The Garden of Evil nc-6
Page 29
“Coffee,” Agata ordered, raising her cup. “Buon Natale!”
The smell of Bea’s cappuccino could wake the dead. He gulped it down gratefully with some fruit and pastries. Then Bea went through the ceremony that had been interrupted the night before: the bowl and the little gifts.
This time round he got a tiepin. Peroni picked out a cheap key-ring with a tiny flashlight attached to the chain and managed to look extraordinarily pleased with it. Bea grabbed one of the remaining two boxes — and didn’t open it — then pressed the final one on Agata.
“This seems like a fix,” she murmured, but took it anyway.
There was a small silver crucifix inside.
“It’s beautiful,” Agata said gratefully. “I will wear it on special occasions. It’s too good” — she wrinkled her nose — “for anything else.”
“Whenever suits you,” Bea said easily, and opened her own box. It held something similar, doubtless from the same collection: a brooch in the shape of a butterfly. She looked at the two men. “Now go away, you two, and have the conversation you want to have. We don’t wish to hear.”
“Conversation,” Costa began, and found Peroni dragging him off to the sitting room, his face like stone.
They sat down. Peroni pointed back towards the kitchen.
“That is the most stubborn, pigheaded woman I have ever met in my life. She makes Teresa look like a saint, for God’s sake. I can’t believe—”
“Bea?”
“Not Bea.”
“I’ve been sleeping, Gianni,” he said quickly. “And you speak in riddles. Please…”
Costa listened, and wished, deeply, he didn’t have to.
* * *
Even mafiosi celebrated Christmas. The tentative tipoff from the informer in Naples had been superseded. The previous evening one of the most senior capos in the same city had taken an equally senior police officer into his home for a traditional La Vigilia supper. In the course of the meal, the crime boss had told his acquaintance that a contract on the life of Agata Graziano was now in place, in the hands of the ’Ndrangheta from Calabria, secretive men, rarely penetrated by the police, professional criminals who took on commissions from outsiders only rarely, and usually saw them through.
“You told her?” Costa asked.
“Of course I told her,” Peroni answered. “How can you keep something like that secret? Falcone has made all the arrangements. We have a safe house in Piedmont she can use. If necessary we could come up with some kind of new identity, a place in the witness protection scheme…”
“Agata won’t agree to that. Not for an instant.”
“Why not?” Peroni demanded. “These are serious people. Malaspina wants her dead. We can’t protect her properly here. Falcone has decided. She must go. Today. Now.” He folded his arms. “Tell her. I have. She refuses. She says if we keep on nagging she’ll take a cab back to that convent of hers and send us the bill.”
“You could try making her,” Costa suggested.
“Don’t play the smart-ass with me, sir. We can’t make her. If she wants to walk straight out of here and wander round Rome till she’s dead, there’s nothing we can do to prevent it. She’s a free woman.”
“I’m not sure that’s really true,” Costa found himself saying.
“We can’t stop her. She’s adamant she wants to be part of the next conference we have. Teresa has called one at the Tomassoni place for two. After that we have to go to the morgue. Like an idiot, Falcone told her.”
“She’s helped us, Gianni,” Costa pointed out. “We’d still be arguing with Toni Grimaldi if it weren’t for her.”
“She won’t be able to help us much if she’s dead. Besides…”
Costa stared at the damaged, miserable face of the man who’d come to be one of his closest friends over the past few years. There was more to Peroni’s sorrowful state than the steadfast refusal of Agata Graziano to disappear from Rome.
“Besides what?”
“We are still arguing with Grimaldi. There are bad noises coming from above. The kind people make when they are facing nasty decisions.” Peroni’s big farmer’s face, scarred in ways Costa barely noticed anymore these days, fell into a deep, miserable scowl.
“Such as?” Costa asked.
