David Hewson (25 page)

Laila
couldn't stop stealing either, even in the house. Peroni had patiently
removed all manner of stuff--cutlery, food, family photographs, even an
old, stained ashtray--from the multitude of pockets in the grubby black
jacket the girl wore all the time. God knows what she'd stashed in the
room Nic had given her upstairs, where she retreated from time to time.

The
three of them now sat in front of the bigger of the two fires, Laila sprawled
out teenage-fashion on an old sofa, trying to read a comic book Nic had dug up
from somewhere. Peroni was slumped in the chair next to her, eyes closed,
snoring lightly. It was getting on for noon. Teresa had already called the
office and checked with Silvio Di Capua. The autopsy on Mauro Sandri was done,
the report filed safely in the cabinet marked "boring," the one
that said people who die from gunshot wounds and knives were rarely deserving
of further attention. Agent Leapman and his friends had made sure she
couldn't get her hands on the one body that did interest her, that of the
so-called Margaret Kearney.

Silvio
sounded as if he was coping. He needed to be left on his own more, Teresa
thought, needed to understand he was capable of this.

Then
the sequence of events of the previous day raced through her mind.

"Shit,"
she hissed abruptly to herself and reached again for the phone. Gianni Peroni
didn't even stir. He was sound asleep.

When
she phoned, Teresa had meant to tell Silvio to take the dead American
woman's belongings round to the embassy. It had slipped her memory.
You're
getting old
, she thought.
This is Alzheimer's kicking in
.

And
it doubtless meant another argument soon, maybe more trouble for Leo Falcone
from those faceless men above him. She'd heard whispers going round the
Questura the previous night. Falcone was in trouble. His career escalator was
stuck. Maybe soon it would start to go the other way.

Yeah
, she
thought. These were the tricks men played when they wanted something. Don't
take a person to one side and say, what's the problem? Just bring out the
whips and the shackles and start talking demotion. Maybe worse.

On the other hand
...

It
meant there was the opportunity for another look. Once they'd achieved
something here. Not that she expected to find anything. She didn't fool
herself about that for one moment. It would just feel right to be trying.
She'd been no use to Peroni and Nic with the girl. They might as well
have invited in an alien.

Or
Leo Falcone, she suddenly thought.

"Laila,"
she whispered, catching the kid's attention. She got a hint of a
suspicious smile in return. Teresa nodded at the sleeping Peroni, making the
obvious gesture with her two palms pressed to the sides of her head.

Then
she pointed to the kitchen and got up. The girl, as she'd hoped, followed
her.

There
was just enough juice left for a couple of small glasses. Men and shopping, she
thought. Venus and Mars.

"We
made a good snowman. You must have done that before."

The
girl made a puzzled face. "No."

The
squat figure sat in the garden, staring back at them through the frosted glass,
an old man's hat found in a cupboard somewhere perched lopsidedly on his
white head.

"We
treat you like a kid. And you're not. Not really, are you?"

Laila
squirmed. Teresa wished she could get the hang of this awkward challenge in
communication. Peroni had a family of his own. It gave him a head start with a
recalcitrant kid like this.

"It
doesn't matter. When I go to town, is there something you need? Someone
you'd like me to contact?"

The
dark eyes clouded over instantly. All that suspicion again. Maybe Peroni would
have been graced with a real answer. Not her. "No..."

Teresa
touched the old, grubby jacket. "How about some new clothes?"

"I
get my own clothes."

"You're
such a pretty kid. Slim too. It would be a pleasure to buy something. I was
never slim. At your age..."

Teresa
tried to remember herself then, to put the image she had in her own head
against what she saw in Laila now. "I was a fat, bad-tempered little
monster. Not much changes."

The
girl laughed, a little nervously.

"What's
so funny?" Teresa asked. "Don't you believe me?"

"No!"

There
was a divide you couldn't cross and if she knew more about kids, as much
as Peroni did, she'd have understood that already. A kid could never see
an adult and imagine them when they were young, never envisage them as anything
but what they were: part of another world, in Laila's case a threatening
one, fixed, run by other people, with their arguments and hidden possibilities.
Peroni had worked on that assumption from the moment he started talking to the
girl. He didn't pretend to be anything he wasn't. He simply set out
his position--
I will be your friend, you can trust me, just keep
listening and you'll see
--and let her find a way to get close
to him, like a moth attracted to a distant flickering flame. It established a
connection, almost straightaway. It created room for hurt too. Teresa and the
kid had both heard the tail end of Peroni's heated conversation with
Falcone. Peroni even told her a little of what it was about. Teresa, the
grown-up rational adult, was able to dismiss this level of bickering as the way
things were. Laila was different. She heard the sound of men yelling at each
other and shrank into herself, fearing the worst.

"So
what do you think I was like when I was your age?"

Laila
thought about it. "Normal."

"Hah!
How wrong can you get? I'm not normal now, kid. You want to know what
they call me? In the Questura?"

"What?"

"
"Crazy Teresa." The lunatic pathologist. Mad as they come."

Laila
shook her head, refusing to accept a word of it. This seemed, to Teresa Lupo,
dreadfully unfair.

"It's
true," she asserted, "whether you believe it or not. And I
am
crazy. Crazy enough to buy you some stuff just because I want to. Just because
all that black gear drives me nuts. Why be pretty and hide it?"

Laila
didn't think of herself as pretty. Pretty didn't exist in
Laila's world. She probably didn't think of herself at all. A
flicker of anxiety crossed her face. "When will they make me go?"

