He’d heard that story in so many places. It was part of the changing face of Italian organized crime.
‘You don’t know what Robert Gabriel looks like?’
‘Just Riggi’s description,’ she said. ‘Lanky, muscular kid around twenty with black hair, lots of it. If he’s got something to sell around here. .’ Her finger ran across the crowd in the bar. ‘. . they’ll know him. The way it works is you walk around, look interested, talk to people. Don’t do anything obvious like asking where you can score.’
‘Thanks for the advice. I appreciate it.’
‘I’m trying to help! If we bump into Riggi then you and I are out on a date.’ Her big brown eyes focused on him. ‘Is that OK with you?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve played that game, would it?’
‘No.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Comes naturally.’
‘How many bars are there? Like this? The places the Gabriel kid would have worked?’
She looked at the ceiling, counting the answer off on her fingers.
‘Around here, seven. Near Navona, another five or so. Couple by the Pantheon. Six, eight, maybe more, in Trastevere.’
So many? Costa was surprised. This was a side to Rome he, like most citizens, rarely saw. It happened off camera, in places they never visited, a hidden undercurrent in the city’s busy tide of daily life.
Rosa raised her glass.
‘Soda water and fresh mint. Long evening ahead. Are you ready for it?’
‘Until midnight. Maybe not even that.’
She turned serious for a moment and her made-up face suddenly seemed a lot older.
‘I need you to understand this, Nic. We’ve got a case against Riggi already but it’s fragile. I have to find a little more. Or to put it another way, I need to make sure we don’t lose anything we already have.’
He got the message. Her news about Riggi wasn’t an accidental revelation, some personal favour Rosa had idly slipped to him as he sat on his Vespa outside the Questura. It was her way of warning him off any action that might impact upon her own case.
‘We’d better split up and start talking, I suppose,’ Costa said.
Rosa Prabakaran smiled. Then, as he watched, she changed again, found a sultry smile from somewhere, a walk, a posture that seemed to fit this loud, overheated temple to a form of twenty-first century hedonism he found deeply tedious.
She ambled over to the counter and started chatting to the barista shaking cocktails. Costa wandered outside, said hello to a couple of pretty girls enjoying the fading sun, then slipped round the corner and called back to forensic. Di Capua was still on duty. Costa was glad of that. Teresa’s deputy seemed to understand these things better than most.
‘I need you to look up the personal mobile-phone number for a plain-clothes officer,’ Costa told him. ‘After that I’m going to call it and I want a trace to where he is now. Is that possible?’
Di Capua laughed.
‘Are you serious? This is kindergarten stuff. Beneath me. Let me put you over to my new friend, Maria. She can handle it.’
Costa remembered the accident with the camera and the rumour that the same girl had seen Malise Gabriel’s corpse at the weekend and noticed nothing untoward.
‘You mean the Maria who. .?’
He didn’t have time to finish the sentence. A bubbly young woman was on the line asking a series of detailed questions. Costa steeled himself. She seemed to know what she was doing.
It took a minute to get Riggi’s number, then another three to set up the trace. Costa sent up a little prayer that the bent narcotics cop wasn’t on voicemail then walked back round the corner, stood next to the pretty girls outside the bar, and dialled, withholding his own number.
After four rings a bad-tempered male voice barked, ‘
‘Hey, Sergio!’ Costa said in a loud, crude voice. ‘Where the hell you been? We’re waiting for you. At the bar. The girls are here and they look gorgeous. Girls? Say hello to Sergio!’
The giggly kids had been listening. They raised their mojito glasses and yelled, ‘Sergio!’
‘I can’t believe you’re late again, you idle jerk,’ Costa said. ‘You got your head on right?’
‘What’re you talking about, moron?’ Riggi yelled. ‘I’m not Sergio. Check the damned number next time.’
Then silence. Costa smiled at the girls and shrugged. He walked back round the corner and waited. It was Silvio Di Capua who called back.
‘If you tell me your new girlfriend screwed that up,’ Costa told him, ‘my reputation for possessing a forgiving nature will be sorely tested.’
‘New girlfriend. I wish. Maria’s one smart kid. You just have to keep her away from touching things. Physical stuff. Anything breakable.’
‘That doesn’t bode well for a developing relationship. Where was the call from?’
He listened. It was a rough fix, based on the mobile network’s cell. But if he married it up with Rosa’s knowledge. .
Costa walked back into the bar and pulled her away from a couple of loud and bleary-eyed Australians.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, dragging his hand off her bare arm. ‘I might have been getting somewhere there.’
‘Were you?’
‘I said might have been.’
‘Trastevere. The names of the bars Riggi frequents.’
She looked puzzled but rattled off the ones she knew.
Di Capua said the call came from somewhere near the Piazza Trilussa, the tiny little square on the other side of the Ponte Sisto, the pedestrian bridge that ran across the river from close to the Palazzetto Santacroce. There was one obvious dive on her list. It was a long walk.
He went over to the coat stand in the corner and picked up the helmets he’d left there, thrusting the spare into Rosa Prabakaran’s hands.
‘What the hell’s going on, Nic?’ she demanded.
‘You said we’d look good on the Vespa,’ he told her.
FOUR
Kids, Riggi thought. You had to use them. No one else was stupid enough to do the job. But dealing with their idiocy, their unpredictability, their flakiness — these things drove him crazy sometimes.
He sat on a stool outside the bar in the back street near the Piazza Trilussa watching the streams of brightly clad adolescents wandering into the centre of Trastevere for the evening. A long night usually, one that might not end till three or later, till daylight, when some would find themselves on a bench by the Tiber, exhausted yet popped up with chemicals, munching cheap pizza, wondering what came next.
Riggi’s uncle had lived in Trastevere. When the cop first came to Rome from Venice he’d lived with the old man for a while, in a narrow, winding street that ran up the Gianicolo hill, all the way to the church of Montorio and beyond, towards the piazzale dedicated to Garibaldi. This was only eight or nine years ago, but it seemed a lifetime away. So much had happened since, in Riggi’s life, in that of Trastevere. His uncle had sold his little house for a fortune to some banker in Chicago who’d sliced it into apartments that he now rented over the Internet to tourists. Most of the neighbours had done the same so the streets that once were alive with Romans now had an anonymous, shifting population, without ties, without history.
When Riggi first came to Rome his uncle had proudly told him how Trastevere was the last true neighbourhood in the centre of the city. A solid, tightly knit community of families, most of whom had been staking their claim to these tapering streets of modest, cramped houses for centuries. Now many of the locals had taken the tourist dollar, moved out to new apartment blocks built on the flat estuarial land near Fiumicino. Places that came with easy parking and supermarkets nearby, fast trains back into the city for those who needed them. All the conveniences of modern life.
