A Season for the Dead (5 page)

6

The Rinaldis owned a large, restored apartment in a late nineteenth-century block on the Via Mecenate, a residential street by the park which led from the Via Merulana toward the Colosseum. The neighborhood was on the cusp of acceptability. It was only a few minutes’ walk to the smarter, older quarters of the Caelian Hill. Nero’s Golden House lay beneath the parched summer grass about a hundred yards from the entrance to the block. The apartment was well decorated in a lean, modern style, generously proportioned and quiet, since it gave out onto the vast internal courtyard of the building, not the street in front. Still, Nic Costa was unable to dispel the idea that the Rinaldis were not exactly rolling in money. The Via Merulana was not a place to wander with pleasure at night. It was only a little distant from the squalor of Termini Station. If he looked closely outside he would see the signs: needles in the gutter, used condoms in doorways. At night the park became a haunt for rent boys. A university professor would prefer to live somewhere else, Costa felt. It was one of those neighborhoods that was always up and coming but never quite got there.

The apartment had been thoroughly searched already. Costa and Rossi studied the preliminary report: a small amount of cannabis, no messages on the answering machine, no incriminating letters, nothing on the cheap desktop computer that sat in the tiny study next to the bedroom. He wondered how Falcone expected them to come up with something new.

Rossi found the Rinaldis’ bank statements tucked into a drawer of the computer desk. Costa’s suspicions were correct. Rinaldi and his wife maintained separate accounts and both were in the red, Stefano Rinaldi’s to the tune of a quarter of a million euros. There were threatening letters from the bank too. Unless the Rinaldis cleared some of their debt, even the modest apartment in the Via Mecenate was in jeopardy of disappearing from beneath them.

Was this enough to turn someone like Stefano Rinaldi into a multiple killer? Falcone would never accept such a flimsy idea. Where was the evidence? Costa made a note to re-interview the neighbors. The preliminary report came up with so little. All the usual comments they got in domestic incidents, stories that painted the victims as a quiet, solitary couple, with few friends. No one had ever seen Mary Rinaldi with a bruised face. No one had heard her complain about the behavior of her husband. They were, it seemed, a bland, childless pair struggling to make ends meet. Falcone was right: There had to be more. The bank statements and the threats from the bank were symptoms, surely, of some larger malaise in the Rinaldis’ life.

Something else bothered him. Mary Rinaldi didn’t work, the report said. Rinaldi must have earned a decent package at the university. They should have been able to survive. Yet here they were with a sizeable debt outstanding on a mediocre home, fighting to keep their heads above water. Where was the money going? He went back to the bank statements and found the answer: cash. Stefano Rinaldi’s salary from the university amounted to almost six thousand euros a month after deductions. Even with a tidy mortgage, that should have been enough to live on. The statements told a different story. Rinaldi immediately transferred a quarter into his wife’s bank account, standing payments accounted for a further half, and the rest disappeared in credit card bills and some huge cash withdrawals, sometimes as much as one thousand euros a week.

Nic Costa had been around long enough to understand there were only so many reasons why a man wanted ready money in his hand in this kind of quantity: women, booze and drugs being the main ones. Maybe Sara Farnese had been expensive to maintain, though somehow he doubted that. The woman seemed too independent to rely on someone like Rinaldi for money. Maybe there was someone else now in her place. But if that was the case, why was Rinaldi so furious with Sara that he wanted to kill her current boyfriend?

There was always a simpler answer. While Rossi ran through the answering machine Costa went into the bathroom which was small, covered in mirrors and had just a toilet, a washbasin with a plain cabinet above it and a shower in the corner. He opened the cabinet door and looked inside: a woman’s razor, some headache pills, a packet of laxatives, and two neat rows of white plastic tablet containers from a health store. He read the names: evening primrose oil and ginseng, gingko biloba and selenium. There were eight different preparations in all. One or both of the Rinaldis must have rattled like a pillbox when they went out of the apartment in the morning.

Costa picked up the biggest container, the one with evening primrose oil inside, opened it and looked at the round, shiny yellow capsules. There were only about ten left and they sat on a wad of cotton wool. Gelatin health pills nestled on a soft white bed of fluffiness.He hated cotton wool. The feel of it gave him the same shivers some people get from running their nails up and down a blackboard. It seemed so pointless. They put cotton wool in pill containers only to stop things rattling around and breaking. A flexible gelatin capsule couldn’t break, not easily. Costa turned the container upside down and emptied the visible contents into the sink. Then he righted it and gently pulled out the cotton wool from the base.

