The Sacred Cut nc-3

by David Hewson

  Little Em.

  No one had called her that since she’d turned twelve. It was a name used by her family, and those close to them, during those warm, sunny days in Rome, back when the world was whole and human and new, back when a string of strange men came through their apartment in Aventino, leaving her presents, making her feel special, dancing with her in the bright white living room to any damn music they felt like.

  Little Em.

  Someone approached. It was Nic Costa. The young Italian cop walked up, his interesting, intelligent face full of concern. He retrieved her gun from the slush, looked at her, then pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket.

  “Here,” he said.

  She remembered the pain now, and ran her tongue over her bruised lower lip, grateful it didn’t feel too bad.

  “Thanks. Where the hell were you?”

  “Looking. It’s a big dark place out there.”

  She nodded. “I wouldn’t argue with that.”

  There’d never been an experience like this in her life, ever. Nothing in the Bureau had prepared her for it.

  “I lost the kid, Nic. Sorry. I didn’t have a choice.”

  He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t seem too bothered.

  Gianni Peroni arrived, a little out of breath, obvious pleasure on his face at seeing she was safe. She liked these men. A lot. Her head felt funny. Her balance wasn’t what it ought to be. For a split second she thought she was going to cry.

  By Peroni’s side was Laila. The girl came straight up to her, looked in her eyes with something that resembled gratitude, then held up the lone cuff dangling from her wrist, wanting to be released.

  “Sure,” Emily Deacon said. “After…”

  After we’ve talked, she wanted to say. After I’ve done the FBI agent thing, all confidence and bluster, pretending everything’s OK now, everything’s just dandy, if only you’ll answer a few questions, listen to what the cold, tough automaton from the Bureau has to say.

  After…

  The lights went out. She was scarcely aware that it was Nic Costa’s arms that stopped her head from splitting open on the Campo’s freezing cobblestones.

  * * *

  It was quiet in the cabin high over the side street close to the Palazzo Borghese. Monica Sawyer twitched and writhed under the heavy sheets, shadows moving through her head, unseen figures dancing to events that had an interior logic they didn’t care to share with her. These were disturbing dreams, enticing dreams, ones she wasn’t used to, dreams that made her roll and turn and moan from time to time, out of fear, out of anticipation. Made her sweat too, struggling inside the scarlet silk slip Harvey had bought her once, on a brief holiday to Maui, thinking he could inject life back into the marriage.

  Harvey.

  His name just popped into her mind, like a sour discordant note that had sounded in a piece of glorious, fiery, scary music.

  Scarlet was her colour, or so Harvey said. Scarlet made her look slutty too. He liked that.

  “Harvey, Harvey,” she whispered, not knowing whether she wanted to summon him there or not, wishing she hadn’t drunk so much, hadn’t let all those strange old grapes from Virgil’s day get deep inside her brain.

  “Look at me now. Look at…”

  With a sudden physical shock, a jerk that made her body go rigid, she was awake, mind racing with sudden activity, one awkward fact ringing in her head. It wasn’t Harvey she was trying to summon into her dream, like an incubus invited in by some deep dark part of her imagination. It was Peter O’Malley.

  Who was out looking for churches.

  Except he wasn’t. Now, with a half-hungover clarity, she could see something that was hidden from her when he was around. Peter O’Malley was just plain wrong. Priests didn’t hang around bars like that, slyly working their way into the confidence of stray women. They didn’t know about wine and food. They couldn’t turn on the charm, creep into someone’s head with such a sly degree of determined stealth. And they didn’t stay out all night either. Monica knew she’d have woken up if he had returned. Even when she’d been drinking, she was a light, nervous sleeper.

  Nothing in his story added up. He wasn’t the kind of man to tend a flock of nuns in Orvieto, or anywhere else. Peter O’Malley was a loner wandering the streets of Rome, homeless for some reason, with just a small black bag for company. If it hadn’t been for the dog collar she wouldn’t have countenanced inviting him into the apartment. That thought made her feel foolish. And resentful too.

