Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Dead Men’s Socks by David Hewson

David Hewson’s debut story for EQMM focuses on a character from his series of contemporary crime novels about Rome’s Questura. The British author’s books have been translated into 23 languages and his first novel, Semana Santa, was made into a movie with Mira Sorvino. The ten books in the series to which this story belongs are currently in development for English-language TV. The sixth in the series, The Garden of Evil, was the American Library Association’s 2008 mystery of the year.

Peroni bent down to take a good look at the two bodies in front of him and said quite cheerily, “You don’t see that every day.”

“Actually,” Silvio Di Capua replied, “I do. This is a morgue. Dead people find their way here all the time.”

The cop was early fifties, a big and ugly man with a scarred face and a complex manner, genial yet sly. He frowned at the corpses, both fully clothed, lying on gurneys next to the silver autopsy table. One was grey-haired, around Peroni’s age, short with a black — clearly dyed — goatee, tubby torso stretching against a dark suit that looked a size too small for him. The other was a taller, wiry kid of twenty-two or so, with a stubbly bruised face and some wounds Peroni didn’t want to look at too closely. Dark-skinned, impoverished somehow, and that wasn’t just the cheap blue polyester blouson and matching trousers. Rome was like everywhere else. It had its rich. It had its poor. Peroni felt he was looking at both here. Equal at last.

“What I meant was, you don’t see that...” He pointed at the feet of the first body. “And that...” Then the second.

Di Capua grunted, then put down his pathologist’s clipboard and, with the back of a hand cloaked in a throwaway surgical glove, wiped his brow.

Peroni was staring at him, a look of theatrically-outraged disbelief on his battered features. Di Capua, immediately aware of his error, swore, then walked over to the equipment cabinet, tore off the present gloves, pulled on a new pair.

It was nine A.M. on a scorching July morning. Peroni and Di Capua had just come on shift. The day was starting as it usually began. Sifting through the pieces the night team had swept up from the busy city beyond the grimy windows of the centro storico Questura. Today was a little different in some ways. The head of the forensic department, Teresa Lupo, had absented herself for an academic conference in Venice, leaving the Rome lab in Di Capua’s care. Leo Falcone, Peroni’s inspector, was on holiday in Sardinia. Nic Costa, his immediate boss, was taking part in some insanely pointless security drill at Fiumicino Airport. Their absence left Peroni at a loose end, with no one to reign in his inquisitive and quietly rebellious nature.

“Don’t try to distract me with minutiae,” the pathologist said.

“I like minutiae,” Peroni replied. “Little things.” He looked down at the kid in the cheap blue blood-stained clothes and thought: little people too. “Who are they?”

Di Capua glanced at his clipboard and indicated the older man. “Giorgio Spallone. Aged fifty-one. An eminent psychiatrist with a nice villa in Parioli, fished out from the river this morning. Probable suicide. His wife said he’d been depressed for a while.”

“Do psychiatrists do that?” Peroni asked straightaway. “Wouldn’t they just climb on the couch and talk to themselves instead?”

Di Capua stared at him and said nothing.

“Where?” Peroni continued.

“Found him beached on Tiber Island.”

“That’s a very public place to kill yourself,” Peroni replied. “Bang in the center of Rome. I’ve never known a suicide there in thirty years.”

“He probably went in elsewhere,” Di Capua said with a shrug of his spotless white jacket. “Rivers flow. Remember?”

“Time of death?” Peroni asked. “He’s dried out nicely now. Shame it’s shrunk his suit. That won’t do for the funeral.”

“I don’t know. I just walked through the door. Like you.”

The cop glanced at the second corpse. “And this one?”

Di Capua picked up his notes.

“Ion Dinicu. Twenty-two years old. Some small-time Roma crook the garbage-disposal people came across in Testaccio.”

“Small-time Roma crook,” Peroni repeated. “It sounds so... judgmental.”

“He lived in that dump of a camp on the way to Ciampino. Along with a couple of thousand other Gypsies. We got him straightaway from the fingerprints...”

“Oh yes,” Peroni said, smiling. “We printed them all, didn’t we? Man, woman, and child, guilty of nothing except being Roma.”

“I’m not getting into an argument about politics,” Di Capua told him.

“Fingerprinting innocent people, taking their mugshots... that’s politics?” Peroni wondered.

“Don’t you have work to do?”

“I knew his name already,” Peroni went on, ignoring the question. “Got here before you. Looked at the records downstairs. The kid never went inside. Couple of fines for lifting bags from tourists on the buses. Got repatriated to Romania when we were busing people there. Came back, of course. They never take the hint, do they?”

“Maybe he should have done,” the pathologist suggested.

The cop went to the other end of the body and leaned over Dinicu’s bloodied, bruised features.

“What killed him?” he asked. “And when?”

Di Capua sighed.

“You’ve worked here a million years, Peroni. You know what a man looks like when he’s been beaten up. When did it happen? I apologize. The battery died on my crystal ball. Come back later when I’ve got a new one.”

“Some big tough guy who liked to use his fists,” the cop said. He pointed at the corpse of Spallone. “The other guy’s got a messy head too.”

Di Capua folded his arms.

“Not unusual with river deaths. Could have hit the stonework falling in. Got washed around by the swell. When we’ve done the autopsy, then I’ll tell you.”

Peroni leaned over the dead psychiatrist and said, “Nah. If you hit stonework, you get grazed. The Roma kid could have gone that way. He’s cut. Spallone here...” He looked more closely. A bell was ringing, but too faintly. “He’s bruised. Swollen. No blood.”

“Blunt-force trauma,” Di Capua said.

“That tells me a lot.”

The pathologist folded his arms and looked a little cross.

“Why should I tell you anything? You’re not dealing with either of these guys. Not as far as I know. Inspector Vieri’s been round seeing Spallone’s widow. He sent some wet-behind-the-ear agente to wake up the little hood’s camp at seven. No one talking, of course. If it wasn’t for the prints and photos, we couldn’t even ID him. Agente said even his own father wouldn’t help. Chances are it’s a gang rivalry thing and some other Romanian hood will wind up dead a couple of days down the line...”

