Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Peroni waited till he heard the door close. Then he did his best to push back the feeling of nausea and the pain in his head, tried to concentrate, to think straight.

  “Gianni?” the girl whispered, keeping close to him, shivering with the growing cold. “What do we do?”

  “We wait, Laila,” he answered, with as much assurance and certainty as he could muster. “We wait a while. Just like the man said. Then we get out of these things and go somewhere nice and warm and comfortable. My friend’s place maybe. It’s not far away. Let’s sit down, huh?”

  He found his way to the floor, the girl following him. Peroni closed his eyes and wondered how badly he was hurt, wondered too at the American’s closing words. Maybe the body in the car was just a taste of what was to come: random, shocking acts, designed to persuade Leapman to do the right thing. Maybe the killer had something nastier in store just to hammer home the message.

  “Gianni,” the girl whispered.

  “Just give it a minute,” he groaned. His head was spinning. His face hurt like hell.

  Then something intervened, some semblance of sleep.

  When he came to, jogged by a push from the kid, the place was different, noticeably colder and darker too. A stream of snow still circled down through the oculus. Laila had her head bent over their wrists, working at something.

  “How long was I out?” he asked.

  “Long time,” she said and looked up at him, half smiling. “Doesn’t matter now.”

  Her mouth and her right wrist were covered in blood. Peroni saw in an instant what she’d done: spent all the time he was unconscious biting and wriggling at the plastic of her cuffs, working the flexible material over and over until she found a way through.

  She stood there, half guilty, half wondering whether just to flee again. That was her natural instinct.

  “That’s good,” Peroni said confidently, as if he hadn’t a clue what she was thinking. “If you reach into my jacket pocket,” he continued, “you should find a penknife there. It’s in a little compartment with a zip on it. You should be able to get at it now.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then her slim hand angled its way into his coat, an easy, familiar motion, and came out, so quickly, with the knife. And his wallet.

  “Laila.”

  The kid was crying. Real tears, streaming down her cheeks, more than he’d seen when the two of them faced the American, more than when they both knew they were so close to losing their lives.

  “Not now,” he pleaded. “I need you to help me. I need you.”

  Then she said something that made his blood run cold. Something straight from the American, said it with the same fervour, the same darting eyes looking everywhere.

  “Busy, busy, busy, busy …”

  A part of Peroni wanted to believe you could heal a damaged child with nothing but love and affection and honesty. But Teresa was surely right. It went deeper than that. Laila suffered from an illness, a malady as real as a fever, more damaging since it lurked inside her, unseen, unfathomable, misinterpreted by an icy, suspicious world.

  Peroni turned and raised his painful wrists.

  “Get busy with these, huh?” he murmured.

  “Then?” she asked.

  “Then we get you something to eat. And a comfortable bed. Your uncle Gianni’s got work to do. You’ve saved his skin tonight, you know.”

  “I did?” she asked, only half believing him.

  “You sure did. You’re not going to leave me here like this, are you?”

  She thought about it, but not for long. Then she opened the knife and started to saw at the plastic.

  Ten minutes later Peroni had freed the terrified caretaker, who was locked inside a portable office by the side of the building.

  After that, he called Leo Falcone.

  UPSTAIRS, IN THE RUSTIC, faded bathroom, Emily Deacon stood before the flaking mirror and peered at herself, trying to find answers for questions she couldn’t quite begin to frame.

  She was never good at relationships and she knew it. Getting close to someone was like a drug. It solved so many problems but it had side effects too. Commitment left the window open for pain to blow in like poison on the breeze. It made the inevitable parting even harder, turned friends into enemies. She’d felt this way, seen this attitude blight her tentative, stumbling efforts at building a relationship, ever since she was a kid.

  Ever since Rome.

  Ever since her dad came back from his turn with the Babylon Sisters, playing out some bloody vaudeville act deep in the desert in Iraq, damaging himself irreparably for reasons that still eluded her but were now getting closer.

