The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  These were the antecedents that Costa’s father had drummed into him from the earliest age, the story of the collapse of a once-supreme theological sovereign power and its replacement by a worldly, bickering, and equally corrupt parliamentary democracy that had never quite found its feet. Marco Costa had been born eight years after the Lateran Treaty was signed, into a nation dominated by fascism, one that would soon disintegrate into the bloodshed and poverty of war. This was all history, but Italian history, which meant that it was never as distant as one might sometimes have hoped, or completely forgotten.

  Costa followed Esposito and Falcone up the broad stairs, exchanging glances, nothing more, with a group of Carabinieri officers on the way out. Very soon he found himself in a long, ornate room, with a carved-oak ceiling, tall, shuttered windows, elaborate gilt furniture, and so many paintings he didn’t know where to look.

  At a vast ormolu table stood the president of Italy, Dario Sordi. Seated to his left was a familiar figure from occasional high-level meetings within the Questura, Luca Palombo, the tall, heavily built, gray-haired security chief of the Ministry of the Interior. Next to him was an individual Costa did not know, though something about the man’s dress, a standard, expensive dark blue suit, suggested he came from the same distant and occasionally shadowy world as Palombo. At the end of the table stood a screen displaying a blank white rectangle from the computer projector opposite.

  A door in the corner of the room opened. Another familiar figure entered and Costa reminded himself that he did not normally move in circles like this. Ugo Campagnolo, the prime minister of Italy’s sixty-third government since the Second World War, heir, in the space of a few short years, to Prodi, Berlusconi, and, most recently, Walter Veltroni. Campagnolo was a man who had emerged from the constant bilious flux of national politics by both courting and coveting controversy. Smaller than he appeared in the media, a handsome, slender man, with the energized, upright figure of the waiter he once was, he entered at a brisk pace, his face locked in the rictus smile the nation knew from a million photo opportunities. His wavy dark hair was a little too perfect for a man in his late fifties, though the chiseled tanned features, this close, seemed to confirm his frequent claim that he, unlike some of his predecessors, had never taken advantage of the surgeon’s knife. Over the previous fifteen years, as the older grouping collapsed amid scandal and self-recrimination, Campagnolo had quietly built his own party, courting the moneyed classes with promises of fiscal laxity, and the proletariat by outflanking Berlusconi’s naked populism. The previous year, after the collapse of the brief Veltroni regime, Campagnolo had won power through the most slender of margins and some dubious political double-dealing, becoming prime minister only months after the previous center-left administration had placed Sordi in the presidency. The rifts between Campagnolo and Sordi began almost immediately. Scarcely a week went by without some new dispute appearing between the Quirinale and Campagnolo’s parliament. It was an uneasy and embittered standoff between a veteran politician who was widely admired but possessed little in the way of direct power, and a prime minister who was seen as a naked opportunist, without a conviction in his body, but with enough influence and cunning to win the popular vote against a fractured opposition.

  Costa watched the prime minister take a chair next to the security man, Palombo, without uttering a word or casting a single glance in the president’s direction. Only days before, the papers had once again been full of the rifts between the two, over domestic and international issues and over Campagnolo’s decision to place the G8 summit in the heart of Rome itself, not in some country estate that might be guarded with ease and minimal disruption to everyday life.

  They were very different men.

  Costa felt he had known Sordi’s long, pale face, and its almost permanent expression of wry bemusement, forever. As a senator, Sordi had been a close friend of his father’s until some unexplained fracture divided them. Even before he moved into the Quirinale, Sordi was a legend in Italy. The man himself made a point of never mentioning his distant past, though it was well mapped out in the papers and the national psyche. As a schoolboy during the Second World War, he had joined the partisans fighting the German occupation. On March 23, 1944, a date engraved upon the memory of many a Roman family, Sordi had taken part in the infamous attack in the Via Rasella, a narrow street by the side of the Quirinale hill. Twenty SS men died and more than sixty were wounded. A truant from school, young Sordi had personally gunned down two Germans, or so the papers said. Somehow he had escaped the terrible vengeance subsequently ordered by the Nazis, in which 335 Italians—Jews, Gypsies, soldiers, police officers, waiters, shop workers, some partisans, a few ordinary Romans who were simply unlucky—were massacred in regulation groups of five. The Germans dumped their bodies in the caves of the Fosse Ardeatine, close to the isolated rural catacombs of Callisto and Domitilla, no more than a ten-minute walk from Costa’s home on the Via Appia Antica.

