The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “And after that you will kill me?”

  The man seemed puzzled by the question.

  “No, no, no. After that he will kill you.”

  The man nodded toward the back of the room, then gestured for someone to come forward.

  Giovanni Batisti watched and felt his blood freeze.

  The newcomer must have sat silent throughout. Perhaps he was in the other car when they seized him at the crossroads.

  He looked like a golden boy, a powerfully built youth, naked except for a crude loincloth. His skin was the color of a cinematic Mediterranean god. His hair was burnished yellow, long and curled like a cherub from Raphael. Bright blue paint was smeared roughly on his face and chest.

  “We require a sign,” the man in black added, reaching into his pocket and taking out an egg. “My friend here is no ordinary man. He can foretell the future through the examination of the entrails and internal organs. This makes him a …” He stared at the ceiling, as if searching for the word.

  “A haruspex,” Batisti murmured.

  “Exactly,” the man agreed. “Should our act of divination be fruitful …”

  The painted youth was staring at him, like a muscular halfwit. Batisti could see what appeared to be a butcher’s knife in his right hand.

  On the table, a pale brown hen’s egg sat in a saucer with a scallop-shell edge.

  The man with the gun said, in a clear, firm voice, “Ta Sacni!” Then he leaned forward and, in a mock whisper behind his hand, told Batisti, “This is more your field than mine. I think that means, ‘This is the sanctuary.’ Do tell me if we get anything wrong.”

  The golden boy stepped forward and stood behind him. In his left hand was a small bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water. His eyes were very blue and open, as if he were drugged. He bent down, gazed at the egg, and then listened, rapt, captivated, as the man in black began to chant in a dry, passionless voice, “Aplu. Phoebos. Apollo. Delian. Pythian. Lord of Delphi. Guardian of the Sibyls. Or by whatever other name you wish to be called. I pray and beseech you that you may by your majesty be propitious and well disposed to me, for which I offer this egg. If I have worshipped you and still do worship you, you who taught mankind the art of prophecy, you who have inspired my divination, then come now and show your signs that I might know the will of the gods! I seek to understand the secret ways into the Palace of the Pope. Thui Srenar Tev.”

  Show me the signs now, Batisti translated in his head.

  The youth spilled the water onto the table. The knife came down and split the egg in two.

  The older one leaned over, sniffed, and said, “Looks like yolk and albumen to me. But what do I know? He’s the haruspex.”

  “I cannot tell you what you want to know,” Batisti murmured. “You must appreciate that.”

  “That is both very brave and extremely unfortunate. Though not entirely unexpected.”

  The naked youth was running his fingers through the egg in the saucer. The man pushed his hand away. The creature obeyed, immediately, a sudden fearful and subservient look in his eye.

  “I want the code for your computer,” the older one ordered. “You will give it to me. One way or another.”

  Batisti said nothing, merely closed his eyes for a moment and wished he retained sufficient faith to pray.

  “I’m more valuable to you alive than dead. Tell the authorities what you want. They will negotiate.”

  “They didn’t negotiate for Aldo Moro. You think some junior political hack is worth more than a prime minister?” He seemed impatient, as if this were all a tedious game. “You’ve been out of the real world too long, Batisti. These people smile at you and pat your little head, caring nothing. These”—he dashed the saucer and the broken egg from the table—“toys are beneath us. Remember your Bible. ‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly …’”

  Batisti recalled little of his Catholic upbringing. It seemed distant, as if it had happened to someone else. This much of the verses he remembered, though.

  “‘But faith, hope, love, abide these three,’” he said quietly. “‘And the greatest of these is love.’”

  “Not so much of that about these days,” the silver-haired man replied mournfully. “Is there?”

  Then he nodded at the golden boy by his side, waiting, tense and anxious, for something to begin.

