Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “ ‘Probably,’ ” the commissario snorted. “When will you be out?”

  “Mid-afternoon at the earliest.”

  “Make it noon. You’ve got the manpower. You managed to requisition half the Questura without my knowing last night. You could have called.”

  Falcone nodded. He could have done that. But he chose not to. Nothing got past Moretti easily. There was too much explaining to be done and all for no reason. He’d worked for better bosses, and worse. With Moretti it was simpler for both of them if they both stuck to their own particular skills. In Falcone’s case, investigation. For Moretti, the behind-the-scenes management of internal and external relations, the marshalling of budgets and staff. Politics.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you, sir. Not until we knew who she was.”

  Moretti laughed. The sound shocked Falcone. There didn’t even seem an edge inside it. “She’s an American. That’s all. I find it a little insulting you think it’s worth calling me over for her but not for that poor bastard who was taking the photos. He was at least Italian.”

  “I don’t make the rules,” Falcone murmured. “Sir.”

  It was a standing order these days. Verbal and physical attacks on Americans were rare and usually had nothing to do with nationality, but the previous October an American military historian had been badly beaten up in the centro storico. Had a couple of uniformed cops not stumbled on the scene the man could have died. The brutal assailant had escaped. No one had claimed responsibility. Initially it was assumed that the Red Brigades were behind the attack, and everyone waited for the customary anonymous phone call citing it as a blow against American imperialism. But it never came. No one—not the police, not SISDE, not even the military spooks as far as Falcone knew—had come up with a shred of evidence to suggest who was really responsible, or whether this was part of a concerted campaign against US citizens. Nevertheless, the order had come down from high, in all probability from somewhere in the Quirinale Palace itself: all incidents involving Americans had to be reported to a senior level immediately.

  “Just another tourist, huh?” Moretti said. “Woman on her own? Well, I suppose I can guess what happened there. Probably met some complete stranger. Thought it was just a little romance. Throw a few coins in the fountain, then walk here for a little fun. It’s just another sex crime, right?”

  Falcone checked his watch, then looked at the activity inside the building. “You tell me,” he replied, and began walking towards the Pantheon door, knowing the commissario had no choice but to follow.

  The lights of the Pantheon burned brightly, supplemented by a forest of police spots. Half a dozen SOCOs in white bunny suits were now scouring every last square millimetre of the patterned floor. A makeshift canvas tent had been erected over the corpse in the centre, with a set of lights tethered at the corners. Snow had continued to fall steadily through the night. Teresa Lupo and her team had built the contraption to keep the body from being buried ever more deeply by the continuous white stream that worked down through the oculus directly above them. From the moment Falcone saw the corpse emerging from the ice under Teresa Lupo’s care, he understood the body was in good hands. She was a wonderful pathologist, the best, even if his relationship with her was often strained. She had seen immediately that it was important to preserve any shreds of evidence that might be hidden in the ice as it melted under the heat of the lights. There was another reason too. The body had been arranged, quite deliberately, on the circle which marked the exact midpoint of the building, arms and legs outstretched to their limits in an angular fashion Falcone recognized, though he was unable to remember from what. The pose of the body—there was no other way to describe it—possessed meaning. It was, somehow, a cryptic message from the woman’s murderer and one they needed to try to understand as quickly as possible.

  Carefully, Falcone wound his way through the clear area marked by tape that had been set up to allow safe access in and out of the building. Moretti followed in silence. They reached the mouth of the tent. Falcone stopped and gestured towards the body. Lupo and her deputy, Silvio Di Capua, were on their knees moving gently around it, poring over the dead woman with painstaking, obsessive deliberation. He had watched them get to work in the early hours of the morning. Teresa Lupo had ordered her people to erect the tent the moment she saw the scene, but it had proved a long and difficult job in the bitter cold of the Pantheon’s interior under a constant whirling downfall of snow. It was almost an hour before they could crawl beneath the covering to examine the ice funnel, slowly sweeping away the snowflakes with tiny brushes, revealing the horror that lay beneath, millimetre by millimetre.

