“You dare threaten me, Falcone!” Viale raged. “Here! Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“I think so,” Falcone answered quietly. “And also we have these.”
He took the sheets of paper out of the envelope and threw them on the table. Leapman snatched them up and stared at them, aghast. They were copies Costa had made that morning of the material Emily Deacon found the day before: the Net conversations and, most damning of all, the memo from 1990. The one labelled “Babylon Sisters.”
“Where the hell did you get this?” Leapman murmured.
“From Emily Deacon,” Falcone replied. “And now she’s missing.”
“That little bitch sure knows a lot of things she’s not supposed to. I thought-”
“What?” Peroni snapped. “That she was just a dummy? Like the rest of us?”
“Yeah,” Leapman agreed with a sour face.
Peroni pointed a hefty finger in his direction. “Wrong again, smartass. And here’s another thought. What if she’s dead too? You don’t honestly think you can keep that under wraps, do you?”
It was remarkable. Leapman was thinking then, exchanging glances with Viale. Something was going on. Peroni risked just the briefest of glances with the man at his side. The twinkle in Falcone’s eyes told him he wasn’t wrong. The ruse had worked. They were through.
Leapman shook his head and muttered, “This is a mess. Such a mess.”
Moretti had put down his pen and turned a sickly shade of white. “You told me none of this would happen, Viale,” the commissario complained. “You said-”
Peroni took immense pleasure in breaking in. “Must be a hell of a pension you’ve built up over the years, Moretti. I was in that position once. Hurts like hell when they take it away from you. Mind you, jail too…”
Moretti closed his eyes briefly, then shot Peroni a look of pure hatred. “You ugly, sanctimonious bastard,” he hissed. “You don’t have to deal with these people, day in, day out. You don’t have to listen to them pushing and pushing, threatening, cajoling: ”Do this, do that.“ ”
“I thought that was what you got paid for,” Peroni replied, then added a final, “sir.”
“We don’t have time for this, gentlemen,” Falcone reminded them, glancing at his watch. “Where’s it going to be? Here, or in the Questura?”
Costa was getting desperate. The picture of the heartless ultimatum Kaspar had set was starting to damage his concentration. Teresa was doing what she loved: cruising the Questura for any titbits of information she could glean by badgering people who, by rights, shouldn’t even be talking to her. Nic had taken on the task of working the street. No one answered the bell at the address Emily had mentioned. He’d peered through the window, looking at the sparse furniture, the kind you got in a rented apartment, not a real home, and thought about breaking in. It was difficult to see what it could tell him about what had happened there thirteen years before. Then he’d hammered on six doors to no avail. Struggling to decide what to do next, he watched one of the Jewish bakers lugging flour through the doorway of his tiny store, smelled the fragrance of fresh bread on the cold December air and, against his own wishes, felt his stomach rumble. He needed to approach this with the same cold, deliberate dedication that Kaspar was showing he possessed. Either that or he could panic them all into another bloody disaster.
At the heart of the Piazza Mattei stood the little fountain of the tortoises. It was a modest creation by Roman standards, and possessed a comic touch that had amused Costa when he was a boy. Four naked youths, their feet on dolphins, were struggling to push four small tortoises into the basin at the summit of the fountain. It was ludicrous, almost surreal somehow. And today, he noted, the water was flowing.
He walked to the fountain and climbed over the low iron rail protecting the structure from the carelessness of motorists negotiating the narrow alleys of the ghetto. Then he dipped a finger into the snow at its foot, in the central basin. The ice was melting. He looked at the sky. The bitter cold still blanketed the city, but a change in the weather was imminent.
It had to be. Something in the human psyche lost sight of facts like these from time to time. When extraordinary events occurred, one adapted, almost came to regard them as normal, forgetting to allot them the perspective they merited. Rome would return to the way it was supposed to be in December. Planes would fly again, buses and trains would run almost on time. One way or another, the killings would cease. Chaos, by its very nature, was impermanent.
What mattered was bringing events to a close quietly, with as little damage as possible. Nic didn’t know if he could do that. Falcone was in his meeting, but once he emerged he’d be on the phone, asking questions. Would Costa have any answers? If he did, would he be inclined to share them with his boss?
And…
He had to ask himself. How much of the truth was Emily telling him? Ever since the previous night when he’d forced her to confront the idea that her father was the man behind Kaspar’s miserable fate in Iraq, he’d felt there was something she was concealing.
Teresa had looked up the report on the attack in the Piazza Mattei the previous October and tried, in vain, to find something new. The facts were plain, baffling and suspiciously scarce. The American professor had been staying temporarily at Number Thirteen as a houseguest, while conducting some academic research at the American embassy. He’d been assaulted in the square by the fountain. It was pure luck that a couple of cops were in the vicinity. No assailant had been apprehended. No motive could be found. It could be a blind alley…
Then Teresa had suggested she try to find something out about the property itself. After fifteen minutes-a period of time in which Costa, to his frustration, had gotten nowhere-she phoned back, ecstatic. The earliest deeds she could track showed Number Thirteen had been owned by the same private company based in Washington as far back as 1975. That, in itself, was unusual. Foreign owners rarely kept properties for that length of time. The firm wasn’t listed in the US phone book. It didn’t show in any of the financial records which she’d bullied some lowly minion in research into checking. Something stank, Teresa thought. Costa felt sure her instincts were correct. The tough part was turning instincts into hard fact. It was all going nowhere unless he could prise something out of the memory of someone who’d lived in the square for some time.
“What you do in circumstances like these,” Costa thought, trying to still those images running around his head, “is get yourself a coffee.”
He walked into the little cafe on the square, ordered a large macchiato and dumped a couple of extra shots of caffeine inside it from the coffee and sugar sludge parked on the bar in a bowl. Then, as he waited for the sudden caffeine jolt to hit, he tried to think what Falcone would have done in the circumstances.
The inspector had just a few mottos, all of them rarely heard, all of them apposite. One came to Costa at that moment. Curiosity is the basis of detection. Without it, a man learned nothing. Without it, you might as well be an accountant.
He tried to recall the substance of the reports he’d read over the last few days and set them against the conversation he’d had with Emily after Kaspar had handed the phone back to her. Then he finished his coffee and called over the middle-aged proprietor.
He should have figured this out earlier. The ghetto never changed. Places were handed down from generation to generation. He was just a short stroll from the commercial heart of the modern city, but this was a village, one where everyone knew everyone else. Rome was, in some ways, still a collection of individual communities living noisily cheek by jowl. It was what separated Rome from other capitals he had visited, cities that seemed metropolitan sprawls, with ill-defined borders and areas where not a soul lived at night.