by David Hewson
‘Nic,’ Rosa said brightly, glad to see him arrive. ‘Meet my new friend, Jimmy.’
Costa looked at the gigantic youth towering above him. Jimmy had a crew cut and a blank, unmemorable face. He was wearing some kind of sports shirt with huge numbers on the chest and a baseball cap on backwards.
‘What are you doing in Rome, Jimmy?’ Costa asked, briefly shaking his hand.
‘History.’
Costa looked more closely at the shirt. The logo made out that it was from the Raffaello College football team, the academy for foreign kids in the Via Corso where Agata taught.
‘Is it fun?’
‘My old man made me do it. History sucks.’
‘That’s an interesting point of view. A friend of mine just started work at the Raffaello. Agata Graziano. She teaches art.’
His small, piggy eyes lit up.
‘Oh wow. The new one? Black-haired chick? She’s a babe. You gotta introduce me.’
Costa frowned and said, ‘I think you should tell her she’s a babe yourself. Now . . .’ Costa picked up a slimy, limp slice of pizza, placed it in Jimmy’s paw-like hand and waved at the far corner where a bunch of similarly attired kids were standing slack-jawed beneath a TV set showing American football. ‘Go over there. Eat that. And don’t come back.’
The American kid looked as if he might be trouble for a moment. Then he thought better of it and slunk off.
Rosa was shaking her head.
‘You’ve absolutely no idea how to handle them, have you?’
‘Really?’ he wondered. ‘He’s gone, isn’t he? Where did I go wrong?’
‘We find things out by talking to them. Not scaring them away.’
He took her by the arm and led her to a dark and empty corner where the music was just a little less loud, though still of sufficient volume to afford a curiously noisy form of privacy.
‘We find things out by talking to Robert Gabriel.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Or Gino Riggi. Isn’t that right?’
‘If only,’ she grumbled.
Costa didn’t have much patience left. He asked her for the background to her assignment: watching the cop from narcotics. Slowly, carefully, Rosa outlined what she knew, with the rigorous precision he’d come to associate with her.
It wasn’t a pretty story, or a rare one. Riggi was one more cop who’d spent a little too long beneath the surface, so much that he’d failed to remember where the lines were drawn. Internal investigations suspected him of taking money from the Turkish gang, the Vadisi, playing both sides.
‘We think his contact there is called Cakici,’ Rosa said. ‘Robert Gabriel’s some kind of intermediary who runs between the two. If I could lay my hands on the English kid I’d offer him a deal. Immunity from prosecution in return for what he knows. If I could get close to him.’
She raised her slight shoulders in desperation.
‘Of course that was before Leo decided he was wanted for murder. Now, I just don’t know. He doesn’t sound a lot like his sister, does he? Not from what I read in the papers? She’s all sweetness and light.’
‘Adoptive sister,’ Costa said. ‘Robert was adopted. Apparently he never quite fitted in.’
‘Ah.’ Rosa nodded.
As if that explained everything, Costa thought. He glanced around the room.
‘You think we might find Robert Gabriel here? Or Riggi?’
‘The centro storico is the Vadisi’s territory. They like dealing with the foreign kids. Here one minute, gone the next. It’s easy. The profits are reasonable. They don’t get involved in long-term deals with suppliers or addicts. The Campo, Trastevere, that’s theirs. The places Romans go for their drugs – San Giovanni, out in the suburbs – they’re still pretty much Italian. Though I have to say our own people are getting muscled out over time. The Turks, the Balkan gangs, they’re a lot tougher, a lot meaner. They’ll contemplate things that your average Italian hood would baulk at. No need to go to confession afterwards, is there?’
He’d heard that story in so many places. It was part of the changing face of Italian organized crime.
‘You don’t know what Robert Gabriel looks like?’
‘Just Riggi’s description,’ she said. ‘Lanky, muscular kid around twenty with black hair, lots of it. If he’s got something to sell around here . . .’ Her finger ran across the crowd in the bar. ‘. . . they’ll know him. The way it works is you walk around, look interested, talk to people. Don’t do anything obvious like asking where you can score.’
