Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  He hesitated and, for one short, worrying moment, she felt she had lost him.

  He pulled out a small, rather feminine purse and stared mournfully at the contents. “I’m still enough of an Irishman to feel uncomfortable about having a lady buy me drinks.”

  She put her hand on the soft black arm of his priestly jacket. “Then consider it a tuition fee.”

  “Done,” he said and rattled off some orders to the barman.

  The wine came: Amarone, with a brief lecture about how the grapes were dried before being fermented, then something called Primitivo di Manduria, which, from what she gathered, was kind of the red equivalent of the Greco, an ancient grape still kept alive by a handful of small producers, this time in Puglia, the heel of Italy. And the food: bresaola, paper-thin slices of mountain-dried wild boar; a selection of salumi, some spicy, some mild; pale, translucent parings of pork fat, lardo di colonna; slivers of ripe, fruity Parmesan and a salad of buffalo mozzarella served with pomodorini di Pachino, tiny red tomatoes as sweet as cherries.

  They ate and they drank and outside day turned to night through a steady, continuous veil of falling snow.

  She didn’t know how much time she’d spent in the bar. She didn’t care. She was alone in Rome. She didn’t speak a word of the goddamn language. And Father O’Malley was such good company. The single most charming man she could remember meeting in years. He listened and when he spoke afterwards it was about the very subject she’d been discussing. He could talk about anything. Architecture. Literature. Politics. The pleasures of the table. Almost everything, it occurred to her, except religion. Perhaps Peter O’Malley had enough of that, trapped in servitude to his sisters back in Orvieto. Perhaps he felt abruptly and briefly free in this strange, small world of cold, white, impassable streets.

  Monica Sawyer listened and she laughed, knowing she was getting more than a little drunk. She was used to the attention of men: tall, with a well-kempt head of long, chestnut hair, and a smart, articulated face, one people liked to look at. Back home, when Harvey was away, she didn’t hesitate to stray a little now and then. Finally she took his wrist, looked at his watch, then looked at him, with an expression she was sure did not amount to an invitation. That would be wrong. Improper. It wasn’t what she was feeling or planning. She simply wanted company and his was, at that moment, the best.

  “Peter,” she said quietly, “I have to go. I don’t want this to sound wrong. Please believe that. I’m not in the habit of picking up men in strange bars. Certainly not priests. But we rented an apartment round the corner. For the next two weeks, would you believe. It’s as empty as the grave with just me rattling around in it. The TV doesn’t even have cable and I can’t understand a damn word of those Italian stations. If you need somewhere to stay, you can take the sofa or the floor. It’s up to you.”

  He did something odd at that moment. He looked at their two glasses—his almost full with red, hers empty—and very carefully moved them so they were in a perfect line, parallel with the edge of the table. It was a touch obsessive, she thought. Or perhaps not. His pale, smart face had turned thoughtful.

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I can find somewhere, I’m sure.”

  “It’s got a terrace,” she added. “We’re right on the top of the block. You can see the dome of St. Peter’s. You can see places I don’t even know the names of.”

  “A terrace?” he repeated.

  “One of the best damn terraces in Rome. That’s what the agent said and I can’t imagine a Roman would lie, now would he?”

  “Not for a moment,” he replied and raised his glass to her.

  Five minutes later they went outside. She was giggling, light-headed, and scarcely noticed the softly falling snow. A handful of office workers were struggling through the deep, crisp drifts in the street. Peter had just a small bag with him, a black polyester one stuffed to bursting, the way single men did.

  He reached into his coat pockets, pulled something from the depths, stretched it out and looked ready to begin adjusting it over his finely sculpted grey head.

  His quick, intelligent eyes caught hers. He was unsure about this for some reason.

  “I’d look a fool now, wouldn’t I?” he asked, abruptly stuffing it back into his pocket as if he’d just had second thoughts.

  It was one of those stupid Disney-style hats that kids wore. Big Mickey Mouse ears you tied around your own ears.

