by David Hewson
He barked Costa’s name into the voice-operated phone. A single word was all he needed.
“Nic?”
Waiting for an answer, he wondered what it had been like to spend an evening with the pretty and charming Sister Agata Graziano in Franco Malaspina’s extravagant palace, one of the few grand mansions in Rome Leo Falcone had never visited in his entire career. Costa deserved some time in pleasant company, a few hours to take his mind off the pain Falcone knew would be there, and would remain, until this case was closed.
It took an unconscionable number of rings for an answer to come. Falcone listened to the snatched, breathless conversation and heard, with a growing dread, the line go silent halfway through.
“Where are you?” he barked. “Where are you?”
His head alive and confused with myriad possibilities, he spun the vehicle sharply round to perform a U-turn in the Piazza Borghese, knocking over the stand of a newspaper vendor packing up his stock for the night. Sheets of Christmas wrapping paper flew into the air.
He fought to get the vehicle under control, and finally managed to manoeuvre it hard and fast the wrong way down the narrow alley that led to the studio.
Braking sharply, he brought the Lancia to a halt a few metres short of the entrance to the Barberini’s office. Falcone flew from the vehicle, took out his handgun, and held it high and ready. To his relief, two familiar figures were coming up the alley from the south, one fast and young, the second older, out of condition, and struggling.
There was a van parked there, badly, blocking the street entirely. Its back door was open. The interior was empty.
A menacing smell reached him from the door: spent ammunition. Somewhere, beyond the light in the open doorway, he heard the sound of a man’s weak cries and, more distant, angry, violent shouting.
He was still considering this when the two of them arrived, almost together. Peroni’s face was pale and troubled; his breath came in snatched gasps.
“Sir . . .” Rosa Prabakaran began.
The big man pushed her to one side. “We need to get in there,” he urged, then somehow found the strength to drag out a weapon and hold it low by his side. “Now, for God’s sake. Nic’s there. You left the line open, you old fool. We all heard it.”
Falcone wondered, not for the first time, about these lapses. They seemed to happen with increasing frequency; everyone was getting older.
“I did,” he said, and nodded, remembering now. Conference calls on the private system they’d used stayed there until they were closed. That was doubtless what sent Peroni racing here, too fast for his own good.
Falcone looked at the weapon in Rosa Prabakaran’s hand. It was obvious the young cop had never used a gun in anger before. The pistol trembled in her fingers.
“Stay behind me,” he ordered. “Do what I say always.”
He made the call he knew was inevitable now, and wondered how long it would take for them to respond. On a quiet, wet night before Christmas, the Questura was scarcely at its most alert, even when an inspector demanded urgent assistance at a shooting incident. The most recent statistics had shown that it took between ten and twenty minutes for uniformed cars to arrive at incidents outside the centre of the city, where the tourists were. No one would be patrolling these dead, silent streets as a matter of course. This was his to deal with, no one else’s.
Inspector Leo Falcone entered the dim light of the Barberini outpost’s door with a steady, determined stride, and became aware, the moment he crossed the threshold, of the distinct and pervasive stink of human blood.
Nine
THERE WAS A STOREROOM. IT TOOK ALL HIS STRENGTH to drag her there, as she kicked and fought, his hand over her mouth, his arms tight around the rough fabric of her black dress. The door was ajar. Costa levered it open with his foot, grabbed her more tightly, and dragged the two of them through into the darkness.
She struggled all the way, wrestling in his arms. They fell against the shelves. Cans of paint tumbled to the floor, old easels, dusty, unused for years.
“Nic!” she screeched.
He pulled the door shut, then, in the meagre light that fell from the cracks above and below, he pushed her to the end of the small, enclosed chamber and held her close. In the gloom her eyes glittered with emotion.
“They have weapons,” he said simply. “They kill people. We keep quiet. We wait.”
