"The Sacred Cut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hewson David)

Giovedi

FALCONE PLAYED IT BY THE BOOK. HE SEALED THE Pantheon and the immediate vicinity. He called in every officer he could lay his hands on and marshalled the best scene-of-crime team available. When the crew from the morgue arrived they were led by Teresa Lupo, who’d been dragged out of bed and, when she saw the reason, glad of the fact. Then Falcone supervised an initial search of the Pantheon’s interior, uncovering enough evidence to ascertain the identity and American citizenship of the dead woman, and set in train the sequence of events needed to inform the American embassy and Mauro Sandri’s relatives. Finally, along with a string of more minor requests, he’d ordered the recovery of the tape of every last CCTV camera in the area, including several inside the Pantheon itself.

When Falcone was satisfied that the crime scene was effectively preserved in aspic, ready for a more thorough and searching examination come sunrise, he’d walked through the continuing blizzard to one of the empty squad cars parked next to the frozen fountain. There, exhausted, he had reclined the passenger seat all the way back and tried to get a little sleep. It would be a long day. He needed his rest and the energy to think. And even that was denied him because one thought kept running through Leo Falcone’s mind. When he’d reached the portico of the Pantheon he had been about to climb the very steps where Mauro Sandri stood. All that had stopped him was the phone call, the nagging, drunken tirade from Filippo Viale, which had begun when he entered the square and went on, pointlessly running through the same question, over and over again.

Are you with us, Leo?

Falcone hadn’t understood why Viale felt the need to come back to this tedious issue so quickly. He’d put it down to the drink and the SISDE officer’s curious mood. The call was still in his head, every precise second of it. Viale’s voice had become so shrill in his ear that he had paused just short of the portico, and in doing so had avoided walking into the space created by the two central pillars and outlined by the light from the interior, which formed the perfect frame for the gunman on the fountain steps.

Without Viale’s call, he would have gone on to join the photographer. And perhaps he would now be the one lying in the black plastic body bag stored on a metal gurney, safe inside the Pantheon, parked like a piece of luggage in front of one of the building’s more hideous modern accretions, the gross and gleaming tomb of the first king of a post-Roman united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele.

Professionally, Leo Falcone met death and frustration frequently and never gave them any more consideration than the job required. On the rare occasions they had touched him personnally, he found himself less confident of his response, and this lack of certitude became itself one more unfamiliar, unwelcome intruder into a life he tried to regard as sane, ordered and functional.

In the space of one evening an officer of the security services had given him a curious warning that his career had, at the very least, stalled and was, perhaps, already in decline. Then, in short order, almost in response to this very idea, the black veil of the grave had swept against his cheek, so closely he could feel how chill and empty a place it truly was.

Sleep, real sleep, was impossible in such circumstances. When Leo Falcone was woken by the rapping of a gloved hand on the window, just after sunrise at seven on that frozen Roman morning, he had no idea whether he’d slipped fully into unconsciousness at all during the preceding hours.

He wiped the condensation from the window and realized there was no time to worry about the loss. Distorted by the condensation on the glass, Bruno Moretti’s stern, moustachioed face was staring at him from the white and chilly world outside. Falcone’s immediate superior, the commissario to whom he reported on a daily basis, had found a reason to drag himself out of the office and visit a crime scene. It was a rare and unwanted event.

Falcone climbed out of the car, trying to fathom some reason for this departure from custom.

“This is a nice way to start the holiday season,” the commissario moaned immediately, glancing at the lines of uniformed men blocking off the Pantheon and most of the piazza. “Just what we need, Falcone. The tourist people are screaming at me already. They’ve a lot of people on their books who thought they were coming here today.” He scanned the square, full of cops. “Now this…”

“We have two deaths, sir,” Falcone replied patiently.

“That was more than six hours ago.”

Moretti was a bureaucrat. He’d worked his way up through traffic and intelligence, branches of the service that had their merits in Falcone’s opinion but left the man with little feeling for investigation.

Falcone glanced at the scene-of-crime officers and wondered if Moretti had any idea how important their work was, how easily it could be spoiled by a hurried search. “I can’t expect the SOCOs to make a serious effort in the dark. It’s impossible. Particularly in a place like this.”

Moretti sighed and said nothing. That was, Falcone thought, the closest he was going to get to some sign of recognition that there really was no other way to proceed.

“We have to do this very carefully, sir. It’s the only chance we have. Once we leave there the hordes are going to be climbing over everything. If we’ve missed one small piece of evidence, it’s gone, for good probably.”

Moretti was glowering at the building, as if he wished it weren’t there. The snow had stopped now but the sky was the colour of lead, pregnant with more. The great dome of the Pantheon wore a picturesque mantle. The rest of the square was a hideous sight, frozen slush churned to a grey mess by the constant movement of emergency vehicles and the tramp of feet.

“ ”Probably,“ ” the commissario snorted. “When will you be out?”

“Mid-afternoon at the earliest.”

“Make it noon. You’ve got the manpower. You managed to requisition half the Questura without my knowing last night. You could have called.”

Falcone nodded. He could have done that. But he chose not to. Nothing got past Moretti easily. There was too much explaining to be done and all for no reason. He’d worked for better bosses, and worse. With Moretti it was simpler for both of them if they both stuck to their own particular skills. In Falcone’s case, investigation. For Moretti, the behind-the-scenes management of internal and external relations, the marshalling of budgets and staff. Politics.

“I didn’t want to disturb you, sir. Not until we knew who she was.”

Moretti laughed. The sound shocked Falcone. There didn’t even seem an edge inside it. “She’s an American. That’s all. I find it a little insulting you think it’s worth calling me over for her but not for that poor bastard who was taking the photos. He was at least Italian.”

“I don’t make the rules,” Falcone murmured. “Sir.”

It was a standing order these days. Verbal and physical attacks on Americans were rare and usually had nothing to do with nationality, but the previous October an American military historian had been badly beaten up in the centro storico. Had a couple of uniformed cops not stumbled on the scene the man could have died. The brutal assailant had escaped. No one had claimed responsibility. Initially it was assumed that the Red Brigades were behind the attack, and everyone waited for the customary anonymous phone call citing it as a blow against American imperialism. But it never came. No one-not the police, not SISDE, not even the military spooks as far as Falcone knew-had come up with a shred of evidence to suggest who was really responsible, or whether this was part of a concerted campaign against US citizens. Nevertheless, the order had come down from high, in all probability from somewhere in the Quirinale Palace itself: all incidents involving Americans had to be reported to a senior level immediately.

“Just another tourist, huh?” Moretti said. “Woman on her own? Well, I suppose I can guess what happened there. Probably met some complete stranger. Thought it was just a little romance. Throw a few coins in the fountain, then walk here for a little fun. It’s just another sex crime, right?”

Falcone checked his watch, then looked at the activity inside the building. “You tell me,” he replied, and began walking towards the Pantheon door, knowing the commissario had no choice but to follow.

The lights of the Pantheon burned brightly, supplemented by a forest of police spots. Half a dozen SOCOs in white bunny suits were now scouring every last square millimetre of the patterned floor. A makeshift canvas tent had been erected over the corpse in the centre, with a set of lights tethered at the corners. Snow had continued to fall steadily through the night. Teresa Lupo and her team had built the contraption to keep the body from being buried ever more deeply by the continuous white stream that worked down through the oculus directly above them. From the moment Falcone saw the corpse emerging from the ice under Teresa Lupo’s care, he understood the body was in good hands. She was a wonderful pathologist, the best, even if his relationship with her was often strained. She had seen immediately that it was important to preserve any shreds of evidence that might be hidden in the ice as it melted under the heat of the lights. There was another reason too. The body had been arranged, quite deliberately, on the circle which marked the exact midpoint of the building, arms and legs outstretched to their limits in an angular fashion Falcone recognized, though he was unable to remember from what. The pose of the body-there was no other way to describe it-possessed meaning. It was, somehow, a cryptic message from the woman’s murderer and one they needed to try to understand as quickly as possible.

Carefully, Falcone wound his way through the clear area marked by tape that had been set up to allow safe access in and out of the building. Moretti followed in silence. They reached the mouth of the tent. Falcone stopped and gestured towards the body. Lupo and her deputy, Silvio Di Capua, were on their knees moving gently around it, poring over the dead woman with painstaking, obsessive deliberation. He had watched them get to work in the early hours of the morning. Teresa Lupo had ordered her people to erect the tent the moment she saw the scene, but it had proved a long and difficult job in the bitter cold of the Pantheon’s interior under a constant whirling downfall of snow. It was almost an hour before they could crawl beneath the covering to examine the ice funnel, slowly sweeping away the snowflakes with tiny brushes, revealing the horror that lay beneath, millimetre by millimetre.

Moretti looked at the naked woman, then fired a disgusted expression somewhere into the dark corners of the building. “Sex crime, Leo. As I said.”

“And the photographer?”

Moretti scowled. He didn’t like being put on the spot like this. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out.”

Falcone nodded. “We will.”

“Make damn sure you do. The last thing this city needs is something that scares off tourists.”

Falcone reached into his pocket and took out the woman’s passport. They’d found it in a bag in a corner of the building. It named her as Margaret Kearney, aged thirty-eight. The next-of-kin details weren’t filled in. Her driving licence had been issued in New York City six months before.

“We don’t actually know she was a tourist. All we have is a name.”

“This is going to be messy, isn’t it?” Moretti grumbled. “The Americans are asking questions already. They’ve got some resident FBI people up at the embassy who want to talk to you.”

“Of course,” Falcone murmured, trying to decode what Moretti had said. “I don’t understand. You’re saying these are FBI people who are resident here in Rome?”

Moretti emitted a dry laugh. “Well, isn’t that wonderful? Something you don’t know. Of course they’ve got FBI people here. Who the hell knows what they’ve got here? They’re Americans, aren’t they? They do what the hell they like.”

“What do I tell them?”

Moretti’s dark eyes twinkled with delight. “Welcome to the tightrope. You tell them just enough to keep them happy. And not a damn thing more. This is still Italy as far as I’m concerned. We police our own country, thank you. At least until someone tells me otherwise.”

Falcone glanced at Teresa Lupo. She’d broken off from the work in the tent to speak, in low and guarded tones, to Gianni Peroni, who was standing by the altar looking exhausted. Nic Costa hung around just out of earshot.

“I understand,” Falcone murmured.

“Good,” Moretti replied. “You didn’t say how the dinner went. I would have gone myself but, frankly, I don’t think they feel I’m sufficiently… interesting. At least they never talk to me with quite the enthusiasm they seem to summon up for you.”

“It slipped my mind. It was… fine.”

“Really?” the commissario sniffed. “That’s not what that slippery bastard Viale said when he called this morning. He doesn’t like hearing the word ”no,“ Leo. You’re either very brave or very foolish.”

TWO PEOPLE WERE WALKING into the building now, picking their way through the tape maze like professionals. A man and a woman who were complete strangers. He was about forty-five, thickset, with cropped grey hair, like that of a US marine, and a head that looked too small for his body. The woman was much younger, perhaps twenty-five, striking in a bright scarlet coat. They were walking into a crime scene as if they owned the place and Leo Falcone already possessed a gloomy, interior conviction about who they were.

Moretti eyed the couple too, watched Costa and Peroni walk briskly over to intercept them, then shuffled his coat around him, getting ready to go back to the warmth of his office. He laughed. “Tell your monkeys to be polite, Leo. We’re all watching. Maybe Filippo Viale too. Brave or foolish? When this is over, I suspect we’ll all know which.”

Costa saw them first, brushing past the uniforms on the door with a flash of an ID card and a cocky self-assurance that irked him immediately.

“Hey, Gianni,” he murmured, “you know these people?”

Peroni looked washed out. Teresa had told them to use her place in Tritone when they got a break. There was no way Costa would make it home to the farm on the Appian Way. As for Peroni… Costa could only wonder when the big man had last slept in the small, functional rented apartment he’d found out in the suburbs on the other side of the river, beyond the Vatican. Peroni already had a set of keys to Teresa’s place. Maybe he lived there most of the time anyway.

“No,” Peroni answered, perking up suddenly. He moved quickly to block the couple’s path, holding out his big arms wide, stretching from tape to tape.

The man with the crew cut glowered up at him, half a head shorter but just as big in the body.

“You don’t mind if I ask,” Peroni said. “This isn’t exactly a public performance we’re giving here.”

“FBI,” the American murmured in a low, grunty voice and kept on walking.

“Whoa!” Peroni yelled, and caught the man firmly by the arm, not minding the filthy look he was getting in return.

“Officer,” the female agent said, “this woman is an American citizen.”

“Yeah,” Peroni replied, “I know. But let’s go through some niceties first. My name is Gianni Peroni. This is my partner, Nic Costa. We are policemen. This nice-looking gentleman walking towards us is Inspector Falcone. He’s the boss around here. When he says you get to go further, you go further. Until then-”

Falcone arrived, looked the two FBI agents up and down and said, “Over here we like people to call ahead and make appointments.”

The man withdrew an ID card from his pocket. The woman in the scarlet coat did the same. Costa leaned forward and stared at the photos, checking them, making sure the two Americans understood the point. There were rules here. There were procedures to be followed. She didn’t look much like the photo on the ID card. According to the date it was two years old. She’d seemed much younger then.

