Costa 08 - City of Fear (23 page)

“Just a cop. Just looking for answers.”

“Some cop. You didn’t even ask me a question.”

“You sure about that? Also, I wanted to pass on some more news. We found the guy who killed your friend Cattaneo.”

There was silence on the line.

“You remember Beppe?” Peroni pressed. “The two of you went to Tarquinia. Got in a shoot-out with those three kids in the shack that belonged to the Petrakis family. Some local officer died.”

“I remember. Who the hell …?”

“The brother killed your friend.”

“Whose brother?” the voice on the phone yelled.

Peroni sighed, as if exasperated. “Does the catering business make you slow or something? Lorenzo Bartoli’s brother. Seems he came to believe those kids in the shack didn’t shoot Lorenzo at all. You two did. You and Cattaneo. So Cattaneo got it in the head in his car a while back. I have the pictures here somewhere. You think I should email them? Not pretty. Best you finish your lunch first.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d just like to know the truth, Ettore. It might help us stop him from coming after you. Can’t pick him up ’cause, to be honest, his confession is a little shaky, see. Not one he will repeat for the lawyers, even if we had some means of bringing him in. Which we don’t, not right now.”

“This thing is closed.…”

“Don’t they have TVs in Chicago? You’ve watched what’s happening here and you’re telling me it’s closed?”

“For me it is.”

“Not if Aldo Bartoli finds you, Ettore. He’s a dedicated man. Real angry too. If someone was to point his attention to some nice restaurant in Chicago … What does an airline ticket cost these days? You get my point? If I can find you, so can he. With a little help. This is in your interest, just as much as ours.”

“You don’t have the first clue what you’re into,” Rufo snarled, then the line went dead.

“He may have a point,” Elizabeth Murray said quietly.

“I’ve a good mind to call up Aldo Bartoli and give him the bastard’s address,” Peroni grumbled. “Ettore’s a Roman. He knows what’s going on here. And he doesn’t even ask what it’s like. How bizarre is that?”

The phone on the table rang, so loud it made Teresa jump. Peroni stabbed the speaker button and said, “Ettore?”

It was Costa again, calling from the car. “You found Rufo?” he asked.

“Don’t be so quick off the mark. It makes us old guys feel, well, old.”

“Where is he?”

“Selling pizza in Chicago. Too busy to talk to the likes of us. You got something?”

After the visit to Tarquinia, Costa wanted Falcone to consider the possibility that Petrakis and his team were not in Rome at all, but out in the countryside, dashing in and out of the city as they pleased.

“Unlikely,” the inspector commented when Costa finished speaking. “They need resources. Good transport access. Speed. Terrorists work from urban locations.”

“That,” said Costa, a little sharply, “is conventional thinking. It’s not going to get us anywhere. All I’m asking is that you consider the possibility they’re in the Tarquinia area. That …”

The call became muffled. Teresa thought she heard something competing with the sound of Nic’s voice, a high-pitched drone, like that of a far-off scooter somewhere in the background.

“… we’re going to take one last look anyway.”

“Nic …” she found herself saying.

But the line was dead. The three young officers were out in the bare, empty Maremma. Teresa could picture some of the places she’d visited
out there: beautiful sights, old and rich in history, separated by long stretches of desolate wilderness.

“I’m going to call that bastard Rufo again,” Peroni growled.

“No,” Falcone told him. “He won’t talk. We’ve done enough. Go home. Get some sleep.”

“Can we even get home?” Teresa asked.

“You can,” Silvio Di Capua said. He showed them a map on the computer screen, the Carabinieri’s official ruling on where the public could and could not go. A red ring marked out a lozenge-shaped forbidden zone in the city’s center, from the road past the Forum to the Quirinale hill, then down again to the Piazza Venezia. Teresa Lupo couldn’t imagine the constantly bustling center of her native city depopulated in this way. It was eerie, wrong.

“We can go by the river,” Falcone pointed out.

“You can stay with us, Silvio, if you like.”

Her deputy lived way out in the suburbs and had left his car at the Questura. Even if he managed to retrieve it, there was no guarantee how long it would take to drive home, or to get back in the morning.

“Silvio and I discussed this,” Elizabeth Murray told them. “There’s plenty of space here.”

Outside, a siren sounded. Almost immediately another, more distant, appeared to answer its call, then a third, then another. This was not their city anymore. They were simply one more group of civilians, trapped by the machinations of Andrea Petrakis and the state’s response to them.

“What is it?” Teresa asked, seeing the expression on Peroni’s face.

“The Petrakis couple were messing around with drugs,” he said, looking at Falcone. “Or so Aldo Bartoli seems to think.”

“So?” she asked.

“They wouldn’t dare do that without permission.” Peroni reached for the old, battered address book he kept in his jacket pocket. “Let me call a man with a past. See if he’s hungry.”

THERE WAS A SINGLE HUMPBACKED MOUND, MUCH LIKE the ones they had seen at the public site on the outskirts of Tarquinia. Around the perimeter was a low, rusty barbed-wire fence. Parched grass surrounded the grave site. A narrow path of bare earth ran from an unlocked gate to a metal door set against the nearest side of the knoll that rose ahead in the trees.

“Someone’s been here,” Rosa said, looking at the ground.

“We know that already,” Costa replied. “It could just have been sightseers.”

“Out here? Have you ever been inside one of these things?”

“No.”

Closer up it looked as if a small house had been buried by some prehistoric landslide, leaving nothing but the roof extending above the surface.

