The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  She thought about that. “There are more women.”

  “And the rest of it?” Peroni asked.

  “Point taken.”

  The two men looked at each other. Peroni kicked over a seat and beckoned to her to take it. Then he went off for some coffees.

  She looked at the screen. “What’s this?”

  “It’s the database we keep on Balkan criminals,” Costa replied. “It just gets bigger by the day.”

  “Our guy isn’t Balkan, whatever that means these days.”

  “You know that?”

  “I know that. I saw the profiling reports. They had some data on where the man had stayed in the US. All phoney names, phoney credit cards. He did it well. We’ve interviewed people who spoke to him. They all gave different descriptions. He’s good at disguise. He’s good with accents. Sometimes American English. Sometimes UK. Australian. South African. He could handle them all.”

  “You have a photo-fit?”

  It was the obvious question. Her face said as much. “How many do you want? Leapman has included them in the files he’s sent to your boss. We’ve got them coming out of our ears. Every one different. I mean completely different. I told you. He’s good.”

  Peroni returned with the drinks. She looked at the stewed brew in the plastic cups and said, “Do you call that coffee? There’s a place near the Pantheon. Tazza d’Oro. If we have time we could go there. That’s coffee.”

  Peroni bristled and in very rapid, very colloquial Italian, the kind a couple of street cops would throw at each other in the heat of the moment, protested. “Hey, kid. Don’t throw your toys out of the pram. You’re dealing with a couple of guys who live here. We know Tazza d’Oro. Since when did they start letting Yankees in?”

  She didn’t miss a syllable. “Since they found out we tip properly. Where are you from in Tuscany?”

  “Near Siena.”

  “I can hear it.” She nodded at Costa. “He’s Roman. Middle class. Doesn’t swear enough to be anything else.” Emily Deacon paused. “Am I earning any trust here?”

  “Kind of,” Costa conceded. “You didn’t learn that at language college.”

  She nodded. “Didn’t need to. I lived here in Rome when I was a kid. Nice house on the Aventino. For almost a decade. My dad was based at the embassy for most of that time. Then I did an architecture degree in Florence. And you know what’s funny?”

  They didn’t say a word. From her face they could tell this wasn’t funny at all.

  “Maybe it’s from the last few years I spent in Washington, but sometimes I must still sound American. It just slips out. You can always tell. You always get someone on a bus or somewhere who gives you a nasty look. Or a little lecture about colonialism and how, being Roman, they just know this subject inside or out. Or maybe they just spit in your face. That happens from time to time too.”

  “ ”Always‘?“ Peroni wondered, taking the argument back an important step.

  She sipped at the coffee and pulled a sour face. “No. That’s an exaggeration. Just a lot more than when I was a kid. In fact…” She took her attention off them at that moment, began to conduct some inner conversation with herself. “This was a happy place then. I never wanted to leave.”

  “The world’s not so happy anymore,” Costa said. “For all of us.”

  “Agreed.” She fidgeted on the hard office chair, uncomfortable at having revealed as much as she had. “I’m still waiting for an answer, though. This guy isn’t Serb or Kosovan or anything. So why are you going through all these records?”

  Costa explained about the girl who’d escaped from them inside the Pantheon, and how some Balkan connection was probably the best way to find her, since they controlled the street people as much as anyone did. Then he pushed over the photo Mauro had taken. Emily studied the young, frightened face.

  “Poor kid,” she said quietly. “Trying to pick your pocket when she must have been scared out of her mind. Are they really that desperate?”

  “Sometimes.” Costa hated simplistic explanations. “It’s what they do. There’s plenty of people out there on the streets who’ll scream ”Zingari!“ every time some petty crime happens. We’ve plenty of other crooks too. But the honest answer is: yes, they’re that desperate. And it’s an organized business. With its own structure. Its own rules.”

  “Good,” she said. “That should mean you can find her.”

  “Maybe we can,” Peroni conceded.

  “Will she have family here? Can you track her down like that?”

  “Most of them don’t have family,” the big man explained. “Not what we’d regard as family anyway.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the photo. It seemed a good time to ask.

  “When Leapman called you in for this assignment,” Costa began, “you could have refused, surely. The fact this man murdered your father means you want him caught. But it also means you’re involved, beyond anything the likes of us would expect. You have… something personal invested here. That could worry me.”

  Emily Deacon took one last look at the photo, then placed it on the desk. “I could have said no when my dad laid a job with the Bureau straight in my lap. I’d got a good architecture degree. I could have gone on and done a master’s. Here, probably.”

  She looked at him, trying to work out the right answer for herself too. “You won’t understand. We’re Deacons. We grow up with a sense of duty. There have been Deacons working for the government for the best part of a hundred years. In the Treasury. The military. The State Department. It’s what we do. We don’t ask why.”

