The Fallen Angel

THREE

The first Appian Way, the Antica, curved away from the gate of San Sebastiano in the Aurelian walls then ran south-east across Italy, past ruined tombs and temples, gatehouses and the debris of imperial-era barracks. Past Nic Costa’s home too, where it was little more than a narrow cobbled lane surrounded by the detritus of a lost empire. The Via Appia Nuova, its modern equivalent, was very different, a broad, busy highway choked with traffic, its city stretch passing low, grey housing estates, supermarkets and furniture warehouses, the ugly facade of twenty-first-century urban life. It was this that took them to Ciampino.

They were passing a line of cheap stores not far from the airport turnoff, Costa driving, a habit he’d kept from the days he and Peroni were of equal rank. There was something in the older cop’s silent, sullen mood that intrigued him.

Rome’s second airport, originally a military and business installation, was now an unlovely provincial dump preferred by the budget operators unwilling to pay the fees of the flashier Fiumicino. It was a few minutes away. Without being asked, the big man called ahead and made sure immigration knew to expect them, and to expect, too, that the Questura would send an armoured meat wagon to take the Turkish gangster Cakici back into their custody in central Rome before the day was out.

‘Why are we blaming the Turks again?’ Costa asked, fishing to get the big man talking out loud.

Without emotion Peroni repeated Falcone’s reasoning. It lay in the flimsy intelligence they’d received from Rosa Prabakaran’s superiors. Gino Riggi had been in the pay of the gang known as the Vadisi, the Wolves, that held the drugs franchise for the tourist dives around the Campo and Trastevere. The Gabriel kid had been the go-between for Riggi and the Turks. The fierce burst of publicity about the case had persuaded the Vadisi their operations could be jeopardized by the arrest of Robert Gabriel for murder. So they acted to save themselves.

‘Would they murder two people, one of them a cop, for that?’

Peroni’s jowly face contorted into a scowl.

‘Seems a little excessive, doesn’t it?’ he said.

‘Seems like asking for trouble,’ Costa thought.

‘I guess. . Leo knows that too.’

They’d worked together for so long that they could almost read one another’s moods. Falcone wasn’t content with the explanations he was trying to use as a basis for this case, and his dissatisfaction made him cling to them all the more. Not out of arrogance or laziness. It was his way of testing a theory, pushing it until the flimsy structure fell to pieces.

‘None of this fits,’ Peroni muttered as he watched a couple of tourist coaches pull out from the entrance to the airport, cutting across a line of cars without thinking. ‘Or maybe it fits too well. I hate this whole damned thing. I hate the thought of what that man did to his own daughter. Someone intelligent, cultured. Why? What would drive someone to do such a thing?’

‘He was sick physically,’ Costa suggested. ‘Perhaps that made him sick in the head too?’

Peroni gave him a cold stare and asked, ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Not for one minute. Mina loved her father. I’m sure of it. Would she feel that way if he abused her?’

‘You wouldn’t think so,’ the big cop muttered. Then he cheered up briefly and asked, ‘Did your father ever read you fairy stories?’

Costa laughed and said, ‘You’d never have asked that question if you’d met him. No. He didn’t.’

‘Well I did. With my kids. Loved doing it. One day I picked up a copy of Grimm’s tales, an old, cheap one at a church sale.’ The smile left his face. This memory troubled him. ‘Picked a story at random, sat down by their beds and read it out loud. They were eight, ten at the time.’

‘And?’ Costa said, prompting him when he fell quiet.

‘It was about a king whose beautiful wife was dying. So she made him promise he’d never marry again unless he found someone who was more lovely than she was.’ They stopped and waited for a tourist bus to disgorge its line of backpacking passengers. ‘The mother never thought that would happen, of course. But there was someone more beautiful, to the father. His daughter. When the mother died, he became crazy with grief and told his daughter he’d marry her.’

Costa thought for a moment and murmured, ‘This may be why my father didn’t read fairy stories.’

