Private Rome

Chapter 14

I didn’t like Christian Altmer. There was something off about the guy, as though he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. The easy charm, good looks and winning smile couldn’t conceal that, and I’d learnt not to ignore my first instincts. The moment I settled into the back seat of the cab I’d caught on the Via della Giuliana, I sent Mo-bot a secure email asking for background on Altmer.

Stadler seemed more straightforward: a conservative businessman of high standing within his profession, who was obviously motivated by concern for a friend. But a successful track record in business didn’t make him incapable of errors of judgment when it came to the people he worked with — something that had been brought home to me by Matteo’s arrest. It was possible that I’d been mistaken in appointing him head of Private Rome, though I still hoped to be able to prove otherwise.

I told the cab driver, a cheerful guy in his thirties who hummed along to the Italian ballads blaring from his radio, to take me to La Rustica Mall on the eastern edge of the city. The neighborhood around Vatican City was alive with tourists, and the hot air thick with fumes from the heavy traffic. Rome was busy this scorching July day, but as we drove through the city the crowds and traffic thinned until we reached a mall that could have been in any suburb in the world.

Luna was waiting by the main entrance and jumped in next to me the moment the cab stopped beside her. She seemed skittish and glanced around nervously as the driver complied with my instruction to head east. We joined the slow-moving traffic rolling out of the parking lot.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be thanking me,” she replied. “You should be getting on a plane and going back to America.”

“What are you afraid of?” I asked.

“Rome is full of enemies, old and new.”

“Who are your enemies?”

She smiled enigmatically, didn’t answer.

She relaxed a little once we reached the Autostrada 24 Roma a’ Teramo, a wide highway that stretched north-east of the city. The driver told me it was known locally as the Parks Motorway. We raced along it for about fifteen kilometers before taking a curling exit and joining the Via Polense, a narrow, single-lane road that snaked through countryside and up into the hills to the east of Rome.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Luna leant forward and said, “C’è una piccola strada a nord di Bullica-Ciavaccone.”

The driver nodded and when we neared the town of Poli, took a right turn onto an even narrower road that climbed higher into the hills. Leaves and branches whipped at the car, but when they cleared, I looked to my right and saw a magnificent view of the San Pietro Valley, a disorganized patchwork of forest, olive and citrus groves, farmhouses and small villages, all shining under the midday sun.

Luna’s nerves eased the further we traveled from Rome and the higher we went into the hills. I tried to strike up a couple of conversations with her; the first about what a police officer would be doing in a notorious brothel, and the second about who could scare a detective. She didn’t respond to either but continued to smile at me, eyes concealed behind a pair of opaque sunglasses with green tortoiseshell frames that matched her short voile dress.

The taxi reached a tiny hillside road, which according to a sun-bleached sign ran between Bullica and Ciavaccone. The earth around us was tinder-dry, but the leaves on the trees were green and gave the arid land a sense of vitality that would otherwise have been absent in the brutal heat.

“Hasn’t been much rain,” I remarked.

“We are into the fourth week of a drought,” Luna replied, speaking for the first time since we’d left the city. “It’s difficult for the farmers.”

We climbed higher still, above the patchwork of citrus and olive groves spread out across the hillside.

As we rounded a bend, approaching a particularly sudden drop, Luna leant forward and touched the driver on the shoulder.

“Proprio qui, per favore,” she said, instructing him to stop.

He pulled into a narrow turning place on the hillside and I asked him to wait, but he spoke quickly to Luna.

“He wants to go to Poli for fuel,” she translated. “He’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

I nodded and we got out, watching the man drive away, leaving us in the baking heat of the exposed hillside.

“This way,” Luna said, heading east, but I didn’t need her to guide me; the site of the accident was clear to see.

“Are those his tire marks?” I asked.

She nodded.

There was a pair of thick black lines veering toward the edge of a steep drop, and a gap where bushes and trees had been uprooted and the view to the valley below exposed.

“Looks like he tried to stop,” I said. “Like he really didn’t want to crash.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “What else do you see?”

I crouched down and studied the rubber residue on the road surface before standing up and looking around.

“Quiet road, good visibility all around.”

There was a clear line of sight in both directions from the sweeping bend, and the elevation meant we could see the road winding up and down for long distances around us. Headlights would have been visible from a great distance at night.

“He’s in the center of the road to begin with,” I said, as we walked between the tire marks. I crouched down again and examined the nearest mark. “There’s a kink here, and again further on, as though the car hit something.”

“That’s what I saw too,” Luna said.

“Maybe he was being shunted from behind?” I suggested, and she nodded. “You think there was another vehicle?”

“I think he might have been forced off the road.”

We walked to the place where the tire tracks ended, the edge of the steep drop, and I craned over and peered down at the valley floor some 200 feet below. My stomach lurched at the thought of Lombardi plummeting to his doom.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

Luna was about to respond when gunfire erupted all around us.