The Sacred Cut nc-3

by David Hewson

  “You know what it’s all about, folks?” Agent Leapman asked. “Motivation. I’m giving you one motivated girl here. I picked her myself for that very reason. Use her well, won’t you? And try to bring her back in one piece.”

  * * *

  Monica Sawyer’s apartment was in a dark side street near the Palazzo Borghese, some way north of the Pantheon. The place was a square modern cabin built directly on top of the roof of a solid grey nineteenth-century block. It sat unnaturally on the summit of the building like a child’s construction made of toy bricks. The estate agent boasted she had the best view in Rome. It was bullshit, but Monica had quite a view all the same, one so astonishing that she’d already booked another month at $3,500 a week, for May, when she and Harvey would be able to use to the full the terrace that stretched out on three sides of the ugly modern structure.

  A perfect layer of snow, marked only by bird prints, now hid the warm terra-cotta tiles she’d seen when she arrived three days before. Monica walked carefully across the snow, which was close to ankle deep, listening to Peter O’Malley talk with wonder about what they could see. He had a soft, musical voice like that of an actor, one whose slightly metallic Irish tint reminded her how much the Hibernian accent had influenced American. The night was clear now, with a scattering of dark stratus high in a sky bright with a full moon. They had checked the TV when they arrived. Peter wanted to know what the weather would do and when he could return to Orvieto. She poured herself a Scotch while he listened to the impenetrable Italian on the box. There were pictures of cop cars around the Pantheon, shots of a police press conference with a tall, goatee-bearded inspector facing down the cameras and looking as if he wouldn’t say a damn thing.

  That wasn’t what interested Peter, though. He wanted to know what the sky would bring. When the bulletin was done he told her. There would be more snow after midnight.

  Now, on the terrace, still in her fur coat, she clutched the glass of Scotch and followed him round, listening. He’d stopped drinking. In truth, she thought, he hadn’t consumed much at all in the enoteca. It was hard to tell.

  Peter O’Malley was laughing now. They were standing on the northern side of the terrace, looking away from the river, up towards the rising lights of some hill.

  His arm slipped through hers and squeezed gently.

  “Symmetry,” he said. “Can you see it?”

  “Where?” she replied, feeling stupid.

  “Everywhere. You just have to look.” He pointed to the twinkling street lamps on the distant hill. “You know where that is?”

  “No idea.”

  “Trinità dei Monti. The church at the top of the Spanish Steps.”

  She nodded. She’d walked there before the snow came and had been surprised to find there was a McDonald’s near the foot of the twin staircases and an American-style Santa ringing a bell and yelling for money in Italian.

  “Been there. So what?”

  He led her round to the opposite wall of the apartment. The bright, white, wedding-cake building in the Piazza Venezia stood out like a sore thumb: in front of it the jumble of Renaissance rooftops, with the huge half sphere of the dome she had come to recognize.

  “That I do know,” she said, a little proud of herself. “I went inside yesterday. It’s beautiful. The Pantheon.”

  “The home of all the gods,” he said. “That’s good.”

  Then they went to the western wall, which had the larger part of the terrace, an expanse of open space a good ten yards deep, with flower pots, an old stone table and a permanent, brick-built barbecue with a little sink by it. An awning had been built in front of the full-length windows. The shrivelled and leathery stems of a couple of meagre grapevines wound their way around the supporting pillars. A few blackened leaves still hung on the furled, wiry whips feeling their way through the trelliswork. Two tall gas heaters whistled away, pumping out enough warmth to make it possible to sit outside, even on a night like this, to be alone in Rome, above everything, out of sight.

  He was gesturing. She looked over the river, where a snow-clad circular building rose, brightly illuminated by a forest of spotlights.

  “And that is?”

  “I told you,” she objected. “It’s only my first time here.”

  “Castel Sant” Angelo. Think, Monica. Draw a line from Trinità dei Monti to the castle. Draw another line from the Pantheon, out to the Piazza del Popolo over there. What do you get?“

  She looked out to the north, the direction he was pointing, out into the face of the icy breeze, then ducked beneath the trellis and fell into one of the hard, cold summer seats. She got what he was driving at. She wasn’t stupid.

  “A cross. A crucifix.”

  “And we are?”

