by David Hewson
A bitter, almost despondent look appeared on Falcone’s lean face. “Welcome to modern policing,” he said. “What Grimaldi has explained to you will be standard practice in all cases from this point on until we can successfully challenge it. Other officers are having this change in policy explained to them privately over the next few days, though not the reasons for it. We would like to keep those to ourselves.” He grimaced. “At least for a little while.”
Teresa Lupo glowered at the female inspector across the table. “You did this? Your cack-handed blundering has put the onus on us to prove bastards like these need to show us they’re innocent? That’s half our working practices dumped straight out the window. Just because you barged in there without doing your homework first.”
“No!” Susanna Placidi screeched back at her. She pointed at the photos on the screen. “I did my best. Malaspina is responsible for this. That man—”
“Not good enough,” the pathologist yelled. “You’re incompetent, Placidi. This is—”
“Ladies. Ladies!”
Grimaldi had a loud and commanding voice. It silenced them, for a little while at least.
Costa waited for the temperature to fall a little, then said, “In that case, you’d better start looking for some proof.”
“Where?” Susanna Placidi demanded.
Grimaldi stared at Falcone and raised an interested eyebrow.
“That,” the inspector announced, “is something you no longer need worry about.” He shook his head, stared at the desk, then at her. “This case… appalls me, Placidi. We have lost a dear friend. There are women who have been attacked — and worse — in this city of ours, while it was your responsibility to protect them. Your laxness and incompetence have cost innocent people their lives. You have damaged our ability to unravel the dreadful mess you have left behind. And all you can say is… you did your best. If that was the case, your best was sorely lacking. You can go home now. This case no longer concerns you.” He reached over and dragged the computer to his side of the table. “Nor any in the future, if I can help it. Breathe one word to a soul about what we have discussed here and I will, I swear, drag you in front of a disciplinary tribunal and finish what’s left of your career for good.”
Grimaldi took an envelope out of his pocket and placed it in front of her. “These are formal suspension papers, Inspector. I will confirm the notice was properly delivered.”
Placidi was speechless, red with rage, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I will give you a lift home, signora,” Grimaldi offered.
“I have a driver and a car!”
“Not anymore,” the lawyer replied.
Three
Falcone waited for them to leave. Then he got up and checked the door. There was no one else in earshot.
“This is my city,” he told them. “Our city. It’s got its problems, God knows. But I always thought a woman could walk safely on these streets. Any woman. Black or white. Legal or illegal. I don’t care. I will not allow that to change. Not under any circumstances. Whatever the cost.”
It was Peroni who broke the silence. He was laughing, just for a moment, and with precious little mirth.
Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. “Well?”
“I love it when the word ‘cost’ comes into your conversation, Leo,” Peroni observed pleasantly. “It always suggests life is about to turn interesting.”
Falcone ignored the taunt. He looked relaxed. Determined, too. Costa knew this mood. It meant someone was about to wander outside the usual rules.
“Look at us.” Falcone smiled, opening his hands in a wide, expansive gesture. “Two careers in autumn. Two careers in spring. And the best criminal pathologist in Italy.”
“No praise, please,” Teresa protested. “You know how uncomfortable that makes me.”
“It’s true! What better time for you to test your skills?” Then, more grimly, “What better time for us?”
His eyes drifted to the computer screen. The image of Franco Malaspina was caught there, frozen by some paparazzo’s camera. The millionaire had frizzy dark hair and the features of a Sicilian, an angular, handsome face almost North African in its dusky hue. His bleak black eyes glittered back at the photographer, staring at the lens intently, full of the easy willful arrogance of a certain kind of Roman aristocrat.
“This man thinks he and his friends are unassailable,” Falcone said. “I have close to one hundred officers in the Questura on this case, two in Africa seeking earlier victims as potential witnesses, and I have put out every appeal I can think of to our friends in the Carabinieri. This is not a time for internecine rivalries and they know it. These are the kinds of crimes none of us ever expected to see in Rome, and we must do all in our power to bring these men to face justice. Yet…” He wrestled his slender hands together in frustration. “I cannot tell any of them the names we have here. If I did that, these four men would know. Their lawyers would return to court again, screaming harassment of the innocent. Tame politicians would be dragged out of their beds to hear their complaints. We all know how these things work. We would lose what little we have, perhaps forever. There is an army of officers, good men and women, who will do everything they can to find some conventional — some might say old-fashioned — evidence that might break this case. Yet they must work in the dark, since I daren’t share with them a word of the information you have heard here. They will fail, with dignity and professionalism, but it will be failure all the same.”
“Leo—” Costa began.
“No,” the inspector protested. “Hear me out. Unless they have left some obvious and stupid form of identification in this hellhole of theirs, Inspector Placidi’s incompetence means these four have every right to feel untouchable.” He glanced at Teresa Lupo. “Am I mistaken, Doctor?”
“I told you, Leo. We are swimming in forensic. In proof.”
“What? A business card? A letter? A driving licence?”
“Proof!”
