The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  He tried to imagine what it would be like to be free and penniless in Italy. He could do better than sell cheap bags. He could steal and bully, wriggle his way into any number of scams. Except that he would be just one more penniless black African among the tide of clandestini trying to scrape a living off the street. Even if he managed to escape the wrath of the Mungiki forever—and that he somehow doubted—Joseph Priest wondered what he might achieve in a world where, at the age of twenty-eight, he had to begin again from scratch, just as he had as a nine-year-old beggar in Kibera, Nairobi’s slum, the biggest in Africa they said, almost as if it were a matter of pride.

  “Deniz, Deniz,” Priest murmured, taking a couple of strides nearer the fountain, checking his watch, seeing he was now a minute late, and the second hand seemed to have picked up speed. “You’d better not be kidding me, my man.”

  He dried his fingers once again, took a deep breath, and pushed the button. Then again. One more step forward. A third try.

  Nothing happened. The only phone they gave him was on the wall opposite, recording his failure. He’d no way of calling them, telling them the truth.

  It just doesn’t work. I tried. Really. I did.

  Maybe the batteries had gone flat. Maybe the ancient stone beneath Neptune’s feet was so thick, the twenty-first century couldn’t penetrate it. Or the waters of some imperial-era aqueduct had seeped their way into the electronics the Turk had managed to smuggle into the fountain system a few nights before.

  The bomb didn’t work and it never would.

  Joseph Priest knew that, somehow. Just to prove it to himself, he barged back through the crowd, elbowing everyone out of his way, a cop at one point, even, and the American woman—the looker, the one who’d told him to beat it just a few minutes earlier.

  He got to the edge of the fountain and found himself giggling for some reason. Priest pulled out the remote, leaned over the stone wall, grinned at the people round him. Goggle-eyed teenagers, fashion professionals. Photographers. A few tourists too. He pumped the button repeatedly. It was dead. As dead as they ought to be.

  He looked at the young girl next to him, grinned, and said, “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

  Then he threw Deniz Nesin’s little black toy into the foaming waters of the Trevi Fountain, where it sank beneath the surface to join a glittering collection of coins.

  He turned. The American woman and the big guy with the sunglasses were there, up close, staring at him.

  She threw back her head. Her hair was blond going on red. Long and soft.

  “Sadly,” she said, “I don’t think it’s yours, Joseph.”

  He managed to elbow the young kid next to him hard in the ribs, and the way she recoiled from the blow, shrieking in pain and shock, at least gave him a body in the way.

  Running was never a problem. He’d been doing that most of his life. But when he got to the edge of the crowd, going back the way he came, toward the ice cream place he’d never revisit, he was shocked to see they were following him, with weapons in their hands. They were close and all they were looking at was him.

  Joseph Priest felt, at that moment, scared, and a fool. He dumped the bags, dumped everything in his pockets, all those items that might incriminate him, then took to his heels and ran, wondering where he could hide now, knowing there was no way home.

  21

  “AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO FINDS IT REMARKABLE THAT Luca Palombo was there twenty years ago too?” Teresa Lupo wondered. They were back in the apartment, with Falcone, Silvio, and the Englishwoman, and Teresa was astonished to discover no one seemed much interested in what she and Peroni had found out at the Villa Giulia.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you knew already,” Elizabeth Murray told the pathologist. “Of course Palombo was part of the investigation. He was a senior Carabinieri officer. It was pretty obvious to everyone he was going places. If a man like that hadn’t been part of the Blue Demon case, that would have been odd.” She studied them, a large, exhausted figure clutching her walking stick, immobile in one of the threadbare chairs. “Well, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would have been very odd,” Falcone agreed. “You really must try to avoid seeing conspiracies in everything, Teresa.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell you at the briefing yesterday?” Peroni asked.

  “Because it wasn’t relevant,” Elizabeth replied. “Is that all you found out at the Villa Giulia? I’m sorry. I could have saved you the journey. I was rather hoping …”

  “No, it’s not all,” Teresa snapped.

