David Hewson (53 page)

This
recollection had some force, it was obvious in her eyes. "I remember you
hated that music of his. You used to bring those big band tunes, dance tunes,
little me, big you, all those years ago. And you murdered him. Long before
Kaspar got there. Somehow I knew he had died back then. I just never wanted to
see it."

He
put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face, shook her, hard. "Dan
took the money too, Emily! No one made him. No one made any of them, not on his
team. If that fool Kaspar hadn't started shooting, they'd all have
been in and out of there and no one the wiser. One team rich, smart and in on
the deal. The other poor and heroes and still with their consciences. It's
a dirty world. You're telling me you never noticed?"

Costa
saw the sudden grief in her face. The way her finger tightened on the button.

"I
don't believe you," Emily Deacon insisted.

Fielding
pushed her away. She didn't protest.

"Then
why did he come back and say nothing?" he asked. "Why didn't
he come back and start asking some questions about what went wrong?"

"He
didn't know!" she screeched.

Fielding
gripped her shoulders again, peered into her face with glistening eyes. "You're
too smart to believe that," he said after a while. "Aren't
you?"

Emily
said nothing. She just stood there, shaking her head, staring at him, furious.

"Think
about it," Fielding continued. "Dan did nothing because he was on
the payroll, Emily. Everyone on his team was. Before they even went in. Not
that it was the money. In the beginning anyway. The others, yes. Not him. Not
me."

"Then
what, Fielding?" she wondered. "You're telling me this was
all some moral decision too?"

Thornton
Fielding looked, for a moment, as if he'd forgotten the deadly armament
strapped to his body. He was mad with her, furious she didn't get it.

"You're
so young," he spat at her. "You really have no idea."

"Tell
me."

He
closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head, clutched the deadly vest to him. "Dan
and I had been working together off and on for years. Since Nicaragua.
We'd spent all that time throwing all manner of dirty shit at dirty
situations. And you know what? It never cured a damn thing. We were just so
sick
of being part of that machine, deciding who was right, who was wrong. Sick of
the fact that so many of yesterday's friends turned out to be
tomorrow's bad guys. Your dad had this huge sense of duty, but duty has
to be earned somehow by the people above you or you start to question it. His
got used up in the end. We both felt that way. And that's the real
killer."

He
looked at Leapman, and there was disgust in his face. "In that kind of
situation either you become like him--an automaton who does what he's
told and doesn't think twice--or you become the enemy. There is no
in between. We'd taken the money, but the truth is we'd have done
it for free. We didn't want the war to spread. There were all these
lunatics saying it had to go on, all the way to Baghdad. As if we were a
liberating army, bringing peace and joy and freedom to the world. Babylon
Sisters wasn't about Kuwait. It was about being there as a forward base
once the hawks back home persuaded Bush to go all the way. You get me?"

She
was listening, struggling to take all this in.

"Emily,"
he pleaded, "you have to understand. No one needed to get hurt. Dan had
arranged for us to get our guys taken, along with him. They'd all be
freed, unharmed, later and no one would be the wiser. A straightforward deal.
Except..." He sighed, hung his head, stared at the stone floor. "We
didn't bring Bill Kaspar in. Dan and I talked about it but in the end we
just didn't have the guts. We thought he and the rest of them would lie
down once they saw what they were up against. We didn't think he'd
feel the urge to make nine people dead heroes. So Dan and his crew had to watch
a bloodbath, knowing they couldn't do a damn thing to stop what was going
on. And then--"

"Then
what?" Emily asked, livid.

"Then
you find yourself facing painful choices. It wasn't Dan's fault.
Not mine. Not Kaspar's, really. It was just a stupid idea that began as a
good one. A couple of tired spooks dragging out some peacenik idealism we
thought might stop the world from tilting even further out of balance. Stupid.
Dumb as they come, and when those Iraqis came back to each and every one us
after the war, kept calling, kept asking for more, threatening to expose us if
we didn't go along with them, we found out exactly how dumb."

