The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  Machines, she thought. There were too many of them, and too few human beings. That was all the services seemed to rely on now. Computers and procedures. Rule books and protocols. It hadn’t been like this in the 1970s and 1980s. In those days, everything was more flexible, open to interpretation.

  A lot easier to hide too.

  That thought prompted her to go and check out Domenico Leone once more. Judging by the fierce look in the sniper’s eyes, he wasn’t getting any less livid as the hours went by. She pushed some more furniture against the door blocking the stairs from the floor below, then went back to her viewpoint at the edge of the roof.

  It was time for one more dry run. She spread-eagled her large body over the concrete, legs akimbo, and brought the firearm up to her right shoulder. The sniper’s rifle felt steady in her arms. She squinted through the telescopic sight, scanning the grounds of the Quirinale gardens, across flower beds, ornate classical fountains, stretches of lush green lawn, and dark patches of shrubbery.

  It was empty. She almost believed the palace was too. No one moved anywhere, not even in the windows.

  Another minute passed and then, against all custom and practice, she took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, sucking the smoke greedily.

  Not that she was supposed to. The doctor back home had told her that repeatedly. An annoying little man.

  Elizabeth Murray took a long, satisfying draw of the thing and blew a gray cloud out into the cooling evening air. Rome was just as beautiful as ever, she decided, watching the smoke disperse against a background of the palace roof and the city skyline beyond. It had been a mistake to leave.

  Something drew her attention to the expanse of green in front of her. With the cigarette still in her mouth, she bent and peered through the scope again, scanning the palace gardens.

  A tall, slightly stooped figure was walking the main path, a cup and plate held awkwardly in one hand, a book in the other.

  She knew where he was going. The scope ranged the flower beds and fountains again; it found the marker she’d already set for herself.

  It was a handsome old statue, somewhat weathered by decades out in the grubby Roman rain. But the wings on Hermes’s feet made good sighting points, and when she fiddled with the focus a little she could see the delicate stone feathers there, clear as day.

  62

  COSTA SLAMMED THE PHONE BACK INTO THE CRADLE. They were in Falcone’s office, trying to digest the warning from Teresa Lupo, trying to work out how to respond.

  The inspector stood up. “You say Sordi is in the garden around six-thirty?”

  “Usually. Same place. Creature of habit.”

  “Habits can kill,” Peroni grumbled. “We’ve still got half an hour or so. How about I check the outside? There has to be some kind of vantage point on those gardens. Someone might get on the roof.”

  “Check it out,” Falcone ordered. “Get two or three officers you can trust. Take a separate car. We’ll go straight to the Quirinale and see if we can argue our way in. Tell no one.”

  Minutes later, they were back in the Lancia, trying to squeeze the big sedan out of the tangle of police vehicles swamping the cobblestones of the Piazza di San Michele Arcangelo.

  There was a quick, sharp rap on the driver’s-side window.

  It was Signora Campitelli, the old woman who’d scolded the security men earlier. She seemed insistent, so much so that she was blocking the only way out.

  Costa wound down the glass. “Signora, can this wait? We’re in a hurry.”

  “Showed those bastards, didn’t we? No maschere a Roma!”

  Falcone was getting furious in the passenger seat, about to say something that might have persuaded her to stay where she was, out of nothing more than bloody-mindedness.

  “We did indeed,” Costa said hastily. “Excuse us, please. We have to go show them again.”

  “Hah!”

  Her stick rose triumphantly toward the soft evening sky. She stepped back, still shouting, dragging her shopping cart sufficiently to one side to allow the wide car to squeeze through.

  “May we now depart?” Falcone banged the blue light on the roof and activated the device.

  The klaxon’s shriek echoed off the high terraces of the centro storico. The Lancia crisscrossed the warren of narrow streets, finally screeching into the broader thoroughfare of the Corso, where the shoppers were now wandering down the middle of the road, starting to revisit stores that had been empty or closed for days. The Piazza Venezia was returning to its normal state of chaos. Workmen were already dismantling one of the high checkpoint towers that Palombo’s men had erected earlier in the week.

  It took little more than a minute to climb the Quirinale hill and abandon the car in the street next to the piazza.

  The bell of Il Torrino was finishing its mark of the hour, the sixth peal dying over the hill.

  There were two corazzieri in regal uniform on the gate, and a third in the pillar box. All looked as miserable as sin for some reason. Falcone marched up to the sentry in the cabin. Costa followed, ID card out. The inspector demanded to speak to Fabio Ranieri.

  “Not available,” the man said, and nothing more.

  “Ranieri is a friend of mine,” Costa added. “This is important. You must find him.”

  “Not … available …”

  “Then call the duty captain. I need to speak to him.”

  One of the others came over, sensing trouble.

  “Something wrong?” he asked, in a gruff northern voice.

  “We need to see the duty officer now—” Falcone began.

  “You can’t,” the corazziere in the box repeated. “That’s final. Come back tomorrow. Maybe by then someone can tell us what the hell’s going on here.…”

  Costa elbowed his way past the sentry and picked up the phone.