“The IDs are fine,” he told them politely. “We have to check. You’d be amazed what the press will do over here just to get a picture.”

“Of course,” the woman answered. She was trying to look like a business executive: expensive, well-cut clothes, blonde hair tied back a little scrappily in a bun that seemed to want to work itself free and let her locks hang more freely around an attractive, almost girlishly innocent face. Something didn’t match up and, just for a moment, he couldn’t stop staring at her. She had razor-sharp, light blue eyes that were cutting into him now.

“I’m Agent Emily Deacon,” she said in perfect Italian. “This-”

She pointed at her colleague without once looking at him and Costa realized, on the instant, she didn’t like the man by her side.

“-is Agent Joel Leapman. We’re here for a reason. If you let us through to see what you’ve got, we just might be able to help.”

Peroni tapped Leapman on the arm and gave him a broad grin. “There. Now that’s asking nicely.”

“So do we get through?” the American snapped.

Falcone nodded, then led the way. Teresa Lupo had cleared the corpse of snow entirely now and indicated to them to wait as she quietly dictated some notes into a voice recorder. The dead woman lay on the geometric slabs, legs and arms akimbo, her white, bloodless skin waxy under the artificial lights. When he’d had the chance between phone calls and working with the SOCOs, Costa had watched closely as the body had emerged from the ice. The positioning of the corpse on the central marble circle was quite deliberate. Her limbs were outstretched, directed at equidistant points in the vast, curving sphere of the Pantheon, as if making a statement. It was an image that jogged a memory and was, perhaps, designed to. He recalled it now. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of an idealized figure, a naked man with a full head of hair, set inside first a square then a circle. His limbs described two positions: legs together, at the base of the circle, touching the central arm of the lower side of the square, then apart, on the circle alone; and arms outstretched first horizontally, touching the square alone, then raised, to both the circle and the square’s upper corners.

The dead woman’s stiff position on the shining, damp floor, one surely fixed by her murderer, matched the second of each of these poses perfectly. This was not simply a striking image. It had a meaning, a very specific one.

“The Vitruvian Man,” he said quietly, remembering a distant art lesson from school.

The American woman looked at him oddly. “Excuse me?”

“She reminded me of something. From a long time ago.”

“You’ve got a memory, Mr. Costa,” she conceded. “What else do you recall?”

He tried to flesh out the hazy recollection his brain had dug up from somewhere. It was a long time ago. The idea itself was elusive and complicated too. “That it’s about dimensions and form.” He nodded at the huge spherical roof above them. “Just like this place.”

“Just like this place,” she repeated and, unexpectedly, smiled. The change in expression was remarkable. It took years off her face. She looked like a student suddenly, fresh, unmarked.

It didn’t last. Agent Leapman was making impatient noises. He looked at Teresa Lupo, who was still chanting into the recorder. “You’re the pathologist, right?”

Teresa hit the pause button, blinked and gave him a hard stare. “No, I’m the fucking typist. Just give me a moment and I’ll take your letter next. Who the hell are you, by the way?”

The card got flipped out again as if it were some kind of magic amulet. “FBI.” He nodded at his colleague. “Both of us.”

“Really?” Teresa sighed and went back to talking into the machine.

Quietly, calmly, with a distinct effort designed to cool down the temperature of the conversation, Emily Deacon interposed. “I think we can help.”

The pathologist hit the stop button. “How?”

“She was strangled. With a piece of cord or something. Am I right?”

Teresa glanced at Falcone, searching for a sign. He looked as lost as Peroni and Costa.

“There’s no evidence of sexual assault,” the American woman continued. “This isn’t sexual at all, not in the usual sense anyway. Which begs the question: why did he undress her? It happened here? You do have her clothes?”

“It happened here,” Costa conceded. “Sometime between eight in the evening, when the staff closed the place, and midnight, when we turned up.”

Teresa Lupo was staring at the body again, trying to think. She didn’t stay mad with people for long. Not if she thought they had something she wanted. “It was snowing all last night. All that ice is going to play havoc with everything I normally use for time of death. There are calculations I can use, but they’re not going to be wonderfully accurate in the circumstances.”

The two FBI agents exchanged a glance. It was almost as if they’d seen enough already.

Falcone finally found his voice and Costa couldn’t work out why he’d stayed silent for so long. “I’ve been very generous around here. What do we get in return?”

“We’ll let you know,” Leapman murmured.

Emily Deacon glanced at the pathologist. “This is your call. I’m not trying to push you along. But do you think it would be possible to turn her? I need to see her back.”

Teresa glanced at her assistant Silvio Di Capua, who was putting away some of the equipment they’d been using. Di Capua shrugged.

“We can turn her,” she said, then held out a hand to stop Leapman, who was heading for the body without the slightest hesitation. “I said ”we.“ ”

The American halted reluctantly. Teresa and Di Capua called on two morgue assistants to help. They positioned themselves around the right-hand side of the corpse and placed gloved fingers on her limbs and shoulders.

“Is this going to be nasty?” Peroni asked, worried. “I like warnings about nasty stuff whenever possible.”

“Then don’t look,” the Deacon woman said bluntly.

On Teresa’s call, the team lifted the white corpse, rotated it on its own axis and gently placed the woman front first onto the marble floor, her head now tilted to one side against the shining stone. Peroni swore, then went to stand in the corner. Costa stared at the woman’s naked back and the strange shape carved there, an oddly symmetrical pattern of curves cut straight into the skin from above her waist to the shoulders, like a huge, cruel tattoo.

“What’s it meant to be?” he asked. “A cross?”

It was a diagonal shape, with four protruding curving arms.

Teresa stared at the body. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Consider yourself lucky.” Leapman bent to take a closer look at the corpse. “He used the cord. At least I don’t see any other marks. She was dead when he got round to doing what he wanted to do.”

The pathologist was shaking her head, bemused. “The pattern’s so precise. How could you do it? Here?”

Emily Deacon didn’t want to look at the shape on the woman’s back. She knew it too well already, Costa guessed. “To begin with you’d need a crayon, a ruler, possibly, and a scalpel,” she said softly. “After a little while I guess you just need something that cuts and a very steady hand.”

Leapman took out a hankie and blew into it noisily. “We’ve seen enough. We need a meeting in our office at the embassy. Five this evening. Bring who you want, but I’m going to trust you people with material I don’t want to go any further than our front door. So make sure whoever you bring can keep their mouths shut, and listen good because I don’t like repeating myself.”

Falcone shook his head in disbelief. “This is Rome. This is a murder inquiry. We are the state police force and we do this our way. You will visit us when I say. And I’ll ask you any damn thing I like.”

Leapman pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. “This, Inspector, is a signed order from a guy in the Palazzo Chigi none of you people want to argue with. This is all agreed with your superior and with SISDE too. Take a look at the signatures. It gives me the right to take this body into our custody any moment I choose. Which happens to be now. So don’t you go messing with anything before our people arrive.”

Teresa Lupo’s pale face went florid with fury. She walked over to the American and stabbed him in the chest with a podgy forefinger. “What were your names again? Burke and fucking Hare? The age of body-snatching is over, my American friend. I am the state pathologist here. I say where she goes and when.”

Falcone was glaring at the sheet of paper, livid. “How long before your people get here?” he asked Leapman without even looking at him, ignoring Teresa Lupo’s growing shrieks of complaint.

“Ten minutes. Fifteen.”

Falcone handed back the envelope. “She’s yours. We’ll see you at five. Until your people arrive, you can wait outside.”

Agent Leapman snorted, then stamped off back to the door and the snow beyond.

Emily Deacon hesitated for a moment, some uncertainty, regret perhaps, in her sharp blue eyes.

“I’m sorry for the unpleasantness,” she said. “It isn’t intentional. It’s just… his manner.”

“Of course,” Falcone replied flatly.

“Good.” She took one last look at the pathologist before leaving. “Forget what he said. We won’t have a vehicle here for thirty minutes or more in this weather. Why not make good use of the time?”

THERE WAS ONLY so much that could be done when the bodies had gone, Mauro’s into the white Questura morgue van, the American woman’s into the hearse the FBI had provided. At midday Falcone took one look at Costa and Peroni and ordered them to take a break. He wanted them both to attend the meeting at the embassy. They’d seen the shooter in the square. They were involved. Falcone said he needed them wide-awake for the FBI.

So the two of them took their leave of the crime scene and walked the fifteen minutes to Teresa Lupo’s apartment through an icy ermine Rome that was uncannily deserted under a brief break in the cloud that meant a bright winter sun spilled over everything.

Nic Costa had visited Teresa’s home once before. It was on the first floor of a block in Via Crispi, the narrow street running down from the summit of the Via Veneto. There had been a thoroughfare down the hill here for the best part of two thousand years. In imperial times, it had linked the Porta Pinciana in the Aurelian Wall with the Campus Martius, the “Field of Mars,” which was dominated in part by the architectural might of the Pantheon. The street opposite Teresa’s home, the Via degli Artisti, was named after the nineteenth-century Nazarene school of painters who had lived in the area. The walls of the neighbourhood seemed littered with plaques that bore witness to the famous names who had once lived there: Liszt and Piranesi, Hans Christian Andersen and Maxim Gorky. The snow had restored a little of its charm. Few cars now snarled up the narrow streets. No tourists walked wearily along the Via Sistina to the church of Trinità dei Monti, set at the summit of the Spanish Steps, with its panoramic view over the Renaissance city that had come to occupy the Campus Martius over the centuries.

As the two men trudged in silence, dog-weary and cold, Costa thought about the body laid out stiffly on the geometric slabs and fought to remember the history lessons that had gripped him as a schoolboy. It was important, always, to remind himself: this is Rome. Everything interconnects. The inscription on the portico of the Pantheon read: M•AGRIPPA•L•F•COS•TERTIUM•FECIT-Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, three times consul, made this. Yet, like so much else concerning the Pantheon, this was a deceit, a subtle sleight of hand performed for reasons now lost. Augustus’s old friend and ally Agrippa had built a temple on the Campus Martius and called it the Pantheon, a dedication to “all the gods,” but that had burned down some time after his death. The building which replaced it some hundred and fifty years later, between AD 120 and 125, had been the work of Hadrian. Some even thought the emperor had designed it personally. Circular monuments, ideas stolen from Greece and points further east, reworked for a new age, were his hallmark. Nic Costa’s knowledge of architectural history was insufficient to give him reasons. But when he thought of Hadrian’s legacy-the private villa in Tivoli, the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome in the forum, with its huge, extant half sphere of a ceiling-it was easy to see this was a thread that ran throughout the emperor’s thinking. Even to the end. The huge round mass of the Castel Sant“ Angelo on the far bank of the Tiber had served many purposes over the years: fortress, jail, barracks and papal apartments. But the emperor built it as his personal mausoleum. The spiral ramp to his initial resting place still existed, just a ten-minute walk from the dome of St. Peter’s, which Michelangelo had created some fourteen hundred years later in the image of Hadrian’s own Pantheon.

Costa watched Peroni fumbling with the key to the apartment block door. “Gianni, are you OK?”

“Yeah. I just need some sleep. Something to eat. Excuse my moods, Nic. It’s not like me.”

“I know,” Costa said. “You go inside. I’ve got something to do. Plus I’ll bring you a little present.”

Peroni’s eyes sparked with worry. “Don’t overdo the vegetables!”

“It’s a promise.”

It was just before one. There was a store around the corner Nic knew. They did the kind of food Peroni liked: roast porchetta, complete with crisp skin, nestling inside a panino raked with salt and rosemary. He could pick up something for himself too.

But first he caught the photographic shop before it closed and half talked, half badgered the man behind the counter into running the seven cassettes from Mauro’s cameras and his accessory bag straight through the Fuji developing machine. The prints would be ready before four. Costa could pick them up by ringing the private bell to the apartment above.

When he got back, Peroni was sprawled out on Teresa’s sofa, looking very at home and listening to the weather on the TV. He took the pork sandwich and started stuffing his face with it straight from the bag.

“Not bad,” he conceded. “How come I never found this place?”

“You do much shopping when you’re staying here?”

Peroni sniffed, then said, “The snow’s locked in for days, Nic. No trains. No planes. Not much moving on the roads either. I guess that means our man’s not going to find it easy to get out of Rome. If he wants to.”

“Why would he want to?” Costa asked. There was a message in the American woman’s body. A problem demanding a solution. Why would a person set a riddle, then walk away without seeing whether it was solved?

“I dunno,” Peroni grumbled, finishing the sandwich, then struggling to his feet, brushing crumbs off his shirt. “I don’t know a damn thing anymore. Except I need to sleep. Wake me at the right time.” Then he hesitated, thinking. “Why the hell did Leo give in to those Americans so easily? I mean, he could have put up a fight. I can’t believe we’re trooping round to their place like this when the poor bitch got killed on our territory. Her and Mauro too.”

That was one thing Costa did understand. Leo Falcone never fought battles he knew he couldn’t win. It was one of the things that made him stand out in the Questura. He was smarter than most. There was, perhaps, another reason too. A faceless figure from SISDE had turned up halfway through the morning-just in time to see the American woman loaded into the hearse-and had talked to Falcone in private. Costa had never seen him before. Peroni, who knew just about every cop and spook in town, civilian and military, had and had sworn ferociously under his breath at the sight.

“What was that guy’s name? The one from SISDE?”

