The Sacred Cut nc-3

by David Hewson

  “Maybe we are,” Peroni wondered.

  “No!” she insisted angrily. “There’s a logic here. A crazy, distorted logic but it’s rational somehow too. We just have to see it.”

  “I agree,” Costa said, and wondered how much that was worth. Leapman’s focus might be awry but the American had a point. They all knew the way these cases went. Intelligence, forensics, careful investigation… all of these things were important. But the final act of closure usually came by accident. A mistake, a chance encounter. The killer was active. With activity came risks. The point was to have people there, on the ground, when he slipped up. Falcone knew that as well as anyone. Both he and Leapman would surely have men on the street steadily building up a picture of the man from what little information they had, hoping that one day soon they would turn a corner and find him staring into their faces.

  The reason they were chasing the girl was to save her and not, in all honesty, because they thought she’d lead them to his lair.

  The voices from under the bridge began to grow in volume. They were heated, too, and it wasn’t just Alexa shouting. Costa cast Peroni a concerned glance. They’d let the woman walk straight into the unknown, assuming she could handle herself. Then, to Costa’s relief, they heard careful footsteps on the snow-covered stone steps. Alexa reappeared. She looked puzzled, a little scared maybe.

  “We were getting worried,” Peroni said. “They didn’t sound too friendly down there.”

  “They’re just doped up to hell, most of them. I’ve got a name for you. Laila. Kurdish. She was here tonight, apparently. They don’t know where she’s gone. Or so they say.”

  “And?” Costa pressed.

  “I don’t know,” she answered hesitantly. “They just took the money and came up with the story. It could be complete bullshit. Tell me, are you the only people looking for her?”

  “As far as we know.”

  “It’s just that someone else has been asking. He didn’t have a picture, but he knew what she looked like.”

  “What did he say?” Costa demanded.

  “He was a priest. He said she’d been staying at the hostel where he worked. There’d been an argument. He wanted to patch it up. Except…” She looked down at the faces by the river, from where some angry rumbles were coming. “This girl. Laila. They say she doesn’t stay in hostels much. She’s a street kid, likes to be on her own. Kind of weird. Not dope. Just funny in the head. If they’re telling the truth, this man’s lying.”

  “To hell with this,” Peroni grunted, heading for the steps. “We’ve got to talk to them.”

  Alexa put a hand on his jacket. “Be careful. There are some real assholes down there.”

  “Yeah, right,” Peroni grumbled, and brushed past her.

  He was there so quickly that Costa and the two women missed what he said. Then Costa found himself remembering why he stuck with Peroni as a partner, why he never even thought of moving somewhere else. Peroni was speaking to a huddle of kids, perhaps fifteen of them, peering out of the darkness, young faces full of fear and resentment lit by a stinking brazier burning cardboard and damp wood. They knew they were talking to cops. They were waiting for all the trouble that meant. And Gianni Peroni was speaking to them in exactly the opposite way to the manner they expected: carefully, with conviction, and a quiet, forceful respect.

  “You have to believe me,” he was saying. “We know you want to protect this girl. We understand why you don’t want to help the likes of us. But she’s in trouble. We have to find her.”

  Alexa barked something incomprehensible and pulled out some more of Peroni’s money. The gang of youths stood there, immobile, but restless too. Finally a skeletal kid as tall as Costa came out of the darkness and took the money.

  “I show you,” he said, pointing upriver, towards the Vatican. “You come with me. Over there. Now. You come. You come.”

  He was dragging Peroni’s sleeve. It was all a game, Costa thought. Just a runaround for a few euros. He watched Peroni start to shuffle off, wondering at what stage they had to admit defeat. Then a sound made him turn his head. The huddle of bodies in the shadow of the bridge had changed. They were moving, making space for someone. Emily Deacon was walking straight into the middle of them, talking, in an accent which through fear betrayed her origins, asking, asking.

  Seeing something too. A slim slight figure hiding at the back.

