The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  He could hear the sound of a tractor working in the adjoining field, the distant voices of the farm laborers going about their work.

  “Do you want me to continue?” she asked softly.

  “She had cancer. They both did.”

  He could picture them wasting away; he could recall so sharply the impotence he felt as he watched.

  “I was out of the service by then,” she went on. “Marco kept on nagging people. He wouldn’t let it go. They were bound to find out in the end.”

  She took more papers out of the briefcase.

  “I was in touch with Dario, discreetly. The idea that the crime gangs were deliberately infiltrating the political process—not just buying off individuals along the way—it terrified us. The mobs were weaker when they were rivals. If they came together, made a concerted attempt to infiltrate the process of government …” She stopped for a moment. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. When your father became sick, we sent some friends into his office. They were looking for bugs. They found some. They also found this.”

  Costa stared at the report. It bore the letterhead of a private laboratory in Milan and a few paragraphs of text that seemed mired in scientific jargon. One thing he could understand: the recurring term radiation.

  “These people have friends everywhere. Among them are some former secret-service agents in the former Eastern Bloc. They used junk like this long before it occurred to anyone else it might disguise a murder. What they put in the desk in your father’s office must have been there for months, if not years. Long-term, low-level exposure to radiation is extremely difficult to detect, unless you know that’s what you’re looking for.”

  He got up and walked to the corner of the patio, scanned the drive. It was empty except for the small red Fiat in which she’d arrived. Costa wiped his eyes with his sleeve, then came and sat down.

  “What about my mother?” he asked her.

  She reached for another sheet of paper. He could see it was from the same company.

  “When we realized what had happened—the similarity between her symptoms and his—we managed to get someone into her office in the university. Radiation lingers. There was still a faint trace there. The same kind.” The Englishwoman frowned. “I’m sorry. Maybe they warned your father. Maybe not.” She glanced at the farmhouse behind them. “They were bugging this place. You know that. You also know threats would have made no difference. The way your father was …”

  “You could have told me.” Costa felt like screaming, like running away.

  She sat still and silent, waiting for him to calm down. After a little while she asked, “Told you what? That we believed these people—Ugo Campagnolo among them—had your mother and father murdered, in the cruelest way imaginable, and there was nothing in the world we could do about it? We can’t link him to the radioactive material here. We can’t even prove an organization called the Blue Demon exists.” She hesitated. “Not yet.” Elizabeth Murray watched him closely, then asked, “Why do you think Andrea Petrakis came back?”

  “Is this a test?”

  “You could say that.”

  “He was ordered back. They were worried about something.”

  “Exactly.” Her eyes never left him. “A few of us have been quietly working on the Blue Demon for years. It’s not easy. I moved to New Zealand for a reason. To stay alive principally. In our favor, there is the simple matter of human nature. This is an awkward arrangement. The members have detested each other for decades. You can’t bury all that hatred overnight, even when the prize is an entire nation. Now that they’re winning, it’s worse. There are even more arguments to be had over how to divide up the spoils. Some of those who signed up find it deeply boring too, and much prefer the old ways. In the end they wind up marginalized. Left out of the loop. They don’t like that.”

  “You have someone?” he asked. “An informer?”

  “I wish it were that simple. Some months ago there was word that one of those involved was willing to turn himself in. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. We were told he would give us everything. Names, bank accounts. The structure of everything Campagnolo and those behind him worked to establish. If we could bring in this man alive … Keep him that way. Get into court. That’s a big if. Particularly now they know. They’d kill him without a thought, of course, the way they were content to shoot Ugo instead of Dario when they saw the endgame was falling apart. There’s no friendship among thieves.”

  He remembered those few grim, bloody moments in the garden of the Quirinale.

  “Who was the shooter?” he asked.

  “Someone in the campanile. That’s all anyone knows. All they’re likely to know. The same goes for the bomb in the palace. It was in a room in the basement. My guess is someone placed it there after Palombo detained all Ranieri’s officers. I don’t see how it could have happened any other way. They weren’t trying to kill the G8 people. They weren’t that interested in assassinating Dario. They were making a statement. Trying to tell us they knew we were chasing them and they wouldn’t allow it. That was why they summoned Andrea Petrakis back from Afghanistan.”

  A car stopped in the road at the end of the drive. She watched it for a moment, then said, “Rennick was fooled into thinking this was one last false-flag operation. He didn’t realize Andrea was seriously damaged goods by that stage, more damaged than even Luca Palombo appreciated. Andrea had come to believe all that nonsense his father invented about the Blue Demon. Except that for him it didn’t mean a bunch of murdering criminals. It meant … some bloody retribution against Rome, against Western society. He really believed he was some avenging angel from Hell.” She drained her coffee.

  “He was a leaky weapon, one that might go off anywhere. Rennick was willing to contemplate some small-scale display of terrorism in the heart of Rome, with a handful of casualties, just enough to keep the hoi polloi in its place, and maybe even send Andrea straight back into the arms of the leadership in Afghanistan. He didn’t tell his superiors. I know that. I checked. They would have stopped it the moment they heard. Those days are over. Besides, it was never going to happen. You understand why? Andrea said it himself. You heard him. He didn’t come here for the reason Rennick thought. He came here to kill the Blue Demon.”