  He wondered how much of that she really believed. “And when we find this man. What do you want then?”

  “Justice,” she said with plain, flat certainty.

  “Is that what Agent Leapman wants too?”

  “Joel Leapman is a primitive organism driven by primitive desires.” She spoke with cold, aloof disdain. “It’s thanks to people like him that people like me get spat at on buses. Ask him what he’s after. Not me.” She thought for a moment, then fixed them with her keen, intelligent eyes. “I know exactly what I want. I want to see this man standing up in court, getting convicted for every human being he’s killed. Every life he’s ruined. I want to see him go to jail forever and have those ghosts haunt him each and every day. I want to sleep better knowing that he can’t, because of all the nightmares coming his way. Will that do?”

  Peroni cast Costa a sideways glance. The one that said: why do we always get them?

  Nic Costa knew what he meant. He was coming to understand a little about this woman and it didn’t fill him with joy. She wasn’t at the hard end of investigations with the FBI. Of that he was sure. Perhaps Leapman had called her into the Rome inquiry because of her specialist architectural knowledge. Or her perfect Italian. Perhaps it was even simpler than that. Her presence was down to who she was: the daughter of the last victim. The Deacons seemed to be an important family. Maybe Leapman had no choice. Maybe Leo Falcone was in the same position. It would explain the uncharacteristic way the normally abrasive and individualist inspector had rolled over and allowed the Americans to walk straight into the case.

  “You think this guy knows Rome?” Peroni asked.

  “Like the back of his hand,” she said straightaway. “I’m certain of it.”

  “Nah, he doesn’t,” Peroni told her with some certainty. “He thinks he knows it. He’s like you. He goes to Tazza d’Oro and likes it because he feels it makes him Roman, not like some cheapskate tourist throwing coins into the Trevi fountain. Don’t get me wrong. That’s good, because it means he’s trying. You too. But it’s not the real thing. Me and Nic are. This is our town. We drink coffee in places a million times better than Tazza d’Oro. Want some?”

  Her delicate eyebrows rose in amusement. “Now?”

  Peroni scowled at the plastic cup. “Yeah. Why not? This stuff is piss.”

  “And you think it’s going to be easy to find this kid?”

 
“Absolutely.” He nodded at the computer. “But not sitting in front of the one-eyed monster there. This is a people business, Emily. Night people, if you get my meaning. I got a whole list of them in my head right now. You’re going places in Rome you didn’t even know existed.”

  “Really. So if it’s that easy, Officer Peroni—”

  “Hey, hey! Gianni. Nic. Please…”

  Emily Deacon smiled. “If it’s that easy, don’t you think he might be doing it too? This girl must have seen what happened. She must know things we’d dearly love to hear. Why else would he want to kill her?”

  Costa gave his partner a hard look. They should have thought of this themselves. They’d been distracted by the meeting at the embassy, and having an outsider attached to the investigation.

  “I’ll drive,” Costa said.

  BY THE TIME PERONI was renewing his acquaintance with the first name on his long list of East European hoods, Teresa Lupo was dictating the preliminary autopsy results on Mauro Sandri, running through all the familiar terms she’d come to learn over the years when dealing with firearms deaths, still unable to push what she’d heard in the American embassy out of her head.

  Silvio Di Capua was busy cleaning the stainless-steel table, watching her out of the corner of his beady eyes with the same guarded awe she’d come to expect, wondering, perhaps, what she saw in the big old Tuscan cop who was now sharing her home. It was none of his business, even if it was a good question. Gianni Peroni was a good human being: honest, decent and kind, in spite of his tough outward appearance. She liked his company.

  At least Silvio Di Capua’s crush on her had waned a little since her assistant realized she was no longer available. He was by the door now, washing his hands and looking ready to grab his too-short black leather bomber jacket and head home for the night when Leo Falcone walked in. She watched with some dismay the way Silvio flinched at the sight of the inspector, like a mouse catching sight of a bird of prey. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the analogy was appropriate. Falcone, as his surname suggested, had the beady eyes of a raptor and a bare, birdlike skull too. The sharp jut of his goatee only enhanced further the impression of a hunter. He was the kind of person someone like Silvio Di Capua feared the most. Not just for his acerbic tongue or the sudden, direct habit he had of tackling every issue head-on. Worse, much worse sometimes, was the way he never let anything go. This irked Di Capua more than anyone because, when it came to morgue matters, he was the one Falcone chose as the weak point, the place to start poking at with a long, suspicious forefinger.

  Teresa Lupo was apt not to play things by the book, if a few unorthodox methods suited her better, but she made a point of keeping those habits under her hat, most of the time, anyway. It was always Di Capua whom Falcone squeezed for proof, turning those bleak, suspicious eyes on him and asking all the questions the little man never wanted to hear. Then there’d be the recriminations and, worst of all, in the end Teresa would have to hear out Silvio’s grovelling apology for blabbing, accompanied, as always, by an invitation to dinner.

