Costa 08 - City of Fear (38 page)

He laughed. “Why anyone would rush to be in a room with those people is beyond me. Play well. What’s it they say?” He gestured with his arm, theatrically. “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.”

“They’re the leaders of the world,” she replied primly.

“And we’re their subjects. Quite.”

A moment later, heart still beating wildly in her chest, she found herself in the long, broad corridor that Petrakis had described. Just to be sure, she checked her map once more. It was all as he had said. A palace more grand than anything she had ever seen. Tapestries hung from the walls like everyday drapes. Paintings decorated every spare inch. A line of open windows gave out onto the green gardens of the Quirinale that seemed to stretch forever, as if they were a private park made for a king.

The music grew louder as she walked, a light dance tune, the kind old people listened to, tapping their feet. It came, she knew, from the adjoining room, and was accompanied by the low murmur of voices.

She walked on toward the door he’d marked on the map, holding the instrument case firmly, feeling the handle grow slippery in her sweating fingers.

Zeru, Josepe …

Nothing can bring back the dead, she thought. But one might mark their memory in a way others would not forget.

The door she sought looked as if it had been carved from old gold. Mythical creatures, dragons and unicorns, danced the length of the frame. She could see her son’s face, clear in her memory.

Then a flash of recollection, cruel and relentless. It was the day they’d found a baby thrush in the garden, too young to fly, too weak to feed.

Josepe had quietly taken the creature to one side and, out of kindness, smothered it in an old blanket. Zeru had not witnessed this, had not been told, and yet, when he became aware of its disappearance, he knew somehow, understood intuitively what had happened, feeling the small creature’s agony somewhere in the recesses of his young heart. How he had sobbed!

What would he say now?
her inner voice asked.

“Zeru was a little boy,” she answered softly, feeling tears prick her eyes. “A child is a child. What they know is a truth for them, a fairy tale. Not for the rest of us.”

She heard a sound behind her. Anna Ybarra’s blood ran cold.

Turning, her hands still tight on the instrument case, with the primed Uzi inside, she found herself facing a solitary figure she recognized. The old man from the podium. He was standing erect, amused,
smoking a cigarette, slyly blowing the smoke out of the neighboring window.

“Another truant, I see, signora,” Dario Sordi, the president of Italy, remarked. “Enjoying the view when you should, by all rights, be playing. Unless I’m mistaken.”

At that point something clouded his eyes and she knew immediately what it was. Recognition. Astonishment. Yet not alarm, though she failed to understand why.

“Perhaps I am mistaken,” he added.

TERESA LUPO WONDERED WHAT KIND OF SPECTACLE they made, sitting on the steps of the little church near the Quirinale looking miserable as Hell. They bunched together on the hard stone, silent, watched by the sour-faced saints high on Borromoni’s curving façade. It wasn’t a thinking silence, either. That was what worried her most. For the last couple of days she’d started to consider herself a cop, not a pathologist, and this blank inactivity bothered her. Cops were meant to discover, to seize ideas out of thin air, then turn fancy into fact, something concrete, something one could act on. Not sit around waiting. Peroni hadn’t done this, not quite. He’d disappeared around the corner for some unannounced reason. A hunt for the restroom, she guessed. But the rest of them …

She turned to Falcone, whose long, tanned face was in his hands as he stared down at the empty street, and asked, “So what do we do now? Just sit here like tourists waiting for the bus to turn up?”

“Unless you have any better suggestions …” the inspector murmured.

“But it’s not supposed to be like this!”

“What is it supposed to be like?” Rosa wondered.

“We’re supposed to be finding things out.
Working
things out. Seeing some … rational link between what’s going on.”

“‘Rational link’?” Falcone mocked. “What an extraordinarily old-fashioned view of police work.”

“What else is there?”

His lean face wrinkled with distaste. “I sometimes wonder if you’ve taken a moment’s notice of anything I’ve tried to teach you over the years.”

“You? Teach me?”

“When it comes to …
science
”—he said the word as if it had a bad taste—“I value your advice immensely. Not that science is doing us many favors.”

“Leo!” She pointed in the direction of the Quirinale Palace. “Over there a bunch of faceless gray spooks are concocting some kind of fake terrorist incident. Here, in our city. All in the hope that the so-called perpetrator will then be allowed to return to the bandit lands of Afghanistan and lead those selfsame spooks straight to the evil bastards they’ve been chasing, with no success whatsoever, for years. Which seems pretty unlikely if you ask me, not that I’m an expert in such matters, thank God.”

“It would seem that way,” he agreed.

“People have died because of this nonsense. One of our own …”

“You heard the American’s apology for that. We were warned not to interfere.”

“These are criminal acts.”

He shrugged. “Would you like me to arrest someone?”

“Yes!”

“How? Esposito won’t countenance it. Palombo would overrule it if I tried. Besides, if they’re right …”

“The ends cannot justify the means,” she retorted.

He frowned. “It’s easy to say that, isn’t it? But what if you could turn back time? What if you could prevent New York City, Bali, all those other enormities? Just by torturing a single human being? A guilty man. A murderer who would murder thousands more if he could—”

“Doesn’t work, and you know it. You’d have to torture a thousand human beings, and most of them wouldn’t be guilty at all.”

