A Season for the Dead nc-1

by David Hewson

  He breathed deeply, leaned forward and placed his hands on his knees. It had been a good idea, whatever Uncle Luca thought.

  A voice behind him, a hard voice with a foreign accent, said suddenly,

  “Smile.”

  The sweat went cold on Nic Costa’s skin. He turned. The man was skeletally thin and entirely bald, with a black shirt and trousers and staring blue eyes. He had a large SLR camera in his hands.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Press.” The bald man fired off a couple of shots, then moved to improve the angle.

  “This is private property. I want that film right now.”

  “Fuck you,” the photographer spit out from behind the lens.

  Nic Costa sighed. It was so obvious. He’d seen the trick many times. They’d try to make you mad just to get a better shot. A fist raised to the lens made the picture. Passive people didn’t sell. “Okay,” he said. “Fire away.” He stood upright, folding his arms in front of him and smiled, a big, cheesy smile, like that of a teenager out for a joyride.

  The photographer swore under his breath. This wasn’t what he wanted.

  “Do I get paid?” Costa asked, then stopped. Someone else was coming.

  One of the team, he guessed, and about time too. They were supposed to be watching the perimeter. They should never have let the photographer get this far.

  He squinted at the figure walking rapidly up the track toward them. He was about thirty, powerfully built, with a striking face and dark, straight hair. The checked shirt and loose jeans didn’t fit properly. The black spectacles he wore seemed out of place too. Costa didn’t recognize him. But the photographer did.

  “Not you?” the paparazzo yelled. “Hey. This is my find. You fuck off back where you belong. Back to… ‘Time’ magazine.” He made a sarcastic quote-mark gesture with his fingers.

  The man in the checked shirt said nothing. He was staring beyond both of them, staring at the house. Costa said, “You’ve both got to get out of here. Before there’s trouble.”

  Then he followed the gaze of the one in the checked shirt. The man’s eyes were fixed on the window. Sara Farnese was there, watching this odd confrontation, as if she were trying to make sense of it.

  There was a noise from the photographer, a gasp of surprise and hurt. The checked shirt had pulled a flick knife from somewhere and had stuck it into his ribs. The wounded man was stumbling forward, his hand clutching his chest as if he were trying to stop his life from running out onto the dry, rocky ground.

  Nic Costa watched him, watched the checked shirt change his focus, away from the paparazzo, first to the distant figure of Sara and then to him. Sometimes you fight.

  “The blood of the martyrs…” the man said and took a swift step toward him.

  Costa didn’t move, finishing the sentence for him. “… is the seed of the Church.”

  The man stopped a couple of yards away, puzzled, watching. His eyes narrowed behind the ill-fitting glasses. This was not part of the plan.

  “None of it’s true,” Costa told him. “I never touched her. It was all a game. To get you here. And it worked.” He opened his hands, a calm, conciliatory gesture. “Let’s call it a day, huh? This place is crawling with police.”

  The man looked around him, amused, as if to say: Really?

  Nic thought: Something is wrong. They should have been here already.

  They should never have let him get this far.

  The man roared, coming forward with an unexpected turn of speed, the knife, now red, held firm in his right hand. Nic Costa feinted to one side, dodging the power of the attack. There was no way he could reason with this man anymore. He needed to get out of there, to distract him away from the wounded photographer, to bring in the rest of the team. He ran.

  He dashed through the thorny scrub feeling it rip his thighs, then breathed deeply, leaned into the light morning wind and thought of nothing but the speed in his legs. He’d taken no more than four long strides when something fiery and painful bit into his shoulder.

  Nic Costa’s foot struck a hard, sharp object. He fell onto the dry, rough earth, slamming his head onto a rock, dragging at the thing in his back. The blade was lodged deep. He grasped the handle and felt like screaming, in pain and anger. He should have been able to pull it out and get back to running away from this deadly lunatic who seemed to have risen from the rocks of the parched scrubland.

