The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “Sorry,” she muttered, stung.

  Peroni came to her rescue. “Can we see where the Frasca couple were found?”

  A practical, straightforward question, she realized. Unlike her, Peroni was a cop, someone who thought in straight lines. Sometimes it was the best way to be.

  “If you must,” Pietro Conti groaned, and struggled out of his chair. “But before we leave the subject, I will tell you one thing.”

  They waited.

  “Licentious, weak, self-obsessed, flawed—a people waiting on oblivion, almost inviting it,” the museum director went on. “Should anyone fit that description, it’s us, surely. If an old man like me can see that, so can a younger one as bright as Andrea Petrakis. He gave those foolish children what they wanted. The place in Tarquinia. Their”—his mouth wrinkled with disgust—“fun. But he knew it was a weakness and he hated them for that. Hated us too. I saw that in his eyes. Now, let me show you our nymphaeum, such as it is.”

  18

  THE DEVICE DENIZ HAD GIVEN HIM LOOKED LIKE THE remote from a video camera. Small, black, plastic, it sat in Joseph Priest’s hand, wriggling in his sweaty grip. There weren’t just models and photographers and a small crowd of gaping locals and tourists crowded round the Trevi Fountain. There were carabinieri too, as if they knew—or at least suspected—something might happen.

  The Kenyan let slip a quiet curse and told himself not to be so stupid. It was a famous place. There’d be pickpockets and street people, hassling, looking for a purse or a camera to steal. Of course the cops would be there. Except that these cops held weapons, modern automatic rifles, the kind the Mungiki never managed to get, even in Nairobi. They weren’t watching the half-naked women on the perimeter wall fronting the fountain’s foaming waters anymore. They were scanning the crowd, peering hard at anyone they felt deserved it.

  Priest was as close to Neptune as he could get. He could have thrown Deniz’s little remote and hit the sea god on the chest, if only that would work. He didn’t give the idea more than a passing thought. Weeks of training in rough itinerant camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had left him in no doubt about the nature of the people he’d joined. Bad luck wasn’t going to serve as an excuse.

  One of the carabinieri, a thickset man with sunglasses, no more than two strides away, was staring at him, cradling a black rifle in his arms.

  Priest surreptitiously stuffed the detonator control back into his pocket and smiled, the big, open grin he imagined he ought to use. Then he removed a counterfeit designer bag from his shoulder, dangled it in front of the man, laughing, trying not to tremble.

  “Special cop discount,” he said, aware of the tremor in his voice. “What you think? Huh?”

  “I think you should go somewhere else. You know the rules.”

  Priest nodded. He didn’t understand the first thing about being a street hawker.

  “Cigarette, boss?” he asked, raising his fingers to his mouth.

  “No. You got a hearing problem?”

  He laughed, cupped his hand to his ear, and shuffled off into the crowd, trying to think. The cop’s eyes were surely boring into his back still. Priest knew he couldn’t wander too far. Deniz’s little control wouldn’t be able to talk to its partner, buried beneath all that contorted stone, in whatever ancient supply system fed the teeming waters of the Acqua Vergine into its mostra at the Trevi.

  He bumped into someone, apologized, tried to smile again, and found himself looking into the face of a very pretty, very pale woman. She wore a gray business suit with a black leather handbag over her left shoulder and stared at him as if he’d come from another planet.

  “I can sell you a nicer bag than that,” he said in English, looking her in the eye. “Something a little brighter.”

  “Beat it,” she shot back.

  American.

  He held up the same one he’d shown the cop. “For you, a really good price. You’re like me. You got a Third World currency now. And … yeah …”

  He grinned. She was a looker. Much more so than Anna Ybarra.

  To his surprise she didn’t swear at him. She simply turned back to watch the models jigging away to some music from a system set beside the fountain. There was a big man by her side. She spoke to him. The way the guy nodded in tune to her words told Joseph Priest the man was hers to control.

