The Garden of Evil (36 page)

One

A
T 8 A.M., WHEN THE NOISE FROM THE NEIGHBOURING
room woke him, Costa walked out into the street and found stall-holders in white jackets firing up charcoal braziers for hot chestnuts, panini stands getting ready for the day. A lone tree, sprinkled with artificial snow, stood erect at the entrance to the square. Next to it was some kind of musical stage at the foot of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, complete with a gaggle of bored-looking musicians and a troupe of skimpily dressed girl dancers shivering, clutching at their bare arms, trying to find some protection against the weather. A bright winter sun did nothing to dispel the bitter, dry, bonechilling cold. A trickle of people wrapped in heavy clothing meandered past the moody entertainers on to the broad pavements of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, spilling out into the traffic lanes now closed to all but pedestrians, as they were every Sunday.

It was still Christmas in Rome, just. The place felt unreal, expectant somehow. Costa walked down the middle of the road, where a thousand cars and vans normally fought each other daily, thinking, praying for his phone to ring. Then, when he got near the foot of the tree, close enough to see the low illumination of the fairy lights still lit even in the brightness of the day, a familiar unmarked blue Fiat worked through the barriers and came to a halt next to him. Peroni was behind the wheel. He looked bemused. But not unhappy.

The big man pushed open the passenger door and said, not quite angry, “You left your ID card in that crummy hotel. Amazingly they phoned to tell us. You’d better get in.”

Two minutes later—far more quickly than he could ever have expected on a normal day—they were parked in the Piazza Navona, the place empty save for the pigeons. Peroni said little along the way, except for murmuring a couple of cautious remarks about his looks. Costa ignored them. He felt distanced from everything, as if this were all part of a waking dream. As if . . .

They got out and walked round the corner towards the statue of Pasquino.

Costa’s heart skipped a beat. There was a slender figure in black there, back to him, facing the battered, misshapen statue, staring at some fresh sheet of white paper stuck on the base.

He ran, ignoring Peroni’s anxious calls from behind.

A sister, a nun. He didn’t know the difference. He no longer cared.

When he got there, he placed a hand gently on her shoulder. The figure turned, smiled at him, then stepped backwards, primly removing herself from his touch.

She was a woman in her forties, with a very pale and beautiful face, light grey eyes, and silver hair just visible.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I thought . . .”

His attention was divided between her and the poster on the statue. A poster she’d fixed there the moment before. There were other figures in black nearby too. They had pieces of paper in their hands and rolls of tape. They were placing the sheets everywhere, on walls, on shop windows, carefully aligning each at eye level to make them as visible as possible.

“They’re all over the city,” Peroni said, catching up with him. “On the other statues. In the Piazza Venezia. This lady asked for you in particular.” He glared at the woman in black. “Which is all she’d say.”

“Not true,” the sister objected. “I wished you a good morning and happy Christmas too. You should be flattered. Normally I would say nothing at all.”

“Sister,” Peroni replied, “Agata Graziano is missing. We would very much like to find her. There is no time for these antics.”

She shrugged and responded with nothing more than an upturned smile, a worldly gesture and very Roman. Much the kind of response Agata would have given if she’d wished to avoid the conversation.

He read the poster, a new message for the talking statues, one they were determined to post everywhere, as Falcone had posted his, though this was very different.

“It was Agata’s idea?” he asked quietly. “Sister . . .”

The woman’s grey eyes returned his gaze, unwavering, interested, and, he thought, marked by an inner concern she was reluctant to reveal.

“You’re Nic?”

“I am.”

“This is true,” she replied. “You are as she described.”

The woman looked at Peroni and began to motion with her hands, saying, “Shoo, shoo,
shoo
! This is for him. No one else.”

Under the fierceness of her stare, the big man backed off, towards the large public square behind.

She waited, then retrieved an envelope from the folds of her black cloak.

“Sister Agata sends this. For you and you alone.”

He ripped it open and read the contents: a single sheet in a spidery academic hand. Unsigned.

“God go with you,” the woman said quietly.

