The Garden of Evil nc-6

by David Hewson

  “Yes,” Falcone added from across the desk. “Go home. You look terrible.”

  “She was my responsibility,” Costa shot back at both of them furiously. “I go home when we find her.”

  Falcone flicked through some papers in front of him on the desk. “The truth is this. Agata walked away from that church of her own volition. It’s not possible she was snatched. That priest would have noticed.”

  “The priest didn’t notice a thing,” Costa pointed out.

  Falcone scowled. “That’s what he said. These Church people stick together like glue. You’d think we were the enemy sometimes. Agata did this for a reason. Perhaps she just can’t take any more. When she wants us to know, we will.”

  “That’s comforting,” he grumbled.

  “In a way,” Peroni said thoughtfully, “it is. Better than some of the alternatives anyway. Now go home. You’re no damned use to us here. Besides, nothing’s going to happen tonight now, is it? This is something we’re going to have to pick up in the morning. It would help us all if you were halfway awake by then.”

  “In the morning,” Costa pointed out, “Grimaldi plans to offer Franco Malaspina a pardon.”

  “Then Agata will have nothing to fear at all,” Falcone pointed out without emotion.

  “Do you think she’ll be happy with that idea?” he asked.

  “Since when was this job about happiness?” Peroni grumbled. “Get out of here. You’re starting to become tedious.”

  He nodded. Peroni was right. “True,” Costa agreed, and walked out of the Questura, out into a bleak and empty Rome.

  Two

  He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to think, not sleep. Costa walked from the back street in which the Questura stood out into the broad, open Piazza Venezia and, this once, strode straight across the cobbles without seeing a single vehicle tearing maniacally from one side to the other. From the ugly white wedding-cake monstrosity of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, he went on to the Via dei Fori Imperiali, Mussolini’s flat, broad highway through the heart of ancient Rome, with the Palatine and the jagged ruins of the old forums on the right, and the terraced ranks of Trajan’s Market, red-brick walls leading up to the Quirinal Hill, rising in a semicircle to the left. Even close to midnight on Christmas Day, the lights set amid the monuments were burning brightly, cutting out soft yellow silhouettes of a different city from a different time. Rome looked beautiful. He knew, at times like this, he could never live anywhere else. This was home. It was a part of him, and he a part of it. Weary, he strode on to find the low bench seats by the side of Caesar’s Forum, a place he had often visited as a child with his father, listening to all those tales from history, building in his own imagination a picture of the solemn night that saw the cremation of the dictator there. He could name without thinking the buildings that sat in the space beyond, a collection of wrecked columns and porticoes bearing such grandiose names they seemed eternal, the temples of Castor and Pollux, of Saturn and Vesta, the forums of Augustus and Nerva, the great Arch of Titus… relics of a race of men and women with whom he still felt some kind of affinity. In their struggles against their own dark nature, their endless striving to attain goodness, justice, in a world that seemed, at times, hopelessly fallen, Costa sought some kind of comfort, some distant sign of grace.

  He had sat here sometimes with Emily, talking, listening, and wondering in silence. All those moments were equally precious to him now. Yet the vista that stretched before him was simply old stone, as Caravaggio’s paintings were in essence nothing but ageing pigment on ancient canvas. Without the presence of humanity, without imagination and the gentle touch of another — a gesture that said I see, I feel, I hurt, I love too — they were nothing. That was what the artist was saying in the painting that had come to obsess Ippolito Malaspina and, four centuries on, his descendant too. Beyond the mundane and the physical lay another experience, one that could be reached only through the selfless route of compassion and surrender.

  It must have been the night. Stray dust in the wind. Something pricked at his eye. Costa wiped it away, a single, stinging tear, from the corner. Then he saw he was not alone. By the low, feeble bushes at the edge of the pavement overlooking the small, once-holy place where a famous man had been turned to ashes, a woman sat on the ground with a child on her lap. She wore the heavy clothes of an immigrant: bulky yet exotic once, with a patterned headscarf that might have been colourful years ago, and a flowing, grubby dress beneath a man’s winter parka.

  The child could have been no more than five or six, so tightly wrapped against the cold or rain it might have been a boy or a girl, there was no telling. In front of them lay all the usual signs of the lost and destitute, the illegal and starving, carried around the city. We are hungry. I look for work. Have pity.

  And a cardboard box full of small objects, barely visible, glittering under the bright illumination of the Forum.

  He got up, walked over, and retrieved one of the items. It was fashioned from rubbish: foil and silver paper tightly wrapped together to make something that approximated a piece of jewellery, a brooch perhaps. This was how they spent their day, he guessed. Trawling through litter bins, trying to turn the detritus of the city into a handful of small change, enough to buy a little bread.

  Costa put the thing back in the box. The woman was staring at him, silent. Afraid, he thought. It was late at night. They were on their own. Sometimes, rarely, but it happened, a band of racist thugs might emerge from the suburbs and beat up people like these, just for the hell of it.

  He took out his wallet, leaned down, and gave the woman a fifty-euro note.

  “Happy Christmas,” Costa said, and some dimly remembered line from a song repeated in his memory with a cruel insistent irony… War is over.

