by David Hewson
Priest was getting a little weary of the history lesson by that stage, but his interest picked up when Petrakis did something very clever: namely, provide context. All this information, the young Kenyan discovered, had a point. The Italian needed him to understand how important the Acqua Vergine was to Rome, how its public display, in fountains and features, was a source of both pride and comfort for citizens beginning to stew in the summer heat, able to take a sip in the street, knowing the water would be fresh and good. History had a familiar face. The mostra where the Antica concluded its journey was the Trevi Fountain, a place Joseph Priest had visited himself, since it was a mandatory sight on the itinerary of any tourist, even a terrorist in disguise.
Two hours after he left Tarquinia, he found himself striding toward the street not far from the Via Rasella that he’d visited the previous week. A bunch of women’s bags was slung over his right shoulder. He was practicing his basic Italian in his head. To the people around, he must have looked like one more African hawker about to pester tourists in the city center. The narrow cobbled lanes were less crowded. The TV channels had made much of the murder of the Polish woman driver and her passenger, and the statement from the president about an imminent terrorist threat. Tourists were trying to scramble onto the last departures from Fiumicino and Ciampino before the flight ban slammed down. The mainline train stations were choked with travelers fighting for the few remaining seats. Hotels and restaurants were already wailing about the economic effect. The mayor had been on CNN, claiming no one need fear, that security was good and the necessary measures would not interfere with any holiday in Rome.
He hadn’t seemed convincing. The straggle of visitors walking cautiously through the city center looked less carefree than a week before. Some had no choice about being there. Petrakis had told him why. This wasn’t just a time for world leaders. The city was engaged in a Fashion Week spectacular too, one scheduled long before Ugo Campagnolo had invited the leaders of the G8 to the Quirinale Palace. It was an annual affair that attracted thousands of people in the rag trade, spawning a series of shows and catwalk events, some private, some public, all organized with the extravagant flair for publicity that went with the clothing business.
Security fences and guard posts seemed to be springing up everywhere, in the Piazza di Spagna and outside subway stations and public buildings. Armed uniformed police toting ugly black automatic weapons lounged on street corners, scrutinizing the passersby. But the fashionistas brought their own crowd. Bright and garish, loud and unmissable, untouched by the threat, or so they wished to believe.
The Trevi was swamped by a garrulous mob, all eyes on a line of brightly clad women stepping through lines of photographers held back by uniformed police. They pranced through the mob, then lined up to stand on the low wall that fronted the fountain, posing, pouting, stretching themselves into the curiously androgynous pose that models seemed to like. This was one of the most photographed scenes in the world and Priest was now a part of it, someone who would alter the way the place would be perceived from this point forward, forever.
Priest strode across the street, pushing his way through, head down. He paused to glance left, toward the Via Rasella, remembering what had happened there the previous day. He had helped scout that location with Petrakis. The Italian had been insistent for some reason; no other street would suffice for their first blow in Rome. Then he found a squat stone bollard on which he was able to perch, leaning against the wall, and turned to look at the place that Petrakis had chosen for their second act.
A single statue, the regal figure of Neptune, dominated the scene, erect before the pillars of some kind of palace, bestriding a fantastical scene of imaginary sea creatures, tritons and horses and serpents, frozen in stone, yet somehow full of motion. The waters of the Acqua Vergine emerged from some invisible outlets at the sea god’s feet as he rode, triumphant in a seashell chariot. The fountains burst forth with gusto, falling into a semicircular blue pool behind the line of models now posing for the cameras.
As he watched, the perimeter of the pool became entirely surrounded by models and cameramen, TV crews and eager members of the public. None took much notice of the water or the statuary with its great, sweeping figure of the god above them.
They think they’re more important, Joseph Priest thought.
As Andrea Petrakis had instructed, he took out the expensive camera phone, set it to video, checked the picture, dialed the number he’d been given, then stared at the lens, waiting for them to answer the call.
