David Hewson (8 page)

"I'm
sorry for the unpleasantness," she said. "It isn't
intentional. It's just... his manner."

"Of
course," Falcone replied flatly.

"Good."
She took one last look at the pathologist before leaving. "Forget what he
said. We won't have a vehicle here for thirty minutes or more in this
weather. Why not make good use of the time?"

THERE
WAS ONLY so much that could be done when the bodies had gone, Mauro's
into the white Questura morgue van, the American woman's into the hearse
the FBI had provided. At midday Falcone took one look at Costa and Peroni and
ordered them to take a break. He wanted them both to attend the meeting at the
embassy. They'd seen the shooter in the square. They were involved. Falcone
said he needed them wide-awake for the FBI.

So
the two of them took their leave of the crime scene and walked the fifteen
minutes to Teresa Lupo's apartment through an icy ermine Rome that was
uncannily deserted under a brief break in the cloud that meant a bright winter
sun spilled over everything.

Nic
Costa had visited Teresa's home once before. It was on the first floor of
a block in Via Crispi, the narrow street running down from the summit of the
Via Veneto. There had been a thoroughfare down the hill here for the best part
of two thousand years. In imperial times, it had linked the Porta Pinciana in
the Aurelian Wall with the Campus Martius, the "Field of Mars,"
which was dominated in part by the architectural might of the Pantheon. The
street opposite Teresa's home, the Via degli Artisti, was named after the
nineteenth-century Nazarene school of painters who had lived in the area. The
walls of the neighbourhood seemed littered with plaques that bore witness to
the famous names who had once lived there: Liszt and Piranesi, Hans Christian
Andersen and Maxim Gorky. The snow had restored a little of its charm. Few cars
now snarled up the narrow streets. No tourists walked wearily along the Via
Sistina to the church of Trinita dei Monti, set at the summit of the
Spanish Steps, with its panoramic view over the Renaissance city that had come
to occupy the Campus Martius over the centuries.

As
the two men trudged in silence, dog-weary and cold, Costa thought about the
body laid out stiffly on the geometric slabs and fought to remember the history
lessons that had gripped him as a schoolboy. It was important, always, to
remind himself: this is Rome. Everything interconnects. The inscription on the
portico of the Pantheon read:
M*AGRIPPA*L*F*COS*TERTIUM*FECIT
--
Marcus
Agrippa, the son of Lucius, three times consul, made this
. Yet, like so
much else concerning the Pantheon, this was a deceit, a subtle sleight of hand
performed for reasons now lost. Augustus's old friend and ally Agrippa
had built a temple on the Campus Martius and called it the Pantheon, a
dedication to "all the gods," but that had burned down some time
after his death. The building which replaced it some hundred and fifty years
later, between AD 120 and 125, had been the work of Hadrian. Some even thought
the emperor had designed it personally. Circular monuments, ideas stolen from
Greece and points further east, reworked for a new age, were his hallmark. Nic
Costa's knowledge of architectural history was insufficient to give him
reasons. But when he thought of Hadrian's legacy--the private villa
in Tivoli, the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome in the forum, with its
huge, extant half sphere of a ceiling--it was easy to see this was a
thread that ran throughout the emperor's thinking. Even to the end. The
huge round mass of the Castel Sant" Angelo on the far bank of the Tiber
had served many purposes over the years: fortress, jail, barracks and papal
apartments. But the emperor built it as his personal mausoleum. The spiral ramp
to his initial resting place still existed, just a ten-minute walk from the
dome of St. Peter's, which Michelangelo had created some fourteen hundred
years later in the image of Hadrian's own Pantheon.

Costa
watched Peroni fumbling with the key to the apartment block door. "Gianni,
are you OK?"

"Yeah.
I just need some sleep. Something to eat. Excuse my moods, Nic. It's not
like me."

"I
know," Costa said. "You go inside. I've got something to do. Plus
I'll bring you a little present."

Peroni's
eyes sparked with worry. "Don't overdo the vegetables!"