  “He’s a fraud,” she said quietly to herself and wondered why she didn’t feel more scared.

  Because you’re kind of hoping he comes back and…

  “No,” she said, and remembered. He’d taken the one set of keys. This was, the more she came to consider matters, deeply, deeply stupid. She was in a foreign city, unable to speak a word of the language, unable to pick up the phone and call for help if she needed it. She glanced at her watch, thought about what the time was in San Francisco, where Harvey might be during that part of the late afternoon.

  And what would she say if she called?

  There was this priest, Harvey. He didn’t have anywhere to sleep. We downed some drinks and one thing almost led to another. Correction. I downed some drinks. And now I know he’s not a priest at all, though what he really is still beats me.

  This wasn’t getting better. Maybe he was just a harmless bum looking for somewhere to sleep. Now she thought of it, he’d had an opportunity to take things further. If he’d pushed a little more after they’d talked on the roof…

  Monica Sawyer considered that moment and knew the truth of it. If he’d pushed a little more, she’d have fallen into bed with him and thought: To hell with Harvey, let’s see what a little of God’s glory can do.

  But he didn’t. He went out.

  Looking for churches.

  Quite.

  She got up, pulling on a nightgown because it was damn cold in this tiny, artificial box. Monica knew what she had to do, which was to find something, anything, that would make her suspicions concrete, give her reason to call the cops and scream into the phone until someone somewhere listened.

  “The bag,” Monica said to herself.

  She opened the bedroom door. The living room was empty. The bag was by the French windows, which were ajar, bringing a cold draught into the room. Monica cursed herself. It was a night for getting careless. Outside, the two gas heaters still burned, hissing quietly, like vents in the side of a small volcano sitting on a rooftop in the middle of the city.

  She checked the single front door. It had this incredible lock-multiple bolts, the kind you’d expect on a domestic Fort Knox. All of them still thrown from the outside as he left. She couldn’t open it however hard she tried. But there was an old-fashioned manual bolt on the inside too. She threw it and felt a little better. Maybe she couldn’t get out, but Peter was now unable to get back in unless she allowed him.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Monica whispered to herself. She went back to the sofa and picked up the black bag, finding it unexpectedly heavy, placed it on the table and blinked, trying to see better. The interior lights were terrible. Insignificant, tiny yellow bulbs that barely penetrated the shadows of the cabin. She glanced at the terrace, with its hissing heaters. Two big fluorescent spots threw a bright semicircle under the awning there. It would be so much easier. She went outside and laid the bag on the plastic picnic table under the awning.

  The night was extraordinary: starlit, perfectly still, beautiful, like a painting on one of those pretty picture Christmas cards old people sent each other.

  You’ll be old one day, the little voice inside her said.

  “Yeah,” Monica agreed. “But you won’t find me sending out crap like that.”

  Even though the main door was bolted she closed the French windows behind her. It seemed like a good idea.

  She started to open the zipper, then shut her eyes. Was this really such a good idea? Going through a stranger’s thi
ngs, looking to find proof he wasn’t what he claimed? She could stay where she was, safe from anyone getting in, wait until morning, call the cops and tell them she’d lost her keys.

  Unless she met him on the stairs on the way out. Unless…

  Too many possibilities started to crowd into her head. Monica pulled the zipper all the way back and was dismayed to find staring out at her exactly what she would, in ordinary circumstances, have expected. Peter O’Malley’s modest, inexpensive bag revealed a black woollen sweater, just the kind a priest would wear. Neatly folded, the way an organized man, one who lived inside an institution, would have learned over the years.

  She hesitated and looked behind her into the cabin. The living room was still empty. It wasn’t even dawn. Maybe he was gone for good, out doing whatever he really did for a living.

  Which was probably nothing exciting at all.

  She pulled out the sweater and placed it carefully on the terrace table, which, being well protected against the weather by the awning, was still relatively dry and clean. Monica was determined everything would go back in as it came out, in exactly the same condition, exactly the same order. As much as possible, anyway.

