The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “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.”

  Peroni’s fork halted halfway to his mouth. “Do we need to know this?” he moaned.

  “Of course,” she insisted. “We’re meant to. Someone doesn’t inflict an injury on a dead man without a reason.”

  They stared at her.

  “A dead man?” Costa asked.

  “It was all theater. Batisti was killed by a bullet through the back of the head. Then they butchered him in a very specific way to make it look like haruspicy.” She pointed to the photo. “I can’t think of any other explanation. Why else would you partially remove a man’s liver and run a knife over it to make a pattern based on some ancient form of divination? There was an egg in a saucer on the table too. That was another Etruscan form of fortune-telling.”

  “Why on earth …?” Falcone began.

  “I told you. It was a message,” Teresa interrupted. “A positive ID for our benefit. Like that poster of the Blue Demon on the wall. Like the Roman numerals. It was Andrea Petrakis leaving his calling card. A boast, if you like. Petrakis wants to make sure we know it was him, and that he hasn’t forgotten his beloved Etruscans.”

  “And they were who exactly?” Peroni asked, bemused.

  “The people here before us. That was their tough luck. Rome wiped them out. An entire civilization. It was a long time ago. This was ancient history for Julius Caesar, for pity’s sake. But not for Andrea Petrakis. The Liver of Piacenza was a training tool for a haruspex, like a model skeleton for a modern physician. Historians like Petrakis drool over it because it’s one of the few examples of the Etruscan language. The only other of any substance is in Zagreb, on the remains of a mummy’s shroud. It was made out of linen that was covered in Etruscan script. Rites, rituals, prayers. They call it the Liber Linteus.”

  “Linteus means linen, doesn’t it?” Costa asked.

  “Who says a Latin education is wasted? Exactly. Andrea Petrakis would know all about this. The theory that went around after the Blue Demon murdered the Frasca couple was that Petrakis regarded himself as the leader of some kind of nationalist liberation movement. A lunatic looking for a revival of the Etruscan nation, who were, like him, originally Greek. Before Rome came along, the Etruscans controlled most of Italy, from the Po in the north as far as Salento in the south. The Liber Linteus is the only book of theirs that survives. The Romans burned the rest. If you think of yourself as Etruscan, you can understand why you might feel a little oppressed. I guess.”

  The pizzas arrived and Peroni asked, “Does the fact we’re talking history mean that the liver part is done with?”

  “Pretty much,” she replied, nodding. “Petrakis was a junior professor in Etruscan studies at an age when most kids would still be working on a postgrad degree. A world-class obsessive. Maybe, in his own crazy head, it makes sense to kill people like this.”

  Costa shook his head. “I don’t see it. He’s an intelligent man. Who’d believe in a separatist movement based around a civilization that was destroyed more than two thousand years ago?”

  “You can never apply logic to terrorism,” Falcone suggested.

  “I’m not sure about that,” Costa insisted. “This man was capable enough to escape from Italy, then hide away in Afghanistan for two decades. To deal with weapons. Money. Why would he take to pretending to read the future through butchering another human being, the way some primitive tribe did?”

  Teresa Lupo frowned at him with the disappointed expression of a teacher failed by a bright pupil. Now that she and Peroni had settled into a relationship that seemed more close, and happy, than many marriages, she was beginning to resemble the big man. The same love of food was visible in their stout, healthy frames, and a similarly skeptical approach to the world in their pale, engaged faces.

  “He didn’t,” she told him. “First, the Etruscans didn’t indulge in human sacrifice. They would have been horrified by the very idea. Their priests slaughtered animals, not men.”

  She skimmed her fingers over the phone and brought up new photos. Costa stared at pastoral scenes of dancing and celebrations, tall, elegant women, bearded, handsome men. Then more, these photos vividly sexual in nature.

  “The Estruscans weren’t brutal primitives just emerging from the Iron Age, either. More like colonizing Greek hippies. The Romans thought them degenerate and debauched. Uncontrollable hedonists who did what they wanted, when they wanted, to anyone they chose.”

  “And then?” Peroni asked, interested now that the conversation had moved on.

  “Then along came Rome. The Estruscans got assimilated. We beat them at war, looked at their culture, adopted what we liked, and destroyed the rest. The Etruscans were the victims of what we think of as civilization. Organized society, materialism, greed, pursued by a single-minded and fierce warlike state. Us. The Romans marched north and eradicated their language, their customs … everything. It says here that sophisticated ancient Romans were bemoaning the death of Etruscan culture as early as the first century A.D. They looked on it as a lost golden age, a kind of paradise, one they’d destroyed themselves.”

  Peroni put down his knife and fork. “That boy. The one we think killed Batisti …”

  “Batisti was shot,” Falcone reminded him.

  “Fine, fine.” Peroni’s large, bloodless face contorted in puzzlement. “The boy was dressed up as if he was in some kind of ceremony. That knife he had. The blood on him. Maybe he believed he was the Blue Demon. Whatever that was.”

