Sacred Cut Read online

  “This would be a duty break, right? I can still shoot if I want to?”

  Nic Costa listened to Sandri’s squeaky northern tones, sighed and put a restraining hand on his partner’s arm, worried that Peroni’s temper just might take a turn in the wrong direction. The photographer had been doing the rounds of the Questura all month. He was a nice enough guy, an arty type who’d been given some kind of government grant to create a documentary record of the station’s work. He’d photographed all manner of people: traffic cops and forensic, the lunatics from the morgue, the paper-monkeys in clerical. Costa had seen some of his work already: a set of moody monochrome prints of the warders working the cells. The photos weren’t half bad. And he had noted the photographer’s steady progress around the station, understanding the greedy, interested gaze the man gave him and Peroni every time they crossed his path. Mauro Sandri was a photographer. He thought in visual terms, and not much else in all probability. He must have looked at Nic Costa—small, slight, young, like an athlete who’d somehow quit the track—set him, in his mind, against the big, bulking frame of his partner—more than twenty years older and with an ugly, violently disfigured face no one ever forgot—and felt his shutter finger start to itch.

  Gianni Peroni surely knew that too. Nic’s partner was used to sideways glances, for his looks and his history. He’d been inspector in vice for years until, almost a year before, he’d been busted down to the ranks for one simple slip-up, when he’d tasted the goods he was supposed to be investigating. All for a private, internalized reason he’d later shared with one person only, the younger partner who pounded the street alongside him. That didn’t stop an intelligent man, one who could read an expression even on Peroni’s battered features, seeing the two cops together and understanding there was a story there. It was inevitable that Sandri would pick them as his subject one day. Inevitable, too, that Gianni Peroni would see it as a challenge to ride the photographer a touch hard along the way.

  “You can still shoot, Mauro,” Costa said and caught a glimpse of a resentful twinkle in Peroni’s bright, beady eye.

  He took his partner’s arm again and whispered, “They’re just pictures, Gianni. You know the great thing about pictures?”

  “No, tell me, Professor,” Peroni murmured, watching Sandri struggle to work another 35 mm cassette into his Nikon.

  “They only show what’s on the surface. The rest you make up. You write your own story. You imagine your own beginning and your own ending. Pictures are fiction pretending to be truth.”

  Peroni nodded. He wasn’t his normal self, Costa thought. There were dark, complex thoughts rumbling around deep inside a head that temperamentally liked to avoid such places.

  “Maybe. But does this particular fiction have a caffè corretto inside it?”

  Costa coughed into a gloved hand and stamped his feet, thinking about the taste of a big slug of grappa hidden inside a double espresso and how little activity there could be on a night such as this, when even the most crooked Roman hoods would surely be thinking of nothing but a warm bed.

  “I believe it does,” he answered, and scanned the deserted street, where just a single bus was struggling down the centre line at a snail’s pace, trying to keep from skidding into the gutter.

  Costa stepped out from the shelter of the doorway, pulling the collar of his thick black coat up, shielding his eyes from the blizzard with a frozen hand, then darted into an alley, towards the distant yellow light trickling from the tiny doorway of what he guessed just might be the last bar open in Rome.

  THEY PROVED TO BE the only three customers in the tiny cafe down the alley beyond the Galleria Doria Pamphili, among the dark tangle of ancient streets that ran west towards the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. Costa stood with Gianni Peroni at one end of the counter, trying to calm down the big man before something untoward happened. Mauro Sandri was crouched on a stool a good distance away, concentrating hard on polishing the lenses on his damn cameras, not even touching the booze-rich caffè Peroni had bought him before war broke out.

  The owner, a tall, skeletal man with a white nylon jacket, scrappy brown moustache and greased grey hair, looked at the three of them in turn and declared quite firmly, “Were this up to me, I’d slap the guy around a little, Officer. I mean, you got to have limitations. There’s public places and there’s private places. If a man can’t get a little peace and quiet when he wanders into the pisser and gets his cazzo out, what’s this world coming to? That’s what I want to know. That, and when you people are getting the hell out of here. If you weren’t police I’d be closed already. A man don’t pay the mortgage selling three coffees in an hour, and I don’t see anyone else showing up for this party either.”

  He was right. Costa had seen only a few figures scurrying through the snow when they trudged to the bar. Now it was solid white beyond the door. Anyone with sense was, surely, snug at home, swearing not to set foot outside until the blizzard ended and some sunlight turned up to disclose what Rome looked like after an extraordinary night like this.

  Gianni Peroni had downed his coffee and added an extra grappa on top, which was unlike the man. He sat hunched on an ancient, rickety stool, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible so no one lingered, staring mutely at the bottles behind the bar. It wasn’t Sandri’s stupid trick with the camera that had caused this, Costa knew. Trying to snap a picture of Peroni taking a piss—vérité was what Mauro had called it—was merely the final straw that had pushed the big man over the edge.

  They’d discussed this already earlier that evening, when Costa had quietly asked the big man if everything was OK. It all came out in a rush. What was really bugging Peroni was the fact he wouldn’t see his kids this Christmas, for the first time ever.

