David Hewson (36 page)

"Hey,
mister," he moaned, "seeing as how I seem to be doing you favours
day in and day out around here, how about you do one for me?"

"What?"

He
nodded at the booth and the small, private office down the same curving side of
the building. "Cover for me. There's supposed to be two of us
around but the other guy's sick and, what with the weather..."

He
licked his bulbous lips and Peroni knew what was coming. "All you got to
do is sit there and look important. You're up to it."

It
wasn't a big favour. The place was empty. Peroni had no intention of
sweeping away the snow. Nor had he anything else to do. He'd checked in
with Falcone, heard the news about the dead woman's apartment and
received not the slightest reprimand for his behaviour earlier with Leapman. He
recognized the resignation in Falcone's voice. The whole case was in
stasis, buried under the weather and the search for
something--anything--in the trail of places the elusive killer had
abandoned along the way. The likelihood was that until the killer did
something--something stupid, without spilling of blood
preferably--they'd just be sitting around twiddling their fingers,
waiting, not that Leo Falcone would admit as much.

"Where
are you going exactly, friend?" Peroni demanded.

The
man's florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. "It's no
big deal. I need a drink. I've been freezing my balls off in this place
all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What
am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That's all I ask.
Here..."

He
led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the
closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two
nights before.

"Everything's
working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a
bulb blows, it'll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change
the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I'm going to let you have a
special treat for helping me. When I come back I'm gonna let you close
the door, all on your own. I don't allow civilians to do that ordinarily.
Big privilege."

Lazy bastard
,
Peroni thought. It was just a door, one of two, the other closed. A big, very
old door.

"Is
that so?" he asked.

"You
bet," the caretaker said, on his way out already, picking up speed with
the eagerness of a man in desperate need of alcohol.

Peroni
sat down on the hard chair behind the glass front of the booth. Then he thought
about what he was doing and pulled himself back into the darkness of the little
cubicle. Entry into the place was free. People just walked in and out as they
pleased, except for the odd dumb tourist who couldn't believe it was possible
to get into a historic monument without a ticket. There was no need to make his
presence obvious, none at all.

So
he sat on the chair behind the glass and did what came naturally to him in the
solitary gloom of the booth. He thought about his kids, wondering what they
were doing, whether they were happy, whether they missed him. He thought about
Laila, trying to imagine what kind of life she led, what had brought her all
the way from Iraq to the streets of a hostile city where no one, as far as he
could work out, knew who she was or cared much either.

And
he looked at this odd old building, with its spherical interior pointed towards
the sky like half an upturned eyeball, the pupil set on the stars. Peroni tried
to work out where it lay in the tangle of facts they'd assembled so far. He
hadn't listened much to Emily Deacon's lecture about why the
Pantheon was important. Temperamentally he inclined towards Joel
Leapman's view. That a man who carved weird geometrical shapes out of the
skins of the people he slaughtered was just plain crazy, however you tried to
rationalize it. Thinking about the idea again inside the Pantheon itself, he
was no longer so sure. The kind of killer they were hunting was, undoubtedly,
deranged and dangerous. That didn't make the guy illogical or erratic.
The very opposite, in fact. If they'd thought this through--if
events had given them the chance even to begin the process--he'd
have suggested to Falcone that they should have left some plainclothes guy
around here all day, just on the off chance. The old saw about people returning
to the scene of their crimes was part of the argument. That did happen. More to
the point, this place obsessed the man somehow. It was part of his story, part
of the way he saw the world. In its angles and curves, the shadowy corners of
its precise proportions, this killer found some hidden truth that made sense of
what he was trying to achieve.

Several
ideas were starting to form in Gianni Peroni's head, each of them pushing
the memory of his kids and a stray Kurdish girl from his mind.

Then
he glanced at the long vertical slit of the door, outlined by the lights of the
square behind, and saw a slim, recognizable figure slip through, casting a long
slender shadow on the geometric floor.

Peroni
sat in the booth, trying to decide how to handle the girl. She'd crept
straight into the shade to the right of the altar opposite the entrance,
hopping the rope designed to keep out the public, intent on something. Every
movement was deliberate, determined. Teresa had been right. Laila was back here
to retrieve something. Then another shape came through the door: the caretaker
returning, walking steadily, head down, not the shambling gait Peroni expected
of a man who, just half an hour earlier, looked as if his mind was set on
downing three quick coffees liberally laced with brandy.

Peroni
glanced at his watch.

"You're
five minutes late," he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the
booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam
of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.

The
girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar,
half-concealed by the cloth.

"Laila."

He
spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it
wasn't enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human
voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man
approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing
once again into the night?

"It's
me," he said. "Peroni. You don't need to worry. There's
nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all."

Except...

Just
a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back
of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those
wonderful little nightmares kids--or, more accurately, their
existence--sent scattering through a parent's mind at random times:
car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the
road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.

And,
Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men
who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and
all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of
prey.

It
was a shitty world sometimes, though Peroni guessed Laila had learned that at a
very early age.