  “Laila,” she yelled. “Laila!”

  Somebody murmured, “Amerikane…”

  They were crowding round the FBI agent, pushing, hustling. Alexa was nowhere to be seen.

  “Gianni!” Costa yelled, then saw something metallic flash in the light of the brazier.

  Emily saw it too. She dodged the halfhearted lunge with the knife and kicked the youth behind it hard in the crotch. He went down, screaming, but there were a dozen more of them now, crowding round her, starting to yell.

  And the slight figure was moving too. Edging out at the back, seizing her opportunity.

  Costa swiftly thought about the options, came to the conclusion there was just one. He fired off two shots into the empty sky, watching carefully to see that they understood what the deadly racket meant for them.

  The girl was breaking into a sprint, moving quickly towards the next set of steps. She was on her own now, clear in a retreating sea of dark, furious bodies.

  “Oh great,” Emily Deacon barked at him. “And I thought we were the ones who were supposed to be gun-happy?”

  “Just making sure I take you back to Mr. Leapman in one piece like he asked,” Costa said. “How good are you at running?”

  “Damn good,” she replied.

  He nodded at the bridge. “Take these steps. See where she goes when she emerges. I’ll go after her. Gianni, you stay with Emily.”

  Peroni was heading for the stone stairway already.

  A good twenty metres ahead of him, Nic Costa saw the girl tumble, slipping on the slushy pathway, then scramble up and continue to flee. He took a deep breath, broke out from under the bridge and set off in her tracks.

  It was a minute before he reached the next set of steps. He raced up them, following her footprints in the snow, thinking all along it had been a mistake to loose off those shots, not quite knowing why.

  Then he climbed back to the road level, checked Peroni and Emily waiting for his lead a couple of hundred metres down the Lungotevere, Alexa by their side, her cigarette sending a thin plume of smoke up into the icy night air.

  Costa glanced across the street and saw the slim, young figure of the girl slip into the snarl of alleys adjoining Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

  Watching her disappear, in the dun security lights of a grocery store, was a tall, upright man dressed in black.

  * * *

  The heretical monk Giordano Bruno died at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori on a cold February day in 1600. Now his black, hooded statue stood on a pedestal in the centre of the square, dispassionately surveying the twenty-first century. The trash from the daily market-wooden boxes, limp vegetables, plastic bags-lay in the filthy slush, uncollected by market workers who’d pleaded the weather as an excuse for skipping work. Only a handful of late-night drinkers braved the snow to make the customary round of bars, the Americans heading for the Drunken Ship and Sloppy Sam’s, the locals to the Vineria and the Taverna del Campo. And around the statue, huddling against the wind, wondering how to make money, a bunch of down-and-outs, permanent hangers-on in a part of the city that was never short of tourists to work.

  Of the hundred or so people milling around the Campo that night Emily Deacon was one of the few who knew who Giordano Bruno was. She could, if she wanted, recall the reasons why an eccentric recluse, one who brought about his own death through sheer stubbornness towards a vengeful authority, became a founding father of modern humanist philosophy. She’d visited the square often as a teenager and, as her family gradually fell apart, come to wonder what Bruno, a man convinced the world of the future would be immeasurably
better than the one he inhabited, would make of modern-day Rome. These ideas rolled around her consciousness now. She knew the city so well, the place brimmed with so many memories, good and bad, that it was hard to focus on what mattered. Leapman had brought her to Rome, surely, for her specialist knowledge. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he’d be better off with someone who was fresh, untouched by the scars and connections of the past. And these thoughts themselves touched a raw nerve. They were unwanted, unnecessary. Emily knew she had a job to do, an important one. A job that could close this case for good because, when she’d left Peroni gasping for breath in the back streets near the bridge, when she’d realized Nic Costa had taken his own path and was now lost to her in the night, she’d found the girl herself, tracked her doggedly through the labyrinth of medieval alleys, over the broad main road of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, then past the Palazzo della Cancelleria, towards the Campo, noting, too, that they were not alone. Emily Deacon could run. She was as fast as the girl, faster probably. Whoever was following them was also fit, but older, a black figure flitting through the shadows, with one clear intent as he struggled to keep up with them.