‘Thanks for the advice. I appreciate it.’
‘I’m trying to help! If we bump into Riggi then you and I are out on a date.’ Her big brown eyes focused on him. ‘Is that OK with you?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve played that game, would it?’
‘No.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Comes naturally.’
‘How many bars are there? Like this? The places the Gabriel kid would have worked?’
She looked at the ceiling, counting the answer off on her fingers.
‘Around here, seven. Near Navona, another five or so. Couple by the Pantheon. Six, eight, maybe more, in Trastevere.’
So many? Costa was surprised. This was a side to Rome he, like most citizens, rarely saw. It happened off camera, in places they never visited, a hidden undercurrent in the city’s busy tide of daily life.
Rosa raised her glass.
‘Soda water and fresh mint. Long evening ahead. Are you ready for it?’
‘Until midnight. Maybe not even that.’
She turned serious for a moment and her made-up face suddenly seemed a lot older.
‘I need you to understand this, Nic. We’ve got a case against Riggi already but it’s fragile. I have to find a little more. Or to put it another way, I need to make sure we don’t lose anything we already have.’
He got the message. Her news about Riggi wasn’t an accidental revelation, some personal favour Rosa had idly slipped to him as he sat on his Vespa outside the Questura. It was her way of warning him off any action that might impact upon her own case.
‘We’d better split up and start talking, I suppose,’ Costa said.
Rosa Prabakaran smiled. Then, as he watched, she changed again, found a sultry smile from somewhere, a walk, a posture that seemed to fit this loud, overheated temple to a form of twenty-first century hedonism he found deeply tedious.
She ambled over to the counter and started chatting to the barista shaking cocktails. Costa wandered outside, said hello to a couple of pretty girls enjoying the fading sun, then slipped round the corner and called back to forensic. Di Capua was still on duty. Costa was glad of that. Teresa’s deputy seemed to understand these things better than most.
‘I need you to look up the personal mobile-phone number for a plain-clothes officer,’ Costa told him. ‘After that I’m going to call it and I want a trace to where he is now. Is that possible?’
Di Capua laughed.
‘Are you serious? This is kindergarten stuff. Beneath me. Let me put you over to my new friend, Maria. She can handle it.’
Costa remembered the accident with the camera and the rumour that the same girl had seen Malise Gabriel’s corpse at the weekend and noticed nothing untoward.
‘You mean the Maria who . . . ?’
He didn’t have time to finish the sentence. A bubbly young woman was on the line asking a series of detailed questions. Costa steeled himself. She seemed to know what she was doing.
It took a minute to get Riggi’s number, then another three to set up the trace. Costa sent up a little prayer that the bent narcotics cop wasn’t on voicemail then walked back round the corner, stood next to the pretty girls outside the bar, and dialled, withholding his own number.
After four rings a bad-tempered male voice barked, ‘Pronto.’
‘Hey, Sergio!’ Costa said in a loud, crude voice. ‘Where the hell you been? We’re waiting for you. At the bar. The girls are here and they look gorgeous. Girls? Say hel
lo to Sergio!’
The giggly kids had been listening. They raised their mojito glasses and yelled, ‘Sergio!’
‘I can’t believe you’re late again, you idle jerk,’ Costa said. ‘You got your head on right?’
‘What’re you talking about, moron?’ Riggi yelled. ‘I’m not Sergio. Check the damned number next time.’
Then silence. Costa smiled at the girls and shrugged. He walked back round the corner and waited. It was Silvio Di Capua who called back.
‘If you tell me your new girlfriend screwed that up,’ Costa told him, ‘my reputation for possessing a forgiving nature will be sorely tested.’
‘New girlfriend. I wish. Maria’s one smart kid. You just have to keep her away from touching things. Physical stuff. Anything breakable.’
‘That doesn’t bode well for a developing relationship. Where was the call from?’
He listened. It was a rough fix, based on the mobile network’s cell. But if he married it up with Rosa’s knowledge . . .
