The Garden of Evil

by David Hewson

  “Something happens? Specifics.”

  “A moment. A word. A look. A thought . . . a recollection. The memory of a gesture. The way someone picks up a cup of coffee or laughs at a terrible joke. A smile. A frown. It . . .” Nic Costa sighed and opened his hands, lost for something else to say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” she asked. “You gave me my answer.” Agata Graziano glanced nervously at her feet, then asked, “Does it also happen at that moment, Nic? The one depicted in the painting? Is that when you truly know?”

  “No,” he said immediately.

  “You’re blushing very profusely,” she pointed out.

  “What do you expect? This is not a conversation . . . not the kind of thing you talk about. With anyone. Least of all . . .”

  But the Ekstasists wanted to capture that intense, private instant for themselves. That was why they raped and murdered on the streets of Rome. They needed to understand something. So, though she was reluctant to admit it, did Agata Graziano.

  “You mean least of all someone like me?” she replied. “I would have thought I’m the obvious person. Someone who’s utterly disinterested in the matter.”

  “All I can tell you is the truth as I see it.”

  She shook her head, cross suddenly, and with herself this time. Her dark hair glittered under the lights of the bright chandeliers.

  “This infuriating painting is designed to drive me mad. It’s a game, a joke, a riddle, like Franco and his stupid gang. Why did he never paint anything like it again? Not because he couldn’t. And what on earth does it really mean? Caravaggio was not Annibale Carracci. He wouldn’t paint pornography for anyone who came along bearing a full purse.”

  An abrupt flash of displeasure crossed her face, and it was directed at him.

  “It would all have been so much easier if you could have answered yes to that last question.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then it would have had some personal dimension? The discovery of God in some small, intimate physical moment. But it’s not. It’s more than that. Or less. Oh . . .” A modest curse escaped her lips. “I blame this on you. And Leo Falcone. And now . . .” She took hold of his wrist again, turned it, and checked the watch there. “It’s late and I’m in trouble. That hasn’t happened in months. I’m none the wiser, too, which is worse. Men!”

  He liked her anger. It made her more vulnerable somehow.

  “I’m sorry if your carriage has turned back into a pumpkin.”

  “Unlike Cinderella, I have no need of a carriage. Or fairy stories. Furthermore, my sisters adore me, which is why they are so indulgent. Therefore your analogy is quite poorly chosen.”

  “I’m a lot wiser,” he replied. “I know we have a painting that appears to depict a woman, no ordinary woman, some kind of goddess, in the moment of ecstasy. That she is surrounded by men, one of whom is singing a refrain from an erotic poem, the Song of Songs. I knew none of that this morning. All I knew was”—it came out before he could halt the words—“that somehow, in some strange way, this has to do with Emily’s death. That perhaps, if I appreciated how, I would understand that better also.”

  She folded her arms and gazed at him. “You will never give up, will you?”

  “Not until I know,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Know what, exactly? A name? An identity?”

  “More than that. I want to understand what caused this. I want to see the instant this darkness appeared, from nowhere”—this thought depressed him, even as he uttered it—“to infect us.”

  “That is an interesting quest.” She said it quietly, nodding to herself, thinking.

  Then she grasped his wrist and checked the watch again. “We have time for one more viewing,” she insisted. “There’s only so much trouble a sister can get herself into in a single night.”

  “We’re going back to the studio?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are a genius.”

  “I am?” he asked, bewildered.

  “I believe so. Let’s put this conundrum to bed once and for all, I hope. Are you with me?”

  She knew there could only be one answer. Costa tried not to look back as they left, remembering Falcone’s words. It was important not to give these men any more excuses to run to their lawyers. Even so, he wondered whether they would be watching, Malaspina and Buccafusca, Castagna and the short, insignificant man he knew to be Tomassoni, a name that continued to stir some distant memory he could not yet place.

