The Garden of Evil

One

At 8 A.M., when the noise from the neighbouring room woke him, Costa walked out into the street and found stall-holders in white jackets firing up charcoal braziers for hot chestnuts, panini stands getting ready for the day. A lone tree, sprinkled with artificial snow, stood erect at the entrance to the square. Next to it was some kind of musical stage at the foot of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, complete with a gaggle of bored-looking musicians and a troupe of skimpily dressed girl dancers shivering, clutching at their bare arms, trying to find some protection against the weather. A bright winter sun did nothing to dispel the bitter, dry, bonechilling cold. A trickle of people wrapped in heavy clothing meandered past the moody entertainers on to the broad pavements of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, spilling out into the traffic lanes now closed to all but pedestrians, as they were every Sunday.

It was still Christmas in Rome, just. The place felt unreal, expectant somehow. Costa walked down the middle of the road, where a thousand cars and vans normally fought each other daily, thinking, praying for his phone to ring. Then, when he got near the foot of the tree, close enough to see the low illumination of the fairy lights still lit even in the brightness of the day, a familiar unmarked blue Fiat worked through the barriers and came to a halt next to him. Peroni was behind the wheel. He looked bemused. But not unhappy.

The big man pushed open the passenger door and said, not quite angry, “You left your ID card in that crummy hotel. Amazingly they phoned to tell us. You’d better get in.”

Two minutes later — far more quickly than he could ever have expected on a normal day — they were parked in the Piazza Navona, the place empty save for the pigeons. Peroni said little along the way, except for murmuring a couple of cautious remarks about his looks. Costa ignored them. He felt distanced from everything, as if this were all part of a waking dream. As if…

They got out and walked round the corner towards the statue of Pasquino.

Costa’s heart skipped a beat. There was a slender figure in black there, back to him, facing the battered, misshapen statue, staring at some fresh sheet of white paper stuck on the base.

He ran, ignoring Peroni’s anxious calls from behind.

A sister, a nun. He didn’t know the difference. He no longer cared.

When he got there, he placed a hand gently on her shoulder. The figure turned, smiled at him, then stepped backwards, primly removing herself from his touch.

She was a woman in her forties, with a very pale and beautiful face, light grey eyes, and silver hair just visible.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I thought…”

His attention was divided between her and the poster on the statue. A poster she’d fixed there the moment before. There were other figures in black nearby too. They had pieces of paper in their hands and rolls of tape. They were placing the sheets everywhere, on walls, on shop windows, carefully aligning each at eye level to make them as visible as possible.

“They’re all over the city,” Peroni said, catching up with him. “On the other statues. In the Piazza Venezia. This lady asked for you in particular.” He glared at the woman in black. “Which is all she’d say.”

“Not true,” the sister objected. “I wished you a good morning and happy Christmas too. You should be flattered. Normally I would say nothing at all.”

“Sister,” Peroni replied, “Agata Graziano is missing. We would very much like to find her. There is no time for these antics.”

She shrugged and responded with nothing more than an upturned smile, a worldly gesture and very Roman. Much the kind of response Agata would have given if she’d wished to avoid the conversation.

He read the poster, a new message for the talking statues, one they were determined to post everywhere, as Falcone had posted his, though this was very different.

“It was Agata’s idea?” he asked quietly. “Sister…”

The woman’s grey eyes returned his gaze, unwavering, interested, and, he thought, marked by an inner concern she was reluctant to reveal.

“You’re Nic?”

“I am.”

“This is true,” she replied. “You are as she described.”

The woman looked at Peroni and began to motion with her hands, saying, “Shoo, shoo, shoo! This is for him. No one else.”

Under the fierceness of her stare, the big man backed off, towards the large public square behind.

She waited, then retrieved an envelope from the folds of her black cloak.

“Sister Agata sends this. For you and you alone.”

He ripped it open and read the contents: a single sheet in a spidery academic hand. Unsigned.

“God go with you,” the woman said quietly.

He took one more look at the words on the poster beneath the malformed, crumbling statue. His childhood studies, literature and art, had never really left him. The quotation was recognisable. Given the book, he could have found it. The words were an adaptation from Dante again, with a message, direct and personal, tagged on the front.

Costa read the words out loud, listening to their cadence, hearing her voice in each syllable.

“ ‘Franco, Count of Malaspina. Do you not know that, for all your black deeds and black blood, you are like all of us “worms born to form the angelic butterfly”? For Emily Costa and all those murdered women whose lives were taken by your sad anger, God offers forgiveness. Take it.’ ”

The sister watched him impassively as he spoke, her head tilted to pay attention to the words.

“He’s not looking for salvation,” Costa noted, stuffing the letter into his jacket pocket, then taking out his gun, checking the magazine was full, and thinking ahead of what might lie in wait.

Agata was attempting to force Malaspina’s hand, both by revealing his guilt and by what she believed to be the secret he hated most: his ancestry. It was… Costa wished his head were functioning better. It was wrong, he felt, though he was unable to be precise about his reasons.

The woman in the black robes eyed the weapon with a baleful expression.

“Everyone is looking for salvation,” she murmured with a quiet, simple conviction. “Whether they know it or not.”

He wasn’t in the mood for distractions. Peroni came over, looking hopeful.

“I have to do this on my own, Gianni,” Costa said, ignoring the woman.

“But—”

“But nothing. That’s how it is.”

The sister’s smug smile was becoming annoying.

“Arrest these women for flyer-posting,” he ordered. “Keep them inside under lock and key until this evening.”

She began to protest, and her colleague across the way too.

“Sister,” Peroni interrupted, “you have the right to remain silent. Or call the Pope. But he might be busy today.”

“You’ve no idea how many women there are in Rome like us,” the senior one hissed at him. “None at all.”

He didn’t. Nor was it important. There was only one thing that mattered.

Costa started running north, back into narrow streets and lanes beyond the Piazza Navona, back into the streets of Ortaccio, letting the long-forgotten rhythm of his movement across the cobbled streets of Renaissance Rome remind him of a time before this pain, a time when he was nothing more than a single, insignificant agente in a city full of wonders.

Two

By nine-thirty Gianni Peroni was sick of seeing nuns and sisters. It seemed as if an army had assembled on the streets of Rome, every last woman in a religious order who could walk, flocks of them, no longer scampering through the streets quickly, discreetly, like skittish blackbirds brought to earth, but instead throwing off their shy invisibility to stomp around the deserted city with one idea only: putting up Agata Graziano’s curious message in places even the most adventurous flyer-posters would never dare to venture. Her adaptation of Dante, with Franco Malaspina’s name and crimes now attached, was plastered on some of the most famous and visible buildings in the city.

Copies ran like a line of confetti across the roadside perimeter of the Colosseum, to the fury of the architectural authorities, who had interrupted the peace of their holiday break to call the Questura in a rage. All the other talking statues were now covered in them, too, as was the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori and the stone sides of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the pedestrian pilgrims’ bridge across the Tiber on the way to the Vatican. A handful of sisters had even managed to attach several to the front of the Palazzo Madama, the Senate building where Caravaggio once lived under the patron age of Del Monte, an act that had brought down the tardy wrath of the Carabinieri, who now, the TV stations said, had fifteen sisters and nuns in custody, for vandalism against public, though never church, buildings throughout Rome.

The Questura, Peroni was alarmed to discover on his return with the two silent, smug women from the Piazza Pasquino, was in possession of no fewer than twenty-three, which was why Prinzivalli, the duty uniform sovrintendente at the front desk, threw up his hands in horror at the sight of Peroni leading two more through the door and wailed, “What are we doing, man? Collecting them?”

Peroni turned and looked behind him. The quieter of the two women he had apprehended was patiently taping a poster to the notice board in the public waiting room. She seemed to have an entire roll of them stuffed inside the voluminous dark folds of her gown. He found himself wondering at the idea that a community of sisters should have a photocopying machine, then cursed his own ignorance. All along, Nic had understood something that had eluded the rest of them. These women were not shy and weak and unworldly. Some, perhaps. But not all. Many had a determination and a conviction that escaped the daily population of the city who nodded at them on buses and in the street, never thinking for a moment there was much life or interest beneath that drab uniform. Yet they possessed a certain kind of courage, needed it to withdraw from conventional humanity in the first place.

