City of Fear

24

They were passing Civitavecchia when Falcone called with the lead. Costa turned off the radio to take it. Aldo Bartoli, the brother of the dead carabiniere, was still at work, Falcone told him. Aldo was unwilling to discuss the case with a stranger over the phone, but agreeable to a personal approach on the understanding that his name would not be attached to any report.

So they kept driving, past Tarquinia, a solitary town in the Etruscan foothills to their right as they followed the coast road. Mirko Oliva was at the wheel, talking of his childhood holidays when his family swapped urban Turin for Monte Argentario, the rocky peninsula where Porto Ercole lay. The mood changed as every passing minute took them farther from Rome. The young officer was a good conversationalist, happily chatting about the fishing, the swimming, the hiking. The radio stayed off. It was against the rules. But so was sneaking into Tuscany without authority.

Rosa sat in the back, asking questions from time to time, laughing. Costa watched the countryside slip past and the landscape become ever more bleak and bare as they entered the flatlands of the Maremma. He couldn’t get their destination out of his head. Porto Ercole was where Caravaggio died a pauper in a charity hospital. For years he’d thought of it as a harsh, cold coastal hamlet, unwelcoming toward visitors, neglectful of strangers who arrived sick and penniless. Then they crossed the causeway that linked the mainland to Monte Argentario and found themselves on a narrow road winding through lush green countryside, Mirko still talking about holidays and his childhood. And Nic Costa began to realize how foolish it was to judge a place by its history alone.

The Guardia Costiera building was a pink-washed villa on the sleepy, picturesque harbor front. It looked more like a home than an outpost of the law enforcement agency tasked with surveillance of the port and the Tyrrhenian Sea beyond. The national flag fluttered red, white, and green by the steps at the entrance. There was the sound of a television from behind shuttered windows thrown open to the breeze. Rich yachts filled the tiny port. Luxurious homes dotted the surrounding hills. Mirko Oliva said that his father’s old place just outside town, little more than a country cottage, was now worth more than one million euros, and would probably wind up in the hands of some rich financier from Milan. This was not the bitter, poor outpost of a shattered Italy that had turned its back on a stricken Caravaggio, leaving him to a beggar’s death and an unmarked grave. Times had changed.

They walked into the coast guard post and found that Aldo Bartoli was the only officer there. He was sitting beneath an old-fashioned ceiling fan in front of a small TV, watching the news, sucking on a cigarette, a thin, wiry man in early middle age, with close-cropped silver hair, a mournful face, and a downturned, immobile mouth that didn’t look as if it often broke into a smile. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed, like those of someone who drank too much.

He listened to their introductions and then stated, without emotion, “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Costa asked.

“There’s been a bomb. In Rome.” Bartoli thrust a hand at the TV. A reporter was standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. It appeared to be awash with blood, more than was physically possible, even in the most vicious of blasts.

“No one dead,” Bartoli told them. “It’s a miracle. They shot the terrorist. That’s something, anyway. Maybe there are more bombs in the city. Poison in the water supply. God, am I glad to be out of all that crap!”

“Excuse me,” Costa apologized, then stepped outside to call Rome.

It was a brief conversation; an unwelcome one, judging by Falcone’s testy response.

“You can’t get back here, Nic. They’ve closed every route in and out. Make arrangements to stay in a hotel somewhere. Do some digging. Ask this Bartoli where you should start. Take a look around Tarquinia.”

Costa watched a palatial yacht edging across the peaceful harbor. It was impossible to imagine that, little more than ninety minutes away, Italy’s capital was paralyzed by chaos, waiting for the next outrage. He wanted to be there.

“What good are we here? We can make it back. I know roads—”

“There’s nothing for you to do here. Don’t you understand?”

He could see Rosa and Mirko Oliva seated next to the dour-faced Guardia Costiera officer, silent, watching the newscast.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

He was sure he heard Falcone utter a short, grim laugh.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘bad.’ You can’t move anywhere, except on foot, and that’s not easy. The city council has warned everyone to drink nothing but bottled water until they know the public mains are free of contamination. Whatever this device was, they planted it in the domestic supply. There may be others. So there’s panic in the shops. For bottled water and food. Most people won’t be able to get home from work for hours.”

“It feels wrong we’re not there, Leo.”

“There are a million people — ours, the Carabinieri, Palombo’s secret-service agents — tripping over each other here. They don’t need three more bodies in the way.”

“What was it?”

“Some kind of explosive device hidden inside the Trevi Fountain. A small bomb and a lot of red dye. It’s almost as if they didn’t want to kill anyone. As if it was some kind of a prank. There’s a handful of models and photographers in the hospital with minor injuries. This was for show, not to kill. The only fatality is the terrorist. The news says some unmarked officers saw him planting the thing on CCTV. There was some kind of confrontation near the Via Condotti. He was shot dead by two agents.”

“Ours?”

“No. We knew nothing about it until the bomb went off. Palombo’s people, I guess. I talked to Esposito. He’s no more in the picture than we are. There’s been an unconfirmed email claiming responsibility. It says this is just the beginning. We have to work on the assumption the dead man planted several devices. Esposito’s sent out everyone he can lay hands on. They’re searching everywhere. Every tourist site. Every station. Every bus and train. Let’s leave them to it.”

Costa tried to picture his native city brought to its knees.

“Who’s claiming responsibility?” he asked.

“The email went straight to the president’s office. They haven’t released that detail yet. Nic … there are aspects of this case that are beginning to trouble me. Please. Take care. See what Bartoli can tell you. Pass on anything you find immediately, and do nothing else. We’re not entirely masters of our own fate at the moment. I don’t want you thinking we can try to track down these people. That was never our brief. Just try to find some facts.”

“And then?”

“Then Commissario Esposito calls the president and asks him what to do next. If we get that far. We’re a handful of officers up against … what? I’ve no idea, and neither do you.”

There were some questions the inspector wanted answered. A second warning not to try to return to Rome. Then Falcone hung up.

Aldo Bartoli sat grim-faced and immobile in the office, watching what was happening in Rome, Rosa and Mirko by his side. From the apartments nearby, Costa could hear the racket of TV sets, tuned to the same terrible news. It was a scene he knew was being repeated everywhere throughout Italy. Perhaps the world. This was what Petrakis had sought in the first place, twenty years ago: attention, fear, to instill some deep, haunting doubt in the nation about what the remains of the day might bring. Back then he had failed in everything except the murder of two young Americans. Now he was making amends. This bloody act, a foretaste — it seemed to say — of what was to come, had attracted an audience of millions, brought together by the same sense of terror.

“Jesus!” Bartoli’s outraged voice broke through his thoughts with a stream of florid curses. Costa strode back into the office. There was a new picture on the screen: a shaky video, the kind taken using a cell phone. He watched as the familiar statues at the Trevi Fountain disappeared in a storm of rubble and dust, and a livid red spume of liquid burst out from the cloud, soaking the cowering, screaming crowd in fake blood.

“The bastards handed out that thing themselves,” Bartoli exclaimed. “They put it on the Internet, as if it was some kid’s video.”

“Who?” Costa asked. “Did they use a name?”

Bartoli glowered at him. “You know who. That’s why you’re here.”

He turned up the volume. The announcer was speaking rapidly, blurring his words with an unprofessional haste. A caption ran across the bottom of the TV, looping over and over.

The president’s office has announced that the terrorist group known as the Blue Demon has claimed responsibility, and say this is the first act of many.…

Familiar images filled the screen: of a young Andrea Petrakis, the corpses in the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia, the bloodied shack near Tarquinia where the three students died, alongside a member of the Carabinieri.

“So they really are back,” Bartoli said. He looked at his watch. “I need a beer. And you”—he nodded at the three of them—“will not believe a word I’m about to tell you.”