  But they were nowhere to be seen and that was strange. This was Franco Malaspina’s home. In a sense, it was his party. Yet Costa had the distinct feeling that the man had left, with his fellow Ekstasists, venturing together out into the dark Roman night.

  One

  GIANNI PERONI DIDN’T NEED A MACHINE TO TELL HIM something was wrong. He’d stayed glued to the screen most of that evening while Rosa went through some personal documents on Malaspina and his circle sent round by Falcone. Teresa Lupo was now in the kitchen making dinner, grumpy at the lack of progress in the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Nothing had advanced during the day; her team was still awash in physical evidence, but lacked a single item that could directly link the crimes there to any one individual.

  “Stop being some grubby Peeping Tom,” Teresa ordered, and returned to the table with three plates brimming with gnocchi covered in tomato sauce and cheese. “You can’t stay watching that thing all night. Besides, Leo told you . . . it would bleep if anyone came near the statues.”

  “I can bleep for myself,” Peroni objected, and took a big forkful without looking, a good portion of which went straight down the front of his white shirt.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, then put a fat finger on the computer screen. When he took it away they could just make out the image of a figure, shadowy and unidentifiable under the streetlights.

  “Him,” he said simply.

  It was a man in a dark coat, collar up, face indistinguishable in the night. That was the problem with CCTV, the police system, and these special cameras Falcone had organised. They were surveillance devices, not identification systems. There wasn’t enough detail for Peroni to see what the man really looked like.

  The two women abandoned their food and came to sit on either side of him.

  “What about him?” Teresa asked.

  “Listen to someone who knows how to read these streets of ours. I have spent a lifetime watching Romans walk around this city and I know when something’s amiss. It’s a freezing cold night in December. Spitting with icy rain. No sane person stays outside in that weather. Except him.”

  “Has he done anything, Gianni?” Rosa asked.

  “No . . .” the big man replied, in that deliberately childish way he used when he was trying to argue. “That’s the point.”

  Teresa grabbed a forkful of food, most of which made it to her mouth, then said, still eating, “So he’s just standing there. Where is this?”

  “Abate Luigi,” Peroni replied immediately. “The first act of Tosca. Remember?”

  “If you continue to throw opera at me like that I’ll take you to one of the damned things.”

  He turned to stare at her. “This is work,” Peroni objected.

  “He’s a man in the street,” Rosa said. “Just standing there.”

  “It’s not a street,” he insisted. “It’s a dead end that doesn’t go anywhere. And yes, he’s just standing there, though I swear he keeps looking at the statue too.”

  He took some more food, then said, “He wants to see it, but he daren’t. Leo said our email would flush these bastards out, looking to see what we were saying about them. For all they know, there’s a different message on every damned statue. This is one of Malaspina’s bunch. Maybe the man himself. I’m telling you. I can feel it.”

  Teresa slapped him cheerfully around the head. “It’s a man in the street who’s probably waiting for one of those high-class hookers of
yours. Get real. And remember, Leo said just to look and see where he went. Nothing else.”

  “Nothing else?” Peroni answered, aghast. “Look at the picture on this stupid thing. It’s night. There’s no moon. We can’t identify him. As long as we’re sitting here we’re useless. Maybe”—he flicked a finger at the screen—“we could try and see where he went using all these other cameras Leo’s got us wired up to. But I don’t believe it. This is just some idiotic pile of plastic crap. It doesn’t catch criminals for us. It can’t pick up the phone and scream for backup. It’s . . .”

  He stopped, displeased with himself, wishing he felt confident enough to think he was off duty and able to open a beer.

  “We all want to do something, Gianni,” Teresa said, then, to Rosa’s embarrassment, she took his battered face in her hands and planted a noisy kiss on his lips.

  “I will do something,” he insisted. “Watch me.”

  Teresa pounced with another theatrical kiss. When it was over, Rosa groaned, took her eyes off the screen, and said, “Not now. Our friend’s leaving.”

  Peroni swore.

  “Did he do anything?” Rosa asked.

