by David Hewson
And, behind him, breathing.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Gallo groaned and began to turn.
The man was still sitting there on the bank, looking as if he had been waiting patiently for hours. He no longer wore the dark glasses. He had removed the jacket to reveal a plain white shirt. There was a reason for this, Gallo thought. The night was desperately close, so hot it was hard to take in sufficient air in a single breath. Then he cursed his own stupidity. The man had shrugged off the jacket because it was part of some disguise, a way of concealing his identity when they had met, in the presence of others. Now that they were alone, and his intent was clear, it was no longer needed.
Gallo fixed his attention on the figure in front of him. He was much younger than he had first thought, possibly about his own age. He was muscular too, in a way that spoke of work-outs and gyms. Oddly, there was sympathy in his face, as if some part of him regretted what was happening.
It was a face that was familiar somehow, which both surprised and irritated him.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he croaked.
The seated figure looked closely at him. The hint of compassion was there. Gallo did not mistake the expression. ‘Just a cog in the wheel,’ he said. ‘Just a part of the mechanism.’
‘We’ve met.’ His head hurt too much to think straight. But the memory was there. He’d done something with this man. Picked up a package maybe. Or delivered one.
‘If I ever offended you in some way …’ Gallo wanted to plead with this odd, taut figure in the dark, though he knew it was useless. And there was another thought in his head, one that kept getting bigger. If the man intended to kill him – and Jay Gallo could think of no other reason why they had come to the dead river – why had he waited? Why had he sat for hours by his unconscious figure on the sand, risking discovery, just to see him wake? Was there something he wanted? Something Gallo could still provide, maybe barter with?
‘You want to trade?’ Gallo asked.
The seated man turned. His face came into the harsh moonlight. It was an exaggerated face, one that would turn from beauty to ugliness with a simple change of the light. He had dark, alert eyes glinting in the moonlight, pale skin and full cruel lips. The face of a bit player in a canvas by Caravaggio, Gallo thought randomly.
‘What’s there to trade?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Nothing.’
To Gallo’s dismay he was rising to his feet.
Jay Gallo tried to struggle to join him but his head hurt too much, his mind was just too woozy.
‘Hey,’ he said, desperate for anything that could delay what was coming. ‘Why did you wait like that? Why?’
The strange face was cut in half by the moonlight. It was shocked, offended by the question. ‘You think I kill sleeping men?’
Gallo’s hands went up in front of him, two outstretched palms trying to ward off this big, black figure overhead.
‘You think,’ the man repeated, his voice beginning to rise, beginning to turn into a roar, ‘I’d send you to glory without you knowing?’
‘Don’t,’ Jay Gallo whimpered. ‘I’ll do anything.’
The black figure nodded. ‘I know,’ he said, calm once more.
The pale disc of the moon disappeared behind blackness. A stone-hard fist came down out of the high dark, punching. The meagre light began to fade, began to be subsumed by blood and shattered bone. He found himself moving, lifted by two strong arms above.
Then there was some final relief: he fell into something cold, something that stank rotten but woke him all the same.
Jay Gallo choked on the stagnant water, wondering whether it made him feel better or worse. Then, under the unrelenting pressure of the hands that gripped his shoulders, his head went below the surface, his eyes stared into black nothingness.
The cold poison began to fill his lungs, no matter how much he struggled against the fists that held him down, how often he tried to vomit out the dank water.
The chill left the dead river and raced into his mouth. Jay Gallo fought it for as long as he could but at some stage the body needs to breathe even if there’s nothing out there to pass as oxygen. When he thought his lungs might break he coughed once, felt the coldness win some bitter victory in his chest, and then was still.
EIGHTEEN
Five minutes after Teresa Lupo had returned Costa made his excuses. Rossi had been right. There was a practical reason for the three of them to meet that evening. Nevertheless there was an unspoken one too, one in which he was an unwanted witness. Rossi and the woman were beginning to get too close for him to watch.
