Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Viale put a slight hand on Falcone’s arm and looked directly into his face. There was northern blood in him, Falcone decided. It showed in the flat, emotionless landscape of his anonymous face, and those grey-blue eyes, cold, mirthless.

  “No, we can’t just leave it at that, Leo. Just say yes now and I can push through the paperwork straightaway. You could be sitting behind a new desk before the end of January.”

  Falcone laughed and watched the snow again. It made him feel good somehow. It reminded him of his parting words to every man he’d sent out into the city that night, ordering them, for once, to disturb his private time on the slightest excuse.

  “I’ll think about it,” Falcone replied. “Just like last time.”

  Viale cast him a vile glance and muttered a low, obscene curse. Viale was, Leo realized, more than a little drunk.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Leo,” Viale murmured. “Don’t play games.”

  “It’s always been one of my rules,” Falcone answered calmly, “not to fuck with the grey men. It’s bad for your career.”

  Viale snorted, then casually stuffed a piece of sponge cake into his mouth, despatching crumbs and sugar down the front of his black jacket. “You think you’re above all this, don’t you? Sitting there in your grubby little office. Sending out grubby little men to chase people you probably can’t put in jail anyway, even if you catch them.”

  “It’s a job someone’s got to do,” Falcone answered, then looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. Perhaps it was late enough to make a polite exit without offending anyone except Viale, who was offended enough as it was.

  “It’s a job?” Viale snarled. “Jesus Christ, Leo.”

  The grey man cast his eyes around the room, then shook his head. Falcone did the same. Most of the individuals there were getting stinking drunk. It was tradition. It was Christmas.

  Viale barked at the waiter. The man came back with a flask of grappa. Viale poured out a couple, just for them, as if no one else in the room existed.

  “This is a hundred a bottle and I’m paying,” he muttered, then nodded at the tiny window, now blocked with snow. “Even you need something warm inside on a night like this.”

  Falcone took the glass, sipped at the fiery drink, then put it on the table. Alcohol had never been his thing.

  Viale watched him. “You don’t like joining in, do you? You think you can get through all this shit on your own, so long as your luck holds and you keep getting good marks every time they come to check the statistics. What’s a man like you messing around with that crap for?”

  Targets, benchmarks, goals … Falcone didn’t like the jargon of the modern police force any more than the rest of his colleagues. But unlike most he saw a point behind the paperwork. Everyone needed some kind of standard by which their efforts could be measured internally, and publicly if need be. That was anathema to people like Viale, who could screw up for years and never get found out unless a rare, scrupulous civil servant or politician got on their back. That thought jogged a memory from somewhere, but Falcone couldn’t nail it down.

  He glanced at his watch again, then pushed the glass away. The raw smell of the grappa was overwhelming. “Say what you want to say, Filippo. It’s late. I want a good night’s sleep. With this weather the Questura’s going to be short of people tomorrow. Maybe we’ll have to help out uniform or traffic.”

  “Traffic!” Viale snapped. “Why the hell would you want to waste your time on that?”

  “I believe it’s something to do with being a public servant,” Falcone replied dryly.

  Viale waved the glass of clear liquid at him. “And I’m not, huh? How do you know?”

  “I don’t, Filippo. That’s the point.” Falcone shifted awkwardly. He didn’t want to upset this man any more than he had already. Viale had influence, power over him perhaps. But he didn’t want to prolong this difficult interview either. “Shouldn’t we discuss this some other time? During the day. When we both feel”—he couldn’t suppress a glance at the carafe of grappa—“more ready to talk sense.”

  Viale’s immobile face flushed. “I’m amazed you think you have the time.”

  Falcone remained silent, waiting for the rest.

  “Think about it, Leo. You’re forty-eight. Has anyone asked you to sit the commissario interview recently?”

  Falcone shrugged. He hadn’t even considered promotion of late. Life had been too busy.

  Viale provided the answer for him, which was interesting of itself. “Not in three years. And you haven’t even asked. That looks bad.”

  “Promotion’s not everything,” Falcone replied, knowing his answer sounded feeble. “Some of the most important people we have are just plain street cops who’ll never move up the ladder in their lives, or expect to. Where the hell would we be without them?”

  Viale leaned along the table and breathed booze fumes in his face. “We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about you. A man who looked like he was going far. And now he’s treading water. Worse, he’s making bad decisions. Backing the wrong people.”

  Falcone bristled. He’d an idea now where this was leading. “By which you mean …?”

  “Shit,” the grey man hissed. “You know damn well. You’re getting sentimental in your dotage, Leo. You’re looking out for people who don’t deserve it. This Peroni idiot, for one thing. If it wasn’t for you he’d be out of the force without a pension. With good reason, too. Why’d anyone with any sense stick up for a guy like that?”

  Falcone thought carefully before answering. “They asked my opinion. I gave it. Peroni’s a good cop, whatever happened in the past. We can’t afford to lose people of that calibre.”

  “Peroni’s a disaster waiting to happen. Him and that partner of his. And don’t tell me you never stuck up for him. Hell, if it wasn’t for you those two wouldn’t even be working together.”