  “A figure from Etruscan mythology,” Teresa interjected. More taps at the phone, yet another set of photos, one of them recognizable from the briefing in the Quirinale. “There are plenty of their burial sites north of here, near Viterbo, Grosseto, Tarquinia, in the Maremma. The early ones depict a paradise that’s almost Christian. A happy afterlife, parents meeting with their children. Our idea of Heaven. Then this.”

  She brought up the most vivid of the pictures: the long-bearded blue face, the eyes that burned, fangs dripping blood.…

  “I know that face,” Peroni said.

  “We all do, Gianni. It’s Satan. The bringer of damnation. Before the Blue Demon came along, the Etruscans inhabited a world that was either good or nothing. After this charming gentleman turned up, the place possessed evil. Someone had devoured the apple or opened Pandora’s box. Or perhaps he was just a gift the Romans brought to make all those pleasure-loving Etruscans feel the weigh
t of human guilt. The Devil was in the room and he wasn’t going to leave. If you look at the wall paintings, you get the picture. The Blue Demon stands between the living and Paradise. He decides who gets to live happily ever after, and who goes into a new place he’s invented. Somewhere called Hell. Good name for a terrorist group, don’t you think? Or its leader. No one was ever sure which it was supposed to be. There were only four in the cell anyway, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it didn’t matter.”

  “I remember that case,” Peroni said miserably. “I was a young agente. It was all so … inexplicable. A decent family destroyed. Those kids in Tarquinia too. And all for what?”

  “Still,” Falcone declared, “it’s not our business, is it?” He picked up a piece of ham in his fingers and stared at the others. There was some kind of challenge in his expression. “You heard Luca Palombo. We need to think about traffic. Crowds. Public relations.”

  The lines of command had been made crystal clear on their return, in a series of further communications between the control room in the Quirinale Palace and the Questura. The investigation into the death of Giovanni Batisti would be the responsibility of the Carabinieri and the secret-service team assembled around the man from the Ministry of the Interior. The state police would focus on security for the coming summit, ensuring that the strict limitations on traffic and pedestrian movement in the street would be made clear to the public and maintained throughout.

  “Police work is our business,” Costa grumbled. “If I wanted to be a security guard …”

  Falcone called for the waiter and asked for some more water. The carafe came, he waited for the man to go back down the stairs, then he poured himself a glass and raised it.

  “I’m very glad we didn’t lose any friends today,” he said. “Let’s drink to that.”

  “An Etruscan toast,” Teresa observed, watching him. “We all lose friends in the end.”

  “Really? You have a feel for these things, you know. And no evidence to look at, no forensic leads to work upon.”

  “Stinking body snatchers …” she hissed.

  He put down his glass and smiled at her. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t spend a day out of the office tomorrow. Go to the Villa Giulia. Ask a few questions about Andrea Petrakis and what happened there twenty years ago. The Frascas were that boy’s parents. It would be curious if the son murdered Giovanni Batisti in the same way Andrea Petrakis dealt with his own mother and father. Symmetrical.” The smile disappeared. “The older I get, the more I hate symmetry. It’s so … unnatural.”

  “Leo,” Peroni scolded him. “That’s police work.”

  “The Villa Giulia is a museum. Anyone can go there and ask as many questions as they like.”

  “It’s police work, and you know it. We’re not supposed to be involved.”

  “That’s not entirely correct,” Falcone responded, staring at the table.

  “I knew there was a reason you invited us out for a meal. Is this on expenses?”

  “Certainly not. I’m paying. We’re merely being”—an expansive wave of his long arm—“released from conventional duties for the duration.”

  “On whose orders?” Costa asked.

  “Esposito’s, as far as the Questura’s concerned.”

  Some ideas were starting to clear in Costa’s head. “This is Dario Sordi’s doing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not answering that question,” the inspector replied. “We have an office set aside. Don’t bother reporting to work tomorrow. As far as they’re concerned, we’re on a training course. All four of us. Along with Teresa’s deputy and your young officers. Prabakaran and Oliva.”

  He wrote down an address twice on the napkin, ripped it in half, and passed over the pieces. “That makes seven in all, with an eighth, who’ll join us tomorrow.”

  “The Via di San Giovanni in Laterano,” Peroni murmured, reading Falcone’s scribble. “I know this place. It’s that apartment in the old monastery, isn’t it? The safe house?”

  “It’s police property that is currently going unused. Seems a shame to waste it. We will have facilities. Whatever we require.”

  Peroni picked at his pizza in silence.

  Teresa looked mildly excited. “And I’m allowed into this monastery?”

  “Very much so.”

  “In order to do what, exactly?” Costa asked.