Peroni pulled a sour face. “Viale. Don’t ask me what he does. Or how big he is. Very, probably. I ran into him a couple of times on vice when we picked up people he wanted left alone. He’s good at the pressure.”

Costa could feel he was treading on delicate ground. “Good enough to squeeze you?”

“I could tell you, Nic,” Peroni said pleasantly, “but the trouble is, afterwards, I’d have to cut out your tongue. I joke, but I’m not supposed to. The honest answer is men like Viale get what they want these days. You mess with them at your peril.”

Costa smiled, said nothing, and moved over to the sofa, stretching out for the first time in what seemed like twenty-four hours.

“Point taken,” Peroni said with a wave of his hand, then disappeared into the bedroom.

MONICA SAWYER STOOD at the plain wooden counter of L’Angolo Divino and wished to God she’d learned to speak Italian. Someone at the rental agency had recommended the place and tried to explain the play on words, how “divino” meant both “divine” and “about wine.” Monica kind of got the joke. It was a wine bar. Or, more than that, an enoteca, a place that sold a variety of wines, cheap and expensive, and some pretty pricey plates of pasta, cheese and cold meats too. At least, that was what she’d been told. Now that she was in the bar, which was set on the corner of two narrow alleys off the Campo dei Fiori, she didn’t have much of a clue about anything. One end of the L-shaped room looked like a library, with row upon row of expensive-looking bottles stretching up to the high ceiling. The rest of the bar was a plain narrow channel that could take three people deep, no more, with a wooden-plank floor, a few pine tables and some plates of very fragrant cheese in a glass cabinet. An old guy in a brown jacket, the kind people in hardware stores used to wear, was talking rapid Italian at her from behind the counter, and it might as well have been Urdu. There was only one other customer in the place, a man in a black suit who sat on a nearby bench reading an Italian paper and sipping at the biggest wine glass Monica Sawyer had ever seen, swilling around the splash of red liquid in the base from time to time before sniffing it, smiling and drinking the tiniest drop.

Monica came from San Francisco. She was familiar with bars. She ought to be able to handle this, she thought. So she said very distinctly, for the third time, “Una copa de chardonnay, por favor,” and felt like bursting into tears when the old man just babbled on incomprehensibly and waved at the huge selection of bottles behind the counter.

“Oh crap,” she muttered. Things had gone from bad to worse. The weather meant she was going to be alone in Rome for days with nothing to do, no one to talk to. And not much chance of getting a decent drink when she wanted one, outside of hotel bars, where a lone American woman of forty-two who was, Monica Sawyer knew, still pretty good-looking could not sit safely without the risk of constant harassment.

“Italian and Spanish are close relatives, but they are, I fear, hardly interchangeable,” said a warm Irish voice at her shoulder.

Monica Sawyer turned and saw that the man in the dark suit was now at her side. He’d got there without making a sound, which in normal circumstances would have been a touch creepy. But she didn’t feel that way somehow. He was smiling at her, a pleasant smile, from a pleasant, intelligent face, somewhat lined and hewn, as if it had been through the wars, but attractive all the same. He was, perhaps, fifty and still had perfect, very white teeth. He wore wire-framed, rectangular spectacles, which were a little old-fashioned, and slightly tinted too, so she could only just make out what she believed to be grey, thoughtful eyes behind the glass. He had a good head of hair, salt and pepper locks, long and wavy, like an artist’s.

They never leave you alone, she thought. But at least this one was Irish. Then she watched him unfold the scarf at his neck and felt deeply and childishly guilty.

“Father,” she said, staring at the slightly crumpled dog collar, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

He was a handsome man. That was the problem. Given that Harvey probably wouldn’t make it to Rome for days, possibly a week or more, she was, she had to admit, in need of a little company. Just the sound of a friendly voice speaking English made such a difference.

“And why should you?”

He was six feet tall and well built. And he was glancing at her fox-fur coat, wondering, perhaps, what kind of woman roamed around the empty, snow-blocked streets of Rome looking as if she’d dressed for the theatre.

“It’s the warmest thing I’ve got,” she explained hastily. “Besides, I was wearing it for my husband. He was supposed to join me from New York today. Then they said the airport was closed. For God knows how long…” She cursed herself inwardly. Monica Sawyer had gone to a Catholic school in Palo Alto. She ought to be able to remember how to behave. Not that he seemed shocked. Priests were different these days.

He touched the coat just for a moment with two long, powerful fingers. “You’ll excuse me. I don’t see this kind of thing very much in my line of work.” Then he held out his hand. “Peter O’Malley. Since we are two strangers stranded in Rome by snow, I hope you won’t mind if I introduce myself. I’ve been hanging around all day wondering what to do and, to be honest with you, it’s a pleasure to hear the native tongue.”

“I was thinking exactly the same thing!” She took his hand, which gripped hers with a brief, muscular strength. “Monica Sawyer.”

“Then that’s out of the way.” He glanced at the old man behind the counter. “You were wanting a drink, Monica?”

“Damn right,” she said automatically and found the heat rushing to her cheeks again.

“Then damn right you shall have one. But not chardonnay, I beg you. It’s a French grape, not a bad one either, but when in Rome -”

She felt like giggling. Here she was, alone in a strange, foreign city, and a priest, a good-looking one at that, was flirting with her.

“Recommend something, Peter,” she said firmly.

“If it’s a white you’re after it would be a crime to leave without tasting a Greco di Tufo.”

The old man behind the counter raised his heavy, grey eyebrows. It seemed a gesture of approval.

“A what?”

“It’s from a grape which is, perhaps, the oldest in Italy. The Pelasgians brought it in from Thessaly way back before Christ. If my memory serves me right there are just a hundred or so small aziende-vineyards to you, Monica-east of Naples that still make it. When you drink a Greco you’re drinking what Virgil did while he was writing the Aeneid, as near as dammit. If you go to Pompeü, as you must, there’s a couple of lines of graffiti on the fresco there, two thousand years old if they’re a day. They go something like, ”You are truly cold, Bytis, made of ice, if last night not even Greco wine could warm you up.“ ”

Monica wondered about this, watching as the barman, unbidden as far she could see, poured a glass of the white the priest had merely waved at with a long finger. “Who the hell was Bytis?”

The Irishman shrugged. “A lover? What else? One who seems to have shirked his duties, in spite of the wine. Or perhaps because of it. Remember Macbeth. ”Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery; it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.“ ”

He cast a sudden, dark, regretful glance at the door. “There, you see. Too much of my youth spent wasting away in the stalls of the Abbey Theatre. It leaves one with a quotation for every occasion. To wit-”

Suddenly, he was very close and whispering in her ear. “Hamlet and the omens of change. ”The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.“ ”

It was a very hammy performance. She couldn’t help but laugh. The wine-clear, dry and quite unlike anything she’d ever tried before-helped. “You’ve done a lot of reading.”

“Not really. I’m merely a very ordinary priest who happened to have a lot of spare hours once upon a time,” he replied. “Ordinary as they come. Ask my little flock of sisters in Orvieto. Though Lord knows when they’ll see me again. To be frank I’m a little giddy at being released into the world like this. I’ve spent most of the day at the station trying to get a train. And the rest of it knocking on the doors of the few hostels I can afford trying to find accommodation. After which”-he raised his glass-“the Irish in me will out.”

Monica Sawyer was surprised to discover she’d finished her white. The Greco was good: sharp, individual, unexpected. She wanted another. She wanted something to eat too.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the priest’s balloon-like glass, which still had a smear of red running around the bottom, one he’d been sipping gingerly throughout their conversation as if he couldn’t quite afford another. “And why’s the thing so goddamn big?”

Peter closed his eyes for a moment and his face suffused with delight. “Amarone. A small pleasure I allow myself when in Rome. The stuff we have to drink at home-”

He wrinkled his nose.

“And that thing you’re drinking from?”

He swilled the smudge of red liquid around the base and held it in front of her face. She took the glass, accidentally brushing his warm fingers on the way, stuck her nose deep inside the rim and was amazed as an entire, enclosed universe of aromas rose through her nostrils and entered her head. It made her think of the flowery prose she read in Decanter magazine: a sudden rush of a warm, spicy summer breeze rising up off the Mediterranean and sweeping over a scrubby brush of parched wild thyme. Or something.

“This is a fine establishment,” the priest said, glancing at the barman. “Like any fine establishment, it will keep a selection of glasses according to the rank of wine. Amarone is in the pantheon. At nine euros a glass it bloody better be.”

“OK,” she said, slapping a hundred-euro note on the counter. “Is your Italian good enough for ”Line “em up, buster, the rich are paying‘? And food. I want food, Peter. Don’t you?”

He hesitated and, for one short, worrying moment, she felt she had lost him.

He pulled out a small, rather feminine purse and stared mournfully at the contents. “I’m still enough of an Irishman to feel uncomfortable about having a lady buy me drinks.”

She put her hand on the soft black arm of his priestly jacket. “Then consider it a tuition fee.”

“Done,” he said and rattled off some orders to the barman.

The wine came: Amarone, with a brief lecture about how the grapes were dried before being fermented, then something called Primitivo di Manduria, which, from what she gathered, was kind of the red equivalent of the Greco, an ancient grape still kept alive by a handful of small producers, this time in Puglia, the heel of Italy. And the food: bresaola, paper-thin slices of mountain-dried wild boar; a selection of salumi, some spicy, some mild; pale, translucent parings of pork fat, lardo di colonna; slivers of ripe, fruity Parmesan and a salad of buffalo mozzarella served with pomodorini di Pachino, tiny red tomatoes as sweet as cherries.

They ate and they drank and outside day turned to night through a steady, continuous veil of falling snow.

She didn’t know how much time she’d spent in the bar. She didn’t care. She was alone in Rome. She didn’t speak a word of the goddamn language. And Father O’Malley was such good company. The single most charming man she could remember meeting in years. He listened and when he spoke afterwards it was about the very subject she’d been discussing. He could talk about anything. Architecture. Literature. Politics. The pleasures of the table. Almost everything, it occurred to her, except religion. Perhaps Peter O’Malley had enough of that, trapped in servitude to his sisters back in Orvieto. Perhaps he felt abruptly and briefly free in this strange, small world of cold, white, impassable streets.

Monica Sawyer listened and she laughed, knowing she was getting more than a little drunk. She was used to the attention of men: tall, with a well-kempt head of long, chestnut hair, and a smart, articulated face, one people liked to look at. Back home, when Harvey was away, she didn’t hesitate to stray a little now and then. Finally she took his wrist, looked at his watch, then looked at him, with an expression she was sure did not amount to an invitation. That would be wrong. Improper. It wasn’t what she was feeling or planning. She simply wanted company and his was, at that moment, the best.

“Peter,” she said quietly, “I have to go. I don’t want this to sound wrong. Please believe that. I’m not in the habit of picking up men in strange bars. Certainly not priests. But we rented an apartment round the corner. For the next two weeks, would you believe. It’s as empty as the grave with just me rattling around in it. The TV doesn’t even have cable and I can’t understand a damn word of those Italian stations. If you need somewhere to stay, you can take the sofa or the floor. It’s up to you.”

He did something odd at that moment. He looked at their two glasses-his almost full with red, hers empty-and very carefully moved them so they were in a perfect line, parallel with the edge of the table. It was a touch obsessive, she thought. Or perhaps not. His pale, smart face had turned thoughtful.

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “I can find somewhere, I’m sure.”

“It’s got a terrace,” she added. “We’re right on the top of the block. You can see the dome of St. Peter’s. You can see places I don’t even know the names of.”

“A terrace?” he repeated.

“One of the best damn terraces in Rome. That’s what the agent said and I can’t imagine a Roman would lie, now would he?”

“Not for a moment,” he replied and raised his glass to her.

Five minutes later they went outside. She was giggling, light-headed, and scarcely noticed the softly falling snow. A handful of office workers were struggling through the deep, crisp drifts in the street. Peter had just a small bag with him, a black polyester one stuffed to bursting, the way single men did.

He reached into his coat pockets, pulled something from the depths, stretched it out and looked ready to begin adjusting it over his finely sculpted grey head.

His quick, intelligent eyes caught hers. He was unsure about this for some reason.

“I’d look a fool now, wouldn’t I?” he asked, abruptly stuffing it back into his pocket as if he’d just had second thoughts.

It was one of those stupid Disney-style hats that kids wore. Big Mickey Mouse ears you tied around your own ears.

“You’d look a fool,” she agreed, then took his arm when he offered it, leaning on him as they struggled through the snow, past a deserted Piazza Navona, on towards home.

LISTENING TO GIANNI PERONI cough his way through a series of bathroom ablutions, Nic Costa flicked through the prints that had come back from the photo shop and found himself bugged by the minutiae of the last sixteen hours. The focus of the investigation was now fixed understandably on the man in black, who stood on the steps of the fountain, locked in the Weaver stance next to the frozen dolphins, dispensing deadly fire from his outstretched hand. Trying to summon up a vision of that distant figure made it easy to forget there was one other unknown actor in the scene: the person who was trapped inside the Pantheon when they arrived, the individual who had brushed against Nic Costa as he fled the cavernous interior of the hall, with its macabre secret trapped beneath a growing mountain of ice and snow.

