by David Hewson
They made an odd pair. Rossi, with his big, sad face and sprawling body, looked like a man who would stay single all his life and had probably forgotten when he last slept with a woman. Crazy Teresa had run through endless affairs in the department, all of them brief, all of them encounters which tended to leave the male party wan and glassy-eyed afterward. A little taller than Nic Costa, powerfully built, with a handsome face that smiled constantly as it examined every last thing that fell under its gaze, she was an astonishingly skilled pathologist who had worked as a successful hospital surgeon before something—the craving for excitement was her excuse—drove her into the morgue. Costa never really swallowed that line. Her work wasn’t exciting. She was so painstaking and exact she found herself working long, tiring hours just to extract every last shred of evidence. The bodies Teresa Lupo called her “customers” were, in spite of her easy way with them, still the remains of human beings. Her relationship with them went beyond the forensic. At times she was able to offer the kinds of insight that failed the best of cops and that, he thought, was what drove her. She liked playing detective, and often was very good at it.
Rossi and the woman sat together opposite him, picking at the plates, guzzling the cheap house red and sucking at cigarettes when a gap between the delivery of the flesh and the booze allowed. Costa had arrived late, on purpose. He waited until the waitress, a surly-looking girl with rings in her nose and ears, came up with a pad, then ordered salad and a glass of Cala Viola, a young Sardinian white which was the only wine he recognized on the list.
“Chicken salad?” the girl demanded.
“Just salad.”
“We don’t do ‘just salad,’ ” she snarled. “You can take the chicken off if you like.”
Costa sighed, digging in his heels. “Why don’t you take the chicken off?”
“Hah! And have you moaning when it comes to paying the bill? Do I look that stupid?”
Rossi leaned forward and gave her the serious look. “Hey. If it comes to it, I’ll take the chicken off. He’s a vegetarian. Okay?”
The nose ring twitched. The girl suddenly looked more sympathetic. “Sorry,” she said sincerely. “Me too. Jesus, are we in the wrong place or what?”
When the waitress returned with a large plate of rocket and salad leaves and a decent glass of icy wine Crazy Teresa was midway through an explanation of the physical function of the mushy glands sitting in front of them, lightly cooked with garlic and celery.
“Can we not talk food tonight?” Nic Costa asked.
“You’re squeamish?” Crazy Teresa inquired, amazed. “You two, of all people. After what happened yesterday?”
Luca Rossi sided with his partner. “Maybe it’s because of what happened yesterday. I mean, I like eating this stuff. To be absolutely honest with you, I’d really rather not know what it is.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “But you”—she pointed a strong, aggressive finger at Costa’s face—“need to watch this diet thing carefully. Medically, scientifically, vegetarianism is a fad. A dangerous one too. Unless you know how to balance your diet.”
Costa looked at the plate of unidentifiable meats, the pile of spent cigarettes and the near-empty flagon of wine in front of her and wondered who Crazy Teresa was to hand out lectures on eating habits.
“He can run faster than any man in the Questura,” Rossi said defensively. “They say you should’ve seen him on the pitch.”
“I did see him on the pitch, before he took up this running thing. He’s fast but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be faster if he ate some meat now and again. Look at that guy who plays hooker.”
Teresa was a rugby groupie. That was another well-known fact.
“Lamponi?” Rossi asked, a little jealous perhaps.
“Yeah. Look at the pecs. Look at the thighs on that.” She stabbed a ribbon of tripe. “That’s what meat does for you. Gives a man a body.”
Luca Rossi exchanged a knowing look with his partner. “He’s gay,” he said.
“What?”
“Lamponi. He’s gay,” Rossi repeated.
“Hell!”
“Perhaps,” Nic Costa suggested, “it was something in his diet. Too many female hormones in all those glands he keeps eating.”
“Yeah,” Rossi agreed. “Things start growing where they shouldn’t. Stuff starts shrinking instead of . . .” He shrugged.
Crazy Teresa banged the empty carafe on the table to order a new one, lit a cigarette and glared at them. “Bullshit merchants. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nic Costa looked at his watch. It was his turn to go to the house tonight. He didn’t want to be late. “What are we supposed to be talking about, Teresa? I gathered there was something on your mind.”
She pushed her fork around the remains on the plate. Costa realized he liked this woman. She was smart, fun too, but there was a serious side to her that underpinned everything.
“This skinning trick?” she asked slyly. “You’re happy with the way things have turned out? All nice and obvious like that?”
“It’s not closed,” Costa said. “Not by any means, though I didn’t see anything in your report that raised any new issues.”
“To hell with the report. That’s just about what I know. Sometimes there are things that grate, and maybe they’re nothing at all, but you still ought to hear them.”
Rossi folded his arms and looked at her. “We’re listening.”
“The professor. Did he have any medical experience? Had he worked in an abattoir at some stage?”
Costa shrugged. “Not that we know of. He was an academic. I can’t see how he would have done either of those things. Why?”
Teresa Lupo was unhappy about something. “I don’t know. I may be wrong about this, but it’s just a very odd thing to do. To skin someone like that and do it pretty well too at what I assume is his first attempt.”
