Something extraordinary happened then. Leo Falcone’s shoulders heaved an inch or two. Teresa Lupo realized she was witnessing him laugh, an event which was entirely new to her.
“I’m just a bystander in all this, aren’t I?” he asked finally, then fixed her with a hungry stare. “So?”
“So this.”
She pulled out Margaret Kearney’s US passport and showed him the photo. “Notice how very black her hair is there? How stiff the pose? She didn’t get this done in some supermarket booth, now, did she? I hate passport photos where people are actually thinking about what they look like. It’s so unnatural.”
“And?”
She pointed to the picture. “Note the glasses.” Then she picked up a plastic bag containing a pair of spectacles and began opening it. “These. Don’t worry. We’ve checked for prints. Nothing. No prints anywhere, as far as we can tell. Like the Americans said, this creep is good. Here-try them. Tell me what you see.”
Falcone glowered at the spectacles in her hand. “I don’t wear glasses.”
“Try them, Leo!” she ordered.
He did as he was told and put on the plain black-plastic glasses.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Not fuzzy? No different from normal?”
Falcone removed them and she could see he was starting to get interested now.
“Exactly.”
“No reason it should be. Those are plain glass. They’re not corrective at all.”
And she wondered: would he run straight back to the Americans with this information? Or would he mull it over first? She couldn’t take the risk, even if it did mean he just might go ballistic when he discovered what else she had done. There was an easy way to find out, too.
“One final thing,” she added. “ ”Margaret Kearney.“ There’s an address on her driver’s licence. Leapman and his friends said they’d be contacting relatives, right?”
“They said that,” Falcone agreed.
“The Internet’s a wonderful thing, you know. Tell him, Silvio.”
Di Capua stared at his shiny boots and said in a very low, timorous voice, “There’s no Margaret Kearney in the Manhattan phone book.”
“What?” Falcone yelled.
“There’s no phone number listed,” Di Capua continued. “She could be ex-directory, of course. Except the residential address isn’t an apartment either. It’s just a forwarding service.”
“You’ve been looking up this woman on the Internet?” Falcone bellowed. “This is a morgue. We get paid to do that kind of thing. What the hell gives you the right to interfere with our work like this? Again?”
Gingerly Teresa put a hand on his arm. “But you didn’t do it, Leo. They told you not to, remember? Nobody placed a gagging order like that on us. So, when I noticed the hair, when I looked at that passport, those glasses-please, don’t blame Silvio, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me-I just kept looking at this woman and I couldn’t stop thinking, ”Something is wrong here.“ ”
He didn’t know whether to shout and scream or thank them, she guessed. It was hard being Leo Falcone much of the time.
“This doesn’t go any further than here,” he told her. “Agreed?”
“Sure,” she said. “And maybe now I should make a call to them explaining they left a few things behind. What do you think? I don’t want them to feel we’re being uncooperative. I don’t want them to get…”
She left it at that. The “suspicious” word could have been pushing things a little too far.
“Do it,” he agreed.
“You see what this means, Leo? We don’t know who Margaret Kearney is. But the hair, the glasses, that stupid fake passport photo, the phone number, the address… we sure as hell know who she isn’t.”
Falcone scowled at the items in the green box, as if a set of inanimate objects could somehow be to blame.
“Still, I guess we don’t need to tell Agent Leapman that,” Teresa added. “Do we?”
She watched the inspector turn this information over in his head. Falcone was one smart man. He was surely there already. All the same, it had had to be said, just to lock the three of them together, deep in all this potential shit.
Stefan Rajacic didn’t look like a pimp, Nic Costa thought. He was about sixty years old, squat in an old tweed suit and brown overcoat, with a swarthy, expressive face and dark, miserable eyes. The moustache-heavy and greying, like that of an old walrus-gave him away. It belonged to a world that had vanished, that of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. The man could have been a portlier version of Stalin, trying to fade into old age with plenty of memories and what remained of his dignity. He was the seventh pimp they’d seen that night and the only one Gianni Peroni, who seemed to know every last man of his ilk in Rome, treated with a measure of respect.
Rajacic stared at the photograph of the girl through the fumes of his Turkish cigarette and shook his head. “Officer Peroni,” he said in a heavily accented voice cracked by years of tobacco, “what do you want of me? This girl is what? Thirteen? Fourteen? No more surely?”
“I don’t know,” Peroni admitted.
The Serb waved his hand at the photo. “What kind of a man do you think I am?” He looked at Emily Deacon. “Has he told you I deal with children? Because, if he has, it’s a lie. Judge me for what I am but I don’t have to take that.”
“Officer Peroni said nothing of the sort, sir,” she replied evenly. “He told me you were a good man. You were last on our list. We’d hoped we’d never need to come this far. That tells you something, surely?”
“ ”A good man,“ ” Rajacic repeated. He stared at Peroni. “You’re a fool if you said that. And I don’t think you’re a fool.”
“I know what you are,” Peroni told him. “There’s a lot worse out there. That’s all I said. And, yes, I know you wouldn’t deal with a girl this age. I just thought maybe you’d heard something. Or could suggest who we might ask next.”
Rajacic downed his beer and ordered another. The barman wandered over with a bottle and placed it on the table with an undue amount of respect. He knew who Rajacic was. There were just two other customers in the place. Outside, the street was deep in filthy slush. Business went on as usual, though. Costa knew that, if he looked, there would be pushers sheltering in the doorways, and a handful of hopeful hookers too, hunting business with haunted, hungry eyes. There were places nearby that Costa counted among his favourites in Rome. Just a short walk away were Diocletian’s baths and the church created by Michelangelo from the original frigidarium. In the Palazzo Massimo around the corner was an entire room from a private villa of Livia, the empress of Augustus, decorated to resemble a charming, rural garden, with songbirds, flowers and fruit trees. But they were rare oases of delight in an area that seemed to become more tawdry each year. Costa couldn’t wait to be on the move again.
“We’re struggling here, Mr. Rajacic,” he said. “We need to find this girl. She could be in danger. We know how the system works. Girls come here when they’re young. If they’re lucky, the welfare people pick them up, put them in a home. If they’re not, they fall through the net and something else happens. First they learn to beg. Then they learn to steal. Then, when they’re old enough, they become the goods themselves. And maybe sell some dope on the side. That’s how it is. Somewhere along the way they must go to someone, a person like you, and see what the options are.”
“Not if she knows me,” Rajacic insisted, waving a big cracked open palm in their faces. “Not if she asks. These people who deal in children… they’re scum. I handle no one who isn’t old enough to know what she’s doing. And no drugs either.”