A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  Sara Farnese, who was, as far as they knew, a quiet, academic university professor, kicked hard on the pavement, like an athlete setting off for the race. She broke into her pace, a faster pace than she had used down the Via dei Corridori, one which was more natural to her. Then she disappeared past the squat rotund magnificence of the Castel Sant’Angelo sprinting like a pro, arms moving rhythmically, legs pounding the ground, with the raincoat flapping behind in the wind.

  Five minutes later a skinny, scared-looking young woman from Kosovo, with a ten-month-old baby in her arms, sat outside the makeshift tent that was her home. It was on the wide footpath by the banks of the Tiber near the Ponte Cavour. She was astonished to see a man walking towards her, a slender man with a woman’s raincoat flapping around him. He wore a broad, self-amused smile and was somewhat out of breath.

  She held the child more tightly to her and retreated into the shade of the small, tattered tent. He was not a cop, surely, who would move her on again. Cops didn’t wear women’s raincoats. They didn’t smile like this, a nice smile, she realized, one that came from some happiness inside.

  He stopped and crouched next to her, looking at the child, breathing heavily. Then he took off the raincoat, bundled it up with a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses and a headscarf and gave them to her.

  ‘Can you use these?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a €50 note. It was a lot of money. She knew what that meant.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said in what she knew was bad Italian. ‘I don’t …’ She didn’t want to say any more. It was a lot of money.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a family habit. My father told me to give something away twice every day,’ he said, in a warm, calm voice. ‘Maybe one day I’ll be hoping someone does the same to me.’

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the note in her baby’s tiny fingers. It was more cash than she had seen in two weeks. ‘A lot of money,’ she said again.

  ‘I told you. Twice a day. I was busy this morning, I missed out. You’re lucky. You get both.’

  She smiled nervously. ‘I like being lucky.’

  Nic Costa wondered how old she was. Probably no more than seventeen.

  ‘Promise me something,’ he said, scribbling on a page ripped from his notebook.

  ‘What?’ she said, taking the paper from him.

  ‘You’ll go to this address. It’s a hostel. They can help.’

  ‘OK,’ she replied mutedly, some suspicion in her voice.

  ‘I don’t come this way often,’ he said. ‘Remember that address.’

  Then he walked off, back towards the steps that rose up to road level, back towards the bridge that led on to the Vatican.

  He was on the stone staircase when his mobile phone rang.

  ‘I’m in your debt, Mr Costa,’ said Sara Farnese, and he could hear the relief in her voice.

  ‘The name’s Nic. You’re welcome. I lost your coat and things. Sorry.’

  She laughed. It was the first time he had heard her make any sound of pleasure and this was, he thought, the real Sara Farnese, not the person she tried to portray to the world. ‘It was worth it ten times over. Watching them, chasing you … Nic.’

  ‘So you escaped?’ he asked.

  The line went quiet. It was a direct question, an understandable one in the circumstances. Perhaps she was wondering whether it was personal or professional. He was unsure himself. Nic Costa was curious about where she would go in the circumstances, and cursed his prurience: he wished, automatically, that he had arranged to have her followed.

  ‘Call again, Nic. If you like,’ she said, and was gone.

  TWELVE

  The man wore a black suit and dark glasses. He was muscular and probably middle-aged, though he wore such heavy clothing, in spite of the heat, it was difficult to tell from what was on show. For the life of him, Gallo could not work out the accent. Southern? Sicilian maybe? He didn’t want to try. There was something serious about him, something that said you just did your job, did it well, got your money, then walked away.

  The car struggled through the traffic out to the motorway which led to Fiumicino airport and the coast. He had jazz playing on the music system: Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter’s sax wailing like a banshee. Gallo knew Ostia well. He’d taken many parties around the old port area and the ruins of the imperial town.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Who are who?’ the man grunted.

  ‘The people I’m supposed to entertain.’

  ‘Visiting college professors. Not archaeologists themselves, but people with an interest. I hope you know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No problem.’

