by Aidan Conway
“Over there,” he muttered holding the filter for his joint-in-progress between pursed lips and giving another sideways jerk of the head, “digital and analogue.”
“And a firewall, a worm, a Trojan horse?”
“Can’t buy them,” he said, with a slight chuckle of derision, “You make them, like viruses. You have heard of viruses?”
“Yes,” said Rossi, nodding. “And hacking? What do you know about that?” he continued. “In practical terms.”
He looked up now from his handiwork.
“What do you wanna know?”
“I’d like to know if you know anyone who’d care to make themselves some extra money, that’s all.”
A flicker of interest animated his previously uninterested movements.
“Look,” said Rossi, “what do you say if I buy you lunch?”
*
There was a note on the kitchen table when Rossi returned to the flat.
“Gone to do the decent thing. Cheers. M.”
“So, I’ll be seeing you on the eight o’clock news,” Rossi muttered to himself, as he made tea and pottered around the empty flat, trying not to associate the new-found space with new-found loneliness.
He sat down to mull over more pressing matters. The young shop assistant, Gabriele, Gab, had proven to be a veritable goldmine of ideas and information and, once he had understood the nature of the arrangement, had also proven to be a most able teacher. Rossi had pretty soon scratched through his anarchic veneer to uncover an acute intelligence which, coupled with a devil-may-care attitude to risk-taking, had convinced him he could rely on and trust this neophyte with helping him to execute the rest of his plan. Yes, he was just a little mad, he reflected. But he was mad and feeling ever so slightly alive and maybe even enjoying the job again, despite everything else.
The plan was for Rossi to drop by the shop just before closing, and Gab would then set about explaining to him the various strategies available to them – strategies which would allow Rossi to make a much closer examination of the lives, the virtual lives, of some, if not all, of the victims so far. Then, if necessary, they might have to do what Gab had termed some “entering” and potentially some “breaking and entering” to sites and possibly property “if the need arose”.
“You get me into the buildings and I’ll get you into the networks. OK?” Gab had said, leaning back after his very satisfactory lunch of pizza, fried stuffed rice balls – arancini – and Coke. “Then we can talk about a fee.”
“A hundred up front,” Rossi had countered, still pondering the ease with which he was contemplating what were highly illegal acts, “and guaranteed immunity. Then we’ll see about results-based bonuses.” It wasn’t much, but Rossi knew for a kid of his age it was enough to matter.
“For tonight?”
Rossi had nodded.
Gab had chewed it over, but not for long, before giving his assent.
“Va be’. OK. It’s a deal.”
Rossi felt as clear-minded and forward looking as a traveller who, after wandering in dark woods, has realized that the road out is within sight. He knew now that he had to focus on the victims again and not just on their presumed killer. These women had all had very normal public lives, and unremarkable private ones, as their enquiries and the testimony of husbands and family had borne out.
But something was growing in Rossi, a doubt, a suspicion that they – he, Carrara, and now Marini – had made a gross underestimation with regard to these women. They had jumped on the serial-spree killer solution, concluding that they were not being killed by people they knew. Then they had conjectured a motive and following the trail presented to them had arrived within what seemed like touching distance of their quarry. At least in theory.
But they had ignored or overlooked another vital element which he now theorized was both the “how” and the “why” in this case. He laughed to himself. Oscar Wilde would have loved it. In each of the cases, apart from any public life and private life, they had failed to take into account the possible existence of a secret life. And from what Gab had told him about how to unearth such things, he now also had reason to believe that not only had they failed to look in the right places but that someone had been putting obstacles in their way.
Sixty-Three
On the same day, in two different parts of the city, two very different men, both without papers, had turned up on police and state premises. Jibril stood before the City Morgue and Hospital of Legal Medicine. He had spent the previous evening a fugitive from the bitter cold by riding first the trams and then the night buses before getting some sleep on a park bench once the sun had come up to give some semblance of warmth. For his lunch, he had bought bread rolls and tinned tuna and had then walked the city for hours on end as he turned over his options.
He waited. In the early darkness, the building had the same sobering effect it had on all who would subsequently have to cross its threshold, not only because of its barracks-like security but also for the air of grim detachment its soiled, grey concrete exuded, not to mention evident questions of basic cleanliness and organization.
“I have come to identify my friend. I think he may have been murdered,” said Jibril when an answer finally came from the intercom. “His name is Victor … I believe a body was found.”
The gate opened and when he was inside he found himself before another barrier.
“Documento,” said the sour-faced, unshaven official.
Jibril shook his head.
“No ID?” the man asked looking up now.
“No.”
“Wait,” he said indicating a room with a few stiff wooden chairs.
There ensued a conversation first by telephone which Jibril tried in vain to follow through the small glass window behind which the wizened functionary was seated. The latter then hauled himself out of his chair, disappeared into an adjacent room and came back with another younger uniformed employee who with a hand gesture bid Jibril come to the desk.
“What exactly is it you want to do?”
Jibril explained his predicament again in as calm and polite a way as he could. The younger employee grimaced as he appeared to strain to understand Jibril’s accented but otherwise clear Italian.
