those he suspected of terrible deeds. This awkward, intuitive wisdom was beyond the ordinary men and women within the Questura. They were lucky not to have it.
‘No,’ Teresa Lupo agreed. ‘Not that way. Do you really want to pursue this further, Leo? Toni Grimaldi doesn’t. But you’re the boss.’
‘What about you?’ he asked hopefully.
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know. If you asked the man in the street. .’
‘Then half the time they’d want to bring back hanging, and the rest they’d let the guilty walk away free,’ he interrupted.
‘Quite,’ she agreed. ‘It’s so much easier to define crime than it is to put your finger on justice, isn’t it?’ She observed him, thinking. ‘You’re letting this get to you and I don’t like watching that. You need to step back a little. See it from the kind of perspective we had in the beginning. When it was a dead man in the street, an intellectual man, a genius some might say. A man who loved science and reason and Galileo. And loved women and arguments and. . life, I guess too.’
Teresa Lupo tried to crystallize her thinking. It was so woolly, so vague it was impossible. But doubts led to certainties sometimes, if only they could be viewed in the right light.
She took Falcone by the arm and said, ‘You know the most illuminating conversation we’ve had about this curious little affair was last Sunday, in the ghetto, in Gianni’s little restaurant.’
‘True,’ Falcone replied. ‘We’re in the middle of a murder inquiry. I don’t have time for social events.’
She looked at her watch.
‘We still have to eat. Listen to me. It’s nearly four thirty. I doubt anything’s going to happen our end today. I’d put money on it not happening yours. Why not?’
A thought had clouded his face. He glanced anxiously at his watch.
‘Oh lord,’ Falcone said. ‘I forgot what date it was.’
He scratched his head.
‘Dinner,’ he said. ‘That’s a good idea. Very good idea, actually. Eight o’clock. I’ll book a place I know.’
He was pointing at Silvio Di Capua and the work experience kid, who were head down in the corner going through some papers.
‘Bring them along too.’
‘Are you serious?’ she asked.
‘Why not? I’m paying. Finding that mattress deserves something.’
Teresa put it to the pair of them. They looked surprised. Horrified, more like.
‘We’re busy,’ Di Capua said. ‘The Ducati from Tuesday night’s supposed to turn up any minute downstairs.’
Maria waved her gloved hands in their faces.
‘We’re going to rip it apart,’ she said gleefully.
‘But thanks for asking,’ Di Capua said, and went back to work.
‘Eight o’clock,’ Teresa agreed. ‘And now?’
Falcone scooped up his papers. He looked a little calmer, almost happier for some reason.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Some fresh air. I need to get out of this place for a while. Call Costa and Peroni. I’ll meet you all there. And persuade Nic to go home and get a change of clothes for once. He’s only ten minutes from that place of his. It ought to be easy enough.’
TEN
‘Leo? Gone for a walk?’ Peroni asked, amazed.
They sat on the porch of Costa’s villa near the Via Appia Antica, sipping Pellegrino, watching the birds pick at the black grapes on the vines. Netting, Costa thought. That might be what he needed if he ever got round to trying to put the vineyard back in order.
‘He never goes for a walk,’ the big cop went on. ‘And this dinner? What’s he playing at?’
‘We don’t know what Leo does when he’s off duty, do we?’ Costa said.
There’d been a time, once. When he was briefly in love with the woman from Venice. But then that fell apart, as his affairs usually did after a while. And Leo Falcone was back to being the man they knew: a dedicated and talented police officer whose life revolved around the Questura, and barely seemed to exist outside it.
‘Suppose not,’ Peroni replied.
He turned and looked at Costa.
‘Is he happy, Nic? I mean, just a little bit. I’d never expect Leo to be really happy. Not like a normal human being. But a little bit. It would worry me if he didn’t have even that.’
Some more birds — finches, he thought — had begun to descend on the crop of grapes. They looked better than usual this year. He ought to be making wine, inviting people round to pick the crop, take part in the entertaining ceremony of crushing them, turning the juice into bad wine, just as his father had done with his friends a generation ago when Costa was a child. But those times, that way of life, seemed gone now. Everyone was so busy. The hectic round of work and duty never seemed to offer the space, the opportunity for leisure, time with the people you loved. Then the seasons turned once more, summer to autumn, autumn to winter. Another year gone, lost forever, haunted by the ghosts of words unspoken, promises never kept.
‘He’ll be happy when this is over,’ Costa said. ‘Something about this case. .’ He knew what it was, and so did Peroni. There was no need to say it out loud. Falcone was haunted by the thought of Mina Gabriel’s damaged innocence, and the idea that she might be punished for defending herself against the brutish attentions of her own father. ‘It gets to him, doesn’t it?’
‘Gets to all of us,’ Peroni said. ‘Can I take the car? I need to change too. You can make your own way there?’
‘Of course.’
The big man stood up and stretched a little painfully. Both he and Falcone faced retirement in a few years. Neither, Costa thought, would find it easy to leave the Questura behind. It wasn’t just the job. It was the people, the companionship, the notion of some shared sense of direction. The idea that, in some small way, their mutual efforts represented a glimmer of hope, a trace of humanity, in a world going bad.
‘We need to get Leo out more,’ Costa said without thinking. ‘We need to go back to the way we were. When Emily was alive. When we felt like. .’ There was no other word, and he was a Roman so it was not difficult or embarrassing for him to use it. ‘. . like a family.’
Peroni nodded.
‘We do,’ he agreed. ‘Starting tonight.’
Costa watched him go, thinking all the time about Agata, what to say, how he might help her through this difficult transition. He became lost in his thoughts after a while. So much so that, when the time came to go, he simply walked upstairs, threw on the first set of clean clothes he found, then came back down, fell on the Vespa and kicked it into life on the first try.
ELEVEN
They assembled at the restaurant just before eight, Agata coming directly from work. Falcone had picked Al Pompiere back in the ghetto, just a few steps away from Sora Margherita, the humble little hole-in-the-wall they’d visited a few nights before. He arrived in a fresh grey suit, a carnation in his lapel, a smile on his face, looking so calm, so at one with himself, Costa wondered why, a few hours earlier, he’d been worried about the man.
They went up the staircase to the first floor of the restaurant, one of the best in the ghetto. A reserved sign stood on a secluded window table with a view back to the Piazza delle Cinque Scole and, on the small mound opposite, one face of the gloomy, sprawling Palazzo Cenci. Costa found the sight distracting: this tragedy was
