“Symmetry,” he said. “Can you see it?”
“Where?” she replied, feeling stupid.
“Everywhere. You just have to look.” He pointed to the twinkling street lamps on the distant hill. “You know where that is?”
“No idea.”
“Trinità dei Monti. The church at the top of the Spanish Steps.”
She nodded. She’d walked there before the snow came and had been surprised to find there was a McDonald’s near the foot of the twin staircases and an American-style Santa ringing a bell and yelling for money in Italian.
“Been there. So what?”
He led her round to the opposite wall of the apartment. The bright, white, wedding-cake building in the Piazza Venezia stood out like a sore thumb: in front of it the jumble of Renaissance rooftops, with the huge half sphere of the dome she had come to recognize.
“That I do know,” she said, a little proud of herself. “I went inside yesterday. It’s beautiful. The Pantheon.”
“The home of all the gods,” he said. “That’s good.”
Then they went to the western wall, which had the larger part of the terrace, an expanse of open space a good ten yards deep, with flower pots, an old stone table and a permanent, brick-built barbecue with a little sink by it. An awning had been built in front of the full-length windows. The shrivelled and leathery stems of a couple of meagre grapevines wound their way around the supporting pillars. A few blackened leaves still hung on the furled, wiry whips feeling their way through the trelliswork. Two tall gas heaters whistled away, pumping out enough warmth to make it possible to sit outside, even on a night like this, to be alone in Rome, above everything, out of sight.
He was gesturing. She looked over the river, where a snow-clad circular building rose, brightly illuminated by a forest of spotlights.
“And that is?”
“I told you,” she objected. “It’s only my first time here.”
“Castel Sant” Angelo. Think, Monica. Draw a line from Trinità dei Monti to the castle. Draw another line from the Pantheon, out to the Piazza del Popolo over there. What do you get?“
She looked out to the north, the direction he was pointing, out into the face of the icy breeze, then ducked beneath the trellis and fell into one of the hard, cold summer seats. She got what he was driving at. She wasn’t stupid.
“A cross. A crucifix.”
“And we are?”
“Where the two arms meet? But so what, Peter? Don’t get scary on me. It’s just coincidence. It’s just…”
She looked out over the city, shining under the icy, bright moon, then shivered. “It’s just how things are.”
He walked under the shelter of the awning, stole her glass from the table, took a sip of whisky from it.
“What if there are no coincidences? What if everything has history? A reason?”
He wasn’t serious, she thought. It was just some game. “In a place like this, you could come up with stuff like that anywhere,” she protested. “I could say, look, here’s the Colosseum. Or the Capitol. Or whatever. Look. It makes a circle. A square. An octagon. It’s Rome, for God’s sake. It’s all here.”
“Quite,” he replied.
“You’re sounding like a priest now,” she said softly, slurring the words a little. “I’d forgotten for a while that’s what you are.” She didn’t know what to do. Whether to feel stupid for letting a stranger into her home, into her mind, like this. Or just to roll with it and see where everything went. He was a priest. There was nothing to be scared about.
“Must be hard doing what you do,” she said. “Having to stay apart from other people.”
“There’s nothing hard in that. It helps you think about what really matters.”
“You don’t miss the comfort of another person?”
His smart eyes clouded over. “You can’t miss what you never knew.”
“I don’t believe that, Peter. Not of you.”
Peter O’Malley was not a happy man. He was looking for something, all the time. Why? Monica wondered.
“Why are you a priest? It doesn’t seem right. Whatever would make a man like you do this?”
“A man like me…” He laughed lightly, breaking the fragile spell that had begun to hover around them, something dark at its edges, and she felt relieved, light-headed even. “A man like me is just a fool looking for magic where none exists. And then…”
He waved a hand at the glorious night, the city slumbering under a jewelled sky.
“Then it just sneaks up on you and you realize it was there, in front of you, all along.”
It wasn’t the face of a priest. That was the problem. It was the face of a man of the world, one who’d lived a full and active existence before retreating into this dark shell, the anonymous uniform of the calling.
“Magic,” she muttered, wondering if she would follow where she thought he was leading.
He looked at his watch. Her heart sank. “And a city full of churches, Monica. I’d best find one to pray in, don’t you think?”
An hour after they left the embassy, Emily Deacon arrived at the Questura. She’d dressed down for the night: black jacket, black jeans, blonde hair loose around her slim neck. She looked younger, like a student just out of college. And relieved too, Costa thought, to be out of the grip of Agent Leapman, even if being reassigned so abruptly had come as a shock.
She stood in the main office next to Costa’s desk, scanning the room. The night shift were hard at work, making calls, sifting through records on computer screens, reading reports. Falcone had put virtually everyone he had on the job. Some fifty men and women had now begun the task of collating information, trawling through CCTV videos, interviewing the people who lived in the apartments over the shops and restaurants near the Pantheon.
“Are you getting anywhere?” she asked.
Peroni glanced at Costa. Earlier, the two men had demanded a discussion with Falcone, wanting to know exactly how much information they should share with the Americans. It had been inconclusive. Falcone had made a good point: it was ludicrous to belabour the question until they found something worth sharing and that seemed some way off. They already knew the CCTV cameras in the Pantheon had nothing. Those in the streets nearby had captured little but the blizzard. Falcone had shrugged and left it at that, then closeted himself upstairs with Commissario Moretti for a private meeting.
“Early days,” Peroni answered hesitantly. “Can I get you something? A coffee?”
The acute blue eyes looked him up and down. “You don’t trust me. It’s understandable. I’d probably feel the same way if it was me. It’s because I’m American, I guess.”
“No,” Costa told her. “It’s just… a little unusual.”
“You have difficulty dealing with the unusual?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s just that sometimes it takes a while to adapt. Police departments are like monasteries, really.”
Peroni snorted. A smile flickered on Emily Deacon’s face.
“Monasteries?” she asked, raising a slender fawn eyebrow.
“Really,” Costa protested. “OK, we let in a few women for show. But these are institutions that keep themselves to themselves, rarely share their working practices with others and suspect all outsiders on principle. Big organizations work that way. The FBI’s the same, surely.”
She thought about that. “There are more women.”
“And the rest of it?” Peroni asked.
“Point taken.”
The two men looked at each other. Peroni kicked over a seat and beckoned to her to take it. Then he went off for some coffees.
She looked at the screen. “What’s this?”
“It’s the database we keep on Balkan criminals,” Costa replied. “It just gets bigger by the day.”