The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  The man laughed. “No one smokes on government property. Except for Dario Sordi. And he’s not on my roof.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Belfiore’s face clouded with puzzlement. He pulled out a phone and called someone, asking for the name of the officer who’d been assigned roof duty. Then he made another call, to the man himself, Peroni assumed. There was no reply.

  Belfiore looked at the security guard. “You know Leone?”

  “Good guy,” the doorman said promptly. “I see him at Roma games sometimes.”

  “Does he smoke?” Peroni cut in.

  He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Belfiore scratched his chin.

  “I’m under orders,” Peroni lied. “Plus, I have the nastiest ispettore in Rome on my back and he doesn’t like secondhand news. I need to see this man up there for myself. I’m not leaving this building till I do.”

  “Do you have any idea where you are?” Belfiore asked. The boss-class spook didn’t seem so congenial anymore.

  “Not really.” Peroni pointed to the elevator. “Are we going up there, or what?”

  65

  “WHERE’S THE PRESIDENT?” COSTA ASKED.

  They were striding down the corridor next to the Salone dei Corazzieri. The palace seemed deserted. There was no one anywhere, not on the security gates, not in the offices.

  “Still in his apartment,” the first corazziere answered. “He doesn’t go out to the garden till six-thirty. You can set your watch by it. The agreement was we talk to Palombo. Stick to it. If Ranieri says otherwise …”

  “You don’t even know where Ranieri is,” Rosa Prabakaran pointed out, and got a caustic glance from Falcone for her pains. Costa understood why. They were lucky to get this far. It could still, so easily, go wrong.

  They rounded a corner past the salone and climbed a short set of winding marble stairs.

  The men in uniform stopped outside a mahogany door at the summit and glanced at one another.

  The senior officer rapped on the door with his knuckles and called out. Nothing. Then he shouted again, his rank and name, demanding that Palombo answer.

  Rosa leaned forward, turned the handle, and pushed. Costa and Falcone took out their guns and edged in front of the corazzieri, who had no other weapon than their swords, still sheathed.

  Behind them, one of the men in uniform murmured a low, shocked curse.

  Automatically, Costa shoved his way to the front and entered the office, gun high, scanning the space ahead.

  Luca Palombo sat motionless in a leather chair behind the desk, body thrown back at a crazy angle against the bright, sunny window. His chest was a sticky red mess of blood and gore, his head was bent forward, mouth gaping open, eyes shocked, dark, unfocused.

  Falcone strode across the office and bent over the stricken figure. “Dead. Can’t have happened more than a few minutes ago. Who’s had access?”

  “I told you I saw another corazziere,” the northern officer complained. “Everyone was supposed to be confined to barracks except us.”

  The older one seemed lost, for words and for action.

  Costa caught Falcone’s eye, motioned to him to move back from the desk. Then he turned around and met the eyes of the uniforms, raising a hand slightly.

  At the end of the wall, by the purple velvet curtains, in an office surely made for the courtiers of a pope, was a narrow door, ajar only a few inches. In the reflection of the window, Costa could just make out the shape of a pair of shiny leather shoes, black, polished, the kind a soldier might wear, behind the polished wood.

  The senior corazziere had caught sight of it too, and stared at him, mouthing the word Us.

  Costa brought the gun up to eye level, glimpsed the drawn sword, and raised his eyebrows.

  Not waiting for another word of protest, he moved forward, deliberately, slowly, until he was beyond the curtain. His left hand slammed the door open, his right held the gun tight and still, where he expected the man’s head to be.

  There was a shout of pain as his effort collided with something physical on the other side. Dazzling sunlight streamed into the room. He could hear the corazzieri assembling behind him, prepared, alert; could hear too the gasp of surprise that greeted the figure cowering on the other side, who was shaking like a leaf, holding his shoulder as if in pain.

  Ugo Campagnolo’s too-tanned features were wreathed in sweat. There was terror in his face.

  “He’s gone?” the prime minister cried, his voice breaking. “He’s gone?”

  “Who?” Costa responded calmly.

