“Have you heard her since?” Costa asked.
He looked guilty all of a sudden. “No…”
“Where do you live?”
“Number three. First floor. Been there twenty-two years—”
“Go home,” Costa interrupted. “We may want to talk to you later.”
He didn’t wait to see if the old man did as he was told. Costa walked down the steps, got in front of Peroni, and stared at the door.
The smell was terrible. Peroni sniffed and screwed up his big, plain face.
“I hope I’m wrong,” he observed miserably, “but I don’t think that’s just cat.”
Lorenzo Lotto was right. the questura ought to have these toys. They probably did, but all the familiar obstacles — procedures, bureaucracy, interoffice feuding — got in the way. Photo records were in the firm grip of intelligence, a bunch of secretive, surly, computer freaks who were capable of doing a great job, but only on their terms, and only if they and they alone pushed the buttons. Large organisations choked on their own fat, whether they were police forces or huge companies. Teresa had known that for years. What she’d never understood was how quickly technique and skill had progressed out in the real world, where machines and working practices were embraced without the need for committees or long consultative procedures. Lorenzo and Katrina could achieve in minutes what would take her days to do. And that was another good reason not to slink back to the Questura, apologise for slugging the duty commissario, and then try to lend some weight to the hunt for Leo Falcone.
Teresa liked toys. They intrigued her. She wondered about their possibilities.
After Costa and Peroni left, she spent forty minutes with Katrina going through the photos of Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, finding a few more with Alessio Bramante in them, learning nothing. The boy didn’t look quite as angry in the other photos. He didn’t look totally normal either. Something had happened to the child that day. Something had sent him scuttling down from the Aventino, fleeing something that could, if there were such a thing as logic in this case, only be his father. And whatever it was, it was also, it seemed to her, quite out of reach. Kids ran away, of course. They probably had sour, bitter faces like this when they did so. It was possible Alessio had run in the wrong direction. And that a couple of left-wing leaf-eaters like the Giordanos were child molesters or worse, simply looking for an opportunity to find their next victim.
But it didn’t feel right. She’d got Lorenzo to call a couple of other people and check on them. The same message came back from everywhere. The Giordanos were solitary, decent, if deeply weird people, who didn’t like the modern world, hated mixing with their fellow human beings outside gatherings of other tree-huggers, but would, when called upon, perform acts of extraordinary kindness up to the point that their meagre standing in society allowed.
Bernardo had been a tram driver all his life. His wife worked part-time in a bakery. The word ordinary didn’t do them justice. But they’d kept a “nephew” for years, a kid who became a teenager, then left. Only two facts seemed to be agreed upon about him: he didn’t go out much, even when he got older. And Elisabetta, possibly with help from some fellow leaf-eaters, educated him at home.
There had to be more. Teresa had drunk one of Lorenzo’s glasses of prosecco — which was so good she steeled herself against accepting another — then sent him fishing again. One thing bothered her. The old one: money. Even leaves didn’t come for free. When Bernardo died, Lotto’s informant said, Elisabetta had given up her job at the bakery. This didn’t ring true. A tram driver’s pension wouldn’t provide enough money to retire on. Most women in those circumstances, particularly one with a child to raise, would have looked for more work, not abandoned what she had.
Lorenzo shook his head. No one knew where Elisabetta got her income, and that had intrigued plenty at the time. She never seemed well off. But she never seemed short either. It was one of life’s mysteries.
“Another for the list,” Teresa grumbled, then glared at Katrina, who was starting to look bored. There were no more images of Elisabetta’s horrible pink dress to be found. The machine couldn’t find anything reliably on the basis of a face. People changed too much when seen from different angles. The mind was used to working in three dimensions. Stupid chunks of silicon weren’t.
She studied the final picture of Alessio. He looked surly, holding Bernardo’s hand — or, more accurately, being held by him, since there was a tight possessiveness to the man’s grip that surely said This one won’t run away again.
“The T-shirt he was wearing,” Teresa murmured. “The one with that seven-pointed star. Can you search for that?”
She glanced at Katrina, who pulled up a photo of Alessio with it on almost immediately. The keyboard clacked. Some invisible digital robot went off on its whirring work.
“Seven is a magic number,” Katrina said, apropos of nothing.
“Only if you believe in such things,” Teresa muttered.
The screen cleared. It revealed most of the photos they’d seen before. Katrina did something to get rid of them. Just three remained now.
Teresa Lupo stared at them and, to her surprise, found herself wondering exactly where she stood on the subject of magic.
“Be there, be there,” she whispered, stabbing at the speed-dial keys on her phone.
The idiotic beep came back at her: unavailable.
She swore. Men.
This couldn’t wait. She called Silvio Di Capua.
“Greetings, minion,” she said. “Now get a piece of paper and write this down.”
“What happened to ‘And how are you this fine day?’”
“I’m saving it for later. Take these names to Furillo in Intelligence. Just say to him I am now calling in the debt I’m owed and if he so much as tells a soul without my express permission I can guarantee his small yet highly embarrassing medical secret will be on every Questura notice board come Monday.”
“Subtle persuasion. I like that. Messina’s out there ticking off the sites Peroni had down for Leo, by the way. I am personally responsible for that.”
“Congratulations. Tell Furillo to look at everything. Debts. Criminal records. Motoring. Social services. Everything he can lay his prying little paws on. I want to know about records. In particular I want to know about connections.”
“Done. Names.”
She gave him Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, and their address, and crossed her fingers as she spoke. Even leaf-eaters had to step out of line from time to time.
“More?”
She looked at the photos on the screen. They weren’t great. This was a guess, perhaps a bad one. All the same…
“One more,” she said.
The site they first visited in San Giovanni looked more like a bomb crater than an archaeological dig. It stood close to the busy hospital, a mass of buildings, some old, some new, that, in one form or another, had been providing medical aid to the citizens of Rome for sixteen centuries. Peccia and his men had changed into their preferred work uniform: black, all-covering overalls, and, for the handful ready for action, hoods. They were carrying slim, modern-looking machine pistols. Messina, a man who had always preferred to avoid firearms, had no idea what kind of weapons they were or why Peccia would prefer them. They just looked deadly. That, he decided, was enough.
There was, naturally, a procedure. The interior layout of the target was established. A method of entry was agreed upon. Then a small number of men — Peccia had twelve in all — made the first sortie, watched by backup officers.
Bruno Messina observed, uneasily, as the squad entered the low, algaed tunnels of the site next to the hospital’s main emergency unit. These men had the slow, mechanical gestures of trained automatons, jerking their way through the open corridors and half-hidden chambers of some ancient underground temple as if they were taking part in some video game. He knew now why Bavetti preferred sending uniformed officers, men and women with visible faces, out into the city to ask questions. It seemed more human, more of a real response than this puppet show.