The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  Her head was full of questions. Too many.

  She pulled out her phone, found his number, and sent him the single one-word message they’d agreed.

  Inside.

  Less than a minute later came his reply.

  Wait.

  She sat down on an old, rickety chair, next to the wrecked carriage. There was a single small, high window through which the bright summer day streamed, illuminating the dark, dusty interior of the stable. The shaft of light fell, almost deliberately she thought, on something that must have stood there for years: a crucifix attached to the side wall, a tortured bronze figure of the dying Christ, head bowed, awaiting release.

  46

  LETIZIA RUSSO’S HOME WAS A NEAT THIRD-FLOOR APARTMENT in a block by the river in Testaccio. She was an unsmiling, pinch-faced woman, thin and birdlike, with a sharp, spinsterish manner.

  They sat on an old-fashioned sofa. She watched them from an armchair in the window, the light falling so that the shadow of the curtain fell on her face.

  “You do know why we’re here, signora?” Rosa asked.

  “I can guess. What do you want of me?”

  “Memories,” Costa answered.

  “Is that all?”

  “For now. We’re trying to picture what happened. It’s not easy.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “The Frascas. What were they like?”

  “Not the best family I’ve worked for. Not the worst. I was just the housekeeper. I came in and cleaned. Looked after the little boy from time to time. They were kind, after their fashion. I was”—she stabbed her skinny chest with a finger—“a servant. I never forgot that.”

  “The boy …”

  “Daniel was beautiful. I taught him to talk like a Roman. They didn’t like it. They said”—her voice changed accent, became hard—“we don’t want him speaking like some cabdriver. Huh! Daniel was as bright as a button. And now …” The sour look came back. “The papers say the poor boy was shot dead somewhere only the other day. That he killed someone and was soft in the head. Not my Daniel.”

  “No,” Costa agreed. “Perhaps he wasn’t.”

  Her expression never changed. She asked, “Then where is he?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s so much we don’t understand. We’re trying.”

  The old woman nodded at the window. There was scarcely any traffic running along the riverside road. On the Tiber itself he could see two high-speed Carabinieri launches racing toward the city, armed officers upright at the bows. Overhead the clatter of a helicopter flying low rattled the rooftops.

  “Not doing much good, is it?”

  “Would you prefer we did nothing?” Rosa asked tartly. “What happened on the day they were killed?”

  The corners of Letizia Russo’s thin-lipped mouth turned down in a gesture of ignorance. “It was the weekend. I was visiting a relative in Civitavecchia. First I heard was on the news.”

  Costa asked her the usual details. What she found in the apartment. What she was asked by the investigating officers. She listened, staring at him.

  “Why don’t you know this, if you’re police?”

  “Because it was twenty years ago and the investigating team then—they were from other agencies.”

  “I didn’t get into the apartment for a week. By then they said these animals who called themselves the Blue Demon were dead or gone. Daniel too. When they finally let me in …” Another casual frown. “It looked the way it always did.”

  Costa recalled the photographs they’d seen in the briefing in the Quirinale. “The blood on the walls …”

  “I saw no blood.” She stopped, thinking. “They said they’d cleaned up before me.”

  Rosa was staring at him. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Daniel Frasca was still missing. Could they cover all the points?”

  “Maybe,” he responded, unsure himself. “What was different, signora? About the apartment?”

  “Nothing.” She hesitated. “Especially that room they said they’d cleaned. It was the way it always was. Signora Frasca was not the most house-proud of women. There were always things left for me to tidy away. Things another woman would have dealt with herself. Coffee cups. Danny’s toys.”

  “Their friends?” he asked.

  “There weren’t many. Not that I saw. A few Americans came around. English. All foreign. Mainly embassy business, I think. I never understood this. Signor Frasca spoke excellent Italian. He was Italian. By ancestry. I never knew him to have Roman friends. They were not the most sociable of couples. They adored Danny, I’ll say that for them.” Her face hardened. “Then one day they’re dead. Buried in America, the papers said. Not so much as a memorial service in Rome. I was only a housekeeper. This was none of my business, I imagine. All the same, I would have mourned, if anyone wanted it.”