  Costa’s mind returned to those last moments of insanity in the palace gardens. Petrakis approaching Dario Sordi, his face full of fury and a passion for revenge. “Andrea had no idea what the Blue Demon really represented,” he said quietly. “For him it was the man who betrayed his parents.”

  “Quite. So Palombo conveniently put none other than Dario Sordi in the frame, which happened to fit very neatly with the worldview Andrea had developed over the years. The lunatic craved a target, and when he had it, nothing was going to stop him. Not Renzo Frasca, not us, not you—certainly not that poor fool Giovanni Batisti, who opened his mouth to Palombo the moment Dario tried to sound him out.”

  “Are you sure of this?” he asked.

  “Ranieri had a wiretap on Palombo for a while. Palombo thought he could control Andrea. He didn’t realize Petrakis intended to destroy everything—and everyone—he associated with Rome. Dario. Palombo. Ugo too probably, if he’d got the chance. If you tell a man to pretend he’s a monster, place him among monsters, then demand that he act, in word and deed, like a monster, only a fool should be surprised if in the end he becomes a monster.”

  Costa felt as if the world had turned upside down, rearranged itself into a form that was different, unrecognizable, yet one that made a terrible kind of sense. All the self-hate he’d recognized in his father over the years. All the pain and the internalized agony. It was, he now saw, a form of self-recrimination, the knowledge that his own dogged integrity had brought an untimely death upon his wife, and then, in a way Marco Costa probably regarded as a deserved form of retribution, upon himself too.

  “Can you prove any of this?”

  Her pale, very English face fell. “Not a thing. Sorry.”
r />   “I need to think,” he said, and got up from the table.

  She didn’t move. “There’s no time for thinking,” Elizabeth Murray observed, sounding a little cross. “Don’t you understand?”

  “I’m sorry.…”

  “Listen to me, Nic. I’ve been chasing the ghost of the Blue Demon for twenty years. I used to think it was Ugo Campagnolo himself. Now I wonder how I could ever have been so stupid. This is the dark side of Italy, the part that’s always there, as much as we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. They made Campagnolo prime minister and then they murdered him when they thought he might prove a liability. They will pack the government that replaces him with their own men, loyal to the organizations, not those who elect them. They’re inside the Carabinieri, the police force, the judiciary, the entire process of government. As every day passes they become more powerful, their influence more corrosive. This is my adopted country and I had to abandon it because these sons of bitches made me fear for my life. Did you hear what I said? This all happened because they think we may finally have them. And your response is going to be to walk away? Your name is Costa, isn’t it? Or were you adopted?”

  “Don’t push me, please.”

  She reached into the briefcase once more and removed something. Costa saw what it was: the resignation letter he’d handed to Prinzivalli at the Questura desk the day before.

  “I gave that to a police officer.…”

  “A damned good one too,” she interrupted. “He handed it straight to Leo. It never went any further. We’re not totally alone, you know. We have a few select friends. And this is your answer, is it? To hide your head in the sand. To flee. Just as Dario and I did twenty years ago, burying the evidence your father was insisting we expose. Looking the other way for no other reason than cowardice dressed as convenience.”

  She faced him beneath the uncut, overflowing vines of the terrace.

  “Marco was the only man alive who had the guts to stand up to these crooks. If some of us had shared his courage, perhaps he’d still be alive today. And your mother. Maybe this place”—she gestured toward the honey-colored house—“would feel like a home instead of a tomb.”

  “That’s enough!”

  His anger left her red-faced. “How many people know what you just heard, do you think? How many dare we trust?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I’ve no idea. There must be some kind of specialist group.…”

  She laughed at him. “Where? To do what? Are you hearing what I’m telling you? Twenty years ago, when these people raised Ugo Campagnolo out of the gutter and put him into power, they were the conspiracy. Today the conspiracy is us. A handful of people who hardly dare pass the time of day with a stranger. Why do you think I told you so little in San Giovanni? I didn’t know for one second whether one of you would run back to Palombo and tell him every word.” She threw the envelope on the table. “Well, I know now. We have a meeting this afternoon. If you want to come, bring a suitcase and some things. I don’t know when you’ll see this place again. But”—she nodded at the house—“if you want to stay here and watch the grass grow, then good day. You’re no use to us.”

  There was so much to take in and, staring into her big, friendly face, so little time to think.

  Costa found himself wondering what his father would have done in such circumstances, and knew the answer immediately, almost as if he’d heard the old man’s cracked, gravelly voice in his ear once more.

  He picked up the envelope and tore it to shreds. The Englishwoman watched him, expressionless.

  “I have one more favor to ask,” Elizabeth Murray said. “Dario’s in my car. He doesn’t know whether you want to see him or not. This has been eating at him for years, Nic. Talk to him. The last week … Ranieri’s death—this has all taken its toll on the man. He needs you.”

