“I like this man,” Lotto declared. “I liked your father, too, by the way. Katrina…”
She flicked through the photos faster than Costa could count them. After a minute she closed in on a sequence of four. The couple were at a stand of some kind. There were publications for sale, and a large banner behind, with an anti-American slogan and the name of some left-wing group Costa had never heard of.
“Ooh.” Lorenzo Lotto’s face creased with an expression of extreme distaste. “I’d quite forgotten those people ever existed.”
“Who are they?” Costa asked.
“They were a bunch of tree-hugging lunatics. Wanted us all to return to the woods and eat leaves. Try telling that to some Fiat worker in Turin who’s about to lose his job to a sweatshop in the Philippines.”
“Lorenzo!” Teresa chided.
But he was on the phone already, talking in a low, private whisper none of them could hear. The conversation lasted less than a minute. Then he put down the phone, scribbled something on a pad, and passed the paper to Katrina.
“E-mail all four photos to this address now, please.”
Peroni shuffled uncomfortably on his big feet. “Do we get to know with whom you are sharing our evidence?”
Lotto’s grey eyebrows rose in disbelief.
He leaned forward and stabbed a finger at a large, bearded man seated behind the stand, in front of the banner. In this shot, he was talking animatedly to the couple. The light was brighter. This was earlier in the day, before Alessio’s arrival.
“The likes of us inhabit a small world these days,” Lotto said simply, bestowing upon Teresa a short glance of reproof. “Him.”
They were silent. Then the phone rang. Lotto picked it up, walked away until his voice was indistinct again, and spoke for a good minute or more, making notes continuously.
The call ended. He returned and allowed himself a brief smile.
“The man’s name was Bernardo Giordano. He died two years after these photographs were taken. Cancer. So much for living on leaves. Give me tobacco and alcohol any day.”
“What about the woman? Did she have kids?” Costa demanded.
“They had a nephew who came to live with them in Rome some years back. It seemed he stayed a very long time. Family problems back home supposedly.” Lotto winced. “They were a strange pair. Even for the Vegetarian Revolutionary Front or whatever they called themselves. They wouldn’t have anything modern in their lives, apparently. Not even a phone.”
“The woman’s still here?” Teresa asked.
“Yes, but it may not be the same child. Not the one in the picture,” Lotto cautioned. “There are still several hundred photos you haven’t even looked at. And I was starting to enjoy your company.”
“I’ll go through the photos,” Teresa promised.
Lotto sighed, then tore off a strip of the paper from his notepad. “She still lives at the same address. Flaminio. Her name is Elisabetta, and don’t shorten it or she’ll kill you. Three minutes by car, the way you people drive. Don’t raise your hopes too much, though. The ‘nephew’ left home a while back. Also, Elisabetta’s somewhat crazy, it seems. A diet of leaves…”
Costa took the note gratefully and looked at his watch. “I wish we could work that quickly,” he grumbled.
“I am delighted,” Lorenzo Lotto replied, “you can’t.”
It looked unimpressive these days, but the Flaminian Way was one of the oldest and most important roads in Rome, a busy route into the city built two centuries before Christ, running directly from the Capital through the Apennines to modern Rimini on the Adriatic. Half a kilometre ahead it crossed the Tiber at the Milvian Bridge, a landmark that, Costa now recalled, had something to do with Giorgio Bramante’s obsession. It was here that Christianity had become all-powerful in Rome, here, not far from the modern trams and the buses locking horns with frustrated motorists, that much of Western mankind’s history had been shaped in a fateful battle eighteen centuries before. The past shaped the present; it always had, it always would, and that knowledge informed Costa’s professional outlook as much as his personal one. The line from there to here was omnipresent; part of his job was always to try to discern its path in the surrounding darkness.
The rain had ceased by the time they reached the address in Flaminio that Lorenzo Lotto had given them, a narrow back alley behind the main road, close to the point where the trams changed direction, filling the air with their metallic wheezes and groans. It was an old, grimy block. The woman lived in what a real estate agent would have called “the garden apartment.” In truth it was the basement, a dark, dismal-looking place down a set of greasy steps. Peroni opened the rusted iron gate bearing the name Giordano, stared down the mossy steps to the flecked red door which stood behind two trash cans and muttered, “I don’t know about you, Nic, but I never much liked cats.”
The stench of feline urine was everywhere, rising like a fetid invisible cloud from behind the stairwell, made worse somehow by the recent downpour.
Elisabetta Giordano didn’t just refuse to have dealings with the phone. She didn’t answer the doorbell either. Peroni kept his index finger hard on the button at the head of the steps for a good minute and heard nothing. Maybe it didn’t work. Nor was there a neighbour around to offer a clue as to whether the woman might be at home, not until they were halfway down the stairs. At that moment an old man appeared behind them, waving a skinny fist in their direction.
“You two friends of the old witch?” he demanded.
“Not exactly,” Peroni replied. “Is the old witch around?”
“What am I, social services? Why’s it my job to look after these lunatics? What do I pay taxes for?”
Costa was getting impatient. The windows were opaque with dirt and dust. All he could make out behind them were a few grubby curtains; it was impossible to tell whether anyone was at home.
“Have you paid much in tax recently, sir?” he asked nonchalantly and immediately regretted it.
“Paid a fortune in my lifetime, sonny! And what do I get for it? Nothing! I phoned you morons two days ago!”
The men looked at one another.
“Phoned who?” Peroni asked. “About what?”
“Social services! That’s who you deadbeats are. I know your look. All cheap clothes and bored faces. You’d think that boy of hers would come back and help from time to time. Not that the young lift a finger for anyone these days.”
Costa took three steps upwards towards the man, who stood his ground, leaning on a hefty stick. He showed him his card.
“We’re not social services. What did you call about?”
The man looked a little taken aback by the realisation he was shouting at the police.
“What else? What we’ve all been complaining about for years. The noise. Crazy bitch. Plays music all night, all day. Yelling to herself and calling it singing. She shouldn’t be left on her own like that. We’ve told them a million times.”
“She sings to herself?” Peroni asked.
“Yes! She sings. Sounds worse than her stupid cats. Would you like to live next to that?”
“No,” Costa said, and put away his card.
“Also” — the stick came out and jabbed perilously close to Costa’s face — “it wasn’t just the singing. The last time, she was yelling and screaming worse than ever. Why do you think I called?”
Costa looked at him. “Yelling and screaming what?”
The old man hunted for the words. “Like she was in trouble or something,” he said grudgingly. “But don’t start getting on your high horse with me. We’ve put up with all manner of shit from that woman over the years. If I called for help every time she went bananas, you’d be here three times a day.”