  None of this was SISDE’s business. It infuriated Falcone that he was getting a lecture on personnel issues from someone outside the force. He’d be damned if he’d listen to it from anyone inside either. Costa and Peroni were on his team. It was his call who worked with whom.

  “These are two lowly cops on the street, Filippo. They’re my problem. Not yours.”

  “No. They are two time bombs waiting to destroy what’s left of your career. Peroni’s going to go off the rails again before long. Mark my word. And the Costa kid …” Viale leaned forward and said this quietly, as if it were a confidence. “Come on, Leo. You know who his old man was? That stinking Commie who caused us no end of trouble when he was alive.”

  Suddenly Falcone recalled the memory that had been eluding him. Some fifteen years earlier Nic Costa’s father, an implacably incorrupt Communist politician, had exposed a series of financial misdeeds inside both the civilian and military security services. SISDE in particular came out badly. Heads had rolled as a.result. A couple of fall guys even found themselves briefly in jail.

  “What on earth has that got to do with the son?” he asked.

  “There’s trouble in the blood,” Viale muttered. “People like that have got ideas above their station. Be honest with yourself. You know it as well as I do.”

  “These are internal police matters,” Falcone replied sharply. “You don’t have to concern yourself with our business.”

  “I’m concerned with you, Leo. People are taking note. They’re starting to wonder. In this business you’re either moving up or moving down. No one stands still. Which way do you think you’re going right now? Huh?”

  He leaned close, wreathed in grappa fumes, to make sure his last point struck home. “Where I am everyone moves up. You know why? This is our world. We own it. We have the money. We have the power. We don’t need to go squeaking to a committee of bureaucrats so we can use it. We don’t have to worry whether some asshole of an MP is going to start shooting his mouth off in parliament about what we do. Not anymore. You’re a man who wants results. That’s what I like about you. We’ve got opportu
nities for someone like you. Ten years down the line you’re still going to be employed too. Which, given how things stand …”

  Viale paused and, with an unsteady hand, poured the remains of Falcone’s glass into his.

  “… isn’t the case where you are now. Listen to a friend, Leo. These last few years I’ve been offering you a job. That’s not what’s on the table now. Now I’m throwing you a lifeline. One that could pull you out of all the crap you’re swimming in. Before it’s too late.”

  Falcone’s cell phone rang. He excused himself, answered it, listening carefully to the familiar voice.

  “I’m needed,” he said when the call ended.

  Viale’s face creased in a drunken sneer, one Falcone found faintly amusing. “What is it? Some tourist got mugged again down the Colosseum? The Kosovans getting uppity about who rules the hooker trade?”

  “Not exactly,” Falcone replied, smiling, getting to his feet, reaching for his camel-hair coat, doubting it really would keep out the cold on such a night. “It’s much more important than that. Excuse me.”

  Viale raised his glass. “Ciao, Leo. You have until the New Year. After that you’re on your own.”

  THEY LEFT THE CAR where it was, tyre-deep in drifting snow in a blocked dead end off the Corso, and walked to the Piazza della Minerva through a squally wind. The weather changed by the moment. Briefly, through a clear patch high overhead, a full moon illuminated billowing banks of heavy cloud scudding over the city. The stars shone, bright and brittle in the thin winter air, possessing a piercing clarity that was almost painful.

  Then the blizzard returned, and the three men pulled their collars around their faces and turned the corner into the small square, where the plain, brute cylinder of the Pantheon’s rear wall loomed above them, luminous under the night’s silver light. It was a sight Nic Costa had never expected to see. The vast hemisphere of the dome, the largest in the world until the twentieth century, so vast that Michelangelo had made the diameter of St. Peter’s dome half a metre smaller out of respect, was now swathed in snow, cutting an unmistakable semicircle out of the sky, like the meniscus of a gigantic new moon rising above the dark urban horizon.

  Costa cast a glance at Bernini’s famous elephant in front of the church. The creature was almost unrecognizable. A heavy drift had engulfed the statue and the foot of the diminutive Egyptian obelisk that sat on its midriff. A perfect, miniature mountain rose up from the ground to form a triangular peak, surmounted by the bare needle-like pinnacle of the column, etched with impenetrable hieroglyphs. Sandri snapped some more pictures. Peroni shook his head. Then they carried on, walking parallel with the eastern wall of the Pantheon, into the small, rectangular open space of the Piazza della Rotonda.

  Costa felt he knew every inch of the piazza. He’d arrested pickpockets working the busy summer crowds who had flocked to see the impossible: an imperial Roman temple unchanged in its essential form over almost twenty centuries. And a sight that, just as important to many, was free, since Hadrian’s original shrine to every last god in the heavens had in the seventh century been converted into the consecrated church it still remained. Once, Costa had picked up a drunk who’d fallen asleep beneath the spouting mouths of the comical dolphins and fauns of the fountain opposite the temple’s massive, colonnaded portico. But long before he became a cop, when he was just a school kid, full of awe and passion for the history of his native city, he’d come here whenever he could, just to sit on the steps of the fountain and listen to water trickle from the dolphins’ beaks like liquid laughter, just to stare at the way everything changed in the shifting light of the day and the season, feeling two thousand years of bustling history brush up against his face.

