by David Hewson
Peroni turned, still doing his best to cover the kid behind him, peered into her face and held out his hand. She was clutching the wallet, thin fingers tight on the leather, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
“Laila,” he whispered. “Please …”
Stealing’s a bad thing, he wanted to say. Stealing gets you into big trouble, marks you out for life, as visibly as if you were wearing a sign round your neck saying “evil.” Or a magical symbol carved out of your back.
That was why cops like him spent their working days chasing little thieves, looking for those telltale marks. It was too hard trying to catch the big, smart guys, the ones who carried scalpels and didn’t baulk at using them. And as for the really big fish—well, they just got immunity from their paid politicians anyway. None of which helped a dumb cop on the street to work out the difference between what was truly good and bad.
She passed the wallet over to him without a word, eyes glittering, shiny, full of fear.
“Here!” Peroni bellowed into the darkness and sent the wallet spinning out into the heart of the building, hard enough, he hoped, to take it into the shade on the other side where their unseen stalker could collect it, say a quick thank-you, then disappear into the night leaving everyone safe and sound.
Instead, the thing fell with a gentle thud, slap bang in the middle of the tiny mound of snow building beneath the oculus, and sat there under the silver light like a beacon, like a bright, shiny trap.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” Peroni said, half to himself, half to the figure hiding in the dark. “I’m not playing any tricks here, friend. Just take the damn wallet and go, will you?”
The gun felt heavy in his hand. Behind him, Laila was beginning to squirm. If there’d been an easy and obvious exit he’d have sent her flying towards it, screaming at her to get the hell out of this makeshift tomb in the centre of a slumbering, snow-covered city. Instead, all he could think of was how to hide her from whatever was approaching, how to keep her frail body protected behind his.
And even that wasn’t enough. When it came, straight out of the darkness, it came as a storm of pure physical force, furious, relentless. The man was punching and kicking and screaming, pistol-whipping Peroni’s skull with what felt like a hammer. The gun flew out of Peroni’s hand, clattering across the stonework, spinning into the shadows. He tried to dodge, to find some way of shifting his frame away from the sudden, vicious onslaught of violence, but it was impossible. His hands left Laila and tried to cover his face. He felt his breath flee from his lungs, his mind start to wander off into another place.
… death, they called it, somewhere this man knew very well indeed. Somewhere he liked to visit often, in the company of others.
“Just let her go,” Peroni mumbled, aware that the iron taste of his own blood was feeding into his mouth as he spoke, bowing his head now, knowing what was to come. “What can a kid do to you?”
He saw the butt of the pistol now, racing down towards him through the dark, heard what the figure at the other end of that powerful, sweeping arm was saying, over and over again.
Busy, busy, busy, busy.
He was a busy man, Peroni thought. That was about all they knew of him. Then even that was gone once the pistol butt connected, gone into an agonizing blackness where nothing made sense, not even the words he heard through the rushing bloody haze inside his head.
“THIS ZIGGURAT IS UNIQUE, Nic,” Emily said. “Read the report. That design is not uncommon, but an entire room, the holiest of holies, was decorated with it throughout. There’s nowhere like it in the whole of Iraq. Probably in the world. The place was uncovered back in the 1980s, at which time no one had the money to excavate it properly. It’s only now people are starting to see what’s really there. The irony is the Romans probably knew about this kind of architecture all along. They borrowed from it for buildings like the Pantheon. The resemblance can’t be coincidence. Hell, it even had an oculus. Hadrian could have copied the whole damn thing.”
“So what do you think happened?” he asked.
“Let’s start with some facts. He knew my dad. They were in the ziggurat together. My dad and those other people got out. Kaspar didn’t.
Work it out.”
It wasn’t hard.
“Laura Lee?” he asked again.
“I think she was the woman who died in the Pantheon. It’s not her real name. God knows what that is. I tried to look at the files on her this afternoon. All gone. Buried so deep they might as well not exist. Why would anyone want to do that?”
The answer was always the same. “Because something went wrong.”
“Exactly. Listen: none of this is random. It never has been. He’s had thirteen years in some stinking Iraqi pit to think about this. So, come this year, Iraq’s free. He doesn’t walk up to the nearest American base and say, ‘Hey, take me home.’ For some reason he doesn’t want to come in from the cold. He wants to get even. So he begins on the line that led to my dad.”
There was something missing. She knew it too.
“Why?” Nic asked. “If you were in jail that long, why’d you want to prolong the pain?”
“I don’t have the answer to that yet. Maybe Joel Leapman does, but he isn’t telling. You heard him. Publicly he’s just sticking to the line that Kaspar’s insane. But listen to the tone of some of their messages. You said it yourself. They’re offering this guy a lifeline. This sounds stupid, but I think in some way they still regard him as a hero. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, why send an FBI unit and God knows who else here? Why not just leave it to you people to clean up all the crap?”
“He doesn’t trust Leapman,” Costa suggested. “Or anyone.”
“I know. Maybe he really is just plain crazy. Until we get the chance to ask him there’s no way of telling. Hell, if I’d known this last night I would have asked. Perhaps that’s all it needs. You just have to leech the wound.”