“If you could have killed Hitler before he ordered Auschwitz?” Rosa asked.

“Any argument that requires the mention of Hitler in order to succeed is doomed from the start, as far as I’m concerned.”

Peroni was walking up the street, his hands filled with cones of gelati.

It was beautiful ice cream. Her favorite: pistachio. A thin green line of it had melted down his lapel and he hadn’t noticed. Teresa wiped it off with a tissue as he sat down next to her.

“Your job’s nothing like mine, is it?” she said.

“I never claimed it was,” Peroni answered, looking puzzled.

“Our occupation, such as it is,” Falcone cut in, “principally consists of assembling unseen shapes in a darkened room, then waiting for the arrival of daylight to see if any of them resemble, in some small way, what we expected.”

Peroni looked around at them and said, “Normally I would ask you to bring me up to date on things. But in this instance …”

She patted him on the knee, so hard he shut up. “I was simply coming to realize what a rotten police officer I’d make. Spending all this time running your hands through meaningless dust …”

Peroni considered this. Then he said, “I think you mean dust for which we have yet to find a meaning.”

Teresa laughed and then pecked him on the cheek, not minding that they saw. She loved this man, for all the right reasons. In a way, she loved all of them. They were a team. A family. A group of people bound to one another by invisible, powerful ties. This was one more reason why it hurt so much that there were no shapes to work with, no darkened room, no prospect of daylight. It was such a joy to see the spark in their faces the moment some glimmer of revelation appeared.

The pathologist finished her cone, got up, and stood beneath the grim stare of Borromini’s stone saints. She dialed Silvio Di Capua on her cell phone; it took him a second to answer, no more, and a minute to fill her in on his thinking.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” she asked.

“Gone out.”

“Gone out where?”

“She said she was meeting a friend. I’m a forensic scientist, not a bodyguard. Besides, she can look after—”

“Shut up, Silvio! I’m trying to think.”

“You called to tell me that?”

“No.” She remembered now. “I called to talk to Elizabeth.”

“Ask me.”

“You’re a man. You think the wrong way. Like me.”

“Intellectual cross-dressing can become very confusing, whether you’re watching or taking part.”

“Very clever.” She thought of the numerals. There had to be something in the numerals. “When you start a message with a number, it usually signifies either a time or a date,” she suggested.

“Been there, looked at that. It can’t be a date, not if it refers to the summit. The twelfth of the month is already past. And if it’s time …”

“It can’t be today, since we’re past midday. But it has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because the big men in the Quirinale Palace say so. Don’t ask for an explanation. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Then it’s not a time and it’s not a date. So what is it? Can I pair it with the following numeral and make something?”

“You tell me,” she demanded.

“No. I can’t.”

“Thank you for that.”

“Non è niente.”

“They’re Roman numerals. Latin.”

“So?”

“So why do you assume that the number twelve would mean back then what it does now?”

“Twelve is twelve,” he said with a long, pained sigh. “Numbers are numbers. Gloriously immutable. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why the sky never falls.”

“You’re missing my point.” Two points, actually, the more she thought about it. “Petrakis thinks he’s living in the past. Maybe part of the joke is that he writes that way too. What did the number twelve mean to Julius Caesar? Midday? Possibly. But they weren’t walking around with watches on their wrists, were they? I don’t know. Check it out.”

“Good one,” he agreed. “Will do.”

“And, also, check out the obvious.”

There was a pause on the line. The two of them had this discussion from time to time. About the way Silvio was an astonishingly learned
and sharp individual, one so clever that occasionally he was unable to see something directly in front of his own face.

“The obvious?” he repeated, sounding a little scared.

“Even if we don’t know what the first number stands for,” Teresa said patiently, “this would signify that the second set possesses some separate meaning. Not a time. Not a date. Not … I don’t know. Perhaps just the same as the other numbers we’ve had to deal with.”

Somehow she could sense fear inside his silence.

“Silvio,” she asked testily. “You
have
looked, haven’t you? Shakespeare? The text Petrakis used for the other codes?”

“The other codes had three numbers,” he said hesitantly.

“So does this one, if the first number refers to something else. What is it?”

“II. I. CLXXIII.”

“Act Two. Scene One. Line one hundred and seventy-three. Possibly. Check out the time. Check out the verse. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

“On it,” he said hastily. “Anything else?”

There was nothing she could think of and she said so. The others were watching her. Peroni had a new blob of pistachio ice cream on his suit.

“Well?” Costa asked hopefully when she sat down beside them.

“Science,” she told him. “Boring old integers. Nothing you philosopher types need bother your clever heads about.”

“DÍGAME,” DARIO SORDI MURMURED, LOOKING AT THE young woman in the long velvet dress, a large closed instrument case in her hand, at the expression of fear and anticipation on her plain, intense face.

The corridor by the Salone dei Corazzieri was deserted. The room beyond, one he knew so well, every glittering inch engraved upon his memory, reverberated to the sound of music and the low chatter of voices in many languages. He had been glad to escape. Smoking was an enjoyable excuse, nothing more.

“Excuse me?” the young woman said.

“I was under the impression we’d met before,” Sordi answered before throwing his half-finished cigarette out of the window, into the gardens beyond.