by David Hewson
“If we cannot prosecute this man, then negotiating something quietly, through a third party, is the best we can achieve.” He cast a brief glance in Costa’s direction. “I’m sorry, Nic. Truly. That is the way it must be. Now, go home all of you, please. It’s Christmas. We should not spend it in a place like this.”
One
TWO YEARS BEFORE, THEY HAD DINED TOGETHER ON Christmas Day: Falcone, Peroni, Teresa, he and Emily, all of them at the farmhouse on the edge of Rome, watching a rescued Iraqi orphan build a snowman among the vines outside the back door in the fields that led to the tombs and churches and monuments of the old road into the city.
It seemed a memory from a different lifetime. The streets were deserted by the time they climbed into the cars of the convoy, and a steady drizzle fell on the cobblestones of the centro storico. A chill wind was now beginning to build from the north. There would be no snow, not even a little. Costa felt sure of that, and a part of him regretted the thought, because he would have liked to show Agata Graziano the Pantheon in that kind of weather, would have enjoyed the look of wonder on her face at the line of soft flakes swirling through the oculus.
He felt tired. His wounded shoulder hurt. It wasn’t mending as quickly as he’d hoped. Over the past few weeks Costa had become conscious of some rising interior knowledge within himself; he was getting older, now a widower, one who would be unable to put Emily’s memory to rest for a long time.
It may have been the doubt and distance on his face that prompted her remark. As they fell into the back of the centre car, Agata Graziano looked him in the eye and asked, “Do all policemen give up this easily?”
He closed his eyes and tried to laugh. “I don’t think anyone would call this easy,” he replied. “We’ve worked for weeks. Susanna Placidi was there before us. All told, we’ve spent months trying to bring this man to justice, and we’ve failed. Leo is right. As usual.”
“The arrogance of men.”
“We have nothing to put in front of a magistrate, Agata. That’s the truth. Accept it.”
The car began to move. Her eyes turned from him. She stared out the window, at the rain and the gleaming, empty cobbled streets.
“I do,” she sighed. “And I shall go to Piedmont as Leo dictates.” She looked at him, a quizzical frown on her dusky face. “Will you really negotiate with a man such as Franco? After all this?”
“We negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers in Iraq if it saves a life sometimes. In the end, if you want peace, you talk to your enemies. Who else is there?”
“And then they kidnap someone else because they know they have you.”
“Perhaps,” he answered with a shrug. “But would you like to explain that to the relative of someone in their custody? That the life of a man or woman they love should be sacrificed in order to save other, unknown human beings in the future?”
“No,” she said instantly. “I would not like that responsibility.”
The car turned into the Corso. There was not a single Christmas light in the shop windows, not a soul on the street.
“Why do you do this?” she asked. “Why do you take on the pain of others?”
The question puzzled him.
“We don’t, do we? It’s just a question of . . .”
He remembered his father, and the routine round of charity, money to men and women without homes, without hope, quiet donations, often to Church institutions a good communist was supposed to avoid.
“The point is . . . we don’t walk away. We don’t stop. We don’t give up. Not until . . .” He thought of Teresa and her forensic people working through the night; Falcone bending the rules, agonising over what might work and what might make the situation with Malaspina worse. “Not until it’s hopeless.”
“And then?”
“Then I go home, open a good bottle of wine, and drink myself stupid.”
“Nic!” Her small hand dashed across his knee. “That is shocking,” she cried. “You will not do this tonight. Bea will have cooked another wonderful meal for us. Then tomorrow I expect a personal escort to this hovel in Piedmont Leo has in mind for me, and that will be no pleasure at all if you have a thick head.”
“Sir,” he said, with a mock salute.
She reached into her bag. He wondered, for a moment, what other surprises might lurk there. All that came out was a small, very modern mobile phone.
“That looks like a possession to me,” he pointed out.
“One more gift from Rosa. It’s better than a gun, isn’t it?”
