by David Hewson
“I don’t know anything about some damn pattern,” Fielding complained, waving a hand at her. “This is your business, Emily, not mine.”
“Yes! It is my business.” Her voice rose. “But believe me. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”
He thought about that, trying to measure if it were true or not. “Are you kidding me?”
“No!”
Fielding rubbed his hand across his mouth, thinking. “OK. Let’s say I believe you. Here’s the first piece of advice: don’t ask Leapman any of these questions. You’re right. You won’t get an answer. And it may just make things worse between you.”
“Fine,” she persisted. “So let me ask you. Again. What happened in 1991?”
An uncharacteristic sourness crossed Thornton Fielding’s face. “You’ve got books, haven’t you, Emily? You know what happened in 1991. Desert Storm. A bunch of allies got together to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait.”
“My dad was involved in that?”
“He was the military attaché. What did you expect him to do? Stay here counting paper clips?”
So that part of her memory was accurate. He had gone away, and for some time.
“You mean he went there?”
Fielding shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know the details. It’s a million miles from my job and I don’t want to know the details. Let me just say this. Rome’s a great place for putting together certain kinds of projects. Particularly ones that have to do with the Middle East. You’ve got the communication. You’re near the action. You don’t have the security issues you hit somewhere like Greece. There are facilities, too, out of town. That’s as much as I know.”
“He was in Iraq?” she pressed.
“Maybe. Probably. Hell, I don’t know and I’m not about to start asking. There was a whole bunch of spooky people around at the time. I kept clear. I didn’t like what was going on. We had a casus belli there anyway—Saddam had invaded another country, for God’s sake. But we hadn’t thought it through. Which was kind of the opposite second time round, in my opinion. With that we’d done the war games over and over again and never quite found the reason to use them. Not in all truth. I very nearly resigned over that one.”
She was shocked. The idea of Thornton Fielding walking out of the embassy after twenty years seemed incredible.
“You thought about quitting?”
Her bafflement seemed to offend him. “Is that so odd? Do you think we just sit here taking orders, never questioning them? I wasn’t the only one. Some guy in the visa department just left his desk the day the first bombs fell, went outside and joined the crowds. Guess he’s making coffee in a bar or something right now. Stupid move. I can’t believe I nearly joined him.”
His eyes slid towards the closed door again. Suddenly she felt guilty for putting this decent man in such an awkward position.
“It’s not always easy to do what’s right, Emily. You have to marry up your conscience with your duty. Sometimes they don’t match too well. One has to make way for the other. Either that or you just start all over again at something new and I’m too old for that. Hell, I’m too good for that. You can walk away or you can wait for another day to fight. I chose the latter.”
She tried to think back to the blur that was her childhood.
“He was gone a long time, I think. I remember it was odd. My mom cried at night. She was worried.”
“He was gone for almost three months,” Fielding said bluntly. “But he came back, Emily. At least you got that. They didn’t all make it.”
“And now he’s dead. This creep killed him anyway. In a temple in Beijing. Killed him, then carved this crazy pattern out of his back, just like all these others.”
The connection hovered just out of reach… Fielding was waving a hand in front of his face. “I thought I told you. No details. Don’t give me any details…”
“Without details I’m lost, Thornton. And I can’t get a single piece of useful information out of the damn system, because it’s blocked off to underlings like me. The moment I get near anything I hit the same barrier: no security clearance. I can’t talk to Leapman. All I’ve got is you and some local cops who maybe know more than they’re letting on.”
“I haven’t got any more, Emily,” he said with resolution. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. Forget it. You want my advice? Go home. Get sick. Lay a complaint against Leapman or something. You won’t have a problem making them believe that. Get back to Washington, find yourself a comfy desk somewhere and get on with your life. Leave Rome and all this shit behind. There are graves around here you don’t want to start digging up.”
“That’s not possible.”
He looked into her face and there was no mistaking his expression. Thornton Fielding was begging her to be gone.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I met him last night, Thornton, and I can’t just walk away from this now. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. Why? I don’t know. I have to know. Because of who I am. Because… Shit. He’s smart. Maybe he thought that’s why I was here in the first place? To lure him out. And he just didn’t want to play someone else’s game.”
