The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Falcone finally found his voice and Costa couldn’t work out why he’d stayed silent for so long. “I’ve been very generous around here. What do we get in return?”

  “We’ll let you know,” Leapman murmured.

  Emily Deacon glanced at the pathologist. “This is your call. I’m not trying to push you along. But do you think it would be possible to turn her? I need to see her back.”

  Teresa glanced at her assistant Silvio Di Capua, who was putting away some of the equipment they’d been using. Di Capua shrugged.

  “We can turn her,” she said, then held out a hand to stop Leapman, who was heading for the body without the slightest hesitation. “I said ”we.“ ”

  The American halted reluctantly. Teresa and Di Capua called on two morgue assistants to help. They positioned themselves around the right-hand side of the corpse and placed gloved fingers on her limbs and shoulders.

  “Is this going to be nasty?” Peroni asked, worried. “I like warnings about nasty stuff whenever possible.”

  “Then don’t look,” the Deacon woman said bluntly.

  On Teresa’s call, the team lifted the white corpse, rotated it on its own axis and gently placed the woman front first onto the marble floor, her head now tilted to one side against the shining stone. Peroni swore, then went to stand in the corner. Costa stared at the woman’s naked back and the strange shape carved there, an oddly symmetrical pattern of curves cut straight into the skin from above her waist to the shoulders, like a huge, cruel tattoo.

  “What’s it meant to be?” he asked. “A cross?”

  It was a diagonal shape, with four protruding curving arms.

  Teresa stared at the body. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Consider yourself lucky.” Leapman bent to take a closer look at the corpse. “He used the cord. At least I don’t see any other marks. She was dead when he got round to doing what he wanted to do.”

  The pathologist was shaking her head, bemused. “The pattern’s so precise. How could you do it? Here?”

  Emily Deacon didn’t want to look at the shape on the woman’s back. She knew it too well already, Costa guessed. “To begin with you’d need a crayon, a ruler, possibly, and a scalpel,” she said softly. “After a little while I guess you just need something that cuts and a very steady hand.”

  Leapman took out a hankie and blew into it noisily. “We’ve seen enough. We need a meeting in our office at the embassy. Five this evening. Bring who you want, but I’m going to trust you people with material I don’t want to go any further than our front door. So make sure whoever you bring can keep their mouths shut, and listen good because I don’t like repeating myself.”

  Falcone shook his head in disbelief. “This is Rome. This is a murder inquiry. We are the state police force and we do this our way. You will visit us when I say. And I’ll ask you any damn thing I like.”

  Leapman pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. “This, Inspector, is a signed order from a guy in the Palazzo Chigi none of you people want to argue with. This is all agreed with your superior and with SISDE too. Take a look at the signatures. It gives me the right to take this body into our custody any moment I choose. Which happens to be now. So don’t you go messing with anything before our people arrive.”

  Teresa Lupo’s pale face went florid with fury. She walked over to the American and stabbed him in the chest with a podgy forefinger. “What were your names again? Burke and fucking Hare? The age of body-snatching is over, my American friend. I am the state pathologist here. I say where she goes and when.”

  Falcone was glaring at the sheet of paper, livid. “How long before your people get here?” he asked Leapman without even looking at him, ignoring Teresa Lupo’s growing shrieks of complaint.

  “Ten minutes. Fifteen.”

  Falcone handed back the envelope. “She’s yours. We’ll see you at five. Until your people arrive, you can wait outside.”

  Agent Leapman snorted, then stamped off back to the door and the snow beyond.

  Emily Deacon hesitated for a moment, some uncertainty, regret perhaps, in her sharp blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry for the unpleasantness,” she said. “It isn’t intentional. It’s just… his manner.”

  “Of course,” Falcone replied flatly.

  “Good.” She took one last look at the pathologist before leaving. “Forget what he said. We won’t have a vehicle here for thirty minutes or more in this weather. Why not make good use of the time?”

