A Season for the Dead (4 page)

“There are jerks in the world. So what’s new?”

“What’s new?” Rossi repeated. “This. I picked the jerk up by the scruff of his neck and started throwing him around the place. If the traffic cop on the scene hadn’t been there, I would probably have killed the moron.”

Costa looked back inside the church, checking that she was still there. When he turned away, Rossi’s sad, liquid eyes were burning at him.

“They moved me as part of the deal to stop him from suing. To be honest, I don’t really care, not anymore. I’m forty-eight, unmarried, unsociable. I spend my nights watching TV, drinking beer and eating pizza and, right up till that moment, I didn’t mind, I didn’t care. Then something hits you out of the blue. Sometimes the scales just fall from your eyes for the stupidest of reasons. It happened to me. It’ll happen to you one day too. Maybe you get tired, with some bright new kid snapping at your ankles and then you just see this stuff for the shit it is. Maybe it’s something worse. You’ll finally realize this isn’t just some game. People die, for no reason whatsoever. And one day it’s you.”

“I never thought it was any other way,” Costa replied. There was some personal resentment toward him in Rossi’s voice. Costa didn’t like to hear it. “Go home, Luca. Get some sleep. I’ll deal with everything.”

“Like hell you will. You think I want Falcone busting my balls tomorrow?”

Costa put a hand inside the older man’s jacket and pulled out his cigarette pack. It was almost empty. “Well, in that case, get some serious smoking done. We can talk about this later.”

Rossi nodded at the church. “You want to know something else too? I’ll tell you now. I doubt you’re going to listen.”

“What?”

“
She
scares me. That woman in there. A woman who could watch all that stuff and hold it tight inside her. What kind of person can do that? She almost died today. She saw whatever was up in that room—no, don’t tell me. I don’t want people with no skins on them walking around inside my head at night. It’s not healthy. You look at her and you think: She doesn’t mind a damn. That might just be where they belong.”

Costa felt his hackles rise. “You didn’t see her there, Luca. You can’t judge. You didn’t stay long with her at that altar either, from what I can work out. You didn’t watch her, not knowing where to look, wanting to bawl her eyes out. It takes time with some people. You ought to know that.”

Luca Rossi prodded him in the chest, hard. “You’re right. I didn’t see.”

Crazy Teresa came out into the bright sun too, saw them, came over and cajoled Rossi for a smoke. When he reluctantly agreed, the pathologist climbed out of her white polyester suit and stood there, a heavily built woman in her thirties, with a long, black ponytail. She wore the baggiest pair of cheap jeans Costa had ever seen and a creased pink shirt. She looked like Rossi, a little wasted. Crazy Teresa lit the cigarette, blew a cloud of tobacco fumes into the scorching afternoon air and said, with a beatific smile, “It’s days like this that make it all worthwhile, boys. Don’t you agree?”

Costa swore, then went back inside the nave, cursing himself for the way he’d handled that one.

She was still at the altar, on her knees, hands locked low on her blood-spattered suit, eyes wide open, praying. Costa waited until she had finished. He knew what she was looking at. Ahead of her, behinda painting of the head of Christ, done in gold, like some Byzantine icon, was a bigger image on the wall. It was Bartholomew, about to die. The saint had his hands tied above his head, just as the corpse did in the tower. A grim-faced executioner stood next to him, holding the knife, looking into his eyes as if he just couldn’t work out where to begin.

Finally, Sara Farnese got off the floor and joined him on the bench.

“We can do this some other time,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be now.”

“Ask what you want. I’d rather get this out of the way.”

She was calm again and he thought about what Rossi had said. Sara Farnese was certainly a woman in control of herself.

“This Stefano Rinaldi,” he asked, “what was he to you?”

“He was a professor in my department. I had an affair with him. Is that what you wanted to hear? It was brief. It ended months ago.”

“Okay. And the woman upstairs in the room. His wife.”

“Mary. She’s English.”

“I got that from the papers in her bag. Did she know?”

Sara Farnese peered at him. “You want all this now?”

Costa said, “If that’s fine with you. If not, we can do this some other time. It’s your decision.”

Sara Farnese looked at the painting behind the altar again. “She found out. That was why it ended. I don’t know why it began in the first place. It was a friendship that just spilled over into something else. Stefano and Mary’s marriage was shaky in any case. I didn’t make it that way.”

