A Known Evil

by Aidan Conway

  “Are you saying that the funds are not adequate?” she replied. “I believe,” she added, referring again to her papers, “there are ringfenced resources for this eventuality.”

  “Yes, but we don’t need to go overboard with manpower and hiring and getting specialist machinery into position – snowploughs and the like – not to mention fuel and maintenance expenditure. Besides, you’ll see, it will all blow over and we’ll be able to give ourselves a slap on the back for not having wasted public money unnecessarily,” he concluded, with forced jocularity, scanning the room with rodent eyes for signs of reciprocity, signs that were not, however, forthcoming. “So, we keep a close watch on the forecasts and we take it from there.”

  “And are you in a position to give assurances that you have the personnel in place who can interpret the data fully?” asked a not entirely convinced-looking senior member of the Civil Protection Division. “You will remember that it is, after all, down to the council to implement the necessary action and not us. We can only intervene in the event of a state of emergency or natural calamity being declared.”

  “Of course,” the mayor replied.

  “So you have the necessary means and logistics?”

  “I can go on record, here and now, and assure you that all departments know what is expected of them and have been fully briefed and prepared. And I repeat, Dottore, that while we are talking about two or three centimetres of snow, the matter can be managed with the minimum of interference and without causing undue alarm or inconvenience to the citizens of Rome. Citizens who already have quite enough on their plate, as I’m sure you’d agree. And now, signore e signori, if there is nothing else, may we perhaps adjourn?”

  Driving across the city towards the hospital to drop off some fresh flowers and have a quick look in on Yana, Rossi was feeling newly energized and rather satisfied with himself despite having had to deal with an increasingly embattled Maroni. He’d left Iannelli in the flat again in lieu of a better idea emerging and had managed to pin “the boss” down in his office before “high level meetings” and “engagements” had whisked him away from the world of mere mortals. Something was brewing though. A glance at the wastepaper basket’s compacted contents told him Maroni had been shredding a lot more documentation than might have been deemed natural wastage. From the look on his face he had been able to see storm clouds were gathering there too.

  While Iannelli had slept, he had stayed up late the night before working on his plan to target the clubs and red-light spots. In the meantime, his own renewed positivity and general demeanour seemed to have blunted all his previous negativity. If Iannelli could cheat death, well, maybe? He wasn’t one for miracles but the more luck there was going around the better. Carrara was still nursing something approaching rancour but had, nonetheless, gone through the motions with Rossi’s strategy.

  Then he’d had to get away again – there was a mountain of work to get through – and Iannelli was still holding out on his next move. It was like juggling career and family, Rossi thought to himself. Dario was still in shock, he was sure of that. But he would, if he could, persuade him today to do the only possible thing, which was to give himself up, as it were, innocent though he was of any crime.

  He reprised the morning’s conversation with Maroni.

  “You can have your bloody manpower,” his hassled superior had conceded when he’d managed to detach himself from the phone. “Take them off whatever job can wait but just don’t go breaking anyone’s balls whose balls you shouldn’t be breaking. Got it? We’ll need every friend we can get before too long, Rossi. Mark my words.”

  Then he’d stared at him for some seconds before asking: “Have you got any idea what’s going on?”

  Rossi had shaken his head. So Maroni was chasing shadows too? Or bluffing?

  “Just trying to get my hands on this psycho,” Rossi had replied.

  Maroni hadn’t even seemed overly perturbed by the far-fetched, at least by his standards, theory regarding their potential quarry’s cryptic missives.

  “Well, they have to mean something, don’t they, Rossi? So you may as well put that stunning intellect of yours to the test and follow it up as you see fit! After all, you’re the professor. And the philosopher. And God knows what else.”