“I don’t know, but I have a rotten feeling we’re about to find out. Malaspina is starting to affect us in all kinds of ways. Other forces are starting to become involved. The Carabinieri are on the line constantly. I imagine that is just what he wants. There are investigations everywhere crawling to a halt because of evidence problems. The word is getting out there, Nic. These hoodlums understand all they have to do is cross their arms and say no to a swab or a fingerprint and everything goes into the queue with the lawyers.”
“How the hell do they know?”
Peroni looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Because we’re in Rome. Because people are human. There’s talk. What’s new? Everyone’s starting to realise what the problem is. If we can’t corroborate what we have, Malaspina will simply prance up and down in front of us, waving his fingers in the air, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.” Peroni’s sharp, piercing eyes didn’t blink. “Those men from Calabria will get their chance and then they’ll be gone, without a single footprint back to the Palazzo Malaspina. We’ve lost enough people already. Let’s not lose any more.”
Costa got up and walked into the kitchen to find Agata sitting on a stool, her attention deep inside the pages of one of Bea’s women’s magazines. She looked bemused.
“I think there’s something important we need to discuss—” he began.
“The answer’s no,” she cut in. “I called Leo and told him again while you were talking. He is… acquiescent. This meeting with Teresa is at two. I would like to visit my sisters briefly along the way, if that is permissible.”
She looked up at him and smiled: a different woman? The same? He wasn’t sure. There was something in Agata Graziano’s face at that moment he didn’t recognise, though in another woman he would have called it guile.
“So, shall we go?” she asked, picking up the black leather bag Rosa Prabakaran had provided the day before, one that looked as much at home on her now as it would have done on any young woman in Rome.
Two
She spent an hour in the Convent, an anonymous grey building close to the river and the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo. No men were allowed past the high wooden door, so Rosa Prabakaran and two other female officers accompanied her, and came out none the wiser. Agata had simply gone to her room and the chapel, spoken to some other sisters, entered the library to consult some books, then returned in just enough time for them to make the meeting with the forensic team.
The terraced house in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina was unrecognisable. Half the square was now blocked off to allow forensic officers clear access. The ancient, moth-eaten furniture from the ground floor had been removed. A sanitized plastic tunnel now ran through the front door for visitors. In the space between plastic and wall, men and women in white suits were on hands and knees performing a fingertip search of every last crack in the ancient floor, every mote of dust in the corners. The route led through the entire central, twisting staircase, a sterile cocoon through which they would pass until, Teresa said, they got to the top floor, where the work was essentially done and there was enough room for a meeting.
Halfway up, Agata stopped and stared at the area where, the day before, she had found herself face-to-face with the skull of the corpse Costa prayed would turn out to be Ippolito Malaspina. This section of the building was unrecognisable. Silvio Di Capua had clearly won his battle with the city planning authorities. Gigantic iron supports had been brought in to run from floor to ceiling, and workmen had removed the wall brick by brick, revealing the rectangular hidden room behind. Open to view, it seemed much smaller. The cabinet was still there, now empty. The boxes of documents that he had seen lining the far wall had disappeared too.
&nbs
p; He knew Teresa’s methods well. She was a woman who was directed, always, by priorities, and possessed an instinctive grasp of what was worth seizing first. Forensic on the strange skeleton Agata had found would surely be uppermost in her mind. But she understood, as well as any, that this was no straightforward case, no hunt for incriminating evidence. They had that already. What they needed was a link — a connection that placed Franco Malaspina in this dingy, rotting building, and made him a part of the Ekstasists, in such a firm and undeniable way that even the most sceptical or malleable of magistrates could not ignore it.
Whatever hopes he had in that direction faded the moment they entered the top floor, where the canvases were now stacked neatly to one side. Toni Grimaldi stood close by in a grey suit, a short cigar in his hand and a sour expression on his face.
“Oh, wonderful,” Peroni murmured, rather too loudly for comfort.
