David Hewson (41 page)

Peroni
turned and raised his painful wrists.

"Get
busy with these, huh?" he murmured.

"Then?"
she asked.

"Then
we get you something to eat. And a comfortable bed. Your uncle Gianni's
got work to do. You've saved his skin tonight, you know."

"I
did?" she asked, only half believing him.

"You
sure did. You're not going to leave me here like this, are you?"

She
thought about it, but not for long. Then she opened the knife and started to
saw at the plastic.

Ten
minutes later Peroni had freed the terrified caretaker, who was locked inside a
portable office by the side of the building.

After
that, he called Leo Falcone.

UPSTAIRS,
IN THE RUSTIC, faded bathroom, Emily Deacon stood before the flaking mirror and
peered at herself, trying to find answers for questions she couldn't
quite begin to frame.

She
was never good at relationships and she knew it. Getting close to someone was
like a drug. It solved so many problems but it had side effects too. Commitment
left the window open for pain to blow in like poison on the breeze. It made the
inevitable parting even harder, turned friends into enemies. She'd felt
this way, seen this attitude blight her tentative, stumbling efforts at
building a relationship, ever since she was a kid.

Ever since Rome
.

Ever
since her dad came back from his turn with the Babylon Sisters, playing out
some bloody vaudeville act deep in the desert in Iraq, damaging himself
irreparably for reasons that still eluded her but were now getting closer.

Why Dad? Why not someone else? Was he really Bill Kaspar's boss
pretending to be his best buddy? And if so, why did Kaspar feel justified in
coming back to snuff out his life inside a beautiful wooden temple in a park in
Beijing thirteen years later, carving into his back a shape from an ancient
temple outside Babylon? Was he that desperate for revenge
?

She
looked at herself in the mirror and said, "Except he didn't
stop."

If
she was right, every last person who'd escaped Iraq thirteen years
earlier was now dead. So why was Kaspar still killing? What would stop him?

The
answer lay in his obsession. There were attractions in the belief, however
crazy, that you could bring order to a life by placing it in the middle of an
intricately symmetrical pattern of shapes and ideas. But it was the kind of
process that belonged to the lost, the detached, the doomed. Obsession was,
ultimately, the easy way out, derogating responsibility to an inanimate, dead
simulacrum of perfection, a fake paradise buried inside a tangled whorl of
lines and curves. In the real world it was the untidiness, the lack of
completeness, the unpredictability of everyday life, that made each day human. That
random, unforeseeable force lay at the bottom of a relationship, too. If the
magnetism of personal attraction could be rationalized, it couldn't, she
knew, exist.

Was
that why she'd always struggled to keep a man? Her insistence for some
kind of reason, some element of proof? The face that stared back at her from
the mirror had no answers. What she saw was just another part of the riddle. She
was still working to shrug off the child Emily, whose earliest memories lay in
that different, early Rome, where she'd spent the first ten years of her
life believing the world was a bright, colourful heaven, a place of kindness,
grace and beauty where the hard decisions were always someone else's.

Innocence,
ignorance--two sides of the same coin.

"You've
got to grow up sometime," she told herself. That was why she'd
bitten Nic's head off when he called her "Little Em." A part
of her recognized how apposite it still was.

She
washed her face, brushed her teeth, sat down on the toilet seat and held her
head in her hands, trying to find a strand of logic that would allow her to go
forward.

There
was still a missing piece. But she was too damn tired.

She
got up, checked her face and hair once more in the mirror, wondered what she
really saw there. A scared adolescent? A woman trying to identify herself among
all the noise of modern life? Or, more likely, someone halfway between the two,
a changeling shifting shapes, wondering what she would be in the end.

Emily
Deacon was aware that, for the first time in her life, she was about to take
the initiative, to tell a man it was time he took her to bed. Even if nothing
happened there except the closeness of sleeping next to another human being.

Scared,
in the way she felt when she was a kid, embarking on an adventure beyond the
bounds of normal life, excited, intensely awake all of a sudden, she went
downstairs.

He
was asleep on the sofa, sprawled out, fully dressed. Completely asleep, not
moving a muscle except for the faint rise and fall of his chest.

"Nic,"
she said softly, so quietly she didn't know herself whether she wanted
him to hear.

She
closed her eyes and laughed inwardly.

"There's
always tomorrow," she whispered in a voice no louder than a breath.

And
there's always a cigarette.

She
went to her purse, took out a Marlboro and a lighter, pulled the black jacket
around her shoulders and opened the door very quietly, making sure she
didn't wake him.

The
air was still, the night arctic and exquisitely beautiful. A too-white moon
shone like a miniature cold sun over the rounded, snowy landscape punctuated by
the outlines of the tombs on the Appian Way.

She
lit the cigarette, watched the smoke curl its way towards the bare writhing
muscle of a vine winding its way around a trellis and imagined how beautiful
this shaded, grape-laden terrace would be during the summer.

"And
I can't even get myself a man," she murmured, then wished she could
laugh out loud.

The
voice was cold, American and familiar.

"I
wouldn't say that," it grunted.

A
powerful arm came round her neck. A hidden hand forced some kind of cloth into
her face, pushing the fabric brutally around her nose and mouth. There was the
slight sound of glass breaking inside the rag, a smell that made her think of a
hospital operating room, long, long ago, in the ancient facility on the Lateran
where her father took her when she broke her arm trying to make her bike fly
like something out of
Power Rangers
.

This won't hurt... Steely Dan, where are you now, and what the
hell did you do all those years ago?
... someone said, her dad, a faceless
doctor, Kaspar the Unfriendly Ghost, grinning Joel Leapman, Thornton Fielding,
all concern and pity, Nic Costa even...

