The Garden of Evil

One

Gianni Peroni didn’t need a machine to tell him something was wrong. He’d stayed glued to the screen most of that evening while Rosa went through some personal documents on Malaspina and his circle sent round by Falcone. Teresa Lupo was now in the kitchen making dinner, grumpy at the lack of progress in the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Nothing had advanced during the day; her team was still awash in physical evidence, but lacked a single item that could directly link the crimes there to any one individual.

“Stop being some grubby Peeping Tom,” Teresa ordered, and returned to the table with three plates brimming with gnocchi covered in tomato sauce and cheese. “You can’t stay watching that thing all night. Besides, Leo told you… it would bleep if anyone came near the statues.”

“I can bleep for myself,” Peroni objected, and took a big forkful without looking, a good portion of which went straight down the front of his white shirt.

“Sorry,” he murmured, then put a fat finger on the computer screen. When he took it away they could just make out the image of a figure, shadowy and unidentifiable under the streetlights.

“Him,” he said simply.

It was a man in a dark coat, collar up, face indistinguishable in the night. That was the problem with CCTV, the police system, and these special cameras Falcone had organised. They were surveillance devices, not identification systems. There wasn’t enough detail for Peroni to see what the man really looked like.

The two women abandoned their food and came to sit on either side of him.

“What about him?” Teresa asked.

“Listen to someone who knows how to read these streets of ours. I have spent a lifetime watching Romans walk around this city and I know when something’s amiss. It’s a freezing cold night in December. Spitting with icy rain. No sane person stays outside in that weather. Except him.”

“Has he done anything, Gianni?” Rosa asked.

“No…” the big man replied, in that deliberately childish way he used when he was trying to argue. “That’s the point.”

Teresa grabbed a forkful of food, most of which made it to her mouth, then said, still eating, “So he’s just standing there. Where is this?”

“Abate Luigi,” Peroni replied immediately. “The first act of Tosca. Remember?”

“If you continue to throw opera at me like that I’ll take you to one of the damned things.”

He turned to stare at her. “This is work,” Peroni objected.

“He’s a man in the street,” Rosa said. “Just standing there.”

“It’s not a street,” he insisted. “It’s a dead end that doesn’t go anywhere. And yes, he’s just standing there, though I swear he keeps looking at the statue too.”

He took some more food, then said, “He wants to see it, but he daren’t. Leo said our email would flush these bastards out, looking to see what we were saying about them. For all they know, there’s a different message on every damned statue. This is one of Malaspina’s bunch. Maybe the man himself. I’m telling you. I can feel it.”

Teresa slapped him cheerfully around the head. “It’s a man in the street who’s probably waiting for one of those high-class hookers of yours. Get real. And remember, Leo said just to look and see where he went. Nothing else.”

“Nothing else?” Peroni answered, aghast. “Look at the picture on this stupid thing. It’s night. There’s no moon. We can’t identify him. As long as we’re sitting here we’re useless. Maybe” — he flicked a finger at the screen — “we could try and see where he went using all these other cameras Leo’s got us wired up to. But I don’t believe it. This is just some idiotic pile of plastic crap. It doesn’t catch criminals for us. It can’t pick up the phone and scream for backup. It’s…”

He stopped, displeased with himself, wishing he felt confident enough to think he was off duty and able to open a beer.

“We all want to do something, Gianni,” Teresa said, then, to Rosa’s embarrassment, she took his battered face in her hands and planted a noisy kiss on his lips.

“I will do something,” he insisted. “Watch me.”

Teresa pounced with another theatrical kiss. When it was over, Rosa groaned, took her eyes off the screen, and said, “Not now. Our friend’s leaving.”

Peroni swore.

“Did he do anything?” Rosa asked.

“Not that I saw.…”

“Then what—”

“I was just imagining,” he interrupted, feeling as miserable and dejected as he had on the day of Emily Deacon’s funeral. One pressing thought continued to nag Peroni: if he felt this way, what emotions still ran through Nic Costa’s sensitive soul? “You eat. I’ll watch.”

“Food…” Teresa shoved the plate in front of him.

He pushed it away and muttered, “Later.”

Gianni Peroni wasn’t much of a one for instinct alone, least of all that gained through the artificial medium of a nighttime surveillance camera watching some ancient statue in a tiny, grubby piazza by the side of a church off one of Rome’s busiest streets. Nevertheless, he found he didn’t much care for a beer anymore, not even when the man with the upturned collar walked right out of sight of the camera, heading north, back towards the Piazza Navona. There was another camera there, part of Falcone’s covert surveillance scheme that was also hooked into the centro storico’s CCTV system through an arrangement made outside the Questura’s normal channels.

That was the way things were, and the way they would remain until these men were brought to book.

He was happy with the idea. Simply uncomfortable with pursuing it in the cosy remote warmth of Leo Falcone’s apartment, with a plate of good gnocchi going cold by his side.

“North,” Peroni said, knowing that this would take the figure in the dark towards the most visible of those statues, Pasquino, which stood at the very end of the street in which they were now located, perhaps no more than a minute away on foot if he ran as quickly as he could manage.

He keyed through the cameras along the way and saw nothing. There were so many back alleys, so many cobbled channels through this part of the city. This was the Rome of the Renaissance, not a place built for stinking modern traffic or the eager lens of some video camera perched in a private corner, its grey monocular eye fixed permanently on the shifting, ceaseless world below.

This remote, soulless form of policing was stupid. What’s more, it could become an obsession, and was, he thought, for Nic already, which only made things worse.

“Eat…” Peroni muttered, and took a big forkful.

Then he turned the camera to Pasquino, not expecting to see a thing except a few midweek diners wandering through the drizzle, debating where to eat.

The fork stopped a finger’s width from his mouth. Tomato and garlic, gnocchi and cheese, dripped onto the computer keyboard in a steady thick rain.

“Gianni,” Teresa said uneasily.

“He’s there. Look. It’s him.”

There must have been hordes of men wandering the street that night with their collars turned up, their faces hidden from the rain.

“You don’t know…” she began, then he snatched some of the photos from across the table and laid them out over the keys.

“Tall, well built, young…” Peroni murmured. “It could be any of them. If only he’d move into the light so we could see his face.”

“It could be any number of people,” Teresa objected.

They watched the figure in the wet raincoat wander towards the statue at the end of the road, against the wall of the cut-through to the Piazza Navona. Falcone’s taunting poem had been there four or five hours now. The email boasting about it had gone out around the same time. It was a crazy idea, Peroni thought. Any sane criminal would never have risen to the bait. But Falcone understood these men somehow, understood that this was all some kind of tournament, a challenge, a deadly diversion the enjoyment of which depended, surely, on the degree of risk.

The man in the gleaming coat walked steadily towards the statue of Pasquino, a two-thousand-year-old torso damp in the rain, strewn with messages, one of them very recent.

“Do it,” Peroni muttered. “Do something. Anything.”

The man in the coat walked past the statue and the posters, his head scarcely turned there. Nothing happened. Nothing.

“Shit,” Teresa grumbled. “Are you going to eat your food or not?”

He refused to take his eyes off the screen. Something was going on. The figure had turned back, as if unable to stop himself. He was now over the low iron railings that protected the statue from nothing but badly parked traffic.

The three of them watched. With his back to the camera, the man took something out of his pocket and, in a series of crazed, violent movements, scraped at the paper on the stone, casting anxious sideways glances around him.

“Show your face,” Peroni snarled. “Show your face. Show your damn face…”

There was one last stab at the stone, and a scattering of paper tumbling down to the rain-soaked pavement.

Peroni was fighting to get inside his coat before anyone could say a word. By the time he’d got it around his big frame, Rosa was ready to leave too.

It wasn’t the kind of thing he did normally. But at that moment it seemed appropriate. Gianni Peroni retrieved his service pistol from its leather holster, slammed out the magazine, checked it was full, and slammed it back.

“Wonderful,” Teresa moaned. “What am I supposed to tell Leo if he calls?”

“Watch the screen.” He grabbed the earpiece of his mobile phone and stuffed it into place. “Try to see if you can make out where he’s going now.”

“And Leo?” she asked again.

Rosa was at the door.

