by David Hewson
Keep it that way, he prayed and stumbled on towards the river side of the building.
A memory came from his mountaineering days. Wind speed increases with altitude.
A sudden, gusting blast roared round the cabin’s apex, crackling with vicious energy, dashing hard, stinging ice into his face. He huddled into himself, drawing his arms around his head, fighting to keep upright, vainly trying to wish away the blank numbness growing in his brain. Then the blizzard paused for breath. After a moment in which Costa doubted his ability to go on, he struggled towards the corner of the building, hugged the drainpipe there, steeled himself against another battering from the storm.
Sometimes there were no choices. Whatever the situation inside the cabin, he’d have to break in. It was simply too dangerous to do anything else. He turned the corner, clinging to the brickwork. Most of this side of the building was given over to a French window, almost opaque under a glazing of ice, with just a small gap kept clear by an updraught from the heating inside.
He crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a frozen stone.
There was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic Hollywood moments you never forgot.
John Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of True Grit. Costa almost wept at the irony.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
It’s so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.
Then he saw the man.
People watch TV, stupid, his distant brain reminded him.
He was where you’d expect someone to be while glued to the box.
Upright in a chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.
Costa pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.
There was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn’t, surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.
Never assume.
Someone who carved shapes out of his victims’ backs was impossible to predict. All Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.
He got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could. The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.
“Police!” Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.
The man didn’t budge.
Costa moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming like that, wishing the room wasn’t so stuffily hot and filled with a strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over, painted in a colour he didn’t want to think about too closely.
And the man didn’t shift an inch, which made Costa feel foolish as he watched the back of his head and the thick brown hair, waiting for a response, saying, more than once, “Don’t move.”
There was a noise: voices, the sound of wood smashing, the racket of an entry team on the other side of the door.
Focus.
“Don’t,” he said, accidentally nudging the chair, and watched in shock as a woman’s head, ripped from her body, red gore blackening around her throat, rolled sideways over the arm, fell on his foot, finished upright on the carpet, long brown hair flowing back from a pale dead face, mouth open, fixed in a scream, glassy eyes staring at him, seeing nothing.
“Shit!” he gasped, and lurched over to the smashed French windows, turned his back on this crazy scene, breathed in as much of the freezing, snow-filled air as he could get into his lungs, hoping it would get the noxious smell of meat out of him somehow.
They were inside now. He could hear their voices behind him, hear the shock and someone starting to retch.
And it was as if someone had turned a key, opened the door to a little enlightenment. The unnatural heat and the stench had stirred something the frozen rooftop had put into cold storage. The pieces finally started to fall into place. Teresa Lupo had, in a sense, warned him, if only he’d pursued the point far enough to get the detail.
She’s not exactly complete.
The cord was in one of the suitcases, not around her neck, because it couldn’t have been …
Nic Costa turned round and looked at the room. The geometric pattern covered half of the side wall and would probably have extended further had not the source run out. It was a running fresco painted in what could only be the woman’s blood. And a message too, in English. One word in big, bold, dark red letters, underneath the scrawls: WHO?
The SOCOs would have a field day here. The place had to be crawling with promising material and that, in itself, was strange. Costa had read the files, had understood what happened in the Pantheon. The killer had always been meticulous about cleaning up afterwards. But here he seemed to be leaving a deliberate sign.
I am nearly done. Help me.
Falcone walked through the room, stared at the item on the floor, and sniffed.
“Neat,” he said. “You just prop the poor bitch’s head up on a couple of cushions, turn on the TV and all you see is someone working on a couch-potato habit. Clever.”
Then he came up to Costa, something in his hand.
“You dropped this, that’s why we came up,” the inspector said, and gave him the mobile phone that, just a couple of minutes earlier, had tumbled all the way from the windy rooftop down into the drifts in the street. “Nothing personal, Nic, but I think it’s time you went home and got some sleep. Don’t you?”
BY FOUR IT WAS DARK. By five the city was a treacherous warren of icy alleys, deserted under a blinding moon. But at least the blizzard was over. Gianni Peroni had taken the jeep everywhere he could think of. Back to the Serbian’s cafe next to Termini. Down to the dark corners by the river where she’d lurked the night before. It was futile. The Serbians knew nothing. In the streets there were plenty of kids: dark, miserable figures, huddled inside their black jackets, crowding round fires built from noxious-smelling trash. Not one admitted to seeing her. Peroni tried every last trick in the book—money, threats, sweet talk—and it was just no good. They knew her. That much was plain. But Laila was an outcast in this bunch for some reason. Too strange, too difficult, to fit in.