  “I’ll get Mauro to apologize,” Costa told his partner now. “He didn’t mean anything, Gianni. You had the measure of the guy straightaway. He just does this, all the time. Taking pictures.”

  Besides, Costa thought, any photo could have been quite something too. He could easily imagine a grainy black-and-white shot of Peroni’s hulking form, shot from the back, shrinking into the corner of the bar’s grubby urinal, looking like an outtake from some fifties shoot in Paris by Cartier-Bresson. Sandri had an eye for a picture. Costa half blamed himself. When Peroni had dashed for the toilet door and Sandri’s eyes had lit up, he should have seen what was coming.

  “I’ve bought all the presents, Nic,” Peroni moaned, those piggy eyes twinkling back at him, the scarred face full of guilt and pain. “How the hell do I get them to Siena now with this shitty weather everywhere? What are they going to think of me, on top of everything else?”

  “Phone them. They know what it’s like here. They’ll understand.”

  “They will?” Peroni snapped. “What the fuck do you know about kids, huh?”

  Costa took his hand off Peroni’s huge, hunched shoulder, shrugged and said nothing. Peroni had two children: a girl of thirteen, a boy of eleven. He never seemed to be able to think of them as anything but helpless infants. It was one of the traits Costa admired in his partner. To the world he looked like a bruised, scarred thug, the last man anyone would want to meet on a dark night. And it was all an act. Underneath, Peroni was just a straightforward, honest, old-fashioned family man, one who’d stepped out of line once and paid the heaviest price.

  “Oh, crap.” Peroni sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to lash out at you. I don’t even want to lash out at Mauro over there.”

  “That’s good to know,” Costa replied, then added, “if there’s anything I can do …”

  “Such as what?” Peroni asked.

  “It’s an expression, Gianni. It’s a way a friend has of saying, ‘No, I haven’t the first idea how I can help, and the truth is I probably can’t do a thing. But if I could, I would.’ Understand?”

  A low, croaking snort of semi-amusement escaped Peroni’s throat. “OK, OK. I am contrite. I repent my sins.” His scarred face screwed up w
ith distaste aimed, it seemed to Costa, somewhere deep inside himself. “Some more than others.”

  Then he shot a vicious look at Sandri, huddled over the Nikons. “I want that film, though. I’m not having my pecker pasted all over the notice board for everyone to see. They told the guy he could follow us around and take pictures. They didn’t say he could walk straight after us into the pisser.”

  “Mauro swears there’s really nothing there. People wouldn’t even see it was you. And maybe it’s a good picture, Gianni. Think of it.”

  The battered face wrinkled sceptically. “It’s a picture of a man taking a piss. Not the Mona Lisa.”

  Costa had tried to talk art to Peroni before. It hadn’t worked. Peroni was irretrievably romantic at heart, still stuck on the idea of beauty. Truth came somewhere far behind. And it occurred to Costa too that maybe there was more to the big man’s misery than the genuine distress he felt at being separated from his kids. There was also the matter of the relationship Peroni had struck up with Teresa Lupo, the pathologist working at the police morgue. It was meant to be a secret, but secrets never really stayed hidden for long inside the Questura. Peroni was dating the likeable, wayward Teresa and it was common knowledge. When Costa found out, a couple of weeks before, he had thought long and hard about it and had come to the conclusion that the two might, just, make a good couple. If Peroni could swallow his guilt. If Teresa could keep her life straight for long enough to make things work once the initial flush of mad enthusiasm that came with any affair subsided into the routine of everyday existence.

  “Gimme a cappuccino,” Costa said to the barman. “It’s going to be a long, cold night out there.”

  There was a howl of protest from behind the counter. “It’s nearly twelve for God’s sake. What am I running here? A soup kitchen for cops?”

  “Gimme one too,” Sandri piped up from the other end of the bar, pushing away his cold corretto. “Get one for all of us. I’m paying.”

  Then the photographer walked over, looked Peroni in the eye and placed a 35 mm film cassette in his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really. I shouldn’t have done it like that. It’s just …”

  Peroni waited for an explanation. When it didn’t come, he asked, “Just what?”

  “I knew you’d have said no. I apologize, OK? I was wrong. But you have to understand this, Peroni. If a man like me had to ask every time he took a photograph, there’d hardly be any pictures in the world. All those ones you remember. All those ones you think are important. They came from some guy with a camera who pointed the stupid thing while no one was really taking any notice and went … pop. Improvisation. Speed. That’s what this job’s all about. Stealing other people’s moments.”

  Peroni looked him up and down and considered this.

  “A little like your job, huh?” Sandri added.

  The barman slid three coffees down the counter, spilling milk and foam everywhere.

  “Listen, assholes, this is the last,” he snarled. “Do you think you could possibly just pay for them, then go steal a few moments someplace else, huh? I’d like to go to bed and count the seven and a bit euros I earned tonight. And I got to open those doors at six-thirty tomorrow morning, not that anyone’s going to be walking through them.”