“We go to Navona,” Peroni ordered. “When we’re there, we decide.”

He kissed her quickly on the cheek. There wasn’t time to register the concern, and the fear, in her eyes.

“Tell Leo this time the bastard doesn’t get to run away so easily.”

Two

The night was cold. There were no lights in any of the adjoining buildings. The Barberini’s outpost was set in an external block of the Palazzo Malaspina so distant from the main building he couldn’t even hear the sound of the music he knew must be there, and the voices too: men and women looking forward to the Christmas holidays and a break from work, a time for family. There was, as far as he could see, no one else in the entire block except the armed guard from the private security firm, the same man who had let him in to the building that morning, and now did so with a cheery, unsurprised enthusiasm.

“Sister Agata,” the man chided her, “you work too hard. You and your friend disturb my sleep.”

“Go back to it,” she said quietly. “But don’t snore.”

Then, silent, she led him ahead, still carrying the two overfilled grocery bags full of papers and reference material that she had left with a puzzled checkroom attendant at the Palazzo Malaspina when they’d arrived. They walked into the long, dark corridor that ran past closed offices to the room with the painting. Costa felt detached at that moment, full of random thoughts and emotions, about the case and what had happened, about himself and his loss. Had Malaspina and his group really left the palace? He had no idea, and that realisation in itself felt awkwardly distant somehow, making him appreciate he had not yet found his way back into thinking like a police officer. Emily’s death still stood in the way, and he had no idea how long that obstacle would remain, or whether, in truth, he wished for its removal.

There were many places Malaspina and his friends could have disappeared to in that bright, sprawling palace. But if Falcone had done his job, they now had something on their mind. An anonymous email designed to taunt them, one that, thanks to his own encounter with Malaspina, just might lead them to break cover. And then there was Costa’s presence in the man’s very private home. Could both have explained Malaspina’s tense and aggressive demeanour?

It was possible, he knew. It was also possible that Malaspina was talking to his lawyer already, trying to stir up some new harassment accusation. Costa had done his best to avoid that possibility. The way Falcone had engineered their meeting meant that there would be no formal instructions on hand in the Questura to support any such charge. Nevertheless…

A part of him was already beginning to wonder how he might feel if these men succeeded in escaping responsibility for their acts. Like every active police officer, he recognised the pulse, the temperature, of an investigation. The telltale signs were there. The presence of Grimaldi the lawyer, with his sour face that said, “This is going wrong already.” The constant concern in Falcone’s eyes, the way the inspector was willing to work outside the rules, not caring about any personal professional risk to himself and those he was using… All of these indicators told Costa that failure was by no means a remote possibility. If the Ekstasists simply sat back and did nothing remotely illegal again, there might be precious little chance of apprehending them.

Nor, some small inner voice whispered, would anyone else die, or be snatched from some squalid street assignation and taken to a dark, dismal corner of the city and subjected to a brutal ordeal, simply for the gratification of a bunch of playboys and their hangers-on. That would be a kind of result, and he retained sufficient detachment, even at that moment, to ask himself the all important question: how much was he seeking justice, and how much vengeance?

What was it Bea had said the day of the funeral? For pity’s sake, Nic, let a little of this grief go. He hadn’t wept, not truly, not yet. The taut dark tangle of loss and anger remained locked inside him. In the company of Teresa and Peroni — Falcone too — up to a point, it was easy to pretend it wasn’t there, until they started subtly introducing the subject into the conversation. Talking to Agata Graziano, a woman of the Church, quite unlike any he’d ever met, that inner act of delusion was possible too. But the knot remained, begging for release, like some bitter black tumour inside, waiting to be excised.

Then Agata reached the door of her room, the focus of her tight, enclosed universe of intellect, and turned on the light. Costa found himself dazzled once more by the painting, which, under the glare of the harsh artificial bulbs, seemed to shine with a force and power that burned even more brightly than they had during the day.

She walked over to the computer and called up a familiar painting on the screen: a stricken man on the ground, an executioner standing over him, clutching a knife.

“What can you tell me about this?” she demanded, returning, so easily, to the role of teacher.

“The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Valletta, Malta. Caravaggio painted it while he was in exile from Rome, trying to be a knight and failing.”

She looked unimpressed. “In order to become an apprentice knight of the Order of Saint John, he would have had to swear an oath that went something like ‘Receive the yoke of the Lord, for it is sweet and light. We promise you no delicacies, only bread and water, and a modest habit of no price.’ Bit of a comedown after the Palazzo Madama and Del Monte’s bohemian crowd. No wonder the poor boy didn’t stick it. You’re giving me history, Nic. Facts, for pity’s sake. I can get those from a book. I want more. I want insight.”

He felt tired. He didn’t want to go on. He needed sleep, needed a break from this world that Agata had dragged him into. It possessed too many uncomfortable dimensions. It was the universe that Caravaggio had spun around himself, and it was too real, too full of flesh and blood and suffering.

Nevertheless, the memories were there. He’d spent so much of his life, before the arrival of Emily, in the company of this man. It was impossible to break that bond now.

Costa sighed and pointed at the stricken Baptist, dying on the grimy stone of the prison cell, his executioner about to finish the act with a short knife drawn from behind his back.

“He signed it,” Costa said wearily. “It’s the only painting he ever put his name to. It’s in the blood that flows from the saint’s neck.”

“Really?” she asked. “You’ve been to Malta? You’ve seen his name there?”

“I can’t go everywhere there’s a Caravaggio painting, Agata. Can’t this wait until the morning?”

“No.” She frowned. “I’ve never been to Malta. They won’t let that painting travel. It’s the only one of his important works I’ve never seen. One day perhaps. But now. Look!”

She hammered at the computer keys and zoomed in on the focal point, the dying man, and then, more closely, the pool of gore running in a thick lifelike flow from his neck.

“Use your eyes, Nic, not secondhand knowledge. There is no name. He didn’t sign this painting. You picked that up from a book, like everyone else. Paintings are to be seen, not read. What Caravaggio writes in the saint’s blood is f. michel. Which, depending on your viewpoint, means frater Michelangelo — to denote his joy at becoming this trainee knight. Or, perhaps, fecit, to denote his authorship of the painting. I know which I believe. Three months later he was expelled from the order, from Malta entirely, ‘thrust forth like a rotten and fetid limb,’ they said in the judgment, which they delivered to him in front of this selfsame masterpiece. There’s gratitude.”

He shook his head. “I give up. I am tired. I am stupid. I do not see the connection.”

She dragged him back to the luminous canvas that dominated the room.

Costa stood in front of the naked red-haired woman, who seemed so close she was real, her pale, fleshy back towards him, her mouth open, legs tantalisingly apart, sigh frozen in time, watched by the leering satyr with Caravaggio’s own face, holding music that clearly came from the same brush as that in the Doria Pamphilj earlier in the day.

“You will stand there until you see something,” Agata ordered. “Concentrate your attention on the area beneath this lady’s torso, please. I offer that advice out of more than mere decorum. Now I must fetch something.”

With that, she left the room.

He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, then focused on the painting. The nude female form swam in front of his eyes. It was the most seductive, the most dreamlike, of compositions, from her perfect, satiated body to the lascivious satyr and the two cherubs — putti, common symbols in religious Renaissance painting, though here they had a more earthly and lewd aspect, each fixed on the woman’s orgasmic cry. One sang from the left-hand corner. The second perched in a perfect blue sky, carelessly pouring some ambrosial fluid from a silver jug, the thin white stream spilling into the goblet below, then — he could see this now he had learned to stand close — running over the edges, down to a hidden point behind and beyond the central figure’s fulsome torso.

It was hard to concentrate on the area she had indicated. This part of the canvas contained nothing: no object, no intriguing swirl of pigment, no depth or the slightest attempt to create it. What he saw, beneath the gentle curve of the nude’s ample thighs, was a patch of vermilion velvet, lacking the sheen and texture of the remaining fabric around her, the coverlet on which she lay.

He stared and he thought. When Agata came back, carrying something he didn’t dare look at, Costa said, “This isn’t right.”

“Go on,” she urged.

“You told me it had been X-rayed. That it was impossible it had been under-painted and over-painted.”

