by David Hewson
A slender middle-aged woman in a plain blue blouse and black skirt came to the door. Her hair was greying and cut severely short. She stared at him through a pair of black-rimmed glasses. He didn’t feel welcome.
‘I’m from the station. I was Luca’s partner.’
‘Really?’
‘I came to say …’ She didn’t look as if she’d been crying. If anything she was full of fury. ‘… how sorry we all are. We’ll do what we can.’
‘Too late for that, isn’t it? Hell, I’m not his sister. Come in.’
She threw open the door and he followed her along a hall decorated with paintings of flowers. It led into a sunny living room. In the corner, seated in a plain wooden chair, was a stocky woman in her early thirties. She was dressed in a nylon housecoat. Her face was pale and flabby, recognizably similar to Rossi’s. She had long black hair flowing down her back and shoulders, like a schoolgirl’s.
The woman looked at him as he entered, opened her mouth and made an unintelligible noise. It sounded like the moan of a wounded animal.
‘Nic Costa,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I worked with Luca.’
She made the noises again, only this time they were more prolonged, more agonized.
‘Maria’s deaf and dumb,’ the older woman said. ‘I’m her care worker. I used to spend time here when Luca couldn’t cope.’
She turned to Maria Rossi and began signing with a quick, ready fluency.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know he had a sister, let alone any of this. I can’t believe we never got around to talking about it.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ she replied, and began signing again. The woman in the chair nodded and smiled at him. ‘That was Luca for you. I offered your condolences by the way. I made some small talk.’
‘Thanks.’ This was all so unexpected. He had no idea what to ask, what to offer. ‘How bad is she?’
‘How bad does deaf and dumb get?’ the woman snapped. Then she cursed herself and went to the window for a moment, staring out at the motorway. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. I’ve been working with Maria for five years. Ever since Luca took her out of the home to try and look after her himself. After a while I came to realize you don’t just end up caring for one person. It’s both of them, and lately, to be honest, it was him. He was a complicated man. A good man. Not that it ever made him happy.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me? I wouldn’t have let him work all those hours. Last night …’ He couldn’t say it. Rossi’s presence in the Piazza Navona was coincidence. Falcone could have sent any of them on the same job. No one was to blame except the man who killed him.
‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘He was ashamed of her?’
‘No.’ That was impossible. ‘Perhaps in some way he was ashamed of himself, for not being able to make things better. I only got to know him recently. There was something … Luca wasn’t happy inside his own skin. Maybe that’s part of the job.’
She looked at him, seeming to approve of his answers, then went over to Maria, sat down next to her, smiling, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘I think you’re right. He told me one time he kept waking up in a fury, mad that he couldn’t do anything else for her. I don’t think he was making it up.’
A flurry of signs brought a brief smile from Rossi’s sister and then half a sob.
‘She can’t lip-read. Always found it too difficult. It means it’s easy for me to lie.’
Costa scribbled out his home phone number. ‘If she needs anything, call me any time. We can help with money. There’s a pension. I know it’s no comfort now but tell me what she needs and I’ll see to it.’
The woman looked at the piece of paper and sighed. ‘She needs her brother back.’
Costa’s face fell. The woman closed her eyes, ashamed of herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Maria has to go back in the home. She can’t look after herself. That’s the only place she can get full-time care.’
He understood how Rossi felt.
‘It’s OK,’ the woman continued. ‘She’s not going to be worried about that. She has friends there. She used to visit anyway. It’s just …’ She had to wait until she could continue. ‘She’ll miss him. We all will.’
‘I know.’
He looked at the small, tidy apartment. There were images of flowers everywhere.
‘They’re Maria’s,’ she said, noticing his interest. ‘It’s what she does. She’s deaf and dumb. She’s not stupid. Nor was he.’
Costa walked over and looked at a small oil painting of a single hyacinth bloom: vivid blue hues against a yellow background. She’d seen Van Gogh. The work was full of life and happiness. She’d found something that eluded her brother and had, perhaps, fought to share it with him.
‘If you want,’ the woman said, ‘I can show you his room. Perhaps there’s something there you’d like. To remind you of him. A photograph. I don’t know. He had a lot of stuff.’
‘I didn’t know him that well. But I know someone who’d appreciate it.’
She led him down the corridor. Rossi’s bedroom was small and looked out of the back onto a car park. The dead smell of stale cigarettes hung in the air. There was a single bed, neatly made, a desk with a few tidied papers, an office diary and a swan-neck lamp. A corkboard on the wall was covered in little yellow notes and photographs. Costa looked at them. They were dates for outings: trips to the sea at Ostia, meetings at the hospital, coach tours into the country. His sister was in every last photograph, smiling throughout, on the beach, at a fancy-dress party, eating at a country restaurant. Luca made her happy. That was his gift.
There was only one with Rossi in it. The two of them were pictured seated in a long open-topped Bugatti 57 in a vintage car museum somewhere. Rossi had his hands on the steering wheel. Maria laughed from the passenger seat. He looked like a different man, someone in control of himself.