  He stumbled drowsily to his feet, anxiously scanning the dead farmland. There was a figure on the shimmering horizon, approaching fast. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you run. And sometimes, Nic Costa thought, his head reeling into concussion, you had no choice at all.

  The dark shape grew larger. He wondered what else the man carried in his armory, wondered again where the rest of his team were. A cop didn’t deserve to die like a saint. It seemed inappropriate, somehow, almost profane. Nic Costa slumped to his knees, feeling his consciousness fade.

  Then there were voices. Loud voices. Shouting. Two people only, and one of them familiar. One of them—the word came easily in his present state; he felt no shame in thinking it— cherished.

  He lay sprawled on the hard, arid earth, feeling the darkness begin to swamp his mind, listening to Sara Farnese. It sounded as if she were begging for his life.

  Twenty-Six

  Alicia Vaccarini spent the night tethered to the chair against the upright wooden beam in the curious octagonal chamber where Gino Fosse had left her. There had been a sound outside only once; the noise of a drunk going home, singing. She was gagged. She was tied. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could hope to achieve. He would return soon, she knew, and then there would be no more delays. This madman believed, in some demented way, that he was doing her a favor.

  The manner of his “apology” left her full of dread. There was no avenue for persuasion, no prospect of clemency. He was set upon this path, and was distraught that something—something on the television—had disturbed his well-planned sequence of events.

  She had slept, for how long she could only guess, and woke when daylight began to filter into the room through the narrow, slitted windows. There had to be people nearby. There had to be someone who would come, she believed. Even in August, when the heat had depleted the streets, this was still Rome. The city was alive beyond these crumbling medieval walls. The guards would soon be opening up offices in the Parliament building. Secretaries would be delivering mail.

  Staff at the small neighborhood café where she drank her morning macchiato would be wondering why she was absent. Alicia Vaccarini was a woman of habit. There would be those who noticed her absence. By lunchtime, she believed, someone would question it. She had been scheduled to attend a reception for a visiting party of Brussels bureaucrats at ten. It was unknown for her to miss such events. She was diligent. She had nothing else to do.

  So by two, three at the latest, there would be someone checking her apartment, discovering she had never returned home the previous day. The police would be called in. Questions would be asked, with no ready answers.

  She tried to convince herself there was hope in this slow, muddled series of small discoveries. It was impossible. He would be back and when he did he would achieve what he wished. He would be anxious to be done with her and move on to whatever came next.

  The book was still open on the floor. She refused to look at it. The patron saint of musicians deserved to be a brighter, happier figure, she decided. Not a white marble corpse lying in a shroud with three visible wounds on her neck. Alicia Vaccarini had only one, and it was shallow and ceased to bleed soon after Fosse had raced from the room. One wound was enough, she thought, and closed her eyes, wondering if there was somewhere, within her, the ability to pray. It was a time for desperate measures.

  Then there was a sound from downstairs. Her heart leapt in hope. She heard footsteps rising. Familiar ones: determined and heavy. She closed her eyes and wept.

  When she opened them, Gino Fosse was standing in
front of her looking confused. He was wearing a checked shirt smeared with dirt and torn at the front. His mouth hung open as he gasped for breath. She was unable to decide whether his odd appearance was good or bad. Then he started to speak, a rapid-fire babble of insane nonsense about the Church and the perfidy of women. The phone rang. It was on a sideboard next to the window opposite her. He walked over and picked it up. She listened intently. There was a shade of subservience in his voice. It was the first time she had ever heard it. He had seemed so confident, so capable of acting individually.

  He went quiet, his head bent. This was bad news. Alicia closed her eyes for a moment and prayed someone would come, that soon there would be the sound of the police beating down the doors to this odd monastic prison.

  “No,” he said insistently into the phone. “It’s impossible. You can’t ask that. Where will I go?”

