by David Hewson
“I go first,” he announced before entering the inky pool swimming beneath their feet.
It seemed an endless descent, one step at a time, gripping the dry, splintery rail. Finally, the beam fell on bare earth. Costa found himself in a subterranean cavern of some size, so deep beneath the surface that he could hear nothing of the world above, not a bird, not an insect.
Rosa joined him and shone her light around the space in front of them.
“It’s huge,” she said.
“And empty.”
There were marks in the floor, niches carved out of the brown soil, where once, Nic guessed, at least two sarcophagi had lain. The archaeologists had been there already, or perhaps the grave-robbers before them. Not an item remained in the center of the chamber. He shone his light farther in front. There was a small archway carved in the stone ahead, and a dark, seemingly smaller chamber beyond.
“Where’s the Blue Demon, Nic? Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s the place the woman gave us.”
Costa knew why she was asking. The beam of her flashlight had flickered sideways, coming to rest on the frieze running around the nearest wall. What was painted there, with some skill, seemed to have no connection with the dark terrors he had expected. It was a bacchanalian orgy: naked men and women, with wine cups overflowing, running through a wood that must have been much like the one in which the tomb was built. Some wrestled. Some made love. Some performed more perverse sexual acts. There were animals too, and violence. One cruel, explicit scene in particular seemed more in keeping with the kind of pornography that Costa had occasionally seized from the seedier shops around Termini.
“You can see why they didn’t open this one up to the public,” Rosa muttered, sounding a little shocked. “No one’s going to be bringing any school trips down here.”
The tone of the frieze to their left altered as they neared the low, narrow door that led into the farther chamber. The expressions on the faces of the characters shifted subtly, from ecstasy to first surprise and then doubt, bordering on fear.
He felt Rosa following him and knew, from the sound of her tense, short breathing and the way she kept close by him, her shoulder occasionally brushing his in the gloom, that she was noticing this change in the paintings too. Then he was through the opening. She followed him and they turned both beams of their flashlights on the wall to the left.
A brief, pained shriek escaped Rosa’s throat. Costa felt his own blood run cold. It took a moment for him to think straight, to remind himself that this was nothing but paint on ancient plaster, placed here twenty-five hundred years before.
The frieze had disappeared. The images ran the full length of the wall, larger than life, the product of some terrible and vivid imagination. The trick the long-dead artist had played was both devious and sinister. Seen by the visitor walking through from the larger chamber, it was as if the lines of giddy revelers were tumbling ecstatically toward Hell.
Still in each other’s arms, in congress, dancing, fighting, eating, drinking, they appeared to fall through the slender opening into the second chamber like unwitting victims slipping into a nightmare.
The Blue Demon was there to meet them: the same hideous devil, recreated time and time again, sharp fangs dark with gore, his eyes like coals, his tail whipping like a serpent, an inhuman erection rising from his loins. The creature seized the cavorting figures as they stumbled into his domain, then feasted off them, tearing the unwitting Etruscans to pieces, handing the remains to lesser demons to shred and gorge upon. This was a horror from Hieronymus Bosch, but shorn of the aesthetic license of the artist who would come almost two millennia later. There were no fanciful, dreamlike sequences here, just flesh and blood and entrails, and the all-powerful figure of the azure lord, the master of ceremonies, his talons slicing at his hapless victims as they made the transition from light to dark, blinded by bliss, unaware of their fate until there was no going back.
Costa felt Rosa’s fingers grip his arm.
“Get me out of here, Nic,” she whispered, her voice almost unrecognizable.
“When we’re finished,” he replied, then moved the beam from the red-eyed monster on the wall and on to the tiny chamber itself.
It was no larger than a child’s bedroom and, unlike the adjoining room, it wasn’t empty. On the floor, there was a group of objects, dark — metal by the looks of it.
Modern too.
He told Rosa to keep her light on them, bent down, and looked. They were munitions boxes, with NATO markings. The latches were easily undone. Beneath the lid lay packs of material neatly stacked like sets of playing cards. Costa retrieved one and saw the telltale word on the side.
“Do you know what Explosia is?” he asked her.
“Can we discuss this outside?”
He put the pack back in the case and straightened.
“It’s the commercial name for Semtex. They changed it after all the bad publicity. It was Semtex back when Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. Now that we’re all as free as birds …”
Explosia. He remembered the course well, and the female instructor who had taken them through the history of the ways terrorists wreaked havoc on the world. Most Islamic groups relied on simple, homemade fertilizer-based devices. Real explosives had become hard to come by, and the genuine material now possessed chemical tags and metallic coding that meant it could be traced to the original buyer.
Next to the boxes lay several automatic weapons wrapped in clear plastic, as if straight from the factory, and boxes of shells.
“Using traceable material like this, it’s …”
Nothing Andrea Petrakis did matched up to the template of twenty-first-century terrorism from the East.
“… strange,” he began to say, then stopped.
Something had moved in the darkness. Something small. Something close.
He felt Rosa’s body brush his, saw the shaking beam of her flashlight edge toward the black void in the corner. The sound was coming from there.
