by David Hewson
‘So what do you think is happening here, Miss Farnese?’ Falcone asked.
She seemed taken aback. ‘I’ve no idea. What do you mean?’
‘Why are your former lovers being killed like this? As if they were martyrs somehow?’
‘I can’t begin to guess,’ she insisted. ‘This is as inexplicable to me as it is to you.’
‘And yet,’ Falcone continued, ‘you must know the person responsible. This is someone who is familiar with the intimate details of your private life. You see my point?’
‘Everybody sees your point.’ It was Teresa Lupo who intervened, risking Falcone’s wrath. ‘It’s the way you ask. May I suggest you get some women detectives in here? You need to strike a balance between duty and prurience.’
‘Thanks,’ Falcone hissed. ‘You can take the body out of here now, Doctor. I want an autopsy report by this afternoon.’
The pathologist sighed and called for her team. The wheels squealed across the old, stone floor. Sara Farnese watched the covered corpse being lifted gently onto the gurney, watched in silence as it was pushed out into the sun-filled courtyard. They had removed the anchor and the rope which now lay on the ancient mosaic floor.
‘San Clemente,’ Sara said. ‘Why didn’t I realize? He had that anchor round his neck when they found him?’
‘As if he was another martyr,’ Costa said, watching her like a hawk.
‘I told you,’ she snapped. ‘Mostly these stories are apocryphal. In the case of Clemente it certainly is. If the person who did this knows Tertullian – which I assume he does – he knows that too. Tertullian wrote about Clemente and never once mentioned any kind of martyrdom. It’s a fairy tale that was never even told until the fourth century.’
Costa tried to understand the significance. ‘Why would it matter? What difference does it make whether he knows this is a sham or not?’
Falcone interrupted, smiling. ‘Because it’s a question of belief. We look at these acts and think they must be the work of a man with some misplaced sense of religion. In fact …’
Teresa Lupo, now returned to the nave and glowering openly at Falcone, interrupted. ‘In fact you don’t have a clue. Spare us cops practising fake psychology, please. All any of us knows is this: a man who can skin another human being is not a suitable subject for some kind of cheap Freudian analysis, however hard you try. He can surely hold two entirely conflicting rationales in his head simultaneously and never hear them rub up against each other. I told you boys last night. I tell you now. This is a man who is strong, determined and powerful. A man who has some kind of medical knowledge, or has worked in a slaughterhouse. Forget what’s in his head because it’s got some impenetrable logic all of its own and you’d need to be as crazy as he is to understand it. Look for the physical facts.’
Costa watched Sara Farnese’s face. ‘Do you know anyone like that?’
‘No,’ she said, looking at the long-haired woman in the white coat, grateful for her support. ‘But whoever he is he knows Tertullian too. You forgot that.’
‘Quite,’ the pathologist agreed. ‘Seems like I’ve got the easy job around here.’ She walked away, grabbing for the cigarettes beneath the enclosed suit.
‘What else do you want?’ Sara Farnese asked as Lupo’s team left through the outside gate.
Falcone shuffled on his feet, thinking. ‘The name and address of everyone you’ve had a relationship with since coming to Rome.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not possible. You can’t ask for someone’s entire private life.’
Falcone leaned towards her, so close that their faces almost touched. ‘Miss Farnese,’ he said softly. ‘Everyone you have slept with is a suspect. Everyone you have slept with is a potential victim. We need their names. For their sakes as much as ours. Surely you can see that?’
‘Some of these are married men. This is ridiculous. How would you feel if it were you?’
Falcone gave her a disagreeable frown. ‘Maybe I’d feel glad to be alive.’
She had no answer. Costa touched her arm gently, wondering again about this strange chasm there seemed to be in her life. ‘Sara. It’s important. We can get some women detectives you can talk to. Everything will remain confidential.’