Costa knew it was important to gather information on the man in black, to find out where he stood in the story the FBI agents were about to share with them. But he couldn’t forget the other player in events either, someone who seemed an interloper at the scene, whose presence there-as accomplice or accidental spectator?-demanded an explanation.

He tried to remember his impressions of those hurried moments in the dark, tried to follow Falcone’s sensible if caustic admonition: interview yourself, and don’t leave out the tough questions. He’d scarcely seen the figure who dashed in and out of the murky corners of the airy, freezing hemisphere that night. Mauro’s photos didn’t help either. Costa had scanned through most of the two hundred prints, covering everything from their time in the bar to the last moments outside the Pantheon. In the crucial shots all Mauro had captured were vague, ghostly shadows, black smears on film. Once they returned to the Questura, he would pass the photos to a specialist in forensics, but his gut told him there was nothing there worth keeping.

Or worth killing for. Surely the man in black would have understood that too?

Interview yourself. Nic Costa knew he’d seen nothing but shadows. But there were other senses. He closed his eyes and tried to think. There was something there. He recalled the moment now, and it was surely the very oddness of the memory that had sent it to the back of his mind since it seemed so implausible.

When the fugitive had brushed past him two things had happened. A hand-small, quick, nimble-had flicked at his jacket, automatically searching, as if it did this always without thinking. And there was a fleeting fragrance-something musky and lingering, familiar too, a scent that was fixed to a single connection in his head.

He looked at the slight shadow slipping out from the corner of the illuminated portico in the last-but-one photograph Mauro Sandri took in his life.

The perfume was patchouli oil. Nic knew the kind of person who liked to wear the old hippie scent these days too. Street kids, the ones who’d worked their way in from the Balkans, Turkey and beyond, looking to find a welcoming paradise, discovering, instead, that for many the only way to stay alive was to develop, as quickly as possible, a talent for pickpocketing or worse.

Peroni walked into the room and stared over his shoulder. “Anything there?”

“No,” Costa replied, tapping his forehead. “It was there. I should have known. Whoever was in the interior, it was a bum. He tried to get something out of my pocket on the way out. He had that… kind of perfume you get on the street kids. Sweet. Almost like dope. Patchouli. You know the smell I mean?”

Peroni sat next to him on the sofa. He was fresh from the shower. Costa liked the way his partner looked now. Activity was good for both of them.

“Oh yes,” Peroni said with a nod.

“It’s an eastern thing. You see them selling the stuff in the Campo a lot.”

“Around Termini too,” Peroni added. “From what I recall you tend to find that stuff only on girls. Which means they’re into dope. Or selling themselves. Or both. On very rare occasions, they can be remarkably conscious of their personal hygiene for kids who live on the streets.”

Costa thought about that light, fluting voice in the dark. “It’s a girl, then.”

Peroni frowned. “Why’d she try to lift something from you? If I’d been running out of that place, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.”

“Maybe she’s a pickpocket.”

“It’s possible-”

“They’re not all into dope and prostitution, Gianni. Just the ones you met. I’ve dealt with plenty of street muggings too. Some of these kids are professionals in their own way. They steal out of second nature.”

“I believe you.” Peroni didn’t look convinced.

“So tell me again about the CCTV. In the Pantheon.”

“Nothing to tell.” Peroni grimaced. “There were four cameras. He’d done something to each of them. The security guy I talked to didn’t know what. He said it had to be in the control box or something. It wasn’t just a matter of snipping the wires either. If he’d done that-”

Costa interrupted him. “The alarm would have gone off.”

“Quite.” Peroni pulled on a tie and yanked it roughly around his bull-like neck. “What are you getting at?”

Some small certainty was growing in Costa’s mind. “Somehow he got into the place without triggering the alarm. Maybe he’d some keys, we don’t know. He must have talked the woman inside somehow too. He couldn’t risk attacking her in the square, even in weather like this. And he did what he wanted without triggering the alarm either. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been out of the place by the time we arrived. It took us, what? Ten minutes, no more, to get from the bar to the Pantheon after we got the call. He had to kill the woman, undress her, make that mark on her back. That must have taken the best part of an hour, possibly more.”

Peroni nodded, unsure where this was going. “Maybe he stepped on an alarm or something after he’d killed her.”

“Could happen, I guess. But what if he got out of there clean, too? What if he locked everything up carefully behind him and he was just walking away when the bell started ringing? So he thinks: Why? He’s not there anymore. Nothing alive’s in there, or at least that’s what he thought. He’s disabled the alarms in all the places he needs to. He knows where to walk without triggering anything. What he doesn’t know is some immigrant kid is hiding inside too, maybe trying to get out of the cold, I don’t know. And this kid saw everything he did. Everything.”

“Not good,” Peroni murmured darkly.

Costa was still flicking through the prints absentmindedly, not really looking at them. He realized now they were out of order. The developer had processed them in a rush, mixing them up. Some didn’t match the right envelopes.

“So what would he do?” Costa mused.

Peroni nodded. “He’d wait outside till we opened the doors. Until whoever was inside tried to get away. And then he’d kill the kid. Or try to. Except poor Mauro stepped in front of the bullets instead. And you started chasing the bastard before he could finish the job. Jesus-”

Costa’s fingers skipped over the prints, stopped over one and pulled it out of the pack. The photo had slipped into the wrong bunch. It was stacked in the middle of the series in the bar. So easy to miss.

Mauro had wound up the zoom to go in close. It was probably the last real photo he ever took. The girl was almost as tall as Nic Costa, but slightly built, and wore a dark windcheater and jeans. She was slipping past the portico, just beginning to run. The shot was taken at an angle. Maybe Mauro was falling already, struck by the bullets, as he pressed the shutter button, spinning on his heels as he tried to avoid the deadly fire.

Physically she looked no more than thirteen or fourteen, with a waif’s haircut rough cropped short into the head. But there was an adult, haunted look in her pretty, dark face. A chilly mix of terror and determination stared out from her wide-open eyes, beyond Mauro, straight at the man standing on the steps by the frozen dolphins, trying to end her life.

Peroni peered at the photo. “An immigrant kid. Turkish maybe. She won’t have a home. She won’t even have a real identity. She isn’t going to come running to us.”

Costa looked at his watch. They had fifteen minutes till the appointment in the Via Veneto.

“Someone’s got to know her,” he said.

Gianni Peroni sucked through his teeth, still transfixed by the photo and the vulnerable face gazing back at them. He’d worked vice for years and understood the inevitable path these kids took from petty street crime to drugs and prostitution.

“I can call in some favours, Nic,” he said, sounding reluctant. “But maybe we’ve got to go places Leo had best not hear about. That OK with you?”

Costa glanced at the photo again and the kid’s dark, desperate eyes.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “You bet it’s OK.”

THE AMERICAN EMBASSY stood on a steep bend on the Via Veneto, a stiff climb up from the Piazza Barberini. Here, behind well-guarded iron gates, a small army of diplomats, paper-pushers, military officers, immigration officials and, for all Costa knew, professional spooks populated the elegant nineteenth-century labyrinth of corridors of what had once been the Palazzo Margherita.

Leo Falcone met them in the waiting room, silent and serious in a grey business suit. To Costa’s surprise, Teresa Lupo was with him, twiddling her nascent ponytail, a touch scruffy in an old winter jacket and jeans, and not happy either.

“How are you, Gianni?” she asked Peroni as they all sat together, waiting.

“I’m doing just fine,” Peroni replied. “No offence, but what the hell are you doing here?”

“Working,” she answered gruffly. “If I’m allowed. Do you have a problem with that?”

He grunted something that sounded like an apology.

“She’s here because I wanted her here,” Falcone interposed. “Whatever papers these people have, that body still has to be accounted for.”

“Told you,” Teresa added. “Just the fucking typist.”

“If that’s the way you see it,” Falcone murmured, watching a tall man walk towards them, some papers in his hand. “But let’s keep these arguments to ourselves, please.”

The embassy official introduced himself as Thornton Fielding. He didn’t look like a natural colleague for Agent Leapman. Fielding was diplomatic and articulate. He wanted their signatures on some nondisclosure papers too.

Falcone stared at the paperwork. “This is Italy, Mr. Fielding. I’m not in the habit of signing forms about what I will or won’t do in my own country.”

Fielding didn’t even blink. “Technically, Inspector, this is the sovereign territory of the United States of America. Either you sign these forms or you don’t get to see Agent Leapman.” He hesitated. “Personally I’d find that a damn good reason for not signing, but the choice is yours.”

“You like him too, huh?” Peroni asked.

“He’s just the most fun guy you’re ever going to meet,” Fielding said quietly. “Now are you putting your name to these or not?”

When they were done he made a call from the desk. They watched as Emily Deacon walked down the corridor towards them.

“Nice woman,” Fielding said. “Don’t judge her by the company she keeps.”

Then he disappeared down the corridor, leaving them to Emily Deacon. They followed her and watched as she swiped an ID card on the security door to what turned out to be a large, high-ceilinged office.

Agent Leapman was seated in a leather executive chair behind a polished walnut desk, squeezed into a tight white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to display beefy, powerful arms. Emily Deacon, surely the junior partner in this relationship, motioned them to a leather sofa, then perched on a chair next to him, demure in plain brown slacks and a cream shirt. She held a notepad on her lap and could, Costa thought, have passed as a secretary, were it not for the intent way she kept shuffling through a pile of papers on the desk, looking as if she knew every last sheet.

“I appreciate you coming here.” Leapman spoke with no visible emotion as he played with a remote switch in his hand. The blinds on the window slanted to block out the security lights outside. A small screen came down from the ceiling.

“We had a choice?” Teresa asked.

“Not really,” Leapman replied. “I know I said I wasn’t dictating who could come to this meeting, Falcone, but I rather expected it would be police only.”

Falcone took a deep breath before answering. “A piece of paper from the Palazzo Chigi doesn’t change Italian law. Miss Lupo has to sign a death certificate for the woman. She’s every right to be here. You can make a phone call to check if you want.”

Leapman allowed himself a brief glance towards Emily Deacon, one that said, See, I told you what they’re like.

“OK,” he grumbled. “Just remember what the deal is here. This is for you people only. I don’t want to read it in Il Messaggero tomorrow morning. Deacon…”

He passed over the remote and she hit the button. A photo came on the screen. It was a building Costa recognized from somewhere, then a series of shots of the same place, taken from different angles: a rose-coloured temple of some kind, shot in bright sun, near fountains and water, with a large rotunda dome supported by open columns.

“It looks like the Pantheon,” Peroni said immediately.

“It should,” she said. “It’s the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Built for the 1915 International Exhibition. The architect, Maybeck, was trying to re-create something classically Roman, like an engraving by Piranesi of some half-ruined temple.”

“Nice,” Peroni answered. “You got a corpse there too?”

She nodded, surprised perhaps that he got the point so quickly. “Last May. It was the first, as far as we know.”

“Who?” Falcone asked immediately.

“A man,” she said. “Just a tourist from D.C. In spite of what we saw today we don’t think this is sexual. We could be wrong…”

Leapman rocked his chair to and fro in disapproval.

“We just don’t know,” she continued. “The building is near the Marina. Pretty safe most of the time, but San Francisco ’s a city with some rough parts nearby. The cops wrote it off as street crime. Just one thing, though.”

She pressed the button and ran through a new series of photos. They were of the victim, facedown on the rose-coloured stone floor. He was naked from the waist up. The cord that had been used to strangle him still dug deep into the flesh at the back of his neck. A rough pattern was cut into his lower back in an approximation of the shape they’d seen in the Pantheon that morning.

Leapman cleared his throat, lit a cigarette and said, “He was still practising then. It took a little while before he got it right. Next.”

More photos, this time of a stumpy circular tower with two galleries at the summit, pointing up into a clear blue sky.

“ Coit Tower, also San Francisco,” Deacon continued. “Three weeks later they found this when they were opening up for the day. On the floor of the tower too. Our guy’s good with locks.”

It was another corpse. Totally naked this time. A man, facedown, with grey hair. He was running to fat. Perhaps fifty. The cuts on his back were a little less ragged. The pattern was larger, running out to the folds of flesh at his waist, and more distinct: a geometric dance of angles and curves that made a recognizable image.

“Who was he?” Falcone demanded.

“Tourist from New York,” Leapman replied. “Traveling alone. He’d been hanging out in gay bars, which complicated things for a while.”

They could just about make out the withering glance Leapman was casting them across the room. “That’s the trouble with city cops,” he continued. “Narrow minds. They like to jump to quick conclusions. The San Francisco guys figured they had another dead queer on their books. They didn’t even call us in. We hadn’t a clue any of this was starting to happen. Not for another month.”

He nodded at Emily Deacon. She cued up a shot of a classical building, with a white colonnaded portico and a rotunda dome, partly in brick. Only the stars-and-stripes flag fluttering from a pole told them this was not in Italy.

She took up the story. “ Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. End of June now. This was Thomas Jefferson’s home, which may or may not be significant. Jefferson designed it himself. The neoclassical influence probably comes from his time as ambassador in Paris but you don’t need to be an architect to see where the idea originated.”

“Dead tourist in the hall when they opened up,” Leapman interjected impatiently. The image of a body came up on the screen. “Woman this time, local, from Virginia. You can imagine the picture.”

“Still nothing sexual?” Falcone asked.

Leapman shook his head.

“Can I see the autopsy reports for some of these people?” Teresa Lupo asked.