  “Well?” Falcone asked when she said nothing more.

  “It’s the fact that all we can see about this case is what people choose to put in front of us. There’s no …” She struggled for the right word. “… no dust. No traces left behind. No stray pieces anywhere, not a single witness, not a photograph that hasn’t come out of Palombo’s album. Not even one member of staff at the museum who saw a thing.”

  “There were renovations,” Elizabeth Murray reminded her. “The place was closed to the public. It was the weekend, so there were no academic staff there.”

  “The caretaker turned up not long after they found the bodies,” Peroni cut in. “He didn’t look the sort to keep his nose out of anything.”

  Teresa felt grateful for his intervention. She could tell what they were thinking, the Englishwoman and Falcone. That she wasn’t a cop. That she was out of her depth, flinching at shadows no one else could see.

  “They kept the caretaker away from the bodies,” Teresa added.

  “We always keep civilians away from the bodies,” Silvio Di Capua said from the computer, then shut up when she glared at him.

  “I’m telling you,” Teresa insisted, “something about this is just plain wrong. Two dead people in a museum. No one sees anything. No one has a story to tell. Not a report on file anywhere. How do you explain that, Silvio?”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said. “From what I can tell, the Carabinieri don’t have anything on their present system from then. Unless it’s live, of course. Why should they? We wouldn’t.”

  “Are you serious?” she shrieked. “Eight people died. For a week or so everyone thought Italy was back in the terror years again. Someone murdered the Frascas. The Petrakis couple. Those three kids in the farmhouse near Tarquinia. The carabiniere. And you’re telling me there’s nothing anywhere on their system, on ours, on the ministry’s …?”

  “You’re judging them on the basis of how we work now,” Di Capua declared. “Twenty years ago they used different standards, different methodologies. Trying to fathom what they were doing—it’s the same kind of thing Petrakis was trying to work out as a historian. Looking at fragments, hoping to decode them.”

  Peroni came to her aid again. “At least he had some fragments. It’s very unusual to have nothing at all. Don’t you think?” He frowned. “Leo? We could approach Palombo and ask for some background. There’s got to be some sly way of doing it without letting him know what’s going on here. Just a request for information. I can handle it. I just act dumb and ask for some clarification. He’d never know.…”

  Falcone shook his head. He looked tired, Teresa thought. His tanned features were gaunt, his silver beard less than perfectly trimmed. They were locked out of the heart of the operation, stranded in a strange, cold place none of them quite understood. The inspector was never beneath a little intrigue. But he wanted to be the perpetrator of intrigue, not its victim.

  “And what would you ask for? If it was of any use, Palombo would know why we were asking. Then we’d compromise ourselves, Commissario Esposito, the president himself. You know our orders. We can’t approach anyone in the team at the Quirinale, not under any circumstances. I will not break that promise, or allow any of you to do so, either. We can’t take the risk.”

  Teresa slammed her fists down on the table. Silvio Di Capua’s machine jumped.

  “I don’t believe this! So how are we supposed to pass the day, Leo? We can’t
talk to anyone. We can’t access any contemporary reports except some ancient inquiry that got buried before it could get anywhere.”

  A thought struck her. She looked at Elizabeth Murray. “Who did kill your report?”

  “No one killed it,” the Englishwoman insisted. “It seemed pointless. Everyone concurred. Except for Marco Costa, as I said.”

  Falcone was staring at her. “These things don’t just die of their own accord. Someone must have planted the idea.”

  She looked a little out of sorts. The discomfort didn’t sit well on her.

  “Who?” Peroni insisted.

  “It was just gossip. I was just the secretary. They kept me out of the room when they wanted to talk privately. But …” She glanced at Teresa, who was unable to read the woman’s expression. Relief or resentment? It was impossible to tell. “Marco told me it was Campagnolo who kept pressing for the commission to be concluded. He was very insistent. He had powerful friends, even back then.”

  “So that’s two people you met yesterday who were directly involved in the Frasca case and never bothered to mention it.”

  “Rome is a small place …” Falcone began.