“By which you mean scientific proof. DNA and prints. The two primary pillars of our investigative process today. You heard Grimaldi. They are useless. Proof means nothing if I can’t take it before a judge. They have us gagged and bound, don’t you see? Without some miracle I cannot foresee, the only ones who can establish their guilt are these men themselves. All our conventional means of attack are worthless. I can do… nothing.”
He placed his long forefinger on the photograph of Franco Malaspina and stared at Costa. “And I want them, this creature most of all. He is not some Renaissance prince who can flaunt himself on these streets regardless of the law.”
Falcone glanced at his watch. “At twelve-thirty the four of you will meet in the Piazza Navona, outside the Brazilian Embassy. I will arrange for lunch to be brought round to my apartment at one.” He glanced at Costa and Peroni in turn. “The place has only two bedrooms, I’m afraid, so you two can fight over the sofa between yourselves.”
“I’m staying in your apartment?” Rosa Prabakaran asked, astonished.
“Until further notice,” Falcone declared.
Teresa Lupo’s arms flailed in the air in protest. “And I’m supposed to walk out of the biggest murder case we’ve had in years and throw in my lot with some private underhand snooping of yours?”
“If there is one thing I have learned about you in recent times,” Falcone replied, “it is that you will do what you feel like regardless of anything I say. I invite you along to listen and then decide. Given that no one, not God himself, seems privy to either your working methods or your diary, I doubt you will have much difficulty being engaged simultaneously in both your conventional work and a task that is a little… different, and something else besides for all I know.”
Teresa was momentarily speechless, then muttered, “Was that a compliment or not?”
“I will not rest until these bastards are in jail, and neither will you,” Falcone continued, ignoring her question. “I have gone through what passes as Placidi’s investiga
tion log on this case. There is a strand of evidence no one here knows about, an odd, possibly worthless thread. Susanna Placidi certainly thought so. Which was why she buried it at the bottom of the pile.”
The grey eyes travelled over them all and fell on Rosa Prabakaran.
“We have an appointment with a statue,” Falcone said cryptically. “After that you are on your own.”
PART SIX
One
“Statues can’t talk,” Peroni insisted.
The five of them — Costa, Rosa, Teresa, Peroni, and Falcone — stood in the tiny open space known as the Piazza Pasquino, named for the battered three-quarters statue of a man with no arms and an unrecognisable face turned as if to look towards some vanished companion. Falcone had arrived on time, then marched them there immediately. They were in a busy narrow street which fed off the sprawling Piazza Navona. The rain had halted for a while.
“This statue can,” Falcone replied. “Unfortunately, the only police officer who had the wit to listen was Agente Prabakaran.”
Smiling at that, Rosa walked forward. She pointed to the worn, stained stone on which the statue known as Pasquino stood, and explained, “The antiracist people told me. They found it first.”
The base of Pasquino was covered with posters, hastily pasted there, most in frantic, badly written script, though a few were printouts from a computer and even had simple photographs and cartoons on them.
Costa remembered this place from his schooldays. Pasquino had been plastered in anonymous messages for centuries. In recent times most were antigovernment, posted there by left-wing or anarchist groups, or ordinary citizens who wanted to vent their anger without revealing their identity. He couldn’t recollect ever seeing any racist material. Racism was rare in Rome. The sight of Pasquino jogged another memory, though Rosa got there first.
“There are other statues that used to serve the same function,” she said. “They placed messages on those too.”
“Later,” Falcone interrupted, and ushered them down into the narrow medieval street of the Governo Vecchio. His apartment was a hundred metres or so along from Pasquino’s piazza, on the first floor, next to an upmarket shop selling expensive fountain pens and mechanical pencils. The place was huge and beautifully furnished. Falcone was clearly proud of it, judging by the brief, modest tour he insisted upon — out of the practical consideration, naturally, that they would now be closeted there for some time. There was an elegant living room decorated in plain, modern taste, two bedrooms, a well-equipped kitchen with a small balcony, and a line of healthy potted plants glistening after the morning’s rain. The apartment was spotless, with the smell of recent cleaning. He had prepared for this moment. There was also a box full of smart clothes, sent by Bea from the farmhouse, which Falcone passed over without a word of explanation.
The inspector beckoned them to the table, opened the briefcase he’d brought, and took some photos out of a folder.
“More statues,” he said, and glanced at Prabakaran. “Agente?”
She pointed to the representation of a muscular man built into a brick wall. He wore a beret and was holding a barrel over a drinking fountain. Water still trickled from the cask, though the statue looked centuries old. “This is Il Facchino. The Porter. It’s in a side street off the Corso, near the Piazza del Collegio Romano. And this…” She removed another photo from Falcone’s folder: a weatherworn full-length statue of a Roman noble in robes, standing on a plinth against a grime-stained marble wall.
“I recognise that,” Peroni said instantly. “It’s in Vittorio Emanuele, next to the church, Sant’Andrea della Valle. I chased off some classy whores doing business there years ago. It’s also” — the big man glanced at each of them, to make sure they would be impressed — “the scene of the first act of Tosca.”
Teresa blinked. “You know opera?”
“One of the hookers told me. I said they were classy. I didn’t hear any statue talking, though.”