He pulled out a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. There was a sheet of paper on it, a message from an office notepad covered in handwriting. “The dead guy in the tower had this in his pocket. It says it’s from you and asks him to meet you here, at the church, as soon as he can. Says it’s really important. Did you send this?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“How could Rinaldi know he was coming?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps I talked about it at work. I really don’t know.”

“The other man was your lover?”

She winced at the word. “We . . . met from time to time. His name is Hugh . . .”

“. . . Fairchild. I know. He had his passport with him. You want to look?”

“Why?”

“Next of kin. It says he’s married.”

“No,” she said coldly. “I don’t want to look.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Does it matter?”

Costa wondered. Was he being prurient? And if so, why? “Maybe not. There was that thing about blood and martyrs written on the wall. You saw that, I guess. And that other stuff. Who’s this St. Ives? Is he another martyr or something?”

“No. It’s a place in England.”

“And seven wives?”

“I didn’t even know he had one,” she answered with some bitterness.

“So what do you think happened?”

Sara Farnese glowered at him, her green eyes full of resentment. “You’re the policeman. You tell me.”

“Anyone who looks at this will say one thing,” Costa said with a shrug. “Your old boyfriend found out about your new one and decided it was time to bring things to a close. For all of them, he and his wife included. Maybe you too.”

“I told you. Stefano didn’t want to kill me. And they weren’t ‘boyfriends.’ They were people I slept with from time to time. In Stefano’s case, months ago.”

Costa didn’t get it. Even now, pale and shocked, Sara Farnese was a beautiful woman. He couldn’t understand why someone like her would want to lead such an empty life.

“People go crazy for all sorts of reasons,” he said. “Not always the obvious ones.” Men walked up a set of stairs and found someone’s blood dripping down their face. People you loved walked out in the morning and came home at night with a death sentence hanging around their necks.

“Perhaps.” She looked unconvinced.

“I’m sorry I had to ask these questions. You understand why?”

She didn’t say anything. She seemed transfixed by the painting behind the altar: Bartholomew about to lose his skin.

“It’s apocryphal,” she remarked in a matter-of-fact way.

“What?”

“The story of the skinning. He was martyred, certainly. But probably something more mundane. Beheading was the usual method. The early Church embroidered these stories to encourage the waverers. To make sure the movement didn’t falter.”

“Hence ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’?”

She peered at him, surprised, he thought, that he had seen the point.

“Is there some family I can call?” he asked.

“No one, thanks.”

“No one? Parents?”

“My parents died a long time ago.”

“There are people we can get to help in situations like this. Counseling.”

“If I need it I’ll let you know.”

He thought again of what Rossi had said. There was much more to this woman than met the eye.

“Don’t you ever pray?” she asked unexpectedly.

Costa shrugged. “Not a family habit. And I never knew what to ask.”

“You just ask the same old questions. Such as, if there’s a God, why does he let bad things happen to good people?”

“They were good people? This Englishman? The one who killed him?”

She considered this. “They weren’t bad people, if that’s what you mean.”

“Hey,” he added without thinking, “you should think yourself lucky you’re not a cop. We get to wonder about that and the other one too: Why do good things happen to bad people? Why did Stalin die in his bed? Why are the rich so rich and the poor so poor? My old man’s a Communist. I used to ask that one a lot when I was a kid, and boy, did I get whacked around the ear plenty.”

There was the slightest flicker of a smile on her face and it made Sara Farnese look like a different person, someone younger, someone with a fragile, interior beauty nothing like the cold, icy elegance that was her normal face for the world. Nic Costa was amazed. Against his own instincts he suddenly found himself understanding why a man could become obsessed by this woman.

“Families matter,” Costa said. “They make you a team against the world. I don’t envy anyone who has to stand up against all this crap alone.”

“I’d like to go now,” Sara Farnese said. She rose and walked toward the door, where the sun was finally starting to lose some of its power and the day was starting to die.

Nic Costa followed her all the way.

5

The next morning Costa and Rossi found themselves summoned into Falcone’s office at eight. The inspector looked grumpier than ever and uncannily alert, his sharp-featured face set in an unwavering frown. No one liked his temper. No one credited him with any great management skills. But Falcone was a man of talent, and there were insufficient of those in the higher levels of the force. He’d solved some difficult cases, ones that had made big headlines in the news. He had influence, beyond the police station. There was plenty of respect for him in the Questura, and little in the way of affection.

