A Known Evil

by Aidan Conway

  “But, like you say, his time had come anyway. And it was already the moment to change tack – perhaps time to put a bomb somewhere, or bring an airplane down – and then when we realized how much he was getting into the role and getting out of control we had to reel him in fast. One cop killing, while unfortunate, was acceptable, to help create a certain tension; but two, three? That would look careless, don’t you think? And if he’d been caught, if he’d talked, tried to drive a bargain? Where would that have left us? With a major headache. And you can’t always count on somebody letting him fall down the stairs, can you?

  “So, that’s where you came in. You were the bait. Before that, he was on the payroll, doing what he did best. We had plenty on him, while that actually mattered to him. The drug ops, the prostitutes, the trafficking. So, he was cooperative, up to a point and let’s say we intimated you could be obtainable. He was a dog that’s got used to fresh meat. He wouldn’t settle for tinned stuff. Then this rumour goes around that he’s tested positive for HIV – we have a line of communication with all that side of things, every little helps – and that he was going on a spree, going to take down as many as he could. Cops above all. He was out of our hands, he’d gone off the fucking grid.

  “And yes, it was me who tried to kill Yana. Let’s say I had to demonstrate my loyalty. Volunteer to do some of the dirty work. And Giuseppe was proving to be so erratic. We’d lost all contact with him for a time, so I stepped up at short notice, as it were. But she was good – very strong, and attractive too, for a Slav. I could have got to appreciate a girl like that. But she’d seen me, so we couldn’t afford to take any risks. Really, it was nothing personal. And by the way, it wasn’t Giuseppe who showed up at the Wellness. That was just a little trick on our part. A red herring, as they say. Confused you, didn’t it?”

  “How many Hail Marys do you want for your confession?” Rossi sneered. “But before you do finish, there’s just one thing missing in all this. You haven’t mentioned the money yet, and I’ve been following it.”

  “Oh, really?” replied Marini. “So what have you discovered? That money talks? That it makes the world go round? That it doesn’t grow on trees? Go on. Do enlighten me, professor.”

  “That it’s all you and your lot care about. Fuck your ideology and bullshit about the patria. You’re screwing this city and the country for money full stop. And you’ll do anything to hang on to it and make more and yet more of it for you and your friends in high places, in the Church, and the government and you’re prepared to stoop to anything because it’s the drug you’re hooked on and you can’t get enough of it.”

  Marini made a gesture towards the ring road and the city behind her.

  “This Rome of yours, Rossi, you know what it is? I’ll tell you. It’s a kind of old, dirty, ignorant but actually very fuckable whore. It’s like Switzerland without the cuckoo clocks and the efficiency and with dog shit and double parking on every street. But in my experience, everything that goes through this place comes out looking pretty damn good. Money, guns, drugs, people, you name it. If you can get over your hang ups, put aside your principles, you come out smiling. It’s Babylon, Rossi, whether you like it or not.”

  “Rome’s mine too, and it’s frauds and cowards like you who’ve been whoring this country for too long. You’ve squeezed every cent out of it and you still can’t stop. That’s why you got scared when the MPD decided to call time on the party, isn’t it? But all your cosy little arrangements with the cardinals and the ISW could just be coming to an end, so you hatched your little project. Your murder project. Your strategy of tension 2.0 for the twenty-first century.”

  Marini gave an empty laugh.

  “You don’t have a shred of proof of any of that. You can’t even get near us, Rossi. And you know it. But if it makes you feel better to think you know it all, by all means have your little fantasy. Dream your fucking dream.”

  “And your child? That son of yours?” said Carrara. “What about him?”

