Costa 08 - City of Fear (16 page)

Conti glanced out of the window. “If you’d told me he was capable of such things … Those poor young idiots in the Maremma. I taught them. The girl, Nadia Ambrosini, was very pretty, if somewhat vapid and lacking in academic focus.” He pointed a short, wrinkled finger at them. “I was merely a curator then. Had I thought anything untoward was in the cards …”

“You would have acted, sir,” Peroni assured him. “No one foresaw what would happen. You’ve no need to feel any guilt.”

“Easy for you to say,” Conti responded. “When they come here as students, they’re in our charge. We’re responsible for them. We have to be, since so often they refuse to be responsible for themselves.”

“Why did the other students worship him?” Peroni asked.

Pietro Conti looked puzzled. “Who said they did?”

“They followed him. He was the leader of their group. They went to that place of his parents’, near Tarquinia. There were photographs.…”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you see in the gutter press. I read those stories too. How Andrea was some sort of Svengali. I assumed they were the fantasies of a desperate reporter. You think otherwise?”

Peroni said, “Possibly.”

“Well, I can’t say I noticed. I rather felt the students were laughing at him most of the time. Or using him. The girl in particular. Female students can be like that. Cruel.”

Teresa found herself glancing at Peroni, reassured to see he found this just as baffling.

“But they went to that place in the country,” she pointed out. “They died there.”

“Yes,” the director agreed. “They did.” He wriggled uncomfortably in his seat, as if steeling himself to say something unpleasant. “Look. I was never asked this before. I find it odd that I am going over this subject now, twenty years after those three children were put in their graves.” He cleared his throat. “Andrea Petrakis was a very clever, very unusual, and rather unpleasant young man. One of his talents was that he knew how to provide his peers with whatever they wanted. A place where they could go and … ‘hang out,’ was the phrase back then, I believe.”

“Hang out?” she asked.

Conti glared at her. “Oh, please. I’m no fool. They used to talk about it, quite openly. They were little more than provincial children, most of whom had fled very traditional Catholic upbringings. Andrea offered them a place where they could do whatever they liked. If they adored him—and I have my doubts about that—it was for purely practical purposes. He provided them with what they sought, which is the easiest way anyone can win popularity with the young.”

Teresa tried to work this out. “You’re saying they didn’t even
like
him?”

“I’m saying …” He tried to find the right words. “They were two parties who knowingly exploited one another. Petrakis fed their needs. He provided them with drugs. Many drugs. We had officers in the Carabinieri crawling over this place afterwards. Quite why such mundane crimes were of interest to them, in the light of what happened to that unfortunate American couple, is something I’ll never understand.”

“You mean Petrakis was their dealer?” she asked.

“Precisely. In return, they indulged his strange ideas about the Etruscans, and gave him rather a lot of money too, I imagine.”

“Is that what drove them?” she asked. “Not politics, but dope?” The briefing from the Quirinale was either plainly inaccurate or deliberately misleading.

“I never heard a word of politics discussed in those circles. I would have welcomed it if I had. They all seemed remarkably … dull, to be honest with you. Except for Andrea.”

“That’s what these kids wanted? The chance to behave the way they never could at home with Mamma around? To be hippies, like the Etruscans?”

Pietro Conti regarded her contemptuously and asked, “What?”

“Hippies,” she repeated, feeling uncomfortable beneath the heat of his gaze. “Or so I read.…”

He adopted a pose—fingers tented, head to one side—of the indignant academic.

“Where did you read this? In some history book for infants? The Etruscans owned half of Italy for more than two hundred years. They
provided at least three kings of Rome. This was a proud and independent warrior nation that showed its enemies no mercy whatsoever.” He nodded at the door. “You should see some of the exhibits we have. They had a society, a culture, that didn’t fit in with our ideas on morals. But they were no … hippies.” He shrugged. “And in the end they were defeated. Now, because all that Rome has left us is a few tombs and some rather risqué objects, we regard an entire civilization as some fey lost race of aesthetes. Poets bearing olive branches, too delicate for this rough world of ours.”

The old man folded his arms. “Andrea Petrakis was a decent scholar. He certainly knew enough to reject such nonsense. You’ll have to do better with your theories than that, my dear.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, stung.

Peroni came to her rescue. “Can we see where the Frasca couple were found?”

A practical, straightforward question, she realized. Unlike her, Peroni was a cop, someone who thought in straight lines. Sometimes it was the best way to be.

“If you must,” Pietro Conti groaned, and struggled out of his chair. “But before we leave the subject, I will tell you one thing.”

They waited.

“Licentious, weak, self-obsessed, flawed—a people waiting on oblivion, almost inviting it,” the museum director went on. “Should anyone fit that description, it’s us, surely. If an old man like me can see that, so can a younger one as bright as Andrea Petrakis. He gave those foolish children what they wanted. The place in Tarquinia. Their”—his mouth wrinkled with disgust—“
fun
. But he knew it was a weakness and he hated them for that. Hated us too. I saw that in his eyes. Now, let me show you our nymphaeum, such as it is.”

THE DEVICE DENIZ HAD GIVEN HIM LOOKED LIKE THE remote from a video camera. Small, black, plastic, it sat in Joseph Priest’s hand, wriggling in his sweaty grip. There weren’t just models and photographers and a small crowd of gaping locals and tourists crowded round the Trevi Fountain. There were
carabinieri
too, as if they knew—or at least suspected—something might happen.