  “Cut that out!” the man yelled, slamming his fist hard on the handset. “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you know who’s boss around here now?”

  “Who?” Falcone asked.

  The officer nodded in the direction of the Ministry of the Interior. “Those gray-faced bastards. Not us. Not anymore.”

  “We’re state police officers,” Costa told him. “We’ve been investigating the Blue Demon on the personal orders of President Sordi. We now believe there will be an attempt on Sordi’s life, within the next half hour.”

  The three tall figures in silver breastplates looked at one another. One officer took off his helmet and said uneasily, “You’d better not be jerking us around.”

  “Andrea Petrakis is planning an attack within these walls,” Costa insisted. “Very soon. With help from someone on the inside. Someone let that woman in this afternoon, didn’t they? I don’t think it was one of the Corazzieri.”

  “No. I don’t think it was.” The officer stared at the oldest of the three. “Ranieri’s in custody somewhere and every last corazziere apart from us is sitting on their backside in the barracks till someone lets them out.”

  The higher-ranking officer didn’t look them in the eye when he said, “You heard our orders.”

  “Your orders are to guard the president, aren’t they?” Costa persisted, trying to push a button that might work. “Who’s doing that now?”

  “We are,” the talkative one said immediately. “Three of us. Plus a bunch of waiters and a few goons from the Ministry. It’s a tomb in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. That Palombo bastard has taken over Ranieri’s office as if he owns it. God knows who else is in the building. Except”—he thought for a moment—“some other corazziere I spotted wandering down in that direction a couple of minutes ago.”

  He turned to the senior officer again. “Something is wrong, and you know it.”

  “If you’re mistaken about this …” the senior corazziere told Costa.

  “Take us to Palombo now,” Falcone cut in. “Free Ranieri. We’ll bear the responsibility.”

  The senior officer didn’t even move.

  Then
the younger officer cursed softly. He stepped into the cabin and grabbed a set of keys.

  “For God’s sake. If he won’t do it, I will. Follow me.”

  63

  A GOOD BOOK, A CUP OF EARL GREY TEA, A PLATE OF English cookies. These familiar items seemed, to Dario Sordi, comforting signs of a world beginning to find some kind of equilibrium. The president sat in his usual shady spot in the deserted Quirinale garden, content, almost at ease.

  It was earlier than his usual time, but the palace was unusually empty save for a few servants. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes alone in his apartment making discreet phone calls to men and women who mattered. Politicians and judges, allies, the uncommitted, even an occasional foe. It was important they heard the truth about the Ybarra woman from him, and understood his insistence that she be dealt with inside the Italian judicial system, investigated by the police and no others.

  There would be arguments. There always were. This was the world of politics, and he was only the president—not, as Ugo Campagnolo constantly reminded the media, a politician elected by the masses. Nevertheless, Sordi felt, as he ended the final call, that he might win this particular battle. The Questura’s rapid decision to bring in the combative Giulia Amato as investigating magistrate had been a wise move. The woman was not the type to be diverted by a quiet threat from some party hack and the promise of preferment. Even with his growing ranks of supporters placed in the political hierarchy and the law enforcement agencies, Campagnolo would be hard-pressed to seize Anna Ybarra from the grip of the police and the magistrate.

  He found himself staring at the expressionless face of Hermes. The handsome young god always seemed distracted, a little fey, as he stretched down to tie the ribbon on his marble sandal.

  “Do you have any messages for me, I wonder?” Sordi asked aloud.

  There was silence, punctuated only by the distant rumble of a jet wheeling high overhead, something he hadn’t heard in a while.

  “Another Etruscan in our midst,” the president murmured, recalling a little of his school-days mythology. His native city had inherited the past, for good and bad. History always emerged like an orphan, anonymous, unclaimed, impossible to control. Like the Blue Demon itself. Alone now, able to think clearly for the first time in days, Sordi felt he could finally begin to understand a little of the original inspiration for that terrifying image on the subterranean tomb in the Maremma, and the effect it had on the impressionable Andrea Petrakis. For the doomed Etruscans—for Petrakis too—the Blue Demon was Rome, with her rapacious, insatiable hunger for domination, for territory and power, at any human cost. That ruthless greed, a burning desire to own and rule, was one more gift his ancestors had handed down to the modern Western world, alongside more noble ideals about law and charity and God. Which of them was now uppermost? Sordi didn’t wish to consider this question too closely. His answer might tally too easily with that of a confused and embittered individual like Andrea Petrakis. The Etruscans, with their worldly, hedonistic attitude to life, had invented for themselves a bright and fleeting paradise, one that had been stolen from them, then destroyed by the men from the south who brought guilt and responsibility, democracy and order, into an enclosed, interior society built on nothing more than a lust for the immediacy of existence.

  This endless argument was, in a sense, the very same squabble Sordi had pursued with Nic’s father, Marco, over the years—one that had, in the end, driven two dear friends apart. Should a human being choose the dull, dead round of pragmatism and responsibility over the brief and brilliant spark of individual satisfaction, the ecstasy of the moment? Was a life that spanned eight decades of duty and routine and service really more worthy than some briefer interlude that lit the sky with fireworks and then vanished, leaving the stage to others dazzled by the intensity of its departure?