  “Oh, he’ll survive. He won’t be the unluckiest kid in the world. It happens all the time. We have to fall in love for this, you know. Or at least appear to fall in love. That’s how we get inside their lives, maybe your life. My father doesn’t know. He never understood what I wanted to do. I tried telling him what made me tick, how I felt about the world and where it was going, the filth, these sub-humans who think they can sit at the same table as us. The Jews, the Muslims, the fucking queers. So, I hid it all. He’d defend me to his last breath but he knows nothing of what I do. I’ll move on. Change name. Change city. Maybe country. Begin again. Another project. And you know, gentlemen, I have to say that, thinking about it all, and what’s in store, I really can’t wait. And now, if you’ll both kindly turn around and kneel down. We have talked long enough. I think that it is time.”

  *

  Rossi had always thought he might have seen his whole life pass before him while awaiting execution, but it wasn’t to be that way. Instead, as he watched the flakes gliding in front of his eyes he thought only of Yana, his mother and father already gone from him, and was otherwise at peace with his thoughts and with the world. He’d done his duty, he’d done his best. He hadn’t left an heir. That could be one regret. Too late now.

  Carrara beside him had his head bowed, his eyes closed and was, Rossi supposed, praying to his God. The suffering would be worse for him – family man that he was. Rossi saw his God all around him. He loved snow. Always had, ever since he had first seen it as a child, in England, waking up to that quiet, perfect world without compare. If the world had a soul, this was it.

  There was a click. The pistol cocking? Then the unmistakeable sound of a car door opening and slamming followed by the engine jumping into life. Rossi was first to turn and see Marini steering the SUV out and across the car park to where a broken wire fence gave onto the snowy fields stretching away behind them. Snow tyres, of course. She’d come prepared. Carrara, too, had now come to his senses. They both got to their feet.

  “I can take a shot,” said Carrara training his gun on the vehicle.

  “Not much point,” said Rossi. “There’s no pin in yours either.”

  Seventy-Two

  Below them, in the middle distance on the GRA, the headlights and tail lights were now scarcely moving at all. Everything had come to a grinding halt as the snow continued to wreak its impish chaos. And there was no sign of it stopping. Carrara and Rossi looked at each other.

  “Did you bring those chains in the end?” Rossi enquired.

  “Would I let you down?”

  “And would I?” said Rossi reaching through the car window to produce a half bottle of Jameson from the glove compartment.

  “We let her get away, didn’t we?” said Carrara.

  Rossi shrugged and took a generous swig before passing him the bottle.

  “Sometimes you have to accept there’s only so deep you can go, if you want to see another day.”

  “Did you know all along? That she was behind it all? Did you know she killed Kristina? Whoever she really was.”

  “I knew she wasn’t white as the driven snow,” Rossi replied. “But other than that, I was taking a gamble. Her switching the guns told me she was planning something but I still wasn’t sure if she was only looking to take out Giuseppe.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “I weighed it, in the kitchen, on the digital scales. I’d put one less round in mine. You’d never notice the difference. As for Yana, I hadn’t twigged that it was Marini. But during my sabbatical, I got myself a consultant and guess what we found? All the women had been on dating sites but from their work computers. And ClearTech, the company we’ve farmed all the IT forensics out to, had overlooked key aspects of all the victims’ behaviour. So someone along the line must have suppressed or muddied the data trails leading to the same social sites used by all the women involved, apart from Yana.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Through the central computer sy
stem and then the ministry where Paola Gentili worked and with a bit of bluster and a bit of breaking and entering we hacked their network. Some clever bastard, of course, had booby-trapped everything so that when we found a trail it triggered a data self-destruction bug. Like when a bank’s been fiddling the books and they smash up all their hard drives and shred their documents. But they could blame it on hackers, anyone they like. But what I’d seen was enough; that they’d had online presences with unknown potential suspects right up to the day before they were killed.”

  “So we were being deliberately misled?”

