The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “A shame. Agostino was like so many of his peers, a talented though damaged man. He raped Gentileschi’s daughter, Artemisia, another gifted painter.”

  The prime minister became interested. “Artists, eh? What do you expect?”

  “When the young woman complained, she was herself taken into custody. The authorities … our predecessors … examined her physically. Internally, and quite brutally. Then they tortured the girl by crushing her fingers. A peculiarly cruel torment for a painter, I think.”

  “Women …” Campagnolo muttered. “What happened?”

  “Agostino went to jail briefly. Afterwards Artemisia became celebrated for painting, repeatedly, the same subject. An Old Testament scene. Judith decapitating the infidel Holofernes—a woman’s revenge on a lustful man. They’re spectacular canvases. If you compare the one in the Uffizi with Caravaggio’s similar work in the Barberini here … There’s something personal in them, some fierce female anger that a man—even a genius like Caravaggio—could never reproduce. You would see this instantly.” He thought of Campagnolo’s reputation as a serial womanizer. “Especially you.”

  Campagnolo sniffed and looked back at the crowd. “She got something out of it, then? You make a good tour guide, Dario. If you’re still breathing when I move into this place, you can have a job showing around the visitors.”

  Then he raised his empty glass, said “Ciao,” and, to Sordi’s relief, departed.

  The president walked outside, down the steps into the garden, to the stone bench beneath the wicker canopy by the side of Hermes, the place where he’d spoken to Nic Costa the day before. It felt like an eternity ago. This was one part of the Quirinale that Dario Sordi loved. Early each evening, work permitting, he retired here and drank a single cup of Earl Grey tea, alone with his thoughts and a plate of special cookies he had sent from England—ones that, in spite of their name, Garibaldi, were unavailable in Italy.

  When he first moved into the palace, in an early flush of enthusiasm, he had harbored a fantasy about starting his own kitchen garden on the grounds, one he could oversee himself, growing the Roman vegetables of his youth: artichokes and agretti and the wild chicory he had once gathered in the suburbs near the Porta San Sebastiano during the war, when food was scarce. The taste, sharp and bitter, remained with him still, as did the joy with which his meager pickings, little more than scraps of weed, were received when he brought them home. To have raised this simple vegetable in the gardens of the Quirinale would have brought a smile to the faces of his parents. The same straggly plant grew near the Ardeatine Caves where Sordi’s father and uncle had been among those slaughtered by the Nazis after the attack in the Via Rasella. Its green leaves seemed to struggle from the brown earth in defiance of the climate and the poorness of the soil. Sordi liked this persistence against the odds, though perhaps its proletarian plainness would have looked out of place in the grandiose avenues of a palace.

  As he lit a furtive cigarette, a shape moved in the darkness.

  “Who is it?” Sordi demanded. “Show yourself.”

  Fabio Ranieri emerged from the shadows. “I’m sorry, sir. I was taking another look around. It is my job, you know.”

  Ranieri stepped into the light. He was a tall, strong man and his face, handsome and sincere, was a welcome sight.

  “We’re here to look after you,” the Corazzieri captain told him. “Not”—he nodded back toward the brilliantly lit palace—“them. I couldn’t help but hear some of the things that bastard Campagnolo was saying. Lord knows he makes enough noise for ten.”

  “No,” Sordi scolded him gently. “I will not listen to another word. The men and women in that building are more important than an old wreck like me. Your care is for the position, not the person. Whether you respect Ugo Campagnolo or not, at least respect what he represents—the aspirations of several million of your fellow countrymen.”

  Ranieri cleared his throat and stared at the ground.

  “Oh dear,” Sordi muttered, with genuine regret. “Things must be bad if we’re beginning to argue.”

  “I hate seeing Rome like this. While they”—another angry glance at the Quirinale—“feast like Nero watching our city burn.”

  “Bad history. That never happened. Nero wasn’t even here at the time, or so I was always taught.” Sordi stepped forward, keen to see the captain’s face. “Listen to me, Fabio. I will not be here forever. When I go, you must work with the people who come after me. Whoever they are, and your part in their choice is no greater or less than that of any other Italian.”

