‘I know that.’
‘No, you don’t.’
The petulant tone of a child again. There was another sound. A louder female voice. Her mother, he thought immediately. Shouting. Angry. Words he couldn’t quite understand, though he knew what they meant. Then a shriek of pain accompanied by what sounded like a physical blow, and the line went dead.
Families. He thought of Peroni and his love of everything to do with that word. Of Falcone and how the very mention of such a secret, insular closeness could place a dark cloud in the eyes of one of the most decent men he knew. These tight, sometimes cloying ties encompassed the best of humanity and, on occasion, masked the worst of it.
‘I am not some monster,’ Costa repeated to himself and wondered: who is? Who would ever admit to that fact? The most vicious and brutal criminals he’d met never saw themselves in that light either, not quite. They felt justified in their actions, possessed of some moral compass, and if the rest of the world failed to understand, then so what? Lives were made, not inherited or handed down. Usually.
The phone buzzed again.
‘Mina?’ he asked anxiously.
It was a message from a number he didn’t recognize. He stared at the words on the screen: ‘Meet me in the Campo. The Lone Star. Be alone. Robert Gabriel.’
THREE
Costa knew this place well, from work, not pleasure. It was one of the busiest bars in the Campo dei Fiori area: a grubby dive serving cheap alcohol to a predominantly international and young crowd. The Lone Star was where the students and backpackers from America and England congregated of a night. To drink, to flirt. To feel free of the restraints of home. He’d lost count of the fights he’d dealt with, the number of drug busts he’d seen recorded among its customers. All just a few short steps away from the plain, upright building that had once been home to the mistress of Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, her presence still marked by a small crest on the wall of the house where Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia came into the world.
He wondered if any of the kids around him knew how much history lay just outside the door, and what the offspring of Rodrigo Borgia, no strangers to debauchery themselves, would have made of the Campo dei Fiori five centuries on. The bar was packed. A hundred youngsters or more. The music was deafening, the voices predominantly English: drunk, elated, expectant. He scanned the faces, looking for one that might jog a memory. Costa was aware that he hadn’t got a good look at Mina’s brother that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci. All he remembered was a tall figure, a head of bushy hair and that curious remark before the gunshot:
After fifteen futile minutes he asked the barman if he knew an English kid called Robert Gabriel. No luck. After half an hour he was ready to go home. Then the phone beeped again. Not a call, just another text message: ‘I wanted to see you were alone. Meet me in the apartment. Via Beatrice Cenci. Fifteen minutes.’
He was here. He had to be. Costa found himself gazing across the sea of bodies again. He stopped at a tall figure in the far corner, near the side door that led to the little lane connecting the Campo with the Piazza Farnese. The kid was watching him, interested, maybe a little afraid. Robert Gabriel looked different somehow. Just as tall, and the hair was long, though a little lank, unwashed. His complexion was darker than Mina’s, his expression bleak and unintelligent. He was wearing a bleached denim jacket over a black T-shirt.
Costa shrugged at him as if to say: we could just talk here.
But then he was gone, out through the side door into the street.
Costa got out as quickly as he could but it was no use. The ancient square, with its hooded statue of the executed monk Giordano Bruno at its centre, had taken on its night-time identity: loose and noisy. Watching the crowds of young men and women meandering between the bars he found himself wondering why Mina Gabriel had never thought to join her brother in this perennial ritual. It seemed easy, natural for the foreigners who came to Rome to study, to spend an enjoyable year pretending to be Roman before real life, with its cares and demands, came to claim them.
The sky was a dark sweep of velvet punctured by stars and the lights of passing aircraft. Fifteen minutes. He tried to call Falcone but the inspector was on voicemail. No one at the Questura would assemble any kind of support in the time he had. Either he went along with the invitation or he walked away from the whole affair, went back to the Vespa in Governo Vecchio, hoped the ancient carburettor had cleared enough to take him home.
He found himself thinking of Mina Gabriel, picturing her that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci, staring at him, needing something.
Costa pushed his way through the shifting, aimless throng in the Campo, and started to walk back towards the ghetto, a route that would, he realized, take him directly past the Palazzetto Santacroce from which she’d made that last, scared call, its message opaque and impeded by some intervention he failed to understand.
FOUR
The door to the building was open, the entrance hallway dimly lit with low security lights that wound up the long staircase like decorations left over from Christmas. He shouted the brother’s name. Costa’s voice echoed round and round the winding steps, dying somewhere near the summit. He recalled that long climb the previous day, with Peroni stopping to catch his breath on every floor.
The thought of making that journey again was starting to fill his head with dismay when a loud, metallic clang shook the floor beneath his feet. It took a moment to realize what it was. The lift, the small, old-fashioned open iron elevator with the out-of-order sign on the doors, was ascending from below with an asthmatic rusty wheeze.
One more lie, Costa thought as he listened to the rheumatic squeal of the cables and pulleys straining against one another. Then the cage arrived with a heavy, clattering bang. Nothing happened. He walked over and could see, in the dim light of the interior bulb, that it was empty. The buttons were within reach through the collapsible door. Someone had sent it for him.
He got in and waited. This was a vast, empty place. Robert Gabriel could be anywhere. After a few moments there was another rattling sound and the cage began to move uncertainly down, descending into the thick, airless dark, a dead space rank with the smell of damp and decay. Instinctively Costa patted his jacket, the empty spot where his gun would have been if he were on duty.
‘One of those days,’ he said to himself.
The lift came to a halt with a rickety jolt. The only thing visible was a single dingy light bulb dangling from a cord beyond the cage. He threw the door open with a clatter and got out, calling once more. Another light came on, then a third. His eyes began to adjust. The basement was full of building material. Sacks of cement, planks, a wheelbarrow, boards covered in hardened plaster. From somewhere in a far corner came the scurrying sound he associated with rats. Close by he could see a single heavy door which looked as if it might lead to some kind of ‘garden’ apartment, the accommodation that was always the cheapest in these places.
He walked ahead. There was a thin line of yellow light beneath the door.
‘Robert,’ he said calmly and turned the handle.
There was no reply. He walked in and found himself in what appeared to be a photographic studio. A small forest of professional-looking floodlights was set against one wall, several of them lit so they cast a dazzling white field of illumination across the room. They were all aimed in a single direction: at an ornate double bed covered in crumpled scarlet sheets, set against a wall decorated with a sea of cavorting cherubs, winged chubby creatures, the kind Raphael once painted, though not quite like this.
The tiny creatures, like miniature angels, leered lasciviously as they coupled and licked and squeezed and squealed on the cloudy pillows of a perfect blue sky, eyes down, always, to the bed beneath them.
