The dogs of Rome cab-1

by Conor Fitzgerald

  He brushed his hand over the steering wheel, and leaned back into the seat. He would get an SUV in Argentina. He would cruise the boulevards of Buenos Aires in his car, living the life Alleva had planned for himself. He had heard it was a city like Paris. He had checked it out on Google Earth, and seen the trees.

  The motorway was almost empty, and he gave full rein to the power of Di Tivoli’s engine. He closed the window and brought the car up to 180 kph before starting to slow down. The road looped around the outskirts of L’Aquila. He did not like moving inland like this, away from the sea, but in a few days, he would be standing on the wharves of Buenos Aires watching the ships arrive.

  The motorway came to an abrupt end at an intersection designed by an idiot where cars nosed and edged their way into the stream of traffic speeding in the opposite direction. He drove on for two kilometers and, following the gentle advice of the navigator, turned right onto a white gravel road that cut through the fields like a bandage.

  The house was four kilometers from the road, and three from the first house he had seen. The land was richer, heavier, and greener than that near Alleva’s hideout. It was cooler, and the cypress trees cast long shadows.

  He reached a two-story villa made of brown stone with a red slate roof, and the SatNav assured him he had arrived. He sat there waiting to see if anyone would come out, ask what the hell he thought he was doing. No one did. The place looked empty. It had taken him two hours.

  He drove around the house, bumping his way over a patch of field, to park the car out of sight in an overgrown garden, next to a rusted swing. Just as he was about to turn off the engine, he caught a slight flicker of gray movement from the bushes at the far end of a plowed field that started where the garden ended. He instinctively grabbed the steering wheel, then relaxed his grip a little as he recognized the gray outline of a wild boar, which turned and trotted away into a thicket.

  He cracked open the car door, put one foot on the grass, and checked for any other wild animals that might be about. He could hear scuffling and crackles in the thickets, whispers in the trees, and the wash of riverwater over gravel, but nothing human disturbed him. He looked down the field toward the area where he had seen the piggy eyes looking at him a few moments before. He got out. The grass felt good on his aching insteps.

  Staying at the back of the house, keeping his head slightly down all the time, he crept up to a window and peered in. He could make out heavy rustic furniture, an old rug on a red floor. He moved over to a back door, tried it. It was locked. The next window was small, frosted. It would lead into a bathroom. He stood with his back to it, and hit it with his elbow.

  But at the last moment, he pulled his elbow back, afraid of what the shards of exploding glass might do. He located a muddy rock, and hurled it at the glass. He thought he heard a crack, but the rock bounced back. He tried again. This time the window disintegrated. The noise scared him a little, and he stayed still, listening to the trees and fields. Carefully he picked the deadly triangles of glass from the side of the frame, felt around to the latch, opened the window, threw in his bag, then climbed in after. He moved quickly through the house to the entrance hall. He opened the front door, looked out, saw nothing. He double-checked that he had pulled the front door closed. To his right was a small panel of circuit breakers and the main switch for the electricity, which he snapped on.

  The living room was large and open-plan, fronted by a broad, crystal-clear rectangular window that looked out over a sloping mound and gave a good view of the sky. It reminded him of the field on the Microsoft desktop. There was a thick and expensive table in the center of the room, magazines and books scattered on it. But the window made him feel too visible, and he crept upstairs.

  He found what seemed to be a child’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. He carried his bag over to the corner of the room and dropped it on the bed, over which lay a faded Spiderman bedspread. He lay down on it, and breathed in the earthy smell of mold, liking it. He had lost touch with his sleep schedule, but reckoned he was due for another hypersleep. He closed his eyes.

  An hour later, Pernazzo awoke from one of the deepest, most dreamless, and calmest sleeps he had had in years.