He had the papers from the Rinaldi case on his desk, complete with a set of grisly photographs.

Falcone waved the reports in their faces. “Skimpy,” was all he said.

“Sir,” Costa answered, “we’re working on something fuller now. You’ll have it by ten.”

Rossi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Falcone was staring at him and both men knew what his look was saying:
So the kid speaks for you now, does he?

“You have anything on this Farnese woman?” Falcone asked.

Costa shook his head. “Like what? You mean a record or something?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“She’s clean,” Rossi said. “I ran a check last night. There’s not so much as a speeding ticket.”

Falcone leaned forward and made sure Costa was looking at him. “You have to check these things.”

“I know,” Costa agreed. “I’m sorry.”

“So that’s the story?” Falcone asked. “The old boyfriend killed the new boyfriend and took his own wife along for the ride?”

“Looks like that,” Costa agreed.

Falcone shrugged. “It does look like that. I talked to forensics this morning. They couldn’t find a single trace of anyone else in that tower, ground floor or second. Clean as a whistle except for Rinaldi’s prints and the two dead people in there.”

“So what’s the problem?” Costa wondered.

“The problem?” Falcone nodded at Rossi. “Ask him.”

Costa looked at his partner. They still hadn’t made up since the near-quarrel the day before. He respected the big man. He didn’t want this coldness between them.

“Luca?” he asked.

Rossi frowned. “The problem is:
why?
Rinaldi stopped seeing the Farnese woman, what, three, four months ago? Why now?”

“Maybe he only just found out about the Englishman,” Costa suggested. “He heard her talking about how much she liked him and just went crazy.”

Falcone stabbed a finger at him. “Do we know that? It’s not in your report.”

Costa thought back to his conversations with her. “No.”

“We’re going to have to go back to that woman,” Falcone ordered. “Get some detail in all this. Dates. Names. Reasons.”

“Fine.” Costa nodded. Rossi was looking out of the window now, reaching for a cigarette. He and Falcone had talked beforehand, Costa thought. There could be no other explanation.

“Why did he go to these lengths?” Falcone demanded. “Why skin a man? Why go through this routine of putting his own wife on a chair as if he wanted the Farnese woman to find her alive? And this stuff he wrote on the wall . . .”

“He was insane,” Costa said firmly. “You’d have to be insane to kill someone like that.”

Falcone snorted. “Too easy. Besides, even if it’s true, do you think there’s no logic behind craziness? It all just spews out for no reason? This man was a university professor. He was intelligent, organized. He was convincing enough for the Englishman to come to him from the airport thinking he was meeting the woman. He managed to get his wife into that tower and string her up. Then he killed the boyfriend, skinned him, went off to the library . . . Or maybe he did her first, in which case how come the Englishman let himself be strung up after seeing her? Can one person handle all those things? I guess so. But how? In what order? You tell me that. And this Fairchild. He was a big man. He didn’t just hold up his hands and let Rinaldi tie him. What went on there?”

“I know that,” Rossi said. “I talked to Crazy Teresa in the path lab just now. They think there’re traces of some drug, some sedative maybe.”

“What sedative?” Falcone asked. “How’d a university professor come to be walking around with medication to hand just when he feels like skinning someone? If it comes to that, how the hell does a man like that
know
how to skin someone? And—this is the biggest one for me, the one I keep coming back to—
why?
Why like this?”

“Miss Farnese is a professor in that area,” Costa suggested. “The quotation on the walls is from some early Christian theologian. Maybe it sounded appropriate.”

“Appropriate?”
Falcone repeated, as if it were the most stupid thing he’d ever heard in his life. “You mean he’s saying to her, ‘We’re all martyrs to you, bitch. And here’s the proof’? I don’t get it. What was he hoping to achieve? If he were going to kill her, it would make more sense. But you claim that’s not the case. He just wanted to get her to go, as quickly as possible, to the place he’d left his own wife, still alive. What’s the point?”

Costa looked at Rossi for help. His partner was still staring out of the window, working on the cigarette. It was another hot, cloudless day out there. Nic Costa wondered exactly what it was that Falcone expected of him.

