“What did he say?” Costa demanded.
“He was a priest. He said she’d been staying at the hostel where he worked. There’d been an argument. He wanted to patch it up. Except…” She looked down at the faces by the river, from where some angry rumbles were coming. “This girl. Laila. They say she doesn’t stay in hostels much. She’s a street kid, likes to be on her own. Kind of weird. Not dope. Just funny in the head. If they’re telling the truth, this man’s lying.”
“To hell with this,” Peroni grunted, heading for the steps. “We’ve got to talk to them.”
Alexa put a hand on his jacket. “Be careful. There are some real assholes down there.”
“Yeah, right,” Peroni grumbled, and brushed past her.
He was there so quickly that Costa and the two women missed what he said. Then Costa found himself remembering why he stuck with Peroni as a partner, why he never even thought of moving somewhere else. Peroni was speaking to a huddle of kids, perhaps fifteen of them, peering out of the darkness, young faces full of fear and resentment lit by a stinking brazier burning cardboard and damp wood. They knew they were talking to cops. They were waiting for all the trouble that meant. And Gianni Peroni was speaking to them in exactly the opposite way to the manner they expected: carefully, with conviction, and a quiet, forceful respect.
“You have to believe me,” he was saying. “We know you want to protect this girl. We understand why you don’t want to help the likes of us. But she’s in trouble. We have to find her.”
Alexa barked something incomprehensible and pulled out some more of Peroni’s money. The gang of youths stood there, immobile, but restless too. Finally a skeletal kid as tall as Costa came out of the darkness and took the money.
“I show you,” he said, pointing upriver, towards the Vatican. “You come with me. Over there. Now. You come. You come.”
He was dragging Peroni’s sleeve. It was all a game, Costa thought. Just a runaround for a few euros. He watched Peroni start to shuffle off, wondering at what stage they had to admit defeat. Then a sound made him turn his head. The huddle of bodies in the shadow of the bridge had changed. They were moving, making space for someone. Emily Deacon was walking straight into the middle of them, talking, in an accent which through fear betrayed her origins, asking, asking.
Seeing something too. A slim slight figure hiding at the back.
“Laila,” she yelled. “Laila!”
Somebody murmured, “Amerikane…”
They were crowding round the FBI agent, pushing, hustling. Alexa was nowhere to be seen.
“Gianni!” Costa yelled, then saw something metallic flash in the light of the brazier.
Emily saw it too. She dodged the halfhearted lunge with the knife and kicked the youth behind it hard in the crotch. He went down, screaming, but there were a dozen more of them now, crowding round her, starting to yell.
And the slight figure was moving too. Edging out at the back, seizing her opportunity.
Costa swiftly thought about the options, came to the conclusion there was just one. He fired off two shots into the empty sky, watching carefully to see that they understood what the deadly racket meant for them.
The girl was breaking into a sprint, moving quickly towards the next set of steps. She was on her own now, clear in a retreating sea of dark, furious bodies.
“Oh great,” Emily Deacon barked at him. “And I thought we were the ones who were supposed to be gun-happy?”
“Just making sure I take you back to Mr. Leapman in one piece like he asked,” Costa said. “How good are you at running?”
“Damn good,” she replied.
He nodded at the bridge. “Take these steps. See where she goes when she emerges. I’ll go after her. Gianni, you stay with Emily.”
Peroni was heading for the stone stairway already.
A good twenty metres ahead of him, Nic Costa saw the girl tumble, slipping on the slushy pathway, then scramble up and continue to flee. He took a deep breath, broke out from under the bridge and set off in her tracks.
It was a minute before he reached the next set of steps. He raced up them, following her footprints in the snow, thinking all along it had been a mistake to loose off those shots, not quite knowing why.
Then he climbed back to the road level, checked Peroni and Emily waiting for his lead a couple of hundred metres down the Lungotevere, Alexa by their side, her cigarette sending a thin plume of smoke up into the icy night air.
Costa glanced across the street and saw the slim, young figure of the girl slip into the snarl of alleys adjoining Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
Watching her disappear, in the dun security lights of a grocery store, was a tall, upright man dressed in black.
The heretical monk Giordano Bruno died at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori on a cold February day in 1600. Now his black, hooded statue stood on a pedestal in the centre of the square, dispassionately surveying the twenty-first century. The trash from the daily market-wooden boxes, limp vegetables, plastic bags-lay in the filthy slush, uncollected by market workers who’d pleaded the weather as an excuse for skipping work. Only a handful of late-night drinkers braved the snow to make the customary round of bars, the Americans heading for the Drunken Ship and Sloppy Sam’s, the locals to the Vineria and the Taverna del Campo. And around the statue, huddling against the wind, wondering how to make money, a bunch of down-and-outs, permanent hangers-on in a part of the city that was never short of tourists to work.
Of the hundred or so people milling around the Campo that night Emily Deacon was one of the few who knew who Giordano Bruno was. She could, if she wanted, recall the reasons why an eccentric recluse, one who brought about his own death through sheer stubbornness towards a vengeful authority, became a founding father of modern humanist philosophy. She’d visited the square often as a teenager and, as her family gradually fell apart, come to wonder what Bruno, a man convinced the world of the future would be immeasurably better than the one he inhabited, would make of modern-day Rome. These ideas rolled around her consciousness now. She knew the city so well, the place brimmed with so many memories, good and bad, that it was hard to focus on what mattered. Leapman had brought her to Rome, surely, for her specialist knowledge. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he’d be better off with someone who was fresh, untouched by the scars and connections of the past. And these thoughts themselves touched a raw nerve. They were unwanted, unnecessary. Emily knew she had a job to do, an important one. A job that could close this case for good because, when she’d left Peroni gasping for breath in the back streets near the bridge, when she’d realized Nic Costa had taken his own path and was now lost to her in the night, she’d found the girl herself, tracked her doggedly through the labyrinth of medieval alleys, over the broad main road of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, then past the Palazzo della Cancelleria, towards the Campo, noting, too, that they were not alone. Emily Deacon could run. She was as fast as the girl, faster probably. Whoever was following them was also fit, but older, a black figure flitting through the shadows, with one clear intent as he struggled to keep up with them.
She turned the corner into the Campo and knew what she’d see. The kid was predictable. She headed for crowds, particularly those she thought of as hers. Sure enough, the slight young figure was slowing now, strolling into the knot of bodies by the statue, hoping to be anonymous again. Emily cast a worried glance behind her and saw nothing. Not a soul was moving down the narrow medieval thoroughfare of the Via del Pellegrino, and she tried to convince herself she’d lost the man.
“But he’s good,” she muttered, and took out her issue revolver, put it snugly in the right-hand pocket of her jacket, then placed the pair of regulation handcuffs she carried in her left, wishing all the time she’d paid more attention during the repetitive, noisy tedium of the firearms classes back in Virginia.