  Sordi emerged from the war both a hero and an orphan; his father and an uncle were among those executed at the Fosse Ardeatine. Soon, the young partisan became a vocal member of the Communist Party, only to break with it in 1956 over Hungary. Thereafter he remained a committed deputy of the “soft” left, steadily working his way through the political process, gaining along the way a reputation for blunt honesty and indefatigable integrity, not least for his refusal to use his bravery as a teenage partisan to the slightest advantage in the polling booth.

  The contrast with Campagnolo could hardly be greater. The prime minister exploited the Italian weakness for braggadocio and cheek. He was a buffoon of sorts, a political Punchinello, cynical, fundamentally unscrupulous, yet intelligent, persuasive, and battle-hardened, a man who, through the force of his personality, had swept aside the confusion and infighting of the previous coalition administration and replaced it with his own brand of draconian leadership.

  Costa could never imagine Sordi indulging in the swagger and public posturing that had put Campagnolo in power. There had once been photos of the man who was to become president in the Costa home. Usually with Costa’s father, Marco, both raising wineglasses, cigarettes in their hands. Some more-sober pictures were taken at the caves where the victims of the Via Rasella reprisals were murdered. The two men always looked so different, his father seeming young almost to the last, while Sordi—with his bald head and fringe of gray hair—appeared to be set in permanent middle age. Then the friendship was gone, and all the young Costa recalled was that face looking down at him, smiling, its features almost cartoon-like, with a long beak of a nose, drooping ears, and wearily genial gray eyes. The “Bloodhound.” That was what his father called Sordi. Was this simply because he looked like one? Or because Sordi had a tireless dedication to the demands of realpolitik, which Marco, for whom theory was always easier than practice, found tedious?

  In all likelihood, he would never know. The breach had occurred when he was too young to understand, or dare ask. Nevertheless, it was, he sensed, a separation that had caused both men pain.

  Now, more than two decades later, he stood in front of Dario Sordi, president of Italy, and caught a pleasant twinkle in those kindly gray eyes.

  “Ah, a face I have not seen in many years.”

  Sordi stepped out from behind the table, reaching out with his long arms. “Esposito. A pleasure, always. And you must be Falcone. Welcome.” Tall and thin, straight-backed, tanned, with a carefully clipped silver goatee, Costa’s inspector nodded, seemingly unmoved by the president’s warmth. Sordi stopped in front of Costa. “Sovrintendente. So much changed, yet still I see the little boy I used to know. Your father would be proud, even if he would struggle to tell you so. Let me do that for him.”

  Costa caught the look of amazement on the faces of his colleagues.

  “I would like to think so, sir,” he answered quietly, aware that he was fighting to stifle his blushes.

  “Know it,” Sordi replied, and returned to the table, beckoning them to
sit. “Know this too. I wish to God your father were with us now. We could use men like him.” The president glanced at his watch. “What you will now hear must not be repeated outside, except to those you both trust and believe must know.”

  He glanced at Campagnolo. “Prime Minister?”

  “Are you asking me to comply also, Dario?” Campagnolo asked. “Even in the present circumstances, that seems a little impertinent.”

  Sordi’s face betrayed no anger. “I was seeking your support, Ugo. If you wished to say a few words …?”

  Campagnolo laughed and looked at them. “I’m like these people. An invited guest. Here to listen, Mr. President. Nothing more.”

