The Garden of Evil (38 page)

Six

I
T WAS BITTERLY COLD INSIDE WHATEVER REMOTE, DESERTED
wing of Franco Malaspina’s palace now enclosed them. They walked in single file down a long, straight, narrow corridor, then came directly to a plain grey wall, windowless, nothing but old stone and mortar.

“This must be the rear wall of the palace proper,” she whispered. “That was how they built in those days. The master’s part would be erected on its own. The rest—the quarters in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, everything that wasn’t integral to the palace itself—would be added later. We must be in some kind of access corridor between the buildings. It’s—”

“Quiet,” he whispered, placing a finger to his lips.

Agata stopped speaking instantly. Her eyes, whiter than usual in the bright, unforgiving beam of the flashlight, betrayed her fear.

She can hear it too, Costa thought.

Footsteps. Heavy and echoing, with a loud, insistent rhythm.

He flashed the beam around both sides of the junction. They were trapped in a slender stone vein deep within the bulky mass of the palace. The sound danced around them deceptively. There was nowhere to hide, no easy way to discern the source.

Before he could think this through, Agata tugged on his arm and then did something so strange, yet so obvious.

She placed one hand on her left ear, then one on her right, dividing the echo from its origin, measuring which was stronger. Quickly, decisively, she pointed to the left. Then she arced her arm over to indicate the opposite direction.

Costa looked behind her, at the corridor they had already traversed. A way back to freedom. She cast him one brief, withering look, then snatched the flashlight from his fingers and was moving, down the right-hand side, in the lead, brushing vigorously through thick grey cobwebs with her arms, away from whoever was on their trail, or so she hoped.

He kept pace behind, continually glancing backwards, seeing nothing. There were no alternatives, no other route to follow, and very soon they found themselves in another constricted stone channel, this time wide enough only for a single human body, one that curved with a regular, geometric precision, as if tracing a circular room beyond the wall. He had no idea what the interior plan of the Palazzo Malaspina looked like. Costa had only seen the first public rooms, which covered a tiny proportion of the total site. Great Roman palaces often contained many surprises: private chapels, baths, even a secret place for alchemical experiments, like the private casino of the Villa Ludovisi, where Caravaggio had painted for Cardinal Del Monte. It was impossible to judge in which direction they were headed, impossible to see anything except the grimy walls of uniform stones laid almost five centuries before.

The other sound quickened, became louder, and was now identifiably behind them. And closer.

Costa caught up with Agata, felt for his gun to make sure it was safe to hand, and found himself brushing against her, accidentally, inevitably, before realising why.

The corridor was narrowing. In the space of a few steps it became so slender his shoulders rubbed against the walls as they moved, half running. Then the change in dimensions stopped. It would, he thought, stay this way for a while. He caught her arm, stopped her, and mouthed,
Go ahead
.

Her sharp eyes flared with anger and she whispered, “No!”

All the same, when she resumed her pace he managed to drop behind, just a little, enough to stay inside the penumbra of the flashlight beam that was trapped like them in this confined, enclosing space.

Whoever was following was near. He was sure of that.

Costa took out his gun, held it tight, trying to work out some strategy. He blundered on in the semidarkness, weapon in hand, wondering what the possibilities were in the belly of this stone leviathan, where the chances of anything—a scream, a forlorn message on the police radio—reaching the world outside were infinitesimal.

No easy answers came. None at all. Then, abruptly, with a force that made him apologise automatically, he found himself barging into her small, taut body, which was locked in an upright position, hard against stone.

She had stopped. Her breathing was so rapid and so shallow he felt he could hear and feel every gasp she made. The corridor had come to a dead end. It led nowhere, which seemed impossible. The only way was back.

“Stay still,” he murmured.

She wasn’t listening. She was turned to one side, as stationary as the stone that trapped them, and when his eyes adjusted to what he now realised was a new kind of light, he understood why.

The corridor ended in a bare stone wall, but down one side stood a long, musty drape that flapped into his face as the hand she had wrapped tightly in its folds began to shake. This was an entrance into another room, one that, as he began to look, was huge: a circular chamber, bathed, incredibly, in light so bright that even this side view made his head hurt.

In the centre, beneath a domed glass roof that let in the piercing rays of a low winter sun, stood the painting.
Evathia in Ekstasis.
It shone under the incandescent illumination pouring down from above, the central fleshy figure, frozen in Caravaggio’s pigment, seemingly alive, energised, almost exultant, as she opened her throat to release that primal scream.

In front was a couch, a chaise longue much like the one they had found in the squalid studio of the Vicolo del Divino Amore. On it Franco Malaspina, still in a business suit, his trousers hitched halfway down, heaved and groaned over a naked African woman, her skin the colour of damp coal, her eyes wild with terror.

Malaspina’s long, strong body strained over her. They could hear his panting, whimpering, grunting, and the obvious desperation behind the pained sighs. When Costa looked more closely, he could see the man’s eyes flickering between the floor and the figure in the painting, never to the woman beneath him.