He listened to her make a single short call to the convent and wish someone well. Then, as they were turning onto the Lungotevere by the river, she said, “Please turn round. This is important.” “What is?” he asked.
Her bright eyes held him, pleading. “I can’t go through this entire day without entering a church, Nic. Please. Sant’Agostino would be suitable. It is open. I know.”
She watched him, waiting.
“We’d allow in an atheist, you know.”
He spoke to the two guard cars on the radio and ordered them to turn round. It didn’t take long. There was scarcely another vehicle on the damp, shining roads.
“As long as you’re under our protection,” he answered, “you’ll have to let in more than one.”
Two
THE CHURCH WAS DESERTED EXCEPT FOR A LONE PRIEST extinguishing candles and tidying chairs. He didn’t look pleased to see seven men in winter coats march into his church at that moment.
“We’re closing,” the man said, scurrying towards them in his long black robes, causing them to halt. “Please, please. Even a priest deserves some time at Christmas.”
Then he stopped, seeing Agata Graziano, and put a hand to his mouth.
“Sister Agata,” he murmured. “Are you . . . well? I hear all these stories. About you. And the police.”
“The police,” she said, and waved a hand at Costa and his colleagues. “See, I am on business. Perhaps it touches them too.”
“Oh,” the priest answered hesitantly, then added, “You won’t be long, will you? I’m hungry. It’s been a tiring day.”
“We won’t be long,” Costa interjected. “Will we?”
“No,” she murmured, and immediately went towards the altar, small feet making light, echoing steps in the vast, empty belly of the nave.
On his orders four of the men followed discreetly, in the dark shadows of the aisles on both sides. Agata stopped, crossed herself, and fell slowly to her knees. Costa stayed with the priest, his eyes straying, as always, to Caravaggio’s Madonna, the child in her arms, the simple peasants in front of her. The pencil-thin halo above the Virgin’s head seemed brighter, more obvious than he’d noticed before.
“The painting’s about her,” he noted quietly. “I never realised before.”
The priest laughed. “It is called The Madonna of Loreto. You should always read the name on the frame.”
“I should,” he agreed. “This whole church”—something, some revelation, hovered out of reach—“is about women somehow, isn’t it?”
“Primarily,” the man observed, “I would have said it was about God. But then, I’m biased.”
She was done. Agata was walking back towards him again, head down, face serious. She couldn’t have prayed for more than a minute.
Costa thought of Fillide Melandroni taking much the same steps on the selfsame flagstones four hundred years before. Making some compact with the Church, then striding out into Rome in the company of Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni and Ippolito Malaspina for a different life, one of surfeit in the name of the Ekstasists, one in which she would take a knife to the cheeks of her rivals simply to earn a little more money for her favours. Men and women enduring lives steeped in the cruel reality of everyday existence, still seeking spirituality wherever, whenever, they could find it. Watching her slim, dark shadow slip towards him through the nave, Costa understood, at the moment, that Agata Graziano was their diametric opposite: a bright, engage
d mind that had never, until late, considered anything of the earthly world at all.
He glanced at the Caravaggio, wondering what to say.
She didn’t arrive. The priest next to him uttered a short, shocked sigh. Costa turned.
Sister Agata Graziano stood in front of the milky-white statue of the Virgin in the scallop-shell alcove, triumphant beneath her starry halo, a silver circlet beneath her breast, the child standing on her knee, loins girt with metal like a tiny warrior from some distant Greek myth.
Tentatively, with an expression on her face that was part anticipation, part fear, she reached out and touched the lustrous argent cap on the Madonna’s foot, placing her fingers on the shiny worn object as untold numbers of Roman women—Fillide Melandroni among them—must have done before.
“Now that is something new,” the priest whispered.
It only took a moment. Soon she was walking towards the door.
“Please excuse the rudeness,” Costa said, preceding her. The rain had halted. The long sweep of steps in front of the church gleamed like yellowing dirt-stained ivory. The three cars were at the foot. He went ahead, Agata behind, with the men at her back.