  Sordi paused, then declared, “You must understand, all of you, that we have entered extraordinary times. It is my hope and belief they will, with your assistance and a little good fortune, be brief. But until they are over, you must bear with us all. This morning I have signed orders that confirm I shall exercise directly my power as head of state and of the Supreme Defense Council, and as commander of the armed forces. Commissario Esposito, you will report to Palombo here, and he to me. The prime minister is aware of this situation and”—Sordi frowned, and looked a little regretful—“aware that he will accept it. The constitution is clear on this matter and I am exercising the rights and duties it gives me.”

  “There are lawyers who would debate that,” Campagnolo cut in.

  A flash of fury hardened the president’s features. “For the right money, there are lawyers who will debate anything, as you surely know better than anyone, Ugo. I am grateful that you accept this is one occasion when their … talents … are best avoided. We have little time and no room for uncertainty.”

  He glanced at the prime minister. Something passed between them, and it was not animosity, more a recognition that they occupied different positions, ones that were, by their very nature, in conflict.

  “As all Italy understands, a young employee of the state was brutally murdered last night and the unfortunate Giovanni Batisti taken by her killers,” Sordi went on. “For what reason, we can only guess. What you don’t know is that we were forewarned something like this would happen.” Sordi sighed. “The Blue Demon has returned.”

  Costa happened to catch Esposito’s face at that moment. The expression there—shock, fear, and a sudden paleness in the commissario’s usually florid cheeks—was mirrored on Falcone’s lean brown features.

  “Your father warned, and I never listened.” Dario Sordi pointed directly at Costa. “Though I doubt even he could have predicted this turn of events.”

  5

  THE BLUE DEMON.

  Costa hadn’t heard the name in years, except on TV programs about the tragic “Years of Lead,” when Italy had been gripped by terrorist outrages committed by a variety of outlaw bands, on the left and the right.

  The Blue Demon was the oddest, the least understood of them all, even down to its name. An individual? An entity? No one knew, or even whether the entire episode was nothing more than a student prank or a myth gone wrong, some dark, violent fantasy originating in the old land of the Etruscans, in the bleak Maremma north of Rome.

  Luca Palombo, the dour gray-haired spook of the Ministry of Interior, took them through the background to the present events, the bloody recent past that the young knew only dimly and the old preferred to forget. Carefully, with a civil servant’s measured, precise words, Palombo told of the beginning in 1969, before Costa was born, when sixteen people died in the savage bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana, Milan. A year later a fascist coup failed in Rome. The leader, Junio Valerio Borghese, the “Black Prince,” a direct descendant of Pope Paul V, one of the first occupants of the Quirinale Palace, fled Italy, never to return. In 1972 the first police officer was assassinated, in response to the death of a student in custody. Within a fortnight three carabinieri were murdered. Steadily, from that moment on, violence supplanted politics. Then a sudden, cathartic agony, the murder of Aldo Moro, a mild, left-leaning Christian Democrat, cruelly kept captive for more than two months before being riddled with bullets beneath a blanket in the back of a car in a Rome suburb.

  This was one atrocity too far. The nation rose up in horror at Moro’s murder. The authorities arrested and imprisoned everyone they suspected of complicity and, in some cases, nothing more than political sympathy. The wave of violence stuttered to a close as the prisons filled with men and women who regarded themselves as martyrs for a failed revolution.

  “Finally, when we thought it was over,” Palombo continued, with a quiet, miserable disdain, “we met this.”

  He touched the keyboard. A familiar building flashed onto the screen: the Villa Giulia in Rome, a former pope’s mansion close to the ancient Via Flaminia, now a museum so obscure that Costa had never set foot through the door.

  “March the twenty-third, 1989,” Palombo noted, clicking through a series of photographs that might have been stills from some contemporary horror movie. “The nymphaeum.”