She was doing something with her hands, down at her waist. He still lacked the courage to look.

“For a policeman you are remarkably imprecise at times. What I said was that it was clear this had not been painted over another work.”

“Perhaps it’s been restored.”

She shook her head. “There isn’t the slightest sign of any general restoration. My guess is this canvas has been in storage for years. Centuries perhaps. Even when it was on display it would have stood behind a curtain, which would have blocked out any daylight, were people stupid enough to position it near a window. It’s never needed restoring. What you see, for the most part, is what Caravaggio painted a little over four hundred years ago.”

For the most part.

“Here,” he said immediately, and pointed to the plain flat patch of paint. “I thought it had to be restoration. It lacks anything. Depth or substance, interest or any deliberate withdrawal of interest, which is what I’d expect of an area of the canvas that he didn’t feel was of great importance.”

She said nothing, simply gazed up at him with that pert dark face, smiling.

“I could have painted that,” Costa said. “And I can’t paint.”

“You can learn, though,” she replied, grinning.

Finally, he looked at what she was doing. He found it hard to believe.

“What’s that?” he asked, knowing the answer. “What are you doing?”

“This is white base and ammonia,” Agata said, dipping the small, strong brush she held in her right hand deep into a tin pot of pale paste that had a distinctive and pungent smell.

She moved in closer to the surface of the canvas, her eyes focused on the area beneath the flaring swell of the nude’s thigh.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m removing some paint.”

Three

Peroni ran towards Pasquino, feeling his ageing legs complain beneath him. He wasn’t fast enough anymore. By the time he made it to the battered statue, now with newly shredded scraps of paper scattered over the litter at its base, there was no sign of their man in the steady winter rain, no dark figure hurrying through the vast, nearly deserted stadium of the Piazza Navona.

Rosa, keeping up easily with his pace, gave him a sideways look, one he recognised because Costa did it a lot these days too. It said: I’m younger than you, and quicker. This is my call.

“Teresa,” he barked at the neck mike of the phone, “did you see where he went?”

He still wasn’t happy about Rosa being on the case. The girl was inexperienced. She was angry at the way her insight into the investigation had been ignored by her boss, Susanna Placidi. More than anything, in Peroni’s view, she was still marked by the grim Bramante affair that previous spring, a dark, brutal investigation in which the young agente had been attacked by a man who had played the police with the same cruel skill the Ekstasists now appeared to possess, and the same relish too.

“What am I?” the voice in his ear snapped back. “Surveillance now? Of course I didn’t see. These cameras aren’t everywhere.”

“Look north,” Rosa suggested. “He wouldn’t have gone into Navona if he wanted to head in any other direction. He’d have been doubling back on himself.”

She’d keyed herself in to the conference call. Peroni should have expected that. All the young ones were so bright when it came to playing with toys. So were Malaspina and his men. But toys didn’t protect you forever, no matter which side you were on.

“I’m looking,” Teresa answered. “This would all be so much easier if we could call in for support.”

“We can’t!” Peroni yelled. “You know it.”

The line went quiet for a moment.

“I know, I know it. I was just saying. I don’t want you racing round Rome on foot, pretending you’re a teenager. You’re old, you’re unfit, and you’re overweight.”

“It’s pissing with rain, I am looking for a murder suspect, and I have no idea what to do next,” he snapped back. “I am so honoured to receive your personal views on my physical state at a moment such as this.”

He was gasping for breath, too, and his heart was pounding like some crazy drum. She was right, and he wished there were some way he could hide that fact.

“Well?” the pathologist asked.

Rosa could probably outrun even Costa, he thought. Nic was a long-distance man, built for endurance, not speed.

“Find him, and Rosa can go ahead.”

He looked at the young woman in the cheap black coat. If he’d been back on vice, he’d have been wondering why exactly she was out on the street on a night like this, flitting through the trickle of late-night shoppers and revellers brave enough to dodge the rain. She was listening to every word, eyes gleaming with anticipation.

“You do nothing without my permission,” he ordered, jabbing a finger in the air to make the point.

“Sir,” she said, with a quick salute.

Peroni heard a familiar sigh of relief in his earpiece.

“There,” Teresa declared. “That was so easy. I picked him up a moment ago. At least I think it’s him. If it is, he did go north. He’s not running. He’s walking nice and slowly. I imagine he thinks he’s passing for one more idiot getting wet out shopping for the night.”

“Where?” Peroni yelled.

“Going right past that funny old church, Sant’Agostino. You know, if I were a betting person — and I am — I’d say he’s headed back to where this all began. The Vicolo del Divino Amore. Or thereabouts. What did Nic call it?”

“Ortaccio,” Peroni murmured, remembering. Then he watched Rosa Prabakaran set up a steady, speedy pace north, out past Bernini’s floodlit fountain of the rivers, picking up speed to put a distance between them he’d find hard to close.

There were still a few stalls left out from the Christmas fair. Men were putting away sodden cloth dolls of La Befana, the witch, dragging in sticks of sugar candy from the wet, covering up the stalls of Nativity scenes as they were buffeted by the choppy winter wind. He looked up and saw the moon caught between a scudding line of heavy black clouds. A spiral of swirling shapes, starlings he guessed, wheeled through the air. It was Christmas in Rome, cold and wet and pregnant with some kind of meaning, even for a failed Catholic like him.

There were times, lately, when Gianni Peroni wished he could remember how to pray. Not the actions or the words. Simply the ability to reconnect with the sense he’d once possessed as a child that there was some link, some bright live fuse, that ran from him to something else, something kind and warm and eternal. Meaningful and yet beyond comprehension, which made it all the more comforting for the solitary, insular child he had been.

After one quick curse at the rain, he began to follow, heart pumping, head searching for solutions.

Four

It was like watching a surgeon at work. Agata Graziano pulled over an intense white lamp and bent down to the base of the canvas, applying the paste in small squares, one at a time, with a compact paintbrush, then removing it quickly with another solution that smelled of white spirit.

She worked slowly, patiently, with a hand so steady Costa couldn’t imagine how such precision was possible.

And as she laboured, something began to emerge from beneath the pigment that had been dashed on, then revarnished, to hide it.

He lost track of time. She sent him for some water, for her, not the process. When he came back, he looked at this woman. He’d not met Agata Graziano before that day, yet now he felt he knew her, in part at least. There was an expression in her eyes — excitement, trepidation, perhaps a little fear — that he connected with, and that connected the two of them too. This painting contained something she needed to know, had to know, with the same relentless hunger he felt. There was a shared desperation between them, and he wondered what pain on her part had placed it there.

“I can’t work with you hovering over my shoulder,” she said after a while.

Beads of sweat stood on her brow, like lines of tiny clear pearls. She wore a taut, serene expression of absolute concentration. When she finally beckoned him over, he looked at his watch. She had been working on the canvas for no more than twenty-five minutes. It had seemed like hours. What he saw when he came to her side was something new and entirely unexpected. Agata had not simply uncovered a signature. She had found something else, something that took a moment to make its identity clear, because nothing he had seen, in any work of that period, by any artist, bore the slightest resemblance to what had been painted there by the artist in the original version.

It was the size of a child’s hand, a pool of white, milky liquid, the same colour as the stream that fell from the cherub’s jug and spilled over the lip of the silver goblet set by the nude’s pale thighs. The feature sat with the same sticky intensity he had seen in the puddle of gore flowing from the dying Baptist’s neck. The trickles that ran from it formed letters in the same flowing, erratic hand as on the canvas in the co-cathedral in Valetta: the writing of Caravaggio himself.

“What is it, Nic?” she asked, her voice trembling. “That substance. I need you to tell me.”

“It could be.… milk. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“This was a private painting. It was kept behind a curtain. Perhaps in a master’s bedroom. Perhaps in the palace of Del Monte, where Lord knows what occurred. Milk?”

He understood the question — and the answer. Agata had told him earlier that day what kind of trick the artist was playing here, putting flesh on the ideas that had been forming in his own head. This canvas was challenging the viewer to make his or her interpretation of what it portrayed, daring the beholder to transform a scene that was, at first glance, almost innocent into something else, something that became illicit, secret, intensely intimate, but only through the presence of a living human being to provide the final catalyst.