  “So I can see. Silvio. Did you look up that detail on the boy?”

  Falcone seemed bemused. “What detail?”

  “Show him,” she ordered.

  Di Capua pulled up the photo she’d taken with her phone in the bloody room in the house in the Via Rasella. Danny Frasca dead on the floor, a bloody mess. The assistant pathologist zoomed in on a patch of skin on the upper chest.

  “Palombo’s people snatched the body away from me before I could look properly.” Teresa stared at the screen, and the conviction kept growing. “Except for a convenient locket round the neck, what evidence is there that this is the son of Renzo and Marie Frasca?”

  “DNA,” Elizabeth Murray told her. “The best evidence there is.”

  Silvio Di Capua glanced at his boss as if he were beginning to understand where this was going. “That’s not evidence,” he pointed out. “It’s hearsay. Palombo told us it was a fact. He hasn’t shown us any DNA report. I can’t find one on the system, either, and it ought to be there.”

  “There’s a tattoo of a rose on his shoulder,” Teresa went on. “Judging by the appearance, I’d say it was old. So old that I’d hazard a guess it was put there when he was a young boy.”

  Peroni said, “The Frascas wouldn’t do that to their own child. No one would.”

  Di Capua shook his head. “Not many people would. I did a little research, though. The only place I can see that it’s done is in Russia. Among the criminal classes. The tattoo was a sign of their lineage.” He looked at them. “The rose meant ‘This is the child of a Mafia member.’”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Teresa said, “Afghanistan was under Russian occupation from 1979 until 1988, when they retreated. It wasn’t a rout. In the beginning there was some loose Russian support for the Najibullah government in Kabul, but pretty soon Russia was falling apart. By 1991 Moscow had problems of its own. There were Russians still there, though. In Kabul as advisors. As criminals too, helping run the opium trade. When the Taliban arrived in 1996 …”

  She fell quiet, remembering. The return of the Blue Demon had sent her back to her own computer the night before, to revive her memories of this tumultuous time, a period not so long ago when the world seemed to shift on its own axis.

  “The first thing they did was torture, castrate, and then hang Najibullah from a lamppost in the center of town. After that they rounded up everyone they didn’t like and the killings began. Any Russian criminals who got left behind wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. A young boy with a tattoo … who knows? They might have kept him in case he was useful later.”

  “This is far-fetched,” Elizabeth protested, though with little conviction.

  “As far-fetched as the idea Petrakis took the Frasca boy all the way to Afghanistan in the first place? And then back again? You were the one who said that didn’t make sense. Not that picking up some local Russian orphan and returning him to Rome as Danny Frasca makes sense, either. Particularly”—Teresa felt her head begin to spin—“if Petrakis needs the covert support of some Ministry of Interior hack to make the trick work. I don’t know if this is crazy or not, and I can’t find out. We don’t have forensic. We don’t have access to the body. Or Palombo’s report. It’s almost as if they exiled us out here as a joke. They know we can’t make any progress trapped in this place. We don’t have the resources. We can’t prove or disprove anything.”

  This was Falcone’s call. It had to be.

  “You could call Esposito,” Peroni suggested to Falcone. “Tell him this is some setup.”

  “He sent us here,” Di Capua reminded them. “Or Dario Sordi did. Or … who?”

  Unconsciously, Teresa realized, they were all looking at Elizabeth Murray.

  “Sorry,” the Englishwoman said, with a shrug. “All I got was a call asking me to come out of retirement. I did warn you. This world is a hall of mirrors.”

  “We stay, we work, we talk to people,” Falcone insisted. “We’re not sidelined. Nic’s out there. Let’s find some more names for him to chase. What about the three carabinieri who went to the farmhouse in Tarquinia? Who were they?”

  Di Capua’s fingers began to clatter the keyboard again. “The one who died was called Lorenzo Bartoli. The other two were Ettore Rufo and Beppe Cattaneo.”

  “Cattaneo?” Peroni asked.

