The Garden of Evil (22 page)

Two

T
HEIR DESTINATION WAS IN ANOTHER DARK, NARROW
alley in a part of Rome that Gianni Peroni was beginning to dislike. He felt tired and worried. He was concerned, too, about this new commissario who seemed so friendly and had picked him out by name, even going so far as to pat him on the shoulder as they rode to the address that was registered for Giorgio Castagna.

Commissario Esposito took one look at the dingy street and the shiny door, that of a single house, not the apartments one would normally expect.

There were ten other men with them, one of them a sovrintendente, Alfieri, who was less than pleased to discover Esposito didn’t appear to regard him as his most senior officer around.

“Why are you an agente?” the commissario asked idly as they looked at the door from down the lane, thinking of their mode of entrance.

“Because the people in charge at the time got sentimental,” Peroni replied immediately. “I should have been fired. I was an inspector. They found me in a cathouse when it got raided. My life was a little . . . strange at the time.”

Esposito said nothing.

“Why are you asking this?” Peroni demanded. “Since you clearly know it already if you’ve read the papers.”

“Sometimes it’s better to hear things than read them. Don’t you agree?”

“Of course . . .”

“And also because . . .” Esposito shrugged. “I have to make a decision when the dust has settled. Do I throw the book at you all for running this little show outside the rules? Or . . .”

The commissario looked at Alfieri, who was shuffling on his big feet and standing in front of some muscular agente Peroni didn’t know, one who was passing a large, nasty-looking implement from hand to hand, somewhat impatiently.

“We are talking, Officer,” he pointed out. “A private conversation.”

“S-sir,” the man stuttered, “we have someone here who has done the new entry course.”

Esposito raised an eyebrow at the large metallic implement in the hulking agente’s grip.

“No more mallets, eh? Isn’t progress wonderful?” He turned to Peroni. “What would you advise?”

“Nic and Rosa had nothing to do with this. He’s still in mourning. She was just obeying orders.”

“I meant what would you do here?”

It was obvious. Anyone who’d worked Rome for a couple of decades would have known the answer from the outset. But the new generation, men like Alfieri, were formed by the courses they went on, not by what they saw about them on the street.

“The house is terraced,” Peroni pointed out. “I know this area well enough to understand there is no rear exit. It simply backs onto whatever lies behind. They didn’t build passageways out the back in those days.”

“So?” Esposito asked.

“If it was me, I’d ring the doorbell,” he answered.

Esposito nodded across the street and ordered, “Do it.”

Grumbling low curses, aware he was exhausted and his temper on a short fuse, Peroni wandered down the alley, stood in front of the house, and looked at the bell and the upright letter box built into the centre of the old wooden door.

He pressed the buzzer, then popped a fat finger through the letter box and lowered his head down to its level as best he could, trying to peer through. To his surprise there was a light burning brightly on the other side.

After that he went back across the street and looked at Alfieri.

“I’d use your toy instead.”

“Sir!” the man answered, with a burst of bitter sarcasm.

But he went eagerly all the same, ordering the heavily built young agente in front of him, taking obvious satisfaction as the metal ram began to work on the door.

Peroni stayed with Esposito, who wasn’t moving.

“That was decisive of you,” the commissario noted.

“It was indeed. Were you listening? When I said all that about Nic and Rosa not really being a part of Leo’s little freelance venture? One’s still in mourning, the other’s still green.”

Esposito stared at him, puzzled. “I always listen, Agente.”

The metal toy was starting to do its work. The ancient wooden door, which might have sat there for a century or more for all Peroni knew, was trembling on its strong hinges like a tree falling under the axe of some relentless, vindictive forester. Dust—clouds of it—was starting to hang around the entrance as the frame began to come away from the plaster and brickwork that held it in place.

“There’s no rush,” Peroni said, putting a hand on this odd new commissario’s arm as they crossed the street, successfully slowing their progress.

“Why?” Esposito asked immediately.

They were nearly through and Peroni was beginning to feel guilty. He could see what would happen. The heavy planked wood would fall backwards, as if there were a hinge on its base, straight down onto the stone floor he suspected must lie behind.

The two of them were no more than a couple of strides away when it finally began to go. Esposito was free of him, walking quickly towards the action. Some bosses always had to be there first, Peroni reminded himself.

It came loose with a whip-like crack. Peroni watched it go over, trying to calculate, as best he could, the effect it might have on what he believed he had seen through the letter box.