  The car turned off the motorway early. Gallo was puzzled.

  ‘Aren’t we going to the town?’

  ‘Not first. There’s another area that got cut off from the meander by a flood hundreds of years back. The Fiume Morto. The dead river. You know it?’

  ‘No.’ Gallo felt his mood starting to wane. No one ever went to the dead river except hardened diggers. It was just mud and mosquitoes. ‘You might have told me.’

  The black glasses looked at him. ‘I heard you were a clever guy. You can make things up if you want. What does it matter? It’s all show business. Don’t worry. It won’t take long. After that we go to the town. Then you run on autopilot, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ He scanned the flat land of the Tiber estuary. The stink of the flat marshes came in with the air-conditioning. It was chemical, lifeless and made the back of his throat turn dry and start to ache. There was nothing ahead, not a coach, not even a single car. Gallo looked at the man again. He was wearing black leather gloves. Odd in the heat.

  The driver turned to him again. ‘You’ve heard of Tertullian?’

  Gallo laughed dryly. ‘Oh wow. What a sweetheart that guy was. Really full of joy and light. What was that wonderful line about women? “Tu es ianua diaboli.” You’re the doorway of the devil. Boy, do the feminists love that one. What a twisted dude.’

  The man at the wheel was watching him and, in spite of the sunglasses, Jay Gallo could tell there was something severe about him, something cold and immovable.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of another saying.’

  ‘What?’

  “‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”’

  Gallo turned to look at the man. Maybe he wasn’t as old as he had first thought. He moved with the ease of someone about his own age. The glasses, the clothes seemed to be there to age him.

  The travel business, Jay Gallo thought. What a way to earn a living. The mention of Tertullian had put Gallo in full flow. It was rare he got a chance to display his erudition with someone who might begin to appreciate it.

  ‘These early Christians. You know what puzzles me? How did anybody sign up for this thing? What was the point?’

  ‘You mean why did Tertullian call for people to be martyrs?’

  ‘No! Why did the poor suckers take him at his word? Why die just for some … idea?’

  The dark glasses thought about that. ‘You’ve seen the Caravaggio in Santa Maria deli Popolo? St Peter’s Crucifixion?’

  Gallo knew the church as well as he wished. It was a minor star in the galaxy of Roman sights. A chapel by Raphael, a touch of Borgia history and two famous Caravaggios, all in the perfect Renaissance piazza the tourists loved because it sat at the end of the tawdry shopping street, the Corso.

  ‘Yeah.’ He recalled a striking, large canvas of the saint about to be crucified upside down. The cross was being pushed and pulled upright by three largely unseen workers who could have come straight out of any sixteenth-century tavern. Peter stared at the nail running through his left palm with a determination, almost pride, which Gallo never could understand.

  ‘That tells you everything. Peter’s executioners believe they’re raising the means of his cruel death. In truth, with each inch they build
higher the foundations of the Church, as the saint clearly realizes.’

  Gallo waved a hand as if to say this was obvious. ‘Yes, yes. He’s a martyr …’

  ‘Furthermore,’ the man continued, ‘he’s bathed in the light of Grace, which even shines on his murderers. He goes to his death out of duty, and happily because he knows there is a better life awaiting him in Paradise. This is a transformation he seeks. He knows he goes to Heaven.’

  ‘Crazy …’ Gallo grunted, shaking his head.

  The dark glasses stared at the empty horizon ahead.

  Gallo smiled and thought of another Caravaggio, in the Borghese, and the story behind it, one that always went down well with the Americans. ‘And anyway, Caravaggio didn’t believe that crap himself. Look how he paints himself as the severed head of Goliath. When he did that, my friend, he was under sentence of death himself, for murdering a man during a game of real tennis. He painted his own head there to acknowledge the Pope’s hold over him and beg forgiveness. He had good, practical reasons to be afraid. And he was. You don’t see him expecting salvation there. Just the grave. And oblivion.’

