The Sacred Cut Read online

  “Sir,” Costa interjected, “Agent Deacon helped us a lot last night at no small risk to herself. Without her we wouldn’t know anything right now.”

  “Thank you, Nic,” she said under her breath. “I can’t believe I’m getting interrogated like this. Not after…”

  Falcone finished the sentence for her. “After Roger Houseman, or whoever, nearly killed you. Or, to be more precise, chose not to kill you. Why was that?”

  It was such a small thing. A flicker of hesitation in her face. But unmistakable.

  “I can’t begin to guess. Perhaps it didn’t fit his plan. Laila had escaped. Perhaps he doesn’t just kill for the hell of it. In fact everything we know about him suggests that’s the last thing he does. He’s too careful. Too obsessed by detail.”

  “I agree with the last part,” Falcone said. “Still… if he was faced with an officer of the law. One who was determined to apprehend him…”

  “He was too smart for me. And too strong. He…” She thought about this carefully before saying it. “He knows how we work. He actually complimented me on how I’d cuffed the girl. As if he were an instructor or something. Can you believe that? As if he knew I’d done a good job.”

  “You didn’t mention that, Emily,” Peroni said quietly, a faint note of distrust in his voice.

  “It only just came back to me.”

  “Of course,” Falcone said. “It must have been very shocking. You should try to remember more.”

  “I will.” She sighed.

  “Can we get to hear it too?” Peroni asked.

  “That’s the deal,” she said icily. “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, Agent Deacon,” Falcone interposed. “This has been very stressful for you. I didn’t mean to offend. Or interrogate you. It’s just that I’ve spent rather a lot of time in the company of your colleague today and I have to say that man gets to me.”

  She wasn’t rising to the bait.

  “But you see my problem?” Falcone added.

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looked at Costa. “Nic. I need to be in the office. I promised.”

  “This is your problem too,” Falcone persisted. “If Leapman is lying to you as much as he’s lying to us there has to be a reason. Can you guess what that might be?”

  “I don’t know how you work, Inspector. But when we have problems we raise them with our own people. Not strangers from another force. Another country.”

  “Is that what we are?” Falcone queried. “Just a bunch of odd foreigners who happen to be in the way?”

  “No. You’re the resident police force here. You’ve got every right to know what we know. That’s what we agreed. I’ll try to honour it as much as I can.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” Falcone passed the paper with the passport details over to her. “You can give him this, for what it’s worth. I don’t believe you’ll find he’s interested. Agent Leapman is one step ahead of us. Of you too, but I think you know that. You ought to consider what that means.”

  She was getting up rapidly from the table, anxious to be out of there. Falcone placed his hand on her arm.

  “In times like these, Emily,” he said, “it’s best we work together. When you need us…”

  She just glared at his hand until he withdrew it. Emily Deacon was no pushover, however uncertain she felt about the position in which Leapman had placed her.

  “I’ll bear that in mind, Inspector. Nic. Can we go now?”

  Peroni watched the two of them walk out of the door.

  “More coffee, Leo?” he asked.

  Falcone grimaced at the mug. “Is this really the best Nic can do?”

  “Like Teresa said, Nic’s on his own. What kind of man goes to a lot of trouble to make good coffee just for himself?”

  The look on Falcone’s face told Peroni the answer.

  “OK,” the big cop said. “I guess you’ve got your own espresso machine or something. But just grin and bear it.” He filled the kettle and turned it on.

  Falcone felt troubled by his talk with Emily Deacon. He’d got most of what he wanted, but he couldn’t shake off the impression she was withholding something too. The expression on her face when he mentioned the incident in the Campo…

  “You’ve got to remember to call me by my rank in these situations, Peroni. This relationship’s getting too damn casual.”

  “Sorry.” Peroni smiled wanly at the surroundings. “It was this place. It’s a home, Leo. Ooh… sorry again, sir. At least it was a home. For me it’s starting to feel like one of those old tombs out by the road right now. What am I supposed to do about my partner?”

  “He keeps asking me that about you.”

  “Arrogant kids…”

  Peroni stared out of the window. Teresa Lupo and the girl were steadily building a snowman there. It was a good metre tall. Not bad for the short time they’d had.

  “That’s worth ten euros of your money,” he suggested. “Don’t you think?”

  Falcone watched the pair outside working on the cold white figure and remembered how that felt as a child, when he’d spend hours building one alone at the weekend house his father owned in the mountains close to the Swiss border. “It is.”

  “Where the hell did that idea come from anyway?”

  “I loved building snowmen when I was a kid. Is that so odd?”

  “No,” Peroni stuttered. “Not exactly. It’s just… ah, forget it.”

  Falcone took the note out from under the plate and passed it over. “You give it to her. You’re better with kids than me. And after that, you start talking to her. Hard. You and your friend.”

  Peroni blinked. “Hard?”

