It took a good minute for her to answer and when she did he’d no idea what to say. So he just stood there, extending the flowers, smiling awkwardly. Agata was wearing a short and sleeveless black cocktail dress. Her hair was newly fashioned in a way that, to his eyes, looked a little too serious and old. She was struggling to fasten a rather heavy pearl necklace round her dusky throat and there was a look in her intelligent eyes that he couldn’t quite interpret except, perhaps, as embarrassment. The apartment, from what he could see through the half-open door, looked beautiful: modern furniture, large art prints on the wall, an airy individual residence hidden behind the thick walls of a building that probably went back to the seventeenth century or earlier. She didn’t make a move to let him in.
Costa thrust the flowers out a little more, and realized as he did so how sorry some of them looked.
‘I asked you to call first,’ she said.
‘Busy day.’
‘Busy? Doing what? You’re on holiday, aren’t you?’
There was something in the way she spoke, a tone that was almost accusing. He didn’t understand.
‘All sorts.’
Her attention had gone beyond the flowers to the tatty Vespa on its stand on the cobblestones.
‘That’s your scooter, is it? The one Leo told me about?’
‘That’s her,’ he said proudly. ‘Look. You’re living just up the street from one of the best pizza places in Rome. Da Baffetto. We don’t need the scooter. You have to queue usually but. .’ He pulled out his police ID card. ‘Sometimes I have ways.’
She sighed then turned round. He got the message, tucked the bad bouquet under his arm, then gripped the clasp of the pearl necklace and closed it against the warm dark skin of her neck. It was the first time he’d performed this simple act since his wife had died and the closeness of it, the pointless intimacy, made him feel wistful and a little sad.
A tall, muscular man, bald, intellectual-looking, with fashionably heavy black plastic glasses and a haughty pale face, came into view from behind her.
‘Agata won’t be eating pizza tonight,’ he announced in a clipped Milanese accent.
Costa looked at him, trying to understand. The newcomer was about forty-five, handsome in an arrogant, patrician way. He wore a silvery grey suit, silk perhaps, very expensive, and eyed the little Vespa as if it were poisonous. Still looking at the scooter he pulled out a set of car keys and pushed a button. There was a grey Alfa Romeo saloon parked thoughtlessly along the road. It made a loud beep then the lights flashed and the doors clicked.
‘I’ll drive us to Testaccio,’ he announced, then placed a proprietorial arm around Agata’s shoulder. ‘The table is booked for eight thirty at Checchino’s. We shouldn’t be late.’
‘Checchino’s?’ Costa knew the place, a little. One of Rome’s most pricey restaurants, not that its speciality — offal — was something he’d touch. ‘Nice if you like that kind of thing.’
‘She will,’ the man interjected with a sardonic smile before almost pushing her out of the apartment.
‘Bruno’s my new boss,’ Agata said as she turned and locked the door, embarrassed in a way that made Costa feel deeply guilty. ‘We’ve got to talk about work. I’m sorry. If you’d called. . If I’d guessed you were at a loose end. I never knew. From seeing you today. .’
‘No problem,’ he cut in with a smile, then wondered what she was about to say. ‘You saw me?’
She didn’t answer and the man had got her out of the apartment so quickly there was no chance to ask again.
As Bruno bustled her off she turned and made the gesture of a phone, surreptitiously as if she didn’t want him to notice. Costa clung to the bunch of flowers and nodded, still smiling.
‘Of course,’ he said to himself as she climbed into the shiny Alfa. Its powerful engine roared with rather more noise and vigour than was necessary. Then Bruno drove briskly away along the narrow, congested street.
An elderly woman in a cotton dress, an ancient checked apron and saggy stockings was sweeping up outside the tiny pasta shop next to the florist’s. Costa walked over and said, ‘Signora?’
She looked at him in a knowing way that suggested she’d followed every moment of this little encounter.
‘Some flowers,’ Costa said, offering her the bouquet.
Her lined face brightened.
‘You’re a kind young man. A lady appreciates that.
‘
‘One word of advice,’ she added, waving a finger.
His heart fell. Romans, even complete strangers, had a way of telling you frankly what they thought, however unwelcome the message.
‘Yes?’
‘Kindness is all well and good. But remember that saying? All’s fair in love and war?’
‘I never really understood it,’ Costa admitted.
She patted his arm as she took the bouquet and said, ‘It shows.’
He shrugged then went and sat on the Vespa, watching the people come and go down the Via Governo Vecchio. Young and old. Couples and families. Queuing patiently for Baffetto’s cheap and excellent pizzas as they did every night, even in the rain. Ordinary men and women, the kind he liked, the kind he wanted to work for, to protect, wandering around on a lazy late-August evening, seemingly without a care in the world. Very few of them, he noticed, were alone.
It was stupid to turn up like that. Selfish to think she would be waiting there, for him alone. Agata Graziano was a beautiful, intelligent young woman discovering a new life in a city where she’d grown up behind the enclosing walls of a convent. An attachment to a solitary cop fumbling through the years, one so lacking in direction that he thought rebuilding an ancient Vespa was a worthwhile venture for a man turned thirty — this was surely the last thing she needed.
Costa looked at his watch. He’d be home in twenty-five minutes, back behind the walls of the farmhouse where he grew up. Somewhere that wasn’t a part of the city, didn’t belong to its ungainly mass of awkward humanity. The place was a kind of escape. A sanctuary. Somewhere to hide. He didn’t mind that at times.
‘Home,’ he said to himself, and, without thinking, popped the scooter kick-start four times in a row then, to compound matters, absent-mindedly jerked on the throttle.
The two-stroke engine coughed once, sputtered, choked and died.
The old woman was still watching him, holding the bouquet, shaking her head.
At that moment his phone buzzed; he felt grateful and stared at the screen. He’d given his number to Mina Gabriel in case she needed it. Now she’d sent a message. It read, ‘Do you believe what that horrid man said? Do you think I’m guilty of something?’
He sighed, gave up entirely on the Vespa and phoned her back. From the sound of her voice she’d been crying.
‘Mina? It’s Nic. Are you all right?’
She mumbled a simple, tetchy ‘Yes.’ Then nothing.
‘Listen to me. Don’t read too much into what happened this afternoon. Leo’s a good man. He’s my friend. He wants to help. We all do.’
‘Help?’
He tried to imagine her, alone in the tower Peroni had told him about.
‘Help,’ he repeated. ‘What can I do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me, Mina!’
‘Can’t.’ He thought he heard a noise, then understood what it was. She was closing a door, perhaps to her bedroom. Trying to make sure she wasn’t heard. Then she whispered, ‘Don’t believe what anyone says about me, Nic. It’s not true.’
‘No one’s saying anything. .’
‘I am not some monster!’