  THERE WAS ONLY so much that could be done when the bodies had gone, Mauro’s into the white Questura morgue van, the American woman’s into the hearse the FBI had provided. At midday Falcone took one look at Costa and Peroni and ordered them to take a break. He wanted them both to attend the meeting at the embassy. They’d seen the shooter in the square. They were involved. Falcone said he needed them wide-awake for the FBI.

  So the two of them took their leave of the crime scene and walked the fifteen minutes to Teresa Lupo’s apartment through an icy ermine Rome that was uncannily deserted under a brief break in the cloud that meant a bright winter sun spilled over everything.

  Nic Costa had visited Teresa’s home once before. It was on the first floor of a block in Via Crispi, the narrow street running down from the summit of the Via Veneto. There had been a thoroughfare down the hill here for the best part of two thousand years. In imperial times, it had linked the Porta Pinciana in the Aurelian Wall with the Campus Martius, the “Field of Mars,” which was dominated in part by the architectural might of the Pantheon. The street opposite Teresa’s home, the Via degli Artisti, was named after the nineteenth-century Nazarene school of painters who had lived in the area. The walls of the neighbourhood seemed littered with plaques that bore witness to the famous names who had once lived there: Liszt and Piranesi, Hans Christian Andersen and Maxim Gorky. The snow had restored a little of its charm. Few cars now snarled up the narrow streets. No tourists walked wearily along the Via Sistina to the church of Trinità dei Monti, set at the summit of the Spanish Steps, with its panoramic view over the Renaissance city that had come to occupy the Campus Martius over the centuries.

  As the two men trudged in silence, dog-weary and cold, Costa thought about the body laid out stiffly on the geometric slabs and fought to remember the history lessons that had gripped him as a schoolboy. It was important, always, to remind himself: this is Rome. Everything interconnects. The inscription on the portico of the Pantheon read: M•AGRIPPA•L•F•COS•TERTIUM•FECIT—Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, three times consul, made this. Yet, like so much else concerning the Pantheon, this was a deceit, a subtle sleight of hand performed for reasons now lost. Augustus’s old friend and ally Agrippa had built a temple on the Campus Martius and called it the Pantheon, a dedication to “all the gods,” but that had burned down some time after his death. The building which replaced it some hundred and fifty years later, between AD 120 and 125, had been the work of Hadrian. Some even thought the emperor had designed it personally. Circular monuments, ideas stolen from Greece and points further east, reworked for a new age, were his hallmark. Nic Costa’s knowledge of architectural history was insufficient to give him reasons. But when he thought of Hadrian’s legacy—the private villa in Tivoli, the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome in the forum, with its huge, extant half sphere of a ceiling—it was easy to see this was a thread that ran throughout the emperor’s thinking. Even to the end. The huge round mass of the Castel Sant‘ Angelo on the far bank of the Tiber had served many purposes over the years: fortress, jail, barracks and papal apartments. But the emperor built it as his personal mausoleum. The spiral ramp to his initial resting place still existed, just a ten-minute walk from the dome of St. Peter’s, which Michelangelo had created some fourteen hundred years later in the image of Hadrian’s own Pantheon.

  Costa watched Peroni fumbling with the key to the apartment block door. “Gianni, are you OK?”

  “Yeah. I just need some sleep.
Something to eat. Excuse my moods, Nic. It’s not like me.”

  “I know,” Costa said. “You go inside. I’ve got something to do. Plus I’ll bring you a little present.”

  Peroni’s eyes sparked with worry. “Don’t overdo the vegetables!”

  “It’s a promise.”

  It was just before one. There was a store around the corner Nic knew. They did the kind of food Peroni liked: roast porchetta, complete with crisp skin, nestling inside a panino raked with salt and rosemary. He could pick up something for himself too.

  But first he caught the photographic shop before it closed and half talked, half badgered the man behind the counter into running the seven cassettes from Mauro’s cameras and his accessory bag straight through the Fuji developing machine. The prints would be ready before four. Costa could pick them up by ringing the private bell to the apartment above.

