"The Sacred Cut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hewson David)MercolediTHE TWO PLAINCLOTHES COPS HUDDLED IN THE DOORWAY of a closed It fell from the black sky as a perfect, silky cloud. Thick flakes curled around the gaudy coloured lights of the street decorations in a soft, white embrace. The pavements were already blanketed in a crunchy, shoe-deep covering in spite of the milling crowds who had pounded the Corso’s black stones a few hours earlier, searching for last-minute Christmas presents in the stores. Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had read the met briefing before they went on duty that evening. They’d looked at the words “severe weather warning” and tried to remember what that meant. Floods maybe. Gales that brought down some of the ancient tiles which sat so unsteadily on the rooftops of the centro storico, the warren of streets and alleys in the city’s Renaissance quarter where the two men spent most of their working lives. But this was different. The met men said it would snow and snow and snow. Snow in a way it hadn’t for almost twenty years, since the last big freeze in 1985. Only for longer this time, a week or more. And the temperatures would hit new lows too. Maybe it was global warming. Maybe it was just a trick throw of the meteorological dice. Whatever the reason, the world was about to become seriously out of sync for a little while and that knowledge, shared among the two and a half million or more individuals who lived within the boundaries of the Comune di Roma, was both scary and tantalizing. The city was braced for its first white Christmas in living memory and already the consequences of this were beginning to seep into the Roman consciousness. People were preparing to bunk off work for any number of sound and incontrovertible reasons. They’d picked up the nasty virus that was creeping through the city. They couldn’t take the buses in from the suburbs because, even if they made it through the dangerous, icy streets, who knew if they’d get back in the evening? Life was, for once, just too perilous to do anything but stay at home, or maybe wander down to the local bar and talk about nothing except the weather. And they were all, librarian and shop assistant, waiter and tour guide, priest and shivering cop, thinking secretly: Peroni glanced at his partner, an expression Costa now recognized, one that said: “Hey, Mauro,” Peroni growled, and crushed the photographer one more time before letting go. “Your fingers are frozen stiff. It’s pitch dark here with nothing to look at but snow. Why don’t you quit taking photos for a while? You must’ve done a couple of hundred today already. Relax. We could go some place warm. Come on. Even you clever guys could handle a The photographer’s round, bulbous eyes blinked back at the two policemen suspiciously. He flexed his shoulders, maybe to shrug off the cold, maybe to get back some feeling after experiencing Peroni’s grip. “This would be a duty break, right? I can still shoot if I want to?” Nic Costa listened to Sandri’s squeaky northern tones, sighed and put a restraining hand on his partner’s arm, worried that Peroni’s temper just might take a turn in the wrong direction. The photographer had been doing the rounds of the Questura all month. He was a nice enough guy, an arty type who’d been given some kind of government grant to create a documentary record of the station’s work. He’d photographed all manner of people: traffic cops and forensic, the lunatics from the morgue, the paper-monkeys in clerical. Costa had seen some of his work already: a set of moody monochrome prints of the warders working the cells. The photos weren’t half bad. And he had noted the photographer’s steady progress around the station, understanding the greedy, interested gaze the man gave him and Peroni every time they crossed his path. Mauro Sandri was a photographer. He thought in visual terms, and not much else in all probability. He must have looked at Nic Costa-small, slight, young, like an athlete who’d somehow quit the track-set him, in his mind, against the big, bulking frame of his partner-more than twenty years older and with an ugly, violently disfigured face no one ever forgot-and felt his shutter finger start to itch. Gianni Peroni surely knew that too. Nic’s partner was used to sideways glances, for his looks and his history. He’d been inspector in vice for years until, almost a year before, he’d been busted down to the ranks for one simple slip-up, when he’d tasted the goods he was supposed to be investigating. All for a private, internalized reason he’d later shared with one person only, the younger partner who pounded the street alongside him. That didn’t stop an intelligent man, one who could read an expression even on Peroni’s battered features, seeing the two cops together and understanding there was a story there. It was inevitable that Sandri would pick them as his subject one day. Inevitable, too, that Gianni Peroni would see it as a challenge to ride the photographer a touch hard along the way. “You can still shoot, Mauro,” Costa said and caught a glimpse of a resentful twinkle in Peroni’s bright, beady eye. He took his partner’s arm again and whispered, “They’re just pictures, Gianni. You know the great thing about pictures?” “No, tell me, Professor,” Peroni murmured, watching Sandri struggle to work another 35 mm cassette into his Nikon. “They only show what’s on the surface. The rest you make up. You write your own story. You imagine your own beginning and your own ending. Pictures are fiction pretending to be truth.” Peroni nodded. He wasn’t his normal self, Costa thought. There were dark, complex thoughts rumbling around deep inside a head that temperamentally liked to avoid such places. “Maybe. But does this particular fiction have a Costa coughed into a gloved hand and stamped his feet, thinking about the taste of a big slug of grappa hidden inside a double espresso and how little activity there could be on a night such as this, when even the most crooked Roman hoods would surely be thinking of nothing but a warm bed. “I believe it does,” he answered, and scanned the deserted street, where just a single bus was struggling down the centre line at a snail’s pace, trying to keep from skidding into the gutter. Costa stepped out from the shelter of the doorway, pulling the collar of his thick black coat up, shielding his