When that resolution was tested… Peroni checked himself. They were still women on their own, and Agata Graziano a defenceless sister, seemingly alone in a city where at least one ’Ndrangheta thug remained on the loose and looking to take her life.

Falcone bustled in. The inspector looked bright-eyed, full of vigour… and damned angry.

“What is this?” he demanded, ripping the sheet from the wall, staring at the words as if they were in a language he couldn’t understand. “Well?”

“Don’t ask me,” Peroni answered. He nodded at the two by his side. “Ask them.”

“I’ve been asking their kind all morning. All they do is stare back at me, smile sweetly, and say nothing. Well?”

The two women smiled at him, sweetly, and said not a word.

“Dammit! Where’s Costa?”

“He had a message,” Peroni replied, fully expecting the storm to break, and utterly without a care about its arrival. “Sister Agata passed it on through this lady here.”

Falcone asked tentatively, “And…?”

“He’s gone. He didn’t say where. She—”

“I don’t know,” the older sister interrupted. “So please do not be unpleasant. You will only make yourself more choleric.”

Falcone’s eyebrows rose high on his bald, tanned forehead. The door opened and two uniformed officers walked in with four more women in long, flowing winter robes.

“Arrest no more nuns,” Falcone ordered. “Put that out on the radio, Prinzivalli.”

The sovrintendente nodded with a smile, made some remark about this being one of the more unusual orders he’d had to pass to the control room of late, and disappeared.

“Sister,” Falcone went on, standing in front of the woman who had delivered the message to Costa, “you must tell me where Agata Graziano is. Where our officer is too. I don’t understand what she’s doing, but it is a distraction, perhaps a dangerous one, in a case of the utmost seriousness. I cannot allow her to be dragged in any further. I regret bitterly that I allowed this involvement at all.”

The woman’s grey eyes lit up with surprise and anger. “You arranged it in the first place, Falcone.”

The inspector’s cheeks flushed. “You know my name?”

“Naturally. Sister Agata spoke to us at length last night. We broke our own rules. We were awake long past the due time.” She smiled at Peroni. “We know about you all. And more.” Her face became serious. “We know you have no case, Ispettore. This man… Malaspina. He has defeated you. He has money and the law on his side. He is one of those nasty, thuggish Renaissance knights Sister Agata told us of, a man who has” — to Peroni’s astonishment she stabbed Falcone in the chest with a long, hard finger — “bested you entirely. For all your power. All your” — this time her eyes flashed in Peroni’s direction — “men.”

“That is an interesting observation, Sister,” Falcone barked. “Now, where the hell are they?”

“You think God has nothing to do with justice?” the woman asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

“If he has,” Falcone answered immediately, “he’s been doing a damned poor job of it lately. If…”

The tall, lean figure in the slick grey suit went quiet. Peroni hummed a little tune and rocked on his heels. It was a remarkably stupid — and quite uncharacteristic — comment for such an intelligent man to make.

The long, bony finger poked at Falcone’s tie again.

“God works through us,” she said. “Or not, as may be the case.”

“Where are they?” he asked again.

She took his wrist and turned it so that she could see his watch. “All in good time.”

Then the woman took one step back and exchanged glances with the others there, all of whom had listened to this exchange in silence. She was, it seemed to Peroni, the senior among them, and they knew it.

“There is one thing,” she said with visible trepidation.

“What?” Falcone snapped, but not without some eagerness.

“Sister Agata told us your coffee isn’t like our coffee. From powder. In big urns. She said… your coffee was… different. May we try some? It is Christmas.”

Falcone closed his eyes for a moment then took out his wallet.

“The Questura coffee is not fit for animals,” he declared. “Take these women out of my sight, Agente. If you can find them somewhere that’s open, buy them whatever they want.”

Three

Ten minutes later they were in the nearest cafe that was open, a place famed for both the quality of its coffee and cakes and its foul-mouthed owner, Totti, a middle-aged bachelor now stiff with outrage behind his counter, like a cock whose territory had been invaded by an alien species.

“It’s not right,” he confided to Peroni behind his hand as they stood at the end of the bar, a little way away from the gaggle of black-clad women sipping at their cups of cappuccino and tasting cornetti and other cakes as if this everyday event were entirely new to them, as it probably was. “It’s bad enough when there are more women here than men. But these women.”

“They are just women,” Peroni grumbled.

He didn’t like Totti. The man was a misanthrope. If there had been anywhere else within walking distance that was open… But the coffee was good. From the expressions on the women’s faces, it was a revelation.

“A waste of a life,” Totti replied. “What good does that do any of them? A couple would look decent scrubbed up and in a dress too.”

Peroni gave him the stare, a good one. There were, he reflected, decided advantages to being an ugly brute at times. Totti’s tooth brush moustache bristled, and without a word, the man walked off to polish, halfheartedly, some beer glasses by the sink.

Each of the sisters now possessed a half-brown, half-white cappuccino moustache above her top lip. Oblivious to something they seemed not to notice even on one another, they were gossiping, the way all Roman women did, but quietly.

He walked over, trying to make sense of the thought that kept bugging him.

“Ladies!” he said cheerily, picking up one of the empty coffee cups. “So, how was it?”

“Very rich,” the senior one said immediately, for all of them, that was clear. “Enjoyable but a luxury. Perhaps once a year. No more.”

“Once a year is better than once a lifetime, Sister,” Peroni observed.

“Before Rome, I worked in Africa,” she answered tartly. “They would have been happy with once a lifetime there.”

“Happy?” Peroni echoed. “I doubt it, don’t you?”

“I never realised a police officer would be so precise about words. Sister Agata said you were remarkable. The three of you. So what now?”

He beamed at them. “Now you clear your debts. You tell me something.”

“Falcone paid,” she said. “He’s not here.”

“It’s a small thing and, being sisters, you believe in charity. It is this.” He had checked with Prinzivalli while Falcone was berating them in the Questura. It had seemed, to him if not to Leo Falcone, an obvious question to ask. “You’ve performed Sister Agata’s bidding on most of the prominent buildings in the centro storico. It’s an impressive feat. You must have been very busy.”

“Thank you,” she said, bowing her head gracefully.

“Yet there is not a scrap of paper on the walls of the Palazzo Malaspina, even though it would be an obvious place for your attention, with or without the connection you suppose.”

They became very still and stared at him.

“I believe Count Malaspina will know what has happened,” the vocal one said eventually. “It’s everywhere. One would have to be blind, surely…”

“One would,” Peroni agreed. “All the same, I don’t see why you should leave that building untouched, almost alone of any of some importance.” He paused. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless that is precisely where you do not wish us to be.”

She fell silent. Peroni leaned forward.

“Sister,” he said quietly, “I don’t know how much you comprehend of the game you are playing. But understand this. If your colleague and my friend are in that place, there is nothing we can do to help them. Nothing. Without cause. Without evidence. Without a reason so compelling we feel able to drag away a magistrate from his lunch to beg for the right papers. The Palazzo Malaspina is inviolate in Rome, beyond our powers, outside our jurisdiction. We can’t go there under any circumstances at the moment. It might as well be the Vatican for all we can do.”

“I can go to the Vatican anytime I like,” she said, and laughed. It occurred to Gianni Peroni that he might not, in everyday life, like this woman very much at all.

Four

It was a brief phone call. Falcone listened to his request. Then he said no.

“You didn’t hear me correctly, Leo,” Peroni insisted. “I know we can’t go inside. I am simply telling you. These witches in wimples are up to something and it involves Malaspina’s place. They think they can handle this on their own. We know differently. I want five good men and an unmarked van. No one will see us. No one will know.”

Falcone’s voice went up a couple of notes. He was furious; he was flustered.

“I don’t have five good men to spare, sitting in some van, waiting for God knows what. Everyone we have is out there, looking for Agata Graziano and Costa. What else do you expect me to do?”