  When he got back, Peroni was sprawled out on Teresa’s sofa, looking very at home and listening to the weather on the TV. He took the pork sandwich and started stuffing his face with it straight from the bag.

  “Not bad,” he conceded. “How come I never found this place?”

  “You do much shopping when you’re staying here?”

  Peroni sniffed, then said, “The snow’s locked in for days, Nic. No trains. No planes. Not much moving on the roads either. I guess that means our man’s not going to find it easy to get out of Rome. If he wants to.”

  “Why would he want to?” Costa asked. There was a message in the American woman’s body. A problem demanding a solution. Why would a person set a riddle, then walk away without seeing whether it was solved?

  “I dunno,” Peroni grumbled, finishing the sandwich, then struggling to his feet, brushing crumbs off his shirt. “I don’t know a damn thing anymore. Except I need to sleep. Wake me at the right time.” Then he hesitated, thinking. “Why the hell did Leo give in to those Americans so easily? I mean, he could have put up a fight. I can’t believe we’re trooping round to their place like this when the poor bitch got killed on our territory. Her and Mauro too.”

  That was one thing Costa did understand. Leo Falcone never fought battles he knew he couldn’t win. It was one of the things that made him stand out in the Questura. He was smarter than most. There was, perhaps, another reason too. A faceless figure from SISDE had turned up halfway through the morning—just in time to see the American woman loaded into the hearse—and had talked to Falcone in private. Costa had never seen him before. Peroni, who knew just about every cop and spook in town, civilian and military, had and had sworn ferociously under his breath at the sight.

  “What was that guy’s name? The one from SISDE?”

  Peroni pulled a sour face. “Viale. Don’t ask me what he does. Or how big he is. Very, probably. I ran into him a couple of times on vice when we picked up people he wanted left alone. He’s good at the pressure.”

  Costa could feel he was treading on delicate ground. “Good enough to squeeze you?”

  “I could tell you, Nic,” Peroni said pleasantly, “but the trouble is, afterwards, I’d have to cut out your tongue. I joke, but I’m not supposed to. The honest answer is men like Viale get what they want these days. You mess with them at your peril.”

  Costa smiled, said nothing, and moved over to the sofa, stretching out for the first time in what seemed like twenty-four hours.

  “Point taken,” Peroni said with a wave of his hand, then disappeared into the bedroom.

  MONICA SAWYER STOOD at the plain wooden counter of L’Angolo Divino and wished to God she’d learned to speak Italian. Someone at the rental agency had recommended the place and tried to explain the play on words, how “divino” meant both “divine” and “about wine.” Monica kind of got the joke. It was a wine bar. Or, more than that, an enoteca, a place that sold a variety of wines, cheap and expensive, and some pretty pricey plates of pasta, cheese and cold meats too. At least, that was what she’d been told. Now that she was in the bar, which was set on the corner of two narrow alleys off the Campo dei Fiori, she didn’t have much of a clue about anything. One end of the L-shaped room looked like a library, with row upon row of expensive-looking bottles stretching up to the high ceiling. The rest of the bar was a plain narrow channel that could take three people deep, no more, with a wooden-plank floor, a few pine tables and some plates of very fragrant cheese in a glass cabinet. An old guy in a brown jacket, the kind people in hardware stores used to wear, was talking rapid Italian at her from behind the counter, and it might as well have been Urdu. There was only one other customer in the place, a man in a black suit who sat on a nearby bench reading an Italian paper and sipping at the biggest wine glass Monica Sawyer had ever seen, swilling around the splash of red liquid in the base from time to time before sniffing it, smiling and drinking the tiniest drop.

  Monica came from San Francisco. She was familiar with bars. She ought to be able to handle this, she thought. So she said very distinctly, for the third time, “Una copa de chardonnay, por favor,” and felt like bursting into tears when the old man just babbled on incomprehensibly and waved at the huge selection of bottles behind the counter.

