A Season for the Dead (10 page)

15

What do I think? Michael, Michael.”

Neri couldn’t stop laughing, couldn’t stop slapping Denney on the shoulder.

“You make a good cardinal. Why’d you ever think you could make a good banker too?”

“It was what was asked of me,” Denney replied sharply. “I know my duty.”

Neri’s big face became serious. “And I know mine. You truly believe this money, this hidden crock of gold, is news to me.”

Denney turned to Crespi, astonished. The little man’s face flushed. “I said nothing,” he complained. “He’s making this up.”

“I don’t lie,” Neri grunted. “I’m too rich to have to lie these days. I told you: This place leaks like a sieve. I’ve known your little secret for weeks, Michael. I’ve had time to consider it. Carefully. To talk about it with my associates too. What I have to say to you now is painful, but say it I must.”

The door opened. Hanrahan walked in, making his excuses. Denney looked at him in despair. This was all going wrong. Neri had advance knowledge. Denney couldn’t begin to guess how, or what this might mean.

“The choice before me,” Neri continued, “is simple. Do I lose a friend? Or do I lose a fortune? Do I throw good money after bad for old times’ sake? Or do I take what I can and be grateful for that?”

“This is a pittance,” Denney complained. “It’s a fraction of what we could earn if we go back in business. And you need a bank, Emilio. You can’t live without that.”

“Banks, banks,” Neri snarled, waving a dismissive hand at Denney. “You live in the past, Michael. It’s the secret, small corporations that attract the interest of those cold-blooded lawyers in the first place. Why waste all our time and money on them when it’s simpler just to go to someone more established and pay him for a mutual relationship? It’s in the nature of the world we live in now that men like us may hide more easily in the light of day. Scurrying around in dark corners merely calls attention to ourselves. Sadly”—Neri seemed genuinely surprised by this insight—“that’s what seems to come naturally to a man like you. Perhaps it’s in your background. Perhaps it comes from this place. If the latter, then more fool you, because they’ve abandoned you, Michael. Even if you don’t know that yourself.”

“What?” Denney knew he was out of favor. But a renewal of his business interests, some clearing of debts, these were actions that would surely begin to clear his name. . . .

“I want my cut of this money,” Aitcheson said. “I want it now and I want it based on what we invested in the first place.”

“You’ll walk away with pennies,” Denney repeated.

Aitcheson stabbed an angry finger at him. “I’ll walk away with
something
. Listen to me well, Michael. I was on the phone to someone in the Justice Department only yesterday. This present state of limbo isn’t going to last. They’re closing Lombardia for good soon, not just suspending us. They’re preparing the warrants. Your name’s on the top. No one else’s right now, and as far as the rest of us are concerned that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

Denney glared at them. “You knew this? All of you? You didn’t think to tell me?”

Crespi stared at the table. Neri looked bored.

Aitcheson sighed. “You’ve been living in la-la land these last six months, Michael. Thinking you can bribe your way out of this mess. It isn’t going to happen. Even if it were possible, Emilio’s right. Letting you back into the game would just mean we open up a black hole again. You’re finished. Face it. We have nothing left to discuss. I wash my hands of you.”

Neri glanced at Hanrahan, then nodded at the ceiling. “They do too. He doesn’t know?”

Denney felt hot, confused. He looked into Hanrahan’s eyes and saw the future begin to fall apart.

“You don’t have a deal?” Hanrahan asked. “After all this work? All this time?”

Neri shook his head. “My dear Irish friend. Please don’t act so surprised. Do we look like fools?” He paused, enjoying this. “Well. Tell him . . .”

Hanrahan grimaced, then pulled out his phone. Denney heard him calling the janitorial staff, asking them to send a couple of men around. “If there’s no deal,” he said, “things are very different.”

“What are you doing?” Denney demanded. “What the hell is going on here?”