  One more sweater. Some underwear. Socks. All very clean. And a pair of light shoes, not the kind you’d normally wear in winter.

  It was all so ordinary.

  Then two shirts, folded so they creased as little as possible. Peter O’Malley, or whoever he was, knew how to pack.

  The last shirt was different. Kind of khaki, woollen. Almost military issue, although maybe the Church made priests wear this kind of thing too, just to remind them who they truly were.

  “You’re prying, Monica,” she said. “You’re a stupid, nosy bitch who’s just got the night terrors from drinking too much. Who…”

  She removed the khaki shirt, placed it in order alongside the rest of his belongings and felt her lungs freeze, go still, in unison with the breathless quiet of the night.

  There was a gun there. A small, black, deadly looking gun.

  She took it out, held it in her hand, where it fitted neatly, wondered how you made a weapon like this work if you needed one, then put it in the correct position on the table.

  Next to the gun was a selection of things she couldn’t quite comprehend. What looked like a radio, with a little earphone. A bunch of silver tubes the size of cigarillos, with wires sticking out of one end, emerging from what looked like a wad of wax. A few notes: euros, dollars, all small denominations. And finally something that really bewildered her.

  Monica Sawyer took the stuff out of the bottom of the bag and held it up to the sky. It was a carefully rolled-up hank of material of some kind. When she unravelled a little she saw it was cut into a repeating geometric pattern, a series of slashes that were clearly part of the design. She stretched it with her fingers and watched the way the precise slashes in the fabric stretched and pulled, keeping their shape, seeming to have some odd, internal strength that came as much from the material’s pattern and its precise arrangement of tears as from the textile itself.

  “It’s rude to look,” said a voice from somewhere behind her.

  Monica Sawyer tried to speak but all that came out was a kind of clack-clack-clack. She was scared. Of the shapes in the fabric. Of this place. Of this cold, cold night.

  But more than anything, she was scared of this voice, which kept on speaking, using words her mind blocked her from hearing, kept on changing accent, changing tone, all coming from a shape that must have been perched somewhere on the roof all the time, looking at a frozen Rome perfect beneath a frozen sky.

  Venerdi

  Nic Costa looked out of the living-room window, out at the bright morning and a garden that was a perfect sheet of white, broken only by the bent old-men backs of olive trees sagging under the weight of snow. The farmhouse off the Appian Way couldn’t cope with the weather. It was still cold, in spite of two log fires roaring away at either end of the big, airy room. This was home, though, a good place to be. Since his father died and Costa had embarked on a lengthy, solitary recuperation from a near-fatal shooting, the house had rarely echoed to anything but his own footsteps. That was a shame. It was a place that needed people to make it live again.

  He glanced at last summer’s logs crackling and sputtering in the ancient fireplaces, still damp from the snow, and remembered what his father had looked like during those final days, swathed in a blanket in his wheelchair, slipping away gradually, battling his disease every inch of the way. Then he heard the deep, round sound of Gianni Peroni’s guffaw roll out of the kitchen, followed, a little more hesitantly, by light young laughter.

  Teresa Lupo walked out, shaking her head, and eyed the tray in his hands. “Are you going to take it up to her, Nic? Or shall I? That coffee’s going cold and there’s nothing Americans hate more than cold coffee.”

  “I’ll do it. How is he?”

  “Gianni?” Teresa’s eyes were shining, as if she’d been close to tears. She looked exhausted, but happy too. Costa had called her after the incident in the Campo. It was her decision to drive there straightaway, then on to the farmhouse. Costa wondered how they would have coped without her.

  “He’s fine.” She sighed. “For an idiot. She’s a messed-up immigrant kid, Nic. I talked to the social people on the phone when you were asleep. They’ll have to take her into care. You can’t just”-she formed the words very deliberately-“transfer the way you feel about your own kids to someone else. However much you need to. Gianni just wants to be home with his own family. I know that. I don’t blame him.”

