A Season for the Dead (3 page)

4

Costa thought about the abbreviated story Sara Farnese told them in the car. It raised a host of questions. He wondered too about her reasoning. Maybe the woman was already in shock, only inwardly, and this was just some crazy wild-goose chase.

“Why Tiber Island?” he asked.

“I told you. We have to go to the church.”

Rossi, who was driving, cast him a chilly glance. Costa wondered if his new partner was starting to get bad feelings about this whole thing. It was an odd decision. They should have waited for instructions, maybe. But he had no evidence a crime had been committed on city territory. Besides, the woman was adamant: She wanted to get there quickly. Costa thought he could make out a good case in front of Falcone. He usually did.

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

She sighed, as if she were talking to a schoolchild. “Bartholomew. The saint was flayed alive. Skinned. Stefano did some work on that period. He would have known. The church on Tiber Island is Bartholomew’s. I can’t think of anything else.”

“That’s it?” Costa replied, fast revising his hopes of keeping Falcone sweet.

“That’s it,” she agreed testily. “Unless you have a better idea.”

The two men looked at each other. The August traffic was light. They made their way along the Trastevere waterfront, then took a left turn onto the tiny island that sat in the middle of the river.

“This Stefano,” Rossi asked as they pulled into the piazza in front of the church, “he was a friend of yours?”

She said nothing, and was stepping out the door before they had come to a halt.

“One scary woman,” Rossi grunted just out of earshot, shaking his head. The two policemen followed her and looked at the church. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong here. This was an old, unspoiled corner of the city, with a cobbled piazza where you could sit in the shade away from the murmur of traffic that ran along both banks of the river.

“You think we should call in?” Rossi asked.

Costa shrugged. “What’s the point? Let them hang us in their time, not ours.”

“Yeah,” the older man agreed. “Let me see if I can find someone. Get some keys.”

The woman was already at the door of the church.

“Hey,” Costa yelled. “Wait.”

But she was gone. Costa swore and raced after her, shouting for Rossi to follow.

The place was empty. They stood in the nave, framed by the polished columns on either side, Costa feeling the way he always did in churches: uncomfortable. It was a matter of upbringing, he guessed. The places just spooked him sometimes.

They looked in the dimly lit side chapels. They tried a couple of doors that opened onto tiny storage rooms full of dust.

“There’s nothing here,” she said.

They stood in the nave, Costa trying to think of other options. She was disappointed, anxious, as if this were some intellectual puzzle demanding a solution.

“It was worth a try,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“I blame myself already,” she said softly. “There has to be more to it than this. We did some work here once. There was a temple here, to Aesculapius, before the church was built. Maybe something underground.”

“Aescoo—who?”

“Aesculapius. He was the god of medicine.” She looked at him. “That makes it appropriate too, don’t you think?”

“Maybe.” Costa was out of his depth and knew it. There was more going on in the woman’s head than he understood. He wondered how much she realized that herself.

Rossi returned waving a set of large, old keys. Costa felt suddenly awkward. Somehow he seemed to have taken the initiative, which was surely Rossi’s prerogative. Rossi was older, more senior. He knew more.

“We’ve been everywhere,” Costa said. “It’s all open anyway. Nothing.”

“Best we call in then,” Rossi said, and seemed relieved at the idea someone else might have to pick up the pieces.

She was staring intently at a small door on the left, before the altar. “Over there.”

“We tried it,” Costa said.

“No. There’s a campanile here too. We didn’t find the way into the tower.”

Costa led the way and threw open the door. The room was small and dark. He pulled out the little flashlight from his pocket and saw instantly why they had missed the exit earlier. The stairs were hidden in the dark far corner, behind an iron screen that was secured with a huge padlock. Rossi grunted, then went to it, fumbled with the keys, found the right one and pushed through into the darkness, scrabbling up the stairs.

“Jesus! What was that?”

The big man’s screech echoed up the stone staircase.

Costa’s fingers finally found a light switch. It illuminated the ground floor of the tower and the stone spiral leading upward through a second floor of old, dry planking.

Rossi staggered down the stairs, still squealing. His bald head was now stained with blood. It ran down his temple, into his eyes. He squirmed, trying to wipe it off, scrubbing at his head with a handkerchief, yelling all the time. For the first time in his police career Nic Costa felt bile rising in his throat. Now that they stood at the staircase, there was a smell inside the hot enclosed oven that was the tower’s interior. It stank of fresh meat starting to go sour. He flashed his light upward. From the wooden ceiling above the stairs there was a slow, steady drip of coagulating blood—Rossi had walked beneath it the moment he’d put a foot on the first step.

“We need help,” Costa said grimly, reaching for the radio in his pocket.

But Sara Farnese was already on the stairs, squeezing past Rossi. “Hey!” Costa yelled, seeing her slim form disappear completely from view. “Don’t do that. Don’t touch anything. Jesus—”

His partner was losing it. Rossi was scratching at his face as if the blood there were poison, acid, ready to eat into his skin. Costa took the radio and made a short, urgent call. Then he told Rossi to stay downstairs and wait for him. He didn’t like the look on the older man’s face. There was something crazy there, something that said this was all traveling a little too far from home. Nic Costa felt the same way but she was gone, she was upstairs with whatever else lived there, and he couldn’t accept the idea that she might be there alone.

He heard the sound of a switch overhead. A dim, yellow light cast shadows down the stairs. Then Sara Farnese made a noise, something halfway between a gasp and a scream, the first real sign of emotion she had uttered since the carnage in the Vatican Library half an hour before.

“Shit!” Costa cursed, and took the stairs two at a time.