“Something that isn’t obvious,” Peroni replied. “Something that’s you, not an order handed down from upstairs.”

The line went silent. Peroni could imagine the flush of rage racing up Falcone’s tanned cheeks at that moment.

“Listen to me,” he went on hastily. “You know you won’t find them. They don’t want to be found. That’s the point.”

“What is?”

“The boss sister you just met told us. We’ve failed. The law’s failed. All the ways we have of dealing with situations like this… they’re done with, busted, and Agata knows it. The best we can hope to come out with at the moment is a green light from Grimaldi to start using Teresa and her magic DNA machine again on anyone except Malaspina. That’s the payoff… and your cunning little sister thinks she has another way.”

He didn’t hear an instant explosion. That was good.

“Five good men,” he added hopefully. “An unmarked van. An hour or two. No more. I don’t think we’ll need it.”

“I don’t have—”

“If she’s in there, she will surely need our help before long. Whether she — or they — know it or not. Do you want to leave that to a phone call and the off chance we might have a spare car to send round from the Questura? Would that make you happy?”

Falcone uttered a quiet, bitter curse, then added, “For a mere agente you have a lot to say.”

“Nic’s there. I rather like Agata too. What do you expect?”

“Wait outside,” he ordered. “And don’t let anyone know what you’re doing.”

Five

She had specified the place, and the location filled him with dread. It was the area behind the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, the dank cobbled yard full of junk and stray weeds where he had first encountered Malaspina, hooded, armed, and deadly, before chasing him out into the open streets, towards the Mausoleum of Augustus.

Towards Emily.

Costa stopped for a moment as he entered the narrow brick corridor from the street, the place where Malaspina had turned and made that perfect O shape behind the fabric, murmured “boom,” and then dodged his fire in return. After that…

He didn’t want to think about it. There wasn’t time. He retraced his steps down the alley, wondering where she might be, whether he was too late already. The place seemed different. Smaller. Even more squalid. Looking everywhere, half running, close to the wall, trying to move with as little noise and visiblity as possible, he went on until he got to the small enclosed yard at the end.

The sight of the junk, and the vicious, clear memory of Malaspina hidden behind it, brought back such bitter recollections. For one fleeting moment he could see Emily’s face rising in his imagination, staring at him, angry, determined, the way she always was when danger threatened.

Then a sound, thankfully, sent her ghost scattering from his head.

Agata emerged in the far corner of the yard, creeping out from behind some discarded mattresses leaning against the blackened stones of the grimy terrace that had once been the home of Caravaggio. She was trying to smile. There was something in her hand he couldn’t see.

Her clothes were ordinary: a simple black nylon anorak and plain jeans. The kind the convent probably gave out to the poor, he thought. She looked like many a young woman in Rome at that moment, except for the expression on her face, which was excited, with a fixed resolve that worried him.

He walked over and stood in front of her.

“You will come with me now,” Costa said forcefully. “You will leave this place and go to the Questura. Even if I have to carry you.”

“Do that, Nic, and you lose forever. Franco Malaspina will walk free. He will negotiate with that lawyer of yours. His guilt will be forgotten in return for allowing you to establish that of others. Do you wish to bargain with the devil? Is that who you are?”

“Agata—”

“Is it?” she demanded, her dark eyes shining.

“I lost my wife to that man,” he said quietly, hearing the crack in his own voice. “I don’t wish to see another life wasted.”

“Don’t fear on my account. That’s my responsibility. How did he come here for those women?” she asked. “Did you think about that? He’s a well-known man. He wouldn’t walk in the front door. It was too obvious. Nor…” She turned her head briefly to the brick corridor. “.…would he have risked that. It opens out into the Piazza Borghese. He would have been seen there too. People notice. You hardly ever meet Franco out in the open, in the street. It’s beneath him.”

“This is all too late.”

She leaned forward, smiling, her pert, smart face animated as always. “He owns everything. Every square metre. Every last brick and stone. He came through his own house.” She glanced towards a shadowy alcove half hidden behind some discarded chests. “You never looked. It never seemed important. After all, you couldn’t enter his palace anyway.”

Costa struggled to find the words to make her understand.

“Malaspina wants you dead.”

“No.” She shook her head. Her dark curly hair flew wildly around her with the violence of the gesture. “That’s only a part of it. What he wants is to forget what he is, where he came from. All those black women. Women like me. ‘The sport in the blood.’ He’s ashamed of his lineage, as were Ippolito Malaspina and Alessandro de’ Medici before him. There is your resolution, if only you knew it. Franco Malaspina is at war with himself and flails at everything in order to hide that simple fact.”

He sighed. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“So what, then?”

Something still didn’t ring true, however hard she tried.

“This is all conjecture,” he answered. “Useless and dangerous.”

“No,” she insisted. “It’s not.”

“Did you ever stop to think for a moment how we all felt when you ran away?”

“Nic,” she whispered, black eyes sparkling, her mouth taut with emotion and something close to fear, “this is not about me.”

“I lost my wife…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never meant that.”

“You don’t know what hurt is. You’re too afraid to feel it. You’re terrified something real might penetrate the cocoon you have built for yourself.”

“That’s not fair…”

“I don’t care about fair anymore. I just want you to live. Please. Let me take you out of here.”

He held out his hand for her. She looked up at him, scared, resolute too.

“You really think I can go back into my shell now?” she asked, amazed, perhaps resentful too. “As easily as that?”

“I think—” he began.

“It’s impossible,” she cut in, shaking her head. “You made it so. You and Falcone.” She hesitated. “You more than any.”

He took a step forward. She shrank back against the wall, put a hand out in front of her. He saw now what she’d brought. Another large plastic bag with the name of an economy supermarket on the front lay at her feet. An object he couldn’t quite make out protruded from the top.

“Wait…” Costa ordered.

Before he could go on, she had ducked away from his grasping arms and was running behind the discarded chests into the shadowy alcove.

He followed. When he got there, she had the crowbar in the bottom half of a small, battered wooden door, black with soot and grime. The top had been splintered already. Agata had found a way into the Palazzo Malaspina earlier, before his arrival. She was, as always, prepared.

“This is madness,” he muttered. “I should call the Questura now. Why take such risks when you have your sisters all over Rome putting up that poster about the man?”

She leaned hard on the crossbar. The lower half of the door refused to budge.

“Because of what Falcone says,” she answered. “You pile on the pressure, you see what happens. Franco will not walk out of this place for you, will he? But with a little force here… a little force there…”

She had known Leo Falcone longer than he had. It was, he thought, only natural that she should pick up his ways.

“The question is,” she went on, “will you come with me? Or do I go into his palace on my own? There are” — she leaned hard on the crowbar again, to no effect — “no other alternatives. Can’t you see that? Your law won’t help you. Nor your grief.”

Agata gave up on the door and looked at him. Her face shone in a stray shaft of winter sun. “All we need is the painting,” she insisted. “Where else can it be?”

He muttered a quiet curse, walked over, and took the metal bar from her. It was a strong door, in spite of appearances. But after the third attempt the old wood cracked and they could see beyond, into the interior of this distant wing of the Palazzo Malaspina. There was darkness there, nothing else. It was prescient of her to bring along the flashlight in the plastic bag. It now sat in her hand, extending a long beam of yellow light into the gloom.

“I go first,” Costa said. “What are you doing?”

She was pressing the keys of the mobile phone Rosa had given her, dispatching a text message with the speed and enthusiasm of someone who did this every single day.

“Talking to my sisters,” Agata replied cryptically, then pushed past him, flashlight blazing, into the black maw behind the door.

Costa followed quickly. Ahead, high on the wall to their left, a red light blinked persistently. He reached forward, took her hand to guide the beam towards it. There was a security camera there, a single glass eye, blinking. There had to be hundreds in a place like this. He turned round and looked back at the door. There was no entry detection device that he could see. Costa knew how difficult such large and sprawling buildings were to monitor. There was no way of knowing whether they had been seen or not; the probability was that no one had yet been alerted to their presence.

