Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  “It’s not a trick.” They had never worked together before. They came from different stations. Rossi guessed the kid had no idea why some old, overweight cop had been made his new partner. He’d never asked. He just seemed to accept it, to accept everything. Still, Rossi knew something about him. They all did. Nic Costa was one of those cops the others couldn’t quite believe. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t eat meat. He kept fit and had quite a reputation as a marathon runner. And he was the son of that damned Commie the papers used to go on about, a man who had left Nic Costa with one very unusual habit. He was a painting freak, one particular painter too. Nic Costa knew the whereabouts and the provenance of every last Caravaggio in Rome.

  “Sounds like a trick to me.”

  “It’s knowledge,” Costa said, and for a moment looked more like his real age, which Rossi knew to be twenty-seven. Maybe, the older man thought, there was more to him than met the eye. “No sleight of hand, big man. This is magic, the real thing.”

  “Give me some magic then. Over there . . .” Rossi nodded toward the walls of the Vatican. “I guess they’re full of the things.”

  “No. Just the one. The Deposition from the Cross, and they took that from its original location too. The Vatican never much cared for Caravaggio. They thought he was too revolutionary, too close to the poor. He painted people with dirty feet. He made the apostles look like ordinary mortals you might meet in the street.”

  “So that’s what you like about him? You get that from your old man, I suppose.”

  “It’s part of what I like. And I’m me, not someone else.”

  “Sure.” Rossi remembered the father. A real troublemaker. He never stood to one side for anything, never took a bribe either, which made him one very odd politician indeed. “So where?”

  The kid nodded toward the river. “Six-minute walk over there. The Church of Sant’Agostino. You can call it The Madonna of Loreto or The Madonna of the Pilgrims. Either works.”

  “It’s good?”

  “The feet are really dirty. The Vatican hated it. It’s a wonderful piece of work but I know of better.”

  Rossi thought about this. “I don’t suppose you follow football, do you? It may give us more to talk about.”

  Costa said nothing. He turned on the radio scanner and plugged in the earpiece. Rossi sniffed the air.

  “You smell those drains? They spend all this money building the biggest church on the planet. They got the Pope in residence just a little walk away. And still the drains stink like some backstreet in Trastevere. Maybe they just chop up bodies and flush them down the toilet or something. As if we’d get to know.”

  Costa kept fiddling with the damned radio scanner. They both knew it was supposed to be banned.

  “Hey,” Rossi growled. “Don’t you think I get bored too? If Falcone hears you’ve been messing with that thing, he’ll kick your ass.”

  Costa shrugged his narrow shoulders and smiled. “I was trying to find some football for you. What’s the problem?”

  Rossi stuck up his big hands and laughed. “Okay. You got me there.”

  They watched the thin crowds shuffle across the square in the enervating heat. It was too hot for the bag-snatchers, Rossi decided. The weather was doing more to reduce the Rome crime rate than anything a couple of cops could ever achieve. He could hardly blame Costa for playing with the scanner. None of them liked being told there were places in the city where they weren’t welcome. Maybe Costa had some anticlerical thing in his genes, however much he told everyone he was apolitical, the opposite of his father. And the Vatican was part of the city, whatever the politicians said. It was crazy to think some thieving little bastard could snatch a bag in front of them then scuttle off into the milling masses inside St. Peter’s and suddenly become untouchable, the property of the Pope’s Swiss Guards in their funny blue uniforms and ankle socks.

  Costa was never going to hear anything of import on his little pocket scanner. Too little went on in the Vatican for that. But just listening was a form of protest in itself. It said: We’re here.

  Rossi eyed a long crocodile of black nuns who followed a woman waving a little red pennant on a stick. He looked at his watch and wished the hands would move more quickly.

  “Enough,” he announced, then, to his surprise, felt Costa’s hand on his arm. The young detective was listening intently to a squealing racket in the earpiece of the radio.

  “Someone’s been shot,” Costa told him, suddenly earnest. “In the Library Reading Room. You know where that is?”

  “Of course,” the older man said, nodding. “Might as well be Mon-golia, as far as we’re concerned.”

  Costa’s sharp brown eyes pleaded with him. “Somebody’s been shot. We’re not going to just stand here, are we?”

  Rossi sighed. “Say again after me: ‘The Vatican is another country.’ Falcone can put it more clearly for you if you want.” Falcone could, Rossi thought, put it very clearly indeed. He didn’t even want to imagine what that conversation would be like. He’d been very glad that the last five years had been spent outside Falcone’s reach. He only wished it could have been longer.

  “Sure,” Costa agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t look. They never said we couldn’t go in there. They just said we couldn’t arrest people.”

  Rossi thought about that. The kid was right, up to a point.

  “That’s all you heard? Someone’s been shot?”

  “Isn’t that enough? Do you want to go back and tell Falcone we didn’t even offer to help?”

  Rossi patted his jacket, felt his gun there, and watched Costa do the same. They looked down the Via di Porta Angelica toward the entrance to the private Vatican quarters. The Swiss Guards who were normally there checking visitors’ papers were gone, doubtless called to the event. Two Roman cops could walk straight in without a single question being asked. It seemed like an invitation.

