Still, it didn’t give Costa much room for manoeuvre. They’d agreed it was too risky to post a second person outside the apartment, even one posing as a cleaner or a deliveryman. The individual they were after seemed too smart for tricks like that. Any intruder would stick out like a sore thumb if the man came back in the meantime. So if something went wrong Falcone and his team would have to make an entrance from outside.
Now that he’d climbed those steep, steep stairs Costa appreciated how long that would take. His instinct couldn’t tell him whether someone was at home, but if someone was, it was going to be vital not to alert him.
On this side of the cabin was a blind ledge just a metre wide, pointing back towards the hill where Trinità dei Monti lay, now hidden by the blizzard. Around the corner was a private terrace made for another climate. A pair of small palm trees cut incongruous shapes in their giant terra-cotta pots there, ice fringing their dead leaves, making them look like fantastic Christmas trees. The snow was so deep Nic could only guess at what occupied the other areas of the roof from the rounded white outlines they made: a barbecue, an outside sink with a single, swan-necked tap, a collection of brushes and brooms carelessly left to rot in the open air.
He took one final, careful step up the treacherous ladder, reached the wall and pulled himself upright onto the constricted strip of the ledge, teeth chattering, shivering uncontrollably, feet almost off the building’s edge.
Falcone had ordered him to keep the ring tone on his phone turned off until they knew the state of the cabin. No one wanted the risk of an unwanted call. But in the freezing cold Costa found it difficult to think straight. His brain felt numb. Had he remembered to turn it off or not? And if so when?
With numb fingers he struggled to pull the handset out of his pocket, fumbling it in his hands. The thing was off. He still couldn’t remember doing that. Then he tried to put the phone away, found it slipping in his frozen fingers, knew what would happen next, how the ineluctable laws of gravity and stupidity could collide at times like this.
The handset turned in his dead, icy grip, revolved slowly through the snow-flecked air, bounced off the ledge and tumbled down into the street below.
Costa closed his eyes, felt the flakes begin to fall on them instantly and cursed his luck. He couldn’t go back down the ladder. He was too weary, too cold. The icy rungs were perilous enough when he was climbing, with the odds and gravity in his favour. Nothing could persuade him to risk a descent.
He took out his gun, checked the safety was on, the magazine loaded. He was a lousy shot at the best of times. Now, with unsteady fingers and a head that felt like a block of ice, he’d be as much of a danger to himself as anyone else.
Trying to clear an open space in his mind, he pushed the weapon into the side pocket of his jacket and hoped some warmth and blood would come back to his hand, and with them some semblance of control.
Costa edged carefully along the narrow ledge, spent one dizzying, terrifying moment negotiating the corner, then rolled onto the deep snow of the terrace, glad that he finally had some railings between him and the precipice down to the street. When he got back his breath, when his head told him to keep moving or he’d just curl up in a tight, shivering ball, freeze and die on the spot, he stood up, clung to the wall and edged along it. There was just one small window here. A bedroom in all probability. He neared the glass. The curtain was closed. There was no light inside, not a sign of life.
Keep it that way, he prayed and stumbled on towards the river side of the building.
A memory came from his mountaineering days. Wind speed increases with altitude.
A sudden, gusting blast roared round the cabin’s apex, crackling with vicious energy, dashing hard, stinging ice into his face. He huddled into himself, drawing his arms around his head, fighting to keep upright, vainly trying to wish away the blank numbness growing in his brain. Then the blizzard paused for breath. After a moment in which Costa doubted his ability to go on, he struggled towards the corner of the building, hugged the drainpipe there, steeled himself against another battering from the storm.
Sometimes there were no choices. Whatever the situation inside the cabin, he’d have to break in. It was simply too dangerous to do anything else. He turned the corner, clinging to the brickwork. Most of this side of the building was given over to a French window, almost opaque under a glazing of ice, with just a small gap kept clear by an updraught from the heating inside.
He crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a frozen stone.
There was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic Hollywood moments you never forgot.
John Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of True Grit. Costa almost wept at the irony.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
It’s so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.
Then he saw the man.
People watch TV, stupid, his distant brain reminded him.
He was where you’d expect someone to be while glued to the box. Upright in a chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.
Costa pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.
There was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn’t, surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.
Never assume.
Someone who carved shapes out of his victims’ backs was impossible to predict. All Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.
He got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could. The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.
“Police!” Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.
The man didn’t budge.
Costa moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming like that, wishing the room wasn’t so stuffily hot and filled with a strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over, painted in a colour he didn’t want to think about too closely.