Costa didn’t like the idea one bit. “I don’t think that’s your job.”
“You could be right,” she agreed hesitantly. “But someone’s got to do it. Bill Kaspar has some entire messy chapter of history running around and around in his head, and until we understand that we get nowhere. I went back over the names of his victims again this afternoon. Most of them just don’t exist, but those that do have some interesting histories. The second victim was an executive with a private oil-distribution service. He’d worked in Iraq before the war. One of the women had been attached to the US embassy in Tehran for a while, civilian contract supposedly. It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re just the kind of people who could be involved in this kind of covert activity. One way or another they got out and he didn’t. Now he’s back and he’s killing his old comrades. One by one. And I don’t think he’s done.”
The doubt must have been obvious in Nic’s face.
“You have a problem with that?” she asked.
“Yes. Why the hell did Laura Lee or whoever she was come here to Rome in the first place? Surely she must have known. And how did he track down all these people?”
“He’s a professional, remember? It’s what he does. You’ve got to see him close up to understand that, Nic. He must have been something. Maybe that’s what’s eating him up. Knowing he failed.”
“It doesn’t answer the question about her. If she knew, why would she deliberately put herself in danger?”
“I can give you one simple reason,” Emily replied with a grim certainty. “Because she didn’t have a choice. She’s still in the service. Leapman made her come to Rome, just as he made me. We were both bait. She got unlucky. Kaspar took her from straight under Leapman’s nose, snatched her out of his grip and carved her up. No wonder Leapman’s running around like a bear with a sore head. Imagine what his boss is saying right now.”
Costa could. Men like Leapman attracted their own kind. Someone kicked down on him. He kicked down in return.
“Are you with me so far?” she aske
d.
“I think so. But what do you want me to do?”
“You’ve done it. I wanted you to listen. I was sort of half-hoping you’d tell me I was crazy.”
“You are crazy. Just not about this.”
“Thank you, Mr. Costa,” she said primly, then closed her eyes and gently let her head slip down onto the back of the sofa. “Jesus, I feel as if I could sleep for a million years. And, maybe, when I wake up all of this could be gone, just a bad dream.”
She was close enough for him to smell her hair. A part of him wanted to reach out and touch a shining, golden strand, know what it felt like under his fingers.
“I don’t know what the hell to do,” she said in a quiet, half-scared voice. “Aside from not dreaming.”
He looked at the wine bottle. It was just about gone.
“I am going to find us something to eat,” he said. “Then …”
It was just a glance, he told himself. Just an expression in her eyes.
“… we sleep on it.”
She’d moved against him, just enough for him to feel her shoulder against his. He hadn’t meant it that way. Not consciously.
The blue eyes fixed him. Nic Costa felt lost in them. She looked grateful. Sharing the burden of doubts had helped her, brought the two of them closer. A brief smile flickered on her face. She was very close. On another occasion, under different circumstances …
He stirred uncomfortably on the sofa, looking for something to divert the way the night was moving.
“So what the hell is the Scarlet Beast, then?” he asked her.
It worked. There was a flash of delight on her face, an expression he was beginning to recognize, beginning to look forward to.
“First,” she said, pushing aside the bottle, “no more wine. We need all the concentration we’ve got. And food, Mr. Costa. This odd bachelor pad does run to food and water, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good. There’s just one more secret. And then”—Emily Deacon made a conscious effort to get the words right—“I’m through.”
LAILA WAS HALF YELLING, half pleading, in another language, a musical one quite foreign to him, though he knew somehow what it was.
Her own: Kurdish. He’d heard enough of the street immigrants speaking it to be familiar with the odd cadences, half Western, half oriental.
And in his hurting, confused head, Peroni knew what she was saying too.
Please, please, please.
She was a thin, dark figure dancing on her light, light feet in this shadowy hall, pleading for her life from an unseen stranger while the big, burly cop who was supposed to be keeping her safe curled into a pained ball on the stone floor like a damaged child.
Please, please, please.
He tried to stand and the hammer blow of the pistol came down again, dashing him to the stones under a flurry of obscenities.
Laila screamed, louder this time, a noise that might even filter out into the night air through the open eye of the oculus.
No, no, no, no, no.
Then it came to him, with a sudden grim certainty that made him feel more miserable than ever. She wasn’t arguing for her life. She was begging for his. Trying to bargain with this unseen monster to keep away the hurt and that act of final silence.
“Don’t waste your breath, Laila,” he spluttered through bloody lips. “Run. Let this jerk have his fun.”
Then the world was moving. A strong, firm hand gripped him by the collar of his coat, pushed him hard against the wall, into the faint stream of moonlight falling through the oculus.
A powerful guy, Gianni Peroni thought. That was a big load he was throwing around like a sack of potatoes. A big …
Peroni found himself staring into a face that surprised him. It belonged to a man about his own age, clean-shaven, handsome in a sharp-featured way, keenly alert, devoid of emotion. Not the kind of face you expected of a killer, more like that of an academic or a doctor. He was wearing glasses. Maybe it was the odd silver light of the moon, but his skin seemed to have an unnatural tinge to it. Something in his eyes, the engaged, angular line of his mouth, told Peroni it was worth listening just then. The gun pointing straight at his temple helped, too.