Her screams tore through the darkness, like the cries that might have come from the dead Etruscans shuffling in drugged rapture from the chamber outside into the bloody, flailing arms of the Blue Demon.
In the unforgiving light of her flashlight beam lay a body. A middle-aged man in jeans and a shirt that had once been white. His mouth was open, his eyes black and sightless, staring up at them. Rats ran over him, making rustling sounds as they scurried beneath the fabric. His dead hand clutched at his chest and what looked like a wound there.
Rosa’s cries were wordless, mindless, and the small, enclosed space made them sound so loud Nic feared the walls might cave in. She dropped her flashlight, sobbing. Costa took her arm, coaxed her back into the first chamber, pushed her to the stairs, helped her up, one foothold at a time, listening as her choking sobs began to subside.
It seemed to take forever to climb the rickety wooden steps. When they reached the top, he could see that evening had arrived, a bright, clear Mediterranean night, lit by stars. Rosa’s cheeks were stained with tears. But she had control of herself again, and there was a glimmer of shame in her intelligent, pretty face that told him she wished he’d never seen her this way.
“We need to call Falcone,” he told her, and stepped outside. “Mirko?”
There was no one there. He took two more steps toward where the car ought to be. Then something pounced on him, and for an instant he wondered whether he’d met the Blue Demon itself. Costa found himself on the ground trying to defend himself from a flurry of vicious and furious punches. Something dragged the weapon from his shoulder holster. As he lay, aching on the hard earth, arm in front of his face, trying to make sense of this, his head turned and he saw Rosa next to him, hand to her mouth, where a faint trickle of blood had emerged.
A dark, foreign-looking individual was kneeling over her, his hand drawn back, recoiling from a punch. As Costa watched, he snatched the gun from the young officer’s holster, cast i
t to one side, and then, for no reason whatsoever, struck her across the face with the back of his hand, hard.
Costa stared up at the man who’d brought him to the ground. Behind stood a woman whose expression seemed much like those of the long-dead Etruscans he’d just seen on the walls of the tomb below. Confused. Frightened. Expectant.
“God punishes the curious,” the figure above him said, pointing a pistol straight into Costa’s face.
31
Teresa Lupo gave Peroni the look. The one that said, Only you could pick a place like this for meeting the mob.
He’d taken her and Falcone to an intimate and rather expensive-looking restaurant called Charly’s Saucière only a few doors away from their apartment, on the same road, near the Lateran piazza. They were the only customers in an elegant dining room, depopulated, the elderly waiter told them, by the crisis in the city. He looked decidedly disappointed when Falcone ordered a single bottle of mineral water for the three of them.
Ten minutes later a dapper middle-aged man in a dark suit arrived. He gave no name, and didn’t ask theirs, but immediately ordered a glass of Barolo and a plate of foie gras with truffles as if he were a regular. He looked like a well-paid accountant or lawyer, though Teresa couldn’t help notice the missing two fingers on his left hand.
The visitor stared at Peroni as if she and the lean inspector next to her didn’t exist.
“We’re here to talk history? In company?”
“I’m training a new assistant,” Peroni replied, and Teresa only just stopped herself kicking his shins under the table. “You OK with that?”
“And him?”
“Management,” Falcone said simply. “I’m just here to pay the bill.”
“Good.”
The stranger watched the antipasti arrive. When the waiter was gone, he picked up a piece of fat goose liver with his fingers and shoved some into his mouth. Appearances could be deceptive. The suit, the shirt, the red silk tie … the immaculate black hair, dyed, and the mustache trimmed to perfection … Whoever this hood was, he’d spent a lot of money on his appearance. But he still couldn’t get rid of the peasant in him, not entirely.
“This conversation don’t exist,” the man announced. “Never happened. You not eating? Onion soup’s good. Snails. Steak tartare.” He tried a little more foie gras. “I’ll go for the steak. Come on. It’s not polite to eat alone.”
Peroni shook his head. “We lost our appetites somewhere along the way. It was that kind of day.”
The man glared at him, called over the waiter, placed his order, then waited until they were alone again.
“Shame. And once this is done, we’re even?”
Falcone didn’t even blink. Teresa looked at Peroni and the man and asked, “Dare I ask what kind of favor we’re repaying here?”
They didn’t respond. They didn’t even look at her, which was an answer in itself.
“Twenty years ago,” Peroni said. “A Greek couple called Petrakis. They were killed in Tarquinia. From what I gather, they’d been dealing dope. Maybe upsetting some people you know. I need to understand what happened and why.”
“Petrakis, Petrakis, Petrakis.” The stranger rapped his fingers on the table. “Greek, you say?”
“Toni …” Peroni sighed.
He did have a name and, judging by the flash in his eyes, he didn’t like to hear it out loud.
“We don’t have time. This is important.” Peroni nodded at the door.
“You know what’s going on out there.”
“Nothing’s going on. Thanks to you people, mainly. And the Carabinieri. Those idiots you got wandering around looking like they’re in a movie or something. Who are you kidding?”
“A politician and his driver have been murdered,” Teresa pointed out. “We’re lucky someone didn’t die at the Trevi Fountain today. It may just be the beginning.”
