A Season for the Dead nc-1

by David Hewson

  He stepped out of the car and breathed in the smell of the countryside: parched scrub and dust, with the distant fragrance of wild thyme somewhere underneath. Cicadas rattled in the dead grass at his feet. The black, darting outlines of bats, squeaking frantically, broke the perfect night sky.

  The house was an old farmhouse in the dead land between the old Appian Way and the modern, busy thoroughfare of the Via Appia Nuova.

  He remembered what he had said to Sara Farnese in front of the altar in the church on Tiber Island. A family was a team against the world, a bulwark against the insanity. He could not imagine what it would be like to be denied its sanctity. He could not begin to understand how anyone could survive the day without someplace like this, some safe, holy refuge in which joy and hope, fear and tragedy intermingled, became controllable through the mutual regard individuals felt for one another.

  The light was still on in the front room. Marco Costa was asleep in an armchair. Pepe, the argumentative little terrier his father loved so much, lay at Marco’s feet, curled into a ball. Nic could remember the animal as a puppy, bought after his mother died, as if in compensation. He had been offended at the time, but his father had been right. The dog’s ceaseless need for love and attention, and his instant return of the same, made those dark months bearable. Now the years were taking their vengeance with the same vicious brutality, for both master and animal.

  Giulia, his sister, had left a note in the kitchen, where the old man could not find it. She had to go to Milan on business for a week. There had been a call from their elder brother in Washington, young Marco. It was hardest for him. The busy lawyer’s life and the harsh working regime of America left little time for home visits. The slow process of dying was difficult enough to manage when one lived just a few miles from the old man; from the other side of the Atlantic it was impossible.

  During the coming week, however, some routine could be maintained. Nic would stay during the evening whenever possible; Bea, Marco’s former secretary from his earliest days in politics, and still a firm friend, would come in for the daylight hours and any other time when work called Nic away. Giulia hated to leave him but she needed the time off too.

  Nic read the rest of the note. The old man had taken his pills with his usual bad grace. His mood was up and down. The doctors said…

  Her writing had faltered as she spelled out the words: perhaps weeks, not months now.

  He closed his eyes and wanted to scream. His father was sixty-one, half a head taller than him, and once a bull of a man, someone who had, on occasion, stood up to the toughest of Turin union hoods and won his bloody way. Now he was some flimsy human husk, eaten away each day by this insidious, invisible disease. It was savagely unjust, whatever the doctors said about the old man’s habits. To move, in the course of a single year, from such strength to such frailty was a cruel transformation, for Marco Costa and those who loved him. It was also implacable, beyond treatment, something his son still found hard to accept.

  There was a sound from the kitchen. Bea came in with two glasses of wine for them. She was still a handsome woman, straight-backed, with short auburn hair, attentive blue eyes and a sharp tongue when it was deserved. As always, she wore bright clothes; on this occasion an orange silk shirt with cream trousers. Gold glittered at her tanned neck and on her slim wrists. She was a little younger than Marco, perhaps fifty-five now, and had been single throughout her life.

  Their relationship puzzled Nic; there were memories from his childhood, uncertain ones, suggesting Bea had been more than merely a friend to Marco at one time. Seeing him through his illness was now a matter of duty, something she would not shirk. She waved at him to come back into the kitchen, out of earshot of his father.

  “Don’t believe everything you read,” she said, nodding at Giulia’s note.

  He put down the wine and poured himself some water. “Bea, the doctors…”

  “They’re all a bunch of quacks and charlatans.”

  “But…” He waved the piece of paper, feeling stupid.

  “But nothing. My own father had the same kind of disease, and the same kind of head on his shoulders. Sure it kills them in the end. But I tell you this, Nic. A man like that dies when he chooses to let go, when he thinks there’s no more reason for him to stay around.”

  “Of course.”

  She gave him a harsh look, with some cause: His answer had been too quick, too easy. “You think I’m deluding myself? Listen. If Marco finds no reason to live, he’ll be in a casket tomorrow. If something holds him—and something does right now—he’ll be sitting down with us at Christmas.”