He could just make out three of them by the pool in a tiny frame on the screen. Through the shaky picture, Petrakis raised his glass. Beer, Priest realized, and couldn’t wait to taste one too. His mouth felt dry. He was more scared than he’d ever been since the first job that got him into the Mungiki, muscling protection money out of street traders in some dangerous Nairobi back street. Deniz Nesin was there, with what looked like a clear glass of Arabian tea in his hand, his face serious as always. Deniz had arranged all this camera stuff, and the rest. The man was happier around toys and gadgets than people.
The Turk leaned forward and said, the words audible even as Priest looked straight into the eye of the phone, “Do you remember what to do?”
“Yes, boss!” he replied, and tried to make some small salute.
Then the camera shifted position and he saw Anna Ybarra. She was still wearing the same dark swimsuit. He’d found it hard to dispel the image of her in the pool that morning. She wasn’t beautiful. Not really. But she had something that worked on him, and she knew it.
“Be careful,” Anna said in her husky English.
Priest grinned and pulled out the mounting apparatus Deniz had given him. It was black metal, fitted the phone perfectly, and had some kind of sticky adhesive base that was supposed to adhere to anything — brick, metal, plastic. There was a road sign by the bollard: Pedestrians Only. He fixed the phone in the mount, reached up, and attached both to the metal sign, pointing the lens toward the sea god and his strange retinue, human and stone, opposite. When it was seated firmly, he stretched up to adjust the focus and the frame, making sure the three of them back in Tarquinia would see everything, and could pass it on everywhere, over the Web, in seconds.
“Be careful …” he murmured, thinking of Anna Ybarra again.
The last time, after they checked out the empty houses in the Via Rasella, Petrakis had taken him to an ice cream shop just a few meters away, down a side street between the Trevi and the busy Via del Tritone. Priest decided he might buy something there afterwards, when the panic had taken hold and he was able to walk safely away, back to the rented Moto Guzzi Nevada parked in a back road behind the Villa Borghese.
He elbowed his way through the crowd, not looking at anyone — the cops, the photographers, the models. They were all so self-absorbed that no one noticed another African bag seller. Even the police, with their big, ugly guns, couldn’t take their eyes off the women in their bikinis and skimpy clothes, arching and angling on the wall in front of the Trevi Fountain.
The device lay hidden beneath Neptune’s feet, buried there somehow by Deniz Nesin two nights before. A bitter, cruel surprise slumbering under the rocks and the waters of the Acqua Vergine Antica. It was a brilliant plan, and one that had only a single drawback. Radio waves weren’t as subtle or insistent as water, Deniz said. Hard marble was almost impervious to their power, unless one found a way to get very close indeed.
The little remote control they’d given Priest needed to be within twenty meters of the sea god’s torso for its signal to reach the detonator and the explosive hidden beneath the stone. He hoped he had enough leeway to be around the corner from the statues when he hit the button.
There was no way he could return to Nairobi a failure. Joseph Priest knew he’d be as good as dead the moment he left the airport. He might as well have stayed in Rome, trying to sell cheap bags for real.
17
Teresa Lupo had worked alongside Pero
ni many times before, but not like this. Peroni was a cop, big, gruff, amiable, in spite of his brutish, damaged appearance. She was a forensic pathologist, fifteen years younger than him. He’d brought stability, love, and some genuine companionship into her life. Professionally, their jobs meshed but never competed, much like their shared private lives. That was, she thought, for the best.
They had to take the long route through the city, driving over to the Trastevere side and then on to the Vatican, before crossing the Tiber again in Flaminio. The centro storico was gridlocked because of Palombo’s security measures. Close to the Vatican, from the Castel Sant’Angelo to St. Peter’s, the scaffolding and guard posts were beginning to appear, and the streets seemed full of uniformed men nursing weapons.
The Villa Giulia was a former papal residence near the Viale delle Belle Arti and the National Gallery of Modern Art. The place was a compact palace, grandiose but a little faded, its frescoed colonnades in need of some restoration. The grounds were well tended and possessed the kind of follies she associated with the Vatican hierarchy when it was at leisure: fake temples and a balustraded structure in faded gray stone. That could only be the nymphaeum, the artificial cave harking back to pagan times where, two decades before, the mutilated bodies of Renzo Frasca and his wife had been found.