The Kenyan let slip a quiet curse and told himself not to be so stupid. It was a famous place. There’d be pickpockets and street people, hassling, looking for a purse or a camera to steal. Of course the cops would be there. Except that these cops held weapons, modern automatic rifles, the kind the Mungiki never managed to get, even in Nairobi. They weren’t watching the half-naked women on the perimeter wall fronting the fountain’s foaming waters anymore. They were scanning the crowd, peering hard at anyone they felt deserved it.

Priest was as close to Neptune as he could get. He could have thrown Deniz’s little remote and hit the sea god on the chest, if only that would work. He didn’t give the idea more than a passing thought. Weeks of training in rough itinerant camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had left him in no doubt about the nature of the people he’d joined. Bad luck wasn’t going to serve as an excuse.

One of the
carabinieri
, a thickset man with sunglasses, no more than two strides away, was staring at him, cradling a black rifle in his arms.

Priest surreptitiously stuffed the detonator control back into his pocket and smiled, the big, open grin he imagined he ought to use. Then he removed a counterfeit designer bag from his shoulder, dangled it in front of the man, laughing, trying not to tremble.

“Special cop discount,” he said, aware of the tremor in his voice. “What you think? Huh?”

“I think you should go somewhere else. You know the rules.”

Priest nodded. He didn’t understand the first thing about being a street hawker.

“Cigarette, boss?” he asked, raising his fingers to his mouth.

“No. You got a hearing problem?”

He laughed, cupped his hand to his ear, and shuffled off into the crowd, trying to think. The cop’s eyes were surely boring into his back still. Priest knew he couldn’t wander too far. Deniz’s little control wouldn’t be able to talk to its partner, buried beneath all that contorted stone, in whatever ancient supply system fed the teeming waters of the Acqua Vergine into its
mostra
at the Trevi.

He bumped into someone, apologized, tried to smile again, and found himself looking into the face of a very pretty, very pale woman. She wore a gray business suit with a black leather handbag over her left shoulder and stared at him as if he’d come from another planet.

“I can sell you a nicer bag than that,” he said in English, looking her in the eye. “Something a little brighter.”

“Beat it,” she shot back.

American
.

He held up the same one he’d shown the cop. “For you, a really good price. You’re like me. You got a Third World currency now. And … yeah …”

He grinned. She was a looker. Much more so than Anna Ybarra.

To his surprise she didn’t swear at him. She simply turned back to watch the models jigging away to some music from a system set beside the fountain. There was a big man by her side. She spoke to him. The way the guy nodded in tune to her words told Joseph Priest the man was hers to control.

He had a dark suit, close-cropped dark hair, sunglasses. White shirt
and tie. Muscular, with a tanned face and a thin-lipped mouth that seemed to run in a near-straight horizontal line from one side of his face to the other.

Joseph Priest really didn’t like this guy.

“Scusi,”
he murmured, then pushed his way through the mob until he turned the corner into the narrow street leading back to Tritone.

A quick glance back confirmed what he’d hoped for. The video phone was still there, high on the sign behind the crowd. Andrea, Deniz, and Anna were probably watching everything from the patio of the villa outside Tarquinia, relaxed, laughing maybe, while he risked his neck, alone, without so much as a weapon to help him, since Andrea said that would only increase the danger.

“Always the same,” Priest muttered to himself. “Give the black guy the shit job.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, wondered how big an explosion Deniz had planned, and whether the Turk had been truthful about his chances of escaping its effects.

There’d be lots of flying masonry, he guessed. Lots of smoke and noise and damaged bodies. Getting away didn’t worry him. In Nairobi and Mombasa, he’d crawled out of any number of violent encounters, sometimes right under the nose of the law.

What he didn’t want was to get hurt by his own actions. There’d been some fighting in Afghanistan, a quick escape in the night when the British got too close to where they were staying. A couple of people died in that, and it hadn’t been the other side’s soldiers who killed them, but some crazed Taliban kids, firing off their rifles wildly at anything that moved. To lose your life that way seemed so … unfair.

He leaned up against the wall that ran to the side of the fountain. Neptune’s street show was now a good ten strides away. The stone seemed so solid it ought to survive anything. Joseph Priest checked round, made sure no one was watching, looked up, and did his best to nod discreetly to the phone set high on the wall beyond the models and the bored, rude cops. He wondered if the three of them would notice, whether they were even looking at anything except the heaving sea of bodies that lay just a few seconds away from some bloody oblivion.

They made a strange team. This wasn’t the kind of work Priest enjoyed. Not that he had any choice in the matter.

Timing was essential, Andrea had said. Eleven-thirty exactly, because at that moment the big men of the G8 would be posing for the cameras on the piazza outside the Quirinale Palace, kicking off the summit for the privileged pack of photographers allowed into their secure and private lair to record the event.

He watched the second hand on the fake Rolex that Andrea had given him that morning as it ticked around.

It didn’t seem quite right to pray at that moment. So he took a deep breath and then, his legs stiff from expectancy, sweat starting to prick his brow, pulled out the control once more and thrust his strong dark thumb onto the button.

THEY WALKED THROUGH GALLERIES OF OBJECTS THAT amazed her: glazed ceramics, statues, jewelry. Scenes of a vanished past, of war and love, feasting and mythical creatures, some in agony, some coupled together in strange, unreal forms of ecstasy. The Villa Giulia was a world within itself, one she could hardly believe she had missed in all her years in Rome. Then they were outside, striding through the grounds to the place where Renzo and Marie Frasca’s bodies had been left like store dummies posed for posterity.