Rossi’s long face grew doubtful. “Is it that hard? I had an uncle in the country. He used to do this trick when he killed a rabbit. He’d make some little nick in the back of the neck, sort of shake the thing up and down in some way he knew, and the whole skin came right off. Like a glove or something, inside out, clean as anything.”
Crazy Teresa was incredulous. “You’re comparing human beings with furry rodents? Are you serious? What you call ‘skin’ is actually three separate, living organs. The epidermis, which is the outer part, the dermis underneath, the subcutis, the layer of fat below that. You can’t make a nick somewhere, throw the corpse up in the air and have it come down stripped. This is complicated . . .”
She watched some food land on the neighboring table courtesy of the pierced waitress.
“Wait here. I won’t be a moment.”
Crazy Teresa stalked into the kitchen. Rossi watched his partner warily from across the table.
“I’m paying,” he said.
“Oh, I know that, Uncle Luca.”
“She said it was important, Nic.”
And maybe it is, Costa thought. More important than Luca Rossi could begin to guess.
Crazy Teresa came back with a side of pork belly, uncooked, and a small kitchen knife. She dropped the meat in front of them and watched the raised eyebrows from the tables around.
“It’s okay,” Teresa yelled back at them. “We’re not going to eat it just yet.”
Costa smiled at her. “That’s a relief.”
“Listen. The pig’s is a pretty close approximation to the human skin system in some ways, which is why it’s used for grafts from time to time. You’ve got to remember too that some cannibal cultures call us the ‘long pig,’ and there’s a reason for that. Physiology and taste. So here.”
She sat down and gave the short knife to Rossi.
“Try skinning it.”
He waited a moment, then began to slice away at the fat underneath the thick epidermis. Then he pulled, hoping to lift it away from the carcass. It was impossible, even for a strong man like Rossi.
; “There’s all that fat,” he complained. “People aren’t like that.”
Teresa eyed him. “Not all people. You’d be amazed how much fat you can get on a corpse. You’re right. It’s not an exact match, but it’s close. What I’m trying to say to you is there’s no easy, quick solution. I looked up some of the classical images of this Bartholomew person on the Web. Almost every one shows him about to be martyred and they all have the same idea. The person who wants to do it is staring at him, wondering how to do the job. It’s not obvious.”
Costa thought of the painting in the church. This was exactly what it portrayed. Skinning a man required more than just strength and resolution. It surely needed some level of knowledge of the body as a starting point.
“So how’d he do it?” Costa asked.
Teresa took the knife off Rossi, stood up, went behind the big man and made him hold his arms up in the air.
“My guess is he went in behind the neck and circled there, feeling his way, getting an idea for how deep to cut, not trying to remove anything right then.”
Rossi lowered his arms, feeling stupid. “You mean he cut his throat?”
“Not enough to kill him,” Teresa noted. “That’s not the idea. All the reference works on skinning people emphasize how important it is for the victim to remain conscious for as long as possible. In some North American cultures they prided themselves on their ability to remove most of the skin intact and be able to show it to the victim before he died.”
“What happened then?” Costa asked.
“This is all conjecture,” Teresa warned. “I’ve tried to come up with a way in which I can estimate the exact sequence of events but it’s impossible. I guess he turned him sideways somehow, went down the back, all the way along the spine, lifting a little on each side, then gradually opened it out, up to the shoulder blades, out to the waist until most of the back was off.”
The party at the adjoining table stood up, mumbling, and went to the counter to pay.
“And he’d still be alive?” Rossi wondered.
She shrugged. This was all hypothesis. “He might have blacked out from the agony, if he was lucky. But then he’d probably come to later. After the back, the knife would work round the groin, the arms, work round to the front. Just very slowly, until he could bring it all to the chest, like a sheath.”
Rossi pushed away the plate in front of him.
“How long?” Costa asked. “From beginning to end?”
“An hour. Maybe more. And you don’t just need a strong stomach for this. You need a lot of physical strength too. This Rinaldi man was in rotten shape. He ate terribly. He drank too much. He had the kind of liver you’d see on a French goose. I don’t know . . . This may be all wrong.”
Costa and Rossi waited. Crazy Teresa was about to say what she had wanted to say all along.
She leaned over the table and spoke softly, so that no one beyond would hear. “My feeling is this: The average surgeon wouldn’t have the strength for that. Someone who worked in an abattoir maybe. Someone who had watched a procedure in a hospital could too. But a flabby, out-of-condition university professor? No. I can’t give you any hard scientific fact to put down in a report. But I don’t believe it. Not for one moment. Sorry . . . I know you thought you had this one fixed.”
The two men looked at each other.
“On the other hand,” she said, “you’re listening to Crazy Teresa. So maybe you should take that into account.”
Rossi put a hand on her arm, shocked. “What do you mean? ‘Crazy Teresa’?”
She refilled her glass again. “I gather that’s a nickname some of them are using now.”
“Who?” Rossi demanded. “You let me know! You give me the names!”
Costa said nothing and wished he didn’t face the drive ahead, wished he could order another glass of the good wine.
“This is a professional organization,” Rossi continued. “We don’t countenance behavior like that, do we?”