Toni stopped eating for a moment, furled his heavy black eyebrows, and asked, “Wait. Are you trying to tell me these two things are linked? Some Greek bums who got what was coming to them years ago. And this?”
“I assume you read,” Teresa snapped. “What’s going on now is the work of Andrea Petrakis. The son of the couple who got murdered. We’d assumed, at least some of us, that he was responsible for that, and a lot else besides. Now …”
“Now what?” Toni wondered.
“Now we’re not so sure.”
He sniffed the wine, making out he was some kind of connoisseur. “Greeks. What kind of kid would kill his parents? Never get that in Italy.”
Actually, Teresa thought, there were at least four cases she could name in which Roman offspring had murdered one or more parents.
“Is that what happened here?” Falcone asked.
Toni shrugged.
Peroni leaned over the table and slid the plate away. The hungry mobster held his knife and fork over the empty space. He looked hurt.
“We think what’s going on now has to do with what went on then,” Peroni repeated very slowly, very patiently. “We think it might get worse unless we can do something to stop it. To achieve that, we need to understand what happened. This is nothing to do with your business, Toni. It’s about people. Ordinary people. We need to bring it to an end. Quickly. With no one else dead.” He watched the man opposite, whose knife and fork stayed in the air. “Or do you like seeing Rome this way?”
The cutlery went down. Outrage flared in Toni’s dark, glassy eyes.
“Do not insult me, Peroni. I grew up on these streets. This is my city. More than yours.”
“Then help us.”
“With what?”
“The Petrakises,” Teresa answered quietly, wishing Falcone would do something, say something, instead of just watching this overdressed creep behave like a jerk. “Who killed them? And why?”
The plate with the half-finished foie gras went back over to his side of the table.
“You sure know how to ruin a guy’s appetite.”
Peroni swore and got to his feet. “Let’s go,” the big man told Falcone. “I was an idiot. I thought these scum still had an ounce of decency in them.”
“Hey! Hey!” Toni yelled. “That’s just plain offensive.”
There was a commotion from out back. A howl, as if someone were in pain. Then the old waiter shuffled out, his hands to his gray face, babbling about something on the TV.
Peroni strode through into the kitchen and watched what was happening. After a few seconds he went back into the dining room and called the others through.
They watched for only a minute or two. It was enough. The TV stations had found fresh footage of the outrage at the Trevi Fountain. It came from the cell phones of some of those who’d been around at the time. These shots were clearer than anything they’d seen before, much more vivid than the shaky video the Blue Demon had posted on the Web. It looked as if somehow the fountain itself had burst a blood vessel, soaking everyone nearby in gore. As if Rome herself were bleeding profusely into the street. People were screaming. A few were hurt, huddled on the ground, covered in dust and rubble, clutching shattered limbs.
Falcone turned to the mob man and asked, “Are you really going to walk away from all this? And feel nothing?”
Toni grunted something wordless.
“Or are we back in the Years of Lead?” Falcone asked. “Where the mob plants bombs the moment any rotten politician stuffs money in your pockets?”
The man in the flashy suit shook his head, reached out, took a couple of stems of asparagus from a serving dish in the kitchen, and stuffed them in his mouth.
Without another word he went back to the table and picked up his glass.
“These are not ordinary times, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Teresa said, following him. “If we weren’t desperate …”
“She’s good,” Toni told Peroni. “The lady’s melting my heart.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Teresa wanted to scream.
“You ever see anything like that?” T
oni interrupted. “Who could do that kind of thing? Why?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” she snapped.
He looked at her, and for the first time seemed interested. “You really think these dead Greeks might help?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Peroni replied patiently.
“Huh! You know what channel conflict is?”
“Marketing bullshit,” Teresa responded.
Toni shook his head. His hair moved oddly. She wondered if it was a rug. He picked up his fork and started eating again.
“No. It is not. Imagine you’ve been selling something, say”—he played with his wineglass—“some decent Barolo. You’ve been selling it for years. Spending time developing distribution, marketing. Establishing demand.”
Falcone poured himself another glass of water and raised it in a sarcastic salute.
“I’ll ignore that, Mr. Inspector. You buy it from the people you always did. Pay a good price too. Then one day you go out to sell some more and they’re there. The winemakers. The ones who took your money in the first place. They’ve opened up shop in your street, selling the thing you already bought from them. Selling it cheap. Saying, ‘Don’t buy from those old guys anymore. They’re yesterday. Buy from us.’ What’s a businessman going to do?”
They waited. He waved to the waiter, who came out with the steak tartare. The man looked as if he’d been crying.
“I’ll tell you,” Toni went on. “Hypothetically. First, you sit down and talk to them. You try to reason with them. You explain that this has been a good business for everyone. We’ve all made money. We never had no fallings-out. So why not keep it that way? We can cut a deal. Manage the margins a little, maybe. Act like decent human beings, the way grown-ups do—”
“This was dope, hard drugs. Not Barolo,” Teresa interjected.
“Wasn’t nothing, it being hypothetical and all. Then, if the talking doesn’t work, you get a little more direct. You tell them how it’s going to be.”
He looked idly at the dessert menu, screwed up his face, and said, “Nah.”
“And when that doesn’t work?” she pressed.