She
was shaking her head. "Dad wouldn't--"

"He
did!" Fielding cried. "We all did. There wasn't any
alternative. It was either go along with what they wanted or see every last one
of us in jail or worse. Until Kaspar got out, of course. And you know the funny
thing?"

There
was a sudden look of bitter hatred on his face. "By then it didn't
matter. If Bill Kaspar hadn't come a-hunting, all of this would have just
slipped out of sight. Except," he added sourly, "when you started
waking up in the middle of the night sweating from the memories."

There
was activity beyond the big doors. Brisk, bossy Carabinieri voices.

Fielding
nodded at the button and took several steps back. "So you want to press
that, Little Em? If it makes you feel good, go ahead."

"Oh,
Thornton," she said immediately. "It will make me feel so very,
very good."

Emily
Deacon hit the button and Thornton Fielding's vest lit up like a string
of firecrackers. Costa was over to her in a flash, trying to drag her down to
the cold, hard floor.

She
fought him, watching Fielding all the time. "Don't worry,"
she murmured. "Kaspar's broke. It's just Coke cans, sand and
a few detonators. And a little fertilizer for the one I got to throw. You'd
be amazed what I've learned over the last couple of hours."

Thornton
Fielding did a fiery little jig around the heart of the building then, when the
detonators fizzled, fell to the ground in a crumpled, sobbing heap.

Nic
Costa looked into Emily's face and a part of him was convinced he knew
what she saw at that moment. An image from a different time. A young girl
dancing with her father's best friend, not knowing what darkness lay
beyond the bright white room in which every happy memory seemed to exist, and
how difficult it was to see into the mind of another human being, even one you
thought you knew and loved.

"Nic,"
she said with a sudden, bright efficiency. "Inspector Falcone. Gianni.
Are you ready?"

"Of
course," Falcone replied, then grimaced at the dejected figure of
Thornton Fielding crawling underneath the grey eye of the oculus. "I
think," he said to Leapman, "that belongs to you."

There
was an expression on Falcone's face Costa didn't recognize. Finally,
he put a name to it: astonishment.

They
followed her to the bronze slab doors, helped her pull the right one back on
its ancient hinges. A flood of policemen poured into the hall, asking
questions, waving guns, shrinking back as Falcone barked at them about this
being a state police show.

"Come
with me," Emily said.

Costa
and Peroni walked behind her over to the office. She took out a key, unlocked
the door and let them in.

There
was a well-built, craggy-faced man there, in a caretaker's uniform that
was one size too small for him. He was leaning back in a chair, feet on the
desk next to a mobile phone and a small radio, laid out in a precise line
parallel with the edge of the surface. An old and dusty copy of Dante's
Inferno
lay in front of him, open at the page.

William
F. Kaspar took out the radio earpiece, looked at the three of them, nodded to
Emily and said, "As I always say, improvisation is the key to everything,
Agent Deacon. Nice job. I'm proud of you."

He
waved the book at them. "Mind if I keep this? I found it in here and, to
be honest, I don't think it's one of his."

He
pointed to a figure bundled into the corner, gagged, hands tied behind his
back, wearing a grubby vest and underpants. Peroni recognized the florid-faced
caretaker and stifled a laugh.

"Let
me tell you," Kaspar continued, "this guy is a world-class shirker.
Plus he has potty mouth you wouldn't believe. Beats me how they let him
look after a place like this."

Falcone
pushed open the door of the side entrance. There were no Carabinieri there. Only
a fresh, light scattering of snow coming down through the growing darkness.

Costa
waved a pair of handcuffs in the air. Emily Deacon forced her way in front of
him and peered at Kaspar.

"How
are things?" she asked him.

He
stared through the open interior door, back into the great circular hall,
looking as if he were saying good-bye. Then he peered closely at the objects on
the table. The book. The radio. The phone. All set in a line.