  “You’d look a fool,” she agreed, then took his arm when he offered it, leaning on him as they struggled through the snow, past a deserted Piazza Navona, on towards home.

  LISTENING TO GIANNI PERONI cough his way through a series of bathroom ablutions, Nic Costa flicked through the prints that had come back from the photo shop and found himself bugged by the minutiae of the last sixteen hours. The focus of the investigation was now fixed understandably on the man in black, who stood on the steps of the fountain, locked in the Weaver stance next to the frozen dolphins, dispensing deadly fire from his outstretched hand. Trying to summon up a vision of that distant figure made it easy to forget there was one other unknown actor in the scene: the person who was trapped inside the Pantheon when they arrived, the individual who had brushed against Nic Costa as he fled the cavernous interior of the hall, with its macabre secret trapped beneath a growing mountain of ice and snow.

  Costa knew it was important to gather information on the man in black, to find out where he stood in the story the FBI agents were about to share with them. But he couldn’t forget the other player in events either, someone who seemed an interloper at the scene, whose presence there—as accomplice or accidental spectator?—demanded an explanation.

  He tried to remember his impressions of those hurried moments in the dark, tried to follow Falcone’s sensible if caustic admonition: interview yourself, and don’t leave out the tough questions. He’d scarcely seen the figure who dashed in and out of the murky corners of the airy, freezing hemisphere that night. Mauro’s photos didn’t help either. Costa had scanned through most of the two hundred prints, covering everything from their time in the bar to the last moments outside the Pantheon. In the crucial shots all Mauro had captured were vague, ghostly shadows, black smears on film. Once they returned to the Questura, he would pass the photos to a specialist in forensics, but his gut told him there was nothing there worth keeping.

  Or worth killing for. Surely the man in black would have understood that too?

  Interview yourself. Nic Costa knew he’d seen nothing but shadows. But there were other senses. He closed his eyes and tried to think. There was something there. He recalled the moment now, and it was surely the very oddness of the memory that had sent it to the back of his mind since it seemed so implausible.

  When the fugitive had brushed past him two things had happened. A hand—small, quick, nimble—had flicked at his jacket, automatically searching, as if it did this always without thinking. And there was a fleeting fragrance—something musky and lingering, familiar too, a scent that was fixed to a single connection in his head.

  He looked at the slight shadow slipping out from the corner of the illuminated portico in the last-but-one photograph Mauro Sandri took in his life.

  The perfume was patchouli oil. Nic knew the kind of person who liked to wear the old hippie scent these days too. Street kids, the ones who’d worked their way in from the Balkans, Turkey and beyond, looking to find a welcoming paradise, discovering, instead, that for many the only way to stay alive was to develop, as quickly as possible, a talent for pickpocketing or worse.

  Peroni walked into the room and stared over his shoulder. “Anything there?”

  “No,” Costa replied, tapping his forehead. “It was there. I should have known. Whoever was in the interior, it was a bum. He tried to get something out of my pocket on the way out. He had that … kind of perfume you get on the street kids. Sweet. Almost like dope. Patchouli. You know the smell I mean?”

  Peroni sat next to him on the sofa. He was fresh from th
e shower. Costa liked the way his partner looked now. Activity was good for both of them.

  “Oh yes,” Peroni said with a nod.

  “It’s an eastern thing. You see them selling the stuff in the Campo a lot.”

  “Around Termini too,” Peroni added. “From what I recall you tend to find that stuff only on girls. Which means they’re into dope. Or selling themselves. Or both. On very rare occasions, they can be remarkably conscious of their personal hygiene for kids who live on the streets.”

  Costa thought about that light, fluting voice in the dark. “It’s a girl, then.”

  Peroni frowned. “Why’d she try to lift something from you? If I’d been running out of that place, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.”

  “Maybe she’s a pickpocket.”

  “It’s possible—”

  “They’re not all into dope and prostitution, Gianni. Just the ones you met. I’ve dealt with plenty of street muggings too. Some of these kids are professionals in their own way. They steal out of second nature.”