He drove through the thick Saturday night traffic, down brightly lit streets into the darkness at the edge of the city. It was a clear, starlit evening with a full moon. Even with the windows down, the interior of the old Fiat was uncomfortably hot. The car swept round the illuminated hulk of the gate of San Sebastiano, out to the old Appian Way, travelled a mile down the narrow road and took the familiar turning to the house, following the rutted drive until he parked beneath the vines of the rough car shelter that leaned drunkenly against the wall. He stepped out of the car and breathed in the smell of the countryside: parched scrub and dust, with the distant fragrance of wild thyme somewhere underneath. Cicadas rattled in the dead grass at his feet. The black, darting outlines of bats, squeaking frantically, broke the perfect night sky.
The house was an old lone farmhouse in the dead land between the old Appian Way and the modern, busy thoroughfare of the Via Appia Nuova. He remembered what he had said to Sara Farnese in front of the altar in the church on Tiber Island. A family was a team against the world, a bulwark against the insanity. He could not imagine what it would be like to be denied its sanctity. He could not begin to understand how anyone could survive the day without some place like this, some safe, holy refuge in which joy and hope, fear and tragedy intermingled, became controllable through the mutual regard individuals felt for one another.
The light was still on in the front room. Marco Costa was asleep in an armchair. Pepe, the argumentative little terrier his father loved so much, sat at his feet, curled into a ball. Nic could remember the animal as a puppy, bought after his mother died, as if in compensation. He had been offended at the time, but his father had been right. The dog’s ceaseless need for love and attention, and his instant return of the same, made those dark months bearable. Now the years were taking their vengeance with the same, vicious brutality, for both of them.
Giulia, his sister, had left a note in the kitchen, where the old man could not find it. She had to go to Milan on business for a week. There had been a call from their elder brother in Washington, young Marco. It was hardest for him. The busy lawyer’s life and the harsh working regime of America left little time for home visits. The slow process of dying was difficult enough to manage when one lived just a few kilometres from the old man; from the other side of the Atlantic it was impossible. During the coming week, however, some routine could be maintained. Nic would stay during the evening whenever possible; Bea, Marco’s former secretary, from his earliest days in politics, and still a firm friend, would come in for the daylight hours and any other time when work called Nic away. Giulia hated to leave him but she needed the time off too. He read the rest of the note. The old man had taken his pills with his usual bad grace. His mood was up and down. The doctors said …
Her writing had faltered as she spelled out the words: perhaps weeks, not months now.
He closed his eyes and wanted to scream. His father was sixty-one, half a head taller than him, and once a bull of a man, someone who had, on occasion, stood up to the toughest of Turin union hoods and won his bloody way. Now he was some flimsy human husk, being eaten away each day by this insidious, invisible disease. It was savagely unjust, whatever the doctors said about the old man’s habits. To move, in the course of a single year, from such strength to such frailty was a cruel transformation, for Marco Costa and those who loved him. It was also implacable, beyond treatment
, something his son still found hard to accept.
There was a sound from the kitchen. Bea came in with two glasses of wine for them. She was still a handsome woman, straight-backed, with short auburn hair, attentive blue eyes and a sharp tongue when it was deserved. As always, she wore bright clothes; on this occasion an orange silk shirt with cream trousers. Gold glittered at her tanned neck and on her slim wrists. She was a little younger than Marco, perhaps fifty-five now, and had been single throughout her life. The relationship puzzled him; there were memories from his childhood, uncertain ones, which suggested Bea had been more than merely a friend to Marco at one time. Seeing him through his illness was now a matter of duty, something she would not shirk. She waved at him to come back into the kitchen, out of earshot of his father.
‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ she said, nodding at the note.
He put down the wine and poured himself some water. ‘Bea, the doctors …’
‘They’re all a bunch of quacks and charlatans.’
‘But …’ He waved the piece of paper, feeling stupid.
‘But nothing. My own father had the same kind of disease, and the same kind of head on his shoulders. Sure it kills them in the end. But I tell you this, Nic. A man like that dies when he chooses to let go, when he thinks there’s no more reason for him to stay around.’
