by James Green
‘What do you think you should do? They’re your family.’
Ricci slumped back down into his chair. He was tired and his head felt like someone was driving a spike into it.
‘Headache bad?’
‘Never mind my headache. Why do you think he wasn’t interested in a nuclear bomb about to arrive here in Rome?’
Jimmy gave a shrug. Ricci asked too many dumb questions to answer them all.
‘He knows something that we don’t; also I think he was trying to make a point.’
‘What point?’
‘That he doesn’t like me.’ There was no more outburst, the headache and frustration combined to silence Ricci. He leaned forward with his head in his hands. ‘You should see a doctor.’
Ricci ignored him so Jimmy sat back and waited.
The monsignor didn’t like him and he guessed the monsignor was the kind of man who let people know when he didn’t like them. But in Jimmy’s case he couldn’t do much about it because he was under orders to help. So the drinks and opera with friends could have been an “up yours”, which would become clear later. And he did it because he knew something they didn’t. If he really didn’t care about the bomb was it because he knew there was no bomb? If that was the case then what was the whole fucking game about? He could see why Ricci had a headache. This whole shambles almost gave him one.
Ricci sat up again. He looked dreadful but he was ready to get going again.
‘How long before we hear? You think less than an hour?’
‘The police have the car, all they need to do is get something to test with. They’ll start looking for names from flights and rentals straight away, not wait for results. I don’t know how many vans get rented from the airport or cars big enough to carry some sort of crate but I hope it’s not so many. Once they start checking names from rentals against passenger lists they should turn up something fairly soon and that gives them the type of vehicle and registration. After that it shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘So, shall we wait here?’
‘No, I need some air. They’ve got the mobile number so it doesn’t matter where we wait and this dump depresses me.’
Jimmy looked round. It was a dump, and yet from the outside it was what the tourists wanted the Vatican to look like. It was just as well that they never got into the place. The inside would have been a real disappointment. It was like the Catholic Church really. What you saw from the outside was impressive, but it wasn’t what you got if you came inside.
Ricci was standing by the door waiting.
‘Well, are you coming?’
‘Sorry, I was thinking about something.’
‘You think too much, you know that? You spend too much time in your own head. No wonder you think they show bloody films there. Come on, I need a drink.’ Jimmy stood up, there it was again. People had been telling him that almost from day one but he wouldn’t listen. Well, now he’d listened and it all made sense. He joined Ricci, switched off the office light, and walked towards the stairs. ‘I’ll leave my car at your place and get a taxi home. I’ll pick the car up tomorrow.’
‘If there is a tomorrow.’
‘No, you’re wrong, it’s all too weird. There’ll be a tomorrow, there’s always a tomorrow. You’re good, Jimmy, very good, but I think you’re wrong on this. Dead wrong.’
No I’m not, thought Jimmy. I was wrong, but now I think I’m right. In fact I know I’m right.
THIRTY-FOUR
‘You know my trouble, Danny, I don’t listen to people. People keep telling me things and I just don’t listen. I guess I try to live in my head too much.’
‘I told you there was nothing I could do.’
‘I know. You told me. You told me more than once but I just wouldn’t listen.’
Jimmy took a sip of his beer and Danny reluctantly took a sip from his coffee. The barman read his paper and the few regulars talked, smoked, or stared into space. The bar was just the same, dull and shabby, and the sky still didn’t get any further than being a narrow ribbon of blue between the apartment roofs. Jimmy liked it.
‘Where’s Ron?’
‘A lecture.’
‘But you’ve bunked off?’
‘I do sometimes. It doesn’t matter now, does it?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘We’re starting on Dogmatic Theology.’
‘Good.’
‘What do you mean, good? You wouldn’t say good if you’d just started on Dogmatic Theology.’
‘So what’s your favourite?’
Danny thought about it.
‘Maybe Church History. Know what happened and why it happened and you begin to get some idea about why things are the way they are. Church History helps.’
‘I know what you mean.’
Danny got up.
‘Back in a minute.’
He walked away towards the toilet.
Jimmy liked Danny. In many ways they were the same. They both wanted to know why things were the way they were. With Danny it was the Church, with Jimmy, just at the minute, it was the investigation. He thought about how Ricci had reacted the previous night in the bar when the call had come through. The test had been positive, there had been something radioactive carried in the red Punto. Florence airport had turned up a van rented by two Asian men travelling on British passports who had flown in from Pakistan via Frankfurt. Ricci had gone all nervous on him and had ordered a large whisky.
‘Christ, Jimmy, I was wrong and you were right. Christ, Jimmy.’ He had put his mobile on the table. He wanted to call somebody, his family probably. He wanted to say, ‘Don’t ask questions, just pack a small bag and get out of Rome as fast as you can and as far as you can.’ But if every copper who was looking for the men and the van did that Rome would be in total panic inside one hour and the chances of nailing the culprits would have gone. Jimmy remembered watching him. He hadn’t made any call. He’d drunk his whisky, picked up his phone and put it away, and asked what they should do. What did he think there was for two men sitting in a bar in central Rome to do? The police had all they needed.