‘You honestly believe that? Please …’
He couldn’t argue. They all knew that everything leaked from the department in the end. He couldn’t begin to guess what names existed inside Sara Farnese’s head but it would be impossible to promise them privacy once they entered the files in the Questura Centrale. There was too much media interest already and too much money riding on any scraps of information that could be secretly gleaned from the files.
‘We require this for your sake too,’ Falcone said forcefully. ‘Whoever this man is, he knows everything about you. Perhaps he’s trying to impress you with these acts. Perhaps they are warnings. But one thing I’m sure of. At some stage he will realize they’re not having the desired effect and he will hold you to blame. At that point his next victim will surely be you, the source of his sorrows.’
She stared at him. ‘Whoever this is, I am not the source of his sorrows. This is not my doing.’
‘As he sees it … I should have put it that way,’ Falcone said, in the closest to an apology his pride would allow. ‘Who do you know in the Vatican?’ He threw the question at her idly, as if it were unimportant. Costa cursed himself. He had told Falcone of his concerns about what had happened in the library that morning. He had no idea his vague doubts would translate into direct questions so quickly.
‘What?’
‘There were phone calls, between Rinaldi and someone in the Vatican. There were indications that Rinaldi believed he was under some kind of surveillance when he entered the Reading Room, either electronically or from some person in the room. In your line of work you must know many people. It’s important we have their names.’
‘I’ve no special relationship with anyone in the Vatican.’ Her face was pale and hard, a mask.
‘Without some honesty …’ Falcone shrugged. ‘I fear this will go on. I can’t see any reason why he should stop here. We need names. All of them.’ He reached forward and looked intently into her eyes. ‘We need to know everything about your life.’
‘Go to hell,’ she hissed.
Falcone smiled. Costa recognized the moment. He enjoyed breaking people. He believed this was the point of victory. ‘Miss Farnese. I can insist on your cooperation. I can take steps if it is not forthcoming. I can call you into protective custody.’
‘Sir,’ Costa interrupted, gaining the full blast of Falcone’s furious gaze. ‘This is happening too quickly. If we give Miss Farnese time. If I get one of the women detectives to help us back at the station.’
‘If …’ Falcone said sourly.
Costa took him to one side so she couldn’t hear. ‘Please. If you push her she’ll say nothing. Let me talk to her somewhere else. Somewhere she can think it through.’
Falcone’s hard features froze for a moment. Then he nodded at Costa. ‘Maybe she needs one person she can trust. Maybe …’
He eyed Costa, wondering. ‘There’s a lot of reporters out there now. Take her out on your own. Go have a coffee somewhere and think about this. Bring her in by the back door in an hour.’
‘OK.’ Costa was puzzled. There was something else and Falcone was uncharacteristically reluctant to say it.
‘Sir?’
‘You’re right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ve an idea. Act a little, kid. Those reporters think they’ve got some scarlet woman in their sights here. Let’s play them along. When you go outside stay close to her. Make it look like … there’s perhaps something between you.’
‘You’re asking me to …’ Costa began to say, furious.
‘I’m telling you to send out a message. I want this lunatic to see you and think he knows who’s chasing her tail now. We could spend months following him around like this. It would make it a lot easier if he comes to us. Comes to yo
u, to be precise.’
‘Sir …’
‘Don’t worry, kid,’ Falcone beamed. ‘We’ll be waiting. You do have faith in your own police force now, don’t you?’
Nic Costa walked off without answering and beckoned Sara to follow him to the door. Outside the media had arrived in force. A mob five metres deep thronged the gateway into the courtyard, held back by uniformed men trying to keep the line intact. The moment they saw her the questions came: screamed out of the heaving mass, unintelligible in the babble of desperate voices. Nic Costa threw an arm around her and they braved the mob, moving through the cameras and the thrusting microphones, pushing forward, all the way to his small car.
She kept her face down to the ground. He held his arm tight round her shoulders and stared, unbending at the cameras, finding time to smile once or twice, time too to look at her, fondly, with an affection he didn’t find hard to feign.