  “That’s right,” Di Capua answered. “The dead man came from Tarquinia. The other two from Rome. Cattaneo …”

  Peroni scowled. “Cattaneo was a crook. We found him with half his face shot off in a car out near Fiumicino ten years or so ago. I was on the case. The guy was as crooked as they come. Some Sicilian drug gang had him on the payroll. We had word he worked as a hit man for them from time to time. Cattaneo liked that kind of job. Never did find who killed the bastard, but there were plenty of people with good reason.”

  Falcone nodded and said, “I remember.”

  “What the hell were two carabinieri from Rome doing out there in Tarquinia?” Peroni asked. “They’ve enough local people on the ground. Elizabeth?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked. It didn’t seem—”

  “Relevant,” Peroni interrupted. “You got anything on Ettore Rufo? The name means nothing to me.”

  Di Capua pointed at the screen. “He took early retirement one year after the case. No trace of him on any of the systems after that.”

  “Find the man,” Falcone ordered. “Find me …”

  “Behold!” Di Capua cried, and turned to them with a broad grin on his face, flourishing his chubby hand at the monitor. “Bartoli’s older brother was in the Carabinieri too. He quit two months after his brother died. The system says he’s now a coastguardsman in some place called Porto Ercole. Where’s that?”

  “North of Tarquinia. Just over the Tuscan border. Nic can get there.”

  “We’re not supposed to go into Tuscany without permission,” Peroni pointed out.

  “No,” Falcone agreed serenely. “We’re not.”

  22

  ANNA YBARRA SAT IN SILENCE NEXT TO THE TWO MEN huddled over the laptop computer in the villa’s dining room, trying to understand what was happening. It seemed impossible to her. There was nothing like this in the little village of Hernani. Nothing at all.

  Somehow Deniz had managed to hook the cell phone to the computer screen. They saw the scene at the Trevi Fountain unfold in miniature, moment by moment. It felt wrong, like watching a bad homemade movie. Joseph working his way through the crowd, turning from a visible dark spot to little more than a pinprick and then disappearing, only to return. And still no explosion.

  Had Joseph really thrown the remote into the fountain? She thought so, and so did the two men with her. Deniz sighed when they saw the movement of the Kenyan’s arm, a gesture that seemed to indicate, even through this shaky, indistinct medium, a sense of d
espair and surrender.

  “Might have known,” the Turk muttered, and took a sip of his water.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” Anna told him. She hadn’t liked the Kenyan much, hadn’t appreciated the way he stared at her, openly, lasciviously. He’d taken the risk, though, while they sat around drinking, swimming, waiting. “He tried. What else could he do?”

  “He did try,” Petrakis agreed, then picked up his own phone.

  “Who are those people?” she asked, pointing at the picture on the computer. “In the crowd. There’s a man and woman there. They look interested in him.”

  “It’s a fashion show,” Petrakis told her. “You’d expect security.”

  “He spoke to them. They followed him. Why?”

  “You just can’t get the staff …” the Italian murmured.

  Then he keyed a short number into his phone and turned to smile at them, waiting, his finger over the button.

  “Tell me what you think of Joseph,” he asked.

  “He was a comrade,” she answered immediately. “One of us.”

  “Really?” Petrakis said, mockingly.

  She felt a red flare of anger in her head. “Why do you keep us in the dark, Andrea? How can we work together if we know nothing?”

  “I’m a general. You’re a soldier. You know what you need to know. Now … Deniz?”

  The Turk did something to the keyboard. The screen split into two windows. One was the shaky video of the Trevi Fountain. The other appeared to be a live newscast from the piazza of the Quirinale Palace. All the G8 leaders were lined up for the cameras, smiling, silent in the sun.

  Petrakis’s finger hovered over the phone. “Watch.”

  He pressed the key. After a long second the picture at the Trevi Fountain changed. A dust cloud began to boil, shakily, from beneath the group of statues at the back, obscuring everything. Then a violent crimson geyser gushed from the mist, raining down gory liquid and rubble on the gathering in the cobbled piazza, sending them shrieking into one another, turning a half-orderly crowd into a screaming, terrified mob.