  He got out of the bed, unzipped the bag, and carefully set out five blank passports: two Italian, one Argentine, one British, and one Greek. He chose the Greek one. He felt around the front cover of the passport until his fingers touched a tiny bump under the cover, the tell-tale sign of an implanted RFID chip. He went downstairs again, moved fast across the open space of the living room, and found the kitchen. He was in luck. Where the kitchen counter made an L-turn away from the sink sat a white microwave, its blue LED flashing 0.00 at him.

  He opened the microwave door, popped the passport in, turned the dial to full power, and pressed the on switch. A light came on and the passport started slowly turning on the revolving dish. He left it there for no more than three seconds, then pulled open the door, which pinged at exactly the same moment as a far-away dog barked. He repeated the operation five times, letting the paper cool between each blast. A blank RFID in the passport would trigger an alert at the airport, but a broken one would be ignored.

  Back in the bedroom, he searched an old wardrobe. Many of the clothes had black patches of dry rot and damp on them, all of them had a musty odor. But he found an old shirt that fit him. He got down on all fours and hunted around the bottom of the wardrobe, emerging with several pairs of shoes. He found socks. An old-style pair of All-Star basketball shoes with a high ankle turned out to be his size. Things were looking up.

  He found a pair of blunt scissors in the top drawer of a child’s study desk painted in several colors not on the market since the 1970s.

  He cut along the edges of the photos from the first page, the scissors making a thunk-snip sound as he walked them across the white spaces. He chose the most perfectly cut one, and inserted it into the framed area of the Greek passport. From the same desk drawer he took out a small, old-fashioned bottle of glue, but it was completely dry. He thought for a moment, then went into the corridor and opened a door to his left, which opened into another child’s room, and then one on the right, which led into a bathroom brightly tiled in yellow. He found some toothpaste, carried it back into the bedroom, and squeezed some onto the back of the photo. He pressed the photo firmly into place, then tested it with his thumb. It held without sliding, which was all he needed.

  Now he took out the metal embosser. He disassembled the head and inserted the die with the Greek emblem that Alleva had prepared for himself. When he had inserted the relief die, he thumped the embosser arm to make sure it was set firm. The sound of the slam echoed back at him from the other side of the house. Then he fixed the recessed die in place, slipped the photo and paper between them and pressed down hard, making a gentle thud that almost sounded as if it had come from below. The wooden desk creaked. The Greek-cross embossing and surrounding lettering came up fine. The effect was excellent, especially since no one was going to examine Greek lettering with any real knowledge. It would look even better once he had applied the laminated strip of cellulose acetate, which would require the use of an iron.

  But that could wait. In the meantime, he would prepare the Argentine and Italian passports and get dressed, maybe even wash, and finally get rid of the knife and pistol. He was beginning to enjoy himself. Tomorrow, he would be taking an Italian ferry from Naples to Sardinia or from Bari to Greece. The possibilities were many. The day after, he would land in Paris.

  Then he would use his Greek passport to book a flight to Argentina. Maybe he would spend a few days in Paris. He had never been there. Maybe he could even spend a day at Disneyland. He looked at his handiwork again, and suddenly was worried that the photo did not look like him. The face he saw seemed too yellowish. But he had taken it only the other day. A second worrisome thought struck him. The photo was too recent. The issue date on the passport was from three years ago. The photo was from three days ago. Would they n
otice?

  He picked up the toothpaste and went back, passport in hand, to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror in the cabinet door. He felt lightheaded and unreal. He had not eaten. He leaned over the washbasin and took a few breaths. Then he looked back up at his reflection and screamed.

  An old man with no ears was standing behind him.

  54

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2 P.M.

  "Stay the re,” was all the man with no ears said. Then he called downstairs. “Will someone come up here and take a look?”

  “Coming.” A woman’s voice.

  Pernazzo considered hurling himself at the man in the doorway, but he felt rooted to the spot. The man with no ears and bored eyes looked impregnable. Then he stepped aside and Pernazzo saw a raw-faced woman with peroxide hair who chewed gum as she studied his face. He had seen her somewhere before.

  “Are you Pernazzo?”

  “No.”

