The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  A series of mug shots appeared, two men, a girl, none of them much more than twenty. Happy, bright-eyed, smiling for the camera.

  Rennick picked up his narrative.

  “Students from the University of Viterbo, working at the Villa Giulia as part of their Etruscan studies course. From what your people put together afterwards, these three got hypnotized by their course leader, a junior academic named Andrea Petrakis. Born in Tarquinia, in the Maremma, to Greek parents who’d lived in the area for a decade or so. Petrakis was twenty-two years old when the Frascas were murdered. He was something of a prodigy. Got his university degree when he was seventeen. Seemed set to become an expert on Etruscan matters. Then …” Rennick grimaced. “The Etruscans originated from Greece. Perhaps Petrakis felt some bond with them. He seized upon their fate as a way of explaining how he felt about Italy at that time. Petrakis was very reticent for one who seems to have made such an impression on those around him. We have no background, no record of real relationships, except with those in his group. No girlfriends, boyfriends, nothing. His parents didn’t mix much, either. A reclusive family. All we have is this.”

  It was a blurry photograph of an unsmiling young man with long, dark wavy hair. He was gazing into the camera with a fixed, aggressive expression, very much in control, standing next to the girl from the earlier photograph. A pretty kid, she was staring up at him with an expression that might have been adoration. Or, perhaps, condescension. It was difficult to tell.

  “One picture,” Rennick went on. “They worshipped him for some reason. Maybe politics.”

  “What kind of politics?” Costa asked.

  “The politics of lunacy,” Campagnolo burst in. “These people from the seventies. All of them. Left, right … they were insane. We spent twenty years burying these madmen. Why are they back now?” He stabbed a finger at Sordi. “You take the risk here, Dario. On your head be it. You steal from me my power.”

  “Only for a few days,” the president replied carefully. “In line with the constitution—”

  “I am the elected leader of this country!” the prime minister roared. “They voted for me, old man. Not you.”

  “The constitution …”

  “Screw the constitution!” Compagnolo’s dark, beady eyes roved the room. “I have a long memory. Do not forget. Sordi cannot maintain this position for long. If any misfortune should happen, I shall ensure the blame goes where it should.”

  “Ugo,” Sordi pleaded. “It’s important you understand this situation.”

  The prime minister stiffened with disdain. “I do not need to understand that which I cannot control. Send me a memo.”

  Then he got up, cast his eyes around the room, and marched out, the same way he’d entered.

  “I apologize for that little scene,” Sordi said when the man was gone. “Palombo. Brief the prime minister in person, afterwards.”

  Costa had barely noticed. He was still trying to understand what they’d been told.

  “What did the Blue Demon want?” he asked.

  “Revolution?” Rennick guessed. “A Marxist state? A fascist one? We don’t know, any more than we understand why they should name themselves after some strange Etruscan devil. They kidnapped the Frascas, killed them, and then a few days later …”

  He touched the computer keyboard. “See for yourself.”

  Another photo. Black-and-white. A remote, ramshackle two-story house in a bleak field. Carabinieri cars parked in the rough drive. Officers standing around looking lost and miserable.

  Palombo took over.

  “Five days after the Frascas were found dead, the Carabinieri got a phone call from someone at the Villa Giulia suggesting Petrakis was involved. The staff there hadn’t liked him. He hung around when he wasn’t wanted. They’d found him in the museum after hours.” He grimaced. “Rome sent two officers to the parents’ house. Both of them were dead, shot in bed. A good week before the Frascas. The couple were such recluses that no one knew, except Andrea, I guess.”

  More photographs that seemed to be from the same landscape. A tiny shack in an uncultivated field strewn with tall weeds.

  “They found material in the house that led them to an abandoned farm the parents owned two kilometers away. No road. No electricity. They weren’t expecting anything. There was a local carabiniere with them to help.”

  Costa could recall the story from later reconstructions on TV crime shows. One dead officer. Three supposed extremists killed. The loss of the carabiniere was a national tragedy, a moment when the country’s heart skipped a beat, waiting to see if the nightmare of urban terror was about to return.