  “I’m not running,” Rossi growled. “Not in this damned heat.”

  “Your call,” Costa answered, and was off, out of the square, through the open gate, legs pumping.

  “Kids . . .” Luca Rossi grunted, and shook his head.

  3

  By the time Rossi arrived at the Library, some seven minutes later, Nic Costa had quietly established that the man who lay on the floor, head ripped apart by at least three bullets, was indeed dead. He had watched the injured attendant being taken away by two scared-looking medics. He had quietly, carefully, made a few inquiries. The room was in utter chaos, which suited Costa just fine. The terrified Guido Fratelli had immediately assumed that Costa was some kind of Vatican official, which was good enough for the three other Swiss Guards who had come to the room, established there was no imminent danger, and now awaited further orders. Costa had no early desire to disillusion any of them. He had, in four years on the force, seen plenty of dead bodies and even a couple of shootings. But finding a corpse and the epidermis of another, and in the Vatican, was a new experience, one he was unwilling to relinquish.

  His mind was working overtime. He let it race. The effort almost pushed the smell of the room from his consciousness, making the stench of blood and the way it mixed with the hot, arid air from the open windows just a little less noticeable.

  He let Fratelli babble out his story, unable, all the time, to take his eyes off the woman who sat on a chair, back to the wall, watching everything. She was something short of thirty, modestly dressed in a tight, gray business suit. She had shoulder-length dark hair, expensively cut, large green eyes and a serious, classically proportioned face, like one in some Renaissance painting. Not Caravaggio, she was too beautiful for that. No one had that kind of radiance in his work, not even the madonnas. It wasn’t supposed to exist. She looked, too, as if she were holding everything that had happened inside her, trying not to let it explode.

  When the guard was done she stood up and walked over to him. Costa noticed that her gray suit was spattered with blood. She seemed unworried by it. Delayed shoc
k, he thought. Sometime soon she would realize how close she had come to being murdered, how a man had been shot to death in front of her after displaying this strange and gruesome trophy on the desk. The skin still lay there, looking like the castoff from some bad Halloween party. Nic Costa found it difficult to believe it had once belonged to a human being.

  “You’re city police?” she asked, in a voice which had some odd tinge of accent to it, as if she were half English or American.

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought so.”

  The Swiss Guards looked at each other and groaned but had yet to find the courage to argue. They were still waiting for someone.

  Rossi, who had been content to let the kid do the talking, smiled at them. The big man was willing to stand back. It felt a touch weird but Costa had got there first. He already seemed to be in control. All the same Luca Rossi felt a touch gray around the gills. Which he did more and more recently.

  The woman said, “I think Stefano was trying to tell me something.”

  “Stefano?” Costa asked. “The man who was going to kill you?”

  She shook her head and Nic Costa couldn’t stop himself watching the way her hair moved from side to side. “He didn’t try to kill me. That idiot”—she indicated Guido Fratelli, who went red at her words—“didn’t understand what was going on. Stefano wanted me to go with him somewhere. He didn’t get the chance to explain.”

  The guard muttered something in his own defense and then fell silent.

  “What was he trying to tell you?” Costa asked.

  “He said . . .” She was trying hard to think. He could understand why it would be difficult. There was so much crammed into such a short period of time. “He said, ‘she’s still there.’ To think of Bartholomew. And that we should hurry.”

  Nic Costa watched her deliberate these points and he revised his opinion of her. Perhaps it wasn’t delayed shock. Perhaps she really was this cool, this detached from what had happened.

  “Hurry where?” he was about to ask when a man in a dark suit elbowed his way into the conversation, stabbed him hard in the shoulder with a fat index finger, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

  The newcomer was about his own size, well built and middle-aged. His suit stank of cigars.

  “Police,” Costa replied, deliberately cryptic.

  “ID?”

  He took out his wallet and showed the man his card.

  “Out,” the suit ordered. “Out now.”

  Costa looked at his partner, who felt similarly incensed, judging by the small amount of color that seeped back into his cheeks.

  Rossi bent down to the truculent newcomer and asked, “And we are?”

  The newcomer looked, Costa thought, like a boxer who had just found God: a big face with florid, pockmarked cheeks and a broken nose. He had a crucifix in the lapel of his black wool jacket which, as far as Costa was concerned, meant nothing.

  “Hanrahan,” he grunted, and again Costa tried to place the accent: Maybe there was some gruff Irish touch and a little American in there. “Security. Now you boys just walk along, eh? Leave this to us.”

  Costa tapped him on the shoulder and was amused by the anger that flared in his gray eyes. “You want to know what we found out? I mean, we were just here to help, Mr. Hanrahan. This could have been a very nasty thing. Someone shooting in the Vatican. Let’s face it, you took a while to get here. We could’ve been stopping something pretty bad.”

  The woman looked at the three men fiercely. Costa knew what she was thinking: They lock horns at a time like this? She was right too.

  “This is a Vatican matter,” Hanrahan said. “We’ll look into it. If we need your help, we’ll call.”