“I did a school trip from Rome when I was a kid,” Rosa said. “It was … scary, but thrilling too. They’re huge. They go deep and, when you get to the bottom, it’s not a grave at all. It’s like a room, two rooms sometimes. The sort of place you’d go for a banquet or a wedding. They believed they were departing for something good, a place to meet their family, their lovers. Drinking, dancing, feasting …”

And then along came the Blue Demon
, Costa thought, remembering what Teresa had told them. The worm of doubt worked its way into the Etruscans’ safe and comforting credo, insidiously spreading the notion
that death was not an automatic invitation to an eternal paradise. That there was another destination too.

He walked up the path and took hold of the handle on the metal door. It opened freely, screeching on dry hinges. On the ground lay a padlock and chain. The metal where the chain had been snapped by bolt cutters was clean and shiny, even in the dying golden light.

“Whoever was here,” he said, “they weren’t just looking.”

He turned on the flashlight, told her to do the same, and flicked the beam forward, beyond the open door, into the black mouth of the tomb. Ahead lay a long line of steps, descending at a steep angle into the earth, with a single, flimsy banister to the right.

“I go first,” he announced before entering the inky pool swimming beneath their feet.

It seemed an endless descent, one step at a time, gripping the dry, splintery rail. Finally, the beam fell on bare earth. Costa found himself in a subterranean cavern of some size, so deep beneath the surface that he could hear nothing of the world above, not a bird, not an insect.

Rosa joined him and shone her light around the space in front of them.

“It’s huge,” she said.

“And empty.”

There were marks in the floor, niches carved out of the brown soil, where once, Nic guessed, at least two sarcophagi had lain. The archaeologists had been there already, or perhaps the grave-robbers before them. Not an item remained in the center of the chamber. He shone his light farther in front. There was a small archway carved in the stone ahead, and a dark, seemingly smaller chamber beyond.

“Where’s the Blue Demon, Nic? Are you sure this is the right place?”

“It’s the place the woman gave us.”

Costa knew why she was asking. The beam of her flashlight had flickered sideways, coming to rest on the frieze running around the nearest wall. What was painted there, with some skill, seemed to have no connection with the dark terrors he had expected. It was a bacchanalian orgy: naked men and women, with wine cups overflowing, running through a wood that must have been much like the one in which the tomb was built. Some wrestled. Some made love. Some performed more
perverse sexual acts. There were animals too, and violence. One cruel, explicit scene in particular seemed more in keeping with the kind of pornography that Costa had occasionally seized from the seedier shops around Termini.

“You can see why they didn’t open this one up to the public,” Rosa muttered, sounding a little shocked. “No one’s going to be bringing any school trips down here.”

The tone of the frieze to their left altered as they neared the low, narrow door that led into the farther chamber. The expressions on the faces of the characters shifted subtly, from ecstasy to first surprise and then doubt, bordering on fear.

He felt Rosa following him and knew, from the sound of her tense, short breathing and the way she kept close by him, her shoulder occasionally brushing his in the gloom, that she was noticing this change in the paintings too. Then he was through the opening. She followed him and they turned both beams of their flashlights on the wall to the left.

A brief, pained shriek escaped Rosa’s throat. Costa felt his own blood run cold. It took a moment for him to think straight, to remind himself that this was nothing but paint on ancient plaster, placed here twenty-five hundred years before.

The frieze had disappeared. The images ran the full length of the wall, larger than life, the product of some terrible and vivid imagination. The trick the long-dead artist had played was both devious and sinister. Seen by the visitor walking through from the larger chamber, it was as if the lines of giddy revelers were tumbling ecstatically toward Hell.

Still in each other’s arms, in congress, dancing, fighting, eating, drinking, they appeared to fall through the slender opening into the second chamber like unwitting victims slipping into a nightmare.

The Blue Demon was there to meet them: the same hideous devil, recreated time and time again, sharp fangs dark with gore, his eyes like coals, his tail whipping like a serpent, an inhuman erection rising from his loins. The creature seized the cavorting figures as they stumbled into his domain, then feasted off them, tearing the unwitting Etruscans to pieces, handing the remains to lesser demons to shred and gorge
upon. This was a horror from Hieronymus Bosch, but shorn of the aesthetic license of the artist who would come almost two millennia later. There were no fanciful, dreamlike sequences here, just flesh and blood and entrails, and the all-powerful figure of the azure lord, the master of ceremonies, his talons slicing at his hapless victims as they made the transition from light to dark, blinded by bliss, unaware of their fate until there was no going back.

Costa felt Rosa’s fingers grip his arm.

“Get me out of here, Nic,” she whispered, her voice almost unrecognizable.

“When we’re finished,” he replied, then moved the beam from the red-eyed monster on the wall and on to the tiny chamber itself.

It was no larger than a child’s bedroom and, unlike the adjoining room, it wasn’t empty. On the floor, there was a group of objects, dark—metal by the looks of it.

Modern too.

He told Rosa to keep her light on them, bent down, and looked. They were munitions boxes, with NATO markings. The latches were easily undone. Beneath the lid lay packs of material neatly stacked like sets of playing cards. Costa retrieved one and saw the telltale word on the side.

“Do you know what
Explosia
is?” he asked her.

“Can we discuss this outside?”

He put the pack back in the case and straightened.

“It’s the commercial name for Semtex. They changed it after all the bad publicity. It was Semtex back when Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. Now that we’re all as free as birds …”

Explosia
. He remembered the course well, and the female instructor who had taken them through the history of the ways terrorists wreaked havoc on the world. Most Islamic groups relied on simple, homemade fertilizer-based devices. Real explosives had become hard to come by, and the genuine material now possessed chemical tags and metallic coding that meant it could be traced to the original buyer.

Next to the boxes lay several automatic weapons wrapped in clear plastic, as if straight from the factory, and boxes of shells.

“Using traceable material like this, it’s …”

Nothing Andrea Petrakis did matched up to the template of twenty-first-century terrorism from the East.