  Costa had downed one mouthful of hot, milky coffee and foam when the radio squawked. Peroni was looking at him hungrily as he took the call. They had to get out of the bar, they had to find something to do. If they stayed any longer, they’d never leave.

  “Burglar alarm,” Costa said when he’d listened to the message from the control room. “The Pantheon. We’re the closest.”

  “Ooh,” Peroni cooed. “A burglar alarm. Did you hear that, Mauro? Maybe we’ve got some wild action after all. Maybe all those bums who hang around there fleecing the tourists are breaking in, looking for somewhere warm to spend the night.”

  “Damn stupid thing to do if they are,” Sandri said immediately, looking puzzled.

  “In weather like this?” Peroni asked.

  “It’s got a hole in the roof the size of a swimming pool,” Sandri replied. “The oculus. Remember? It’s going to be as cold in there as it is outside. Colder even. Like a freezer. And nothing to steal either, not unless you can remove a few marble tombs without someone noticing.”

  Peroni gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. Not too hard this time. “You know, for a guy who talks art you’re OK really, Mauro. You can take pictures of me all you want. Outside the crapper.” Then he gave Costa a querulous look. “Are we calling the boss? He sounded desperate.”

  Costa thought about Leo Falcone. Their boss had made a point of insisting he could be easily disturbed. “For a burglar alarm?”

  Peroni nodded. “Leo doesn’t say those things without a reason. He wants out of that place.”

  “I guess so.” Costa pulled out his phone as they walked to the door and the white world beyond, feeling somewhat uneasy that Leo Falcone was so reluctant to spend a little leisure time with his superiors. And thinking all the while too about what Mauro Sandri had said.

  There was no reason for anyone to break into the Pantheon. None at all.

  LEO FALCONE LISTENED to the drone of men’s voices echo around the private room in Al Pompiere, the stiff, old-fashioned restaurant in the ghetto where, by tradition, they met once a year just before Christmas. Then he looked at their heavy business coats, lined up on the hangers by the wall like black dead-animal skins, and turned his head towards the window, wishing he were somewhere—anywhere—else.

  The snow was now falling in a steady, persistent stream. Falcone took his mind off the dinner for a moment and wondered what the weather meant for the days to come. He liked to work Christmas. Most divorced men did. Those without kids anyway. He’d seen the quick, internal flash of disappointment on Gianni Peroni’s face earlier in the week when the new rotas had been posted, and Peroni and Costa had realized they would both be on duty over the holiday. Peroni had hoped to go home to Tuscany for a brief reunion with his estranged family. Falcone had wondered, for a moment, whether he could arrange that. Then he’d checked himself. Peroni was just another cop now. He had to live with the hours just like everyone else. That’s what duty was about. That, and turning out for an annual dinner with a bunch of faceless grey men from SISDE, the civilian intelligence service, men who never really said what they meant or what, in truth, they really wanted.

  The seating arrangements were preordained: one cop, one spook, arranged alternately around the white starched tablecloth and the highly polished silverware. Falcone sat at the window end of the long banquet table next to Filippo Viale, who smoked a cigar and clutched a glass of old chardonnay grappa as clear as water, his second of the evening. Falcone had listened to Viale’s quiet, insistent voice throughout the meal, picking at his own food: a deep-fried artichoke to start, a plate of rigatoni con la pajata, pasta seated beneath calf’s intestines sautéed with the mother’s milk still inside, then, as secondo, a serving of bony lamb scottadito served alongside a head of torsello chicory stuffed with anchovies. It was the kind of food Al Pompiere was known for, and, like his dinner companion, it was not to Falcone’s more modern taste.

  Viale had been his point man with the SISDE since Falcone had been promoted to inspector ten years before. In theory that meant they liaised with one another on an equal basis from time to time, when the two services needed to share information. In reality Falcone couldn’t remember a single occasion on which Viale or any other of the grey men, as he thought of them, was of real assistance. There’d been plenty of calls from Viale, fishing for information, asking for a favour. Usually Falcone had complied, because he knew what the cost of reluctance would be: a call upstairs and an icy interrogation from his superiors, asking what the problem was. Before he was promoted, he’d believed the grey men’s power was on the wane. That was in the early nineties, when the Cold War was over and terrorism seemed a thing of the past. A time of optimism, as he saw it no
w, when a younger Falcone, still married, still with some sense of hope, was able to believe the world was becoming a smarter place, one that grew a little wiser, a little more safe, with every passing year.

  Then the circle turned again. New enemies, faceless ones with no particular flag to identify them, emerged out of nowhere. While the police and the Carabinieri struggled to hold the fort against a rising tide of crime using increasingly meagre and conventional resources, the funding went to the grey men, filling their coffers for operations that never came under any public scrutiny. There was a shift in the moral fulcrum. For some in government the end came to justify the means. This was, Falcone knew, the state of the world he would probably have to work with for the rest of his professional life. That knowledge didn’t make it any easier to bear. