by David Hewson
The previous twelve months had been hard and decisive. Their last investigation as a team, exiled to Venice, had almost resulted in Falcone’s death. Nic’s partner Peroni and Teresa had emerged unscathed, perhaps stronger than ever once the dust settled. While Teresa returned to the police morgue, Peroni became a plainclothes agente again, walking the streets of Rome, on this occasion in charge of a new recruit, a woman who, as the ugly cop was only too keen to tell anyone in earshot, drove him to distraction with her boundless enthusiasm and naïveté.
Costa had pulled the best prize of all out of the bag: a winter spent organising security for a vast art exhibition set around the works of Caravaggio, one that had played to full audiences in the Palazzo Ruspoli from its opening in November to its much-mourned closure two weeks before. There had been some last work to be done, most important of all a final round of security meetings for the return shipping of exhibits, and one long trip to London to liaise with the National Gallery. Then finally, two days before, nothing. No meetings. No deadlines. No phone calls. Only the realisation that this extraordinary period of his life, one which had opened up so many new avenues, was now over. After a week’s holiday he, too, would be back on the job, an agente working the centro storico of Rome, uncertain of his future. No one had told him if he’d be reunited with Peroni. No one had hinted when Falcone might be back in harness. Only one piece of advice had been handed down to Costa from on high by Commissario Messina. It was time, Messina said one evening on his way out, for a man of Costa’s age to start thinking about his future. The exams for promotion were being scheduled. Soon, Nic ought to consider trying to take one step up the ladder, from agente to sovrintendente.
Emily had looked at him sceptically when he passed on this information and said, simply, “I’m not sure I can imagine you as a sergeant, Nic. You’re either up there with Falcone or out on the street with Gianni. Although I suppose we could use the money….”
There were always decisions to be made, ones that conflicted with his own personal desires in the perpetual dilemma faced by any police officer with enthusiasm, ambition, and a conscience. How much of a man’s life was owed to his profession? And how much to those he loved?
Costa had found the answer to those questions eight weeks before, when Emily had joined him in an expensive restaurant in London, after his final meeting at the Gallery in Trafalgar Square. She had been living in his house on the outskirts of Rome for a year now. Come summer, she would possess sufficient qualifications to seek work as a junior architect.
When he looked into her face that night in the West End, over some of the most costly bad food he’d ever eaten, Nic Costa knew, finally. For once, he wasn’t hesitant. Too many times she’d reprimanded him with an amused look and the teasing words “Are you sure you’re Italian?”
Sometime that summer, in July possibly, or the early part of August, depending on how many relatives of Emily’s wanted to make the journey from the U.S., there would be a wedding, a civil affair, followed by a reception on the grounds of the house on the Via Appia. Sometime in late August — around the twenty-fourth if the doctors were right — they would have a child. Emily was now seven or eight weeks pregnant, enough for them to tell others of their plans. And when they were parents, Nic Costa promised himself, life would surely begin in earnest, something he was about to say to the four of them gathered in Leo Falcone’s living room, after he and Emily had made their two announcements, only to find his words drowned out in the clamour of noise around them.
Falcone hobbled off to the kitchen talking excitedly of the bottle of vintage champagne — real champagne, not just good prosecco — he’d been keeping for such an occasion. Raffaella was busy fussing over Falcone, while hunting for even more food to pile on the table. Teresa Lupo was piling kisses on the pair of them, looking worryingly close to tears or hysteria or both, before dashing to help Raffaella with the glasses.
And Gianni Peroni just stood there, a big smirk over his battered face, one aimed in the disappearing Teresa’s direction, saying I told you so.
Emily, a little amazed by the histrionics, leaned her head onto Costa’s shoulder, and whispered, “Haven’t they had any weddings in this country for a while?”
“It seems not,” he answered softly, and then, theatrically, took her in his arms and kissed her.
She broke away, laughing, as they were both confronted by a forest of waving arms bearing glasses and plates of food.