  “Not that I saw. . . .”

  “Then what—”

  “I was just imagining,” he interrupted, feeling as miserable and dejected as he had on the day of Emily Deacon’s funeral. One pressing thought continued to nag Peroni: if he felt this way, what emotions still ran through Nic Costa’s sensitive soul? “You eat. I’ll watch.”

  “Food . . .” Teresa shoved the plate in front of him.

  He pushed it away and muttered, “Later.”

  Gianni Peroni wasn’t much of a one for instinct alone, least of all that gained through the artificial medium of a nighttime surveillance camera watching some ancient statue in a tiny, grubby piazza by the side of a church off one of Rome’s busiest streets. Nevertheless, he found he didn’t much care for a beer anymore, not even when the man with the upturned collar walked right out of sight of the camera, heading north, back towards the Piazza Navona. There was another camera there, part of Falcone’s covert surveillance scheme that was also hooked into the centro storico’s CCTV system through an arrangement made outside the Questura’s normal channels.

  That was the way things were, and the way they would remain until these men were brought to book.

  He was happy with the idea. Simply uncomfortable with pursuing it in the cosy remote warmth of Leo Falcone’s apartment, with a plate of good gnocchi going cold by his side.

  “North,” Peroni said, knowing that this would take the figure in the dark towards the most visible of those statues, Pasquino, which stood at the very end of the street in which they were now located, perhaps no more than a minute away on foot if he ran as quickly as he could manage.

  He keyed through the cameras along the way and saw nothing. There were so many back alleys, so many cobbled channels through this part of the city. This was the Rome of the Renaissance, not a place built for stinking modern traffic or the eager lens of some video camera perched in a private corner, its grey monocular eye fixed permanently on the shifting, ceaseless world below.

  This remote, soulless form of policing was stupid. What’s more, it could become an obsession, and was, he thought, for Nic already, which only made things worse.

  “Eat . . .” Peroni muttered, and took a big forkful.

  Then he turned the camera to Pasquino, not expecting to see a thing except a few midweek diners wandering through the drizzle, debating where to eat.

  The fork stopped a finger’s width from his mouth. Tomato and garlic, gnocchi and cheese, dripped onto the computer keyboard in a steady thick rain.

  “Gianni,” Teresa said uneasily.

  “He’s there. Look. It’s him.”

  There must have been hordes of men wandering the street that night with their collars turned up, their faces hidden from the rain.

  “You don’t know . . .” she began, then he snatched some of the photos from across the table and laid them out over the keys.

  “Tall, well built, young . . .” Peroni murmured. “It could be any of them. If only he’d move into the light so we could see his face.”

  “It could be any number of people,” Teresa objected.

  They watched the figure in the wet raincoat wander towards the statue at the end of the road, against the wall of the cut-through to the Piazza Navona. Falcone’s taunting poem had been there four or five hours now. The email boasting about it had gone out around the same time. It was a crazy idea, Peroni thought. Any sane criminal would never have risen to the bait. But Falcone understood these men somehow, understood that this was all some kind of tournament, a challenge, a deadly diversion the enjoyment of which depended, surely, on the degree of risk.

  The man in the gleaming coat walked steadily towards the statue of Pasquino, a two-thousand-year-old torso damp in the rain, strewn with messages, one of them very recent.

  “Do it,” Peroni muttered. “Do something. Anything.”

  The man in the coat walked past the statue and the posters, his head scarcely turned there. Nothing happened. Nothing.

  “Shit,” Teresa grumbled. “Are you going to eat your food or not?”

  He refused to take his eyes off the screen. Something was going on. The figure had turned back, as if unable to stop himself. He was now over the low iron railings that protected the statue from nothing but badly parked traffic.

  The three of them watched. With his back to the camera, the man took something out of his pocket and, in a series of crazed, violent movements, scraped at the paper on the stone, casting anxious sideways glances around him.

  “Show your face,” Peroni snarled. “Show your face. Show your damn face. . .”