The way they lived depressed him. It was all such a waste. And it made him think of his own children, warm in a comfy, fatherless home outside Siena, getting ready for Christmas, eyes glittering in anticipation of what was to come.
For the first time ever he wouldn’t be there. Not for one minute. He wasn’t a reflective man. He hated looking back. There were too many painful memories lurking in the recent past. Time healed, he knew that. One day the hurt would subside and, with that miraculous capacity for self-deception every living being on the planet seemed to possess, the good times would come to be uppermost in his mind on
ce more. Till then he just had to swallow down the awkward mix of emotions that kept gripping him. He’d been a good father but, in the end, a lousy husband. It was just another of life’s cruel tricks that one couldn’t cancel out the other.
Tired, bored, almost despondent, he took a break and went for a coffee in one of his favourite places, the little cafe run by the old-fashioned restaurant Checco er Carrettiere behind the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere. He knew why he went there. He used to take the kids during the summer, watch them wait goggle-eyed as some pretty girl in a smart white waitress uniform piled high some of the best ice cream in Rome.
Today the tiny cafe was as deserted as the frozen piazza. There was a pretty young girl behind the counter but she looked tired and careworn. He sat on a stool pouring sugar into a double macchiato and knew: those times would never come again. They were locked in the past. A part of him had understood that would happen all along. Kids grew up, invented their own lives, went away in the end. But his own stupidity had hastened the process irreversibly, sent them scattering north to Tuscany, where he’d never be anything but a stranger to them now.
He finished the coffee and ordered another. On days like this the system needed caffeine. Then he tried to distract himself by focusing on Laila, racking his brain again about where she might have gone. Something didn’t make sense. He had established a bond with the kid. It just didn’t add up that she should flee the house like that, without a word, without a good reason. He was out of options too. Short of pounding the streets aimlessly, hoping for some rare good luck—and surely that was a waste of time—he might as well give in, call Leo Falcone, get some sleep, then rejoin the team. Maybe even pat the surly American on the back and say sorry a little more loudly if that was what was needed.
The girl behind the counter came with the second coffee and said, to his dismay, “I know you from the summer. Where are your kids?”
“It’s not ice-cream weather,” was the best he could offer.
“It’s not anything weather,” she complained. “I don’t know why I bothered opening the doors. Waste of time.”
“Thanks. I’m flattered.”
“Oh.” She laughed and the sudden burst of amusement brought back the memory of her, not much more than a kid herself, piling up ice cream generously as they waited and watched under the bright, burning July sun. “Sorry. I was just feeling a bit down.”
Everyone did from time to time, Peroni reminded himself. You just had to stop it slipping into self-pity.
“Gimme an ice cream, then,” he said.
Her lively eyes opened wide in amusement. “What?”
“You heard. A tub. Those cones are too damn difficult for an old guy like me. Coffee. Pistachio. And another flavor, too. You choose.”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “In this weather?”
“Yeah. In this weather. Me customer, you waitress. Work on the relationship, kid.”
The girl disappeared out back for quite a while. When she returned she’d taken off the white uniform and was now wearing a short red skirt and a black sweater.
She sat down next to him. There were two dishes in her hand, each with a selection of multicoloured blobs of ice cream.
“It’s on the house,” she said. “I’m calling it a day.”
“Wise move,” he answered and tried the chocolate. It was exquisite, though the cold made his teeth hurt. “What is it? Boyfriend trouble?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Oh, per-lease. Is that really the best you can do?”
“It’s a start,” he objected. “You see a pretty young girl. She looks miserable. Nine times out of ten it’s boyfriend trouble. Old men like me understand that. We were young men once. We used to cause these problems.”
She licked the pistachio. It gave her a creamy green tongue.
“Well?” he persisted. “Am I wrong?”
“No …” Her voice had that pouty, caustic edge he recognized growing in his own daughter.
“Well?”
“He never calls!” she cried. “Never! It’s always me. I’m always the one who has to phone him. What is it with men? Do they hate phone bills that much?”
He shrugged. “It’s not just men. That happens in relationships. It’s how it is. Like old-fashioned dancing. One person leads, the other one follows.”
“It’s not like dancing. So why do they do it?”
Her face had that frank, questioning intensity you got from teenagers.
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because …” He couldn’t go on. There was no answer. It was a stupid question. He couldn’t think of a single good reason to support what he’d just said.
“Do you call your wife?” she asked. “Or does she call you?”