  “Highly probable but difficult to prove. By whom we’ll never know, but I wouldn’t rule out Silvestre’s having had a hand in it. He’s had it in for me since I blew away his protection racket scam, even if he did get away scot free. Anyway, we were always going to be chasing shadows. And even if we went public they could just put it down to glitches in the system or teething problems with outsourcing. But there were the money trails too. Iannelli came up with a few names and we were able to hack into some accounts of business figures with links to the ISW and it all started to fit together. The trafficking, the money laundering, the Lateran Treaty connections, and Spinelli’s plan to cut off the Church’s financial oxygen. Then there was the cardinal’s timely or untimely death, depending how you want to look at it and his links with the Lausanne money-laundering bust.”

  “I should have guessed it,” said Carrara. “It was staring us in the face.”

  “I suppose you’ll say it’s my fault, my technical Achilles heel.”

  “Well, you do tend to want to do it your way, don’t you?”

  Rossi ignored the comment.

  “Then again,” said Rossi, “thinking about it, would you suspect a false report from the forensics lab? You wouldn’t because we know them. Even if samples do disappear.”

  Carrara shrugged as if from long experience.

  “They can always put a spanner in the works if they want to. If the money’s right.”

  “Well,” Rossi continued, “he still must have been pretty smart, using multiple identities and cross-checking responses. Some of the women could have even entered into face-to-face hook-ups. Too trusting, naive, maybe searching for attention and falling for easy flattery. He was able to track them down and study their movements, creatures of habit that they were, and that way, he could go in with minimal risk, and get out fast having studied his escape routes and checked for CCTV. He got women who didn’t change their routines, either because they were foolhardy or because they had never considered the risks. And that was how he was able to commit one perfect murder on the heels of another. But he had changed the rules of engagement by the time Marini decided to make us think that we could trap him. That was risk-taking. But he was only ever going to be there if it was low-key, just us three. Like she said, I was the bait, and she must have promised me in return for his showing up and probably an extra wedge of hard cash to persuade him to put a stop to his death fetish fantasy.”

  “But it was all hypothetical. You didn’t know for sure, did you, about all this? And then what about Kristina?”

  “Kristina’s killing was different because Marini didn’t keep regular hours. Like her father said, she was notoriously unpredictable in her movements, so she would have been difficult for an assassin to pin down. If it was meant to be a hit it didn’t seem so plausible and she was hardly the kind of woman to let herself get trailed, was she? Even if it was a hit or precisely because it was meant to look like one, I had my suspicions that it couldn’t have been him. But there was no proof to the contrary. Until we made our discoveries in the flat – the groceries, then the judge, and then she came out of hiding anyway with that fantastic tale of intrigue which, despite its unlikelihood, we couldn’t not believe. Still, whatever way it could have gone, it wouldn’t have brought us any nearer to stopping the killing as it was all being directed by her, by ‘them’.”

  “And what about him?” said Carrara gesturing first to the corpse cooling in its thickening blanket of snow before reaching out to take another swig. “How are we going to explain away that?”

  “Leave him. He’s not going anywhere. It will have to be another ‘settling of scores’. Rather a lot of those, aren’t there? Ever wondered why? Very convenient for us. He’ll have some false ID for sure.”

  “Is there a murder weapon there by chance?” Carrara enquired. “Better take a look.”

  The boot was empty save for the standard spare tyre, jack, and some oily rags. A stolen car, of course. Rossi went back to his own vehicle and opened the boot.

  “You’ll need one of these then,” he said, holding out a sturdy and well-used lump hammer. “Found it years ago. Never used it. Should fit the bill. Chuck it under the seat. It will speed things along when the lucky patrol car finds him in a few days’ time. I suppose we could get Marta to identify him. That would be something.”

  “They’ll get the glory, when they do.”

  “Well, I told them Bonaventura was our man. So the glory, if glory there is, will be mine too. And yours, of course.”

  “At least there’ll be less paperwork.”

  “Oh, by the way, there was just one more thing. We did actually get a little bonus out of this.”

  “Really?”

  “Gab boosted my wi-fi so he could pick it up in the bar across the road. I wonder how much he managed to lift from Marini’s PC while she was at my place. Could make for interesting reading.”

  “You crafty son of a bitch!”