eyes from the blizzard with a frozen hand, then darted into an alley, towards the distant yellow light trickling from the tiny doorway of what he guessed just might be the last bar open in Rome. THEY PROVED TO BE the only three customers in the tiny cafe down the alley beyond the Galleria Doria Pamphili, among the dark tangle of ancient streets that ran west towards the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. Costa stood with Gianni Peroni at one end of the counter, trying to calm down the big man before something untoward happened. Mauro Sandri was crouched on a stool a good distance away, concentrating hard on polishing the lenses on his damn cameras, not even touching the booze-rich The owner, a tall, skeletal man with a white nylon jacket, scrappy brown moustache and greased grey hair, looked at the three of them in turn and declared quite firmly, “Were this up to me, I’d slap the guy around a little, Officer. I mean, you got to have limitations. There’s public places and there’s private places. If a man can’t get a little peace and quiet when he wanders into the pisser and gets his He was right. Costa had seen only a few figures scurrying through the snow when they trudged to the bar. Now it was solid white beyond the door. Anyone with sense was, surely, snug at home, swearing not to set foot outside until the blizzard ended and some sunlight turned up to disclose what Rome looked like after an extraordinary night like this. Gianni Peroni had downed his coffee and added an extra grappa on top, which was unlike the man. He sat hunched on an ancient, rickety stool, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible so no one lingered, staring mutely at the bottles behind the bar. It wasn’t Sandri’s stupid trick with the camera that had caused this, Costa knew. Trying to snap a picture of Peroni taking a piss- They’d discussed this already earlier that evening, when Costa had quietly asked the big man if everything was OK. It all came out in a rush. What was really bugging Peroni was the fact he wouldn’t see his kids this Christmas, for the first time ever. “I’ll get Mauro to apologize,” Costa told his partner now. “He didn’t mean anything, Gianni. You had the measure of the guy straightaway. He just does this, all the time. Taking pictures.” Besides, Costa thought, any photo could have been quite something too. He could easily imagine a grainy black-and-white shot of Peroni’s hulking form, shot from the back, shrinking into the corner of the bar’s grubby urinal, looking like an outtake from some fifties shoot in Paris by Cartier-Bresson. Sandri had an eye for a picture. Costa half blamed himself. When Peroni had dashed for the toilet door and Sandri’s eyes had lit up, he should have seen what was coming. “I’ve bought all the presents, Nic,” Peroni moaned, those piggy eyes twinkling back at him, the scarred face full of guilt and pain. “How the hell do I get them to Siena now with this shitty weather everywhere? What are they going to think of me, on top of everything else?” “Phone them. They know what it’s like here. They’ll understand.” “They will?” Peroni snapped. “What the fuck do you know about kids, huh?” Costa took his hand off Peroni’s huge, hunched shoulder, shrugged and said nothing. Peroni had two children: a girl of thirteen, a boy of eleven. He never seemed to be able to think of them as anything but helpless infants. It was one of the traits Costa admired in his partner. To the world he looked like a bruised, scarred thug, the last man anyone would want to meet on a dark night. And it was all an act. Underneath, Peroni was just a straightforward, honest, old-fashioned family man, one who’d stepped out of line once and paid the heaviest price. “Oh, crap.” Peroni sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to lash out at you. I don’t even want to lash out at Mauro over there.” “That’s good to know,” Costa replied, then added, “if there’s any-thing I can do…” “Such as what?” Peroni asked. “It’s an expression, Gianni. It’s a way a friend has of saying, ”No, I haven’t the first idea how I can help, and the truth is I probably can’t do a thing. But if I could, I would.“ Understand?” A low, croaking snort of semi-amusement escaped Peroni’s throat. “OK, OK. I am contrite. I repent my sins.” His scarred face screwed up with distaste aimed, it seemed to Costa, somewhere deep inside himself. “Some more than others.” Then he shot a vicious look at Sandri, huddled over the Nikons. “I want that film, though. I’m not having my pecker pasted all over the notice board for everyone to see. They told the guy he could follow us around and take pictures. They didn’t say he could walk straight after us into the pisser.” “Mauro swears there’s really nothing there. People wouldn’t even see it was you. And maybe it’s a good picture, Gianni. Think of it.” The battered face wrinkled sceptically. “It’s a picture of a man taking a piss. Not the Costa had tried to talk art to Peroni before. It hadn’t worked. Peroni was irretrievably romantic at heart, still stuck on the idea of beauty. Truth came somewhere far behind. And it occurred to Costa too that maybe there was more to the big man’s misery than the genuine distress he felt at being separated from his kids. There was also the matter of the relationship Peroni had struck up with Teresa Lupo, the pathologist working at the police morgue. It was meant to be a secret, but secrets never really stayed hidden for long inside the Questura. Peroni was dating the likeable, wayward Teresa and it was common knowledge. When Costa found out, a couple of weeks before, he had thought long and hard about it and had come to the conclusion that the two might, just, make a good couple. If Peroni could swallow his guilt. If Teresa could keep her life straight for long enough to make things work once the initial flush of mad enthusiasm that came with any affair subsided into the routine of everyday existence. “Gimme a cappuccino,” Costa said to the barman. “It’s going to be a long, cold night out there.” There was a howl of protest from behind the counter. “It’s nearly twelve for God’s sake. What am I running here? A soup kitchen for cops?” “Gimme one too,” Sandri piped up from the other end of the bar, pushing away his cold Then the photographer walked over, looked Peroni in the eye and placed a 35 mm film cassette in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really. I