25

“My brother was an infant,” Aldo Bartoli insisted. “A child. Why do you think I joined the Carabinieri in the first place? To look after the young idiot. I did a good job too. Until those bastards from the city turned up.”

They sat in a cafe by the harbor. The TV in the corner was locked to the news. A small group of locals sat around it, watching in silence. Costa couldn’t take his mind off Rome. He ached to be there, to do something useful, that had meaning.

Bartoli’s younger brother, Lorenzo, was alone on duty the day of the trip to the shack near Tarquinia. The visiting officers, Ettore Rufo and Beppe Cattaneo, only stopped by the town Carabinieri headquarters to ask for directions. Aldo Bartoli was sure the officers hadn’t wanted his brother along.

“The kid was like that. A pest. He wanted to be a part of everything. He would never have let them go there alone. He phoned me. It was my day off. He said some big guys from the city had turned up looking serious. They had weapons. Not the usual kind, he said. They wanted directions to some shack belonging to the Petrakis family. Lorenzo said he’d show them. That was the only way.”

Bartoli nursed his beer, his eyes misty, his face full of grief. “That was the last time I ever spoke to him. Next thing I knew, there was a call telling me my brother was dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.

“Yeah. Well …” Bartoli called for grappa. “He should never have been there. He was useless. Couldn’t even shoot straight. Couldn’t think straight. If I’d been on duty …”

“Wait.” Costa was trying to get the sequence of events straight in his head. “According to the files, Rufo and Cattaneo came to the local station after they’d found Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis dead.”

The man looked incredulous. “Says who?”

“The files.”

Bartoli shook his head. “Even Lorenzo would have called for help if that had happened. The way I heard it, those guys were just asking directions.”

“When did you know the parents were dead?” Costa asked.

“Afterwards, I guess. It all got complicated. All these people turned up from Rome. All I could think about was my brother.” He stared at Costa. “It kind of happened all at the same time.”

“Tell us about them,” Mirko suggested. “The Petrakis family.”

The coastguardsman squirmed on his seat, looking uncomfortable. “No one liked that pair. They never did a stroke of real work that I could see. Had enough money to keep a little plane down at Civitavecchia, though. The kid liked to fly it. Used to buzz the town sometimes. Flying low. Thought it was some kind of joke. I had words with him. With them. They laughed in my face … didn’t give a damn.”

“Did you have any idea they might be involved in terrorism?” Costa asked.

Bartoli shook his head. “Course not. I would have reported them. I kept my eye on them, though. They were always going places they weren’t welcome. Those tombs. The scary place they found the Blue Demon. They had a thing about all that stuff. The museum people got nervous once or twice and called me. The Petrakis kid thought he knew everything.”

“How did he get on with his parents?” Rosa asked.

The man shrugged. “Fine, as far as I could see. The son was probably the only person they didn’t argue with. Everyone else — us. The police.” He hesitated. “Look. Afterwards, when they told us what had gone on in Rome …” Bartoli scratched his gray head. “It never made sense to people. Why would someone name themselves after some painting in a tomb somewhere? All that Etruscan stuff is history.”

“Not to Andrea Petrakis,” Rosa said.

“Then he’s crazy.”

“Where did Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis get their money?” Costa asked.

Bartoli grimaced. “I asked myself that question a lot. Before all this happened. Every time I tried to get permission to get serious with the Petrakises, someone on high told me to mind my own business. I wondered if it had to do with drugs. There was talk about that in the town. People in Rome were watching them. I was beginning to wonder if maybe they were informers. And then they were dead. Killed by their own son, supposedly.”

He slammed his glass hard on the table. Alcohol spilled over his shaking hand. The barman walked over without being asked and placed another grappa on the table. He knew Aldo Bartoli, knew what he needed.

“Why am I wasting my time telling you all this? I told the big people who came up from Rome after Lorenzo got killed. When they buried my poor, stupid brother … I told them then something wasn’t right. When they didn’t listen, I went to the police. When you kicked me out, I tried to tell the newspapers, until someone got hold of the reporters and whispered in their ears that Aldo Bartoli was a little soft in the head.”

He downed the drink in one shot.

“I don’t think I ever saw my mother smile again after that day. She went to her grave and my old man drank himself to death. So I got the hell out of there, found myself a job watching rich people bump their yachts into each other, sticking tickets on them for bringing in too many cigarettes from time to time. This story’s dead. As dead as my brother. You can’t do a damn thing to change that.”

Costa looked at his watch. It was close to five. There would still be people around in Tarquinia they could talk to.

“So what do you think?” Aldo Bartoli demanded. “Does it sound like I’m a lunatic?”

“We need facts …” Costa began.

“Facts. I saw the parents’ bodies in the morgue,” Bartoli snapped. “They’d been dead a week, maybe more. Andrea was living in Rome. He didn’t come home at all during that time, not as far as I could see. Why kill them? What was his motive? He didn’t look like the most loving son around. He didn’t look like he wanted them dead, either.” Bartoli grinned. He looked a little drunk. “Maybe the Carabinieri were just cleaning up the statistics, huh? Dumping the deaths of the parents at the kid’s door so they didn’t have to report it as one more unsolved crime?”

Rosa Prabakaran brushed away a strand of long brown hair from her dark, thoughtful face and said, “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Bullshit,” Bartoli mumbled. His eyes looked redder, mistier. “There’s something else you should know. This is the one where you start to know I’m crazy.”

“Try me,” Costa suggested.

“They didn’t want us to see Lorenzo when he was dead. The big men in the Carabinieri said it was a bad sight. Not for a mother or a father. Mine being the nice, trusting people they were, they believed that too.”

Aldo Bartoli was beginning to enjoy this, Costa realized, as if he had something to say that had been waiting for years.

“Being a country carabiniere, I’d gotten used to dead bodies. Usually in pieces inside a car stinking of drink, smashed up against a tree or a wall. I wanted to see my brother before they buried him. Whatever he looked like. A friend of mine worked in the morgue. He got me in when no one was looking. Five minutes. Was enough.”

Someone at the bar was getting bad-tempered. The TV news went off. It was as if no one wanted to see any more.

“The story,” Bartoli continued, “was that Lorenzo and those two carabinieri from Rome were walking up the front path of this crappy shack of the Petrakises when the kids inside opened fire. Lorenzo was hit straightaway. The other two got lucky. They fought back, and by the time they got to the shack, the kids inside had killed themselves.” He raised a long, skinny finger. “One problem. Lorenzo didn’t look bad at all. I’d seen much worse out on the roads on a Saturday night. He had just one bullet wound.…” Aldo Bartoli swiveled his head and indicated the nape of his neck. “Close up, from what I could make out. Here. In the back. The way the mob used to execute people. Which is odd, when you come to think of it, since he was walking forward at the time. Those university kids must have been real clever to have killed him like that.” The coast guard officer pushed back his beer.

“A cynical man might have thought those students didn’t kill him at all. Those two carabinieri from Rome did, and then went on and murdered those kids, which is what they came for in the first place.”

“Why would they do that, Aldo?” Costa asked him.

“I’ve no idea. But I talked to someone who said they’d seen those two before. A week or so earlier. Around the time the Petrakises got shot. How’s that for a coincidence? If those two guys were good at murdering my brother, maybe they were good at murdering those Greeks too. Nothing to do with Andrea Petrakis. He just got the blame, because someone decided that was what was going to happen.”

Costa shook his head and was silent.

Aldo Bartoli blinked. “And you know another odd thing? A few years later they found one of those carabinieri—Cattaneo, I think his name was — shot dead. Bullet through the back of the skull, though for some reason this one came out a little messier than it did with Lorenzo.” He grinned. “They never did find out who did that. I guess it’s like my kid brother. There’s no knowing now, is there? I’d like to ask the other guy. Rufo’s his name. Except I never managed to find him to talk to, not that I haven’t tried. If you get lucky there …”

Costa glanced at the two young officers with him. Both looked glassy-eyed, a little shaken.