  3

  THE PEALS FROM THE NEARBY CLOCK TOWER CUT through the muffled rumble of late-afternoon traffic. In his mind’s eye Gianni Peroni could imagine the slender white campanile that sat atop the great palace on the hill above them. The Italian tricolor fluttered at the summit, the blue European flag beneath, both accompanied, if the president was in residence, by his own personal standard on the other. All three flew at half-mast during times of national mourning. Perhaps that would happen soon, Peroni thought with regret.

  At that moment he felt every day of his fifty-three years. His hefty muscular frame ached from the hours he’d spent on the cobbled streets of the centro storico, and his mind was numb from staring at so many blank faces regarding him with trepidation and a little fear. He knew he wasn’t the prettiest cop on the beat. The physical slashes that marked his cheeks like knife scars saw to that. No stranger opening the door to him could possibly guess that the appearance he gave—so rough, so intimidating—was nothing like the man himself, until he spoke, kindly, with a keen, bright diligence and genuine emotion.

  This was a bad day in Rome, one that might so easily get worse. Peroni took a deep breath, thought about the next address on his list, and then heard the sonorous chimes of the president’s campanile swamped by the thunderous roar of a police Twin Huey flying in to hover low over the Quirinale hill.

  Commissario Esposito’s briefing had made plain the seriousness of the situation, and the degree of the response. Nine of the twelve Polizia di Stato helicopters from the Pratica di Mare air base south of the city were in the air, circling endlessly. They had been joined by those of the Carabinieri, the secret services, and some of the more shadowy security agencies Peroni didn’t care to think about. The combined racket they made placed a low, shrill shriek in the perfect blue sky above the summer crowds of tourists and commuters struggling through the heat.

  Over the years, Peroni had come to associate the racket of these machines with the state of the city’s temperament. Their volume rose and fell with the general mood in the dark, cobbled alleys of the centro storico and the quieter, more modern suburbs to which the average Roman retreated at the end of the working day. On that basis the city’s current frame of mind was uncertain, unhappy, and pregnant with foreboding. A junior minister in the Ministry of the Interior had been kidnapped, seized just after midnight by some band of unknown criminals. They had casually slaughtered his unfortunate female driver, a young single mother, at the wheel of his government car. Peroni had been on duty and was one of the first on the scene ten hours earlier. The heartbreaking sight of the unarmed woman’s bloodied, torn corpse still strapped in by her seat belt would haunt him for a while. There was, it seemed to him, little point in her murder, except to demonstrate its own brutality.

  No ransom demand, or any other kind of communication, had been received by the authorities. Not a trace of the victim or his abductors had yet been found. But everyone knew who Giovanni Batisti was: a minor opposition politician dealing with the security of the meeting of G8 world leaders, a meeting due to begin, somewhat controversially, the following day in the center of the city itself. An officer of the state who possessed secrets useful to the enemy, whosoever they might be. The assumption, on the part of the police and everyone else, was immediate and unquestioned. This was terrorism, a prelude to something else, something worse.

  Hundreds of men and women were now engaged in trying to understand what had happened in those few bloody minutes at the crossroads in the Via delle Quattro Fontane. Yet, in t
he end, much of the work fell to those who patiently tramped the historic streets of Rome. Helicopters and surveillance cameras, police officers bearing arms in the most visible of public streets, constant appeals to the public through the media … these things were fine for the cameras. When it came to the point at which good encountered evil, its discovery was usually down to a few individuals who might count themselves lucky, cursed, or just plain stupid, depending on the outcome of events.

  The story broke too late for the morning newspapers, which of course made it all the more irresistible to the TV and radio stations. So, within the space of a morning, the pretty face of Elena Majewska and the kindly, scholarly features of Giovanni Batisti had become familiar icons throughout Rome, if not Italy, on TV screens, in the imaginations of ordinary people fearful about his fate and about that of the nation at large. The indignation of the city was apparent everywhere, in hushed conversations in cafes, and, more visibly, in the protest notices that had begun to appear in the windows of shops and private homes, on any spare space that could be found.