He remembered her story. About the female pope being torn to pieces not far from here, and how it was all untrue, and maybe that wasn’t the point anyway. Nic Costa stomped his way through the pack with all the finesse he once used in a bad-tempered rugby match, holding her safe, feeling her slender, fragile body and, after a while, an arm clinging to his waist.
Then they reached the car, he made space with a few deftly aimed jabs of his elbow, and they were free.
He looked at her, pale and frightened in the passenger seat, and thought of the faces he had made into that sea of cameras, the way he had acquiesced so easily, so willingly, to Falcone’s idea.
She turned to him, puzzled, hurt. ‘What’s happening, Nic? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll fix this. Somehow.’
She stared out of the window, out into the hot, airless day. Nic Costa watched and felt he was swimming in a sea of lies.
TWENTY-ONE
Gino Fosse lived in a three-storey tower which belonged, he felt, in the pages of a Gothic fairy tale. The structure was built of honey-coloured bricks and situated on the Caelian Hill midway along the imperial thoroughfare of the Clivus Scauri. Opposite stood the sprawling hulk of the basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, to which he was now loosely attached as one of the parish priests, though almost all his professional time was spent at the hospital of San Giovanni, a ten-minute walk away. It was not the same as working in the Vatican, but the Church knew best.
Fosse felt obliged to know some history of his surroundings. The tower which had been his home this last month was embedded in the Aurelian Wall, built in the third century AD and still, for the most part, an intact circle around the centre of the city. A pleasant run, one he sometimes made in a tracksuit which disguised his calling, was to follow its line unimpeded straight to the great gate of San Sebastian and onto the Appian Way.
Initially the structure had been a small Roman sentry point along the brick expanse of the defences. In the Middle Ages it had been enlarged to provide accommodation for the expanding ecclesiastical entourage of the large and powerful basilica across the square. Giovanni e Paolo, though little known to the average tourist, was, for Fosse, one of the most interesting churches in Rome. The visible shell was unremarkable, save for the Romanesque campanile which cast an afternoon shadow across his first-floor window. Beneath the church lay centuries of rich history, however, and a story which had bemused him from the moment he first encountered it.
The tale of the martyrs John and Paul was, for centuries, thought to be apocryphal by those who dared say as much. It concerned two Christian officers at the court of Constantine who, after the accession of Julian the Apostate in AD 360, refused to sacrifice to pagan gods. As a consequence, they were beheaded, along with a woman who came to comfort them, in their own house on the Caelian Hill which later became the site of the basilica.
Myth begat myth, church begat church. Centuries of building and rebuilding ensued, resulting in the formidable pile which now dominated the view from Fosse’s tower. Yet, when the archaeologists – doubtless atheists to a man – came to explore the foundations of the present church they found, deep beneath it, the well-preserved remains of an ancient Roman house. And three Christian graves, with clear signs that they were the scene of much reverence from as early as the end of the fourth century AD.
Sometimes Fosse would take privileged visitors into the subterranean houses and show them the paintings on the wall. It was always a humbling experience, an unspoken sermon on the mystery that underpinned all human life, and the relentless unreliability of what the clever people in universities like to call ‘facts’.
The former guard post had, since the fifteenth century, been given over to the more humble employees of the parish. The modest living quarters afforded him a sitting room, a bedroom and a tiny bathroom, all built into the first floor of the circular tower, with the ground floor used for storage. At the top was a small octagonal room which Fosse regarded as his private place, closed even to the occasional visitors who were, to his annoyance, granted entrance to the tower.
The composer di Cambio, who wrote a choral work described by the ‘bad pope’ Alexander VI as ‘the sound that angels now make in Heaven’, had lived and died in these quarters in the late fifteenth century. This obscure historical connection – which Fosse found baffling on the occasion he listened to the boring drone of the work when it was performed, on the anniversary of di Cambio’s death, in Santi Giovanni e Paolo – meant the tower was on the list of ancient monuments for which permission to view could be gained by applying to the relevant office in the Vatican. Accordingly, every few weeks since his arrival he had been forced to allow some curious gaggle of sightseers, usually American, into his home, where they would bill and coo at the ‘cuteness’ of the place. They would then stare out of the four slitted medieval windows that gave onto the Clivus Scauri and begin, surreptitiously, to peek at their watches.
