by David Hewson
Costa read two more pages, then tucked the diary under his jacket, went back into the living room, said a polite, terse good-bye and was gone.
Forty-Nine
"You made a sound. When…" He was reluctant to finish the sentence. She laughed at his embarrassment. It was midmorning. The traffic outside made a low roar. Gino Fosse had returned at eight, showered, slept a little, not disturbing her. Then she had woken him slowly, gently, touching his strong, naked body with keen fingers, arching over him, letting her breasts fall into his face until his teeth fastened on a nipple and she felt his growing interest stir against her legs.
“When you what?” she asked him. They were still locked lazily together, she above him, rolling gently, feeling his physical presence subside.
“You know.” His eyes went dark for a moment. There was so much inside him she didn’t understand. Where he went to all night. What he did. Robbing, she guessed. It wasn’t such a bad thing. Needs must.
But if all he did was steal, why would they want her to watch him like this? Why would they demand, so insistently, with threats only barely concealed, that she had to call them every time he left and tell them everything they had discussed?
“Say it,” she ordered.
The pinkness in his cheeks, the result of their mutual exertions, flushed a little brighter. “When I come. You felt it.”
“Of course.” She laughed. “What do you think?” There was a sheen of sweat on her soft, young skin. “Those others. I make them wear something. But you’re special, Gino. You’re safe. With you I want to feel when it happens. Not that I wouldn’t know anyway. I’m good. Aren’t I?”
“You’re good,” he agreed. “Why? Why me?”
She frankly peered straight into his eyes. “Because you didn’t expect anything. Because you were gentle.”
There were so many mysteries for him here. He’d never wanted Irena, not in the beginning. Then something had changed, in him, not her.
“What do you feel when it happens?” he asked.
She thought for a moment. No one had asked before. He saw this in her face and felt some small, warm surge of pride to think he was the first. “That there’s something of you just blooming inside me. Something that could stay if I wanted it to. Stay and grow. Become a child maybe.”
His face went white. Abruptly he withdrew from her, shrinking back under the damp sheet. She hated to see him like this, the sudden shock, the strange, internal grief that seemed to be masquerading as fury.
“I told you,” she said, stroking his matted hair. “With the others I make them wear something.”
He refused to look at her. She wondered once again what he did, thought about the curious smell on him when he came back that morning. A stink that suggested he’d been near cooked meat.
“But it won’t happen, Gino. It can’t.”
He looked into her pale, young face, struggling to make sure she told the truth.
“I got pregnant once back home. You can go places. You can get rid of the problem before it arrives. They made a mess of it. I can’t have kids, not ever. I just make them wear these things so I don’t get their diseases. But I can dream. We can both dream if we want.”
He let her fingers run down his cheek, play with his lips. She bent down and kissed him, hard.
“Families kill you,” Gino Fosse said. “Families tear your life to shreds.”
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “What else is there?”
He was unable to think of an answer.
She leaned into his ear, her breath hot. “When you come inside me I feel something warm and alive, where it’s supposed to be, as if you were bleeding out your life for me, Gino. I take your gift and it sits there, wondering, making me grateful.”
Not once, not in any of the brief, aggressive encounters he recalled from the past, had he considered the idea that this was a mutual event. The act had always been about his own efforts to achieve some brief, cathartic satisfaction. It had never occurred to him that there could be pleasure on the other side too. You’re the doorway of the Devil. That was what Tertullian had said and he’d always interpreted this literally, that a woman was the receptacle, an unfeeling, unresponsive place into which he could cast his lust.
He looked around the room. It was grubby. Their clothes lay on the floor. His bag, now depleted of most of his tricks, sagged on the stained carpet. All that was left was the gun and some ammunition. It had to be enough.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”
He looked at her with those cold, dead eyes and she wished she could keep her mouth shut sometimes.
“Why? What do you want with them?”
“Nothing.” His anger annoyed her. It had been a reasonable request, not the kind he ought to resent. “I want to know about you. I want to hear what they did to make you this way.”
“I was this way without them,” Gino Fosse said. It was foolish, dishonest, to pretend anything else was to blame. No family, no colliding set of events, had made him what he was. He recalled the fat TV man roasting on the grill, thought of the look of terror in his eyes. This was no one’s doing but his. It was a conscious, deliberate act with a specific purpose in mind. Just like skinning a live cat had been twenty years or so before. The dark seed had been growing inside him all along. It just needed someone to nurture it.
Before the work began he’d stared for hours at those haunting, grisly depictions of martyrdoms in the churches, watching the saints meet their fate, wishing he could hear the words on their lips. But they were different. In his agonies, Arturo Valena screamed nothing but curses. Alicia Vaccarini went weeping, unenlightened. He tried to remember the Englishman, losing his skin, tied to the beam in the church on Tiber Island, tried to decode the noises that issued from his gagged throat. And the Rinaldi woman, so stupid, so baffled by what was going on. These were now distant memories. What happened that day was not his doing alone. Hanrahan had made the arrangements.