“Dead quack gets an inspector and the full team. Dead immigrant gets a visit from an infant. The Roma mourn their dead, Silvio. Just like we do. Also you’re forgetting the deal.”

“The deal?”

“You don’t do cop work and we don’t dissect your corpses.”

Di Capua was starting to get mad.

“Yeah well... One drowned doctor. One beat-up street kid. And you hanging round here as if you care. Don’t you have work to do?”

“There’s always work if you look for it,” Peroni answered. “Right now I’m...” He searched for the right word. “Foraging.”

“Then why don’t you go forage somewhere else?”

“What next?” the big man answered, ignoring him again. “Slice and dice. Weigh the organs. Check the spleen and things. Peek inside at every last little bit of them, working or not, until you get something to write down on your report... what? Tomorrow? The day after?”

Di Capua opened his arms wide.

“That’s the way it goes. Custom and practice. One mistake and we all could hang. As you know. Now...”

“Just a favor,” Peroni said quickly, coming close, putting a huge arm round the skinny, balding pathologist.

“Why should I...?”

“The socks,” Peroni interrupted. “Those...” He pointed at the two sets of feet in front of them. Shoes off already. Ankles splayed. Very dead.

“What about them?” he asked.

Peroni laughed, took away his arms, clapped his big pale hands. Then he retrieved a pair of scissors from the kidney bowl on the silver autopsy table and carefully cut up through the front of all four trouser legs. Spallone’s expensive dark blue barathea didn’t give in easily. The Roma kid’s garish polyester was so flimsy he could slice it apart just by lifting the lower blade.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked when he finished.

Both men were wearing long socks pulled up close to the knee. Odd socks. The one on each right leg light blue and unpatterned. The other pale grey and ribbed so subtly the markings were scarcely noticeable.

The fabric of the blue socks seemed as cheap and thin and as artificial as the kid’s shiny jacket and trousers. The toes were close to going on both. The grey ones were newer, wool maybe. Expensive.

“I never knew a young guy who wore long socks like that,” Peroni murmured. “Curious...”

“Gianni...”

“But not as strange as the fact that two dead men, found the same morning in different parts of Rome, seem to have dipped into the same sock drawer before they went out for the night.”

“You don’t know that!” Di Capua was incensed.

Peroni retrieved his phone from his pocket and took a picture of the dead legs. Then he reached forward and very lightly tweaked Spallone’s dead big toe.

Di Capua shrieked.

“That was the favor,” the big man added. “I don’t leave till I get it.”

The pathologist grumbled. But he still went and got a pair of tweezers and, very carefully, pulled each sock from each dead limb, depositing them in four separate plastic envelopes.

Then the two men peered at the plastic bags. One set, the grey ones, had a brand, a pricey one from Milan. The others looked the kind people picked up three pairs to the euro from a street stall. No name. Nothing to identify them.

“I can check on the fabric to see if they’re the same too,” Di Capua said, serious now. “Give me till the end of the afternoon.”

“Thanks,” Peroni said, and slapped the pathologist hard on his white-jacketed shoulder. “That would be good.”

Inspector Vieri’s team worked on the floor below, in an office next to Falcone’s unit. Peroni’s customary home was empty now. Costa had taken everyone except him to Fiumicino for the drill there. Peroni knew why he’d been left behind. He always found it difficult to keep a straight face when the management decided to lead everyone in the merry dance known as role-play.

Vieri had arrived the previous month sporting the finely tailored suit and standoffish manners of a young officer eyeing some rapid progress up the ranks. He had all the traits that mattered when it came to catching the eye of promotion boards: a couple of degrees from fancy universities, a spell at business school, periods in some of the more fashionable specialist units involving terrorism, organized crime, and financial misdemeanors. The man was all of thirty-three and had never, Peroni suspected, punched or been punched once in his entire life. To make matters worse, he hailed from Milan and spoke in a gruff, cold northern voice that matched his angular pasty face. He never set foot in the Questura without shoes so polished they looked like mirrors. No one ever saw a hair out of place on his bouffant, gleaming, black-haired head. The general opinion in the Questura bar round the corner was he’d make comissário before he turned forty, maybe even thirty-five. After that, the direction of his golden future was anyone’s guess. Just to rub salt in the wound, the man’s wife was a beautiful redhead who worked as a producer for the state TV company RAI. All things considered, as far as the average grizzled Roman cop was concerned, Vieri might as well have worn a sign saying “Shoot me” on his back.

This morning’s suit was dark blue barathea, not unlike the shrunken jacket and trousers clinging to the corpse of Spallone upstairs. Peroni, who had barely met the man, strode over smiling, introduced himself, and asked if he could help.

Vieri gave him a taciturn stare. He’d brought a handful of officers from Milan with him when he arrived in Rome, turned them into his personal confidants, people he spoke to before any of the locals whenever possible. An unwise decision for such a clever man.

“Don’t you have work in your own unit?” Vieri asked. He didn’t look in the least grateful for the offer of free manpower. Just suspicious.

“Sure,” Peroni replied pleasantly. “But sometimes a little local knowledge can help an officer who’s new around here. I hope you don’t mind my saying. Rome’s a village really, sir. The peasants tend to stick with their own and...”

Vieri wasn’t listening. He was staring at his phone, a model that was decidedly fancier than anything handed out as stock issue to the average Questura officer. Another innovation from Milan.

“The socks,” Peroni added.

The young inspector scowled and waved him down. He was reading his e-mail. It seemed to Peroni he was the kind of man who thought every message, whatever its contents, was of overriding importance, if only because it was addressed to him.

Vieri barked out a couple of orders to two men across the room. Local guys. Peroni knew them both. One of them nodded. The other briefly stared at Peroni with hooded eyes.

“The socks,” Peroni repeated. “If you’d care to come upstairs to the morgue I can show you. Better to see than try to explain sometimes.” He scratched his ear. “I keep trying to work out how many possible solutions there might—”

“I don’t approve of police officers interfering with the work of the forensic department,” Vieri said rather pompously, not once taking his eyes off the phone.

Peroni felt his hackles rising and wondered whether he cared if this man noticed or not. “It’s cooperation, not interference, sir...” he began.

To Peroni’s surprise Vieri’s hard stare managed to silence him.

