by David Hewson
He led the way up the narrow, steep stairs and was aware, from some hidden sense, that this place was different, in a way that made him take out his weapon instinctively and hold it in front of him in the darkness.
The door was open, the entire floor beyond a space without so much as a stick of furniture from what he could see. A single skylight stood off-centre in the pitched, low roof. Through it a wan stream of weak moonlight fell, revealing nothing but bare worn planks in the centre of the room.
Falcone felt for a light switch. It took some time for him to realise there was none. But there was the smell of gas, faint yet discernible, and as his eyes adjusted they found the shapes of the same glass bulbs he had seen on the ground floor. He had no idea how to turn on gaslights, and no desire to find out.
He took a flashlight from one of the officers behind him and cast it around the pool of darkness that lay impenetrable in front of them. There were shapes, familiar ones. And from somewhere, he thought, the sound of faint movement, of someone disturbed by their presence.
“Fetch more light,” Falcone ordered in a loud, confident voice.
Two officers ran downstairs, out to the vans for gear.
Falcone strode into the centre of the room, dashing the beam of the flashlight everywhere, taking in what it revealed.
He should, perhaps, have expected this. In front of him lay an array of paintings, canvas upon canvas, each stored leaning against the next, protected by some kind of cloth covering, stacked in a fashion that was half professional, half amateur.
The corner of one piece of cloth was incomplete. Falcone lifted it and ran the beam across what lay beneath. He saw pale flesh, naked women, bodies wrapped up in one another. And a kind of style and poise that spoke of skill and artistry.
“What is it, sir?” the officer who had worked at the computer asked.
“Fetch me more light and we’ll see.”
Falcone still recalled well the time he had spent working alongside the Carabinieri art unit in Verona, with the pleasant major there, Luca Zecchini, who would spend hours showing him the vast register of missing artworks which every officer on the unit would be required to inspect from time to time. The size and richness of it amazed him, and the fact that there was a market for works which could never, in normal conditions, be shown to a single living soul because of their fame.
The brighter floods arrived. He ordered the sea of searing brightness they created to be turned towards the piles of paintings, then walked around them, throwing off the covers, hearing the low buzz of excitement grow behind him.
“I know that,” someone said after a while.
“It’s one version of The Scream by Munch,” Falcone explained. “I believe it’s been missing from Copenhagen since 2004. This . . .” He stared at another work, a smaller, older canvas. “. . . looks like Poussin, I believe.”
There were pictures here he thought he recognised from Zecchini’s register, works perhaps by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, and a host of earlier artists beyond his knowledge, unless they were all very good fakes.
He moved towards the farthest corner, an area where not the slightest mote of moonlight fell, and one which was still in shadow from some large canvas under wraps covering the entire diagonal of the space there.
“What we have here, gentlemen,” Falcone went on, “is a storeroom for stolen works of art, one that seems to have been sitting beneath our noses, in the centre of Rome, for years.”
Falcone stopped and kept a firm grip on his gun. “It would be fitting,” he added, “if we could match up these objects with their so called owner, don’t you think?”
In one quick movement he threw aside the sackcloth over the painting and stepped behind the frame. The man was there on the floor cowering, hands around his knees, head deep in his thighs, not saying a word.
Nino Tomassoni was wearing a grubby pair of striped pyjamas and stank of sweat and fear.
“This is a fine collection,” Falcone said drily. “Would you care to tell us where it came from?”
The figure on the floor began rocking back and forth like a child.
“I asked a question,” Falcone added.
The man mumbled something.
“Excuse me?”
“He will k-k-kill me . . .” the crouching man stuttered.
The expression in his bulbous eyes was more fear than insanity. Falcone wondered how long Tomassoni had been hiding here, and how he had come to know the events of the night. There was so much to ask, so many ways in which this strange little man could provide the means by which they might find a way, finally, into the depths of the Palazzo Malaspina and close the door on its owner forever.
“No one will kill you, Nino,” he said calmly. “Not if we look after you. But all these paintings . . .”
Falcone cast his eyes around the room. This was a miraculous find in itself. He could scarcely wait to call Vincenzo Esposito to tell him the news.
“I fear this looks very bad.”
Out of interest, he lifted the sackcloth on a small canvas to his left and found himself staring at a jumble of geometric shapes and human limbs that seemed to him, perhaps erroneously, reminiscent of Miró.
“Did he bring the painting here?” he asked.
The man said nothing and stayed on the floor, holding his knees, mute and resentful.
“The Caravaggio?” Falcone persisted. “After he stole it from the studio tonight, and killed your friend Buccafusca along the way, did he bring it here? If so, may I see it?”
“That animal was not my friend,” the figure on the floor muttered, still rocking.
“This is your decision,” Falcone observed with a shrug. “We will find out in any case. I was merely offering you an opportunity to demonstrate your willingness to cooperate. Without it . . .”
Tomassoni stabbed an accusing finger at him from the floor. “The Caravaggio was mine! Ours. It always has been. Since the very beginning.”
This was beyond Falcone. “I do not understand.”