“I need names in Tarquinia,” he told Bartoli.

“I don’t know any worth talking to.” He leaned forward. Costa could smell the strong spirit on his breath. “Did you understand what I just told you?”

“I think so,” Costa replied, getting up and throwing some money on the table for the drinks.

26

They spent an hour in Tarquinia, trying to find someone who would talk. In the local police offices, in the Carabinieri station, the council. It was as if they were intruders at a funeral. No one had time for anything except the events in Rome. An uneasy silence grew among the three of them. Costa was still hoping he would be able to sneak back to the city late that evening, after dark, when the roads might be more manageable. The younger officers had their doubts. Rosa had called a local hotel and booked three rooms as a precaution. Mirko Oliva was making noises about food. They recognized a wasted trip when they saw one, understood instinctively when it was time to take a break and hope the following day would be more promising.

Costa insisted on one final visit, out to the tourist tombs on the edge of town. They found only a couple of women closing the site for the day, one tall and surly, one dumpy and pleasant, shooing out the last straggle of visitors. Costa left Rosa and Oliva talking to the pair, found a quiet corner, and took out the cell phone that Dario Sordi had given him.

It seemed to take forever for someone to answer. It didn’t sound like Sordi’s voice, and there was no name.

“Who are you?” Costa asked.

“The president told you I’d answer this call, Sovrintendente. Ranieri of the Corazzieri. You remember? The man who found that microphone in your house last night.”

Dario Sordi’s visit seemed an age away.

“Can I speak with him?”

A pained sigh briefly filled the earpiece. “The president is with his guests, welcoming them to Italy. If one can call it that, in the circumstances. I doubt he would appreciate the interruption. On a day like this …”

“I’m sorry. I’m not in Rome.”

“Oh … where?”

“I’m in Tarquinia.”

“Indeed.” Ranieri didn’t sound surprised.

“Do you know the area?” Costa asked.

“Only as a place in the distance from the road when we drive north to see my wife’s parents in Livorno. It looks beautiful. Is your visit proving … educational?”

“Not very.”

“Perhaps you would like me to pass on a message?”

Costa couldn’t think of one. He wasn’t really sure why he had called.

“Where were you twenty years ago?” he asked the Corazzieri officer.

There was a lengthy pause before Ranieri replied.

“The NATO offices in Brussels. Military liaison. A cold place, but the food could be quite good if you knew where to eat. I missed the Blue Demon episode, I’m afraid. Those years …” Ranieri’s voice sounded hesitant, almost guilty. “I was scarcely in Italy at all. Reading about what happened in the papers — it was as if it was a different country. One I would prefer not to meet again.”

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No,” the man said emphatically. “You were told to call when it was necessary. I will tell him you will get in touch some other time. If you make it after nine-thirty tonight, then the formal proceedings will be over. Perhaps …” There was an unexpected silence, as if Ranieri was waiting for someone to leave the room. “Once the food is cleared away, the evening is Campagnolo’s. An appropriate time for the cabaret, don’t you think? I feel sure the president will not wish to linger.”

Costa walked back to the gatehouse and the tombs complex. Mirko Oliva was still talking to the two women. Tempers were rising.

“Why can’t we see the tomb?” he asked.

“Because it’s closed,” the tall woman insisted. “Permanently. If you want access, you’ve got to talk to the museum. Why do you want to see it, anyway?”

“Why do we?” Costa asked Mirko, trying to bring down the temperature.

“Because,” the young officer stuttered, “it’s the Blue Demon.”

He paused and looked lost for a moment.

“The thing we’re supposed to be looking for,” Oliva added quietly. “Let’s face it — what else do we have? Aldo Bartoli’s nuts.” He looked searchingly at Costa. “Isn’t he?”

“It’s not worth it,” the other attendant cut in before Costa could reply. “Trust me. I’ve been down there.”

She gestured toward the site. The burial mounds rose like gigantic anthills, most with explanatory signs next to them. There was another archaeological area covered in corrugated iron and plastic sheeting, running through what looked like an abandoned parking lot.

“Aldo Bartoli thinks that’s scary?” Rosa Prabakaran asked.

“Like you said,” the tall one declared. “Nuts.”

She made another gesture: swigging back a bottle. The other attendant scowled at her.

“That man lost his brother. Then his parents,” the woman snapped. “You leave the poor soul alone. He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Good riddance …”

Costa watched the friendly one. There was something she wanted to say. “Did you know the Petrakis couple? The son?” he asked her.

“We all knew of them,” she answered.

“Signora,” Rosa pleaded. “We’ve spent hours here, elsewhere in the Maremma. Trying to get people to help us. And …” She swept the warm early-evening air with her hand, and for a moment Costa found himself imagining her in this place two and a half millennia before, dark-eyed, attractive, an Etruscan, someone from a different world. “It’s as if the Petrakis family never existed.”

“They didn’t,” the first attendant said. “Not for us. Foreigners. Greeks. Selling drugs to our children. Getting up to God knows what in that place of theirs — not that you or the Carabinieri ever took much interest.”

“None of us understood them,” her colleague added, more calmly. “That’s the honest truth. If people tell you nothing, it’s because they know nothing. The Petrakis family spoke to no one except to insult us. Then, one day, they were gone. All we could do was read the papers and think: These were the monsters that lived among us, and we never really noticed. I suppose you never do.”

Costa found himself looking at the tomb, with its corrugated-iron roof and air of abandonment. “How on earth did Andrea become obsessed by that?” he asked.

“He didn’t,” the tall woman declared. “That’s our Blue Demon tomb. The one Andrea used to hang around is on the road to Monte Romano. Middle of nowhere. You’d never know it was there unless someone told you. Just a heap of earth near the wood. No one goes near.”

Her colleague was thinking. “Someone does. I saw people there two days ago, when I went to my sister’s. From the museum, I imagine. They were …” She scratched her cheek, remembering. “They looked as if they were going inside.”

The other woman drew herself up to her full height. “I am the senior assistant here, Felicia. I know what the museum is doing. No one has been inside the Monte Romano site for years. Not since …” She grimaced. “Not since we used to have to chase the Petrakis boy out of there.”

Felicia was not budging. “I saw someone. Two men. In the afternoon …”

Costa picked up a map of the area from the ticket counter. “Where?” he demanded.

Felicia drew a circle by the side of a narrow country road leading inland, three kilometers away. “It’s in the wood off the Strada di Santa Amaia. No one goes down there except a few farmers.”

“Thank you,” Costa told her, then looked at his two officers. “We have one more call to make.”

“That’ll be five euros,” the tall woman said, holding out her hand. “For the map.”

27

Around five Anna Ybarra went back to the palatial living room and sat next to Deniz Nesin, who was glued to the television. All the afternoon programs — the cartoons and the kids’ features, the contests and the old-fashioned song-and-dance shows, with their aging singers and prancing, half-naked dancers — had been canceled. There was only one story, and that was Rome: a city in agony, shaken, living off its nerves.

The Turk didn’t want to talk, so Anna went outside. It was still burning hot. The garden, with its dainty bushes and too-new white statues, was empty. Finally she found Andrea Petrakis by accident almost, noticing that the doors to the aircraft hangar — a gigantic garage-like structure built next to the parched grass strip — were half open.

She walked in, not caring whether or not he would be offended. The plane looked like an exaggerated child’s toy. High wings, a slender, shiny wooden propeller. A tiny engine that might have seemed more at home on a motorbike.

He was poking at the silver metal behind the propeller with a wrench. She opened the flimsy cabin door — the window was little more than clear plastic sheeting attached to a bare metal-tube frame. Then she eased herself into the right-hand seat and played with the joystick in the center, aware of the intense way Petrakis watched her from the other side of the windshield.