  “Oh crap,” she muttered. Things had gone from bad to worse. The weather meant she was going to be alone in Rome for days with nothing to do, no one to talk to. And not much chance of getting a decent drink when she wanted one, outside of hotel bars, where a lone American woman of forty-two who was, Monica Sawyer knew, still pretty good-looking could not sit safely without the risk of constant harassment.

  “Italian and Spanish are close relatives, but they are, I fear, hardly interchangeable,” said a warm Irish voice at her shoulder.

  Monica Sawyer turned and saw that the man in the dark suit was now at her side. He’d got there without making a sound, which in normal circumstances would have been a touch creepy. But she didn’t feel that way somehow. He was smiling at her, a pleasant smile, from a pleasant, intelligent face, somewhat lined and hewn, as if it had been through the wars, but attractive all the same. He was, perhaps, fifty and still had perfect, very white teeth. He wore wire-framed, rectangular spectacles, which were a little old-fashioned, and slightly tinted too, so she could only just make out what she believed to be grey, thoughtful eyes behind the glass. He had a good head of hair, salt and pepper locks, long and wavy, like an artist’s.

  They never leave you alone, she thought. But at least this one was Irish. Then she watched him unfold the scarf at his neck and felt deeply and childishly guilty.

  “Father,” she said, staring at the slightly crumpled dog collar, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  He was a handsome man. That was the problem. Given that Harvey probably wouldn’t make it to Rome for days, possibly a week or more, she was, she had to admit, in need of a little company. Just the sound of a friendly voice speaking English made such a difference.

  “And why should you?”

  He was six feet tall and well built. And he was glancing at her fox-fur coat, wondering, perhaps, what kind of woman roamed around the empty, snow-blocked streets of Rome looking as if she’d dressed for the theatre.

  “It’s the warmest thing I’ve got,” she explained hastily. “Besides, I was wearing it for my husband. He was supposed to join me from New York today. Then they said the airport was closed. For God knows how long…” She cursed herself inwardly. Monica Sawyer had gone to a Catholic school in Palo Alto. She ought to be able to remember how to behave. Not that he seemed shocked. Priests were different these days.

  He touched the coat just for a moment with two long, powerful fingers. “You’ll excuse me. I don’t see this kind of thing very much in my line of work.” Then he held out his hand. “Peter O’Malley. Since we are two strangers stranded in Rome by snow, I hope you won’t mind if I introduce myself. I’ve been hanging around all day wondering what to do and, to be honest with you, it’s a pleasure to hear the native tongue.”

  “I was thinking exactly the same thi
ng!” She took his hand, which gripped hers with a brief, muscular strength. “Monica Sawyer.”

  “Then that’s out of the way.” He glanced at the old man behind the counter. “You were wanting a drink, Monica?”

  “Damn right,” she said automatically and found the heat rushing to her cheeks again.

  “Then damn right you shall have one. But not chardonnay, I beg you. It’s a French grape, not a bad one either, but when in Rome—”

  She felt like giggling. Here she was, alone in a strange, foreign city, and a priest, a good-looking one at that, was flirting with her.

  “Recommend something, Peter,” she said firmly.

  “If it’s a white you’re after it would be a crime to leave without tasting a Greco di Tufo.”

  The old man behind the counter raised his heavy, grey eyebrows. It seemed a gesture of approval.

  “A what?”

  “It’s from a grape which is, perhaps, the oldest in Italy. The Pelasgians brought it in from Thessaly way back before Christ. If my memory serves me right there are just a hundred or so small aziende—vineyards to you, Monica—east of Naples that still make it. When you drink a Greco you’re drinking what Virgil did while he was writing the Aeneid, as near as dammit. If you go to Pompeü, as you must, there’s a couple of lines of graffiti on the fresco there, two thousand years old if they’re a day. They go something like, ”You are truly cold, Bytis, made of ice, if last night not even Greco wine could warm you up.“ ”