Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “What?” Falcone yelled.

  “There’s no phone number listed,” Di Capua continued. “She could be ex-directory, of course. Except the residential address isn’t an apartment either. It’s just a forwarding service.”

  “You’ve been looking up this woman on the Internet?” Falcone bellowed. “This is a morgue. We get paid to do that kind of thing. What the hell gives you the right to interfere with our work like this? Again?”

  Gingerly Teresa put a hand on his arm. “But you didn’t do it, Leo. They told you not to, remember? Nobody placed a gagging order like that on us. So, when I noticed the hair, when I looked at that passport, those glasses—please, don’t blame Silvio, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me—I just kept looking at this woman and I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘Something is wrong here.’ ”

  He didn’t know whether to shout and scream or thank them, she guessed. It was hard being Leo Falcone much of the time.

  “This doesn’t go any further than here,” he told her. “Agreed?”

  “Sure,” she said. “And maybe now I should make a call to them explaining they left a few things behind. What do you think? I don’t want them to feel we’re being uncooperative. I don’t want them to get …”

  She left it at that. The “suspicious” word could have been pushing things a little too far.

  “Do it,” he agreed.

  “You see what this means, Leo? We don’t know who Margaret Kearney is. But the hair, the glasses, that stupid fake passport photo, the phone number, the address … we sure as hell know who she isn’t.”

  Falcone scowled at the items in the green box, as if a set of inanimate objects could somehow be to blame.

  “Still, I guess we don’t need to tell Agent Leapman that,” Teresa added. “Do we?”

  She watched the inspector turn this information over in his head. Falcone was one smart man. He was surely there already. All the same, it had had to be said, just to lock the three of them together, deep in all this potential shit.

  STEFAN RAJACIC didn’t look like a pimp, Nic Costa thought. He was about sixty years old, squat in an old tweed suit and brown overcoat, with a swarthy, expressive face and dark, miserable eyes. The moustache—heavy and greying, like that of an old walrus—gave him away. It belonged to a world that had vanished, that of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. The man could have been a portlier version of Stalin, trying to fade into old age with plenty of memories and what remained of his dignity. He was the seventh pimp they’d seen that night and the only one Gianni Peroni, who seemed to know every last man of his ilk in Rome, treated with a measure of respect.

  Rajacic stared at the photograph of the girl through the fumes of his Turkish cigarette and shook his head. “Officer Peroni,” he said in a heavily accented voice cracked by years of tobacco, “what do you want of me? This girl is what? Thirteen? Fourteen? No more surely?”

  “I don’t know,” Peroni admitted.

  The Serb waved his hand at the photo. “What kind of a man do you think I am?” He looked at Emily Deacon. “Has he told you I deal with children? Because, if he has, it’s a lie. Judge me for what I am but I don’t have to take that.”

  “Officer Peroni said nothing of the sort, sir,” she replied evenly. “He told me you were a good man. You were last on our list. We’d hoped we’d never need to come this far. That tells you something, surely?”

  “ ‘A good man,’ ” Rajacic repeated. He stared at Peroni. “You’re a fool if you said that. And I don’t think you’re a fool.”

  “I know what you are,” Peroni told him. “There’s a lot worse out there. That’s all I said. And, yes, I know you wouldn’t deal with a girl this age. I just thought maybe you’d heard something. Or could suggest who we might ask next.”

  Rajacic downed his beer and ordered another. The barman wandered over with a bottle and placed it on the table with an undue amount of respect. He knew who Rajacic was. There were just two other customers in the place. Outside, the street was deep in filthy slush. Business went on as usual, though. Costa knew that, if he looked, there would be pushers sheltering in the doorways, and a handful of hopeful hookers too, hunting business with haunted, hungry eyes. There were places nearby that Costa counted among his favourites in Rome. Just a short walk away were Diocletian’s baths and the church created by Michelangelo from the original frigidarium. In the Palazzo Massimo around the corner was an entire room from a private villa of Livia, the empress of Augustus, decorated to resemble a charming, rural garden, with songbirds, flowers and fruit trees. But they were rare oases of delight in an area that seemed to become more tawdry each year. Costa couldn’t wait to be on the move again.