“Don’t touch anything,” he ordered.

“I’ve never been in a little plane before.” Anna found herself avoiding his eyes. In truth she had never been in a plane at all until they spirited her away to Pakistan.

The panels and instruments were in front of the left seat — the pilot’s, she guessed. There weren’t many. It didn’t look complicated.

Petrakis was eyeing her avidly, and there was something soft, something intriguing in his eyes that she liked.

He put down the wrench.

“I need to check the engine. The way everything is rigged. There’s only so much you can manage on the ground. You can come along, if you like.”

“Oh.”

She was surprised by the note of excitement in her voice.

“It’s got a little autopilot,” he added. “Just a couple of cheap servos hooked up to the ADI. The only way to work out if it’s accurate is to take the thing up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Put on your belt,” Petrakis ordered.

She began to wrestle with the buckle. He seized the little plane’s nose and pulled the aircraft out of the hangar, hauling it until they stopped next to the brown grass of the strip.

“Don’t you need to swing the propeller or something?” she asked as he clambered into the pilot’s seat.

“This is the twenty-first century,” Petrakis said, smiling so freely at that moment, Anna Ybarra felt she was in the presence of a stranger.

He strapped on his belt and brought the engine to life. Its odd, high-pitched whine made her grip the seat tightly in anticipation. Then he edged the push-pull throttle forward and they moved onto the makeshift runway. The miniature aircraft picked up speed with a rapidity that threw her back into her seat. Its tiny frame was shaking around her, as if it might fall to bits. The volume rose, the vibration made her feel giddy. He watched the dials and then, when some magic moment was reached, jerked back on the stick, bringing up the nose, and they were airborne, free of the earth, unhooked from gravity, climbing more rapidly than she thought possible, as if on some fairground ride that didn’t know when to stop.

It took only a couple of minutes for them to reach a height where she felt as if she were in a real plane, high above the earth. To the north she could see the flat Maremma coast stretching toward the outline of Monte Argentario, a place they’d visited four days before, to eat fish at some fancy restaurant in Orbetello. In the distance, to the south, was the ugly smear of smog that was Rome.

“Here,” Petrakis shouted over the engine noise, giving her the stick. “Fly straight and level. No sudden movements.”

She gripped the control between them. It shook in her hands, as if the plane wished to resist. Petrakis wrapped his fingers round hers and taught her how to manage the thing. It was obvious, really. She kept the stick stiff and immobile and the aircraft followed, as if in harness to it.

He looked pleased. Almost impressed.

“How does it feel?” she yelled over the wind and the engine noise.

“What? Flying?”

“No. Knowing they’re afraid of you.”

“Of us,” he corrected, watching her.

“Of us.”

“It feels good,” he answered, and abruptly grabbed the control from her.

She didn’t know what he did then, but it felt wonderful. The tiny plane turned and became locked into some steep circling turn. Her body was thrust down into the cheap plastic seat by the force of the maneuver. They were both giggling like kids, though he was checking things too: tapping panels, looking at readings there, getting through the jobs he had in mind all along. He was never far away from that, even a thousand feet or so above the Etruscan countryside in little more than a motorized kite.

“I wish I could fly,” she said softly.

“You did fly, Anna. You have.”

“Not really,” she murmured, and found herself hoping he hadn’t noticed the doubt she felt, the uncertainty that was never far from the surface.

He wasn’t listening. Andrea Petrakis was staring down through the open side window, onto a shallow, bowl-like expanse of dry farmland — olive groves and empty fields — stretching behind the town of Tarquinia that sat beneath the left wing.

“We need to go back,” he said, and his voice sounded the way it did on the ground, hard and determined.

“No,” she said, looking at the blazing horizon. “Not yet.”

He looked at her and it was the old Andrea.

Without saying another word, he moved the stick. The little plane turned on its axis, then rolled into a steep descent, toward the coast and the villa in the lowlands.

28

It took them more than an hour to find the place, tracing and retracing the tiny rural lanes that crisscrossed the hills behind the town. The site turned out to be a tract of land in a dip along a winding single lane to the hill village of Monte Romano. The main road was half a kilometer away. Few people would pass by; even fewer would see the archaeological site located in a shady rectangle cut from the lines of straggling trees.

Costa told Mirko Oliva to pull over. There were three flashlights in the trunk. The light was failing. The dying sun hung as a bloody red disc sinking toward the hidden Tyrrhenian Sea past the line of the ridge.

“Can we eat something after this, boss?” Oliva asked.

“Yes, Mirko,” he said patiently.

Rosa took the flashlight he offered. She looked exhausted. Events in the city seemed to hang over them all, impossible to dismiss or discuss in any meaningful way.

“Why are we here, Nic?” Rosa asked.

“If you’d been living in a foreign land, a distant one. For twenty years. Among people from a very different culture. People who didn’t speak your language … Then one day you came back to the country where you grew up. Wouldn’t you want to take a look around the places you used to know?”

“He’d be happy out there,” Oliva said. “In Afghanistan.”

They stared at him.

“He thinks he’s an Etruscan, doesn’t he?” the young officer explained. “Centuries ago … They must have been hard men. Maybe Andrea would feel more at home out there than here. We’re all Italians now. We’re soft, aren’t we?”

“That’s an interesting idea,” Costa observed.

“Pleased to be of assistance, sir,” the young officer said with a little bow.

Rosa was laughing at him. Costa looked at her and smiled.

Mirko Oliva nodded at the clearing in the woods. “So is this where the Blue Demon lives? The real one? The scary one?”

“Guess so,” Rosa agreed.

His genial face fell. “Can I ask a favor, boss? If this involves going down there … You need someone to stay up here. Let it be me. I don’t much like being underground. I get claustrophobic. It’s like being in the grave. If you really need me …”

“Did you mention all this at the interview board?” Rosa demanded, staring at him.

“Yes,” the young officer answered, “but they sounded desperate.”

Costa had no idea whether or not that was a joke. He phoned Falcone to brief and be briefed. Then he agreed that Oliva would remain outside, in touch with Rome if need be, keeping an eye open for anything that might be useful.

After that, he and Rosa went off with their flashlights to the tomb in the woods.

29

They continued to work in the apartment in the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, listening to families return to the neighboring homes, grumbling out in the corridor, resigning themselves to days of uncertainty and disruption.

Teresa Lupo had rarely been so close to the hourly grind of investigative research and fact-checking, and it both surprised and impressed her. Peroni and Falcone would take a single name attached to a report on the Blue Demon investigation, then try to forge some connections. If there were none in the computer systems, they would look through whatever online news-service reports they could track down. When that failed, they turned to the phone directories, calling people with the same last name, asking if they knew of someone who’d been involved in the case.

It was a painstaking, hit-and-miss process. One that should have been undertaken by a substantial team of officers. Not two middle-aged cops who were struggling to make any headway at all. Peroni’s pale, damaged face seemed more bloodless than usual. Falcone’s lean, tanned features had lost their customary urgency, and his eyes, usually so sharp, were fast becoming glazed and weary.

Around six they took a call from the team in Porto Ercole. Falcone put Costa on the speakerphone, and so they listened to the story of Aldo Bartoli, the drunk who had, perhaps, confessed to murdering the carabiniere he believed had killed his brother. Why had Lorenzo Bartoli died? No one had any good answers, and Costa wanted to be on his way. The information gave Falcone some focus, though.

Teresa was making one more round of coffees — the best support she felt able to give at that moment — when Peroni whooped with something close to joy.

“What is it?” Elizabeth Murray asked, lifting her head up from the file reports that Falcone had given her.

