Costa 08 - City of Fear (17 page)

The nymphaeum didn’t seem to have changed much in twenty years. All it lacked was two horribly disfigured corpses stretched out on the plinth beneath the gaze of the four stone muses supporting the balustrade above.

The place had been dug out of the dank Roman earth and it smelled of damp and algae. Lily pads choked the narrow stream that ran in a winding channel behind the empty platform. Ferns and moss tumbled from the alcoves. The mosaic in front, a sea triton playing the pipes, was grimy with dust and dirt from the feet of tourists wandering around this small subterranean folly, one that, close up, lacked the grandeur and taste Teresa Lupo had come to associate with the imperial-era grottoes that it sought to imitate. There were no mythical fairy creatures here. Only the ghost of a monster.

Peroni turned and looked at the staircase, thinking in the plain, logical way cops did, one she wished she might, one day, emulate.

“Two corpses,” he said. “Adults. Hard work dragging them in from the street, down those stairs. One man alone—”

“Could not do it,” Pietro Conti agreed. “That is, I think, obvious.”

“Did you come here, the weekend it happened?” she asked.

He shook his head. “The museum was closed to the public for some much-needed building work. I was in Cambridge. A small conference organized by the Fitzwilliam. But …” He shrugged. “I heard enough on my return. By then it was all over.”

“Is there anyone left who was around when it happened?”

“There’s a caretaker. Gatti. Ordinarily he would have been in the apartment. But the place was closed for renovation. There seemed no need.” He pulled out a cell phone and called for the man. “Andrea Petrakis had a key to the main areas. It was his right. He was a junior professor. The people in Viterbo said so.”

Peroni pulled out his pad and looked at the notes there. “They were murdered at their home in Parioli, almost two kilometers from here. He had to transport them by car, drag them in from the street, take them down those stairs, leave his message.…”

“Shakespeare, as it turned out,” Conti grumbled. “It took a lot of cleaning to get rid of that. Nor do I feel it’s the act that a professor, even a junior one, ought to countenance. Spray-painting on the walls of a museum.” He glanced at them. “Andrea was rather fond of tricks and riddles and codes. That play in particular. I think it mirrored his view of the world. The wrong people were in control, you see. Caesar, the dictator posing as a democrat. The heroes were those who would depose him, and instead they found themselves cast as villains. And in the end they would lose.” He sniffed and looked around him at the grimy stones. “As did everyone concerned, I rather thought.”

“Shakespeare,” Teresa repeated, thinking. “Why write a message like that in the first place?”

A burly middle-aged man was striding down the steps. Gatti, the caretaker, looked like a wrestler. He wore a grimy T-shirt and faded jeans, and had a round, bristly bucolic face, ruddy from sun or labor or drink.

“Angelo …” Conti said, standing back as the man arrived. He had a powerful smell of sweat about him, and an expression of surly
bafflement. “These people are from the police. They would like to know what you remember of the Petrakis incident.”

“Why?”

Peroni gazed into his face. “You must have read the papers.”

“Better things to do.”

Conti retreated a little farther and commented, “Reading is not to Angelo’s taste.” A fiery glance came from the hefty workman. “Nor,” the director added hastily, “need it be.”

“Twenty years ago …” Teresa began.

“Two dead people there,” Gatti grunted, pointing at the empty flat stone beneath the four grimy nymphs.

“Did you see them?” Peroni asked him.

“Yes.” Nothing more. This was going to be hard work. Teresa felt her temper rising, then bit her tongue. Peroni was so much better in these situations.

“Tell me what happened, Angelo,” the big cop said quietly. “I know these things are upsetting and we shouldn’t be here asking, after all this time. But we’ve no choice.” He eyed Conti, in a way Gatti couldn’t miss. “We’ve got bosses too. They’re all the same.”

The man laughed a little at that. Angelo Gatti was smarter than he wanted to appear.

“I saw what you saw.
Exactly
what you saw. Two dead people. Lots of blood. Some words on a wall for me to clean up.”

“Nothing else?” Peroni persisted.

“What? To clean up? No. Nothing else. They’d done that. All those cops and people in suits. The photographers. You know what I thought when I got here?”

He wanted to be asked.

“What did you think?” Peroni said.

“I thought there was a wedding going on. So many people with cameras. So many suits and uniforms. No one looking happy. Just like every wedding I ever went to.”

Teresa couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?”

“I told you! The same as everyone else. A bunch of pictures in the paper. I bought one that time. Seemed only right. Only way to find out what was going on. All the bosses”—he glanced at Conti—“were at the
seaside or somewhere. The Carabinieri didn’t want the likes of me around. Went crazy the moment I appeared”—he nodded toward the steps that led to the terrace above—“up there. As if they belonged here. Not me.”

“The bodies …”

“Saw them in the paper. Just like you.”

“Just in the paper? Not here?” Peroni asked. “You’re sure of that? Absolutely?”

“Sure I’m sure. All I saw was a lot of men in suits looking like they were going about their business. Then there was me. Up there. Getting marched off like I’d broken the law or something. Americans. Italians.”

Peroni wasn’t listening to the man’s complaints. He was focusing on detail.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “There were two murder victims found here. You’re telling me none of you saw them? No one from the museum at all?”

“The people we deal with have been dead rather longer than a few hours,” Pietro Conti replied rather pompously. “Why would we want to be involved? He only came because he heard something was going on. Isn’t that right?”

Peroni watched the squat, muscular man. “Where did you hear that, Angelo? That something had happened here?”

“Cafe in Flaminio. Someone saw all the cars turning up. I got curious. I’m the caretaker. Job means what it says.”

Teresa took Peroni to one side. “We’re wasting our time here,” she told him. “These two know nothing. We need to get Silvio and Elizabeth Murray to trawl through the documents and see what they can find.”