Neri smiled at the apartment, appreciating the Murano glass, the mirrors, the paintings. “Nice place,” he said. “They’ll be scratching each other’s eyes out to see who gets it next.”

16

Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa to the Rome police department, sat in front of a varied collection of animal body parts: veal hearts, cartilage, pig thymus glands and a tangle of cow intestines with milk still inside. She was ecstatic and was joined in her joy by Luca Rossi, who wore, for the occasion, a Lazio baseball cap, placed backward on his balding head, and ate with a noisy, openmouthed enthusiasm. This was, it transpired, Rossi’s favorite food,
cucina romana,
the traditional working-class fare of the city: the offal which, by tradition, the proletariat had been left after the clergy of the Vatican had picked from the best cuts of meat.

The restaurant was a cheaper clone of the flashy, expensive Checchino dal 1887 around the corner, the city temple to the eating of guts and glands. Its sixteen simple tables were fully booked and heaving with cooked organs which Nic Costa could not begin to identify even if he so wished. This was the big man’s joke: to bring a vegetarian to a place where the consumption of arcane flesh was a religion. Or perhaps he didn’t even think about it. Costa watched the way Rossi looked at Crazy Teresa as they prodded and poked at some tripe and hoof jelly and wondered if there was the prospect of love in the air.

They made an odd pair. Rossi, with his big, sad face and sprawling body, looked like a man who would stay single all his life and had probably forgotten when he last slept with a woman. Crazy Teresa had run through endless affairs in the department, all of them brief, all of them encounters which tended to leave the male party wan and glassy-eyed afterward. A little taller than Nic Costa, powerfully built, with a handsome face that smiled constantly as it examined every last thing that fell under its gaze, she was an astonishingly skilled pathologist who had worked as a successful hospital surgeon before something—the craving for excitement was her excuse—drove her into the morgue. Costa never really swallowed that line. Her work wasn’t exciting. She was so painstaking and exact she found herself working long, tiring hours just to extract every last shred of evidence. The bodies Teresa Lupo called her “customers” were, in spite of her easy way with them, still the remains of human beings. Her relationship with them went beyond the forensic. At times she was able to offer the kinds of insight that failed the best of cops and that, he thought, was what drove her. She liked playing detective, and often was very good at it.

Rossi and the woman sat together opposite him, picking at the plates, guzzling the cheap house red and sucking at cigarettes when a gap between the delivery of the flesh and the booze allowed. Costa had arrived late, on purpose. He waited until the waitress, a surly-looking girl with rings in her nose and ears, came up with a pad, then ordered salad and a glass of Cala Viola, a young Sardinian white which was the only wine he recognized on the list.

“Chicken salad?” the girl demanded.

“Just salad.”

“We don’t
do
‘just salad,’ ” she snarled. “You can take the chicken off if you like.”

Costa sighed, digging in his heels. “Why don’t
you
take the chicken off?”

“Hah! And have you moaning when it comes to paying the bill? Do I look that stupid?”

Rossi leaned forward and gave her the serious look. “Hey. If it comes to it,
I’ll
take the chicken off. He’s a vegetarian. Okay?”

The nose ring twitched. The girl suddenly looked more sympathetic. “Sorry,” she said sincerely. “Me too. Jesus, are we in the wrong place or what?”

When the waitress returned with a large plate of rocket and salad leaves and a decent glass of icy wine Crazy Teresa was midway through an explanation of the physical function of the mushy glands sitting in front of them, lightly cooked with garlic and celery.

“Can we not talk food tonight?” Nic Costa asked.

“You’re squeamish?” Crazy Teresa inquired, amazed. “You two, of all people. After what happened yesterday?”

Luca Rossi sided with his partner. “Maybe it’s because of what happened yesterday. I mean, I like eating this stuff. To be absolutely honest with you, I’d really rather not know what it is.”

“Okay.” She shrugged. “But you”—she pointed a strong, aggressive finger at Costa’s face—“need to watch this diet thing carefully. Medically, scientifically, vegetarianism is a fad. A dangerous one too. Unless you know how to balance your diet.”