  Palombo clicked the keyboard and brought up a picture of a small arsenal, scattered around a grubby stone floor: automatic rifles, revolvers, small handguns.

  “These kids started shooting the moment they knew they were cornered. The local officer went down almost immediately. After that they turned their guns on themselves. They were all as high as kites. The place was full of drugs. LSD. Speed. Dope. Pure Afghan opium most of all—so much Petrakis had to be dealing it.”

  The photograph changed to an interior one. Three bloodied corpses, faces down, arms outstretched. The pretty girl wasn’t pretty anymore. She had a revolver in her right hand.

  “Nadia Ambrosini,” the Italian security man told them. “The daughter of a bank manager from Treviso. The ones from a middle-class background are always the worst. She shot the other two, then turned the gun on herself.”

  Then one final image.

  It was a poster on the wall of the shack, above a contorted corpse: a lithe and naked devil with a pale blue face. He wore an expression of pure hatred, his muscular arms outstretched, a writhing snake, fangs exposed, in each hand. Blood dripped from his sharp, spiky teeth. An enormous and unreal erection, more that of a beast than a man, rose from his loins. The photograph of Andrea Petrakis they saw earlier was stuck to the poster with tape, as if identifying him with the monster.

  Below were the words, scrawled maniacally in tall capital letters, IL DEMONE AZZURRO.

  The Blue Demon.

  6

  PERONI LISTENED TO THE QUIRINALE CAMPANILE START to chime the quarter-hour. The house was midway down the hill, next to a small restaurant with tables on the narrow pavement. The ground-floor windows were cloudy with dust, as if the place had been empty for years.

  Mirko Oliva walked up, scrabbled at the glass with his elbow, and peered inside.

  “This is no one’s home,” the young officer declared. “It’s a mess in there. Looks like they had the builders once upon a time.”

  There were just two nameplates on the door. One was for a marquetry business, an enterprise Peroni felt sure had long departed, judging by the faded card and some newspaper clippings in the window praising the quality of its work. On the bell above was a single word in scrawled handwriting: Johnson.

  Oliva peered at it. He glanced at them, serious suddenly. “Wasn’t there somebody famous called Moro too?”

  “Once upon a time,” Peroni answered patiently.

  “Well, if the Moro who called said he lived on the ground floor, he was lying.”

  It was a three-story building. Peroni strode into the road to get a better view of the upper floors. The windows on each level looked much the same as those below: old, grimy, and opaque. Except the pair at the top.

  He walked to the pavement opposite to make sure. Both sets of panes had been thrown wide open. There was something else odd. Rosa came to stand next to him. “What’s that?” she asked, staring upward.

  A black swarm of insects was moving in and out of the window. A cloud of tiny bodies buzzing angrily, as if fighting over something.

  “Flies,” Peroni murmured, then looked across the street.

  The young agente was grinning at him. His finger was prodding at the old red paint on the door and finding little in the way of resistance. Beyond it, Peroni could just make out a dark, bare hallway.

  Open, Mirko Oliva m
outhed.

  Peroni walked back, pushed the door open, and was greeted by the damp, fusty smell of rotting walls and bad drains. His fist stayed on both bell pushes as he edged into the property. There wasn’t a sound anywhere.

  He caught sight of Oliva with Rosa Prabakaran behind him. Her hand was already close to her jacket, feeling for the weapon there, just to make certain, the way any half-experienced officer did these days.

  “I’m sure this is nothing at all,” Peroni told them. “I go first, all the same.”

  Mirko Oliva looked a little surprised. “Shouldn’t we tell the control room before we go in?”

  “I was about to say that,” Peroni lied.

  Oliva pulled out his secure police phone. “What’s this street called?” he asked.

  “It’s the Via Rasella,” Rosa Prabakaran said immediately.

  The name jogged some distant memory in Peroni, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.