“You want to identify your friend? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve got no documents, no ID, nothing?”
“No.”
“Nothing we can do. Without ID, I can’t let anyone in.”
“But I only want to know if he is alive or dead.”
A bright female member of staff in her mid-forties carrying files and papers had entered the small front office.
“What seems to be the problem?” she enquired. The second official gave an enigmatic backwards jerk of the head.
“Says he wants to identify a body.”
“And nobody told me?”
“Thought you were out,” the squat first official mumbled somewhere into his own chest.
She looked at Jibril for a moment then summoned him to a side entrance and into another room where she closed the door. She indicated a seat and sat down opposite him. He began to wonder if he would now need money. He knew exactly how much he had in his pocket. It was enough for a week, maybe two.
“What’s your name, please?”
He gave his name and a surname.
“And the relationship, with your friend?” she asked. She was firm but kind too, Jibril noted.
“He’s my best friend. We grew up together, in Nigeria. He came here to Rome before me and now he has disappeared. I must know if he is alive or if he is dead.”
“Was your friend in any trouble?”
Jibril shook his head.
“He is missing. That’s all I know.”
She looked up now at the tall, slim African seated before her. In his eyes she thought she could see the glassy beginnings of defiant tears or maybe it was just fatigue.
“Do you have anyone who can vouch for you, Jibril? An emb
assy official, a doctor, for example.”
“I know a journalist,” he said, scenting suddenly an opening, and he reached for his wallet from which he produced Iannelli’s business card. He passed it across the desk, and after studying it she slid it back accompanied by what seemed to be a gentle sigh.
“Follow me,” she said rising from her chair and gesturing with an open hand. “This way, please.”
Dario Iannelli strolled past the group of plain-clothes officers chatting at the entrance to the Commissariato Appio Nuovo, just a short walk from Rossi’s house. He had borrowed some of the inspector’s clothes and cut a much more respectable, if not distinguished, figure. For once, more or less at a loss for words, he wasn’t sure quite how he was going to describe his current situation.
“Buongiorno. I was wondering if you could help me.”
“Yes.”
“My name is Dario Iannelli and, well, despite what you may have heard, I am not actually dead.”
The young female officer who had been hunched over her papers did something of a double take.
“Sorry, but could you repeat that, please?”
“I am Dario Iannelli. The journalist. I’m not dead.”
The officer scrutinized the serious and civilized face in front of her for a moment before turning rather pale. She recognized him now from the TV, even without the make-up.
“Oh, Dio!” she exclaimed almost scrabbling then for the telephone. “Er, one moment, please,” she said gesturing to him with her free hand to come round to the inner sanctum behind the glass screen while banging out an extension number with the other.
“Come quick. Got a slight emergency situation. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. No.”
She put down the phone and took a breath to regain her composure.
“Do you have some ID?”
Iannelli opened wide his hands, like a mime from some wordless Beckett play.
“Nothing?”
“All gone up in smoke I’m afraid, on the Palermo-Messina.”
For a moment, in the female officer’s mind, it seemed that cold logic had now sown some small seeds of doubt regarding the veracity of this apparent miracle.
“But I do have someone who can vouch for me,” said Iannelli sensing the slight change. “Inspector Michael Rossi. He lives just round the corner.”
He glanced down at himself.
“These are actually his clothes. Would you like his number?”
Jibril walked out into the bracing cold of the winter evening. Many in his situation might have been thanking the lucky stars above their heads. After all, he was, at least nominally, a free man, grateful not to have been detained as an illegal immigrant. A criminal. Whether it had simply been easier for them to turn a blind eye or that there had been genuine kindness behind their showing him the door, he could not be sure. He cared little. His actions now were automatic, mechanical. He wound his scarf around his neck as many times as it would go and tucked the end inside his jacket, his rather too-thin jacket. He walked on, and he kept walking, first alongside the tramlines and then under the railway bridge and further on towards Porta Maggiore – like a miniature l’Arc de Triomphe, as far as he could see, but actually another of Rome’s ancient gateways. A door between one world and another. The capital, the polis, and the empire beyond. It was here, too, outside the city walls that the graves began.
Entering the old city proper he found himself, although he didn’t yet know it, on the Esquiline, one of Rome’s seven hills and its highest. The almost icy wind was being channelled hard now between the handsome if somewhat neglected ranks of grandiose Renaissance-style palazzi flanking both sides of the once-majestic Via Principe Eugenio up to the square of Piazza Vittorio. But most of this, too, was lost on Jibril.
Was this the right road for the mosque? He’d been told there was one near here. He asked an elderly North African who pointed a bony finger in the vague direction of the other end of the square, indicating a point beyond the obscure shadows of the railing-encircled gardens. He kept walking. A huge white “M” on a red background told him that here was a Metro station. As he passed, crowds surged up and out from below the ground to climb the broad stone steps. He might have taken some comfort from so many of them not being natives here but various shades of brown and yellow and darker brown and black. Their languages also were a hotchpotch of almost anything but Italian. He might have been encouraged, too, by their tired but determined and often smiling faces, by their chatter and by their apparent sense of purpose and vigour, but he wasn’t. In fact, he hardly noticed them at all. The only thing that Jibril could feel now was the nothingness. As if the house he had lived in all his life had been burned to the ground and he was the only survivor. That and the bitter, biting cold.