She was slumped with her back to the wall. Her hands were over her mouth, her green eyes open wide in shock and amazement. Costa followed the direction of her gaze. He saw the corpses in the full beam of the single bulb and fought to keep the contents of his stomach down.

There were two bodies in the room. The woman’s was fully dressed in a dark skirt and red blouse. It was suspended from a beam by a makeshift noose. Close to the dangling legs was an old wooden chair which might have been kicked from beneath her—or, perhaps, had fallen away as she struggled to keep herself upright. Costa did not look too closely at her face but she appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with streaky fair hair and thin, leathery skin.

About two yards away was a second figure, strapped upright to a supporting timber beam: a man with a striking shock of golden hair and a face contorted by the agonies of a terrible death, with a gag tied tightly across his mouth, raising the bloodless lips and perfect white teeth into an ironic smile. He hung by his arms, which were tethered above his head to a blackened beam. His legs dangled free to the wooden floor. There was skin only on his face, hands, feet and groin.

A buzzing cloud of flies hovered over the fleshy torso. Their noise filled the tiny circular room. Around the walls, painted time and time again in the dead man’s blood, was the message Sara Farnese had first heard in the Vatican Library, written in scrawled capital letters:
THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH.
And, once only, a couplet in English, one Nic Costa could understand enough to realize it was even crazier. It was painted on the wall behind the body so the writing was behind its head. The words read like the first two lines of a poem . . .

As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.

Nic Costa felt his stomach spasm, then looked at her. Sara Farnese was unable to take her eyes off the bloody, stripped corpse. She looked as if she were going insane inside her own head.

He crossed the tiny room in two strides and knelt down, between her and the flayed corpse, touching her hands with his.

“You’ve got to get out of here. Now. Please.”

She tried to avoid the obstacle of his body, tried to see once more. Costa placed his hands on her cheeks and forced her to look into his face.

“This is not your doing. This is not something you should see. Please.”

Then, when she failed to move, he bent down and lifted her into his arms with as much care as he could muster and walked down the circular stone stairs, feeling her weight in his arms, avoiding as best he could the diminishing drip of blood from the ceiling.

Rossi stood outside the door. As they passed he muttered something about support being on the way. Costa carried her into the nave. At the front he placed her on the bench pew. She was staring at the altar. Her eyes shone with unshed tears.

“I’ve got things to do,” he told her. “Will you wait here for me?”

She nodded.

Costa beckoned Rossi to stand by the woman’s side, then took a deep breath and returned to the tower and the bloody room on the second floor, to sort through what he could. The woman was easily identified from an ID card in her handbag. The skinned man’s clothes lay in a tangled pile near his body. In the jacket pocket was a UK passport and the stub of a ticket for a flight from London that morning.

Ten minutes later the teams began to arrive, clambering up the stairs, filling the tiny room: scene of crime, lab people, an army of men and women in white plastic suits who wanted him out of there, wanted to get on with their work. Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, the woman pathologist the police admired in a distant, scared fashion, was leading the way. It made sense; Costa couldn’t see Crazy Teresa passing up on a case like this. She must have known the big man was there too. Station gossip had it that something had been happening between them recently.

Leo Falcone walked in and considered the stripped corpse as if it were an exhibit in a museum. The inspector was as well dressed as ever: pressed white shirt, red silk tie, light-brown patterned suit, shoes that picked up the full yellow light from the single bulb and still managed to shine like mirrors. He was a striking figure: completely bald, with a perfect walnut tan and a silver beard cut in a sharp, angular fashion, like that of an actor playing the Devil onstage. He stared at Costa and said, with what sounded like venom in his smoker’s voice, “I heard what happened in the Vatican. I sent you out to catch bag-snatchers. What in God’s name is this?”

“The dead guy in the Vatican,” Costa replied. “This is his wife. I looked in her purse. It’s with the other one’s pile of clothes.”

“And the other one?” Falcone demanded.

Nic Costa felt like screaming at him. He hadn’t asked for this. He didn’t want to come to this place. Most of all he didn’t want to watch Sara Farnese going steadily crazy in front of him.

“Working on it,” he said, and walked down the stairs, leaving them to get on with their business.

Rossi, to his disappointment, had not stayed with Sara Farnese. Costa located him outside trying to find some shade in the hot, cobbled square, sucking on a cigarette as if his life depended on it.

“Did she say anything?” Costa asked.

Rossi was silent. The horror of the crime was bad enough but Costa knew there was more to his distress than mere shock. There was something about this big, complex man he failed to understand.

“Not a word.” Luca Rossi didn’t look Costa in the eye. He frowned. It put a big double chin on his pale, flabby face. “I was scared in there. I didn’t dare go into that room. You could feel it. Bad . . .”

“It’s enough to scare anyone.”

“Bullshit!” Rossi hissed. “You walked in like it was just another day.” He motioned to the scene-of-crime people outside the church door, smoking just like him. “They’re the same.”

“Trust me. They’re shaken. We’re all shaken.”

“Shaken?” Rossi mocked him. “Falcone looks like he could eat breakfast off that corpse.”

“Luca.” It was the first time Costa had used the big man’s Christian name. “What’s wrong? Why are we working together? Why did they move you here?”

The big man’s watery eyes cast him an odd, sad glance. “They never told you?”

“No.”

“Jesus.” He stubbed out the cigarette with a shaking hand and immediately fumbled for another. “You really want to know? I went to some road accident. Happens all the time, I know. This one wasn’t so different. There was the father behind the wheel, dead drunk. And on the road his kid, who’d gone straight through the windshield and was now in pieces. Dead. Very dead.” Rossi shook his oversize head. “You know what bothered the father? Trying to wheedle his way out of the accident. Trying to convince me he wasn’t drunk.”