Gravity wasn’t his fault. Nor the overenthusiasm of a bunch of officers newly returned from a course on how to smash their way into private homes.

“Why?” Esposito turned to ask again as he marched to join the others.

Peroni stopped. The massive wooden slab tumbled backwards. Plumes of plaster and brick dust rose from around its frame as the old and once solid structure that held it in place collapsed under the blows it had received from Alfieri’s strongman. Whatever lay behind the door . . .

This wasn’t a conversation Esposito had allowed to develop.

Led by the commissario in his black raincoat, the team pushed into the brightly lit space that now appeared before them, making the grunt-like noises of enthusiasm men tended to produce on occasions like this.

It didn’t last long. Someone—Alfieri, Peroni suspected—screamed. Then the entire pack of them retreated in haste, waving their hands in distress that, on the part of a couple—though not Vincenzo Esposito—appeared to border on horror.

A pair of naked legs—a man’s, and he was pretty sure of the identity—flapped down onto them, pivoting from some unseen point above, pushing gently against their faces and hands. The body had been given some brief renewed life by the force of the door as it came off its hinges and fell backwards, piling into the corpse somewhere above the knee.

Peroni walked forward, cocked his head through the doorway, looked up, and saw what he’d expected all along, ever since he got a glimpse of those white, dead legs through the narrow slit of the letter box. The pale, misshapen naked body of a man was suspended there, hanging from a noose which appeared to be thrown across an ancient black beam that ran, open and horizontal, across the entrance space at the first floor.

“Because of that,” he said.

Three

F
ALCONE KNEW THE PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO IN LUCINA
well. It was a small, very old cobbled square by the side of the Palazzo Ruspoli in the bustling shopping street of the Corso, with a porticoed church that looked more like an Imperial temple than a home for Catholics, and a handful of houses that must have gone back centuries.

It was an expensive location for a lowly official of a state art institution. As he stood with his men at the edge of the cobbled square, their flashing lights reflecting on the damp stone, the racket of their engines bringing activity to the windows of the surrounding apartments, Falcone found himself thinking, not for the first time, of Costa’s insistence that the key to this case somehow lay in the past. A past that might, perhaps, be unreachable through any conventional means. More and more, Falcone felt himself to be a player in a drama that was taking place in another era, another century altogether, one in which he lacked sufficient understanding to follow the rules, or even begin to comprehend them.

This had to change. They owed that to all those dead women, Emily included. Yet for all the progress he felt sure they ought to make over the next few hours, Falcone felt unsure of himself. Out of caution, he had placed a call to the Palazzo Malaspina, enquiring whether the count was at home, only to be told that he had left the palace after the party for “private business” and had yet to return. Even without Agata’s questionable identification, this was sufficient to make it possible for Malaspina to have been at the scene in the Barberini studio. Still, it was too soon, Falcone felt, to exert any pressure on the man. If it was him behind the black, all-covering hood, he was surely closeted with his lawyers now, concocting some alibi. Or else he had fled the city altogether.

In the absence of usable physical evidence, could one man possess sufficient money and influence to bury his direct involvement in several bizarre murders forever? This question had nagged Falcone ever since he became aware of Malaspina’s background. He loathed to think that it could be true. Yet he knew enough of the ways of those who lived at the summit of society to understand that they did, from time to time, abide by rules and mores which would never be allowed to the masses living further down the ladder. Bribery, corruption, casual acquaintance with criminals . . . These failings occurred in all walks of life, in business, in local and national government, and, on occasion, in the law enforcement agencies too. Could they extend to turning a blind eye to the vicious deaths of a series of unfortunate women?

Only in the minds of a privileged few, such as Franco Malaspina and those he had assembled around him. Men like Nino Tomassoni, who was now, perhaps, in bed in his home, an ancient building, decrepit and untouched by recent paint, just a few short metres from the neon lights of the Corso, with its ribbon of stores, some with the Christmas lights still winking, even in the dead of night.

What was it Susanna Placidi had said? Tomassoni was the weak one, perhaps the original source of the emails themselves, a peripheral player at the very edges of this drama. If so, he was there for a reason, and it was one Falcone felt determined to discover.

He turned to look at the team he had assembled: four armed men, one with the necessary equipment for taking down the door to the house should that be needed.

“Follow me,” he ordered, then walked directly to Nino Tomassoni’s front entrance, put his thumb on the bell push, and held it there. After ten seconds, no more, he nodded at the entry man to begin taking down the door.

