The Garden of Evil nc-6

by David Hewson

  He sighed. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “So what, then?”

  Something still didn’t ring true, however hard she tried.

  “This is all conjecture,” he answered. “Useless and dangerous.”

  “No,” she insisted. “It’s not.”

  “Did you ever stop to think for a moment how we all felt when you ran away?”

  “Nic,” she whispered, black eyes sparkling, her mouth taut with emotion and something close to fear, “this is not about me.”

  “I lost my wife…”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never meant that.”

  “You don’t know what hurt is. You’re too afraid to feel it. You’re terrified something real might penetrate the cocoon you have built for yourself.”

  “That’s not fair…”

  “I don’t care about fair anymore. I just want you to live. Please. Let me take you out of here.”

  He held out his hand for her. She looked up at him, scared, resolute too.

  “You really think I can go back into my shell now?” she asked, amazed, perhaps resentful too. “As easily as that?”

  “I think—” he began.

  “It’s impossible,” she cut in, shaking her head. “You made it so. You and Falcone.” She hesitated. “You more than any.”

  He took a step forward. She shrank back against the wall, put a hand out in front of her. He saw now what she’d brought. Another large plastic bag with the name of an economy supermarket on the front lay at her feet. An object he couldn’t quite make out protruded from the top.

  “Wait…” Costa ordered.

  Before he could go on, she had ducked away from his grasping arms and was running behind the discarded chests into the shadowy alcove.

  He followed. When he got there, she had the crowbar in the bottom half of a small, battered wooden door, black with soot and grime. The top had been splintered already. Agata had found a way into the Palazzo Malaspina earlier, before his arrival. She was, as always, prepared.

  “This is madness,” he muttered. “I should call the Questura now. Why take such risks when you have your sisters all over Rome putting up that poster about the man?”

  She leaned hard on the crossbar. The lower half of the door refused to budge.

  “Because of what Falcone says,” she answered. “You pile on the pressure, you see what happens. Franco will not walk out of this place for you, will he? But with a little force here… a little force there…”

  She had known Leo Falcone longer than he had. It was, he thought, only natural that she should pick up his ways.

  “The question is,” she went on, “will you come with me? Or do I go into his palace on my own? There are” — she leaned hard on the crowbar again, to no effect — “no other alternatives. Can’t you see that? Your law won’t help you. Nor your grief.”

  Agata gave up on the door and looked at him. Her face shone in a stray shaft of winter sun. “All we need is the painting,” she insisted. “Where else can it be?”

  He muttered a quiet curse, walked over, and took the metal bar from her. It was a strong door, in spite of appearances. But after the third attempt the old wood cracked and they could see beyond, into the interior of this distant wing of the Palazzo Malaspina. There was darkness there, nothing else. It was prescient of her to bring along the flashlight in the plastic bag. It now sat in her hand, extending a long beam of yellow light into the gloom.

  “I go first,” Costa said. “What are you doing?”

  She was pressing the keys of the mobile phone Rosa had given her, dispatching a text message with the speed and enthusiasm of someone who did this every single day.

  “Talking to my sisters,” Agata replied cryptically, then pushed past him, flashlight blazing, into the black maw behind the door.

  Costa followed quickly. Ahead, high on the wall to their left, a red light blinked persistently. He reached forward, took her hand to guide the beam towards it. There was a security camera there, a single glass eye, blinking. There had to be hundreds in a place like this. He turned round and looked back at the door. There was no entry detection device that he could see. Costa knew how difficult such large and sprawling buildings were to monitor. There was no way of knowing whether they had been seen or not; the probability was that no one had yet been alerted to their presence.

  All the same he picked up the crowbar off the floor and dashed the forked end hard into the lens of the camera, stabbing at it until the glass broke and he was able to lever the unit off the wall.

  She watched in silence. In the half-light she looked afraid.

  He took the flashlight from her hand. There was no protest.

  “Stay behind me,” he ordered, and strode forward into the gloom.

  Six

  It was bitterly cold inside whatever remote, deserted wing of Franco Malaspina’s palace now enclosed them. They walked in single file down a long, straight, narrow corridor, then came directly to a plain grey wall, windowless, nothing but old stone and mortar.

  “This must be the rear wall of the palace proper,” she whispered. “That was how they built in those days. The master’s part would be erected on its own. The rest — the quarters in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, everything that wasn’t integral to the palace itself — would be added later. We must be in some kind of access corridor between the buildings. It’s—”

  “Quiet,” he whispered, placing a finger to his lips.

  Agata stopped speaking instantly. Her eyes, whiter than usual in the bright, unforgiving beam of the flashlight, betrayed her fear.

  She can hear it too, Costa thought.

  Footsteps. Heavy and echoing, with a loud, insistent rhythm.

  He flashed the beam around both sides of the junction. They were trapped in a slender stone vein deep within the bulky mass of the palace. The sound danced around them deceptively. There was nowhere to hide, no easy way to discern the source.

  Before he could think this through, Agata tugged on his arm and then did something so strange, yet so obvious.

