The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  Letizia Russo was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she’d encountered these anonymous figures with rifles and feared the worst. Perhaps Palombo had already taken custody of the one witness who could testify to the American’s true identity.

  The security man’s lecture was brief and caustic. When he was done reminding them that they had no place being where they were, Palombo turned to Costa and ordered, “Now release him.”

  Falcone remained stock-still in front of their prisoner and said, very calmly, “We have a witness who has identified Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. We have reason to believe he was involved in the murder of the Petrakis couple twenty years ago.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rennick barked.

  “We have evidence that he had knowledge of the Blue Demon tomb, where a colleague of ours was murdered last night,” Falcone persisted. “At the very least, we must take him in for questioning. It’s a matter of the law.”

  “The law says he has a diplomatic passport,” Palombo shot back. “Along with that comes immunity.”

  “It’s a passport issued under a false name. Sir,” Peroni snapped. “In my book that makes it invalid.”

  “I wasn’t aware it was the job of some has-been agente in the state police to decide immigration policy. Release him. That’s an order.”

  “We don’t take orders from you,” Falcone said.

  The tall, lean spook turned away abruptly and made a phone call. They waited. He came back and handed over the handset.

  The inspector’s face fell. “Sir,” he murmured, listening. Then: “You asked for evidence, Commissario. We have it. A positive ID of Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. His phone number on the person of the arms dealer killed in Tarquinia. These raise many, many questions. I cannot …”

  They could hear the voice rising out of the phone, tinny and furious.

  “You’re ordering me to release an identified suspect in a case involving several murders and terrorist acts, including the death of a police officer,” Falcone said with a stony face. “May I know why?”

  A single scream emerged from the handset. Then nothing.

  Falcone pocketed the phone. Palombo held out his hand toward the American.

  “Allow me to say this one thing first,” Falcone pleaded, looking him straight in the eye. “I understand your position, Palombo. This is a crisis. We are simply police officers who do what they see as their duty, without access to all the facts. There are ramifications here we do not understand, nor should we. This man”—he indicated Rennick—“is an impostor. He is at the very heart of your operations. He knows as much as, or more than, Giovanni Batisti, who was seized just a few meters from here, by an individual that I suspect Rennick—or Frasca, you choose—must know personally.”

  “Speculation, Inspector.” Palombo’s sigh was bored.

  “Of course it’s speculation, you moron!” Teresa yelled. “That’s why we need him to come down to the Questura to answer some questions.”

  Palombo gestured toward Costa. “You will release Signor Rennick into my custody. Your own commissario has told you the same thing. Capitano?”

  One of the masked figures came closer, his weapon half raised.

  “Oh, brother!” Teresa shrieked, pointing a finger in his face. “What brave boys! You don’t dare show your faces out in the daylight. A bigger bunch of brainless, dickless idiots—”

  Falcone intervened, moving between her and Palombo. “Let me deal with this. Nic?”

  Costa got the message. He unlocked the cuffs. Rennick shook himself free. The man, to his credit, looked guilty. Upset. Apologetic, even.

  “I intend to see you again before you leave Italy,” Costa told him. “When you’re without your friends.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” the American said.

  “I’ll pass that on to Mirko Oliva’s parents when we’re allowed to tell them their son is dead.…”

  Palombo had his hand on Rennick’s arm. The American removed the Italian’s long fingers, as if he felt some distaste at their touch.

  “None of us here”—Rennick nodded at the soldiers and Palombo—“means you or Italy any harm. You’ll see.”

  Costa looked at him, wondering how he could have been so stupid. He recalled Elizabeth Murray’s stories of a world shaped by the dying days of the Cold War. Letizia Russo had painted a picture of a tight little family that seldom went out of the house, never made friends, kept itself separate, and would one day make an astonishing sacrifice for no obvious reason. There was, he understood suddenly, only one possible explanation for that.