  Bea owned a tiny apartment in Trastevere which she always said she would sell one day, to return to her native Puglia. Nic had come to understand over the last few months when that day would be: once Marco was dead.

  He took her hands, which were still young, the fingers long and supple. “I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, Bea.”

  “Then don’t. Pay attention to him, Nic. This is a time that will be with you for the rest of your life. There are things that must be said or you’ll always regret them. Perhaps things that must be done too. I don’t know. A woman never understands the relationship between a man and his father. Still, most of them don’t either. There…” She picked up her bag and took out her car keys. “Lecture’s over. I’ll be back as usual tomorrow.”

  He watched her go, trying to recover those mental images of her when she was young. Bea was beautiful then: a glorious, colorful presence in the family’s life. There was a time, perhaps when he was seven or eight, that he felt he was in love with her. The perfume she wore—the same invasive scent she still used—continued to prick his memory.

  She still had the same exotic air about her, one that his father never seemed to acknowledge. Bea was a mystery. She had never talked of a man, never seemed to need one. Marco Costa, and the cause, had been her life, and now one was dying and the other was already dead.

  He went back to the room where Marco still slept, undisturbed by the movement around him. It was late. Nic bent down and placed his arms carefully beneath his father, lifting him out of the chair, shocked by how light he had become.

  Halfway to the bedroom, Marco’s breathing changed. The old man’s gray eyelids opened slowly. Nic saw the glint of a welcome recognition in the familiar features which were now creased and wrinkled, like those of an eighty-year-old.

  “You should be out chasing women,” his father said in a voice that carried the stain of a lifetime’s tobacco.

  Nic carried him to the bed and gently laid him on the clean white sheet, newly ironed by Bea. “I have been.”

  “Bullshit,” the old man whispered, then began to smile at some returning memory. “People have been chasing you. I watch TV, you know. I can recognize the way my own son runs even when he’s wearing some woman’s coat.”

  It was the body that was failing him. Marco Costa’s mind was as sharp as his son could ever remember.

  “Did they know too?” Nic asked. “Did the TV people realize it wasn’t her?”

  “No.” Marco laughed. “Do you think I should call? Collect a little tip-off money? I don’t understand where you get this theatrical streak. Not from me.”

  Nic began to work on his clothes.

  His father slapped gently at his hand. “I can do that. I’m not a cripple. I keep telling Bea that.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You’re not a cripple. Bea knows it.”

  The old man shot him a curious glance. “She knows everything, Nic. She’s family now. In a way she always was though I was too stupid to tell her.”

  “I think she knows. You treat her badly enough.”

  “If you pamper me like an invalid, I’ve a duty to be demanding.”

  He never gave up, never let go. It was part of his charm and part of his problem too. “Then you’re doing your duty very well.”

  Marco Costa’s face grew serious. “She is family. When the time comes, I’d like h
er around. I say that now. I may not be able to say it when it happens.”

  Nic nodded. “Bea will be here,” he said, and walked away from the bed, feeling the familiar stinging in his eyes, hiding his reaction by tidying some stray papers on the desk.

  The room had once been the family study, until Marco’s illness and his inability to climb stairs made it the old man’s bedroom. It was still alive with the memories of Nic’s childhood, still decorated just as it had always been, with the striking Communist posters, the bust of Gramsci, his father’s hero, and the piece his mother had insisted upon, a classical head of a handsome man, turning, with an expression of determination on his face, as if to face some unseen enemy.

  Much of Nic’s life was rooted in this room. It was here that all three Costa children had been educated, their parents refusing to tolerate the public schools because, at the time, they insisted Catholicism was the state religion, to be taught to every child. It was here that each in turn learned, and quietly rejected, their parents’ own intense brand of politics, here that three studious children read classics and modern stories, Homer and Jack London. And later Marco’s most cherished possession, a first edition of Gramsci’s own Lettere del Carcere published in 1947, a decade after his death.