“Sweet Jesus,” Agata moaned. “What’s wrong, Nic?”

He didn’t answer. He was thinking of the footsteps behind. Or trying to.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded. Then, when he remained silent, she answered her own question. “Even with the painting he finds no . . . gratification. That’s it, isn’t it? Even now?”

They were watching the man who had murdered Costa’s wife struggling to reach some kind of satisfaction with another woman snatched from the street, another pawn in his desperate, pitiless manoeuvres.

Agata shook her head. Her face seemed full of self-doubt, self-hatred even.

“We have to get out of here,” he insisted, casting a glance through the small gap created by the portion of curtain she was holding.

As they looked on, Malaspina let out a long, pained bellow of misery, then stood up from the couch, clutching his trousers to himself, refastening them. Costa’s fingers tightened on the gun, but the woman was quick. While Malaspina remained absorbed in his own misery, scarcely noticing her presence, she fled, as many must have done before, scampering from him in fright, snatching some clothes off the floor, and then leaving, Costa noticed, by an open door that lay almost exactly opposite from where they now stood.

It was an opportunity. If the two of them could escape alive, he’d be happy, he thought, and wondered how many ’Ndrangheta men Malaspina had in his service. One was dead already. If luck was on their side, perhaps that left no more than a single hired thug to guard the Palazzo Malaspina on this quiet, lazy day after Christmas.

“I pity him,” Agata murmured, taken aback by her own surprise. “I . . .”

He heard the metallic sound echo down the corridor and recognised immediately what it was. The checking of a magazine. One last prerequisite before violence.

“Get out! Get down!” Costa ordered, pushing her rapidly, roughly, through the drape, into the sea of light beyond and, he knew, the presence of Franco Malaspina.

A deafening burst of automatic fire burst deep within the stone vein back along the route they had stumbled. Sparks flew off the walls around him. Costa rolled forward to follow Agata, loosing off a wild succession of shots back into the gloom as he fell.

Seven

G
IANNI PERONI SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF A WHITE
Fiat van bearing the name of a drain-clearing company on the side. It was parked a hundred metres from the main entrance to the Palazzo Malaspina. The place looked dead. The double doors at the top of the front staircase were closed. Not a soul had come or gone in the twenty minutes since they’d arrived. The four other officers with him—men he didn’t know, men who were deeply unhappy about having their holiday leave interrupted and didn’t seem too keen to accept his assumed authority over them—were starting to grumble the ways cops did when boredom took hold.

“I sat outside some place on the Gianicolo for four days once,” the one behind the wheel, a skinny, tall individual with a Florentine accent, complained. “Turned out it was the wrong house. Belonged to a big—and I mean
big
—woman opera singer and we thought we were staking out the capo of some Sicilian family. Four days. You take that with you to the grave.”

“Did you hear her sing?” asked a voice from behind.

“Yes. . . .” The driver answered in a petulant whine.

“So why didn’t you check?” another one demanded. “I mean . . . a capo doesn’t normally have opera singers around, does he?”

“Hindsight,” the driver moaned. “Every smart-ass I ever met has it running through his veins.”

“It’s a fair question,” another voice from the back piped up.

“We checked! It was someone else’s fault.”

“It usually is,” Peroni observed. “May I make a request, gentlemen?”

They went quiet and listened.

“Shut up and watch, will you?”

“Watch what?” the driver asked. “And why? You’re just an agente now, Peroni. You’re not the boss.”

Gianni Peroni muttered something obscene under his breath, then caught the dark figure in the distance, slowly making her way down the cobbled street towards the palazzo.

“Watch that,” he ordered.

And they did.

IT WAS A NUN—OR A SISTER, PERONI HAD NO WAY OF TELLING
which—on the oldest motorcycle he had ever seen, one that belonged in a museum, not on the road, since it was probably illegal: rust everywhere, bald tires, a cracked exhaust that, even from this distance, sounded like a flatulent pigeon recovering from the night before.

“What the hell is this?” wondered a puzzled voice from the back.

“Watch,” Peroni ordered again.

She made her way slowly down the street. Then, outside the palazzo, she stopped. The woman wore black flowing robes, so long and billowing he wondered whether they might catch in the spokes.

If she’d ridden a two-wheeled vehicle before, she didn’t show much sign of it. She was perhaps sixty, tall, skinny, awkward. A bright red cyclist’s helmet sat over the black and white headgear he had come to associate with the uniform of a nun in Rome.

“It’s Evel Knievel’s grandma,” the driver joked, and the rest of them snickered, until they caught sight of the displeasure on Peroni’s ugly face.

The woman struggled to flip down the stand, got there eventually, then dismounted. After that she reached into the flapping folds of her robe and withdrew a large kitchen knife.

They watched as the woman looked around to check no one was watching, then bent down and started stabbing at the front tire with the kitchen knife. It deflated in a matter of seconds; the wall must have been paper thin.

After that she walked up the broad, semicircular stone staircase of the Palazzo Malaspina, found the bell by the shining wooden double doors, put her finger on the button, and kept it there.