  “I am a captain of the Corazzieri,” Ranieri replied, bowing his head slightly. “My job is to protect the president.”

  “And you do it very well. Any news?”

  “Nothing.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Except that young Costa called. I told him you were busy.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He was in Tarquinia. He wanted to know where I was twenty years ago. Apart from that, I’m not sure he knew himself.”

  “He must have his reasons. The cell phone, please.”

  Ranieri handed him the private mobile that he had organized at Sordi’s request. The president stumbled over the buttons, feeling foolish.

  “I don’t remember the number.”

  “Here …”

  Ranieri dialed, then handed the phone back. Sordi put the thing to his ear, and as he did so a strong female voice said, “Dígame.”

  Dario Sordi replied, automatically, “I fear you’re in Italy, not Spain, signora, and I have misdialed. My apologies. Unless you have Sovrintendente Costa with you?”

  He waited.

  “Signora? Signora …?”

  34

  THEY’D NEEDED A DRINK AFTER THE STRANGE MEETING in the restaurant with Peroni’s mobster pal. Falcone chose the location, which was why they were in the Via della Croce, drinking Falanghina in the Antica Enoteca, staring at some of the best cold food in Rome, trying to work up an appetite.

  The inspector had decided he didn’t want to walk all the way from San Giovanni. Instead he had tried to drive them home in his Lancia. Four armed carabinieri turned them back at the barricade by the Colosseum, glancing at their police IDs, then laughing. That did nothing to improve Falcone’s temper. Now the inspector’s sleek car was abandoned halfway up the sidewalk of a side street on the opposite side of the Corso, near the Mausoleum of Augustus, in the shadow of an ugly fascist-era marble office building. Rome’s shaky traffic-management system had collapsed under the pressure of the street closures and the panic to get out into the suburbs. Much of the centro storico was deserted, isolated by a multitude of barricades. Beyond them, traffic was snarled in every direction.

  The old wine bar should have been bursting with people fighting to get to the counter, yelling for their glasses of good Italian wine from Tuscany and Puglia, Sicily and the Veneto, picking at plates of food. Instead, there were just two couples in the place. The waiters looked bored and a little scared. Peroni had chosen the dishes automatically, his favorites whenever they came here. Three generous plates, one of roast pork with prunes, a second covered with cheese, and a third of antipasti, sat on the bar, untouched.

  “Was that a good day?” Teresa Lupo asked. “As far as the work is concerned, I mean.”

  Falcone scowled and held the Falanghina up to the light. It was perfect: cold and fragrant. “I’ve known better. If it weren’t for your assistant and the Englishwoman …”

  “Silvio and Elizabeth are quite a team,” she agreed. “I hope they manage to get some sleep. There’s a limit to how much a computer can tell you.”

  The two men stared at her.

  “I know, I know!” she objected. “I’m learning, aren’t I? I’d like to think our trip to the Villa Giulia provided a little useful intelligence.”

  “I suppose so.…” Falcone looked thoroughly miserable. She found herself feeling sorry for this solitary, difficult man. The inspector hated being excluded from the center of
events. More than anything, he detested the idea of losing. All the men she’d come to admire, and in some ways love, did. It was a peculiarly damaged form of heroism on their part.

  “Leo?” Teresa asked, carefully. “There’s something I need to get clear in my mind.”

  “Ask away,” he responded.

  “Our new friend Toni. Walking out like that just because I asked him about the Blue Demon.”

  “What about it?” There was a canny look in his eye.

  “Well, why? It’s not as if it’s a secret that they’re the people we’re looking for. Why did he suddenly get so touchy?”

  “I didn’t understand that, either,” Peroni began, leaning forward. “It was as if it meant something different to him.”

  Falcone’s phone bleated. He glanced at it, then turned the handset to face them. It was a short text, one that came, the screen indicated, from the private cell phone of Mirko Oliva. It read, simply: They’re here.

  “Is that it?” Peroni asked Falcone. “Where are Nic and those kids now, anyway?”

