The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “From Emily Deacon,” Falcone replied. “And now she’s missing.”

  “That little bitch sure knows a lot of things she’s not supposed to. I thought—”

  “What?” Peroni snapped. “That she was just a dummy? Like the rest of us?”

  “Yeah,” Leapman agreed with a sour face.

  Peroni pointed a hefty finger in his direction. “Wrong again, smartass. And here’s another thought. What if she’s dead too? You don’t honestly think you can keep that under wraps, do you?”

  It was remarkable. Leapman was thinking then, exchanging glances with Viale. Something was going on. Peroni risked just the briefest of glances with the man at his side. The twinkle in Falcone’s eyes told him he wasn’t wrong. The ruse had worked. They were through.

  Leapman shook his head and muttered, “This is a mess. Such a mess.”

  Moretti had put down his pen and turned a sickly shade of white. “You told me none of this would happen, Viale,” the commissario complained. “You said—”

  Peroni took immense pleasure in breaking in. “Must be a hell of a pension you’ve built up over the years, Moretti. I was in that position once. Hurts like hell when they take it away from you. Mind you, jail too…”

  Moretti closed his eyes briefly, then shot Peroni a look of pure hatred. “You ugly, sanctimonious bastard,” he hissed. “You don’t have to deal with these people, day in, day out. You don’t have to listen to them pushing and pushing, threatening, cajoling: ”Do this, do that.“ ”

  “I thought that was what you got paid for,” Peroni replied, then added a final, “sir.”

  “We don’t have time for this, gentlemen,” Falcone reminded them, glancing at his watch. “Where’s it going to be? Here, or in the Questura?”

  COSTA WAS GETTING DESPERATE. The picture of the heartless ultimatum Kaspar had set was starting to damage his concentration. Teresa was doing what she loved: cruising the Questura for any titbits of information she could glean by badgering people who, by rights, shouldn’t even be talking to her. Nic had taken on the task of working the street. No one answered the bell at the address Emily had mentioned. He’d peered through the window, looking at the sparse furniture, the kind you got in a rented apartment, not a real home, and thought about breaking in. It was difficult to see what it could tell him about what had happened there thirteen years before. Then he’d hammered on six doors to no avail. Struggling to decide what to do next, he watched one of the Jewish bakers lugging flour through the doorway of his tiny store, smelled the fragrance of fresh bread on the cold December air and, against his own wishes, felt his stomach rumble. He needed to approach this with the same cold, deliberate dedication that Kaspar was showing he possessed. Either that or he could panic them all into another bloody disaster.

  At the heart of the Piazza Mattei stood the little fountain of the tortoises. It was a modest creation by Roman standards, and possessed a comic touch that had amused Costa when he was a boy. Four naked youths, their feet on dolphins, were struggling to push four small tortoises into the basin at the summit of the fountain. It was ludicrous, almost surreal somehow. And today, he noted, the water was flowing.

  He walked to the fountain and climbed over the low iron rail protecting the structure from the carelessness of motorists negotiating the narrow alleys of the ghetto. Then he dipped a finger into the snow at its foot, in the central basin. The ice was melting. He looked at the sky. The bitter cold still blanketed the city, but a change in the weather was imminent.

  It had to be. Something in the human psyche lost sight of facts like these from time to time. When extraordinary events occurred, one adapted, almost came to regard them as normal, forgetting to allot them the perspective they merited. Rome would return to the way it was supposed to be in December. Planes would fly again, buses and trains would run almost on time. One way or another, the killings would cease. Chaos, by its very nature, was impermanent.

  What mattered was bringing events to a close quietly, with as little damage as possible. Nic didn’t know if he could do that. Falcone was in his meeting, but once he emerged he’d be on the phone, asking questions. Would Costa have any answers? If he did, would he be inclined to share them with his boss?

  And…

  He had to ask himself. How much of the truth was Emily telling him? Ever since the previous night when he’d forced her to confront the idea that her father was the man behind Kaspar’s miserable fate in Iraq, he’d felt there was something she was concealing.

  Teresa had looked up the report on the attack in the Piazza Mattei the previous October and tried, in vain, to find something new. The facts were plain, baffling and suspiciously scarce. The American professor had been staying temporarily at Number Thirteen as a houseguest, while conducting some academic research at the American embassy. He’d been assaulted in the square by the fountain. It was pure luck that a couple of cops were in the vicinity. No assailant had been apprehended. No motive could be found. It could be a blind alley…

  Then Teresa had suggested she try to find something out about the property itself. After fifteen minutes—a period of time in which Costa, to his frustration, had gotten nowhere—she phoned back, ecstatic. The earliest deeds she could track showed Number Thirteen had been owned by the same private company based in Washington as far back as 1975. That, in itself, was unusual. Foreign owners rarely kept properties for that length of time. The firm wasn’t listed in the US phone book. It didn’t show in any of the financial records which she’d bullied some lowly minion in research into checking. Something stank, Teresa thought. Costa felt sure her instincts were correct. The tough part was turning instincts into hard fact. It was all going nowhere unless he could prise something out of the memory of someone who’d lived in the square for some time.

