by David Hewson
“Cute,” Rennick agreed. “So we have to go through this small talk. Fine. Didn’t Borromini commit suicide, if I remember right?”
“You know Rome well.”
“Well enough. Why am I here?”
“Did Palombo tell you what happened last night? Near Tarquinia?”
He nodded. The tall security-services officer looked gray and tired, as if he hadn’t slept much in a while. Miserable too.
“I’m sorry about your colleague. You shouldn’t have been there. You were told.”
“If I’d known one of my officers might die in front of my eyes …”
Rennick took his arm and led him into the fluid shadows of the columns to the left of the high altar. It felt as if they were inside the belly of a cold stone beast. There was no one else there, not even the usual church official.
In the half-light the American peered into his face and it occurred to Costa that, in different circumstances, he might enjoy getting to know this man. He seemed sincere and serious. The weight of the years had left its mark.
“Listen to me. These are difficult times.” Rennick spoke in a low, authoritative voice.
“I’d gathered that.”
“No. You haven’t. Not at all. In situations like this, smart people do as they’re told. Nothing more. Nothing less. No improvisation. No peeking. This is not the moment to be inquisitive, my friend. I know you’re close to Dario Sordi. Maybe he’s put some ideas in your head. Dismiss them, now. For your own sake and that of your colleagues. We’re in control here, as much as we can be. Anything you try on the side just muddies the waters, and that’s not helpful. That’s what leads to people getting hurt.”
“Did Giovanni Batisti confide in you?” Costa asked straight out.
Rennick’s narrow eyes screwed up in puzzlement. “What?”
“Did Batisti tell you that Sordi never believed Andrea Petrakis was behind the Blue Demon? That it was the creation of someone else, someone who never left for Afghanistan or anywhere? Someone who stayed behind: invisible, silent, waiting, the way Gladio operatives were supposed to? Maybe in Rome or somewhere else, a city, a job in which a man might hide out in the plain light of day.” He paused. “America, say.”
Costa touched Rennick’s arm and leaned in to speak, glancing at the door, nodding to the distant figure he saw there.
“Did you create the Blue Demon, Signor Rennick?”
The man closed his eyes for a moment as if the question pained him. “The Blue Demon’s a myth. A character from mythology. Andrea Petrakis used the name to cover his tracks, to make himself appear more than the simple bloody murderer he is. Don’t think the world’s more complicated than it is. And stay out of our way. In a couple of days everything will be normal. I guarantee it.”
“‘We shall be called purgers, not murderers,’” Costa recited, looking into his eyes, wondering what he saw there.
“What?”
“A line from Shakespeare. You mentioned it in the briefing with the president. I was impressed. Not many men can quote something as obscure as that. A specific play too, Julius Caesar, so easily …”
“You shouldn’t spend all your time in the company of cops.”
Costa pulled out a sheet of paper from his pocket. “This was scratched on the wall of the tomb in Tarquinia. Next to the corpse of a man called Stefan Kyriakis. Did you know him?”
“Never heard of the man.”
Rennick’s eyes wouldn’t leave the paper and the numbers there: XII. II. I. CLXXIII.
“Twelve, two, one, a hundred and seventy-three,” Costa said. “We thought it was Shakespeare too. But …” He shrugged. “There are too many numbers.” He watched Rennick’s face. “What does it mean?”
“I haven’t a clue. You’ve got to excuse me.…”
“Palombo didn’t tell you about these numbers, did he?”
“I … don’t have time for this,” Rennick said, shaking his head.
“Who did he tell?”
Rennick had turned to leave. Costa put a hand on his arm.
“One last question, sir. Why did Stefan Kyriakis, an arms dealer who supplied weapons to Andrea Petrakis, possess your phone number?”
“What?” Rennick murmured. “What?”
“How do you think I reached you? We have the SIM from his phone. Your number is on it. We have evidence that links you to him, directly. How is that possible, sir?”
The American remained immobile, unable to speak.
From the door opposite, open to the street, a woman was striding across the floor, her eyes on the tall figure standing in the light beneath Borromini’s dome. There was a stream of Roman epithets emerging from her mouth, the volume rising as she approached.
Rennick looked trained for these situations and was already reaching for his weapon. Costa leaped on the man, wrenching the pistol from his grasp, sending it rattling across the marble floor.
“Bastard!” Letizia Russo yelled, then raced up and slapped him hard around the face. “Bastard!”
The American didn’t say anything. For a moment he tried to laugh it off, then she slapped him again.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, signora,” Rennick muttered in perfect Italian.
“Bastard! I cried for you. For your wife. For that child I used to hug in my arms. They said you were dead. Murdered. And Danny gone …”
Falcone was leading the rest of them through the door: Peroni, Teresa, Rosa. They stood in front of Rennick, blocking the way. Costa relaxed his grip. The American was going nowhere.
“Signora Russo?” Falcone said.
The old woman stood erect and furious in front of the man.
“Si?”
“Do you recognize this man? If so, will you identify him for us, please?”
“Renzo Frasca!”