  She turned the corner into the Campo and knew what she’d see. The kid was predictable. She headed for crowds, particularly those she thought of as hers. Sure enough, the slight young figure was slowing now, strolling into the knot of bodies by the statue, hoping to be anonymous again. Emily cast a worried glance behind her and saw nothing. Not a soul was moving down the narrow medieval thoroughfare of the Via del Pellegrino, and she tried to convince herself she’d lost the man.

  “But he’s good,” she muttered, and took out her issue revolver, put it snugly in the right-hand pocket of her jacket, then placed the pair of regulation handcuffs she carried in her left, wishing all the time she’d paid more attention during the repetitive, noisy tedium of the firearms classes back in Virginia.

  She put her head down, stared at the grubby snow and began to cut a diagonal path across the square, marking out a decent distance from the statue, looking, she hoped, like any passerby moving through the night.

  Laila was cowering there, hiding herself in a crowd of youths. Emily didn’t like what she saw. The girl looked odd.

  Emily locked one cuff around her own left wrist, keeping the metal hidden from view. They could spend all night running around Rome after this girl. It was important to bring her to a halt here.

  Then she doubled back to the statue quickly, silently slipped between two youths sharing a joint, stood beside the girl and placed a hand on her arm.

  “Laila,” she said quietly, firmly, “there’s nothing to worry about. We’re here to help.”

  The kid turned, her pale face shining with pure terror.

  “It’s all right,” Emily said.

  But Laila was ready to run again and there was no option. Emily reached out, took Laila’s slender right wrist, and locked the right handcuff around it, tight to the soft skin. The girl leapt away from her, as if touched by an electric shock. The others were beginning to mill round the two of them, not taking any notice when she kept on yelling, “Police, police.”

  Laila almost dragged her off the steps. Someone’s hand tried to separate them, jerking hard on the cuff chain. It was the scene by the river all over again, and Emily thought of the options in front of her, thought about how carrying a knife was, in circles like these, just part of everyday life. Finally, she remembered what Nic Costa had done in similar circumstances. She needed help. She needed to make a point.

  Emily Deacon took the gun out of her right-hand pocket, held it high in the air and, for the second time that night, two shots burst towards the luminous disc of the moon.

  “Nic!” she yelled. “Peroni!”

  The youths got the message. They were moving back, looking scared, ready to run, to get as far away from trouble as possible. There were faces at the windows of the Campo bars but no sign of movement. The shot had bought her time. Now she needed assistance.

  “Nic!” she screamed again and pushed the girl hard into the stone pedestal of the statue to stop her trying to drag herself away.

  “Wait…” she was saying, until something got in the way. A fist, hard as stone, coming from somewhere behind her right shoulder, catching her on the jaw, making her shaky grip on the gun loosen so much that it slipped, with a steady, inevitable momentum, right out of her fingers and flew rattling across the ancient, slushy cobblestones.

  She half stumbled against the plinth, tasting blood in her mouth, struggling to think straight. Then a figure bent over her, the face hidden in the shadows, and he was laughing, a normal, natural laugh, calm, controlled, one that made her spine go stiff.

  “You ask for men,” he murmured in a flat, North American voice. Something black and cold and familiar pressed against her cheek, sending the stink of gun oil straight into her head. “They send you children.”

  Her eyes dodged the weapon, raking the square anxiously, wondering where the hell Costa and Peroni were. They’d surely heard the shots. Then he dragged her upright, stared into her eyes. He was about fifty, with a chiselled anonymous face and lifeless grey eyes. A stupid thought came to her: I know this man somehow.

  He yanked the chain of the cuffs high in the air, dragging the two of them together. With her left hand, unseen, she fumbled in her pocket, searching desperately for a solution.