  Letizia Russo seemed to be struck by some stray thought.

  “What is it?” Rosa asked.

  “When people die, there are decisions you have to make.”

  “Who gets what? Who does what?” Costa said. “Anyone who loses someone—”

  “I asked if I could help,” the woman cut in. “I asked what might become of the Frascas’ things. Police. Carabinieri. You never think of such matters. This was a family. They had a home. Belongings. Items that would be precious to someone, some relative. Some of it—you would never have shipped everything all the way to America. So I asked for a memento.…” Her skinny hand waved through the air. “They cut me dead. The embassy would take care of everything. How? Daniel’s little paintings? He loved to draw. Who would want them? Who would pay to send them all the way across the ocean?” A low Roman curse escaped her bloodless lips. “I am not a thief! I asked for nothing that anyone might want. Many foreign families have employed me. Once the ambassador of Egypt, who has a beautiful house on the Aventino. No one has ever accused me of stealing something. It’s unthinkable. Always, when I finish service, I receive a gift. It’s tradition. If the family is dead …”

  Costa tried to imagine the scene. “You wanted something to remember them by,” he said. “Nothing more.”

  “Exactly! I played with young Danny. He loved me. No one else took any interest in what was in that apartment of theirs. What was a photograph? A simple family picture? They had plenty. All of them better than that thing they gave to the papers.”

  “You took it,” Costa murmured, thinking. “They found out.”

  “Just the photograph. And a vase too.”

  She got up, walked over to the mantelpiece, and removed an old-fashioned piece of blue porcelain.

  “Delft,” the woman said, stroking it. “Dutch. Not worth much. I checked. A week—maybe more—later, when Signor Frasca and his wife are on their way back to America in their coffins, there is a knock on the door. Four big men. Police or security, or something. I don’t remember. They treat me like I’m a criminal. They say, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’” She held up the vase. “I tell them. Here. Take it. They look at me like I’m an idiot. They don’t want that. Only the photograph. I ask you. Why?”

  “What did it show?” he asked.

  “It was a picture. A snap! The father, the mother, that lovely little boy. One day in the Forum. Smiling. Happy. A sunny day. Danny had a gelato. I can still see his face today. That little boy loved me.”

  “Did you give it to them?”

  She scowled. “I had no choice. They were threatening me with the courts. With prison! Me! All for a memento no one wanted.”

  Rosa was looking at him, interested. “You didn’t keep a copy, I suppose?” she wanted to know.

  “What am I? An idiot? They threatened me! Who wants to employ a housekeeper who steals? No one. Why should they?”

  “The only photograph of the Frascas we’ve ever seen …” Costa began.

  The old woman nodded. “The one in the newspapers. I saw it too. Did them no justice. Terrible old picture. Even I wouldn’t recognize them from that.” She blinked. �
�Or that other photograph. At the Villa Giulia. It’s a scandal. How can the newspapers print such things? Two human beings, butchered by that terrorist animal … that poor boy stolen away into slavery, or whatever.”

  “What was Renzo Frasca like?” he asked again. “What did he do?”

  “Talked on the telephone. Read books. Went to the theater.” She frowned. “A lot of meetings too. He traveled much. In Italy. Not abroad. The north mainly. I remember that.”

  “Tarquinia?” Rosa asked, a little breathless.

  “Somewhere north,” she agreed.

  “What kind of books?”

  “History. Roman history.” Letizia Russo thought for a moment, then added, “And the Etruscans. Like that Petrakis animal. He and his wife went to the Villa Giulia to see those statues there. They took me once, with Daniel. Disgusting! A child should never have seen such obscenities. But”—she shrugged—“Americans.”

  Sometimes one found answers in the most unlikely of places. He had no idea why he asked the question. It was probably no more than desperation.

  “Shakespeare …?”

  “Hah! Shakespeare!” she shrieked. “Sometimes you’d think there was nothing else in the world but that man. Every time there was a play. A book. A movie …”

  “Nic?” Rosa asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither.”