The Irishman had spread his net wide, culling so much information, from tapped phone calls, Fosse’s own illicit photographs, stolen items perhaps. Hanrahan knew names and dates. He was a constant voice in Fosse’s ear. Even so, there was no blood on Hanrahan’s hands. He may have suggested the means but it was Gino Fosse who used them.
Then there were the two cops. Hanrahan would never have sanctioned that. He had his limits.
“What do you do?” she asked. “When you go out of here? Who are you, Gino?”
He scowled at her. She should know better. She was in enough danger as it was. “Don’t ask.”
“I want to know!” she pleaded.
He closed his eyes, wishing she weren’t there. The end was so close. This distraction was the last thing he needed. And this revelation too: that she felt him inside her, that two people could touch one another in such a strange and intimate fashion. This was, in its way, a momentary, mystical epiphany just as shocking as the glittering rodent eyes behind the altar in San Lorenzo. This threatened his resolve. This made the world seem a different place.
He stood up, went to the bag and took out the gun, brought the weapon back to the bed and placed it in her hand. “I bring deliverance,” he answered. “To people who deserve it.”
Her pretty face cracked at that. She wouldn’t touch the weapon. She seemed terribly young again, and scared. It occurred to him that she knew what a gun could do. He thought of where she came from. Maybe she had personal experience.
“Why?” she asked, handing him back the weapon.
“I told you. Because they deserve it. Because their sins cry out for vengeance.”
Not the cops, though. They got theirs for free. She wiped her damp eyes with her forearm, like a child.
“Come with me,” she said. “We could run away.”
“Where?”
“The coast somewhere. Rimini. They say Rimini’s nice.”
He thought of the sea, the endless sea, and the way the blue tide washed away everything.
“I’d like that,” he said.
He walked over to the bag and took out an envelope. It was full of notes. He counted out all but a handful and gave her the money. She stared at it. There was so much, more than she could ever have imagined.
“I’m not finished. I’ve one more piece of work to do. Irena…” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead, surprised by his own tenderness. “You must leave, right now. In two days’ time. Rimini. Be on the beach. I’ll see you there.”
She was silent. He wanted to feel she lied too, lied about feeling his warm, sparking presence inside her. You’re the doorway of the Devil. Tertullian was right. He had to believe that. If he didn’t, he could never be the Gino Fosse he knew, the one he understood, the one with a goal, a mission. This Gino had heard the rats chattering in San Lorenzo, had dared the anonymous, shriveled heads in the Lateran to speak their true names.
There was no choice. He clasped her hand, forcing her fingers tightly around the money. “Go,” he ordered, and handed her the cheap champagne. “Take this and we’ll drink it together.”
Her eyes were wet. She didn’t dare call him a liar.
He watched her pack her few things, waited as she walked out of the door, not looking back. Soon now, he knew, the phone would ring. Soon there would be a new deliverance.
Fifty
The office was empty apart from a couple of cops shuffling papers at the far end, out of earshot. Falcone had gone on from San Lorenzo in Lucina to organize the cover for Denney’s departure. He had teams throughout the city and more at the airport. Almost every man in the department was on the case, except Nic Costa, who now sat at Luca Rossi’s old desk, drinking bad coffee from the machine, trying to clear his head. Throwing his ID card at Falcone had helped. Now that he thought of himself as a civilian again, a state he barely remembered, he was surprised and interested to discover his mind could go to places that some inner restraint prevented it from visiting in the past.
There were footsteps across the big, bare office. Teresa Lupo was approaching, a folder in her hand. She looked dreadful. He wondered if anyone would ever call her Crazy Teresa again.
“Thanks for coming,” he told her.
“You caught me on the way out. Got some papers for Falcone. What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
She took a good look at him, trying to judge his mental state. “I have to do the autopsy on Luca this afternoon. If you want to see him, it would be best now.”
“Seen enough dead people for a while.”
She sat down and put her folder on the desk. “Me too. And I never thought I’d say that. What are you doing here, Nic? Falcone’s throwing every man he’s got onto the street.”
“I guess he doesn’t want me around. I’m supposed to deal with the loose ends over Luca. Contact the pension people. Do whatever you do when a cop gets killed.”
She shook her head, baffled. “There are civilians who do that for a living. He doesn’t need the poor bastard’s partner to get involved.”
“I don’t mind. He had a sister. Did you know that? She’s deaf and dumb. Luca took her out of the home and looked after her.”
He took the photo out of his pocket and passed it across the desk.
“He never mentioned a thing.” She sighed and ran her hand across the photo, as if there were some of his presence still there.
Then he threw across the book. “Luca kept notes too.”
She opened it and stared at the contents. “Who’d have thought a big man would write like that? It looks like a girl’s hand or something. One screwed-up individual. And all these tiny doodles. Jesus. Poor fucked-up man.”
There were scribbled headings with dates and times. It was a kind of diary, but one driven by Luca Rossi’s head more than actual events.