  He had a dark suit, close-cropped dark hair, sunglasses. White shirt and tie. Muscular, with a tanned face and a thin-lipped mouth that seemed to run in a near-straight horizontal line from one side of his face to the other.

  Joseph Priest really didn’t like this guy.

  “Scusi,” he murmured, then pushed his way through the mob until he turned the corner into the narrow street leading back to Tritone.

  A quick glance back confirmed what he’d hoped for. The video phone was still there, high on the sign behind the crowd. Andrea, Deniz, and Anna were probably watching everything from the patio of the villa outside Tarquinia, relaxed, laughing maybe, while he risked his neck, alone, without so much as a weapon to help him, since Andrea said that would only increase the danger.

  “Always the same,” Priest muttered to himself. “Give the black guy the shit job.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, wondered how big an explosion Deniz had planned, and whether the Turk had been truthful about his chances of escaping its effects.

  There’d be lots of flying masonry, he guessed. Lots of smoke and noise and damaged bodies. Getting away didn’t worry him. In Nairobi and Mombasa, he’d crawled out of any number of violent encounters, sometimes right under the nose of the law.

  What he didn’t want was to get hurt by his own actions. There’d been some fighting in Afghanistan, a quick escape in the night when the British got too close to where they were staying. A couple of people died in that, and it hadn’t been the other side’s soldiers who killed them, but some crazed Taliban kids, firing off their rifles wildly at anything that moved. To lose your life that way seemed so … unfair.

  He leaned up against the wall that ran to the side of the fountain. Neptune’s street show was now a good ten strides away. The stone seemed so solid it ought to survive anything. Joseph Priest checked round, made sure no one was watching, looked up, and did his best to nod discreetly to the phone set high on the wall beyond the models and the bored, rude cops. He wondered if the three of them would notice, whether they were even looking at anything except the heaving sea of bodies that lay just a few seconds away from some bloody oblivion.

  They made a strange team. This wasn’t the kind of work Priest enjoyed. Not that he had any choice in the matter.

  Timing was essential, Andrea had said. Eleven-thirty exactly, because at that moment the big men of the G8 would be posing for the cameras on the piazza outside the Quirinale Palace, kicking off the summit for the privileged pack of photographers allowed into their secure and private lair to record the event.

  He watched the second hand on the fake Rolex that Andrea had given him that morning as it ticked around.

  It didn’t seem quite right to pray at that moment. So he took a deep breath and then, his legs stiff from expectancy, sweat starting to prick his brow, pulled out the control once more and thrust his strong dark thumb onto the button.

  19

  THEY WALKED THROUGH GALLERIES OF OBJECTS THAT amazed her: glazed ceramics, statues, jewelry. Scenes of a vanished past, of war and love, feasting and mythical creatures, some in agony, some coupled together in strange, unreal forms of ecstasy. The Villa Giulia was a world within itself, one she could hardly believe she had missed in all her years in Rome. Then they were outside, striding through the grounds to the place where Renzo and Marie Frasca’s bodies had been left like store dummies posed for posterity.

  The nymphaeum didn’t seem to have changed much in twenty years. All it lacked was two horribly disfigured corpses stretched out on the plinth beneath the gaze of the four stone muses supporting the balustrade above.

  The place
had been dug out of the dank Roman earth and it smelled of damp and algae. Lily pads choked the narrow stream that ran in a winding channel behind the empty platform. Ferns and moss tumbled from the alcoves. The mosaic in front, a sea triton playing the pipes, was grimy with dust and dirt from the feet of tourists wandering around this small subterranean folly, one that, close up, lacked the grandeur and taste Teresa Lupo had come to associate with the imperial-era grottoes that it sought to imitate. There were no mythical fairy creatures here. Only the ghost of a monster.

  Peroni turned and looked at the staircase, thinking in the plain, logical way cops did, one she wished she might, one day, emulate.

  “Two corpses,” he said. “Adults. Hard work dragging them in from the street, down those stairs. One man alone—”

  “Could not do it,” Pietro Conti agreed. “That is, I think, obvious.”