Sixty-Four
“Well, you might not believe it,” Carrara continued, “but I think we may actually be getting somewhere with this strategy. Maybe even a contact.”
For two days, they had felt as if they had been in a blind alley and he had wished on more than a few occasions that Rossi might have been there to give something like direction. As luck would have it, Maria had now come through with what she was sure was a positive lead. She had been hammering at her nail day and night and had finally hit on something.
“Really?” said Rossi at the other end of the line.
“We’ve had the lads out every night on all the usual street locations, been hassling the clubs and the brothels, and we’ve doubled the road blocks and random checks and it seems like it may just be working in our favour.”
“So, there’s a contact? With Bonaventura?”
“Possibly a contact.”
“Ah.”
Carrara’s enthusiasm, however, did not seem in any way diminished.
“Well, it’s funny but since we started cracking down – it’s been dressed up as a mayoral anti-crime initiative – it seems that there’s been a surge in the online side of the business. It’s like the men, husbands mainly, are afraid of getting a spot fine sent to their home address, so they’re staying off the streets and looking around on the sites instead.”
“How interesting,” said Rossi reaching for a newspaper and trying not to knock over the glass perched on a cushion.
“And Maria thinks she has a contact with a profile that ticks all the right boxes. She’s got a load of them but now she says she’s really starting to narrow them down.”
“Has she actually seen him?”
“No. Not yet. She’s trying to build up trust but the signs are quite good.”
“Time frame?”
“Don’t know.”
“And what have you seen?”
“A few of the messages, the exchanges. Pretty hardcore some of it, by the way.”
“I can imagine.”
There was a pause.
“You don’t sound too impressed.”
“No,” said Rossi, “no, it’s not that. It’s just, well. It all seems so, I don’t know.”
“So not like police work?”
“Well, yes. In a way.”
“Not our way of doing things, right?”
Rossi was now twirling around the finger or so of Martell remaining in his glass while scanning the newspaper propped against another cushion.
“It’s certainly not the weather for street work either, is it?”
“Doesn’t usually seem to stop ’em. After all, work is work, isn’t it?”
“Suppose it is,” Rossi half sighed. “And look, now that you mention it, I’m going to be coming back on board. Sorry it took a bit longer than I’d thought.”
A slight pause ensued.
“Had a brainwave?” Carrara enquired.
“Well, I’ve certainly had enough of sitting around. Fancy a bit of action myself now and seeing as you two are going places, it looks like you might need an experienced head, once it all kicks off. What do you say?”
“Sounds great to me, Mick. Glad you’re up for it.”
“A
ctually, never been better.”
“What happened then? Have you been on a retreat or something? Given up the booze?”
“Well, let’s say that after a period of quiet reflection I have been getting in touch with my inner child, or inner teenager, again.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that’s for you to work out, Gigi, don’t you think? But I’m certainly ready to ‘hack it’ again, as they say. And what do you say to tomorrow morning, at the office? Or will I be disturbing you … two?”
“Nothing to worry about there. Maria’s been working from her own place and liaising via a secure link. Says she works better alone.”
“She’ll be asking for a salary next. Does she know how bad the pay is?”
Carrara’s laughter was real. Rossi smiled and sensed that Carrara knew it too.
“If we were in it for the money …” Carrara began.
“We’d be the villains instead,” Rossi finished. “Or in politics.”
“I have to say I’m looking forward to something like intelligent conversation again.”
“The lads not stretching your cognitive capacities then?”
“Not overly, no.”
“Tomorrow it is then.”
“Tomorrow it is then,” replied Carrara.
“OK,” said Rossi, then as if remembering something: “Oh, did you get on to Luzi again?”
“He’s been out of the country for business, but he’s coming back today. I left a message with his secretary. I said I thought it could wait, that it was purely routine.”
“Get on to him,” said Rossi, “and why don’t you ratchet it up a bit. Say you need to see him asap. Oh, and send me a report through of what you’ve been up to while I’ve been away.”
“OK,” Carrara replied, “will do.”
It was later that afternoon after the Metro had brought him back to Castro Pretorio station and thence to his well-furnished and welcoming executive office at Piazza della Croce Rossa that Luzi finally cracked. He’d taken a shower in the en suite bathroom and then a glance at the papers had told him of the latest victim. The killer still at large. Police looking for one man in connection with all the murders. Then there had been the phone call, the polite and business-like tone of the officer who had interviewed him the first time. But it was serious now. It was too much. There had been too many. He would have to tell. He couldn’t go on lying. Could he come by, later, for another little chat? A few loose ends to tie up. Some new lines of enquiry. Yes, it would have to be today. He did know there had been another murder, didn’t he? They required his full cooperation. Was he a suspect? Not over the phone, Mr Luzi. Not over the phone. But he had told them everything! Everything. No. Not everything.