  For Rossi, from the moment he had walked in the door that morning, the pervasive atmosphere of nervousness had echoed something of the way it had on the eve of Tangentopoli, the mega bribes scandal of twenty years previously. That had seen the whole political establishment rocked to the foundations and a large chunk of its leaders, ringleaders more like, either doing time or put out of the game for good. Yet, it was at moments like this that Rossi could enjoy a little of the interest accrued on his own account. Sure, he might have bent the rules, at times, to get at the bad guys, but he’d never taken even a penny to let one villain off the hook. Schadenfreude, was it? Delighting in the misfortunes of others? Well, what if it was? So be it.

  His thoughts shifted back to his lodger. Regardless of the choice Iannelli made, sooner or later the story would have to break. And after having heard some of the details of his Sicilian escapade, Rossi felt sure Maroni’s allusions to “something very big” was likely close in shape, substance, and being to what Dario had half-unearthed on his travels. And it was probably going to hit the proverbial fan whether Dario went public on it or not. The time was ripe. The storm clouds were full, the atmosphere charged, and the attempt on Dario’s life had opened another Pandora’s box. Hitting a journalist, and a journalist of Iannelli’s standing, meant the gloves were off. Yes, Rossi, too, felt that the wheels were turning, that the lumbering machine of change and imminent turmoil was moving. He now also suspected that much, if not all, of the bizarre violence convulsing the city may very well have constituted bloody cogs in its complex, interconnected, and infernal mechanism.

  But his immediate objectives were Giuseppe Bonaventura and Yana. Iannelli’s incredible return had given him not only new hope but also a new pure anger. And even if it was personal, well so be that too. He’d been doing his duty for years and now he wanted his payback time. This morning he felt alive and hungry again, spurred on, pushing now to get his man and, yes, to get his revenge. If it was him, he wanted him. He wanted to stand before his nemesis and look him in the eye and then? A traffic light flicked from amber to red. He stopped abruptly to the annoyance of the stream of traffic behind him.

  As he continued to savour the fantasy, he passed the imposing mass of the thirteenth century Torre delle Milizie tower and his mind wandered from the present inferno to things medieval: to dungeons, to darkness, to other Gothic horrors from collective and personal pasts. He remembered then a picture in a school textbook, of the oubliette, where prisoners were thrown and, as the name suggested, forgotten. As he pondered that most base form of incarceration, the message about “the black hole” again came to mind.

  It seemed an age ago now though it had been only some ten days. A black hole of missing money? Iannelli’s discovery of a network of large-scale corruption and establishment complicity? The fascist legacy waiting to be reclaimed? Were the pieces of some huge, dark, puzzle coming together? Or was it a Jungian reference, one perhaps for him: the hole in your life? The so-called “dark web”? Was that where he was hiding? Was that where perhaps he wanted to be found? Maybe his first hunch at the beginning of the case hadn’t been so far off after all. But his reverie was broken by the buzz of an incoming call. He checked his phone. He’d missed the call the first time but it had been only moments before and now he took it with something approaching alacrity.

  Like a jagged knife tearing through flesh, Rossi had pulled the car over, slicing the pavement and the road and even butting into one of the roadside wheelie bins, jam-packed, overflowing and un-emptied as usual. A teetering bottle fell from its precarious lodging and shattered. A female dog walker collecting her dog’s ejections in a plastic bag afforded him and his parking efforts a disgusted sideways glance, but Rossi c
ouldn’t have been more oblivious. He had his head in his hands now. Then, in a paroxysm of rage that sent his erstwhile observer and four-legged companion both skittering along the street for fear, he pounded the steering wheel until only the near exquisite pain in his fists and wrists made him stop.

  There had been another. A carbon copy. Not a witness, not a clue. Another defenceless mother bludgeoned to death on another Roman street but this time in the centre, near the old Roman gate of Porta Pia. Name: Daniela Ferrante. Age: 42. Morning again. Dead for maybe two or three hours and missed first at work. On a side street, the body had been dumped over railings into a basement. Carrara was already there and had given him the lowdown. Prior to getting the call he had been “throwing ideas around” with Marini and she was with him now, under the most convincing of covers, as a journalist, Carrara assured the incandescent Rossi. Complete with blonde wig, no doubt. Was Carrara losing it? Was the stress getting to him too? He slewed the car around and reached out to hammer the siren on. Then he cut through the slovenly traffic like a man possessed.