  She placed one hand on her left ear, then one on her right, dividing the echo from its origin, measuring which was stronger. Quickly, decisively, she pointed to the left. Then she arced her arm over to indicate the opposite direction.

  Costa looked behind her, at the corridor they had already traversed. A way back to freedom. She cast him one brief, withering look, then snatched the flashlight from his fingers and was moving, down the right-hand side, in the lead, brushing vigorously through thick grey cobwebs with her arms, away from whoever was on their trail, or so she hoped.

  He kept pace behind, continually glancing backwards, seeing nothing. There were no alternatives, no other route to follow, and very soon they found themselves in another constricted stone channel, this time wide enough only for a single human body, one that curved with a regular, geometric precision, as if tracing a circular room beyond the wall. He had no idea what the interior plan of the Palazzo Malaspina looked like. Costa had only seen the first public rooms, which covered a tiny proportion of the total site. Great Roman palaces often contained many surprises: private chapels, baths, even a secret place for alchemical experiments, like the private casino of the Villa Ludovisi, where Caravaggio had painted for Cardinal Del Monte. It was impossible to judge in which direction they were headed, impossible to see anything except the grimy walls of uniform stones laid almost five centuries before.

  The other sound quickened, became louder, and was now identifiably behind them. And closer.

  Costa caught up with Agata, felt for his gun to make sure it was safe to hand, and found himself brushing against her, accidentally, inevitably, before realising why.

  The corridor was narrowing. In the space of a few steps it became so slender his shoulders rubbed against the walls as they moved, half running. Then the change in dimensions stopped. It would, he thought, stay this way for a while. He caught her arm, stopped her, and mouthed, Go ahead.
r />   Her sharp eyes flared with anger and she whispered, “No!”

  All the same, when she resumed her pace he managed to drop behind, just a little, enough to stay inside the penumbra of the flashlight beam that was trapped like them in this confined, enclosing space.

  Whoever was following was near. He was sure of that.

  Costa took out his gun, held it tight, trying to work out some strategy. He blundered on in the semidarkness, weapon in hand, wondering what the possibilities were in the belly of this stone leviathan, where the chances of anything — a scream, a forlorn message on the police radio — reaching the world outside were infinitesimal.

  No easy answers came. None at all. Then, abruptly, with a force that made him apologise automatically, he found himself barging into her small, taut body, which was locked in an upright position, hard against stone.

  She had stopped. Her breathing was so rapid and so shallow he felt he could hear and feel every gasp she made. The corridor had come to a dead end. It led nowhere, which seemed impossible. The only way was back.

  “Stay still,” he murmured.

  She wasn’t listening. She was turned to one side, as stationary as the stone that trapped them, and when his eyes adjusted to what he now realised was a new kind of light, he understood why.

  The corridor ended in a bare stone wall, but down one side stood a long, musty drape that flapped into his face as the hand she had wrapped tightly in its folds began to shake. This was an entrance into another room, one that, as he began to look, was huge: a circular chamber, bathed, incredibly, in light so bright that even this side view made his head hurt.

  In the centre, beneath a domed glass roof that let in the piercing rays of a low winter sun, stood the painting. Evathia in Ekstasis. It shone under the incandescent illumination pouring down from above, the central fleshy figure, frozen in Caravaggio’s pigment, seemingly alive, energised, almost exultant, as she opened her throat to release that primal scream.

  In front was a couch, a chaise longue much like the one they had found in the squalid studio of the Vicolo del Divino Amore. On it Franco Malaspina, still in a business suit, his trousers hitched halfway down, heaved and groaned over a naked African woman, her skin the colour of damp coal, her eyes wild with terror.

  Malaspina’s long, strong body strained over her. They could hear his panting, whimpering, grunting, and the obvious desperation behind the pained sighs. When Costa looked more closely, he could see the man’s eyes flickering between the floor and the figure in the painting, never to the woman beneath him.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Agata moaned. “What’s wrong, Nic?”

  He didn’t answer. He was thinking of the footsteps behind. Or trying to.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded. Then, when he remained silent, she answered her own question. “Even with the painting he finds no… gratification. That’s it, isn’t it? Even now?”

  They were watching the man who had murdered Costa’s wife struggling to reach some kind of satisfaction with another woman snatched from the street, another pawn in his desperate, pitiless manoeuvres.

  Agata shook her head. Her face seemed full of self-doubt, self-hatred even.

  “We have to get out of here,” he insisted, casting a glance through the small gap created by the portion of curtain she was holding.

  As they looked on, Malaspina let out a long, pained bellow of misery, then stood up from the couch, clutching his trousers to himself, refastening them. Costa’s fingers tightened on the gun, but the woman was quick. While Malaspina remained absorbed in his own misery, scarcely noticing her presence, she fled, as many must have done before, scampering from him in fright, snatching some clothes off the floor, and then leaving, Costa noticed, by an open door that lay almost exactly opposite from where they now stood.

  It was an opportunity. If the two of them could escape alive, he’d be happy, he thought, and wondered how many ’Ndrangheta men Malaspina had in his service. One was dead already. If luck was on their side, perhaps that left no more than a single hired thug to guard the Palazzo Malaspina on this quiet, lazy day after Christmas.