Costa walked back into the bar and pulled her away from a couple of loud and bleary-eyed Australians.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, dragging his hand off her bare arm. ‘I might have been getting somewhere there.’
‘Were you?’
‘I said might have been.’
‘Trastevere. The names of the bars Riggi frequents.’
She looked puzzled but rattled off the ones she knew.
Di Capua said the call came from somewhere near the Piazza Trilussa, the tiny little square on the other side of the Ponte Sisto, the pedestrian bridge that ran across the river from close to the Palazzetto Santacroce. There was one obvious dive on her list. It was a long walk.
He went over to the coat stand in the corner and picked up the helmets he’d left there, thrusting the spare into Rosa Prabakaran’s hands.
‘What the hell’s going on, Nic?’ she demanded.
‘You said we’d look good on the Vespa,’ he told her.
FOUR
Kids, Riggi thought. You had to use them. No one else was stupid enough to do the job. But dealing with their idiocy, their unpredictability, their flakiness – these things drove him crazy sometimes.
He sat on a stool outside the bar in the back street near the Piazza Trilussa watching the streams of brightly clad adolescents wandering into the centre of Trastevere for the evening. A long night usually, one that might not end till three or later, till daylight, when some would find themselves on a bench by the Tiber, exhausted yet popped up with chemicals, munching cheap pizza, wondering what came next.
Riggi’s uncle had lived in Trastevere. When the cop first came to Rome from Venice he’d lived with the old man for a while, in a narrow, winding street that ran up the Gianicolo hill, all the way to the church of Montorio and beyond, towards the piazzale dedicated to Garibaldi. This was only eight or nine years ago, but it seemed a lifetime away. So much had happened since, in Riggi’s life, in that of Trastevere. His uncle had sold his little house for a fortune to some banker in Chicago who’d sliced it into apartments that he now rented over the Internet to tourists. Most of the neighbours had done the same so the streets that once were alive with Romans now had an anonymous, shifting population, without ties, without history.
When Riggi first came to Rome his uncle had proudly told him how Trastevere was the last true neighbourhood in the centre of the city. A solid, tightly knit community of families, most of whom had been staking their claim to these tapering streets of modest, cramped houses for centuries. Now many of the locals had taken the tourist dollar, moved out to new apartment blocks built on the flat estuarial land near Fiumicino. Places that came with easy parking and supermarkets nearby, fast trains back into the city for those who needed them. All the conveniences of modern life.
And Trastevere was slowly transformed, the Roman elements of it mutating into museum pieces for the crowds of wandering foreign tourists, the houses sold on for sums of money that men like his uncle, a dignified but impoverished print worker, could never have dreamed of attaining through their daily labour.
He hated the place. He loved it too. The kids here, gullible youngsters like Robert Gabriel, were his to control, to use, to master.
Riggi sipped his beer and thought of the ones he’d dealt with over the years. Most, in the early days, had wound up in court, busted for small amounts of dope, silent, always, about where the stuff came from. Two weeks later they’d be back in the bars, their tiny fortunes stored in plastic bags and rolled-up balls of foil. He hadn’t changed a thing by arresting them. It was like brushing away the flood water back home in Venice. The acqua alta always returned. Why? Because this was where, when the season chose, it belonged.
So he came to the conclusion it might be easier to win their confidence, to let them think he was as crooked as they were, given the opportunity. This way he got to glimpse the men behind them, the shadowy, dark figures who lived far away in pleasant suburbs, with wives and children at expensive private schools, all paid for by a pricey pinch of chemical that went into some foreigner’s nostril or mouth or vein late on a Trastevere night.
At some unnoticed point over the years the dividing line between him and them had disappeared altogether. Why? He’d no idea. He couldn’t even pinpoint the moment, the event, at which the change had occurred. Sometimes the acqua alta turned up on schedule. Sometimes it never showed. That was the way of things.
