“Our guy isn’t Balkan, whatever that means these days.”
“You know that?”
“I know that. I saw the profiling reports. They had some data on where the man had stayed in the US. All phoney names, phoney credit cards. He did it well. We’ve interviewed people who spoke to him. They all gave different descriptions. He’s good at disguise. He’s good with accents. Sometimes American English. Sometimes UK. Australian. South African. He could handle them all.”
“You have a photo-fit?”
It was the obvious question. Her face said as much. “How many do you want? Leapman has included them in the files he’s sent to your boss. We’ve got them coming out of our ears. Every one different. I mean completely different. I told you. He’s good.”
Peroni returned with the drinks. She looked at the stewed brew in the plastic cups and said, “Do you call that coffee? There’s a place near the Pantheon. Tazza d’Oro. If we have time we could go there. That’s coffee.”
Peroni bristled and in very rapid, very colloquial Italian, the kind a couple of street cops would throw at each other in the heat of the moment, protested. “Hey, kid. Don’t throw your toys out of the pram. You’re dealing with a couple of guys who live here. We know Tazza d’Oro. Since when did they start letting Yankees in?”
She didn’t miss a syllable. “Since they found out we tip properly. Where are you from in Tuscany?”
“Near Siena.”
“I can hear it.” She nodded at Costa. “He’s Roman. Middle class. Doesn’t swear enough to be anything else.” Emily Deacon paused. “Am I earning any trust here?”
“Kind of,” Costa conceded. “You didn’t learn that at language college.”
She nodded. “Didn’t need to. I lived here in Rome when I was a kid. Nice house on the Aventino. For almost a decade. My dad was based at the embassy for most of that time. Then I did an architecture degree in Florence. And you know what’s funny?”
They didn’t say a word. From her face they could tell this wasn’t funny at all.
“Maybe it’s from the last few years I spent in Washington, but sometimes I must still sound American. It just slips out. You can always tell. You always get someone on a bus or somewhere who gives you a nasty look. Or a little lecture about colonialism and how, being Roman, they just know this subject inside or out. Or maybe they just spit in your face. That happens from time to time too.”
“ ”Always“?” Peroni wondered, taking the argument back an important step.
She sipped at the coffee and pulled a sour face. “No. That’s an exaggeration. Just a lot more than when I was a kid. In fact…” She took her attention off them at that moment, began to conduct some inner conversation with herself. “This was a happy place then. I never wanted to leave.”
“The world’s not so happy anymore,” Costa said. “For all of us.”
“Agreed.” She fidgeted on the hard office chair, uncomfortable at having revealed as much as she had. “I’m still waiting for an answer, though. This guy isn’t Serb or Kosovan or anything. So why are you going through all these records?”
Costa explained about the girl who’d escaped from them inside the Pantheon, and how some Balkan connection was probably the best way to find her, since they controlled the street people as much as anyone did. Then he pushed over the photo Mauro had taken. Emily studied the young, frightened face.
“Poor kid,” she said quietly. “Trying to pick your pocket when she must have been scared out of her mind. Are they really that desperate?”
“Sometimes.” Costa hated simplistic explanations. “It’s what they do. There’s plenty of people out there on the streets who’ll scream ”Zingari!“ every time some petty crime happens. We’ve plenty of other crooks too. But the honest answer is: yes, they’re that desperate. And it’s an organized business. With its own structure. Its own rules.”
“Good,” she said. “That should mean you can find her.”
“Maybe we can,” Peroni conceded.
“Will she have family here? Can you track her down like that?”
“Most of them don’t have family,” the big man explained. “Not what we’d regard as family anyway.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the photo. It seemed a good time to ask.
“When Leapman called you in for this assignment,” Costa began, “you could have refused, surely. The fact this man murdered your father means you want him caught. But it also means you’re involved, beyond anything the likes of us would expect. You have… something personal invested here. That could worry me.”
Emily Deacon took one last look at the photo, then placed it on the desk. “I could have said no when my dad laid a job with the Bureau straight in my lap. I’d got a good architecture degree. I could have gone on and done a master’s. Here, probably.”
She looked at him, trying to work out the right answer for herself too. “You won’t understand. We’re Deacons. We grow up with a sense of duty. There have been Deacons working for the government for the best part of a hundred years. In the Treasury. The military. The State Department. It’s what we do. We don’t ask why.”
He wondered how much of that she really believed. “And when we find this man. What do you want then?”
“Justice,” she said with plain, flat certainty.
“Is that what Agent Leapman wants too?”
“Joel Leapman is a primitive organism driven by primitive desires.” She spoke with cold, aloof disdain. “It’s thanks to people like him that people like me get spat at on buses. Ask him what he’s after. Not me.” She thought for a moment, then fixed them with her keen, intelligent eyes. “I know exactly what I want. I want to see this man standing up in court, getting convicted for every human being he’s killed. Every life he’s ruined. I want to see him go to jail forever and have those ghosts haunt him each and every day. I want to sleep better knowing that he can’t, because of all the nightmares coming his way. Will that do?”
Peroni cast Costa a sideways glance. The one that said: why do we always get them?
Nic Costa knew what he meant. He was coming to understand a little about this woman and it didn’t fill him with joy. She wasn’t at the hard end of investigations with the FBI. Of that he was sure. Perhaps Leapman had called her into the Rome inquiry because of her specialist architectural knowledge. Or her perfect Italian. Perhaps it was even simpler than that. Her presence was down to who she was: the daughter of the last victim. The Deacons seemed to be an important family. Maybe Leapman had no choice. Maybe Leo Falcone was in the same position. It would explain the uncharacteristic way the normally abrasive and individualist inspector had rolled over and allowed the Americans to walk straight into the case.
“You think this guy knows Rome?” Peroni asked.
“Like the back of his hand,” she said straightaway. “I’m certain of it.”
“Nah, he doesn’t,” Peroni told her with some certainty. “He thinks he knows it. He’s like you. He goes to Tazza d’Oro and likes it because he feels it makes him Roman, not like some cheapskate tourist throwing coins into the Trevi fountain. Don’t get me wrong. That’s good, because it means he’s trying. You too. But it’s not the real thing. Me and Nic are. This is our town. We drink coffee in places a million times better than Tazza d’Oro. Want some?”
Her delicate eyebrows rose in amusement. “Now?”
Peroni scowled at the plastic cup. “Yeah. Why not? This stuff is piss.”
“And you think it’s going to be easy to find this kid?”
“Absolutely.” He nodded at the computer. “But not sitting in front of the one-eyed monster there. This is a people business, Emily. Night people, if you get my meaning. I got a whole list of them in my head right now. You’re going places in Rome you didn’t even know existed.”