“No! You don’t! It’s ours!” He glanced around the shrouded canvases mournfully. “It’s the only one that is. And now I don’t even have it. Now . . .”
He stopped. Falcone smiled. It was an answer of sorts. These interviews always began with a small, seemingly insignificant moment of acquiescence. It would suffice.
“Perhaps you would like to get dressed,” he suggested. “This is going to be a long day. I think pyjamas are not the best idea. You should bring some of your other things too. Whatever you want from this home of yours. I believe you will be in custody for a while. Safe and secure, I promise that.”
The man shuffled to his feet. He was short and overweight, perhaps thirty-five. Not Malaspina’s class or kind. Nino Tomassoni must have offered something different, something particular, for him to have moved in those circles.
“And thank you for those messages,” Falcone added. “The emails you sent to my colleague. They will work in your favour. As to the postings on the statues . . .”
He didn’t like the look on Tomassoni’s face. It was vicious and full of spite.
“What about them?” the man asked.
“Were they your work too?”
“For all the good it did me,” he replied. “I’ll get my things.”
Falcone bent down and retrieved the object he had noticed on the floor from the start. It was a specialist radio, and when he turned it on it was easy to see the unit was tuned to a police frequency. It wasn’t hard to understand how Tomassoni had worked out what had happened that evening. Buccafusca’s death had been broadcast on the network. The threat to himself must have been obvious after that.
“This is illegal too,” the inspector noted. “I hope I shall have reason to ignore it.”
The little man swore again and shuffled through the mill of bodies, then hurried downstairs a floor and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
He got there so quickly Falcone was several steps behind, and fumi
ng at the way the officers on the landing simply let him through.
“Rossi,” he yelled at the man closest to the door, “what the hell do you think you’re doing letting a suspect slam a door in your face like that? Get in there and watch him.”
He knew what had happened the moment he heard the noise: a loud, repetitive rattle that seemed to shake the very fabric of the ancient, fragile building in which they stood.
“Get down!” Falcone yelled, and pushed the nearest man he could find to the floor, watching the rest of them follow, terrified. A storm of dislodged plaster began to descend on them. The ancient wallpaper rippled beneath the deafening force of gunfire.
The nearest officer to the door got a foot to it, then retreated back behind the wall. Falcone could see—just—what was happening beyond the threshold, and imagine in his mind’s eye how this came about.
He had left the vehicles outside unattended, needing every man he had. Now someone was standing on one of them, possibly the Jeep that was directly beneath the window, and letting loose with some kind of repeating weapon—a machine gun or pistol—directly through the glass, straight into the dancing, shaking body of Nino Tomassoni.
Flailing across the floor, intent on avoiding the hail of shells that was pouring into the building, Falcone rolled towards the staircase, found it, then, followed by two other men who had the same idea, half fell, half stumbled down the steps to the ground floor. Clinging to the damp wall, he made his way towards the entrance and the collapsed door they had brought down earlier.
“Behind me,” Falcone ordered, and watched the shining cobbles and the dim streetlights, gun in hand, wondering what this might be worth against the man outside.
The noise had stopped. By the time he felt the cold night air drifting in through the empty space at the front, another sound had replaced it: an engine at full rev, squealing across cobbles.
“Damn you,” Falcone swore.
He threw himself out into the street, men yelling at his back, screaming at them to keep cover.
The figure was no longer on the roof of the Jeep. Falcone had no idea where he’d gone to. A black slug-like Porsche coupe was wheeling across the greasy cobbles, describing a fast arc in the space in front of the old church.
As he watched, it disappeared behind the group of police vehicles, and Leo Falcone found himself running again, with men by his side, good men, angry men, weapons in their hands, heat rising in their heads.
“Behind me!” he bellowed again, and forced them to fall back behind his extended arm.
A single raking line of repeat fire raged through the night air on the far side of the convoy of blue vehicles. He fell below the window line of the van in front, aware, as he did so, that thin metal was no protection against a modern shell.
It lasted a second, no more. They were going. This was a warning, not an act of intent. Falcone raised his weapon and pointed it across the open space of the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, back towards the Christmas lights still burning in the Corso, conscious that the men around him were doing the same.
“Do not fire,” he said firmly. “Do not fire.”
In the distance, walking down the road, struggling to get out of the way as the Porsche found the street and roared off towards the Piazza Venezia and the open roads of Rome, was a straggling group of revellers, with stupid Christmas hats on their heads, a bunch of happy young partygoers looking for the way home.
“Get the control room on this,” he ordered, barking the license plate number of the black vehicle at them as he returned towards the door. “As if they won’t know already.”
He raced up the stairs and found the bedroom. The place was beginning to stink of gas.
“Find the source of that smell,” he barked at the nearest officer. “The last thing we want in here is an explosion.”
Nino Tomassoni lay on the floor of his squalid bedroom, openmouthed, eyes staring at the ceiling, his blood-soaked, shattered body strewn with broken glass.
“There goes the witness,” Rossi observed with a degree of unhelpful frankness Falcone found quite unnecessary. “Do we have any more?”
“Just the one,” Falcone murmured. “Franco Malaspina will not touch her, I swear.”