  There was one last stab at the stone, and a scattering of paper tumbling down to the rain-soaked pavement.

  Peroni was fighting to get inside his coat before anyone could say a word. By the time he’d got it around his big frame, Rosa was ready to leave too.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing he did normally. But at that moment it seemed appropriate. Gianni Peroni retrieved his service pistol from its leather holster, slammed out the magazine, checked it was full, and slammed it back.

  “Wonderful,” Teresa moaned. “What am I supposed to tell Leo if he calls?”

  “Watch the screen.” He grabbed the earpiece of his mobile phone and stuffed it into place. “Try to see if you can make out where he’s going now.”

  “And Leo?” she asked again.

  Rosa was at the door.

  “We go to Navona,” Peroni ordered. “When we’re there, we decide.”

  He kissed her quickly on the cheek. There wasn’t time to register the concern, and the fear, in her eyes.

  “Tell Leo this time the bastard doesn’t get to run away so easily.”

  Two

  THE NIGHT WAS COLD. THERE WERE NO LIGHTS IN ANY of the adjoining buildings. The Barberini’s outpost was set in an external block of the Palazzo Malaspina so distant from the main building he couldn’t even hear the sound of the music he knew must be there, and the voices too: men and women looking forward to the Christmas holidays and a break from work, a time for family. There was, as far as he could see, no one else in the entire block except the armed guard from the private security firm, the same man who had let him in to the building that morning, and now did so with a cheery, unsurprised enthusiasm.

  “Sister Agata,” the man chided her, “you work too hard. You and your friend disturb my sleep.”

  “Go back to it,” she said quietly. “But don’t snore.”

  Then, silent, she led him ahead, still carrying the two overfilled grocery bags full of papers and reference material that she had left with a puzzled checkroom attendant at the Palazzo Malaspina when they’d arrived. They walked into the long, dark corridor that ran past closed offices to the room with the painting. Costa felt detached at that moment, full of random thoughts and emotions, about the case and what had happene
d, about himself and his loss. Had Malaspina and his group really left the palace? He had no idea, and that realisation in itself felt awkwardly distant somehow, making him appreciate he had not yet found his way back into thinking like a police officer. Emily’s death still stood in the way, and he had no idea how long that obstacle would remain, or whether, in truth, he wished for its removal.

  There were many places Malaspina and his friends could have disappeared to in that bright, sprawling palace. But if Falcone had done his job, they now had something on their mind. An anonymous email designed to taunt them, one that, thanks to his own encounter with Malaspina, just might lead them to break cover. And then there was Costa’s presence in the man’s very private home. Could both have explained Malaspina’s tense and aggressive demeanour?

  It was possible, he knew. It was also possible that Malaspina was talking to his lawyer already, trying to stir up some new harassment accusation. Costa had done his best to avoid that possibility. The way Falcone had engineered their meeting meant that there would be no formal instructions on hand in the Questura to support any such charge. Nevertheless . . .

  A part of him was already beginning to wonder how he might feel if these men succeeded in escaping responsibility for their acts. Like every active police officer, he recognised the pulse, the temperature, of an investigation. The telltale signs were there. The presence of Grimaldi the lawyer, with his sour face that said, “This is going wrong already.” The constant concern in Falcone’s eyes, the way the inspector was willing to work outside the rules, not caring about any personal professional risk to himself and those he was using . . . All of these indicators told Costa that failure was by no means a remote possibility. If the Ekstasists simply sat back and did nothing remotely illegal again, there might be precious little chance of apprehending them.

  Nor, some small inner voice whispered, would anyone else die, or be snatched from some squalid street assignation and taken to a dark, dismal corner of the city and subjected to a brutal ordeal, simply for the gratification of a bunch of playboys and their hangers-on. That would be a kind of result, and he retained sufficient detachment, even at that moment, to ask himself the all important question: how much was he seeking justice, and how much vengeance?