  “Him!” His eyes peered cautiously into the larger office, and at the dead man at the desk. “The monster!”

  “You mean Andrea Petrakis?” Falcone asked.

  “I mean … I mean …” His eyes, bright and beady, had begun to veer between fright and cunning.

  “I was talking to Palombo. It was a private conversation. There was a knock on the door. So I stepped in here.”

  They listened, and said nothing.

  “I heard.” Campagnolo’s eyes grew bright with remembered terror. “I heard.”

  The man stank of fear and perspiration, yet even at that moment there was a sly expression on his face, one that spoke of an imminent attempt to control and defuse this situation.

  “You must find this intruder. Not waste time in here. Those are my orders. Find him. You listen to me.”

  Costa’s eyes strayed to the verdant palace terraces beyond the window.

  In the distance, by the statue of Hermes, sat a familiar figure, hunched over a book, entirely focused on its pages, a white teacup held idly in his right hand.

  A shape was slowly coming into view from the palace patio. A man in the silver uniform of a corazziere. In his right hand stood a long, shiny sword, half its length dark with blood.

  66

  THE MINISTRY MAN BELFIORE LED PERONI TO A SMALL, slow, rickety elevator. Together, they rose in silence to the top floor of the building. There was a narrow concrete staircase to the roof. The door at the top of the steps was closed. Locked, or so it seemed.

  “This is more my line of work than yours,” the big cop told Belfiore. He set his shoulder to the old wood and pushed and heaved with all his weight. He’d taken down plenty of doors in his time and he knew this one wasn’t going to pose a problem. The lock was flimsy and easily buckled under the force of a couple of kicks. Someone had piled a stash of objects behind, blocking any entry. Twice Peroni heaved with his shoulder; he managed only to get the door back by the width of a hand.

  He paused, thinking, then asked, “There’s no other way?”

  “None,” Belfiore responded. “I’ll get help.”

  There was a sound from the other side. A man’s voice, angry, muffled, yet somehow full of concern, even though there were no words.

  “Dammit,” Peroni muttered.

  He went at the door again with all his weight and force. This time it moved farther. Belfiore, who was a little slimmer, said, “Let me try.”

  It was a squeeze, but he got his hand around and managed to dislodge whatever was on the other side.

  Peroni burst through. He found himself surrounded by ancient garden objects and old junk. In the dark corner ahead lay a man in the anonymous black clothing of the security services, a guise he’d seen too often these last few days in Rome. The man was bound and gagged.

  Something else. A smell of tobacco on the air. Familiar. One that reminded him of what Teresa had told them when she called, speculating a little, as they all were, constantly.

  “I’m not armed. Wait for my people,” Belfiore ordered.

  “I don’t think so,” Peroni said, and strode out through the little cabin door onto the roof of the spooks’ building behind the Quirinale.

  The figure was where he’d seen it from the street, in the far corner, overlooking the palace gardens. Stretched out, legs akimbo, heavy, stiff, but focused on the job. The rifle butt was ha
rd against the shoulder, the sights up to the face.

  Peroni used to smoke himself. Loved it. Only age and a newfound interest in his own health, which came from meeting Teresa Lupo, had made him quit. But a good smoker never forgot.

  “Elizabeth!” he yelled, and took out his gun.

  He was too far away to shoot. Even if he wanted to. Peroni hated guns, weapons of all kinds. There had to be another way.

  “Elizabeth!” he repeated. Then, to himself, “Don’t make me shoot you. Please.”

  The Englishwoman turned for a moment. She shook her head.

  Then she huddled over the sniper’s rifle, intent on the distant target.

  Peroni kept the gun by his side and walked across the roof.

  He watched as Elizabeth Murray fired a single shot, the rifle kicking hard against her shoulder.

  67

  “A FOOL?” PETRAKIS FOUND HIMSELF SAYING AS HE STARED at the old man on the stone bench, amazed that still there was no fear in his pale, exaggerated face.

