The Garden of Evil (39 page)

Eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man laughed and took one more step forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“. . . is why I exist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pulled the trigger. The weapon clicked on empty.

Nine

G
IANNI PERONI HAD NEVER BEEN IN A BUILDING LIKE IT
before. There were women in black robes, nuns and sisters, wandering everywhere, lost once they had gained entrance, puzzled about what to do. And there were so many rooms: chamber after chamber, some grand, some small and functional, many looking little used in this sprawling palace that was home to a single human being detached from the reality beyond his domain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded, the gesture barely perceptible.

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

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

Ten

C
OSTA EDGED BACK TOWARDS THE DRAPE AND THE CORPSE
of the ’Ndrangheta thug, making sure Agata stayed out of range by forcing his right hand down behind and guiding her along the wall. When they were close enough—he could feel the man’s body hard against his foot, he could smell the rank odour of the wound—he turned and caught her gleaming eye.

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

She didn’t move.

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

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

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

“Agata . . .”

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caravaggio—” she began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drop it,” Malaspina ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

“Nic!” Peroni bellowed down from above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falcone’s voice began to object.

“No!” Costa shouted.

There was quiet.

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

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

“You speak in riddles.”

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

“I have no idea.”

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

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

The point of the stiletto twitched in his direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re guessing,” Malaspina growled.

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

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

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

“Shut up,” Malaspina muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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