City of Fear nc-8

by David Hewson

  “You’re late. The band’s started already.”

  “It was difficult getting here. No buses. No transport.”

  “It’s the same for everyone.” He examined the sheet of paper. It bore, she saw, the official seal of the president’s office. “I must see your ID.”

  Her mind went blank. The only proof of identity she possessed was the press card of the American TV reporter.

  “ID,” he insisted.

  “I left it at home,” she said finally. “I thought … a letter from the president’s office was enough. I’m a musician. I’m late as it is. If I let them down again …”

  She hated lying — and liars more than anything. Yet, when it was necessary, deceit seemed to come so easily.

  “Please. They’ll fire me, and I need the money. Playing an instrument”—she held up the case—“is no way for a single mother to earn a living. Please …”

  He sighed. “You’re not Italian.”

  “Spanish. My husband’s Italian. Wherever he is.”

  He waved the letter Petrakis had given her. “Don’t walk around Rome without an ID. It’s the law.”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  He laughed. “Why anyone would rush to be in a room with those people is beyond me. Play well. What’s it they say?” He gestured with his arm, theatrically. “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.”

  “They’re the leaders of the world,” she replied primly.

  “And we’re their subjects. Quite.”

  A moment later, heart still beating wildly in her chest, she found herself in the long, broad corridor that Petrakis had described. Just to be sure, she checked her map once more. It was all as he had said. A palace more grand than anything she had ever seen. Tapestries hung from the walls like everyday drapes. Paintings decorated every spare inch. A line of open windows gave out onto the green gardens of the Quirinale that seemed to stretch forever, as if they were a private park made for a king.

  The music grew louder as she walked, a light dance tune, the kind old people listened to, tapping their feet. It came, she knew, from the adjoining room, and was accompanied by the low murmur of voices.

  She walked on toward the door he’d marked on the map, holding the instrument case firmly, feeling the handle grow slippery in her sweating fingers.

  Zeru, Josepe …

  Nothing can bring back the dead, she thought. But one might mark their memory in a way others would not forget.

  The door she sought looked as if it had been carved from old gold. Mythical creatures, dragons and unicorns, danced the length of the frame. She could see her son’s face, clear in her memory.

  Then a flash of recollection, cruel and relentless. It was the day they’d found a baby thrush in the garden, too young to fly, too weak to feed.

  Josepe had quietly taken the creature to one side and, out of kindness, smothered it in an old blanket. Zeru had not witnessed this, had not been told, and yet, when he became aware of its disappearance, he knew somehow, understood intuitively what had happened, feeling the small creature’s agony somewhere in the recesses of his young heart. How he had sobbed!

  What would he say now? her inner voice asked.

  “Zeru was a little boy,” she answered softly, feeling tears prick her eyes. “A child is a child. What they know is a truth for them, a fairy tale. Not for the rest of us.”

  She heard a sound behind her. Anna Ybarra’s blood ran cold.

  Turning, her hands still tight on the instrument case, with the primed Uzi inside, she found herself facing a solitary figure she recognized. The old man from the podium. He was standing erect, amused, smoking a cigarette, slyly blowing the smoke out of the neighboring window.

  “Another truant, I see, signora,” Dario Sordi, the president of Italy, remarked. “Enjoying the view when you should, by all rights, be playing. Unless I’m mistaken.”

  At that point something clouded his eyes and she knew immediately what it was. Recognition. Astonishment. Yet not alarm, though she failed to understand why.

  “Perhaps I am mistaken,” he added.

  53

  Teresa Lupo wondered what kind of spectacle they made, sitting on the steps of the little church near the Quirinale looking miserable as Hell. They bunched together on the hard stone, silent, watched by the sour-faced saints high on Borromoni’s curving façade. It wasn’t a thinking silence, either. That was what worried her most. For the last couple of days she’d started to consider herself a cop, not a pathologist, and this blank inactivity bothered her. Cops were meant to discover, to seize ideas out of thin air, then turn fancy into fact, something concrete, something one could act on. Not sit around waiting. Peroni hadn’t done this, not quite. He’d disappeared around the corner for some unannounced reason. A hunt for the restroom, she guessed. But the rest of them …

  She turned to Falcone, whose long, tanned face was in his hands as he stared down at the empty street, and asked, “So what do we do now? Just sit here like tourists waiting for the bus to turn up?”

  “Unless you have any better suggestions …” the inspector murmured.

  “But it’s not supposed to be like this!”

  “What is it supposed to be like?” Rosa wondered.

  “We’re supposed to be finding things out. Working things out. Seeing some … rational link between what’s going on.”

  “‘Rational link’?” Falcone mocked. “What an extraordinarily old-fashioned view of police work.”

  “What else is there?”

  His lean face wrinkled with distaste. “I sometimes wonder if you’ve taken a moment’s notice of anything I’ve tried to teach you over the years.”

  “You? Teach me?”

  “When it comes to … science”—he said the word as if it had a bad taste—“I value your advice immensely. Not that science is doing us many favors.”