One
WHEN NIC COSTA OPENED HIS EYES, HE WAS SOMEWHERE that smelled familiar: the scent of flowers and pine needles.
People, too, in a room that wasn’t meant for a crowd.
Christmas, Costa said to himself, waking with a start, then sitting upright in his own bed, in the house on the edge of the city, his head heavy, his mind too dulled by the hospital drugs to think of much at that moment.
He reached for the watch by the side of his bed, aware that his shoulder felt as if it had been run over by a truck, and saw that it was now almost four on the afternoon of December 23. He’d lost more than half a day to sleep and medication. Then his eyes wandered to the room and stayed fixed on the single point they found, the person there.
Franco Malaspina was wearing a grey, expensive business suit, perfectly cut, and sat, relaxed, on the bedroom chair where Emily used to leave her clothes at night. He stared back at Costa, legs crossed, hands on his chin, looking as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
“What in God’s name . . .” Costa found himself muttering, wondering where a gun might be in this place that was so familiar, so private, yet at that moment so profoundly strange to him.
Malaspina unfolded his legs, then yawned, not moving another muscle. He had strong, broad, athletic shoulders, those of a powerful man. In the bright daylight streaming through the windows, his dark Sicilian features seemed remarkably like those of Agata Graziano.
“This was their choice, not mine,” the man protested in his easy, patrician accent. “Take your anger out on them.”
Costa’s attention roamed to the others in the rooms. All eyes were on him. Some he knew. Some, mainly men in suits like Malaspina’s, were strangers, as was a middle-aged woman with bright, closecropped blonde hair who wore a black judicial gown over her dark blue business jacket and sat on a dining room seat in the midst of the others, as if she were the master of proceedings.
“What is this?” Costa asked.
“It is a judicial hearing, Officer,” the woman said immediately.
“Your superiors felt it so important, we came here and waited for you to wake up. This was their prerogative. My name is Silvia Tentori. I am a magistrate. These men here are lawyers representing Count Malaspina. The Questura has legal representation. . . .”
Toni Grimaldi stood next to Falcone, with Peroni on the other side. None of them looked happy.
“I thought he didn’t like being called Count,” Costa found himself saying immediately. His head hurt.
Agata Graziano sat next to Falcone, looking frail, bleary-eyed, and unusually upset.
“You know the judiciary,” Malaspina observed. “Very well, I imagine. It’s all formality, even these days. You can call me Franco.”
“Get out of my house . . .”
He tried to move and couldn’t, not easily, not quickly.
It was Agata Graziano who rose from her chair, picked it up, and came to sit by him. Costa couldn’t help noticing the pain this caused Leo Falcone.
“Nic,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry about this. It was never meant to happen.” She glared at Malaspina. “His lawyers made it so. If there was some other way. If I could prevent this somehow—”
“You could just tell Signora Tentori the truth,” Malaspina interrupted. “Then”—he purposefully looked at his watch—“I might be able to go about my business.”
“The truth,” Costa murmured.
“The truth?” Malaspina echoed in an amused, nonchalant voice. “Here it is. After the festivities I hosted on behalf of this ungrateful woman’s gallery, I spent last night in my own home, until eleven, when I went out to meet a companion, who will vouch for me. After that, I received a call saying the police were making enquiries. So”—he shr
ugged—“I did what any good citizen would. I went to the Questura. And sat there. From a little before one in the morning until five, when Inspector Falcone here finally managed to find the time to see me.”
“I did not know—” Falcone butted in.
“That is not my fault,” Malaspina responded.
“The others,” Costa said. “Castagna. Tomassoni.”
Malaspina’s dark face flushed with sudden anger. “My friends, you mean? And Buccafusca too. They are dead, murdered, and you sit here pointing the finger at me when you should be out there looking for whoever did this. I wish to see their families. I wish to help them make arrangements. Yet all I hear are these stupid accusations. Again. I tell you . . . there is a limit to what one man will bear before he breaks, and you have crossed that limit now. To be told one is under suspicion in these circumstances. Of crimes committed when I am sitting in your own Questura, offering whatever assistance I can . . .”
Costa could read the look in their eyes. It was despair. He could only guess at what the night had brought them: death and disappointment. Malaspina believed he had won again, and this informal judicial hearing, with his rich-man’s lawyers hanging on every word, was surely some formality he hoped to use to seal that fact. And to take pleasure from the act of entering the home of a man whose wife he had murdered. It was there, plain in his face.
Still, his timing was not perfect.
“Emilio Buccafusca was murdered . . . this painting was stolen . . . before you went to the Questura,” Costa pointed out.
Malaspina leaned forward, like a schoolteacher making a point to a slow pupil. “While I was at a private dinner. With someone who can vouch for me.”
One of the grey men in grey suits said, “It offends my client that you waste time on this nonsense when you could be looking for the real criminals in this case.”
“It offends me that the man who shot my wife is sitting in my bedroom, smiling,” Costa answered immediately. “Ask your questions, then get out of here. But this I tell you . . .” He pointed at Malaspina. “I am not done with this man yet.”