  A classical pleasure garden, built in a stone grove hollowed out from the garden of the villa. In the foreground stood a monochrome mosaic of a marine creature, half man, half monster, riding triumphantly across the waves, a long flute held playfully to his lips, his serpent-like body snaking behind him. Beneath a balustrade supported by four pale stone nymphs etched with algae, green ferns cascading from adjoining rock niches, ran a narrow channel of water disappearing into caves on both sides, its sinuous path drawing the eye to a bare stone plinth set in a semicircular alcove.

  The mind knew what to expect: some beautiful, freestanding statue of Venus or Diana, half-naked, enticing, an icon of beauty in a private pleasure ground built for a pope whose private life was very different from the severe countenance he maintained in public.

  Instead there were two bodies, torn and mangled, contorted in a way that only death can achieve. A bloodied man and a woman, arms tentatively around one another, necks stretched awkwardly, upturned in agony. A scrawled, spray-painted message on the algaed stone behind them read, in letters two hands high: II. I. LXIII.

  The victims in the nymphaeum of Villa Giulia wore only bloodstained underclothes. Their abdomens were terribly mutilated.

  Costa didn’t want to look. Or remember. He was only ten years old when this savage murder filled the papers for days on end one hot summer. He could recall the way his father would snatch the morning editions off the table when they arrived, then destroy them. There had been photos in those papers. Costa was sure of it. But not like this.

  “Signor Rennick?” Palombo continued, turning to the man by his side. “Please.”

  The American was about the same age as the man from the Ministry of the Interior, with a narrow, dark face, and a head of very black hair that might have been dyed. From his seat, in good Italian, with an obvious American accent, he said, “Mr. President. Prime Minister.” The order of greeting was clearly deliberate. Campagnolo smiled. Dario Sordi scarcely noticed.

  “The dead man’s name was Renzo Frasca, an Italian American,” Rennick went on. “Born in Sicily, moved with his family to Washington, D.C., when he was six years old. Dual nationality. Degree in English literature from Harvard. A good public servant. When the terrorists who called themselves the Blue Demon seized him, he was an undersecretary in the U.S. Embassy here. Nobody special.” He waited for a moment, then continued. “You understand what I’m saying here? They murdered a bean counter and his wife. Frasca dealt with minutiae. Trade agreements. Tariffs. Then one day …” He pointed at the screen, and the two bodies there. “This happens to him. I won’t bore you with the details of the autopsy. It’s worse than you could imagine. Frasca and his wife, Marie, were butchered. Thirty-two years old, both of them. They had a son, Danny. Three years old. From what the investigators could work out, the boy probably watched his parents die. We never found him.”

  A new picture on the screen. A house in the middle-class suburb of Parioli, an area Costa recog
nized. Then interior shots: an elegant living room, the walls spattered with blood. It looked like an abattoir, worse than any murder scene he’d ever witnessed.

  “It was a weekend. The Frascas were due to attend an embassy social function. Partway through that there was a message.”

  “What do the numbers mean?” Costa asked.

  The American glanced at Palombo. The Italian officer came in and said, “We never understood until it was too late. II. I. LXIII. Two. One. Sixty-three.” He shrugged. “We thought it was a reference to the Bible, not that we could make that work. It didn’t seem that important, in the end. It wasn’t …”

  Sordi scowled. “Others made the connection for you,” the president interrupted. “These are act, scene, and line numbers from Julius Caesar, the Shakespeare play.”

  He glanced at the ceiling, then recited:

  “Between the acting of a dreadful thing

  And the first motion, all the interim is

  Like a phantasm, or a hideous dream:

  The genius and the mortal instruments

  Are then in council; and the state of man,

  Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

  The nature of an insurrection.”

  The president’s sonorous voice echoed around the vast hall.

  “‘We shall be called purgers, not murderers,’” the American murmured, in what Costa took to be another quotation from the play.

  “They were murderers,” Sordi grumbled. “Nothing else. Killers delivering a promise of what was to come. A warning that we would spend a little time in shock and then wake up to the truth: There was a bloody insurrection in our midst, one started by these monsters.” His eyes blazed. “We believed we’d missed the last part.”