expectation he wondered how old she really was.
The girl was tall, almost his own height, and sylph-like. She crossed the street then walked into the dark alley opposite. A familiar female shape was there, a shorter one. Agata had followed him and immediately approached the distraught teenager the moment she arrived, coming out of the crowd of bemused and distant bystanders to help. He watched as she placed her arms around the girl and held her.
Something the size of a small rock landed no more than a metre away, followed by a steady rain of pebbles. A sharp object cracked against his skull then a line of metal tubing clattered noisily to the ground next to him, bouncing around in a manic dance across the cobbles.
Costa steeled himself. It was wrong to move the man. Wrong medically, if by some miracle there were still some faint flickering light of life. Wrong from an investigative point of view too. But this was an accident, not a crime scene, one that was not, perhaps, entirely finished. Besides, it was a way of getting the girl to move, perhaps the only means he could find.
He pushed his arms beneath the bloodied torso, reaching forward as far as he could until his own face touched the stained and dirty shirt that enclosed the fractured body in front of him. It was impossible to ignore the smell of violent injury, though at least this awkward position, so close he had to turn away his own head as he strained to lift the body upright, meant that he didn’t have to look at the shattered skull.
Then he took a deep breath and began to lift the girl’s father off the ground.
The body felt unexpectedly light in his arms. Something warm and liquid trickled onto his neck. He didn’t want to think about what it might be. Steadily, making sure he didn’t stumble, Costa crossed the street and staggered towards the alley opposite. When he felt sure he was sufficiently distant from the palace behind, he lowered his burden gently onto the pavement. The girl and Agata were a few steps away. The daughter watched him for a moment then withdrew herself from Agata’s grip and came to stand at the end of the cul-de-sac, her eyes on the building opposite.
The stream of rubble was turning into a torrent. Costa looked up and saw that a good five metres of scaffolding at the end of the balcony had begun slowly to tear itself from the front, dangling downwards, swaying from side to side like some timber and metal pendulum struggling to mark the passage of time as it dispensed itself and the fabric of the balcony onto the street below.
Finally there was a siren. He turned and saw the mirrored flash of a blue emergency light on the Lungotevere de’ Cenci. Costa made a frantic call to the control room to warn them about the state of the building and demand an emergency construction crew. A police van turned into the head of the lane and found itself blocked by parked cars. It stopped, and some men got out and began to walk directly towards the area of the collapse.
Ignoring the continuing torrent of debris raining down on the street, Costa stepped out and waved at them to stop. At that moment the final segment of hanging terrace and scaffolding began to give way and tumbled to earth in a deadly rain of metal and timber and concrete that shattered on the black cobblestones a few metres in front of him. He retreated quickly, trying to find safety, listening to what sounded like the crackle of gunfire.
‘Nic. .’ Agata was by his side, peering anxiously into his face, as he reached the pavement. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ She was alone. ‘Where’s the girl?’
‘Here.’ Agata Graziano turned to look behind her. The crowd had retreated into the alley when the balcony began to collapse. Now they were cautiously starting to return. Agata put a puzzled hand to her head. ‘Well, she was. .’
He heard that young, almost childish voice again, and this time it bore something different, something he hadn’t expected. Anger. Fury. Perhaps even blame.
‘Robert!
The girl was back in the road, walking towards the inky pool of darkness around what he assumed was the palace door. Costa found the questions kept coming. Why had no one else in the building noticed what was happening here? There were no lights on the lower floors, only in the windows close to the collapsed balcony. No illumination over the entrance itself, where surely there should have been at the least a set of lit bell pushes of the kind that sat outside every apartment block in Rome.
‘OK,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘I am past persuasion.’
He marched into the road, stood in front of the girl and ordered her to return to the safer side of the street. She ignored him completely, her eyes fixed on the palazzo, calling someone’s name again and again.
Costa sighed, seized her by the waist then threw her over his shoulder the way a father did with a recalcitrant child. She weighed more than he expected but she didn’t protest, just kept calling that single name, plaintively, out of fear, he thought, nothing else.
‘Don’t leave here again,’ he ordered as he let her down onto the pavement.
She went quiet and shut her eyes briefly. Then she looked at him and Costa felt his heart skip a beat. There was something she wanted to say, and wouldn’t, out of fear, perhaps. Or something else. He knew it. Could feel it. Understood, too, that there was nothing he could do to persuade her to speak what was on her mind, in her heart.
‘My brother’s in there somewhere,’ she murmured. Then, shouting again, ‘Robert. .!’
Another shape came out from the darkness by the entrance. It stayed in the shadows. Costa could just make out a tall figure walking through the continuing shower of dirt and stone as if it didn’t matter.
There was a gun high in his right hand, waving towards the stars. Costa felt his heart sink. Quickly he held out both arms, told those around him to retreat further back into the alley behind, and tried to think.
A good half-dozen uniformed men were slowly working their way up the street, wary of the building. They saw what was happening and took positions by the parked cars, reaching for their weapons.
The girl tugged on Costa’s arm.
She stared into his face, pleading.
‘It’s my brother. He’s not. . bad.’
‘Please go back to where you were.’ She didn’t move. ‘Mina. .’
‘Don’t you dare hurt him,’ she said, retreating.
He stepped out onto the cobblestones, arms held high and open, trying to assess what he was seeing.
‘Robert,’ he said firmly. ‘We need to get medical attention for your father.’
The brother was half in shadow. From what Costa could see he was wearing a bloodied T-shirt and jeans. His free hand still kept the gun high in the air. A stray and ludicrous thought went through Costa’s head: he’s running away from home, the way children sometimes do.
All that the uniforms would see was a man in possession of a firearm. They would be quietly telling themselves to waste no time or niceties in bringing this confrontation to an end, and Costa couldn’t blame them for that.
‘Your sister needs you,’ Costa added, watching him closely.
He wished he could see the face of this figure in the shadows, read some expression there. But the youth stayed back in the darkness, as if afraid. Only the gun was in the half-light, wavering.
‘She’s safe now,’ a stony voice said in English.
Costa found his head was beginning to hurt.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Robert?’ the girl cried in a begging, childlike tone from behind.
Another explosion ripped through the warm Roman night and this time it was a gunshot. Costa found himself blinking, cowering instinctively, unable to see what had happened, where the weapon was aimed.
Then a memory. Another time. Another shot, by the grim walls of the mausoleum of Augustus, one that had taken his wife from the world.
He wheeled round anxiously, dark images rising in his head. Agata was there, with the girl. They stood backed up against the wall, eyes shiny with fear. Unharmed.
‘Thank God for that,’ Costa muttered to himself, and heard the uniforms moving swiftly, heard shouts.
When his attention returned to the street it was empty save for the taut, determined shapes of five or six cops working their way through the lines of parked cars, cautiously, step by step, making sure to stay on the safe side of the street.
The brother was gone, fled into the spider’s web of lanes that ran throughout the ghetto in this labyrinthine
