Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Teresa had looked up the report on the attack in the Piazza Mattei the previous October and tried, in vain, to find something new. The facts were plain, baffling and suspiciously scarce. The American professor had been staying temporarily at Number Thirteen as a houseguest, while conducting some academic research at the American embassy. He’d been assaulted in the square by the fountain. It was pure luck that a couple of cops were in the vicinity. No assailant had been apprehended. No motive could be found. It could be a blind alley …

  Then Teresa had suggested she try to find something out about the property itself. After fifteen minutes—a period of time in which Costa, to his frustration, had gotten nowhere—she phoned back, ecstatic. The earliest deeds she could track showed Number Thirteen had been owned by the same private company based in Washington as far back as 1975. That, in itself, was unusual. Foreign owners rarely kept properties for that length of time. The firm wasn’t listed in the US phone book. It didn’t show in any of the financial records which she’d bullied some lowly minion in research into checking. Something stank, Teresa thought. Costa felt sure her instincts were correct. The tough part was turning instincts into hard fact. It was all going nowhere unless he could prise something out of the memory of someone who’d lived in the square for some time.

  “What you do in circumstances like these,” Costa thought, trying to still those images running around his head, “is get yourself a coffee.”

  He walked into the little cafe on the square, ordered a large macchiato and dumped a couple of extra shots of caffeine inside it from the coffee and sugar sludge parked on the bar in a bowl. Then, as he waited for the sudden caffeine jolt to hit, he tried to think what Falcone would have done in the circumstances.

  The inspector had just a few mottos, all of them rarely heard, all of them apposite. One came to Costa at that moment. Curiosity is the basis of detection. Without it, a man learned nothing. Without it, you might as well be an accountant.

  He tried to recall the substance of the reports he’d read over the last few days and set them against the conversation he’d had with Emily after Kaspar had handed the phone back to her. Then he finished his coffee and called over the middle-aged proprietor.

  He should have figured this out earlier. The ghetto never changed. Places were handed down from generation to generation. He was just a short stroll from the commercial heart of the modern city, but this was a village, one where everyone knew everyone else. Rome was, in some ways, still a collection of individual communities living noisily cheek by jowl. It was what separated Rome from other capitals he had visited, cities that seemed metropolitan sprawls, with ill-defined borders and areas where not a soul lived at night.

  “Who’s the oldest resident in the square?” Costa asked, flashing his card.

  The man kept polishing a glass with a spotless cloth, thinking. “You mean the oldest who’s still got half a brain?”

  Costa sighed. “Listen. I don’t have the time …”

  The cloth came out of the glass and jabbed at a house on the other side of the square. “Sorvino. Number Twenty-one. Ground floor. Don’t say I told you.”

  No one liked talking to the police. Not even cafe owners, who’d be the first to start screaming down the phone if someone walked off with an extra sachet of sugar.

  “Thanks,” Costa murmured. He threw a couple of coins on the counter, then walked out into the cold morning air.

  Number Twenty-one, thanks to the vagaries of house numbering in the ghetto, was four doors down from Thirteen. He pushed the bell marked “Sorvino.” A stiff-limbed little woman in a faded blue floral-pattern dress came to the door and peered at him through round, thick glasses. She was eighty, maybe more, at an age when it was difficult to tell. Short, but proudly erect, as if to say: to hell with the years. She took one look at the badge and nodded him into the living room. It was immaculate: crammed with polished antique furniture, a selection of framed photographs, and what seemed like hundreds of pieces of Jewish memorabilia.

  “I was hoping to talk to someone with a memory,” he said urgently. “Someone who’s lived here a long time.”

  “Is eighty-seven years long enough for you?”

  “More than enough,” he replied, smiling, hoping he didn’t look too impatient.

  She picked up a delicate porcelain cup, still half full. “Camomile tea. I recommend it for people of a nervous nature.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  “No you won’t. You’re young. You think you can live through anything. What are you looking for? It must be something important.”

  “Very. Facts. Names.” He hesitated. “Names mainly. I’ve been knocking on doors. Getting nowhere.”

  “The ghetto’s changing. You don’t see families the way you used to.”

  “I want to know about Number Thirteen.”

  “Ah.” She nodded and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. “II Duce had a girl there during the war. German. Ilse, I think she was called. Not that he ever visited, you understand. He wouldn’t dirty his hands coming to meet the likes of us, now would he?”

  Jews of her generation had a mixed attitude towards Mussolini. Until the later stage of his career, Il Duce had taken little interest in anti-Semitism. Costa could recall his father telling stories of how some Jews even joined the fascist party. Relatively limited numbers had been transported to the concentration camps. It was the old Roman story: nothing was ever quite black and white.

  “What happened to the house after the war?”

  She looked at him severely. “I’m not an estate agent.”