“Computers,” Peroni muttered. He glanced at the subterranean hollow around them. “Something odd happened here. We’re not going to find out what it was from some idiotic machine.”

Her voice rose. “So what’s the point if no one remembers a thing?”

The caretaker from the Maremma heard and bridled. He jerked a stubby finger in Teresa Lupo’s direction. “I remember lots. Not my fault it’s not what you want to hear.”

“Angelo has a very good memory,” Pietro Conti added. “That’s one
reason I thought he might be able to help. As much as anyone, anyway. We weren’t involved. None of us were. The Carabinieri and all those gentlemen who came with them. They didn’t want us around. It’s understandable, isn’t it? What did we have to offer, other than the name of Andrea Petrakis?”

“And who gave them that?” Teresa demanded.

The two men exchanged an uneasy glance.

“Not us,” Conti answered eventually. “They had it already. These people were remarkably unpleasant. They took over this place as if they owned it. None of us felt much minded to pose awkward questions.…”

“I asked them,” Gatti announced. “The Carabinieri told me to mind my own business.”

“This was our business,” Conti cut in. “Petrakis was attached to the museum. I’ve no idea where they got his name from. If they’d been asking about drugs, possibly. But not in relation to something of this nature. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. He simply seemed to be one more arrogant young man, not a murderer.”

“The Carabinieri,” Peroni growled. He gazed at Gatti. Teresa could imagine these two in a bar somewhere, groaning about the state of the world over beer and
panini
. “I don’t suppose any of them gave you their names, did they?”

The caretaker shook his grizzled head. “You think they’d have told the likes of me who they were?”

“You could have asked,” Teresa said with a sigh.

“I could have. But I didn’t. They told me to get lost and I wasn’t in the mood to argue. Who wants to see a couple of dead bodies, anyway? What’s the point?”

“Thanks,” Peroni began to say, and started to turn away from beneath the gaze of the four stone nymphs who had been watching their conversation, as if quietly amused.

“I said they never gave me their names,” Gatti added. “Doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

The big cop stopped and stared at him.

“One of them, anyway. Saw him on the TV. Only yesterday. Same long, miserable face as he had back then, when he was young and throwing his weight around. Big man now. Important.”

“Saw who? Where?”

“The
carabiniere
who kicked me out of here when I came looking. He was at the Quirinale Palace when Sordi was laying down the law to us all, about where we can go, what we can do. Two steps behind that cunning old bastard he was, pulling his strings too these days, I guess.”

“Who?” she insisted.

“The TV said he was important. Something to do with security … They called him Palombo.”

THE TREVI FOUNTAIN DIDN’T LOOK ANY DIFFERENT. Nothing had happened. Still, he felt everyone was looking at him. The three of them in their nice, comfortable villa outside Tarquinia most of all.

Joseph Priest put his head down, slipped the detonator back into his pocket, wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans, took the thing out, and tried again. Twice.

What was it Deniz said?
If at first you don’t succeed … get closer
.

Which was a very easy statement from someone sitting on a rich man’s patio miles away, laughing at all this down a phone line.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to be free and penniless in Italy. He could do better than sell cheap bags. He could steal and bully, wriggle his way into any number of scams. Except that he would be just one more penniless black African among the tide of
clandestini
trying to scrape a living off the street. Even if he managed to escape the wrath of the Mungiki forever—and that he somehow doubted—Joseph Priest wondered what he might achieve in a world where, at the age of twenty-eight, he had to begin again from scratch, just as he had as a nine-year-old beggar in Kibera, Nairobi’s slum, the biggest in Africa they said, almost as if it were a matter of pride.

“Deniz, Deniz,” Priest murmured, taking a couple of strides nearer the fountain, checking his watch, seeing he was now a minute late, and
the second hand seemed to have picked up speed. “You’d better not be kidding me, my man.”

He dried his fingers once again, took a deep breath, and pushed the button. Then again. One more step forward. A third try.

Nothing happened. The only phone they gave him was on the wall opposite, recording his failure. He’d no way of calling them, telling them the truth.

It just doesn’t work. I tried. Really. I did
.

Maybe the batteries had gone flat. Maybe the ancient stone beneath Neptune’s feet was so thick, the twenty-first century couldn’t penetrate it. Or the waters of some imperial-era aqueduct had seeped their way into the electronics the Turk had managed to smuggle into the fountain system a few nights before.

The bomb didn’t work and it never would.

Joseph Priest knew that, somehow. Just to prove it to himself, he barged back through the crowd, elbowing everyone out of his way, a cop at one point, even, and the American woman—the looker, the one who’d told him to beat it just a few minutes earlier.

He got to the edge of the fountain and found himself giggling for some reason. Priest pulled out the remote, leaned over the stone wall, grinned at the people round him. Goggle-eyed teenagers, fashion professionals. Photographers. A few tourists too. He pumped the button repeatedly. It was dead. As dead as they ought to be.

He looked at the young girl next to him, grinned, and said, “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

Then he threw Deniz Nesin’s little black toy into the foaming waters of the Trevi Fountain, where it sank beneath the surface to join a glittering collection of coins.

He turned. The American woman and the big guy with the sunglasses were there, up close, staring at him.

She threw back her head. Her hair was blond going on red. Long and soft.

“Sadly,” she said, “I don’t think it’s yours, Joseph.”

He managed to elbow the young kid next to him hard in the ribs, and the way she recoiled from the blow, shrieking in pain and shock, at least gave him a body in the way.

Running was never a problem. He’d been doing that most of his life. But when he got to the edge of the crowd, going back the way he came, toward the ice cream place he’d never revisit, he was shocked to see they were following him, with weapons in their hands. They were close and all they were looking at was him.