  “Leo!” She pointed in the direction of the Quirinale Palace. “Over there a bunch of faceless gray spooks are concocting some kind of fake terrorist incident. Here, in our city. All in the hope that the so-called perpetrator will then be allowed to return to the bandit lands of Afghanistan and lead those selfsame spooks straight to the evil bastards they’ve been chasing, with no success whatsoever, for years. Which seems pretty unlikely if you ask me, not that I’m an expert in such matters, thank God.”

  “It would seem that way,” he agreed.

  “People have died because of this nonsense. One of our own …”

  “You heard the American’s apology for that. We were warned not to interfere.”

  “These are criminal acts.”

  He shrugged. “Would you like me to arrest someone?”

  “Yes!”

  “How? Esposito won’t countenance it. Palombo would overrule it if I tried. Besides, if they’re right …”

  “The ends cannot justify the means,” she retorted.

  He frowned. “It’s easy to say that, isn’t it? But what if you could turn back time? What if you could prevent New York City, Bali, all those other enormities? Just by torturing a single human being? A guilty man. A murderer who would murder thousands more if he could—”

  “Doesn’t work, and you know it. You’d have to torture a thousand human beings, and most of them wouldn’t be guilty at all.”

  “If you could have killed Hitler before he ordered Auschwitz?” Rosa asked.

  “Any argument that requires the mention of Hitler in order to succeed is doomed from the start, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Peroni was walking up the street, his hands filled with cones of gelati.

  It was beautiful ice cream. Her favorite: pistachio. A thin green line of it had melted down his lapel and he hadn’t noticed. Teresa wiped it off with a tissue as he sat down next to her.

  “Your job’s nothing like mine, is it?” she said.

  “I never claimed it was,” Peroni answered, looking puzzled.

  “Our occupation, such as it is,” Falcone cut in, “principally cons
ists of assembling unseen shapes in a darkened room, then waiting for the arrival of daylight to see if any of them resemble, in some small way, what we expected.”

  Peroni looked around at them and said, “Normally I would ask you to bring me up to date on things. But in this instance …”

  She patted him on the knee, so hard he shut up. “I was simply coming to realize what a rotten police officer I’d make. Spending all this time running your hands through meaningless dust …”

  Peroni considered this. Then he said, “I think you mean dust for which we have yet to find a meaning.”

  Teresa laughed and then pecked him on the cheek, not minding that they saw. She loved this man, for all the right reasons. In a way, she loved all of them. They were a team. A family. A group of people bound to one another by invisible, powerful ties. This was one more reason why it hurt so much that there were no shapes to work with, no darkened room, no prospect of daylight. It was such a joy to see the spark in their faces the moment some glimmer of revelation appeared.

  The pathologist finished her cone, got up, and stood beneath the grim stare of Borromini’s stone saints. She dialed Silvio Di Capua on her cell phone; it took him a second to answer, no more, and a minute to fill her in on his thinking.

  “Where’s Elizabeth?” she asked.

  “Gone out.”

  “Gone out where?”

  “She said she was meeting a friend. I’m a forensic scientist, not a bodyguard. Besides, she can look after—”

  “Shut up, Silvio! I’m trying to think.”

  “You called to tell me that?”

  “No.” She remembered now. “I called to talk to Elizabeth.”

  “Ask me.”

  “You’re a man. You think the wrong way. Like me.”

  “Intellectual cross-dressing can become very confusing, whether you’re watching or taking part.”

  “Very clever.” She thought of the numerals. There had to be something in the numerals. “When you start a message with a number, it usually signifies either a time or a date,” she suggested.

  “Been there, looked at that. It can’t be a date, not if it refers to the summit. The twelfth of the month is already past. And if it’s time …”

  “It can’t be today, since we’re past midday. But it has to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the big men in the Quirinale Palace say so. Don’t ask for an explanation. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Then it’s not a time and it’s not a date. So what is it? Can I pair it with the following numeral and make something?”

  “You tell me,” she demanded.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “Non è niente.”

  “They’re Roman numerals. Latin.”

  “So?”

  “So why do you assume that the number twelve would mean back then what it does now?”

  “Twelve is twelve,” he said with a long, pained sigh. “Numbers are numbers. Gloriously immutable. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why the sky never falls.”

  “You’re missing my point.” Two points, actually, the more she thought about it. “Petrakis thinks he’s living in the past. Maybe part of the joke is that he writes that way too. What did the number twelve mean to Julius Caesar? Midday? Possibly. But they weren’t walking around with watches on their wrists, were they? I don’t know. Check it out.”

  “Good one,” he agreed. “Will do.”

  “And, also, check out the obvious.”

  There was a pause on the line. The two of them had this discussion from time to time. About the way Silvio was an astonishingly learned and sharp individual, one so clever that occasionally he was unable to see something directly in front of his own face.

  “The obvious?” he repeated, sounding a little scared.

  “Even if we don’t know what the first number stands for,” Teresa said patiently, “this would signify that the second set possesses some separate meaning. Not a time. Not a date. Not … I don’t know. Perhaps just the same as the other numbers we’ve had to deal with.”

  Somehow she could sense fear inside his silence.

  “Silvio,” she asked testily. “You have looked, haven’t you? Shakespeare? The text Petrakis used for the other codes?”

