The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

Silvio Di Capua had sent out for a change of clothes. Costa tossed him the SIM card from the phone, then he and Rosa went to sleep for a few hours, at Falcone’s insistence. When he got up, Silvio, Teresa, and Elizabeth Murray were already around the computer, chattering and pointing at the screen. Falcone was in the kitchen. Commissario Esposito was there with him, talking quietly as the two men sipped coffees. It could have been any ordinary surveillance scene, were it not for the state of the city outside.

  Rosa came in, fresh from the bathroom, her hair still wet and wrapped in a towel. She looked older than a day before, Costa thought. There were signs of a new, unwanted wisdom and dark shadows beneath her eyes. He recalled the journey to the Maremma, Mirko Oliva amusing them all with his stories of a wild childhood on Monte Argentario, raising a rare sparkle in her serious face. He had wondered whether there might, one day, be something between the two young officers. Hoped so, if he were honest. She’d never had a relationship—not that anyone in the Questura knew of, at least, and it was a place with few secrets. Rosa Prabakaran deserved a little happiness in her life. The years she’d spent with the police had been far from easy.

  “Take a look at this,” Teresa said.

  Something popped out of the printer in front of her. He picked up the page and shared it with Rosa. It was a familiar item: a police report, this one dated from five years before. The name of Stefan Kyriakis sat at the top. The dead man he’d stumbled upon in the tomb of the Blue Demon was pictured in a standard Questura mug shot. With a rough mustache and an unpleasant, aggressive scowl, he wasn’t a pretty sight. The charges were ugly too: smuggling weapons from Corsica into Italy through the main port of Monte Argentario. Six pallets of automatic rifles, with accompanying ammunition.

  “Porto San to Stefano,” Costa said. “That’s a fifteen-minute drive from Porto Ercole. It keeps coming back to the Maremma, doesn’t it?”

  “What happened to him?” Commissario Esposito asked. He and Falcone had joined them silently. For once they didn’t look at loggerheads.

  “He was charged with arms smuggling and beating up a couple of the officers who apprehended him,” Silvio Di Capua responded. “Never came to court. No reason given. The man doesn’t appear in our records ever again.”

  The commissario scratched his head and stared at Falcone, as if looking for help. He was in full uniform. His face was gray and tired. It must have been a long night for everyone.

  “So?” Esposito asked. “What about this phone lead you have?”

  “A SIM card?” Silvio Di Capua said. “That’s a lead?”

  “You can find out who he called,” Costa began.

  “It’s a SIM card, Nic. The phone logs the calls. Not the card. All that keeps is the network, the number, and any texts. Of which there are none, by the way.”

  Teresa gave him a filthy look. “We must be able to find out something.”

  “I’ve passed on the details to a couple of phone geeks I know. If we’re lucky, we may be able to track down the account holder. That’s not strictly legal, by the way.…”

  “Don’t tell me this,” Esposito warned him. “Do you have no answers at all?”

  “We’ve got plenty of questions,” the inspector replied. “Why did those two carabinieri come up from Rome intent on killing those kids in the Petrakises’ shack?”

  “You don’t know that,” Esposito grumbled.

  Falcone shook his head. “What other explanation fits? They murdered those students, and the local officer who happened to be fool enough to go along with them. Nic and Rosa spoke to his brother. He saw the body in the morgue, even though they tried to keep it hidden. The bullet wound was in the back of the neck.”

  “It’s not just him,” Teresa intervened. “There was the girl. Nadia Ambrosini.” She hammered at the computer until she found what she wanted: the photograph of the dead students after the attack. “Nadia is holding the gun. The story is that she shot the other two, then killed herself when she realized they were going to be captured. Why? She was a bank manager’s daughter. The director of the Villa Giulia knew her. She was an airhead. Into dope and disco. Not theatrical suicides. Come on”—she waved at the photo on the screen, her face the very picture of disgust—“a weapon in the hand? Please. This is posed. An act. A riddle. Like Giovanni Batisti, shot dead, then butchered to make it look as if he’s some kind of human sacrifice. Like …”

  She picked up a piece of paper. It was a page from a police notepad, with Falcone’s writing and the Roman numerals. “Like these.” Teresa shook her head. “Twenty years ago Andrea Petrakis leaves a cryptic message about Julius Caesar after he’s butchered Renzo and Marie Frasca at the Villa Giulia. He does the same when he kills Batisti. And next to the body of this arms smuggler, who’s clearly just made some kind of delivery.” She stared at them. “Am I the only one thinking this?”