The museum director was named Pietro Conti. He was short, frail, and elderly, beyond retirement age, she thought, with pallid, blotchy skin, perhaps indicative of illness, and a pinched, grizzled face bearing a meager salt-and-pepper mustache. Conti greeted them in his office, a capacious, sun-filled room. He listened to Peroni’s brief explanation for their visit, then said, “Ask away.”
“You were here?” Teresa asked. “You knew Andrea Petrakis?”
“Briefly.”
The man volunteered nothing else.
“What was he like?” Peroni asked.
Conti shrugged. “All this was a long time ago. You read the reports, surely. You’re police officers. Why ask me?”
“You’ve seen the news. You know Petrakis has returned. We need to try to understand this man. To comprehend why he’s come back, now. In this … frame of mind.”
“Don’t ask me about his frame of mind. I never understood it then. Why should I today? Andrea Petrakis was arrogant, willful, disrespectful of authority. Obsessive about everything that interested him, which seemed to be Etruscans principally, and Shakespeare for some reason, which I suspect gives you a clue to his view of history.”
“What clue?” Peroni wondered.
“That he saw everything in dramatic terms,” Conti replied, as if the answer were obvious. “Ordinary lives didn’t interest him. Only great ones, or those he regarded as great. This is dreadful arrogance for any historian. Politicians merely steer the ship. Real people, ordinary people, row it. I found Andrea lacking in insight, though highly intelligent. The people in Viterbo had given him some kind of junior professorship, which was a mistake. He believed he understood the subject matter rather better than was the case.” Conti frowned. “That young man was spoiled, which is never good for one so inexperienced and with such admiration for himself. Where he got this crazy idea …” The director waved his fragile right hand in the air. It seemed so thin Teresa wondered if it might break.
“What crazy idea?” she asked.
“That he possessed some kind of empathy with the Etruscans. That they were not simply a lost race suitable for study, but a kind of metaphor one might use to explain the modern world. He had Greek blood. He thought this gave him some special insight. But …”
Conti glanced out of the window. “If you’d told me he was capable of such things … Those poor young idiots in the Maremma. I taught them. The girl, Nadia Ambrosini, was very pretty, if somewhat vapid and lacking in academic focus.” He pointed a short, wrinkled finger at them. “I was merely a curator then. Had I thought anything untoward was in the cards …”
“You would have acted, sir,” Peroni assured him. “No one foresaw what would happen. You’ve no need to feel any guilt.”
“Easy for you to say,” Conti responded. “When they come here as students, they’re in our charge. We’re responsible for them. We have to be, since so often they refuse to be responsible for themselves.”
“Why did the other students worship him?” Peroni asked.
Pietro Conti looked puzzled. “Who said they did?”
“They followed him. He was the leader of their group. They went to that place of his parents’, near Tarquinia. There were photographs.…”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you see in the gutter press. I read those stories too. How Andrea was some sort of Svengali. I assumed they were the fantasies of a desperate reporter. You think otherwise?”
Peroni said, “Possibly.”
“Well, I can’t say I noticed. I rather felt the students were laughing at him most of the time. Or using him. The girl in particular. Female students can be like that. Cruel.”
Teresa found herself glancing at Peroni, reassured to see he found this just as baffling.
“But they went to that place in the country,” she pointed out. “They died there.”
“Yes,” the director agreed. “They did.” He wriggled uncomfortably in his seat, as if steeling himself to say something unpleasant. “Look. I was never asked this before. I find it odd that I am going over this subject now, twenty years after those three children were put in their graves.” He cleared his throat. “Andrea Petrakis was a very clever, very unusual, and rather unpleasant young man. One of his talents was that he knew how to provide his peers with whatever they wanted. A place where they could go and … ‘hang out,’ was the phrase back then, I believe.”
“Hang out?” she asked.