He took one more look at the words on the poster beneath the malformed, crumbling statue. His childhood studies, literature and art, had never really left him. The quotation was recognisable. Given the book, he could have found it. The words were an adaptation from Dante again, with a message, direct and personal, tagged on the front.

Costa read the words out loud, listening to their cadence, hearing her voice in each syllable.

“ ‘Franco, Count of Malaspina. Do you not know that, for all your black deeds and black blood, you are like all of us “worms born to form the angelic butterfly”? For Emily Costa and all those murdered women whose lives were taken by your sad anger, God offers forgiveness. Take it.’ ”

The sister watched him impassively as he spoke, her head tilted to pay attention to the words.

“He’s not looking for salvation,” Costa noted, stuffing the letter into his jacket pocket, then taking out his gun, checking the magazine was full, and thinking ahead of what might lie in wait.

Agata was attempting to force Malaspina’s hand, both by revealing his guilt and by what she believed to be the secret he hated most: his ancestry. It was . . . Costa wished his head were functioning better. It was wrong, he felt, though he was unable to be precise about his reasons.

The woman in the black robes eyed the weapon with a baleful expression.

“Everyone is looking for salvation,” she murmured with a quiet, simple conviction. “Whether they know it or not.”

He wasn’t in the mood for distractions. Peroni came over, looking hopeful.

“I have to do this on my own, Gianni,” Costa said, ignoring the woman.

“But—”

“But nothing. That’s how it is.”

The sister’s smug smile was becoming annoying.

“Arrest these women for flyer-posting,” he ordered. “Keep them inside under lock and key until this evening.”

She began to protest, and her colleague across the way too.

“Sister,” Peroni interrupted, “you have the right to remain silent. Or call the Pope. But he might be busy today.”

“You’ve no idea how many women there are in Rome like us,” the senior one hissed at him. “None at all.”

He didn’t. Nor was it important. There was only one thing that mattered.

Costa started running north, back into narrow streets and lanes beyond the Piazza Navona, back into the streets of Ortaccio, letting the long-forgotten rhythm of his movement across the cobbled streets of Renaissance Rome remind him of a time before this pain, a time when he was nothing more than a single, insignificant agente in a city full of wonders.

Two

B
Y NINE-THIRTY GIANNI PERONI WAS SICK OF SEEING
nuns and sisters. It seemed as if an army had assembled on the streets of Rome, every last woman in a religious order who could walk, flocks of them, no longer scampering through the streets quickly, discreetly, like skittish blackbirds brought to earth, but instead throwing off their shy invisibility to stomp around the deserted city with one idea only: putting up Agata Graziano’s curious message in places even the most adventurous flyer-posters would never dare to venture. Her adaptation of Dante, with Franco Malaspina’s name and crimes now attached, was plastered on some of the most famous and visible buildings in the city.

Copies ran like a line of confetti across the roadside perimeter of the Colosseum, to the fury of the architectural authorities, who had interrupted the peace of their holiday break to call the Questura in a rage. All the other talking statues were now covered in them, too, as was the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori and the stone sides of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the pedestrian pilgrims’ bridge across the Tiber on the way to the Vatican. A handful of sisters had even managed to attach several to the front of the Palazzo Madama, the Senate building where Caravaggio once lived under the patron age of Del Monte, an act that had brought down the tardy wrath of the Carabinieri, who now, the TV stations said, had fifteen sisters and nuns in custody, for vandalism against public, though never church, buildings throughout Rome.

The Questura, Peroni was alarmed to discover on his return with the two silent, smug women from the Piazza Pasquino, was in possession of no fewer than twenty-three, which was why Prinzivalli, the duty uniform sovrintendente at the front desk, threw up his hands in horror at the sight of Peroni leading two more through the door and wailed, “What are we doing, man? Collecting them?”

Peroni turned and looked behind him. The quieter of the two women he had apprehended was patiently taping a poster to the notice board in the public waiting room. She seemed to have an entire roll of them stuffed inside the voluminous dark folds of her gown. He found himself wondering at the idea that a community of sisters should have a photocopying machine, then cursed his own ignorance. All along, Nic had understood something that had eluded the rest of them. These women were not shy and weak and unworldly. Some, perhaps. But not all. Many had a determination and a conviction that escaped the daily population of the city who nodded at them on buses and in the street, never thinking for a moment there was much life or interest beneath that drab uniform. Yet they possessed a certain kind of courage, needed it to withdraw from conventional humanity in the first place.