  “C’mon,” said Rossi, “get those chains out, or we’ll both be stiffs.”

  Epilogue

  It had been the capital’s heaviest snowfall in living memory. The body of Giuseppe Bonaventura was eventually picked up following an anonymous call, and Rossi’s theories matched with the forensics to link him to the first two murders and the final killing but in the absence of DNA not to the ‘Marini’ case. The Colosseum and Tor Sapienza shootings remained unsolved as did the attack on Yana – no reliable witnesses, no DNA, and then the rumours began to circulate that at the Colosseum plain-clothes officers had been seen in the crowd with guns drawn straight after the shooting. All of course strenuously denied and labelled as sheer paranoia.

  Yana had no recollection of her own assault. When she had first spoken, the doctors had concluded that it must have been a moment of mysterious clarity only to have subsequently been filed away again in the depths of her sub-conscious. Spinelli finally went free despite admitting to having concocted the drugging story in a moment of panic. The potentially incriminating e-mails had been his own work during moments of alcohol-fuelled instability. Some mud, however, had stuck and the elections saw caution and suspicion get the better of the Italians as a broad coalition took over the reins of power in the interests of the country and to maintain the status quo, thus changing everything so that nothing might change at all. Achille Basso, however, would not be so lucky in his attempts to retain office.

  Iannelli’s discoveries and subsequent articles became the catalyst for a maxi police swoop on the capital and beyond, netting myriad bent public officials, politicians, and assorted pseudo-do-gooders caught with their hands in the cookie jar in a systematic network of corruption, bribes and fraudulent practices linked to the management of the immigration crisis, public works tenders, and cocaine provision to the city’s needy. Maroni, however, was not among those led away to the cells. His previous agitation had been due to his wife’s new-found lust for life following his coming into a large inheritance from an Argentinian rather than an American uncle. Gab, meanwhile, had promised to devote part of his life’s work to cracking the few impenetrably encrypted files he had managed to capture from Marini’s computer as he embarked on setting up his own business.

  It was summer when Rossi was called to a smallholding outside the GRA where an SUV flagged up as of high importance on the RSCS database had been discovered in a ravine. The body of the long-haired, female, sole occupant in an ad
vanced state of decomposition but without any identification, gun, or personal computer remained “unidentified” and filed, stored, kept – what was the word? – in the city morgue before being buried in a grave marked “unknown”. A fitting end? Rossi’s initial disquietude had been allayed by a subsequent phone call from the judge, who had long since assumed legal guardianship of Marini’s son.

  “She left me a note,” he said, “saying she had to ‘disappear’, perhaps for a long time, and that’s the last I have heard from her.”

  Have heard. Verb tenses again? Rossi couldn’t but wonder.

  As for Rosa Garcia, a Colombian cocaine ring had been smashed and among the many crimes attributed to them was her murder. Rossi had at least laid to rest one of his ghosts while knowing, as his father used to say, that the ghosts were as numerous as the blades of grass.

  He was in excellent spirits as he parked the car on Via Merulana then stepped out into the mild night air.

  “Shame Dario can’t be here,” he said, “but with the bodyguards, it would be a bit too much of a squeeze.”

  “So, it’s just us, for once,” said Yana, “think you can manage that, Inspector?”

  Rossi smiled and kept his distance as she swung herself out and then, with her crutches, set off at a cracking pace as they left Shwarma Station’s enticing offerings behind them and crossed Via Merulana. Tonight was to be an Italian meal in an Italian trattoria. With Italian antipasti, primo, secondo, vino and dolce followed by caffé and grappa and nothing else. A traditional night. Yana had insisted on it and Rossi had put only one condition: that, tonight, she explain the story of her daughter.

  It was Friday and with summer and the tourist season well and truly underway there came a considerable buzz as an international array of sightseers milled around this edge of the historic centre, moving from one church to another, to ancient ruins and between ice-cream parlours and restaurants and bars dotted around the piazzas and the side streets.