  Why Dad? Why not someone else? Was he really Bill Kaspar’s boss pretending to be his best buddy? And if so, why did Kaspar feel justified in coming back to snuff out his life inside a beautiful wooden temple in a park in Beijing thirteen years later, carving into his back a shape from an ancient temple outside Babylon? Was he that desperate for revenge?

  She looked at herself in the mirror and said, “Except he didn’t stop.”

  If she was right, every last person who’d escaped Iraq thirteen years earlier was now dead. So why was Kaspar still killing? What would stop him?

  The answer lay in his obsession. There were attractions in the belief, however crazy, that you could bring order to a life by placing it in the middle of an intricately symmetrical pattern of shapes and ideas. But it was the kind of process that belonged to the lost, the detached, the doomed. Obsession was, ultimately, the easy way out, derogating responsibility to an inanimate, dead simulacrum of perfection, a fake paradise buried inside a tangled whorl of lines and curves. In the real world it was the untidiness, the lack of completeness, the unpredictability of everyday life, that made each day human. That random, unforeseeable force lay at the bottom of a relationship, too. If the magnetism of personal attraction could be rationalized, it couldn’t, she knew, exist.

  Was that why she’d always struggled to keep a man? Her insistence for some kind of reason, some element of proof? The face that stared back at her from the mirror had no answers. What she saw was just another part of the riddle. She was still working to shrug off the child Emily, whose earliest memories lay in that different, early Rome, where she’d spent the first ten years of her life believing the world was a bright, colourful heaven, a place of kindness, grace and beauty where the hard decisions were always someone else’s.

  Innocence, ignorance—two sides of the same coin.

  “You’ve got to grow up sometime,” she told herself. That was why she’d bitten Nic’s head off when he called her “Little Em.” A part of her recognized how apposite it still was.

  She washed her face, brushed her teeth, sat down on the toilet seat and held her head in her hands, trying to find a strand of logic that would allow her to go forward.

  There was still a missing piece. But she was too damn tired.

  She got up, checked her face and hair once more in the mirror, wondered what she really saw there. A scared adolescent? A woman trying to identify herself among all the noise of modern life? Or, more likely, someone halfway between the two, a changeling shifting shapes, wondering what she would be in the end.

  Emily Deacon was aware that, for the first time in her life, she was about to take the initiative, to tell a man it was time he took her to bed. Even if nothing happened there except the closeness of sleeping next to another human being.

  Scared, in the way she felt when she was a kid, embarking on an adventure beyond the bounds of normal life, excited, intensely awake all of a sudden, she went downstairs.

  He was asleep on the sofa, sprawled out, fully dressed. Completely asleep, not moving a muscle except for the faint rise and fall of his chest.

  “Nic,” she said softly, so quietly she didn’t know herself whether she wanted him to hear.

  She closed her eyes and laughed inwardly.

  “There’s always tomorrow,” she whispered in a voice no louder than a bre
ath.

  And there’s always a cigarette.

  She went to her purse, took out a Marlboro and a lighter, pulled the black jacket around her shoulders and opened the door very quietly, making sure she didn’t wake him.

  The air was still, the night arctic and exquisitely beautiful. A too-white moon shone like a miniature cold sun over the rounded, snowy landscape punctuated by the outlines of the tombs on the Appian Way.

  She lit the cigarette, watched the smoke curl its way towards the bare writhing muscle of a vine winding its way around a trellis and imagined how beautiful this shaded, grape-laden terrace would be during the summer.

  “And I can’t even get myself a man,” she murmured, then wished she could laugh out loud.

  The voice was cold, American and familiar.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” it grunted.

  A powerful arm came round her neck. A hidden hand forced some kind of cloth into her face, pushing the fabric brutally around her nose and mouth. There was the slight sound of glass breaking inside the rag, a smell that made her think of a hospital operating room, long, long ago, in the ancient facility on the Lateran where her father took her when she broke her arm trying to make her bike fly like something out of Power Rangers.

