The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “Open the doors,” he said. “The main ones.”

  Costa was walking towards them already, anxious to enjoy the look of astonishment on the faces of Gianni Peroni and Mauro Sandri when those gigantic bronze shutters were pulled back to reveal this wonder to the world on the other side.

  “What?” the caretaker asked, putting a hand on Costa’s shoulder until something in the detective’s eyes told him this was not a good idea.

  “You heard!” Costa snapped, getting angry with the man, wondering what he thought he was protecting here.

  There were more keys and some kind of electronic monitor needed attention. Costa got on his cell phone and called his partner, just beyond the doors.

  “I think it’s just a kid, Gianni,” he told Peroni. “If he runs, you can get some exercise. Otherwise… hell, it’s almost Christmas.”

  The big man’s laugh came back as a double echo, from the phone and, fainter, from beyond the doors. “You’re itching to do Leo’s clean-up statistics some good tonight.”

  “Just stand back and watch when we open this place.” Then Costa thought about what Peroni had said. “Is Falcone there?”

  “Walking right across the square. And on the phone too. This isn’t a conference call or something?”

  Costa heard a low metallic groan and slid the phone back in his jacket. The caretaker was heaving at the bronze behemoth on his right, tugging it back on a set of ancient hinges. Costa took hold of the second door and pulled hard at the handle. It moved surprisingly easily.

  In the space of a few seconds they had the doors open. The night wind slammed straight up the portico and flung snow into their faces. Nic Costa brushed the stinging flakes out of his eyes. Gianni Peroni stood there, clearly transfixed by what he saw. Sandri was a few steps behind him, tense, upright, firing off photos constantly. Falcone had arrived too and seemed to be barking angrily down the phone.

  Costa turned round and took another look at the magical scene behind him, snow swirling down from the heavens, as if tethered to some magnetic, twisting beam of light.

  The vagrant was moving in the Pantheon now. Nic Costa no longer cared. He stood back from the door to let the intruder run, to break out from this tight, enclosed universe that was the dream of an emperor who had been dead for nearly two millennia.

  Then he looked outside again and recognized a different shape—upright and stiff on the steps of the fountain—not quite able to believe what he was seeing, to reconcile it with this bewitching night.

  A figure slipped past him, brushing against his jacket. Costa didn’t even look. With fumbling fingers he unzipped his coat, felt for his gun in the holster.

  “Get down,” he said, still trying to marshal his thoughts, letting the words slip from his mouth so softly he doubted the caretaker even heard. Then he took a deep breath and yelled, as loudly as he could, “Gianni! Get down for Christ’s sake!”

  Instinctively, without planning the move, he dashed out into the portico and felt the freezing wind bite at his face. Gianni Peroni was still staring into the interior of the Pantheon, ugly face alight with joy, grinning like a kid. Falcone was getting close to him too, his stern, immobile features for once rapt, enthralled by the scene inside.

  “Get down!” Costa screamed again, waving his hands, waving the small black revolver through the falling cloud of white flakes. “Now! The bastard’s got a gun.”

  He heard the first shot drown out the end of his warning. Something small and deadly sang its way through the air. Sparks flew off the column close to the astonished faces of the two cops under the portico. Falcone’s arm went out and pushed Peroni down to the stone pavement.

  Costa was focused on the man on the steps now. The figure was directly by the fountain, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing one of those idiotic tie-down hats with earpieces that made you look like Mickey Mouse caught in a storm. He was standing in a professional firing position, the Weaver stance, right hand on the trigger, left supporting the gun, feet apart, comfortable as hell in the sort of pose Costa sometimes saw at target-shooting events. The small pistol was aimed, very deliberately, in their direction. A tiny flame lit up the barrel as Costa watched and a muffled crack rolled their way.

  Costa scanned the piazza, doing his best to check there was no one else in the vicinity, then unleashed two shots towards the figure in the snow. A stream of tiny fires lit up furiously in response, sending more sparks up from old stone that was, at least, some kind of protection for them. For those who were smart enough to take it.

  Mauro Sandri was still standing. Maybe it was panic. Maybe it was just second nature. The photographer was flapping around like a wild man, one hand still on his stupid camera, loosing off shots of anything, the Pantheon, the night, the three cops trying to squirm their way out of the firestorm coming at them from the square.

  Then he turned, and Costa knew precisely what would happen next. Mauro spun round on his little heels, camera in hand, the motor drive of the Nikon clicking away like a clockwork robot, turned and faced the black figure still upright on the steps.

  “Mauro,” Costa said quietly, knowing there was no point.

  He was a stride away from the little photographer when the bullets hit. Two. Costa heard the reports as they left the barrel of the gun. He heard them hit the diminutive black figure on the steps, tear through the fabric of his winter jacket, bite like deadly insects deep into Sandri’s body.

  The little photographer flew into the air like a man receiving an electric shock, then fell in a disfigured heap onto the ground.

  “See to him!” Costa yelled at Peroni and Falcone as they scrambled to their feet in the deep, consuming snow. “This son of a bitch is mine.”