  “I believe you.” Peroni didn’t look convinced.

  “So tell me again about the CCTV. In the Pantheon.”

  “Nothing to tell.” Peroni grimaced. “There were four cameras. He’d done something to each of them. The security guy I talked to didn’t know what. He said it had to be in the control box or something. It wasn’t just a matter of snipping the wires either. If he’d done that—”

  Costa interrupted him. “The alarm would have gone off.”

  “Quite.” Peroni pulled on a tie and yanked it roughly around his bull-like neck. “What are you getting at?”

  Some small certainty was growing in Costa’s mind. “Somehow he got into the place without triggering the alarm. Maybe he’d some keys, we don’t know. He must have talked the woman inside somehow too. He couldn’t risk attacking her in the square, even in weather like this. And he did what he wanted without triggering the alarm either. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been out of the place by the time we arrived. It took us, what? Ten minutes, no more, to get from the bar to the Pantheon after we got the call. He had to kill the woman, undress her, make that mark on her back. That must have taken the best part of an hour, possibly more.”

  Peroni nodded, unsure where this was going. “Maybe he stepped on an alarm or something after he’d killed her.”

  “Could happen, I guess. But what if he got out of there clean, too? What if he locked everything up carefully behind him and he was just walking away when the bell started ringing? So he thinks: Why? He’s not there anymore. Nothing alive’s in there, or at least that’s what he thought. He’s disabled the alarms in all the places he needs to. He knows where to walk without triggering anything. What he doesn’t know is some immigrant kid is hiding inside too, maybe trying to get out of the cold, I don’t know. And this kid saw everything he did. Everything.”

  “Not good,” Peroni murmured darkly.

  Costa was still flicking through the prints absentmindedly, not really looking at them. He realized now they were out of order. The developer had processed them in a rush, mixing them up. Some didn’t match the right envelopes.

  “So what would he do?” Costa mused.

  Peroni nodded. “He’d wait outside till we opened the doors. Until whoever was inside tried to get away. And then he’d kill the kid. Or try to. Except poor Mauro stepped in front of the bullets instead. And you started chasing the bastard before he could finish the job. Jesus—”

  Costa’s fingers skipped over the prints, stopped over one and pulled it out of the pack. The photo had slipped into the wrong bunch. It was stacked in the middle of the series in the bar. So easy to miss.

  Mauro had wound up the zoom to go in close. It was probably the last real photo he ever took. The girl was almost as tall as Nic Costa, but slightly built, and wore a dark windcheater and jeans. She was slipping past the portico, just beginning to run. The shot was taken at an angle. Maybe Mauro was falling already, struck by the bullets, as he pressed the shutter button, spinning on his heels as he tried to avoid the deadly fire.

  Physically she looked no more than thirteen or fourteen, with a waif’s haircut rough cropped short into the head. But there was an adult, haunted look in her pretty, dark face. A chilly mix of terror and determination stared out from her wide-open eyes, beyond Mauro, straight at the man standing on the steps by the frozen dolphins, trying to end her life.

  Peroni peered at the photo. “An immigrant kid. Turkish maybe. She won’t have a home. She won’t even have a real identity. She isn’t going to come running to us.”

  Costa looked at his watch. They had fifteen minutes till the appointment in the Via Veneto.

  “Someone’s got to know her,” he said.

  Gianni Peroni sucked through his teeth, still transfixed by the photo and the vulnerable face gazing back at them. He’d worked vice for years and understood the inevitable path these kids took from petty street crime to drugs and prostitution.

  “I can call in some favours, Nic,” he said, sounding reluctant. “But maybe we’ve got to go places Leo had best not hear about. That OK with you?”

  Costa glanced at the photo again and the kid’s dark, desperate eyes.

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “You bet it’s OK.”

  THE AMERICAN EMBASSY stood on a steep bend on the Via Veneto, a stiff climb up from the Piazza Barberini. Here, behind well-guarded iron gates, a small army of diplomats, paper-pushers, military officers, immigration officials and, for all Costa knew, professional spooks populated the elegant nineteenth-century labyrinth of corridors of what had once been the Palazzo Margherita.

