The Sacred Cut Read online

Peroni gave her a mock-sinister leer. “Soon you eat. My new friend Laila and I are cooking Kurdish. Which isn’t that far from Tuscan, just a little less fashionable.”

  “Good!” the girl protested. “It’s good.”

  Emily walked over, as close as the sputtering fat from the pans allowed, and stared at a banquet of frying food: eggs swimming in olive oil, chunks of bread turning crisp and golden in a mess of whole cloves of garlic, sliced onions and a tangle of half-burnt peppers.

  “I don’t suppose you have toast?” she asked. “Or yogurt?”

  Teresa arrived with a cup of coffee and gave it to her. “This is a bachelor pad, in case you hadn’t noticed. That means the bread’s all stale and the yogurt… ooh. I have to warn you, Nic. Some of those things in your fridge are so past their sell-by date they wouldn’t count as vegetarian anymore.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Costa protested.

  “Of course you have,” Teresa said in a deeply patronizing fashion. “How long, Gianni?”

  “Come back in five.”

  “Done,” Costa said and ushered the two women back into the main room, out of earshot.

  Emily Deacon sat down and came right to the point. “OK. What happened with the girl? What did she tell you?”

  “Don’t worry,” Costa replied. “We’ve passed it all on to Leapman. She gave us an address. The place she first saw him. Probably where he lived. The chances of him being there now—”

  “That’s it? You didn’t get any more?”

  The two Italians exchanged glances. “Emily,” the woman said, “this is one seriously screwed-up kid. Even before what happened last night. The charities gave up on her, she was so unreliable, so disruptive. She’s not—if you will excuse a non-medical phrase—right in the head. You can’t just sit down, ask her questions and take notes. Try if you want.”

  “Maybe I will. She doesn’t look that way now.”

  “She met the man,” Costa said. “This is Peroni’s patch. Give him a starving kid and a couple of pans. Don’t ask me how he does it. I doubt I’ll ever understand. He knew she was hungry, I guess. No, it’s more than that.”

  Teresa Lupo cast a backwards glance at the kitchen and sighed. Emily Deacon understood then: there was something going on between her and Costa’s partner.

  “He’s being like a parent, for God’s sake,” Teresa sighed. “Nic and I did all the cop things. Threw questions at her. Kept on and on. Gianni waited awhile, sat not saying much, then started listening. Like Nic said. Don’t ask. It’s a gift.”

  Emily thought about Gianni Peroni and realized she understood that last point. There was something extraordinarily warm behind that pugilistic facade. All the same…

  “We need to know what happened in the Pantheon,” she insisted. “What she saw.”

  “Now that,” Costa answered, “is a place even Gianni can’t go just yet. The shutters come straight down. Give him some time. We’ve got that, you know. This man is on the run now. Maybe on the street himself. He knows we’re looking for him. He’s not leaving Rome in a hurry. There’s not a train going out of Termini. No buses. No planes. Not much traffic.”

  She thought about the way the man had looked at her the previous night, the conscious decision he’d had to make. “He doesn’t want to leave Rome. He’s got unfinished business here.”

  “Then we’ll work on finding out what it is,” Costa insisted.

  “This is crazy. Why am I here? Why are you keeping a material witness in a private house? The only murder witness we’ve got?”

  “Why not?” Costa asked. “Where else would she go? She doesn’t have a home. She doesn’t have parents, not here anyway. None of the charities want her because all she does is steal stuff in front of their eyes.”

  “I don’t care!” Emily yelled, hearing her voice rise a couple of decibels. “This is all so wrong. You can’t run a criminal investigation like this.”

  The pathologist rolled her eyes up at the ceiling and said nothing.

  “So what do you think we should do?” Costa asked.

  “Talk to her some more. Now. Get Leapman down here.”

  “She’d like Agent Leapman,” Teresa said quietly. “She’d just love a man like that. I bet she wouldn’t stop talking.” She looked Emily directly in the face, daring her to argue. “Well?”

  “OK,” Emily agreed. “Maybe that’s not such a great idea.”

  “So what do you think we should do?” Costa repeated.

  The girl put her head round the door of the kitchen. Emily could see the doubt in her face. The kid had heard her yelling, could sense the tension in the room.

  Emily Deacon made herself smile.

  “Let’s eat,” she said under her breath, then added more loudly. “Laila. You made us breakfast. That’s nice.”

  “Ready!” The girl gestured into the kitchen.

  They sat around an ancient wooden table. Peroni and Laila handed out dinner plates of food: potatoes, onions and peppers, with a couple of fried eggs perched on top of each, everything swimming in olive oil, with bread on the side. Emily Deacon looked at hers and wondered when she’d ever eaten anything like this before for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

  “Good country food,” Peroni said, stabbing a finger at the plate. “In a normal house”—he cast a deprecatory glance at his partner—“there’d have been some ham or sausage or something.”