“Let the girl go,” Peroni said once more.
The unfeeling, incisive eyes kept boring into him. “What’s she to you? A Kurd?”
“A kid’s a kid,” Peroni answered, tasting the warm trickle in his mouth again.
The man didn’t say anything. The powerful hands grabbed him again, slammed him hard against the wall.
“Don’t struggle,” the man said. “It only hurts more.”
Then he dangled something familiar in front of Peroni’s face as it mushed up against the stonework: a couple of pairs of plastic handcuffs, the sort the cops kept for special occasions.
“Yeah, yeah,” Peroni grumbled and shoved his hands out behind him, bunched up the way they did in training, holding his palms together as the cuffs came on, cutting tight into his skin.
“You,” the American said, jabbing a finger at Laila.
She held out her hands in front of her, looking meek and obedient.
He nodded. “You’re a smart little cookie, huh? You want some advice? Quit stealing. It just leads to trouble.”
The plastic went round her slender wrists with rather more care than he’d allowed before. Then he bounced Peroni round again, pulled him tight to the girl, withdrew another cuff from his pocket, looped it to join the two of them together through the wrist restraints and tied off the join around the narrow iron support for the altar rail. They couldn’t move. Just to ram home the point, the American reached into Peroni’s pocket, took out his phone, dropped it on the floor, and stomped the thing into pieces.
“I worked with Kurds once,” he said sourly. “They’d call you brother, they’d give you anything, they’d die for you. Then one night they’d see you’d got money in your baggage, and they’d come in and slit your throat, walk out and spend it on a new VCR. You know why?”
Peroni sighed. “I’m a cop, mister. I walk these streets. I do my best. I try to put people like you in jail if I can.”
It was as if the other man didn’t even hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because we taught them how. You think about that the next time she steals something.”
“Yeah,” Peroni replied sourly, without even thinking. “Nobody’s really responsible for anything these days, are they?”
He wondered if he was going to throw up. Or faint. Or both, possibly in the wrong order. “I guess,” he added, “it wasn’t really you who carved that woman up in here the other night. Just someone else wearing the same skin.”
The gun came down again. “You know you could just be right.”
The American drew out a small torch and shone the beam briefly in Peroni’s face. Then he pulled out the wallet, opened it up and took out a couple of old, battered photographs, held them beneath the beam. Two clusters of people, out in the desert somewhere. All were wearing military fatigues and sunglasses, looking as pleased as punch, posing against a couple of those huge jeep things the Americans loved.
He was in the first photo. Younger, happy, in control. The boss maybe, posing with his team, eight or so men and women, all smiling at the camera, all lords of their little universe.
“I got all of them inside me,” the American murmured. “Every one of them. I watched them die and I couldn’t do a damn thing because we were just walking straight into some stupid little turkey shoot, not knowing what was waiting there for us.”
“I guess that picture must be important to you, huh,” Peroni said.
“You could say that.”
He pushed the other photo to the front. A different set of people but the same kind of crowd. One them familiar, Peroni realized. Emily Deacon’s dad, looking a whole lot younger and happier than he had in that formal shot from a few months ago that they’d seen in the embassy. And a couple of women too. One who just might have been
the corpse they’d found in this very building two nights before.
The American’s mouth came close to Peroni’s ear. “Ain’t they pretty?”
The grey, stony face didn’t flicker, but something was going on, Peroni realized. The man was thinking. He had the time, too. There was nothing Gianni Peroni could do that would shape the flow of events now.
“So you’re just a minion?” the American asked. “A local cop? Those guys from the embassy told you nothing?”
“Yeah, a minion. I only know what they think I need to know.”
Peroni gazed into the icy eyes, wondering what, if anything, could move this man. “That there’s a lunatic out there, carving some pattern out of people’s backs, for no reason at all. And he sure loves US military webbing, too.”
That struck a nerve somewhere. The guy was laughing. Not the cold, dry laughter Peroni had heard in the dark. This was more human somehow, more scary because it came from a place deep inside the man, and because it was the kind of laughter that could just go anywhere, from joy to despair in a heartbeat.
“No reason?” the American asked, and pushed the gun back into Gianni Peroni’s face. “You believe that?”
Peroni looked down at the dead grey metal barrel and tried to tick off the few remaining options in his hurting head.
“Not really,” he murmured.
HE’D FOUND SOME PASTA and a jar of tomato sauce. They sat on the sofa together in front of the empty plates, aware of the clock ticking towards midnight, bone-weary. Nic Costa wasn’t even sure he wanted any more questions answered. He wasn’t sure what he wanted at all.
Emily leaned back into the soft cushions, closed her eyes and asked, “Do you have a bible?”
He blinked, wide awake all of a sudden. “Excuse me?”
“A bible. This is a good Italian household, isn’t it?”
So many things to explain. So many preconceptions. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I have a bible. I wouldn’t dare bring one through the door. I’d have my old man’s ghost haunting me forever. I told you. He was a Communist. Do you really need one?”