  He fell silent then, listening. His shoulders hunched over and his face contorted with grief and fury. But he would do as he was told, Alicia realized, and there, perhaps, lay salvation.

  “Shit!” he yelled.

  He threw the phone to the floor. He kicked it across the carpet. She watched as he dashed around the tiny, airless room, snatching at curtains, ornaments, anything he could lay his hands on, smashing these objects to the ground, screaming obscene nonsense.

  They’ll hear, she thought. Someone knows. Someone is coming. And they will hear.

  He went behind her. She shuddered. Two clammy hands came around her neck and clasped her cheeks. He turned her head to look up at the disgusting, frightening photographs arrayed on the ceiling, photographs she had avoided up to that point. All were black and white. The women in them looked back, their faces impassive, as if they didn’t care or wanted to wish themselves out of the camera’s eye.

  “See what happens,” he murmured into her ear, half crying. “See what’s done and can’t be undone.”

  Her bladder failed and a warm stinging stream ran down her legs. The hands moved again. The gag relaxed. He untied the knot at the back of her head and let the gag fall from her. Alicia Vaccarini moaned, pleased she could breathe easily again.

  Then he came back around her once more and she looked into his eyes. He’d altered again. This was a different person, one full of conviction and cruel determination. His hand came up abruptly, slapping her across the face. She yelped. The hand swept backward, his knuckles slammed against her lips. She tasted blood. She sensed something new now: an intense, personal hatred for her.

  “Whore,” he yelled. “You’re all the same. The doorway of the Devil. You know that?”

  “Please…”

  “Shut up!” His fist came up again, hesitated. She got the message.

  She said nothing.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, thinking. She watched him, silent. It was beyond protest, beyond pleading. The decision now was his, and he was insane, violent one moment, repentant, or at least uncertain, the next.

  “They’re coming,” he told her. “Here! To my home. My home.”

  She spoke very quietly, very calmly. “Don’t make it any worse than it is.”

  He stared at her, wondering. “It could be worse? How?”

  There was some light in his eyes. Some kind of doubt. There was room for her to work. “I can help you,” Alicia said. “I have friends. I can tell the police you’ve been kind. That you didn’t mean it. We all make mistakes.”

  “We all burn in Hell.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s an old story. Even the Church doesn’t believe that anymore.”

  “Then they’re stupid.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. Truly, I’m sorry.”

  She breathed deeply for the first time in hours, finding a flicker of hope in his apology.

  “It’s all right,” Alicia Vaccarini promised. “Everything will be all right.”

  His face was so odd. In some light he would be handsome. In another, not hideous but exaggerated somehow, like a character painted by Caravaggio.

  “You don’t understand, Alicia. I’m sorry because I can’t do you justice. The church in Trastevere. The means of your death, a holy means. Something that could help wash away your sins. Save you perhaps. All of this is impossible now. They’re coming to take away my home. They think they can trap me. They’re very, very stupid.”

  “It can work out. I can help.”

  “Perhaps.” He was thinking. He was as rational now as he had appeared in the restaurant. Something occupied him. He went over to the pile of jazz CDs strewn on the floor, sifted quickly through them until he found what he wanted, then put it on the hi-fi. The wail of a high, sweeping electric violin filled the room. Then he came back to her.

  “Have you ever watched a man smash a brick with his hand, Alicia? The martial arts place I go to, they show you how to do that. They teach you the secret.”

  “No,” she answered quietly, not wishing to excite him.

  “The secret is you don’t try to hit the brick. What you aim at is something imaginary a little way behind it. That is what you’re trying to destroy. You get the result you want by focusing on that hidden place, by making that your target. And in doing so you smash the brick. Do you understand?”

  “I think so. Could you untie me, please? I’m very stiff. I need to go to the bathroom.”

  He shook his head, annoyed she appeared to miss his point. “This is important, Alicia. Our true goal’s beyond. It’s not something that we see. What we do along the way—what we touch, what we destroy—is irrelevant. It’s the end point that matters. Being able to see the end with your inner eye. To know you’ll get there.”