shouldn’t have done it like that. It’s just…” Peroni waited for an explanation. When it didn’t come, he asked, “Just what?” “I knew you’d have said no. I apologize, OK? I was wrong. But you have to understand this, Peroni. If a man like me had to ask every time he took a photograph, there’d hardly be any pictures in the world. All those ones you remember. All those ones you think are important. They came from some guy with a camera who pointed the stupid thing while no one was really taking any notice and went… pop. Improvisation. Speed. That’s what this job’s all about. Stealing other people’s moments.” Peroni looked him up and down and considered this. “A little like your job, huh?” Sandri added. The barman slid three coffees down the counter, spilling milk and foam everywhere. “Listen, assholes, this is the last,” he snarled. “Do you think you could possibly just pay for them, then go steal a few moments someplace else, huh? I’d like to go to bed and count the seven and a bit euros I earned tonight. And I got to open those doors at six-thirty tomorrow morning, not that anyone’s going to be walking through them.” Costa had downed one mouthful of hot, milky coffee and foam when the radio squawked. Peroni was looking at him hungrily as he took the call. They had to get out of the bar, they had to find something to do. If they stayed any longer, they’d never leave. “Burglar alarm,” Costa said when he’d listened to the message from the control room. “The Pantheon. We’re the closest.” “Ooh,” Peroni cooed. “A burglar alarm. Did you hear that, Mauro? Maybe we’ve got some wild action after all. Maybe all those bums who hang around there fleecing the tourists are breaking in, looking for somewhere warm to spend the night.” “Damn stupid thing to do if they are,” Sandri said immediately, looking puzzled. “In weather like this?” Peroni asked. “It’s got a hole in the roof the size of a swimming pool,” Sandri replied. “The oculus. Remember? It’s going to be as cold in there as it is outside. Colder even. Like a freezer. And nothing to steal either, not unless you can remove a few marble tombs without someone noticing.” Peroni gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. Not too hard this time. “You know, for a guy who talks art you’re OK really, Mauro. You can take pictures of me all you want. Costa thought about Leo Falcone. Their boss had made a point of insisting he could be easily disturbed. “For a burglar alarm?” Peroni nodded. “Leo doesn’t say those things without a reason. He wants out of that place.” “I guess so.” Costa pulled out his phone as they walked to the door and the white world beyond, feeling somewhat uneasy that Leo Falcone was so reluctant to spend a little leisure time with his superiors. And thinking all the while too about what Mauro Sandri had said. There was no reason for anyone to break into the Pantheon. None at all. LEO FALCONE LISTENED to the drone of men’s voices echo around the private room in Al Pompiere, the stiff, old-fashioned restaurant in the ghetto where, by tradition, they met once a year just before Christmas. Then he looked at their heavy business coats, lined up on the hangers by the wall like black dead-animal skins, and turned his head towards the window, wishing he were somewhere-anywhere-else. The snow was now falling in a steady, persistent stream. Falcone took his mind off the dinner for a moment and wondered what the weather meant for the days to come. He liked to work Christmas. Most divorced men did. Those without kids anyway. He’d seen the quick, internal flash of disappointment on Gianni Peroni’s face earlier in the week when the new rotas had been posted, and Peroni and Costa had realized they would both be on duty over the holiday. Peroni had hoped to go home to Tuscany for a brief reunion with his estranged family. Falcone had wondered, for a moment, whether he could arrange that. Then he’d checked himself. Peroni was just another cop now. He had to live with the hours just like everyone else. That’s what duty was about. That, and turning out for an annual dinner with a bunch of faceless grey men from SISDE, the civilian intelligence service, men who never really said what they meant or what, in truth, they really wanted. The seating arrangements were preordained: one cop, one spook, arranged alternately around the white starched tablecloth and the highly polished silverware. Falcone sat at the window end of the long banquet table next to Filippo Viale, who smoked a cigar and clutched a glass of old chardonnay grappa as clear as water, his second of the evening. Falcone had listened to Viale’s quiet, insistent voice throughout the meal, picking at his own food: a deep-fried artichoke to start, a plate of Viale had been his point man with the SISDE since Falcone had been promoted to inspector ten years before. In theory that meant they liaised with one another on an equal basis from time to time, when the two services needed to share information. In reality Falcone couldn’t remember a single occasion on which Viale or any other of the grey men, as he thought of them, was of real assistance. There’d been plenty of calls from Viale, fishing for information, asking for a favour. Usually Falcone had complied, because he knew what the cost of reluctance would be: a call upstairs and an icy interrogation from his superiors, asking what the problem was. Before he was promoted, he’d believed the grey men’s power was on the wane. That was in the early nineties, when the Cold War was over and terrorism seemed a thing of the past. A time of optimism, as he saw it now, when a younger Falcone, still married, still with some sense of hope, was able to believe the world was becoming a smarter place, one that grew a little wiser, a little more safe, with every passing year. Then the circle turned again. New enemies, faceless ones with no particular flag to identify them, emerged out of nowhere. While the police and the Carabinieri struggled to hold the fort against a rising tide of crime using increasingly meagre and conventional resources, the funding went to the grey men, filling their coffers for operations that never came under any public scrutiny. There was a shift in the moral fulcrum. For some in government the end came to justify the means. This was, Falcone knew, the state of the world he would probably have to work with for the rest of his professional life. That