“Frasca died twenty years ago …” the American began.
“I worked for you!” she yelled. “I did your laundry. I changed your child’s diapers when you were too lazy to do it yourself.”
Rennick glared at the inspector. “Listen, I don’t have time for this nonsense and neither do you. The Frasca case is dead. There’s a headstone over a grave in Washington that bears their names. The DNA on that kid killed in the Via Rasella the other night—”
“You made up that report!” Teresa cried. “Give me the body. Let me run my own tests.”
He shook his head and murmured, “I can’t do that right now.”
Peroni took a photograph from his pocket and gave it to Letizia Russo. Costa caught a glance: a handsome young man with long blond hair.
“I have some good news, signora. This is what Danny looks like now. We got pictures from his Web page. Daniel Rennick is a student at Harvard. Bright kid, it seems. His subject is English literature, just as it was for his father.” The big agente leaned toward the American. “I don’t imagine he remembers a thing about Italy, does he? Just three years old when you switched identities. You can change a lot about yourself. But not a kid’s first name. Not if everyone called him Danny from the start.”
The Russo woman clung to the photograph, took one more look, then put it in her bag.
“Bastard!” she murmured, her eyes filling with tears, then turned on her heel and walked outside into the bright day.
“I’m an officer of the U.S. government, with diplomatic immunity,” the man they still knew as Rennick insisted. “I’ve got things to take care of today that you people can’t even begin to imagine. I am walking out of here now.…”
Costa grabbed his arms behind his back and slipped on the cuffs. Rennick began to howl with fury.
“Don’t make so much noise,” Falcone growled. “We can hold you on that phone number alone. Put him in the car and take him to the Questura.”
Peroni took hold of him and headed for the door.
“How long have we got?” Costa asked.
The inspector grimaced. “Palombo will hear the moment we get him in an interview room. Maybe before. If we
have an hour before they spring him, we’ll be lucky.” He glanced at Peroni shuffling the American out into the daylight. “Did he know what the message meant? The numbers?”
“He said he didn’t.”
“Was he lying?”
“I don’t think he even knew there was a number. Or that Giovanni Batisti was set up.” He frowned. “Either that or he’s a well-trained liar. An hour? Is that all?”
The nave of the tiny church went dark. Black-clad figures were swamping the doorway, blocking the light. They wore masks and bore automatic weapons. He’d no idea who they were: some special police unit, Carabinieri, military. Or something else altogether.
Luca Palombo strode through the mass of bodies, his face red with fury.
“Apparently not,” Falcone murmured.
49
Silvio di Capua sat at the computer desk staring at the numbers on the page, on the screen, and now etched deep inside his head too.
XII. II. I. CLXXIII.
“You’ll go mad if you look at that any longer,” Elizabeth Murray told him. “How much sleep have you had over the last twenty-four hours?”
“Probably more than you.”
She patted the laptop computer and grinned. “I’m still enthralled by these things. We never had toys like this in my day. You are so lucky.”
He wished he found her words cheering. “Teresa thinks we’re in danger of relying on this stuff too much. That one day the cops will sit back every time there’s a crime, look at us, and say, ‘Fetch the DNA, link the criminal records.’ Then go out to lunch. And if we don’t have an answer …”
There’d been a case not long before where all standard DNA techniques had been snatched from them, albeit briefly. It was not an experience he wanted to live through again.
“Data is data,” she observed. “It’s what you do with it that counts.”
Elizabeth was a little behind the game. She’d gone out for an hour that morning, to take a break, see an old friend, remember Rome, a city she’d lived in for twenty years, she said, and scarcely visited after retirement. She didn’t know about Peroni’s fruitless attempt to get more information out of Cattaneo in America.
The others had left by the time she returned. This seemed to surprise her. “Where’s everyone else gone?” she asked.
He thought of the way they’d bustled out with barely a word. “Some wild-goose chase, I guess. I was working on these numbers. Or trying to. Nic thought he might have something worthwhile.”
“To do with what?”
“Probably nothing. Guesswork. I deal in detail, not hypothesis. I don’t do all that faux cop stuff. I like looking at numbers, at facts, at words and pictures. Not”—this thought came from nowhere and he knew it ought to shock him—“at people.”
“People commit crimes, Silvio.”
“And they rarely get caught unless you come up with a case that’s based on the kind of facts people like me dig up. Evidence. Numbers …”
Numbers were solid, indisputable, unchanging, even if they were open to interpretation. XII. II. I. CLXXIII. Twelve, two, one, a hundred and seventy-three … or 1221173. There were any number of ways the figures scratched on the wall of the Blue Demon’s tomb might be read.
“Did they look hopeful?” Elizabeth asked.
“What?” he murmured, distracted.
“Falcone and the others. When they left?”
“I didn’t really notice.” Di Capua stared at the screen. “It can’t be Shakespeare, can it?”
He’d been through every play there was. The works were divided into acts, scenes, and lines. There was no fourth element, and nothing that could be interpreted as the number twelve. Even Julius Caesar ran to just five acts. So the initial idea that had struck him — using the first number for the act, and the final one for a particular word — hadn’t worked at all. He’d wasted two hours on that.