There
was movement from behind the drape. She walked out. Her dark eyes were
glittering, a little moist maybe. But she was smiling, smiling in a way he
hadn't seen before. Smiling naturally, a little shy, a little proud too.

She
had something in her hands that looked very much like a man's wallet and
Gianni Peroni was suddenly aware that he didn't give a damn about the
thing, however interesting it might prove. The investigation could wait. There
was something more important going on here.

"Hey,"
he said and held out his arms, wishing to God she'd just run straight
into them.

That
was too much to ask. Laila walked up, holding the wallet in her right hand,
grinning now, wiping tears--of joy, relief, fear, what?--from her
cheeks.

Peroni
put his arms round her skinny shoulders and hugged that frail, frightened body
to his big chest.

"Don't
you go giving your uncle Gianni frights like that," he whispered into her
lank, musky-smelling hair. "He's an old man, too old for this
business."

And
she wasn't going to the Questura tonight either. They could sleep at
Teresa's. Or Nic's if she preferred. Anywhere there wasn't a
soul in uniform or the dead, disinterested face of a social worker looking at
her, shaking a disappointed, middle-class head, thinking, "Damaged goods,
damaged goods, put it down on the list and let someone else pick up the
problem."

Uniforms...

He
hadn't even spoken to the caretaker since the moron got back from his
secret drink. It was time to kiss good-bye to this weird, spooky space and
re-enter the land of the living.

Soon,
too, because when Peroni turned he could see the idiot was now closing the
door, that big vertical slab of bronze that had stood in the same archway for
almost a couple of millennia, watching generation after generation walk through
and gawp at the mysteries within.

Which
was odd, given that he was supposed to be handing over that particular
privilege as a reward to the dumb cop who'd stood duty while he'd
lined his gut with cheap brandy.

"Hey,
buster," Peroni yelled, "you've still got some customers
inside. Remember?"

The
door kept moving. It slammed shut and the sudden absence of the electric lights
from the square made Gianni Peroni blink, sent a brisk rush of pain and fear
stabbing through the back of his head.

Laila
was clinging to him. She was shivering. The caretaker was nowhere to be seen.

Gianni
Peroni pushed the girl firmly back into the corner and whispered in her ear,
"There's nothing wrong here. Trust me. Just stay out of the way
until your uncle Gianni sorts this out."

She
didn't protest. She crushed herself up behind the drape again, so hard
against the ancient slabs of the stone wall that it looked as if she were
hoping she could somehow creep inside the cracks.

There
was a sound from nearby, close to the little office the caretaker had shown
him. Someone was flipping the circuit breakers. The lights were going off, one
by one, in a circular dance. The CCTV cameras too, he guessed. This guy had
been here before. Laila knew that, maybe straightaway, just from sensing his
presence.

Smart kid
,
Peroni thought, then yelled out into the airy, pregnant darkness, lit now by
nothing more than the silvery light tumbling down the oculus.

"Listen,
mister, I'm armed. I'm a cop. And you're not going anywhere
near this kid, not unless you come straight through me. And that's
not
gonna happen. Understand?"

Then,
just for form, "Best give yourself up now. Or climb out the window and
curl up in the cold somewhere. You hear me?"

It
was just a laugh. The kind of laugh you got in the movies--hard-edged,
nasal, knowing. Foreign too, somehow, because Italians didn't laugh like
that, they didn't know how to make such a shapeless, wordless sound
become a figure of speech in itself, full of meaning, brimming with
malevolence.

All
the same, a man couldn't scare you just by laughing. Not even this guy,
with his magic scalpel and his skilful fixation on shapes.

No.
Peroni knew why the sound made him shrink inside himself, shivering, wondering
which way to look. It was the way the laughter echoed symmetrically around the
hidden axes of the building, the way it ran along some hidden geometric path,
crossing and recrossing the empty interior, time and time again, almost as if
the man who made the noise planned it that way, rolled his own voice into some
mystic complex of ley lines until it floated upwards and out of the ancient
dead eye, out towards the moon.

Peroni
flipped the safety catch on his service pistol and tried to remember the last
time the weapon had been fired in anger.

"LAURA
LEE? Who the hell is Laura Lee?"

Emily
Deacon had an answer already. She just wanted to make him earn it.

"Let's
take this one step at a time. Decode the first message before anything else. Remember,
this is three days after Kaspar has killed my dad in Beijing. Can that be a
coincidence?"

Anything
could be a coincidence, Costa thought. You could ruin an entire investigation
by reading too much into shreds of half-related information like this.

"Maybe."

"No!
Think about it. Kaspar's reached right into the heart of the US
diplomatic service here. He's murdered a military attache. He
knows, as sure as hell, there'll be all kinds of people on his back. So
what do these guys chasing him do?"

It
could be true. He saw the logic. "You think
they
sent him this
message?"

"Damn
right I do. Maybe it's us. Maybe the CIA. I don't know. But someone
from our side is dialing into his private line. And they're telling him,
"We know who you are, we know where you've been, we know what
you've done. Time to call it a day, Bill K, before you get hurt
too." "