He put his hands together and asked very slowly, “You met who?”
“Bill Kaspar.”
Fielding’s handsome face drained of expression. “Jesus Christ, Em. Where the hell did you get a name like that?”
“From the guy last night,” she lied. He’d only given her a surname. Her early memories provided the rest. “He called me that, too. ”Little Em…‘ “
Bill Kaspar. What a guy.
They’d all said that of this man once upon a time. She didn’t know how she remembered that or why. Just that it was true. Her father thought that. Perhaps Thornton Fielding did once too.
“ ”Little Em…‘ “ she repeated. ”But I’m not little anymore, Thornton.“
“I can see that,” he murmured. “We’ve all grown up a lot over the last few years.”
“So tell me. What the hell’s going on around here?”
“Can’t,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not even sure I know myself. I just know this: you steer clear of this shit. Otherwise it will eat you up, like it did…”
He fell silent and looked at the door. It was different now. He wanted someone to intervene.
“Like it did my father? And these other people too?”
“Emily…”
She was making Thornton Fielding squirm and it felt awful.
“You know what I think, Thornton? Leapman brought me here as bait of some kind. I’m my father in disguise just to remind this man of something, to throw him off his guard. Joel Leapman thinks I’ll bring out this… monster. Make him crawl out of the woodwork. Is that what Bill Kaspar was like all along? And if he was…”
He was staring at some papers on the desk, pretending she wasn’t there.
“Dammit, Thornton! You were my dad’s friend. Are you going to help me find out what happened to him or not?”
He didn’t say a thing. It was all a waste of time. Maybe he was so scared he’d report it all back to Leapman the moment she was gone.
“And you’re the guy who nearly resigned over a principle, huh? You expect me to believe that?”
It didn’t make her feel any better. Thornton Fielding was part of the good Rome she remembered, and here she was beating up on him for no real reason at all.
“I can’t help what you believe, Emily. But please. Listen to me. Drop this. For your own sake. Just leave the whole thing alone.”
She stormed through the door and slammed it behind her. Fielding watched her go, miserable. Then he turned round his desk and started typing, very slowly, very deliberately, into his PC.
Emily Deacon walked back to her seat in Leapman’s office. The place was empty. Leapman hadn’t even left a message.
You don’t leave messages for bait.
So what she was supposed to do? Where she was supposed to be? It was an act. Everything
was, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do to change matters.
The icon on her e-mail in-box blinked. She opened the message.
I am sorry for the problems you have been experiencing with the embassy network. We are currently carrying out some urgent maintenance in order to rectify this. I have set up a temporary network identity which you can use in the meantime. This will expire permanently at 14.00.
Username: WillFK. Password: BabylonSisters.
Regards, TF
Breathless, she typed in the details, logged on. Then she looked at her watch. It was now 13.05. Fielding wasn’t being generous but maybe this was about as much as he could risk.
Emily Deacon entered keywords she’d tried before, the ones that brought down the security block.
Then she sat back in her seat and watched the screen begin to fill with text.
TWO UNIFORM MEN found Monica Sawyer. They’d taken a crowbar to the boot of the half-burnt-out Renault at the foot of the Spanish Steps, peered inside, wondered about the smell and the dark liquid leaking from the couple of suitcases in there, then popped the locks on them.
One was still in the emergency department of San Giovanni puking up diminishing returns from his breakfast. The second, a raw young recruit who looked no more than twenty, now sat between Costa and Peroni in the jeep, leaning back in the rear seat, eyes closed, face the colour of the grey, wan sky still dumping snowflakes down on the city.
Costa and Peroni had listened in silence to his story. They’d been called in by Falcone as they vainly combed the riverfront for Laila, Peroni complaining loudly that there had to be other cops in town who could handle the call.