  Knowing the idea was pointless, that no one could shoot that well, not even the dark-hearted bastard still standing by the frozen dolphins and fauns, Costa fired all the same, then began to sprint, began to hit his speed, and thought: At least I can run. Can you?

  The figure was folding on himself, turning, like a crow shrinking into a crouch before it half jumped, half fell off a fence. There was fear there as he fled down the steps on the far side of the dolphins and fauns. Costa knew it and the knowledge made him run harder, heedless of the slippery, centuries-old paving stones beneath his feet.

  He loosed off another shot. The man was fleeing into a corner of the square, trying to find sanctuary in the dark, tangled labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys that lay beyond, in every direction.

  And, just as Costa was beginning to digest this thought, the weather joined in. A sudden vicious squall careered straight out of the north, a thick wad of snow lurking deep in its gut. The cruel, cutting ice stung and blinded. His feet gave way. The rugby player in him surfaced from the long-dead past, told him there was no option but to roll with the fall, to tumble into the soft, freezing blanket on the ground, because the alternative was to pitch gravity and momentum against the weakness of the human body and snap a tendon or a bone along the way.

  It was dark and cold as he fell into the soft, fresh snow, striking the hard stone beneath with his shoulder. For a brief moment the world was a sea of whirling white and sharp, violent pain. Then he was still, feeling himself, checking nothing was broken.

  When he got his equilibrium back and forced himself painfully to his feet, the figure in black had vanished. Dense clouds of white were falling with an unforgiving force again, burying the man’s footprints with every passing second, turning everything into a single, empty shade of nothingness. Costa strode to the corner of the street. The shooter could have gone one of two ways, west down the Via Giustiniani, towards the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with its Caravaggios and, for Nic Costa, some bitter memories. Or north, into the warren beyond Piazza della Maddalena.

  Costa stared at the ground. It looked like a fresh bedsheet, scarcely crumpled, full of secrets, all of them unreachable.

  Reluctantly, knowing what he would find, he retraced his steps to the portico. A siren was
sounding somewhere in the wintry night. Costa wondered how long it would take the ambulance to make its way through the treacherous streets. Then he saw Gianni Peroni hunched on the flat stone of the portico, hands over his eyes, next to Mauro Sandri’s inert form, and he knew it didn’t really matter.

  He walked over, determined to handle this well.

  “Hey,” Costa said, placing a hand on his partner’s shoulder, then crouching to peer into those strangely emotional squinty eyes, now liquid with cold and a bright inner fury. “We couldn’t have known, Gianni.”

  “I will remember to point this out when I break it to his mamma, or his wife or boyfriend or whoever,” Peroni replied bitterly, trying to bite back his rage.

  “He must have looked like one of us, I guess. It could have been you. Or me. Or anyone.”

  “That’s a comforting thought,” Peroni mumbled.

  Costa glanced at the dead photographer. Blood, black under the moonlight, was caking in Sandri’s open mouth. Two more patches, one on his upper chest, the second in the centre of his abdomen, gleamed on his jacket. Costa remembered that curious stance the gunman had held while firing at them. It contained some meaning. When they had started to swallow down the bitter bile of their shock, when the investigation proper began, this was a point to note, an item of interest to be pursued.

  Peroni patted Sandri’s motionless arm. “I told him, Nic. I said, ”Mauro, you’re not going to die. I promise. You’re just going to lie there and wait for the medics to come. Then one day you go back to photographing mugs like me, and this time round you can take snaps of my pecker as much as you want. This time round‘… Oh shit.“

  “We’ll get the bastard, big man,” Costa said quietly. “Where’s Falcone?”

  “Inside,” Peroni said with a slow, deliberate venom. “Maybe he’s enjoying the view.”

  A blue flashing beacon began to paint the walls on the far side of the square. Then a second. The caterwauling of the sirens became so loud that lights came on in apartment windows in the neighbouring streets. Costa straightened up. There was no point in talking to Peroni when he was in this mood. He had to wait for the storm to pass.

  Costa walked through the doors towards the stream of white that fell, still circling around itself, from the vast open eye of the oculus.

  The caretaker was in his cabin by the entrance, florid face tucked into his chest, trying as hard as he could to stay out of everything. Leo Falcone stood by the inverted funnel, which kept growing as it was fed from the sky. Costa remembered studying the Pantheon at school in art class. Here, at the centre of the hall, lay the defining focal point of the ancient building, the axis around which everything was arranged in a precise show of ancient symmetry, both the great hemisphere and the monumental brick cylinder which tethered this imaginary cosmos to the ground.

  “The photographer’s dead, sir,” Costa said, trying to allow a note of reproach to slip into his voice.

  “I know,” Falcone replied without emotion. “Scene of crime are on the way. And the rest. Do you have any idea where the man in the square went?”

  “No.”

  Falcone’s stony face said everything.

  “I’m sorry,” Costa continued. “We came here thinking it was some homeless guys breaking in to keep warm. It was a burglar alarm, for God’s sake.”