Costa looked at the plate of unidentifiable meats, the pile of spent cigarettes and the near-empty flagon of wine in front of her and wondered who Crazy Teresa was to hand out lectures on eating habits.

“He can run faster than any man in the Questura,” Rossi said defensively. “They say you should’ve seen him on the pitch.”

“I did see him on the pitch, before he took up this running thing. He’s fast but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be faster if he ate some meat now and again. Look at that guy who plays hooker.”

Teresa was a rugby groupie. That was another well-known fact.

“Lamponi?” Rossi asked, a little jealous perhaps.

“Yeah. Look at the pecs. Look at the thighs on that.” She stabbed a ribbon of tripe. “That’s what meat does for you. Gives a man a body.”

Luca Rossi exchanged a knowing look with his partner. “He’s gay,” he said.

“What?”

“Lamponi. He’s gay,” Rossi repeated.

“Hell!”

“Perhaps,” Nic Costa suggested, “it was something in his diet. Too many female hormones in all those glands he keeps eating.”

“Yeah,” Rossi agreed. “Things start growing where they shouldn’t. Stuff starts shrinking instead of . . .” He shrugged.

Crazy Teresa banged the empty carafe on the table to order a new one, lit a cigarette and glared at them. “Bullshit merchants. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nic Costa looked at his watch. It was his turn to go to the house tonight. He didn’t want to be late. “What are we supposed to be talking about, Teresa? I gathered there was something on your mind.”

She pushed her fork around the remains on the plate. Costa realized he liked this woman. She was smart, fun too, but there was a serious side to her that underpinned everything.

“This skinning trick?” she asked slyly. “You’re happy with the way things have turned out? All nice and obvious like that?”

“It’s not closed,” Costa said. “Not by any means, though I didn’t see anything in your report that raised any new issues.”

“To hell with the report. That’s just about what I know. Sometimes there are things that grate, and maybe they’re nothing at all, but you still ought to hear them.”

Rossi folded his arms and looked at her. “We’re listening.”

“The professor. Did he have any medical experience? Had he worked in an abattoir at some stage?”

Costa shrugged. “Not that we know of. He was an academic. I can’t see how he would have done either of those things. Why?”

Teresa Lupo was unhappy about something. “I don’t know. I may be wrong about this, but it’s just a very odd thing to do. To skin someone like that and do it pretty well too at what I assume is his first attempt.”

Rossi’s long face grew doubtful. “Is it that hard? I had an uncle in the country. He used to do this trick when he killed a rabbit. He’d make some little nick in the back of the neck, sort of shake the thing up and down in some way he knew, and the whole skin came right off. Like a glove or something, inside out, clean as anything.”

Crazy Teresa was incredulous. “You’re comparing human beings with furry rodents? Are you serious? What you call ‘skin’ is actually three separate, living organs. The epidermis, which is the outer part, the dermis underneath, the subcutis, the layer of fat below that. You can’t make a nick somewhere, throw the corpse up in the air and have it come down stripped. This is complicated . . .”

She watched some food land on the neighboring table courtesy of the pierced waitress.

“Wait here. I won’t be a moment.”

Crazy Teresa stalked into the kitchen. Rossi watched his partner warily from across the table.

“I’m paying,” he said.

“Oh, I know that, Uncle Luca.”

“She said it was important, Nic.”

And maybe it is, Costa thought. More important than Luca Rossi could begin to guess.

Crazy Teresa came back with a side of pork belly, uncooked, and a small kitchen knife. She dropped the meat in front of them and watched the raised eyebrows from the tables around.

“It’s okay,” Teresa yelled back at them. “We’re not going to eat it just yet.”

Costa smiled at her. “That’s a relief.”

“Listen. The pig’s is a pretty close approximation to the human skin system in some ways, which is why it’s used for grafts from time to time. You’ve got to remember too that some cannibal cultures call us the ‘long pig,’ and there’s a reason for that. Physiology
and
taste. So here.”

