A Season for the Dead

Seventeen

The phone rang just after he had served the old man breakfast: fresh fruit, orange juice straight from the squeezer, a cocktail of pills. His father watched him as he took the call.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said the moment Nic Costa put down the phone. “Bea will be here soon. I’m not helpless. I’ll survive.”

“Thanks.”

“What is it?”

The old man never asked about his work. This was a pact between them. Nic was surprised that was now changing.

“There’s been another death.”

“So what? Are you the only cop they’ve got?”

“It’s not that.” He was trying to clarify matters in his own head. “It’s connected somehow by the sound of it. Maybe we’ve jumped to conclusions about what happened in the Vatican. Maybe…” The old man’s tired eyes wouldn’t leave him. Marco Costa knew when something was badly wrong. “… it’s all a lot worse than we thought.”

“Tell me about it,” the old man ordered. “If you want. When you get back. Now…” He picked up a bread roll from the table. “You eat that in the car. No one can live off fruit alone. Not even you.”

Fifteen minutes later Nic Costa was parked outside the old, low church near the Colosseum, by the narrow road that led to the Lateran palace, the first St. Peter’s. This was a part of Rome he never really understood. The Colosseum was two minutes’ stroll away. The busy modern thoroughfare of Labicana set up a constant traffic roar to the north. A short walk would take him to the Rinaldis’ lonely apartment in the Via Mecenate. There were high, late nineteenth-century blocks towering over the narrow cobbled streets of the neighborhood. A few stalls made up the tiny street market that had probably worked here for ten centuries or more. It was a quiet, residential area, one that the tourists rarely visited. And within it lay such odd, unexpected sights: churches and squares that seemed to go back to a different city.

Sara Farnese would, he felt sure, know this area well, would be able to point out a wall here, a crypt there, and know its place in the Roman story. He felt lost, all the more so when he walked into the large, elegant courtyard that now bustled with people. The center was occupied by rows of simple seats, perhaps three hundred of them, pointed toward a low wooden stage. The floor was still littered with cheaply printed programs: Vivaldi and Corelli performed by a local semiprofessional orchestra. An open-air concert had taken place here the night before. That made the morning’s discovery even more odd.

At eight-fifteen an Irish Dominican named Bernard Cromarty, a senior member of the order that had administered San Clemente for almost three hundred and fifty years, had opened the doors to the chapel to prepare for the morning service. What he found there led him to run, terrified, from the dark, enclosed interior, out into the hardening morning light, screaming for help.

Costa studied the courtyard, noting how much had been left behind after the concert, took a deep breath and went inside. This was a grander, older church than the place on Tiber Island. It had a solemn, distinguished interior, with a quiet richness of decoration. The murmur of men’s voices sounded like the whispering of monks rebounding off the walls. In the center of the nave, flanked by two high, imposing pulpits, was an ancient choir leading up to a dimly lit altar, raised slightly above ground level. A group of recognizable figures was bent low around the far edge of the structure, studying something out of sight. Falcone stood upright, in expensive jeans, their neat crease visible even from this distance, and a too-white shirt. It was Sunday. Perhaps the inspector had been called away from a social engagement. He’d been married once but that had ended in divorce years ago. Now, the gossips had it, he played the field, in fancy company too.

The cold, bearded face was creased in concentration. Costa joined Luca Rossi by Falcone’s side. The focal point of this part of the church was supposed to be the small casket which lay at the base of the altar, beneath a canopy supported by delicate columns. Now another object stole their attention. In front of the coffin, surrounded by flickering candles which were almost spent, was the figure of a naked man. He lay on his side. His knees were drawn up as if crouching, his arms were extended and bent upward, with the hands placed together in an obvious position of prayer. His eyes were open, as was his mouth, giving him an expression of mute surprise, as if he had chanced upon something in the night, something that had stolen the life out of him.

His fair hair was wet and plastered to his skull. His face showed signs of a severe beating: livid dark bruises, a swollen eye and several open wounds. Around his neck was a thick nautical rope which was attached to a small, rusty anchor, of a size suitable for a pleasure dinghy, and now lying flat on the mosaic floor behind his back.

Teresa Lupo busied herself around the corpse. With minute care she placed a gloved finger in the mouth, leaned forward and sniffed. She wrinkled her nose and, very gingerly, took a slender arm and tried to move it.

“Well?” Falcone asked. Standing next to him was a priest, a severefaced man of seventy or more with a wild shock of white hair and sad gray eyes. He watched them guardedly, as if the church and everything inside it was his personal property.

“Brackish water,” the pathologist said. “The salt’s pretty strong. He wouldn’t smell like this if he’d been in the Tiber. Must be somewhere else. Somewhere estuarial. I’ll be able to tell you more once I’ve got him back to the office.”

Falcone stared down at the dead man’s face. “How long?”

“Several hours,” she replied. “There’s obvious rigor. He must have been placed here in the evening or early this morning.”

Rossi stared gloomily at the corpse. “How was that possible, Father? I thought there was a concert here last night. How could a dead man be brought into this place?”

