He looked his partner up and down. Peroni and uniforms didn’t fit. The blue trousers and shirt hung baggily on the older man’s big frame. And, as always, Peroni was bending the rules just to make a point. On his hefty flat feet were a pair of sneakers, black leather sneakers, true, and ones that were, on this occasion, shiny from the rare application of polish. It wasn’t so long since Costa had been a rookie Rome street cop who donned a uniform every day. But Gianni Peroni hadn’t pulled on the blue for almost three decades. He wasn’t going to go back in rank and time without a protest.
Costa considered those huge feet again, squeezed tightly into a couple of expensive-looking Reeboks.
“It’s a health thing,” Peroni complained. “Don’t start. I’ve done more damn walking in this place than I managed in an entire lifetime back home. It’s downright cruel.”
“We don’t have squad cars . . .”
“They could’ve let us drive a boat!”
This had been a source of grievance for Peroni ever since they arrived. Gianfranco Randazzo, the surly Castello commissario, had, perhaps with some justification, reasoned that there was no point in putting a couple of visitors through the complex and intensive training course required for a lagoon licence. That had condemned both of them to the streets, public transport or begging a lift from one of the local cops.
“The argument’s lost, Gianni. We’re almost through here. What use would a boat licence be back home? Also, I don’t think drive is quite the right word.”
“That,” Peroni insisted, waving a big, fat finger in Costa’s face, “is not the point. We should have been on an equal footing. Not treated like outsiders. Foreigners even.”
Foreigners. Yet, in a sense, that was what they were. Venice was so different, a place that constantly went out of its way to make them feel like strangers flitting through a bright, two-dimensional landscape that was never quite real. The locals even dropped into the lagoon dialect, a strange, glottal tongue largely impenetrable to ordinary Italians, whenever they felt like a little privacy. Costa had learned a little of the language. Sometimes it was easy to guess—Mèrkore for Mercoledì, Wednesday. Sometimes it sounded like a Balkan tongue, Croat perhaps. Today, for the Venetians, was Xòbia, a day that began with a letter utterly foreign to true Italian.
This hadn’t been the exile they expected. Leo Falcone, the inspector who joined them in their subtle disgrace, had been seconded to some art theft squad in Verona not long after they arrived. On the street, apart from a couple of arrests for robbery, their time in Venice had been without much incident, for which both men were grateful. Yet they were never quite comfortable, and there were two excellent reasons, two omissions from their lives which would shortly be rectified.
There was a louder clatter from the tracks beyond the station. Costa looked at his watch. The fast train from Rome was on time. Emily Deacon and Teresa Lupo would now be sitting on it, anticipating a two-week holiday beginning that very night. It had all been planned. Earlier in the month, as a surprise, he’d paid a small fortune for a couple of tickets for La Fenice the following evening. Tonight Peroni had booked a quiet table for the four of them at his favourite restaurant, a place the big man loved, and was loved in return by the two sisters behind the bar, who fed him extra cicchetti as if he were a stray canine newly wandered through the door. Emily and Teresa had planned to be regular visitors during the men’s temporary banishment. It hadn’t worked out like that. Teresa’s workload in the Rome morgue never seemed to diminish. Emily had found herself immersed in academic life the moment she started working on her master’s in architecture at the school in Trastevere. Matching their free time with that of two street cops who always seemed to get the worst shifts around hadn’t proved easy. Costa had seen Emily just three times in the past six months, even though she was now living in his own farmhouse off the Appian Way. But now they were free. Two weeks’ leave beginning at the end of the day, and two police apartments in the narrow working-class backstreets of Castello, far from tourist-land, to use as a base.
Peroni was eyeing him and Costa knew, on the instant, he was reading his thoughts. The two of them had been partners for eighteen months. More than that, they’d been friends.
The big man looked down at his black trainers, shuffled his shoulders as a sign he was about to move, then laughed.
“It’s a good feeling, huh?” he asked.
Before Costa could answer, he found he was facing Peroni’s back. The big man was heading towards the station doors with that sudden burst of speed that always took people by surprise.
“You know,” Costa said, catching up, “perhaps I could get another two tickets for La Fenice tomorrow. Teresa might like it.”
Peroni glanced back at him, appalled. The long, modern train was drawing up at the final platform.
“Opera?”
Costa scanned the platform. They were there, just visible in a sea of bodies, half running in spite of their hefty shoulder bags, like a couple of schoolgirls on a trip to somewhere new. He wished to God he weren’t working just then. He wished he weren’t wearing a stupid uniform, doggedly prepared to spend one last day trudging the streets of Venice, helping lost tourists find their way back to the waterfront, glancing at his watch to see how long until the end of his shift.
Some dumb commuter in a shiny suit bumped into him and muttered a curse. The Venetians were even worse in a crowd than the Romans. There was a steady stream coming off the busy platforms. He’d followed Peroni’s bulky form and stumbled straight into their path. The big man didn’t care who got pushed and shoved out of the way. By the time Costa fought through, Peroni had his arms around Teresa Lupo in a bear hug, was slapping wet kisses on her full, pink cheeks, ignoring the flap of her arms on his back, a gesture that didn’t really convince as a protest at all.
Costa watched the pair of them and shook his head, wondering, as he often did these days, who exactly was the junior partner in this relationship.
His mind was still on them when Emily broke into his line of vision, peering at him, amusement and pleasure in her smart, querulous face. Her hair was longer, a lively natural shade of gold. Her eyes shone with that brightness that seemed to look straight through him. She was now utterly unlike the serious, single-minded FBI agent he’d first met, a lifetime before.
Emily smiled: lovely white teeth, perfect pink lips, a face that now seemed burned on his memory, unforgettable, a part of him. She wore jeans and a simple cream shirt, the V-neck displaying a new tan. Hugging the bag to her shoulder, she looked like a student embarked on her first long trip abroad.
“I was looking for directions, Officer,” she said quietly, almost meekly, not a touch of her native American audible through the measured, easy Italian.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked, a little awkward in the unfamiliar blue costume, wishing he had Gianni Peroni’s lack of self-awareness, and that he could forget he was a cop standing in a crowded railway station, slap in the middle of rush hour.