The Garden of Evil (11 page)

One

S
TATUES CAN’T TALK,” PERONI INSISTED.

The five of them—Costa, Rosa, Teresa, Peroni, and Falcone—stood in the tiny open space known as the Piazza Pasquino, named for the battered three-quarters statue of a man with no arms and an unrecognisable face turned as if to look towards some vanished companion. Falcone had arrived on time, then marched them there immediately. They were in a busy narrow street which fed off the sprawling Piazza Navona. The rain had halted for a while.

“This statue can,” Falcone replied. “Unfortunately, the only police officer who had the wit to listen was Agente Prabakaran.”

Smiling at that, Rosa walked forward. She pointed to the worn, stained stone on which the statue known as Pasquino stood, and explained, “The antiracist people told me. They found it first.”

The base of Pasquino was covered with posters, hastily pasted there, most in frantic, badly written script, though a few were printouts from a computer and even had simple photographs and cartoons on them.

Costa remembered this place from his schooldays. Pasquino had been plastered in anonymous messages for centuries. In recent times most were antigovernment, posted there by left-wing or anarchist groups, or ordinary citizens who wanted to vent their anger without revealing their identity. He couldn’t recollect ever seeing any racist material. Racism was rare in Rome. The sight of Pasquino jogged another memory, though Rosa got there first.

“There are other statues that used to serve the same function,” she said. “They placed messages on those too.”

“Later,” Falcone interrupted, and ushered them down into the narrow medieval street of the Governo Vecchio. His apartment was a hundred metres or so along from Pasquino’s piazza, on the first floor, next to an upmarket shop selling expensive fountain pens and mechanical pencils. The place was huge and beautifully furnished. Falcone was clearly proud of it, judging by the brief, modest tour he insisted upon—out of the practical consideration, naturally, that they would now be closeted there for some time. There was an elegant living room decorated in plain, modern taste, two bedrooms, a well-equipped kitchen with a small balcony, and a line of healthy potted plants glistening after the morning’s rain. The apartment was spotless, with the smell of recent cleaning. He had prepared for this moment. There was also a box full of smart clothes, sent by Bea from the farmhouse, which Falcone passed over without a word of explanation.

The inspector beckoned them to the table, opened the briefcase he’d brought, and took some photos out of a folder.

“More statues,” he said, and glanced at Prabakaran. “Agente?”

She pointed to the representation of a muscular man built into a brick wall. He wore a beret and was holding a barrel over a drinking fountain. Water still trickled from the cask, though the statue looked centuries old. “This is Il Facchino. The Porter. It’s in a side street off the Corso, near the Piazza del Collegio Romano. And this . . .” She removed another photo from Falcone’s folder: a weatherworn full-length statue of a Roman noble in robes, standing on a plinth against a grime-stained marble wall.

“I recognise that,” Peroni said instantly. “It’s in Vittorio Emanuele, next to the church, Sant’Andrea della Valle. I chased off some classy whores doing business there years ago. It’s also”—the big man glanced at each of them, to make sure they would be impressed—“the scene of the first act of
Tosca
.”

Teresa blinked. “You know opera?”

“One of the hookers told me. I said they were classy. I didn’t hear any statue talking, though.”

“He’s known as Abate Luigi,” Rosa continued, ignoring the distraction. “Pasquino still talks today. I thought even you might have noticed, Gianni. The statue’s always covered in cryptic slogans. Usually, if you can understand them, ones that insult the same few people in the government.”

“I know it!” Peroni insisted. “What the hell has this got to do with us?”

Costa intervened. “The talking statues were a way of making a point that could have got you into trouble if your name was attached to it. Perhaps a political point. Perhaps just ratting on a neighbour.” A memory troubled him; it came with a mental picture of Emily, lovely in a shirt and jeans by the side of the gleaming lagoon, that lost summer eighteen months before. “In Venice they used to do it privately, by posting unsigned letters through those lions’ mouths I once showed you. In Rome, we prefer something a little more public. But these days only on Pasquino. You say there were messages on the other statues?”