  “Did you come here, the weekend it happened?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “The museum was closed to the public for some much-needed building work. I was in Cambridge. A small conference organized by the Fitzwilliam. But …” He shrugged. “I heard enough on my return. By then it was all over.”

  “Is there anyone left who was around when it happened?”

  “There’s a caretaker. Gatti. Ordinarily he would have been in the apartment. But the place was closed for renovation. There seemed no need.” He pulled out a cell phone and called for the man. “Andrea Petrakis had a key to the main areas. It was his right. He was a junior professor. The people in Viterbo said so.”

  Peroni pulled out his pad and looked at the notes there. “They were murdered at their home in Parioli, almost two kilometers from here. He had to transport them by car, drag them in from the street, take them down those stairs, leave his message.…”

  “Shakespeare, as it turned out,” Conti grumbled. “It took a lot of cleaning to get rid of that. Nor do I feel it’s the act that a professor, even a junior one, ought to countenance. Spray-painting on the walls of a museum.” He glanced at them. “Andrea was rather fond of tricks and riddles and codes. That play in particular. I think it mirrored his view of the world. The wrong people were in control, you see. Caesar, the dictator posing as a democrat. The heroes were those who would depose him, and instead they found themselves cast as villains. And in the end they would lose.” He sniffed and looked around him at the grimy stones. “As did everyone concerned, I rather thought.”

  “Shakespeare,” Teresa repeated, thinking. “Why write a message like that in the first place?”

  A burly middle-aged man was striding down the steps. Gatti, the caretaker, looked like a wrestler. He wore a grimy T-shirt and faded jeans, and had a round, bristly bucolic face, ruddy from sun or labor or drink.

  “Angelo …” Conti said, standing back as the man arrived. He had a powerful smell of sweat about him, and an expression of surly bafflement. “These people are from the police. They would like to know what you remember of the Petrakis incident.”

  “Why?”

  Peroni gazed into his face. “You must have read the papers.”

  “Better things to do.”

  Conti retreated a little farther and commented, “Reading is not to Angelo’s taste.” A fiery glance came from the hefty workman. “Nor,” the director added hastily, “need it be.”

  “Twenty years ago …” Teresa began.

  “Two dead people there,” Gatti grunted, pointing at the empty flat stone beneath the four grimy nymphs.

  “Did you see them?” Peroni asked him.

  “Yes.” Nothing more. This was going to be hard work. Teresa felt her temper rising, then bit her tongue. Peroni was so much better in these situations.

  “Tell me what happened, Angelo,” the big cop said quietly. “I know these things are upsetting and we shouldn’t be here asking, after all this time. But we’ve no choice.” He eyed Conti, in a way Gatti couldn’t miss. “We’ve got bosses too. They’re all the same.”

  The man laughed a little at that. Angelo Gatti was smarter than he wanted to appear.

  “I saw what you saw. Exactly what you saw. Two dead people. Lots of blood. Some words on a wall for me to clean up.”

  “Nothing else?” Peroni persisted.

  “What? To clean up? No. Nothing else. They’d done that. All those cops and people in suits. The photographers. You know what I thought when I got here?”

  He wanted to be asked.

  “What did you think?” Peroni said.

  “I thought there was a wedding going on. So many people with cameras. So many suits and uniforms. No one looking happy. Just like every wedding I ever went to.”

  Teresa couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?”

  “I told you! The same as everyone else. A bunch of pictures in the paper. I bought one that time. Seemed only right. Only way to find out what was going on. All the bosses”—he glanced at Conti—“were at the seaside or somewhere. The Carabinieri didn’t want the likes of me around. Went crazy the moment I appeared”—he nodded toward the steps that led to the terrace above—“up there. As if they belonged here. Not me.”

  “The bodies …”

  “Saw them in the paper. Just like you.”

  “Just in the paper? Not here?” Peroni asked. “You’re sure of that? Absolutely?”