‘Of course.’
She gave him a harsh look, with some cause: his answer had been too quick, too easy. ‘You think I’m deluding myself? Listen. If Marco finds no reason to live he’ll be in a casket tomorrow. If something holds him – and something does right now – he’ll be sitting down with us at Christmas.’
Bea owned a tiny apartment in Trastevere which she always said she would sell one day, to return to her native Puglia. He had come to understand over the last few months when that day would be: once Marco was dead.
He took her hands which were still young, the fingers long and supple. ‘I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, Bea.’
‘Then don’t. Pay attention to him, Nic. This is a time that will be with you for the rest of your life. There are things that must be said or you’ll always regret them. Perhaps things that must be done too. I don’t know. A woman never understands the relationship between a man and his father. Still, most of them don’t either. There …’
She picked up her bag and took out the car keys.
‘Lecture’s over. I’ll be back as usual tomorrow.’
He watched her go, trying to recover those mental images of her when she was young. Bea was beautiful then: a glorious, colourful presence in the family’s life. There was a time, perhaps when he was seven or eight, that he felt he was in love with her. The perfume she wore – the same invasive scent she still used – continued to prick his memory. She still had the same exotic air about her, one that his father never seemed to acknowledge. Bea was a mystery. She had never talked of a man, never seemed to need one. Marco Costa, and the cause, had been her life, and now one was dying and the other already dead.
He went back to the room where Marco still slept, undisturbed by the movement around him. It was late. Nic bent down and carefully placed his arms beneath his father, lifting him out of the chair, shocked by how light he had become.
Halfway to the bedroom, Marco’s breathing changed. The old man’s grey eyelids opened slowly. Nic Costa saw the glint of a welcome recognition in the familiar features which were now creased and wrinkled, like those of an eighty-year-old.
‘You should be out chasing women,’ his father said in a voice that carried the stain of a lifetime’s tobacco.
Nic carried him to the bed and gently laid him on the clean white sheet, newly ironed by Bea. ‘I have been.’
‘Bullshit,’ the old man whispered, then began to smile at some returning memory. ‘People have been chasing you. I watch TV you know. I can recognize the way my own son runs even when he’s wearing some woman’s coat.’
It was the body that was failing him. Marco Costa’s mind was as sharp as his son could ever remember.
‘Did they know too?’ he asked. ‘Did the TV people realize it wasn’t her?’
‘No.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think I should call? Collect a little tip-off money? I don’t understand where you get this theatrical streak. Not from me.’
Nic began to work on his clothes.
His father slapped gently at his hand. ‘I can do that. I’m not a cripple. I keep telling Bea that.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re not a cripple. Bea knows it.’
The old man gave him a curious glance. ‘She knows everything, Nic. She’s family now. In a way she always was though I was too stupid to tell her.’
‘I think she knows. You treat her badly enough.’
‘If you pamper me like an invalid I’ve a duty to be demanding.’
He never gave up, never let go. It was part of his charm and part of his problem too. ‘Then you’re doing your duty very well.’
Marco Costa’s face grew serious. ‘She is family. When the time comes, when you want to be near, I’d like her around. I say that now. I may not be able to say it when it happens.’
He nodded. ‘Bea will be here,’ he said, and walked away from the bed, feeling the familiar stinging in his eyes, hiding his reaction by tidying some stray papers on the desk.
The room had once been the family study, until Marco’s illness and his inability to climb stairs made it the old man’s bedroom. It was still alive with the memories of Nic’s childhood, still decorated just as it had always been, with the striking communist posters, the bust of Gramsci, his father’s hero, and the piece his mother had insisted upon, a classical head of a handsome man, turning, with an expression of determination on his face, as if to face some unseen enemy. Much of Nic’s life was rooted in this room. It was here that all three Costa children had been educated, their parents refusing to tolerate the public schools because, at the time, they insisted Catholicism was the state religion, to be taught to every child. It was here that each in turn learned, and quietly rejected, their parents’ own intense brand of politics, here that three studious children read classics and modern stories, Homer and Jack London. And later Marco’s most cherished possession, a first edition of Gramsci’s own Letter from Prison published in 1947, a decade after his death.