"Quiet,"
Bill Kaspar said, and shuffled the items in front of him, making a random
pattern, like three dominoes rattling aimlessly around a board. "Quieter
than they've been in a long time."

Natale

TERESA
LUPO STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW, WORKING her way through the mountain of
dishes Peroni had left in his wake. He'd now retreated to the living room
with Nic and Emily, clutching a bottle of grappa, and begun to talk in that
low, concerned way she'd come to recognize. Leo Falcone was outside with
Laila, working to put a little life back into the disintegrating snowman before
better weather came along and melted it into the hard earth.

Teresa
had been astonished when Falcone accepted the invitation to Christmas lunch. She
was a little surprised she'd gone along with the idea too, but the
expression on Peroni's face when Nic Costa floated the idea meant there
really was no other option. Peroni wanted to cook a holiday meal. He wanted to
sit down at a table with other people. With a kid, more than anything.

And
Falcone... He was a lonely man. He had nothing else to do. So it made sense
for him to be outside now, parading around the diminishing white figure,
wondering where best to place an old, limp carrot. Laila, who'd been
ferried to the farm from the social worker that morning and would be ferried
back in the evening, watched with an equal amount of seriousness. The two of
them were driving Teresa crazy.

"Lighten
up, for God's sake," she muttered. Falcone drove her crazy a lot. She'd
always known he was an intense, solitary man. But she'd never realized
this was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. Watching him walk
slowly around the snowman, carrot in hand, looking as if he were about to enter
into the most important decision he'd faced in his entire life, made
Teresa Lupo feel uncomfortably sympathetic towards a man she didn't, in
truth, much like.

Unable
to contain herself any longer, she threw open the window and yelled, "The
face, Leo. Try putting it on the face."

Falcone
gazed back at her in despair, sighed, then nodded at Laila.

"The
carrot's not the problem," the girl said. "The face
is."

Teresa
looked at the blasted thing. The face was wrong.

"Well,
just
do
something," she snapped.

"But..."
Falcone protested.

She
slammed the window shut, not wanting to hear any more or see it either. There
were people on this planet for whom time was a stranger. People who took no
notice of the passing years, never stopped once to add them up and work out the
sums: what was now possible, what would soon disappear from your grasp once
that hand ticked past midnight on another New Year's Eve.

Peroni
claimed he'd found the last turkey in town. She stared at its carcass, a
bundle of fleshy bones that resembled a small, stripped dinosaur. God, they
could eat. The girl in particular. Peroni's cousin outside Verona,
who'd offered to take Laila in, just for a few months to see if it could
work, was going to have to buy a new freezer. Even Nic Costa had tried a tiny
taste of the turkey, which Peroni had cooked to perfection, slathered in oil
and garlic and rosemary. Costa eating meat. That was something she'd
never thought she would see.

She
turned back to the window again. The girl was remaking the face, shifting the
stark gaze of the creature's coal eyes straight at the house. Falcone was
watching her, finger to his cheek, thinking. About more than a snowman too,
Teresa guessed. There'd been a storm hanging over all of them since the
events in the Pantheon two days before. The media hadn't gone to town on
the story beyond the plain details: that a killer had been apprehended by the
state police. Then the headlines seemed to wane. The papers and the TV people
liked stories with beginnings, middles and ends. Bill Kaspar didn't
really fit that profile, not without the blue file of SISDE documents, which
Falcone had now taken into his care. And done what with? She half knew.
She'd asked him straight out when they were alone together briefly and
got that mute, secret stare in return. Falcone had presumably put them in a
safe place known only to him, in case any of them needed insurance in the
future. All the same, some kind of internal investigation was going on in the
Questura at that very moment. Falcone knew a damn sight more about it than
he'd let on over lunch. The same was probably happening round at the
SISDE offices. And the Americans? She didn't have the heart to ask Emily
Deacon whether she still had a job or not. It didn't seem right. She and
Nic were, if not yet an item, sure to be one soon, Teresa thought. They had
that glint in their eyes.