  “You’ve been waiting for this moment for twenty years or more, haven’t you? These acts are the price you expect us to pay for some greater benefit that ordinary men and women cannot see. Elena Majewska. Giovanni Batisti. Mirko Oliva … What’s that neat little euphemism you use? Collateral damage?”

  Palombo marched in between them and barked, “Enough!”

  “No!” Rennick cried.

  The two men faced up to each other. It was the Italian who backed down.

  “These officers have lost a colleague,” Rennick told Palombo. “They deserve something. They deserve more than we can give them.”

  He ordered the men at the doorway to leave. Luca Palombo stood where he was.

  “I’m no happier with these deaths than you are, nor do I understand why they occurred,” the American said, shaking his head. “But how many people died on 9/11? In Madrid? Bali? London? Thousands. Perhaps thousands more in the future, unless we win this war.”

  “Ben,” Palombo murmured. “This isn’t necessary.…”

  “Yes it is,” Rennick insisted. “Imagine we could place a spy right there, in with them. Not in the training camps. Not with the middlemen. I mean at the very top, a place we’ve never penetrated before. Imagine we could fake some event that persuaded them they could trust someone who was ours. Take him straight into their lair. You know their names. We all do. You know we’ve been trying to find them for years, and we never will, not without some traitor in their midst. A man who has their absolute confidence because of what he’s done.”

  “For that you’ll sacrifice Rome?” Rosa asked him.

  “For that I’d sacrifice my life. And the lives of others too. We all pay a price, one way or another. This is the way it is. It’s not pretty or tidy or safe, and that’s why we told you to stay away. For your own good. There will be one more attack. It will be spectacular. It will not cost a single innocent life. Sometime tomorrow”—he glanced outside, toward the empty street—“things will start to return to normal. Here, anyway. I promise that. And in a little while, a month perhaps, a year … we will find them, the men we’ve been looking for all these years. The seed we plant here will bear fruit.”

  “Twenty years is a long time to be undercover, isn’t it?” Teresa asked. “Twenty years among people you’re supposed to hate. Have you never heard of the Stockholm syndrome? How do you know Andrea Petrakis is still yours?”

  Palombo pointed at Costa and Rosa. “It’s thanks to this man you two are still alive. Do you think that was just an accident?”

  “You were lucky,” Rennick said bluntly. “I was worried when he didn’t call in. I’m sorry I didn’t get there soon enough for your friend. I tried to tell you. This is a field operation: Step into it at your own risk. We’re done. We’re going now. No more questions. No more answers. Good day.”

  But Palombo lingered as he left.

  “Do not repeat one word of what you heard here to anyone,” he told them. “I will deal with you people later.”

  They watched the two men join the masked officers in the street, climbing into their armored black vans. The vehicles passed through the barricade and headed toward the tightly guarded piazza of the Quirinale Palace.

  51

  EARLY AFTERNOON. ON A NORMAL DAY, MEN AND WOMEN flocked from their offices, walking to a favorite cafe or restaurant to sit down with a coffee and a panino, a plate of pasta, a dish of meat and
vegetables from some neighborhood tavola calda, to discuss football and politics, work and the cost of living. New friendships and enmities began, old ones blossomed, faded, and ended. Everywhere, from the drab commercial streets of Parioli to the tourist quarters of the Campo dei Fiori and the little alleys of the ghetto, there was life, with its awkward idiosyncrasies, its argumentative logic and irregular serendipity.

  But this wasn’t a normal day. The church bells tolled over a city that was apprehensive and, in its heart, quietly mutinous. No lovers walked hand in hand through the quiet green park that hid the subterranean remains of Nero’s Golden House. No students chattered happily on the steps of Ignatius Loyola’s Collegio Romano in the centro storico. Among young and old, rich and poor, there was a sense of resentment, a growing loathing, of the criminals who had created this timidity, the politicians whose arrogance had invited their presence, and the masked, black-clad figures who had usurped their familiar police officers in blue—men and women who, though flawed, fallible, and somewhat weather-beaten much of the time, were somehow all the more reassuring for that.

