by David Hewson
He stood up, looked around the grounds, smiled very visibly, the way that politicians did when they knew they were being watched, and shook Costa firmly by the hand.
“Your father was a great friend of mine and an honest and frank colleague in the shameful world of politics,” the president said in a firm, loud voice. Then, turning again, in a whisper he added, “Ranieri and I shall visit you, with two men he trusts. Ten o’clock. Be there, Nic. I need friends about me now.”
“Of course …”
He stopped. Sordi’s pallid face had lost what little blood it seemed to possess. A noise was rising from somewhere beyond the walls, down the hill, past the narrow streets clinging to the lee of the Quirinale, tumbling toward the Trevi Fountain.
It was the distant clockwork rattle of a machine gun, and Nic could tell from Dario Sordi’s face that it was a sound the man had heard before.
10
“Danny, Danny, Danny …”
The golden boy had skipped forward into the sunlight, like some long-lost god newly sprung to life.
With that, a thunderous noise filled the room, and Peroni found himself screaming over it, bellowing at the two cops with him to get down on the floor, out of reach of the deadly, shattering eye of the window.
A deafening racket shook the building. Peroni watched a line of dust devils burst out of the ancient walls behind them as the tracer line of bullets bit into the brickwork.
Rosa was on the bare timber boards already. Mirko Oliva had begun messing with his gun, looking ready to race to the front of the room. Peroni grabbed him as the young officer began to move, punched him hard in the shoulder, then shoved him facedown to the floor, letting momentum do the rest.
He was still grappling with Mirko when they hit the ground so hard it made his old bones jar with the pain.
“I don’t want a dead hero on my hands,” the old cop grunted, pointing a fat finger in the trainee’s face.
The gunfire had halted. Rosa, sensibly, was sliding backwards to the door, phone in hand, chanting a quiet demand to whoever was on the other end.
“Boss …”
“Quiet, Mirko,” Peroni told him, trying to think.
The figure above them was talking in his strange foreign voice, and Peroni couldn’t dispel the thought: This is not a man; it is a child, weak, defenseless, scared, baffled, exposed in the bright shaft of golden sun.
A child covered in blue paint and stained with the blood of the man he’d just slaughtered.
“Peroni …”
There was a note in Rosa’s low cry.
He jerked his finger back toward the door and made sure Oliva saw too. Then he looked up.
The boy was wavering in the beam of light, arms outstretched, face a picture of tortured agony, standing in front of the table where Giovanni Batisti’s body lay torn and bloody against the old, bare wood, something outside of him that was meant to be in.
Peroni couldn’t see through the window. Maybe the gunman had gone. Maybe not. The golden boy belonged to him, to them. He had to. Was that why the man on the other side of the street relaxed his finger on the trigger, ceased spitting hot shells across the brief width of the Via Rasella in their direction?
“Get down,” Peroni called to the strange, upright creature in the sunlight, gesturing to the floor with his hands, hoping that would be enough.
He felt confused trying to weigh up the options. One thing, above all, seemed clear and significant.
They had left the golden boy behind. That said everything.
Those lost eyes, straying behind the sweaty, grimy blond curls, stayed on the window. Still, he kept murmuring, “Danny … Danny …”
Not moving a centimeter, arms stretched out like some cheap Jesus from an Easter street procession.
“I don’t have the words anymore,” Peroni murmured, and knew he had to finish this.
He shuffled up to a half crouch and wondered how strong the youth was, how easy it might be to drag him out of the target zone, back behind the relative safety of the antiquated building’s crumbling brickwork.
“Don’t you even dare, Peroni!” the young policewoman shrieked, with such force and vehemence he had to turn and look.
Rosa was in the doorway in front of Mirko Oliva, her foot almost in his face, as if she was ready to kick him back into place if necessary.
“Stay there,” Peroni ordered, wondering why he was taking instructions from some twenty-something female cop.
He was half on his feet when she fell on him, at a moment when his bulk was teetering off balance.
It was this, he thought later, that saved them both.
They fell, tumbling, back to the ground, and the roar of the gun was on them before they even touched the floor. Peroni grabbed her slender body and tugged and pushed the two of them across the bare, splintering boards to the far side of the room, close to the front wall, seeking the dark corner, a place that offered some kind of respite because it was clear, once they got there, where the slew of bullets raking the room was aimed: through the window, directly at the only thing that was in the light.
“Danny … Danny …”
It sounded like a plea, sounded shocked and scared and angry.
His tall, tanned body was caught in the ripple of fire, jerking like a puppet on a string. Livid wounds opened up in his bare, stained flesh.
“Danny … Danny …”
Mirko Oliva couldn’t take it anymore. He scrambled to the window, holding his gun high above his head, pointing into the street, and fired off every round he had, shooting blind out into the gap.
Peroni closed his eyes, praying no one in the adjoining buildings had walked into that.
Then he waited, keeping Rosa in place with an arm, not that she needed it. He found himself looking into her deep brown eyes, perhaps because he didn’t want to see what lay in the heart of the room at that moment. She was, he decided, a very smart, very private woman, one he was glad to have around, even if sometimes her presence made life deeply awkward and uncomfortable.