“No,” Leapman replied. “We don’t have copies here. Besides, I don’t see the point.”

“Maybe-” she began.

“The answer’s no. Next.”

It could almost have been the same building, except for the window in the portico, which had now changed shape.

“This is Jefferson too,” Emily Deacon explained. “The University of Virginia just around the corner. The Rotunda is effectively a half-size copy of the Pantheon. Just four days later. A man’s body in the centre of the hall, and this is pretty much what we saw today. The killer’s got the pattern he wants now and he doesn’t shift from it.”

She keyed up the corpse. The arms and legs were at the selfsame angle as those of the woman in the Pantheon. A second photo showed the cadaver turned onto its front.

“His scalpel work is improving,” Leapman said.

“Plus,” Deacon interjected, “he’s getting picky about the way he positions the body. The head faces due south. He kept to that afterwards. From now on, too, he alternates the position of the limbs. Sometimes angled like this. Sometimes with the feet together and the arms at ninety degrees to the torso.

“The point about facing south is particularly odd,” Emily continued, “because in most of those buildings there was no obvious reason. They weren’t aligned in any particular direction. We only picked up on this later. In the Pantheon itself the entrance and the high altar do face north-south. You could see why he’d lay the body that way. All these ones before-it’s as if he was planning for what happened last night. As if the Pantheon was some kind of final destination.”

“How hard is it?” Costa said.

“What?” Leapman asked.

“What he’s doing to their back.”

Leapman looked at his colleague. He seemed out of his depth once he went beyond purely procedural matters.

“It’s not simple and it’s not that difficult either,” she said. “I can give you the summary of the psychological profiling later. We’re not done here yet.”

Another photo, a tiny circular building almost hidden in a wood, but still with an obvious ancestry. “We were on the case by this time but he wasn’t making it easy for us. There was another hiatus now, until the middle of July. Perhaps he was worried he was pushing his luck. This is a folly in Chiswick, west London. Again, an American visitor. This time a woman.”

Now another Pantheon copy, this time by a lake. “Ten days later, Stourhead in Wiltshire, southwest England. By now he’s stretching out the miles. Maybe he knows we’ve seen something. Maybe he wants us to see something.”

A familiar facade from Venice filled the wall. “End of August. Il Redentore. By Palladio, which has clear echoes of the Pantheon. The killer’s playing games and earning a lot of air miles. The victim’s a man this time.”

“How many?” Falcone asked. “In all?”

“Seven that we know of, excluding last night,” she said. “There’s nothing to suggest we have them all, though. This guy’s clever. He hops countries. He kills at unpredictable intervals. It’s only over the last few months that we’ve managed to collate the information to prove there’s a pattern that goes beyond those first killings in the States. All we know for sure is that he’s murdered five men and three women. All American. All Caucasian. All middle class. All unexceptional. For all we know they were picked at random to prove a point.”

“Which is?” Costa asked.

She played with the remote and pulled up a composite shot, seven scarred backs, each with the flesh marked in a similar fashion, then moved on to a graphic.

“This is the pattern from one of the later deaths. Probably the closest he got to what he was trying to achieve.”

She turned on the room light, picked up a printout of the composite of the wounds, and placed it on Leapman’s desk. Then she reached into a drawer and took out a thick black pencil, a ruler and a compass and drew a square on the sheet, almost to the edges.

“The pattern’s actually a subset of a more complicated idea.”

Very quickly, with the kind of skill Costa associated with an architect or an artist, she marked four straight lines inside the square, running from the point where the arms of the cross met the perimeter. Finally, she used the compass to join the points where both the curving lines and the straight ones met at the edge, describing a perfect circle.

“This is what’s called the sacred cut,” she told them. “With the first couple of victims you can even see the marks he used to align it properly.”

She pulled up two morgue shots, early versions of the shape. “If you look closely, you can see he drew a couple of lines in felt-tip to help him get the hang of things. The other pointer to suggest a link is the way he alternates the position of the limbs. This is a direct reference to the Vitruvian Man. A naked man, arms and legs outstretched, vertical and horizontal. Drawn within both a square and a circle. It’s the same concept.”

She exchanged a brief glance with Costa. He understood the prompt.

“Like the body in the Pantheon,” he said. “I get it.”

“Good for you,” Leapman muttered, making a point of looking at his watch. “So, Agent Deacon. You’re the architect here. What does it mean?”

“I have a degree in architecture,” she replied. “It doesn’t make me an expert.” She struggled to form the right answer, then looked at each of them in turn, as if to make sure they understood: she wasn’t too sure of all this herself. “On one level it’s a construct used to explain the geometry behind ancient architecture. On another it’s a metaphor for perfection, kind of a mystical symbol. It’s supposed to represent a faultless union between the physical world and the spiritual one. Remember the way the body was laid out in the Pantheon?”

She sketched out a copy of the familiar da Vinci sketch, rapidly and with some skill. “The Greeks were the first to set down in writing the idea that great buildings depended upon precise geometric proportions, though they probably stole it from Asia and the Middle East because you see the same theory in earlier buildings there. The Romans picked up the belief that those proportions came directly from the Gods through the shape of a human being. Vitruvius was a soldier under Julius Caesar before he became an architect. He wrote ten books that became the bible on the subject. They got lost for some centuries, until the Renaissance, when Vitruvius again became the primary source for most of the architects we respect today. Michelangelo drew Vitruvian bodies constantly, with limbs in both positions along the perimeter, trying to get inside the idea, and he wasn’t the only one.”

Emily Deacon placed both drawings side by side on the desk. “Vitruvius used the human body-a holy vessel as far as he was concerned-as the starting point for the proportions needed to create the perfect building.”

Her slim fingers traced the outlines of the shapes. “The Vitruvian Man squares the circle, just as the making of the sacred cut does. This had a religious importance. It symbolized the marriage of the earthly, the physical fact of the square, with the ineffable perfection of the celestial, the circle. It was about…” She looked across at Leapman, who was beginning to get restless with the explanations. “Finding some kind of truth, God even, inside a shape. The shape of a human body. The shape of a building. The proportions are the same. Look at these.”

She indicated the outlines of the sacred cut. “There you have just about every shape and proportion you are going to find in a great building. Even the rectangles the cut creates fit a classically correct, arithmetic rule an architect calls the golden mean. It’s the way things are meant to be.”

Costa tried to remember some of his old art lessons. They’d talked about the golden mean. It permeated everything: architecture, sculpture, painting, mathematics, even music.

Deacon wasn’t done. “When this man, whoever he is, places a body in the centre of the Pantheon, or a place like it, what he’s doing is making some kind of statement. Laying down a piece in a puzzle, trying to complete the picture. The Pantheon is simply a larger version of the geometric pattern he’s describing with those dead limbs. A circle cut by a square. The woman lay where Hadrian must have once stood himself, looking out from the focus of an artificial cosmos, through the eye of the oculus, out to what he regarded as heaven. She was at the epicentre of this structured view of the universe he created. Equally, the real universe was looking back at her. Whoever this man is, he knows all this. He’s not just some… nut.”

“Really?” Leapman sighed. “So where does this get us? Profiling has got us nowhere so far.”

“I don’t know yet,” she half snapped in reply. “Maybe it makes him feel he’s holy somehow. Maybe he’s looking for something, trying to get order back into his world. But we’ve no data, so it’s just guesswork. There’s a missing piece here. This man is smart, educated and very, very capable. Something started him on this path. If we could find out what that is-”

“But we haven’t,” Leapman interruped. “And the odds are we won’t. Why do we keep going over this? I don’t want to understand the bastard. I want to catch him. This guy’s killed at least eight people now, maybe more. All Americans. If we get the chance to ask him why once he’s in jail, fine. But I’m not going to lose any sleep if he’s just plain dead either. We’re not going to nail down this animal by profiling or mumbo jumbo. We get him through work.”

He glared across the desk at Falcone. “If we’re lucky, we get him through you.”

A hint of a smile crossed the inspector’s face. “I’m not a great believer in luck, Agent Leapman. And by the way, it’s nine victims. We lost a photographer last night, if you recall. He was Italian, but all the same.”

Leapman cursed under his breath, then glowered at the images of the dead, scarred backs.

“I do believe in detail, though,” Falcone continued. “Why don’t you just turn over everything you have and let us go through the material to see if there’s anything you’ve missed?”

“We don’t miss things,” Leapman snarled.

“Let me rephrase,” Falcone said, correcting himself carefully. “Perhaps there’s a fact, an event in there that means something to us and nothing to you.”

To Costa’s surprise, Leapman didn’t throw the idea straight out of the window into the snow. “It’s got to work both ways,” he said eventually.

“Meaning?” Falcone wondered.

“Meaning a quid pro quo. Deacon works with you from now on. She reports back to me on what you find. In return, you get some files and she fills me in on anything you discover.”

The woman looked up from the desk, her face suffused with sudden anger. “Sir-”

Leapman interrupted, waving a dismissive hand in her direction. “I can spare you. Saves me hearing all this shit about profiling and numbers and stuff.”

Falcone nodded and smiled at her. “Agreed,” he said. “Welcome on board.”

Leapman dragged the keyboard of his PC towards him. “I’ll e-mail you some documents. Let me say this again: these are confidential. If you copy them outside the loop to anyone else, we’ll know and I will personally drag your ass to the Palazzo Chigi for a serious kicking. If I see them reported in the press you’ll be writing parking tickets in Naples before the week’s out.”

“You seem to have such influence,” Falcone said with a faint smile.

“If you like,” Leapman replied, “you can test me.”

“No,” Falcone demurred. “But you could tell me one more thing.”

“What’s that?” Leapman answered without looking up.

“How long you’ve been here in Rome, waiting for this man to turn up. How he sent you here in the first place. And-”

Falcone reached over and pushed the keyboard out of Leapman’s reach, making sure the American had to look him in the face.

“-why the hell we had to wait for two people to die before you got around to telling us we had this monster on our streets.”

Leapman glowered at him. “Deacon?”

She blinked, hesitating, then punched the remote. Costa could feel the hatred rolling off her. A new photo came on the screen: an oriental temple, red-walled with three roofs, set behind rows of white marble steps.

“The Temple of Heaven, Beijing,” she explained. “A Chinese Pantheon, if you like. The cosmology, the proportions, are virtually identical. It was a sacrificial altar once too.”

“Still is for the man out there,” Leapman said quietly, almost to himself.

Emily Deacon was struggling to keep her composure. “This is the last we know of before Rome. In September another body was found there. It took us a little while to get on the case. We never expected to see him outside North America or Europe. And”-she flicked the remote and pulled up more tourist shots of the temple-“there were other reasons.”

“Show the good people,” Leapman ordered.

She pulled up another shot. The man was on his back, naked, face contorted in death, a noose of cord biting cruelly into his neck.

“Excuse me,” she said and walked briskly out of the door.

Leapman sighed and picked up the remote, keying up the next picture: the victim turned facedown, with the now-familiar horned shape carved into his skin.

“After this,” he continued, “we had some intelligence. It pointed us to Rome.”

“Intelligence?” Falcone asked.

“Intelligence. Don’t ask because I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted. Just take my word for it. We had some idea that he was on his way here. So”-Leapman closed his eyes for a moment as if this were boring him-“here I am, eating shit food, living in a service apartment, biding my time. Because my masters in Washington decide we should set up an office over here, wait around a little while and see what happens. Why didn’t we tell you? Well, what do you think, Inspector? We didn’t have any proof he was here. We didn’t have a single clue when or where he might do anything if he did turn up. What, exactly, would you have said if I’d walked in and dumped this bunch of half-guesses and supposition on your desk?”

Leapman waited for an answer. It didn’t come. “I’ll take that as a sign you see my point. We had to come. We had to wait. Now we know this animal’s loose we’ve got to track him down once and for all. He’s fucked around with us too much already. Besides…”

He keyed up shots of the corpse on the floor of the temple in Beijing.

“It wasn’t some poor stupid tourist he killed this time. This guy was someone important. The military attaché at the US embassy in Beijing. Career diplomat. Talented guy. Came from one of those old New England families that put their offspring into public service just to prove what wonderful citizens they are, never once asking themselves whether it’s the right job for the spoiled little brats in the first place.”

Leapman looked at the picture of the dead diplomat again and sighed. “That’s what class is about, don’t you think? Being able to make choices?”

Then he pulled up another photo. It was the same man at a formal occasion, wearing a dinner jacket, shaking the hands of a smiling Chinese official. He was staring sourly at the camera, clutching at a full glass of booze as if it were a lifeline.

“His name was Dan Deacon,” Leapman explained. “I don’t see a family resemblance myself, but I guess it’s there. Good old Dan fixed up his daughter with a fine career, huh? Not that I reckon he asked her once if it was what she wanted. One minute she’s sitting in Florence congratulating herself on getting an architectural degree. Next she’s doing push-ups in boot camp because Daddy says so and, my, doesn’t Daddy know how to glad-hand some of the people on the interview panels too. Still, it gives me an opportunity.”

He switched off the projector and rolled up the lights so they could see his face all the more clearly.

“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 the 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…”

Emily Deacon smiled. “If it’s that easy, don’t you think he might be doing it too? This girl must have seen what happened. She must know things we’d dearly love to hear. Why else would he want to kill her?”