  “What you do in circumstances like these,” Costa thought, trying to still those images running around his head, “is get yourself a coffee.”

  He walked into the little cafe on the square, ordered a large macchiato and dumped a couple of extra shots of caffeine inside it from the coffee and sugar sludge parked on the bar in a bowl. Then, as he waited for the sudden caffeine jolt to hit, he tried to think what Falcone would have done in the circumstances.

  The inspector had just a few mottos, all of them rarely heard, all of them apposite. One came to Costa at that moment. Curiosity is the basis of detection. Without it, a man learned nothing. Without it, you might as well be an accountant.

  He tried to recall the substance of the reports he’d read over the last few days and set them against the conversation he’d had with Emily after Kaspar had handed the phone back to her. Then he finished his coffee and called over the middle-aged proprietor.

  He should have figured this out earlier. The ghetto never changed. Places were handed down from generation to generation. He was just a short stroll from the commercial heart of the modern city, but this was a village, one where everyone knew everyone else. Rome was, in some ways, still a collection of individual communities living noisily cheek by jowl. It was what separated Rome from other capitals he had visited, cities that seemed metropolitan sprawls, with ill-defined borders and areas where not a soul lived at night.

  “Who’s the oldest resident in the square?” Costa asked, flashing his card.

  The man kept polishing a glass with a spotless cloth, thinking. “You mean the oldest who’s still got half a brain?”

  Costa sighed. “Listen. I don’t have the time…”

  The cloth came out of the glass and jabbed at a house on the other side of the square. “Sorvino. Number Twenty-one. Ground floor. Don’t say I told you.”

  No one liked talking to the police. Not even cafe owners, who’d be the first to start screaming down the phone if someone walked off with an extra sachet of sugar.

  “Thanks,” Costa murmured. He threw a couple of coins on the counter, then walked out into the cold morning air.

  Number Twenty-one, thanks to the vagaries of house numbering in the g
hetto, was four doors down from Thirteen. He pushed the bell marked “Sorvino.” A stiff-limbed little woman in a faded blue floral-pattern dress came to the door and peered at him through round, thick glasses. She was eighty, maybe more, at an age when it was difficult to tell. Short, but proudly erect, as if to say: to hell with the years. She took one look at the badge and nodded him into the living room. It was immaculate: crammed with polished antique furniture, a selection of framed photographs, and what seemed like hundreds of pieces of Jewish memorabilia.

  “I was hoping to talk to someone with a memory,” he said urgently. “Someone who’s lived here a long time.”

  “Is eighty-seven years long enough for you?”

  “More than enough,” he replied, smiling, hoping he didn’t look too impatient.

  She picked up a delicate porcelain cup, still half full. “Camomile tea. I recommend it for people of a nervous nature.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  “No you won’t. You’re young. You think you can live through anything. What are you looking for? It must be something important.”

  “Very. Facts. Names.” He hesitated. “Names mainly. I’ve been knocking on doors. Getting nowhere.”

  “The ghetto’s changing. You don’t see families the way you used to.”

  “I want to know about Number Thirteen.”

  “Ah.” She nodded and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. “II Duce had a girl there during the war. German. Ilse, I think she was called. Not that he ever visited, you understand. He wouldn’t dirty his hands coming to meet the likes of us, now would he?”

  Jews of her generation had a mixed attitude towards Mussolini. Until the later stage of his career, Il Duce had taken little interest in anti-Semitism. Costa could recall his father telling stories of how some Jews even joined the fascist party. Relatively limited numbers had been transported to the concentration camps. It was the old Roman story: nothing was ever quite black and white.

  “What happened to the house after the war?”

  She looked at him severely. “I’m not an estate agent.”

  “I know that. I just wondered who lived there. You’re a kind woman, Signora, I’m sure. You would want to know your neighbours.”

  “No more than they want to be known,” she said primly.

  “Of course.”

  “Soldiers,” she said with a shrug. “American soldiers, for a while anyway. Nice men. Officers. They had beautiful manners, not like Roman men. They were strangers. I was of assistance to them now and again. I like strangers to go away with fond memories of Rome. As any good citizen would.”

  “Of course. And then?”

  “You’re asking me who’s lived there for the last fifty years?”

  “That would be useful.”

  “Huh.”

  It was never easy dealing with this generation. They resented something. That the world had changed. That they were getting older within it, powerless.

  “Please try to think. A man was attacked there earlier this year. Do you remember?”

  “I heard it! Fighting in the street! Here! Not since the war…” She frowned. “The world gets worse. Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “I’m trying,” he replied.

  “Not hard enough, it seems to me.”