  “You cuffed her well,” he said. “I watched. But you have to think about consequences. Always. Was it the right thing to do? What happens next?”

  The gun moved from the girl’s terrified head to hers.

  “Decisions,” he said wearily. “Sometimes there’s no avoiding them. You American? Or Italian?”

  “Guess,” Emily hissed at him.

  She pushed in front of the kid, tugging against his powerful grip on the chain, and covered Laila’s slight body, wondering all the time if it were really possible to escape from such a situation, to try to find a refuge in the scattering handful of people retreating from the violence of this scene.

  Then some clarity entered her mind and it said: Best not to fool yourself.

  She drew back and spat full into the pale, emotionless face, then said, in a quiet, controlled voice, “You murdered my father, you bastard. I hope you rot in hell.”

  The grey eyes blinked. Something went through his head at that moment and in a strange, unexpected way it changed things. Not that there was time to consider what he might be thinking just then. Her fingers had found what she wanted: the key.

  This man recognized her. There could be no mistake. He was staring at her, partly bemused, partly lost, troubled, struggling to come to terms with something she couldn’t fathom.

  His hand reached out, jerked her blonde hair close to his mouth.

  “Emily Deacon,” he murmured. “Little Em. Following in Daddy’s footsteps. Such a waste…”

  He relaxed his grip a little, let her head move back from his face. The gun brushed her lips. She twisted the key in the lock on her wrist and, with one deft twist, released the clasp, squeezing Laila’s hand to let her know she was free, then held on to her gently, waiting for the moment.

  “Civilians,” he whispered and there was doubt in his voice now, something holding him back. “Don’t you hate it when they get in the way? Little Em…”

  “Don’t call me that, you murdering bastard,” she hissed at him and lunged hard with her free hand, punching straight into the throat with the side of her hand, the way they’d taught her.

  “Go, go, go!” she yelled at Laila as he fell back into the snow, pushing the kid out from under Giordano Bruno’s shadow, out into the square, beneath a sky that was beautiful with stars but starting to cloud over with the filmy promise of snow.

  Someone was shouting. A familiar voice. Nic Costa’s.

  The figure on the ground pulled himself upright. She mustn’t run. This man was good. He could bring her down anytime he wanted.

  He still held the gun loosely at his side, like a professional.


  “Do it, asshole,” she snarled at him. “No time for your scalpel, though, is there? No chance to leave your mark.”

  “Steely Dan Deacon’s girl,” he said quietly, casting a cautious eye at the two figures racing across the square now. “Didn’t she grow up smart and pretty? And don’t the Deacons fuck you up just when you least expect it?”

  He was on her in an instant, strong hand at the neck of her jacket, index finger and thumb pushing into her sinews, forcing his face into hers, looking cold again, deliberate.

  “Don’t get in my way again, Little Em,” the monotone whispered. “I don’t have time for distractions.”

  He was so close she saw his breath clouding in front of her eyes. A kind of tic occupied one of his cheeks, marred the fake handsomeness of his features.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, trying to focus her attention on the angular face and the voice, to work out what part of him was familiar, locked hidden somewhere in her brain.

  “Kaspar the unfriendly ghost,” he answered, distracted for a moment, as if an idea was coming to him. “Figure it out, Little Em. We’ve both got work to do.”

  Then he relaxed his grip, took one last look at her and started running, away from the shadow of the hooded monk, fleeing into the darkness of a side street, gone for now, she thought, not forever.

  She leaned back against the pedestal and found her mind racing. She’d touched the beast. She knew him, even if he didn’t at that moment have a name that was anything but a riddle. And it came to her that what she’d felt instinctively about the error of Leapman’s approach was true. The killer wasn’t born this way. Something had created him, and he was acutely aware of that fact himself, probably resented it with all his soul. Like the philosopher turned to stone above her, he didn’t fear judgement. Perhaps, in a sense, he sought it.