  Moretti looked at the naked woman, then fired a disgusted expression somewhere into the dark corners of the building. “Sex crime, Leo. As I said.”

  “And the photographer?”

  Moretti scowled. He didn’t like being put on the spot like this. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out.”

  Falcone nodded. “We will.”

  “Make damn sure you do. The last thing this city needs is something that scares off tourists.”

  Falcone reached into his pocket and took out the woman’s passport. They’d found it in a bag in a corner of the building. It named her as Margaret Kearney, aged thirty-eight. The next-of-kin details weren’t filled in. Her driving licence had been issued in New York City six months before.

  “We don’t actually know she was a tourist. All we have is a name.”

  “This is going to be messy, isn’t it?” Moretti grumbled. “The Americans are asking questions already. They’ve got some resident FBI people up at the embassy who want to talk to you.”

  “Of course,” Falcone murmured, trying to decode what Moretti had said. “I don’t understand. You’re saying these are FBI people who are resident here in Rome?”

  Moretti emitted a dry laugh. “Well, isn’t that wonderful? Something you don’t know. Of course they’ve got FBI people here. Who the hell knows what they’ve got here? They’re Americans, aren’t they? They do what the hell they like.”

  “What do I tell them?”

  Moretti’s dark eyes twinkled with delight. “Welcome to the tightrope. You tell them just enough to keep them happy. And not a damn thing more. This is still Italy as far as I’m concerned. We police our own country, thank you. At least until someone tells me otherwise.”

  Falcone glanced at Teresa Lupo. She’d broken off from the work in the tent to speak, in low and guarded tones, to Gianni Peroni, who was standing by the altar looking exhausted. Nic Costa hung around just out of earshot.

  “I understand,” Falcone murmured.

  “Good,” Moretti replied. “You didn’t say how the dinner went. I would have gone myself but, frankly, I don’t think they feel I’m sufficiently … interesting. At least they never talk to me with quite the enthusiasm they seem to summon up for you.”

  “It slipped my mind. It was … fine.”

  “Really?” the commissario sniffed. “That’s not what that slippery bastard Viale said when he called this morning. He doesn’t like hearing the word ‘no,’ Leo. You’re either very brave or very foolish.”

  TWO PEOPLE WERE WALKING into the building now, picking their way through the tape maze like professionals. A man and a woman who were complete strangers. He was about forty-five, thickset, with cropped grey hair, like that of a US marine, and a head that looked too small for his body. The woman was much younger, perhaps twenty-five, striking in a bright scarlet coat. They were walking into a crime scene as if they owned the place and Leo Falcone already possessed a gloomy, interior conviction about who they were.

  Moretti eyed the couple too, watched Costa and Peroni walk briskly over to intercept them, then shuffled his coat around him, getting ready to go back to the warmth of his office. He laughed. “Tell your monkeys to be polite, Leo. We’re all watching. Maybe Filippo Viale too. Brave or foolish? When this is over, I suspect we’ll all know which.”

  Costa saw the
m first, brushing past the uniforms on the door with a flash of an ID card and a cocky self-assurance that irked him immediately.

  “Hey, Gianni,” he murmured, “you know these people?”

  Peroni looked washed out. Teresa had told them to use her place in Tritone when they got a break. There was no way Costa would make it home to the farm on the Appian Way. As for Peroni … Costa could only wonder when the big man had last slept in the small, functional rented apartment he’d found out in the suburbs on the other side of the river, beyond the Vatican. Peroni already had a set of keys to Teresa’s place. Maybe he lived there most of the time anyway.

  “No,” Peroni answered, perking up suddenly. He moved quickly to block the couple’s path, holding out his big arms wide, stretching from tape to tape.

  The man with the crew cut glowered up at him, half a head shorter but just as big in the body.