She stared at him and withdrew from his grip, standing back against the shelves he could just make out in the stripes of yellow illumination from the room beyond. They contained the junk of ages: fusty books, small canvases wrapped in sackcloth, and palette after palette of long-dried paint.
“Why did you bring me into this?” she whispered with obvious bitterness. “What did I do?”
He glanced at the door. “You knew enough to unlock the painting,” he answered immediately. Then, before she could say another word, he placed his finger to his lips.
They were there, outside, moving swiftly, arguing. Angry voices. Two. And a further sound too: a man in pain, howling, pleading for help. The security guard surely, from along the entrance corridor.
One voice, more than the other, seemed familiar from the Barberini’s party that evening. Franco Malaspina. Agata surely thought so too. She listened in shock and covered her mouth with her small, dark hand.
The noise of them grew louder. It was obvious what they wanted. The painting. The canvas was large, perhaps manageable by one man, but much easier for two. They were talking about how to remove it, what to cover it with, how to proceed.
And they were different: one confident, masterly, the second scared, fearful.
Finally, the other, weaker one spoke up.
“You shot him,” he moaned in a high-pitched, almost feminine whimper. “You shot him. For God’s sake.”
“What do you think we brought these things for?” the second voice snapped.
“He’s alive!”
There was a pause. Costa watched Agata. She seemed ready to break.
The bolder intruder spoke. “I’ll deal with that on the way out. Don’t squawk. You can wash the blood off later. Now help me move it. We don’t have time . . .”
Agata’s eyes went glassy. She stumbled. Her elbow caught something—a box file, covered in dust—teetering on the edge of the shelf. As it balanced in the darkness, she reached for it, caught thin air, her flailing fingers sending more old and grubby objects tumbling noisily to the floor, a telltale cacophony of sound announcing their presence.
The room beyond became silent.
Then a voice, the one he thought he knew, said loudly and full of confidence, “I wondered why the lights were on. Careless . . .”
Ten
IT WAS MORE THAN A YEAR SINCE LEO FALCONE HAD FIRED a weapon, and that was on the firing range, on the routine duty he regarded as an administrative chore. Inspectors didn’t shoot people. If he could help it, none of these officers did either. That was not why the police existed.
He tried to remember what he knew about how to enter a building safely. It wasn’t a lot. So he clung to the walls of the entrance corridor, with its ancient, smoky ochre walls. The plaster was peeling from the damp beneath the old stone of the palace in which the corridor lay like an afterthought, tucked into the hem of a sprawling pile of dark masonry that sat, unvisited and unknown, in this strange and, for Falcone, increasingly inimical part of the city.
Right arm out perpendicular to his body to ensure Peroni and Rosa stayed behind, Falcone took a series of rapid strides, hard against the wall, seeing nothing, hearing voices ahead. A bright light indicated the studio where he had first approached Agata Graziano and asked for help, a decision he now regretted deeply.
There were no more shots, though. That gave him some satisfaction. Then he moved forward again, gun held high, ready and visible, and beckoned the two figures behind him to dash safely into the alcove on the right, where Falcone dimly recalled the presence of a middle-aged security guard.
&nbs
p; Rosa went first, squeezing behind his beckoning hand. Falcone stared down the corridor and briefly turned to nod at Peroni to wait. Then they looked at one another, a familiar expression of shared dismay in each man’s eyes. Rosa had let out a sudden, high-pitched shriek. Falcone turned, spat something low and vicious in her direction, hoping it would shut her up, and crossed the corridor.
There was a figure in uniform on the floor, brutally wounded, sitting upright against the wall clutching his bloodied stomach with both hands, a look of intense fear in eyes that were fast fading towards unconsciousness.
Falcone listened to him say something that might have been “Help me.”
“There are people on the way,” the inspector said, and, feeling a rising tide of fury enter his head, stormed back into the corridor with a firm intent, weapon in front of him, not knowing whether the female agente and Gianni Peroni, his only support at that moment, were following on behind.