  “Thank you, sir,” the woman said in a heavy Middle Eastern accent.

  The child’s eyes stared at him, shining, puzzled, fearful.

  “You don’t need to be out in this kind of weather,” he said, reaching for something else in his wallet. “There are places… the church…” His voice seemed to wobble. “Nuns… sisters…”

  He threw down the card he’d kept for years, the one he hadn’t handed out to anyone for a while because the old routine, the one he had inherited from his father — a gift a day, always to a stranger — had disappeared from his world altogether somehow.

  “Please…” he croaked.

  The woman looked up at him, a shadow of a smile on her wide face, which was, he suspected, both tanned and dirty, and said, “I am Muslim, sir.”

  “It doesn’t matter to them,” he snapped. “Does it to you?”

  The tone in his voice alarmed them. He could see it on their faces. They were frightened, of him, of what he stood for.

  “I’m sorry…” he stuttered. “I didn’t mean to sound like that. The point is… there’s help. Please. Go. Tomorrow. Please…”

  He took out the wallet again, opened the flap, turned the thing upside down, let all he had — notes and cards and scraps of paper that no longer meant a thing — fall out, mumbling incomprehensibly as he did this, not even knowing himself what the words were.

  Everything tumbled down to lie in the grimy fabric between her knees, so much, so loose in the wind, it spilled over onto the pavement and began to scatter on the breeze.

  They were more frightened this time.

  “Too much, sir,” the woman said.

  “It’s not too much. It’s nothing. It’s… meaningless.”

  It wasn’t the night. Or dust on the breeze. Costa was crying, his eyes so full of tears he could scarcely see. Everything was a blur — the lights on the ragged lines of ruins, the white wedding cake of the Vittorio Emanuele monument.

  He staggered back to the stone bench and sat, head high, staring through these tears, choking, sobbing, feeling, at that moment, as if the world had ceased to matter.

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long this went on. It came to an end when the child
walked over and tapped his arm. It was a boy, with a face as innocent as an infant in one of the paintings Costa loved so much. In his hands he carried the cash that had fallen from the wallet — most of it — and the cards and the notes. And a small brooch made of tinfoil and the lining of a cigarette packet.

  “Grazie.”

  “Prego,” Costa mumbled, and looked at it, unable to raise a smile however hard he tried.

  At that moment his phone rang. The boy retreated, back to his mother. The living world returned.

  “Pronto…” Costa said in a voice he didn’t recognise.

  * * *

  “Nic? Are you all right? You sound—”

  “Where are you?” he asked. Just hearing her voice made his throat well up with emotion once more.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m safe. Listen to me. This is important.”

  He did listen. He wasn’t sure he heard the words correctly. He wasn’t sure he understood anything much at that moment.

  Besides, there was something he had to say, something so important it couldn’t wait, whatever Agata thought.

  “No—” he interrupted her in mid-sentence.

  “You must listen to me,” she insisted, “carefully.”

  “Where are you?”

  There was a quiet, impatient silence on the line. Then…

  “I told you this before,” she said with a clipped, angry precision. “There are places I may go where you cannot.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?”

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  “No!”

  He was getting to his feet, screaming like a madman on Mussolini’s deserted highway under the silhouetted skeletons from another time.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman get up, grab her son, and bundle the child away, stumbling down the broad pavement, carrying their belongings, the cardboard box, some plastic bags — the sight of them ripped at his feelings — and a huge roll of grubby bedding.

  “Where I come from,” he said as calmly as he could, tears rolling down his face again, warm and salty, welcome in some strange way too, “you do not run away. You do not abandon people as if they mean nothing whatsoever. In my world there is nothing worse.”

  That silence again, and he wondered how it was possible to interpret nothingness, to sense in this absence of sound that she was listening, shocked, baffled, wondering what to say.

  “In my world,” Sister Agata Graziano replied eventually, “I have never had to think of things like that. You must do as I ask. Please. Alone. That is the only way. I will call.”

  She said no more. The line was dead. Costa was utterly alone, wishing, more than anything at that moment, that there was something he could say to the woman on the street and her frightened child, fleeing into the night, afraid of what he had become.

  But, all too swiftly, they were gone, out towards the Piazza Venezia, and the places where the homeless gathered together for safety when winter closed in: the Pantheon and the Campo dei Fiori, the riverside haunts by the Tiber where he and Emily had once helped save one — just one — young foreigner from the night.

  The tears still pricked at his eyes.

  Costa wiped them away with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he limped across the empty roadway of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, found one of the cheap flophouses off the Via Cavour, and rented a hard, cold single bed for the night.

  PART EIGHTEEN

  One

  At 8 A.M., when the noise from the neighbouring room woke him, Costa walked out into the street and found stall-holders in white jackets firing up charcoal braziers for hot chestnuts, panini stands getting ready for the day. A lone tree, sprinkled with artificial snow, stood erect at the entrance to the square. Next to it was some kind of musical stage at the foot of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, complete with a gaggle of bored-looking musicians and a troupe of skimpily dressed girl dancers shivering, clutching at their bare arms, trying to find some protection against the weather. A bright winter sun did nothing to dispel the bitter, dry, bonechilling cold. A trickle of people wrapped in heavy clothing meandered past the moody entertainers on to the broad pavements of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, spilling out into the traffic lanes now closed to all but pedestrians, as they were every Sunday.