  “Sure I’m sure. All I saw was a lot of men in suits looking like they were going about their business. Then there was me. Up there. Getting marched off like I’d broken the law or something. Americans. Italians.”

  Peroni wasn’t listening to the man’s complaints. He was focusing on detail.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “There were two murder victims found here. You’re telling me none of you saw them? No one from the museum at all?”

  “The people we deal with have been dead rather longer than a few hours,” Pietro Conti replied rather pompously. “Why would we want to be involved? He only came because he heard something was going on. Isn’t that right?”

  Peroni watched the squat, muscular man. “Where did you hear that, Angelo? That something had happened here?”

  “Cafe in Flaminio. Someone saw all the cars turning up. I got curious. I’m the caretaker. Job means what it says.”

  Teresa took Peroni to one side. “We’re wasting our time here,” she told him. “These two know nothing. We need to get Silvio and Elizabeth Murray to trawl through the documents and see what they can find.”

  “Computers,” Peroni muttered. He glanced at the subterranean hollow around them. “Something odd happened here. We’re not going to find out what it was from some idiotic machine.”

  Her voice rose. “So what’s the point if no one remembers a thing?”

  The caretaker from the Maremma heard and bridled. He jerked a stubby finger in Teresa Lupo’s direction. “I remember lots. Not my fault it’s not what you want to hear.”

  “Angelo has a very good memory,” Pietro Conti added. “That’s one reason I thought he might be able to help. As much as anyone, anyway. We weren’t involved. None of us were. The Carabinieri and all those gentlemen who came with them. They didn’t want us around. It’s understandable, isn’t it? What did we have to offer, other than the name of Andrea Petrakis?”

  “And who gave them that?” Teresa demanded.

  The two men exchanged an uneasy glance.

  “Not us,” Conti answered eventually. “They had it already. These people were remarkably unpleasant. They took over this place as if they owned it. None of us felt much minded to pose awkward questions.…”

  “I asked them,” Gatti announced. “The Carabinieri told me to mind my own business.”

  “This was our business,” Conti cut in. “Petrakis was attached to the museum. I’ve no idea where they got his name from. If they’d been asking about drugs, possibly. But not in relation to something of this nature. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. He simply seemed to be one more arrogant young man, not a murderer.”

  “The Carabinieri,” Peroni grow
led. He gazed at Gatti. Teresa could imagine these two in a bar somewhere, groaning about the state of the world over beer and panini. “I don’t suppose any of them gave you their names, did they?”

  The caretaker shook his grizzled head. “You think they’d have told the likes of me who they were?”

  “You could have asked,” Teresa said with a sigh.

  “I could have. But I didn’t. They told me to get lost and I wasn’t in the mood to argue. Who wants to see a couple of dead bodies, anyway? What’s the point?”

  “Thanks,” Peroni began to say, and started to turn away from beneath the gaze of the four stone nymphs who had been watching their conversation, as if quietly amused.

  “I said they never gave me their names,” Gatti added. “Doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

  The big cop stopped and stared at him.

  “One of them, anyway. Saw him on the TV. Only yesterday. Same long, miserable face as he had back then, when he was young and throwing his weight around. Big man now. Important.”

  “Saw who? Where?”

  “The carabiniere who kicked me out of here when I came looking. He was at the Quirinale Palace when Sordi was laying down the law to us all, about where we can go, what we can do. Two steps behind that cunning old bastard he was, pulling his strings too these days, I guess.”

  “Who?” she insisted.

  “The TV said he was important. Something to do with security … They called him Palombo.”

  20

  THE TREVI FOUNTAIN DIDN’T LOOK ANY DIFFERENT. Nothing had happened. Still, he felt everyone was looking at him. The three of them in their nice, comfortable villa outside Tarquinia most of all.

  Joseph Priest put his head down, slipped the detonator back into his pocket, wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans, took the thing out, and tried again. Twice.

  What was it Deniz said? If at first you don’t succeed … get closer.

  Which was a very easy statement from someone sitting on a rich man’s patio miles away, laughing at all this down a phone line.