“He’s known as Abate Luigi,” Rosa continued, ignoring the distraction. “Pasquino still talks today. I thought even you might have noticed, Gianni. The statue’s always covered in cryptic slogans. Usually, if you can understand them, ones that insult the same few people in the government.”
“I know it!” Peroni insisted. “What the hell has this got to do with us?”
Costa intervened. “The talking statues were a way of making a point that could have got you into trouble if your name was attached to it. Perhaps a political point. Perhaps just ratting on a neighbour.” A memory troubled him; it came with a mental picture of Emily, lovely in a shirt and jeans by the side of the gleaming lagoon, that lost summer eighteen months before. “In Venice they used to do it privately, by posting unsigned letters through those lions’ mouths I once showed you. In Rome, we prefer something a little more public. But these days only on Pasquino. You say there were messages on the other statues?”
“Exactly,” Falcone said, and removed a large envelope from his case and spread the contents on the table: sheet after sheet of words, jumbled together in the random yet semi-logical way a madman might have worked. He glowered at the messages and pointed at a set of enlargements of the head of each of them. “Placidi didn’t even look closely enough to see this.”
Magnified, it was clear there was a crest on the top of each, an ancient coat of arms of some kind. When he caught the direction of Costa’s gaze, Falcone threw a photographic blowup of the emblem onto the table.
Three dragon-like creatures were depicted there, limbs writhing, talons clutching at the screaming torso of a female figure entangled in their scaly embrace. The beasts possessed vicious, grinning features, half human, half beast. The expression on the woman’s face might have been pleasure or pain, rapture or the final rictus of terror.
A title ran above the chilling emblem in contorted medieval script: The Ekstasists.
* * *
The verses weren’t written but formed from words and letters cut out of the headlines of newspapers and magazines, then pasted together to form cryptic poems.
Rosa began to sort them into three separate piles, then read out one from the first.
“You baboon whores, beware the bad thorn’s prick.
It’s blood he lusts for, not the thing between your legs.”
“Malaspina,” Costa said. “The bad thorn.”
She nodded. “This was stuck on Pasquino the morning after a hooker was left for dead near the Spanish Steps. Right next to another talking statue they call the Baboon.”
“That’s a hell of a stretch, Rosa,” Teresa complained.
“So everyone told me. But there’s a pattern once you see it. The messages each make some cryptic reference to one of their unpleasant little club. We’ve a total of thirteen: four each for Castagna and Buccafusca, five for Malaspina. Here’s another one.”
She picked out a sheet from the second pile.
“Run quick, poor Simonetta!
The mountain chestnut spills its spiny seeds regardless.
And snakes are deaf to your black cries.”
“The chestnut being Castagna?” Peroni asked, knowing the answer.
“That one was left on Il Facchino before the event,” Rosa explained. “The following day a black woman was raped, then beaten with a wooden club in the Via dei Serpenti in the Monti district, close to the Forum. We couldn’t possibly have understood the reference to snakes and mountains beforehand, of course. These guys are not stupid. They’re not trying to lead us to them. It’s some kind of a joke. A tease.”
“Who the hell is ‘Simonetta’?” Teresa demanded.
“You’d know if you moved in art and history circles,” Rosa replied, looking at Costa.
So many memories were coming back to him at that moment, from his single days when much of his free time was spent in art galleries, staring at the works on the walls, trying to understand what he saw there and link it to his native city’s past. And, too, from the delightful time he’d spent working se
curity for the exhibition in the Palazzo Ruspoli, when he and Emily had finally decided to marry. An entire room there had been devoted to the Medici dynasty.
“Modern academics believe that the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, had a black slave for a mother,” Costa said. “It was kept secret as much as possible, of course. But there were so many reports it’s generally thought to be true. The woman’s name was supposedly Simonetta.”
“The Medicis were black?” Peroni asked, amazed.
Rosa smiled. “A little. Millions of people are, you know. Where’s the surprise? White Italians have been screwing us for centuries. Simonetta, incidentally, didn’t come from Florence. She was from near here. Lazio. Collevecchio. Thirty minutes up the A1. It’s a little too chichi for coloured people these days. But the prostitute they attacked worked the motorways. She was picked up from the Flaminia service station by three men she swore she couldn’t identify. Flaminia is the nearest service point to Collevecchio, which means…”
She left it there.
Teresa, astonished, asked, “You really think these bastards would go to those lengths to make some kind of obscure point? Why, for God’s sake?”
Falcone didn’t let the policewoman answer.
“To see how long it would take us to figure out what they were doing. Rosa’s right. This is a game, a test. The kick they get out of taunting us is as much a part of their pleasure as the crime itself.”
He stabbed a long finger at another message. This time Costa read it.
“The mouth of darkness truly bites.
Unlike the mouth of truth.
Ask dirty sweet Laeticia.”
“ ‘The mouth of darkness’ is presumably a play on the name Buccafusca,” Falcone said. “This one was pinned to Abate Luigi the day after an Angolan illegal immigrant, Laeticia Candido, landed in hospital. The staff — not the victim — called the Questura. She’d been found unconscious near the Bocca della Verità. The mouth of darkness and the mouth of truth.” He appeared stiff with visible outrage.