“My wife calls me. Only rarely and with gleeful updates on how well the divorce is going and what new bills dropped through her mama’s door.”
She didn’t know whether to believe that or not. “Really?”
“Really. No need to feel sorry. Crap like this happens.”
“You’ve got a girlfriend, then?”
Peroni was beginning to wish she’d put the uniform back on. It made her easier to handle somehow. “What is this? I’m the grown-up around here. I ask the questions.”
“So you have got a girlfriend?”
He shifted awkwardly on the tiny metal stool. “Yeah. Sort of. Now. It’s not what you think. I didn’t have then.”
“Sounds a deep relationship,” she commented. “This ‘sort of girlfriend.’ Does she call you? Or do you call her?”
Peroni swallowed a huge chunk of gorgeous lemon sorbet, which stuck at the back of his throat and made him gag for a moment. Once the coughing stopped he was dismayed to find some of the gelato was dribbling down his chin. He never would get the hang of eating this stuff.
The girl handed him a napkin. He dabbed at his face, then said, “Bit of both. What’s it to you?”
It was a lie. Teresa always called. He had just never faced the fact till then.
“You’re eating my ice cream for free, mister. I can ask any damn thing I like.” She poked the front of his coat with a long fingernail. “Men who don’t call piss me off.”
“I am getting that message.”
The green eyes narrowed. “Are you? Are you really?”
He thought about it and wondered how he’d come to develop this habit of having weird, half-jocular arguments with strangers in cafes. Nothing like this ever happened in Tuscany. People were too polite there. The Romans just spoke a thought the moment it entered their heads.
“I am hearing what you say, my girl. It doesn’t mean I intend to act on it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She took his ice-cream dish, even though it was only half-eaten.
“Hey!” Peroni objected. “That’s mine.”
“No it isn’t. I gave it to you.”
“OK.” He threw some notes on the counter. “How much?”
She threw the money back at him. “I told you. It’s free. I just don’t think you phone her. You’re a man. Why would you?”
“That’s my ice cream,” he repeated. “I want it back.”
She waved at the door. “Go outside and call your girlfriend. Now. You can have some more when you come back and say you’ve done it. And no lying. I’m not as dumb as I look.”
“Jesus Christ …” Peroni cursed, and added a few more epithets under his breath that it was best the girl didn’t hear. “What is this?”
“Christmas,” she hissed. “Almost. Hadn’t you noticed?”
Damn teenagers, he thought. You never got an ounce of respect from them. Though maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Not that he would tell her so.
“I was going to do it anyway,” he objected, heading for the door, trying not to listen to her muttering, “Yeah, right,” straight into his big back.
It was crazy. Now that he thought about it he never called Teresa. He had to loo
k up her mobile number in his address book because he hadn’t even programmed it into the phone.
Teresa answered on the third ring and was quiet for a moment when she heard his voice.
“Gianni?” she asked eventually. “Are you OK?”
“Of course I’m OK! Nothing wrong with me phoning you, is there?”
The pause on the line said otherwise. “Not exactly. Though I have to tell you I am in a very strange apartment right now dealing with a stray head. That lady you met earlier, if you remember. I think we have all the pieces at last.”
“Jesus,” he swore quietly. “Listen, Teresa. There’s something I need to know. About Laila. What happened this morning? Why’d she leave like that? Have you any idea?”
She sighed and said something about taking the call outside. The line was quiet for a short while, then Peroni heard the unmistakable sound of the night wind roaring behind her.
“I told her you were going to get fired unless she gave you something about what happened in the Pantheon,” Teresa said over the noise. “I’m sorry. I thought it might help.”
“I wish I’d thought of that,” he said. He made absolutely sure that there was no edge to his words. “It was really clever. Classic stuff too, Teresa. Good cop, bad cop, huh? Maybe they should pin a badge on you and let me drive the corpse wagon.”
He could almost feel the tension on the other end. “Don’t be so ridiculous, you big goof. Falcone would be lost without you. Gianni?”
“Yeah?”
“You mean that? I did the right thing?”
“Of course I mean that! It should have worked too. If she had anything to tell us …”
She sounded so relieved he felt like going back into the cafe and hugging that mouthy girl.
“Gianni, she knows something. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“Me neither.” If Laila did have more to tell, that ought to have dragged it out of her. “I just don’t get it.”
“Unless …”
Teresa Lupo would have made a good cop. “Unless what?”
“She keeps stealing things. What if she stole something from this guy? What if he took his jacket off when he was doing what he did? Do you think Laila could resist a peek? Or something more?”