‘There was all the kids’ stuff,’ Peroni went on. ‘The girl running away into the forest. Coming back disguised, working as a servant, trying to hide her true identity. But the king fell in love with her anyway, even though he’d no idea who she really was. And in the end, after a lot of stupid shenanigans, they married. Father and daughter. Happily ever after.’

He scowled at the vast car park, the lines of taxis waiting to get into Ciampino’s overcrowded pickup area. ‘Happily ever after. And no one said a word. Last time I bought a kids’ book at a church sale, I can tell you. Why can’t life be just good and bad, the way it’s supposed to be?’

Costa flashed his police ID at the car park and drove to the secure area. Peroni waited as he parked the blue liveried police car, a cheap, dirty Fiat, not the flashy Alfas the Carabinieri got.

‘Still, I suppose I should be glad you left the Vespa at home,’ he added, breaking the mood a little.

‘Bit far for her,’ Costa replied. ‘But she’s still as strong as an ox. A little ox. One day,’ he pointed back towards the Via Appia Antica, ‘I’m going to ride her all the way down there, into the hills. Want to come?’

Peroni laughed.

‘I’ll pass on that. You always said you were going to go there on a pushbike.’

‘Too old. Too little time.’ Costa looked at him. ‘I’ve never worked organized crime, Gianni. Not seriously. Tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘How many ride-by killings do we get a year? Gang assassinations? Two? Three?’

‘Not as many as we used to get.’

‘And why’s that?’ Costa continued. ‘Because it’s an Italian thing. The Sicilians, the Neapolitans. They love all that show-off stuff. But they’re not running these rings any more. They’re more interested in easy, safe money. Bribery, corruption, skimming.’

‘Riggi wasn’t involved with the Sicilians.’

‘Precisely. Here’s another thing. If you’re going to kill someone from a motorbike, surely you need two people. One to ride. One to shoot. Have you ever known a mob ride-by where there was just one person on the bike?’

Peroni was smiling and shaking his head.

‘No, sovrintendente, I haven’t.’

‘And the small matter of the Ducati?’

Costa folded his arms. Just before they left they’d heard that the red motorbike had been located at four that morning, at an autostrada service station on the route north to Florence. Two cops had performed a textbook arrest and taken a thirty-three-year-old man into custody. It took a local inspector only thirty minutes to realize he had a case of theft on his hands, not murder. The bike had been abandoned shortly after the shootings, left in a side street near the Via Beatrice Cenci with the keys in the ignition. The man in custody was a city bus driver who’d been on duty till midnight and seen the machine by the side of the street on the way home. He was planning to drive the Ducati north to a relative in Florence and sell it on. The original rider’s clothes were still missing. The machine itself had fake number plates. No weapon had been found, no real clue as to the identity of the man who had killed Riggi and Robert Gabriel the previous night.

Peroni screwed up his flabby face and said, ‘Even the stupidest gangsters I’ve met, and there’ve been quite a few, would never have left a machine like that in the vicinity, with the keys in the ignition. Why take the risk? They’d have whisked it out of Rome in a van or something. Taken it out into the countryside and burned the thing. Or repainted it, changed the numbers, and put it in an empty dope crate back to Turkey or somewhere. That bike’s worth, what, seven, eight thousand euros? Either they’d destroy it or sell it.’

Exactly as Costa had thought. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘So Leo knows all this. He’s just working with what he has.’

‘We’re here to talk to this Cakici guy for no other reason than he was Riggi’s contact with the Turkish mob?’

Peroni’s bright blue eyes sparkled.

‘A contact who was trying to flee the country on a false passport, remember.’

‘Probably just scared we’d come looking for him. As we have. My guess is he’s as innocent of these murders as Mina Gabriel is of the death of her father.’

‘I hope your guess is correct,’ Peroni said quietly, unwrapping a chocolate bar and taking a big bite of it. ‘On the latter anyway. I truly do.’

Costa thought of the interview ahead.

‘All the same, I don’t like scum who sell drugs to teenagers,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a point, shall we?’