She sat down and gave the short knife to Rossi.

“Try skinning it.”

He waited a moment, then began to slice away at the fat underneath the thick epidermis. Then he pulled, hoping to lift it away from the carcass. It was impossible, even for a strong man like Rossi.

“There’s all that fat,” he complained. “People aren’t like that.”

Teresa eyed him. “Not all people. You’d be amazed how much fat you can get on a corpse. You’re right. It’s not an exact match, but it’s close. What I’m trying to say to you is there’s no easy, quick solution. I looked up some of the classical images of this Bartholomew person on the Web. Almost every one shows him about to be martyred and they all have the same idea. The person who wants to do it is staring at him, wondering how to do the job. It’s not obvious.”

Costa thought of the painting in the church. This was exactly what it portrayed. Skinning a man required more than just strength and resolution. It surely needed some level of knowledge of the body as a starting point.

“So how’d he do it?” Costa asked.

Teresa took the knife off Rossi, stood up, went behind the big man and made him hold his arms up in the air.

“My guess is he went in behind the neck and circled there, feeling his way, getting an idea for how deep to cut, not trying to remove anything right then.”

Rossi lowered his arms, feeling stupid. “You mean he cut his throat?”

“Not enough to kill him,” Teresa noted. “That’s not the idea. All the reference works on skinning people emphasize how important it is for the victim to remain conscious for as long as possible. In some North American cultures they prided themselves on their ability to remove most of the skin intact and be able to show it to the victim before he died.”

“What happened then?” Costa asked.

“This is all conjecture,” Teresa warned. “I’ve tried to come up with a way in which I can estimate the exact sequence of events but it’s impossible. I guess he turned him sideways somehow, went down the back, all the way along the spine, lifting a little on each side, then gradually opened it out, up to the shoulder blades, out to the waist until most of the back was off.”

The party at the adjoining table stood up, mumbling, and went to the counter to pay.

“And he’d still be alive?” Rossi wondered.

She shrugged. This was all hypothesis. “He might have blacked out from the agony, if he was lucky. But then he’d probably come to later. After the back, the knife would work round the groin, the arms, work round to the front. Just very slowly, until he could bring it all to the chest, like a sheath.”

Rossi pushed away the plate in front of him.

“How long?” Costa asked. “From beginning to end?”

“An hour. Maybe more. And you don’t just need a strong stomach for this. You need a lot of physical strength too. This Rinaldi man was in rotten shape. He ate terribly. He drank too much. He had the kind of liver you’d see on a French goose. I don’t know . . . This may be all wrong.”

Costa and Rossi waited. Crazy Teresa was about to say what she had wanted to say all along.

She leaned over the table and spoke softly, so that no one beyond would hear. “My feeling is this: The average surgeon wouldn’t have the strength for that. Someone who worked in an abattoir maybe. Someone who had watched a procedure in a hospital could too. But a flabby, out-of-condition university professor? No. I can’t give you any hard scientific fact to put down in a report. But I don’t believe it. Not for one moment. Sorry . . . I know you thought you had this one fixed.”

The two men looked at each other.

“On the other hand,” she said, “you’re listening to Crazy Teresa. So maybe you should take that into account.”

Rossi put a hand on her arm, shocked. “What do you mean? ‘Crazy Teresa’?”

She refilled her glass again. “I gather that’s a nickname some of them are using now.”

“Who?” Rossi demanded. “You let me know! You give me the names!”

Costa said nothing and wished he didn’t face the drive ahead, wished he could order another glass of the good wine.

“This is a professional organization,” Rossi continued. “We don’t countenance behavior like that, do we?”

Nic Costa raised an empty glass to his partner.

“Sweet man,” Teresa said, flattered. “Excuse me now. I need to go.”

They watched her large, happy frame squeeze through the restaurant and head for the corridor at the rear.