When he got to the bottom, he found Taccone there, fuming.
“Dammit!” the tall, broad-shouldered sovrintendente yelled out into the piazza, apparently at no one.
They stopped by the middle car. Costa was conscious of the large, familiar shape of Peroni by his right side, standing in front of Agata, trying to guide her towards the rear door.
“That stupid photographer we saw yesterday,” Taccone grumbled. “The one outside Tomassoni’s house. He was here too. I swear. He went past on a scooter. Looking.”
The sovrintendente turned to face them. “Don’t scum like that ever take a day off?”
Peroni’s eyes caught Costa’s. “What the hell would a photographer be doing out here on a night like this?” the big man retorted. “Where is he? What—”
“Let’s get inside . . .” Costa started saying, then heard his words drowned out by the roaring, whining sound of a two-stroke engine, coming somewhere from the right.
He caught Agata by her slight shoulders, gripped her hard, and dragged her down to the damp, dirty stones behind the rear doors. From the corner of his eye, fast approaching the three vehicles, lined up together, locked in formation, he could see the scooter roaring into the piazza.
There were two men on it, both hooded. The passenger sat backwards on the pillion, one hand tight on the rail by the seat. In his other sat a weapon, black, with a long barrel and a long magazine.
Three
COSTA TORE AT THE DOOR, FORCED IT OPEN, AND MANAGED to bundle her inside, ordering her to keep low on the floor of the big police sedan. Then his words disappeared beneath the chatter of a machine pistol, barking repeatedly into the black night, its metallic voice echoing off the old stone façade of the church.
As Costa looked up, Taccone caught a shot to his upper torso and fell back screaming onto the steps. Peroni was yelling at the others to get down behind the vehicles. There were seven men there. Enough, surely. But it was night. It was Christmas. They weren’t expecting any of this. This was Rome. Not some gangster town on the Ionian Sea in Calabria, where Malaspina had surely hired his deadly ’Ndrangheta thugs.
Hide or fight.
It was that choice again. The only choice.
He looked at the stricken Taccone, crawling across the steps to try to find some safety from the constant horizontal rain of machine-pistol fire raking the piazza. For a brief second, he found his attention straying to another figure at the head of the stairs: the priest, upright, hands to his face again.
Peroni had the man in view already and was yelling at him, a long angry sentence filled with the kind of curses a Roman priest rarely heard, and a final threat that if the man didn’t get indoors soon a police officer would likely shoot him instead.
“Gianni!” he barked over the noise, and then found himself catching his breath.
The piazza had gone quiet. All he could hear were the pained groans of the wounded sovrintendente, the anxious breathing of Peroni by his side, and, like a distant echo, the faint reverberation of remembered gunfire rattling around his head.
Peroni peered hurriedly around the car for a second, then got back to safety and shook his head.
“He’s changing magazines, Nic. We have to—”
Costa didn’t wait. He lunged over to the wounded Taccone and snatched the weapon from the man’s hand. Then, with both his own and the borrowed gun firm in his grip, he stood up, walked out from behind the long, dark shape of the unmarked police Lancia, and pointed both barrels at the two figures on the bike, the gunman struggling with the machine pistol, the rider looking anxiously around, jerking at the throttle.
He didn’t waste time with procedure, with a warning. They were five, eight metres away at most. Costa walked forward, firing loosely at both men, intent on getting as close as he could, and aware that others were beginning to follow him. His own body surely blocked their shots. At that moment, he really didn’t care. There was nothing else that mattered on the planet but these two men, in the familiar black hoods he’d come to associate with Franco Malaspina and his works.
A cry of pain broke the brief silence between two shots. The figure in black on the pillion jerked, threw his hands in the air, and began to fall sideways. The machine pistol rolled out of his hands and clattered on the wet cobblestones. The engine whined madly and the scooter’s front wheel jerked towards the black coverlet of the sky before the vehicle shot forward, leaving its wounded passenger behind, racing for the web of streets beyond the Piazza Navona, cutting a fast, direct path into the confusion of lanes and dead ends and alleys that was Ortaccio.