Beneath it was a small transparent plastic bag containing white powder. Costa swore at the incompetence of the squad who had made the first search. He took out the bag, unwrapped it, tasted the coke, confirming what it was. The source of the Rinaldis’ cash problem was now apparent. Perhaps dope would explain Stefano’s excitable state. Except that the autopsy had so far failed to uncover any trace of drugs.

Costa swore again. It had to be significant: It was the only thing he’d found so far that was.

He returned to the living room and showed the dope to Rossi, who commented, “And these are supposed to be intelligent people? Why do they go around picking up gutter habits like that?”

“No family,” Costa said. It was astonishing how often that factor cropped up in his line of work. Except every dopehead had a kind of family: the person who fulfilled his or her needs. In the case of the middle classes that was usually fixed, regular, like a visit to the doctor. Those steady withdrawals from the bank each week said as much. Somewhere in the city was the dealer who knew them, a person who, Costa understood, dealt only with professionals, never took risks, and was probably smart too, full of some quick philosophy to justify what he did.

The two of them spent an hour going through the address book in Mary Rinaldi’s bag, phoning every number there, talking to hairdressers and doctors, distant friends and a couple of travel agencies. Any of them could be a supplier but it didn’t feel right. Then they did the same with the names on Rinaldi’s computer, printed off every one, forty in all, mainly academic contacts. The narcotics people could run through the list later and see if any rang a bell.

Rinaldi used the computer a lot. It was full of essays and letters, many to the bank. Costa clicked on the e-mail program, expecting it to be protected by some kind of password. To his surprise it popped up and showed an inbox with three messages, each dated from two days before: one was junk mail, the other an invitation to an academic convention in Florida.

He opened the third and stared at it. The message said, simply,
“Money no problem. Be there ten am.”
For some reason, the sender’s name and e-mail address had been deleted. But there was a Rome phone number at the bottom of the screen.

Rossi looked at him, staggered. “They missed this? Falcone is going to go crazy.”

Costa picked up the phone on the desk and dialed. A woman answered. She said, “Cardinal Denney’s office.”

“Sorry. Wrong number.”

Rossi’s long face wouldn’t leave him alone. “Well?”

“It was the office of someone called Cardinal Denney.”

The big man’s watery eyes grew wide. “Someone called Cardinal Denney?”

“The name means something?”

Rossi was heading for the door. “I need a drink. Before one more damn thing. A drink. Now.”

7

Costa insisted: if they were going to a bar while on duty it would be somewhere he knew. Rossi now glowered at the modest wineglass which was half full of a liquid the color of straw. He sniffed, tasted it, grimaced, then crammed a piece of cheese on some bread and nibbled artlessly, spilling crumbs everywhere. They sat on tiny stools around a low table in a wine bar Costa sometimes went to. It was near his tiny home in the Campo dei Fiori. The place was quite empty apart from the two cops and a woman who had stopped mopping the floor to serve them.

“Why can’t we go to a real place and drink beer like normal people?” Rossi moaned. “Don’t you know mathematics? Why do we have to pay twice the price to make our own sandwiches when I can get three times this quantity around the corner for half what it costs in this dump? And they do beer.”

Costa cautiously patted Rossi’s colossal stomach. It was an act of some intimacy which the big man tentatively allowed, like a lion allowing its trainer to stroke its head.

“Beer makes you fat,” Costa said. “Beer makes you fart. Trust me. A partner knows. Diet is important, Uncle Luca. Particularly for a man of your age, in your . . . condition.”

“I’m happy where I am, thanks. And I’m not your fucking uncle.” Rossi moaned again. “And what’s with this fancy apartment in the Campo? Cops don’t live in places like that. That’s why I have to drink in a stuck-up
enoteca
. . .”

“It’s not fancy. It’s just where I like to live.”

“So you can screw the tourist girls when they’ve had too much to drink on a Saturday night?”

“No. Because I like it. That’s all.”

“Inexplicable,” Rossi declared. “So where’s the nearest painting now, huh?”

“Too many to choose from,” Costa answered. The big man looked at him as if to say:
So now I know why you live here.

“I didn’t know about the accident, Luca. What happened there. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Rossi grumbled. “We both have. Yesterday. Sometimes it catches you like that. You just walk along thinking, it’s not so bad, I can make it through the day. Then you just stumble around the corner and put your shoe into something that makes you realize the bad stuff was there all along and you just fooled yourself into thinking it could be any other way.”

“There’s a painting near here. It’s about that. I could show you if you like.”

Rossi almost laughed. “Me? Look at a painting?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“You won’t tell anyone? Some of those bastards take the piss.”

“It’s a deal. But I want to hear about Cardinal Denney first.”

Rossi grabbed him by the arm. “Keep your voice down, for Christ’s sake.”