“Ettore Rufo. I tracked down a relative. Rufo moved to America within a year of leaving the Carabinieri.” He waved a piece of paper in the air. “Got a restaurant now. In Chicago. Called it after himself.” Peroni looked at Falcone. “You want me to ask about a reservation?”

“Do it,” the inspector ordered.

Elizabeth Murray watched him, worried. “This might get back to Rome,” she cautioned.

“It’s the only name we’ve picked up all day,” the inspector complained. “I’ll take that risk.”

Peroni was on the phone already. Teresa Lupo sat next to him, playing with the computer keyboard, listening, a little in awe as she always was when he turned on both the pressure and the charm, switching from Italian to English and back, talking his way past whoever answered the phone. It was lunchtime in Chicago, and by the sound of it Ettore Rufo had wound up with a busy restaurant.

She did a search on the name and found out that her instincts were right: Rufo’s looked big and popular on its website, full of leather seating and shiny tables, pretty waitresses bearing cocktails, a couple of chefs holding steak and lobster aloft. It was all a long way from a bloody shoot-out in the Maremma. The obvious question rose in her head: Would a payoff from the Carabinieri really fund a venture of this scale?

“Ettore?” Peroni cried, when he finally got through. “It’s Martelli. Calling from Rome. You remember? We talked twenty years ago when we were on the Blue Demon case together.”

Then he hit the speaker button so they could all hear.

“Twenty years ago … I don’t remember much,” said a cold, unpleasant voice. “No one called Martelli, either. Who are you?”

“I was a cop then.”

“Weren’t no cops involved. Who the hell is this? Gimme your badge number.”

“Sure,” Peroni answered, and rattled off some digits. “You want to call me back?”

“No. I wanna make sure you don’t bother me no more.”

“Why’s that? You’re in Chicago. It’s all safe there, Ettore. I’m in Rome. You don’t watch the news? That bastard Petrakis has popped up again. I thought you’d want to help.”

“Petrakis, Petrakis …” Ettore Rufo sounded as if he never wanted to hear the name again. “I got a restaurant to run. Who are you?”

“Just a cop. Just looking for answers.”

“Some cop. You didn’t even ask me a question.”

“You sure about that? Also, I wanted to pass on some more news. We found the guy who killed your friend Cattaneo.”

There was silence on the line.

“You remember Beppe?” Peroni pressed. “The two of you went to Tarquinia. Got in a shoot-out with those three kids in the shack that belonged to the Petrakis family. Some local officer died.”

“I remember. Who the hell …?”

“The brother killed your friend.”

“Whose brother?” the voice on the phone yelled.

Peroni sighed, as if exasperated. “Does the catering business make you slow or something? Lorenzo Bartoli’s brother. Seems he came to believe those kids in the shack didn’t shoot Lorenzo at all. You two did. You and Cattaneo. So Cattaneo got it in the head in his car a while back. I have the pictures here somewhere. You think I should email them? Not pretty. Best you finish your lunch first.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d just like to know the truth, Ettore. It might help us stop him from coming after you. Can’t pick him up ’cause, to be honest, his confession is a little shaky, see. Not one he will repeat for the lawyers, even if we had some means of bringing him in. Which we don’t, not right now.”

“This thing is closed.…”

“Don’t they have TVs in Chicago? You’ve watched what’s happening here and you’re telling me it’s closed?”

“For me it is.”

“Not if Aldo Bartoli finds you, Ettore. He’s a dedicated man. Real angry too. If someone was to point his attention to some nice restaurant in Chicago … What does an airline ticket cost these days? You get my point? If I can find you, so can he. With a little help. This is in your interest, just as much as ours.”

“You don’t have the first clue what you’re into,” Rufo snarled, then the line went dead.

“He may have a point,” Elizabeth Murray said quietly.

“I’ve a good mind to call up Aldo Bartoli and give him the bastard’s address,” Peroni grumbled. “Ettore’s a Roman. He knows what’s going on here. And he doesn’t even ask what it’s like. How bizarre is that?”

The phone on the table rang, so loud it made Teresa jump. Peroni stabbed the speaker button and said, “Ettore?”

It was Costa again, calling from the car. “You found Rufo?” he asked.

“Don’t be so quick off the mark. It makes us old guys feel, well, old.”

“Where is he?”

“Selling pizza in Chicago. Too busy to talk to the likes of us. You got something?”

After the visit to Tarquinia, Costa wanted Falcone to consider the possibility that Petrakis and his team were not in Rome at all, but out in the countryside, dashing in and out of the city as they pleased.

“Unlikely,” the inspector commented when Costa finished speaking. “They need resources. Good transport access. Speed. Terrorists work from urban locations.”

“That,” said Costa, a little sharply, “is conventional thinking. It’s not going to get us anywhere. All I’m asking is that you consider the possibility they’re in the Tarquinia area. That …”

The call became muffled. Teresa thought she heard something competing with the sound of Nic’s voice, a high-pitched drone, like that of a far-off scooter somewhere in the background.

“… we’re going to take one last look anyway.”

“Nic …” she found herself saying.

But the line was dead. The three young officers were out in the bare, empty Maremma. Teresa could picture some of the places she’d visited out there: beautiful sights, old and rich in history, separated by long stretches of desolate wilderness.

“I’m going to call that bastard Rufo again,” Peroni growled.

“No,” Falcone told him. “He won’t talk. We’ve done enough. Go home. Get some sleep.”

“Can we even get home?” Teresa asked.

“You can,” Silvio Di Capua said. He showed them a map on the computer screen, the Carabinieri’s official ruling on where the public could and could not go. A red ring marked out a lozenge-shaped forbidden zone in the city’s center, from the road past the Forum to the Quirinale hill, then down again to the Piazza Venezia. Teresa Lupo couldn’t imagine the constantly bustling center of her native city depopulated in this way. It was eerie, wrong.

“We can go by the river,” Falcone pointed out.

“You can stay with us, Silvio, if you like.”

Her deputy lived way out in the suburbs and had left his car at the Questura. Even if he managed to retrieve it, there was no guarantee how long it would take to drive home, or to get back in the morning.

“Silvio and I discussed this,” Elizabeth Murray told them. “There’s plenty of space here.”

Outside, a siren sounded. Almost immediately another, more distant, appeared to answer its call, then a third, then another. This was not their city anymore. They were simply one more group of civilians, trapped by the machinations of Andrea Petrakis and the state’s response to them.

“What is it?” Teresa asked, seeing the expression on Peroni’s face.

“The Petrakis couple were messing around with drugs,” he said, looking at Falcone. “Or so Aldo Bartoli seems to think.”

“So?” she asked.

“They wouldn’t dare do that without permission.” Peroni reached for the old, battered address book he kept in his jacket pocket. “Let me call a man with a past. See if he’s hungry.”

30

There was a single humpbacked mound, much like the ones they had seen at the public site on the outskirts of Tarquinia. Around the perimeter was a low, rusty barbed-wire fence. Parched grass surrounded the grave site. A narrow path of bare earth ran from an unlocked gate to a metal door set against the nearest side of the knoll that rose ahead in the trees.

“Someone’s been here,” Rosa said, looking at the ground.

“We know that already,” Costa replied. “It could just have been sightseers.”

“Out here? Have you ever been inside one of these things?”

“No.”

Closer up it looked as if a small house had been buried by some prehistoric landslide, leaving nothing but the roof extending above the surface.

“I did a school trip from Rome when I was a kid,” Rosa said. “It was … scary, but thrilling too. They’re huge. They go deep and, when you get to the bottom, it’s not a grave at all. It’s like a room, two rooms sometimes. The sort of place you’d go for a banquet or a wedding. They believed they were departing for something good, a place to meet their family, their lovers. Drinking, dancing, feasting …”

And then along came the Blue Demon, Costa thought, remembering what Teresa had told them. The worm of doubt worked its way into the Etruscans’ safe and comforting credo, insidiously spreading the notion that death was not an automatic invitation to an eternal paradise. That there was another destination too.