Eleven
COSTA TOOK A DEEP BREATH, THEN STEPPED IN FRONT OF Agata and looked around him, seeking something, anything, that might count as a weapon. He was still searching when the old wooden door that separated them from the studio exploded in a roar of heat and flame. The shotgun blast came straight through it, just a metre or so from where he stood hoping to protect her. A thin scattering cloud of lead shot fell around them, ricocheting off the high walls, peppering their heads and shoulders with tiny searing balls of fire.
Agata was screaming. Something caught Costa in the eye: dust or a shard of wood. He was aware of the barrel of the weapon crashing through what remained of the door and a figure there, following it: all in black, with the familiar hood.
He had the weapon crooked in his arms. The eyes behind the slits stared at them, dark and malevolent. The man was fumbling in his jacket for more shells, which he casually stuffed into the maw of the gun as if he were on some idle weekend game shoot.
The entry didn’t take more than a moment, too little time for Costa to attack.
Instead he held his arms wide open, fingers grasping into the darkness, a gesture that meant nothing.
“You don’t need the woman,” he said firmly. “Take me if you like. But not her. She has no idea what this is about. She has no idea who you are.”
Without realising it, he’d backed all the way to the end of the storeroom. She was trapped behind him, trembling, crouched against the wall.
The long, deadly shape of the weapon rose, loaded now.
“That bitch always had a sport in the blood,” the figure said, in a low, dead voice, half recognisable, half lacking any human feeling at all.
He brought the gun up easily, with the kind of familiarity a hunter used, as if it were second nature.
This was all a question of timing, Costa thought, something it was impossible to know. He wasn’t even sure what his hand had found on the shelf, only that it was hard and heavy and easy to grip.
As the gun moved towards horizontal, he took tight hold of the metal handle and swung it in front of him with as much force as he could muster. The can of ancient paint flew off the shelf, towards the shape in black, who had moved forward sufficiently to be silhouetted against the bright studio lights behind. It crashed into his face, the lid bursting open as it met the woollen hood.
A flow of pigment the colour of ancient blood flooded over the black fabric. The can crashed to the ground. A cry came from behind the covered mouth. It was something, Costa thought. It was . . .
. . . nothing.
Before he could attack again, the man took a step back, wiped the paint from his face with one elbow, and stood there, madder than ever, the weapon swiftly back between his hands.
Costa threw something else from the shelf, something not so heavy or awkward. It bounced off the wall, just catching the barrel of the gun as it exploded.
Fire and heat and a terrible, deafening noise filled the air. Something took hold of his left shoulder and flung him backwards with agonising force. Feeling giddy, and aware of a growing, burning pain racing through his body, he tumbled into Agata, whose slender arms managed, almost, to break his fall to the hard ground.
One more time, he thought, knowing what was happening now without needing to look. That was all. The man with the gun was getting closer, intent on finishing this for good.
Costa turned, ignoring the searing, spreading ache from his shoulder, and threw himself forward. He caught the barrel, placed his right hand, palm down, over the two gaping holes there, and forced it up towards the ceiling, waiting for the moment when the agony would begin again as the shells tore through his flesh and perhaps gave them a few more brief moments of survival.
Twelve
FALCONE SAW A TALL, MUSCULAR FIGURE DRESSED IN BLACK, hooded, struggling with the painting, weapon on the floor. He barked the first words that came into his head, in a voice that was loud and forceful and brooked no argument. The man raised his arms over his head and started to talk, in a falsetto babble riddled with fear.
“Shut up!” Falcone yelled, then ordered Rosa to keep her gun on him.
Something was happening at the far end of the room, in an annexe that lay beyond the canvas and the bright, piercing lights that stood above it.
Peroni came to his side, weapon raised.
“How well can you shoot, Leo?” he asked.
He didn’t dare answer, and instead watched in despair as three figures tumbled through the door, the first all in black, too, with a shotgun held in the air by Costa’s struggling arm as the young officer, his left shoulder covered in blood, his coat ripped by pellets, pushed the intruder out into the light.
