by David Hewson
“Why?”
He blinked as if it were a stupid question. “Because I can.”
She took one more short stride to stand in front of him, thrust her slender, dusky arm in front of his face, pinched her own skin on her wrist.
“Not because of this? Because of the shade of someone’s skin? A sport in the blood? Some small thing inside you’ve come to hate and a painting that obsesses you?”
Malaspina’s eyes strayed to the canvas in the centre of the room. “You’re a fool, Agata,” he murmured. “You understand nothing.”
“I understand everything! My father was an African. My mother was a Sicilian whore. I am a little more black than you, Franco. But not much. Does it matter that Ippolito Malaspina shared my race? Our race?”
Costa couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. There was nothing there. No recognition. No emotion whatsoever.
The machine pistol lay in the dead thug’s arms, no more than one step away.
“No,” Malaspina answered Agata, almost with sadness. “It doesn’t.”
“Caravaggio—” she began.
“We were here before Caravaggio,” he interrupted. “We were here before Christ, before Caesar. We are what Man was meant to be, before you and yours came to poison us.”
She shook her head. Agata was lost, her eyes flying around the chamber with its sunken floor, its obscene statues and paintings, the paean to brutality that was everywhere.
“You hate them,” she insisted. “You hate me. You hate yourself.”
Malaspina stared at her and there was contempt in his eyes. “Not for that,” he murmured. “So much wisdom, Agata, and so little knowledge…”
“I forgive you everything,” she said, trembling like a leaf in the wind. “Those poor women. Everyone.” She glanced in Costa’s direction for a moment. “Even Nic can forgive you. He’s a good man. Everything can be atoned for if you wish it. Accept who you are, what you have done. Ask for justice and it is yours.”
He shook his head and cut the knife through the air in front of her, unmoved by a single word.
* * *
Costa rolled left, eyes never leaving the weapon that lay in the dead man’s bloodied hands. He turned as quickly as he could, snatched the metal stock up, rose to a crouch, felt for the trigger, gripped it, played once with the metal stub, heard a single shot burst from the barrel and exit through the drape behind. Then he rolled sideways once again, trying to avoid any attack that was coming, landing on his knee, a firm position, one that would take him out of Agata’s way and give him a direct line to Malaspina, an opportunity he would take on the instant, without a second thought.
It was all too late. By the time Costa wheeled round with the weapon in his hands, Agata was in the man’s grasp, his strong arm around her throat, the stiletto tight to her neck. Her eyes shone with terror.
“Drop it,” Malaspina ordered.
Agata screamed. Malaspina had curled the blade into her flesh in one short, cruel flick, fetching up a line of blood.
“Drop it or I will slit her like a pig,” he declared with no emotion, then turned the knife further into her neck as she struggled helplessly in his arms.
The weapon slipped from Costa’s hands. To drive home the point, he kicked it away, watching, listening, as the black metal screeched across the shiny marble, fetching up near the circular boundary wall opposite, well out of reach.
He could hear something from above. Footsteps, short and feminine, and the rushing of long robes. It was the sound Agata made across the polished tiles of the Doria Pamphilj.
Then something louder. The heavy approach of men. And another noise he recognised, and welcomed.
“Nic!” Peroni bellowed down from above.
Costa looked upwards, to the gallery that circled this strange Pantheon in miniature. They were gathering there, police officers and nuns, a crowd of witnesses, an audience which spelled a certain end for the last of the Ekstasists.
“The lawyers won’t get you out of this, Franco,” the big man bellowed from above, scanning the gallery, trying to work out some way down to the ground floor. “We’re in this place now. Legally. There are more officers on the way. Even you can’t walk away now.”
There was fury on Malaspina’s face. Nothing more. Not fear, not an acceptance that this was the end, which was what Costa wanted. The knife was still hard on Agata’s neck. The blood there welled like a river ready to burst its banks.
“Little men, little women,” Malaspina shouted, head jerking from side to side, taking in the flood of visitors now racing onto the balcony. “All of you. No idea of your place. No idea of the…” The count’s face contorted until there was nothing there but hatred, a black, dead loathing for everything. “.…impudence.”
The knife moved again. Agata yelled, more faintly. A second wound line started to appear beneath her ear. The balance had shifted, Costa sensed. In Malaspina’s mind, the dark, savage place where he imagined himself to live supreme, this was the endgame, the rich knight’s final hour, the moment of death and dissolution, the final opportunity to place a bloody mark against a world he detested.
She was, to him, as good as dead already.
Costa strode forward to confront him, stopping within reach of the sharp, deadly stiletto that never strayed from her neck, tempting the blade away from her dusky skin towards his own.
The idea had been buzzing in his head now for days. He had never discussed it with anyone, with Agata least of all, and it was her opinion, more than any, that he had come to value about Franco Malaspina.
Yet Agata Graziano was wrong. Costa understood this instinctively and he believed he knew why. He and Malaspina shared the same pain.
He leaned forward until his own features were so close to Malaspina’s he could see the wild, crazed determination in his eyes, smell the sweat of anticipation on him, and feel the sense that there was no going back now, not for any of them.