“It’s the aftermath of sex,” Costa said. “In Malta he wrote in warm blood. Here, he wrote in…” He stared at the leering satyr’s face, Caravaggio’s face. “He wrote in a simulacrum of his own semen.”

She took his arm. Costa bent down to read the words as she spoke them aloud: fra. michel l’ekstasista.

“Brother — there can be no doubt about that here — Michelangelo Merisi, the Ekstasist, a made-up word,” Agata said. “This is impossible! It makes even less sense than before. What is an Ekstasist, for pity’s sake?”

He couldn’t speak. He didn’t have the courage to tell her.

She threw the damp and now misshapen paintbrush onto the stone floor and swore once more. Then she placed her small fists together and, eyes closed, looked up at the ceiling.

“Why does this elude me? Why?”

This close there was something else he noticed, and he knew why Agata had missed it. All that interested her was the canvas. Everything else was irrelevant. He remembered his old teacher’s words again. Always look at the title.

Costa walked over to the table where she kept her tools and implements. He found a small chisel and returned with it to the canvas.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He placed the chisel beneath the nameplate. There was the smallest of gaps there.

“If we’re going to take this thing apart, we might as well do it properly. When you made me stand here staring at that part of the painting, I noticed something else. This isn’t right either.”

He forced the chisel blade beneath the plate, twisted, and forced away the wood there.

Agata came to join him, looking, staring, entranced.

“Oh my God…” she whispered.

Five

This wasn’t her kind of work. Teresa Lupo found it hard keeping her attention on ten or more tiny video screens at one time, each showing the same kinds of figures, people in dark winter coats, struggling through rain that was starting to turn sleety and driving. The man — if it still was him — had continued to head north, through the labyrinth of Renaissance alleys that had turned into the shopping streets and the offices of modern Rome.

It was getting ridiculous. Rosa was racing these black streets in vain. Peroni was breathless, trying to keep up with her. Even if Teresa could have picked up the phone and brought in support, she doubted they’d have much chance of tracking down a lone figure, in a dark coat, face unseen, on a night like this.

Then, to her astonishment, she saw him. Him. It was the centre screen on the monitor. He was stopping to take cash from an ATM machine in the Via della Scrofa, his black frame captured perfectly by the surveillance camera situated to keep an eye on the location. She watched. The machine coughed up. Lots and lots of notes that went straight into his coat pockets. Not the kind of amount you’d take out for a night on the town. He had a scarf up tight around his face. She couldn’t see who he was. But this was the same man, Teresa knew. It had to be: the stance, the clothes, the shifty way he kept his head down… Instantly, she was on the line to Rosa, sending her in the right direction, with Peroni, breathing heavily down the phone line, some way behind.

Then, as she heard Peroni’s rasping, loud voice bellow something she couldn’t hear, the landline handset on the table rang. She knew she ought to ignore it. But this being Leo Falcone’s apartment, the man had to have one of those newfangled phones with a little panel on the top that told you the number of the person calling, and the name if you’d put it into the address book.

It was flashing at her now and it said: Questura — Falcone.

Typical. He even keyed in his own office phone number.

“What?” she yelled when she picked it up.

There was a pause. Falcone never liked shouting unless it came from him.

“I was merely calling in to enquire about progress.”

“We have him, Leo,” she yelled back. “He came along and tried to scrape that stupid poster of yours off the statue.”

“You saw him? Who he was?”

“No! Do you ever look at these little toys of yours before you give them to other people to play with? You can’t see people’s faces very well. Particularly when they’ve got their collars turned up. Have you seen the weather out there?”

The brief silence that followed was so typical of the man she wanted to scream. Leo Falcone had many talents, and one of them was the unerring ability to hear something in your own voice you desperately didn’t want him to detect.

“I told you to try to identify him, either visually or by tracing where he went,” he said. “Nothing more. Well?”

“Peroni’s going crazy, Leo. Emily died, remember?” she screeched. “We can’t all just bottle up our emotions like you.…”

It was uncalled for, unfair, and, quite simply, cruel. Falcone felt the loss as much as anyone. Perhaps his inability to show that made it worse. She would never know.

“I’m sorry—” she began.

“Where is he?” the calm, distanced voice interrupted. “Where’s Peroni? And Prabakaran?”

She rattled off the street names in an instant. Then the phone went dead without another word.

“You’re welcome,” Teresa murmured, and stuffed the mobile headset back on. It took a moment before she realised both Rosa and Peroni were screaming for directions over the crackly line.

“He’s leaving a cash machine in the Via della Scrofa, still going north,” she said without thinking. “Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Anywhere in that area. Also, I suspect Leo’s on his way, too, so be careful.”

Peroni said something quite unlike him. He sounded old, she thought. Old and thoroughly pissed off with the job. And that wasn’t just because of Emily or the mess that had followed.

“Be careful,” she murmured again, to no one, and then went quiet. “He’s taken some money. A lot of money.”

A thought came to her: it was only intuition, but it had seemed, for a moment, as if this were a strange, foreign act. A man taking out cash from a street machine, something he didn’t do often. Then putting all that money straight into the pockets of his coat, not a wallet.

“I think it’s Franco Malaspina,” she said quietly. “Or someone else who isn’t in the habit of keeping a lot of cash about his person. The rich are like that, aren’t they?”

The figure in black had stopped under a streetlight. She watched as he paused, took out a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and lit one. It made a small white point of light on the monochrome screen. He seemed so calm, so certain of himself. For a second the light of a passing vehicle caught his face. With a flash of her fingers, she stopped the video, rewound a couple of frames, and froze the picture. It might be Malaspina. There wasn’t enough in the way of detail to tell one way or another.

No more traffic came along to help. The roads were empty. It was getting late.

The figure stood back from the rain-filled gutter as a dark and shiny new van drove up. It stopped by the side of him. A man got out. He wore a hooded anorak, the top close around his head. Unrecognisable in their similar clothes, the two of them exchanged words.

She watched what happened next and felt her mind go numb.

The second man went to the rear of the van, took out something the length of a child’s arm, and began to examine it under the streetlight. He passed it to his colleague. Quickly, with the swift, professional skill she’d expect of a soldier or a cop who’d spent too long in weapons training, the first man in black bent back into the open van and removed a stack of cartridges, loaded several into the repeating magazine, then tucked the sawn-off shotgun beneath his coat before slamming the door shut.

Then the two of them got back in the van and began to drive away. North. Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Towards Ortaccio.

“Gianni!” she yelled into the neck mike. “For Christ’s sake! Peroni!”

Her voice rang around Leo Falcone’s empty dining room. Nothing came back from the phone but static.

Six

He could feel his heart pounding against his ribs, his breath coming in short, painful gasps. Peroni was running along some dark, nameless alley leading off the Via della Scrofa, seeing Rosa’s short, dark frame ahead, steadily adding to the distance between them.

“Leo?” he barked into the neck mike. “Leo?”

The walls were high around him: five or six storeys of apartments set over stores that were full of Christmas gifts, lights dimly twinkling over jewellery and paintings, upmarket clothes and furniture, all the pricey individual glitter that took place at ground level, in public, in this part of the city.

Even so, he found himself yelling out loud, looking like a madman to anyone watching, screaming into the blackness, at nothing but his neck mike, “For Christ’s sake, man. There are two bastards with shotguns wandering out here. Forget the rules. Call in backup.”

There was no reply. Teresa had already told him Falcone had left the Questura for the scene. Was he bringing support? The sight of two armed men wandering through Rome at night was certainly good reason to do so. But if they were from the Ekstasists… Peroni knew enough about the labyrinthine workings of the Italian legal system to understand why Falcone might have reservations. With good lawyers and bottomless pockets, it might be easy to get away with a simple fine for possession of a weapon in a public place, and bury forever the prospects of a conviction for Emily and the dead of the Vicolo del Divino Amore.

A good minute before, Rosa had turned a corner, heading left, straight into the web of ancient twisting lanes that led towards the place where those women had been dug out of the cold grey Roman earth, retrieved from the rubble of centuries, wrapped in plastic like still, dark grubs trapped inside a tight cocoon.

