Private Rome

Chapter 8

Tor Bella Monaca is a rundown neighborhood to the east of Rome. The creation of idealistic city planners who’d imagined a diverse population living there in crowded harmony, the place was packed with graffiti-covered tenement blocks that flanked litter-strewn streets peppered with discount liquor stores and cut-price markets. I could see the tenements start to loom into view as we approached the area along Via Casalina, an elevated highway that ran to the south of Tor Bella Monaca.

I was only half paying attention to my surroundings, using my time in the back of an old Mercedes E-Class taxi to run a reverse-image search on the photos I’d taken of the mysterious woman who’d been waiting for me outside police headquarters.

Most of them were unusable, but one yielded a match: a profile picture for an investigative journalist called Faduma Salah, who worked for La Repubblica, one of Italy’s leading daily newspapers. I translated her bio, which revealed she was originally a refugee from Somalia, who had come to Italy as a child, undertaking the perilous journey across the Mediterranean with her family. She’d studied journalism at the University of Milan, where she’d been a prize-winning undergraduate and graduate student. She’d joined La Repubblica out of college and had worked her way up the paper’s ranks by breaking difficult stories. She had tackled organized crime, political corruption and terrorism; from this resumé she struck me as tenacious and brave.

I checked the time: 9:42 a.m. Too early for a call Stateside. It would be approaching 1 a.m. in LA, so I sent Mo-bot a secure email, telling her what I’d learned and asking her to run a full background on Faduma Salah and was only mildly surprised when I received an almost immediate reply saying she’d get right on it. Maureen Roth rarely slept, and yet she somehow managed to outperform the hardened tech heads she had working for her, despite in many cases being almost double their age.

Thanks, I wrote in reply, and she sent me a smiley face emoji straight back.

“It is just along there,” the cab driver said, nodding to a bright yellow tower block that stood on the corner of the intersection between Via Giovanni Battista Cigola and Viale Santa Rita da Cascia. “The fifth floor of the building.”

“You bring many people here?” I asked, as he slowed to a halt by the park opposite the high-rise.

“It’s a popular place,” he replied. “Twenty-five euros, please.”

I gave him thirty and stepped out of the cab into a quiet street. The noise of distant traffic filled the warm air but there was little to hear nearby, just a couple of radios leaking music and chat through open apartment windows.

As the cab turned around, I crossed the road and walked toward the apartment block. I saw two drunks sitting on a bench on the other side of some trees that fronted the street. They muttered quietly as they eyed me over their half-empty liquor bottles. Beyond the trees lay a parking lot filled with old cars.

I walked along a cracked concrete path toward the entrance to the block, which was set down a run of steps. The glass doors and windows either side had been painted black, making it impossible to see inside, and the apartments that flanked the entrance looked as though they never caught any sunlight, their windows edged with damp.

A guy in his early twenties, a little overweight, bearded, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and trainers, stood in a tiny patch of sun near the bottom of the steps and watched me as I approached. He didn’t say or do anything but I suspected he was a lookout, keeping an eye open for potential troublemakers or cops.

“The Pleasure Hall?” I asked, wondering why Faduma Salah had sent me to such a sleazy neighborhood.

The guy looked me up and down and nodded. “Five,” he said.

I went through the main entrance and found the floor tiles and walls of the lobby had been painted bright red. Dirty footsteps covered the floor and damp stained the walls, making me feel I was inside a smoker’s lung. The place stank of urine and neglect. As I hurried to the open elevator I was greeted by the stench of bleach.

I took the tiny car up to the fifth floor. I stepped out into the corridor and heard pounding music. The walls were painted black and peppered with inset LED lights that changed color in time to the beat. There were twenty doors, ten on each side of the corridor, but only one stood open. It lay to my right and the music seemed to originate there so I walked toward it. As I neared it, a big man in a black suit and shirt appeared and blocked the doorway. He sized me up before standing aside to let me pass.

I walked into an open-plan seating area where a dozen women in revealing outfits lounged around on couches, armchairs and oversized cushions. A slim woman in her forties sat behind a high counter. Her shaved head was bowed over an iPad; she was engrossed in a movie.

“Signore?” she said, noticing my approach.

I couldn’t figure out why Faduma had sent me to a brothel until my eye was drawn to movement on the other side of the room. Someone was trying surreptitiously to ease a door closed with their foot. Through the crack I could see a small sitting room and, reflected in the black screen of a turned-off television, the face of Luna Colombo, Matteo Ricci’s former police partner.