All the same he picked up the crowbar off the floor and dashed the forked end hard into the lens of the camera, stabbing at it until the glass broke and he was able to lever the unit off the wall.

She watched in silence. In the half-light she looked afraid.

He took the flashlight from her hand. There was no protest.

“Stay behind me,” he ordered, and strode forward into the gloom.

Six

It was bitterly cold inside whatever remote, deserted wing of Franco Malaspina’s palace now enclosed them. They walked in single file down a long, straight, narrow corridor, then came directly to a plain grey wall, windowless, nothing but old stone and mortar.

“This must be the rear wall of the palace proper,” she whispered. “That was how they built in those days. The master’s part would be erected on its own. The rest — the quarters in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, everything that wasn’t integral to the palace itself — would be added later. We must be in some kind of access corridor between the buildings. It’s—”

“Quiet,” he whispered, placing a finger to his lips.

Agata stopped speaking instantly. Her eyes, whiter than usual in the bright, unforgiving beam of the flashlight, betrayed her fear.

She can hear it too, Costa thought.

Footsteps. Heavy and echoing, with a loud, insistent rhythm.

He flashed the beam around both sides of the junction. They were trapped in a slender stone vein deep within the bulky mass of the palace. The sound danced around them deceptively. There was nowhere to hide, no easy way to discern the source.

Before he could think this through, Agata tugged on his arm and then did something so strange, yet so obvious.

She placed one hand on her left ear, then one on her right, dividing the echo from its origin, measuring which was stronger. Quickly, decisively, she pointed to the left. Then she arced her arm over to indicate the opposite direction.

Costa looked behind her, at the corridor they had already traversed. A way back to freedom. She cast him one brief, withering look, then snatched the flashlight from his fingers and was moving, down the right-hand side, in the lead, brushing vigorously through thick grey cobwebs with her arms, away from whoever was on their trail, or so she hoped.

He kept pace behind, continually glancing backwards, seeing nothing. There were no alternatives, no other route to follow, and very soon they found themselves in another constricted stone channel, this time wide enough only for a single human body, one that curved with a regular, geometric precision, as if tracing a circular room beyond the wall. He had no idea what the interior plan of the Palazzo Malaspina looked like. Costa had only seen the first public rooms, which covered a tiny proportion of the total site. Great Roman palaces often contained many surprises: private chapels, baths, even a secret place for alchemical experiments, like the private casino of the Villa Ludovisi, where Caravaggio had painted for Cardinal Del Monte. It was impossible to judge in which direction they were headed, impossible to see anything except the grimy walls of uniform stones laid almost five centuries before.

The other sound quickened, became louder, and was now identifiably behind them. And closer.

Costa caught up with Agata, felt for his gun to make sure it was safe to hand, and found himself brushing against her, accidentally, inevitably, before realising why.

The corridor was narrowing. In the space of a few steps it became so slender his shoulders rubbed against the walls as they moved, half running. Then the change in dimensions stopped. It would, he thought, stay this way for a while. He caught her arm, stopped her, and mouthed, Go ahead.

Her sharp eyes flared with anger and she whispered, “No!”

All the same, when she resumed her pace he managed to drop behind, just a little, enough to stay inside the penumbra of the flashlight beam that was trapped like them in this confined, enclosing space.

Whoever was following was near. He was sure of that.

Costa took out his gun, held it tight, trying to work out some strategy. He blundered on in the semidarkness, weapon in hand, wondering what the possibilities were in the belly of this stone leviathan, where the chances of anything — a scream, a forlorn message on the police radio — reaching the world outside were infinitesimal.

No easy answers came. None at all. Then, abruptly, with a force that made him apologise automatically, he found himself barging into her small, taut body, which was locked in an upright position, hard against stone.

She had stopped. Her breathing was so rapid and so shallow he felt he could hear and feel every gasp she made. The corridor had come to a dead end. It led nowhere, which seemed impossible. The only way was back.

“Stay still,” he murmured.

She wasn’t listening. She was turned to one side, as stationary as the stone that trapped them, and when his eyes adjusted to what he now realised was a new kind of light, he understood why.

The corridor ended in a bare stone wall, but down one side stood a long, musty drape that flapped into his face as the hand she had wrapped tightly in its folds began to shake. This was an entrance into another room, one that, as he began to look, was huge: a circular chamber, bathed, incredibly, in light so bright that even this side view made his head hurt.

In the centre, beneath a domed glass roof that let in the piercing rays of a low winter sun, stood the painting. Evathia in Ekstasis. It shone under the incandescent illumination pouring down from above, the central fleshy figure, frozen in Caravaggio’s pigment, seemingly alive, energised, almost exultant, as she opened her throat to release that primal scream.

In front was a couch, a chaise longue much like the one they had found in the squalid studio of the Vicolo del Divino Amore. On it Franco Malaspina, still in a business suit, his trousers hitched halfway down, heaved and groaned over a naked African woman, her skin the colour of damp coal, her eyes wild with terror.

Malaspina’s long, strong body strained over her. They could hear his panting, whimpering, grunting, and the obvious desperation behind the pained sighs. When Costa looked more closely, he could see the man’s eyes flickering between the floor and the figure in the painting, never to the woman beneath him.

“Sweet Jesus,” Agata moaned. “What’s wrong, Nic?”

He didn’t answer. He was thinking of the footsteps behind. Or trying to.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded. Then, when he remained silent, she answered her own question. “Even with the painting he finds no… gratification. That’s it, isn’t it? Even now?”

They were watching the man who had murdered Costa’s wife struggling to reach some kind of satisfaction with another woman snatched from the street, another pawn in his desperate, pitiless manoeuvres.

Agata shook her head. Her face seemed full of self-doubt, self-hatred even.

“We have to get out of here,” he insisted, casting a glance through the small gap created by the portion of curtain she was holding.

As they looked on, Malaspina let out a long, pained bellow of misery, then stood up from the couch, clutching his trousers to himself, refastening them. Costa’s fingers tightened on the gun, but the woman was quick. While Malaspina remained absorbed in his own misery, scarcely noticing her presence, she fled, as many must have done before, scampering from him in fright, snatching some clothes off the floor, and then leaving, Costa noticed, by an open door that lay almost exactly opposite from where they now stood.

It was an opportunity. If the two of them could escape alive, he’d be happy, he thought, and wondered how many ’Ndrangheta men Malaspina had in his service. One was dead already. If luck was on their side, perhaps that left no more than a single hired thug to guard the Palazzo Malaspina on this quiet, lazy day after Christmas.

“I pity him,” Agata murmured, taken aback by her own surprise. “I…”

He heard the metallic sound echo down the corridor and recognised immediately what it was. The checking of a magazine. One last prerequisite before violence.

“Get out! Get down!” Costa ordered, pushing her rapidly, roughly, through the drape, into the sea of light beyond and, he knew, the presence of Franco Malaspina.

A deafening burst of automatic fire burst deep within the stone vein back along the route they had stumbled. Sparks flew off the walls around him. Costa rolled forward to follow Agata, loosing off a wild succession of shots back into the gloom as he fell.

Seven

Gianni Peroni sat in the passenger seat of a white Fiat van bearing the name of a drain-clearing company on the side. It was parked a hundred metres from the main entrance to the Palazzo Malaspina. The place looked dead. The double doors at the top of the front staircase were closed. Not a soul had come or gone in the twenty minutes since they’d arrived. The four other officers with him — men he didn’t know, men who were deeply unhappy about having their holiday leave interrupted and didn’t seem too keen to accept his assumed authority over them — were starting to grumble the ways cops did when boredom took hold.

“I sat outside some place on the Gianicolo for four days once,” the one behind the wheel, a skinny, tall individual with a Florentine accent, complained. “Turned out it was the wrong house. Belonged to a big — and I mean big — woman opera singer and we thought we were staking out the capo of some Sicilian family. Four days. You take that with you to the grave.”

“Did you hear her sing?” asked a voice from behind.

“Yes.…” The driver answered in a petulant whine.