  “No, it’s not,” Costa insisted. “This is our business too.”

  Hanrahan said just one word: “Jurisdiction.”

  “You mean,” Costa asked, “your dumb guard here killed the man on your turf so that’s it?”

  Hanrahan glanced at Guido Fratelli. “If that’s what happened.”

  Costa walked to the desk; he picked up an edge of the skin. This had once covered an arm. It felt damp and cold. And more human than he had expected.

  “And what about this?” he asked.

  Hanrahan glared at him. “What’s your point?”

  “My point?” The man was not a cop, Costa realized. He wasn’t even a Swiss Guard, because they always wore some kind of uniform. Security maybe, but he was about defending things, not interested in the slow, careful process of discovery. “My point is that somewhere there’s got to be a body this fits. And for the life of me I don’t think that’s going to be here.”

  “Detective—” the woman interrupted.

  “Please. Bear with me. What I’m saying, Mr. Hanrahan, is that we’ve got two murders here and if you’re a betting man I’ll give you good money one of them took place in our jurisdiction. And you”—he cast a withering glance at the miserable Guido Fratelli, now close to tears—“you don’t. Now we’re cooperating, we’re being nice. Do you think there’s some small chance we might get the same in return?”

  Hanrahan shook his head. “You really do not know what you are dealing with.”

  “Hey!” Costa’s voice rose. He put a hand on Hanrahan’s shoulder. “Are we after the same thing or what?”

  “No,” Hanrahan said instantly with a grimace. “Not at all. Now . . .”

  The woman pushed between them and looked Nic Costa in the face.

  “Do you have a car?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “He said to go there quickly. Can we do that, please? Now?”

  Once again, Costa was puzzled by how calm she was. All the time they had been arguing she had been thinking, trying to work out the riddle the dead man had left her.

  “You know where?”

  “I think so. It was stupid of me not to realize earlier. We need to go now. Please?”

  Nic Costa patted Hanrahan on the shoulder as they left and said, “See? You just have to know how to ask.”

  4

  Costa thought about the abbreviated story Sara Farnese told them in the car. It raised a host of questions. He wondered too about her reasoning. Maybe the woman was already in shock, only inwardly, and this was just some crazy wild-goose chase.

  “Why Tiber Island?” he asked.

  “I told you. We have to go to the church.”

  Rossi, who was driving, cast him a chilly glance. Costa wondered if his new partner was starting to get bad feelings about this whole thing. It was an odd decision. They should have waited for instructions, maybe. But he had no evidence a crime had been committed on city territory. Besides, the woman was adamant: She wanted to get there quickly. Costa thought he could make out a good case in front of Falcone. He usually did.

  “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  She sighed, as if she were talking to a schoolchild. “Bartholomew. The saint was flayed alive. Skinned. Stefano did some work on that period. He would have known. The church on Tiber Island is Bartholomew’s. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “That’s it?” Costa replied, fast revising his hopes of keeping Falcone sweet.

  “That’s it,” she agreed testily. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  The two men looked at each other. The August traffic was light. They made their way along the Trastevere waterfront, then took a left turn onto the tiny island that sat in the middle of the river.

  “This Stefano,” Rossi asked as they pulled into the piazza in front of the church, “he was a friend of yours?”

  She said nothing, and was stepping out the door before they had come to a halt.

  “One scary woman,” Rossi grunted just out of earshot, shaking his head. The two policemen followed her and looked at the church. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong here. This was an old, unspoiled corner of the city, with a cobbled piazza where you could sit in the shade away from the murmur of traffic that ran along both banks of the riv
er.

  “You think we should call in?” Rossi asked.

  Costa shrugged. “What’s the point? Let them hang us in their time, not ours.”

  “Yeah,” the older man agreed. “Let me see if I can find someone. Get some keys.”

  The woman was already at the door of the church.

  “Hey,” Costa yelled. “Wait.”

  But she was gone. Costa swore and raced after her, shouting for Rossi to follow.

  The place was empty. They stood in the nave, framed by the polished columns on either side, Costa feeling the way he always did in churches: uncomfortable. It was a matter of upbringing, he guessed. The places just spooked him sometimes.

  They looked in the dimly lit side chapels. They tried a couple of doors that opened onto tiny storage rooms full of dust.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said.

  They stood in the nave, Costa trying to think of other options. She was disappointed, anxious, as if this were some intellectual puzzle demanding a solution.

  “It was worth a try,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I blame myself already,” she said softly. “There has to be more to it than this. We did some work here once. There was a temple here, to Aesculapius, before the church was built. Maybe something underground.”

  “Aescoo—who?”

  “Aesculapius. He was the god of medicine.” She looked at him. “That makes it appropriate too, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.” Costa was out of his depth and knew it. There was more going on in the woman’s head than he understood. He wondered how much she realized that herself.

  Rossi returned waving a set of large, old keys. Costa felt suddenly awkward. Somehow he seemed to have taken the initiative, which was surely Rossi’s prerogative. Rossi was older, more senior. He knew more.