  The interior stank of something worse than bad drains. Rats, he guessed. Dead ones. Peroni walked to the half-open door of the first downstairs room, gun in right hand. No one had been in this part of the building in years. Old machinery, half-finished chairs, and the skeleton of a table stood gathering dust. Oliva was at his shoulder, peering around inquisitively. Peroni took one step into the room, placed his large right foot into the grime on the floor, then dragged it backwards. The effort left a long, sweeping mark on the boards.

  Oliva smiled and tipped an imaginary cap. Point taken. Rosa watched them both, as if she were in the company of children.

  “We’re wasting time,” she complained.

  “You mean in the house?” Peroni asked. “Or checking out the ground floor first?”

  “Both, probably.”

  She was a bad-tempered piece of work at times.

  “If someone’s still here,” he said patiently, “they won’t be hiding where we expect them to hide. Now, will they?”

  “If …”

  Enough, Peroni thought, and walked on with Mirko Oliva by his side, checking out the other rooms on the floor. Two were as barren as the first. The third was locked and looked as if it had been that way for years.

  It was just one call among many, Peroni reminded himself. All the same, he did something he hadn’t done in years. In the absence of a key, he kicked hard at the door. The thing fell in on itself. In the dust and cobwebs lay a very old and very dirty toilet.

  Rosa clapped her hands to a slow, sarcastic rhythm.

  The second floor was more promising. There were marks in the dust in the main room.

  “Squatters,” Rosa declared, coming back with some trash from the kitchen: an empty bag from a local bread shop, a discarded tuna can.

  “Why’d they leave?” Oliva asked.

  “That kind never stay anywhere more than a week.” There was an impatient scowl on her dark face. “They know we can arrest them if they hang around too long. Can’t we get this over and done with, Peroni? We’ve six more calls to make.”

  “Carelessness is a privilege of youth,” he announced. “If we need prints off anything you’ve handled, forensic will call you many unpleasant names, Officer, and deservedly so.”

  She took the point about the potential evidence and dumped it on the floorboards.

  He stepped up the dusty, creaking bare steps leading to the story above. Three officers, two of them young, one a rank junior, the other not as smart as she sometimes thought. The old cop checked himself. He was getting jittery in his dotage.

  The odd smell that was just discernible when they entered the ground floor was becoming stronger. He glanced back and waved them to a standstill. Rosa was second, naturally, right behind him, setting out her rank above Mirko Oliva.

  Peroni stood there, puzzled by the pungent, resinous odor. It reminded him of hippies and foreigners.

  Then Rosa tugged at his arm and mouthed the word he was hunting for.

  Incense.

  Joss sticks. The talismanic odor of freaks and squatters. Deadbeats from all over the world, breaking into empty houses, staying a week and then moving on. There were so many around, the police never bothered much anymore. Except when they got in the way.

  He tried to extinguish the angry fire that was beginning to burn in his head. They were supposed to be looking for a family man who’d been kidnapped by murderous terrorists, not wasting their time on minutiae like this.

  “Polizia!” Peroni bellowed, and stormed up the remaining few steps, to find himself in a hot, stuffy room that stank of something physical. There was nothing in it but a cheap wooden dining table and a few chairs. And a man, who was seated, back to the door, head slumped forward, like someone who had fallen asleep while eating.

  Flies too. Peroni had forgotten about the flies. They buzzed in and out of the windows in a black cloud, focusing on the slumped figure at the table, hesitantly, as if there was something there they didn’t understand, either.

  He kept his gun in front of him. The stench of the incense returned, stranger somehow. It seemed to be coming from a pool of darkness in one corner, where the sunlight streaming through the open windows couldn’t reach.

  “Polizia,” Peroni said more quietly, and started to work his way around to the front of the hunched form.

  “Boss,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.

  “What?”

  “He’s not moving.”

  Peroni knew that. Knew too that, though he could only see the back of this figure in a dark, crumpled business suit, it was Giovanni Batisti, huddled over the table, face in his arms.

  On the wall behind, someone had stuck up a poster, one so big that it looked as if it ought to have come out of one of the tourist shops around the corner near the Trevi Fountain, where you could pick up Raphael or Caravaggio, Da Vinci or some modern junk, for next to nothing.