"It's
a promise."

It
was just before one. There was a store around the corner Nic knew. They did the
kind of food Peroni liked: roast porchetta, complete with crisp skin, nestling
inside a panino raked with salt and rosemary. He could pick up something for
himself too.

But
first he caught the photographic shop before it closed and half talked, half
badgered the man behind the counter into running the seven cassettes from
Mauro's cameras and his accessory bag straight through the Fuji
developing machine. The prints would be ready before four. Costa could pick
them up by ringing the private bell to the apartment above.

When
he got back, Peroni was sprawled out on Teresa's sofa, looking very at
home and listening to the weather on the TV. He took the pork sandwich and
started stuffing his face with it straight from the bag.

"Not
bad," he conceded. "How come I never found this place?"

"You
do much shopping when you're staying here?"

Peroni
sniffed, then said, "The snow's locked in for days, Nic. No trains.
No planes. Not much moving on the roads either. I guess that means our
man's not going to find it easy to get out of Rome. If he wants
to."

"Why
would he want to?" Costa asked. There was a message in the American woman's
body. A problem demanding a solution. Why would a person set a riddle, then
walk away without seeing whether it was solved?

"I
dunno," Peroni grumbled, finishing the sandwich, then struggling to his
feet, brushing crumbs off his shirt. "I don't know a damn thing
anymore. Except I need to sleep. Wake me at the right time." Then he
hesitated, thinking. "Why the hell did Leo give in to those Americans so
easily? I mean, he could have put up a fight. I can't believe we're
trooping round to their place like this when the poor bitch got killed on our
territory. Her and Mauro too."

That
was one thing Costa did understand. Leo Falcone never fought battles he knew he
couldn't win. It was one of the things that made him stand out in the
Questura. He was smarter than most. There was, perhaps, another reason too. A
faceless figure from SISDE had turned up halfway through the morning--just
in time to see the American woman loaded into the hearse--and had talked
to Falcone in private. Costa had never seen him before. Peroni, who knew just
about every cop and spook in town, civilian and military, had and had sworn
ferociously under his breath at the sight.

"What
was that guy's name? The one from SISDE?"

Peroni
pulled a sour face. "Viale. Don't ask me what he does. Or how big
he is. Very, probably. I ran into him a couple of times on vice when we picked
up people he wanted left alone. He's good at the pressure."

Costa
could feel he was treading on delicate ground. "Good enough to squeeze
you?"

"I
could tell you, Nic," Peroni said pleasantly, "but the trouble is,
afterwards, I'd have to cut out your tongue. I joke, but I'm not
supposed to. The honest answer is men like Viale get what they want these days.
You mess with them at your peril."

Costa
smiled, said nothing, and moved over to the sofa, stretching out for the first
time in what seemed like twenty-four hours.

"Point
taken," Peroni said with a wave of his hand, then disappeared into the
bedroom.

MONICA
SAWYER STOOD at the plain wooden counter of L'Angolo Divino and wished to
God she'd learned to speak Italian. Someone at the rental agency had
recommended the place and tried to explain the play on words, how
"divino" meant both "divine" and "about
wine." Monica kind of got the joke. It was a wine bar. Or, more than
that, an
enoteca
, a place that sold a variety of wines, cheap and
expensive, and some pretty pricey plates of pasta, cheese and cold meats too. At
least, that was what she'd been told. Now that she was in the bar, which
was set on the corner of two narrow alleys off the Campo dei Fiori, she
didn't have much of a clue about anything. One end of the L-shaped room
looked like a library, with row upon row of expensive-looking bottles
stretching up to the high ceiling. The rest of the bar was a plain narrow
channel that could take three people deep, no more, with a wooden-plank floor,
a few pine tables and some plates of very fragrant cheese in a glass cabinet. An
old guy in a brown jacket, the kind people in hardware stores used to wear, was
talking rapid Italian at her from behind the counter, and it might as well have
been Urdu. There was only one other customer in the place, a man in a black
suit who sat on a nearby bench reading an Italian paper and sipping at the
biggest wine glass Monica Sawyer had ever seen, swilling around the splash of
red liquid in the base from time to time before sniffing it, smiling and
drinking the tiniest drop.