  “I pity him,” Agata murmured, taken aback by her own surprise. “I…”

  He heard the metallic sound echo down the corridor and recognised immediately what it was. The checking of a magazine. One last prerequisite before violence.

  “Get out! Get down!” Costa ordered, pushing her rapidly, roughly, through the drape, into the sea of light beyond and, he knew, the presence of Franco Malaspina.

  A deafening burst of automatic fire burst deep within the stone vein back along the route they had stumbled. Sparks flew off the walls around him. Costa rolled forward to follow Agata, loosing off a wild succession of shots back into the gloom as he fell.

  Seven

  Gianni Peroni sat in the passenger seat of a white Fiat van bearing the name of a drain-clearing company on the side. It was parked a hundred metres from the main entrance to the Palazzo Malaspina. The place looked dead. The double doors at the top of the front staircase were closed. Not a soul had come or gone in the twenty minutes since they’d arrived. The four other officers with him — men he didn’t know, men who were deeply unhappy about having their holiday leave interrupted and didn’t seem too keen to accept his assumed authority over them — were starting to grumble the ways cops did when boredom took hold.

  “I sat outside some place on the Gianicolo for four days once,” the one behind the wheel, a skinny, tall individual with a Florentine accent, complained. “Turned out it was the wrong house. Belonged to a big — and I mean big — woman opera singer and we thought we were staking out the capo of some Sicilian family. Four days. You take that with you to the grave.”

  “Did you hear her sing?” asked a voice from behind.

  “Yes.…” The driver answered in a petulant whine.

  “So why didn’t you check?” another one demanded. “I mean… a capo doesn’t normally have opera singers around, does he?”

  “Hindsight,” the driver moaned. “Every smart-ass I ever met has it running through his veins.”

  “It’s a fair question,” another voice from the back piped up.

  “We checked! It was someone else’s fault.”

  “It usually is,” Peroni observed. “May I make a request, gentlemen?”

  They went quiet and listened.

  “Shut up and watch, will you?”

  “Watch what?” the driver asked. “And why? You’re just an agente now, Peroni. You’re not the boss.”

  Gianni Peroni muttered something obscene under his breath, then caught the dark figure in the distance, slowly making her way down the cobbled street towards the palazzo.

  “Watch that,” he ordered.

  And they did.

  * * *

  It was a nun — or a sister, Peroni had no way of telling which — on the oldest motorcycle he had ever seen, one that belonged in a museum, not on the road, since it was probably illegal: rust everywhere, bald tires, a cracked exhaust that, even from this distance, sounded like a flatulent pigeon recovering from the night before.

  “What the hell is this?” wondered a puzzled voice from the back.

  “Watch,” Peroni ordered again.

  She made her way slowly down the street. Then, outside the palazzo, she stopped. The woman wore black flowing robes, so long and billowing he wondered whether they might catch in the spokes.

  If she’d ridden a two-wheeled vehicle before, she didn’t show much sign of it. She was perhaps sixty, tall, skinny, awkward. A bright red cyclist’s helmet sat over the black and white headgear he had come to associate with the uniform of a nun in Rome.

  “It’s Evel Knievel’s grandma,” the driver joked, and the rest of them snickered, until they caught sight of the displeasure on Peroni’s ugly face.

  The woman struggled to flip down the stand, got there eventually, then dismounted. After that she reached into the flapping folds of her robe and withdrew a large kitchen knife.


  They watched as the woman looked around to check no one was watching, then bent down and started stabbing at the front tire with the kitchen knife. It deflated in a matter of seconds; the wall must have been paper thin.

  After that she walked up the broad, semicircular stone staircase of the Palazzo Malaspina, found the bell by the shining wooden double doors, put her finger on the button, and kept it there.

  “Next time I go undercover, I go as a nun,” one of the voices behind muttered, and there was more than a modicum of admiration in it too.

  Finally the door swung open. Peroni squinted to get a good look at the man there. He was relieved by what he saw. Sister Knievel might have pulled one of Malaspina’s ’Ndrangheta thugs. Instead she got a flunky, a tired-looking middle-aged individual of less than average height, one who didn’t look too smart and had probably been called away from cleaning the silver.

  He didn’t seem much interested in helping a stray sister whose ancient motorbike had developed a flat tire. The way the woman was talking at him, she plainly meant to ensure he didn’t have much choice. At one point she took hold of the collar of his white cotton servant’s jacket and dragged him out onto the steps. Peroni watched, impressed. He could almost hear the conversation.

  Sir, I am in a hurry for mass. I am only a nun. You must help.

  Yes, but…

  SIR!

  Reluctantly, with a very Roman shrug of his hunched shoulders, the servant gave in and walked down the broad steps, followed her to the rusty machine, bent down, and started looking at the flat. Naturally, he left the door ajar. This was a rich man’s residence. No one expected opportunistic thieves. Nor could the servant see what the woman was doing as she stood over him — namely, beckoning to someone around the corner, half hidden at the top of the street.