  She looked up from her notes, feigned a smile and said, “Inspector. Good evening. And you’ve come alone too. Not with those nice new American friends of yours. How pleasant.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Falcone objected. “You heard, didn’t you?”

  “Actually, no. I was trying to work out a few things in my head. Such as why a very odd corpse was stretched out on the floor of the Pantheon like that. Listening to cops bitch at one another is a secondary diversion at such times and I’m happy for it to stay that way.” She switched off the tape recorder. “So what can I do for you?”

  As usual, Falcone came straight to the point. “You can tell me what you two found out when you had the woman to yourself. And don’t tell me it’s nothing because I won’t believe you.”

  She beamed at him. “This is because of your great faith in our abilities?”

  “If you like,” he conceded grudgingly. “Or maybe I just know when you’re not telling us something. There’s an air of smugness around this place right now and I’d very much like to puncture it.”

  “You don’t want the report on that poor photographer?”

  “I know what happened to the photographer. I was there. Remember?”

  She looked into his miserable face and felt a twinge of guilt. Falcone wasn’t happy about any of this. It wasn’t fair to bitch. All the same, she did have something to bitch about.

  “So you want me to offer some insights into a corpse which, with your full agreement, was snatched away from me right in front of my eyes, quite without reason, and completely contrary to Italian law, too, I might add?”

  “Don’t start,” Falcone said. “I’ve just been upstairs listening to Bruno Moretti, among others, telling me how we need to keep the FBI sweat at every turn.”

  Falcone went silent, thinking. It was an odd moment, Teresa thought. For once he looked as if he were racked by doubts.

  Somewhere outside a car started with a sweet, certain rumble.

  “Join me,” Falcone ordered and walked to the window. There he pointed to an expensive-looking Lancia travelling across the car park towards the exit, too fast for the treacherous conditions.

  “Know who that is?” Falcone asked.

  “What am I?” she snapped. “Superwoman, perfect night vision through a car roof or something?”

  “Filippo Viale. Top-rung spook from SISDE. I thought you might have bumped into him in the past.”

  She didn’t say a word. This was so unlike Falcone.

  “Viale sat in on the entire conversation with Moretti. Truth is, he, not Moretti, was running things there.”

  “Leo?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled. “I’m just pissed off. I’ve got the Americans telling me I report to them about what we’re doing. I’ve got Viale telling me I report to him about what the Americans are doing. And somewhere in the middle of all this I need to find out what happened to that woman and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  He was scared. No, that wasn’t right. He was lacking in confidence, and in Leo Falcone that was almost the same thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. It was deeply out of character for Falcone to give away details like this, particularly the part about the SISDE officer. Those people moved in and out of the building like ghosts, unremarked, almost unseen. It was standard form that no one acknowledged their presence, let alone admitted to taking orders from them.

  She reached for some papers in the folder in front of her.

  “Since this is for you and you alone I’ll make it short and sweet. Silvio? Get the camera.”

  Silvio slunk off to the filing cabinet and came back with a large, semi-professional digital Canon.

  Teresa Lupo looked at him. “Lights, Silvio. Action.”

  Hands shaking slightly, he fired up the screen. She took it and started flicking through the shots there.

  “Do we know who she was, this tourist?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Falcone answered. “Just the name. Her hotel. Is it relevant? You heard what Leapman said. This man is supposed to select his victims at random. The only linking factor is that they’re all American tourists.”

  “I know that. But what did this woman do? What was her job?”

  Falcone shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I don’t hold out much hope we’re going to find out either. Leapman has put out a statement to the papers saying she was a divorcée from New York. No profession. No personal details. We’re supposed to refer all media inquiries to him from now on, which is the one part of this piece I am quite happy with.”

  “Illuminating.”

  She pulled up a shot of the woman’s torso and hit the magnification button. “Of course, this would be so much easier if I had a body to work with, but I’ll do my best. You see this?”

  She was pointing to an obvious scar on the left-hand side of the woman’s stomach.

&
nbsp; “Appendix?” Falcone asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” she gasped. “What kind of surgeon leaves an appendix scar that size, with that much loss of flesh? If they did that in the States this poor bitch would have sued them for billions. She wouldn’t be holidaying in Rome, she’d own the place.”

  Di Capua was rocking backwards and forwards on his heels now, sweating a little, distinctly uncomfortable, as if he knew where this was going.

  Falcone scowled at her. “So—”

  “So I don’t have a damn body. I can’t take a better look at this under proper lighting. I can’t try and see what lies underneath the scar tissue. Thank you, thank you, thank you—”