“Merry Christmas, gentlemen,” Grimaldi announced with a yawn before lifting the sackcloth on one of the canvases, squinting at what he saw, and adding, “They say this stuff is worth millions.”
Agata strode over and threw the sackcloth off entirely.
“Poussin,” she declared, with the briefest of scowls. “At least it’s supposed to be. Leo?”
Falcone came away from the window, where he’d been staring idly into the piazza.
“Poussin it is,” he agreed. “If you think it’s a fake, best tell the people in Stockholm now, because they have other ideas.”
“It’s their painting,” she replied, then stared at the newcomer.
“How goes your case, Sister?” Grimaldi asked under the heat of her glare.
“I don’t have a case.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you’re not the only one. Let me make my position clear. Today… Christmas Day… I listen to what they have to say. Then I decide whether to allow you to put it in front of a magistrate. Once again. Think of me as that man or woman of the judiciary. Before you can convince them, you must convince me. Should you fail…”
He bestowed a humourless smile on all of them. Grimaldi almost always wore the expression Costa associated with Questura lawyers, the one that said, I will stop you doing anything stupid because I know I can. He was also one of the smartest and most assiduous men they had, a decent, dedicated police official who would work every minute of the day to get a conviction when he thought there was a chance of one.
“Franco stole all these paintings, didn’t he?” Agata asked, raking her slender arm around the room. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Prove it,” Grimaldi replied.
Falcone’s long, lean face wrinkled with displeasure. “You know we can’t. Yet. But look at the circumstantial evidence.”
“I’ve looked at little else for weeks,” the lawyer answered. “Let me summarise. Nino Tomassoni was involved in an art theft ring. So, the French would have it, was this Véronique Gillet. Malaspina knew both of them socially, and perhaps, in the case of the woman, intimately.”
“He slept with her,” Costa said. “He told me so.”
“Sleeping with a suspected criminal is an offence?” Grimaldi threw his big arms open in a theatrical gesture.
Peroni spoke up. “Toni, we have known each other for many years. I understand your caution—”
“This is not caution. This is plain common sense and good practise. You have nothing. Even those dreadful photographs you found here. Have you one single woman to interview as a result?”
The colour rose in Falcone’s face. “They’re either dead or back in Africa. Give us a chance, man. A little time.”
“You don’t have time, Leo. This investigation has cost the Questura a fortune in legal fees alone. And how far have you gotten? Malaspina has all of us tied up in knots. You can’t ask him to take the most basic of scientific tests because he’s used your ham-fisted investigations against you—”
“Not ours,” Falcone cut in.
“The law does not distinguish between competent police officers and incompetent ones. You’re all the same in the eyes of the magistrate. That is why you cannot use your swabs on this man. Or anyone else who is unwilling if they know about this loophole. Please, you have made us enough work already. Do you know what our priority is at this moment?”
“To put this murderous bastard in jail?” Peroni snapped, as livid as Falcone now.
“Live in the real world, Gianni,” the lawyer retorted. “In the absence of an impending arrest, our priority must be to overturn this judgment in principle that Malaspina obtained against you.”
Falcone turned and looked at him. “ ‘In principle’?” he repeated.
“In principle. Must I spell this out for you?”
Agata, clearly baffled, said, “For me you must.”
“Very well,” Grimaldi agreed. “If I try to attack the individual ruling that Malaspina won, then I open up every nasty black bag of worms you people have provided him with. The harassment. The unproven and unprovable allegations. The use of evidence that does not meet the most basic of legal rules. The very personal nature in which you pursued this investigation.”
“Malaspina is a crook and a murderer,” Falcone snarled.
“And an aristocrat with more money and connections than most of us could dream of in several lifetimes,” Grimaldi said, unimpressed. “Think about it. See this through our eyes.”
Costa was starting to get a sick feeling in his stomach. “Through your eyes?” he asked.
The lawyer hesitated. He didn’t appear to enjoy his position any more than the rest of them.