There was no time for niceties. Besides, Tomassoni, if Susanna Placidi had got just one thing right, was a small man who might possibly be cowed by a show of force.

“When you’re in,” Falcone commanded the men around him, “I want you to make the noise from hell. I’ll deal with the neighbours.”

That seemed to go down well. He watched the door fly off its hinges in a cloud of dust.

“Everyone goes inside,” he ordered. “The man may be armed and accompanied.”

He was the first to step through the cloud of dust that followed the final hammer blow. And the first to come to a halt, too, amazed by what lay beyond the threshold.

When the grey cloud cleared from the forced entry, he found himself faced with a scene that seemed to come from a different century. The interior of Nino Tomassoni’s home—the residence, Falcone already knew from intelligence, of a solitary man unknown to his neighbours, one who had inherited his expensive central address from parents who had emigrated to the United States years ago—was like nothing he had expected, more a film or theatre set than a home fit for the twenty-first century.

Though it was now past three in the morning, gaslights flickered inside glass bulbs down each of the long walls of the narrow entrance room, casting a faint orange glow over the interior. Paintings in gold frames hung alongside them. On each side stood a pair of ornate carved gilt chairs, worn antiques with tattered red velvet seats and backs, and a shaky aspect that probably made them unfit for use. The floor was dusty stone, unswept for ages. From somewhere came a dank smell, the kind Falcone associated with the illkempt homes of solitary, impoverished bachelors, places that reeked of rotting food, stale air, and solitary habits.

“This is creepy,” someone said from behind him. “Like a museum or something.”

That was right, Falcone thought. Just like a museum, and the idea gave him some encouragement, though he was not quite sure why.

“Room by room, floor by floor,” he ordered quietly. “I do not understand the layout of this place. It’s . . .”

From another time.

The words just slipped into his head.

“I want someone to take a look at the back to see if there’s some way out there, and that way blocked if it exists. I want—”

His phone rang. It was Vincenzo Esposito. He sounded shocked, a little out of sorts, which was probably a rare experience for the man.

Falcone listened, absorbing the news. Esposito would remain at Castagna’s home for the rest of the night, and he had ordered a permanent guard for Agata Graziano to be sent to the hospital in San Giovanni where she had gone with Costa.

“Don’t lose any more witnesses,” the new commissario ordered, his voice low and grim over the phone.

“No, sir,” Falcone replied, and cut the call.

THE HOUSE HAD THREE FLOORS AND NO REAR ENTRANCE, SIMPLY
a blank wall, without windows on any level. The gaslights seemed to be intermittent. In other areas, weak yellow bulbs, usually hanging from the ceiling by a single wire, without a fitting or shade, provided the illumination. There were no carpets and little in the way of furniture; no sign of a human presence.

Many riddles continued to nag him about the nature of the Ekstasists. The studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore was just one of them. It was, Falcone felt sure, a place they used only occasionally,
in extremis,
when their games moved beyond some norm that was simply decadent and into a realm that was more dangerous, doubtless more tantalising. They were an organisation, one that needed a home. Malaspina was too intelligent and circumspect to allow it to be inside his own palace. Buccafusca and Castagna were well-known men in the city, too, likely to arouse comment and suspicion if their illicit activities took place on premises with which the public were familiar—an art gallery, or the porn studios out near Anagnina where Castagna’s father based his grubby empire. So Nino Tomassoni, a quiet, insignificant minor bureaucrat in the gallery of the Villa Borghese, who lived a solitary life in a house a short walk away from everywhere in what was once Ortaccio, offered a solution of a kind.

The ground floor was occupied by nothing more than storage space crammed with junk: old furniture, discarded boxes of papers and magazines, many pornographic, and several bags of household rubbish. On the second they found one large bedroom, with a dishevelled double bed and sheets that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks, and a smaller room with a single mattress and no sign of recent use. The floor above contained a small study, with a computer that was still on when Falcone touched the keyboard, open at an email application. He called for one of the younger officers to come forward and start using the thing.

“Can you see what’s been sent from this recently?” Falcone asked.

The man flailed at the grubby keyboard.

“There are four months of old messages, in and out,” the agente replied after a couple of seconds.

“Good. Call in the forensic computer people. Tell them to take it away for analysis. But . . .” He stopped the man before he left the grimy seat at the table on which the machine sat. “First tell me if there are any messages to Susanna Placidi here.”

The keyboard clattered again. Several emails came up on the screen. They were familiar. Falcone smiled and patted the officer on the shoulder.