Costa gave his partner a hard look. They should have thought of this themselves. They’d been distracted by the meeting at the embassy, and having an outsider attached to the investigation.

“I’ll drive,” Costa said.

BY THE TIME PERONI was renewing his acquaintance with the first name on his long list of East European hoods, Teresa Lupo was dictating the preliminary autopsy results on Mauro Sandri, running through all the familiar terms she’d come to learn over the years when dealing with firearms deaths, still unable to push what she’d heard in the American embassy out of her head.

Silvio Di Capua was busy cleaning the stainless-steel table, watching her out of the corner of his beady eyes with the same guarded awe she’d come to expect, wondering, perhaps, what she saw in the big old Tuscan cop who was now sharing her home. It was none of his business, even if it was a good question. Gianni Peroni was a good human being: honest, decent and kind, in spite of his tough outward appearance. She liked his company.

At least Silvio Di Capua’s crush on her had waned a little since her assistant realized she was no longer available. He was by the door now, washing his hands and looking ready to grab his too-short black leather bomber jacket and head home for the night when Leo Falcone walked in. She watched with some dismay the way Silvio flinched at the sight of the inspector, like a mouse catching sight of a bird of prey. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the analogy was appropriate. Falcone, as his surname suggested, had the beady eyes of a raptor and a bare, birdlike skull too. The sharp jut of his goatee only enhanced further the impression of a hunter. He was the kind of person someone like Silvio Di Capua feared the most. Not just for his acerbic tongue or the sudden, direct habit he had of tackling every issue head-on. Worse, much worse sometimes, was the way he never let anything go. This irked Di Capua more than anyone because, when it came to morgue matters, he was the one Falcone chose as the weak point, the place to start poking at with a long, suspicious forefinger.

Teresa Lupo was apt not to play things by the book, if a few unorthodox methods suited her better, but she made a point of keeping those habits under her hat, most of the time, anyway. It was always Di Capua whom Falcone squeezed for proof, turning those bleak, suspicious eyes on him and asking all the questions the little man never wanted to hear. Then there’d be the recriminations and, worst of all, in the end Teresa would have to hear out Silvio’s grovelling apology for blabbing, accompanied, as always, by an invitation to dinner.

She looked up from her notes, feigned a smile and said, “Inspector. Good evening. And you’ve come alone too. Not with those nice new American friends of yours. How pleasant.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Falcone objected. “You heard, didn’t you?”

“Actually, no. I was trying to work out a few things in my head. Such as why a very odd corpse was stretched out on the floor of the Pantheon like that. Listening to cops bitch at one another is a secondary diversion at such times and I’m happy for it to stay that way.” She switched off the tape recorder. “So what can I do for you?”

As usual, Falcone came straight to the point. “You can tell me what you two found out when you had the woman to yourself. And don’t tell me it’s nothing because I won’t believe you.”

She beamed at him. “This is because of your great faith in our abilities?”

“If you like,” he conceded grudgingly. “Or maybe I just know when you’re not telling us something. There’s an air of smugness around this place right now and I’d very much like to puncture it.”

“You don’t want the report on that poor photographer?”

“I know what happened to the photographer. I was there. Remember?”

She looked into his miserable face and felt a twinge of guilt. Falcone wasn’t happy about any of this. It wasn’t fair to bitch. All the same, she did have something to bitch about.

“So you want me to offer some insights into a corpse which, with your full agreement, was snatched away from me right in front of my eyes, quite without reason, and completely contrary to Italian law, too, I might add?”

“Don’t start,” Falcone said. “I’ve just been upstairs listening to Bruno Moretti, among others, telling me how we need to keep the FBI sweat at every turn.”

Falcone went silent, thinking. It was an odd moment, Teresa thought. For once he looked as if he were racked by doubts.

Somewhere outside a car started with a sweet, certain rumble.

“Join me,” Falcone ordered and walked to the window. There he pointed to an expensive-looking Lancia travelling across the car park towards the exit, too fast for the treacherous conditions.

“Know who that is?” Falcone asked.

“What am I?” she snapped. “Superwoman, perfect night vision through a car roof or something?”

“Filippo Viale. Top-rung spook from SISDE. I thought you might have bumped into him in the past.”

She didn’t say a word. This was so unlike Falcone.

“Viale sat in on the entire conversation with Moretti. Truth is, he, not Moretti, was running things there.”

“Leo?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he grumbled. “I’m just pissed off. I’ve got the Americans telling me I report to them about what we’re doing. I’ve got Viale telling me I report to him about what the Americans are doing. And somewhere in the middle of all this I need to find out what happened to that woman and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

He was scared. No, that wasn’t right. He was lacking in confidence, and in Leo Falcone that was almost the same thing.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. It was deeply out of character for Falcone to give away details like this, particularly the part about the SISDE officer. Those people moved in and out of the building like ghosts, unremarked, almost unseen. It was standard form that no one acknowledged their presence, let alone admitted to taking orders from them.

She reached for some papers in the folder in front of her.

“Since this is for you and you alone I’ll make it short and sweet. Silvio? Get the camera.”

Silvio slunk off to the filing cabinet and came back with a large, semi-professional digital Canon.

Teresa Lupo looked at him. “Lights, Silvio. Action.”

Hands shaking slightly, he fired up the screen. She took it and started flicking through the shots there.

“Do we know who she was, this tourist?” she asked.

“Not really,” Falcone answered. “Just the name. Her hotel. Is it relevant? You heard what Leapman said. This man is supposed to select his victims at random. The only linking factor is that they’re all American tourists.”

“I know that. But what did this woman do? What was her job?”

Falcone shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I don’t hold out much hope we’re going to find out either. Leapman has put out a statement to the papers saying she was a divorcée from New York. No profession. No personal details. We’re supposed to refer all media inquiries to him from now on, which is the one part of this piece I am quite happy with.”

“Illuminating.”

She pulled up a shot of the woman’s torso and hit the magnification button. “Of course, this would be so much easier if I had a body to work with, but I’ll do my best. You see this?”

She was pointing to an obvious scar on the left-hand side of the woman’s stomach.

“Appendix?” Falcone asked.

“Are you kidding me?” she gasped. “What kind of surgeon leaves an appendix scar that size, with that much loss of flesh? If they did that in the States this poor bitch would have sued them for billions. She wouldn’t be holidaying in Rome, she’d own the place.”

Di Capua was rocking backwards and forwards on his heels now, sweating a little, distinctly uncomfortable, as if he knew where this was going.

Falcone scowled at her. “So-”

“So I don’t have a damn body. I can’t take a better look at this under proper lighting. I can’t try and see what lies underneath the scar tissue. Thank you, thank you, thank you-”

“What is it?” Falcone interrupted.

“My guess? It’s the scar from a bullet wound. Nasty one too. Judging by the size of the affected area, she got shot close up. She was probably lucky to live through it.”

Falcone’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “A bullet wound? How old?”

She traced her finger over the photo. “Can’t be exact. More than three years. It happened to her as an adult. After she’d stopped growing. Beyond that I don’t know. Of course it would be easy to clear this up if we could get the woman’s medical history. What was she called?”

“Margaret Kearney,” he replied. “We won’t get any medical records out of the Americans. You saw what they’re like.”

“This happened in Rome, Leo!” Her voice had risen a couple of decibels. “Why the hell are we being pushed around as if we’re disinterested bystanders or something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because of who his last victim was. A diplomat. What’s the point in asking? We just have to learn to live with what we have. You think I should walk back into Moretti’s office and ask him to change things around? Do you really believe this kind of decision’s coming from his desk? And that’s all you’ve got?” he added. “That she had a bullet wound? Even if it’s true, so what? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“I guess not.”

She looked at Silvio Di Capua, who was quaking in his small, very clean Chelsea boots. “Get the cord, Silvio. And the hair.”

He went away making a soft, squeaking noise of terror, and came back with a couple of sample bags.

Teresa Lupo picked up the first. “In order to stop you screeching the place down, let me say I removed this entirely innocently from the woman’s neck. They only said they wanted the body. I didn’t think they’d miss it.”

The fabric lay coiled like a tiny serpent inside the evidence bag.

“That’s the thing he used?” Falcone asked. “It’s a cord?”

“It looks like a cord,” Teresa replied, then took out the fabric and, with two sets of tweezers, carefully unrolled it. “Until you take it apart a little.”

Falcone blinked at the object unfurling under her precise fingers.

It was dark grey and green, an odd patchwork that had been tightly rolled into the ligature which had killed the woman.

“Recognize the shape?” Teresa pulled the fabric tightly to make her point.

It was the Maltese cross pattern from Emily Deacon’s sacred cut. As near as dammit.

“He cut it out of a piece of fabric and then used it to kill her?” Falcone asked, bewildered.

“That’s one explanation. This is very tough fabric, though, and it seems manufactured to me. I’ve asked forensic to take a look.”

Falcone scowled. “I don’t see where that gets us.”

“Patience, Leo. So what about this?”

Falcone looked at a familiar sight: a sample of hair in a transparent morgue bag.

“This is from Margaret Kearney’s head,” she explained. “Black as coal, as you can see.”

He nodded, not understanding the point.

“You’re a gentleman, Leo. I’ll say that for you. The poor cow was stone dead on the floor there and you didn’t even take a good look down below, did you? This is not her natural hair colour. This”-she held up the second slide. A hank of light brown hair lay trapped between the pieces of glass-“is what her head’s supposed to look like. We took out the dye just to make sure. You can’t rely on what the pubic zone tells you. This is a general observation that goes beyond the matter of body hair, by the way. I trust you and Silvio will take it to heart.”

Falcone sighed and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now nearly nine. “So you think she had a bullet wound. He killed her with some crazy piece of cloth. And you know she dyed her hair.”

“Oh, Leo, Leo,” she protested, “you really know nothing about women, do you? Naturally, her hair was a pleasant brown. Personally, I would have been quite happy with it. See?”

She waved her own lank crop at him. “What colour’s this?”

“Black,” he replied.

“No, no, no! How can a man like you, someone who’s usually so observant, be so blind? It’s really a very dark brown. Genuine black, the colour you have here”-she held up the second slide-“that’s quite rare naturally.”

He opened his hands in an expression of bafflement.

“Look,” she continued, “a woman who had black hair to begin with and went grey might dye it black. The rest of us? Check out the statistics with the hair-dye manufacturers. I have. A lot of women dye their hair blonde because that’s what gentlemen prefer, right? A good number like something chestnut or so, too. Think about it. Have you ever met a woman with nice chestnut hair who had an urge to dye it jet black? OK. You’re struggling to find the experience to answer that question. Let me do it for you. No. It doesn’t happen. It’s weird. It doesn’t compute. Black, real black like this, is something you get handed down in the genes. You learn to live with it. Maybe you learn to get rid of it. What you don’t do is make it happen if it wasn’t there in the first place.”

“That’s it?” he asked. “Maybe a bullet wound? Maybe an inexplicable use of hair dye?”

Silvio groaned. They both knew what Falcone was doing. Daring her to come up with something else. However she happened to have acquired it.

“No. That isn’t it. Silvio?”

“Oh, Jesus.” Di Capua walked towards the deep cabinet drawers where they stored everything that came attached to a death, however ordinary, however apparently meaningless. “Jesus, sweet Jesus. Here comes the shit again, here come the written warnings. Why can I not work with normal people? Why can I not-”

“Shut up!” she yelled.

He picked out a green plastic box, brought it over and placed the thing on the table. The name “Margaret Kearney” was handwritten on a label stuck to the front. Inside were a pile of neatly stashed clothing, a bag and several plastic folders full of personal belongings.

Falcone did a double take looking at it. Finally he said, “The cord I can go along with. Now tell me this isn’t what I think.”

“It’s her stuff, Leo. Hell, if I can’t have her surely I can have her stuff, can’t I?”

“I made it absolutely plain. Leapman had that piece of paper that gave him full authority-”

She was quick to interrupt. “Just a minute. You weren’t there when that team of dumbos he’d hired turned up with the hearse. ”We’re here for the body,“ they said. Well, that’s what they got. I even let them take our gurney. Do you have any idea what those things cost? I’ll be billing the White House personally if we don’t get it back.”

He put a hand on the green box. “This…”

“This is something they never asked for. Will they? Sure, once someone realizes what a stupid mistake they made. And they can have it. I won’t stand in their way. But tell me, Leo. What was I supposed to do? Run after them and say, ”I think you forgot something?“ Or leave it there in the Pantheon, for God’s sake?”

Something extraordinary happened then. Leo Falcone’s shoulders heaved an inch or two. Teresa Lupo realized she was witnessing him laugh, an event which was entirely new to her.

“I’m just a bystander in all this, aren’t I?” he asked finally, then fixed her with a hungry stare. “So?”

“So this.”

She pulled out Margaret Kearney’s US passport and showed him the photo. “Notice how very black her hair is there? How stiff the pose? She didn’t get this done in some supermarket booth, now, did she? I hate passport photos where people are actually thinking about what they look like. It’s so unnatural.”

“And?”

She pointed to the picture. “Note the glasses.” Then she picked up a plastic bag containing a pair of spectacles and began opening it. “These. Don’t worry. We’ve checked for prints. Nothing. No prints anywhere, as far as we can tell. Like the Americans said, this creep is good. Here-try them. Tell me what you see.”