  On Di Tivoli’s documentary show. That’s where he had seen her.

  Manuela Innocenzi.

  “Yes, you are,” she said, then turned around and walked out.

  Pernazzo made a half movement after her, but the man with no ears stepped to close off the door. There was at least one other person in the corridor.

  “Hey. Wait a minute,” said Pernazzo. “Maybe there’s been a mistake. Who do you think I am?”

  No reply.

  Surreptitiously, he felt around the washstand for the scissors, but then remembered they were in the bedroom, and they belonged to a child and were small and blunt.

  He heard the sound of someone shuffling slowly across the landing and into his bedroom. Again, Pernazzo considered rushing the man with no ears, but found his feet would not respond.

  “Come here,” ordered the man in the doorway. “Come on,” he added in an exasperated and half-cajoling voice when Pernazzo did not move. “I don’t want to have to drag you out by the ears. In there,” said his captor. He gave him a gentle push into the bedroom and stood by the door. Sitting on the bed, leafing idly through the passports, was the woman again. Pernazzo felt his sweat soak through the entire back of his shirt. He had to try to gain a negotiating position. He nodded at the passports, and tried to fix a knowing smile on his face, but she did not glance up.

  “Pretty good, aren’t they?”

  She threw a glance in his direction, as if checking to see where the unexpected noise had come from, then put down the passports and pulled out some Transcend memory sticks from the bag.

  “Ah, now those. Those are special,” he tried, but she had already lost interest, and was now peering with one eye at a circular metal die contained in a transparent plastic disc. Pernazzo recognized it as the one with the British crown and lion.

  “That’s the relief die for the British passport. The recessed die is in another case,” he offered.

  Manuela Innocenzi put the metal circle down on the bed, and picked up one of the five sheets of numbers.

  “That’s just backup. In case something goes wrong with the memory sticks, which could never happen. With these numbers I can reconstruct bank account numbers and telephone contacts.”

  She took out the Ka-Bar Tanto, and examined its hilt. She took it out of its sheath, and turned it back and forth as if looking for blemishes on the blade. He realized he should never have kept that knife, no matter how important it was to him.

  Pernazzo stared at a Star Wars bedside mat on the floor beside the bed. C3P0 had his hand raised in greeting.

  “How did you find me?” All at once, this was all he wanted to know.

  She ignored the question, but spoke at last. “You had no reason to do all these things. You had a choice. I was born into it, and I tried to move above, without hurting my father’s feelings. Arturo was my last chance to change. I would have made it, too. I’d have got away. Escaped into goodness.”

  Pernazzo had no idea what the ugly woman was talking about, but he was in no doubt of her power.

  She said, “You killed Arturo with this,” and gently waved her hand to forestall any protests. “And you kept it because you are proud of what you did. Arturo and I had a deep sense of justice. Know that? It’s what we had in common.”

  Pernazzo felt a shadow move down his head and body as hope drained away.

  “This is yours, too?” Her voice sounded tender. Pernazzo looked down and saw she had placed Alleva’s undersized pistol on the child’s bed. “Not this backpack, though. This was his. I remember he used it to bring a packed lunch. He was always walking or cycling, always had this bag. He kept a book for identifying flowers in it. Not just flowers. He was enthusiastic even about weeds, grass.”

  Pernazzo looked at a world map on the bedroom wall. It curled at the edges. The Soviet Union still existed. Argentina was green, Brazil orange, Chile pink. His feet were cold.

  “How did you find me?”

  “We all get found out in the end.”

  Pernazzo found himself in the corridor, the earless old man behind him. He moved down the staircase as if it were an escalator. At the bottom of the steps stood a youth in a white tracksuit, who looked hardly older than a child. He had a bum-fluff moustache, a hairless chest, and doe-like eyes. He was also holding a pistol and pointing it casually at Pernazzo’s heart. It was an elegant model, like Massoni’s.