knowledge didn’t make it any easier to bear. Nor was he flattered by the grey men’s apparent belief that they saw something in Leo Falcone they wanted. “Leo,” Viale said quietly, “I have to ask. I know we’ve been through this before. But still… it puzzles me.” “I don’t want another job.” Falcone sighed, hearing a note of testiness in his voice. “Can’t we just leave it at that?” They’d been trying to recruit him off and on for a good four years or more. Falcone was never quite certain how genuine Viale’s offer was. It was a standard SISDE trick to hold out lures to men in the conventional force. It flattered them, made them feel there could be a future somewhere else if life got too difficult in the Questura. Viale downed the grappa and ordered another. The waiter, who was handing around a very old-fashioned sponge cake as dessert, took the glass and returned with it filled immediately. Viale was a regular here, Falcone guessed. Maybe he had booked the dinner. Maybe he was the boss. SISDE officers never said much about their rank. By rights Falcone was supposed to be matched against someone near his own position in the hierarchy. He didn’t know Viale well. Like so many SISDE officers, the man was infuriatingly anonymous: a dark suit, a nondescript pale face, a head of black hair, dyed in all probability, and a demeanour that embraced many smiles and not a touch of warmth or humour. Falcone couldn’t even put a finger on his age. Viale was of medium height, slightly built, with a distinct paunch. Yet Falcone felt sure there was something more serious about the man than he revealed. Viale didn’t sit behind the same kind of desk Falcone did, nor did he have to tackle the same, incessant trinity of problems: detection, intelligence and resources. Viale was, somehow, a man who made his own life and there, Leo Falcone thought, was something to envy. Viale put a slight hand on Falcone’s arm and looked directly into his face. There was northern blood in him, Falcone decided. It showed in the flat, emotionless landscape of his anonymous face, and those grey-blue eyes, cold, mirthless. “No, we can’t just leave it at that, Leo. Just say yes now and I can push through the paperwork straightaway. You could be sitting behind a new desk before the end of January.” Falcone laughed and watched the snow again. It made him feel good somehow. It reminded him of his parting words to every man he’d sent out into the city that night, ordering them, for once, to disturb his private time on the slightest excuse. “I’ll think about it,” Falcone replied. “Just like last time.” Viale cast him a vile glance and muttered a low, obscene curse. Viale was, Leo realized, more than a little drunk. “Don’t fuck with me, Leo,” Viale murmured. “Don’t play games.” “It’s always been one of my rules,” Falcone answered calmly, “not to fuck with the grey men. It’s bad for your career.” Viale snorted, then casually stuffed a piece of sponge cake into his mouth, despatching crumbs and sugar down the front of his black jacket. “You think you’re above all this, don’t you? Sitting there in your grubby little office. Sending out grubby little men to chase people you probably can’t put in jail anyway, even if you catch them.” “It’s a job someone’s got to do,” Falcone answered, then looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. Perhaps it was late enough to make a polite exit without offending anyone except Viale, who was offended enough as it was. “It’s a job?” Viale snarled. “Jesus Christ, Leo.” The grey man cast his eyes around the room, then shook his head. Falcone did the same. Most of the individuals there were getting stinking drunk. It was tradition. It was Christmas. Viale barked at the waiter. The man came back with a flask of grappa. Viale poured out a couple, just for them, as if no one else in the room existed. “This is a hundred a bottle and I’m paying,” he muttered, then nodded at the tiny window, now blocked with snow. “Even you need something warm inside on a night like this.” Falcone took the glass, sipped at the fiery drink, then put it on the table. Alcohol had never been his thing. Viale watched him. “You don’t like joining in, do you? You think you can get through all this shit on your own, so long as your luck holds and you keep getting good marks every time they come to check the statistics. What’s a man like you messing around with that crap for?” Targets, benchmarks, goals… Falcone didn’t like the jargon of the modern police force any more than the rest of his colleagues. But unlike most he saw a point behind the paperwork. Everyone needed some kind of standard by which their efforts could be measured internally, and publicly if need be. That was anathema to people like Viale, who could screw up for years and never get found out unless a rare, scrupulous civil servant or politician got on their back. That thought jogged a memory from somewhere, but Falcone couldn’t nail it down. He glanced at his watch again, then pushed the glass away. The raw smell of the grappa was overwhelming. “Say what you want to say, Filippo. It’s late. I want a good night’s sleep. With this weather the Questura’s going to be short of people tomorrow. Maybe we’ll have to help out uniform or traffic.” “Traffic!” Viale snapped. “Why the hell would you want to waste your time on that?” “I believe it’s something to do with being a public servant,” Falcone replied dryly. Viale waved the glass of clear liquid at him. “And I’m not, huh? How do you know?” “I don’t, Filippo. That’s the point.” Falcone shifted awkwardly. He didn’t want to upset this man any more than he had already. Viale had influence, power over him perhaps. But he didn’t want to prolong this difficult interview either. “Shouldn’t we discuss this some other time? During the day. When we both feel”-he couldn’t suppress a glance at the carafe of grappa-“more ready to talk sense.” Viale’s immobile face flushed. “I’m amazed you think you have the time.” Falcone remained silent, waiting for the rest. “Think about it, Leo. You’re forty-eight. Has anyone asked you to sit the commissario interview recently?” Falcone shrugged. He hadn’t even considered promotion of late. Life had been too busy. Viale provided the answer for him, which was interesting of itself. “Not in three years. And you haven’t even asked. That looks bad.” “Promotion’s not everything,” Falcone replied, knowing his answer sounded feeble. “Some of