  “The other codes had three numbers,” he said hesitantly.

  “So does this one, if the first number refers to something else. What is it?”

  “II. I. CLXXIII.”

  “Act Two. Scene One. Line one hundred and seventy-three. Possibly. Check out the time. Check out the verse. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

  “On it,” he said hastily. “Anything else?”

  There was nothing she could think of and she said so. The others were watching her. Peroni had a new blob of pistachio ice cream on his suit.

  “Well?” Costa asked hopefully when she sat down beside them.

  “Science,” she told him. “Boring old integers. Nothing you philosopher types need bother your clever heads about.”

  54

  “Dígame,” Dario Sordi murmured, looking at the young woman in the long velvet dress, a large closed instrument case in her hand, at the expression of fear and anticipation on her plain, intense face.

  The corridor by the Salone dei Corazzieri was deserted. The room beyond, one he knew so well, every glittering inch engraved upon his memory, reverberated to the sound of music and the low chatter of voices in many languages. He had been glad to escape. Smoking was an enjoyable excuse, nothing more.

  “Excuse me?” the young woman said.

  “I was under the impression we’d met before,” Sordi answered before throwing his half-finished cigarette out of the window, into the gardens beyond.

  “I don’t think so, sir. I’m a musician.…”

  “What instrument?”

  She hesitated. “Brass.”

  “My late wife played the flute. Not very well, if I’m being honest. Is that brass too?”

  She thought for a moment, then answered, “Of course.”

  He came and stood closer to her. “The modern flute may be made of metal, but it’s still woodwind, or so I seem to recall. Any musician would know that. Although a reporter might not.” Sordi recalled the single word of Spanish he’d heard when he tried to call Costa on the private phone, the one that was supposed to be their link alone. “Or someone who was simply a voice in the dark in Tarquinia.”

  She pushed him back, firmly, with her right hand. Her face, which seemed initially full of a simple honesty, was contorted by anger. He fell against a radiator and found himself clutching at a curtain to stay upright. When he regained his balance, she was fumbling at the instrument case, releasing the catch. Inside there was a weapon, too large for a pistol, too small to be a conventional military rifle. These things had changed so much since the Second World War, and he had never had a great deal of interest in firearms even then.

  The thing looked efficient and deadly.

  Her trembling fingers snatched at the barrel, then the stock. The case fell to the floor. Her hand found the butt of the weapon, the trigger guard, and she started to grip it in a way that betrayed both skill and purpose.

  The pistol, almost a child’s toy, was aimed his way, though not as directly as her determined gaze.

  “This is the Quirinale Palace,” Dario Sordi told her. “At any moment, security people will interrupt our little discussion. They will not wait to ask questions, signora. They will see you with that thing and they will shoot you dead.”

  “They’re all in there,” she retorted, nodding at the closed door into the Salone. “With the important people. Where you should be.”

  “Important?” He frowned. “You flatter me, signora.”

  The barrel moved slowly toward him, like the black nose of a hungry beast. He raised his hands — which was, he supposed, what she wanted.

  Sordi caught their reflection in the nearby window: a tall, straight-backed old
man who hated to see himself; a young, plain woman, her face distorted by fury and doubt.

  He stepped closer.

  The barrel swung straight back toward him, dashed forward, stabbed him in the chest. Not a painful blow. More of a prod. A threat.

  “Why are you not afraid of me?” she asked, pointing the sleek black weapon toward him.

  He laughed. There seemed nothing else to do. “I’m almost eighty years old,” Dario Sordi replied. “I’ve been smoking since the age of thirteen, and drinking wine, good and bad, rather longer than that. On occasion I argue so much my blood pressure attains levels my doctor believes physically impossible. If I live another five years or another five seconds, what does it matter?”

  She was silent, listening.

  “They used to make me read Horace when I was a schoolboy,” he continued. “I remember one line in particular …” It was the day of the Via Rasella, and he’d spent the morning poring over a copy of the Odes, struggling with the language. “‘Sed omnes una manet nox.’ ‘But the same night awaits us all.’ What exactly am I supposed to fear, signora? Such a small and commonplace creature as death …?”

  He was glad there were no Corazzieri there. Glad he had the chance to try to talk to her.

  “Latin’s the language of priests,” she hissed.

  “Among others,” he agreed.

  “When I go in there,” she told him, pointing with the gun at the glittering doorway, “don’t follow.”

  “I may be just another citizen in the world beyond this place,” he told her. “But in the Quirinale, I go where I want.”

  The barrel rose and pointed straight into his face. She didn’t speak.

  He held up his hands higher, smiled, and said, “You asked me a question only a few hours ago. Were you happy with the answer?”

  She shook her head, in doubt, not negation.

  “These demons that pursue you must be hungry indeed,” Dario Sordi said.

  “You don’t know my demons.”

  “No,” the president admitted. “Not your present ones.” She refused to meet his gaze. “I know the ones to come, though. Here is something I never told anyone before — anyone except my wife, that is, and she’s gone.” He stiffened, feeling suddenly cold. “Their faces don’t die, signora. They never leave you. I can see those two young Germans I murdered even now. The surprise in their eyes. As if everything was a joke, even life itself.”