“I know it was once fashionable for police officers to watch and sigh and groan as pathologists go about their business,” the inspector said. “Truthfully, it’s a waste of time. Theirs and ours. When forensic have something useful to tell us, they will do so and I will listen. In the meantime...”

Peroni watched him bark out yet more orders. Hunts for CCTV images. Mobile-phone records. Car details. A call to the media to see if anyone had seen a man answering Spallone’s description near the river the previous night. Nothing about the Roma kid.

“You don’t think it was suicide?” he asked when Vieri was finished.

“I don’t know, agente,” the man replied curtly. “I have no preconceptions. His widow assures us he was a troubled man. He absented himself from home at regular intervals.” Vieri shrugged. “I’ve no reason to disbelieve her. Spallone was a widely respected man. He sat on the board of several public bodies. He was a patron of the opera. Known in political circles. We will investigate and report in due course.” For the briefest of moments his stony, ascetic face displayed something approaching doubt. “I imagine she’s right. They were a wealthy couple, well connected. Hard to see anything else.”

Peroni stood there, wondering whether to point out that Vieri had contradicted himself already. Instead he said, “I would really appreciate two minutes of your time to see these socks.”

“You didn’t listen to a word I said, did you?” Vieri snapped.

“On the contrary. I hung on every one.”

The young inspector turned away from him. He was listening to someone else speaking on the phone.

“The Roma kid...” Peroni began, not moving a centimeter, speaking a little more loudly to regain Vieri’s attention.

“If the father can’t even stir himself to come and identify the body, there’s very little I intend to do at the moment. They can stew until they want to talk, or sort it out between themselves and then we’ll pick up the pieces.”

Peroni blinked, struggling to believe what he was hearing though, with a moment’s reflection, he knew the man’s callous words should not have come as such a shock. This was the modern force, not the one he’d joined thirty years before. Priorities, procedures, resource management... and the keeping sweet of bereaved relatives of men who sat on public boards and patronised the opera. All these mean, inhuman practices had come to swamp the previous shambling chaos through which officers sifted hopefully, trying to sort good from bad, the crucial from the inconsequential, with little to help them other than their own innate intelligence and knowledge of their fellow men and women.

“You’ll never get a thing out of the Roma if you send kids to talk to them,” he said with undisguised brusqueness. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Vieri’s eyebrows — which were, the old cop now noticed, manicured and shaped — rose as if in a challenge.

“You think you could do better?” the man from Milan asked.

“I know it,” Peroni replied straightaway. “You want me to go there?”

“You don’t work for me,” Vieri said, looking him up and down. “Frankly, I prefer younger officers. My problem, not yours...”

With that he turned and started talking to his men again. About phone records and databases, video and intelligence. Peroni guessed this team could try to work two cases — no, one and a quarter at best — for the rest of the day and never set foot outside the building, never do a thing without having a phone to their ear, their fingers on a keyboard, their minds tuned for a call from the morgue and the delivery report that said: It’s fine, go home, there’s nothing you can do.

One of the men Vieri had brought with him from Milan was watching Peroni with a look that spoke volumes. It said: Get out of here.

“You know,” Peroni said, touching the guy’s arm and nodding at the sunny day beyond the window, “it’s really not scary out there. You won’t even get sunburn, I promise. You should try it sometime.”

Then he marched out of the room, along the corridor, back into his own empty office, looked at the vacant chairs there, the silent phones, the desks, the computers, papers strewn everywhere.

Years before, Peroni had been an inspector himself. As arrogant as Vieri. Maybe more so. Maybe with better reasons. He was good at that job, a leader, a man who let people run with their own imagination at times, and always — or usually — managed to reel them in before they went too far. Then his job and his private life collided and when he woke up from that crash everything he held dear was gone: family, career, a good few friends. He was lucky to keep any kind of position in the police after that, even one as a lowly agente, maybe the oldest, lowliest officer there was by now. Lucky too that, for some reason he could never understand, love came back into his life in the shape of Teresa Lupo, the morgue boss now in Venice. And friendship in the form of Costa and Falcone.

But they weren’t here. He was and he could do what he damned well liked.

Afterwards Peroni would try to convince himself it was a considered, reasoned decision, one weighed and balanced, pros and cons, before he made up his mind. But this was, he knew, a lie, a conscious act of self-deception. The proof already lay in his pocket. On the way out, he’d subtly lifted a very full notepad from the desk of one of Vieri’s taciturn Milanese minions.

There was one sentence in it about Ion Dinicu and three pages about the eminent psychiatrist Giorgio Spallone and his businesswoman wife Eva. They lived in a fancy street in Parioli. It seemed a good place to start, but only after he’d checked a couple of things on the computer first.

The villa was, like everything in the couple’s quiet, rich, suburban cul-de-sac, daintily perfect. A three-story detached home from the early twentieth century, soft orange stone with colorful tiled ribbon decorations over the green shuttered windows. A small orchard of low orange and lemon trees ran between the ornate iron gate and baroque front door with its stained glass and plaster curlicues and gargoyles. In the finely raked gravel drive stood a subtle grey Maserati saloon and next to it a lurid red Ferrari.

He glanced through the window of the low sports car. There were magazines on the passenger seat, titles about women’s fashion, a few coarse gossip mags, and, somewhat oddly, a glossy about men’s health, with a cover of a muscular bodybuilder type straining at a piece of exercise equipment. There was nothing on the seats or the dash of the Maserati. The car looked clean and tidy. And, like the Ferrari, not much used except as some icon placed behind the iron gates, one advertising the wealth of those to whom these vehicles — so unsuited for the busy, narrow roads of Rome — belonged.

Showy jewelry for the drive, and it wasn’t hard to work out which was his and which hers.

Parioli, he thought. The place was such a byword for bourgeois snobbery that the term pariolini to describe its residents had become, for some, an insult in itself. It was a little unfair. But only a little.

He walked up to the door, rang the bell, and showed his ID when a maid in a white uniform answered. She was foreign, of course. Filipino, he guessed. The name “Maria” was embroidered on the uniform. She’d been crying recently and didn’t look into his face after she read the ID.

“I know we’ve been here already. How upsetting this is, Maria,” he said. “But I do need to check a couple of small details with Signora Spallone. Please...”