How many bar kids pushing dope had he met this way over the years? Forty. Fifty. More. He’d lost count. Most of them looked the same anyway. Lanky, tall, pale, with unkempt hair and blank, dead faces. From time to time one of them would fail the exam, the subtle, short interview Riggi gave them before revealing who he truly was. And then they’d wind up in front of a magistrate, serving a little time, always in silence. The Vadisi understood the need for this. A cop who never caught anyone would soon attract suspicion. Statistics mattered, more and more. He needed sacrifices, just as much as the Turks did. They were necessary for all the old reasons, and practicality meant that it was easier to put the innocent and the gullible to the sword than the guilty. This was a world constantly on the edge of breaking. An occasional scapegoat, some dumb youngster putting up his hand to selling coke and heroin and poppers, kept the lid on, for a while anyway.
There’d been a time when he thought that Robert Gabriel might have been in line for this fate. But Gabriel was different, and had been from the start. Wily, cowardly, unpredictable – all the things Riggi loathed. But someone who could shift huge amounts of dope too, come back with an empty stash and pockets brimming with money, always ready for more.
Too much money sometimes, Riggi knew. The arithmetic of pushing dope was simple. Gabriel was beating the numbers and the Roman narcotics cop couldn’t quite work out how. By skimming from the proceeds? That seemed unlikely and dangerous. By working for two masters? Riggi wondered about that and knew it was a conversation he and the English kid had to have. There’d been rumours of late of a new player in the centro storico, someone Italian, not Turkish. That idea gave him a chill. It spoke of wars, of blood, of messy public revelations.
Also . . . Riggi tried to remember. But the beer, and he’d drunk a lot of it lately, seemed to cloud his recollection.
He recalled the first time he and Robert Gabriel had met, and a curious memory returned. In a way he felt it was almost as if Robert Gabriel had recruited him. Not that this was possible. The young English kid hadn’t needed bending to Riggi’s will. He was there, in the mental place they both wanted, already, willing to shuttle between him and the Vadisi henchman, Cakici, without a second thought, as if this duplicitous and risky existence came naturally.
There was something about Robert Gabriel that Riggi had mistrusted from the start. Now, with a talented and tenacious cop like Leo Falcone on his tail, Gabriel was beginning to look like a serious liability. He had to get the kid out of Rome, quickly. Riggi would even buy the airline ticket himself if need be. If that didn’t happen �
�� if the kid was an idiot and insisted on staying . . .
Gino Riggi didn’t see himself as a dishonest man. He’d never enriched himself much from his time working both sides of the street. A holiday in Thailand. A decent hi-fi system. Some money sent back home to his widowed mother who lived in a humble back-street apartment in Castello, too proud to ask for help. That was all this meant. It wasn’t for personal gain, not really. Riggi had rationalized this time and time again, usually late at night with a belly full of beer and a stomach complaining that a little food wouldn’t go amiss either.
In a world that was fractured to breaking point the best a decent man could do was to try to keep a little equilibrium around him. He allowed the Vadisi to deal to the dumb and feckless foreign kids whose tourist dollars, largely donated by doting parents intent on giving them a brief European education, kept the economy of the Campo and Trastevere alive, if barely. In return the Turks kept away from the places where real Roman kids went to play, stayed out of prostitution and some of the nastier sides of the drug business. There was an accommodation, an awkward, illicit one that could put him in jail if it became known.
And if that happened? If the house of cards around him really tumbled down one day? Not a single gram of coke would disappear from the streets. No dealers would get busted. Nothing much would change.
He snatched the bottle of strong Moretti beer to his mouth and downed some. No one had ever been hurt in his little territory over the years. Not seriously. He didn’t want that on his conscience. But if Robert Gabriel wouldn’t take the hint . . .
‘Stupid English kids,’ Riggi said.
He glanced at his watch. It was eight thirty. At least the English were usually punctual.
A tall, dark-haired figure was bouncing down the cobblestones of the little alley with the jaunty punk walk so many of these dumb, drug-pushing adolescents thought was cool. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, jeans. The same thing a million other kids in the city liked to wear.
The morons all looked the same after a while, Riggi realized, and knew, from the sinking feeling in his stomach, he had to get out of this mess. It was wrong. It was dangerous. And one day soon he’d no longer be able to keep this creaky world afloat.