“Exactly,” Falcone said, and removed a large envelope from his case and spread the contents on the table: sheet after sheet of words, jumbled together in the random yet semi-logical way a madman might have worked. He glowered at the messages and pointed at a set of enlargements of the head of each of them. “Placidi didn’t even look closely enough to see this.”

Magnified, it was clear there was a crest on the top of each, an ancient coat of arms of some kind. When he caught the direction of Costa’s gaze, Falcone threw a photographic blowup of the emblem onto the table.

Three dragon-like creatures were depicted there, limbs writhing, talons clutching at the screaming torso of a female figure entangled in their scaly embrace. The beasts possessed vicious, grinning features, half human, half beast. The expression on the woman’s face might have been pleasure or pain, rapture or the final rictus of terror.

A title ran above the chilling emblem in contorted medieval script:
The Ekstasists
.

THE VERSES WEREN’T WRITTEN BUT FORMED FROM WORDS AND
letters cut out of the headlines of newspapers and magazines, then pasted together to form cryptic poems.

Rosa began to sort them into three separate piles, then read out one from the first.

“Malaspina,” Costa said. “The bad thorn.”

She nodded. “This was stuck on Pasquino the morning after a hooker was left for dead near the Spanish Steps. Right next to another talking statue they call the Baboon.”

“That’s a hell of a stretch, Rosa,” Teresa complained.

“So everyone told me. But there’s a pattern once you see it. The messages each make some cryptic reference to one of their unpleasant little club. We’ve a total of thirteen: four each for Castagna and Buccafusca, five for Malaspina. Here’s another one.”

She picked out a sheet from the second pile.

“The chestnut being Castagna?” Peroni asked, knowing the answer.

“That one was left on Il Facchino
before
the event,” Rosa explained. “The following day a black woman was raped, then beaten with a wooden club in the Via dei Serpenti in the Monti district, close to the Forum. We couldn’t possibly have understood the reference to snakes and mountains beforehand, of course. These guys are not stupid. They’re not trying to lead us to them. It’s some kind of a joke. A tease.”

“Who the hell is ‘Simonetta’?” Teresa demanded.

“You’d know if you moved in art and history circles,” Rosa replied, looking at Costa.

So many memories were coming back to him at that moment, from his single days when much of his free time was spent in art galleries, staring at the works on the walls, trying to understand what he saw there and link it to his native city’s past. And, too, from the delightful time he’d spent working security for the exhibition in the Palazzo Ruspoli, when he and Emily had finally decided to marry. An entire room there had been devoted to the Medici dynasty.

“Modern academics believe that the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, had a black slave for a mother,” Costa said. “It was kept secret as much as possible, of course. But there were so many reports it’s generally thought to be true. The woman’s name was supposedly Simonetta.”

“The Medicis were black?” Peroni asked, amazed.

Rosa smiled. “A little. Millions of people are, you know. Where’s the surprise? White Italians have been screwing us for centuries. Simonetta, incidentally, didn’t come from Florence. She was from near here. Lazio. Collevecchio. Thirty minutes up the A1. It’s a little too chichi for coloured people these days. But the prostitute they attacked worked the motorways. She was picked up from the Flaminia service station by three men she swore she couldn’t identify. Flaminia is the nearest service point to Collevecchio, which means . . .”

She left it there.

Teresa, astonished, asked, “You really think these bastards would go to those lengths to make some kind of obscure point? Why, for God’s sake?”

Falcone didn’t let the policewoman answer.

“To see how long it would take us to figure out what they were doing. Rosa’s right. This is a game, a test. The kick they get out of taunting us is as much a part of their pleasure as the crime itself.”

He stabbed a long finger at another message. This time Costa read it.

“ ‘The mouth of darkness’ is presumably a play on the name Buccafusca,” Falcone said. “This one was pinned to Abate Luigi the day after an Angolan illegal immigrant, Laeticia Candido, landed in hospital. The staff—not the victim—called the Questura. She’d been found unconscious near the Bocca della Verità. The mouth of darkness and the mouth of truth.” He appeared stiff with visible outrage.

