The Garden of Evil (25 page)

Four

A
T EIGHT IN THE EVENING, BEA WAS STANDING AT THE
foot of the stairs, tapping her feet, looking mildly cross.

“A part of me wishes to say this is the worst girl you have ever brought back, Nic,” she muttered, perhaps only half joking.

“I wouldn’t call her ‘girl’ to her face,” he said. “Nor do I think it accurate to say I brought her back.”

“No,” she grumbled. “More like putting her in prison really, isn’t it? And I’m the warder.”

Bea didn’t like the men at the bottom of the drive. Some urge within her made it essential she take them coffee and water and panini from time to time. On the last occasion, she had encountered Peroni, who was singing a bawdy Tuscan song at the top of his voice. Costa understood this was as much to keep up morale as anything. It was Peroni’s way to try to lighten the situation and keep a team going. He couldn’t expect Bea to understand such an idea, and so there had been a chilly encounter between the two of them.

“Also . . . she hasn’t yet had a bath. She may be a genius but to me the poor thing’s positively feral in normal company.”

“Normal company being us, naturally. Agata does not live the way we do. If you want to return to your apartment . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t expect a woman like her to be alone in a house with a man. It wouldn’t be right. Also . . . someone shot you last night, in case you forgot.”

“Buckshot,” he answered. “Water off a duck’s back, really. You know the Costa breed. We feel nothing. Seriously. It’s uncomfortable. Nothing more.”

“The arrogance of men . . .” she muttered. “There will be food on the table in five minutes. I would be grateful if someone turned up to eat it. I’ve called several times. Not a word in return. You speak with her. I give up.”

With that she marched back to the kitchen, leaving Costa at the foot of the steps, wondering.

This was an awkward situation, but it was his house.

He went upstairs, along to the largest guest room, which had been hastily cleaned by Bea, with new sheets found for the double bed, and towels and soap for the bathroom. It was a beautiful room, his brother’s when he was young, with the best view in the house, an undisturbed one back to the Via Appia Antica, and scarcely a sign of modern life, no roads, just the single telegraph pole leading to the property, visible in the very corner, beyond the vines and the cypresses lining the drive.

He knocked on the door and said, “There’s food.”

“I know.”

Nothing more.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

He was about to go when she added, “Come in, Nic. Please. I want to ask you something.”

With a sigh, he opened the door. Agata sat in front of the dresser staring at herself in the mirror, an expression of puzzlement and fear on her face. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and black slacks. Her hair was tied back tightly, drawing the rampant curly locks away from her face, which, now he saw more of it, was angular and striking. This was the head of some artist’s model, not beautiful in a conventional sense, not even pretty necessarily, but one that was fated to be looked at, stared at even, because it contained such an intensity of life and thought and—the word did not seem inappropriate—grace.

“Look what they’ve done to me,” she complained. “I asked for books and information. They bring me these clothes, too, and say I must wear them to look less conspicuous. Why?”

“Castagna, Buccafusca, and Nino Tomassoni are dead,” he pointed out. “Like it or not, you’re our only material witness. These precautions—”

“Franco simply hates anyone who’s black. Even half black. We all saw that today.” She couldn’t stop looking at the image of herself in the glass. “We don’t have these big mirrors at home,” she murmured. “Or private rooms with beds large enough for four. And this house . . .”

She stood up and walked to the window. “I can’t even see a light from here. Or hear a human voice or a car or bus.”

“Most people would think that an advantage.”

She turned and stared at him, astounded. “What? To be denied the sounds of humanity? I’ve lived my entire life in the city. I know it. Those are the sounds of its breathing. Why do people wish to run away from everything? What are you frightened of?”

“Tomorrow,” he replied, shrugging. “Today sometimes too.”

She laughed, just. “Well, thank you. That’s one trick you’ve taught me. I never feared anything until you people came into my life. Now I see a man with a gun round every corner, and I look at a painting—a painting by Caravaggio—and wonder if it should shake my faith. Thank you very much indeed.”