the most important people we have are just plain street cops who’ll never move up the ladder in their lives, or expect to. Where the hell would we be without them?” Viale leaned along the table and breathed booze fumes in his face. “We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about Falcone bristled. He’d an idea now where this was leading. “By which you mean…?” “Shit,” the grey man hissed. “You know damn well. You’re getting sentimental in your dotage, Leo. You’re looking out for people who don’t deserve it. This Peroni idiot, for one thing. If it wasn’t for you he’d be out of the force without a pension. With good reason, too. Why’d anyone with any sense stick up for a guy like that?” Falcone thought carefully before answering. “They asked my opinion. I gave it. Peroni’s a good cop, whatever happened in the past. We can’t afford to lose people of that calibre.” “Peroni’s a disaster waiting to happen. Him and that partner of his. And don’t tell me you never stuck up for him. Hell, if it wasn’t for you those two wouldn’t even be working together.” None of this was SISDE’s business. It infuriated Falcone that he was getting a lecture on personnel issues from someone outside the force. He’d be damned if he’d listen to it from anyone inside either. Costa and Peroni were on his team. It was his call who worked with whom. “These are two lowly cops on the street, Filippo. They’re my problem. Not yours.” “No. They are two time bombs waiting to destroy what’s left of your career. Peroni’s going to go off the rails again before long. Mark my word. And the Costa kid…” Viale leaned forward and said this quietly, as if it were a confidence. “Come on, Leo. You know who his old man was? That stinking Commie who caused us no end of trouble when he was alive.” Suddenly Falcone recalled the memory that had been eluding him. Some fifteen years earlier Nic Costa’s father, an implacably incorrupt Communist politician, had exposed a series of financial misdeeds inside both the civilian and military security services. SISDE in particular came out badly. Heads had rolled as a.result. A couple of fall guys even found themselves briefly in jail. “What on earth has that got to do with the son?” he asked. “There’s trouble in the blood,” Viale muttered. “People like that have got ideas above their station. Be honest with yourself. You know it as well as I do.” “These are internal police matters,” Falcone replied sharply. “You don’t have to concern yourself with our business.” “I’m concerned with you, Leo. People are taking note. They’re starting to wonder. In this business you’re either moving up or moving down. No one stands still. Which way do you think you’re going right now? Huh?” He leaned close, wreathed in grappa fumes, to make sure his last point struck home. “Where I am everyone moves up. You know why? This is our world. We own it. We have the money. We have the power. We don’t need to go squeaking to a committee of bureaucrats so we can use it. We don’t have to worry whether some asshole of an MP is going to start shooting his mouth off in parliament about what we do. Not anymore. You’re a man who wants results. That’s what I like about you. We’ve got opportunities for someone like you. Ten years down the line you’re still going to be employed too. Which, given how things stand…” Viale paused and, with an unsteady hand, poured the remains of Falcone’s glass into his. “… isn’t the case where you are now. Listen to a friend, Leo. These last few years I’ve been offering you a job. That’s not what’s on the table now. Now I’m throwing you a lifeline. One that could pull you out of all the crap you’re swimming in. Before it’s too late.” Falcone’s cell phone rang. He excused himself, answered it, listening carefully to the familiar voice. “I’m needed,” he said when the call ended. Viale’s face creased in a drunken sneer, one Falcone found faintly amusing. “What is it? Some tourist got mugged again down the Colosseum? The Kosovans getting uppity about who rules the hooker trade?” “Not exactly,” Falcone replied, smiling, getting to his feet, reaching for his camel-hair coat, doubting it really would keep out the cold on such a night. “It’s much more important than that. Excuse me.” Viale raised his glass. “Ciao, Leo. You have until the New Year. After that you’re on your own.” THEY LEFT THE CAR where it was, tyre-deep in drifting snow in a blocked dead end off the Corso, and walked to the Piazza della Minerva through a squally wind. The weather changed by the moment. Briefly, through a clear patch high overhead, a full moon illuminated billowing banks of heavy cloud scudding over the city. The stars shone, bright and brittle in the thin winter air, possessing a piercing clarity that was almost painful. Then the blizzard returned, and the three men pulled their collars around their faces and turned the corner into the small square, where the plain, brute cylinder of the Pantheon’s rear wall loomed above them, luminous under the night’s silver light. It was a sight Nic Costa had never expected to see. The vast hemisphere of the dome, the largest in the world until the twentieth century, so vast that Michelangelo had made the diameter of St. Peter’s dome half a metre smaller out of respect, was now swathed in snow, cutting an unmistakable semicircle out of the sky, like the meniscus of a gigantic new moon rising above the dark urban horizon. Costa cast a glance at Bernini’s famous elephant in front of the church. The creature was almost unrecognizable. A heavy drift had engulfed the statue and the foot of the diminutive Egyptian obelisk that sat on its midriff. A perfect, miniature mountain rose up from the ground to form a triangular peak, surmounted by the bare needle-like pinnacle of the column, etched with impenetrable hieroglyphs. Sandri snapped some more pictures. Peroni shook his head. Then they carried on, walking parallel with the eastern wall of the Pantheon, into the small, rectangular open space of the Piazza della Rotonda. Costa felt he knew every inch of the piazza. He’d arrested pickpockets working the busy summer crowds who had flocked to see the impossible: an imperial Roman temple unchanged in its essential form over almost twenty centuries. And a sight that, just as important to many, was free, since Hadrian’s original shrine to every last god in the heavens had in the seventh century been converted into the consecrated