None had the wit to ask what was in the tiny space at the summit. Nor would they have gained admittance in any case; Fosse had established that this last room had no public right of view. This was part of the price of what he saw as his exile. The resulting privacy made it perfect for the purpose required when his new and urgent calling had become apparent.
It was now seven on a blazing Sunday morning. His collection of more than three hundred jazz CDs was scattered on the floor in the small octagonal tower. It was difficult sometimes to know what to play. Soon he would go to the hospital, to talk to the sick and the dying, to sit in on operations, gowned and gloved, and offer his support to the surgeons and nurses. Soon, too, he would be forced to think of other matters, of the names he had gathered, and how these lives might be taken.
While Gino Fosse sat listening to John Coltrane racing through ‘Giant Steps’, he felt a sense of wonder. On the walls were the photographs, the constant, nagging reminder of his duty. Here too were the tools of his new trade: the ropes; the drugs he had carefully smuggled out of the hospital for when his own considerable strength was insufficient; the nine-millimetre M9 Beretta automatic pistol he had stolen on a visit to the army hospital next to San Giovanni – he enjoyed the idea it should have virtually the same name as the cardinal’s three-pointed hat; and the knives – large and small, slender and broad, all sharpened so delicately that he was able to believe there existed but a single atom at the edge of the blade, one that would slice through anything it encountered.
The hospital had need of him for the rest of the morning. But from lunchtime onwards he was free, and there was much to do.
TWENTY-TWO
Publicity mattered. Alicia Vaccarini learned that two months after she had won the parliamentary deputy’s seat for the Northern Alliance in Bologna. It took that long for one of the local rags to uncover the truth about her private life: that the former university professor was a lesbian with a string of lovers, some of whom were only too willing to talk in return for a little money. The Northern Alliance had a firm position about ‘aberrant behaviour’. It did not approve. In a few
brief, heady weeks Vaccarini had gone from being the fêted victor in a marginal seat to an outcast inside her own party.
When the central committee organizer had marched into her office to say she would not be chosen for reelection at the end of her term three years hence she’d complained, bitterly, ‘Why didn’t you ask?’
The cold, hard man had stared and said, simply, ‘Why didn’t you tell?’
She now had only a year left, a year before unemployment, obscurity, poverty perhaps, at the age of forty-eight. Yet Alicia Vaccarini was a clever woman, a lecturer in economics, a worker of the system. She knew how to get grants out of Brussels. She knew how to sit on committees and wait until the right moment to intervene. She had worked to ensure her future, accepting seats on a variety of bodies, judicial, municipal and even one which had overseen some preliminary discussions about the merging of the Carabinieri with the state police. There had been opportunities, compromises, particularly when she found her decisions had some sway with people of influence, interested parties seeking a certain resolution. From time to time, there had been arrangements which, under a strict reading of the law, were illegal. But these, she reasoned, were the price of political practicality. Whatever the Northern Alliance felt about her now, she had been elected with a duty, to serve those who voted for her in Bologna, and to further her own career. These were not necessarily contradictory. Vaccarini had been careful. None of the current corruption investigations came close to her, nor was it likely they would. When she had intervened she had been careful to ensure that the reward was never obvious: a favour here, a simple, valuable gift or service, or a payment abroad. She had cultivated new and unexpected friends, people who would never have come close to her had she stayed inside the cold, rigid embrace of the Alliance. And there was the irony: some of them were from quarters she would never have done business with before. On the right. On the left. In the higher echelons of the police and the security services. Even in the Vatican. The world was full of people needing a little help, and willing to offer something in return. It was pragmatic to accept these visible flaws in the façade of society and, when appropriate, to use them to one’s own ends.