He walked up the path and took hold of the handle on the metal door. It opened freely, screeching on dry hinges. On the ground lay a padlock and chain. The metal where the chain had been snapped by bolt cutters was clean and shiny, even in the dying golden light.

“Whoever was here,” he said, “they weren’t just looking.”

He turned on the flashlight, told her to do the same, and flicked the beam forward, beyond the open door, into the black mouth of the tomb. Ahead lay a long line of steps, descending at a steep angle into the earth, with a single, flimsy banister to the right.

“I go first,” he announced before entering the inky pool swimming beneath their feet.

It seemed an endless descent, one step at a time, gripping the dry, splintery rail. Finally, the beam fell on bare earth. Costa found himself in a subterranean cavern of some size, so deep beneath the surface that he could hear nothing of the world above, not a bird, not an insect.

Rosa joined him and shone her light around the space in front of them.

“It’s huge,” she said.

“And empty.”

There were marks in the floor, niches carved out of the brown soil, where once, Nic guessed, at least two sarcophagi had lain. The archaeologists had been there already, or perhaps the grave-robbers before them. Not an item remained in the center of the chamber. He shone his light farther in front. There was a small archway carved in the stone ahead, and a dark, seemingly smaller chamber beyond.

“Where’s the Blue Demon, Nic? Are you sure this is the right place?”

“It’s the place the woman gave us.”

Costa knew why she was asking. The beam of her flashlight had flickered sideways, coming to rest on the frieze running around the nearest wall. What was painted there, with some skill, seemed to have no connection with the dark terrors he had expected. It was a bacchanalian orgy: naked men and women, with wine cups overflowing, running through a wood that must have been much like the one in which the tomb was built. Some wrestled. Some made love. Some performed more perverse sexual acts. There were animals too, and violence. One cruel, explicit scene in particular seemed more in keeping with the kind of pornography that Costa had occasionally seized from the seedier shops around Termini.

“You can see why they didn’t open this one up to the public,” Rosa muttered, sounding a little shocked. “No one’s going to be bringing any school trips down here.”

The tone of the frieze to their left altered as they neared the low, narrow door that led into the farther chamber. The expressions on the faces of the characters shifted subtly, from ecstasy to first surprise and then doubt, bordering on fear.

He felt Rosa following him and knew, from the sound of her tense, short breathing and the way she kept close by him, her shoulder occasionally brushing his in the gloom, that she was noticing this change in the paintings too. Then he was through the opening. She followed him and they turned both beams of their flashlights on the wall to the left.

A brief, pained shriek escaped Rosa’s throat. Costa felt his own blood run cold. It took a moment for him to think straight, to remind himself that this was nothing but paint on ancient plaster, placed here twenty-five hundred years before.

The frieze had disappeared. The images ran the full length of the wall, larger than life, the product of some terrible and vivid imagination. The trick the long-dead artist had played was both devious and sinister. Seen by the visitor walking through from the larger chamber, it was as if the lines of giddy revelers were tumbling ecstatically toward Hell.

Still in each other’s arms, in congress, dancing, fighting, eating, drinking, they appeared to fall through the slender opening into the second chamber like unwitting victims slipping into a nightmare.

The Blue Demon was there to meet them: the same hideous devil, recreated time and time again, sharp fangs dark with gore, his eyes like coals, his tail whipping like a serpent, an inhuman erection rising from his loins. The creature seized the cavorting figures as they stumbled into his domain, then feasted off them, tearing the unwitting Etruscans to pieces, handing the remains to lesser demons to shred and gorge upon. This was a horror from Hieronymus Bosch, but shorn of the aesthetic license of the artist who would come almost two millennia later. There were no fanciful, dreamlike sequences here, just flesh and blood and entrails, and the all-powerful figure of the azure lord, the master of ceremonies, his talons slicing at his hapless victims as they made the transition from light to dark, blinded by bliss, unaware of their fate until there was no going back.

Costa felt Rosa’s fingers grip his arm.

“Get me out of here, Nic,” she whispered, her voice almost unrecognizable.

“When we’re finished,” he replied, then moved the beam from the red-eyed monster on the wall and on to the tiny chamber itself.

It was no larger than a child’s bedroom and, unlike the adjoining room, it wasn’t empty. On the floor, there was a group of objects, dark — metal by the looks of it.

Modern too.

He told Rosa to keep her light on them, bent down, and looked. They were munitions boxes, with NATO markings. The latches were easily undone. Beneath the lid lay packs of material neatly stacked like sets of playing cards. Costa retrieved one and saw the telltale word on the side.

“Do you know what Explosia is?” he asked her.

“Can we discuss this outside?”

He put the pack back in the case and straightened.

“It’s the commercial name for Semtex. They changed it after all the bad publicity. It was Semtex back when Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. Now that we’re all as free as birds …”

Explosia. He remembered the course well, and the female instructor who had taken them through the history of the ways terrorists wreaked havoc on the world. Most Islamic groups relied on simple, homemade fertilizer-based devices. Real explosives had become hard to come by, and the genuine material now possessed chemical tags and metallic coding that meant it could be traced to the original buyer.

Next to the boxes lay several automatic weapons wrapped in clear plastic, as if straight from the factory, and boxes of shells.

“Using traceable material like this, it’s …”

Nothing Andrea Petrakis did matched up to the template of twenty-first-century terrorism from the East.

“… strange,” he began to say, then stopped.

Something had moved in the darkness. Something small. Something close.

He felt Rosa’s body brush his, saw the shaking beam of her flashlight edge toward the black void in the corner. The sound was coming from there.

Her screams tore through the darkness, like the cries that might have come from the dead Etruscans shuffling in drugged rapture from the chamber outside into the bloody, flailing arms of the Blue Demon.

In the unforgiving light of her flashlight beam lay a body. A middle-aged man in jeans and a shirt that had once been white. His mouth was open, his eyes black and sightless, staring up at them. Rats ran over him, making rustling sounds as they scurried beneath the fabric. His dead hand clutched at his chest and what looked like a wound there.

Rosa’s cries were wordless, mindless, and the small, enclosed space made them sound so loud Nic feared the walls might cave in. She dropped her flashlight, sobbing. Costa took her arm, coaxed her back into the first chamber, pushed her to the stairs, helped her up, one foothold at a time, listening as her choking sobs began to subside.

It seemed to take forever to climb the rickety wooden steps. When they reached the top, he could see that evening had arrived, a bright, clear Mediterranean night, lit by stars. Rosa’s cheeks were stained with tears. But she had control of herself again, and there was a glimmer of shame in her intelligent, pretty face that told him she wished he’d never seen her this way.

“We need to call Falcone,” he told her, and stepped outside. “Mirko?”

There was no one there. He took two more steps toward where the car ought to be. Then something pounced on him, and for an instant he wondered whether he’d met the Blue Demon itself. Costa found himself on the ground trying to defend himself from a flurry of vicious and furious punches. Something dragged the weapon from his shoulder holster. As he lay, aching on the hard earth, arm in front of his face, trying to make sense of this, his head turned and he saw Rosa next to him, hand to her mouth, where a faint trickle of blood had emerged.

A dark, foreign-looking individual was kneeling over her, his hand drawn back, recoiling from a punch. As Costa watched, he snatched the gun from the young officer’s holster, cast it to one side, and then, for no reason whatsoever, struck her across the face with the back of his hand, hard.

Costa stared up at the man who’d brought him to the ground. Behind stood a woman whose expression seemed much like those of the long-dead Etruscans he’d just seen on the walls of the tomb below. Confused. Frightened. Expectant.

“God punishes the curious,” the figure above him said, pointing a pistol straight into Costa’s face.