Conti glared at her. “Oh, please. I’m no fool. They used to talk about it, quite openly. They were little more than provincial children, most of whom had fled very traditional Catholic upbringings. Andrea offered them a place where they could do whatever they liked. If they adored him — and I have my doubts about that — it was for purely practical purposes. He provided them with what they sought, which is the easiest way anyone can win popularity with the young.”
Teresa tried to work this out. “You’re saying they didn’t even like him?”
“I’m saying …” He tried to find the right words. “They were two parties who knowingly exploited one another. Petrakis fed their needs. He provided them with drugs. Many drugs. We had officers in the Carabinieri crawling over this place afterwards. Quite why such mundane crimes were of interest to them, in the light of what happened to that unfortunate American couple, is something I’ll never understand.”
“You mean Petrakis was their dealer?” she asked.
“Precisely. In return, they indulged his strange ideas about the Etruscans, and gave him rather a lot of money too, I imagine.”
“Is that what drove them?” she asked. “Not politics, but dope?” The briefing from the Quirinale was either plainly inaccurate or deliberately misleading.
“I never heard a word of politics discussed in those circles. I would have welcomed it if I had. They all seemed remarkably … dull, to be honest with you. Except for Andrea.”
“That’s what these kids wanted? The chance to behave the way they never could at home with Mamma around? To be hippies, like the Etruscans?”
Pietro Conti regarded her contemptuously and asked, “What?”
“Hippies,” she repeated, feeling uncomfortable beneath the heat of his gaze. “Or so I read.…”
He adopted a pose — fingers tented, head to one side — of the indignant academic.
“Where did you read this? In some history book for infants? The Etruscans owned half of Italy for more than two hundred years. They provided at least three kings of Rome. This was a proud and independent warrior nation that showed its enemies no mercy whatsoever.” He nodded at the door. “You should see some of the exhibits we have. They had a society, a culture, that didn’t fit in with our ideas on m
orals. But they were no … hippies.” He shrugged. “And in the end they were defeated. Now, because all that Rome has left us is a few tombs and some rather risqué objects, we regard an entire civilization as some fey lost race of aesthetes. Poets bearing olive branches, too delicate for this rough world of ours.”
The old man folded his arms. “Andrea Petrakis was a decent scholar. He certainly knew enough to reject such nonsense. You’ll have to do better with your theories than that, my dear.”
“Sorry,” she muttered, stung.
Peroni came to her rescue. “Can we see where the Frasca couple were found?”
A practical, straightforward question, she realized. Unlike her, Peroni was a cop, someone who thought in straight lines. Sometimes it was the best way to be.
“If you must,” Pietro Conti groaned, and struggled out of his chair. “But before we leave the subject, I will tell you one thing.”
They waited.
“Licentious, weak, self-obsessed, flawed — a people waiting on oblivion, almost inviting it,” the museum director went on. “Should anyone fit that description, it’s us, surely. If an old man like me can see that, so can a younger one as bright as Andrea Petrakis. He gave those foolish children what they wanted. The place in Tarquinia. Their”—his mouth wrinkled with disgust—“fun. But he knew it was a weakness and he hated them for that. Hated us too. I saw that in his eyes. Now, let me show you our nymphaeum, such as it is.”
18
The device Deniz had given him looked like the remote from a video camera. Small, black, plastic, it sat in Joseph Priest’s hand, wriggling in his sweaty grip. There weren’t just models and photographers and a small crowd of gaping locals and tourists crowded round the Trevi Fountain. There were carabinieri too, as if they knew — or at least suspected — something might happen.
The Kenyan let slip a quiet curse and told himself not to be so stupid. It was a famous place. There’d be pickpockets and street people, hassling, looking for a purse or a camera to steal. Of course the cops would be there. Except that these cops held weapons, modern automatic rifles, the kind the Mungiki never managed to get, even in Nairobi. They weren’t watching the half-naked women on the perimeter wall fronting the fountain’s foaming waters anymore. They were scanning the crowd, peering hard at anyone they felt deserved it.