  “We’re struggling here, Mr. Rajacic,” he said. “We need to find this girl. She could be in danger. We know how the system works. Girls come here when they’re young. If they’re lucky, the welfare people pick them up, put them in a home. If they’re not, they fall through the net and something else happens. First they learn to beg. Then they learn to steal. Then, when they’re old enough, they become the goods themselves. And maybe sell some dope on the side. That’s how it is. Somewhere along the way they must go to someone, a person like you, and see what the options are.”

  “Not if she knows me,” Rajacic insisted, waving a big cracked open palm in their faces. “Not if she asks. These people who deal in children … they’re scum. I handle no one who isn’t old enough to know what she’s doing. And no drugs either.”

  “I know,” Costa insisted. “As I said, we’re desperate.”

  “Who isn’t?” the Serb wondered. “These are desperate times. You never noticed?”

  He swigged some beer from the bottle, stubbed out the cigarette and looked at them. Maybe there was something there, Costa thought. Maybe …

  “You know what?” Rajacic grumbled. “When I came here fifteen years ago I used to have to call home and beg for girls. Most wouldn’t even phone me back. They had dignity then. They didn’t need the likes of me. Now? This is a world in motion, my friends. I got the United Nations working for me, and more women calling pleading for work than I can handle. Kosovans. Croats. Russians. Turks. Kurds. All those people who watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, the old world rolling over and dying, and they thought: ‘Now the good times begin, now everyone gets free and rich like all those big shots in the West promised.’ Some joke, huh? You guys never told them it didn’t really work like that, did you? You left it to pimps like me. I’m the one who gets to say it to some pretty little seventeen-year-old straight off the boat, no papers, no money, nothing going for her except what she’s got between her legs. And now you’re coming asking for help—”

  “We don’t have time to apologize, Stefan,” Peroni grumbled.

  “No.” The dark eyes flashed at him. “You don’t.” He picked up the photo. “What is she? Kosovan? Albanian?”

  Peroni grimaced. “We just don’t know.”

  “From the looks of her she could be anything. Turk or Kurd even. Jesus …”

  “But she can’t just walk into a city like this without knowing someone, surely?” Emily objected. “She must have a name. A phone number. Something.”

  “That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it?” Rajacic asked. “Who?” Peroni reeled off the names. The Serb scowled as he heard each one. “My,” he said at the end. “I wouldn’t want to meet even one of them in a day. Six …”

  “Can you think of someone else we should be talking to?” Emily asked.

  The brown eyes blinked in disbelief. “Do I look like I have a death wish?”

  “Mr. Rajacic,” she persisted, “this girl’s so young. She might not even be in the loop you’re talking about now. We don’t know where she is, but we know what she saw. She’s got to be scared. And in danger too.”

  He glowered back at them. “What did she see?”

  The two cops looked at each other. They were running out of options.

  “A couple of murders,” Peroni sai
d quietly. “Don’t go telling anyone, huh? The kid’s got problems enough as it is.”

  Rajacic finished the beer and clicked his fingers for another. “Two?”

  “It was on the TV,” Costa said. “A woman was killed in the Pantheon. An Italian photographer was shot too. We know this girl was there. Inside. Probably just looking for shelter or something. We know the guy who killed this woman realizes that too now. You see my point?”

  The old man thought about this, then got up, went to the bar and, without saying a word to the man behind the counter, picked up the phone by the till and began talking rapidly in his native language.

  “He acts like he owns the place,” Emily observed.

  “He does,” Peroni said. “Even a pimp needs an office. I don’t suppose you understand any of that lingo?”

  She shook her head. Rajacic was virtually yelling into the phone now.

  “He doesn’t act like a pimp,” she observed. “Not really.”