He listened to the lilting sound of another female voice, excited, breathless over the open communications line, chanting the names of streets so old, so obscure, he’d never really understood what they meant.

Gasping for breath, cursing his age, Peroni leaned against a wall that was damp from the rain and black with grime and soot.

“Wait for me,” he panted.

“How long?” she demanded.

“Tell me where. It’s the studio, isn’t it?”

“No,” Rosa said anxiously. “I thought so too. But they turned away from that one block away. They’re going around the back of the Palazzo Malaspina. Towards the Piazza Borghese. Maybe…” She hesitated. “Are we sure these are the right people?” she asked. “This looks like a robbery or something.”

It was Teresa who answered. Peroni felt remarkably grateful for the simple sound of her voice.

“It’s them,” she said simply over the line. “Leo? For God’s sake, are you there?”

Silence.

“Wait for me,” Peroni ordered, and began to run again, his legs leaden from the effort, his body soaked in a cold and clammy sweat.

Seven

Costa stared at the title he’d uncovered with the chisel. Agata had let go of his arm now. She was crouched down, examining the words with a magnifying glass she had retrieved from the set of tools on the table behind.

The letters appeared carved in an archaic script that was similar to those on the title plate that had been used to cover them, though these were more elegant, more individual. It occurred to him that the two had, perhaps, been contemporaneous, the second placed over the other shortly after the painting was completed, as if to hide it from view, perhaps in a hurry.

The words read: Evathia in Ekstasis.

“It means nothing to me,” he confessed.

“It means everything,” she murmured, and he could hear the trepidation in her voice.

She lifted the glass so that he could see the words more closely. As he did so he realised they weren’t carved at all. That was simply a trick of the artist. They were painted onto the wood in a style designed to imitate the cut and gouge of a chisel. There were scratch marks there, too, fine lines, just as there were on the painting.

“He painted the title?” he asked. “Caravaggio? Why would he do that? Surely it was beneath him?”

“He did it for the best reason of all. No one else would. No one else dared.”

Costa stepped back and had to fight to turn his attention away from the canvas. The woman there, her mouth half open in that eternal sigh, seemed so lifelike he felt that he would touch warm flesh if he were rash enough to reach out and place a single finger on her pale, perfect skin.

“This was a private painting,” he said. “For a man’s bedroom. Kept behind a curtain. I still don’t understand why he’d have to put a name on it himself. And why that would need to be covered up so quickly.”

She’d gone back and retrieved the glass of water he’d fetched for her, and was now sipping it, eyes sharp and thoughtful, shaded a little with fear.

“Evathia is the Greek for ‘Eve.’ Evathia in Ekstasis means ‘Eve in Ecstasy.’ This isn’t Venus at all, though there is a tradition in some quarters to associate the two of them. Remember the Madonna del Parto? Mary with Jesus on her lap. Or Venus with Cupid. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. They’re both associated with the spring, with birth and fecundity.”

“So?” he asked.

“So imagine, Nic. Imagine that the owner of this painting realised how dangerous it was, even hidden behind a curtain. To protect himself he had the artist put a new name on it and afterwards, unless you knew the secret, your perspective was changed. The painting was tamed. We were tamed. Not him, surely. Or…” Her eyes never left him. “.…those who came after and knew what this really was, those who owned it in the years that followed. When someone outside the secret is allowed to see the canvas, we see the new name, not the real one. We behold the beautiful satiated woman and the apple and assume this is Venus with the fruit Paris gave her. Not something else, the elemental gift Eve plucked from the tree. We see this bearded, lascivious figure and assume he is some kind of satyr. But where are the horns? Where are the goat’s legs? This isn’t a satyr at all. This is…” Her eyes lost their focus. She was thinking, and deeply shocked by what that revealed. “.…blasphemy. And pornography.”

His head whirled with images, other canvases, other works by Caravaggio, as his mind fought to find some comparison with what he saw now, so close he felt he could sense Michelangelo Merisi’s presence alive in the room.

“We’re meant to witness what only God saw before, Adam and Eve at their first coupling,” Agata murmured, almost to herself. “ ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife.’ Genesis 4:1, directly after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The Lord said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Full of that knowledge, they make love, and the world loses its innocence. Seven verses later Cain kills Abel. Lust and evil with all their consequences are set loose on humanity. Caravaggio paints the very instant the world turned, when, with that single sigh of ecstasy, Pandora’s Box is opened, and everything we now think of as good and bad comes flying out, never to be confined again.”

It was cold in the studio, and deathly quiet. She glanced at Costa, guilt and fear etched in her dark features.

“This is the moment of the Fall. The instant no one ever dared depict before because it was too intimate, too shocking,” she murmured. “Caravaggio seeks to be both sacred and profane at the same time, and to engage us in his guilt for doing so, since this canvas only becomes each of those things because of our presence here, our shared part in that original sin.”

She shook her head, then glared at him. “Why did Leo Falcone give me this? Why me?”

If she was right — and it seemed impossible to think otherwise — this surely was the worst sight with which to confront a woman like Agata Graziano. It was something a sister of the cloth was never supposed to face. Perhaps — and he realised this was a thought that had been dogging him since they first met — it stirred doubts, about herself, her calling, even her religion, that had been swimming around that intelligent head for years.

She deserved the truth, he thought.

“Because Franco Malaspina’s gang of thugs call themselves the Ekstasists,” Costa said quietly, feeling sick with guilt. “Because we need to stop them.”

Her hair flew furiously around her shaking head.

“What? What?”

“I’m sorry, Agata. We never knew.”

“This dispensation is done with,” she spat back at him, livid, her eyes bright with rage. “Take me back to my convent. None of this concerns me now.”

Her arms gripped her small frame tightly. Costa didn’t know what to say or do to comfort this woman. He could only guess at the whirling conflict occurring inside her at that instant. And yet… she couldn’t take her eyes off the canvas.

“I’ll drive you,” he said. “Please…”

Then there was an unexpected sound, one that made them both start with shock. His phone had sprung to life, shrieking in his jacket pocket with a harsh, electronic tone that was out of place in the studio, an unwelcome intruder from another world.

Costa took it out and tried to listen.

Something got in the way. It was the growing noise of voices, angry voices, shouting, bellowing, from outside the door, down the long dark corridor where the security guard in the blue suit had been gently dozing, a revolver at his waist.

As they listened, too taken aback to speak, the roar of a weapon rent the air. Costa felt seized by a sudden spasm of cold dread. He recognised the precise timbre of that sound. He had heard it once before, in the muddy grass at the foot of the Mausoleum of Augustus, the moment Emily had been ripped from the living.

Agata was walking towards the door, furious.

He raced to intervene, grabbed her roughly around the waist, and stopped her forcefully. Two small brown fists beat on his chest. Agata Graziano’s tearstained eyes stared at him in rage and fear.

He was an off-duty cop, chasing the ghost of an idea, with nothing in the way of official police backing. That meant many things. But at that moment, more than anything, it meant he didn’t have a gun.

“We need somewhere to hide,” Costa said, scanning the room.

A second explosion burst down the corridor, echoing off the thick stone walls of this distant, half-forgotten outpost of the Palazzo Malaspina. Afterwards the air was filled with the rank dry smell of spent ammunition, and the sound of a man in agony.

Eight

There were too many dark streets, too many disturbing possibilities running through Leo Falcone’s head. He’d heard Peroni’s bellowed call over the open voice link. Then he’d issued a single order before sending his Lancia screaming hard across the black, slippery cobblestones of this tangled quarter of the centro storico.

The two men weren’t heading for the Vicolo del Divino Amore but for Agata’s laboratory. That could only mean one thing. They wanted the painting.

He had pushed his luck to the limits, setting up a private, possibly illegal, covert operation with the sole aim of placing unauthorised surveillance on Malaspina and his accomplices. He could put up with the heat from that if he had a conviction, certain and guaranteed, lying down the line. If there was the slightest doubt, the tiniest crack through which these most slippery of men might wriggle, then he would be lost. They would escape once more, for good in all probability. His career would be over, alongside that of Peroni and possibly Costa and Rosa Prabakaran too. He had no great concern about his own fate; he surely did not wish to share it with others. However loudly Peroni yelled, Falcone was determined he would not call in for assistance until he was certain it was both necessary and would result in success.