  “You don’t mind if I ask,” Peroni said. “This isn’t exactly a public performance we’re giving here.”

  “FBI,” the American murmured in a low, grunty voice and kept on walking.

  “Whoa!” Peroni yelled, and caught the man firmly by the arm, not minding the filthy look he was getting in return.

  “Officer,” the female agent said, “this woman is an American citizen.”

  “Yeah,” Peroni replied, “I know. But let’s go through some niceties first. My name is Gianni Peroni. This is my partner, Nic Costa. We are policemen. This nice-looking gentleman walking towards us is Inspector Falcone. He’s the boss around here. When he says you get to go further, you go further. Until then—”

  Falcone arrived, looked the two FBI agents up and down and said, “Over here we like people to call ahead and make appointments.”

  The man withdrew an ID card from his pocket. The woman in the scarlet coat did the same. Costa leaned forward and stared at the photos, checking them, making sure the two Americans understood the point. There were rules here. There were procedures to be followed. She didn’t look much like the photo on the ID card. According to the date it was two years old. She’d seemed much younger then.

  “The IDs are fine,” he told them politely. “We have to check. You’d be amazed what the press will do over here just to get a picture.”

  “Of course,” the woman answered. She was trying to look like a business executive: expensive, well-cut clothes, blonde hair tied back a little scrappily in a bun that seemed to want to work itself free and let her locks hang more freely around an attractive, almost girlishly innocent face. Something didn’t match up and, just for a moment, he couldn’t stop staring at her. She had razor-sharp, light blue eyes that were cutting into him now.

  “I’m Agent Emily Deacon,” she said in perfect Italian. “This—”

  She pointed at her colleague without once looking at him and Costa realized, on the instant, she didn’t like the man by her side.

  “—is Agent Joel Leapman. We’re here for a reason. If you let us through to see what you’ve got, we just might be able to help.”

  Peroni tapped Leapman on the arm and gave him a broad grin. “There. Now that’s asking nicely.”

  “So do we get through?” the American snapped.

  Falcone nodded, then led the way. Teresa Lupo had cleared the corpse of snow entirely now and indicated to them to wait as she quietly dictated some notes into a voice recorder. The dead woman lay on the geometric slabs, legs and arms akimbo, her white, bloodless skin waxy under the artificial lights. When he’d had the chance between phone calls and working with the SOCOs, Costa had watched closely as the body had emerged from the ice. The positioning of the corpse on the central marble circle was quite deliberate. Her limbs were outstretched, directed at equidistant points in the vast, curving sphere of the Pantheon, as if making a statement. It was an image that jogged a memory and was, perhaps, designed to. He recalled it now. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of an idealized figure, a naked man with a full head of hair, set inside first a square then a circle. His limbs described two positions: legs together, at the base of the circle, touching the central arm of the lower side of the square, then apart, on the circle alone; and arms outstretched first horizontally, touching the square alone, then raised, to both the circle and the square’s upper corners.

  The dead woman’s stiff position on the shining, damp floor, one surely fixed by her murderer, matched the second of each of these poses perfectly. This was not simply a striking image. It had a meaning, a very specific one.

  “The Vitruvian Man,” he said quietly, remembering a distant art lesson from school.

  The American woman looked at him oddly. “Excuse me?”

  “She reminded me of something. From a long time ago.”

  “You’ve got a memory, Mr. Costa,” she conceded. “What else do you recall?”

  He tried to flesh out the hazy recollection his brain had dug up from somewhere. It was a long time ago. The idea itself was elusive and complicated too. “That it’s about dimensions and form.” He nodded at the huge spherical roof above them. “Just like this place.”

  “Just like this place,” she repeated and, unexpectedly, smiled. The change in expression was remarkable. It took years off her face. She looked like a student suddenly, fresh, unmarked.

  It didn’t last. Agent Leapman was making impatient noises. He looked at Teresa Lupo, who was still chanting into the recorder. “You’re the pathologist, right?”