And he had been right. There’d been nothing for them to do.
Ricci was the one they’d phoned to say they’d got them. They’d been picked up as they approached Rome. Now they were somewhere being interrogated. It was all simple and straightforward. Jimmy smiled, remembering how Ricci had been really pissed off after the danger was over. He had banged on about how they had been cut out of it, as though it had all been done deliberately to spite him.
‘I should have been there. It was us who worked out what was going on. We did the detective work. We worked it out all the way from Cheng to Florence airport.’ Jimmy liked how it was “we” now, how they had done it all together and Ricci had never had any doubts. ‘They just took our message and watched the Florence to Rome road, for God’s sake. Traffic probably made the collar.’ Christ, was he pissed off, and he wouldn’t leave it alone. He had kept on about it. ‘This way we get nothing and the team chasing Anna gets it all. They get to be heroes, and the best of it is, they didn’t even do what they set out to do. They missed Anna. She’s free and clear, but they’re still the bloody heroes and no one even knows who we are. We get nothing.’
Jimmy reflected that he could have asked Ricci whether saving Rome from a terrorist-sponsored nuclear attack was getting nothing. But Ricci hadn’t been in the mood to appreciate the irony. Maybe he had wanted a James Bond movie ending with him as the hero. What they got was what you always get, the bad guys got picked up and the good guys went home. And that’s what he had done, finished his drink, gone home, and left Ricci in the bar. For Ricci, last night it was over, but not for Jimmy. He knew it wasn’t over.
Danny came back.
‘You want another beer?’
‘No, I’m OK with this one. Don’t much feel like drinking or talking. I’m not good company today.’
‘Thinking about the investigation? I thought you said it was sorted.’
‘I know.’
‘Then for God’s sake leave it alone.’
‘I guess I still live in my head too much.’
‘What time’s your meeting?’
‘Two o’clock.’
‘You’ll tell her how it went?’
‘I think she probably knows.’
Danny looked at his coffee trying to make his mind up whether to say what he was thinking. He decided he would.
‘Jimmy, you told me it was all over, finished. But you didn’t tell me what happened. You didn’t tell me how it finished, and that’s OK because I don’t want to know. But I’m still worried about you. One minute you’re telling me some weird story and saying how you want me to watch your back because it’s all big deal stuff and very hush-hush. Then all of a sudden it’s finished. Everyone’s gone home and the show’s over. Whatever this is about it’s not that bullshit about Archbishop Cheng. I think this is about you, and that’s me as a copper speaking as well as a friend. I think you’re still in trouble. The machine is still chewing you.’
Jimmy looked at him. Was he a friend? When had that happened, if it had happened? Or was it just words? What the hell, friend or copper, either or both, he was right. Jimmy knew he should have listened to him from the beginning. In a way it was all about him, and he should have seen it long ago. God knew it was pointed out often enough.
‘No, Danny. It really is finished and it’s not something you need to worry about. Not as a copper, not as anything.’
Danny gave a shrug.
‘OK, if you say so. But you’re going to pack it in, aren’t you? Whatever it was, it’s made you change your mind about becoming a priest.’
‘I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m asking the question, although whether I still have a choice may be in someone else’s hands.’
He looked at his watch; it was nearly time to go but all he wanted was to stay and sit. He’d been up all night going through the whole thing from beginning to end and now he was worn out. Now he just wanted to rest. He picked up his glass and finished his beer. He began to rise.
‘I better get going.’
‘OK, see you around.’
Jimmy put his hand in his pocket pulled out some coins and put some on the table.
‘You won’t be having another, will you?’
‘Do I ever?’
‘See you, Danny.’
‘See you, Jimmy.’
Jimmy picked up the bottle and glass and took them to the bar and walked away. The barman glared at Jimmy’s back, then went back to his paper. Danny watched him go. Just before he reached the door the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ jingled. Jimmy stopped, took out his mobile, and held it to his ear and walked out of the bar into the street. As he walked past the window Danny could see he was listening to someone. God go with you, he thought, then added, not that it will change anything even if he does.
THIRTY-FIVE
It was the same attic room, shitty as always.
‘Come in, Mr Costello.’ Jimmy came in and sat down. ‘You asked to see me. Was it to bring me up to date?’
‘I think you’re pretty well up to date, Professor. Wouldn’t you say that you were pretty well up to date?’
She was still neat, still just back from the laundry, and Jimmy was right, she wouldn’t say. She sat and waited. He had asked for the meeting, it was up to him.
‘What happens now, Professor?’
‘In what way?’
‘Now that the Vatican has become a nuclear power,’ he paused just long enough to know that he had scored, ‘which you realise puts it in breach of the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and I don’t know how many others?’
She didn’t say anything and her expression never changed. Whatever had been there, in her eyes, had flickered and gone. But it had been there and she knew he had seen it. She didn’t try to be clever. If he knew, he knew.
‘When did you know?’
‘I worked it out last night.’
‘May I ask how?’