  It had occurred to Costa too.

  “It’s a message for the same person. Whoever was supposed to read it back then is still here to receive it now.”

  He turned to Esposito and said, “We need to know the schedule for the summit. At least that might help us understand what they’re planning to attack.”

  Commissario Esposito, a good man at heart, but a politician too, shook his head and stared at them glumly.

  “They could be planning to attack anything. Besides, do you think I’d get an answer?”

  “There are questions we need to put to some of those people,” Teresa told him.

  Esposito picked up his car keys. He wanted out of this conversation. “We’re in the middle of a national emergency. Palombo is one of the most senior security officials involved. You want me to call him in for an interview in the Questura?”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Rosa began. “Mirko—”

  The commissario glared at her. “Do not dare to use the death of an officer in that fashion, Agente. I answer to those above me, and they answer to Luca Palombo, who has already decreed that Oliva’s death is a matter for the Carabinieri. Find me some facts that will allow me to question that position and I will drag the bastards responsible in front of a magistrate myself.” Then, more quietly, “But a set of numbers scrawled on a wall, a host of suppositions—these do not represent evidence, and on a day like this I will not waste time trying to pretend they do.”

  He regarded each of them in turn. “Find me something of substance. If not, then Palombo will have his way and we will see what happens when this madness is over.”

  “They buried it once,” Teresa cut in. “They’ll bury it again.”

  “Some things are best buried,” Esposito replied. “It’s less painful that way.”

  Then he took a theatrical look at his watch and declared, “I have a meeting at the Ministry in thirty minutes. We have nothing else to discuss here. If you find something, come first to me.”

  They watched him leave.

  Peroni leaped in. “I can try Cattaneo in America again.…”

  “It’s four in the morning over there,” Teresa complained.

  “I don’t care,” the big man replied.

  Silvio Di Capua was printing out another page. “I’ve a name for the Frascas’ housekeeper. A woman. She must be elderly now. Lives in Testaccio. Is that any—”

  “I’ll do it,” Costa said, and realized Rosa was watching him. “We’ll do it.”

  “Good,” Falcone observed. “We’ll go through what we have and see if there’s something that’s been missed.”

  Peroni was on the phone already. Di Capua and Elizabeth Murray were printing out more pages from the computer.

  Costa went and located the clothes Silvio had got for them, cheap ones bought from a store around the corner, to save time and avoid any security people Palombo might have placed on their homes. He had jeans and a T-shirt. When Rosa came out from her room, she had on a simple lime-green skirt, shorter than anything he’d ever seen her wear, and a skimpy halter top. Big shades too, and a white plastic handbag.

  She follo
wed him down the stairs. Outside, she glanced up and down the empty street and said, “We must look like the only two tourists left in Rome. Is this meant to be a disguise?”

  Probably, he thought. The address Peroni had found was near the Via Marmorata, a short drive away. Silvio had found them a scooter too, and a pair of fluorescent crash helmets.

  “Nic?”

  He watched her fasten the helmet. “What is it?”

  “I still don’t understand why we’re alive and Mirko’s dead.”

  “Perhaps we were lucky. Petrakis got distracted. Or careless.”

  “Careless?” she repeated, staring at him.

  “Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “We’re missing something, and you know it.”

  “We’re missing lots.”

  She watched him get on the scooter. “These people don’t know what’s true, what’s real anymore.”

  “We’re real,” Costa said, and brought the little machine to life.