“Is it going to be like this forever from now on?” she asked, avoiding the wine, reaching for a glass of mineral water instead.
“Forever,” Gianni Peroni declared, and began to make a toast so eloquent, touching, and funny that Costa found it hard to believe he hadn’t rehearsed it many times before.
* * *
There was an entire community of cafés in the Via Degli Zingari, the narrow street round the corner that wound down the hill towards the Forum. When Falcone’s bottle of champagne was done he suggested a walk for some proper coffee. That bachelor habit had yet to disappear; the inspector still resolutely refused to believe it was possible to make a decent macchiato at home.
Half an hour later they were ambling towards Falcone’s preferred destination, enjoying the meagre warmth that had arrived with the disappearance of the morning murk. The wedding arrangements and the pregnancy had been dealt with, in a flurry of frantic questions, hugs, and no small amount of tears on Teresa’s part. Then, as so often happened with such dramatic personal news, they’d found the need to move on to other matters. For Costa, it didn’t get much better than this. Emily, friends, Rome, his home city, a few days of holiday. And both Peroni and Teresa in garrulous, postprandial mood, she reminiscing about work, Peroni fixated with its avoidance.
After one brief and inconclusive argument, the pathologist caught up with them, fat arms pumping with delight, pointed across the square, towards the Via dei Serpenti, tugged on Emily’s shirtsleeve, and exclaimed, in her gruff Roman tones, “Look! Look! I had this wonderful customer down there once. Some dreadful accountant skewered with a sword. It was—”
“It was horrible,” Peroni complained.
“Oh,” Teresa retorted, brightly surprised. “We’re getting discriminating in our old age, are we? I suppose this new female companion of yours puts these crazy notions into your head.”
“Don’t rub it in….”
This wasn’t a popular subject between them.
“Who is she?” Emily asked, unwisely.
“Indian girl,” Teresa said tersely. “Quite pretty too. God knows why she’s in the police.”
The big man grumbled, “Rosa — which does not sound a very Indian name to me at all — was born in some public housing block in Monte Sacro. As I have told you a million times, being of Indian extraction and being Indian aren’t the same thing.”
Teresa didn’t look convinced.
“Of course she’s Indian. Her dad’s from Cochin. He sells umbrellas and lighters and all that junk on some street stall in Tritone. So what? She’s got India in her genes. You can tell that just from talking to her. She doesn’t get mad about anything, not on the surface anyway. I guess it’s karma or whatever.”
Peroni waved a finger in her direction. “She’s a Catholic, for God’s sake!”
“That doesn’t make her an Italian,” Costa interjected. “Not even an honorary one, these days.”
“Quite,” Teresa went on. “And her old man’s a Catholic too. He was one back in India long before he came here. Did you know that?”
Peroni muttered a low curse. Then, grumpily, “No…”
“You should talk to her more,” the pathologist went on. “Rosa is a sweet, serious, responsible human being. Which brings me back to my original point. Why the hell is she in the police? What’s going to happen if she’s left hanging around people like you for long? You, with all these special talents? I mean it.” This last point was aimed at Emily. “I’ve worked in that morgue for a decade and when they’re gone it ca
n be just plain boring. You miss the quality customers. No rubbish from these boys. No time-wasting. Just…” — Teresa sighed, a beatific expression on her face — “…the goods.”
Peroni shook his head and sighed. “Goods like that I can do without.”
“Goods like that put food and drink on our tables, Gianni. Someone’s got to deal with them. Unless you were thinking of moving over to traffic,” she added slyly. “Or still fantasising about… what was it?”
“OK, OK,” he conceded. “We don’t need to be reminded.”
“Pig farming,” Teresa persisted. “Back home in Tuscany. With me working as a local doctor. Stitching up the bucolics after their Saturday night fights. Ministering to fat pregnant housewives.” She slapped him on the arm, quite hard. “What were you thinking?”
“What were we thinking?” he asked quietly.