  The kid seemed nice enough. Pernazzo looked slowly to his right. The raw-faced woman had sat down, her big feet pointed in his direction. She was twisting something in her hands and staring at him with her small blue eyes, never taking them off him, all the time working the gum in her jaw. The old man’s phone rang, he pressed it to his mutilated ear, murmured something about five minutes, put it away.

  “Move,” commanded the boy. They left by the front door, and the boy suddenly gave him a hard shove, as if the house had kept him polite and he was only now coming into his element. Pernazzo slipped on the grass, went sprawling forward, and considered breaking into a sprint, but the boy was just behind him with his long-barreled pistol. Pernazzo saw two four-by-four vehicles parked in front of the gate. How had he not heard? They circled the house, and he was in the back garden again. There was the broken window, the shining glass shards.

  As they approached the thicket at the end of the garden, he tensed, ready to make a break for it, but though the top of his body felt light and ready to burst into flight, the lower part seemed to be wading through water. The youth whispered “Stop,” and his voice was so close that Pernazzo felt the hairs in his ears tingle.

  Pernazzo walked on a few paces, wondering whether his mother could see him now.

  “I said ‘stop.’ ” There was no annoyance in the soft voice.

  Using the energy surging through the upper part of his body, Pernazzo bent down and grabbed a broken elm branch, but it was as light as cork. He spun around, stick in hand, but the kid was five paces behind and out of reach. He didn’t even seem to have noticed Pernazzo’s weapon.

  “Wait a minute!” said Pernazzo. He raised the rotten stick above his head. “This is too light. I need…”

  “What?”

  But Pernazzo could not think of anything to say.

  The kid shot him through the right elbow. When he heard the crack, Pernazzo thought the wood had exploded over his head. And, then, suddenly, the pain was so bad he wanted to tear off his right arm with his left.

  The next bullet buried itself in his kneecap and did not come out. As he went down, he felt vomit rise from his throat, and when he hit the ground he sucked it all back in again and couldn’t breathe. He wriggled over onto his side and dislodged enough to be able to gasp for air. Something infinitely strong and merciless grabbed his shattered arm and pulled, causing the agony to move from his elbow to his entire body. Far above him stood the darkened face of the young man and above him a blue sky with clouds like faint chalk marks.

  Pernazzo had not planned for the pain. It left him no chance of clarity. Most of all, it was not fair. He had no chance, lying there. A distant idea
was beginning to form in his mind, somewhere behind the pain. He would need some time to work it through. Time to recover. It had something to do with change. He was sure it was going to be a beautiful idea.

  “Wait,” said Pernazzo, “I think I may…”

  The young man in the white tracksuit shot Pernazzo twice in the forehead, putting an immediate end to the thrashing movements. He used his foot to push the scrawny corpse over and, never one to take a gamble, delivered two more shots to the back of the head.

  55

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 11 A.M.

  "What about the dogs?”

  The speaker was Sveva Romagnolo, and Blume couldn’t believe her question. He had just finished describing the discovery of Pernazzo’s body at Di Tivoli’s country villa in Amatrice, and this was her idea of a suitable response.

  “The dogs?” He took the phone way from his ear and looked at it as if it were responsible for the ludicrous question. His main concern now was what to do about Paoloni. He could not come to a decision.

  “I know it may sound like a strange question after all you have been telling me, Commissioner, but you see, I’ve already heard all about what happened to Pernazzo. Your boss Gallone was very pleased to be able to give me every detail, along with assurances that he would handle the media. I don’t want to hear any more. Not for now. And it’s the very first thing Arturo would have asked. So now I’m asking for him.”

  “Ferrucci said he would look after that,” said Blume. “But after he got… well… it got forgotten.” What ever he did, he would not report Paoloni to the authorities. Paoloni could do that himself.

  “You know where the creatures were kept imprisoned, don’t you? The details were in Arturo’s files.”

  “Somewhere near Ponte Galleria, I think,” said Blume. He had been working with Paoloni for seven years. Until now, the differences of style had not mattered.