  Peroni recalled the morning that terrorist bombs had devastated the center of London some years before. Within the space of a few hours, posters, rapidly printed at personal expense, distributed by volunteers, began appearing on the walls of the Italian capital, declaring, Adesso siamo tutti Londrinesi.

  We are all Londoners now.

  It felt that way. There was a communal howl of outrage, an instinctive reaction of shock and revulsion. Yet some inner sense of the city told him the response to Batisti’s abduction was more than a statement of solidarity born out of simple common decency. This strange and bloody act had finally breathed life into a subterranean sense of apprehension, one that had been quietly stirring for some time in the febrile, uncertain nature of the times.

  Peroni had watched Commissario Esposito assemble an initial investigative team in the darkness early that morning, only to find, to his dismay if not surprise, that the area was soon swarming with other agencies: the Carabinieri; officers of SISDE, the civilian secret service, and of SISMI, their military counterparts. Foreigners too: Americans flashing badges, British men in suits, who never said a word at all, French, German, Russian …

  Rome was bursting at the seams with spooks and security officers committed to guarding the leaders who were starting to assemble inside the Quirinale. A small army of these tenebrous individuals had found their way to the narrow crossroads of the Via delle Quattro Fontane.

  It was almost, Peroni thought at the time, as if some of them had been expecting such a turn of events.

  The entire area would be sealed off for another day at least, causing chaos for those trying to get to work in the presidential palace and the ministry buildings scattered around the neighborhood. In the tussle that ensued, Commissario Esposito had done his best to press the police case for a leading role in the investigation. Peroni had watched the most senior officer in the Questura as he fought to deal with a rapidly escalating confrontation that was slipping out of his hands. There was something quietly admirable in the commissario’s persistent yet polite professionalism toward the other agencies as they arrived. Nevertheless, it was an effort doomed to failure.

  Once a case moved from simple criminality into the dark world of terrorism, Esposito knew, like every other ordinary serving man and woman in the Polizia di Stato, that he was merely a foot soldier destined to take orders, a tiny cog in a very different campaign, one that embraced much more than mere law enforcement. Whatever had happened to Giovanni Batisti, it would not be left to the police to take the lead in negotiating his release or trying to locate his killers, should the worst happen. The game had, very swiftly, moved on. The police would become pawns on a chessboard in which the pieces were shifted by unseen hands, playing to a gambit they might never explain. This was the way of such investigations, and what amazed Gianni Peroni, a police officer whose experience ran back to the days of the Red Brigades, was that they were forced to confront such challenges only rarely. Bombs had devastated London and Madrid. Aircraft had tumbled from the sky in America. But Rome had been lucky. It was important such good fortune lasted.

  This was why he was now leading one of the many teams of police officers scouring the streets to follow up phone calls from people responding to the pleas put out by the authorities. It was the kind of routine, mindless drudgery that police officers performed much of the time: knocking on doors, asking questions, trying to judge the answers they got, expecting little, receiving nothing mostly. Every officer Commissario Esposito could get his hands on was out there, among them many men and women on holiday who had turned up determined to help. It was boring, necessary labor, and Peroni was glad he had good company for the job: Rosa Prabakaran, an experienced agente who was quickly turning into one of the most intelligent and reliable officers in the Questura team; and a genial trainee, Mirko Oliva, a bright young man from Turin newly transferred from uniform to plainclothes duties.

  Only Oliva, starry-eyed still with the eagerness of youth, managed to look enthusiastic after five futile responses to calls that, for the most part, had been sparked by nothing more than the innocent presence of foreigners of Middle Eastern origin. Terrorism, for the masses, still meant something from outside Italy; their memories, it seemed to Peroni, were mercifully short at times.

  Now the three of them were no more than a ten-minute walk from the point at which Batisti had been kidnapped. The address they’d been given lay in a dark narrow lane to one side of the Quirinale, running from the Barberini Palace to the busy tunnel that traveled beneath the palace gardens to emerge near the Trevi Fountain. Peroni could see a phalanx of buses fighting for space at the foot of the street so that they could discharge their cargoes of tourists.