Every
last one of them said the stupid phrase simultaneously, seeing her feebleness
from somewhere beyond her vision, somewhere outside the aching corona of the
moon.

This won't hurt one little bit
.

Sabato

THE
WEATHER WAS CHANGING AND NOT IN THE WAY ANY of them expected. The snow
hadn't turned to rain. Instead, it had gone away, for a while anyway,
leaving the sky to the sun, a sun that was starting to remember how to shed a
little warmth on the city. A thaw, perhaps a temporary one, was in progress and
a trickle of grey slush and grubby water was beginning to make its way into the
gutters as proof. It was still damn cold, though. A bitter, persistent wind was
blowing in from the sea, a harsh taint of salt in its blustery folds, warning
that the vicious snap of cold had yet to retreat entirely.

Falcone
strode along the Via Cavour, thinking. The previous night, before he got the
message about Peroni, he'd made some calls, discreetly posed a few
questions that had been bugging him. Now, with a set of careful answers, all
legalese, all full of it's and buts, racing around in his head, he was
facing some important decisions. He had fifteen minutes before the meeting he
had demanded with Viale, which had been fixed for nine in the SISDE building
around the corner. Moretti and Leapman would doubtless come along for the ride
at Viale's invitation. Falcone had yet to decide how to handle himself
there. Two of his men had risked their lives the previous day. That gave him
the right to throw around a little weight. Peroni's injuries had proved
less serious than they looked in the hospital at two that morning, when the
doctors had stitched and dabbed at a face that had already taken more than its
fair share of punishment. Afterwards Falcone had sat with the big cop, next to
Teresa Lupo and the Kurdish girl, and agreed, without hesitation, to his first
demand: that Laila be placed temporarily in the care of a social worker Peroni
knew who lived at Ostia, that very night. Then the girl got up, kissed Peroni
on the side of his cheek that didn't bear a bruise or wound and went off
with a plainclothes female officer, giving the three of them the chance to talk
some more, to exchange suspicions and to wonder.

Peroni
was looking to him for something. There were limits to being jerked around,
even by the grey men. Falcone had spoken to Costa first thing that morning and
knew he felt the same way too. The American woman had told Costa a long,
interesting and highly speculative narrative that attempted to explain what was
happening around them now in Rome. Then she'd gone missing, leaving her
things in his house. Costa hadn't a clue where.

Falcone
had phoned Joel Leapman immediately to report the fact that Emily Deacon had
vanished. It was the right thing to do. Her car was gone. He also wanted to
judge the FBI agent's reactions to the news. Leapman seemed genuinely
puzzled. Concerned, even. It was one more weapon Falcone could use.

He'd
recognized, too, the worry in Costa's voice that morning. Deacon
wasn't a field officer. There were personal reasons why she might step
out of line. But there were personal issues everywhere in this case. Peroni and
Costa carried them because they--and Falcone--had been present when
the unfortunate Mauro Sandri fell bleeding in the snow outside the Pantheon
three nights before. For most cops that would simply be bad luck. For Nic and
Peroni--and Falcone understood this was one reason that he defended the
pair constantly--the photographer's death was a challenge, an
outrage, a tear in the fabric of society which demanded correction. This dogged
resistance of theirs had led to Falcone trusting them with information and
thoughts he was reluctant to share with others on the force. Ineluctably,
events over the past eighteen months had made the three of them a team, a
worryingly close and private one at times. Costa, in particular, had reminded
Falcone why he'd become a cop in the first place: to make things better. Hooked
up to Peroni, the pair had shaken Falcone out of his complacency, dared him to
throw off the dead lassitude and cynicism that came with two decades as a
policeman. Costa and Peroni asked big and awkward questions about what was
right and what was wrong in a world where all the borders seemed to be breaking
down. No wonder Viale hated them.

When
Falcone turned the corner he saw them, standing together outside the anonymous
grey SISDE building next to a Chinese restaurant, an odd couple who looked
nothing like plainclothes cops. Peroni was shuffling backwards and forwards on
his big feet, hugging himself in a thick winter coat, scanning the sky, which
now bore fresh scratches of white, wispy clouds that could be the presentiment
of more snow.

Costa
wasn't thinking about the weather. He was examining the fresh marks on
his partner's battered face, looking concerned.

Falcone
walked up and peered into Gianni Peroni's face himself. "I've
seen worse. Think of the up side. You weren't that good-looking
beforehand."

"I
could sue for that," Peroni replied. "I could call you up in front
of the board and out you for the bitch of a boss you are."

"Do
that," Falcone said, almost laughing. "I'll get there one way
or another soon enough."

"Are
you sure you wouldn't rather be at home in bed, Gianni?" Nic asked.

"Don't
nanny me, Mr. Costa," Peroni replied curtly. "Do you think a few
cuts and bruises are going to keep me away from all the fun?"

Fun?
It wasn't that, not for any of them, Falcone thought. It never had been.
Even when Peroni had been an inspector in vice, before his fall from grace, he
was a man known for his seriousness.

"The
funny thing is," Falcone observed, "I've never known anyone
to get beaten up so often. What's your secret?"

"Working
with you," Peroni responded. "Until I was bounced down to your team
of misfits, I never got beaten up at all. Not once in my adult life."

"You
want a transfer?"

"You
know damn well what I want. I want my old job back. I want my old rank. I want
men who drive me around. I want to deal with the admirable world of dope and
prostitution because I tell you, Leo--sorry,
sir
--it's
much saner than your world."

"Is
that so?" Falcone replied, amused. "So how are you now? Did your
friendly pathologist tend your wounds after I left?"