  Rome held its breath in anticipation of what might happen in its midst. For the oldest of them, those who remembered the forties, the atmosphere was bleakly reminiscent of the war, the German occupation, the mood of foreboding that preceded a cathartic outburst of violence by one party against another, turning everyday streets into bloody battlegrounds.

  A normal day …

  In a quiet field by the tomb of Cecilia Metella, daughter-in-law of Crassus, who was in turn both nemesis to Spartacus and patron to a lowly politician named Julius Caesar, a family from Ciampino, ignoring the smell of burned avgas still drifting from the nearby airport, sit down for a picnic, only to find that their dog, a Dalmatian cross, makes a discovery that means their bread and cheese and sausage go uneaten, and their bottle of cheap, weak Frascati wine untouched during the long hours it takes for the police to make their way to the Via Appia Antica.

  A normal day …

  Deep in the underside of the Quirinale Palace, in a stable built for the soldiers of a pope, a young Spanish woman, widowed and made childless by tragedy and misfortune, feels she can hear the minutes tick audibly by as she awaits the appointed moment, unable to take her eyes off the crucifix on the wall, or to extinguish from her mind the memories of a Basque plainchant in the Franciscan sanctuary of Aranzazu near her distant home, and its words, translated to her as a schoolchild by the parish priest who organized the visit.

  Ne irascaris Domine, ne ultra memineris iniquitatis.

  Be not angry, O Lord, and remember no longer our iniquity.

  A normal day …

  In the Forum, hidden in the shadows of the towering ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, Andrea Petrakis meets a ghost from the past, and finds there are no words to say after such a passage of time and circumstance. When his visitor departs, he has something to covet. He opens the large, expensive suitcase the visitor has brought and studies the items there, the key that unlocks the final door.

  It is the uniform of a serving cuirassier, a member of the Corazzieri. The tenuta di gran gala, reserved for the most serious of occasions: white trousers and gauntlets, knee-high leather boots, and a black jacket with epaulettes. The helmet is gleaming gold with a criniera mane of dark horsehair and a high, vivid red fabric flash on the left side. The breastplate is silver, etched with gold emblems, held at the shoulder and waist by leather straps.

  Inside too lies a fine sword, the height of a man almost, encased in a silver scabbard.

  Eyes gleaming, Andrea Petrakis unsheathes the weapon and runs the inside of his index finger along the blade. A thin line of blood appears instantly on his skin. His fingers slip inside the boots to feel the padding, which will take his height close enough to the regulation 190 centimeters required of each corazziere. He licks the blood from his hand and thinks of the afternoon ahead.

  Then he places everything back into the suitcase, picks it up, and, when the time is right, steps out into the deserted Via dei Fori Imperiali, close to the guard posts at the foot of Trajan’s Markets.

  The route back to the Quirinale is still open to pedestrians, some of the way at least. He takes out his phone and, with steady fingers, sends a text.

  A single word.

  NOW.

  PART SIX

  If Demone Azzurro

  We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

  —Unnamed White House senior aide,

  believed to be Karl Rove, speaking to

  New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, 2002

  52

  NOW.

  Anna Ybarra had sat in the stable for what seemed like hours, staring at the phone’s little screen, waiting for the message. When it arrived, she found herself transfixed by the single word there, one that took her thoughts away from the judgmental, twisted figure on the crucifix looking down at her from the wall, pleading, accusing through the dusty air.

  It was important to concentrate on two things only: the face of her husband, Josepe, and their little boy, Zeru. The three of them sitting on the thick grass in the hills on a hot summer’s day, when the acres of farmland below were rich with crops and animals. Walking to the shop in the village through freezing winter gales and the downpours of spring, the boy’s small gloved hand tight in hers.