  73

  DARIO SORDI EMERGED FROM THE CAR AT THE GATE WITH the tall figure of Leo Falcone by his side. The old man waved at the police inspector to stay back as he began to walk slowly toward the house.

  The two men—young and old—met halfway, next to the bench seat they’d installed when Marco Costa’s illness made it difficult for him to walk. Sordi looked grateful for the chance to sit. He seemed so much more frail than a week before. It was the first time Costa had ever seen doubt, and perhaps a little fear, in his eyes, and he felt guilty for being in some way responsible for the change.

  “I’m sorry. I am so very sorry,” Sordi said in a faltering voice, one that betrayed his age. “I apologize that I lacked the courage to tell you to your face. Forgive me.…”

  “Dario, there’s nothing to forgive.”

  “I wish I could believe that. I’ve always tried to think the best of people, Nic. I hoped, I believed for a while, that Campagnolo and the men behind him would be satisfied with what they had. It is a nation, after all. Few own such a jewel as Italy. Few get it handed to them by the weakness and petty divisions of their opponents.” He shook his head, as if fighting to clear his thoughts. “But I was a fool. There’s no compromise to be made with thieves. For an atheist, your father had an extraordinary knowledge of religion, you know. He quoted Augustine at me on this subject once, and I never forgot what he said about”—his mouth became narrow, almost cruel—“kleptocracies: ‘If justice is taken away, then what are states but gangs of robbers? And what are gangs of robbers themselves but little states?’”

  Sordi looked him in the eye.

  “This is not ordinary politics. Far from it. This is criminality posing as democracy. The men behind the Blue Demon are quietly seizing every institution, carving up the proceeds between them, hoping to make sure this nation will remain theirs for generations. My God … I was born into a nightmare like that. I don’t wish to die in one.” His voice broke, his hand shook as he pointed at the house in the field behind them.

  “I wish I could have saved your father and mother,” Dario Sordi whispered. “And poor Ranieri. I wish so much …”

  Costa reached out and embraced him, holding his stiff, bony body firmly, in a way he never could with his own father. Sordi’s chin, bristly and dry, brushed against his cheek. Then the old man pulled back and gazed away for a moment, ashamed of his tears.

  “No one could save my father, Dario. He lived as he wanted to. That was who he was. We all knew that. None of us could have changed him one iota. Perhaps now …”

  He stopped himself. There was a stray thought rising in his head—that perhaps Marco Costa’s spirit did live on somewhere.

  There was a sound. Elizabeth Murray was walking up the drive, looking like a mountain shepherdess who’d lost her way.

  Then he heard something from the road. Two more cars were moving slowly toward them. He could see Gianni Peroni at the wheel of the first, with Teresa Lupo by his side and Silvio Di Capua in the back. Rosa Prabakaran, her face pretty and serious, was driving the second. In the passenger seat next to her was the magistrate Giulia Amato.

  Peroni drew up by the gate and winked at him. “Hop in,” the big cop told him.

  “Goodbye, Dario. Take care,” Costa said quickly, and strode to Peroni’s vehicle. He opened the door for Elizabeth Murray, helping her onto the seat, passing over her crook, before returning to climb in the other side.

  They set off to the south, away from Rome. He reminded himself that, for the last few days, he’d been fantasizing about a journey such as this. Down the Via Appia Antica, to an unknown destination, a different Italy, a land he knew only by reputation, not experience.

  It seemed he was going there.

  Author’s Note

  THE EVENTS AND CHARACTERS PORTRAYED HERE ARE ENTIRELY fictional. However, Operation Gladio and its networks of clandestine undercover partisans were very real and operated for two decades or more with the secret support of successive Western governments fearful of a Soviet domino effect in Europe after the Second World War.

  The CIA’s founder, Allen Dulles, was instrumental in the formation of Glad
io, and it was his organization that paid for most of its operations in both NATO and neutral countries. Their existence was nothing more than a rumor until the 1980s, when the Italian judge Felice Casson discovered archive documents that clearly showed that some elements in the intelligence community had links with right-wing terrorist groups.

  Gladio’s initial brief was to provide the basis for a network of partisan opposition in the event of a Soviet takeover. Power usually devolved to those involved in the covert movements, men who, in the case of Italy, tended to be recruited from within the ranks of former fascists and the criminal classes and were often left to devise their own strategies of action.

  Casson told a BBC documentary the aim was “to create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies. While this strategy was being implemented, it was necessary to protect those behind it because evidence implicating them was being discovered. Witnesses withheld information to cover right-wing extremists.”

  A 1972 attack in Peteano, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, was a rare visible example of Gladio’s apparent links to terrorism in Italy. Three members of the Carabinieri died in a car bomb, which, for years, was blamed on the Italian left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. When Casson reopened the case, he discovered that the explosives used came from a secret Gladio arms cache. Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a former member of the neo-Fascist groups Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, received a life sentence for the attack and went on to speak openly about connections between terrorism and the secret services. He claimed that he had been able to escape and hide after the outrage because of support among the Italian security community for his anti-communist stance.