“The woman had bite marks on her breasts and other parts of her torso. The bites removed substantial amounts of flesh. She will be scarred for life. The only thing she would say about her attackers was that they carried a camera and filmed her throughout.”

Peroni gazed at the pages on the table and let loose a long, pained sigh.

“When Susanna Placidi’s people asked for a statement,” Falcone continued, “Laeticia Candido wouldn’t even file a complaint. If it weren’t for the message, we wouldn’t know there was a connection at all, which is one more reason why they send us these things. Now she’s gone. Home probably. I have the Angolan police looking and some of our officers on the way to help. I am not hopeful.”

Costa had a sudden picture in his head: the Bocca della Verità, where lines of happy tourists queued patiently to place a hand into the gap of an Imperial-era water cover, believing a spoken lie might snap it off, just as Gregory Peck promised Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
. This was central Rome, out in the open, next to the busy Lungotevere, an area where street safety had never been an issue.

“How the hell can this happen, Leo?” Teresa asked, outraged. “Why didn’t someone pick it up?”

He frowned. “Susanna Placidi didn’t have the experience, the imagination, or the learning. Or the witnesses. We believe those women who survived the attacks were paid off, as was Laeticia Candido. We don’t have a single signed statement, one we could use in court. As far as we know, most victims have returned home, doubtless carrying the kind of money they wouldn’t pick up working the streets. Or they’re dead in that hellhole in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. What does that leave us? A few anonymous emails mentioning this odd and inexplicable term, ‘the Ekstasists,’ and some vile street graffiti that seemed unconnected until Rosa here put two and two together. Meanwhile, Placidi ignored everything of use and simply marched in on those grinning aristocrats, thinking they’d hold out their hands the moment they saw a badge.”

“Why did she do that?” Costa asked. “She must have had evidence.”

He caught the dark thunder in Rosa Prabakaran’s face.

“It was a routine follow-up. We had Malaspina’s licence plate caught on CCTV. Nothing more. We were just going through the routine and . . .”

They waited. She shook her head.

“You need to meet him to understand. He laughed at us. It was subtle. He didn’t say an incriminating word. He didn’t need to. I was there, with Placidi, and both of us knew immediately it was him. He
wanted
us to know. It was what he planned. And . . .” She raised her slender shoulders in a gesture of frustration. “Then Placidi did what Malaspina wanted of us all along, I guess. Brought in everyone, demanded DNA, warrants, the lot. We had nothing except a licence number and a smirk on that stuck-up face. It was impossible. Unbelievable. Malaspina and his cronies walked free because we lacked the evidence, and we never even tried to lay these messages at their door.”

“It’s not unbelievable at all.” Falcone reached for the photograph of the man, drawing a finger over his fine, dark features. “It’s the sequence of events he had in place for the moment we came for him.”

Rosa said something caustic under her breath.

“I know, I know,” Falcone said with a pained sigh. “You tried to tell Placidi. But this is a highly unusual case, and we are temperamentally inclined to struggle with anything that lies outside the norm. Would I have made the same mistake if you’d come to me? I’d certainly have wanted some answers. The rape unit doesn’t have that stretch of the imagination. It’s about rape. And this”—his eyes drifted to the window—“is about a lot more than that somehow.” He stared at the messages. “The Ekstasists. Why would wealthy, powerful young men wish to capture some wretched street prostitute reaching a moment of rapture? Educated men like these?”

“ ‘Educated’?” Rosa asked, visibly inflamed by the word.

“Educated,” the inspector repeated. “Listen to the words.
Listen
. They think they’re writing a kind of poetry. They believe they’re taking part in some kind of performance, one that’s not quite real, maybe. I don’t know. These people aren’t born criminals . . .”

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw some of the women they left raped and bleeding in the road,” Rosa spat back at him. “And they were the lucky ones.”