  She looked up at him, not liking what she saw. “They’ll be here soon. It would look best if they didn’t find me like this. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Of course,” he said, and walked behind her. The earth began to shift. The chair moved through ninety degrees as Fosse tilted it forward until Alicia Vaccarini was on her knees, head hanging down, eyes fixed on the worn, stained carpet.

  She waited for his touch, waited to feel him working on the rope. It never happened. Gino Fosse returned to stand in front of her again. This time he was holding the sword, the bright, glittering sword that had cut her once already.

  “Jesus Christ.” She looked at the blade and felt the breath squeezing from her lungs. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  But Fosse didn’t seem to hear. His eyes were on the chair to which she was tied and the curve of her neck.

  He walked to one side of her. Only his ankles were visible: white socks in black trainers. She heard the hiss of the sword cutting through the hot, dank air of the octagonal room and a strange memory came to her from a history course long ago: Anne Boleyn going to her death at the hands of the French swordsman, a bitter kindness on Henry VIII’s part, to save her from the conventional executioner’s axe. The man had been brought in for the occasion because of his reputation. The sword had a clean, deadly efficiency impossible with the axe. He’d hidden the blade beneath the straw, stood behind the condemned woman, listened to her last words then decapitated the disgraced queen with a single blow.

  Alicia could hear it: unseen, the silver blade dashing at her back as her executioner made his practice strokes. Then there was silence. She could picture him drawing the sword to his shoulders, turning in a lethal, powerful arc.

  Without thinking, she lifted her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t wish to see this. She didn’t want to think of the blade missing her neck, smashing into the back of her skull.

  In the curious practicality of the moment she recalled something further of the history lesson: Anne’s last words, “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.” It was impossible to say them. It would be an insult, Alicia thought.

  The music ended, then looped back on itself. The wailing violin began to dance again.

  Twenty-Seven

  San Giovanni, once a refuge for fourth-century pilgrims, was now a modern hospital that sprawled through coun
tless buildings covering a vast parcel of the Caelian Hill. The complex stretched from the old narrow road that led to the church of San Clemente across to the traffic-choked highway that fed streams of cars, buses and trucks into the piazza from the south. Only minutes away was the Clivus Scauri, where Falcone and his men were engaged in the discovery of a further victim and the disappearance of the priest who once, albeit briefly, worked the corridors of the place where Nic Costa now lay on a table in a small cubicle, his head hurting like hell.

  Luca Rossi and Sara Farnese had only just argued their way into the room. They sat on the bench seat watching the nurse bandage him, watching the way he listened to the doctor talk about concussion and how, all things being equal, he ought to spend the day in a ward just to make sure there were no lingering aftereffects. His knife wound was minor. The blow to his head when he fell and hit the rock had left a livid but compact bruise on his right temple. Still, Nic Costa was alive and maddeningly ignorant of the reason for it. He waited for the doctor to go away, then turned to the big man.

  “I don’t like the look on your face, Uncle Luca. You got him?”

  “We wish,” Rossi replied miserably.

  Costa was wide-eyed with amazement. “Christ. What more do you need?”

  Sara Farnese looked at her feet. Rossi glowered at him from across the room. “Hey, kid. Don’t get precious with me.”

  “There were how many men there?”

  “Enough!” The big man’s flabby white face turned an ugly shade of angry pink. “Eight. Maybe ten. Think about it. They were there to protect the farm. Which was where you were supposed to be. None of them knew you were running around doing this crazy stuff somewhere else. Falcone is going to tear the skin off my back for letting you go out there. Except, of course, you weren’t even where I thought you were going to be. Remember the deal? You stay in the drive? Where we could be close by?”

  Nic’s head ached. He did remember now, and Luca Rossi was right. He’d no one to blame but himself. He remembered too his glimpse of Sara at the window and the terror on her face.