She wasn’t there, the maid said, still staring at the ground.

“Where is she?”

“Down at the gym.”

Peroni was thinking about this when the woman sensed his puzzlement and added quickly, “It’s Signora Spallone’s job. She and the signore own it. She wanted to break the news to the people there. They all knew him.”

“Of course,” he said, nodding. “This is such a very small thing. I just need to check some clothing in their bedroom. Giorgio’s. One quick look. The boss won’t let me off shift until it’s done. Can I...?”

She opened the door and he walked in. The place was beautiful, spotless and palatial, walls covered in paintings, old and new, corridors dotted with what looked like imperial-era statues.

“Their bedroom?” he asked.

“They sleep apart,” she said quietly and led the way upstairs.

The first bedroom they came across was huge, the size of many working-class apartments. It had its own separate lounge and a bathroom with two sinks, one toothbrush by the nearest.

He opened a wardrobe and saw line upon line of elegant dresses there.

The husband’s room was as far away as it was possible to get. Right at the back of the house. He could hear the drone of traffic from the busy main road. It was small and functional and hadn’t been decorated in years.

“When did Giorgio move in here?” he asked.

She looked at the bed, all perfectly made for a man who’d never sleep in it again. Then she brushed some stray cotton fibers off the sheets and said, “Two months.” Nothing more.

Peroni opened the wardrobes. Plenty of expensive suits and shirts, drawers with underwear and socks. All wool or cotton. Nothing cheap or artificial.

“He was a careful dresser,” he said.

She nodded. “The signore took pride in his appearance. He was a gentleman.”

“A depressed gentleman?”

Her chin was almost on her chest.

“I am the maid, sir. You ask those questions of the lady.”

Peroni got the address of the gym, a back street near the Campo dei Fiori in the city center, not far from the Questura. An awkward place to get to from Parioli, twenty-five minutes if the traffic was light. Then she showed him to the door. He couldn’t help noticing a pile of unopened letters on a sideboard next to it. A few looked like bills. Several bore the names of banks.

He stood on the threshold for a moment, gazing at the Maserati and the Ferrari.

“Those are not cars for Rome,” Peroni said. “Too big, too expensive. Too easily scratched by some stupid little kid who hates anyone who’s got the money to buy them. Why anyone...”

“They hardly use them,” the woman said. “Only when they leave the city. Every morning I wash them down. But when those big ugly things last went anywhere...” She shrugged.

“How do they get around, then?”

“I call a driver,” she said as if he was being dim.

Peroni didn’t approve of exercise. So gyms didn’t impress him much. The one the Spallones owned was called the Palestra Cassius and occupied the first floor of a vast palazzo in the Via dei Pellegrini, the old pilgrims’ street from the city to the bridge to the Vatican. The name intrigued him until he saw plastered behind reception a black-and-white picture of the man most people knew as Muhammad Ali, not Cassius Clay. There was a debt to history being paid here, but it wasn’t a Roman one.

The place smelled of aromatic oils and sweat. There was a blank-looking girl with a ponytail behind a computer, rows and rows of unused exercise machines, and close to the small windows at the back, a boxing ring. A sign leading off to the right said SAUNA.

“Exercise I can do without,” Peroni told the kid behind the desk when he walked in. “But sitting around sweating doing nothing... that I can manage. Is it good?”

She gave him a leaflet. It boasted of the biggest, most traditional Finnish sauna in Rome. She had her name embroidered on her T-shirt: Letizia. Someone, Spallone’s wife, he guessed, liked to tag the things they owned.

“I could break into a good sweat looking at the prices,” he said.

“We’ve got great introductory discounts,” she piped up. The girl looked around at the lines of empty machines. “And discounts after that if you ask nicely.”

“I always ask nicely. How many people work here? Trainers, fitness people, and the like?”

“Ten, fifteen guys. Plus me. We’re good.”

“I’m sure you are,” Peroni said, showing her the police ID. “But I’d really like to see Signora Spallone now if you don’t mind.”

The woman was in her office with ten or so of her men. Every one of them was big and fit, under thirty, he guessed. Names embroidered on their shirts. Mostly foreign, from the way they spoke and muttered as he showed his ID. More than half of them blond, Nordic. Like Eva Spallone herself, he now saw.

She ushered them out and gave him a hard stare, the one civilians used when they thought the police were paying them too much attention.

“You’re not Italian,” he said.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Not at all. It’s just that I always try to place people. It’s a game.”

Eva Spallone looked no more than thirty-five. She had short blond hair, the face of an angel, bright blue eyes, and the curvy, almost carved kind of figure Peroni normally saw in the magazines, not real life. She didn’t look as if she’d been crying recently.

“Finnish,” he said.

“You guess well.”

“Not really.” He pointed to the books and trinkets behind her desk. “You’ve got that blue-and-white flag there. The sauna makes a thing about being Finnish and not many do that. Two and two tend to make four. Usually, anyway.”

On the desk stood a picture of her with a man he took to be the living Giorgio Spallone. She was in a wedding dress, he in a suit. The Colosseum was in the background. So many weddings used that location for pictures after the ceremony. From the look of her, he guessed this couldn’t have been more than four or five years before.

“I went to your house,” he said. “There was a detail to be cleared up. We thought you’d be at home.”

Her eyes misted over then. Very quickly, it seemed to him.

“This was Giorgio’s business too. It was how we first met.”

A tissue came out of a very expensive rose-colored leather handbag, so small it couldn’t have contained much else. She wiped her pert nose then rubbed her bright blue eyes with the back of her hands.

“In a sauna?” Peroni asked.

“He loved the silence, the tranquillity. When his mind was troubled, it was the place he went. On his own.”

She didn’t want to answer that question.

“So you two started the business?”

“It was a wedding gift.” Another dab of the eye. “He was the kindest man. Everyone here loved him. I had to tell them myself. Lately he’d been so... melancholy.”

Peroni found he couldn’t take his eyes off the wedding photo.

“What detail?” she asked.

“Was your husband a fastidious man?” Peroni asked.

Eva Spallone blinked.

“Fastidious?”

“Was he careful about what he wore? How good his clothes looked? How neat they were?”

“Very much so,” she said.

“Thanks.” Peroni got up.