Nic Costa raised an empty glass to his partner.
“Sweet man,” Teresa said, flattered. “Excuse me now. I need to go.”
They watched her large, happy frame squeeze through the restaurant and head for the corridor at the rear.
“I think you’ve found the perfect partner, Uncle Luca,” Costa said. “One who can drink, smoke and eat at the same time.”
Rossi was offended. “She’s a good woman, Nic. Don’t you say otherwise. And she’s not crazy either.”
Nic Costa took the small knife and stabbed at the raw joint of pork on the table. It was tough. She had a point. The waitress returned and looked at it too.
“Are you done with this, sir?” she asked Rossi. “Or would you like a bag to take it home? I mean, it is going on your bill.”
Rossi sighed as she cleared the table. When she was gone he looked Costa in the eye.
“So what do you think?”
Costa frowned. “I hope to God she’s wrong.”
“Yeah,” Rossi nodded. “All that work. All that nagging from Falcone.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“Well?”
This change in their relationship seemed permanent now. For some reason the big man seemed to look to him for a lead. Perhaps, in spite of his greater experience, he felt lost in these complexities.
“If it wasn’t Rinaldi, if it was someone else, Luca, we don’t have a clue to his motivation. And if we don’t know why he did it, we don’t know why he shouldn’t do it again.”
He hesitated before going further. Rossi’s long face was beginning to droop toward the empty plate in front of him.
“All we have,” Nic Costa said carefully, “is that number to the man in the Vatican.”
Teresa Lupo was coming back from the toilets, smiling, happy, ordering grappa from behind the bar. Rossi was right. She was a smart woman, not crazy at all. And she was correct in her analysis. Costa knew it instinctively.
17
When Jay Gallo came to, it was night. Lying on his back on the hard sand, he could see the lights of the planes descending into Fiumicino airport, hear the roar of their engines. It was the only sound around him. He awoke knowing full well where he was: by the banks of the dead river, with its stink of chemicals, and worse, miles from anywhere. It would be a long walk back to the road and, perhaps, a long time before any motorist would pick up a hitchhiker in his present state. Gallo’s mouth was full of blood. His head felt as if it had been split open. His nose was shattered and his face ached like hell. But he was alive. His hands moved around his body, feeling for broken bones. He raised himself from the sand on a single arm. He could see only through one eye. He could taste the dead river in his mouth. The water seemed stagnant, poisonous with the scum of algae.
“Bastard,” Jay Gallo spat through broken teeth, wondering who, of the many people he had pissed off over the years, had arranged this particular lesson. It seemed rather pointless without that piece of information.
Gradually his senses began to return. His sight improved, enough to see the lights of the coast at Ostia. He began to hear the shriek of seagulls, the far-off sound of a dinghy’s weak motor.
And, behind him, breathing.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gallo groaned, and began to turn.
The man was still sitting there on the bank, looking as if he had been waiting patiently for hours. He no longer wore the dark glasses. He had removed the jacket to reveal a plain white shirt. There was a reason for this, Gallo thought. The night was desperately close, so hot it was hard to take in sufficient air in a single breath. Then he cursed his own stupidity. The man had shrugged off the jacket because it was part of some disguise, a way of concealing his identity when they had met, in the presence of others. Now that they were alone, and his intent was clear, it was no longer needed.
Gallo fixed his attention on the figure in front of him. He was much younger than he first thought, possibly about his own age. He was muscular too, in a way that spoke of workouts and gy
ms. Oddly, there was sympathy in his face, as if some part of him regretted what was happening.
It was a face that was familiar somehow, which both surprised and irritated him.
“Who the hell are you?” he croaked.
The seated figure looked closely at him. The hint of compassion was there. “Just a cog in the wheel,” he said. “Just a part of the mechanism.”
“We’ve met.” His head hurt too much to think straight. But the memory was there. He’d done something with this man. Picked up a package maybe. Or delivered one.
“If I ever offended you in some way . . .” Gallo wanted to plead with this odd, taut figure in the dark, though he knew it was useless. And there was another thought in his head, one that kept getting bigger. If the man intended to kill him—and Jay Gallo could think of no other reason why they had come to the dead river—why had he waited? Why had he sat hours by his unconscious figure on the sand, risking discovery, just to see him wake? Was there something he wanted? Something Gallo could still provide, maybe barter with?
“You want to trade?” Gallo asked.
The seated man turned. His face came into the harsh moonlight. It was an exaggerated face, one that would turn from beauty to ugliness with a simple change of the light. He had dark, alert eyes glinting in the moonlight, pale skin and full cruel lips. The face of a bit player in a canvas by Caravaggio, Gallo thought randomly.
“What’s there to trade?”
“You tell me.”
“Nothing.”
To Gallo’s dismay he was rising to his feet.
Jay Gallo tried to struggle to join him but his head hurt too much, his mind was just too woozy.
“Hey,” he said, desperate for anything that could delay what was coming. “Why did you wait? Why?”
The strange face was cut in half by the moonlight. It was shocked, offended by the question. “You think I kill sleeping men?”
Gallo’s hands went up in front of him, two outstretched palms trying to ward off this big, black figure overhead.