  Leo Falcone met them in the waiting room, silent and serious in a grey business suit. To Costa’s surprise, Teresa Lupo was with him, twiddling her nascent ponytail, a touch scruffy in an old winter jacket and jeans, and not happy either.

  “How are you, Gianni?” she asked Peroni as they all sat together, waiting.

  “I’m doing just fine,” Peroni replied. “No offence, but what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Working,” she answered gruffly. “If I’m allowed. Do you have a problem with that?”

  He grunted something that sounded like an apology.

  “She’s here because I wanted her here,” Falcone interposed. “Whatever papers these people have, that body still has to be accounted for.”

  “Told you,” Teresa added. “Just the fucking typist.”

  “If that’s the way you see it,” Falcone murmured, watching a tall man walk towards them, some papers in his hand. “But let’s keep these arguments to ourselves, please.”

  The embassy official introduced himself as Thornton Fielding. He didn’t look like a natural colleague for Agent Leapman. Fielding was diplomatic and articulate. He wanted their signatures on some nondisclosure papers too.

  Falcone stared at the paperwork. “This is Italy, Mr. Fielding. I’m not in the habit of signing forms about what I will or won’t do in my own country.”

  Fielding didn’t even blink. “Technically, Inspector, this is the sovereign territory of the United States of America. Either you sign these forms or you don’t get to see Agent Leapman.” He hesitated. “Personally I’d find that a damn good reason for not signing, but the choice is yours.”

  “You like him too, huh?” Peroni asked.

  “He’s just the most fun guy you’re ever going to meet,” Fielding said quietly. “Now are you putting your name to these or not?”

  When they were done he made a call from the desk. They watched as Emily Deacon walked down the corridor towards them.

  “Nice woman,” Fielding said. “Don’t judge her by the company she keeps.”

  Then he disappeared down the corridor, leaving them to Emily Deacon. They followed her and watched as she swiped an ID card on the security door to what turned out to be a large, high-ceilinged office.

  Agent Leapman was seated in a leather executive chair behind a polished walnut desk, squeezed into a tight white shirt wi
th the sleeves rolled up to display beefy, powerful arms. Emily Deacon, surely the junior partner in this relationship, motioned them to a leather sofa, then perched on a chair next to him, demure in plain brown slacks and a cream shirt. She held a notepad on her lap and could, Costa thought, have passed as a secretary, were it not for the intent way she kept shuffling through a pile of papers on the desk, looking as if she knew every last sheet.

  “I appreciate you coming here.” Leapman spoke with no visible emotion as he played with a remote switch in his hand. The blinds on the window slanted to block out the security lights outside. A small screen came down from the ceiling.

  “We had a choice?” Teresa asked.

  “Not really,” Leapman replied. “I know I said I wasn’t dictating who could come to this meeting, Falcone, but I rather expected it would be police only.”

  Falcone took a deep breath before answering. “A piece of paper from the Palazzo Chigi doesn’t change Italian law. Miss Lupo has to sign a death certificate for the woman. She’s every right to be here. You can make a phone call to check if you want.”

  Leapman allowed himself a brief glance towards Emily Deacon, one that said, See, I told you what they’re like.

  “OK,” he grumbled. “Just remember what the deal is here. This is for you people only. I don’t want to read it in Il Messaggero tomorrow morning. Deacon …”

  He passed over the remote and she hit the button. A photo came on the screen. It was a building Costa recognized from somewhere, then a series of shots of the same place, taken from different angles: a rose-coloured temple of some kind, shot in bright sun, near fountains and water, with a large rotunda dome supported by open columns.

  “It looks like the Pantheon,” Peroni said immediately.

  “It should,” she said. “It’s the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Built for the 1915 International Exhibition. The architect, Maybeck, was trying to re-create something classically Roman, like an engraving by Piranesi of some half-ruined temple.”

  “Nice,” Peroni answered. “You got a corpse there too?”