  “I know,” the inspector said impassively. He walked to the head of the funnel, where it was close to the apse and the altar, pointing due south, directly opposite the portico entrance and the open bronze doors. Costa followed. There Falcone bent down and, with a gloved finger, pointed at the edge of the fresh snow.

  Costa’s breath caught as he began to understand. A thin line of pigment was running from inside the funnel, out to the edge of the crystals as they tried to turn to water on the marble and porphyry. The stain became paler and paler as it flowed towards the edge but there could be no mistake. Nic Costa knew the colour by now. It was blood.

  “I’ve done this once already,” Falcone said, pulling out a handkerchief from his coat. “Damn snow.”

  Slowly, with the same care Costa had seen Teresa Lupo use in such situations, Falcone swept at the funnel with light, brushing strokes.

  Costa stood back and watched, wishing he were somewhere else. The head of a woman was emerging from beneath the soft white sheet of ice. An attractive woman with a large, sensual mouth, wide open dark green eyes, and a face which was neither young nor old, a full, frank, intelligent face that wore an expression of intense shock so vivid it seemed to border on outrage.

  Falcone briefly touched her long jet black hair, then turned to watch the snow coming down and the way it was beginning to bury her anew.

  “Don’t lay a finger on a thing,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done as much as I did.”

  “No, sir,” Costa whispered, his head reeling.

  “Well?” Falcone didn’t even seem put out by this. It was as if everything were normal, just another everyday event that the cold, distant inspector could take in his stride.

  “Well, what?” Costa snapped back.

  “Well, how about you sit down on that chair over there and write down every last thing you remember. You’re a witness here, Costa. Interview yourself. And don’t skip the awkward questions.”

  Giovedi

  FALCONE PLAYED IT BY THE BOOK. HE SEALED THE Pantheon and the immediate vicinity. He called in every officer he could lay his hands on and marshalled the best scene-of-crime team available. When the crew from the morgue arrived they were led by Teresa Lupo, who’d been dragged out of bed and, when she saw the reason, glad of the fact. Then Falcone supervised an initial search of the Pantheon’s interior, uncovering enough evidence to ascertain the identity and American citizenship of the dead woman, and set in train the sequence of events needed to inform the American embassy and Mauro Sandri’s relatives. Finally, along with a string of more minor requests, he’d ordered the recovery of the tape of every last CCTV camera in the area, including several inside the Pantheon itself.

  When Falcone was satisfied that the crime scene was effectively preserved in aspic, ready for a more thorough and searching examination come sunrise, he’d walked through the continuing blizzard to one of the empty squad cars parked next to the frozen fountain. There, exhausted, he had reclined the passenger seat all the way back and tried to get a little sleep. It would be a long day. He needed his rest and the energy to think. And even that was denied him because one thought kept running through Leo Falcone’s mind. When he’d reached the portico of the Pantheon he had been about to climb the very steps where Mauro Sandri stood. All that had stopped him was the phone call, the nagging, drunken tirade from Filippo Viale, which had begun when he entered the square and went on, pointlessly running through the same question, over and over again.

  Are you with us, Leo?

  Falcone hadn’t understood why Viale felt the need to come back to this tedious issue so quickly. He’d put it down to the drink and the SISDE officer’s curious mood. The call was still in his head, every precise second of it. Viale’s voice had become so shrill in his ear that he had paused just short of the portico, and in doing so had avoided walking into the space created by the two central pillars and outlined by the light from the interior, which formed the perfect frame for the gunman on the fountain steps.

  Without Viale’s call, he would have gone on to join the photographer. And perhaps he would now be the one lying in the black plastic body bag stored on a metal gurney, safe inside the Pantheon, parked like a piece of luggage in front of one of the building’s more hideous modern accretions, the gross and gleaming tomb of the first king of a post-Roman united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele.

  Professionally, Leo Falcone met death and frustration frequently and never gave them any more consideration than the job required. On the rare occasions they had touched him personnally, he found himself less confident of his response, and this lack of certitude became itself one more unfamiliar, unwelcome intruder into a life he tried
to regard as sane, ordered and functional.

  In the space of one evening an officer of the security services had given him a curious warning that his career had, at the very least, stalled and was, perhaps, already in decline. Then, in short order, almost in response to this very idea, the black veil of the grave had swept against his cheek, so closely he could feel how chill and empty a place it truly was.

  Sleep, real sleep, was impossible in such circumstances. When Leo Falcone was woken by the rapping of a gloved hand on the window, just after sunrise at seven on that frozen Roman morning, he had no idea whether he’d slipped fully into unconsciousness at all during the preceding hours.

  He wiped the condensation from the window and realized there was no time to worry about the loss. Distorted by the condensation on the glass, Bruno Moretti’s stern, moustachioed face was staring at him from the white and chilly world outside. Falcone’s immediate superior, the commissario to whom he reported on a daily basis, had found a reason to drag himself out of the office and visit a crime scene. It was a rare and unwanted event.