“Next time I go undercover, I go as a nun,” one of the voices behind muttered, and there was more than a modicum of admiration in it too.

Finally the door swung open. Peroni squinted to get a good look at the man there. He was relieved by what he saw. Sister Knievel might have pulled one of Malaspina’s ’Ndrangheta thugs. Instead she got a flunky, a tired-looking middle-aged individual of less than average height, one who didn’t look too smart and had probably been called away from cleaning the silver.

He didn’t seem much interested in helping a stray sister whose ancient motorbike had developed a flat tire. The way the woman was talking at him, she plainly meant to ensure he didn’t have much choice. At one point she took hold of the collar of his white cotton servant’s jacket and dragged him out onto the steps. Peroni watched, impressed. He could almost hear the conversation.

Sir, I am in a hurry for mass. I am only a nun. You must help.

Yes, but . . .

SIR!

Reluctantly, with a very Roman shrug of his hunched shoulders, the servant gave in and walked down the broad steps, followed her to the rusty machine, bent down, and started looking at the flat. Naturally, he left the door ajar. This was a rich man’s residence. No one expected opportunistic thieves. Nor could the servant see what the woman was doing as she stood over him—namely, beckoning to someone around the corner, half hidden at the top of the street.

The five police officers in the drain-clearing van watched what happened next in total silence. Peroni couldn’t even find the space in his head to raise a laugh. It was so . . . extraordinary. And also so obvious. What the police needed, they clearly knew, was an excuse to enter the Palazzo Malaspina. They had spent weeks trying to find that through myriad means: forensic and scientific investigation, detective work, and an exploration of Franco Malaspina’s ancestry.

They hadn’t counted on the cunning of a bunch of scheming nuns who, doubtless under Agata Graziano’s tuition, had spent the night preparing to penetrate Malaspina’s fortress in a way no law enforcement officer could possibly have imagined, let alone entertained. They would bring in the police by the very simplest of expedients: committing the small crime of trespass themselves.

They flooded round the corner, an entire flock, black wings flapping, running with the short, straitened gait their robes forced on them. Perhaps twenty. Perhaps more. A giggling, excited mass of sisterhood raced down the street and poured onto the steps of the Palazzo Malaspina, scampering upwards, to the door, not stopping to heed the cries of the servant, who was no longer staring at the flat tire on the crippled motorbike because its owner had swiftly departed to join her fellows, leading them exactly where Peroni expected.

Through both doors, now the intruders had thrown the second one open, the black tide flooded happily into the interior of the Palazzo Malaspina, as if this were some schoolgirl jape, the most amusing event to have occurred in their quiet, enclosed lives for years.

Peroni gave each of the men a look that said
Stay here
.

Then he slid out of the passenger door and strode down the street.

The servant was starting to flap and squawk, his pasty face red with outrage, lost for words, unsure what to do. He looked scared too. Peroni didn’t need much imagination to guess that Franco Malaspina wasn’t the nicest of bosses.

The man didn’t take a single step towards the black mass of figures pushing into the palace on the steps above either. Peroni understood why. They seemed a little scary too.

“Sir,” Peroni said, pulling out his police ID card, “I’m from the Questura. Is there a problem?”

“A problem?” the man squawked. “What the hell do you think?”

Peroni glanced at the pool of women. It was diminishing. Most of them were in the palace by now. He could see their silhouettes moving alongside the windows on both sides of the entrance as they ran in all directions.

“You know,” Peroni observed, “this has been a bad day for nuns. It’s shocking.”

“What the . . . ?”

“This is why you pay for a police force. To create order from chaos. To save ordinary citizens from. . .” He glanced at the steps. The last black-clad figure was struggling through the doors. “. . . the unexpected.”

“Oh, crap,” the man moaned. “Malaspina will go crazy.”

Peroni leaned down and put on his most sympathetic face.

“Would you like me to go inside and deal with this for you?” he asked in a noncommittal fashion. “Discreetly of course.”

“Yes . . . but . . .
but . . .
”

Peroni wasn’t listening. He had what he wanted: a legitimate invitation to enter the Palazzo Malaspina, one prompted by a bunch of nuns and sisters who would surely impress any court.

He turned and beckoned to the men in the van. Four burly police officers jumped out, looking ready and eager for action.

The servant groaned, put his hands to his head, and started to mumble a low series of obscene curses.

“You can leave it to us now,” Peroni shouted cheerfully down the street as he walked towards the staircase, wondering what a private Roman palace looked like from the inside, and where on earth, within its many rambling corridors, he might find Nic Costa and Agata Graziano.

He paused on the threshold. This really was not his kind of place. Then, out of politeness more than anything—since he had no intention of waiting—he placed a call to Falcone, explaining, in one sentence, what had happened.

There was a silence, pregnant with excitement.

“We’re in, Leo, and I am not leaving until I have them,” Peroni added, walking through the door, almost blinded by the expanse of shining marble that glittered at him from every direction. “Send me all the troops you have.”