“You came all the way for that?”

“I don’t need to take up any more of your time, signora. Will you be here long? Just in case my boss thinks of anything else.”

“I’m having lunch with a friend. Round the corner. So many people to tell. And you won’t let me do anything with poor Giorgio. No funeral arrangements. It’s okay. I understand.”

He asked himself: Was that what most widows did the day their husband was found floating in the Tiber? Have lunch with someone to tell them how awkward things were?

He wondered. Most people reacted by staying close to the home they shared. A few found that too full of memories. Too painful.

“Here,” she said and gave him a business card for the gym with her mobile number on it.

On the way out he stopped by the ring. Two of the hulks were sparring, landing not-so-gentle blows with puffy brown leather gloves.

Peroni watched them, thought about the gloves, and said quietly to himself, “Boxing.”

The rest of the hulks stood around watching, commenting in a variety of accents, none of them native Italian. None of them looked to be in mourning. Next to the ring was a glass door marked as the sauna entrance. Peroni wandered over and took a look. He’d no idea what a sauna was like, really, so he opened the door and found himself gasping for breath almost instantly. It was like peering into a hot, damp fog. All billowing steam, so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

“You wanna try?” asked a hulk, taking him by surprise when he walked up behind.

“Isn’t there someone in there already?”

The hulk laughed.

“Who knows? You share a sauna, man. That’s what it’s about. Togetherness.” He squinted at the fog. “But no. I don’t think there’s anyone there. Thursdays are quiet.”

“Spallone used to come here alone, I thought,” Peroni told him.

“Yeah well...” The hulk shrugged. He looked and sounded East European, Russian maybe. Peroni couldn’t quite make out the name stitched on his shirt. “That’s more business than choice, I guess. Sauna’s a sociable thing.” A big elbow nudged Peroni in the ribs. “A place for men to talk. Get things off your chest.”

“Maybe I’ll try next week,” Peroni told him and walked out of the building, back into the bright day. It was just after noon now. Lunchtime. He wondered what Teresa was doing in Venice, how the playacting was going at Fiumicino, what kind of culinary delicacy the ever-picky Falcone had chosen for his solitary meal in Sardinia. All this speculation made Peroni hungry so he bought a panino stuffed with rich, salty porchetta from the market and ate it from his big left fist as he drove out to Ciampino and the Roma camp.

He didn’t need any directions for this place. Every cop knew where the Roma lived, dotted around the city in shifting encampments, bulldozed from time to time by the authorities only to reappear a few weeks later, a kilometer or so down the road. Several hundred, even a thousand men, women, and children lived in these places, crammed together in hovels built out of scrap wood and corrugated iron, huddled around makeshift braziers in winter, sweating out in the open in the scorching summer. For years now the Italian government had been trying to push them back into Romania and Hungary. It was like trying to sweep away the tide with a broom.

Peroni pulled through the camp gates and found his car immediately surrounded by scruffy urchin kids, hands out begging for money. He pushed through them and found himself confronted by a tall, surly-looking man with a beard. Grubby clothes, dark, smart eyes. Security around here.

“Police,” Peroni said, showing his ID. “I’d like to see Ion Dinicu’s father.”

“Not here,” the man said immediately.

Peroni sighed, looked around. There were eyes glittering in the dark mouths of the makeshift homes, all watching him. He’d dealt with these people many times in the past. It was never easy. They liked living apart from everyone else. They didn’t want the police to solve their problems, offer them protection. In their own eyes they were a separate nation, detached from a world which failed to understand them. That didn’t mean they were without rules or principles or beliefs. Faith even.

“If Ion isn’t identified... claimed by someone...” Peroni told the man, “... then it’s up to us to deal with his

funeral. If that’s what you want, fine. But bear this in mind. We’ll pass the work on to a charity, in all probability. A Catholic one since we’re in Rome. If anyone wants an invitation...”

The bearded man stood there, silent.

“If Ion’s father speaks to me now, just for a few minutes, I will make sure a request goes through for an Orthodox service. Romanian Orthodox, if you like. It can be done. It won’t be unless I ask for it.”

He waited.

Orthodox and Catholic. It was like football. Same game, different teams. Bitter rivals.

Two minutes later he was in a corrugated shack at the end of the camp, seated at a low plastic table with an elderly bent man who smelled of cheap dark tobacco and wood smoke.

“What do you want?” Ion Dinicu’s father asked.

“To find out who killed your son.”

“Why?”

Peroni shrugged and said, “It’s what I do. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want some kind of...” He hesitated. The word sounded odd, wrong, in these circumstances. “... justice?”

Dinicu’s father had the same kind of eyes as the man on the gate. Dark and intense. Blazing now.

“Find me the man who killed my Ion and I’ll show you justice,” he said. “He was a good boy.”

Peroni sighed.

“He was a pickpocket. A petty thief. Petty. But a thief all the same.”

“That was then!” the old man cried. “Not now.”

“Now he’s dead. I want to know why.”

The Romanian was silent for a while, then he murmured, “Everyone hates us here.”

“Why did Ion come back then? After we deported him?”

“Everyone hates us there too. At least here, there’s money. Work.”

“Tourists on the bus. Women with purses in the park.”

“No!”

“Then what?” Peroni wanted to know.

“When he came back he was a chauffeur. People wanted to go somewhere, they called. He was good. Cheaper than those taxi guys. Reliable. He had his own car.”

This was interesting.

“Where’s the car?”

“Gone. He went out on a job yesterday. Next thing, you send round some kid in a uniform to tell me he’s dead. What am I supposed to say?”

Peroni folded his arms, stared out of the opening of the shack, watched the kids playing with their grubby toys, the women sitting round darning clothes, hanging up washing. He couldn’t shake from his head what he’d seen in the morgue that morning. How many possible explanations were there?

“This is going to seem an odd question,” Peroni said. “What kind of socks did your son wear?”

The man blinked and looked at him sideways. “Is this a joke?”

“Not at all. What kind? Short? Long? Medium?”

Ion Dinicu’s father rolled up the legs of his cheap black trousers. His socks ran all the way to the knee.

“These socks,” he said.

The cop nodded.

“I mean,” the man went on, “these socks. We shared. Socks. Shirts. Was cheaper. Easier that way.”