  It was a reasonable observation. “Perhaps. But I can’t…” He corrected himself. “None of us in the police can do that on our own. We need your help. Your support. Without that…”

  She was a bright-eyed old bird. She didn’t miss a thing. “Yes?”

  “Without that we’re just people who enforce the laws made by politicians. Regardless of what anyone thinks. Regardless of what’s right sometimes.”

  “Oh my,” she said, smiling, revealing small teeth the colour of old porcelain, a little crooked. “A policeman with a conscience. How they must love you.”

  “I don’t do this to be loved, Signora. Please. The house. Whose is it? Who’s lived there over the years?”

  “Who owns it? Americans, I imagine. They look like government people to me. Government people who don’t want to say they’re government people. Not that I care. They keep it in good repair. What more can I say? They come. They go. Different ones. Not for long, usually. Just a few weeks, as if it were a hotel. Not long enough to get to know the likes of me. Pleasant men, mind. Always men, too, on their own.”

  She was trying to remember something. Costa waited, knowing he couldn’t let this interview run and run, wondering whether there were any other avenues left open to him.

  “And?”

  “They were solitary creatures,” she said testily. “Not the kind you could talk to easily in the street.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most.”

  “Do you remember any names? It’s possible this man who was attacked was mistaken for someone else.”

  “So many,” she said, frowning.

  Even the old ones didn’t try much these days. Costa took out his card and gave it to her, pointing out the mobile number.

  “If you think of anything. I was probably mistaken in any case. If these men were only here for a short time… I was hoping there was someone who stayed there longer. Some years ago. A man, perhaps, who regarded it as his home.”

  The old eyes sparkled. “There was one. Ten, fifteen years ago. I recall now. I think he stayed there for a year. Possibly more.”

  “His name?”

  “Even less talkative than most of them, from what I remember. Somewhat abrupt I thought, but perhaps that was just his manner.”

  “His name?” he insisted.

  She shook her head. “How could I possibly know that?”

  Teresa had checked. If Number Thirteen was a normal rental property there would be residency records. None existed. It was a bolt-hole for one of the American agencies, surely. They would have a way around all the regulations ordinary citizens had to face.

  “I may have a photograph, though,” she added brightly. “Would that help?” She nodded at the gleaming walnut sideboard next to him. It was covered in small, mounted pictures. She passed him one. “You know what time of year that is?”

  It was winter. Men, women and children, all in heavy coats, stood in front of the fountain of the tortoises holding lit candles.

  “No.”

  “Shame on you! Have you never heard of Hanukkah? Why should the Catholics steal all the fun for Christmas?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not a Catholic.”

  “How shocking,” she said with a laugh. “Still, I forgive you. We have a little tradition. Every year we take a photograph of ourselves. Just the people living here. By the fountain. Every year. I can show you ones when I was a young girl before the war.” Her eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t the old thing I am now.”

  Costa’s brain was working overtime. “He was in the photograph? This American?”

  “He didn’t want to be! The poor man was walking home just as we were lining up out there. We insisted. A little vino had been drunk, you understand. He didn’t have a choice.” She paused to let this point go home. “We can be very persuasive when we want to be, you know.”

  “I can believe that. When?”

  She frowned. “I really couldn’t say. I’ve so many photographs.”

  “Possibly ten, fifteen years ago?”

  She crossed the room, picked up a couple of photos, took off her glasses to peer at them, then returned with one in her frail hand and passed it to him. Costa scanned the faces there. He looked at the back. There was a year, scribbled in pencil: 1990.

  Bingo.

  “YOU WANT TO KNOW who Bill Kaspar is?”

  Joel Leapman looked like a man speaking from personal experience, and there was something in his eyes—impending pleasure, or a hint of a nasty surprise around the corner—that Gianni Peroni really didn’t like.

  “OK. I’ll tell you. Kind of a soldier. Kind of a spy. A mercenary. A go-between running shuttle betw
een men who, like Kaspar, didn’t really exist either. One of the best. Take it from me. He was the sort of guy you’d follow anywhere, right into hell if that’s where he wanted to go. An American hero, we thought. Not that anyone would ever call him that out loud, you understand. And now we’re going to hang him out to dry. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

  Leapman’s tale confirmed just about everything Emily Deacon had discovered. Back in 1990, William F. Kaspar had been called to lead one of two covert teams into Iraq on an intelligence mission well behind hostile lines. The venture was a disaster. The day after they arrived to establish a forward base inside an ancient monument outside Babylon, the Republican Guard had attacked in force. Dan Deacon was out on patrol with his own team when it happened. Deacon radioed for assistance and was ordered not to engage. Forty-five minutes later, two Black Hawks, backed by fighter support, arrived on the scene. The ziggurat was a smoking shell. From what surveillance could see, Kaspar and his team were dead. Deacon’s crew managed to escape to a deserted farm two miles away, where a helicopter snatched them from the approaching enemy, though one female member was badly wounded along the way.