“Where are you going exactly, friend?” Peroni demanded.
The man’s florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. “It’s no big deal. I need a drink. I’ve been freezing my balls off in this place all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That’s all I ask. Here…”
He led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two nights before.
“Everything’s working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a bulb blows, it’ll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I’m going to let you have a special treat for helping me. When I come back I’m gonna let you close the door, all on your own. I don’t allow civilians to do that ordinarily. Big privilege.”
Lazy bastard, Peroni thought. It was just a door, one of two, the other closed. A big, very old door.
“Is that so?” he asked.
“You bet,” the caretaker said, on his way out already, picking up speed with the eagerness of a man in desperate need of alcohol.
Peroni sat down on the hard chair behind the glass front of the booth. Then he thought about what he was doing and pulled himself back into the darkness of the little cubicle. Entry into the place was free. People just walked in and out as they pleased, except for the odd dumb tourist who couldn’t believe it was possible to get into a historic monument without a ticket. There was no need to make his presence obvious, none at all.
So he sat on the chair behind the glass and did what came naturally to him in the solitary gloom of the booth. He thought about his kids, wondering what they were doing, whether they were happy, whether they missed him. He thought about Laila, trying to imagine what kind of life she led, what had brought her all the way from Iraq to the streets of a hostile city where no one, as far as he could work out, knew who she was or cared much either.
And he looked at this odd old building, with its spherical interior pointed towards the sky like half an upturned eyeball, the pupil set on the stars. Peroni tried to work out where it lay in the tangle of facts they’d assembled so far. He hadn’t listened much to Emily Deacon’s lecture about why the Pantheon was important. Temperamentally he inclined towards Joel Leapman’s view. That a man who carved weird geometrical shapes out of the skins of the people he slaughtered was just plain crazy, however you tried to rationalize it. Thinking about the idea again inside the Pantheon itself, he was no longer so sure. The kind of killer they were hunting was, undoubtedly, deranged and dangerous. That didn’t make the guy illogical or erratic. The very opposite, in fact. If they’d thought this through-if events had given them the chance even to begin the process-he’d have suggested to Falcone that they should have left some plainclothes guy around here all day, just on the off chance. The old saw about people returning to the scene of their crimes was part of the argument. That did happen. More to the point, this place obsessed the man somehow. It was part of his story, part of the way he saw the world. In its angles and curves, the shadowy corners of its precise proportions, this killer found some hidden truth that made sense of what he was trying to achieve.
Several ideas were starting to form in Gianni Peroni’s head, each of them pushing the memory of his kids and a stray Kurdish girl from his mind.
Then he glanced at the long vertical slit of the door, outlined by the lights of the square behind, and saw a slim, recognizable figure slip through, casting a long slender shadow on the geometric floor.
Peroni sat in the booth, trying to decide how to handle the girl. She’d crept straight into the shade to the right of the altar opposite the entrance, hopping the rope designed to keep out the public, intent on something. Every movement was deliberate, determined. Teresa had been right. Laila was back here to retrieve something. Then another shape came through the door: the caretaker returning, walking steadily, head down, not the shambling gait Peroni expected of a man who, just half an hour earlier, looked as if his mind was set on downing three quick coffees liberally laced with brandy.
Peroni glanced at his watch.
“You’re five minutes late,” he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.
The girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar, half-concealed by the cloth.
“Laila.”
He spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it wasn’t enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing once again into the night?
“It’s me,” he said. “Peroni. You don’t need to worry. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.”
Except…
Just a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those wonderful little nightmares kids-or, more accurately, their existence-sent scattering through a parent’s mind at random times: car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.
And, Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of prey.
It was a shitty world sometimes, though Peroni guessed Laila had learned that at a very early age.
There was movement from behind the drape. She walked out. Her dark eyes were glittering, a little moist maybe. But she was smiling, smiling in a way he hadn’t seen before. Smiling naturally, a little shy, a little proud too.
She had something in her hands that looked very much like a man’s wallet and Gianni Peroni was suddenly aware that he didn’t give a damn about the thing, however interesting it might prove. The investigation could wait. There was something more important going on here.
“Hey,” he said and held out his arms, wishing to God she’d just run straight into them.
That was too much to ask. Laila walked up, holding the wallet in her right hand, grinning now, wiping tears-of joy, relief, fear, what? — from her cheeks.
Peroni put his arms round her skinny shoulders and hugged that frail, frightened body to his big chest.
“Don’t you go giving your uncle Gianni frights like that,” he whispered into her lank, musky-smelling hair. “He’s an old man, too old for this business.”
And she wasn’t going to the Questura tonight either. They could sleep at Teresa’s. Or Nic’s if she preferred. Anywhere there wasn’t a soul in uniform or the dead, disinterested face of a social worker looking at her, shaking a disappointed, middle-class head, thinking, “Damaged goods, damaged goods, put it down on the list and let someone else pick up the problem.”
Uniforms…
He hadn’t even spoken to the caretaker since the moron got back from his secret drink. It was time to kiss good-bye to this weird, spooky space and re-enter the land of the living.
Soon, too, because when Peroni turned he could see the idiot was now closing the door, that big vertical slab of bronze that had stood in the same archway for almost a couple of millennia, watching generation after generation walk through and gawp at the mysteries within.