‘Detective work, just straight detective work. You’d laid it all out nicely for me in your script, the one Ricci and I have been acting out for you. All I had to do was go over it. That’s the problem with movies, they’re like dreams, while you’re watching they all seem fine, the plot always makes sense. But afterwards, if you go over it, you spot the holes, the weaknesses, the places things don’t quite fit.’
‘Something gave it away. What was it? Do you mind me asking?’
‘No, it’s why I wanted to meet, I wanted you to ask. I wanted us to talk. It was the red Punto that finally did it, but I think I was on my way for a while. Certainly after Anna went walkabout I knew there was something I should have been seeing. But it was the Punto that really did it, that told me I was right. There was something I’d missed, something that was there all along but I couldn’t see it, not while the movie was running. But after it was all over it was just a matter of going back over the whole thing and looking at it in the right way, which we both know was not the way it was shown to me in the first place.’
She turned it over in her mind. Then she relaxed.
‘You just can’t get the staff, and you can’t do it entirely by yourself, can you? There’s always some little thing that you delegate and that’s where it all starts to unravel. Some little thing like hiring a car.’
‘The guys who came in rented a van so whatever they picked up wasn’t carried to the airport in a small car. There wasn’t enough room.’
‘You would have thought I could have handed that to someone without any mistake getting made. She rented a Punto, did she?’
Jimmy nodded.
‘A red one, maybe it was her favourite colour, whoever she was.’
McBride made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
‘A secretary. She was fair and the right sort of age. I had a false Italian driving licence made up in the name of Anna Bruck. On the day I needed the car to be hired I told the secretary that a Sister Bruck had a problem. She needed a hire car quickly but had been called to a meeting and she couldn’t be in two places at once, could she? Would she phone Hertz and rent a car in Anna’s name and then go and pick it up using her driving licence, which Sister Anna had left with me. I gave her cash to cover the hire.’
‘I would have said you were taking a chance, but if the whole thing was straightforward and payment was in cash I suppose you figured no one would look too closely and no one would be any the wiser. Did you drop it off at Florence?’
‘Yes. It was a nuisance but I couldn’t delegate that. I left it near the Hertz office with the paperwork and the keys in it. No one saw me but it was there when they started to look.’
‘What about the name?’
‘What about it?’
‘Bruck. It’s not exactly Italian is it?’
‘No, but names don’t mean much. The secretary spoke like a Roman, dressed like one, and the licence had a Rome address. The name wouldn’t matter. She was supremely ordinary, nothing would go wrong.’
‘Except she wore a yellow headscarf and kept her sunglasses on even in the office, that got remembered.’
‘Yellow! She wore a yellow headscarf and sunglasses?’
Jimmy nodded.
‘You can’t blame her, she wasn’t a professional, just someone you used, but a woman who’s an expert at staying invisible doesn’t wear a yellow headscarf and dark glasses to rent a car.’
‘No, she certainly does not. But I couldn’t very well have edited her choice of clothes even if I’d thought about it. Yellow, how unfortunate, no wonder it set you to thinking.’
‘It was just one more thing, but it meant she wasn’t the real Anna Bruck whatever the forensic said. Wasn’t it all a bit risky, so late on in the whole thing? The renting of the car in Anna’s name, was that so important?’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t risky as you put it. I’d done it before, you see, so I knew it could work. We really did have a sister, a Nigerian missionary sister, wh
o was visiting Rome and needed a car and suddenly got called away. She lent me her driving licence and I rented the car in her name. No one looked too closely, and my black face wasn’t so different from her black face so no one made a fuss.’
‘What if the secretary had said no?’
‘I knew her, she’s a nice girl, co-operative and always keen to help. If I asked in the right way and said how much the imaginary Sister Anna needed the car I knew she would agree, and she did.’
‘I see, a simple but effective lie.’
‘A lie, Mr Costello? How was it a lie? In a sense, a very real sense, Anna was in Rome and I needed her to rent a car.’
‘But she wasn’t a sister.’
McBride let that one pass.
‘She did what I asked her to do, she rented a car for Anna Bruck. Unfortunately she rented a Fiat Punto and wore a yellow headscarf to do it. Oh well, as I said, I couldn’t do everything myself, could I? And it served its purpose.’
‘You used what came to hand, Cheng, me, Ricci, the China watcher, the monsignor, and the secretary. You looked around and used what was available.’ She nodded, a bit smugly, Jimmy thought. He could use that. He would use it to get the leverage he needed. ‘What are you really, and don’t tell me you’re a simple academic.’
‘I am an academic, Mr Costello, but also I occasionally get asked to do things that need to be done, and this needed to be done.’
‘What about the traces of radioactivity planted? How did you do that?’
He was almost there now. She was enjoying herself, showing him how clever she’d been. All he had to do was wait for her to get sloppy.
‘When the secretary came back from renting the car I told her to put it in my parking space which would be empty and bring the keys to me. I had already arranged for someone from the Instituto de Technica to pick up the car, plant something that would produce suspiciously high levels of radioactivity, and bring it back when I needed it to go to Florence airport. I don’t know what he used. He said it would show up clearly but wouldn’t be at all dangerous when the car was used again.’