Monica
came from San Francisco. She was familiar with bars. She ought to be able to
handle this, she thought. So she said very distinctly, for the third time,
"
Una copa de chardonnay, por favor
," and felt like
bursting into tears when the old man just babbled on incomprehensibly and waved
at the huge selection of bottles behind the counter.

"Oh
crap," she muttered. Things had gone from bad to worse. The weather meant
she was going to be alone in Rome for days with nothing to do, no one to talk
to. And not much chance of getting a decent drink when she wanted one, outside
of hotel bars, where a lone American woman of forty-two who was, Monica Sawyer
knew, still pretty good-looking could not sit safely without the risk of
constant harassment.

"Italian
and Spanish are close relatives, but they are, I fear, hardly
interchangeable," said a warm Irish voice at her shoulder.

Monica
Sawyer turned and saw that the man in the dark suit was now at her side. He'd
got there without making a sound, which in normal circumstances would have been
a touch creepy. But she didn't feel that way somehow. He was smiling at
her, a pleasant smile, from a pleasant, intelligent face, somewhat lined and
hewn, as if it had been through the wars, but attractive all the same. He was,
perhaps, fifty and still had perfect, very white teeth. He wore wire-framed,
rectangular spectacles, which were a little old-fashioned, and slightly tinted
too, so she could only just make out what she believed to be grey, thoughtful
eyes behind the glass. He had a good head of hair, salt and pepper locks, long
and wavy, like an artist's.

They
never leave you alone, she thought. But at least this one was Irish. Then she
watched him unfold the scarf at his neck and felt deeply and childishly guilty.

"Father,"
she said, staring at the slightly crumpled dog collar, feeling the blood rush
to her cheeks. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize."

He
was a handsome man. That was the problem. Given that Harvey probably
wouldn't make it to Rome for days, possibly a week or more, she was, she
had to admit, in need of a little company. Just the sound of a friendly voice
speaking English made such a difference.

"And
why should you?"

He
was six feet tall and well built. And he was glancing at her fox-fur coat,
wondering, perhaps, what kind of woman roamed around the empty, snow-blocked
streets of Rome looking as if she'd dressed for the theatre.

"It's
the warmest thing I've got," she explained hastily. "Besides,
I was wearing it for my husband. He was supposed to join me from New York
today. Then they said the airport was closed. For God knows how
long..." She cursed herself inwardly. Monica Sawyer had gone to a
Catholic school in Palo Alto. She ought to be able to remember how to behave. Not
that he seemed shocked. Priests were different these days.

He
touched the coat just for a moment with two long, powerful fingers. "You'll
excuse me. I don't see this kind of thing very much in my line of
work." Then he held out his hand. "Peter O'Malley. Since we
are two strangers stranded in Rome by snow, I hope you won't mind if I
introduce myself. I've been hanging around all day wondering what to do
and, to be honest with you, it's a pleasure to hear the native
tongue."

"I
was thinking exactly the same thing!" She took his hand, which gripped
hers with a brief, muscular strength. "Monica Sawyer."

"Then
that's out of the way." He glanced at the old man behind the
counter. "You were wanting a drink, Monica?"

"Damn
right," she said automatically and found the heat rushing to her cheeks
again.

"Then
damn right you shall have one. But not chardonnay, I beg you. It's a
French grape, not a bad one either, but when in Rome--"

She
felt like giggling. Here she was, alone in a strange, foreign city, and a
priest, a good-looking one at that, was flirting with her.

"Recommend
something, Peter," she said firmly.

"If
it's a white you're after it would be a crime to leave without
tasting a Greco di Tufo."

The
old man behind the counter raised his heavy, grey eyebrows. It seemed a gesture
of approval.