“Thanks,” he said, with the slightest of nods.
She didn’t say anything, just scowled, but not at him this time; at Oliva, who was trying to reload his weapon beneath the window, but was shaking so much the new shells were scattering over the floor.
“Mirko,” Peroni called to him. “Mirko?”
“Boss?” The young officer’s eyes were bright with shock and fear.
“It’s gone quiet, son. You should notice these things.”
Dead quiet, until that nearby bell tolled again, and Peroni remembered what they called the campanile on the Quirinale Palace. Il Torrino.
“S-s-sorry …” Oliva stuttered.
“It’s OK,” Peroni assured him. “Just stay still. There’s nothing …”
Outside he heard the sound of shouting followed by the revving of motorbike engines.
He glanced at Rosa and said, “You too.”
Before she could object, he’d scrambled across the floor to the window ledge and managed to peek out over it.
“Gianni!” she yelled at him.
Mirko Oliva was beneath the frame, staring back into the room, shaking, face pale, looking ready to throw up again.
“No problem,” Peroni told her. “We’re too high up, and the street’s too narrow.”
He clambered to his feet, got to the window, and leaned out as far as he dared.
The roar of two powerful motorbikes echoed off the walls, heading down toward the Trevi Fountain and the tunnel beneath the hill. He still couldn’t see the street, but at least there was something to pass on to Traffic and the CCTV people.
“Mirko …?”
The young officer got up, leaned over the open window frame, and threw up again, into the hot, bright day.
“Fortunately,” Peroni observed, “I doubt there’ll be anyone below just now.”
He sighed, then turned away. It was important to look, even though he knew what he was going to see.
; Batisti’s corpse remained slumped over the table. His killer was in front of him, flat on the floor, eyes wide open, glassy, the inert body shredded by gunfire, the blue paint barely visible for blood.
A thought came to Peroni: He is the one they wanted to kill, more than anyone else, after he’d served his purpose.
It made no sense, but then, nothing did at that moment.
Something glittered at the dead man-child’s neck. Peroni bent down and, setting aside his squeamishness, reached for the object nestled in the grimy, bloodstained skin. It was a silver locket in the shape of a heart, worn and scratched, on an old and stained chain. When Peroni gently prised open the lid with fumbling, shaky fingers, he saw there a fading photograph of a beautiful young woman with long golden hair, curly tresses of it, much like those of the corpse that lay in front of him.
Memories were flooding back, distressing ones, of another case, one that was briefly in all the papers, on every police notice board until one final outburst of violence had brought it to a close.
Gianni Peroni stared at the features of the wild-eyed blue creature plastered to the wall and felt his heart grow cold.
Then he closed the locket and turned it over. On the back, barely visible after so many years in a wilderness he could only guess at, was the inscription, part English, part Italian.
To My Beautiful Marie on the Birth of Our Son, Daniel. 19 August 1986. Mia per sempre, Renzo.
11
A fierce, dry breeze arrived that afternoon. By evening the natives were complaining about the unseasonably hot weather, and much else besides. In the space of a few hours Rome had changed, become a tense, nervous city, jumpy at the sight of its own time-worn shadows. Armies of workmen had descended on the area around the Quirinale Palace, erecting tall, ugly fencing and security gates at every intersection. High, threatening guard posts were beginning to spread as far as the broad, open thoroughfare Mussolini had carved through the Forum, and in the open central square of the Piazza Venezia itself. The media had adopted Palombo’s terminology, calling it a “ring of steel” to protect the world leaders who were starting to arrive to attend the summit inside the palace. They forecast that the Quirinale hill and most of the area around it would become a forbidden zone for all but the most privileged of citizens, and few Romans or tourists would find life easy for several days to come.
Little of this appeared to concern police pathologist Teresa Lupo, who, thanks to her recent elevation to head of the forensic unit in Commissario Esposito’s Questura, had acquired a new smartphone — one that, for the moment, seemed more interesting than the present company. Costa watched her tapping frantically into her little gadget at their table in Sacro e Profano, a small church in a back street behind the Trevi Fountain that had been converted into a Calabrian restaurant and pizzeria. She had celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday three weeks before, though Costa felt she had scarcely aged in the six years he’d known her. Awkward, doggedly persistent, blessed with an acute intelligence that sometimes led her astray, she was, like Peroni and Falcone, one of his closest friends. Now that she and Peroni were an established couple, and his divorce had finally come through, there was speculation in the Questura that one day soon they would marry. Costa thought he would like that, that he could imagine the two of them together on the big day, both uneasy in new clothes, their big, shambling frames encased inside something they’d never wear again. There was an everyday honesty and devotion between the two of them, a friendship that embraced love too and made them a pleasure to be around, even when the work turned dark and relentless.
He took his attention away from Teresa, tapping away at the phone with her fat fingers, her pale, broad face entirely absorbed in the moment. Their table was on the upper level, where the church organ might once have sat. This gave them a grand view of the vast wood-fired oven that seemed to provide almost everything — pizzas, meat, fish, vegetables — the place produced, and wafted the occasional wisp of smoky aromatic oak up from the nave below.