“A phone number?” she guessed.
“All we have is what Falcone scrawled down on a piece of paper in an underground tomb. We don’t know if there was punctuation between the numbers, spaces, anything else. Or if he got it down correctly in the first place. It would be easy to make mistakes.”
But eight digits — a phone number? He’d liked the idea, until he researched it.
“I can’t find any phone number system in Italy that fits that pattern. It could only be the number itself, anyway, without a country or city code. So that presumes that whoever got to read the message would know the location.”
He looked at her. She didn’t seem tired at all. Sitting on the office chair next to him, Elizabeth Murray looked bright and interested in her check country shirt and moleskin trousers, holding on to her walking stick like a shepherdess making an occasional visit to the city.
“Would Andrea Petrakis — who hasn’t, as far as we know, been in Italy for twenty years — assume that someone would have that kind of information?” he asked.
“Unlikely.”
“So it’s not a phone number. It’s not a reference to a Shakespeare play. It’s not”—he took a long swig of tepid coffee on the desk—“anything.”
“Roman numerals,” she said. “The classics …”
“Virgil, Homer, Tacitus, Suetonius. There’s nothing that breaks down into the right subdivisions. The Aeneid—yes, it has a twelfth book. But no acts, no scenes, just line numbers, and they won’t work. Tacitus — there are books and chapters and line numbers, but no scenes, and not enough books, either. Suetonius — at least there we’ve got something obvious. The book is called The Twelve Caesars. But the twelfth Caesar is Domitian, and where would he come in?”
He flicked up a hidden window on the screen, one of so many he’d lost count.
“Section twenty-one might fit.”
Di Capua read out from the translation.
“‘He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.’ And here, the following paragraph, ‘He was excessively lustful. His constant sexual intercourse he called bed-wrestling, as if it were a kind of exercise. It was reported that he depilated his concubines with his own hand and swam with common prostitutes.’”
The young pathologist sighed. “At least you have to say Ugo Campagnolo is conforming to type. But that’s as far as the connections go.”
“It’s a long time since I read The Twelve Caesars,” Elizabeth confessed. “What happened to Domitian?”
“Murdered by his own courtiers,” Di Capua told her. “Stabbed to death in his bedroom by a bunch of civil servants. You can see why Shakespeare never bothered with him.” He glanced at the screen. “Sounds as if he deserved it, though. Bloodthirsty bastard …”
“Weren’t they all? Let’s take this one step at a time. If these numbers are separate digits, why do you have to assume they all refer to the same thing?”
“Because …” he began. The answer was so stupid he couldn’t say it. Because that is the only way they would make sense to someone who doesn’t know the secret.
Anyone who had the key wouldn’t think that way. They could decode the answer easily, by splitting the different parts into some simple system they understood already.
“I’m an idiot,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “These don’t refer to just one thing. It’s more than that. So the question is …” He thought about this. Time was growing short. “What do we have if we treat these as separate numbers, not some contiguous code?” he mused.
Elizabeth Murray pulled up her chair and stared at the screen. Di Capua felt happy in the presence of this woman. She was intelligent, methodical.
Suddenly she picked up the paperback edition of the collected works of Shakespeare he’d bought at the bookstore around the corner and flicked through a few pages. Then she shook her head, patted his shoulder, and said, “I can’t help you here, Silvio. Let me call my friend. She’s a classical scholar. Let me talk to her over lunch.”
“Enjoy it,” he mutte
red, hammering the keyboard. “I’ll be a while.”
A question occurred to him. What kind of sentence would begin with a number?
“Elizabeth …” he began to ask.
He swiveled around in the desk chair, but she was gone.
50
It was impossible to guess the number of masked armed men crammed into the doorway of Borromini’s little church. Teresa Lupo was yelling. Falcone stood, unmoving, in front of Luca Palombo, the man from the Ministry of the Interior, Peroni and Rosa beside him. Rennick — Nic couldn’t think of him by any other name — was now secure in Costa’s grip, cuffed and not saying a word, listening to Palombo shout down the incandescent pathologist, then start to read the riot act.
Letizia Russo was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she’d encountered these anonymous figures with rifles and feared the worst. Perhaps Palombo had already taken custody of the one witness who could testify to the American’s true identity.
The security man’s lecture was brief and caustic. When he was done reminding them that they had no place being where they were, Palombo turned to Costa and ordered, “Now release him.”
Falcone remained stock-still in front of their prisoner and said, very calmly, “We have a witness who has identified Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. We have reason to believe he was involved in the murder of the Petrakis couple twenty years ago.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Rennick barked.
“We have evidence that he had knowledge of the Blue Demon tomb, where a colleague of ours was murdered last night,” Falcone persisted. “At the very least, we must take him in for questioning. It’s a matter of the law.”
“The law says he has a diplomatic passport,” Palombo shot back. “Along with that comes immunity.”
“It’s a passport issued under a false name. Sir,” Peroni snapped. “In my book that makes it invalid.”