Costa 08 - City of Fear (45 page)

The inspector stood up. “You say Sordi is in the garden around six-thirty?”

“Usually. Same place. Creature of habit.”

“Habits can kill,” Peroni grumbled. “We’ve still got half an hour or so. How about I check the outside? There has to be some kind of vantage point on those gardens. Someone might get on the roof.”

“Check it out,” Falcone ordered. “Get two or three officers you can trust. Take a separate car. We’ll go straight to the Quirinale and see if we can argue our way in. Tell no one.”

Minutes later, they were back in the Lancia, trying to squeeze the big sedan out of the tangle of police vehicles swamping the cobblestones of the Piazza di San Michele Arcangelo.

There was a quick, sharp rap on the driver’s-side window.

It was Signora Campitelli, the old woman who’d scolded the security men earlier. She seemed insistent, so much so that she was blocking the only way out.

Costa wound down the glass. “Signora, can this wait? We’re in a hurry.”

“Showed those bastards, didn’t we?
No maschere a Roma!”

Falcone was getting furious in the passenger seat, about to say something that might have persuaded her to stay where she was, out of nothing more than bloody-mindedness.

“We did indeed,” Costa said hastily. “Excuse us, please. We have to go show them again.”

“Hah!”

Her stick rose triumphantly toward the soft evening sky. She stepped back, still shouting, dragging her shopping cart sufficiently to one side to allow the wide car to squeeze through.

“May we now depart?” Falcone banged the blue light on the roof and activated the device.

The klaxon’s shriek echoed off the high terraces of the
centro storico
. The Lancia crisscrossed the warren of narrow streets, finally screeching into the broader thoroughfare of the Corso, where the shoppers were now wandering down the middle of the road, starting to revisit stores that had been empty or closed for days. The Piazza Venezia was returning to its normal state of chaos. Workmen were already dismantling one of the high checkpoint towers that Palombo’s men had erected earlier in the week.

It took little more than a minute to climb the Quirinale hill and abandon the car in the street next to the piazza.

The bell of
Il Torrino
was finishing its mark of the hour, the sixth peal dying over the hill.

There were two
corazzieri
in regal uniform on the gate, and a third in the pillar box. All looked as miserable as sin for some reason. Falcone marched up to the sentry in the cabin. Costa followed, ID card out. The inspector demanded to speak to Fabio Ranieri.

“Not available,” the man said, and nothing more.

“Ranieri is a friend of mine,” Costa added. “This is important. You must find him.”

“Not … available …”

“Then call the duty captain. I need to speak to him.”

One of the others came over, sensing trouble.

“Something wrong?” he asked, in a gruff northern voice.

“We need to see the duty officer now—” Falcone began.

“You can’t,” the
corazziere
in the box repeated. “That’s final. Come back tomorrow. Maybe by then someone can tell us what the hell’s going on here.…”

Costa elbowed his way past the sentry and picked up the phone.

“Cut that out!” the man yelled, slamming his fist hard on the handset. “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you know who’s boss around here now?”

“Who?” Falcone asked.

The officer nodded in the direction of the Ministry of the Interior. “Those gray-faced bastards. Not us. Not anymore.”

“We’re state police officers,” Costa told him. “We’ve been investigating the Blue Demon on the personal orders of President Sordi. We now believe there will be an attempt on Sordi’s life, within the next half hour.”

The three tall figures in silver breastplates looked at one another. One officer took off his helmet and said uneasily, “You’d better not be jerking us around.”

“Andrea Petrakis is planning an attack within these walls,” Costa insisted. “Very soon. With help from someone on the inside. Someone let that woman in this afternoon, didn’t they? I don’t think it was one of the Corazzieri.”

“No. I don’t think it was.” The officer stared at the oldest of the three. “Ranieri’s in custody somewhere and every last
corazziere
apart from us is sitting on their backside in the barracks till someone lets them out.”

The higher-ranking officer didn’t look them in the eye when he said, “You heard our orders.”

“Your orders are to guard the president, aren’t they?” Costa persisted, trying to push a button that might work. “Who’s doing that now?”

“We are,” the talkative one said immediately. “Three of us. Plus a bunch of waiters and a few goons from the Ministry. It’s a tomb in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. That Palombo bastard has taken over Ranieri’s office as if he owns it. God knows who else is in the building. Except”—he thought for a moment—“some other
corazziere
I spotted wandering down in that direction a couple of minutes ago.”

He turned to the senior officer again. “Something is wrong, and you know it.”

“If you’re mistaken about this …” the senior
corazziere
told Costa.

“Take us to Palombo now,” Falcone cut in. “Free Ranieri. We’ll bear the responsibility.”

The senior officer didn’t even move.

Then the younger officer cursed softly. He stepped into the cabin and grabbed a set of keys.

“For God’s sake. If he won’t do it, I will. Follow me.”

A GOOD BOOK, A CUP OF EARL GREY TEA, A PLATE OF English cookies. These familiar items seemed, to Dario Sordi, comforting signs of a world beginning to find some kind of equilibrium. The president sat in his usual shady spot in the deserted Quirinale garden, content, almost at ease.

It was earlier than his usual time, but the palace was unusually empty save for a few servants. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes alone in his apartment making discreet phone calls to men and women who mattered. Politicians and judges, allies, the uncommitted, even an occasional foe. It was important they heard the truth about the Ybarra woman from him, and understood his insistence that she be dealt with inside the Italian judicial system, investigated by the police and no others.