The long, sleek car sped along the Via della Scrofa, now just a minute, perhaps two, away from the half-hidden lane where the Barberini’s outpost lay.

There was one other cop in the vicinity, too, Falcone remembered, at the party in the palace nearby. He was reluctant to involve him, given the history. But they were shorthanded. They needed help.

He barked Costa’s name into the voice-operated phone. A single word was all he needed.

“Nic?”

Waiting for an answer, he wondered what it had been like to spend an evening with the pretty and charming Sister Agata Graziano in Franco Malaspina’s extravagant palace, one of the few grand mansions in Rome Leo Falcone had never visited in his entire career. Costa deserved some time in pleasant company, a few hours to take his mind off the pain Falcone knew would be there, and would remain, until this case was closed.

It took an unconscionable number of rings for an answer to come. Falcone listened to the snatched, breathless conversation and heard, with a growing dread, the line go silent halfway through.

“Where are you?” he barked. “Where are you?”

His head alive and confused with myriad possibilities, he spun the vehicle sharply round to perform a U-turn in the Piazza Borghese, knocking over the stand of a newspaper vendor packing up his stock for the night. Sheets of Christmas wrapping paper flew into the air.

He fought to get the vehicle under control, and finally managed to manoeuvre it hard and fast the wrong way down the narrow alley that led to the studio.

Braking sharply, he brought the Lancia to a halt a few metres short of the entrance to the Barberini’s office. Falcone flew from the vehicle, took out his handgun, and held it high and ready. To his relief, two familiar figures were coming up the alley from the south, one fast and young, the second older, out of condition, and struggling.

There was a van parked there, badly, blocking the street entirely. Its back door was open. The interior was empty.

A menacing smell reached him from the door: spent ammunition. Somewhere, beyond the light in the open doorway, he heard the sound of a man’s weak cries and, more distant, angry, violent shouting.

He was still considering this when the two of them arrived, almost together. Peroni’s face was pale and troubled; his breath came in snatched gasps.

“Sir…” Rosa Prabakaran began.

The big man pushed her to one side. “We need to get in there,” he urged, then somehow found the strength to drag out a weapon and hold it low by his side. “Now, for God’s sake. Nic’s there. You left the line open, you old fool. We all heard it.”

Falcone wondered, not for the first time, about these lapses. They seemed to happen with increasing frequency; everyone was getting older.

“I did,” he said, and nodded, remembering now. Conference calls on the private system they’d used stayed there until they were closed. That was doubtless what sent Peroni racing here, too fast for his own good.

Falcone looked at the weapon in Rosa Prabakaran’s hand. It was obvious the young cop had never used a gun in anger before. The pistol trembled in her fingers.

“Stay behind me,” he ordered. “Do what I say always.”

He made the call he knew was inevitable now, and wondered how long it would take for them to respond. On a quiet, wet night before Christmas, the Questura was scarcely at its most alert, even when an inspector demanded urgent assistance at a shooting incident. The most recent statistics had shown that it took between ten and twenty minutes for uniformed cars to arrive at incidents outside the centre of the city, where the tourists were. No one would be patrolling these dead, silent streets as a matter of course. This was his to deal with, no one else’s.

Inspector Leo Falcone entered the dim light of the Barberini outpost’s door with a steady, determined stride, and became aware, the moment he crossed the threshold, of the distinct and pervasive stink of human blood.

Nine

There was a storeroom. It took all his strength to drag her there, as she kicked and fought, his hand over her mouth, his arms tight around the rough fabric of her black dress. The door was ajar. Costa levered it open with his foot, grabbed her more tightly, and dragged the two of them through into the darkness.

She struggled all the way, wrestling in his arms. They fell against the shelves. Cans of paint tumbled to the floor, old easels, dusty, unused for years.

“Nic!” she screeched.

He pulled the door shut, then, in the meagre light that fell from the cracks above and below, he pushed her to the end of the small, enclosed chamber and held her close. In the gloom her eyes glittered with emotion.

“They have weapons,” he said simply. “They kill people. We keep quiet. We wait.”

She stared at him and withdrew from his grip, standing back against the shelves he could just make out in the stripes of yellow illumination from the room beyond. They contained the junk of ages: fusty books, small canvases wrapped in sackcloth, and palette after palette of long-dried paint.

“Why did you bring me into this?” she whispered with obvious bitterness. “What did I do?”

He glanced at the door. “You knew enough to unlock the painting,” he answered immediately. Then, before she could say another word, he placed his finger to his lips.

They were there, outside, moving swiftly, arguing. Angry voices. Two. And a further sound too: a man in pain, howling, pleading for help. The security guard surely, from along the entrance corridor.

One voice, more than the other, seemed familiar from the Barberini’s party that evening. Franco Malaspina. Agata surely thought so too. She listened in shock and covered her mouth with her small, dark hand.

The noise of them grew louder. It was obvious what they wanted. The painting. The canvas was large, perhaps manageable by one man, but much easier for two. They were talking about how to remove it, what to cover it with, how to proceed.

And they were different: one confident, masterly, the second scared, fearful.

Finally, the other, weaker one spoke up.

“You shot him,” he moaned in a high-pitched, almost feminine whimper. “You shot him. For God’s sake.”

“What do you think we brought these things for?” the second voice snapped.

“He’s alive!”

There was a pause. Costa watched Agata. She seemed ready to break.

The bolder intruder spoke. “I’ll deal with that on the way out. Don’t squawk. You can wash the blood off later. Now help me move it. We don’t have time…”

Agata’s eyes went glassy. She stumbled. Her elbow caught something — a box file, covered in dust — teetering on the edge of the shelf. As it balanced in the darkness, she reached for it, caught thin air, her flailing fingers sending more old and grubby objects tumbling noisily to the floor, a telltale cacophony of sound announcing their presence.

The room beyond became silent.

Then a voice, the one he thought he knew, said loudly and full of confidence, “I wondered why the lights were on. Careless…”

Ten

It was more than a year since Leo Falcone had fired a weapon, and that was on the firing range, on the routine duty he regarded as an administrative chore. Inspectors didn’t shoot people. If he could help it, none of these officers did either. That was not why the police existed.

He tried to remember what he knew about how to enter a building safely. It wasn’t a lot. So he clung to the walls of the entrance corridor, with its ancient, smoky ochre walls. The plaster was peeling from the damp beneath the old stone of the palace in which the corridor lay like an afterthought, tucked into the hem of a sprawling pile of dark masonry that sat, unvisited and unknown, in this strange and, for Falcone, increasingly inimical part of the city.

Right arm out perpendicular to his body to ensure Peroni and Rosa stayed behind, Falcone took a series of rapid strides, hard against the wall, seeing nothing, hearing voices ahead. A bright light indicated the studio where he had first approached Agata Graziano and asked for help, a decision he now regretted deeply.

There were no more shots, though. That gave him some satisfaction. Then he moved forward again, gun held high, ready and visible, and beckoned the two figures behind him to dash safely into the alcove on the right, where Falcone dimly recalled the presence of a middle-aged security guard.

Rosa went first, squeezing behind his beckoning hand. Falcone stared down the corridor and briefly turned to nod at Peroni to wait. Then they looked at one another, a familiar expression of shared dismay in each man’s eyes. Rosa had let out a sudden, high-pitched shriek. Falcone turned, spat something low and vicious in her direction, hoping it would shut her up, and crossed the corridor.

There was a figure in uniform on the floor, brutally wounded, sitting upright against the wall clutching his bloodied stomach with both hands, a look of intense fear in eyes that were fast fading towards unconsciousness.

Falcone listened to him say something that might have been “Help me.”

“There are people on the way,” the inspector said, and, feeling a rising tide of fury enter his head, stormed back into the corridor with a firm intent, weapon in front of him, not knowing whether the female agente and Gianni Peroni, his only support at that moment, were following on behind.

Eleven

Costa took a deep breath, then stepped in front of Agata and looked around him, seeking something, anything, that might count as a weapon. He was still searching when the old wooden door that separated them from the studio exploded in a roar of heat and flame. The shotgun blast came straight through it, just a metre or so from where he stood hoping to protect her. A thin scattering cloud of lead shot fell around them, ricocheting off the high walls, peppering their heads and shoulders with tiny searing balls of fire.