  This won’t hurt … Steely Dan, where are you now, and what the hell did you do all those years ago? … someone said, her dad, a faceless doctor, Kaspar the Unfriendly Ghost, grinning Joel Leapman, Thornton Fielding, all concern and pity, Nic Costa even …

  Every last one of them said the stupid phrase simultaneously, seeing her feebleness from somewhere beyond her vision, somewhere outside the aching corona of the moon.

  This won’t hurt one little bit.

  Sabato

  THE WEATHER WAS CHANGING AND NOT IN THE WAY ANY of them expected. The snow hadn’t turned to rain. Instead, it had gone away, for a while anyway, leaving the sky to the sun, a sun that was starting to remember how to shed a little warmth on the city. A thaw, perhaps a temporary one, was in progress and a trickle of grey slush and grubby water was beginning to make its way into the gutters as proof. It was still damn cold, though. A bitter, persistent wind was blowing in from the sea, a harsh taint of salt in its blustery folds, warning that the vicious snap of cold had yet to retreat entirely.

  Falcone strode along the Via Cavour, thinking. The previous night, before he got the message about Peroni, he’d made some calls, discreetly posed a few questions that had been bugging him. Now, with a set of careful answers, all legalese, all full of ifs and buts, racing around in his head, he was facing some important decisions. He had fifteen minutes before the meeting he had demanded with Viale, which had been fixed for nine in the SISDE building around the corner. Moretti and Leapman would doubtless come along for the ride at Viale’s invitation. Falcone had yet to decide how to handle himself there. Two of his men had risked their lives the previous day. That gave him the right to throw around a little weight. Peroni’s injuries had proved less serious than they looked in the hospital at two that morning, when the doctors had stitched and dabbed at a face that had already taken more than its fair share of punishment. Afterwards Falcone had sat with the big cop, next to Teresa Lupo and the Kurdish girl, and agreed, without hesitation, to his first demand: that Laila be placed temporarily in the care of a social worker Peroni knew who lived at Ostia, that very night. Then the girl got up, kissed Peroni on the side of his cheek that didn’t bear a bruise or wound and went off with a plainclothes female officer, giving the three of them the chance to talk some more, to exchange suspicions and to wonder.

  Peroni was looking to him for something. There were limits to being jerked around, even by the grey men. Falcone had spoken to Costa first thing that morning and knew he felt the same way too. The American woman had told Costa a long, interesting and highly speculative narrative that attempted to explain what was happening around them now in Rome. Then she’d gone missing, leaving her things in his house. Costa hadn’t a clue where.

  Falcone had phoned Joel Leapman immediately to report the fact that Emily Deacon had vanished. It was the right thing to do. Her car was gone. He also wanted to judge the FBI agent’s reactions to the news. Leapman seemed genuinely puzzled. Concerned, even. It was one more weapon Falcone could use.

  He’d recognized, too, the worry in Costa’s voice that morning. Deacon wasn’t a field officer. There were personal reasons why she might step out of line. But there were personal issues everywhere in this case. Peroni and Costa carried them because they—and Falcone—had been present when the unfortunate Mauro Sandri fell bleeding in the snow outside the Pantheon three nights before. For most cops that would simply be bad luck. For Nic and Peroni—and Falcone understood this was one reason that he defended the pair constantly—the photographer’s death was a challenge, an outrage, a tear in the fabric of society which demanded correction. This dogged resistance of theirs had led to Falcone trusting them with information and thoughts he was reluctant to share with others on the force. Ineluctably, events over the past eighteen months had made the three of them a team, a worryingly close and private one at times. Costa, in particular, had reminded Falcone why he’d become a cop in the first place: to make things better. Hooked up to Peroni, the pair had shaken Falcone out of his complacency, dared him to throw off the dead lassitude and cynicism that came with two decades as a policeman. Costa and Peroni asked big and awkward questions about what was right and what was wrong in a world where all the borders seemed to be breaking down. No wonder Viale hated them.