  He waved the book in his hands at the mute statue. “If you could read, my friend, you’d know these choices are made for us. By nature, not intellect.” Sordi frowned. “They always have been. They always will be.”

  It was the visit to Marco’s son that had prompted him to pick up his own copy of Graves’s I, Claudius again. There’d been little time for reading of late. Besides, he knew the work so well that he was able to turn directly to the parts he loved most, skipping over the author’s occasional historical peregrinations.

  His bookmark stood at chapter 34, a few pages from the end. Gone was the flowery language and philosophy. This was a plain retelling of the climax of this first part of Claudius’s story. How a man regarded by most as a stammering, slobbering cripple—an idiot, worthy only of ridicule—could rise to the emperor’s throne, against his own most fervent wishes.

  Sordi wondered if he loved this story so much because, in some ways, it mirrored his own. Claudius was a republican, a believer in democracy, not the dictatorship of the imperial family. He’d spent years in the wilderness before being thrust into power by a quirk of fate, only to find that the demands of being head of state circumscribed and made impractical the very principles he held so dear as a powerless ordinary citizen.

  The president recalled the old copy he’d found in Marco Costa’s library, a gift to his former ally, a kind of apology. And the inscription.

  From Dario, the turncoat.

  Was this what he’d become? Through compromise and pragmatism, a traitor to his own beliefs?

  Claudius had come to feel that way toward the end of his life, when the intrigue around him reached a feverish intensity. Graves, basing his story for the most part on the account of the emperor’s reign given by Suetonius, had him murdered at the hands of his own wife, Agrippina, acting in concert with her son, Nero, the emperor’s chosen successor. The author’s fictional but all-too-realistic Claudius went to his fate with his eyes wide open, praying that his own end, and the accession of the monstrous tyrant Nero, would finally bring about what he had failed to achieve in his lifetime: the ruin of the tyrannical imperial family, the restoration of Rome to republican democracy.

  Politicians, much more than ordinary men and women, agonized long and hard over what they might leave behind after their deaths, perhaps because they realized only too well their failings in life. Claudius’s modern successors were little different. They too often came to count their legacies for the most part in blood. Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus spilled more than his fair share in his sixty-four years. Yet would Claudius have created such a lost and malevolent creature as Andrea Petrakis? Sordi was reminded once more of the old saw: What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. The constant battle between liberty and security, democracy and the need to safeguard a broken and imperfect state, seemed as real and as undecided now as it was when a frightened, uncertain cripple of the royal family cowered in an anteroom of Nero’s palace on the Palatine, another Roman hill, a short distance away across the Forum, two thousand years before.

  He opened the book and found the page, feeling both a little distracted and disturbed by these thoughts. The tale of Claudius’s conversion, from terrified bystander to reluctant emperor, was so amusingly written that he could read it again and again. But there was a prerequisite to its denouement. Before the new king could be crowned, the old one had to die.

  64

  THERE WERE BUILDINGS IN ROME THAT A WISE POLICE officer never asked about. The high, anonymous block at the back of the Quirinale was just such a one. There was no sign on the door, just a fancy high-tech entrance with a man in a dark uniform beyond the glass and a trickle of nondescript people going home for the evening.

  Spooks, Peroni thought. Another outpost of Luca Palombo’s Ministry of the Interior, this one with a roof terrace overlooking the palace gardens. A viewpoint that still had a dark figure at the corner, even though the emergency was supposed to be over. It was probably nothing.

  One small thing made him uncomfortable. Peroni had brought a pair of binoculars with him. He wasn’t able to see the face of the sniper on the roof, only the lon
g barrel of a rifle and a pair of strong arms on the perimeter wall. But there’d been a cloud of cigarette smoke rising from the space behind the rifle, and that didn’t ring true at all. He had no idea what secret-service officers did during the long, boring hours of waiting for an event that rarely materialized. But smoking out in the open air …

  He looked at the entrance. The man behind it, a bored-looking, lean individual with black greasy hair and heavy spectacles, was already eyeing him. This was, Peroni decided, an invitation. So the big cop walked up to the glass door, took out his ID, pressed the bell, and said, very firmly, into the speakerphone, “I’m from the police. I need to speak to the duty officer immediately.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” asked a tinny voice from the speaker on the wall.

  “This isn’t that kind of business. Just call someone, will you?”

  A brief argument ensued, and it was not one Peroni intended to lose. Eventually an individual who seemed boss class came and allowed him into the building. The newcomer looked like someone recently relieved of a burden. Balding, middle-aged, congenial, with his dark silk tie tugged down to hang around his flabby neck, he resembled a doctor more than the Ministry agent Peroni suspected him to be.

  The man introduced himself as Carlo Belfiore and asked, “How can I help?”

  “You’ve got an officer on the roof.”

  “We had officers on the roof. The emergency is over. Didn’t you hear?”

  “I heard. You still have someone up there. I saw him with my own eyes. Not his face. But I can see his rifle. And …” This still irked. “He was smoking.”