Costa raised an eyebrow. There was still just the woman in the place, mopping away, well out of earshot.

“You never know,” the big man said defensively.

“Know what?”

Rossi shook his head. “You don’t even get to hear the station gossip, do you?”

“Too busy doing a job.”

“Oh my,” the big man grumbled. “The kid’s a saint. Listen. You heard of the Banca Lombardia?”

“Sure.” Costa nodded. “I read it was in trouble. Bad investments. Trouble with the authorities. There’s supposed to be some mob money in it. Ours. The Americans’.”

“Clever boy. Well let me tell you something. Two partners ago I used to share the Fiat sofa with this grown-up guy who couldn’t keep his trap shut. Probably yakked in his sleep, but the funny thing was . . . he was worth listening to. He’d been on temporary assignment with the spooky people in the Finance Ministry and, my, did he like to talk about all these secret stakeouts he did, and all the good-guy politicians that were really on the take. He knew all the names of the people who pulled the strings without anyone in the outside world seeing. You know what? One of them wore a red cap. Goes by the name of Michael Denney, and if it wasn’t for the fact he could hide in that place of his we’d be throwing him in the cells right now.”

“The Vatican?”

“Where else?” Rossi waited, hoping for some enlightenment. “Jesus. The bankers were just the front men. This was a private little operation that Denney spun out of some genuine Vatican venture without telling anyone.” He raised his glass, drained it. “And now it’s rapidly going bust. Liquidity problems. No one knows whether it’s going to pull through or what. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Costa conceded. “I think I read about that.”

“You read nothing. Listen to me, Nic. This Denney’s been putting his holy hands into stuff no one ought to be messing with, least of all a priest. He had offshore funds in places that don’t have offshore funds. Places anyone could put money and no one—not the tax people, not the intelligence agencies—would be any the wiser. There’s a queue of people waiting to talk to him about that. Us. The Ministry of Justice. FBI. And probably the Mafia too from what I hear. They don’t like it when the man from the Vatican does the laundry wrong. Lucky for him he can hide there trying to get the rest of us to agree that, if we let him walk out, he’s covered by diplomatic immunity.” He paused. “You remember what Falcone said? About Rinaldi?”

Costa did. The dead man had been called to give an expert opinion on the subject only a few months before.

“You think Denney was somehow paying Rinaldi to come up on the right side?”

Rossi looked around him to make sure no one else came in. “If he was it didn’t work. Maybe that’s why Denney got pissed off with him. He quit being a churchman years ago to work on the financial side. Should have filled in the right forms if he wanted to claim he was a diplomat. Too late to start whining when there’s money gone missing. A whole lot of money too. I read the file.”

Costa was struggling to make sense of this. “Why would he steal it? Why would a man like that want money?”

“Runs in the family. Denney comes from some Irish-American family in Boston. Big in bootlegging in the early days, sidekicks to Joe Kennedy for a while. Moved into politics, finance, all that stuff. But they never could let everything go. It’s in their blood I guess. He was the kid they marked out for the Church while the rest stuck with the family business. Which was all Denney did for a while too and pretty well too. Made a name for himself working the Irish ghettos in Boston. Man of the people. Didn’t seem to be an act either. Then he hit the up escalator, came to Europe. By the time he’s thirty he’s in Rome. By the time he’s forty-five he’s wearing the red cap and suddenly it’s no more listening to some local jerk confessing to playing fuck-thy-neighbor. He’s gone business, running this bank and he’s pumping the Pope’s money all ways. Into IBM and General Motors. After a while into funnier places too, companies that are never going anywhere, ever, because that’s not why they’re there. Suddenly, it’s no longer about the Pope’s money. It’s stuff coming from all over, laundered by God knows who.”

Rossi stared at the empty glass. “Why the hell am I telling you all this?”

“You’re keeping me up to date on the gossip.”

“Right,” the big man grumbled. “So according to this man of mine, along comes the new millennium and Denney’s bank’s doing like all the rest of them, not good. He’s been betting on these dotcom morons. He’s been hedging this by betting on the airlines and the telecom people too. In short, he’s losing his touch. One day in September he turns on the TV and sees a couple of planes fly into a couple of skyscrapers. And what do you know? Bad turns awful. Bad turns fucking disastrous. Word is that if this bunch was out in the open Denney’d be bust and in the slammer facing some serious incarceration. Which is bad news for him and for all those mob guys who thought they were banking on something that had the Holy Writ on the cover. They are people who do not like to lose their money.”

“This man of yours knows a lot,” Costa observed.

“He was a knowledgeable guy. What do I mean ‘was’? Still is.”