  Zeru growing from baby to toddler to little boy, with a bond, always—a special one—to her alone. It was as if some part of the umbilical cord remained, invisible yet real, a tie that only death could sever. Anna was a sensible, levelheaded woman. That day would come. But not, she always believed, for a long time. And not in the way it did—in the night, unexpected, full of noise and screaming and hatred.

  She had never, not even in a nightmare, believed she might one day witness his tiny wooden coffin enter the hard ground alongside that of his father. Two still corpses hidden beneath soft white pine, the people she loved most snatched from life by a cruel, faceless fate, ignored by the embarrassed state that bore responsibility for their deaths.

  Zeru meant sky. Anna and Josepe had picked the name together the very afternoon the doctor’s scan told them their child would be a boy. Zeru. A Basque name. One full of light and hope. A name that would last a lifetime.

  Holding his tiny, fragile body in the hospital bed in San Sebastián, she had imagined him old, wrinkled, weather-beaten, still living on their family farm, long after she and Josepe had departed the world. Later, she would sometimes dream that she had seen him with children and grandchildren of his own, gathered around him, listening to his stories, of life, the Basque land of Hernani, and the much-loved family that went before.

  At some point he would gesture to the sky—sometimes bright and sunny, noisy with birds, sometimes the night, illuminated by a scattering of stars.

  “That is my name,” the dream Zeru Ybarra said, in a voice that was strong and kind. “That is me.”

  The Euskaldunak, those who spoke the old, true language, would diminish in the decades to come. So Josepe said. Or perhaps that was his brother, the ETA man, talking, through him.

  She wasn’t so sure. They had given their son a true name, a good name, one that had stood their little community and the broader family that the Spanish called the Vascos in good stead over the centuries.

  A name helped give meaning to a life. Sometimes—not always—it offered the consolation that some things persist, the way the plainchant of a distant monastery might linger in the memory, long after it should have been forgotten.

  In the darkness of a stable in the palace of a pope, she murmured, “Zeru …” and wondered, as the two syllables died in the air, whether there was a god anywhere to hear. Once, she’d believed that. But she’
d believed many things. Most of them had turned out to be nothing more than cruel lies. Fantasies for the gullible.

  Anna Ybarra did not look at the crucifix on the wall again. She picked up the saxophone case and opened it, checking and rechecking the weapon inside, just as the dark, silent, frightening men of the Taliban had taught her. Then she glanced at the instrument itself, gleaming gold, a complex machine, intricate with levers and strange, contorted workings, all to produce nothing more than a single musical note, one that a human being might utter through breath alone.

  NOW.

  She took out the map Andrea Petrakis had given her. Even though she was inside the Quirinale complex, it was a long walk from the stable in the Via delle Scuderie back to the palace. Petrakis had stressed how important it was to take the right route, one that would avoid the guard posts as much as possible and take her into the staff quarters of the palace, then to the broad corridor alongside the Salone dei Corazzieri. The guests—presidents and prime ministers, spouses and civil servants—would be in that grand hall, he said, listening to music, sipping champagne. This was her moment, there for the taking.

  Without looking back, she walked outside. There was a cobbled courtyard that cried out for horses and men in bright, anachronistic uniforms. It was empty. She scurried beneath the promenade at the edge of the square, staying in the dark, walking quickly, swinging the instrument case with her right arm, aware that her dress—dark velvet, more expensive than any she had ever worn—was so long she nearly tripped on it as she strode toward the palace.

  Two more courtyards. Then the smell of cooking and the clatter of a kitchen. She checked her map. High on her right was the clock tower, its curious campanile reminiscent of Spain. Flags fluttered there. So many colors. So many different nations.

  “Zeru, Josepe …” she whispered.

  Another walkway beneath a vaulted ceiling, with arches to the side. On the far side of the patio, there was a small flight of stone steps up into the Quirinale proper. The corridor by the Salone dei Corazzieri lay only a few steps beyond.