Costa 08 - City of Fear (9 page)

To My Beautiful Marie on the Birth of Our Son, Daniel. 19 August 1986. Mia per sempre, Renzo
.

A FIERCE, DRY BREEZE ARRIVED THAT AFTERNOON. BY evening the natives were complaining about the unseasonably hot weather, and much else besides. In the space of a few hours Rome had changed, become a tense, nervous city, jumpy at the sight of its own time-worn shadows. Armies of workmen had descended on the area around the Quirinale Palace, erecting tall, ugly fencing and security gates at every intersection. High, threatening guard posts were beginning to spread as far as the broad, open thoroughfare Mussolini had carved through the Forum, and in the open central square of the Piazza Venezia itself. The media had adopted Palombo’s terminology, calling it a “ring of steel” to protect the world leaders who were starting to arrive to attend the summit inside the palace. They forecast that the Quirinale hill and most of the area around it would become a forbidden zone for all but the most privileged of citizens, and few Romans or tourists would find life easy for several days to come.

Little of this appeared to concern police pathologist Teresa Lupo, who, thanks to her recent elevation to head of the forensic unit in Commissario Esposito’s Questura, had acquired a new smartphone—one that, for the moment, seemed more interesting than the present company. Costa watched her tapping frantically into her little gadget at their table in Sacro e Profano, a small church in a back street behind the Trevi Fountain that had been converted into a Calabrian restaurant and pizzeria. She had celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday three weeks
before, though Costa felt she had scarcely aged in the six years he’d known her. Awkward, doggedly persistent, blessed with an acute intelligence that sometimes led her astray, she was, like Peroni and Falcone, one of his closest friends. Now that she and Peroni were an established couple, and his divorce had finally come through, there was speculation in the Questura that one day soon they would marry. Costa thought he would like that, that he could imagine the two of them together on the big day, both uneasy in new clothes, their big, shambling frames encased inside something they’d never wear again. There was an everyday honesty and devotion between the two of them, a friendship that embraced love too and made them a pleasure to be around, even when the work turned dark and relentless.

He took his attention away from Teresa, tapping away at the phone with her fat fingers, her pale, broad face entirely absorbed in the moment. Their table was on the upper level, where the church organ might once have sat. This gave them a grand view of the vast wood-fired oven that seemed to provide almost everything—pizzas, meat, fish, vegetables—the place produced, and wafted the occasional wisp of smoky aromatic oak up from the nave below.

He could scarcely believe they were eating out together so soon after the afternoon’s brutal events. When the sound of gunfire interrupted his bewildering conversation with Dario Sordi in the palace gardens, Costa had raced to the scene with Esposito and Falcone. It was easier to run than drive through the stationary snarl of Roman traffic. Whoever was responsible for the attack had been wise to rely on two wheels for their escape.

At least all three officers were safe, even if the news about Giovanni Batisti was as bad as anyone might have feared. Soon the narrow stretch of the street where the attack occurred had come to be swamped by other parties. Luca Palombo and his counterparts from America and elsewhere had arrived to take control. Not long after that, everyone in the Polizia di Stato came to understand their place in the pecking order.

Teresa, with a small group led by her assistant Silvio Di Capua, managed to spend almost fifteen minutes in the room where Batisti and the corpse of his apparent killer were found. Then they were ejected by a team from the Carabinieri, under Palombo’s direction.

Peroni, Rosa, and Mirko Oliva had been interviewed for almost two hours, with Commissario Esposito in attendance. After that they had been sent out into the street, where the two younger officers disappeared into a nearby bar, shell-shocked and, it seemed to Costa, rather closer to one another than they had been previously. The rest of them returned to the Questura, where the atmosphere was unreal, as if they had entered a lull before some unpredictable storm.

After a few desultory attempts to work their way back into the investigation, efforts that Commissario Esposito rapidly stamped upon, Leo Falcone suggested dinner. The invitation came as such a surprise that no one objected. Strictly speaking, their shift was over—Peroni should have gone off duty hours before. They were all tired, yet aware of an unspent nervous energy, a need to talk. Costa was astonished to discover that he was rather hungry too. Or rather, some inner voice appeared to be urging him to eat soon, because it might be a while before he had another chance to sit down again with friends in a decent restaurant.

A waiter came over with a trolley piled high with plates of fish and vegetables and a small bowl of the scorching pepper sauce Costa always associated with Calabria.

“That’s very kind,” Peroni told him, “but we didn’t order this.”

His battered, homely face still looked a little pale. Costa had been inside that upper room, seen what was in there. The big ugly cop was never good around blood.

Falcone, never one to be squeamish, was already prodding gently at the choicer dishes with his fork, judging the food with the studied and detached care with which he measured those around him. It was a very good restaurant.

The waiter leaned down and in a lowered voice said, “We know who you are. We’ve seen the inspector here before. It was all on the TV. We heard it.”

“Heard what?” Falcone asked as he picked at what looked like tuna and swordfish, already forking pieces onto his plate.

“That you’re …
off the case,”
the waiter said with a theatrical flourish, visibly pleased with his own ability to produce what he thought of as cop-speak. “So you come here. You eat, you think. All those stuck-up
bastards in the Carabinieri, the government. They think they own the world.”

He put down the bottle of wine, which was still, to Peroni’s visible concern, unopened.

“They close the streets. They build a wall around the Quirinale. Where are we living? Rome or Berlin in the 1950s? And when some ordinary guy in the police sticks his neck on the line, what do they do? Sit in their offices until the shooting stops, then come and take it all away from you like they know best.”

“We’ve still got Traffic,” Peroni said brightly. “Didn’t they mention that?”

“No.”

“You should never believe what you hear in the media,” Falcone suggested, then placed a long finger on the side of his nose and winked.