  “I know that. I just wondered who lived there. You’re a kind woman, Signora, I’m sure. You would want to know your neighbours.”

  “No more than they want to be known,” she said primly.

  “Of course.”

  “Soldiers,” she said with a shrug. “American soldiers, for a while anyway. Nice men. Officers. They had beautiful manners, not like Roman men. They were strangers. I was of assistance to them now and again. I like strangers to go away with fond memories of Rome. As any good citizen would.”

  “Of course. And then?”

  “You’re asking me who’s lived there for the last fifty years?”

  “That would be useful.”

  “Huh.”

  It was never easy dealing with this generation. They resented something. That the world had changed. That they were getting older within it, powerless.

  “Please try to think. A man was attacked there earlier this year. Do you remember?”

  “I heard it! Fighting in the street! Here! Not since the war …” She frowned. “The world gets worse. Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “I’m trying,” he replied.

  “Not hard enough, it seems to me.”

  It was a reasonable observation. “Perhaps. But I can’t …” He corrected himself. “None of us in the police can do that on our own. We need your help. Your support. Without that …”

  She was a bright-eyed old bird. She didn’t miss a thing. “Yes?”

  “Without that we’re just people who enforce the laws made by politicians. Regardless of what anyone thinks. Regardless of what’s right sometimes.”

  “Oh my,” she said, smiling, revealing small teeth the colour of old porcelain, a little crooked. “A policeman with a conscience. How they must love you.”

  “I don’t do this to be loved, Signora. Please. The house. Whose is it? Who’s lived there over the years?”

  “Who owns it? Americans, I imagine. They look like government people to me. Government people who don’t want to say they’re government people. Not that I care. They keep it in good repair. What more can I say? They come. They go. Different ones. Not for long, usually. Just a few weeks, as if it were a hotel. Not long enough to get to know the likes of me. Pleasant men, mind. Always men, too, on their own.”

  She was trying to remember something. Costa waited, knowing he couldn’t let this interview run
and run, wondering whether there were any other avenues left open to him.

  “And?”

  “They were solitary creatures,” she said testily. “Not the kind you could talk to easily in the street.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most.”

  “Do you remember any names? It’s possible this man who was attacked was mistaken for someone else.”

  “So many,” she said, frowning.

  Even the old ones didn’t try much these days. Costa took out his card and gave it to her, pointing out the mobile number.

  “If you think of anything. I was probably mistaken in any case. If these men were only here for a short time … I was hoping there was someone who stayed there longer. Some years ago. A man, perhaps, who regarded it as his home.”

  The old eyes sparkled. “There was one. Ten, fifteen years ago. I recall now. I think he stayed there for a year. Possibly more.”

  “His name?”

  “Even less talkative than most of them, from what I remember. Somewhat abrupt I thought, but perhaps that was just his manner.”

  “His name?” he insisted.

  She shook her head. “How could I possibly know that?”

  Teresa had checked. If Number Thirteen was a normal rental property there would be residency records. None existed. It was a bolt-hole for one of the American agencies, surely. They would have a way around all the regulations ordinary citizens had to face.

  “I may have a photograph, though,” she added brightly. “Would that help?” She nodded at the gleaming walnut sideboard next to him. It was covered in small, mounted pictures. She passed him one. “You know what time of year that is?”

  It was winter. Men, women and children, all in heavy coats, stood in front of the fountain of the tortoises holding lit candles.

  “No.”

  “Shame on you! Have you never heard of Hanukkah? Why should the Catholics steal all the fun for Christmas?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not a Catholic.”

  “How shocking,” she said with a laugh. “Still, I forgive you. We have a little tradition. Every year we take a photograph of ourselves. Just the people living here. By the fountain. Every year. I can show you ones when I was a young girl before the war.” Her eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t the old thing I am now.”

  Costa’s brain was working overtime. “He was in the photograph? This American?”

  “He didn’t want to be! The poor man was walking home just as we were lining up out there. We insisted. A little vino had been drunk, you understand. He didn’t have a choice.” She paused to let this point go home. “We can be very persuasive when we want to be, you know.”

  “I can believe that. When?”

  She frowned. “I really couldn’t say. I’ve so many photographs.”

  “Possibly ten, fifteen years ago?”

  She crossed the room, picked up a couple of photos, took off her glasses to peer at them, then returned with one in her frail hand and passed it to him. Costa scanned the faces there. He looked at the back. There was a year, scribbled in pencil: 1990.

  Bingo.

  “YOU WANT TO KNOW who Bill Kaspar is?”

  Joel Leapman looked like a man speaking from personal experience, and there was something in his eyes—impending pleasure, or a hint of a nasty surprise around the corner—that Gianni Peroni really didn’t like.

