David Hewson (18 page)

"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.

Venerdi

NIC
COSTA LOOKED OUT OF THE LIVING-ROOM WINDOW, out at the bright morning and
a garden that was a perfect sheet of white, broken only by the bent old-men
backs of olive trees sagging under the weight of snow. The farmhouse off the
Appian Way couldn't cope with the weather. It was still cold, in spite of
two log fires roaring away at either end of the big, airy room. This was home,
though, a good place to be. Since his father died and Costa had embarked on a
lengthy, solitary recuperation from a near-fatal shooting, the house had rarely
echoed to anything but his own footsteps. That was a shame. It was a place that
needed people to make it live again.

He
glanced at last summer's logs crackling and sputtering in the ancient
fireplaces, still damp from the snow, and remembered what his father had looked
like during those final days, swathed in a blanket in his wheelchair, slipping
away gradually, battling his disease every inch of the way. Then he heard the
deep, round sound of Gianni Peroni's guffaw roll out of the kitchen,
followed, a little more hesitantly, by light young laughter.

Teresa
Lupo walked out, shaking her head, and eyed the tray in his hands. "Are
you going to take it up to her, Nic? Or shall I? That coffee's going cold
and there's nothing Americans hate more than cold coffee."

"I'll
do it. How is he?"

"Gianni?"
Teresa's eyes were shining, as if she'd been close to tears. She
looked exhausted, but happy too. Costa had called her after the incident in the
Campo. It was her decision to drive there straightaway, then on to the
farmhouse. Costa wondered how they would have coped without her.