There would be arguments. There always were. This was the world of politics, and he was only the president—not, as Ugo Campagnolo constantly reminded the media, a politician elected by the masses. Nevertheless, Sordi felt, as he ended the final call, that he might win this particular battle. The Questura’s rapid decision to bring in the combative Giulia Amato as investigating magistrate had been a wise move. The woman was not the type to be diverted by a quiet threat from some party hack and the promise of preferment. Even with his growing ranks of supporters placed in the political hierarchy and the law enforcement
agencies, Campagnolo would be hard-pressed to seize Anna Ybarra from the grip of the police and the magistrate.

He found himself staring at the expressionless face of Hermes. The handsome young god always seemed distracted, a little fey, as he stretched down to tie the ribbon on his marble sandal.

“Do you have any messages for me, I wonder?” Sordi asked aloud.

There was silence, punctuated only by the distant rumble of a jet wheeling high overhead, something he hadn’t heard in a while.

“Another Etruscan in our midst,” the president murmured, recalling a little of his school-days mythology. His native city had inherited the past, for good and bad. History always emerged like an orphan, anonymous, unclaimed, impossible to control. Like the Blue Demon itself. Alone now, able to think clearly for the first time in days, Sordi felt he could finally begin to understand a little of the original inspiration for that terrifying image on the subterranean tomb in the Maremma, and the effect it had on the impressionable Andrea Petrakis. For the doomed Etruscans—for Petrakis too—the Blue Demon
was
Rome, with her rapacious, insatiable hunger for domination, for territory and power, at any human cost. That ruthless greed, a burning desire to own and rule, was one more gift his ancestors had handed down to the modern Western world, alongside more noble ideals about law and charity and God. Which of them was now uppermost? Sordi didn’t wish to consider this question too closely. His answer might tally too easily with that of a confused and embittered individual like Andrea Petrakis. The Etruscans, with their worldly, hedonistic attitude to life, had invented for themselves a bright and fleeting paradise, one that had been stolen from them, then destroyed by the men from the south who brought guilt and responsibility, democracy and order, into an enclosed, interior society built on nothing more than a lust for the immediacy of existence.

This endless argument was, in a sense, the very same squabble Sordi had pursued with Nic’s father, Marco, over the years—one that had, in the end, driven two dear friends apart. Should a human being choose the dull, dead round of pragmatism and responsibility over the brief and brilliant spark of individual satisfaction, the ecstasy of the moment? Was a life that spanned eight decades of duty and routine and
service really more worthy than some briefer interlude that lit the sky with fireworks and then vanished, leaving the stage to others dazzled by the intensity of its departure?

He waved the book in his hands at the mute statue. “If you could read, my friend, you’d know these choices are made for us. By nature, not intellect.” Sordi frowned. “They always have been. They always will be.”

It was the visit to Marco’s son that had prompted him to pick up his own copy of Graves’s
I, Claudius
again. There’d been little time for reading of late. Besides, he knew the work so well that he was able to turn directly to the parts he loved most, skipping over the author’s occasional historical peregrinations.

His bookmark stood at chapter 34, a few pages from the end. Gone was the flowery language and philosophy. This was a plain retelling of the climax of this first part of Claudius’s story. How a man regarded by most as a stammering, slobbering cripple—an idiot, worthy only of ridicule—could rise to the emperor’s throne, against his own most fervent wishes.

Sordi wondered if he loved this story so much because, in some ways, it mirrored his own. Claudius was a republican, a believer in democracy, not the dictatorship of the imperial family. He’d spent years in the wilderness before being thrust into power by a quirk of fate, only to find that the demands of being head of state circumscribed and made impractical the very principles he held so dear as a powerless ordinary citizen.

The president recalled the old copy he’d found in Marco Costa’s library, a gift to his former ally, a kind of apology. And the inscription.

From Dario, the turncoat
.

Was this what he’d become? Through compromise and pragmatism, a traitor to his own beliefs?

Claudius had come to feel that way toward the end of his life, when the intrigue around him reached a feverish intensity. Graves, basing his story for the most part on the account of the emperor’s reign given by Suetonius, had him murdered at the hands of his own wife, Agrippina, acting in concert with her son, Nero, the emperor’s chosen successor. The author’s fictional but all-too-realistic Claudius went to his fate
with his eyes wide open, praying that his own end, and the accession of the monstrous tyrant Nero, would finally bring about what he had failed to achieve in his lifetime: the ruin of the tyrannical imperial family, the restoration of Rome to republican democracy.

Politicians, much more than ordinary men and women, agonized long and hard over what they might leave behind after their deaths, perhaps because they realized only too well their failings in life. Claudius’s modern successors were little different. They too often came to count their legacies for the most part in blood. Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus spilled more than his fair share in his sixty-four years. Yet would Claudius have created such a lost and malevolent creature as Andrea Petrakis? Sordi was reminded once more of the old saw: What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. The constant battle between liberty and security, democracy and the need to safeguard a broken and imperfect state, seemed as real and as undecided now as it was when a frightened, uncertain cripple of the royal family cowered in an anteroom of Nero’s palace on the Palatine, another Roman hill, a short distance away across the Forum, two thousand years before.

He opened the book and found the page, feeling both a little distracted and disturbed by these thoughts. The tale of Claudius’s conversion, from terrified bystander to reluctant emperor, was so amusingly written that he could read it again and again. But there was a prerequisite to its denouement. Before the new king could be crowned, the old one had to die.

THERE WERE BUILDINGS IN ROME THAT A WISE POLICE officer never asked about. The high, anonymous block at the back of the Quirinale was just such a one. There was no sign on the door, just a fancy high-tech entrance with a man in a dark uniform beyond the glass and a trickle of nondescript people going home for the evening.