“So why didn’t you check?” another one demanded. “I mean… a capo doesn’t normally have opera singers around, does he?”

“Hindsight,” the driver moaned. “Every smart-ass I ever met has it running through his veins.”

“It’s a fair question,” another voice from the back piped up.

“We checked! It was someone else’s fault.”

“It usually is,” Peroni observed. “May I make a request, gentlemen?”

They went quiet and listened.

“Shut up and watch, will you?”

“Watch what?” the driver asked. “And why? You’re just an agente now, Peroni. You’re not the boss.”

Gianni Peroni muttered something obscene under his breath, then caught the dark figure in the distance, slowly making her way down the cobbled street towards the palazzo.

“Watch that,” he ordered.

And they did.

It was a nun — or a sister, Peroni had no way of telling which — on the oldest motorcycle he had ever seen, one that belonged in a museum, not on the road, since it was probably illegal: rust everywhere, bald tires, a cracked exhaust that, even from this distance, sounded like a flatulent pigeon recovering from the night before.

“What the hell is this?” wondered a puzzled voice from the back.

“Watch,” Peroni ordered again.

She made her way slowly down the street. Then, outside the palazzo, she stopped. The woman wore black flowing robes, so long and billowing he wondered whether they might catch in the spokes.

If she’d ridden a two-wheeled vehicle before, she didn’t show much sign of it. She was perhaps sixty, tall, skinny, awkward. A bright red cyclist’s helmet sat over the black and white headgear he had come to associate with the uniform of a nun in Rome.

“It’s Evel Knievel’s grandma,” the driver joked, and the rest of them snickered, until they caught sight of the displeasure on Peroni’s ugly face.

The woman struggled to flip down the stand, got there eventually, then dismounted. After that she reached into the flapping folds of her robe and withdrew a large kitchen knife.

They watched as the woman looked around to check no one was watching, then bent down and started stabbing at the front tire with the kitchen knife. It deflated in a matter of seconds; the wall must have been paper thin.

After that she walked up the broad, semicircular stone staircase of the Palazzo Malaspina, found the bell by the shining wooden double doors, put her finger on the button, and kept it there.

“Next time I go undercover, I go as a nun,” one of the voices behind muttered, and there was more than a modicum of admiration in it too.

Finally the door swung open. Peroni squinted to get a good look at the man there. He was relieved by what he saw. Sister Knievel might have pulled one of Malaspina’s ’Ndrangheta thugs. Instead she got a flunky, a tired-looking middle-aged individual of less than average height, one who didn’t look too smart and had probably been called away from cleaning the silver.

He didn’t seem much interested in helping a stray sister whose ancient motorbike had developed a flat tire. The way the woman was talking at him, she plainly meant to ensure he didn’t have much choice. At one point she took hold of the collar of his white cotton servant’s jacket and dragged him out onto the steps. Peroni watched, impressed. He could almost hear the conversation.

Sir, I am in a hurry for mass. I am only a nun. You must help.

Yes, but…

SIR!

Reluctantly, with a very Roman shrug of his hunched shoulders, the servant gave in and walked down the broad steps, followed her to the rusty machine, bent down, and started looking at the flat. Naturally, he left the door ajar. This was a rich man’s residence. No one expected opportunistic thieves. Nor could the servant see what the woman was doing as she stood over him — namely, beckoning to someone around the corner, half hidden at the top of the street.

The five police officers in the drain-clearing van watched what happened next in total silence. Peroni couldn’t even find the space in his head to raise a laugh. It was so… extraordinary. And also so obvious. What the police needed, they clearly knew, was an excuse to enter the Palazzo Malaspina. They had spent weeks trying to find that through myriad means: forensic and scientific investigation, detective work, and an exploration of Franco Malaspina’s ancestry.

They hadn’t counted on the cunning of a bunch of scheming nuns who, doubtless under Agata Graziano’s tuition, had spent the night preparing to penetrate Malaspina’s fortress in a way no law enforcement officer could possibly have imagined, let alone entertained. They would bring in the police by the very simplest of expedients: committing the small crime of trespass themselves.

They flooded round the corner, an entire flock, black wings flapping, running with the short, straitened gait their robes forced on them. Perhaps twenty. Perhaps more. A giggling, excited mass of sisterhood raced down the street and poured onto the steps of the Palazzo Malaspina, scampering upwards, to the door, not stopping to heed the cries of the servant, who was no longer staring at the flat tire on the crippled motorbike because its owner had swiftly departed to join her fellows, leading them exactly where Peroni expected.

Through both doors, now the intruders had thrown the second one open, the black tide flooded happily into the interior of the Palazzo Malaspina, as if this were some schoolgirl jape, the most amusing event to have occurred in their quiet, enclosed lives for years.

Peroni gave each of the men a look that said Stay here.

Then he slid out of the passenger door and strode down the street.

The servant was starting to flap and squawk, his pasty face red with outrage, lost for words, unsure what to do. He looked scared too. Peroni didn’t need much imagination to guess that Franco Malaspina wasn’t the nicest of bosses.

The man didn’t take a single step towards the black mass of figures pushing into the palace on the steps above either. Peroni understood why. They seemed a little scary too.

“Sir,” Peroni said, pulling out his police ID card, “I’m from the Questura. Is there a problem?”

“A problem?” the man squawked. “What the hell do you think?”

Peroni glanced at the pool of women. It was diminishing. Most of them were in the palace by now. He could see their silhouettes moving alongside the windows on both sides of the entrance as they ran in all directions.

“You know,” Peroni observed, “this has been a bad day for nuns. It’s shocking.”

“What the…?”

“This is why you pay for a police force. To create order from chaos. To save ordinary citizens from…” He glanced at the steps. The last black-clad figure was struggling through the doors. “.…the unexpected.”

“Oh, crap,” the man moaned. “Malaspina will go crazy.”

Peroni leaned down and put on his most sympathetic face.

“Would you like me to go inside and deal with this for you?” he asked in a noncommittal fashion. “Discreetly of course.”

“Yes… but… but…”

Peroni wasn’t listening. He had what he wanted: a legitimate invitation to enter the Palazzo Malaspina, one prompted by a bunch of nuns and sisters who would surely impress any court.

He turned and beckoned to the men in the van. Four burly police officers jumped out, looking ready and eager for action.

The servant groaned, put his hands to his head, and started to mumble a low series of obscene curses.

“You can leave it to us now,” Peroni shouted cheerfully down the street as he walked towards the staircase, wondering what a private Roman palace looked like from the inside, and where on earth, within its many rambling corridors, he might find Nic Costa and Agata Graziano.

He paused on the threshold. This really was not his kind of place. Then, out of politeness more than anything — since he had no intention of waiting — he placed a call to Falcone, explaining, in one sentence, what had happened.

There was a silence, pregnant with excitement.

“We’re in, Leo, and I am not leaving until I have them,” Peroni added, walking through the door, almost blinded by the expanse of shining marble that glittered at him from every direction. “Send me all the troops you have.”

Eight

It was like the Pantheon in miniature, and that brought memories crashing back. Costa rolled on the hard stone floor, hurting already, worked out where Agata was, and dragged himself in front of her. They were right up against the wall of a room that formed a perfect circle marked by ribbed columns, each framing a fresco, each fronted by a plinth with a statue. The ceiling was glass held by delicate stone ribs, incandescent with dazzling sunlight. The floor seemed to be sunken, and above it, no more than the height of two men, ran a balustraded gallery, like a viewing platform for some contest that would take place on the stage below.

It took a second or two for him to adapt. The gun was still in his hand. That was some consolation. He got to his knees, then stood up, glancing at Agata, understanding the shocked expression on her face, guarding her with his body as much as he could.