church it still remained. Once, Costa had picked up a drunk who’d fallen asleep beneath the spouting mouths of the comical dolphins and fauns of the fountain opposite the temple’s massive, colonnaded portico. But long before he became a cop, when he was just a school kid, full of awe and passion for the history of his native city, he’d come here whenever he could, just to sit on the steps of the fountain and listen to water trickle from the dolphins’ beaks like liquid laughter, just to stare at the way everything changed in the shifting light of the day and the season, feeling two thousand years of bustling history brush up against his face. Tonight, however, he scarcely recognized the place. The blustering northerly wind was funnelling down the narrow alleys facing the piazza, cascading new and fallen snow straight into the square and the mouth of the Pantheon’s portico. Curious, organically shaped drifts clung to the fountain. The streams of water from the dolphins’ and fauns’ mouths were now frozen solid, like lumpen jewels gleaming in the moonlight. Peroni was scanning the piazza for signs of life. Mauro had his camera out, changing films. Costa approved. This was a rare sight, he thought. It deserved to be recorded. “Where the hell is everyone, Nic?” Peroni asked. “I don’t even see the bums.” The poor were with you always. Particularly in a place like this. “Maybe they’re inside already,” Costa replied. Or, even better, perhaps the city had discovered some hidden reserve of compassion and found space to house them for the night. “We’ve got company,” Peroni said, pointing to a figure emerging from behind the western wall of the building. The newcomer shivered inside his dark uniform, shielding his face against the snow, which seemed to have found newly energized vigour. The caretaker stumbled forward, stared at them hopefully, then asked, “You the cops?” Peroni waved his badge. Costa looked around the square again. More people should have been there. Falcone ought to arrive soon, too. “I’m not going inside on my own,” the caretaker said. “Some of these scum use knives.” Peroni nodded at the doors. “Best open them up, then.” The man let loose a dry laugh, then looked at Sandri, once again aiming his camera right, left and centre. “Sure, Officer. That’s all it takes. Is your man here going to shoot some pictures too? They say you see it just once in a lifetime. Snow coming down like that, straight through the eye.” “So what are we waiting for?” Peroni asked. Costa knew the problem. Behind the portico lay the largest pair of imperial Roman doors in existence. Worked bronze, almost as high as the porch itself, and more than a metre deep. Sometimes, before going on duty, he’d take a coffee in the square in the early morning, watching the Pantheon being prepared for another day of crowds. No one who worked in the building ever approached through the front, not to begin with. The doors opened inwards, their mass being drawn back slowly from behind. “We need the tradesmen’s entrance,” Costa said. “Precisely.” The caretaker sniffed, then drew back his collar to reveal a gnarled, florid face that looked as if half a bottle of grappa could be wrung out of it. “All three of you coming?” Costa looked at Peroni. “I can handle a couple of street people. You stay here with Mauro. Wait for Falcone.” “No,” Peroni said, striding out of the snow and towards the shelter of the portico. “I stay here.” Costa followed in the caretaker’s swift footsteps, walking to the western flank, where they descended some stairs down to what must have been the original level of the city when the Pantheon was built. There was a locked iron gate, then further steps and a long, narrow path, in the shadow of the high modern wall of the adjoining street, to a small, secure door almost at the rear of the building. “The tradesmen’s entrance,” the caretaker announced icily, then turned a couple of locks and threw it open. Costa stepped into the alcove and waited as the man fumbled with some keys at a second door, which led, he guessed, to the great circular interior. He wondered briefly what kind of bum locked the doors behind him. He listened to the metal tumblers turn. “After you,” the caretaker said. “I’ll get the lights.” Nic Costa walked into the darkness and felt the chill of fresh winter air on his face. The night breeze was circling in the vast hemisphere he knew lay before him. And there was another sound too. Of a human being moving: short, anxious steps in the blackness beyond. He felt his jacket, wondered about the gun. Then the lights of the building burst into life, bringing a sudden harsh sun into the shadows of the vast, airy, artificial universe enclosed beneath the ancient structure’s huge dome. Someone cried out with surprise. A young voice. The noise reverberated around the vast emptiness so quickly it seemed to come from everywhere. “Will you look at that?” the caretaker said, no longer thinking about the intruders. Through the giant open eye of the oculus of the roof came a steady, swirling stream of snow, pirouetting around itself with the perfect, precise symmetry of a strand of human DNA. It fell in the dead centre of the room, where an inverted, icy funnel was growing, spreading out beyond the central marble ring and rising, at its peak, to a metre or more. Costa heard movement to his right. A slight, small figure dashed through a brilliant yellow beam cast down by a spotlight near the main altar, then fled into the pool of shadows in a recess on the far side of the building. “Scum,” the caretaker muttered. “What are you going to do?” Costa had been running the options through his mind. Chase some lone, cold, hungry bum through the darkness of Hadrian’s holiest of holies? And all for what? “Open the doors,” he said. “The main ones.” Costa was walking towards them already, anxious to enjoy the look of astonishment on the faces of Gianni Peroni and Mauro Sandri when those gigantic bronze shutters were pulled back to reveal this wonder to the world on the other side. “What?” the caretaker asked, putting a hand on Costa’s shoulder until something in the detective’s eyes told him this was not a good idea. “You heard!” Costa snapped, getting angry with the man, wondering what he thought he was protecting here. There were more keys and some kind of electronic monitor needed attention. Costa got on his cell phone and called his partner, just beyond