Costa had pointed the car towards the Piazza di Spagna as soon as Falcone called. Peroni openly begged down the phone for more time to look for the girl. It didn’t cut any ice. Falcone wanted them there for some reason of his own, and both men had begun to guess what that was. The inspector was feeling cornered, outnumbered, scared even. Big players were gathering around him, people he refused to trust. Costa and Peroni seemed to be at the top of his very short list of confidants just now.
Peroni was right, though. There were plenty of other cops around, all of them on the job already. Plainclothes officers and SOCOs milled around the wrecked vehicle, a tide of white bunny suits and dark winter coats. There were men and women working the nearby shops and offices too. This was a big operation. Falcone wouldn’t commit this kind of resource without good reason. Either he felt that things were coming to a head. Or that they were falling apart.
“Best you go home,” Peroni said to the uniform. The man’s face was utterly bloodless. He’d be seeing the department shrink before long.
“I go off shift at five,” the young officer said curtly. “That’s when I go home.”
Peroni nodded. “What’s your name, son?”
“Sacco.”
“I’ll remember that. You look like a sound guy. This your first?”
Sacco closed his eyes. “The first time I found a body in a suitcase?”
“No,” Peroni replied patiently. “The first murder?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.” Peroni slapped his shoulder and started climbing out of the car. “Take care.”
The two of them walked towards the crime scene, Peroni shaking his head.
“Rookies,” he muttered. “What is it with this macho thing?”
“He’s just doing what he thinks is expected of him, Gianni.”
“Aren’t we all? And what about Laila?”
Peroni’s insistence on treating everyone under the age of twenty-five as somehow not quite fully formed never ceased to astonish Costa.
“Laila’s been living on the streets for months, Gianni. She’s as tough as they come. Didn’t you notice? Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the situation, I don’t think there’s any doubt about her coping.”
Peroni favoured him with an icy stare. “Coping. That’s what life’s about, is it?”
“Sometimes,” Costa offered lamely. “It’s what you do in between figuring out what you really want to do with your time. I seem to recall getting this lecture from you once.”
“OK, smart guy,” Peroni conceded. “Throw my own bullshit back at me if you like.”
“Look. When we’ve got the opportunity I’ll help you find Laila.”
His partner nodded at the wrecked Renault. “If he doesn’t get there first.”
That sparked something in Costa’s head. “He’s got bigger things on his plate, don’t you think? Besides…” He wished there was more time to mull over what they knew and less spent chasing phantoms. “He could have killed her last night if he’d wanted, surely? Emily Deacon’s not that great a deterrent. But he didn’t. Have you worked that one out yet?”
“No,” Peroni confessed. “Unless the Deacon woman broke his stride somehow. Not that that makes much sense. What the hell. Let’s put it to one side for now.”
He walked towards the back of the car. A lone idiot in a Santa Claus uniform stood on the corner forlornly shaking a bell. The city never had this particular American import until recently. This Christmas they seemed to be springing up everywhere.
The fake Santa shook his bell, held out a candy stick, looked Peroni in the eye and nodded at the bucket that stood between them on the snow.
“Have you been a good boy, Officer?” the man asked.
“Define ”good,“ ” Peroni snapped and brushed past him.
Nic Costa looked at the sign round the man’s neck: a charity for foreign kids. He threw a couple of notes in the bucket, then shook his head at the candy stick.
“Give it to your friend,” Santa suggested. “Might sweeten him up a bit.”
“I doubt that somehow,” Costa murmured and joined the team by the car.
Falcone was off to one side, just outside the deserted McDonald’s, talking solemnly with a couple of plainclothes cops, watched by the bored-looking Joel Leapman. Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua were working steadily on something in the boot of the car, half-concealed by badly placed screens, one of which Peroni was moving to get access to the vehicle.
Peroni took one glance at the mess in the boot, one at Teresa Lupo, then turned away and asked sharply, “Anything we should know?”
The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”
“Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything… ?”
“No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”
“Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”
There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.
Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.
“I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”
Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”
“How?” Peroni asked again.
“Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”
There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensi
ve too. Maybe…”
They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.
“You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”
“He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.
“Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”
Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.
“Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”