  “Tarquinia,” Falcone told him. “They should be at the hotel by now. I told Nic to do nothing but ask questions. I told him …”

  Teresa walked outside, muttering something about indecision and men.

  It was still hot. The street was empty. There ought to have been late-night shoppers and couples going out for dinner, arm in arm, laughing. Instead, two carabinieri wandered past cradling automatic weapons, their chests enveloped in heavy bulletproof jackets. They stared hard at a pair of forlorn street musicians, one with an accordion, the other with a trumpet, who were counting their few coins in the light of the fashion store on the far side of the street.

  Teresa dialed Nic’s number. The phone rang for a long time before the automatic answer-message kicked in. The same thing happened with Rosa Prabakaran’s phone, and Mirko Oliva’s.

  “We can ask someone in Tarquinia to go looking,” Peroni suggested, suddenly at her side. Falcone stood beside him.

  “Look where?” Falcone asked.

  Teresa called Silvio Di Capua. They had an arrangement with the phone companies. When necessary they could try to track down the location of the cell from which a call was made. It was inexact. But it was something.

  Peroni listened and when she was finished asked, “When will they be back with an answer?”

  “An hour. Maybe more.” She stared at Falcone. “It’s going to take us longer than that to get there, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. She knew why. Nic wasn’t supposed to be near Tarquinia.

  “Are you going to tell our people in Tarquinia or not?” she asked.

  “Tell them what?” Falcone demanded. “That we’ve had a single obscure text message from a young and inexperienced police officer who’s somewhere he doesn’t belong?”

  Peroni shrugged. “It’s not like Nic to be out of touch like this. Or Rosa.”

  “I know that,” Falcone replied, exasperated. “I also know what the cost will be to them if Palombo finds out where they’ve been. I don’t care about my career. Is it worth risking theirs for two words on a phone?”

  “There’s only one way to find out, Leo,” Peroni said.

  Falcone didn’t answer the big ugly cop. They followed as he strode to his Lancia on the other side of the Corso.

  It was the worst journey out of Rome Teresa had ever known. The main route to the coast was closed. So was the Autostrada Azzurra, which should have been the obvious way north, past the airport’s silent runways.

  Falcone fought and argued his way through traffic jams and road checks until they found the Via Aurelia, and followed it until they began to hug the shoreline, past the old Etruscan towns of Ladispoli and Cerveteri, and the choked modern port of Civitavecchia, which took almost an hour to navigate. It was as if everyone wanted to hide, to get home, get indoors, try to believe that safety lay in being outside Rome, behind the walls of one’s own house, joined to the world outside by nothing more than a TV set and a phone line.

  Driving through these dead, empty towns and villages, Teresa felt as if she were entering a wasteland.

  It was almost a comfort when, as they finally navigated Civitavecchia and the road turned inland, away from the sea, toward Tarquinia, a sign appeared that there was someone alive in the night.

  They stopped at a rest area. Peroni needed it. From somewhere over the steady roll of the waves came the noise of an engine. A fishing boat trawling for a catch, she guessed, though it sounded louder than she might have expected, and more highly pitched, and the source of the noise seemed to come as much from the sky as the dark, shifting waters of the Tyrrhenian.

  35

  THE NIGHT REMINDED HIM OF THE EAST: BRIGHT AND clear, with a luminous moon stuck onto a sky punctured by a million starry pinpricks. The same sky he’d watched for two decades on the run, always waiting, always thinking. Of home and the Blue Demon, of his parents, and what had happened. Lives that had been diverted from their natural courses, turned by events toward unexpected, unforeseen paths.

  For twenty years Andrea Petrakis had dreamed of his return to the place of his birth. Not Italy, but Etruria, a place of freedom, a land where one’s future was mapped out by the strength of human will, where everything was possible for those who dared. His father had taught him that it was his legacy, a destiny deep within the blood. He learned how the Greeks prefigured the Romans, establishing a world built on individual freedom, power from a man’s personal fortitude, not birth or position or luck. How the Greeks had crossed the Ionian Sea, colonized the south, the Magna Graecia of modern Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, home to Pythagoras, an outpost of Athens in Italy. This was the base from which the men of Greece spread north, occupying the land from Naples to the Po, forging the Etruscan identity, bringing philosophy and art, politics and culture, to the primitive tribes that lived there, giving meaning to their little lives. Until Rome grew ever stronger and, in the Pyrrhic War, might defeated right. The Greeks fell everywhere, becoming little more than slaves to the newer, duller, more mundane civilization they had themselves created. Zeus was toppled by an army of bureaucrats and mediocrities, men whose first response upon finding themselves in the foothills of Olympus was to pillage everything that went before.