  “It’s lovely as it is.” Emily sighed, watching Teresa Lupo retrieve an old bottle of ketchup from a cupboard, stare at the use-by date, shrug her shoulders and set the container on the table. The girl grabbed it straightaway, deposited a pool on her food and started to eat manically, as if she’d been starving for half her life. Which, Emily reflected, just might be the case.

  Then Laila looked up at them, amazed they weren’t touching their food.

  “Eat!” she ordered. “Eat!”

  Emily Deacon tried a corner of crisp, almost burnt egg, and, suddenly, out of nowhere, found herself laughing, a self-conscious, half-hysterical laugh, one that stemmed in part, she decided, from her amazement at being among these odd strangers, being touched by the intimate ordinariness of the scene.

  Somewhere out there a man was carving magical shapes on of the backs of dead people. He was waiting in the frozen city. And he had a name. Kaspar. It came to her now. A distant, returning memory from childhood, ten, twelve years ago, maybe more. She’d been in the study of their old apartment on the Aventine hill, stopping her practice on the upright piano for a moment, overhearing a remark from one of her father’s rare discussions of his work with her mother.

  Bill Kaspar. What a guy.

  “What a guy…” she murmured.

  Peroni was peering at her. “Who, me?”

  She smiled at the crude, makeshift feast on the table, and Laila, who’d just about cleared her plate and was eyeing Peroni, probably wondering if, like Oliver Twist, she could really ask for more.

  “Sure, Gianni,” Emily agreed. “You.”

  IT WAS JUST A CAR. Some lunatic with an ancient Renault, probably stolen, who didn’t give a shit what happened once he’d had his fun. Falcone quickly picked up the story from the two uniformed men on the scene. The moron had torched the vehicle outside the church at the top of the steps then, watched by a couple of goggle-eyed street hawkers, pushed it over the edge. The vehicle had rolled and tumbled down the hill, settling in front of the fountain in the Piazza di Spagna, where the fuel tank had exploded with the soft roar Falcone had heard from down the road. Now a puzzled-looking fire crew were hosing down the damn thing in front of a small crowd of puzzled onlookers.

  It was an odd and disturbing scene in a part of the city that never quite worked for Leo Falcone. The mix of tourists and McDonald’s rubbing shoulders in the shadow of the house where Keats died puzzled him at the best of times.

  Falcone strolled back down the Via del Babuino and ordered the uniformed men to return to the Questura, then he called intelligence to check the name on the passport. A
fter they had run a swift search he set off on the drive out to Costa’s house, taking the time alone to think about that morning’s meeting with Joel Leapman, Bruno Moretti and Filippo Viale, the grey man from SISDE, and the way they all just sat there, silent, as if this were some kind of game.

  The streets were treacherous: half snow, half slush. Even in the abnormally light traffic he had to be on his guard every moment. The average Roman had never driven on snow. What passed as the normal rules of the road in Rome were gone. Cars were careering around crazily, from right to left and back again. Drivers were arguing with each other over minor collisions. The city was, briefly, beyond control, beyond order. He thought about the old Renault tumbling down the Spanish Steps, bursting into flames at the foot of the staircase, and how amazing it was no one had got hurt. Rome, like any big city, had its share of vandalism. Still, there were always places that were somehow exempt, almost sacrosanct. People didn’t mess with sights like that. It would be like spray-painting graffiti on St. Peter’s.

  Until now.

  Falcone turned the car into the narrow lane that was the Via Appia Antica and couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The city streets were a mess. The authorities just didn’t have the right equipment to clear up after the constant blizzards. Here, at the municipal boundary, the Via Appia became clear and safe, still showing cobblestones that were, in places, a good two thousand years old.

  “Farmers,” Falcone said to himself. The tractors had been out, unbidden, without payment in all probability, ploughing aside the drifts. This was where the city ended and a different kind of Italy started. He made a note to remind himself of that the next time he wondered why Nic Costa lived where he did.

  The drive to Costa’s farmhouse was different, though: deep in snow so thick that Falcone kept his foot lightly on the pedal all the way, and was grateful the car didn’t grind to a halt. He made one call back to the Questura, then stood on the doorstep, stamping his shoes to get rid of the packed ice, sniffing the air, trying to work out if the smell of the countryside, fresh and wholesome, really suited him.

  Costa looked him up and down when he opened the door. “Problems?”

  “A few,” Falcone replied. “Is she still here?”

  “The girl? Of course.”

  “No. I meant Emily Deacon.”

  Costa nodded. “Sure. I’m going to drive her to the embassy soon.”

  “Has she told you anything?”

  “About what? I wasn’t aware we were interrogating her.”

  “Maybe we should be.” Falcone stayed by the door, not wanting this conversation to go inside. “About this Leapman character, for a start. What the hell’s he up to?”

  Costa shuffled on his feet, uncomfortable. “I’m not sure she’s got anything to tell, to be honest. She’s just as much in the dark as we are.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Falcone murmured, then stamped his smart city shoes on the doorstep one last time and walked inside, throwing his coat onto a chair and following Costa into the kitchen.

  Peroni was clearing away a huge dinner plate still bearing a few eggs and fried potatoes. “Hey, Leo. Want some?”