When that resolution was tested . . . Peroni checked himself. They were still women on their own, and Agata Graziano a defenceless sister, seemingly alone in a city where at least one ’Ndrangheta thug remained on the loose and looking to take her life.

Falcone bustled in. The inspector looked bright-eyed, full of vigour . . . and damned angry.

“What is this?” he demanded, ripping the sheet from the wall, staring at the words as if they were in a language he couldn’t understand. “Well?”

“Don’t ask me,” Peroni answered. He nodded at the two by his side. “Ask them.”

“I’ve been asking their kind all morning. All they do is stare back at me, smile sweetly, and say nothing. Well?”

The two women smiled at him, sweetly, and said not a word.

“Dammit! Where’s Costa?”

“He had a message,” Peroni replied, fully expecting the storm to break, and utterly without a care about its arrival. “Sister Agata passed it on through this lady here.”

Falcone asked tentatively, “And . . . ?”

“He’s gone. He didn’t say where. She—”

“I don’t know,” the older sister interrupted. “So please do not be unpleasant. You will only make yourself more choleric.”

Falcone’s eyebrows rose high on his bald, tanned forehead. The door opened and two uniformed officers walked in with four more women in long, flowing winter robes.

“Arrest no more nuns,” Falcone ordered. “Put that out on the radio, Prinzivalli.”

The sovrintendente nodded with a smile, made some remark about this being one of the more unusual orders he’d had to pass to the control room of late, and disappeared.

“Sister,” Falcone went on, standing in front of the woman who had delivered the message to Costa, “you must tell me where Agata Graziano is. Where our officer is too. I don’t understand what she’s doing, but it is a distraction, perhaps a dangerous one, in a case of the utmost seriousness. I cannot allow her to be dragged in any further. I regret bitterly that I allowed this involvement at all.”

The woman’s grey eyes lit up with surprise and anger. “You arranged it in the first place, Falcone.”

The inspector’s cheeks flushed. “You know my name?”

“Naturally. Sister Agata spoke to us at length last night. We broke our own rules. We were awake long past the due time.” She smiled at Peroni. “We know about you all. And more.” Her face became serious. “We know you have no case,
Ispettore
. This man . . . Malaspina. He has defeated you. He has money and the law on his side. He is one of those nasty, thuggish Renaissance knights Sister Agata told us of, a man who has”—to Peroni’s astonishment she stabbed Falcone in the chest with a long, hard finger—“bested you entirely. For all your power. All your”—this time her eyes flashed in Peroni’s direction—“men.”

“That is an interesting observation, Sister,” Falcone barked. “Now, where the hell are they?”

“You think God has nothing to do with justice?” the woman asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

“If he has,” Falcone answered immediately, “he’s been doing a damned poor job of it lately. If . . .”

The tall, lean figure in the slick grey suit went quiet. Peroni hummed a little tune and rocked on his heels. It was a remarkably stupid—and quite uncharacteristic—comment for such an intelligent man to make.

The long, bony finger poked at Falcone’s tie again.

“God works through us,” she said. “Or not, as may be the case.”

“Where are they?” he asked again.

She took his wrist and turned it so that she could see his watch. “All in good time.”

Then the woman took one step back and exchanged glances with the others there, all of whom had listened to this exchange in silence. She was, it seemed to Peroni, the senior among them, and they knew it.

“There is one thing,” she said with visible trepidation.

“What?” Falcone snapped, but not without some eagerness.

“Sister Agata told us your coffee isn’t like our coffee. From powder. In big urns. She said . . . your coffee was . . . different. May we try some? It is Christmas.”

Falcone closed his eyes for a moment then took out his wallet.

“The Questura coffee is not fit for animals,” he declared. “Take these women out of my sight, Agente. If you can find them somewhere that’s open, buy them whatever they want.”