‘That was before he had the breakdown,’ she explained.
‘Was he always like that?’
‘No,’ she answered with a bitter laugh. ‘He was always on the brink, to be honest. For as long as I knew him.’
He touched the photograph. ‘I can’t take this. It belongs to her. It’s too precious.’
‘It’s my photograph. I was on the trip. I can get another made. Take it.’ She looked around the little room. ‘He hated me coming in here. It was his secret place, I think. Somewhere he liked to hide on occasion. Still had to be cleaned though. I’ll leave you for a while.’
She walked out, closing the door. Nic Costa sat at the small, neat desk and looked out of the window, out at the rows of cars and the apartment blocks running away from the motorway. This was a life he could never have associated with Luca Rossi: an ordered existence with responsibilities no one in the department could have guessed at.
He opened the desk diary and immediately felt guilty, ashamed. It was apparent from the moment he looked at the page that this was where Rossi put the other side of himself: the black and gloomy side that always threatened to lead him to the edge. The writing was unbalanced: sloping and too small. There were doodles, tiny scribbles that could have been the faces of demons. And a small line of doggerel, one Costa knew by heart …
As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
He read more. This was the private place where Rossi took his inner fears for a walk and everyone was in there: Falcone, Teresa Lupo, Sara, everyone. No one was spared. No small detail went unrecorded. He wasn’t surprised Rossi kept the care worker out of the room.
Costa read two more pages then tucked the diary under his jacket, went back into the living room, said a polite, curt goodbye and was gone.
FIFTY-SIX
‘You made a sound. When …’ He was reluctant to finish the sentence.
She laughed at his embarrassment. It was midmorning. The traffic outside made a low roar. Gino Fosse had returned
at eight, showered, slept a little, not disturbing her. Then she had woken him slowly, gently, touching his strong, naked body with keen fingers, arching over him, letting her breasts fall into his face until his teeth fastened on a nipple and she felt his growing interest stir against her legs.
‘When you what?’ she asked. They were still locked lazily together, she above him, rolling gently, feeling his physical presence subside.
‘You know.’ His eyes went dark for a moment. There was so much inside him she didn’t understand. Where he went to all night. What he did. Robbing, she guessed. It wasn’t such a bad thing. Needs must. But if all he did was steal, why would they want her to look after him like this? Why would they demand, so insistently, with threats only barely concealed, that she had to call them every time he left and tell them everything they’d discussed?
‘Say it,’ she ordered.
The pinkness in his cheeks, the result of their mutual exertions, flushed a little brighter. ‘When I came. You felt it.’
‘Of course.’ She laughed. ‘What do you think?’
She threw back her hair. Her teeth glinted dully in the fierce morning light. There was a sheen of sweat on her soft, young skin. ‘Those others. I make them wear something. But you’re special, Gino. You’re safe. With you I want to feel when it happens. Not that I wouldn’t know anyway. I’m good. Aren’t I?’
‘You’re good,’ he agreed. ‘Why? Why me?’
She peered frankly straight into his eyes. ‘Because you didn’t expect anything. Because you were gentle.’
There were so many mysteries for him here. He’d never wanted Irena, not in the beginning. Then something had changed, in him, not her.
‘What do you feel when it happens?’
She thought for a moment. No one had asked before. He saw this in her face and felt some small, warm surge of pride to think he was the first. ‘That there’s something of you just blooming inside me. Something that could stay if I wanted it to. Stay and grow. Become a child maybe.’
His face went white. Abruptly he withdrew from her, shrinking back under the damp sheet. She hated to see him like this, the sudden shock, the strange, internal grief that seemed to be masquerading as fury.
‘I told you,’ she said, stroking his matted hair. ‘With the others I make them wear something.’
He refused to look at her. She wondered once again what he did, thought about the curious smell on him when he came back that morning. A stink that suggested he’d been near cooked meat.
‘But it won’t happen, Gino. It can’t.’
He looked into her pale, young face, struggling to make sure she told the truth. ‘I got pregnant once back home. You can go places. You can get rid of the problem before it arrives. They made a mess of it. I can’t have kids, not ever. I just make them wear these things so I don’t get their diseases. But I can dream. We can both dream if we want.’
He let her fingers run down his cheek, play with his lips. She bent down and kissed him, hard, in a dominant way.
‘Families kill you,’ Gino Fosse said. ‘Families tear your life to shreds.’
‘Sometimes,’ she agreed. ‘What else is there?’
He was unable to think of an answer.
She leaned into his ear, her breath hot, gasping the way she knew he liked. ‘When you come inside me I feel something warm and alive, where it’s supposed to be, as if you were bleeding out your life for me, Gino. I take your gift and it sits there, wondering, making me grateful.’
