I had a brief affair with the man. I wouldn’t claim I knew him terribly well.’

  Yet Stefano Rinaldi felt he knew her well enough to try to commit suicide in front of her and rely on this woman … to do what? To save his wife somehow, in return for the death of her current lover?

  A snatch of their conversation from the previous day came back to him. ‘Miss Farnese. You said that he spoke in two different voices to you.’

  She had forgotten that part. It was obvious in her face, and the return of the memory puzzled her.

  ‘That’s correct. When he quoted Tertullian it was as if it were some kind of pronouncement, meant to be heard by everyone. It was loud, purposeful.’ She thought carefully before going on. ‘It was much quieter when he spoke about Mary. He was just talking to me then.’

  Costa racked his head for what that might mean. ‘Was there anyone else in the room that you knew? Apart from the guard who shot him?’

  ‘No. They were all strangers.’

  ‘But if he said one thing in a loud voice and the next more softly there had to be a reason. As if someone was watching, someone who needed to hear the first part, and to miss the second. Please. Try to think. Is that possible?’

  She considered the idea. ‘I’m sorry. The way I remember it, he entered the room in a rush. The first time he said those words from Tertullian he was well past everybody else. Even when he spoke loudly they wouldn’t hear. The second time was different. But …’

  Nic Costa thought about the kind of money the Vatican could spend on security and felt a sudden and urgent need to go back to the place where he had last seen Hugh Fairchild’s skin lying on an old mahogany desk.

  ‘I understand. I’m sorry. They must seem very stupid questions.’

  ‘Not at all. They seem very intelligent ones. As intelligent as anyone could ask in the circumstances. I wish I could help more.’

  Rossi had been right. It would have been awkward with him in the room. Sara Farnese was an odd mix of strength and timidity. The more she was surrounded by people, the less she would divulge.

  He put his notebook in his pocket and got up.

  ‘Would you like a coffee, Mr Costa?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling. ‘But I have another appointment.’

  ‘Will there be another time?’

  ‘I hope we can clear this all up by tomorrow. There shouldn’t need to be another interview.’

  He nodded towards the window and gave her his card, scribbling his home and mobile numbers on it. ‘Remember what I said about harassment. Call any time and I’ll get someone to talk to them.’

  She looked at the card then placed it in her bag. ‘Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘Good. Oh …’ It was an old trick but sometimes an effective one. ‘I almost forgot. Do you know someone in the Vatican? Someone called Cardinal Denney?’

  She shook her head and smiled, the fullest smile Costa had seen on her face. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of anyone of that name.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Sara Farnese was looking out of the window again, wistfully.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go outside for a little while?’ Costa asked. ‘A walk. You can’t stay here for ever.’

  She frowned at the world beyond the window. ‘I’m not sure I can face that right now.’

  He looked at her and said, ‘Maybe …’

  ELEVEN

  Ten minutes later the door to the apartment block in Vicolo delle Palline opened and the mob outside went wild. In spite of the heat the woman coming out of the building was dressed in a long, full raincoat. Big sunglasses obscured her features and a headscarf covered her hair. She pushed away the forest of TV mikes that were thrust into her face. She said nothing, keeping her head down, trying to look as anonymous as possible in the scrum of reporters clamouring for her attention.

  Cameras flashed. Arms and elbows jostled for position. A reporter from one of the tawdrier magazines fell to the floor winded by a sharp stab to the ribs. Another screeched as he was jostled out of position. One of the bigger hacks started to throw punches at a TV cameraman who was trying to push him out of the way. The slender figure at the centre of the mêlée was unable to avoid the photographers but remained silent throughout, pushing forward through the mass, dark glasses fixed firmly on the ground ahead.

  Then the centre of gravity shifted. The raincoat forced its way through the final barrier of bodies and was free in the cobbled street. The mob’s clamour diminished. This was not what was supposed to happen. Victims gave in eventually. They offered a sight of themselves or a few words in deference to the power of the pack. It was unknown for them to reject the mob’s advances so completely, so successfully. One or two of the hacks wondered what to make of it, but then there was no time.

  Sara Farnese began to run. The two arms of th
e raincoat started to pump. Her legs beat on the ground. The figure that eluded them now set up a pace, steady and deliberate, out beneath Il Pasette into the broad tourist street beyond, inviting them to follow.

  The herd howled and was after her, pausing only briefly to think about how odd this situation was. Close to an ice-cream stand in the Via dei Corridori they almost caught her. Then she picked up speed once more and was away, only just, until the pedestrian lights on the Piazza Pia turned red and a surging sea of cars rolled forward, horns hooting, drivers screaming at each other, a solid sea of metal blocking her way.

  The figure turned and saw the mob on her heels, panting, unused to this kind of chase, determined to repay the effort by pinning her down in public, forcing her to remove the disguise, bellowing at her until she said something, anything to explain why three people died in her name, and in such crazy ways too.

  The first hack, some way ahead of the rest, pounced, placing a firm hand on her shoulder. This was a mistake. A sharp fist stabbed him in the ribs, the breath went out of his body in an instant, and all he heard for his considerable pain was a low, half-obscene curse.

  The traffic was gridlocked in the wide piazza, a mass of overheated vehicles sending out a choking cloud of pollution into the humid forty-degree air. She watched the rest of the pack come close then turned, jumped, mounted the bonnet of a Lexus next to the kerb and raced quickly across the road, leaping from car to car.

  The mob watched in anguished amazement. The hacks were out of breath. The photographers scarcely had the energy to lift their cameras. The TV crews were still struggling up the street wondering what was going on. It was just possible for them to see the conclusion once she had navigated the bonnets, roofs and boots that filled the piazza.