The Fallen Angel

FOUR

Kids, Riggi thought. You had to use them. No one else was stupid enough to do the job. But dealing with their idiocy, their unpredictability, their flakiness — these things drove him crazy sometimes.

He sat on a stool outside the bar in the back street near the Piazza Trilussa watching the streams of brightly clad adolescents wandering into the centre of Trastevere for the evening. A long night usually, one that might not end till three or later, till daylight, when some would find themselves on a bench by the Tiber, exhausted yet popped up with chemicals, munching cheap pizza, wondering what came next.

Riggi’s uncle had lived in Trastevere. When the cop first came to Rome from Venice he’d lived with the old man for a while, in a narrow, winding street that ran up the Gianicolo hill, all the way to the church of Montorio and beyond, towards the piazzale dedicated to Garibaldi. This was only eight or nine years ago, but it seemed a lifetime away. So much had happened since, in Riggi’s life, in that of Trastevere. His uncle had sold his little house for a fortune to some banker in Chicago who’d sliced it into apartments that he now rented over the Internet to tourists. Most of the neighbours had done the same so the streets that once were alive with Romans now had an anonymous, shifting population, without ties, without history.

When Riggi first came to Rome his uncle had proudly told him how Trastevere was the last true neighbourhood in the centre of the city. A solid, tightly knit community of families, most of whom had been staking their claim to these tapering streets of modest, cramped houses for centuries. Now many of the locals had taken the tourist dollar, moved out to new apartment blocks built on the flat estuarial land near Fiumicino. Places that came with easy parking and supermarkets nearby, fast trains back into the city for those who needed them. All the conveniences of modern life.

And Trastevere was slowly transformed, the Roman elements of it mutating into museum pieces for the crowds of wandering foreign tourists, the houses sold on for sums of money that men like his uncle, a dignified but impoverished print worker, could never have dreamed of attaining through their daily labour.

He hated the place. He loved it too. The kids here, gullible youngsters like Robert Gabriel, were his to control, to use, to master.

Riggi sipped his beer and thought of the ones he’d dealt with over the years. Most, in the early days, had wound up in court, busted for small amounts of dope, silent, always, about where the stuff came from. Two weeks later they’d be back in the bars, their tiny fortunes stored in plastic bags and rolled-up balls of foil. He hadn’t changed a thing by arresting them. It was like brushing away the flood water back home in Venice. The acqua alta always returned. Why? Because this was where, when the season chose, it belonged.

So he came to the conclusion it might be easier to win their confidence, to let them think he was as crooked as they were, given the opportunity. This way he got to glimpse the men behind them, the shadowy, dark figures who lived far away in pleasant suburbs, with wives and children at expensive private schools, all paid for by a pricey pinch of chemical that went into some foreigner’s nostril or mouth or vein late on a Trastevere night.

At some unnoticed point over the years the dividing line between him and them had disappeared altogether. Why? He’d no idea. He couldn’t even pinpoint the moment, the event, at which the change had occurred. Sometimes the acqua alta turned up on schedule. Sometimes it never showed. That was the way of things.

How many bar kids pushing dope had he met this way over the years? Forty. Fifty. More. He’d lost count. Most of them looked the same anyway. Lanky, tall, pale, with unkempt hair and blank, dead faces. From time to time one of them would fail the exam, the subtle, short interview Riggi gave them before revealing who he truly was. And then they’d wind up in front of a magistrate, serving a little time, always in silence. The Vadisi understood the need for this. A cop who never caught anyone would soon attract suspicion. Statistics mattered, more and more. He needed sacrifices, just as much as the Turks did. They were necessary for all the old reasons, and practicality meant that it was easier to put the innocent and the gullible to the sword than the guilty. This was a world constantly on the edge of breaking. An occasional scapegoat, some dumb youngster putting up his hand to selling coke and heroin and poppers, kept the lid on, for a while anyway.

There’d been a time when he thought that Robert Gabriel might have been in line for this fate. But Gabriel was different, and had been from the start. Wily, cowardly, unpredictable — all the things Riggi loathed. But someone who could shift huge amounts of dope too, come back with an empty stash and pockets brimming with money, always ready for more.

Too much money sometimes, Riggi knew. The arithmetic of pushing dope was simple. Gabriel was beating the numbers and the Roman narcotics cop couldn’t quite work out how. By skimming from the proceeds? That seemed unlikely and dangerous. By working for two masters? Riggi wondered about that and knew it was a conversation he and the English kid had to have. There’d been rumours of late of a new player in the centro storico, someone Italian, not Turkish. That idea gave him a chill. It spoke of wars, of blood, of messy public revelations.

Also. . Riggi tried to remember. But the beer, and he’d drunk a lot of it lately, seemed to cloud his recollection.

He recalled the first time he and Robert Gabriel had met, and a curious memory returned. In a way he felt it was almost as if Robert Gabriel had recruited him. Not that this was possible. The young English kid hadn’t needed bending to Riggi’s will. He was there, in the mental place they both wanted, already, willing to shuttle between him and the Vadisi henchman, Cakici, without a second thought, as if this duplicitous and risky existence came naturally.

There was something about Robert Gabriel that Riggi had mistrusted from the start. Now, with a talented and tenacious cop like Leo Falcone on his tail, Gabriel was beginning to look like a serious liability. He had to get the kid out of Rome, quickly. Riggi would even buy the airline ticket himself if need be. If that didn’t happen — if the kid was an idiot and insisted on staying. .

Gino Riggi didn’t see himself as a dishonest man. He’d never enriched himself much from his time working both sides of the street. A holiday in Thailand. A decent hi-fi system. Some money sent back home to his widowed mother who lived in a humble back-street apartment in Castello, too proud to ask for help. That was all this meant. It wasn’t for personal gain, not really. Riggi had rationalized this time and time again, usually late at night with a belly full of beer and a stomach complaining that a little food wouldn’t go amiss either.

In a world that was fractured to breaking point the best a decent man could do was to try to keep a little equilibrium around him. He allowed the Vadisi to deal to the dumb and feckless foreign kids whose tourist dollars, largely donated by doting parents intent on giving them a brief European education, kept the economy of the Campo and Trastevere alive, if barely. In return the Turks kept away from the places where real Roman kids went to play, stayed out of prostitution and some of the nastier sides of the drug business. There was an accommodation, an awkward, illicit one that could put him in jail if it became known.

And if that happened? If the house of cards around him really tumbled down one day? Not a single gram of coke would disappear from the streets. No dealers would get busted. Nothing much would change.

He snatched the bottle of strong Moretti beer to his mouth and downed some. No one had ever been hurt in his little territory over the years. Not seriously. He didn’t want that on his conscience. But if Robert Gabriel wouldn’t take the hint. .

‘Stupid English kids,’ Riggi said.

He glanced at his watch. It was eight thirty. At least the English were usually punctual.

A tall, dark-haired figure was bouncing down the cobblestones of the little alley with the jaunty punk walk so many of these dumb, drug-pushing adolescents thought was cool. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, jeans. The same thing a million other kids in the city liked to wear.

The morons all looked the same after a while, Riggi realized, and knew, from the sinking feeling in his stomach, he had to get out of this mess. It was wrong. It was dangerous. And one day soon he’d no longer be able to keep this creaky world afloat.

‘What the hell. .?’ Riggi began as the kid got nearer.

He stopped. His voice was being drowned out by another noise: the roar of a powerful motorbike echoing off the tall tenement houses around him, going too fast to be acceptable, even in the rough and rowdy neighbourhood this had become.