The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Costa vaguely recognized what he was now looking at. It was a newsgroup, one of those anonymous bulletin boards the surveillance people regularly browsed for raw intelligence. There was a short message starting a thread with the title “Babylon Sisters.” The first entry, the one opening the discussion, had been posted on 30 September.

  Emily Deacon stared at the screen and said without emotion, “I found this just by looking on the Net. It’s public and it’s meant to be. Someone put it there for a reason. The memo tells you what Babylon Sisters meant. It was the code name for the operation. My guess is that Babylon was the closest notable location to where they were headed. The name’s from an old rock song my dad liked. Maybe Kaspar had the same tastes. And here it is thirteen years later. Think of the timing, Nic. This was posted three days after my dad was murdered.”

  He looked at the first message on the screen and hated what he saw, felt tainted by the craziness of the language.

  The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of ‘91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

  “You get this kind of crap everywhere on the Net, Emily.”

  “Of course. It’s meant to sound like that. Whoever wrote that message doesn’t want it to mean anything to anyone but Bill Kaspar. They know what Kaspar’s like. They know that, from time to time, he’s going to walk up to a PC somewhere in the world, fire up a search engine and type in two words: ”Babylon Sisters.“ Sooner or later he’s going to hit on this. Sooner or later he’s going to respond. Which he does. Read the second message.”

  Nic hit the key for the next window.

  Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

  The reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, “killthem@killthemall.com.”

  “It could be Kaspar sending messages to himself,” Costa suggested. The language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV to make a room look “normal,” then smear the walls with her blood in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. “He’s crazy enough.”

  “Why wait more than three months before answering yourself? What’s more, consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar’s reply got posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed out onto the street. Want to bet where they’re looking? Net cafes, just to see if he can’t resist the bait second time round. You see what’s happening?”

  He could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn’t cover every last Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

  “Would Leapman write something like this?”

  She shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn’t stop himself watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. “No need to. We have specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who’s got access to files I don’t possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe Kaspar is a good ol‘ boy or something or maybe they just copied it from that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still around on the system my guess is they’d have erased it.”

  There were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

  “We need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there’s something here. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see.”

  “Oh, Nic.” Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. “You really don’t understand what we’re dealing with, do you? My people know. I think a good few of yours do, too.”

  Not Falcone, though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn’t the inspector’s style.

  “Finish reading,” she ordered quietly. “Leapman’s man came back for a third try.”

  He scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from “WillFK@whitehouse.gov.”

  Well hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin‘ idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can’t keep those fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin’ has turned your mind, brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin‘ smells worse than an old soldier gone bad. There’s mercy waiting here if only you got the sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

  Oh and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away without a scratch? You turn weakling when there’s a WASP around? Or are you just going soft in your old age?

  Costa stared at the words on the screen. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

  “Little Em…”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  AS GIANNI PERONI’S LUCK would have it, the same damn caretaker was on duty and sporting the same bad, red-faced mood he’d owned the night Mauro Sandri died.

  The grumpy old bastard spent his time alone at the booth by the door of the Pantheon, checking his watch at regular intervals, wandering over to the centre of the building now and then to sweep away the flecks of snow spiralling lightly down through the oculus. Peroni had a seat in the shadows on the opposite side of the chilly circular hall. The place was a wonderful sight, timeless, even with the anachronistic illumination of the dim electric lights. The distant part of him that remembered school history lessons half imagined an ancient Roman emperor coming here, lord of his own realm, staring up through that open eye, wondering what was looking back at him from the greater kingdom of the heavens. Peroni felt more than a little awed by what he saw. It was wrong that a place like this had been sullied by what happened two nights before. That thought depressed him, that and the plain fact he was probably wasting his time. After he’d left the cafe in Trastevere with such high hopes, Peroni had driven the jeep across the river, parked discreetly in one of the side turnings off Rinascimento and made his way to the monument, taking the caretaker aside for a quiet talk when he arrived. There wasn’t a single sign he was in luck. Only a couple of people had walked through the door while he’d been there, and both of them were searching—in vain—for respite from the cold. The place would close in less than an hour. It was a dumb idea, but it was the only idea he’d got.