It was here too that Anna Costa had died, ten years before, refusing to go to hospital, as Marco would when it was his time. Nic Costa had found her, slumped at the desk as if reading, when he came back from a run. A left-wing magazine was spread out in front of her. Her grey hair, still as long as when she was young, had tumbled across the pages. He could still recall the sharp, painful sense of injustice he had felt. Perhaps it had somehow, illogically, propelled him into the police. It had taken a year before his father had forgiven himself for being absent; he was in Milan, addressing a conference. Nothing had been the same after that. Marco’s career entered its decline; winter came into their lives. The bright, vivid joy of childhood – a childhood which Marco Costa had enjoyed alongside his children – was gone. The practical world beckoned and it was a cold place full of solitary people.
Marco Costa reached out with a scrawny arm and touched his son’s cheek, smiling.
‘So in between the cross-dressing and the athletics have you managed to oppress anyone today?’
‘Not as many as I’d hoped. But there’s always tomorrow.’
He laughed. ‘Of course. There’s always tomorrow.’
They had discussed the matter, just once, which was as much as Marco Costa desired. For the old man dying was an inconvenience, like a cab that arrived half an hour before it was due and honked its horn until you came struggling to the door. He was unafraid, more through practicality than courage. People died, he said, usually before they wished it. He hadn’t achieved as much as he’d hoped, though he knew it was more than most. He had a good family too: two sons and a daughter whose chosen professions, in the police, in the law and as a professional painter, were so
far removed from his own it was impossible for him to feel anything but pride. He did not fear the void that he knew lay ahead. He only regretted that it would disrupt unfinished business, work that would now fall to someone else, someone beyond the Costa clan.
His son felt differently. Even after a year of knowing its imminence, he still could not come to terms with the idea of a world which did not contain his father’s considerable presence. This was the only secret he dared not share with the old man, and that made it all the harder to bear.
NINETEEN
The phone rang just after he had served the old man breakfast: fresh fruit, orange juice straight from the squeezer, a cocktail of pills. His father watched him as he took the call.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said the moment Nic Costa put down the phone. ‘Bea will be here soon. I’m not helpless. I’ll survive.’
‘Thanks.’
‘What is it?’
The old man never asked about his work. This was a pact between them. Nic Costa was surprised that was now changing.
‘There’s been another death.’
‘So what? Are you the only cop they’ve got?’
‘It’s not that.’ He was trying to clarify matters in his own head. ‘It’s connected somehow by the sound of it.’ He had come part of the way to rejecting his earlier ideas already. It should have been no surprise. ‘Maybe we’ve jumped to conclusions about what happened in the Vatican. Maybe …’ The old man’s tired eyes wouldn’t leave him. Marco Costa knew when something was badly wrong. ‘… it’s all a lot worse than we thought.’
‘Tell me about it,’ the old man ordered. ‘If you want. When you get back. Now …’ He picked up a bread roll from the table. ‘You eat that in the car. No one can live off fruit alone. Not even you.’
Fifteen minutes later Nic Costa was parked outside the old, low church near the Colosseum, by the narrow road that led to the Lateran palace, the first St Peter’s. This was a part of the city he never really understood. The Colosseum was two minutes’ stroll away. The busy modern thoroughfare of Labicana set up a constant traffic roar to the north. A short walk would take him to the Rinaldis’ lonely apartment in the Via Mecenate. There were high, late-nineteenth-century blocks towering over the narrow cobbled streets of the neighbourhood. A few stalls made up the tiny street market that had probably worked here for ten centuries or more. It was a quiet, residential area, one that the tourists rarely visited. And within it lay such odd, unexpected sights: churches and squares that seemed to go back to a different city.