  Teresa hit the pause button, blinked and gave him a hard stare. “No, I’m the fucking typist. Just give me a moment and I’ll take your letter next. Who the hell are you, by the way?”

  The card got flipped out again as if it were some kind of magic amulet. “FBI.” He nodded at his colleague. “Both of us.”

  “Really?” Teresa sighed and went back to talking into the machine.

  Quietly, calmly, with a distinct effort designed to cool down the temperature of the conversation, Emily Deacon interposed. “I think we can help.”

  The pathologist hit the stop button. “How?”

  “She was strangled. With a piece of cord or something. Am I right?”

  Teresa glanced at Falcone, searching for a sign. He looked as lost as Peroni and Costa.

  “There’s no evidence of sexual assault,” the American woman continued. “This isn’t sexual at all, not in the usual sense anyway. Which begs the question: why did he undress her? It happened here? You do have her clothes?”

  “It happened here,” Costa conceded. “Sometime between eight in the evening, when the staff closed the place, and midnight, when we turned up.”

  Teresa Lupo was staring at the body again, trying to think. She didn’t stay mad with people for long. Not if she thought they had something she wanted. “It was snowing all last night. All that ice is going to play havoc with everything I normally use for time of death. There are calculations I can use, but they’re not going to be wonderfully accurate in the circumstances.”

  The two FBI agents exchanged a glance. It was almost as if they’d seen enough already.

  Falcone finally found his voice and Costa couldn’t work out why he’d stayed silent for so long. “I’ve been very generous around here. What do we get in return?”

  “We’ll let you know,” Leapman murmured.

  Emily Deacon glanced at the pathologist. “This is your call. I’m not trying to push you along. But do you think it would be possible to turn her? I need to see her back.”

  Teresa glanced at her assistant Silvio Di Capua, who was putting away some of the equipment they’d been using. Di Capua shrugged.

  “We can turn her,” she said, then held out a hand to stop Leapman, who was heading for the body without the slightest hesitation. “I said ‘we.’ ”

  The American halted reluctantly. Teresa and Di Capua called on two morgue assistants to help. They positioned themselves around the right-hand side of the corpse and placed gloved fingers on her limbs and shoulders.

  “Is this going to be nasty?” Peroni asked, worried. “I lik
e warnings about nasty stuff whenever possible.”

  “Then don’t look,” the Deacon woman said bluntly.

  On Teresa’s call, the team lifted the white corpse, rotated it on its own axis and gently placed the woman front first onto the marble floor, her head now tilted to one side against the shining stone. Peroni swore, then went to stand in the corner. Costa stared at the woman’s naked back and the strange shape carved there, an oddly symmetrical pattern of curves cut straight into the skin from above her waist to the shoulders, like a huge, cruel tattoo.

  “What’s it meant to be?” he asked. “A cross?”

  It was a diagonal shape, with four protruding curving arms.

  Teresa stared at the body. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Consider yourself lucky.” Leapman bent to take a closer look at the corpse. “He used the cord. At least I don’t see any other marks. She was dead when he got round to doing what he wanted to do.”

  The pathologist was shaking her head, bemused. “The pattern’s so precise. How could you do it? Here?”

  Emily Deacon didn’t want to look at the shape on the woman’s back. She knew it too well already, Costa guessed. “To begin with you’d need a crayon, a ruler, possibly, and a scalpel,” she said softly. “After a little while I guess you just need something that cuts and a very steady hand.”

  Leapman took out a hankie and blew into it noisily. “We’ve seen enough. We need a meeting in our office at the embassy. Five this evening. Bring who you want, but I’m going to trust you people with material I don’t want to go any further than our front door. So make sure whoever you bring can keep their mouths shut, and listen good because I don’t like repeating myself.”

  Falcone shook his head in disbelief. “This is Rome. This is a murder inquiry. We are the state police force and we do this our way. You will visit us when I say. And I’ll ask you any damn thing I like.”