  When Falcone turned the corner he saw them, standing together outside the anonymous grey SISDE building next to a Chinese restaurant, an odd couple who looked nothing like plainclothes cops. Peroni was shuffling backwards and forwards on his big feet, hugging himself in a thick winter coat, scanning the sky, which now bore fresh scratches of white, wispy clouds that could be the presentiment of more snow.

  Costa wasn’t thinking about the weather. He was examining the fresh marks on his partner’s battered face, looking concerned.

  Falcone walked up and peered into Gianni Peroni’s face himself. “I’ve seen worse. Think of the up side. You weren’t that good-looking beforehand.”

  “I could sue for that,” Peroni replied. “I could call you up in front of the board and out you for the bitch of a boss you are.”

  “Do that,” Falcone said, almost laughing. “I’ll get there one way or another soon enough.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be at home in bed, Gianni?” Nic asked.

  “Don’t nanny me, Mr. Costa,” Peroni replied curtly. “Do you think a few cuts and bruises are going to keep me away from all the fun?”

  Fun? It wasn’t that, not for any of them, Falcone thought. It never had been. Even when Peroni had been an inspector in vice, before his fall from grace, he was a man known for his seriousness.

  “The funny thing is,” Falcone observed, “I’ve never known anyone to get beaten up so often. What’s your secret?”

  “Working with you,” Peroni responded. “Until I was bounced down to your team of misfits, I never got beaten up at all. Not once in my adult life.”

  “You want a transfer?”

  “You know damn well what I want. I want my old job back. I want my old rank. I want men who drive me around. I want to deal with the admirable world of dope and prostitution because I tell you, Leo—sorry, sir—it’s much saner than your world.”

  “Is that so?” Falcone replied, amused. “So how are you now? Did your friendly pathologist tend your wounds after I left?”

  “I’ll live,” Peroni said with a smile. “But I’m getting heartily sick of this weather. And heartily sick of this case too.” He nodded at the sky. “I know you don’t run that crap, which I hate to say doesn’t look finished to me. But do you think we can do something with the second?”

  Falcone sniffed and looked at Costa. “One way or another. Emily Deacon. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.” Costa shook his head. “She t
ook the car. But her computer’s still in my house, which is odd. I’ve been calling and calling. Maybe Leapman …”

  “I asked,” Falcone replied. “He sounded a little worried for once. You don’t imagine, for one moment, that she’s gone out and done something stupid, do you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Costa replied, though he didn’t look too sure.

  Peroni cast a grizzled glance at Falcone and moaned, “Families. Leapman should never have brought her in. What kind of an asshole is he?”

  “The kind who knows exactly what he’s doing,” Falcone said firmly. “Nic, perhaps it’s best if you skip this meeting. It could be a little … career-damaging. You’ve got more ahead of you than us.”

  Peroni’s jaw dropped. “What? What the fu—?” He put his hands together, praying. “Why me, Leo? Why me?”

  “Put out a call for Deacon’s car,” Falcone continued, ignoring him. “Try some of the obvious places. Did you get me those printouts?”

  Costa passed over the manila envelope.

  Peroni scowled at the grey SISDE building. “Career-damaging, Leo? I’ve been there often enough already. And I don’t like these spooky people. They’re bad company. Let me wet-nurse Nic here, hold his hand. Or I could go to the Questura and make some calls, clean your desk, press your suits. Anything—”

  “Or,” Falcone suggested mildly, “Nic could drop you off at home and let you get some rest. You’re not immortal, you know, Peroni. You got clobbered last night.”

  “Yeah!” the big man barked back. “All the more reason for sticking with this, don’t you think?”

  Falcone shrugged. “Your funeral, then. If you’re in, you’re coming into this meeting with me. I’d appreciate a witness. Some backup. Leapman will be there, I imagine. Commissario Moretti too, since they’ll need someone to take notes. Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself.”