  Besides, she’d so much time on him. She could have walked in, picked up anything she’d left behind and walked back out into the premature wintry darkness hours ago. But then what? Peroni clung to the belief Laila acted the way she did because, after Teresa’s invented story, the girl wanted to help him. She’d have made contact somehow, surely. He tried to draw some encouragement, too, from the fact the caretaker was adamant no lone, black-clad kid had been in. Given how few visitors the place was getting in this extraordinary bout of ice and snow, there ought to be some comfort in that.

  His mind was wandering when the caretaker ambled over, picking snowflakes off the sleeve of his tatty uniform.

  “Hey, mister,” he moaned, “seeing as how I seem to be doing you favours day in and day out around here, how about you do one for me?”

  “What?”

  He nodded at the booth and the small, private office down the same curving side of the building. “Cover for me. There’s supposed to be two of us around but the other guy’s sick and, what with the weather…”

  He licked his bulbous lips and Peroni knew what was coming. “All you got to do is sit there and look important. You’re up to it.”

  It wasn’t a big favour. The place was empty. Peroni had no intention of sweeping away the snow. Nor had he anything else to do. He’d checked in with Falcone, heard the news about
the dead woman’s apartment and received not the slightest reprimand for his behaviour earlier with Leapman. He recognized the resignation in Falcone’s voice. The whole case was in stasis, buried under the weather and the search for something—anything—in the trail of places the elusive killer had abandoned along the way. The likelihood was that until the killer did something—something stupid, without spilling of blood preferably—they’d just be sitting around twiddling their fingers, waiting, not that Leo Falcone would admit as much.

  “Where are you going exactly, friend?” Peroni demanded.

  The man’s florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. “It’s no big deal. I need a drink. I’ve been freezing my balls off in this place all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That’s all I ask. Here…”

  He led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two nights before.

  “Everything’s working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a bulb blows, it’ll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I’m going to let you have a special treat for helping me. When I come back I’m gonna let you close the door, all on your own. I don’t allow civilians to do that ordinarily. Big privilege.”

  Lazy bastard, Peroni thought. It was just a door, one of two, the other closed. A big, very old door.

  “Is that so?” he asked.

  “You bet,” the caretaker said, on his way out already, picking up speed with the eagerness of a man in desperate need of alcohol.

  Peroni sat down on the hard chair behind the glass front of the booth. Then he thought about what he was doing and pulled himself back into the darkness of the little cubicle. Entry into the place was free. People just walked in and out as they pleased, except for the odd dumb tourist who couldn’t believe it was possible to get into a historic monument without a ticket. There was no need to make his presence obvious, none at all.

  So he sat on the chair behind the glass and did what came naturally to him in the solitary gloom of the booth. He thought about his kids, wondering what they were doing, whether they were happy, whether they missed him. He thought about Laila, trying to imagine what kind of life she led, what had brought her all the way from Iraq to the streets of a hostile city where no one, as far as he could work out, knew who she was or cared much either.

  And he looked at this odd old building, with its spherical interior pointed towards the sky like half an upturned eyeball, the pupil set on the stars. Peroni tried to work out where it lay in the tangle of facts they’d assembled so far. He hadn’t listened much to Emily Deacon’s lecture about why the Pantheon was important. Temperamentally he inclined towards Joel Leapman’s view. That a man who carved weird geometrical shapes out of the skins of the people he slaughtered was just plain crazy, however you tried to rationalize it. Thinking about the idea again inside the Pantheon itself, he was no longer so sure. The kind of killer they were hunting was, undoubtedly, deranged and dangerous. That didn’t make the guy illogical or erratic. The very opposite, in fact. If they’d thought this through—if events had given them the chance even to begin the process—he’d have suggested to Falcone that they should have left some plainclothes guy around here all day, just on the off chance. The old saw about people returning to the scene of their crimes was part of the argument. That did happen. More to the point, this place obsessed the man somehow. It was part of his story, part of the way he saw the world. In its angles and curves, the shadowy corners of its precise proportions, this killer found some hidden truth that made sense of what he was trying to achieve.