“There was a concert,” the priest answered, warming to the unexpected politeness in Rossi’s question. “Every last seat was sold. I was here myself until one in the morning, helping to clear up.”

“Then how?” Falcone demanded.

The priest shook his head and stared at the stone floor. Costa nodded toward the sunlight behind them in the open courtyard. Something large, shiny and black leaned against the far wall. “What’s that doing there?” he asked. “Why would a musician leave an instrument behind?”

Rossi walked out into the daylight, heaved the double bass case carefully under his arm, not touching the handle. From the way he carried it the thing weighed very little. He returned to the nave and placed it on the stone floor. Falcone bent down, took a nail file out from a leather case and gingerly worked his way around the perimeter, flipping up the clasps. When he was done he threw open the lid. The case was empty. The cheap red velvet lining was soaked with water. It had a sour, salty smell.

“I still don’t see,” Falcone exclaimed. “He couldn’t have moved a naked body when you people were clearing up. And afterward the church would be locked surely.”

“Of course,” the old priest agreed. “There are many valuable items in here.”

“Cameras?” Costa asked hopefully. The priest shook his head.

Teresa Lupo waved to her men at the door to come and retrieve the body. The interior echoed to the squealing of the gurney’s wheels. She came and stood next to Rossi, staring at the empty well for the double bass.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well what?” Falcone demanded testily.

“Is no one going to ask me how he died?”

The detectives looked at each other. It had seemed so obvious. “Poor bastard was beaten up, wasn’t he?” Rossi asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I don’t think that killed him, though. I could be wrong. Ask me again after the autopsy.” She took off the plastic gloves and smiled at Rossi and Costa. “You guys are quite something, you know. I just don’t get this quality of material from anyone else.”

“Meaning?” Falcone thundered.

“He was drowned,” Teresa Lupo said. “Forcibly, in shallow water, maybe less than a yard, which would explain the amount of muddy material in his mouth. I’ll be able to be quite precise with that, I think. The combination of salt water and mud… It can’t be hard to track down where it came from. He was drowned and then, for some reason, the anchor was placed around his neck after he was put on the floor there, after the candles were lit. It couldn’t have been any other way because that thing isn’t heavy enough to hold down a man and the length of rope is too great to have been of any use in the sort of depth I’m talking about. That’s just symbolic somehow. Part of the picture we’re supposed to be appreciating.”

Costa couldn’t take his eyes off the priest. The old man’s eyes were closed. He had crossed himself and was now quietly saying a prayer.

“Father?” he asked, when the man was done.

“What is it?” the priest replied grumpily.

Costa waved at the interior of the church. “There are anchors here already. Carved into the columns. In the paintings on the walls. What does it mean?”

“And none of you can even begin to guess at that?” the old priest asked sourly. “Is that what it’s come to?”

Falcone eyed him unpleasantly. “If you have some information that could help us, Father…”

The old man tut-tutted. “So many professional people. So little knowledge. This is the church of San Clemente. The fourth pope of Rome.” He pointed to the tomb beneath the altar, beyond the naked body surrounded by the guttering candles. “His remains lie there, as they have done for almost two millennia. Do you know nothing? San Clemente was martyred by drowning. He was found with an anchor around his neck.”

The man waved at the corpse on the mosaic floor, a controlled fury in his face. “This… abomination is a deliberate, a direct insult to his memory. The work of a madman.”

Nic Costa wondered at that. If it were a madman, it was one with a very precise theological knowledge. And, more, there was something almost akin to reverence in the violence too.

“Have you any idea who the dead man is?” Falcone asked.

“None,” the priest grunted. Luca Rossi shrugged his broad, stooped shoulders. The others in the police team looked just as blank.

Falcone’s fierce gaze turned on Costa. “We’re not moving a damned thing. Call her. Bring her down here. Do it yourself if necessary.”

“What?”

“The Farnese woman. I want her to see this. Before anything is moved. I want to know if she recognizes him. I want to know what she…thinks.”

“Sir…” Nic objected and hunted in vain for the words. What Falcone said made sense. She would have to be shown a picture of the dead man. There were too many coincidences here. Still, there were easier, less painful ways of achieving these ends. There was, it seemed to him, no practical reason to drag Sara Farnese into this grim scene.

“Why don’t I just bring her to the morgue? What difference does it make?”

“You heard,” Falcone said tersely, walking out to the courtyard, reaching for his phone.

Then he was gone and there was just Luca Rossi staring into Costa’s eyes, looking shifty. “We fouled up, didn’t we?” he asked. “We just leapt right in and thought what somebody wanted us to think.”

It was all there, Costa thought. Just waiting for them in that stinking death-filled room on Tiber Island. I met a man with seven wives…

“I guess so.”

He found it hard to shake off the thought that Rossi had been expecting this all along.

“You know what?” the big man said. “We keep thinking we’re looking for facts. And that’s only half the job. The other half is looking for lies, seeing them for what they are.”

“I’ll do this on my own,” Costa said. “Tell Falcone to give me thirty minutes.”

Then he was out of the door, feeling the August heat starting to fall from the sky, wondering what he was going to tell her.