She had reason to be silent, to be shaking with fear behind him. This was Franco Malaspina’s most private of sanctuaries, and it was dedicated to a kind of classical pornography that defied the imagination. Behind the still-confident figure of Malaspina stood a marble Pan, larger than life and so beautiful he might have been carved by Bernini, laughing as he raped a young girl, every crude physical detail of the ravishment laid bare for the beholder. To their left stood a warrior in silver armour, painted to resemble Carpaccio’s Saint George, savaging the maiden at the stake as the dragon lay bloodily at his feet. Equidistant around the circular chamber stood figures that were semi-human, beasts and men, half-real creatures and, everywhere, naked, vulnerable women, young, virginal, portrayed as if they were on the precipice of some revelation, afraid yet desperate for knowledge, too, lips open, ready to utter the primal scream of joy and release that Caravaggio had placed in the throat of Eve in the painting at the heart of the room.

These were all plays on known works of art, paintings and statues he recognised, transformed by an obscene imagination, and they were old, as old as the Palazzo Malaspina itself, perhaps even more ancient, since Costa believed he could see some that must have preceded Caravaggio’s enticing goddess, the original Eve, in the ecstatic throes of the original sin, taunting them with a conundrum — carnal love or divine? — that was lost, surely, on most of those who saw it.

Franco Malaspina stood next to the canvas, watching them, unconcerned, amused.

As Costa struggled to consolidate his position — Agata behind him, protected, silent, astonished by what she saw — the count strode forward. He was unarmed but Costa could see where his eyes had drifted before he took that first step. Around the room at intervals — there surely to enforce the impression that this was a knight’s secret lair, a chamber of the Round Table, dedicated to the sexual power of men — were collections of armour and weapons: swords and daggers, gleaming, clean, ready for use.

“Do you like my little temple?” Malaspina asked, stopping a short distance in front of them, smiling, bowing.

“Consider yourself under arrest,” Costa retorted, his voice hoarse from the dust in the corridors. “The painting’s evidence enough for me.”

The man laughed and took one more step forward.

“You can’t arrest me here. No one can. This place belongs to me. To us. To my line. To my ancestors. You two are merely insects in the walls. Nothing. Does it not interest you, my little sister? Did you see me well enough from your little peephole?”

“What is this, Franco?” she asked softly.

“This?” Malaspina replied, still moving slowly forward. “This is the world. The real world. As they created it. Those who came before. My ancestors and their friends. Artists. Poets. And lords to rule over them all.” His face turned dark. “The world has need of lords, Agata. Even your Popes understood that.”

“Raping black women from the streets is scarcely a sign of class,” Costa observed, casting a nervous glance at the curtain to the hidden corridor, wondering what had happened to their pursuer, praying that one of his shots — how many remained in the magazine he’d no idea — had hit home.

Malaspina stopped and looked at them, his cruel, dark, aristocratic face full of contempt.

“Be honest with yourself, Costa. Given half the chance, you would have stayed and watched, too, then said nothing. That small, dark demon is in us all. Only the few have courage to embrace it. The Ekstasists have been here always, in this place, in this city. My father was one. His before him. When I have a son…”

It was clear. Costa understood the truth implicitly, and it horrified him, the idea that such a cruel and vicious decadence might be passed on through generations, though surely not with such savagery.

“Your father didn’t kill people, did he?” he asked, trying to work out a safe way to reach the door by which the woman had left earlier. “He didn’t murder some penniless immigrant on a whim.” He nodded towards the canvas on the easel in front of the couch, its cushions still indented with the weight of Malaspina’s body and that of the woman they had seen. “He didn’t need to place that painting in some squalid little room to hide the blood and the bones.”

“Black blood, black bones,” Agata murmured behind him.

“It was just a sick game before,” Costa went on. “A rite of passage for rich, bored thugs. Then Nino showed you that painting. And it became something worse.” He clutched the gun more tightly. There was a noise from near the curtain. “Why was that?”

He backed her more tightly against the wall. The thunder in Malaspina’s face scared him. The man didn’t care.

“I will kill you first,” he said without emotion, then nodded towards Agata, who was still cowering behind Costa’s shoulder. “Then I will have her. This is my domain, little policeman. I own everything. I control everything. When I am done, what is left of you will disappear forever, just like those black whores. This…”

He strode over to the wall and took a long, slender sword, a warrior’s weapon, real and deadly, from one of the displays there, tucking a short stiletto into his belt for good measure.

“.…is why I exist.”

Costa held the gun straight out in front of him. He didn’t care about the consequences anymore, or whether some bent lawyer or magistrate would one day accuse him of murder. He had the man’s cold, angular face on the bead and that was all that counted.

Then Agata was screaming again, slipping from beneath him. Costa’s attention shifted abruptly to the drape and a figure crawling through it, bloodied, wounded, dying maybe.

It was Malaspina’s man and in his gory hands he clutched a gun, clinging to the cold black metal as if it were the most precious object in his life.

The ’Ndrangheta never gave up, never stopped till the job was done.

One brief rake of fire ran low against the circular boundary wall. Costa could feel Agata’s small body quaking behind him. Before the man could find energy for a second run, Costa directed his gun away from Malaspina and released a single shot straight at the bloodied figure wrapped in the curtain, struggling to get upright. The shock of the impact jerked the stricken figure back into the drape, back into the dark chasm at the corridor’s mouth. He didn’t move again.

Grinning, Malaspina took two steps forward, slashing the blade through the air in an easy, practised fashion.

“This is for my wife, you bastard,” Costa murmured, and drew the short black barrel of the Beretta level with the arrogant face in front of him, keeping it as straight and level as any weapon he had ever held, with a steady hand and not the slightest doubt or hesitation.

He pulled the trigger. The weapon clicked on empty.

Nine

Gianni Peroni had never been in a building like it before. There were women in black robes, nuns and sisters, wandering everywhere, lost once they had gained entrance, puzzled about what to do. And there were so many rooms: chamber after chamber, some grand, some small and functional, many looking little used in this sprawling palace that was home to a single human being detached from the reality beyond his domain.

Any servants around clearly had no desire to make themselves known. Perhaps they realised the Malaspina empire was crumbling under this strange invasion and knew what that meant. As he raced through the building, screaming out that they were police and demanding attention, Peroni became aware he was simply becoming more and more lost in some glorious Minotaur’s maze, a travertine prison in which Franco Malaspina lived as solitary ruler of an empire of stiff, frozen grandeur. It was like hunting for life in a museum, like seeking the answer to a riddle from yet another riddle, a journey that wound in on itself, circling the same vistas, the same monuments and paintings and galleries.

The men from the Questura followed him, just as bemused. Twice they met sisters and nuns they had encountered before, and got nothing from them except a shake of the head and equal puzzlement. The women’s brief, it seemed to Peroni, was simple: find a way into the Palazzo Malaspina and breach its invisible defences, in such numbers that the police would surely be summoned. Once that had been achieved… Peroni tried to imagine the extent of Franco Malaspina’s home. It covered a huge area, extending by second-floor bridges beyond neighbouring streets, as far as the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, where this tragedy, one that had such powerful, continuing personal dimensions for them all, had begun.

It was impossible to guess where to start looking. Then they turned a corner, one that looked much like any other — gleaming stone, carved heads on plinths, sterile splendour everywhere — and saw her. Peroni stopped, breathless. Just one look at the woman on the floor, terrified, clutching her clothes to her, made him realise exactly what they were seeking. Somewhere within this vast private empire was Franco Malaspina’s clandestine lair, the sanctum where he felt free to do whatever he liked. This cowed and frightened woman in front of him understood where it lay. He could see that in her terrified features.

One of the other officers got there first, dragged her roughly to her feet, and started to throw a series of loud, aggressive questions into her frightened face.

“Shut up,” Peroni barked at the man and pushed him out of the way, found a chair — all ornate gilt and spindly legs — by the window, brought it for her, and let her sit down. Then he kneeled in front, making sure he didn’t touch her, even by accident, and said, “Please, signora. We need your help. We must find Franco Malaspina, the master of this palace, now. There are people in danger here, just as you were. We must know where he is.”

“Yeah,” the officer who got there first butted in. “Start talking or we start asking for papers.”