  His phone was ringing. It was Silvio Di Capua and he had something.

  “I take it back. What I told you about the SIM being useless,” the young pathologist said quickly.

  “And …?”

  “We traced the account to the Ministry of the Interior. It’s a spook phone. This magic little computer system we’ve got can log into the account records.”

  “Give me the last five people he called,” Costa ordered, pulling out a pad and pen.

  “Can’t do that, Nic. This is a new phone. Apart from your call to Falcone, it was only ever used for one other number.”

  Di Capua read it out, said thanks, then cut the call.

  The women were looking at him. He excused himself, went to the window, and dialed.

  A voice he recognized answered.

  “This is Sovrintendente Nic Costa. We have to meet in thirty minutes. In San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. I think you know where.…”

  Words of protest, of outrage.

  “This is important, sir, or I wouldn’t be bothering you. We have uncovered something very disturbing about the Blue Demon. Something I feel you should know. Thirty minutes. Please …”

  He finished the call. The two women were watching him. He wondered whether any of these connections could possibly make sense. Then he looked into Letizia Russo’s cold, sharp eyes and said, “I would like you to come with us, signora.”

  “Why? Am I under arrest? For stealing a vase twenty years ago?”

  “No. I simply need your help. Please. We will organize a car.”

  “There are no cars. No one moves in Rome. Not now Dario Sordi has turned the city into a prison while he and his cronies drink champagne in the Quirinale Palace!”

  “I’m sure that pains President Sordi as much as it does the rest of us, signora.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Let me—”

  “Your coat, please.”

  There was a muttered curse, then she went into the next room.

  Rosa stared at him and asked, “Where are we going?”

  “To church.”

  47

  THERE WERE FLOWERS ON THE MEAGER REMAINS OF the Tempio del Divo Giulio: roses and chrysanthemums scattered over the dun pile of earth where, more than two millennia before, Mark Antony had read his notorious ovation for an assassinated dictator.

  The noblest Roman of them all.

  Great Caesar, Divine Caesar.

  Now tourists from parts of the world that the tyrant could never have imagined ambled past the place where his bloodied corpse was reduced to ashes.

  Not many today, though. Petrakis found himself virtually alone on this baking summer’s afternoon. The broad thoroughfare through the Forum, from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, was as empty as a Sunday when the city closed the road to traffic. Carabinieri and all manner of police officers, local and state, wandered around the foot of Via Cavour and the narrow streets in front of the ruined Trajan’s Markets. Armed officers scanned the area from temporary watchtowers built of plain, ugly scaffolding. Hideous, loud signs had been erected at every possible entrance into the forbidden zone, the government’s much-vaunted “ring of steel,” all warning that no ordinary citizen was welcome beyond these points, and all who disobeyed would face instant arrest under the emergency legislation.

  He sat, phone in hand, on a piece of ancient, displaced marble, staring at the spot where Caesar’s pyre had stood, amused by the scattering of fading blooms. There was always some stray bouquet there, thrown by a gullible visitor. Petrakis wished he could have been present when they deposited the flowers on the tyrant’s altar, wished he could have told them just a little of the true face of Rome. Of its brutality and hatred of anything, any race, it failed to understand or command. He closed his eyes and thought of the ranked exhibits in the Etruscan halls of the Villa Giulia: men and women locked in a joyful existence, fired by passion and pride, beholden to none, frightened of nothing. He’d wanted to be like that since he could first think, ached to feel that selfsame fire, that release from the daily ritual of routine. His father had promised such gifts and then been snatched from him. Nothing had ever come close.

  And one day the Devil arrived. For the Etruscans, on the wall of a tomb in Tarquinia, a blue shape capering like a malicious fiend newly released from Hell, an arbiter, standing between life and death, bringing misery and torment to anything it might catch.

  For him …

  Petrakis knew the moment, had captured it forever. Bad news, the worst. An explanation, an urgent need for a solution. It took place in a nondescript office in Rome in a place he could no longer remember. There was a man in a suit, making promises Petrakis didn’t understand, sealing bargains that came with hidden conditions, invisible until they were triggered by the relentless, cruel tide of events.