  Several ideas were starting to form in Gianni Peroni’s head, each of them pushing the memory of his kids and a stray Kurdish girl from his mind.

  Then he glanced at the long vertical slit of the door, outlined by the lights of the square behind, and saw a slim, recognizable figure slip through, casting a long slender shadow on the geometric floor.

  Peroni sat in the booth, trying to decide how to handle the girl. She’d crept straight into the shade to the right of the altar opposite the entrance, hopping the rope designed to keep out the public, intent on something. Every movement was deliberate, determined. Teresa had been right. Laila was back here to retrieve something. Then another shape came through the door: the caretaker returning, walking steadily, head down, not the shambling gait Peroni expected of a man who, just half an hour earlier, looked as if his mind was set on downing three quick coffees liberally laced with brandy.

  Peroni glanced at his watch.

  “You’re five minutes late,” he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.

  The girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar, half-concealed by the cloth.

  “Laila.”

  He spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it wasn’t enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing once again into the night?

  “It’s me,” he said. “Peroni. You don’t need to worry. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.”

  Except…

  Just a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those wonderful little nightmares kids—or, more accurately, their existence—sent scattering through a parent’s mind at random times: car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.

  And, Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of prey.

  It was a shitty world sometimes, though Peroni guessed Laila had learned that at a very early age.

  There was movement from behind the drape. She walked out. Her dark eyes were glittering, a little moist maybe. But she was smiling, smiling in a way he hadn’t seen before. Smiling naturally, a little shy, a little proud too.

  She had something in her hands that looked very much like a man’s wallet and Gianni Peroni was suddenly aware that he didn’t give a damn about the thing, however interesting it might prove. The investigation could wait. There was something more important going on here.

  “Hey,” he said and held out his arms, wishing to God she’d just run straight into them.

  That was too much to ask. Laila walked up, holding the wallet in her right hand, grinning now, wiping tears—of joy, relief, fear, what?—from her cheeks.

  Peroni put his arms round her skinny shoulders and hugged that frail, frightened body to his big chest.

  “Don’t you go giving your uncle Gianni frights like that,” he whispered into her lank, musky-smelling hair. “He’s an old man, too old for this business.”

  And she wasn’t going to the Questura tonight either. They could sleep at Teresa’s. Or Nic’s if she preferred. Anywhere there wasn’t a soul in uniform or the dead, disinterested face of a social worker looking at her, shaking a disappointed, middle-class head, thinking, “Damaged goods, damaged goods, put it down on the list and let someone else pick up the problem.”

  Uniforms…

  He hadn’t even spoken to the caretaker since the moron got back from his secret drink. It was time to kiss good-bye to this weird, spooky space and re-enter the land of the living.

  Soon, too, because when Peroni turned he could see the idiot was now closing the door, that big vertical slab of bronze that had stood in the same archway for almost a couple of millennia, watching generatio
n after generation walk through and gawp at the mysteries within.

  Which was odd, given that he was supposed to be handing over that particular privilege as a reward to the dumb cop who’d stood duty while he’d lined his gut with cheap brandy.

  “Hey, buster,” Peroni yelled, “you’ve still got some customers inside. Remember?”

  The door kept moving. It slammed shut and the sudden absence of the electric lights from the square made Gianni Peroni blink, sent a brisk rush of pain and fear stabbing through the back of his head.

  Laila was clinging to him. She was shivering. The caretaker was nowhere to be seen.

  Gianni Peroni pushed the girl firmly back into the corner and whispered in her ear, “There’s nothing wrong here. Trust me. Just stay out of the way until your uncle Gianni sorts this out.”

  She didn’t protest. She crushed herself up behind the drape again, so hard against the ancient slabs of the stone wall that it looked as if she were hoping she could somehow creep inside the cracks.