“What about Véronique Gillet?” he asked quietly, eye-to-eye with the man, close enough for him to switch his attention away from Agata if he wanted, if this taunting did its work.
“Véronique is dead.” Malaspina’s black eyes burned with fury.
“Would this have been part of the game too? If she were still alive?”
There were more sounds from above. More men. He thought he heard Falcone’s voice. Malaspina’s features were locked in bleak determination.
“Do not come near,” Costa ordered in a loud, commanding voice. “Count Malaspina has a hostage and a weapon.”
Falcone’s voice began to object.
“No!” Costa shouted.
There was quiet.
“They listen to you,” Malaspina murmured. “That’s good. There’ll be many people at your funeral. There was a crowd for your wife, wasn’t there? I read it in the papers. I sent a man to take photographs. They amused me.”
“Did they comfort you, Franco?” he asked.
“You speak in riddles.”
“I don’t think so,” he disagreed. “Will there be many mourners for Véronique?”
“I have no idea.”
Costa could see the interest in Agata’s eyes, detect, perhaps, a loosening of Malaspina’s grip on her neck.
“Her body is in the morgue still. Autopsies…” Costa shrugged. “It’s not a pretty event. We cannot release her for a burial, naturally. Not with the case open. She must stay stiff in that cabinet, perhaps for years.”
The point of the stiletto twitched in his direction.
“I may kill you first,” Malaspina murmured. “Just for the pleasure.” “It’s all in the blood,” Costa said, wondering.
“You bore me. You both bore me, and that is dangerous.”
“It wasn’t the black gene at all, was it?” Costa demanded. “You checked your ancestry too. That was merely curiosity. The arrogance of proving you are what you are.”
He watched the point of the knife, tried to measure how Malaspina might move if he managed to
goad him enough for Agata to get free.
The man said nothing. The circular chamber was silent, save for the breathing of Malaspina and the captive Agata Graziano.
Costa pointed to the painting: the naked goddess, the eternal sigh, the moment the world became real.
“What took her was all much more simple, much more human, which is why you hate it so,” he continued. “Your game. Véronique’s game. The game of Castagna, Buccafusca, and Nino Tomassoni when you drew them into it.”
He took one step back and traced a finger along the outline of the naked figure’s fleshy thigh. Malaspina stiffened, infuriated.
“Was that your idea? Or Véronique’s?” There were so many questions, so many possible answers. He didn’t care what Malaspina replied. He only cared that soon, very soon, he might get Agata away from the knife.
“You’re guessing,” Malaspina growled.
“I’m guessing it was yours. She was a weak, difficult woman. Beautiful, I think. Not unwilling to play as you dictated.” He stepped back to them, close again. “The whores. The violence, sham perhaps at first, all part of the price to be paid. Then…”
In the distance, above the shining floor and the bright painting that seemed so alive, he could see Falcone watching from the gallery, listening to every word.
Costa moved yet closer to him. “Something changed. An obvious thing. But something you believed could never happen to you and your kind. This game caught up with you.” He leaned forward. “It came with a price.”
“Shut up,” Malaspina muttered.
“You have sex with poor, miserable street whores. And one day you catch a disease. The disease. It’s not some black gene that gets passed down from generation to generation. You don’t care about that. You like to fool yourself you care about nothing at all. Then the sickness comes and it’s the worst sort, the sort that can kill you. HIV. AIDS, in Véronique’s case. A disease that’s not supposed to affect people like you. Aristocrats, lords with money and power, little gods in your own private world. And when it does…”
He reached for the man’s jacket, watching the blade all the time. There was a shape behind the breast pocket. One he had noticed before, in the farmhouse. A shape that could be one thing only.
Costa dipped his fingers quickly into the pocket and withdrew a small silver case, popped it open, revealed the pills inside.
“Véronique had something like this,” he went on. “Drugs. Expensive drugs, I imagine. Not ones they give to street whores because they can’t afford them and they’re just animals in any case. Special drugs. Ones that work. Mostly.”
The man’s face was stiff and ugly with strain and hate. Costa looked into those black, dead eyes and knew this was the truth.
“You paid for them for yourself, naturally. And for the others too. I imagine you paid for them for Véronique but” — he smiled, deliberately, as he continued — “even the richest man in the world cannot buy a cure for death. With Véronique, they didn’t work. She was ill already. The drugs made her worse. They shortened a life that was in jeopardy to begin with. In the end they killed her—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Malaspina repeated through clenched teeth.
Costa caught Agata’s attention. Her eyes were glassy with tears. She stared at him in horror. This was an explanation from a world she had never known, one that would never have made sense if she had stayed where she thought she belonged, quiet and safe inside a sister’s plain, coarse uniform.
“All your money, all the drugs and treatment… they weren’t enough for Véronique, were they? She’d left it too late,” Costa said simply. “You could save yourself and the others. But you couldn’t save her, the very woman you wished to keep alive. And what was worse, so much worse, was that, as she began to die… as you killed her… a part of you thought this might be love. Some stray strand of humanity inside of you looked at her wasting away and regretted that fact.” He watched the man’s reaction, prayed he saw some dim sign of recognition in his eyes. “But this being you, that small part spoke to the larger part and all it could think of was blood and murder and hate. To take some cruel vengeance on the innocent that should, by rights, have been directed at yourself.”