  He was the Devil of Faust, a sly, compelling creature, offering the world to all who would listen, in return for something that seemed so slight and insignificant.

  He was the Blue Demon, the vicious, feasting animal that sought to conquer and devour everything.

  He was Rome, all-powerful, all-commanding. Rome, the heartless monster before which everyone knelt in obeisance. Europe was a land of lost races, disappeared civilizations. The Etruscans were nothing more than exhibits in a museum, their tongue eradicated, their culture reduced to objects in glass cases. In this way the kingdom of Caesar grew to become the empire of the pope, spreading its ideology everywhere until it was the spirit of the age. From the drab site of a dead dictator’s funeral pyre to the Lincoln Memorial, from the altar of St. Peter’s to the Palace of Westminster, the despotism became insidious, ubiquitous.

  Petrakis glanced in the direction of the Quirinale. The high priests of the religion now feasted and praised one another in the pope’s palace, behind the tower above the markets of Trajan, the one that the lying, cheating tour guides said was the viewpoint from which Nero had watched Rome burn.

  In the wastelands of Afghanistan, trying to work his way to the al-Qaeda leadership, as the man in the suit had ordered all those years before, he’d seen something—a light, a beacon. One bright, cold day in September they had gathered around a portable TV set and watched in amazement as the Twin Towers fell in New York, pillars of the old world tumbling to the ground, to be replaced by fear and chaos, panic and uncertainty.

  At that moment something in him had changed. He had seen through the Blue Demon’s lies, all of them; had known, for sure, that the empire that began with Rome was no longer beyond defeat. Helmand and the bandit lands on the Pakistan border had finally taught him to ride a horse like an Etruscan, to kill an enemy with a simple s
hort dagger, to take what one wanted from life before the inevitable darkness fell, and with it oblivion. He never converted, he never pretended to. They accepted him for what he was: some kind of elemental force, created by events, by nature.

  On that sharp September day those few years before, Andrea Petrakis metamorphosed into the man he had pretended to be for so many years, as easily, as naturally, as an insect emerging from the chrysalis, hungry, expectant, and ready.

  There was a short, straight line from that instant to the present. He had watched it form, shaped it, directed it with all his might and vigor.

  Petrakis stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring.

  The call comes. He gets up, stretches, yawns under the hot sun, and spits, with all the phlegm and force he can muster, directly onto the roses that cover the place where Julius Caesar turned to ashes.

  “You’ll have company soon,” Petrakis whispers, wondering if there is some kind of magic in the universe after all, whether Caesar’s shade might hear his words in some distant twilight realm where dead dictators muster, still pretending they are gods. And, if the bloodthirsty old bastard listens, whether he might understand.

  48

  BEN RENNICK DIDN’T LOOK PLEASED THAT HE’D BEEN dragged out of the Quirinale. He was wearing a lounge suit and a dark tie. There was a bulge beneath the right-hand side of his jacket. But he didn’t seem like the kind of man who would use a weapon easily. It was more of a badge, Costa thought.

  “This had better be important,” the American said.

  “It is,” Costa told him. “I would have broached it with Luca Palombo, but …” He stopped and looked at this man, wondering what was going on inside his head.

  “But what?” Rennick wanted to know.

  “But I don’t think it would be a good idea. Not yet.”

  They were in Borromini’s church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane—San Carlino to the locals—just a few short steps away from the crossroads where Giovanni Batisti had been kidnapped and his driver, the young Polish woman, Elena Majewska, murdered. Costa had forgotten how beautiful this compact place of worship was. The interior seemed alive, organic somehow, a flowing mass of convex stone curves wrapped around a Greek-cross floor plan. It was a five-minute walk from the Quirinale Palace, but the closest point Costa could reach, given the security on the streets. Any nearer, even as far as the neighboring church of Sant’Andrea, by the architect’s bitter rival, Bernini, and the armed officers would have turned him back.