Peroni glowered at him and pointed at the broad glass panes next to them. “If you utter one more moronic word,” he said quietly, “I will, I swear, throw you straight out of that window.” He looked at the woman. In truth she was little more than a girl, a slim, pretty creature, with scars on her cheeks and short hair caught and braided in beads, now dishevelled. She was terrified still, but perhaps not as much as before. “Please,” he repeated. “I am begging you. This is important. This man has hurt people in the past.” He hesitated, then thought, Why not? “He’s killed people. Women like you. Perhaps you’ve heard…”

Her eyes were astonishingly white and broad, fearful but not without knowledge and some strength too. Her body, which was lithe and athletic, shook like a leaf as she clutched her cheap, skimpy hooker’s clothes more tightly as he spoke those words.

“He’s a rich man,” she muttered in a strong African accent.

“You heard about those women who were murdered,” Peroni replied immediately. “You must have done. We’ve had officers out on the streets telling everyone.”

She nodded, the gesture barely perceptible.

“Rich and powerful he may be,” Peroni continued, “but he killed those women and a good friend of mine too. Where is he?”

Her eyes grew bright with anger. “I show you,” she told him, and led the way, down a set of stairs at the end of the hallway, down a long, dark, narrow corridor, over a footbridge, with the bright chilly December morning visible through the stone slats, like emplacements for imaginary archers, open to the air, then on into a distant sector of the palace they would never have found so quickly on their own.

Ten

Costa edged back towards the drape and the corpse of the ’Ndrangheta thug, making sure Agata stayed out of range by forcing his right hand down behind and guiding her along the wall. When they were close enough — he could feel the man’s body hard against his foot, he could smell the rank odour of the wound — he turned and caught her gleaming eye.

“Go down the corridor as fast as you can and make your way outside. Keep running,” he whispered. “Leave this to me.”

She didn’t move.

“Not now,” he insisted, beginning to feel desperate.

Malaspina was taking his time. He was no more than a few steps away, playing with the sword, watching them, an athletic, powerful figure in a place where he felt confident, secure.

“What do you take me for?” she murmured softly, her breath warm in his ear. “I didn’t come here to run away.”

“Agata…”

She was moving, slipping out from beneath him in a way he couldn’t prevent. With a couple of short, deliberate steps, Agata Graziano worked herself free, then paced into the circular hall to set herself between him and Malaspina.

The gleaming blade ceased moving in the man’s hands. He looked… interested.

“How many years have you known me, Franco?” she asked. “Will you kill me? Will you kill me now?”

He shrugged, amused, in control. “After…” he said, half laughing. “Sorry. Needs must.”

“Why?”

He blinked as if it were a stupid question. “Because I can.”

She took one more short stride to stand in front of him, thrust her slender, dusky arm in front of his face, pinched her own skin on her wrist.

“Not because of this? Because of the shade of someone’s skin? A sport in the blood? Some small thing inside you’ve come to hate and a painting that obsesses you?”

Malaspina’s eyes strayed to the canvas in the centre of the room. “You’re a fool, Agata,” he murmured. “You understand nothing.”

“I understand everything! My father was an African. My mother was a Sicilian whore. I am a little more black than you, Franco. But not much. Does it matter that Ippolito Malaspina shared my race? Our race?”

Costa couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. There was nothing there. No recognition. No emotion whatsoever.

The machine pistol lay in the dead thug’s arms, no more than one step away.

“No,” Malaspina answered Agata, almost with sadness. “It doesn’t.”

“Caravaggio—” she began.

“We were here before Caravaggio,” he interrupted. “We were here before Christ, before Caesar. We are what Man was meant to be, before you and yours came to poison us.”

She shook her head. Agata was lost, her eyes flying around the chamber with its sunken floor, its obscene statues and paintings, the paean to brutality that was everywhere.

“You hate them,” she insisted. “You hate me. You hate yourself.”

Malaspina stared at her and there was contempt in his eyes. “Not for that,” he murmured. “So much wisdom, Agata, and so little knowledge…”

“I forgive you everything,” she said, trembling like a leaf in the wind. “Those poor women. Everyone.” She glanced in Costa’s direction for a moment. “Even Nic can forgive you. He’s a good man. Everything can be atoned for if you wish it. Accept who you are, what you have done. Ask for justice and it is yours.”

He shook his head and cut the knife through the air in front of her, unmoved by a single word.

Costa rolled left, eyes never leaving the weapon that lay in the dead man’s bloodied hands. He turned as quickly as he could, snatched the metal stock up, rose to a crouch, felt for the trigger, gripped it, played once with the metal stub, heard a single shot burst from the barrel and exit through the drape behind. Then he rolled sideways once again, trying to avoid any attack that was coming, landing on his knee, a firm position, one that would take him out of Agata’s way and give him a direct line to Malaspina, an opportunity he would take on the instant, without a second thought.

It was all too late. By the time Costa wheeled round with the weapon in his hands, Agata was in the man’s grasp, his strong arm around her throat, the stiletto tight to her neck. Her eyes shone with terror.

“Drop it,” Malaspina ordered.

Agata screamed. Malaspina had curled the blade into her flesh in one short, cruel flick, fetching up a line of blood.

“Drop it or I will slit her like a pig,” he declared with no emotion, then turned the knife further into her neck as she struggled helplessly in his arms.

The weapon slipped from Costa’s hands. To drive home the point, he kicked it away, watching, listening, as the black metal screeched across the shiny marble, fetching up near the circular boundary wall opposite, well out of reach.

He could hear something from above. Footsteps, short and feminine, and the rushing of long robes. It was the sound Agata made across the polished tiles of the Doria Pamphilj.

Then something louder. The heavy approach of men. And another noise he recognised, and welcomed.

“Nic!” Peroni bellowed down from above.

Costa looked upwards, to the gallery that circled this strange Pantheon in miniature. They were gathering there, police officers and nuns, a crowd of witnesses, an audience which spelled a certain end for the last of the Ekstasists.

“The lawyers won’t get you out of this, Franco,” the big man bellowed from above, scanning the gallery, trying to work out some way down to the ground floor. “We’re in this place now. Legally. There are more officers on the way. Even you can’t walk away now.”

There was fury on Malaspina’s face. Nothing more. Not fear, not an acceptance that this was the end, which was what Costa wanted. The knife was still hard on Agata’s neck. The blood there welled like a river ready to burst its banks.

“Little men, little women,” Malaspina shouted, head jerking from side to side, taking in the flood of visitors now racing onto the balcony. “All of you. No idea of your place. No idea of the…” The count’s face contorted until there was nothing there but hatred, a black, dead loathing for everything. “.…impudence.”

The knife moved again. Agata yelled, more faintly. A second wound line started to appear beneath her ear. The balance had shifted, Costa sensed. In Malaspina’s mind, the dark, savage place where he imagined himself to live supreme, this was the endgame, the rich knight’s final hour, the moment of death and dissolution, the final opportunity to place a bloody mark against a world he detested.

She was, to him, as good as dead already.

Costa strode forward to confront him, stopping within reach of the sharp, deadly stiletto that never strayed from her neck, tempting the blade away from her dusky skin towards his own.

The idea had been buzzing in his head now for days. He had never discussed it with anyone, with Agata least of all, and it was her opinion, more than any, that he had come to value about Franco Malaspina.

Yet Agata Graziano was wrong. Costa understood this instinctively and he believed he knew why. He and Malaspina shared the same pain.

He leaned forward until his own features were so close to Malaspina’s he could see the wild, crazed determination in his eyes, smell the sweat of anticipation on him, and feel the sense that there was no going back now, not for any of them.

“What about Véronique Gillet?” he asked quietly, eye-to-eye with the man, close enough for him to switch his attention away from Agata if he wanted, if this taunting did its work.

“Véronique is dead.” Malaspina’s black eyes burned with fury.

“Would this have been part of the game too? If she were still alive?”

There were more sounds from above. More men. He thought he heard Falcone’s voice. Malaspina’s features were locked in bleak determination.

“Do not come near,” Costa ordered in a loud, commanding voice. “Count Malaspina has a hostage and a weapon.”

Falcone’s voice began to object.

“No!” Costa shouted.

There was quiet.