31

Teresa Lupo gave Peroni the look. The one that said, Only you could pick a place like this for meeting the mob.

He’d taken her and Falcone to an intimate and rather expensive-looking restaurant called Charly’s Saucière only a few doors away from their apartment, on the same road, near the Lateran piazza. They were the only customers in an elegant dining room, depopulated, the elderly waiter told them, by the crisis in the city. He looked decidedly disappointed when Falcone ordered a single bottle of mineral water for the three of them.

Ten minutes later a dapper middle-aged man in a dark suit arrived. He gave no name, and didn’t ask theirs, but immediately ordered a glass of Barolo and a plate of foie gras with truffles as if he were a regular. He looked like a well-paid accountant or lawyer, though Teresa couldn’t help notice the missing two fingers on his left hand.

The visitor stared at Peroni as if she and the lean inspector next to her didn’t exist.

“We’re here to talk history? In company?”

“I’m training a new assistant,” Peroni replied, and Teresa only just stopped herself kicking his shins under the table. “You OK with that?”

“And him?”

“Management,” Falcone said simply. “I’m just here to pay the bill.”

“Good.”

The stranger watched the antipasti arrive. When the waiter was gone, he picked up a piece of fat goose liver with his fingers and shoved some into his mouth. Appearances could be deceptive. The suit, the shirt, the red silk tie … the immaculate black hair, dyed, and the mustache trimmed to perfection … Whoever this hood was, he’d spent a lot of money on his appearance. But he still couldn’t get rid of the peasant in him, not entirely.

“This conversation don’t exist,” the man announced. “Never happened. You not eating? Onion soup’s good. Snails. Steak tartare.” He tried a little more foie gras. “I’ll go for the steak. Come on. It’s not polite to eat alone.”

Peroni shook his head. “We lost our appetites somewhere along the way. It was that kind of day.”

The man glared at him, called over the waiter, placed his order, then waited until they were alone again.

“Shame. And once this is done, we’re even?”

Falcone didn’t even blink. Teresa looked at Peroni and the man and asked, “Dare I ask what kind of favor we’re repaying here?”

They didn’t respond. They didn’t even look at her, which was an answer in itself.

“Twenty years ago,” Peroni said. “A Greek couple called Petrakis. They were killed in Tarquinia. From what I gather, they’d been dealing dope. Maybe upsetting some people you know. I need to understand what happened and why.”

“Petrakis, Petrakis, Petrakis.” The stranger rapped his fingers on the table. “Greek, you say?”

“Toni …” Peroni sighed.

He did have a name and, judging by the flash in his eyes, he didn’t like to hear it out loud.

“We don’t have time. This is important.” Peroni nodded at the door.

“You know what’s going on out there.”

“Nothing’s going on. Thanks to you people, mainly. And the Carabinieri. Those idiots you got wandering around looking like they’re in a movie or something. Who are you kidding?”

“A politician and his driver have been murdered,” Teresa pointed out. “We’re lucky someone didn’t die at the Trevi Fountain today. It may just be the beginning.”

Toni stopped eating for a moment, furled his heavy black eyebrows, and asked, “Wait. Are you trying to tell me these two things are linked? Some Greek bums who got what was coming to them years ago. And this?”

“I assume you read,” Teresa snapped. “What’s going on now is the work of Andrea Petrakis. The son of the couple who got murdered. We’d assumed, at least some of us, that he was responsible for that, and a lot else besides. Now …”

“Now what?” Toni wondered.

“Now we’re not so sure.”

He sniffed the wine, making out he was some kind of connoisseur. “Greeks. What kind of kid would kill his parents? Never get that in Italy.”

Actually, Teresa thought, there were at least four cases she could name in which Roman offspring had murdered one or more parents.

“Is that what happened here?” Falcone asked.

Toni shrugged.

Peroni leaned over the table and slid the plate away. The hungry mobster held his knife and fork over the empty space. He looked hurt.

“We think what’s going on now has to do with what went on then,” Peroni repeated very slowly, very patiently. “We think it might get worse unless we can do something to stop it. To achieve that, we need to understand what happened. This is nothing to do with your business, Toni. It’s about people. Ordinary people. We need to bring it to an end. Quickly. With no one else dead.” He watched the man opposite, whose knife and fork stayed in the air. “Or do you like seeing Rome this way?”

The cutlery went down. Outrage flared in Toni’s dark, glassy eyes.

“Do not insult me, Peroni. I grew up on these streets. This is my city. More than yours.”

“Then help us.”

“With what?”

“The Petrakises,” Teresa answered quietly, wishing Falcone would do something, say something, instead of just watching this overdressed creep behave like a jerk. “Who killed them? And why?”

The plate with the half-finished foie gras went back over to his side of the table.

“You sure know how to ruin a guy’s appetite.”

Peroni swore and got to his feet. “Let’s go,” the big man told Falcone. “I was an idiot. I thought these scum still had an ounce of decency in them.”

“Hey! Hey!” Toni yelled. “That’s just plain offensive.”

There was a commotion from out back. A howl, as if someone were in pain. Then the old waiter shuffled out, his hands to his gray face, babbling about something on the TV.

Peroni strode through into the kitchen and watched what was happening. After a few seconds he went back into the dining room and called the others through.

They watched for only a minute or two. It was enough. The TV stations had found fresh footage of the outrage at the Trevi Fountain. It came from the cell phones of some of those who’d been around at the time. These shots were clearer than anything they’d seen before, much more vivid than the shaky video the Blue Demon had posted on the Web. It looked as if somehow the fountain itself had burst a blood vessel, soaking everyone nearby in gore. As if Rome herself were bleeding profusely into the street. People were screaming. A few were hurt, huddled on the ground, covered in dust and rubble, clutching shattered limbs.

Falcone turned to the mob man and asked, “Are you really going to walk away from all this? And feel nothing?”

Toni grunted something wordless.

“Or are we back in the Years of Lead?” Falcone asked. “Where the mob plants bombs the moment any rotten politician stuffs money in your pockets?”

The man in the flashy suit shook his head, reached out, took a couple of stems of asparagus from a serving dish in the kitchen, and stuffed them in his mouth.

Without another word he went back to the table and picked up his glass.

“These are not ordinary times, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Teresa said, following him. “If we weren’t desperate …”

“She’s good,” Toni told Peroni. “The lady’s melting my heart.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Teresa wanted to scream.

“You ever see anything like that?” Toni interrupted. “Who could do that kind of thing? Why?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” she snapped.

He looked at her, and for the first time seemed interested. “You really think these dead Greeks might help?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Peroni replied patiently.

“Huh! You know what channel conflict is?”

“Marketing bullshit,” Teresa responded.

Toni shook his head. His hair moved oddly. She wondered if it was a rug. He picked up his fork and started eating again.

“No. It is not. Imagine you’ve been selling something, say”—he played with his wineglass—“some decent Barolo. You’ve been selling it for years. Spending time developing distribution, marketing. Establishing demand.”

Falcone poured himself another glass of water and raised it in a sarcastic salute.

“I’ll ignore that, Mr. Inspector. You buy it from the people you always did. Pay a good price too. Then one day you go out to sell some more and they’re there. The winemakers. The ones who took your money in the first place. They’ve opened up shop in your street, selling the thing you already bought from them. Selling it cheap. Saying, ‘Don’t buy from those old guys anymore. They’re yesterday. Buy from us.’ What’s a businessman going to do?”

They waited. He waved to the waiter, who came out with the steak tartare. The man looked as if he’d been crying.

“I’ll tell you,” Toni went on. “Hypothetically. First, you sit down and talk to them. You try to reason with them. You explain that this has been a good business for everyone. We’ve all made money. We never had no fallings-out. So why not keep it that way? We can cut a deal. Manage the margins a little, maybe. Act like decent human beings, the way grown-ups do—”

“This was dope, hard drugs. Not Barolo,” Teresa interjected.

