The Garden of Evil (17 page)

One

G
IANNI 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

T
HE 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.”