  Tonight, however, he scarcely recognized the place. The blustering northerly wind was funnelling down the narrow alleys facing the piazza, cascading new and fallen snow straight into the square and the mouth of the Pantheon’s portico. Curious, organically shaped drifts clung to the fountain. The streams of water from the dolphins’ and fauns’ mouths were now frozen solid, like lumpen jewels gleaming in the moonlight.

  Peroni was scanning the piazza for signs of life. Mauro had his camera out, changing films. Costa approved. This was a rare sight, he thought. It deserved to be recorded.

  “Where the hell is everyone, Nic?” Peroni asked. “I don’t even see the bums.”

  The poor were with you always. Particularly in a place like this.

  “Maybe they’re inside already,” Costa replied. Or, even better, perhaps the city had discovered some hidden reserve of compassion and found space to house them for the night.

  “We’ve got company,” Peroni said, pointing to a figure emerging from behind the western wall of the building.

  The newcomer shivered inside his dark uniform, shielding his face against the snow, which seemed to have found newly energized vigour. The caretaker stumbled forward, stared at them hopefully, then asked, “You the cops?”

  Peroni waved his badge. Costa looked around the square again. More people should have been there. Falcone ought to arrive soon, too.

  “I’m not going inside on my own,” the caretaker said. “Some of these scum use knives.”

  Peroni nodded at the doors. “Best open them up, then.”

  The man let loose a dry laugh, then looked at Sandri, once again aiming his camera right, left and centre. “Sure, Officer. That’s all it takes. Is your man here going to shoot some pictures too? They say you see it just once in a lifetime. Snow coming down like that, straight through the eye.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Peroni asked.

  Costa knew the problem. Behind the portico lay the largest pair of imperial Roman doors in existence. Worked bronze, almost as high as the porch itself, and more than a metre deep. Sometimes, before going on duty, he’d take a coffee in the square in the early morning, watching the Pantheon being prepared for another day of crowds. No one who worked in the building ever approached through the front, not to begin with. The doors opened inwards, their mass being drawn back slowly from behind.

  “We need the tradesmen’s entrance,” Costa said.

  “Precisely.” The caretaker sniffed, then drew back his collar to reveal a gnarled, florid face that looked as if half a bottle of grappa could be wrung out of it. “All three of you coming?”

  Costa looked at Peroni. “I can handle a couple of street people. You stay here with Mauro. Wait for Falcone.”

  “No,” Peroni said, striding out of the snow and towards the shelter of the portico. “I stay here.”

  Costa followed in the caretaker’s swift footsteps, walking to the western flank, where they descended some stairs down to what must have been the original level of the city when the Pantheon was built. There was a locked iron gate, then further steps and a long, narrow path, in the shadow of the high modern wall of the adjoining street, to a small, secure door almost at the rear of the building.

  “The tradesmen’s entrance,” the caretaker announced icily, then turned a couple of locks and threw it open. Costa stepped into the alcove and waited as the man fumbled with some keys at a second door, which led, he guessed, to the great circular interior. He wondered briefly what kind of bum locked the doors behind him.

  He listened to the metal tumblers turn.

  “After you,” the caretaker said. “I’ll get the lights.”

  Nic Costa walked into the darkness and felt the chill of fresh winter air on his face. The night breeze was circling in the vast hemisphere he knew lay before him. And there was another sound too. Of a human being moving: short, anxious steps in the blackness beyond.

  He felt his jacket, wondered about the gun. Then the lights of the building burst into life, bringing a sudden harsh sun into the shadows of the vast, airy, artificial universe enclosed beneath the ancient structure’s huge dome.

  Someone cried out with surprise. A young voice. The noise reverberated around the vast emptiness so quickly it seemed to come from everywhere.

&nbs
p; “Will you look at that?” the caretaker said, no longer thinking about the intruders.

  Through the giant open eye of the oculus of the roof came a steady, swirling stream of snow, pirouetting around itself with the perfect, precise symmetry of a strand of human DNA.

  It fell in the dead centre of the room, where an inverted, icy funnel was growing, spreading out beyond the central marble ring and rising, at its peak, to a metre or more.

  Costa heard movement to his right. A slight, small figure dashed through a brilliant yellow beam cast down by a spotlight near the main altar, then fled into the pool of shadows in a recess on the far side of the building.

  “Scum,” the caretaker muttered. “What are you going to do?”

  Costa had been running the options through his mind. Chase some lone, cold, hungry bum through the darkness of Hadrian’s holiest of holies? And all for what?

  “Open the doors,” he said. “The main ones.”

  Costa was walking towards them already, anxious to enjoy the look of astonishment on the faces of Gianni Peroni and Mauro Sandri when those gigantic bronze shutters were pulled back to reveal this wonder to the world on the other side.

  “What?” the caretaker asked, putting a hand on Costa’s shoulder until something in the detective’s eyes told him this was not a good idea.

  “You heard!” Costa snapped, getting angry with the man, wondering what he thought he was protecting here.

  There were more keys and some kind of electronic monitor needed attention. Costa got on his cell phone and called his partner, just beyond the doors.