Falcone glowered at the spectacles in her hand. “I don’t wear glasses.”

“Try them, Leo!” she ordered.

He did as he was told and put on the plain black-plastic glasses.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Not fuzzy? No different from normal?”

Falcone removed them and she could see he was starting to get interested now.

“Exactly.”

“No reason it should be. Those are plain glass. They’re not corrective at all.”

And she wondered: would he run straight back to the Americans with this information? Or would he mull it over first? She couldn’t take the risk, even if it did mean he just might go ballistic when he discovered what else she had done. There was an easy way to find out, too.

“One final thing,” she added. “ ”Margaret Kearney.“ There’s an address on her driver’s licence. Leapman and his friends said they’d be contacting relatives, right?”

“They said that,” Falcone agreed.

“The Internet’s a wonderful thing, you know. Tell him, Silvio.”

Di Capua stared at his shiny boots and said in a very low, timorous voice, “There’s no Margaret Kearney in the Manhattan phone book.”

“What?” Falcone yelled.

“There’s no phone number listed,” Di Capua continued. “She could be ex-directory, of course. Except the residential address isn’t an apartment either. It’s just a forwarding service.”

“You’ve been looking up this woman on the Internet?” Falcone bellowed. “This is a morgue. We get paid to do that kind of thing. What the hell gives you the right to interfere with our work like this? Again?”

Gingerly Teresa put a hand on his arm. “But you didn’t do it, Leo. They told you not to, remember? Nobody placed a gagging order like that on us. So, when I noticed the hair, when I looked at that passport, those glasses-please, don’t blame Silvio, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me-I just kept looking at this woman and I couldn’t stop thinking, ”Something is wrong here.“ ”

He didn’t know whether to shout and scream or thank them, she guessed. It was hard being Leo Falcone much of the time.

“This doesn’t go any further than here,” he told her. “Agreed?”

“Sure,” she said. “And maybe now I should make a call to them explaining they left a few things behind. What do you think? I don’t want them to feel we’re being uncooperative. I don’t want them to get…”

She left it at that. The “suspicious” word could have been pushing things a little too far.

“Do it,” he agreed.

“You see what this means, Leo? We don’t know who Margaret Kearney is. But the hair, the glasses, that stupid fake passport photo, the phone number, the address… we sure as hell know who she isn’t.”

Falcone scowled at the items in the green box, as if a set of inanimate objects could somehow be to blame.

“Still, I guess we don’t need to tell Agent Leapman that,” Teresa added. “Do we?”

She watched the inspector turn this information over in his head. Falcone was one smart man. He was surely there already. All the same, it had had to be said, just to lock the three of them together, deep in all this potential shit.

STEFAN RAJACIC didn’t look like a pimp, Nic Costa thought. He was about sixty years old, squat in an old tweed suit and brown overcoat, with a swarthy, expressive face and dark, miserable eyes. The moustache-heavy and greying, like that of an old walrus-gave him away. It belonged to a world that had vanished, that of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. The man could have been a portlier version of Stalin, trying to fade into old age with plenty of memories and what remained of his dignity. He was the seventh pimp they’d seen that night and the only one Gianni Peroni, who seemed to know every last man of his ilk in Rome, treated with a measure of respect.

Rajacic stared at the photograph of the girl through the fumes of his Turkish cigarette and shook his head. “Officer Peroni,” he said in a heavily accented voice cracked by years of tobacco, “what do you want of me? This girl is what? Thirteen? Fourteen? No more surely?”

“I don’t know,” Peroni admitted.

The Serb waved his hand at the photo. “What kind of a man do you think I am?” He looked at Emily Deacon. “Has he told you I deal with children? Because, if he has, it’s a lie. Judge me for what I am but I don’t have to take that.”

“Officer Peroni said nothing of the sort, sir,” she replied evenly. “He told me you were a good man. You were last on our list. We’d hoped we’d never need to come this far. That tells you something, surely?”

“ ”A good man,“ ” Rajacic repeated. He stared at Peroni. “You’re a fool if you said that. And I don’t think you’re a fool.”

“I know what you are,” Peroni told him. “There’s a lot worse out there. That’s all I said. And, yes, I know you wouldn’t deal with a girl this age. I just thought maybe you’d heard something. Or could suggest who we might ask next.”

Rajacic downed his beer and ordered another. The barman wandered over with a bottle and placed it on the table with an undue amount of respect. He knew who Rajacic was. There were just two other customers in the place. Outside, the street was deep in filthy slush. Business went on as usual, though. Costa knew that, if he looked, there would be pushers sheltering in the doorways, and a handful of hopeful hookers too, hunting business with haunted, hungry eyes. There were places nearby that Costa counted among his favourites in Rome. Just a short walk away were Diocletian’s baths and the church created by Michelangelo from the original frigidarium. In the Palazzo Massimo around the corner was an entire room from a private villa of Livia, the empress of Augustus, decorated to resemble a charming, rural garden, with songbirds, flowers and fruit trees. But they were rare oases of delight in an area that seemed to become more tawdry each year. Costa couldn’t wait to be on the move again.

“We’re struggling here, Mr. Rajacic,” he said. “We need to find this girl. She could be in danger. We know how the system works. Girls come here when they’re young. If they’re lucky, the welfare people pick them up, put them in a home. If they’re not, they fall through the net and something else happens. First they learn to beg. Then they learn to steal. Then, when they’re old enough, they become the goods themselves. And maybe sell some dope on the side. That’s how it is. Somewhere along the way they must go to someone, a person like you, and see what the options are.”

“Not if she knows me,” Rajacic insisted, waving a big cracked open palm in their faces. “Not if she asks. These people who deal in children… they’re scum. I handle no one who isn’t old enough to know what she’s doing. And no drugs either.”

“I know,” Costa insisted. “As I said, we’re desperate.”

“Who isn’t?” the Serb wondered. “These are desperate times. You never noticed?”

He swigged some beer from the bottle, stubbed out the cigarette and looked at them. Maybe there was something there, Costa thought. Maybe…

“You know what?” Rajacic grumbled. “When I came here fifteen years ago I used to have to call home and beg for girls. Most wouldn’t even phone me back. They had dignity then. They didn’t need the likes of me. Now? This is a world in motion, my friends. I got the United Nations working for me, and more women calling pleading for work than I can handle. Kosovans. Croats. Russians. Turks. Kurds. All those people who watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, the old world rolling over and dying, and they thought: ”Now the good times begin, now everyone gets free and rich like all those big shots in the West promised.“ Some joke, huh? You guys never told them it didn’t really work like that, did you? You left it to pimps like me. I’m the one who gets to say it to some pretty little seventeen-year-old straight off the boat, no papers, no money, nothing going for her except what she’s got between her legs. And now you’re coming asking for help-”

“We don’t have time to apologize, Stefan,” Peroni grumbled.

“No.” The dark eyes flashed at him. “You don’t.” He picked up the photo. “What is she? Kosovan? Albanian?”

Peroni grimaced. “We just don’t know.”

“From the looks of her she could be anything. Turk or Kurd even. Jesus…”

“But she can’t just walk into a city like this without knowing someone, surely?” Emily objected. “She must have a name. A phone number. Something.”

“That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it?” Rajacic asked. “Who?”

Peroni reeled off the names. The Serb scowled as he heard each one.

“My,” he said at the end. “I wouldn’t want to meet even one of them in a day. Six…”

“Can you think of someone else we should be talking to?” Emily asked.

The brown eyes blinked in disbelief. “Do I look like I have a death wish?”

“Mr. Rajacic,” she persisted, “this girl’s so young. She might not even be in the loop you’re talking about now. We don’t know where she is, but we know what she saw. She’s got to be scared. And in danger too.”

He glowered back at them. “What did she see?”

The two cops looked at each other. They were running out of options.

“A couple of murders,” Peroni said quietly. “Don’t go telling anyone, huh? The kid’s got problems enough as it is.”

Rajacic finished the beer and clicked his fingers for another. “Two?”

“It was on the TV,” Costa said. “A woman was killed in the Pantheon. An Italian photographer was shot too. We know this girl was there. Inside. Probably just looking for shelter or something. We know the guy who killed this woman realizes that too now. You see my point?”

The old man thought about this, then got up, went to the bar and, without saying a word to the man behind the counter, picked up the phone by the till and began talking rapidly in his native language.

“He acts like he owns the place,” Emily observed.

“He does,” Peroni said. “Even a pimp needs an office. I don’t suppose you understand any of that lingo?”

She shook her head. Rajacic was virtually yelling into the phone now.

“He doesn’t act like a pimp,” she observed. “Not really.”

Peroni watched Rajacic barking at the phone. “It’s not his chosen profession. He was a farmer in Bosnia. The Croats decided his land was theirs. He had the sense not to stay around and argue.”

“Big leap from Bosnian farmer to pimping here,” Costa commented.

“Yeah,” Peroni agreed. “Like the man said, ”A world in motion.“ I don’t get it either. But who’s asking? If every other pimp we had was like this guy-no drugs, no kids.”

Emily’s blue eyes wandered over the pair of them, some bitter judgement there. “He’s still earning a living by selling women on the street.”

“We’ve had people doing that here for the last couple of thousand years,” Peroni answered. “Doubtless will for the next couple too. Do you think we can stamp it out somehow? We’re cops. Not miracle workers.”

She stirred the empty coffee cup. “Sure. I just want to make sure we remember what he is.”

“What he is, Emily, is maybe the only chance we’ve got to find this kid. These people lead separate lives. They talk to us on their terms, when they feel like it. No amount of screaming at them, no amount of time in a cell, changes that. Trust me. I know. I’ve tried.” He nodded at Costa. “We both have.”

“True,” Costa agreed, watching how Rajacic’s attitude had changed while he was on the phone. He looked a little happier. He was getting what he wanted.

The Serb came back to the table and sat down. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he told them.

Peroni slapped him on the big brown arm of his overcoat. “Because you’re a good guy, Stefan. Like I told my American friend here.”

“Or maybe just a damn fool. Don’t go putting this around, Peroni. I don’t want anyone getting the idea I make a habit of helping the cops. And maybe I’m not helping at all.”

A woman was coming out of the door at the back of the bar. She was about thirty, with long, black hair, a tanned gypsy face heavy with makeup and a tight red dress cut low at the neck. Boredom and resentment shone out from her tired eyes. She must have been upstairs, taking the call on an internal line.

Rajacic pushed out a chair and beckoned her to sit. “This is Alexa,” he announced. “My niece.”

Peroni looked her up and down. “You mean this is a family business?”

“When he gets some business,” she snapped.

The Serb pointed to the window. “Am I responsible for the weather now? Please. I’ve listened to enough shit for one evening. These people need your help, Alexa. You’re getting paid anyway. You can go with them. Or you can clean up in the kitchen. Which is it going to be?”

“Some choice,” she grunted and took a seat. “What do you want?”

Rajacic reached over and brushed his fingers against her fine black hair. “Hey, zingara. No tantrums. They just want a little advice.”

He looked at Peroni, who pushed the photo across the table. She picked it up.

“I don’t know who the hell this is,” she complained. “Why ask me?”

Rajacic smiled. “A little gypsy blood crept into the family a while back,” he explained. “Don’t ask how. It’s thick blood, huh, Alexa? Like this kid’s maybe. My friends here are asking themselves, ”Where would a girl like this hide out if she were scared and living off the street?“ Can you tell them?”

Her black eyes didn’t give away a thing. “On the street? In weather like this?”

“Come on,” Rajacic wheedled. “They don’t all stay in hostels. They don’t all have pimps looking after them. What if she’s on her own? Where’d she go? What kind of choices have these kids got?”

“Not many,” she murmured, thinking all the same. “What’s in this for me?”

Rajacic leaned over, prodded her in the arm, hard. At that instant he looked the pimp he was.

“You make an old man very happy,” he murmured. “Now get out of here. Before I think of something else.”

THEY’D BORROWED A JEEP from traffic. Costa sat behind the wheel, feeling out of practice, unused to the four-wheel drive which was the only way the treacherous roads were manageable at speed. Most of the narrow through routes in the centro storico had been closed. What little movement there was now funnelled down the main thoroughfares and the broad avenues which ran either side of the river. Alexa knew where to go. They’d checked out a series of sites-a derelict building north of the Pantheon, a squat in Testaccio, a grimy, freezing hostel in San Giovanni-and got the same result in each one, trying to talk to a bunch of surly adolescents shivering in cheap black clothes that couldn’t keep out the cold. They’d look at the girl’s picture and shake their heads. Then Alexa would yell at them in their own language, and still they’d say nothing.

Now the four of them were driving along the Lungotevere on the Trastevere side of the river, slowly checking the huddled bunches of people sheltering by the Tiber. The sluggish current was out of sight from the road here. The flat, broad shelf by its banks, reached by steps from street level, was a popular shelter for the homeless.

Alexa was in the front passenger seat blowing cigarette smoke out of the crack she’d opened the window, not minding the freezing air it brought into the car, looking for where she wanted them to stop. The atmosphere in the car was bad. They all sensed failure.

“These kids won’t talk to cops,” she said. “Why should they?”

“Because this girl needs our help,” Emily muttered icily.

Alexa shook her head. “They don’t know that. They don’t believe a word you say. They think cops spell trouble. With good reason.”

“What do you suggest?” Costa asked.