He could scarcely believe they were eating out together so soon after the afternoon’s brutal events. When the sound of gunfire interrupted his bewildering conversation with Dario Sordi in the palace gardens, Costa had raced to the scene with Esposito and Falcone. It was easier to run than drive through the stationary snarl of Roman traffic. Whoever was responsible for the attack had been wise to rely on two wheels for their escape.
At least all three officers were safe, even if the news about Giovanni Batisti was as bad as anyone might have feared. Soon the narrow stretch of the street where the attack occurred had come to be swamped by other parties. Luca Palombo and his counterparts from America and elsewhere had arrived to take control. Not long after that, everyone in the Polizia di Stato came to understand their place in the pecking order.
Teresa, with a small group led by her assistant Silvio Di Capua, managed to spend almost fifteen minutes in the room where Batisti and the corpse of his apparent killer were found. Then they were ejected by a team from the Carabinieri, under Palombo’s direction.
Peroni, Rosa, and Mirko Oliva had been interviewed for almost two hours, with Commissario Esposito in attendance. After that they had been sent out into the street, where the two younger officers disappeared into a nearby bar, shell-shocked and, it seemed to Costa, rather closer to one another than they had been previously. The rest of them returned to the Questura, where the atmosphere was unreal, as if they had entered a lull before some unpredictable storm.
After a few desultory attempts to work their way back into the investigation, efforts that Commissario Esposito rapidly stamped upon, Leo Falcone suggested dinner. The invitation came as such a surprise that no one objected. Strictly speaking, their shift was over — Peroni should have gone off duty hours before. They were all tired, yet aware of an unspent nervous energy, a need to talk. Costa was astonished to discover that he was rather hungry too. Or rather, some inner voice appeared to be urging him to eat soon, because it might be a while before he had another chance to sit down again with friends in a decent restaurant.
A waiter came over with a trolley piled high with plates of fish and vegetables and a small bowl of the scorching pepper sauce Costa always associated with Calabria.
“That’s very kind,” Peroni told him, “but we didn’t order this.”
His battered, homely face still looked a little pale. Costa had been inside that upper room, seen what was in there. The big ugly cop was never good around blood.
Falcone, never one to be squeamish, was already prodding gently at the choicer dishes with his fork, judging the food with the studied and detached care with which he measured those around him. It was a very good restaurant.
The waiter leaned down and in a lowered voice said, “We know who you are. We’ve seen the inspector here before. It was all on the TV. We heard it.”
“Heard what?” Falcone asked as he picked at what looked like tuna and swordfish, already forking pieces onto his plate.
“That you’re … off the case,” the waiter said with a theatrical flourish, visibly pleased with his own ability to produce what he thought of as cop-speak. “So you come here. You eat, you think. All those stuck-up bastards in the Carabinieri, the government. They think they own the world.”
He put down the bottle of wine, which was still, to Peroni’s visible concern, unopened.
“They close the streets. They build a wall around the Quirinale. Where are we living? Rome or Berlin in the 1950s? And when some ordinary guy in the police sticks his neck on the line, what do they do? Sit in their offices until the shooting stops, then come and take it all away from you like they know best.”
“We’ve still got Traffic,” Peroni said brightly. “Didn’t they mention that?”
“No.”
“You should never believe what you hear in the media,” Falcone suggested, then placed a long finger on the side of his nose and winked.
The waiter mouthed, “Ah …” and made the same gesture. Peroni, getting
desperate, held up the wine bottle, which the waiter uncorked, pouring four full glasses. The rich, aromatic smell of Pugliese primitivo mingled with the smoke from the oven downstairs.
“Haruspicy,” Teresa declared, finally looking up from the phone after the waiter disappeared.
“It’s not on the menu,” Peroni pointed out.
“I’m not talking about food, you fool! It’s what was going on back there. In that room. In the Via Rasella. Or so they’d like us to think.”
Peroni’s fork dangled over some cold meat. A look of foreboding crossed his big, bucolic face. She glanced at him and added, “Let’s get this out of the way before we eat, shall we?”
“Oh, wonderful,” he groaned. “If you insist …”
“This is exactly what Leo and Nic were told about in the Quirinale. The Blue Demon. Terrorism with an Etruscan flavor. No surprises. Well, not many.”
She held out her phone. There was a photo of some ancient, dark metal object in a museum. Costa craned forward, along with the others, in order to see better. It looked like a very odd ornament, one with a distinct and organic shape.
“The Liver of Piacenza,” Teresa announced.
“Liver?” Peroni asked weakly. “As in …?”
“As in liver. Batisti was mutilated in a very specific fashion. Silvio managed to get me some old news reports about the Frascas’ murder. It looks as if they were injured in much the same way. It was a ritual. Not quite disembowelment, but …” She winced, from lack of facts, not something squeamish. “A haruspex divined the future by looking at the liver of a slaughtered animal. The Liver of Piacenza was used to train people to read what they found. It divides the organ into specific areas that may or may not relate to stellar constellations. There were light surface knife marks on Giovanni Batisti that mirror those used on the Piacenza object. To make them look like the work of an Etruscan haruspex.”