  “Where the two arms meet? But so what, Peter? Don’t get scary on me. It’s just coincidence. It’s just…”

  She looked out over the city, shining under the icy, bright moon, then shivered. “It’s just how things are.”

  He walked under the shelter of the awning, stole her glass from the table, took a sip of whisky from it.

  “What if there are no coincidences? What if everything has history? A reason?”

  He wasn’t serious, she thought. It was just some game. “In a place like this, you could come up with stuff like that anywhere,” she protested. “I could say, look, here’s the Colosseum. Or the Capitol. Or whatever. Look. It makes a circle. A square. An octagon. It’s Rome, for God’s sake. It’s all here.”

  “Quite,” he replied.

  “You’re sounding like a priest now,” she said softly, slurring the words a little. “I’d forgotten for a while that’s what you are.” She didn’t know what to do. Whether to feel stupid for letting a stranger into her home, into her mind, like this. Or just to roll with it and see where everything went. He was a priest. There was nothing to be scared about.

  “Must be hard doing what you do,” she said. “Having to stay apart from other people.”

  “There’s nothing hard in that. It helps you think about what really matters.”

  “You don’t miss the comfort of another person?”

  His smart eyes clouded over. “You can’t miss what you never knew.”

  “I don’t believe that, Peter. Not of you.”

  Peter O’Malley was not a happy man. He was looking for something, all the time. Why? Monica wondered.

  “Why are you a priest? It doesn’t seem right. Whatever would make a man like you do this?”

  “A man like me…” He laughed lightly, breaking the fragile spell that had begun to hover around them, something dark at its edges, and she felt relieved, light-headed even. “A man like me is just a fool looking for magic where none exists. And then…”

  He waved a hand at the glorious night, the city slumbering under a jewelled sky.

  “Then it just sneaks up on you and you realize it was there, in front of you, all along.”

  It wasn’t the face of a priest. That was the problem. It was the face of a man of the world, one who’d lived a full and active existence before retreating into this dark shell, the anonymous uniform of the calling.

  “Magic,” she muttered, wondering if she would follow where she thought he was leading.

  He looked at his watch. Her heart sank. “And a city full of churches, Monica. I’d best find one to pray in, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  An hour after they left the embassy, Emily Deacon arrived at the Questura. She’d dressed down for the night: black jacket, black jeans, blonde hair loose around her slim neck. She looked younger, like a student just out of college. And relieved too, Costa thought, to be out of the grip of Agent Leapman, even if being reassigned so abruptly had come as a shock.

  She stood in the main office next to Costa’s desk, scanning the room. The night shift were hard at work, making calls, sifting through records on computer screens, reading reports. Falcone had put virtually everyone he had on the job. Some fifty men and women had now begun th
e task of collating information, trawling through CCTV videos, interviewing the people who lived in the apartments over the shops and restaurants near the Pantheon.

  “Are you getting anywhere?” she asked.

  Peroni glanced at Costa. Earlier, the two men had demanded a discussion with Falcone, wanting to know exactly how much information they should share with the Americans. It had been inconclusive. Falcone had made a good point: it was ludicrous to belabour the question until they found something worth sharing and that seemed some way off. They already knew the CCTV cameras in the Pantheon had nothing. Those in the streets nearby had captured little but the blizzard. Falcone had shrugged and left it at that, then closeted himself upstairs with Commissario Moretti for a private meeting.

  “Early days,” Peroni answered hesitantly. “Can I get you something? A coffee?”

  The acute blue eyes looked him up and down. “You don’t trust me. It’s understandable. I’d probably feel the same way if it was me. It’s because I’m American, I guess.”

  “No,” Costa told her. “It’s just… a little unusual.”

  “You have difficulty dealing with the unusual?” she asked.

  “Not at all. It’s just that sometimes it takes a while to adapt. Police departments are like monasteries, really.”

  Peroni snorted. A smile flickered on Emily Deacon’s face.

  “Monasteries?” she asked, raising a slender fawn eyebrow.

  “Really,” Costa protested. “OK, we let in a few women for show. But these are institutions that keep themselves to themselves, rarely share their working practices with others and suspect all outsiders on principle. Big organizations work that way. The FBI’s the same, surely.”

  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…”