  It was here too that Anna Costa had died, ten years before, refusing to go to hospital, as Marco would refuse when it was his time. Nic had found her, slumped at the desk as if reading, when he came back from a run. A left-wing magazine was spread out in front of her. Her gray hair, still as long as when she was young, had tumbled across the pages. He could still recall the sharp, painful sense of injustice he had felt. Perhaps it was that that had somehow, illogically, propelled him into the police. It had taken a year before his father had forgiven himself for being absent when Anna died; he was in Milan, addressing a conference.

  Nothing had been the same after that. Marco’s career entered its decline; winter came into their lives. The bright, vivid joy of childhood—a childhood which Marco Costa had enjoyed alongside his children—had vanished. The practical world beckoned and it was a cold place full of solitary people.

  Marco Costa reached out with a scrawny arm and touched his son’s cheek, smiling. “So in between the cross-dressing and the athletics have you managed to oppress anyone today?”

  “Not as many as I’d hoped. But there’s always tomorrow.”

  Marco chuckled. “Of course. There’s always tomorrow.”

  They had discussed the matter, just once, which was as much as Marco desired. For the old man, dying was an inconvenience, like a cab that arrived half an hour before it was due and honked its horn until you came struggling to the door.

  He was unafraid, more through practicality than courage. People died, he said, usually before they wished it. He hadn’t achieved as much as he’d hoped, though he knew it was more than most. He had a good family too: two sons and a daughter whose chosen professions, in the police, in the law and as a professional painter, were so far removed from his own it was impossible for him to feel anything but pride. He did not fear the void that he knew lay ahead. He only regretted that it would disrupt unfinished business, work that would now fall to someone else, someone beyond the Costa clan.

  His son felt differently. Even after a year of knowing its imminence, Nic still could not come to terms with the idea of a world which did not contain his father’s considerable presence. This was the only secret he dared not share with the old man, and that made it all the harder to bear.

  Seventeen

  The phone rang just after he had served the old man breakfast: fresh fruit, orange juice straight from the squeezer, a cocktail of pills. His father watched him as he took the call.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said the moment Nic Costa put down the phone. “Bea will be here soon. I’m not helpless. I’ll survive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What is it?”

  The old man never asked about his work. This was a pact between them. Nic was surprised that was now changing.

  “There’s been another death.”

  “So what? Are you the only cop they’ve got?”

  “It’s not that.” He was trying to clarify matters in his own head. “It’s connected somehow by the sound of it. Maybe we’ve jumped to conclusions about what happened in the Vatican. Maybe…” The old man’s tired eyes wouldn’t leave him. Marco Costa knew when something was badly wrong. “… it’s all a lot worse than we thought.”

  “Tell me about it,” the old man ordered. “If you want. When you get back. Now…” He picked up a bread roll from the table. “You eat that in the car. No one can live off fruit alone. Not even you.”

  Fifteen minutes later Nic Costa was parked outside the old, low church near the Colosseum, by the narrow road that led to the Lateran palace, the first St. Peter’s. This was a part of Rome he never really understood. The Colosseum was two minutes’ stroll away. The busy modern thoroughfare of Labicana set up a constant traffic roar to the north. A short walk would take him to the Rinaldis’ lonely apartment in the Via Mecenate. There were high, late nineteenth-century blocks towering over the narrow cobbled streets of the neighborhood. A few stalls made up the tiny street market that had probably worked here for ten centuries or more. It was a quiet, residential area, one that the tourists rarely visited. And within it lay such odd, unexpected sights: churches and squares that seemed to go back to a different city.

  Sara Farnese would, he felt sure, know this area well, would be able to point out a wall here, a crypt there, and know its place in the Roman story. He felt lost, all the more so when he walked into the large, elegant courtyard that now bustled with people. The center was occupied by rows of simple seats, perhaps three hundred of them, pointed toward a low wooden stage. The floor was still littered with cheaply printed programs: Vivaldi and Corelli performed by a local semiprofessional orchestra. An open-air concert had taken place here the night before. That made the morning’s discovery even more odd.