  “What are we looking for this time?” Oliva asked. He was twenty-three, stocky like a rugby player, with close-cropped black hair and bright blue eyes.

  “You’re supposed to remember these things, Mirko,” Rosa Prabakaran scolded him. “Not keep relying on your colleagues.”

  “Sorry. I wish we were doing something important.”

  “This is important,” Peroni insisted. He looked at his notebook. “Or it might be.”

  It was more than thirty years since Gianni Peroni joined the police, but he could still remember the impetuousness he’d felt in the early days.

  Rosa Prabakaran was beyond that stage already. A slim, elegant young woman, born in Rome to Indian parents, she was dressed in a severe gray suit, the uniform of an ambitious young officer keen to take a step up to sovrintendente. Rosa was something of an enigma within the Questura: self-assured, striking, with a round, dark face, intelligent brown eyes, and—a deliberate sign, Peroni thought, of her heritage—the smallest of gold studs in her snub nose. She never mixed with her colleagues, never talked about anything personal, relationships least of all. When the work was there, she was always the last to leave. When she was off duty, no one had any idea what she did, or with whom.

  “We had a phone call from someone called Moro,” Rosa told the young trainee, giving Peroni a meaningful look, one that said he ought to comment upon Oliva’s sluggishness one day. “He lives on the ground floor. He thinks he saw two suspicious-looking foreigners going up the stairs.”

  “How does someone look ‘suspicious’?” Oliva wondered.

  It seemed, to Peroni, a very good question.

  4

  THE MAN PERONI REGARDED AS ONE OF HIS CLOSEST friends was only a few hundred meters away at that moment, standing outside the Palazzo del Quirinale at the summit of the hill, almost dizzy with memories. Nic Costa was just starting to look his thirty years—slim, athletically built, dark-faced and handsome, his manner still diffident, with a quiet charm bordering on shyness, but sufficient professional steel to have gained him promotion to the rank of sovrintendente. As the three police officers waited for clearance into the presidential palace, Costa scarcely noticed Inspector Leo Falcone and the Questura commissario Vincenzo Esposito next
to him. He’d been through the tightly guarded entrance of the Quirinale once before, as a child, when his father, Marco, a communist politician, had taken him on a private visit “to see how the enemy live.” The place had seemed huge and fascinating, like some magical fortress from a fairy tale, one guarded by the armored figures of the Corazzieri, the presidential guard, tall men with shining swords and glittering breastplates who seemed to tower above most visitors.

  That privileged peek behind the palace’s towering stone façade was a quarter of a century before. The quiet, introverted child he was could never have imagined that one day he would return there as a police officer, in a frightened Rome, a city full of trepidation, a place he barely recognized.

  But Falcone did, and so did Esposito. They were older, in their fifties, and their bleak, immobile faces spoke volumes. Something that was once thought dead had returned, and for those of a certain age it bore a terrible familiarity.

  The impossibly lofty corazziere at the gate let them through, and the moment he was inside the palace Costa found himself recalling his puzzlement as a child over his father’s explanation of what a president did. This was not America. The Italian president was not the day-to-day head of government, an elected king in all but name. That job was given to the prime minister. But a republic required too a figurehead, an emblem of the state. History being what it was, the government had naturally decided that the place for such a man to live was the Quirinale, the very palace that was once occupied by the popes who ruled what was known as the Stati della Chiesa, the Republic of Saint Peter.

  Foreigners seldom appreciated the complexities of politics in Rome. As the son of a communist politician, Costa had rarely been allowed to forget them. From the third century after Christ until 1861, when, in a brief interregnum, the pope became “the prisoner in the Vatican,” the papal hierarchy regarded itself as God’s government on earth. Only when Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty of 1929 gave the Catholic Church some formal recognition, and its own minuscule country set around Michelangelo’s magnificent dome across the river, did the rift between pope and secular politicians begin to heal.