“It’s what he was thinking,” Costa said. “I just spent the best part of an hour inside his mind and I’m damned if I can get out again. It begins the day after that accident on the motorway, when he thought he was losing it. It’s”—he hunted to get the right words—“a little insane, to begin with anyway. Some of it I just don’t understand at all. Rossi really thought he might be going mad. Then you come into it. Then Falcone.” He stared at her. “Then me. It wasn’t meant for public consumption. You don’t have to take it personally.”
She was flicking through the pages. “He thought I was sweet? No one uses that word about me. Never.” Then she turned the page and went quiet.
“It’s okay,” Costa said. “I’m not offended. Read it. Maybe it will make more sense that way.”
“'Kid Costa.’” She spoke softly, even though the office was as good as empty. “‘V. naive. Why the hell me?’ What does that mean?"
“Go on,” he said. “It doesn’t end there.”
A few pages later Rossi returned to the subject and didn’t mince words. She seemed surprised by the venom in the dead man’s words.
She hadn’t realized Rossi resented being his partner so much. He seemed offended by Costa’s innocence and, in particular, the way he had dealt with the Vatican.
“I don’t want to look at this,” she said, putting the diary down on the desk. “It doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s just Luca rambling. Doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
“You think he was mad at me?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Or mad at himself. I don’t know.”
“You haven’t read enough,” he suggested. “He was mad at Falcone. He genuinely didn’t understand why the man was leaning on me like that. Luca thought I was taking too much on myself and not asking enough questions. Maybe he was right.”
“Don’t resent a dead man, Nic. Luca liked you. He told me so himself and that means more than any crap in some stupid diary.”
“No! I don’t resent him at all. I just kick myself for failing to see what he saw. He didn’t understand why Falcone kept putting me at the front of everything. Letting Sara stay at the farm so readily. Pushing me to pretend we were having some kind of relationship. As if…”
It could be wrong to take this further. He was aware of her intense, concerned attention, aware too that he didn’t want to involve someone else in his own troubles.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing, Nic.”
“Then forget it once I’ve said it. But I have to ask, Teresa. Why me? Why not someone with more experience?”
“You did your best.”
“That’s not the point. I did what I was told. I always do, without question. And I should have been asking more questions. I should have made Luca want to say all this to me direct instead of putting it down on some piece of paper he thought no one else would ever see.”
He took the diary and turned it to a page near the back. The tiny handwriting was even more shaky here, as if Rossi were scribbling down his thoughts in a frantic rush. He stabbed his finger at a passage. She took the diary and looked at it, trying to interpret the scribble.
“ ”Rinaldi: dope in the bathroom. And they missed it! Message on the computer, appointment with the killer. And they missed it! Are we lucky or what? And this: someone from the Vatican phoned that morning to make the date. Fosse? No. He was in exile. Who?”
She looked at him and he knew now he wasn’t wrong. Teresa Lupo was scared.
“It was the obvious question and I can’t believe I never asked it,” he said. “Gino Fosse couldn’t have made the arrangement to meet Rinaldi. Fosse was banned from Denney’s office more than a week earlier. The way Rinaldi behaved in the library, looking for the video cameras, suggested there was some accomplice. This surely confirmed it, and makes it look like someone with access to Denney’s office. But we let our heads go somewhere else. We got taken up by events and never stopped to think about what was really happening.”
“You had a serial killer on your hands, Nic. What else do you expect?”
“And something else,” he said, ignoring her question. “I checked. Before Falcone sent us around to Rinaldi’s apartment, the place ha
d been searched by six experienced men who know scene-of-crime inside-out. You see what Rossi’s asking himself here? How come six men missed two such obvious and crucial pieces of evidence?”
“People screw up. It happens all the time.”
“No,” he insisted. “Not like that. It’s too convenient. Rossi knew all along.”
“So why didn’t he say anything to someone?”
“Who to? Me? He tried to, I think. But I wouldn’t listen, and look what he says in the diary. He didn’t think I could handle it. He thought that, if I suspected the truth, I’d take it too far, start screaming for justice instead of doing what he thought was right: keeping quiet, keeping my head down. He wanted to protect me as much as he could. Could he tell Falcone? Think about it. If Luca was right, the reason the search team found nothing in Rinaldi’s apartment is there was nothing to find. Someone, Hanrahan maybe, put it there later. And then Falcone sent us around to find it. What interpretation do you think Luca put on that?”
She was beginning to look around the room, making sure no one was eavesdropping. “Too much. You’ve got to look for simple answers. They always tell you that.”
“You’ve got to look for answers that work. Do you believe Fosse is doing all this on his own? Just ticking off a list of Sara Farnese’s lovers for the hell of it? Surviving in the city without any help?”
She was silent. It was too much to accept. There had to be someone else.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Costa persisted. “So let’s move on to the next point. Do you believe this is even about Sara Farnese at all? If Fosse’s so pissed off with her, why didn’t he kill her when he had the chance? The two of them spoke, remember, when I was lying half conscious on the ground. She somehow persuaded this lunatic to let us both live. Have you worked out how?”
“No.” Her face said it all. It was ridiculous that they should both have survived.
“There’s only one answer. Because I didn’t matter. Neither did she, except as some kind of trigger for his actions. A trigger someone knew how to pull. How?”