Not once, not in any of the brief, aggressive encounters he recalled from the past, had he considered the idea that this was a mutual event. The act had always been about his own efforts to achieve some brief, cathartic satisfaction. It had never occurred to him that there could be pleasure on the other side too. You’re the doorway of the devil. That was what Tertullian had said and he’d always interpreted this literally, that a woman was the receptacle, an unfeeling, unresponsive place into which he could cast his lust.
He looked around the room. It was grubby. Their clothes lay on the floor. His bag, now depleted of most of his tricks, sat on the stained carpet. All that was left was the gun and some ammunition. It had to be enough.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your family.’
He looked at her with those cold, dead eyes and she wished she could keep her mouth shut sometimes.
‘Why? What do you want with them?’
‘Nothing.’ His anger could annoy her. It was a reasonable question, not the kind he ought to resent. ‘I want to know about you. I want to hear what they did to make you this way.’
‘I was this way without them,’ Gino Fosse said. It was foolish, dishonest, to pretend anything else was to blame. No family, no colliding set of events had made him what he was. He recalled the fat TV man roasting on the grille, thought of the look of terror in his eyes. This was no one’s doing but his. It was a conscious, deliberate act with a specific purpose in mind. Just like skinning a live cat had been twenty years or so before. The dark seed had been growing inside him all along. It just needed someone to nurture it.
Before the work began he’d stared for hours at those haunting, grisly depictions of martyrdoms in the churches, watching the saints meet their fate, wishing he could hear the words on their lips. But they were different. Arturo Valena screamed nothing but curses in his agonies. Alicia Vaccarini went weeping, unenlightened. He tried to remember the Englishman, losing his skin, tied to the beam in the church on Tiber Island, tried to decode the noises that issued from his gagged throat. And the Rinaldi woman, so stupid, so baffled by what was going on. These were now distant memories. What happened that day was not his doing alone. Hanrahan had set the arrangements. The Irishman had spread his net wide, culling so much information, from tapped phone calls, Fosse’s own illicit photographs, stolen items perhaps. He knew names and dates. He was a constant voice in Fosse’s ear. Even so, there was no blood on Hanrahan’s hands. He may have suggested the means but it was Gino Fosse who used them.
Then there were the cops. Hanrahan would never have sanctioned that. He had his limits.
‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘When you go out of here? Who are you, Gino?’
He scowled at her. She should have known better. She was in enough danger as it was. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘I want to know!’ she pleaded.
He closed his eyes, wishing she wasn’t there. The end was so close. This distraction was the last thing he needed. And this revelation too: that she felt him inside her, that two people could touch one another in such a strange and intimate fashion. This was, in its way, a momentary, mystical epiphany just as shocking as the glittering eyes behind the altar in San Lorenzo in Lucina. This threatened his resolve. This made the world seem a different place.
He stood up, went over to the bag and took out the gun, brought the weapon back to the bed and placed it in her hand. ‘I bring deliverance,’ he answered. ‘To people who deserve it.’
Her pretty face cracked at that. Her fingers refused to grip the gun. She seemed terribly young again, and scared. It occurred to him that she knew what a gun could do. He thought of where she came from. Maybe she had personal experience.
‘Why?’ she asked, handing him back the weapon.
‘I told you. Because they deserve it. Because their sins cry out for vengeance.’
Not the cops though. They got theirs for free.
She wiped her damp eyes with her forearm, like a child.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘We could run away.’
‘Where?’
‘The coast somewhere. Rimini. They say it’s nice.’
He thought of the sea, the endless sea, and the way the blue tide washed away everything.
‘I’d like that,’ he said.
He walked over to the bag and took out an envelope. It was full of notes. He counted out all but a handful and gave her the money. She stared at it. There was so much, more than she could ever have imagined.
Her chin hung on her naked chest. He wanted to feel she lied, too, lied about feeling his warm, sparking presence inside her. You’re the doorway to the devil. Tertullian was right. He had to believe that. If he didn’t he could never be the Gino Fosse he knew, the one he understood, the one with a goal, a mission. This Gino had heard the rats chattering in San Lorenzo, had dared the anonymous, shrivelled heads in the Lateran to speak their true names.
There was no choice. He clasped her hand, making her fingers curl tightly around the money.
‘Go,’ he ordered and handed her the cheap champagne. ‘Take this and we’ll drink it together.’
Her eyes were wet. She didn’t dare call him a liar.
He watched her pack her few things, waited as she walked out of the door, not looking back. Soon now, he knew, the phone would ring. Soon there would be a new deliverance.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The office was empty apart from a couple of cops shuffling papers at the far end, out of earshot. Falcone had gone on from San Lorenzo in Lucina to organize the cover for Denney’s departure. He had teams throughout the city and more at the airport. Almost every man in the department was on the case, except Nic Costa, who now sat at Luca Rossi’s old desk, drinking bad coffee from the machine, trying to clear his head. Throwing his ID card at Falcone had helped. No one asked for it at the station anyway. Now he thought of himself as a civilian again, a state he barely remembered, he was surprised and interested to discover his mind could go to places that some inner restraint prevented it visiting in the past.