“This is the world, Agata,” he replied meekly. “I’m sorry we dragged you into it. I’m sure, someday soon, you will be able to go back to where you came from. Just not now.”

She was silent for a moment.

“And you?” she asked in the end.

“I will find my own way,” he answered. “By some means or other. Provided I eat from time to time. Now, will you join us? Please?”

Five

A
T NINE-FIFTEEN ROSA PRABAKARAN DELIVERED THE
items Agata had demanded, then left for the night. Costa watched Agata carefully unpack what had arrived, taking immense care over several ancient academic tomes and a notebook computer bearing the stamp of the Barberini on the base, and very little notice indeed of two plastic grocery bags with what she said were her personal items from the convent.

Bea stared at the paltry collection of cheap, well-worn clothes and asked, “Is that it?”

“What more am I supposed to need?”

Bea walked out of the room and came back with her arms full of soft towels, some so large and suspiciously fresh Costa wondered if she’d bought them that afternoon, along with boxes of soap and other unidentifiable cosmetics.

“The plumbing in this place can be difficult sometimes,” she declared. “When you are ready, I will introduce you to the mysteries of the bathroom.”

Then she went upstairs.

Agata watched her leave.

“What is Bea to you, Nic?”

“A family friend. She and my father were . . . very good friends once upon a time. That died. The closeness remained.”

“Does she think I’m odd?”

“Probably,” he admitted.

“Do you?”

“You’re not the normal houseguest.”

“Who is?”

He groaned. Agata did not give up easily. She had insisted she wanted to retire to her bedroom to work. Yet now . . .

“I have to speak to the men outside. You have your belongings. Is there anything else I can provide?”

“Yes. There is a room with some art materials in it. Along there . . .” She pointed to the rear of the house and the place he hadn’t entered, not since Emily’s death. “What is it, please? I couldn’t help but notice earlier. I may need something.”

“Let me show you,” he said, and led the way.

The studio was clean and tidy, though it smelled a little of damp, as it always did when the place went unused and unheated for any amount of time. Emily’s work was everywhere: line drawings of buildings, sketches, studies, ideas, doodles.

“Your wife was an artist?” Agata asked.

“An architect. Or she was hoping to be one. When she finished her studies.”

“You can’t learn to build well overnight,” she countered, picking up a sketch from the nearest pile. It was of the Uffizi in Florence, from the weekend in October when he’d found the time to take a break from work, the first since their wedding in the summer. He didn’t find it easy to look at now.

“She could draw,” Agata commented. “Very well. Art and architecture go hand in hand, but then, you know that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t treat you like an imbecile.”

She looked around the room and shivered. It was cold. She was wearing just the cheap, thin white cotton shirt and the equally inexpensive slacks that came from the convent. The Questura budget hadn’t run to clothes, though Rosa had told him quietly she intended to correct this in the morning. In some strange, subtle way, they were beginning to adopt Agata Graziano, form a protective, insular wall around her, and not simply as a way of keeping out Franco Malaspina and his thugs. A part of her seemed too delicate to be allowed to wander free in the world the rest of them inhabited. Costa wondered whether this was fair, or even an accurate reading of the facts.

“I shouldn’t be in this place, prying. It’s private. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just a room,” he said, and smiled. “You’re welcome to use it as much as you wish. Before Emily had it, my sister worked here. She is an artist too. It needs . . .”

The white walls were now a little grey and in need of paint. He remembered the sound of voices in the house when he was growing up, and how he would come in here for peace sometimes, watching his sister work at some strange, abstract canvas he would never understand.

“It needs company,” he murmured, and found the thought began to bring a sharp, stinging sensation to his eyes.

She noticed and said quickly, “Good night, Nic. I must see what Bea has to teach me about this bathroom of yours.”

Six

H
E WAITED AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS, THINKING,
wondering whether he should stay nearby in case there was some difficulty between the two. But after a while he heard their voices from above, happy voices, followed by the running of water, then, drifting down the steps, the smell of soap and shampoo.