“And you’re wrong,” Falcone continued. “I checked. Rinaldi worked in the same department as Farnese but he didn’t share the same speciality. His field was Roman law, the Curia, all that ancient stuff the Vatican still thinks we should be listening to today.”

“Is that relevant?” Rossi wondered.

“You tell me. I ran through the records. Four months ago Rinaldi was called as an expert witness for some government tribunal looking at the issue of diplomatic immunity for Vatican officials. They want more immunity. We want less. Rinaldi came up with an expert opinion that said they were right, in law, very old law anyway. Where the hell do martyrs come into that?”

“Are you saying, sir, that you think my conclusion’s wrong? That Rinaldi isn’t responsible somehow?”

“Hell no,” Falcone answered immediately. “It’s difficult to see how it could have happened any other way.”

“Well, then what? Isn’t it enough to know Rinaldi did these things? Sometimes we never know why. We just have to accept that.”

Falcone glowered at him. “Not yet we don’t. I’m an inquisitive bastard. It’s what makes me tick. It’s what makes every good cop tick. If you’re not, you never get to know a thing. I want you to answer some of these questions that keep bugging me. I don’t want detectives who think they’re elves in Santa’s workshop going out there, wrapping things up all nicely with all the right ribbons, all the right answers, dropping them on my desk, getting a pat on the head, then looking for some more toys to play with. This job isn’t like that.”

“I know,” Costa replied. “At least I never felt the pat on the head.”

Rossi groaned, stabbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another.

Falcone was smiling again. He’d won a response and Costa cursed himself for being so stupid. “You kids,” the inspector laughed. “You’re so
sensitive
. Listen, Costa, I think you’ve got the right answers. I just don’t like the way you got there. Cutting too many corners. And one more thing,” Falcone added. “I’d like you to listen more. I know we’re into this youth culture thing that says everyone over the age of thirty is a moron . . .”

“I’m twenty-seven, sir.”

“Yeah, yeah. I wish you looked it sometimes. The point I want to make to you, Costa, is the only way any of us really learns is by watching our elders and betters. Forget all that crap in the police college. All we do for a living is deal with human beings. Human beings who, for the most part, are trying to lie to us, trying to screw us around. This is a people business. You should talk less and listen more, son.”

Costa grimaced. “Sir, I—”

“Shut up,” Falcone ordered. “And here’s another thing. That other stuff he wrote on the wall? St. Ives?”

“Crazy,” Rossi said, starting to become interested.

“Maybe,” Falcone agreed. “But I can tell you what it is. I got someone to look it up.”

He stared at a laser printout on the desk and read the words.

“As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?”

The two detectives stared at each other, dumbfounded. Costa grabbed the calculator on the desk and started punching.

Falcone grinned. “It’s a riddle. What’s the answer?”

Costa scribbled some figures on his notepad. “Seven wives. Forty-nine sacks. Three hundred and forty-three cats. Two thousand four hundred and one kittens. That adds up to two thousand eight hundred.” He thought of the tiny enclosed room in the tower and the stink of meat in it. “But what the hell does that mean?”

The inspector scowled. “It means you don’t understand riddles. And you just wasted a lot of effort not answering the question you were asked. ‘I
met
a man with seven wives . . .’ They were all going in the opposite direction. There was just one person going to St. Ives. The narrator. You were looking in the wrong place all along. The obvious isn’t always the right answer.”

Nic Costa shook his head. “That’s the kind of game a lunatic would play.”

“And not finish the line?” Falcone asked. “Why would a dead man set an incomplete riddle? Can you tell me that?”

There was no ready answer.

“I want you to go round to Rinaldi’s home,” Falcone ordered. “We’ve been there already but maybe we missed something. Try to work out what kind of man he was, whether there’s anything to explain this. And try not to piss off Hanrahan again. He’s been on the phone twice to me already. You certainly made an impression there.”

Costa failed to understand the relevance. “Hanrahan? You know him?”

“Oh, we’re just the best of friends.” Falcone was, Costa hoped, being sarcastic. Sometimes it was hard to tell. “Now . . .”

He was out of his seat, standing in front of the window with his back to them, watching the traffic in the street, thinking, or so he wanted them to believe. Another Falcone ritual. The two detectives knew when their time was through.

Rossi led the way out of the room.