  Peroni watched Rajacic barking at the phone. “It’s not his chosen profession. He was a farmer in Bosnia. The Croats decided his land was theirs. He had the sense not to stay around and argue.”

  “Big leap from Bosnian farmer to pimping here,” Costa commented.

  “Yeah,” Peroni agreed. “Like the man said, ‘A world in motion.’ I don’t get it either. But who’s asking? If every other pimp we had was like this guy—no drugs, no kids.”

  Emily’s blue eyes wandered over the pair of them, some bitter judgement there. “He’s still earning a living by selling women on the street.”

  “We’ve had people doing that here for the last couple of thousand years,” Peroni answered. “Doubtless will for the next couple too. Do you think we can stamp it out somehow? We’re cops. Not miracle workers.”

  She stirred the empty coffee cup. “Sure. I just want to make sure we remember what he is.”

  “What he is, Emily, is maybe the only chance we’ve got to find this kid. These people lead separate lives. They talk to us on their terms, when they feel like it. No amount of screaming at them, no amount of time in a cell, changes that. Trust me. I know. I’ve tried.” He nodded at Costa. “We both have.”

  “True,” Costa agreed, watching how Rajacic’s attitude had changed while he was on the phone. He looked a little happier. He was getting what he wanted.

  The Serb came back to the table and sat down. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he told them.

  Peroni slapped him on the big brown arm of his overcoat. “Because you’re a good guy, Stefan. Like I told my American friend here.”

  “Or maybe just a damn fool. Don’t go putting this around, Peroni. I don’t want anyone getting the idea I make a habit of helping the cops. And maybe I’m not helping at all.”

  A woman was coming out of the door at the back of the bar. She was about thirty, with long, black hair, a tanned gypsy face heavy with makeup and a tight red dress cut low at the neck. Boredom and resentment shone out from her tired eyes. She must have been upstairs, taking the call on an internal line.

  Rajacic pushed out a chair and beckoned her to sit. “This is Alexa,” he announced. “My niece.”

  Peroni looked her up and down. “You mean this is a family business?”

  “When he gets some business,” she snapped.

  The Serb pointed to the window. “Am I responsible for the weather now? Please. I’ve listened to enough shit for one evening. These people need your help, Alexa. You’re getting paid anyway. You can go with them. Or you can clean up in the kitchen. Which is it going to be?”

  “Some choice,” she grunted and took a seat. “What do you want?”

  Rajacic reached over and brushed his fingers against her fine black hair. “Hey, zingara. No tantrums. They just want a little advice.”

  He looked at Peroni, who pushed the photo across the table. She picked it up.

  “I don’t know who the hell this is,” she complained. “Why ask me?”

  Rajacic smiled. “A little gypsy blood crept into the family a while back,” he explained. “Don’t ask how. It’s thick blood, huh, Alexa? Like this kid’s maybe. My friends here are asking themselves, ‘Where would a girl like this hide out if she were scared and living off the street?’ Can you tell them?”

  Her black eyes didn’t give away a thing. “On the street? In weather like this?”

  “Come on,” Rajacic wheedled. “They don’t all stay in hostels. They don’t all have pimps looking after them. What if she’s on her own? Where’d she go? What kind of choices have these kids got?”

  “Not many,” she murmured, thinking all the same. “What’s in this for me?”

  Rajacic leaned over, prodded her in the arm, hard. At that instant he looked the pimp he was.

  “You make an old man very happy,” he murmured. “Now get out of here. Before I think of something else.”

  THEY’D BORROWED A JEEP from traffic. Costa sat behind the wheel, feeling out of practice, unused to the four-wheel drive which was the only way the treacherous roads were manageable at speed. Most of the narrow through routes in the centro storico had been closed. What little movement there was now funnelled down the main thoroughfares and the broad avenues which ran either side of the river. Alexa knew where to go. They’d checked out a series of sites—a derelict building north of the Pantheon, a squat in Testaccio, a grimy, freezing hostel in San Giovanni—and got the same result in each one, trying to talk to a bunch of surly adolescents shivering in cheap black clothes that couldn’t keep out the cold. They’d look at the girl’s picture and shake their heads. Then Alexa would yell at them in their own language, and still they’d say nothing.