“Right,” Peroni murmured and found his mind wandering back to the city.

“What happens to my son? You won’t let the Catholics have him? Don’t do that to him. He don’t deserve it.”

Peroni said, “Give me some way I can get in touch with you. When his body’s released I’ll make sure they know he needs an Orthodox service. If you want to come in to the Questura...”

The father was shaking his head briskly.

“Then give me some way...”

The man reached into his pocket and handed him a card. It read “Deluxe Ciampino Limousine Service” and had two mobile-phone numbers printed beneath a colour photo of the front of an elderly but very shiny Mercedes, a young man standing beside it, smiling.

“The second phone number’s mine. First was Ion’s,” he said.

Peroni said thanks, then walked back to the car.

By the time he was back in the city, looking for somewhere to park near the Campo dei Fiori, most of the smell of tobacco and wood smoke had left him. Peroni squeezed the battered, unmarked police Fiat into a diagonal space that left the front wheels up on the pavement of the Via dei Pellegrino and would, to his regret, force pedestrians into the cobbled street. He hated doing this, but there was work to be done.

He got out and called the Questura. Prinzivalli was the duty sovrintendente running the uniform officers out on patrol. This was good news. He was an old-time cop, a colleague going back three decades. Peroni said, “If I asked for five strong men outside an address near the Campo dei Fiori in twenty minutes would you want to know why? Time’s a little short, see.”

There was a pause on the line. Trust was an odd thing. Delicate, easily broken.

“I’ve got officers round there all the time,” Prinzivalli said. “I’d still need to give them some idea what exactly they’re looking for.”

Peroni told him, then passed on Eva Spallone’s mobile number and some more instructions.

“You know the new guy from Milan? The inspector? Vieri?” he said when he was finished.

“Mr. Cheery, we call him,” Prinzivalli replied.

“He’s the one. Well, Mr. Cheery’s busy right now. It’s best he doesn’t know. Not straightaway.”

There was that pause again, then Prinzivalli said, “Vieri hates being interrupted when he’s busy. I’ve learned that already.”

“Me too,” Peroni said, then finished with a few more details and cut the call.

He read the notes he’d made on the computer that morning. Detailed notes. There was a stationery shop on the way to the gym. He went in there, bought the things he needed, then walked down the narrow street to the Palestra Cassius.

It was now close to four o’clock. Peroni smiled for the girl on reception and said, “It’s me again, Letizia.”

She was chewing a nougat from the bowl on the counter, looking bored in the way only teenagers knew.

Eva Spallone wasn’t there. Must have been a long lunch. Prinzivalli could deal with her then.

There seemed to be one customer in the place, a fat guy sweating and grunting on an exercise bike. The hulks were still crowded round the boxing ring. Peroni walked over. Two of the biggest blonds were in boxing shorts, bare-chested, tanned pecs and biceps gleaming with oil, sparring lazily off and on the ropes. They looked bored too.

Peroni clapped his hands and brought the fun to a close. Ten sets of eyes turned on him. He waved his ID card high, chose his most authoritative of voices, and ordered them all into Eva Spallone’s office. That instant.

They obeyed straightaway, shambling over to the far side of the gym in a long line. Peroni watched them. Bodybuilding did something bad to the way people walked, he decided. It was like health stores. They always seemed to be full of sick, sniffy people.

The ten hulks filled the small office. The smell of sweat and oils and liniment was a little overpowering. None of them spoke, which he found interesting.

“This is a simple, routine check,” Peroni announced, forcing his way to the desk. “I want...”

He began coughing. Kept on coughing. The hulks stared at him. They looked worried they might catch something.

“Sorry... sorry,” Peroni said, gasping. “Got a really bad throat today. Hurts like hell. Tell you what...”

He pulled out the dark grey paper he’d bought in the stationery shop and the blue pen, then scrawled a single word in large capital letters.

“Any of you guys ever been...” He coughed and roughed up his voice even more. “Here?”

Then he walked down the line showing them the paper. Eight of them shook their heads. A thuggish-looking guy with the name Vladimir embroidered on his T-shirt glared back at Peroni and said, “Was years ago. In Russia.”

“Must have been fun,” Peroni replied.

Only one, halfway down the line, didn’t answer at all. He was the biggest of them all, one of the boxers, a good deal taller than Peroni, muscle-bound with a flattened nose, dim close-set eyes, and a stripe of Mohican-cut blond hair. His chest gleamed with sweat and oil, his muscles looked as if they’d been sculpted somehow.

There was a name embroidered on his bright red satin shorts. Eva Spallone did take great care to tag her possessions. Peroni looked down at it and said, “Sven?”

“What was the question again?”

Peroni held up the paper. The close-set eyes, glanced at it nervously, then darted round the room.

“The rest of you leave,” Peroni ordered, and he didn’t take his attention off the man in front of him for a moment as they filed out of the office.

“Swedish?” Peroni asked when they were gone.

“Finnish.”

“Like Eva Spallone. Isn’t that nice?”

The hulk just stood there. Big, stupid Sven, with his beady blue eyes and blond cockatoo stripe.

Peroni looked at him and said, “You know, when my daughter was four years old the doctors thought there was something wrong.” He indicated his eyes. “Here. With her sight. We went through all these tests. Pretty nurse in the clinic.” He grinned. “I never said no when it came to running her there.”

“What?” Sven asked.

“Bear with me,” Peroni went on. “One of the things they thought was maybe to do with the way she saw colors. That perhaps she was color-blind.” He sighed. “Scary when you think there’s something wrong with your kid. There wasn’t. She just needed better glasses. But that nurse was so pretty, so careful, I kept going back and talking to her. I thought I knew everything then, of course. Color blindness. Red and green. People couldn’t see traffic lights and things. I was a smartass. She put me straight. Sure they can’t see red or green. But they can see something, which light is on for one thing. So they can drive if they want. No problem usually. And also...” He reached into his pocket and found his own notepad where it sat, next to the one he’d stolen from Vieri’s guy that morning. “It’s not just red and green. That may be the most common kind there is, but you find lots of others. Like one called...” He glanced at the note. “Tritanopia. You heard of that, Sven?”