“They listen to you,” Malaspina murmured. “That’s good. There’ll be many people at your funeral. There was a crowd for your wife, wasn’t there? I read it in the papers. I sent a man to take photographs. They amused me.”

“Did they comfort you, Franco?” he asked.

“You speak in riddles.”

“I don’t think so,” he disagreed. “Will there be many mourners for Véronique?”

“I have no idea.”

Costa could see the interest in Agata’s eyes, detect, perhaps, a loosening of Malaspina’s grip on her neck.

“Her body is in the morgue still. Autopsies…” Costa shrugged. “It’s not a pretty event. We cannot release her for a burial, naturally. Not with the case open. She must stay stiff in that cabinet, perhaps for years.”

The point of the stiletto twitched in his direction.

“I may kill you first,” Malaspina murmured. “Just for the pleasure.” “It’s all in the blood,” Costa said, wondering.

“You bore me. You both bore me, and that is dangerous.”

“It wasn’t the black gene at all, was it?” Costa demanded. “You checked your ancestry too. That was merely curiosity. The arrogance of proving you are what you are.”

He watched the point of the knife, tried to measure how Malaspina might move if he managed to goad him enough for Agata to get free.

The man said nothing. The circular chamber was silent, save for the breathing of Malaspina and the captive Agata Graziano.

Costa pointed to the painting: the naked goddess, the eternal sigh, the moment the world became real.

“What took her was all much more simple, much more human, which is why you hate it so,” he continued. “Your game. Véronique’s game. The game of Castagna, Buccafusca, and Nino Tomassoni when you drew them into it.”

He took one step back and traced a finger along the outline of the naked figure’s fleshy thigh. Malaspina stiffened, infuriated.

“Was that your idea? Or Véronique’s?” There were so many questions, so many possible answers. He didn’t care what Malaspina replied. He only cared that soon, very soon, he might get Agata away from the knife.

“You’re guessing,” Malaspina growled.

“I’m guessing it was yours. She was a weak, difficult woman. Beautiful, I think. Not unwilling to play as you dictated.” He stepped back to them, close again. “The whores. The violence, sham perhaps at first, all part of the price to be paid. Then…”

In the distance, above the shining floor and the bright painting that seemed so alive, he could see Falcone watching from the gallery, listening to every word.

Costa moved yet closer to him. “Something changed. An obvious thing. But something you believed could never happen to you and your kind. This game caught up with you.” He leaned forward. “It came with a price.”

“Shut up,” Malaspina muttered.

“You have sex with poor, miserable street whores. And one day you catch a disease. The disease. It’s not some black gene that gets passed down from generation to generation. You don’t care about that. You like to fool yourself you care about nothing at all. Then the sickness comes and it’s the worst sort, the sort that can kill you. HIV. AIDS, in Véronique’s case. A disease that’s not supposed to affect people like you. Aristocrats, lords with money and power, little gods in your own private world. And when it does…”

He reached for the man’s jacket, watching the blade all the time. There was a shape behind the breast pocket. One he had noticed before, in the farmhouse. A shape that could be one thing only.

Costa dipped his fingers quickly into the pocket and withdrew a small silver case, popped it open, revealed the pills inside.

“Véronique had something like this,” he went on. “Drugs. Expensive drugs, I imagine. Not ones they give to street whores because they can’t afford them and they’re just animals in any case. Special drugs. Ones that work. Mostly.”

The man’s face was stiff and ugly with strain and hate. Costa looked into those black, dead eyes and knew this was the truth.

“You paid for them for yourself, naturally. And for the others too. I imagine you paid for them for Véronique but” — he smiled, deliberately, as he continued — “even the richest man in the world cannot buy a cure for death. With Véronique, they didn’t work. She was ill already. The drugs made her worse. They shortened a life that was in jeopardy to begin with. In the end they killed her—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Malaspina repeated through clenched teeth.

Costa caught Agata’s attention. Her eyes were glassy with tears. She stared at him in horror. This was an explanation from a world she had never known, one that would never have made sense if she had stayed where she thought she belonged, quiet and safe inside a sister’s plain, coarse uniform.

“All your money, all the drugs and treatment… they weren’t enough for Véronique, were they? She’d left it too late,” Costa said simply. “You could save yourself and the others. But you couldn’t save her, the very woman you wished to keep alive. And what was worse, so much worse, was that, as she began to die… as you killed her… a part of you thought this might be love. Some stray strand of humanity inside of you looked at her wasting away and regretted that fact.” He watched the man’s reaction, prayed he saw some dim sign of recognition in his eyes. “But this being you, that small part spoke to the larger part and all it could think of was blood and murder and hate. To take some cruel vengeance on the innocent that should, by rights, have been directed at yourself.”

“You will die,” Malaspina murmured, his voice low and lifeless.

“How did you work the others into your scheme?” Costa asked. “Did you murder some poor black hooker who failed all of you one night, then tell them they were a part of it anyway? Did you promise them lawyers, too, the way you promised them drugs?”

The knife flashed back and forth in Malaspina’s clenched fist, cutting through thin air a finger’s length from Costa’s eyes.

“Most of all, Franco,” Costa asked lightly, “I would like to know what you told her. When Véronique knew she would surely die. Did you offer her one last chance to indulge you, in front of your painted goddess, as a… reward somehow? Was that supposed to be some kind of comfort? Do you really believe this passes as love?”

He folded his arms, waiting for the explosion. “I know what love is, Franco. Most people do. But not you. Never you. She was simply an obsession. Something you owned. Like this palace. Like the painting you forced Nino Tomassoni to give you. One more beautiful object you’ve torn apart as if it were worthless…”

He was screaming, moving, releasing Agata Graziano, throwing her to one side in his fury. Costa backed up, watching the stiletto flash through the air, feeling it make one arc in front of his chest, just close enough to cut a scything line through the fabric of his jacket.

Another sweep, another blow. There was nothing he could do, no weapon, no physical manoeuvre he knew that would offer any defence against a man like this.

Then the growing hubbub from the gallery above, the sound of racing footsteps, shouts, screams, disappeared beneath a deafening, cataclysmic clamour.

The blade swept through nothing and fell from view. The rage was gone from Franco Malaspina’s face. In its place was shock and surprise… and fear.

Costa looked beyond the figure stumbling towards him and saw her now. Agata Graziano had withdrawn something from the pocket of the cheap office-girl’s jacket. It was the gun Rosa Prabakaran had given her, a weapon Costa had never expected to see again. Grey smoke curled from the short snub barrel. As he watched, Agata raised the pistol again and fired one more shot at the falling figure between them, then a third.

Malaspina jerked with pain and the physical blow of the impacts. Blood rose in his mouth. His eyes turned glassy. The knife fell to the floor with a hollow echoing ring, followed by the stricken man, who clutched at the legs of the stand on which Caravaggio’s naked goddess rested, watching the scene, unmoved, her throat locked in a cry that was lost in the clamour of Franco Malaspina’s death.

A pebble-sized hole, surrounded by broken shards of skull, gaped above Malaspina’s ear. The dun, viscous matter Costa could see beneath the man’s hairline matched that which now ran in a spraying line, mixed with blood, across the naked figure of Eve like the splash of a murderous graffiti artist seeking something beautiful to defile.

Agata was shouting, screeching; was not herself; was quite unlike the woman he knew.

He watched in dismay as she emptied every last shell from Rosa’s gun into the still, frozen form on the canvas, painted by the artist she had come, in her own fashion, to love, watched as the mouth and its inaudible eternal sigh disappeared beneath the blast of a shell.

When the bullets ran out, she began to tear at the canvas with her bare hands, ripping into four-hundred-year-old pigment with her nails, weeping, screaming.

He strode over and pulled her away.

Her face stole into his neck, damp with tears. His hand fell on her rough, tangled hair and held her small, slim body close.

Agata Graziano looked up and the power of her gaze was unmistakable. She was staring at him and there was something in her expression — a kind of dislike, bordering on hatred — that was reminiscent, for a moment, of Franco Malaspina.

“This is done now,” Costa said, and wondered, seeing the look persist in her eyes, what it was that she saw.