“Running away,” she answered, serious in an instant. “Believing you can just dump your problems in the gutter and walk on to some new place and forget about them. I’ve been doing that most of my life. In the end it gets downright tedious. What’s more, the little bastards have a habit of picking themselves out of the gutter and following you, whining, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’”
“I would have made a good pig farmer! A great one.”
“You would,” she assured him, full of genuine sympathy. “Until the moment you had to drive them off to the slaughterhouse. What then, my Tuscan hulk? Would you sit outside munching on your panino and porchetta, listening to the squeals?”
Peroni didn’t reply. He just looked at the cobbled sidewalk, worn down by generations of feet.
Then Teresa stopped, aware that someone was missing.
“I didn’t realise Leo was walking so slowly,” she said. “He’s not as bad as that, is he?”
They’d turned a corner a little way back. When Costa looked behind, there wasn’t a soul in the street. Something was wrong. Leo was making slow but steady progress in his return to health. Soon, Costa thought, he’d be back on the job, forcing their new boss, Commissario Messina, to make a tough decision. Did he put the team back together, or keep them apart?
“Nic…?” Emily said softly, a note of concern in her voice.
He was turning to retrace his steps, Peroni starting to follow, when, from somewhere close by came the familiar wail of a police siren, followed by another, then a third, and the honking of angry horns.
“I think…” Teresa began to say, then stopped.
Nearby, someone was screaming and, in that curious way the human mind worked, Nic Costa understood that, wordless and panic driven as the noises were, they came from a terrified Raffaella Arcangelo, out of sight, and for a few desperate moments out of reach too.
Then two figures stumbled into view: Leo Falcone in the arms of a strong, powerful individual whose head was obscured by a black woollen hat pulled down low over his ears.
A man who held a gun tight to Falcone’s neck, jabbing it, shouting something Costa couldn’t understand.
* * *
He didn’t have a weapon.
That thought struck Costa as he raced up the street, trying to analyse what was happening in front of him. It had been months since he’d even touched a gun. Months since he’d given firearms a passing thought. It couldn’t be that important. They were in the centre of Rome, in a highly public area. The worst anyone encountered hereabouts was some lowlife bag-snatcher, nothing more serious than that, though something in Raffaella’s desperate voice had told Costa to bark at the women to stay behind him, just in case. Gianni Peroni was following, as fast as he could. But Costa had twenty years on his partner. When he rounded the corner into the narrow side street where Falcone’s attacker had dragged the old inspector, Nic was, he knew, on his own, unarmed, reliant only on his own wits to deal with whatever he found.
The sirens were getting louder. Costa swung left into the narrow thoroughfare, little more than an alley, shadowed by the high-walled houses that blocked the afternoon sunlight.
There was a small white van parked at an awkward angle, cut across the cobbles to block the road to other cars. Raffaella Arcangelo was on the ground a short distance away, screaming, looking as if she’d been hit. Leo Falcone struggled feebly in the arms of a tall, powerful man dressed completely in black, his face obscured by the woollen hat pulled down low, a scarf up around his mouth. He pressed a gun tight to Leo’s temple and was dragging the crippled inspector back towards the open doors of the van, not saying a word.
Peroni reached the junction sweating, gasping for breath.
“Leave this to me,” Costa ordered, waving a hand in his direction. “Don’t let the women come close. There’s a weapon.”
“Nic!” Emily yelled at him angrily.
He turned and looked at her. The pregnancy had made her pale. That morning he’d found her throwing up in the bathroom. Noisily, a little angry and shocked by the way something inside her, something she would surely grow to love, could inflict such a base, physical humiliation on her.
“Please,” he told her firmly. “Nothing’s going to happen. Just stay where you are.”
Easy words, stupid words. They’d work for a minute or so, though.
He walked calmly forward, ignoring the stricken woman on the ground. Costa was trying to see into the eyes of the man in the black jacket, determine what might be going on in his mind. They’d all done antiterrorist training in the Questura. They all knew how a professional hit man or kidnapper was supposed to behave, what tactics such monsters used to get the victim they wanted. What he saw here didn’t match the profile. This was an amateur, improvising as he went.