  It was still Christmas in Rome, just. The place felt unreal, expectant somehow. Costa walked down the middle of the road, where a thousand cars and vans normally fought each other daily, thinking, praying for his phone to ring. Then, when he got near the foot of the tree, close enough to see the low illumination of the fairy lights still lit even in the brightness of the day, a familiar unmarked blue Fiat worked through the barriers and came to a halt next to him. Peroni was behind the wheel. He looked bemused. But not unhappy.

  The big man pushed open the passenger door and said, not quite angry, “You left your ID card in that crummy hotel. Amazingly they phoned to tell us. You’d better get in.”

  Two minutes later — far more quickly than he could ever have expected on a normal day — they were parked in the Piazza Navona, the place empty save for the pigeons. Peroni said little along the way, except for murmuring a couple of cautious remarks about his looks. Costa ignored them. He felt distanced from everything, as if this were all part of a waking dream. As if…

  They got out and walked round the corner towards the statue of Pasquino.

  Costa’s heart skipped a beat. There was a slender figure in black there, back to him, facing the battered, misshapen statue, staring at some fresh sheet of white paper stuck on the base.

  He ran, ignoring Peroni’s anxious calls from behind.

  A sister, a nun. He didn’t know the difference. He no longer cared.

  When he got there, he placed a hand gently on her shoulder. The figure turned, smiled at him, then stepped backwards, primly removing herself from his touch.

  She was a woman in her forties, with a very pale and beautiful face, light grey eyes, and silver hair just visible.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I thought…”

  His attention was divided between her and the poster on the statue. A poster she’d fixed there the moment before. There were other figures in black nearby too. They had pieces of paper in their hands and rolls of tape. They were placing the sheets everywhere, on walls, on shop windows, carefully aligning each at eye level to make them as visible as possible.

  “They’re all over the city,” Peroni said, catching up with him. “On the other statues. In the Piazza Venezia. This lady asked for you in particular.” He glared at the woman in black. “Which is all she’d say.”

  “Not true,” the sister objected. “I wished you a good morning and happy Christmas too. You should be flattered. Normally I would say nothing at all.”

  “Sister,” Peroni replied, “Agata Graziano is missing. We would very much like to find her. There is no time for these antics.”

  She shrugged and responded with nothing more than an upturned smile, a worldly gesture and very Roman. Much the kind of response Agata would have given if she’d wished to avoid the conversation.

  He read the poster, a new message for the talking statues, one they were determined to post everywhere, as Falcone had posted his, though this was very different.

  “It was Agata’s idea?” he asked quietly. “Sister…”

  The woman’s grey eyes returned his gaze, unwavering, interested, and, he thought, marked by an inner concern she was reluctant to reveal.

  “You’re Nic?”

  “I am.”

  “This is true,” she replied. “You are as she described.”

  The woman looked at Peroni and began to motion with her hands, saying, “Shoo, shoo, shoo! This is for him. No one else.”

  Under the fierceness of her stare, the big man backed off, towards the large public square behind.

  She waited, then retrieved an envelope from the folds of her black cloak.

  “Sister Agata sends this. For you and you alone.”

  He rip
ped it open and read the contents: a single sheet in a spidery academic hand. Unsigned.

  “God go with you,” the woman said quietly.

  He took one more look at the words on the poster beneath the malformed, crumbling statue. His childhood studies, literature and art, had never really left him. The quotation was recognisable. Given the book, he could have found it. The words were an adaptation from Dante again, with a message, direct and personal, tagged on the front.

  Costa read the words out loud, listening to their cadence, hearing her voice in each syllable.

  “ ‘Franco, Count of Malaspina. Do you not know that, for all your black deeds and black blood, you are like all of us “worms born to form the angelic butterfly”? For Emily Costa and all those murdered women whose lives were taken by your sad anger, God offers forgiveness. Take it.’ ”

  The sister watched him impassively as he spoke, her head tilted to pay attention to the words.

  “He’s not looking for salvation,” Costa noted, stuffing the letter into his jacket pocket, then taking out his gun, checking the magazine was full, and thinking ahead of what might lie in wait.

  Agata was attempting to force Malaspina’s hand, both by revealing his guilt and by what she believed to be the secret he hated most: his ancestry. It was… Costa wished his head were functioning better. It was wrong, he felt, though he was unable to be precise about his reasons.

  The woman in the black robes eyed the weapon with a baleful expression.

  “Everyone is looking for salvation,” she murmured with a quiet, simple conviction. “Whether they know it or not.”

  He wasn’t in the mood for distractions. Peroni came over, looking hopeful.

  “I have to do this on my own, Gianni,” Costa said, ignoring the woman.

  “But—”

  “But nothing. That’s how it is.”

  The sister’s smug smile was becoming annoying.

  “Arrest these women for flyer-posting,” he ordered. “Keep them inside under lock and key until this evening.”