  When he was ten years old, he read Virgil’s paean to Arcadia, an homage to a lost pastoral Greek ideal written for a Roman emperor, Augustus, who himself rued the disappearance of the past. Virgil was an Etruscan too, they said, and Andrea Petrakis didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  His father had first taken him to see the Blue Demon not long afterwards. The tomb hidden in the woods seemed like a sanctuary, somewhere holy. Even fleeing the NATO troops in Afghanistan, hiding out in the mountains, in fear for his life, Petrakis could never forget the fire burning in the eyes of the devil who tore apart the Etruscans as they danced and made love on their way to eternity. Or what the creature truly stood for, the real identity of the beast.

  Something caught his attention and dragged him back to the present. The headlights of a car flickered through the blackness below his little plane as it cruised a precise two hundred and fifty feet above the dark, gleaming waters north of Civitavecchia. Petrakis responded immediately; he gunned the Rotax to feed some power into a sharp turn to the right.

  The port was busy. There would be radar and shipping, the coast guard and other, more shadowy security services. In Afghanistan he had sought intelligence during the planning stages, when he was determined that every eventuality must be considered, every possible twist in the scheme dealt with. It was easy in the modern world, their world, to discover the facts. They could scarcely resist boasting about them, on the Web, through sites he could find with a satellite connection on his laptop, even in a poppy farmer’s tent in the Helmand Valley. Marine ground-radar scanned up to a hundred feet above the sea. The active aviation systems of Fiumicino and Ciampino would detect anything above five hundred, whether it carried a transponder or not. There was a sle
nder gap of invisibility between the two, a layer of darkness into which his tiny microlight could flit undetected.

  With his flimsy machine he was able to take off and land from a short, hidden country strip, to evade their radar, to fly slowly down the coastline, south toward Rome, cruising at a modest sixty knots, the craft trimmed out and kept straight and level by the cheap, simple autopilot.

  On the passenger seat and in the small space in the rear of the cockpit lay as much explosive from the Etruscan tomb as the weight and balance limits of the plane would allow. Strapped to his back, bulky and uncomfortable, was a two-thousand-dollar BASE ram-air parachute secured from a specialist supplier in Milan, delivered to the villa the week before.

  Petrakis had undergone illicit training in BASE jumping at a small airfield near Karachi. A rogue member of the Pakistani air force had taken him aloft three times to teach him the technique, on each occasion reducing the height from which they exited the jump plane. This was no ordinary system. The rectangular chute was designed to cope with low-altitude jumps that were impossible for the conventional skydiver.

  There was no room for error, no secondary canopy that could be deployed in the event of failure. These were the devices that BASE jumpers used to leap from buildings and cliff tops. They could function in a descent of five hundred feet or less, a distance a man in free fall would cover in fewer than six seconds.

  He thought of the Blue Demon, and the legacy in his blood. Then Petrakis placed his hand on his back and felt the straps there.

  The moon was bright and serene, its rippled reflection lying on the surface of the gentle waves as if beached there. Petrakis watched as the mouth of the Tiber approached.

  There was not a plane in the sky. The city of Fiumicino, twenty-five kilometers inland, marked by a halo of light, was cut off.

  He followed the coast as it turned southeast, marking fifteen kilometers, still at the same height, waiting for the moment. Once he had passed the long, straight road of Via Cristoforo Colombo, named after one more Italian pirate, he was clear. This was the final route from the nearest shore back to Rome. There was nothing after that but flat, empty farmland, all the way to the second airport, Ciampino, where Air Force One and the private jets of most of the visiting G8 leaders sat on the asphalt.