“And he says it in such a memorable way too. Where’s he working now?”

“Probably with some dumb smart-ass kid who doesn’t believe a word he says. Do I make myself clear?”

“In a particularly obscure way. Did he get the chance to arrest someone?”

“Like who? Lombardia isn’t officially bust yet. Just ‘suspended.’ All the money was passing through places like Liechtenstein and Grand Cayman. Try hunting that down. The finance people had one low-grade clerk in their sights, thought he might talk too if they offered him a deal. When they went to collect they found him floating facedown in the bath in his apartment in Testaccio. ‘Heart attack.’ Very convenient. Who knows? Maybe Denney had him done. Maybe now he’s got the taste he’s offing a few more people who took the money and didn’t come up with the goods.”

“Rinaldi did come up with the goods. He said the Vatican was right. About diplomatic immunity.”

“Didn’t work though, did it? Remember, Denney has contacts. To be honest, though, my guess is they’re none too keen on him either these days. Which gives him plenty more reasons to stay behind those walls where no one can touch him. Not until the Vatican people themselves wash their hands of the black sheep and kick him out onto the pavement. Yeah. Like that’s going to happen.”

Costa was baffled. “Why not? Why would the Church tolerate any of this?”

It could have been Falcone looking at him. Rossi’s expression said just one thing:
Don’t be so dumb, kid.
“This isn’t about the Church. It’s about the Vatican. Another country. Like I said. Mongolia, as far as we’re concerned. Unless it’s in their interests they won’t give us anything. Maybe Denney’s in some kind of purdah now they know what’s been going on. Maybe not. Either way for us it’s irrelevant. He daren’t set foot outside the Vatican. He knows we’d arrest him on the spot. He knows some of his shady friends might want a word too. They’re too picky about their own in there to hang him out to dry. But my guess is he’s not a happy little priest. This was a guy who used to hang out with presidents. The way things are going now he’s just going to wind up a sad old man stuck in a nice comfy prison for the rest of his life. Unless he gets a fit of conscience, of course, and decides to tell us everything. Which I find somewhat unlikely, to be frank.”

Costa was adamant. “We have to check it out.”

The big man wagged a finger at him. “No! Didn’t you hear Falcone clearly enough? I shouldn’t even have told you any of this. You are not going back to that place. Understand?”

“You said it was gossip. I found out someplace else.”

“What about the painting?” Rossi asked, trying to change the subject.

“Still want to see it?”

“My glass is empty. You’re starting to scare the shit out of me. You bet I want to see it.”

Costa led him out of the bar, across the busy main road into the warren of streets that stretched between the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. Rossi followed as the kid ducked into a nondescript church in one of the side roads.

“Who’d put a masterpiece in a dump like this?” Rossi demanded in the gloomy interior. “I’ve seen better churches in Naples.”

“This is San Luigi dei Francesi, big man. Here you’ve got two of the greatest works Caravaggio ever painted, exactly where he meant them to be, where he put them on the walls himself.”

“I get to see both?” He didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“One at a time,” Costa said, and walked forward to deposit some coins in the light meter. A set of bulbs came alive. Rossi blinked at the huge canvas in front of him. Most of it was set in shade: a group of men in medieval dress at a table, counting money. Three of them had turned to look at a pair of figures standing at the right of the scene. From behind came a shaft of revealing light. It burned brightly on the puzzled faces as they sat there, half-cowed, watching the newcomers.

“The Vocation of St. Matthew,”
Costa said. “He’s the one in the middle, pointing to himself, as if to say, ‘Who? Me?’ ”

“And the guys on the right?”

“Jesus, with his hand outstretched, indicating to Matthew he’s been chosen as an apostle. And by his side Peter, who symbolizes the Church which will come to be built on Matthew’s gospel.”

“So what’s this got to do with me losing it in an accident? That
was
your point, wasn’t it?”

Costa nodded. The big man wasn’t slow. “Look at the costumes. The men around the table are in what was, when it was painted, contemporary dress. Jesus and Peter look as if they’ve walked straight out of a biblical scene. Caravaggio was commissioned to record a specific scene but what he did was make a broader point. This is about a moment of revelation, a moment when, in Matthew’s case, he realizes there’s more to life than counting money on a table.”

“You sound like a priest,” Rossi grumbled.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“And this,” Rossi nodded at the painting, “is where you get your kicks?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.” Costa thought about it. “It’s about looking for some meaning, looking for a reason to be alive. Not just working your way through the day and being glad you got to the other end.”

“That’s fine as far as I’m concerned.”

“Sure,” Costa replied. “Until you see something that says otherwise. And then you wind up working with me.”