"Nobody's
making you do anything, Laila."

She
didn't believe that either. Teresa couldn't blame her. It was a
particularly vague answer, one full of holes even a thirteen-year-old street
kid could see.

"Gianni
stays with me?"

"Sure.
For a while. But he's a cop. He's got work to do. Lots of work.
You're not his..."

Teresa
checked herself, horrified at the words running through her head:
You're
not his kid, he's got two of them and he already thinks he's failed
them. You're just filling in the spaces without even knowing it
.

"It's
not his job, Laila. We'll work something out. But Gianni and Nic are paid
to find bad people and put them in prison. They have to find that man you saw.
They need you to help them."

The
girl threw her skinny arms around herself, staring at the floor.

"I
didn't see anything," she mumbled. "I just..."

You
didn't threaten in a situation like this. That couldn't work. Yet
they'd spent hours trying to pull out the facts of what happened, piece
by piece, from Laila's head, and it was all so... meagre. The address
had come easily. The rest was a jumble. She had followed the man because he
looked "interesting."

Really.
How, Laila
? The kid didn't explain. She merely shrugged. This
was what she did. Follow people. Maybe, Teresa thought, offer them
something--she didn't want to think what--then take their money
and their wallets, too.

They'd
got Laila to talk as far as she wanted to. Then she'd clammed up, however
subtly Peroni tried to find a way past her defences. Every understated question
just walked straight into a brick wall.

Teresa
Lupo tried to imagine what it was like for her that night. You sneaked into an
old temple because someone left the door open. So what were you thinking?

It's warm in there
.

OK.
And what do you think when you get there and see two people, a man and a woman,
close up to each other, something going on?

They're going to make out and I can watch
.

OK
too. She knew she'd have done that at thirteen.

I can steal stuff. God knows what
.

And
that was OK as well, except nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. The
two didn't make out. Probably not, anyway, from what Teresa had seen of
the body.

The
man had strangled her with his special piece of cord, the one he kept for such
occasions. Then he took off all her clothes, pulled out a scalpel, looked
around the room, flipped her over so that her dead face bit into all that
ancient stone, did his work (which he'd know by heart by now, without the
need for templates, because he'd done it--how many?--eight
times before already), then flipped the poor mutilated bitch back and let her
blank, unseeing eyes stare at the oculus, pulled out her arms like that, cold
fingers pointing out at some hidden magical points in space.

Teresa
looked at Laila and a hidden inner voice provided the answer, persuaded her she
knew what had happened, so surely she didn't need to keep asking this
poor kid over and over again.

Laila
had done what any sane person would have done in the circumstances. She'd
hidden in the shadows, just where she was when Nic came into the place,
cowering, shivering, stifling the scream in her throat, refusing to look
because seeing would make those noises she was hearing take on another
dimension, let them climb straight into her brain and stay there forever.

Teresa
put a hand on the girl's shoulder and smiled. "Just tell me the
truth, Laila. Then we'll leave it. You really didn't see anything,
did you? It was just too... bad. Too scary to look. It's nothing to
be ashamed of. We'd all have done the same."

"I
told you," the girl said with a pout.

No, you didn't
, she wanted to say. Even Gianni Peroni had missed that, maybe because
it needed a woman to understand how a teenage girl would react to that
particular fear. Men had a curiosity they couldn't quell. They
had
to watch. It was compulsive. A woman had somewhere else to go, somewhere inside
herself where she could believe the world was still warm and kind and
ultimately good.

She
wished to God Peroni had been awake and standing there then. Because Teresa
Lupo knew this kid was telling the truth, and knew, too, she was hiding
something. No amount of street life, no big, shadowy pre-history, could explain
the shifty expression in her eyes. There was a secret there. Maybe it was too
personal--thirteen-year-olds could do things for a man too. Maybe...

You haven't a clue
, Teresa told herself.
Quit guessing. Either she tells or she
doesn't
.

Teresa
thought about Falcone and how he would have handled an interview like this. He
and Peroni were so different, used such dissimilar tactics to reach the same
end. Temperamentally she was closer to Falcone. She didn't like fishing,
didn't care for walking around a problem, looking for its weaknesses. You
plunged in, asked the right questions, then stood there, arms crossed, tapping
your feet loudly on the floor until the answers came. It was one reason she
liked Peroni so much. Loved him even, though she wasn't quite sure
exactly what that meant. Gianni added some charity into the day-to-day routine
of investigation. He got what he wanted by exploiting some innate belief that
in just about everyone there existed some small spark of humanity, if only you
could find it. She was in no doubt this was a weird way for a cop to proceed. Even
Costa, who was once a pushover, had started to toughen up his act of late. The
job did that to most of them. Why twenty years of dealing with vice made Gianni
Peroni the man he was, more sensitive, not less, was beyond her.

But
Peroni had gone as far as he could. It was time to lean on Falcone's
tactics a little. Besides, all she was doing was telling Laila the truth,
juiced up a little.

"Do
you know what it means to get fired?" Teresa asked
sotto voce
,
casting an eye into the living room, making sure Peroni was still asleep.

Some
emotion flickered in Laila's eyes. "I'm not stupid."

"I
know that. I just wanted to make sure you understood."

"Understood
what?"

Teresa
hesitated, as if she'd overstepped the mark. "It's nothing.
It's about Gianni. It doesn't concern you."

"I
know what being fired means," the girl repeated.