  He leaned forward, placed a gentle hand on the shoulder of the man at the table, and said, more out of hope than anything else, “Signore.”

  No sound, no stirring, not a sign of breath, a hint of life.

  Peroni swore and looked at the poster again. It was a blown-up photograph, the kind of overimaginative thing you got in squats and communes. An ancient scrawl, like paint on plaster, depicting an evil-looking devil, teeth bared, eyes on fire, snakes writhing in his fists, skin painted a faded blue.

  So many faint, unconnected memories were fighting for his attention at that moment. The knowledge that the Via Rasella meant something, and this hideous picture on the wall …

  Letters, Roman numerals, had been scrawled—in blood, surely—next to the vile creature’s head.

  III. I. CCLXIII.

  Mirko Oliva swept his hand through the cloud of flies in front of him, then stooped down to tap the still, prone man at the table, getting there before either Peroni or Rosa could stop him.

  What came next seemed obvious, inevitable. Oliva touched Giovanni Batisti on the shoulder, gripped him, shook him. The politician’s body lurched forward. A buzzing, billowing mass of insects rose from inside the fabric.

  The junior officer said something inaudible, clapped his hand to his mouth, then dashed for the open window. Rosa was calling for backup, forensics, everything she could think of. Her voice sounded harsh and brittle and frightened in the airless room where the only other sounds were the buzzing of flies and the distant muffled hum of traffic from the tunnel beneath the Quirinale.

  “I’m too old for this,” Peroni muttered, and found he couldn’t stop himself thinking about the picture on the wall.

  Oliva was still retching out the open window, heaving up his lunch into the street below.

  “Get away from there!” Peroni yelled, angry all of a sudden.

  From the dark corner opposite there emerged another young man, this one almost naked, his face painted blue, like the demon in the poster, his eyes wild with fear and anguish.

  Words Peroni didn’t recognize were coming out of his throat. In his left hand he held a bloodied dagger. In his ri
ght two incense sticks burned, their sweet smoke curling upward to the ceiling, through the swarming cloud of insects.

  7

  PALOMBO TURNED OFF THE COMPUTER SCREEN.

  “The same night Andrea Petrakis’s acolytes killed themselves in Tarquinia, five days after the murder of the Frascas, a witness saw a small motorboat being stolen from Porto Ercole, thirty minutes north. A young man and possibly someone else were on board. The theory was that Petrakis tried to reach Corsica with the Frasca child as some kind of hostage. He was an experienced sailor. His parents owned a boat. He had a student pilot license as well. He understood navigation, the weather. We never heard from him again, until now.”

  “I remember something about a parliamentary commission,” Costa said. “My father was a member.” He looked at Sordi. “So were you, sir.”

  The president nodded. “So I was. Parliament wanted to know whether this was yet one more political terrorist group to worry about, or simply something bizarre. Something inexplicable.”

  “And?” Falcone persisted, when the man said no more.

  “The consensus we reached, with which Marco Costa disagreed, as was his habit, determined that Andrea Petrakis was a lunatic heading his own strange cult, one he named after this image he found in a tomb in the Maremma. The Blue Demon amounted to nothing more than the man himself and his three dead followers. Petrakis managed to make these young people murderous through drugs and any other means he could find. Perhaps his parents found out and he killed them. That was as far as we got.”

  “Until now,” Rennick interrupted, tapping the laptop’s keyboard, bringing the picture back to life. A map appeared. Southern Afghanistan, Helmand province.

  The American indicated an area on the screen using a laser pointer.

  “What you’re looking at is British-managed territory near the Afghan-Pakistan border. The most unstable sector in the region, which is saying something. It’s got everything. Ordinary decent people. Opium farmers. Bandits, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Cheek by jowl, indivisible, inseparable. Three weeks ago one of our teams carried out a raid on a suspect house. We found all kinds of material relating to Rome. Maps. Satellite images. Details of water and transport systems. Documents on the Quirinale hill. Whoever collected this material began on February 13 this year. The very day Prime Minister Campagnolo announced the G8 summit would take place here. Intelligence finally came up with this.…”