  “You heard me, Andrea,” Dario Sordi said. “A foo—”

  There was a sound like the crack of a whip. Petrakis watched as the foot of the statue of Hermes disintegrated into a gray cloud of dust.

  The man in the corazziere uniform raised his bloodstained sword, aware that somehow the time available to him was fast vanishing. It never occurred to Andrea Petrakis that the second shot might be aimed at him. The force of its impact sent him reeling back on himself, deafened by the arrival of the sniper’s bullet, shuddering from its shock.

  The pain was odd, a revelation. It felt as if some kind of vast celestial hammer had beaten on his shoulder, iron against iron. His entire body ached. Blood was beginning to spurt through the ragged hole the shell had made in the shining carapace covering his left shoulder and, unseen, in the flesh beneath.

  As the agony grew, he fought to retain his balance and found himself staggering backwards, struggling to stay upright, wishing for a moment in the shadow, a brief pause to think, to find himself again.

  There was something he needed to say.

  68

  PERONI WANTED TO SCREAM, TO SWEAR, TO LEAP ON THE prone Englishwoman with her deadly rifle, shrieking: Why, why, why?

  Wanted to know why too he hadn’t done what duty demanded. Shot her straight out in cold blood.

  There were people at his back now, a commotion. Violence loomed, that curt, dark confrontation he’d come to know too well.

  Then, as he got to her, the sniper’s rifle barked again and she let loose a squeal of satisfaction.

  He was cursing, pointing his pistol at the long, corpulent form on the concrete roof, ready to fire. But Elizabeth Murray rolled over, dropped the black rifle, held her big hands wide open, looked him in the face—and grinned.

  Peroni kept his gun aimed straight at her face, unable to think of a sensible thing to say.

  “Oh, don’t look so cross, Gianni,” she said, still beaming. “A couple of minutes earlier and you could have got us all into real trouble, my boy.”

  The weapon wavered in his hand. She stretched out her right arm.

  “Now. Will you help an old lady up? Please? I really am past these games, you know.”

  69

  IT WAS AS IF THEY WERE IN A MOVIE. EVENTS SHIFTED rapidly, frame by frame. The first shot splintered the foot of the statue beside Dario Sordi, raising a cloud of fragments and dust. As Andrea Petrakis struggled to finish the final act of what he surely regarded as the purpose of his life, a second crack rent the air. This time the outcome was different: the clatter of metal meeting metal, of a powerful, violent impact shattering the evening calm.

  The man in the ornate uniform jumped back, a look of agonized astonishment on his face. It was only at that moment that Dario Sordi realized they were no longer alone. Beyond Petrakis, Nic Costa was sprinting down the path from the palace, pistol in hand, starting to cry in a voice full of righteous anger, one that reminded the old man of his friend, the young officer’s father. Behind him came a group of corazzieri, swarming into the gardens.

  Dario Sordi looked at his assailant again. The shot had entered the breastplate somewhere near Petrakis’s left shoulder. There was a dark hole torn in the shiny metal there, and blood pumping through. The glistening sword hung loose in the man’s right hand, ineffective. His eyes were glassy with pain and shock. He was stumbling, attempting to head back toward the palace, making hurt, whimpering noises, as if pain were a stranger to him except in its infliction.

  Sordi stood up.

  “Take this man into custody,” he ordered, slightly ashamed of the note of triumph in his voice. He added, more quietly, “And …”

  What?

  “Thank you,” the old politician muttered, mainly to himself. He felt a little giddy, heard more words escape his lips unbidden. “I’m safe now.”

  That grim day in the Via Rasella was rising again in his memory. In his mind’s eye he was seeing the faces of the two Germans, the speaking one from his recurring nightmare brighter than the other.

  Safety was what everyone sought in the end. A private place to call their own. Shelter from the storm. The young never quite appreciated this. To them the world was a place to be fought for, to be won. For some, like Andrea Petrakis, it would remain that way forever, which was a very personal and dangerous tragedy. Age never softened their sharp ambitions, diminished their appetite, whispered the great secret: that life was brief and fragile, a gift to be cherished, not thrown away on a whim or some obsession.