the doors. “I think it’s just a kid, Gianni,” he told Peroni. “If he runs, you can get some exercise. Otherwise… hell, it’s almost Christmas.” The big man’s laugh came back as a double echo, from the phone and, fainter, from beyond the doors. “You’re itching to do Leo’s clean-up statistics some good tonight.” “Just stand back and watch when we open this place.” Then Costa thought about what Peroni had said. “Is Falcone there?” “Walking right across the square. And on the phone too. This isn’t a conference call or something?” Costa heard a low metallic groan and slid the phone back in his jacket. The caretaker was heaving at the bronze behemoth on his right, tugging it back on a set of ancient hinges. Costa took hold of the second door and pulled hard at the handle. It moved surprisingly easily. In the space of a few seconds they had the doors open. The night wind slammed straight up the portico and flung snow into their faces. Nic Costa brushed the stinging flakes out of his eyes. Gianni Peroni stood there, clearly transfixed by what he saw. Sandri was a few steps behind him, tense, upright, firing off photos constantly. Falcone had arrived too and seemed to be barking angrily down the phone. Costa turned round and took another look at the magical scene behind him, snow swirling down from the heavens, as if tethered to some magnetic, twisting beam of light. The vagrant was moving in the Pantheon now. Nic Costa no longer cared. He stood back from the door to let the intruder run, to break out from this tight, enclosed universe that was the dream of an emperor who had been dead for nearly two millennia. Then he looked outside again and recognized a different shape-upright and stiff on the steps of the fountain-not quite able to believe what he was seeing, to reconcile it with this bewitching night. A figure slipped past him, brushing against his jacket. Costa didn’t even look. With fumbling fingers he unzipped his coat, felt for his gun in the holster. “Get down,” he said, still trying to marshal his thoughts, letting the words slip from his mouth so softly he doubted the caretaker even heard. Then he took a deep breath and yelled, as loudly as he could, “Gianni! Get down for Christ’s sake!” Instinctively, without planning the move, he dashed out into the portico and felt the freezing wind bite at his face. Gianni Peroni was still staring into the interior of the Pantheon, ugly face alight with joy, grinning like a kid. Falcone was getting close to him too, his stern, immobile features for once rapt, enthralled by the scene inside. “Get down!” Costa screamed again, waving his hands, waving the small black revolver through the falling cloud of white flakes. “ He heard the first shot drown out the end of his warning. Something small and deadly sang its way through the air. Sparks flew off the column close to the astonished faces of the two cops under the portico. Falcone’s arm went out and pushed Peroni down to the stone pavement. Costa was focused on the man on the steps now. The figure was directly by the fountain, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing one of those idiotic tie-down hats with earpieces that made you look like Mickey Mouse caught in a storm. He was standing in a professional firing position, the Weaver stance, right hand on the trigger, left supporting the gun, feet apart, comfortable as hell in the sort of pose Costa sometimes saw at target-shooting events. The small pistol was aimed, very deliberately, in their direction. A tiny flame lit up the barrel as Costa watched and a muffled crack rolled their way. Costa scanned the piazza, doing his best to check there was no one else in the vicinity, then unleashed two shots towards the figure in the snow. A stream of tiny fires lit up furiously in response, sending more sparks up from old stone that was, at least, some kind of protection for them. For those who were smart enough to take it. Mauro Sandri was still standing. Maybe it was panic. Maybe it was just second nature. The photographer was flapping around like a wild man, one hand still on his stupid camera, loosing off shots of anything, the Pantheon, the night, the three cops trying to squirm their way out of the firestorm coming at them from the square. Then he turned, and Costa knew precisely what would happen next. Mauro spun round on his little heels, camera in hand, the motor drive of the Nikon clicking away like a clockwork robot, turned and faced the black figure still upright on the steps. “Mauro,” Costa said quietly, knowing there was no point. He was a stride away from the little photographer when the bullets hit. Two. Costa heard the reports as they left the barrel of the gun. He heard them hit the diminutive black figure on the steps, tear through the fabric of his winter jacket, bite like deadly insects deep into Sandri’s body. The little photographer flew into the air like a man receiving an electric shock, then fell in a disfigured heap onto the ground. “See to him!” Costa yelled at Peroni and Falcone as they scrambled to their feet in the deep, consuming snow. “This son of a bitch is mine.” Knowing the idea was pointless, that no one could shoot that well, not even the dark-hearted bastard still standing by the frozen dolphins and fauns, Costa fired all the same, then began to sprint, began to hit his speed, and thought: The figure was folding on himself, turning, like a crow shrinking into a crouch before it half jumped, half fell off a fence. There was fear there as he fled down the steps on the far side of the dolphins and fauns. Costa knew it and the knowledge made him run harder, heedless of the slippery, centuries-old paving stones beneath his feet. He loosed off another shot. The man was fleeing into a corner of the square, trying to find sanctuary in the dark, tangled labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys that lay beyond, in every direction. And, just as Costa was beginning to digest this thought, the weather joined in. A sudden vicious squall careered straight out of the north, a thick wad of snow lurking deep in its gut. The cruel, cutting ice stung and blinded. His feet gave way. The rugby player in him surfaced from the long-dead past, told him there was no option but to roll with the fall, to tumble into the soft, freezing blanket on the ground, because the alternative was to pitch gravity and momentum against the weakness of the human