The waiter mouthed, “Ah …” and made the same gesture. Peroni, getting desperate, held up the wine bottle, which the waiter uncorked, pouring four full glasses. The rich, aromatic smell of Pugliese
primitivo
mingled with the smoke from the oven downstairs.

“Haruspicy,” Teresa declared, finally looking up from the phone after the waiter disappeared.

“It’s not on the menu,” Peroni pointed out.

“I’m not talking about food, you fool! It’s what was going on back there. In that room. In the Via Rasella. Or so they’d like us to think.”

Peroni’s fork dangled over some cold meat. A look of foreboding crossed his big, bucolic face. She glanced at him and added, “Let’s get this out of the way before we eat, shall we?”

“Oh, wonderful,” he groaned. “If you insist …”

“This is exactly what Leo and Nic were told about in the Quirinale. The Blue Demon. Terrorism with an Etruscan flavor. No surprises. Well, not many.”

She held out her phone. There was a photo of some ancient, dark metal object in a museum. Costa craned forward, along with the others, in order to see better. It looked like a very odd ornament, one with a distinct and organic shape.

“The Liver of Piacenza,” Teresa announced.

“Liver?” Peroni asked weakly. “As in …?”

“As in liver. Batisti was mutilated in a very specific fashion. Silvio managed to get me some old news reports about the Frascas’ murder. It looks as if they were injured in much the same way. It was a ritual. Not quite disembowelment, but …” She winced, from lack of facts, not something squeamish. “A haruspex divined the future by looking at the liver of a slaughtered animal. The Liver of Piacenza was used to train people to read what they found. It divides the organ into specific areas that may or may not relate to stellar constellations. There were light surface knife marks on Giovanni Batisti that mirror those used on the Piacenza object. To make them look like the work of an Etruscan haruspex.”

Peroni’s fork halted halfway to his mouth. “Do we need to know this?” he moaned.

“Of course,” she insisted. “We’re meant to. Someone doesn’t inflict an injury on a dead man without a reason.”

They stared at her.

“A dead man?” Costa asked.

“It was all theater. Batisti was killed by a bullet through the back of the head. Then they butchered him in a very specific way to make it look like haruspicy.” She pointed to the photo. “I can’t think of any other explanation. Why else would you partially remove a man’s liver and run a knife over it to make a pattern based on some ancient form of divination? There was an egg in a saucer on the table too. That was another Etruscan form of fortune-telling.”

“Why on earth …?” Falcone began.

“I told you. It was a message,” Teresa interrupted. “A positive ID for our benefit. Like that poster of the Blue Demon on the wall. Like the Roman numerals. It was Andrea Petrakis leaving his calling card. A boast, if you like. Petrakis wants to make sure we know it was him, and that he hasn’t forgotten his beloved Etruscans.”

“And
they
were
who
exactly?” Peroni asked, bemused.

“The people here before us. That was their tough luck. Rome wiped them out. An entire civilization. It was a long time ago. This was ancient history for Julius Caesar, for pity’s sake. But not for Andrea Petrakis. The Liver of Piacenza was a training tool for a haruspex, like a model skeleton for a modern physician. Historians like Petrakis drool over it
because it’s one of the few examples of the Etruscan language. The only other of any substance is in Zagreb, on the remains of a mummy’s shroud. It was made out of linen that was covered in Etruscan script. Rites, rituals, prayers. They call it the
Liber Linteus.”

“Linteus
means linen, doesn’t it?” Costa asked.

“Who says a Latin education is wasted? Exactly. Andrea Petrakis would know all about this. The theory that went around after the Blue Demon murdered the Frasca couple was that Petrakis regarded himself as the leader of some kind of nationalist liberation movement. A lunatic looking for a revival of the Etruscan nation, who were, like him, originally Greek. Before Rome came along, the Etruscans controlled most of Italy, from the Po in the north as far as Salento in the south. The
Liber Linteus
is the only book of theirs that survives. The Romans burned the rest. If you think of yourself as Etruscan, you can understand why you might feel a little oppressed. I guess.”

The pizzas arrived and Peroni asked, “Does the fact we’re talking history mean that the liver part is done with?”

“Pretty much,” she replied, nodding. “Petrakis was a junior professor in Etruscan studies at an age when most kids would still be working on a postgrad degree. A world-class obsessive. Maybe, in his own crazy head, it makes sense to kill people like this.”

Costa shook his head. “I don’t see it. He’s an intelligent man. Who’d believe in a separatist movement based around a civilization that was destroyed more than two thousand years ago?”

“You can never apply logic to terrorism,” Falcone suggested.

“I’m not sure about that,” Costa insisted. “This man was capable enough to escape from Italy, then hide away in Afghanistan for two decades. To deal with weapons. Money. Why would he take to pretending to read the future through butchering another human being, the way some primitive tribe did?”

Teresa Lupo frowned at him with the disappointed expression of a teacher failed by a bright pupil. Now that she and Peroni had settled into a relationship that seemed more close, and happy, than many marriages, she was beginning to resemble the big man. The same love of food was visible in their stout, healthy frames, and a similarly skeptical approach to the world in their pale, engaged faces.

“He didn’t,” she told him. “First, the Etruscans didn’t indulge in human sacrifice. They would have been horrified by the very idea. Their priests slaughtered animals, not men.”

She skimmed her fingers over the phone and brought up new photos. Costa stared at pastoral scenes of dancing and celebrations, tall, elegant women, bearded, handsome men. Then more, these photos vividly sexual in nature.

“The Estruscans weren’t brutal primitives just emerging from the Iron Age, either. More like colonizing Greek hippies. The Romans thought them degenerate and debauched. Uncontrollable hedonists who did what they wanted, when they wanted, to anyone they chose.”