The Finn stood there stiff as a gleaming rock, saying nothing.

“I looked it up. They call it blue-yellow color blindness but it’s not that simple. Specially with the blues. Anyone who’s got this thing really struggles with those. Can’t see the difference between blue and black easily, for one thing.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Peroni’s eyes narrowed, “I’m talking about you. How did it go? Let me guess. Eva’s been monkeying around with you for a little while. She says, ‘Oh Sven, oh darling Sven. If only it was the two of us. You and me running the gym. Then we’d be together and make lots of money too. But Giorgio won’t ever divorce me...’ ”

Beads of sweat were beginning to build on the Finn’s broad, tanned forehead.

“So all you’ve got to do is wait one night until he’s in the sauna on his own. Walk in there, boxing gloves on, beat him about the head until he’s out stone cold. You got those gloves on, remember. No serious marks. No cuts. Dump him in the river. Eva says how sad, how depressed he was. Suicide. Stupid cops nod and then you’re done.”

Sven cleared his throat and stared down at his own broad chest.

“I guess Eva thinks a sauna’s a clever place,” Peroni went on. “All that evidence — sweat and blood and everything — gets washed away down the drain. Not sure about that, frankly, but it doesn’t matter. You see, Giorgio Spallone’s a nice guy. Really. His maid in Parioli calls him cars from some poor Roma kid called Ion. He likes Ion. Feels sorry for him. Sneaks him into the gym for a sauna last night as a favour. And there’s the Roma kid, hidden in all that steam, when you go wading in with the boxing gloves, punching Giorgio in the head.”

Peroni reached down and lifted Sven’s vast fists. He undid the lace ties of the boxing gloves at the wrist and gently tugged them off his enormous hands. There were cut marks on the knuckles. He touched them. Sven flinched. Then he looked more closely at the hulk’s face. There was a graze near the right cheekbone.

“Middle-aged psychiatrist’s a piece of cake for a thug like you. A Roma kid like Ion doesn’t go down so easily. I guess the gloves came off there. But he was a little guy. You punched him out in the end.”

“This is stupid...” Sven murmured.

“It was,” Peroni agreed. “See, when it’s done you now have two bodies in all that steam. Both naked. One, Ion, dead, I guess. Giorgio out for the count. You got to dress them — Eva won’t do that for you. You got to get them out of there.”

He cocked his head and looked up at the Finn.

“Ion’s car, I guess. You got his keys, beat where it was out of him. Put the two of them in there. Giorgio goes in the river somewhere near the Ponte Sublicio in Trastevere. Then you drive over and dump Ion with the trash near the nightclubs in Testaccio, the sort of place a Roma kid might find himself in trouble.”

“Stupid,” Sven said again.

“Here,” Peroni told him, “is the problem. Tritanopia. You got to put their clothes on and it’s hot, you’re scared, you’re all alone. And you don’t see what everyone else can. Those two guys are wearing different-colored socks. They’d know it. I’d know it. But not you.”

He pulled out his phone and showed the hulk the photo from that morning: four dead legs, two sets of odd, long socks.

Peroni put the phone away and picked up the paper sheet he’d written on.

“See this? The paper’s just about the same color as Giorgio’s socks. The pen the colour of Ion’s. You can’t read what I wrote there, Sven. Because it all looks the same to you. Here. Let me help.”

He took out a red pen and scribbled over the letters he’d written earlier in blue.

“How’s that?”

Sven could see the word now. He stared at it with his tiny, frightened eyes.

“P-R-I-G-I-O-N-E,” Peroni spelled it out.

“Prison. Jail. Incarceration. That’s the place you’re headed. One murder’s bad enough. But two.”

He sighed, put away the paper, reached up and lifted the Finn’s chin so he could look into his face.

“Two is so much worse. My advice is this. Tell the truth. Think about cooperation. Tell everyone how Eva put you up to it and led you by your beat-up nose. We’ll find out anyway. You don’t think you were the first one she made goo-goo eyes at, do you? We’ll talk to all the other guys. But if you help us now, you’re talking years off the sentence. Otherwise...”

He stood back and looked up and down at the shining, sweating man in front of him, quaking in his tight red satin shorts.

“Otherwise it’s just more fisting time in jail, and really I do not recommend...”

The Finn pushed him out of the way and raced across the gym towards the stairs.

They run oddly too, Peroni thought. Arms pumping, legs going up and down like mechanical dolls.

He walked over to the receptionist, watched by the line of wide-eyed, open-mouthed hulks who’d stayed behind and the fat customer now stationary on his exercise bike. There he picked up a couple of fistfuls of nougats from the bowl and stuffed them into his pockets before calling Vieri.

“There’s good news and there’s bad,” he said when he got through to the inspector, still in his office in the Questura. “The Spallone case and the Roma kid are done. Bad is...” He popped a nougat in his mouth. “... you’re going to have to unplug yourself from your BlackBerry and take a walk outside.”

When he got down the stairs he found Sven cuffed, hands behind his back, face pressed against a blue police wagon blocking the narrow street. Prinzivalli was there, seven men with him. Peroni handed out nougats from his jacket pockets.

“I only asked for five,” he said. “You didn’t need to come.”

Prinzivalli watched the hulk make one last effort to struggle, then give up. The Finn looked shocked and a little teary-eyed.

“It’s on my way home. End of shift.” He popped Peroni’s nougat into his mouth. “I thought perhaps this was something I didn’t want to miss.”

“It’s just an arrest,” Peroni answered.

Eva Spallone was being marched down the street in the custody of two women officers leading her firmly but politely by the arm.

“Wife?” Prinzivalli guessed.

“The ice queen of the north,” Peroni murmured.

Moments later, a Lancia saloon drew up behind the van. Vieri got out, face like thunder, with three of his minions from Milan.

Peroni looked at the men holding Sven, nodded for them to let go a little. The hulk looked up, saw the Spallone woman, and started to squawk in broken Italian, “Was her idea! Hers...”

“Tell him,” Peroni cut in, indicating the approaching Vieri.

“Her idea!” he yelled again, at Vieri this time. “Not mine!”

By now the Spallone woman was close enough to hear.

“Shut up, you moron!” she screamed at him. “Shut the...”