  He was to blame. No one was saying it to his face, of course, because only he knew. If they had gone to work on Marini’s surveillance plan, did they think they might have seen this murder off at the pass? Of course not. In the space of two days they couldn’t have hoped to get a breakthrough. But he should have known all along. He should have seen it! That was what he was good at, wasn’t it? Now here they were quizzing this poor unfortunate who had just joined the widowers’ club. Not particularly nice, Rossi reflected. They often weren’t. Looked like the kind who never lifted a finger and maybe let his missus out once a year. Not a murderer though. That was clear enough but he played the field, if he still could. No, judging by his waistline and taste in clothes, he probably paid for it now and then when funds permitted.

  They’d left the crime scene in the hands of forensics, and after managing to persuade a stubborn Marini to get back into hiding, they’d headed straight to the family home. Carrara, to his credit, had picked up on Rossi’s dark demeanour and he had already run through the best part of the question gamut as they sat opposite their interviewee in the lounge.

  “Social media?”

  “What?”

  “Facebook, Twitter and the like. Did she use them?”

  “Didn’t even have a computer. Said she’d had enough of looking at a screen all day at work. Didn’t want to know about having one at home. That’s mine over there,” he said, sheepishly enough to have awoken the curiosity of a vice cop with time on his hands. But he wasn’t a suspect. Rossi was going through the motions as far as he was concerned but wanted to know more about his now deceased wife.

  He got up from his chair, depositing the coffee cup he’d been nursing for the last twenty minutes or so on the dining table covered in plastic sheeting. They did it to protect the surface, didn’t they? Like people who kept their car seats enveloped in squeaky cellophane long after they’d left the showroom. As if it were ready for murder.

  Rossi excused himself and by means of a few well-understood gestures enjoined Carrara to continue with the few remaining formalities. He took a look around the kitchen. All in order. Nothing very personal about the decor. Brand names in the cupboards. A TV family. Not a book in the living room. Not a book in the house. He nodded to the uniforms manning the entrance to the flat and went down the stairs into the apartment block’s vestibule which he also gave a quick once-over. A decent building, well kept. Not too much graffiti. He checked his phone. Nothing of note. There were footsteps on the stairs behind him.

  “As random as random can be, eh?” said Carrara joining him.

  “Seems that way,” Rossi replied. “A quiet street near her workplace. Do you think she was watched though? Followed from her house? If this is matricide our killer must be keeping some tabs on them.”

  “Stands to reason,” said Carrara.

  “I mean,” said Rossi, “you can spot a woman and you can guess she’s a mom, but you don’t actually know, do you?”

  Carrara gave something like an adolescent’s shrug. He seemed to be harbouring some residual bad feeling or suffering withdrawal symptoms without Marini around and Rossi sensed it. Whether or not she’d entrapped him emotionally or erotically, she’d made him feel more valued and that was in part Rossi’s own fault. He had been taking Carrara a little too much for granted and the pressure on all of them, like some emotional hothouse, was blowing every minor grievance out of proportion. Thus, the situation called for cool heads or, in counselling or anger management parlance, a cooling-off period. The only problem was that it would take time and that was a commodity they didn’t have on their side.

  “Gigi,” said Rossi, with a change of tone, “look, I’ve been thinking. About the other night and our difference of opinion. I want you to go ahead with the plan. I’ve been a bit short-sighted on this one. It was arrogant of me to shoot it down and I should have heard you out or proposed a compromise but in the cold light of day, and now after this, well I think it’s at least worth giving it a try.”