“You will die,” Malaspina murmured, his voice low and lifeless.
“How did you work the others into your scheme?” Costa asked. “Did you murder some poor black hooker who failed all of you one night, then tell them they were a part of it anyway? Did you promise them lawyers, too, the way you promised them drugs?”
The knife flashed back and forth in Malaspina’s clenched fist, cutting through thin air a finger’s length from Costa’s eyes.
“Most of all, Franco,” Costa asked lightly, “I would like to know what you told her. When Véronique knew she would surely die. Did you offer her one last chance to indulge you, in front of your painted goddess, as a… reward somehow? Was that supposed to be some kind of comfort? Do you really believe this passes as love?”
He folded his arms, waiting for the explosion. “I know what love is, Franco. Most people do. But not you. Never you. She was simply an obsession. Something you owned. Like this palace. Like the painting you forced Nino Tomassoni to give you. One more beautiful object you’ve torn apart as if it were worthless…”
He was screaming, moving, releasing Agata Graziano, throwing her to one side in his fury. Costa backed up, watching the stiletto flash through the air, feeling it make one arc in front of his chest, just close enough to cut a scything line through the fabric of his jacket.
Another sweep, another blow. There was nothing he could do, no weapon, no physical manoeuvre he knew that would offer any defence against a man like this.
Then the growing hubbub from the gallery above, the sound of racing footsteps, shouts, screams, disappeared beneath a deafening, cataclysmic clamour.
The blade swept through nothing and fell from view. The rage was gone from Franco Malaspina’s face. In its place was shock and surprise… and fear.
Costa looked beyond the figure stumbling towards him and saw her now. Agata Graziano had withdrawn something from the pocket of the cheap office-girl’s jacket. It was the gun Rosa Prabakaran had given her, a weapon Costa had never expected to see again. Grey smoke curled from the short snub barrel. As he watched, Agata raised the pistol again and fired one more shot at the falling figure between them, then a third.
Malaspina jerked with pain and the physical blow of the impacts. Blood rose in his mouth. His eyes turned glassy. The knife fell to the floor with a hollow echoing ring, followed by the stricken man, who clutched at the legs of the stand on which Caravaggio’s naked goddess rested, watching the scene, unmoved, her throat locked in a cry that was lost in the clamour of Franco Malaspina’s death.
A pebble-sized hole, surrounded by broken shards of skull, gaped above Malaspina’s ear. The dun, viscous matter Costa could see beneath the man’s hairline matched that which now ran in a spraying line, mixed with blood, across the naked figure of Eve like the splash of a murderous graffiti artist seeking something beautiful to defile.
Agata was shouting, screeching; was not herself; was quite unlike the woman he knew.
He watched in dismay as she emptied every last shell from Rosa’s gun into the still, frozen form on the canvas, painted by the artist she had come, in her own fashion, to love, watched as the mouth and its inaudible eternal sigh disappeared beneath the blast of a shell.
When the bullets ran out, she began to tear at the canvas with her bare hands, ripping into four-hundred-year-old pigment with her nails, weeping, screaming.
He strode over and pulled her away.
Her face stole into his neck, damp with tears. His hand fell on her rough, tangled hair and held her small, slim body close.
Agata Graziano looked up and the power of her gaze was unmistakable. She was staring at him and there was something in her expression — a kind of dislike, bordering on hatred — that was reminiscent, for a moment, of Franco Malaspina.
“This is done now,” Costa said, and wondered, seeing the look persist in her eyes, what it was that she saw.
PART NINETEEN
One
Fiumicino was always busy just after the new year. Families on the move, businesses returning to life. Part of the daily round of modern life. They were together at a small table in the cafe drinking coffee, an awkward silence between them, one he was desperate to break.
It was the mother superior of the convent who had called and asked if it was possible for him to give Agata a lift to the airport. The sisters were, she said, too upset about her decision to be trusted. He didn’t have to think twice before saying yes.
Now they sat, she with two plastic grocery bags bulging with personal detritus on the floor after checking in a small, cheap canvas tote for the flight. Costa with… nothing but regrets and thoughts he found difficult to turn into words. He wished she weren’t leaving so soon and was determined not to burden her with that knowledge. Agata had enough to carry now.
“What’s the order like there?” he asked finally, unable to bear the thought that they could part in a few minutes without having exchanged more than a few perfunctory words. “Is that the right word, ‘order’?”
She smiled weakly. Her face seemed to have aged over these past few weeks. She now looked like the person he would have met had she never worn the black robes of a nun: a beautiful woman just turning thirty, with flawless dark skin, high cheekbones, and eyes that shone with intelligence, and a new sense of sadness that had never been there before.
“There is no ‘right word,’ ” she said. “I left. Didn’t they tell you that?”
“No… I mean, I assumed you wanted to move to a convent somewhere else. Away from Rome.”
“I’m not just going somewhere different,” she replied emphatically.
“Oh…”
She reached over and touched his wrist. Automatically — he knew this gesture so well by now he never thought about it — he turned it so she could see his watch.