If Bea had had a daughter, she would have been about Agata’s age. He had seen that glint in her eyes the moment this bright, dishevelled young woman had walked through the door.
The poor thing’s positively feral
.

Costa found himself amused by the description. It was both apposite and somehow ridiculous. Agata was an extraordinarily sophisticated woman. She simply chose not to show it on the outside.

He found his coat, walked down the drive, and went to the men in the marked car blocking the entrance. It was a cold, clear night, full of stars, bright with the light of a waxing moon.

Peroni was there with an officer Costa didn’t recognise. They were listening to the radio—old, bad Italian jazz, the kind Gianni would force on anyone given half the chance—and drinking coffee from a thermos.

“Is there anything I can get you gentlemen?” he asked as they wound down the window.

“Some ladies, some wine, some food,” Peroni responded instantly. “Actually, just the food will do. Got any?”

“You know where the kitchen is. I’m going to bed.”

“How’s the shoulder?” Peroni asked, suddenly serious.

“Aching. But it’s not worth worrying about. Is everything OK here?”

“It’s good,” Peroni said, nodding, meaning it. “Better than it looked. You know, when that bastard stormed out of here all smug and knowing this afternoon, I didn’t think so. I thought . . . there you go. Some rich jerk is going to walk all over us again. But I don’t now. I have no idea why. It’s probably the early onset of mental degeneration. I just think . . . we will nail him, Nic. We’re here. There are a hundred good men and women or more on the case back at the Questura. This new commissario is on our side too. It will work out. Somehow or other. I promise.”

He turned and stared out of the car window. “You know what makes me so certain? It’s that awful detail Rosa got out of the hooker who went away. The idea that these animals photographed those women like that. You know. Just when . . .”

He did know. Costa thought he understood why too. It was the precise instant captured on the canvas. Agata described it exactly:
the moment of the fall.
In the cries of those women, however unreal, however they were brought about, by sex or violence or—and he had to countenance this—the imminence of death, lay some secret pleasure the Ekstasists craved to witness.

“I don’t believe in God,” Peroni went on, “but I’m damned sure that men like that will not walk away from us, not in the end. It’s only Malaspina now, and we will have him.”

Costa agreed. “We will,” he said, then went back to the house, poured himself a small glass of the Verdicchio, which was barely touched, and found the chair by the fire, once his father’s, always the most comfortable in the house.

The dog was there already, a small, stiff furry shape curled up in front of the burning logs, slumbering.

There was a photo on the mantel. He reached up and took it in his hands, wishing, in the futile way one did, that his father could have seen this before he died.

He and Emily stood where newly married couples often did on their wedding day in Rome, by the Arch of Constantine, next to the Colosseum, in their best clothes, Emily with a bouquet in her arms, smiling, happier than he had ever seen her, he in a suit Falcone had helped him buy, the best he’d ever owned, a perfect fit, now consigned to Teresa’s evidence pile, torn apart by Malaspina’s pellets, stained with Costa’s own blood.

Lives were drawn together by invisible lines, unseen contours that joined waypoints one never noticed until they were already fading in the receding distance of memory. From the moment captured here to Emily’s death was but a few brief months, and nothing could have told him that then, nothing could ease the ache he felt now, the pain, the regret over so many unspoken words, such a proliferation of deeds and kindnesses that never took place.

Time stole everything in the end. It had no need of an accomplice, some arrogant, deranged aristocrat hiding behind a mask and a gun.

From above him he heard a sound, one he struggled, for a moment, to recognise. Then it came . . . laughter. Bea and Agata, happy together, their amusement running like a river, almost giggling, the way that children did, or a mother and daughter, joined by some mutual amusement over something that would never, in a million years, reach his ears.

This was how it was supposed to be. This was how it should have been.

He closed his eyes and held the photograph in its frame close to him.

God gave us tears for a reason.

Perhaps, he thought. But something stood between him and Emily’s pale, remembered face, still alive, still breathing in his memory. It was a figure in a hood, one who now possessed a voice and a face and a black, evil intent that was not yet sated.