  Costa got to him first, face anxious, eyes still raking the rooftops. Corazzieri crowded around like some ancient Roman phalanx in silver, a growing human shield of tall men, one that Fabio Ranieri joined, out of breath, uncharacteristically wild-eyed.

  “There’s someone else out there,” Costa told Sordi urgently. “We need to get you inside immediately.”

  The old man found it difficult to hear, to understand. He couldn’t take his eyes off the other figure, the one clutching the bloodied sword, who’d now staggered to the steps in front of the cool, shady terrace, with its long evening shadows, only to turn back, mouth open—eyes too—in shock at his own injury and failure. Sordi wondered which was the greater suffering: the wound or the sudden, brusque collapse of his mission. Wondered too how he might have felt all those years ago in the Via Rasella, if matters had turned out differently.

  He shook his gray head, hoping to clear his thoughts. There was time to work, to prepare. Time perhaps, finally, to discover something tantamount to the truth of the Blue Demon.

  “Don’t you see what this means?” Sordi said. “We have someone. Alive. A witness. I want Falcone. I want …”

  The lean inspector was there already. Sordi realized he should have expected no less.

  “Deal with him,” the president ordered, pointing at Petrakis, half in the darkness of the terrace, leaning against a column, hurt and lost. “As you dealt with the Spanish woman. This one can tell you something. Everything. We shall have answers, important ones. Do this now, please. Quickly. No need to inform Palombo for the moment.”

  But no one moved.

  “He’s got a gun,” someone said.

  Sordi looked. It seemed impossible. The wounded man in the silver breastplate leaking blood had somehow exchanged the sword for another weapon. A black pistol. It trembled in his blood-spattered right hand, as if it had found its way there without the man’s knowing.

  Andrea Petrakis stared straight at him across the verdant space that separated them and shouted, “I know who you are!”

  “I know who I am too, young man,” Dario Sordi whispered, watching him prepare to move.

  Petrakis snatched off his plumed helmet, stumbled down the path toward them, the revolver rising, repeating over and over, “I know, I know, I know …”

  Behind him stood a second figure. A familiar one.

  Ugo Campagnolo stepped out into the sunlight. There was a gun in his hand too. A small weapon, almost insignificant. Sordi watc
hed aghast, knowing what he was about to see.

  Campagnolo walked up to the side of the man in the corazziere’s uniform, extended a shaking arm, then pumped a single bullet into his bare head. Petrakis fell down to the lawn on one knee, screaming. They watched as his assailant took aim and fired again.

  The shot man leaped sideways, as if hit by some electric shock. His broken frame tumbled to the ground, arms outstretched, unmoving.

  Dario Sordi shook himself free of his guards and stormed across the perfect green grass of the Quirinale. There was a scarlet fury in his brain, one he knew and hated.

  “Give my officers the gun,” the president ordered. “The police will need it as evidence. This is too far. Even for you.”

  “Evidence?” There was a wild look in the prime minister’s eyes.

  “The gun,” Costa demanded, then walked up and removed the revolver from Campagnolo’s trembling hands.

  “Evidence?” Campagnolo asked again, more quietly.

  He took one step forward, his features rigid with hatred and anger, and stared into the president’s long, pale face.

  “I saved you, Dario. Don’t you realize, you old fool? He had a weapon—”

  “Which came from where?” Sordi interjected.

  “He had a weapon. He’d have used it.”

  Ugo Campagnolo looked at each of them in turn.

  “I saved the president today. You all saw it. You’re witnesses.”

  He raised himself up on his heels and brushed down the front of his jacket, as if it were covered in dirt.

  “Soon you shall hear about it too. In the papers. On the TV. One call is all it takes. Soon …”

  His voice froze. He faltered, confused by the expressions on the faces of the men watching him. Unseen by Campagnolo, something had traveled toward him. A bright red mark, like a scarlet beauty spot on a movie actress from another era, had briefly brushed across the prime minister’s sweating temple, then disappeared, as if dashing away in search of another target.