  Now the four of them were driving along the Lungotevere on the Trastevere side of the river, slowly checking the huddled bunches of people sheltering by the Tiber. The sluggish current was out of sight from the road here. The flat, broad shelf by its banks, reached by steps from street level, was a popular shelter for the homeless.

  Alexa was in the front passenger seat blowing cigarette smoke out of the crack she’d opened the window, not minding the freezing air it brought into the car, looking for where she wanted them to stop. The atmosphere in the car was bad. They all sensed failure.

  “These kids won’t talk to cops,” she said. “Why should they?”

  “Because this girl needs our help,” Emily muttered icily.

  Alexa shook her head. “They don’t know that. They don’t believe a word you say. They think cops spell trouble. With good reason.”

  “What do you suggest?” Costa asked.

  “Leave it to me. Stay out of the way. I’ll tell them you’re family, looking for her. You got any money?”

  Peroni reached over from the backseat and handed her some notes. She looked at them and whistled. “Wow. You could buy a couple of tricks for that. Supply and demand. Lots of the former, none of the latter.”

  “We need to find this kid,” Peroni insisted.

  She stuffed the cash into the pocket of her bright red nylon anorak and pointed across the river. “There. I know a couple of places. Besides, thinking about it, the wind’s coming from the wrong direction for this side. These kids are destitute. They’re not stupid. Not most of them anyway.”

  The jeep moved into the right-hand lane and waited at the traffic lights at the next bridge.

  “You’re not his niece,” Emily stated with some certainty.

  The woman turned and stared at her. “Says who?”

  “I just thought … It was a turn of speech.”

  “You mean like ‘sex worker’?”

  “N-n-o,” she stuttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I’m his niece. My mother is Stefan’s sister. My old man was a gypsy who climbed in the window one night.” She paused for effect. “That was a turn of speech. They got married. Eventually. Then …”

  The jeep moved forward onto the bridge. Alexa looked down towards the river. “Then things fell apart. Not just personal th
ings, you understand. Life. The country. Everything. Pull in somewhere. I can see lights down there.”

  Costa parked the vehicle on the deserted pavement. They got out of the car and stood in the snow, shivering. The night was bitterly cold, with a stiff wind whipping through the open channel cut through the city by the Tiber. They were close enough now to see the black, silky surface of the river and a silver moon reflecting back at them, a perfect shining circle. It was dark down there, but there were people around, huddled in the shelter beneath the bridge. Costa could see the tiny firefly embers of cigarettes and smell the bitter smoke of a makeshift brazier.

  “Stay here,” Alexa said, “until I call.”

  She hesitated before heading for the steps. “There’s something you ought to know. Stefan is my uncle. When we lost the farm—his farm, our farm, everyone’s—I just ran away here. I thought I could make everything right. I thought the streets were paved with gold. You know the funny thing?”

  She stared at them, with those black, gypsy eyes, and didn’t bother to hide her bitterness.

  “Compared to what it’s like back home now, they are. I sometimes have to remind myself of that when I’ve got some fat businessman wheezing into my face wondering if he’s ever going to get there. I came here … and did what was easy. Stefan used what little money he had to find me, to try to get me to go back. We argued. I won. Which is as it should be because, in the circumstances, I was right. If you’ve got to have a pimp, best it’s your uncle. Best it’s an honest man, and Stefan is. Ask any of his girls.”

  Emily looked her in the face and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  The three of them waited while Alexa walked down the steps shuffling their feet in the snow in a vain effort to keep warm. The night had the crisp, biting smell of a hard winter, one that wanted to hang around. The snow would surely resume soon. Peroni glanced down at the sound of voices below.

  “What do we do when this doesn’t work?” he asked.