body and snap a tendon or a bone along the way. It was dark and cold as he fell into the soft, fresh snow, striking the hard stone beneath with his shoulder. For a brief moment the world was a sea of whirling white and sharp, violent pain. Then he was still, feeling himself, checking nothing was broken. When he got his equilibrium back and forced himself painfully to his feet, the figure in black had vanished. Dense clouds of white were falling with an unforgiving force again, burying the man’s footprints with every passing second, turning everything into a single, empty shade of nothingness. Costa strode to the corner of the street. The shooter could have gone one of two ways, west down the Via Giustiniani, towards the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with its Caravaggios and, for Nic Costa, some bitter memories. Or north, into the warren beyond Piazza della Maddalena. Costa stared at the ground. It looked like a fresh bedsheet, scarcely crumpled, full of secrets, all of them unreachable. Reluctantly, knowing what he would find, he retraced his steps to the portico. A siren was sounding somewhere in the wintry night. Costa wondered how long it would take the ambulance to make its way through the treacherous streets. Then he saw Gianni Peroni hunched on the flat stone of the portico, hands over his eyes, next to Mauro Sandri’s inert form, and he knew it didn’t really matter. He walked over, determined to handle this well. “Hey,” Costa said, placing a hand on his partner’s shoulder, then crouching to peer into those strangely emotional squinty eyes, now liquid with cold and a bright inner fury. “We couldn’t have known, Gianni.” “I will remember to point this out when I break it to his mamma, or his wife or boyfriend or whoever,” Peroni replied bitterly, trying to bite back his rage. “He must have looked like one of us, I guess. It could have been you. Or me. Or anyone.” “That’s a comforting thought,” Peroni mumbled. Costa glanced at the dead photographer. Blood, black under the moonlight, was caking in Sandri’s open mouth. Two more patches, one on his upper chest, the second in the centre of his abdomen, gleamed on his jacket. Costa remembered that curious stance the gunman had held while firing at them. It contained some meaning. When they had started to swallow down the bitter bile of their shock, when the investigation proper began, this was a point to note, an item of interest to be pursued. Peroni patted Sandri’s motionless arm. “I told him, Nic. I said, ”Mauro, you’re not going to die. I promise. You’re just going to lie there and wait for the medics to come. Then one day you go back to photographing mugs like me, and this time round you can take snaps of my pecker as much as you want. This time round“… Oh shit.” “We’ll get the bastard, big man,” Costa said quietly. “Where’s Falcone?” “Inside,” Peroni said with a slow, deliberate venom. “Maybe he’s enjoying the view.” A blue flashing beacon began to paint the walls on the far side of the square. Then a second. The caterwauling of the sirens became so loud that lights came on in apartment windows in the neighbouring streets. Costa straightened up. There was no point in talking to Peroni when he was in this mood. He had to wait for the storm to pass. Costa walked through the doors towards the stream of white that fell, still circling around itself, from the vast open eye of the oculus. The caretaker was in his cabin by the entrance, florid face tucked into his chest, trying as hard as he could to stay out of everything. Leo Falcone stood by the inverted funnel, which kept growing as it was fed from the sky. Costa remembered studying the Pantheon at school in art class. Here, at the centre of the hall, lay the defining focal point of the ancient building, the axis around which everything was arranged in a precise show of ancient symmetry, both the great hemisphere and the monumental brick cylinder which tethered this imaginary cosmos to the ground. “The photographer’s dead, sir,” Costa said, trying to allow a note of reproach to slip into his voice. “I know,” Falcone replied without emotion. “Scene of crime are on the way. And the rest. Do you have any idea where the man in the square went?” “No.” Falcone’s stony face said everything. “I’m sorry,” Costa continued. “We came here thinking it was some homeless guys breaking in to keep warm. It was a burglar alarm, for God’s sake.” “I know,” the inspector said impassively. He walked to the head of the funnel, where it was close to the apse and the altar, pointing due south, directly opposite the portico entrance and the open bronze doors. Costa followed. There Falcone bent down and, with a gloved finger, pointed at the edge of the fresh snow. Costa’s breath caught as he began to understand. A thin line of pigment was running from inside the funnel, out to the edge of the crystals as they tried to turn to water on the marble and porphyry. The stain became paler and paler as it flowed towards the edge but there could be no mistake. Nic Costa knew the colour by now. It was blood. “I’ve done this once already,” Falcone said, pulling out a handkerchief from his coat. “Damn snow.” Slowly, with the same care Costa had seen Teresa Lupo use in such situations, Falcone swept at the funnel with light, brushing strokes. Costa stood back and watched, wishing he were somewhere else. The head of a woman was emerging from beneath the soft white sheet of ice. An attractive woman with a large, sensual mouth, wide open dark green eyes, and a face which was neither young nor old, a full, frank, intelligent face that wore an expression of intense shock so vivid it seemed to border on outrage. Falcone briefly touched her long jet black hair, then turned to watch the snow coming down and the way it was beginning to bury her anew. “Don’t lay a finger on a thing,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done as much as I did.” “No, sir,” Costa whispered, his head reeling. “Well?” Falcone didn’t even seem put out by this. It was as if everything were normal, just another everyday event that the cold, distant inspector could take in his stride. “Well, what?” Costa snapped back. “Well, how about you sit down on that chair over there and write down every last thing you remember. You’re a witness here, Costa. Interview yourself. And don’t skip the awkward questions.” |
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