  “Well we’re not picking up much through the standard channels, are we?” said Carrara his face like a storm cloud now visibly brightening at the edges at the prospect of getting his chance. Rossi shook his head and his thoughts turned to the office covered with the victim’s photos, Post-it notes, maps, conjectured rebuses, street names, and red lines and wild hypothetical links. Now they had this new entry to add. They had got the number crunchers and the uniforms to plough through the gamut of standard procedures – searching and scanning for the connections, their children’s schools and friends, old school mates, bars they frequented, figures in common, driving instructors, doctors, shops they usually went to but no pattern that might lead them to their man had yet emerged.

  “Get yourself what you need,” said Rossi. “Manpower, equipment requests and such like and get to work on it. The other side of the coin is this though: I’ll need forty-eight hours or so to think through some stuff on my own. There’s something else I’m working on and it could just complement Maria’s approach. For which I need you to put your trust in me. As for the rest, I’m handing you full control.”

  “Is it going to be another of your surprises?” said Carrara smarting a little now from the sting in the tail of Rossi’s proposal.

  “Let’s call it a hunch.”

  “But I remain in the dark?”

  “I’m asking you to trust me, Gigi,” said Rossi, gauging now just how much the invisible bond that had united them so well for so long had been loosened.

  Carrara hesitated for a moment as Rossi looked him straight in the eye. Maybe it would work for them both. Either way it would be the acid test. If Marini was rocking the boat for her own egotistical reasons and Carrara wanted to go along with her, so be it. Maybe he too wanted to strike out on his own, knowing a victory in this case would be the launchpad for great things. But only time would tell on that. If they got a result all the better for the city and the force but Rossi was firm now and had decided exactly how he was going to formulate his own strategy. He had stunned Carrara but that was how it had to be. He only hoped he would thank him before too long.

  “I want you with me on this,” said Rossi. “Even if I can’t let you in on it yet, I want you to know that you were right. That I wasn’t thinking outside of the box, that Yana and the whole Spanish connection had thrown me off course. It had all been getting to me, and I’ve been drinking too much. It’s my fault not yours. But I just need some time. Maybe we both need some time.”

  Carrara was weighing it up. The relationship was on the line but it was down to them both to salvage it, and if he too was honest with himself he would have to say he found it hard to see how things had come to this. But somehow they had.

  “Whatever you say, boss,” he replied, his tone restored to something like that of the old Carrara. Rossi felt a powerful wave of relief wash over him and gave his partner a good-natured slap on the back.

  “I’m coun
ting on you, Gigi, and you know where to find me,” he said, making then for the main door.

  “Oh, and you might want to be getting back to Luzi,” he called back over his shoulder. “You know, about his nocturnal habits, and maybe what he does mornings too. Maybe we’re missing something big there.”

  So, the king was still giving orders even when he had abdicated. And then pushing open the street door he went out, back into the cold.

  Sixty-Two

  Rossi parked as near to his house as possible but decided to stretch his legs anyway. He passed the familiar shops. The hairdresser’s, the tavola calda takeaway serving pizza-by-the-slice and sit-down lunches for workmen, and whose proprietor spent the spare moments of his day eyeing young girls.

  He passed the computer shop in which he had set foot perhaps two or three times before, always with written instructions and dizzied by his inability to choose anything. Then he stopped. The window was full of innumerable gadgets – black or silver boxes, cubes, tablets, drives, and pads of every description. Did you actually need all these to be up-to-date? But his eyes were fixed more on the human element now as he crossed Emporium IT’s threshold.

  At the till, the usual part-timer was there and rolling a cigarette that didn’t look like standard issue.

  “Are you going to smoke that?” Rossi enquired.

  “Not now,” came the reply with a gesture towards the clock on the wall. The sacred lunch hour fast approached.

  “Do you know I’m a police officer?” said Rossi.

  The youth shrugged.

  “Don’t give a fuck,” he said. As if out of solidarity, his oversized black T-shirt proclaimed “Anarchy”.

  That’s the spirit, thought Rossi, beginning to feel his idea now hatching.

  “Listen, do you know what a splitter is?”