  “Moretti’s pushing me for progress. More than usual. Don’t ask me what’s going on here, but I need to come up with something and that kid’s got to have it. There’s a lot more we need to know. What really happened in the Pantheon?”

  Peroni felt his blood begin to rise. “We know what happened!”

  “Not the details. She saw it.”

  “She’s a thirteen-year-old kid! You want me to drag that out of her just by yelling or something?”

  “Yes,” Falcone barked back. “If that’s what it takes. It’s what you’re paid for. Remember?”

  Peroni kept quiet. He was a good cop. One of the best, Falcone reminded himself.

  “And something else,” Falcone continued. “Why exactly did this creature want the kid dead, which he surely did? Just because of what she saw? It doesn’t make sense. All it would gain him was some more time where he was staying, and sure as hell he’d be out of there soon anyway. I don’t get it.”

  The kettle came to a boil and switched itself off. Falcone looked at his watch.

  “Forget about the coffee,” he said. “I don’t have time. Get that kid in here when I’m gone. Make her talk. I don’t care how we get this out of her,” Falcone insisted. Peroni couldn’t distance himself from the girl. That was the problem. Maybe that would provide the solution too. “Cruel or kind. I just want to know.”

  Peroni was getting mad. “You’re starting to sound like that damn American. Is that what you want?”

  “I’m your boss, Peroni. I don’t care how you think I sound.”

  “Really? Well, I’m your friend, dammit. I’ve known you for twenty years. I could be ordering you around by now if things had worked out differently.”

  Falcone just stared back at him, lacking the heart to say it. Peroni didn’t need to hear the words. They were there somewhere inside him, always. Things didn’t work out differently. Something—some hidden inner flaw—surfaced and sent a well-ordered life tumbling down the wrong turning.

  “Fine.” Peroni sighed. “But let this humble minion offer you some advice. I know what you’re thinking. You can run this all your own way, let Moretti and the rest of them stew in their own juices, work the old Falcone magic. But let me tell you something. This time it won’t work. That ugly American has got the pen-pushers on his side. All those nice
men in suits with titles that never really make much sense. If you screw with them—”

  “This isn’t the Wild West,” Falcone spat back. “I’ve got the law. That’s bigger than any damn piece of paper from the Palazzo Chigi.”

  Peroni shook his big ugly head. “The law? Don’t you get a flavour of what’s going on these days, Leo? Haven’t you noticed the only people who care much about the law anymore are idiots like us? These are pick-and-choose times, my friend. Wear the coat that suits you. Forget the one that doesn’t. Start squawking about the law to the people you’re dealing with now and they’ll laugh straight in your face.”

  He paused to make sure this hit home. “Let me tell you something, Leo. I do believe that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard you say. And you are not, by nature, a dumb person.”

  Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off the two figures beyond the window: Teresa Lupo watching the girl work steadily on the snowman. He could smell the mountains. He could hear the dead voices of his parents. Single kids were like that. Solitary years followed them around like ghosts all their lives.

  “Is that so?” he asked.

  SWEET, SWEET, SWEET, Billy Kaspar. You’re doing OK for a white kid.

  He’d watched the car roll down the Spanish Steps (straight on the line that led past the Pantheon, across the river, on to the Vatican, perfect in its flaming, smoking trajectory), still hearing the voices, baffled by why they refused to leave him, why they’d taunted him all night long, ever since he’d killed the woman. The voices played a part in that, too, Kaspar thought, not that he was trying to evade any of the responsibility. Something was wrong. The last piece of the jigsaw should have fallen into place. All of Steely Dan Deacon’s team were dead now. The Scarlet Beast had died when he killed Deacon himself back in China. He’d been sure of that. He’d worked out the story, pieced it together in jail. There were pieces to be cleaned up. A couple of minor scores to be settled and now some property, important property, precious, sacred memories, to be recovered.

  But the voices…

  You can hear me, Kaspar. Loud and clear. What did Dan the man say that time?

  The voices wouldn’t go away. They sat on his shoulder, whispering, like cartoon demons.

  What’d he say, boy?

  The same thing, Kaspar recalled. Twice. Thirteen years apart. When they were working on the Babylon Sisters, he’d established a routine with Deacon. They’d meet in the Pantheon, Deacon and he, sit together in a quiet corner. No one could eavesdrop on them in a place like that. And just once Deacon had let slip some doubts.

  Say it.

  Kaspar spoke the words out loud, “Did you meet the man from the Piazza Mattei?”

  It was November 1990. A month before they were due to go in. Kaspar hadn’t understood a damn word. He’d told Dan Deacon so. There wasn’t time to bring anyone else in on the act. It was dumb. Insecure. And a part of him had, at the time, had to quell some rumbling suspicion, some little whisper inside that said Deacon seemed to be checking him out on something.

  Then the conversation had gone awkward, went dead. For thirteen long years, until Kaspar had his cord round Dan Deacon’s scrawny throat in Beijing, trying to strangle some last, cathartic confession out of him.