Agata was screaming. Something caught Costa in the eye: dust or a shard of wood. He was aware of the barrel of the weapon crashing through what remained of the door and a figure there, following it: all in black, with the familiar hood.

He had the weapon crooked in his arms. The eyes behind the slits stared at them, dark and malevolent. The man was fumbling in his jacket for more shells, which he casually stuffed into the maw of the gun as if he were on some idle weekend game shoot.

The entry didn’t take more than a moment, too little time for Costa to attack.

Instead he held his arms wide open, fingers grasping into the darkness, a gesture that meant nothing.

“You don’t need the woman,” he said firmly. “Take me if you like. But not her. She has no idea what this is about. She has no idea who you are.”

Without realising it, he’d backed all the way to the end of the storeroom. She was trapped behind him, trembling, crouched against the wall.

The long, deadly shape of the weapon rose, loaded now.

“That bitch always had a sport in the blood,” the figure said, in a low, dead voice, half recognisable, half lacking any human feeling at all.

He brought the gun up easily, with the kind of familiarity a hunter used, as if it were second nature.

This was all a question of timing, Costa thought, something it was impossible to know. He wasn’t even sure what his hand had found on the shelf, only that it was hard and heavy and easy to grip.

As the gun moved towards horizontal, he took tight hold of the metal handle and swung it in front of him with as much force as he could muster. The can of ancient paint flew off the shelf, towards the shape in black, who had moved forward sufficiently to be silhouetted against the bright studio lights behind. It crashed into his face, the lid bursting open as it met the woollen hood.

A flow of pigment the colour of ancient blood flooded over the black fabric. The can crashed to the ground. A cry came from behind the covered mouth. It was something, Costa thought. It was…

…nothing.

Before he could attack again, the man took a step back, wiped the paint from his face with one elbow, and stood there, madder than ever, the weapon swiftly back between his hands.

Costa threw something else from the shelf, something not so heavy or awkward. It bounced off the wall, just catching the barrel of the gun as it exploded.

Fire and heat and a terrible, deafening noise filled the air. Something took hold of his left shoulder and flung him backwards with agonising force. Feeling giddy, and aware of a growing, burning pain racing through his body, he tumbled into Agata, whose slender arms managed, almost, to break his fall to the hard ground.

One more time, he thought, knowing what was happening now without needing to look. That was all. The man with the gun was getting closer, intent on finishing this for good.

Costa turned, ignoring the searing, spreading ache from his shoulder, and threw himself forward. He caught the barrel, placed his right hand, palm down, over the two gaping holes there, and forced it up towards the ceiling, waiting for the moment when the agony would begin again as the shells tore through his flesh and perhaps gave them a few more brief moments of survival.

Twelve

Falcone saw a tall, muscular figure dressed in black, hooded, struggling with the painting, weapon on the floor. He barked the first words that came into his head, in a voice that was loud and forceful and brooked no argument. The man raised his arms over his head and started to talk, in a falsetto babble riddled with fear.

“Shut up!” Falcone yelled, then ordered Rosa to keep her gun on him.

Something was happening at the far end of the room, in an annexe that lay beyond the canvas and the bright, piercing lights that stood above it.

Peroni came to his side, weapon raised.

“How well can you shoot, Leo?” he asked.

He didn’t dare answer, and instead watched in despair as three figures tumbled through the door, the first all in black, too, with a shotgun held in the air by Costa’s struggling arm as the young officer, his left shoulder covered in blood, his coat ripped by pellets, pushed the intruder out into the light.

Agata Graziano was fighting just as hard, kicking and punching and screaming at the faceless attacker.

It seemed to take an interminable time for Falcone and Peroni to join them, with Rosa continuing to cover the second man, on the inspector’s orders. One armed individual was enough to deal with. These situations deteriorated into chaos so easily. As Falcone raised his pistol towards the head of the first angry figure wrapped so tightly into the mêlée of bodies in front of him, he realised this was not a solution that would work at all. They couldn’t fire because they couldn’t safely distinguish one from the other in the sea of flailing arms, the tight grip of bodies, they’d become.

For a second, no more, there was an opportunity. Costa was down, hard on the floor, his legs kicked from beneath him by the taller, stronger shape in black, but able, along the way, to drag the long grey profile of the shotgun’s barrel with him, finally hauling the whole weapon from the grasp of those powerful dark arms as he did so.

Falcone made a mistake at that moment, and knew it in an instant. He looked at Costa, and had to stop himself asking the obvious. Are you all right?

By the time he’d dragged his attention back to where it mattered, everything had changed.

The man in black had Agata Graziano tight in his arms, terrified and furious. The barrel of a small handgun was hard against her temple, pressing into her olive-coloured skin, making a clear and painful indentation. The second intruder glanced at Rosa Prabakaran, then, without any protest on her part, limped over to the storeroom doorway and stood there by his side, silent, submissive.

Falcone kept his own weapon directed straight ahead, towards the one who mattered.

“You will let her go,” he said simply.

It was the best he had and he knew immediately how weak it sounded. Something happened then that made him feel old and stupid and out of his depth.

In a room with four police officers, three of them armed, one of them wounded, though not badly, it appeared to Falcone, this masked and murderous creature laughed, easily, without fear. As if none of this touched him, or ever would.

He dragged Agata Graziano closer to his chest, holding her like a shield, in a tight, avaricious grip. With his free arm around her throat, he turned the weapon in his right hand abruptly to one side, ninety degrees, away from the threat ahead.

Before Falcone could say another word, the man pumped two shells into the skull of the hooded figure next to him.

Agata Graziano struggled helplessly, eyes white with terror, feet almost off the ground in the power of his grip. Costa, who had been slyly working his way across the stone slabs in the direction of the man’s legs, stopped on the instant. The small black revolver’s barrel was back at the terrified woman’s temple.

“If the painting isn’t outside in thirty seconds,” said the voice behind the hood, a calm, male voice, controlled, patrician, “I will blow these bright brains straight out of her skull.”

Thirteen

It was raining. there were still no police cars. Just Falcone’s Lancia and, a little way along the narrow alley, beneath a single streetlight, the van, with its rear doors open.

Falcone and Peroni had the canvas in their arms and followed the hooded man, who was dragging Agata roughly, the gun never leaving her forehead. Rosa, on Falcone’s instructions, followed behind.

There was nothing any of them could do. Agata was a hostage, held by a man with no desire for negotiation. Costa clutched his aching shoulder, feeling the lead shot biting into his flesh, the blood from the wound making his clothes stick to his skin. Unseen by the figure in black, he’d picked up a weapon, snatching the gun left on the floor by the dead intruder. It felt useless in his left hand, the only good one, and there wasn’t a sound from anywhere, not a siren, not a tire squeal in the night.

“I prefer the car,” the voice behind the black wool mask said, and his arm tightened around Agata’s neck, holding her so hard that her face was taut under the pressure. “Keys.”

Falcone took one hand off the painting and removed them from his pocket, holding them out in the cold night air.

“You,” the man barked at Rosa.

“I’ll do this,” Costa said, then, ignoring the pain, tucked the gun back into his waistband beneath his jacket before stepping in front of the young agente to take the keys from Falcone, keeping his eyes on the man and Agata all the time.

“In the ignition,” the voice behind the hood ordered. “Engine running.”

Costa opened the driver’s door, sat briefly in the seat, brought the potent engine of the Lancia to life, and got out.

A large delivery truck had come to a halt at the top of the alley, blocking that exit. There was only one way out, past the abandoned van the intruders had brought. The exit route was narrow. Not easy. As he walked away from the vehicle, Costa stopped, stared into Agata’s eyes, hoping she might understand. There was, perhaps, one final chance.

Falcone lifted the rear hatch and, with Peroni’s aid, manoeuvred the canvas into the interior as Costa stood his ground, no more than a metre from the masked man and Agata, now still and tense in his tight grip.

“I can go in her place,” he said again, not moving.

“You’re not so much fun.”