  “Whatever we like. Let’s sleep on it. Things will be clearer in the morning. Without files, or evidence, or—”

  “We’re in the middle of a turf war between Dario Sordi and that devil Campagnolo,” Peroni said, interrupting. “I’d stake money on the angels losing this one, Leo. Don’t put anyone else’s neck on the line.”

  The lean inspector stroked his beard and stayed silent.

  “There were numbers on the wall,” Costa said. “Roman numerals. Beneath the poster of the Blue Demon.”

  “Oh, yes,” Teresa remembered. “It seems to me that Petrakis is crazy in the highly intelligent and complicated way only an educated man can be. He adores games and codes and riddles, and the opportunity to show off his erudition. This is the same key as with the dead Frasca couple. Different numbers, though. III. I. CCLXIII. Three. One. Two hundred and sixty-three.”

  Peroni looked at the two of them and shrugged.

  “Shakespeare?” Costa suggested.

  “Congratulations,” Teresa said, beaming. “It’s the same schema. Act, scene, line. From Julius Caesar.” They waited. She watched them as she spoke:

  “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

  Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.”

  Falcone pushed back his glass and said, “San Giovanni in Laterano. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock.”

  12

  THEY WERE ALREADY IN THE DRIVE OF THE FARMHOUSE off the Via Appia Antica. The president, two bodyguards, and Capitano Fabio Ranieri of the Corazzieri. Costa had checked out the regiment with Peroni. As Sordi said, they were formally under the control of the Carabinieri, though with effective autonomy. No one in the Questura had much experience in dealing with the Quirinale’s equivalent of the Swiss Guards. They were regarded as dedicated soldiers committed to a single duty, the protection of the head of state. For this reason their presence beyond the palace was limited, without the contacts—official and informal—that took place in the occasionally uneasy relationship between the Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri.

  Ranieri was out of the car first as Costa arrived. The officer was a massive man around Peroni’s age, taller than Dario Sordi himself, broad-shouldered in a black suit, with close-cropped dark hair and alert, searching eyes.

  “Capitano …” Costa began.

  “This isn’t a formal visit,” the Corazzieri captain interjected. “Call me Ranieri. The president does not wish news of your meeting to become public knowledge. I expect—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Sordi said, patting the man on the back. “Nic—Ranieri. Ranieri—Nic. Or Costa, if you prefer. For myself, I cannot think of him as a surname, but then …” He stopped beneath the porch light and gazed at the low stone villa that had been the Costa family home for almost forty years. “… I have memories.”

  He pointed to the long field leading back to the road. “I helped your father plant those grapes. Before you were born, Nic. It was backbreaking work, for which I was repaid with terrible wine. Did it get any better over the years?”

  “Not much.”

  “I thought that might be so.” He held up a bottle. “From the Quirinale cellars. Brunello. A glass now? Or would you prefer to keep it as a gift?”

  “Neither,” Costa said, and opened the door.

  Sordi sighed. “Then I shall take a drop alone. Let’s go out to the patio,” the president suggested. “These men have work to do.”

  When they reached the old wooden table, he handed Costa a small cell phone.

  “If you need me, call Ranieri using this thing. Do not use any landline or cell, personal or police.” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I must sound pa
ranoid to you. But I would not assume an indirect conversation through any other medium is secure. Campagnolo is beside himself with rage. He has many friends in the security services. We must be prudent.”

  This was not what Costa wished to hear.

  “I can’t get involved in some vendetta between you and the prime minister.”

  Sordi eyed him, half-amused. “You really think that’s what this is about? Personalities?”

  “I don’t know. But …”

  “Ugo Campagnolo is a highly flawed politician who feels, with some justification, that he’s been sidelined. I make no apologies for that. He should never have invited the summit to the heart of Rome in the first place. I cannot allow the man to take responsibility for the mess he’s created. He’s too keen to shake hands with the mighty to see the true picture, the genuine threat we face. I have a duty and I will fulfill it. As far as the main issue here—the Blue Demon—he’s a minor nuisance, nothing more. I would like him to remain that way.”

  There was a noise from behind. Ranieri and his men were in the house.

  “They’re looking for bugs,” Sordi explained. “Purely a precaution.”

  “Bugs?” Costa asked, astonished.

  “Bugs,” the president of Italy repeated, then pulled a corkscrew out of his jacket pocket and began to tug at the dusty bottle of Brunello. “Now, fetch a couple of glasses.”

  Costa went back into the house. Ranieri’s men were wandering around the living room, headphones on, some kind of electronic equipment in their hands.

  When he returned, Sordi had a cigarette in his mouth. He raised the bottle to the harsh outdoor lights, three bare bulbs, an ugly feature that Costa’s late wife, Emily, had nagged him to fix.

  “This should have been opened hours ago. I’m wasting the state’s wine collection. Don’t tell.”

  He looked at the glasses. Costa’s was already filled with orange juice.

  “Oh, well,” the president sighed, and served himself an immodest measure. “I haven’t been here in a while. Did you throw out your father’s books?”