  “I think I’ll pass,” Falcone replied, staring at the group around the table: Emily Deacon, Teresa Lupo, the Kurdish girl. “Am I interrupting something?”

  Peroni shrugged. “Just breakfast. Out here in the big wide world people tend to take it together, you know.”

  “Cut the lecture,” Falcone snapped. “You do have coffee?”

  Teresa Lupo pushed the filter pot over to him. He stared mutely at the thing.

  “This is a home, Leo,” she insisted. “A bachelor’s at that. Not a cafe. This is how coffee comes.”

  Falcone looked at the girl and held out a hand. “I gather you’re Laila. My name’s Leo Falcone. I have the”—this was for their benefit, not hers—“dubious distinction of being their boss.”

  The girl took his hand for a brief moment and stiffened. She didn’t like authority. No one could miss that.

  “How old are you?”

  “Th-thirteen,” she stuttered.

  “I’m sure they’ve asked you this, but let me ask again to make sure. Is there anyone in Rome you want us to contact? Your mother. Your father. Do you know where they are?”

  “My father’s dead. My mother’s in Iraq. Somewhere.”

  She said it in that flat, neutral tone of acceptance Falcone knew only too well. The kid really did have no one.

  He took a ten-euro note out of his wallet. “Fine. You know what I liked to do when I was thirteen and the weather was like this?”

  Teresa Lupo gasped. “You were thirteen once, Leo? Now that’s a hard one to swallow.”

  “When I was thirteen,” Falcone continued, ignoring her, “I just loved to build snowmen.”

  “Snowmen?” the girl asked, wide-eyed.

  “Absolutely.” He waved the note. “This is for you.”

  Her hand reached out gingerly for the money. Falcone placed the note under a spare dinner plate.

  “Once you’ve built me the best snowman I’ve ever seen. And here’s the best part.” He smiled briefly at Teresa Lupo. “Our friendly doctor here is going to help you.”

  “I am?” the pathologist snarled.

  Falcone leaned over and whispered to the kid, loud enough so they all could hear, “She’s good. I promise.”

  Then he waited until the two of them had left the room, Teresa Lupo grumbling under her breath, waited until he heard their voices outside in the snow, ringing in that odd way they do in the extreme cold. Only then did he turn to Emily Deacon, take out a sheet of paper from his jacket and unfold it in front of her on the table.

  “I have an ID for the man we’re all looking for, Agent Deacon. Your friend Leapman doesn’t know about this yet. You can give it to him when you go into your office if you like.”

  Costa and Peroni crowded round to look at the imprint of the passport. It was issued in the name of Roger Houseman, with a contact address for a wife in London as next of kin, and a photo of an anonymous-looking man wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses.

  “Is this who you saw last night?” Costa asked Deacon.

  She shook her head. “No. I mean… possibly. It’s a fake passport, surely.”

  “It’s a fake,” Falcone agreed. “We seem to be having a run on fake passports.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  Falcone repeated himself. “I said we seem to be having a run on them. The woman who was killed in the Pantheon had a false passport too. But I guess you must know that. After all, you were the people who were contacting her relatives.”

  “What?” Deacon seemed genuinely amazed, Falcone thought. And Costa was already bristling on her behalf too, which was worth noting. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Margaret Kearney. Thirty-eight. From New York City. No such woman. No such home address. We checked. I know we’re not supposed to. We’re supposed to swallow every last piece of bullshit you and Leapman push our way. But just this once we didn’t. Margaret Kearney doesn’t exist. So who is she, Agent Deacon? Whose relatives are you comforting exactly?”

  “I don’t know!” She was struggling to make sense of it. It didn’t look like an act, Falcone thought, then reminded himself of what she was. The FBI spent years training their officers. No doubt lying was top of the curriculum. “I didn’t deal with that side of things. I thought it was all handled by the usual people.”

  “ ”The usual people.“ Are these the usual people?”

  Falcone pulled out another piece of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. “This came to me this morning from the Palazzo Chigi. It’s a list of five men. All FBI agents. Do you know them?”

  She peered at the names, shaking her head. “I’ve no idea who these people are.”

  “Really. Do you think they’re armed? I guess so. Are they looking for Roger Houseman or whoever this man is? I guess so too. I’ve worked in the Questura all my adult life, Age
nt Deacon, and I’ve never seen a piece of paper like this before. It says you have five men here doing God knows what and all I know is, if I happen upon them, whatever’s going on, I just look in the other direction, walk away and pretend they don’t exist. So you tell me: what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know! I’d no idea anyone else was working on the case. What are they supposed to be doing?”

  “You tell me…”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know who this man is—” Falcone began.

  “No!” she yelled. “Believe me. I am not part of this.”

  Costa was going a little red in the face now. Peroni, sensibly, was keeping quiet. Both knew how Falcone worked. They’d seen this tactic often enough. You push and push and see how far you get. Emily Deacon was, it seemed to Falcone, telling the truth. But he had to make sure.