Peroni had his breath back and was marching into the light at the street junction — the firing zone — Costa couldn’t think of it any other way.
“Back! I told you!” he yelled, angry at his partner. There wasn’t space for confusion. This situation was delicate enough as it was. He was relieved to see the older man halt in his tracks, a dark expression on his face.
Then he looked at Leo Falcone and felt the stirrings of anger inside him. There was blood on the inspector’s mouth. Worse than that, there was something strange, foreign, in his eyes, a resigned, baffled kind of acceptance that didn’t fit in at all with what he knew of Falcone’s character.
A stray sentence entered Costa’s head.
You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Leo, he thought.
* * *
Leo Falcone could cope with almost anything life could throw at him. Even a bullet in the head that had disrupted, temporarily, the doctors all said, the neural connections between his brain and his limbs. But what was happening to him now was outside his realm of expectation. There was real fear on the inspector’s face, and it made him look old and weak and vulnerable.
Tires squealed at the end of the street. Three blue police cars had fought their way onto the busy sidewalk and screeched to a halt at the concrete blocks placed there to impede traffic. Uniformed officers were scrambling out of them, looking up the narrow alley in the direction of the two men by the car and at Costa, exposed in the wan spring sunlight at the junction.
That’s just what you do in a situation like this, Costa thought with a rising dismay. Turn up the heat.
He moved closer, until he was no more than a couple of metres from the two men, arms held high, hands open, fingers spread wide, talking calmly, not angry, not engaged, as cool as he could make it in the circumstances.
“No one’s going to get hurt,” Costa said. “Let’s just do this simply. You put the gun down. We talk this through.”
“Nic…” Falcone growled, held tight in that painful position, yet with enough venom left to make his point. Costa knew that low, embittered tone of voice. It said, Leave this to me.
He glanced behind him. A large police van, too big for the narrow streets, was blocking the opposite end of the alley. It sounded as if more cars were screaming up either side of the Via degli Zingari, determined to close every exit.
&nbs
p; Costa took a good look into those smart dark eyes. The man held Leo Falcone tight, one arm round his neck, the other keeping the gun, a large black revolver, something ex-military, Costa guessed, at an uncommitted angle, one that could go anywhere, forward, back, where he liked, in an instant.
In training they taught you two things about a situation like this. First, that a man was always most dangerous when he was cornered. And second, that it was so easy to let your emotions get the better of you, and forget that nothing much mattered except getting the victim out alive.
“Nowhere to go…” Costa began saying, then found his voice drowned out by a familiar sound.
The high-pitched screech of a small, overworked scooter engine, a mechanical, too-loud bee buzz, rose up from the main street, getting more vocal, more angry, as it approached.
To his astonishment, the bike had crossed the stone barriers, worked its way through the officers and marked cars, and was now accelerating up the hill. The middle-aged man at the controls gunned the little engine and dropped another gear to get some speed, turning to shake his fist at the cops, a little unsteadily, and maybe not through mere gravity either.
Costa recognised the model. It was a scarlet Piaggio Vespa ET4, a retro machine clothed in 1960s styling to give it the look of the original from some old black-and-white movie in the old Rome of Fellini and Rossellini.
This unexpected sight silenced them all: Falcone and his captor; Costa; the baffled and tardily irate uniforms who let it slip past them.
The figure in black watched the Vespa approach, then picked up Falcone by the scruff of his overcoat and saw something, an opportunity perhaps.
Costa assessed the situation around him. A dozen officers, at least six vehicles, all with four wheels. A perfect closedown for a man on foot or in a car. But with some fake sixties Vespa…
He took one step forward and found himself facing the gun.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Costa said quietly.
Falcone found his voice. He turned his head as best he could, looked his captor straight in the face, and told Nic, “This is Giorgio Bramante. He only ever did one stupid thing in his entire life, as far as I’m aware. I thought he was still paying for it.”