  She climbed on behind him, holding his waist tightly as they rode out into the Via San Giovanni in Laterano.

  45

  “SIGNORA BARNES?”

  The carabiniere at the barrier barely glanced at her press ID card, with its new photo carefully inserted beneath the plastic.

  “Si?” Anna Ybarra said automatically as she stepped into the scanner arch erected to deal with the long line of media queuing for the brief press conference. She passed through without so much as a beep.

  “Grazie,” the officer said, and waved her on to join the snaking queue of bodies working their way onto the piazza and the rectangular space marked out for them in front of the palace.

  It was just as Andrea Petrakis had said. There were two ways in. The narrow Vicolo Mazzarino that led from the Via Nazionale, the route she’d taken. And, on the opposite side of the square, along the Via della Dataria, which led down the steep hill, toward the Trevi Fountain and the main shopping street of the Via Corso, the way she’d use to leave.

  She was wearing the clothes Petrakis had provided, an outfit waiting for her in the trailer: a thin wool pin-striped suit in charcoal gray. The kind of clothes a TV reporter might want for work. He was prepared. Had been prepared. And he’d briefed her too. Quickly, thoroughly, professionally, as they’d dressed that bright, clear morning, in a field where rowdy blackbirds were trumpeting another sunny day on the outskirts of Rome.

  The media event went the way he said. Five speeches, mostly in English, for the benefit of the international media. The first came from the Italian president, Sordi, an upright, distinguished-looking man with a pendulous, sad face and an air of gravity that was impossible to ignore. She had read about him on the little computer they provided in Afghanistan, discovered he had an interesting, intriguing past that was difficult to connect with the august, calm figure she saw on the podium outside the Quirinale Palace. Next came some politics from his own prime minister, the familiar theatrical figure she had seen so many times on the TV in Spain, younger, snappier, more lightweight, yet somehow more powerful.

  The British leader then spoke, since his country held the current presidency of the European Union, and afterwards the American, and finally the Russian, the only one who needed an interpreter.

  She stood there, mesmerized. All of these men talked of the same thing. Of their sorrow at happenings in Rome, their sympathy with the relatives of those who had lost their lives, the determination such acts instilled in them to fight the good fight, for as long as it was needed.

  Anna Ybarra never thought she would be so close to those who ran the world. Close up, even separated by a barrier and a small army of soldiers, police officers, and plainclothes security personnel, they looked quite ordinary as they began to sweat beneath the keen summer sun. They sounded sincere. They looked grave and stern and serious. There was conviction in the air. She could feel it, touch it, see it acknowledged by the nods of the reporters around her, whose questions, when they were allowed, seemed sanitized and predictable, organized in advance, tame invitations to an answer waiting to be delivered.

  It took no more than fifteen minutes. Then the leaders stood still, barely smiling, for the cameras. It was over, too quickly, before anyone had said anything that mattered.

  She found it impossible to dismiss from her head some of the things she had read about Dario Sordi. These mattered, yet not a single professional journalist around her had thought fit to raise them. Or perhaps they were simply too scared.

  Before she knew it, Anna Ybarra found herself pushing to the front of the crowd, a question rising in her head, one she had to voice, though she accepted it was not part of the plan, and that Andrea Petrakis, if they ever met again—and that she doubted somehow—might kill her for its utterance.

  “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

  They were turning to go back into the palace. It was a stupid thing to shout. There were so many presidents there at that moment, and she really only wanted to talk to one.

  “Presidente Sordi?”

  The tall, elderly figure on the podium turned, hesitating.

  Without thinking, she exclaimed, “Dígame!”

  He gazed in her direction. There was puzzlement in his eyes, and perhaps something else. Then he walked back to the microphone and asked, “Do I know you, signora?”

  “No, sir,” she shouted, heart beating quickly, her mind full of fear that she had gone too far. “Not at all.”

  “You have a question?”

  “I wondered …” The reporters around her were staring. She was out of line, asking something that was unexpected, unwanted. The security guards were closing ranks between the barrier and the figures outside the palace. There was so little time.