“Leave it to me. Stay out of the way. I’ll tell them you’re family, looking for her. You got any money?”

Peroni reached over from the backseat and handed her some notes. She looked at them and whistled. “Wow. You could buy a couple of tricks for that. Supply and demand. Lots of the former, none of the latter.”

“We need to find this kid,” Peroni insisted.

She stuffed the cash into the pocket of her bright red nylon anorak and pointed across the river. “There. I know a couple of places. Besides, thinking about it, the wind’s coming from the wrong direction for this side. These kids are destitute. They’re not stupid. Not most of them anyway.”

The jeep moved into the right-hand lane and waited at the traffic lights at the next bridge.

“You’re not his niece,” Emily stated with some certainty.

The woman turned and stared at her. “Says who?”

“I just thought… It was a turn of speech.”

“You mean like ”sex worker“?”

“N-n-o,” she stuttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m his niece. My mother is Stefan’s sister. My old man was a gypsy who climbed in the window one night.” She paused for effect. “That was a turn of speech. They got married. Eventually. Then…”

The jeep moved forward onto the bridge. Alexa looked down towards the river. “Then things fell apart. Not just personal things, you understand. Life. The country. Everything. Pull in somewhere. I can see lights down there.”

Costa parked the vehicle on the deserted pavement. They got out of the car and stood in the snow, shivering. The night was bitterly cold, with a stiff wind whipping through the open channel cut through the city by the Tiber. They were close enough now to see the black, silky surface of the river and a silver moon reflecting back at them, a perfect shining circle. It was dark down there, but there were people around, huddled in the shelter beneath the bridge. Costa could see the tiny firefly embers of cigarettes and smell the bitter smoke of a makeshift brazier.

“Stay here,” Alexa said, “until I call.”

She hesitated before heading for the steps. “There’s something you ought to know. Stefan is my uncle. When we lost the farm-his farm, our farm, everyone’s-I just ran away here. I thought I could make everything right. I thought the streets were paved with gold. You know the funny thing?”

She stared at them, with those black, gypsy eyes, and didn’t bother to hide her bitterness.

“Compared to what it’s like back home now, they are. I sometimes have to remind myself of that when I’ve got some fat businessman wheezing into my face wondering if he’s ever going to get there. I came here… and did what was easy. Stefan used what little money he had to find me, to try to get me to go back. We argued. I won. Which is as it should be because, in the circumstances, I was right. If you’ve got to have a pimp, best it’s your uncle. Best it’s an honest man, and Stefan is. Ask any of his girls.”

Emily looked her in the face and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

The three of them waited while Alexa walked down the steps shuffling their feet in the snow in a vain effort to keep warm. The night had the crisp, biting smell of a hard winter, one that wanted to hang around. The snow would surely resume soon. Peroni glanced down at the sound of voices below.

“What do we do when this doesn’t work?” he asked.

“Keep looking,” Costa replied, “until she runs out of places.” He turned to Emily Deacon. “You don’t need to stick with us. We’re on night duty anyway. You’re not.”

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“You could-”

“I’m fine.”

Peroni caught Costa’s eye and shrugged. “How many people has Leapman got working for him here?” he asked.

She scowled. “I don’t know.”

“Two? Three? Fifty?” Peroni insisted.

She hugged herself tight inside her jacket. “Listen, until a couple of months ago I was a lowly intelligence officer working nine to five in a systems office in Washington. Then I got plucked out to come here. Why? Maybe because I know Rome. Or I speak good Italian. Maybe Leapman thinks I’m owed it because of my dad. But believe me when I say this. I do not know. He doesn’t tell me. He doesn’t listen to a damn word I say. As far as he’s concerned we’re just chasing some lunatic serial killer with a lot of air miles.”

“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.

Little Em.

No one had called her that since she’d turned twelve. It was a name used by her family, and those close to them, during those warm, sunny days in Rome, back when the world was whole and human and new, back when a string of strange men came through their apartment in Aventino, leaving her presents, making her feel special, dancing with her in the bright white living room to any damn music they felt like.

Little Em.

Someone approached. It was Nic Costa. The young Italian cop walked up, his interesting, intelligent face full of concern. He retrieved her gun from the slush, looked at her, then pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket.

“Here,” he said.

She remembered the pain now, and ran her tongue over her bruised lower lip, grateful it didn’t feel too bad.

“Thanks. Where the hell were you?”

“Looking. It’s a big dark place out there.”

She nodded. “I wouldn’t argue with that.”

There’d never been an experience like this in her life, ever. Nothing in the Bureau had prepared her for it.

“I lost the kid, Nic. Sorry. I didn’t have a choice.”

He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t seem too bothered.

Gianni Peroni arrived, a little out of breath, obvious pleasure on his face at seeing she was safe. She liked these men. A lot. Her head felt funny. Her balance wasn’t what it ought to be. For a split second she thought she was going to cry.

By Peroni’s side was Laila. The girl came straight up to her, looked in her eyes with something that resembled gratitude, then held up the lone cuff dangling from her wrist, wanting to be released.

“Sure,” Emily Deacon said. “After…”

After we’ve talked, she wanted to say. After I’ve done the FBI agent thing, all confidence and bluster, pretending everything’s OK now, everything’s just dandy, if only you’ll answer a few questions, listen to what the cold, tough automaton from the Bureau has to say.

After…

The lights went out. She was scarcely aware that it was Nic Costa’s arms that stopped her head from splitting open on the Campo’s freezing cobblestones.

IT WAS QUIET in the cabin high over the side street close to the Palazzo Borghese. Monica Sawyer twitched and writhed under the heavy sheets, shadows moving through her head, unseen figures dancing to events that had an interior logic they didn’t care to share with her. These were disturbing dreams, enticing dreams, ones she wasn’t used to, dreams that made her roll and turn and moan from time to time, out of fear, out of anticipation. Made her sweat too, struggling inside the scarlet silk slip Harvey had bought her once, on a brief holiday to Maui, thinking he could inject life back into the marriage.

Harvey .

His name just popped into her mind, like a sour discordant note that had sounded in a piece of glorious, fiery, scary music.

Scarlet was her colour, or so Harvey said. Scarlet made her look slutty too. He liked that.

“Harvey, Harvey,” she whispered, not knowing whether she wanted to summon him there or not, wishing she hadn’t drunk so much, hadn’t let all those strange old grapes from Virgil’s day get deep inside her brain.

“Look at me now. Look at…”

With a sudden physical shock, a jerk that made her body go rigid, she was awake, mind racing with sudden activity, one awkward fact ringing in her head. It wasn’t Harvey she was trying to summon into her dream, like an incubus invited in by some deep dark part of her imagination. It was Peter O’Malley.

Who was out looking for churches.

Except he wasn’t. Now, with a half-hungover clarity, she could see something that was hidden from her when he was around. Peter O’Malley was just plain wrong. Priests didn’t hang around bars like that, slyly working their way into the confidence of stray women. They didn’t know about wine and food. They couldn’t turn on the charm, creep into someone’s head with such a sly degree of determined stealth. And they didn’t stay out all night either. Monica knew she’d have woken up if he had returned. Even when she’d been drinking, she was a light, nervous sleeper.

Nothing in his story added up. He wasn’t the kind of man to tend a flock of nuns in Orvieto, or anywhere else. Peter O’Malley was a loner wandering the streets of Rome, homeless for some reason, with just a small black bag for company. If it hadn’t been for the dog collar she wouldn’t have countenanced inviting him into the apartment. That thought made her feel foolish. And resentful too.

“He’s a fraud,” she said quietly to herself and wondered why she didn’t feel more scared.

Because you’re kind of hoping he comes back and…

“No,” she said, and remembered. He’d taken the one set of keys. This was, the more she came to consider matters, deeply, deeply stupid. She was in a foreign city, unable to speak a word of the language, unable to pick up the phone and call for help if she needed it. She glanced at her watch, thought about what the time was in San Francisco, where Harvey might be during that part of the late afternoon.

And what would she say if she called?

There was this priest, Harvey. He didn’t have anywhere to sleep. We downed some drinks and one thing almost led to another. Correction. I downed some drinks. And now I know he’s not a priest at all, though what he really is still beats me.

This wasn’t getting better. Maybe he was just a harmless bum looking for somewhere to sleep. Now she thought of it, he’d had an opportunity to take things further. If he’d pushed a little more after they’d talked on the roof…

Monica Sawyer considered that moment and knew the truth of it. If he’d pushed a little more, she’d have fallen into bed with him and thought: To hell with Harvey, let’s see what a little of God’s glory can do.

But he didn’t. He went out.

Looking for churches.

Quite.

She got up, pulling on a nightgown because it was damn cold in this tiny, artificial box. Monica knew what she had to do, which was to find something, anything, that would make her suspicions concrete, give her reason to call the cops and scream into the phone until someone somewhere listened.

“The bag,” Monica said to herself.

She opened the bedroom door. The living room was empty. The bag was by the French windows, which were ajar, bringing a cold draught into the room. Monica cursed herself. It was a night for getting careless. Outside, the two gas heaters still burned, hissing quietly, like vents in the side of a small volcano sitting on a rooftop in the middle of the city.

She checked the single front door. It had this incredible lock-multiple bolts, the kind you’d expect on a domestic Fort Knox. All of them still thrown from the outside as he left. She couldn’t open it however hard she tried. But there was an old-fashioned manual bolt on the inside too. She threw it and felt a little better. Maybe she couldn’t get out, but Peter was now unable to get back in unless she allowed him.

“Let’s get this over with,” Monica whispered to herself. She went back to the sofa and picked up the black bag, finding it unexpectedly heavy, placed it on the table and blinked, trying to see better. The interior lights were terrible. Insignificant, tiny yellow bulbs that barely penetrated the shadows of the cabin. She glanced at the terrace, with its hissing heaters. Two big fluorescent spots threw a bright semicircle under the awning there. It would be so much easier. She went outside and laid the bag on the plastic picnic table under the awning.

The night was extraordinary: starlit, perfectly still, beautiful, like a painting on one of those pretty picture Christmas cards old people sent each other.

You’ll be old one day, the little voice inside her said.

“Yeah,” Monica agreed. “But you won’t find me sending out crap like that.”

Even though the main door was bolted she closed the French windows behind her. It seemed like a good idea.

She started to open the zipper, then shut her eyes. Was this really such a good idea? Going through a stranger’s things, looking to find proof he wasn’t what he claimed? She could stay where she was, safe from anyone getting in, wait until morning, call the cops and tell them she’d lost her keys.

Unless she met him on the stairs on the way out. Unless…

Too many possibilities started to crowd into her head. Monica pulled the zipper all the way back and was dismayed to find staring out at her exactly what she would, in ordinary circumstances, have expected. Peter O’Malley’s modest, inexpensive bag revealed a black woollen sweater, just the kind a priest would wear. Neatly folded, the way an organized man, one who lived inside an institution, would have learned over the years.

She hesitated and looked behind her into the cabin. The living room was still empty. It wasn’t even dawn. Maybe he was gone for good, out doing whatever he really did for a living.

Which was probably nothing exciting at all.

She pulled out the sweater and placed it carefully on the terrace table, which, being well protected against the weather by the awning, was still relatively dry and clean. Monica was determined everything would go back in as it came out, in exactly the same condition, exactly the same order. As much as possible, anyway.

One more sweater. Some underwear. Socks. All very clean. And a pair of light shoes, not the kind you’d normally wear in winter.

It was all so ordinary.

Then two shirts, folded so they creased as little as possible. Peter O’Malley, or whoever he was, knew how to pack.

The last shirt was different. Kind of khaki, woollen. Almost military issue, although maybe the Church made priests wear this kind of thing too, just to remind them who they truly were.

“You’re prying, Monica,” she said. “You’re a stupid, nosy bitch who’s just got the night terrors from drinking too much. Who…”

She removed the khaki shirt, placed it in order alongside the rest of his belongings and felt her lungs freeze, go still, in unison with the breathless quiet of the night.

There was a gun there. A small, black, deadly looking gun.

She took it out, held it in her hand, where it fitted neatly, wondered how you made a weapon like this work if you needed one, then put it in the correct position on the table.

Next to the gun was a selection of things she couldn’t quite comprehend. What looked like a radio, with a little earphone. A bunch of silver tubes the size of cigarillos, with wires sticking out of one end, emerging from what looked like a wad of wax. A few notes: euros, dollars, all small denominations. And finally something that really bewildered her.

Monica Sawyer took the stuff out of the bottom of the bag and held it up to the sky. It was a carefully rolled-up hank of material of some kind. When she unravelled a little she saw it was cut into a repeating geometric pattern, a series of slashes that were clearly part of the design. She stretched it with her fingers and watched the way the precise slashes in the fabric stretched and pulled, keeping their shape, seeming to have some odd, internal strength that came as much from the material’s pattern and its precise arrangement of tears as from the textile itself.

“It’s rude to look,” said a voice from somewhere behind her.

Monica Sawyer tried to speak but all that came out was a kind of clack-clack-clack. She was scared. Of the shapes in the fabric. Of this place. Of this cold, cold night.

But more than anything, she was scared of this voice, which kept on speaking, using words her mind blocked her from hearing, kept on changing accent, changing tone, all coming from a shape that must have been perched somewhere on the roof all the time, looking at a frozen Rome perfect beneath a frozen sky.