  At eight-fifteen an Irish Dominican named Bernard Cromarty, a senior member of the order that had administered San Clemente for almost three hundred and fifty years, had opened the doors to the chapel to prepare for the morning service. What he found there led him to run, terrified, from the dark, enclosed interior, out into the hardening morning light, screaming for help.

  Costa studied the courtyard, noting how much had been left behind after the concert, took a deep breath and went inside. This was a grander, older church than the place on Tiber Island. It had a solemn, distinguished interior, with a quiet richness of decoration. The murmur of men’s voices sounded like the whispering of monks rebounding off the walls. In the center of the nave, flanked by two high, imposing pulpits, was an ancient choir leading up to a dimly lit altar, raised slightly above ground level. A group of recognizable figures was bent low around the far edge of the structure, studying something out of sight. Falcone stood upright, in expensive jeans, their neat crease visible even from this distance, and a too-white shirt. It was Sunday. Perhaps the inspector had been called away from a social engagement. He’d been married once but that had ended in divorce years ago. Now, the gossips had it, he played the field, in fancy company too.

  The cold, bearded face was creased in concentration. Costa joined Luca Rossi by Falcone’s side. The focal point of this part of the church was supposed to be the small casket which lay at the base of the altar, beneath a canopy supported by delicate columns. Now another object stole their attention. In front of the coffin, surrounded by flickering candles which were almost spent, was the figure of a naked man. He lay on his side. His knees were drawn up as if crouching, his arms were extended and bent upward, with the hands placed together in an obvious position of prayer. His eyes were open, as was his mouth, giving him an expression of mute surprise, as if he had chanced upon something in the night, something that had stolen the life out of him.

  His fair hair was wet and plastered to his skull. His face showed signs of a severe beating:
livid dark bruises, a swollen eye and several open wounds. Around his neck was a thick nautical rope which was attached to a small, rusty anchor, of a size suitable for a pleasure dinghy, and now lying flat on the mosaic floor behind his back.

  Teresa Lupo busied herself around the corpse. With minute care she placed a gloved finger in the mouth, leaned forward and sniffed. She wrinkled her nose and, very gingerly, took a slender arm and tried to move it.

  “Well?” Falcone asked. Standing next to him was a priest, a severefaced man of seventy or more with a wild shock of white hair and sad gray eyes. He watched them guardedly, as if the church and everything inside it was his personal property.

  “Brackish water,” the pathologist said. “The salt’s pretty strong. He wouldn’t smell like this if he’d been in the Tiber. Must be somewhere else. Somewhere estuarial. I’ll be able to tell you more once I’ve got him back to the office.”

  Falcone stared down at the dead man’s face. “How long?”

  “Several hours,” she replied. “There’s obvious rigor. He must have been placed here in the evening or early this morning.”

  Rossi stared gloomily at the corpse. “How was that possible, Father? I thought there was a concert here last night. How could a dead man be brought into this place?”

  “There was a concert,” the priest answered, warming to the unexpected politeness in Rossi’s question. “Every last seat was sold. I was here myself until one in the morning, helping to clear up.”

  “Then how?” Falcone demanded.

  The priest shook his head and stared at the stone floor. Costa nodded toward the sunlight behind them in the open courtyard. Something large, shiny and black leaned against the far wall. “What’s that doing there?” he asked. “Why would a musician leave an instrument behind?”

  Rossi walked out into the daylight, heaved the double bass case carefully under his arm, not touching the handle. From the way he carried it the thing weighed very little. He returned to the nave and placed it on the stone floor. Falcone bent down, took a nail file out from a leather case and gingerly worked his way around the perimeter, flipping up the clasps. When he was done he threw open the lid. The case was empty. The cheap red velvet lining was soaked with water. It had a sour, salty smell.