  Costa wondered if it was really so simple. “The girl looks happy, Teresa. Maybe it works both ways. She’s seeing a little of her own father in him. Besides, he’s doing his job too. She refused to say a damn word until he began clowning around.”

  “It’s not the girl I’m worried about,” she said with sudden severity. “He’s not the big, invulnerable hulk he looks, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Now you take that coffee to your guest.”

  He did as he was told and was unable to suppress slight nervousness when he knocked on the door of the guest room. It was now just before eight. Emily Deacon had slept solidly from the moment they took her back to the farmhouse and probably remembered little about the confused hour or so after she fainted in the Campo. She was going to wake up with plenty of questions. Costa took a deep breath. Then, when there was no response, he entered.

  This had been his sister’s room before she went to Milan to work. It had an uninterrupted view back to the old Appian Way. The outline of the tomb of Cecilia Metella sat, a drum-like shape, on the horizon. He placed the tray on the bedside table, coughed loudly and waited as the American woman stirred slowly into consciousness, watching, with no little fascination, the way she was transformed from slumbering innocence back to the taut, alert FBI agent of the day before.

  She looked around the room and frowned.

  “Where the hell am I?” she demanded, then gulped at the glass of fresh orange juice.

  “My house. With the girl. She’s downstairs with Peroni right now. You remember our pathologist?”

  “I remember.”

  “We got her to take a look at you after you fainted. We were worried you might have been concussed. You banged your head when you went down like that. You were… mumbling.”

  “A pathologist? Thanks.”

  “She used to be a doctor,” he said.

  She felt her head. “You could have taken me home.”

  “We didn’t know where home was. Your friend Leapman wasn’t exactly helpful when we spoke to him. He seemed more interested in the man.”

  “As was I,” she grumbled.

  “I’m sorry. We just didn’t know what else to do. We wanted Laila somewhere safe. It seemed to make sense.”

  She swore quietly. “My, won’t I be in his good books now?” Then she looked at him and Costa could see she was remembering something
afresh from the previous night. Something she didn’t care to explain just then. “I need to go into the office. Can you drive me?”

  “Of course. The bathroom’s through that door. When you’re done, come downstairs. Peroni’s cooking breakfast. You might find it interesting. Also…”

  He wanted to laugh. She was looking at herself, still in last night’s clothes, wrapped in the bedsheets, trying to clear her head.

  “This is like being a student again,” she complained. “ ”Also“ what?”

  “You might be able to forget about the bad books.”

  * * *

  Monica Sawyer lay still on the floor, arms hugging the coverlet he’d placed around her the previous night, the cord tight in her flesh, chestnut hair strewn around her face. She looked like a shattered doll dressed in a gaudy nightgown, mouth open, blank eyes staring at the ceiling. Purple thumb marks had turned livid on her neck. A line of dried blood stood on her lower lip.

  It wasn’t a dream. In truth, he’d known that all along. Kaspar looked at her and felt something approaching regret. It hadn’t been planned. He’d lost control and that was bad. He fetched the bag and automatically, without a conscious thought, turned her over, sliced the scalpel down the back of the nightgown, then the scarlet slip, and stared at her back. Not bad for a woman in her forties. Smooth skin, barely blemished.

  He wondered what he would have done if he’d got the chance to lead a life of dissolution. If there’d been the space inside the last thirteen years to do anything but think of survival, a way of getting through the meagre day, then getting even.

  “You’d be as fat as a pig, Kaspar.” It was another voice inside him. They just kept getting noisier all the time, all the more so since this last, unexpected misadventure. This was the guy from Alabama, whose name was lost to him now through the mist.

  “You’d be wearing pinstripes, working in a bank, screwing your wife once a week just to keep her happy.” Uptight New England WASP, speaking through the back of the nose. There’d been many an officer like that, Kaspar thought. Or maybe it was just a movie. Or Steely Dan Deacon himself. He’d got it. That was his New England whine, brought back from the dead by seeing his girl the night before. And letting her live…