“I know,” Costa insisted. “As I said, we’re desperate.”
“Who isn’t?” the Serb wondered. “These are desperate times. You never noticed?”
He swigged some beer from the bottle, stubbed out the cigarette and looked at them. Maybe there was something there, Costa thought. Maybe…
“You know what?” Rajacic grumbled. “When I came here fifteen years ago I used to have to call home and beg for girls. Most wouldn’t even phone me back. They had dignity then. They didn’t need the likes of me. Now? This is a world in motion, my friends. I got the United Nations working for me, and more women calling pleading for work than I can handle. Kosovans. Croats. Russians. Turks. Kurds. All those people who watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, the old world rolling over and dying, and they thought: ”Now the good times begin, now everyone gets free and rich like all those big shots in the West promised.“ Some joke, huh? You guys never told them it didn’t really work like that, did you? You left it to pimps like me. I’m the one who gets to say it to some pretty little seventeen-year-old straight off the boat, no papers, no money, nothing going for her except what she’s got between her legs. And now you’re coming asking for help-”
“We don’t have time to apologize, Stefan,” Peroni grumbled.
“No.” The dark eyes flashed at him. “You don’t.” He picked up the photo. “What is she? Kosovan? Albanian?”
Peroni grimaced. “We just don’t know.”
“From the looks of her she could be anything. Turk or Kurd even. Jesus…”
“But she can’t just walk into a city like this without knowing someone, surely?” Emily objected. “She must have a name. A phone number. Something.”
“That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it?” Rajacic asked. “Who?”
Peroni reeled off the names. The Serb scowled as he heard each one.
“My,” he said at the end. “I wouldn’t want to meet even one of them in a day. Six…”
“Can you think of someone else we should be talking to?” Emily asked.
The brown eyes blinked in disbelief. “Do I look like I have a death wish?”
“Mr. Rajacic,” she persisted, “this girl’s so young. She might not even be in the loop you’re talking about now. We don’t know where she is, but we know what she saw. She’s got to be scared. And in danger too.”
He glowered back at them. “What did she see?”
The two cops looked at each other. They were running out of options.
“A couple of murders,” Peroni said quietly. “Don’t go telling anyone, huh? The kid’s got problems enough as it is.”
Rajacic finished the beer and clicked his fingers for another. “Two?”
“It was on the TV,” Costa said. “A woman was killed in the Pantheon. An Italian photographer was shot too. We know this girl was there. Inside. Probably just looking for shelter or something. We know the guy who killed this woman realizes that too now. You see my point?”
The old man thought about this, then got up, went to the bar and, without saying a word to the man behind the counter, picked up the phone by the till and began talking rapidly in his native language.
“He acts like he owns the place,” Emily observed.
“He does,” Peroni said. “Even a pimp needs an office. I don’t suppose you understand any of that lingo?”
She shook her head. Rajacic was virtually yelling into the phone now.
“He doesn’t act like a pimp,” she observed. “Not really.”
Peroni watched Rajacic barking at the phone. “It’s not his chosen profession. He was a farmer in Bosnia. The Croats decided his land was theirs. He had the sense not to stay around and argue.”
“Big leap from Bosnian farmer to pimping here,” Costa commented.
“Yeah,” Peroni agreed. “Like the man said, ”A world in motion.“ I don’t get it either. But who’s asking? If every other pimp we had was like this guy-no drugs, no kids.”
Emily’s blue eyes wandered over the pair of them, some bitter judgement there. “He’s still earning a living by selling women on the street.”
“We’ve had people doing that here for the last couple of thousand years,” Peroni answered. “Doubtless will for the next couple too. Do you think we can stamp it out somehow? We’re cops. Not miracle workers.”
She stirred the empty coffee cup. “Sure. I just want to make sure we remember what he is.”
“What he is, Emily, is maybe the only chance we’ve got to find this kid. These people lead separate lives. They talk to us on their terms, when they feel like it. No amount of screaming at them, no amount of time in a cell, changes that. Trust me. I know. I’ve tried.” He nodded at Costa. “We both have.”
“True,” Costa agreed, watching how Rajacic’s attitude had changed while he was on the phone. He looked a little happier. He was getting what he wanted.
The Serb came back to the table and sat down. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he told them.
Peroni slapped him on the big brown arm of his overcoat. “Because you’re a good guy, Stefan. Like I told my American friend here.”
“Or maybe just a damn fool. Don’t go putting this around, Peroni. I don’t want anyone getting the idea I make a habit of helping the cops. And maybe I’m not helping at all.”
A woman was coming out of the door at the back of the bar. She was about thirty, with long, black hair, a tanned gypsy face heavy with makeup and a tight red dress cut low at the neck. Boredom and resentment shone out from her tired eyes. She must have been upstairs, taking the call on an internal line.
Rajacic pushed out a chair and beckoned her to sit. “This is Alexa,” he announced. “My niece.”
Peroni looked her up and down. “You mean this is a family business?”
“When he gets some business,” she snapped.
The Serb pointed to the window. “Am I responsible for the weather now? Please. I’ve listened to enough shit for one evening. These people need your help, Alexa. You’re getting paid anyway. You can go with them. Or you can clean up in the kitchen. Which is it going to be?”
“Some choice,” she grunted and took a seat. “What do you want?”
Rajacic reached over and brushed his fingers against her fine black hair. “Hey, zingara. No tantrums. They just want a little advice.”
He looked at Peroni, who pushed the photo across the table. She picked it up.
“I don’t know who the hell this is,” she complained. “Why ask me?”
Rajacic smiled. “A little gypsy blood crept into the family a while back,” he explained. “Don’t ask how. It’s thick blood, huh, Alexa? Like this kid’s maybe. My friends here are asking themselves, ”Where would a girl like this hide out if she were scared and living off the street?“ Can you tell them?”
Her black eyes didn’t give away a thing. “On the street? In weather like this?”
“Come on,” Rajacic wheedled. “They don’t all stay in hostels. They don’t all have pimps looking after them. What if she’s on her own? Where’d she go? What kind of choices have these kids got?”
“Not many,” she murmured, thinking all the same. “What’s in this for me?”
Rajacic leaned over, prodded her in the arm, hard. At that instant he looked the pimp he was.
“You make an old man very happy,” he murmured. “Now get out of here. Before I think of something else.”
They’d borrowed a jeep from traffic. Costa sat behind the wheel, feeling out of practice, unused to the four-wheel drive which was the only way the treacherous roads were manageable at speed. Most of the narrow through routes in the centro storico had been closed. What little movement there was now funnelled down the main thoroughfares and the broad avenues which ran either side of the river. Alexa knew where to go. They’d checked out a series of sites-a derelict building north of the Pantheon, a squat in Testaccio, a grimy, freezing hostel in San Giovanni-and got the same result in each one, trying to talk to a bunch of surly adolescents shivering in cheap black clothes that couldn’t keep out the cold. They’d look at the girl’s picture and shake their heads. Then Alexa would yell at them in their own language, and still they’d say nothing.