Agata Graziano was fighting just as hard, kicking and punching and screaming at the faceless attacker.
It seemed to take an interminable time for Falcone and Peroni to join them, with Rosa continuing to cover the second man, on the inspector’s orders. One armed individual was enough to deal with. These situations deteriorated into chaos so easily. As Falcone raised his pistol towards the head of the first angry figure wrapped so tightly into the mêlée of bodies in front of him, he realised this was not a solution that would work at all. They couldn’t fire because they couldn’t safely distinguish one from the other in the sea of flailing arms, the tight grip of bodies, they’d become.
For a second, no more, there was an opportunity. Costa was down, hard on the floor, his legs kicked from beneath him by the taller, stronger shape in black, but able, along the way, to drag the long grey profile of the shotgun’s barrel with him, finally hauling the whole weapon from the grasp of those powerful dark arms as he did so.
Falcone made a mistake at that moment, and knew it in an instant. He looked at Costa, and had to stop himself asking the obvious. Are you all right?
By the time he’d dragged his attention back to where it mattered, everything had changed.
The man in black had Agata Graziano tight in his arms, terrified and furious. The barrel of a small handgun was hard against her temple, pressing into her olive-coloured skin, making a clear and painful indentation. The second intruder glanced at Rosa Prabakaran, then, without any protest on her part, limped over to the storeroom doorway and stood there by his side, silent, submissive.
Falcone kept his own weapon directed straight ahead, towards the one who mattered.
“You will let her go,” he said simply.
It was the best he had and he knew immediately how weak it sounded. Something happened then that made him feel old and stupid and out of his depth.
In a room with four police officers, three of them armed, one of them wounded, though not badly, it appeared to Falcone, this masked and murderous creature laughed, easily, without fear. As if none of this touched him, or ever would.
He dragged Agata Graziano closer to his chest, holding her like a shield, in a tight, avaricious grip. With his free arm around her throat, he turned the weapon in his right hand abruptly to one side, ninety degrees, away from the threat ahead.
Before Falcone could say another w
ord, the man pumped two shells into the skull of the hooded figure next to him.
Agata Graziano struggled helplessly, eyes white with terror, feet almost off the ground in the power of his grip. Costa, who had been slyly working his way across the stone slabs in the direction of the man’s legs, stopped on the instant. The small black revolver’s barrel was back at the terrified woman’s temple.
“If the painting isn’t outside in thirty seconds,” said the voice behind the hood, a calm, male voice, controlled, patrician, “I will blow these bright brains straight out of her skull.”
Thirteen
IT WAS RAINING. THERE WERE STILL NO POLICE CARS. JUST Falcone’s Lancia and, a little way along the narrow alley, beneath a single streetlight, the van, with its rear doors open.
Falcone and Peroni had the canvas in their arms and followed the hooded man, who was dragging Agata roughly, the gun never leaving her forehead. Rosa, on Falcone’s instructions, followed behind.
There was nothing any of them could do. Agata was a hostage, held by a man with no desire for negotiation. Costa clutched his aching shoulder, feeling the lead shot biting into his flesh, the blood from the wound making his clothes stick to his skin. Unseen by the figure in black, he’d picked up a weapon, snatching the gun left on the floor by the dead intruder. It felt useless in his left hand, the only good one, and there wasn’t a sound from anywhere, not a siren, not a tire squeal in the night.
“I prefer the car,” the voice behind the black wool mask said, and his arm tightened around Agata’s neck, holding her so hard that her face was taut under the pressure. “Keys.”
Falcone took one hand off the painting and removed them from his pocket, holding them out in the cold night air.
“You,” the man barked at Rosa.
“I’ll do this,” Costa said, then, ignoring the pain, tucked the gun back into his waistband beneath his jacket before stepping in front of the young agente to take the keys from Falcone, keeping his eyes on the man and Agata all the time.