  ‘You’re a cultured man,’ the driver said to Gallo’s obvious satisfaction. ‘And what happened to the painter?’

  ‘He got his pardon. Then died on the way back to Rome. Ironic, huh?’

  ‘Possibly. Or apt. Perhaps that was his punishment.’

  But Jay Gallo wasn’t listening. There was something he had to say, something important. ‘And here’s another irony. Tertullian didn’t even take his own advice. He was no martyr. He died in his bed at a hundred and two or something. Hypocrite.’

  He remembered the Vatican number plate and added quickly, ‘Not that I know the first damn thing about religion, of course.’

  ‘Just history?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jay Gallo looked around. They had parked by the low muddy waters of the river. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Or anything to look at either. All the usual places to visit were a good kilometre or two away. He wished there was somewhere he could buy a beer or a good coffee with grappa in it. He wished the place didn’t smell so badly of chemicals and pollution.

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ the man said, seeming to read his thoughts. The jazz album came to an end. He hit the button on the hi-fi, removed the CD and carefully put it away in a case he kept on the dashboard. It was an odd action. For some reason it made Gallo think the car wasn’t his at all. ‘We can still continue our interesting talk while we wait, can’t we? You’re right about Caravaggio, I think. He did have good, practical reasons to be afraid. But you shouldn’t exclude him, or Tertullian, or any of us, you and me, from being agents of God’s will. That would be presumptuous, surely, even for one who knows nothing about religion?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You don’t think God just uses those who believe in him as his instruments? What about Pilate? What about Herod?’

  It was only then that Jay Gallo considered his position seriously. He was sitting by a remote stretch of the Tiber with a man he didn’t know, waiting for a tour group who wanted to see … what exactly? There wasn’t a single archaeological artefact in the vicinity as far as he was aware. Maybe they’d turn out to be bird-spotters instead.

  Maybe they were reviving that long-lost art-form, the snuff movie.

  He looked at the man in the seat next to him. If it came to it, Gallo thought, they were evenly matched. The man was stockier but older, maybe, and he gave him something in height. What was more, Jay Gallo had been in plenty of bar-room brawls over the years. He knew how to look after himself.

  ‘Are you jerking me around?’ he asked the man in the dark glasses.

  ‘Mr Gallo?’

  ‘Is this some kind of a joke?’

  The man thought about it. ‘“The blood of the martyrs …” Does that sound like some kind of joke?’

  Gallo swore under his breath. The man was starting to annoy him. ‘Why do you keep saying that crap? What the fu—’

  A black fist, hard as iron, came out at him, flying fast, and caught him full in the eye. Jay Gallo’s head went back, his vision narrowed, tunnelling into blackness at the edges. There was little pain; more an absence of sensation altogether. Then, in the limited focus he possessed, something darted at him again. The solid leather shape connected with his nose, there was the sound and the sensation of bone breaking. A warm, salty trickle of blood began to run down his throat.

  THIRTEEN

  The official quarters of Cardinal Michael Denney overlooked the Cortile di San Damaso, the sprawling private courtyard hidden from the outside world by the curving western wall of St Peter’s Square. The Vatican was never built as a residence. Denney’s apartment was one of only two hundred or so created within the palace walls. On the far side of the square lay the residency of the Swiss Guard. In his own block senior Vatican officials jostled for position to get the best view of the open space. His neighbours included some of the most powerful figures in the Holy See. The camerlengo, the Pope’s chamberlain, who would briefly oversee the interregnum in the event of the pontiff’s death, was some way down the hall. They rarely spoke these days. Denney was aware he had become persona non grata, a prisoner in a glittering cell. Sometimes he spent hours staring at the reflection of the paintings, the Murano chandeliers and the wall-length ormolu mirrors, waiting for the most menial of civil servants to return his call. All this must, he knew, change. A man could go mad in these circumstances.