“We may have to make choices. Unless you can come up with something very soon. Such as today. Or tomorrow at the latest…” He coughed into his big fist, embarrassed by what he was going to say. “Without that I’m going to have to recommend to the commissario that we scale down this investigation, take the heat off this man, and hope we can come to some kind of arrangement.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Peroni bellowed.
“It means…” Grimaldi looked deeply unhappy. “I have to be practical about this. If you can’t nail him, I must ask myself a broader question. Shouldn’t I be thinking of the future instead? Of all those men like him who’ll get away using the same trick? If I can cut a deal with Malaspina so that he leaves us alone to close that loophole, and we don’t make it retroactive, which might be hard anyway…”
There was silence in the room. Even the handful of scene-of-crime officers had stopped work and turned to stare at the large lawyer in the grey suit, astonished, appalled.
“It’s not as if Franco Malaspina is going to go out there and start his tricks again, is he?” Grimaldi looked like a man at bay. “You people tell me what the right thing to do is. Fail to imprison some murdering bastard who’s finished killing? Or find a way to try to hit the sons of bitches out there who are about to start?”
The man appealed to Teresa Lupo. “You’re forensic. You tell me. What would you rather have? Him on the streets, not daring to touch another woman in his life, and the way it all was before? Or him on the streets and you still trying to do the job with your hands tied behind your back. Well?”
It was Agata who spoke.
“I’m just a sister,” she said, staring at him. “But I think you can only judge a man on what he’s done, not what he might do. These crimes…” She caught Costa’s eye. “If one turns a blind eye to them, what sense of justice is there anywhere?”
“Fine!” the lawyer yelled. “I deal in the law, Sister. I leave justice to priests and nuns like you.” He stabbed a finger at Teresa Lupo. “Tell me, do you want your toys back or not?”
The pathologist just stared at him and shook her head. “You know,” she said quietly, “just when I think I’m working my way out of the habit of wanting to hit people, someone like you comes along. Will you shut up and listen for a moment? I’m greedy. I want both. Let’s run through the small business here quickly, then go to the morgue and stare at some bones. And if that fails—”
The two forensic scientists stared at one another, anxious and, for once, silent.
* * *
There was, in truth, very little to tie any of it to Malaspina. A set of stolen paintings worth tens of millions of euros, looted from a variety of public institutions throughout Europe over a period of seven years. Some documents, found in the boxes in the hidden room, indicating that Nino Tomassoni acted as a kind of warehouseman for whatever gang was involved in the thefts. The photographs from the gap in the wall where the Caravaggio had once stood. One single piece of paper that linked the late Véronique Gillet to the loop: an email sent from her Louvre address, revealing the movement of a Miró canvas from Barcelona to Madrid, a journey during which it had been stolen. Finally the clear evidence that it was Tomassoni who had been sending messages to the Questura in an anonymous effort to draw the police’s attention to the crimes.
“This is it?” Grimaldi asked. “Not a trace of Malaspina in the house. Not a fingerprint. Not a single document…”
“The emails Tomassoni sent to the Questura name Malaspina,” Teresa pointed out.
“Uncorroborated gossip from a dead man,” the lawyer observed.
“Give us time,” Falcone pleaded. “We’re inundated with material. We can’t cope with what we have. It could be weeks. Months.”
“You don’t have months, Leo,” Grimaldi replied with marked impatience. “I wish I could say you did. This happens to be my professional opinion. But it’s more than that. It’s a political issue, too, these days. The Justice people are calling. Everyone is calling. The wheels are starting to come off everywhere, not just with us, with the Carabinieri, the local police, the customs people… Everyone is affected by this and I’m the one who gets the phone call. The criminal fraternity know. Very soon every last one of them will understand they can, in the absence of other hard evidence, duck a fingerprint or a swab. Fifteen years ago we didn’t even have these things and we put people in jail all the time. Now it seems that, without them, we’re screwed.”