“Progress,” he said. “Now, there’s a word we haven’t heard in a while. Let’s take a look at the next floor.”

He led the way up the narrow, steep stairs and was aware, from some hidden sense, that this place was different, in a way that made him take out his weapon instinctively and hold it in front of him in the darkness.

The door was open, the entire floor beyond a space without so much as a stick of furniture from what he could see. A single skylight stood off-centre in the pitched, low roof. Through it a wan stream of weak moonlight fell, revealing nothing but bare worn planks in the centre of the room.

Falcone felt for a light switch. It took some time for him to realise there was none. But there was the smell of gas, faint yet discernible, and as his eyes adjusted they found the shapes of the same glass bulbs he had seen on the ground floor. He had no idea how to turn on gaslights, and no desire to find out.

He took a flashlight from one of the officers behind him and cast it around the pool of darkness that lay impenetrable in front of them. There were shapes, familiar ones. And from somewhere, he thought, the sound of faint movement, of someone disturbed by their presence.

“Fetch more light,” Falcone ordered in a loud, confident voice.

Two officers ran downstairs, out to the vans for gear.

Falcone strode into the centre of the room, dashing the beam of the flashlight everywhere, taking in what it revealed.

He should, perhaps, have expected this. In front of him lay an array of paintings, canvas upon canvas, each stored leaning against the next, protected by some kind of cloth covering, stacked in a fashion that was half professional, half amateur.

The corner of one piece of cloth was incomplete. Falcone lifted it and ran the beam across what lay beneath. He saw pale flesh, naked women, bodies wrapped up in one another. And a kind of style and poise that spoke of skill and artistry.

“What is it, sir?” the officer who had worked at the computer asked.

“Fetch me more light and we’ll see.”

Falcone still recalled well the time he had spent working alongside the Carabinieri art unit in Verona, with the pleasant major there, Luca Zecchini, who would spend hours showing him the vast register of missing artworks which every officer on the unit would be required to inspect from time to time. The size and richness of it amazed him, and the fact that there was a market for works which could never, in normal conditions, be shown to a single living soul because of their fame.

The brighter floods arrived. He ordered the sea of searing brightness they created to be turned towards the piles of paintings, then walked around them, throwing off the covers, hearing the low buzz of excitement grow behind him.

“I know that,” someone said after a while.

“It’s one version of
The Scream
by Munch,” Falcone explained. “I believe it’s been missing from Copenhagen since 2004. This . . .” He stared at another work, a smaller, older canvas. “. . . looks like Poussin, I believe.”

There were pictures here he thought he recognised from Zecchini’s register, works perhaps by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, and a host of earlier artists beyond his knowledge, unless they were all very good fakes.

He moved towards the farthest corner, an area where not the slightest mote of moonlight fell, and one which was still in shadow from some large canvas under wraps covering the entire diagonal of the space there.

“What we have here, gentlemen,” Falcone went on, “is a storeroom for stolen works of art, one that seems to have been sitting beneath our noses, in the centre of Rome, for years.”

Falcone stopped and kept a firm grip on his gun. “It would be fitting,” he added, “if we could match up these objects with their so called owner, don’t you think?”

In one quick movement he threw aside the sackcloth over the painting and stepped behind the frame. The man was there on the floor cowering, hands around his knees, head deep in his thighs, not saying a word.

Nino Tomassoni was wearing a grubby pair of striped pyjamas and stank of sweat and fear.

“This is a fine collection,” Falcone said drily. “Would you care to tell us where it came from?”

The figure on the floor began rocking back and forth like a child.

“I asked a question,” Falcone added.

The man mumbled something.

“Excuse me?”

“He will k-k-kill me . . .” the crouching man stuttered.

The expression in his bulbous eyes was more fear than insanity. Falcone wondered how long Tomassoni had been hiding here, and how he had come to know the events of the night. There was so much to ask, so many ways in which this strange little man could provide the means by which they might find a way, finally, into the depths of the Palazzo Malaspina and close the door on its owner forever.

“No one will kill you, Nino,” he said calmly. “Not if we look after you. But all these paintings . . .”

Falcone cast his eyes around the room. This was a miraculous find in itself. He could scarcely wait to call Vincenzo Esposito to tell him the news.

“I fear this looks very bad.”

Out of interest, he lifted the sackcloth on a small canvas to his left and found himself staring at a jumble of geometric shapes and human limbs that seemed to him, perhaps erroneously, reminiscent of Miró.