  The agents of that change were now assembled around the walnut dining table that sat by the long, eighteenth-century windows looking out onto the courtyard. It had taken him many weeks to persuade these three men to come to Rome and sit down together. Between them they represented a powerful trinity of interests which could, with a little persuasion and the right inducements, resurrect something from the shattered shell of the Banca Lombardia and with it a little of Michael Denney’s reputation. Sufficient, he hoped, to allow him to return home and live out the rest of his life in dignified obscurity.

  Two of the men present he thought he could handle. Robert Aitcheson, the sour-faced American lawyer who oversaw corporate affairs for the bank out of a base in the Bahamas, had as much reason as Denney to clear this thing up. The Feds were already on Aitcheson’s back, chasing up a hot money scam that came to light in the wake of the currency laundering checks introduced after September 11. He needed to get out of the heat. Arturo Crespi was in the same boat. Crespi was a diminutive penpushing banker who oversaw the movement of capital in and out of the web of funds that underpinned the bank. The Finance Ministry was asking too many questions of him already. Ostensibly, he was the bank president, though in everything he deferred to Denney, who had assembled the complex network of offshore trusts piece by piece over the years from what had once been a legitimate, onshore financial enterprise. Crespi was weak and respectable. It had suited Denney at the time. He had been charged with getting an above average return on the money under his care. There had, he believed, been little choice, and, when they began, little in the way of legal obstruction either.

  The third man stood by the window, peering down into the courtyard, sniffing with a summer cold. Emilio Neri was over six feet tall, a giant of a man in his mid-sixties, now beginning to run to flab. He had grey, lifeless eyes, a long, jutting jaw and a head of perfectly groomed silver hair. Today, as always, he wore an expensive suit: thin, pale-coloured silk which now showed damp patches under the arms. He rarely smiled. He spoke only when he had something to say. Neri was, from outward appearances, a successful Roman entrepreneur. He owned a palatial penthouse in the Via Guilia, a pretty young wife, three country houses and an apartment in New York. His name adorned the board of the Fenice Opera House in Venice, where he helped raise funds for its rebuilding, and any number of charitable organizations working with the Catholic poor.

  Only once had his image as a man beyond reproach been questioned. It was in the mid-1970s when a radical press untouched b
y conventional party politics had existed in the city. A scurrilous reporter on a short-lived underground rag had published a portrait of Neri culled from police gossip. It was a story many recognized but few wished to acknowledge. The article told of his upbringing in Sicily as the son of a local Mafia don, his apprenticeship in the racketeering world of black-market tobacco and prostitution and his eventual emergence as a key liaison figure in the continuing dialogue between corrupt government, Church officials and the criminal state that lived then, as now, beneath the mundane façade of Italian society. The piece had accused Neri of nothing criminal. In a way, it was intended as a tribute to the man, who had genuinely come to be something of an art lover, was seen at all the right exhibitions, was always there, in his private box, at the opera and the ballet.

  Three weeks after the magazine article, the author was found in a car parked in a lane near Fiumicino airport. His eyes had been put out, probably by a man’s thumbs. His tongue had been ripped from his mouth. Every finger and both thumbs had been severed at the first socket with a knife. He survived, blind, dumb and unable, or unwilling, to try to communicate. The street gossip, which Denney later discovered was entirely accurate, claimed that Neri had performed his revenge personally in a warehouse he owned on the perimeter of the airport. He’d then, in front of the tortured hack, changed into evening dress and flown by private plane to Venice to see Pavarotti in a new production of Turandot, after which he had attended the first-night party as an honoured guest.

  Denney, once he had come to know the man, wondered why he had gone to all that trouble. Emilio Neri could have sucked the life out of another human being just by looking at him. Still, the papers wrote only about Neri’s charitable activities after that.

  Denney watched Neri’s big back at the window, wondering what was going through his head. There was just one thing Neri wanted now: the return of the money he had placed in Denney’s hands. If that happened, they would, once again, be on the best of terms.

  The door into the room opened. Brendan Hanrahan walked in carrying a tray with coffee on it. Throwing a mint into his mouth, Neri turned to stare at him.