He kept firing, one gun after the other, until every shell was gone and he found himself pulling hard on dead triggers. He flung the spent weapons to either side and kept walking. Across the square the figure on the scooter got smaller and was gone.
Peroni appeared at his side. All the others were soon there, too, even, barely able to stand, Taccone, who was shivering, teeth chattering with cold and fear and pain.
Costa took one look at the injured man.
“Get him an ambulance,” he ordered.
He watched them take the sovrintendente back towards the broad steps of Sant’Agostino. Peroni walked over to stand by the bent, broken body on the ground, still staring in the direction of the disappeared scooter.
“You know,” he said, when Costa got there, “you always told me you were a lousy shot.”
The man on the shiny cobblestones lay on his back, eyes wide to the sky, mouth gaping open to show two lines of badly cared-for teeth. There was a wound in his left temple the size of an espresso cup, bone and gore around the edges.
“I guess,” Peroni added, “our friend Aprea here might not agree.”
“We could have used a witness,” Costa grumbled. “That bastard gets all the breaks.”
Peroni was going through the dead man’s clothes, pulling out nothing but money and ammunition.
“We could have used a real name too,” he replied. “It certainly won’t be Aprea. If he’s one of our Calabrian friends, I doubt we’ll ever get to know.”
“Damn,” Costa muttered. Then louder, “Damn, damn!”
He strode back to the car. The men stood in a huddle around Taccone, who, to Costa’s amazement, was clutching his wounded shoulder with one hand and sucking on a cigarette with the other.
“I like the first aid treatment,” he said to them caustically. “What is the point of all this training exactly?”
They didn’t answer. They had the expression junior officers wore sometimes, the one he’d come to recognise since promotion, one that, at this instant, filled him with dread. The look was furtive and it spelled guilt.
“Where is she?” he asked.
He stormed over to the centre vehicle and threw open the rear doors. The back seats were empty.
&
nbsp; “Where is she? Where in Christ’s name . . . ?”
“She’s gone, boss,” Lippi, the youngest of the officers, said. “She must have run off while we were trying to help you out there.”
Furious, Costa scanned the piazza.
“She could be anywhere by now,” the agente added unhelpfully.
Costa spun round on the slippery marble pavement and found himself roaring her name into the darkness.
“Agata! Agata! AGATA!”
All that came back in the night was the echo of his voice off the marble façade of the church and the clatter of unseen pigeons, invisible wings rising into the black, enveloping sky.
One
HOURS LATER COSTA WAS SITTING IN FALCONE’S OFFICE in the Questura, dog-tired, head fuzzy from the painkillers the medic had given him to take away the hurt from his throbbing shoulder. They’d pulled in men and women from everywhere, once again dragged officers from the warmth of a family Christmas, and sent them out onto the damp, cold streets of Rome, looking for a lone woman of the Church who had disappeared into the dark.
It was almost as if she had never existed. There were no relatives to visit, no friends to check out. The city was deserted. The stream of officers dispatched into the centro storico by Falcone could find scarcely a soul to question, and anyone they did come across had no recollection of a slight young woman in black making her way through the rain to someplace Costa could not even begin to guess at. Falcone had stationed a team at the house on the Via Appia Antica, and further officers were scouring the roads leading to it, looking for some lead. Rosa Prabakaran had visited Agata’s convent and talked to the women there, pleading for help, getting nothing but sympathy and bewilderment. Agata had vanished into the heart of a city that was empty for the holiday. Finding a missing person in the overcrowded metropolis of a normal day was difficult enough.
Locating her in this strange, deserted labyrinth of ancient streets, alleys, and dead ends was even worse. She had surely gone to ground somewhere or been taken by a different set of Malaspina’s men, seeing their advantage when Costa led the response to the armed attack by the man who had called himself Aprea.