She glanced at Peroni, looked as if she felt stupid for a moment. Then the abuse started again, this time in an incomprehensible stream of gibberish, a language so strange Peroni couldn’t begin to guess a single word.

He took out his phone and hit the record button. When she was done he stopped the phone, walked out in front of the van, and said to the officers there, local and Vieri’s crew from Milan, “Listen to me. I want these two taken into separate custody. No chance they get to talk to one another. No shared lawyers.” He held up the phone. “I want a Finnish translator. Call Di Capua and...”

Vieri broke stride and leapt in front of him, then roared, “I am the inspector here!”

Peroni put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Of course.” Then he turned to the men again and said, “The inspector wants these two in custody. No contact. Finnish translator. Forensic are going to seal off the sauna in this place. The Roma kid was killed there, Spallone got beat up. Whatever this woman thinks, there’s got to be some trace left. Check bank records and the financials for this gym of hers. This place was bleeding old man Spallone dry. Talk to the maid. She’s got the Roma kid’s number and called him when Giorgio needed a ride. There’s your link. And the car.” He pulled out the business card Ion Dinicu’s father had given him. “This is an old Mercedes. Dinicu used it as an illegal cab. Spallone was his customer. My guess is, Sven here ferried them away in it after he hit them, then dumped the thing. Find this...” He squinted at the picture and read out the licence plate. “... and we’re in court come Friday. My guess is, start looking around Testaccio.” He glanced at the Finn. “Sven here’s not the brightest button in the box.”

The Finn squeaked.

“And you,” Peroni added, glaring at the hulk in the red satin boxer shorts, “remember. Tell the truth. One word. Fisting.”

They all stared at him in awed silence. Peroni eyed a minion from Milan. The man had his notepad in his hand. He hadn’t written a word.

“I’ll repeat the licence plate once more,” he said. “After that...” He touched Vieri on the shoulder again. “The inspector gets cross.”

They all scribbled it down that time. Peroni looked at Vieri and asked, “Anything else?”

The man’s hair didn’t look as perfect as it had that morning. He was lost for words.

“I’m off shift in thirty minutes,” Peroni added, glancing at his watch. “Take off the fact I never got a lunch break, in truth I’m done now.” He eyed Prinzivalli. “Beer? The usual place?”

The uniform man stripped off his uniform jacket, turned it so the lining was on the outside, and said, “The usual place.”

“Come... with... me...” Vieri ordered, gripping Peroni by the arm.

They walked round the corner, back towards the Campo, and Peroni filled him in on the details along the way.

To the man’s credit, the inspector listened, furious as he was.

When the explanation was done, Vieri shook his head and said, “I could have your job.”

“No, no.” They stopped by the place Peroni had bought his porchetta panino that morning. “I’ve done much worse than this and I never got kicked out then. Besides, I’ve only got a few years left. What’s the point?”

He looked Vieri in the face.

“Anyway, what are you going to say? Fire this man because he tracked down a couple of double murderers on evidence I wouldn’t even walk upstairs to look at? Not when he pleaded with me? I was too busy on my BlackBerry, see. Too tied up watching CCTV and waiting for the mobile-phone records to land in my inbox.” He scratched his head. “Is that how you get on the up escalator in Milan? If so, let me offer some advice. Don’t try it here. Won’t work.”

Vieri stiffened.

“We would have found all this,” he insisted. “When forensic reported, when we got round to the detail...”

Peroni felt a little red light rise at the back of his head.

“You didn’t need the detail. Two dead men, odd socks, same pairs. How many questions does that raise? How many possibilities? They didn’t get up that way. All you have to do is work out how they got naked. Then ask yourself why whoever dressed them didn’t spot the socks were wrong. Really. That’s it.”

The man from Milan was silent, a little down in the mouth.

“You use your eyes,” Peroni added. “Watch what people do with theirs. You know the only person who’s looked me straight in the face all day? That poor Roma kid’s father. He didn’t have anything to hide. He wasn’t choking on some stupid obsession with systems and procedures and idiotic theoretical...”

“Okay, okay,” Vieri interrupted. “Point taken.”

“And yes,” Peroni added, “you would have got there in the end. But this case maybe hangs on our golden boy Sven getting scared enough to cough it all up and put Eva beside him in the dock. Get his confession and before long she’ll realise she can’t wriggle out of it. You won’t have to prove a damned thing. You could have spent months trying to do that, and I’d bet a politician’s pension somewhere along the way Sven would have gone missing, by himself maybe or courtesy of some other hulk Eva was keeping sweet between the sheets.”

Vieri nodded. He seemed to agree.

“It’s Toni, isn’t it?” Peroni asked. “I’m Gianni.”

Vieri glanced behind him to make sure no one was watching. Then he took Peroni’s hand. “The trouble is, Toni, all that northern crap doesn’t really cut it here. Not sure it does anywhere, frankly. Walk around staring at your BlackBerry and your computers all day and you’re as blind as that stupid Finn to a few things, maybe ones that matter. At least he’s got the excuse he was born that way.”

“The paperwork...” Vieri began.

“... is your problem. This is your case. You get the credit. Tell them you sent me out to see Dinicu’s father on a hunch. It all fell into place from there. You’ve got someone itching to confess to two murders and cut a sentencing deal. No one’s going to ask a lot of questions.”

The inspector nodded.

“And if none of this had worked out? All your hunches came up empty?”

Peroni grinned.

“Then you’d never have been any the wiser. Here.”

He gave him the minion’s notepad, the phone with the recorded exchange in Finnish between Eva Spallone and Sven, and the keys to the unmarked police Fiat.

“I stole the notebook from your guy. A translator might find something useful on the phone. And me and Prinzivalli... it may be more than one beer. You get someone to deal with the car.”

“Fine,” Vieri said and started to turn on his heels.

“Hey,” Peroni called. The man stopped and looked at him. “You should come for a pizza with me and my friends. Falcone, Costa, Teresa. Well...” He shrugged. “She’s more than a friend. You’ll like them.”

Inspector Vieri laughed. It made him look human.

“Oh,” Peroni added.

He reached into his pocket, took out a nougat, held out it for the man from Milan.

“Welcome to Rome.”

Copyright © 2012 by David Hewson