“Wasn’t nothing, it being hypothetical and all. Then, if the talking doesn’t work, you get a little more direct. You tell them how it’s going to be.”

He looked idly at the dessert menu, screwed up his face, and said, “Nah.”

“And when that doesn’t work?” she pressed.

“Then you go round and pop a bullet in someone’s head. Stop the trouble right in its tracks. Before it gets out of hand. That’s what I’d guess might happen, anyway. What do you think?”

“So Andrea Petrakis didn’t kill his parents,” Falcone mused. “Even though it says the exact opposite in an official parliamentary inquiry?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Toni replied. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. This kind of thing doesn’t happen often, thank God. You know why?” He grimaced. “Because it’s messy. Usually, it ends in a war. People get angry. People get dead.”

Teresa cut in, “The Frascas died. Those kids in Tarquinia …”

“Who the hell were they?” Toni growled. “Bystanders. Children. What kind of people do you think we are?”

“Best we don’t go there,” she murmured.

“Your charm is short-lived, lady. Something else you need to know?”

“The war,” Falcone said. “You’re saying it didn’t happen.”

Toni clicked his fingers and grinned. “See,” the man said to Teresa. “These two guys are smart. They’re listening to what I’m not saying. If you want to make it as a cop, you could do worse than learn from Peroni. Though it’s a little late for a career change, I’d guess.”

“There was no war?” she asked him. “No retaliation. No comeback from the … winemakers?”

He raised his glass. “The thing about wine is … there’s always another supplier. Or even the same supplier, once you make them see sense. You should be grateful for all this, by the way. Proves the old saying: Nothing beats self-regulation. Most effective form of policing there is.”

“Nothing happened?” Peroni wanted to know. “Nothing?”

Toni shrugged. “Two lying, cheating scumbags lost their lives. The son went crazy and got himself into all kinds of trouble. None of it to do with us. Then … life went on.” He put down his knife and fork for a moment, which seemed to Teresa a sign that something surely baffled him. “You tell me how that came about. I’m just a little guy. Was then. Still am now. Makes no sense. It was like …”

The mob man shook his head, then wound some of the raw meat from his steak tartare into the egg and shallots and capers on the side.

“Hypothetically, it was as if this was the way it was meant to be. Those stupid Greek bastards screwed us around, then got handed over on a plate. It was like there was a sign on the door saying: Shoot here. As if we were doing someone else a favor.” He took a mouthful. “You know what? Looking back, I’m not even sure it was true. We told them good the first time. They knew what was gonna happen if they screwed around again. What the hell!” He shrugged. “We got word they were still dealing. Consequences ensued.”

“Who told you?” Falcone demanded.

“What? That they weren’t listening? I don’t recall. Long time ago. Not the kind of detail you keep.” His bleak face froze for a moment. “All that stuff the son got into afterwards — none of that was about business, was it?” he insisted. “Not ever. It was about something dirtier, something we wouldn’t touch, nor anyone I respect, either, not in a million years. Not directly, anyway.”

“Which was?” Falcone asked.

“Politics,” Toni answered, his mouth full of raw pink beef. “Excuse the language.”

“So what was the Blue Demon in all this?” Teresa asked.

The mob man put down his knife and fork again, picked up a napkin, and wiped his mouth, never taking his dead, emotionless eyes off her.

“It was interesting talking to you all,” he said, then got up and walked out of the door without uttering another word.

32

Costa couldn’t think straight, couldn’t imagine any way out of this. There was no doubt in his mind that the man standing above him was Andrea Petrakis. He looked older, wearier, more dangerous, but this was the same man he’d seen in the photograph they had from twenty years before.

Three against three, under the bright moonlight, though they were now disarmed, disoriented. Mirko Oliva, his face bloodied and ashamed, looked injured. Rosa had ceased struggling.

“I put a call into base when I saw them, boss,” Oliva said quickly, desperately. “There’s backup coming—”

“Liar! Liar! Liar!” Petrakis yelled, so loud it was clear he couldn’t care who might hear.

“We’re police officers,” Costa said calmly. “We’re not alone. You’ll be found. What my colleague says—”

Petrakis kicked Oliva hard in the chest. The big young officer took it with scarcely a flinch. There was a look of thunder in his face Costa didn’t want to see. They had nothing to fight with but their bare hands. There would be no backup. There was only one way to get out of this alive, and that was through talking.

Petrakis leaned down and stared into Costa’s face.

“What were you doing here?” His eyes strayed back to the tomb; his hand indicated the open metal door. “You had no right … no right …”

“You need to think about what we do now, Andrea,” Costa told him. “How we get out of this. All of us.”

“I do?” he asked, laughing.

“Listen to me,” Costa began, then saw, to his horror, what was happening.

“Mirko!” he yelled.

Oliva wasn’t waiting for anything. The young policeman launched himself off the ground, his big, burly rugby player’s body aimed squarely at Petrakis. The impact was sudden and painful. Oliva had his arms around the other man’s torso, might have got somewhere if Costa had the time to get upright himself and help.

The second man, the dark one, intervened, pistol-whipping the figure beneath him brutally. The young cop yelped in pain, then slumped to the earth on his knees, hands cradling his bloodied skull.

Petrakis danced around and around like a crazy man.

“We can still talk about this—” Costa began.

“Talk! Talk!” Petrakis shrieked.

He stalked over to Mirko Oliva, placed the barrel of his weapon against the young cop’s skull, then shot him through the head.

Oliva’s body jumped as if hit by an electric shock and fell in a heap on the dry ground. There was a single gasp of pain and shock, and then he was gone.

Rosa began screaming again.

Mirko, Mirko, Mirko …

The words spiraled toward the velvet Mediterranean sky, to the stars and the bright, heedless moon. Then the man crouched above her delivered another slap and she was silent.

Nic Costa watched Mirko die. It was the way captives were executed in war. Suddenly, without compunction or compassion. Without a single reflection that in an instant a human life would be snatched from the world forever, before its time.

Andrea Petrakis was walking back toward them, the gun in his hand.

There were no prayers, no actions for a time like this. Costa kept his eyes open and watched.

Petrakis was one step away when the sound leaped out of his shirt pocket like an electronic insect bursting out of its cocoon.

For some reason — and Costa wanted to remember this, because he knew it had to be important — the phone call made Andrea Petrakis crazier than ever. Crazier than three cops straying into his private temple. Crazier than the realization that, whatever he did to his captives, it would soon become clear where his team had been lurking as they stalked the citizens of Rome.

Petrakis began screaming, louder than Rosa ever had. Costa rose to a crouch, wondering, waiting for an opportunity.

The other man must have seen, because in an instant the butt of his gun slammed into Costa’s head, sent him clattering, dizzy, to the cold, hard earth.

He wasn’t sure what he heard after that. He thought someone had hurt Rosa. He wanted to fight. To struggle. A line from a piece of poetry came into his head, a snatch of an English work his father had loved toward the end, a paean to rage, a war cry against the dying of the light.

The rasp of his own breathing rose in his ears until it was so loud he thought it might deafen him. He could feel the blood alive in his veins. With a final effort he tried to move, but the agony sent him tumbling back to the dirt. After a moment damp, warm fingers reached out and clasped his hand. Rosa’s.

A gunshot sounded close by, followed by a shriek. The noise was like the yelp of a child or some young animal. Rosa’s taut, terrified grip on his fingers, something that meant so much at that moment, became still and lifeless. He tried to turn his head to see; it was impossible.

“Do not go …” Costa found himself whispering, feeling no rage whatsoever, or fear, only a sense of failure.

There was another noise, closer this time, loud and long and booming, and then darkness.