Costa raised his bloodied right arm and pointed at the face behind the mask. “If there is so much as a scratch or a bruise on this woman when next I see her, I will kill you myself.”

There were words he didn’t catch. Then the man in black pushed Agata through the driver’s side, ordering her to climb into the passenger seat, holding the gun to her head all the time, scanning the four cops by the vehicle constantly, waiting for any kind of movement. There was not, Costa knew, a single opening. It was well done. Finally, when she was in the seat, he let himself fall deftly into the car, working his feet into the pedals, taking the wheel with his free left hand.

The door closed. Costa heard the electronic locks slam shut. He wondered how many times Agata had been inside a vehicle in her entire life. She lived in the centre of Rome. She was, in her own eyes, a working woman, one who took buses and the metro, not expensive cabs and cars.

He doubted she had the first clue how to open a door held shut by central locking, even if she knew where to find the switch.

The hooded head hung out of the open window for a few seconds. “Follow me and she dies,” he said in a firm, low voice which betrayed not the slightest degree of trepidation.

Fourteen

Costa turned and walked away, limping a little, conscious of the blood flowing from his shoulder, intent on moving towards the abandoned van. As he did so, he surreptitiously removed the weapon from his belt, letting it hang loose in his left hand. Before the Lancia could begin to move, he was squeezing through the narrow gap between the van and the stone wall, barely wide enough for one person, a slender space in the darkness into which he could disappear. On the other side… he was praying the gunman hadn’t worked this out yet. He guessed there was room — just — for Falcone’s car. But only if it negotiated the gap carefully, in first gear, and with some manoeuvring.

The high-powered car’s eager cylinders roared with sudden life. Its tires squealed on the cold, damp cobblestones of the lane. The shining vehicle reversed. From his position in the pool of black by the van, Costa saw what he expected. The driver had been focused on more important matters than the traffic. When he looked behind, he saw the truck at the head of the lane blocking the obvious exit. There was only one way out: past the van. Past him.

The Lancia edged forward, towards the space on the far side. Costa waited, moving farther forward behind the open rear door, heart pumping, trying to summon what strength he still had.

He was aware that there was a second or two during which he might act, nothing more.

From the far side of the vehicle came the teeth-jagging racket of metal screeching against metal as Falcone’s prized possession began to squeeze into the narrow gap between the van and the far wall. He heard the wheels squealing over the stones as the driver locked and turned them, trying to negotiate a corner that was near impossible.

Gradually, the gleaming hood began to emerge, and Costa knew he had one slim chance, the moment when the passenger door would be briefly free before the body of the vehicle cleared the obstacle and they would be gone, flying into the night, to a place and a fate he could only guess at.

The Lancia lurched forward, almost free. He could hear the powerful engine growling with anticipation.

“This I will not allow,” Costa muttered to himself, then judged the timing instinctively, seeking the precise instant he saw the full length of the passenger door by his side before extending his wounded arm, screaming as he did so, “Down! Down! Down!”

He saw her face frightened but alert through the glass and that single exchanged glance was enough. She was ready. She was quick. He watched her wayward head of hair dive towards her lap, then turned the weapon in his good hand towards the dark figure at the wheel, placing a single shot through the very top of the side window, praying it would hit home.

There was a bellow of gunfire and the shattering of glass. Splintered shards jumped up into his face, sharp and stinging. He thrust his good hand through the window, then, with the shaft of the pistol, raked at the break there to make it larger, dashing the weapon round and round, screaming words he couldn’t hear or understand. It was enough to get his bloodied right fist through and find the lock. Except she was there already, before him. The passenger door of Leo Falcone’s police car swung open, took him in the chest, sent him reeling backwards, as a body flew out, into his flailing arms.

“Nic!” she yelled.

“Behind me!”

The others were squeezing their way through the narrow crack by the side of the van. There wasn’t enough room for them to gather. He couldn’t get the picture of that sawn-off shotgun out of his mind either. He had failed Emily this way once. Twice… It was unthinkable.

“Behind me!” he bellowed, and felt her slim body squeeze past his aching, screaming shoulder, to some place that might count as safety.

The Lancia revved angrily. The figure behind the wheel was alive, and furious.

But not stupid enough to engage in a battle that was lost.

Costa managed to loose off one more shot with his weak left hand. By then the car was forcing its way out into the open alley, unmindful of the damage caused by stone and metal. Once free, it found a sudden and violent life. Tires spinning wildly on the black shining stones, it careered off the far wall and leapt out into the open space. He watched, the gun loose in his hand, his fingers too cramped, too pained to think of another shot, as the vehicle disappeared in a wild, torque-driven arc, disappearing into the warren of streets he had come to think of once more as Ortaccio, a web of twisting ancient passageways that could lead almost anywhere in the city.

Costa leaned back on the door of their truck and closed his eyes.

He felt weak and stupid, almost paralysed by the aftershock and the wound to his shoulder. But more than anything, he felt elated. This time the man in the hood, with his deadly shotgun, had failed.

“You’re hurt,” she said, sounding cross, as if it were his fault somehow. “Where are the doctors? Leo? Where are the doctors?”

“Coming,” Falcone said.

When he opened his eyes again, the inspector stood next to her, bending down to look at his shoulder.

“He’ll live,” the inspector added. “Now, Agata—”

“ ‘He’ll live’! ‘He’ll live’!” she roared. “What kind of thing is that to say?”

“I’ll live,” Costa broke in, and stared at her, still only half able to believe she had possessed the speed and the wit to take the minute possibility he had created.

“Agata… Did you recognise him?”

She stopped, and glanced at both of them. “Recognise?”

“Was it Franco Malaspina?” he asked, and noticed a sudden, disappointed intake of breath on Falcone’s part when he heard those words.

“How do I know, Nic? I never saw his face.”

“The man knew you,” he pointed out.

“He did,” she agreed. “Still… All I heard was that muffled voice through the mask. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

Her bright eyes gazed at him through the steady rain, asking a question she didn’t want answered. Why he needed this so much. Half suspecting, he knew, the answer.

“We know it’s Franco,” he said quietly, not caring what Falcone thought anymore. “I told you. They are the Ekstasists, Malaspina and the rest. They killed those women in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. My wife. We know. The man’s so rich and powerful and clever, we can’t prove a damned thing. Not without a start. Not without some small concrete piece of evidence. Something that will force his hand.” He knew it was the wrong thing to say. Provocation. Leading a witness on. He didn’t care anymore. “A simple, positive identification would do that.”

Falcone was staring at his shoes. Peroni and Rosa were walking around the other side of the van towards them. Costa knew where they must have been. Inside. A place that seemed, briefly, almost irrelevant at that moment.

“Is this true, Leo?” she asked. “That you suspected Franco all along? You involved me in this, knowing what manner of man he is?”

Falcone held out his arms, pleading. “I was desperate, Agata. We all were. I’m sorry. If I had thought for one moment…”

“Is it true?”

Falcone’s eyes were back on his feet. “This is not the way we do these things,” he said in a low, despairing voice. “There are procedures and rules about evidence. Placing ideas in a witness’s head… If I were to use you as a witness, there would be the issue of protection. He is a dangerous man.” He hesitated, reluctant to continue. “More dangerous than you can begin to know. I don’t want to hear any more of this. I won’t.”

She didn’t wait long.

“It was Franco Malaspina,” she said. “I am sure of it. I know his voice well. I heard him speak my name. There. Use it. I will say this in court. Use my testimony, Leo!”

The inspector shook his head and sighed. “Don’t go down this road. There’s no turning back.”

“I will say this to you. Or to anyone else in Rome who wishes to hear.”

Falcone took out his radio and put out a call for the immediate arrest of Malaspina, Buccafusca, Castagna, and Tomassoni, with all caution to be taken when approaching men who might be armed and dangerous.

“A doctor too,” Agata Graziano insisted. “For Nic. And those men inside.”

Peroni coughed into his big fist. “Those men inside are beyond doctors,” he said. “I think you can cross Emilio Buccafusca off that list too. Judging by the wallet on the corpse in there, he’s out of this already.”

A distant siren broke the silence of the night. From somewhere in the direction of the Mausoleum of Augustus, a blue light flashed down the alley, like some mutant Christmas decoration newly escaped from the tree.