  “OK. I’ll tell you. Kind of a soldier. Kind of a spy. A mercenary. A go-between running shuttle between men who, like Kaspar, didn’t really exist either. One of the best. Take it from me. He was the sort of guy you’d follow anywhere, right into hell if that’s where he wanted to go. An American hero, we thought. Not that anyone would ever call him that out loud, you understand. And now we’re going to hang him out to dry. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

  Leapman’s tale confirmed just about everything Emily Deacon had discovered. Back in 1990, William F. Kaspar had been called to lead one of two covert teams into Iraq on an intelligence mission well behind hostile lines. The venture was a disaster. The day after they arrived to establish a forward base inside an ancient monument outside Babylon, the Republican Guard had attacked in force. Dan Deacon was out on patrol with his own team when it happened. Deacon radioed for assistance and was ordered not to engage. Forty-five minutes later, two Black Hawks, backed by fighter support, arrived on the scene. The ziggurat was a smoking shell. From what surveillance could see, Kaspar and his team were dead. Deacon’s crew managed to escape to a deserted farm two miles away, where a helicopter snatched them from the approaching enemy, though one female member was badly wounded along the way.

  The mission didn’t exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.

  Wars make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.

  All in all, Leapman said, the verdict was that the war was half a job well done. There were people who thought they should have gone all the way into Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. But that wasn’t part of the UN brief, and military people lived by UN briefs back then. The objective had been to recover Kuwait and hope that Saddam learned his lesson. They got part of what they wanted.

  He took a swig of the bottle of water he’d brought with him and stared at each of them in turn.

  “You get all that for free,” Leapman said. “It’s history now, anyway, and who gives a shit? What comes next, though, is different. If this goes public, then everything goes way over our heads, gentlemen. It won’t be me or Viale here who’s screaming blue murder. It’ll be bureau chiefs and generals or worse and none of us wants that. Understood?”

  Peroni found himself nodding automatically, as if he had a choice.

  What happened next, Leapman said, was they realized Baghdad had got insight. Postwar, someone somewhere was helping Saddam.

  “Helping him how?” Falcone demanded.

  “Background,” Leapman answered. “It was a question of adding things up and working out what didn’t make sense. There were sanctions in place by then. Tough sanctions, ones that worked, as well as sanctions can, anyway. All the same, we knew Saddam was getting wind of things he shouldn’t. He understood some of our military hardware better than he ought. He took out three Iraqis we’d placed near him to keep an eye on what was going on. He had intelligence, stuff he wasn’t supposed to know. So we had to ask ourselves what was going on.”

  “Kaspar?” Peroni wondered. “I thought you said he was a hero.”

  “Yeah. I also said he was dead. Great cover twice over, huh? We went back and talked to people in Deacon’s team again. They were uncomfortable about it. I guess if you go through that kind of experience, you don’t want to think ill of your comrades. But a couple of them, Deacon included, had their suspicions. Or so they said after a lot of prompting. Don’t forget, at that stage we thought Kaspar was blown away along with the rest of his team. But maybe that was what we were supposed to believe. And all the while he was living the good life in some quiet palace out in the desert, counting his money, gradually spilling out every last thing he knew, while Saddam lapped it up. So if that’s true, what do you do?”

  You didn’t have much in the way of options, Peroni thought. “You look for proof.”

  “Exactly.”

  Leapman nodded at Viale.
“SISDE already had someone secreted inside Iraq. Dan Deacon came back to Rome for a couple of months and worked alongside Viale here to send in a new team, see if anyone was saying anything about an American on their side. Four officers went in. One came back. The others …”

  Leapman shook his head. “I don’t even want to think what happened there. One report we got said Uday disposed of the poor bastards personally. You heard the stories about how he used to feed the lions?”

  He let them digest that in silence.

  “They weren’t fairy tales,” Leapman continued. “But they weren’t the full story either. Anyway, it was Deacon’s man who came back and he had some news. There was an American there. He was talking. And he was some big tough guy who seemed to know everything. Fitted Kaspar in every respect. Some hero, huh? And you know something? We couldn’t touch him. He was just going to sit there gossiping day and night until we came back another time. We were working with kid gloves then. It took all the persuasion we had to get that covert team in just to look for intelligence. We couldn’t be seen to be running heavier missions, maybe to capture him or take him out, because that would screw up any chance we had of rebuilding a coalition to finish the job.

  Not that that worked either. We were in a deep pile of shit and there was nothing we could do about it.”

  “Still,” Peroni said, “you got there in the end.”

  “Yes, we did!” Leapman barked back at him. “And one day you people might realize what a damn big favour we did you.”

  Falcone shook his head. “You’re getting away from the subject, Leapman.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled. “None of you ever like that conversation. OK. So, come last spring, we get back to Iraq. And we say to some of our intelligence people, look out for this guy called Bill Kaspar. And when you find him, throw him in a cell somewhere, call home and leave him alone with us for a little while.”

  Peroni had to ask. “Us being?”