  It never came. Dan Deacon just shook his head and said…

  What?

  “You should have met the man from the Piazza Mattei.”

  And he’d tried to. Later, when he’d got free, though it all went wrong, damn near got him caught.

  There were two ways to find a secret. You could look for it out in the plain light of day. Or you could keep chipping away at what you didn’t know, waiting for the truth to emerge from the lies. A certainty was growing inside his head, solid, reliable, like the patterns on the floor of the ziggurat all those years ago. It had to work. Otherwise the voices would never go away.

  How long we got to wait, Billy K?

  “I don’t know,” he whispered between gritted teeth.

  The old black voice kept rising up to bait him. Kaspar didn’t like remembering things. Remembering got in the way. There were more important matters to consider. Money, for one thing. Without it he was impotent. All the crucial tasks… buying airline tickets, finding fake passports, weapons, tools, information. Without money they just didn’t happen, and he was running out, fast.

  Since coming back into the world, fleeing that burning jail outside Baghdad, he’d salted away $35,000 in seven different bank accounts in the UK, France, Italy and the Bahamas. Small sums always, originating from some equally small crime, then turned into cash and paid in through a street moneychanger. It was more than enough for his needs, if only he had easy access to it. That wasn’t simple. After 9/11 the American and European authorities had started to change the rules about foreign exchange movements. When the first transaction rang alarm bells and he’d been forced to leave San Francisco in a hurry he’d used the Net to pick up information about how the new world order of money control worked. They watched cash movements as much as they could. They tried to heavy-hand information out of the small foreign banks that allowed just about anyone to open an account. Even with legitimate institutions, quite modest movements of money now attracted attention. It was a constant challenge to transfer a few hundred dollars around here and there, always to another ghost account to hide the trail if someone latched onto what he was doing. The result: only a trickle of cash came safely into his hands each week and he needed another source of income to cover sudden, unexpected expenses.

  Like equipment. Three bugs and a receiver alone had cost him two thousand euros, almost all the ready money he had, from some crook out in Testaccio. With the block placed on his funds by the bureaucratic banks that left him virtually broke.

  He’d used the grubby Internet cafe in the Piazza Barberini before. It was big enough for him to be anonymous. All he need do was pay for a few hours online, type in a fake Hotmail address to validate it, then access his accounts, try to shift a little cash around, do some research, read the news, from CNN to La Stampa, keep ahead of the pack. The place was perfect. You could sit on a PC all day doing anything. No one asked a damn thing. When he was done he just hit the reboot button and the machine wiped out every last keystroke, every place he’d been. It was more anonymous than a phone, more secure than a personal meeting, a place that seemed designed for what he wanted. Once he’d even picked up a woman there, a Lebanese housewife e-mailing back home, and stolen her handbag as she waited for him to emerge from the bathroom of one of the fancy Via Veneto cafes across the road.

  Today the place was almost empty, the piazza close to deserted. Snow continued to paralyse the city. He’d read on the Net about the problems the authorities faced: a lack of ploughs since none had been needed for twenty years, an unwillingness by municipal workers to tackle jobs they’d never had to face before. The bus lines were running a quarter of their normal schedule and at a tenth of their usual capacity. The subway was largely unaffected, but in Rome the subway went mainly to the places people didn’t work anyway. It was as if a cold white coverlet of torpor had fallen from the sky and now sat on the city, daring it to move.

  There were opportunities here, surely. If only he could understand how best to use them.

  He’d found some hair dye in Monica Sawyer’s bathroom, washed it in, waited, washed it out, used her dryer, looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw: grey turning chestnut. Just to make certain, when he went out he bought a tube of fake tan and a pair of cheap sunglasses from a shop in Tritone. Change was good. It helped keep him on his toes, made him work to fit inside a new skin, forget who—what—he really was.

  Now he stood in the toilet of the Net cafe working the tan into his face. It was a little exaggerated, a little too dark. That was good. It meant people wouldn’t look at him too hard. The glasses fitted only loosely. He peered at himself in Monica Sawyer’s hand mirror, hunching up his shoulders like a punk. This was better than the hair dye alone, much better. Now
he could pass as an idiotic hustler, the kind of man who hung around outside tourist restaurants trying to coax the unwary inside with a menu and the promise of a warm, Roman welcome. The kind of man most people would want to avoid.

  Then he went back into the deserted main room, sat at a dusty PC out of sight of the moron at the counter, who just might be smart enough to register the change in his appearance, and started wasting time until his head cleared.

  How long?

  The damn question and the old black voice wouldn’t go away and now he knew he couldn’t stop himself looking, couldn’t help himself when it came to punching the keys, trying out the combinations. All this was new when he first got out. It was amazing how much the world had changed in little over a decade. And it was useful too. A stored global memory you could log into anywhere, provided someone sold the key.