  Anna Ybarra held up her media badge for all to see and said, “Of all the men and women here, you alone know what it is like to be called a terrorist. You’ve killed men in the street for no other reason than their nationality. How is this different?”

  Dario Sordi gazed across the bright space between them and shrugged, an ordinary, humble gesture.

  “I killed soldiers in uniform, with rifles in their hands. Not ordinary men and women struggling to get by. It’s a small difference, though not an insignificant one, I think. This was many years ago, when we were a nation at war, occupied by the enemy, fighting for our own freedom.” He thought for a moment, then added, “For what it is worth, there is not a day goes by when I do not see the faces of the two human beings I murdered, do not remember the surprise I saw in their eyes. They did not expect their lives would come to an end at the hands of a child. As a fellow man I regret this constantly. As a former soldier”—his face grew longer—“I did my duty. But I repeat”—he waved a finger at her across the piazza—“that was in a time of combat, and this is not the case now, however much my colleagues here, with their so-called war on terror, may wish to disagree.”

  She wanted to ask something else, but the words refused to form.

  “Are you sure we’ve never spoken before?” Dario Sordi added, his old, gray eyes closing on her.

  “That’s not possible, sir,” she answered, and slunk to the back of the crowd, disappearing into the huddle of bodies already marching toward the exit, chanting into cell phones, talking to their newsrooms, in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and beyond. Some, she could hear, were starting to mention the comments she had elicited from Sordi, words that would never have been spoken if an interloper, an impostor, had not sought them.

  Petrakis had taken her through the next part, bit by bit, using a map of the city. It was easy to follow his instructions, leaving by the steps on the palace side of the square. She found the alley he’d told her about, narrow and shadowy, partway down the hill. It ran for a short distance, then there was a right fork into the Via della Panetteria. To her right ran the old palace stables, and after a little way the street named after them, the Via della Scuderie, running beneath the Quirinale walls to the Via del Traforo, with its tunnel beneath the palace, the sto
pping point for buses visiting the Trevi Fountain.

  Look for a stable door, he said, marked with a red paper circle, the kind a child might use at school.

  It was one of many similar entrances, halfway along the narrow street. She checked up and down the road to make sure no one was looking. Then she turned the worn brass circular handle on the door and walked through.

  The room beyond was vast and dark. Anna Ybarra took out the small flashlight he’d given her and found herself in what looked like a stable set into the barracks at the back of the Quirinale Palace: a bare stone chamber like the nave of some tiny country church, with a couple of saddles on the wall, and the brittle remains of an ancient carriage.

  In the corner, beneath a broken cartwheel, she found what she was looking for. In a cheap suitcase lay another change of clothes: a long, flowing evening dress, floor-length, cut low at the front, and a pearl necklace. By its side was a large instrument case. It contained a shiny baritone saxophone the color of gold. The name Yamaha was stamped on the bell.

  She took out the instrument, reached into its mouth, and removed the package hidden inside. Petrakis had briefed her on this too. It was the kind of weapon she could never have imagined until they took her to Afghanistan. Now she knew its name. Somehow his sources within the palace had provided a black Uzi Para Micro, a tiny machine pistol developed for Israeli special forces and counterterrorist units. The magazine was hidden in the accessory area of the case along with a slender shoulder stock. Petrakis, who had coached her through the task of learning about firearms, said it contained thirty-three shells. There would be no spares. The entire load of ammunition could be expended in under two seconds, if she wanted. This was a weapon for slaughter, not marksmanship.

  Anna Ybarra put on the evening dress, which fitted a little awkwardly around her strong shoulders. Then she cradled the Uzi, stock against her arm, practicing, trying to imagine what it would be like in the room he’d mentioned, the Salone dei Corazzieri. Standing on the platform with the musicians, pretending she was a last-minute replacement for someone who couldn’t show. Letting them play a few notes, then stepping off the stage, walking into the melee of dinner suits and glamorous dresses, wondering which way to arc the weapon in the single burst she’d be allowed.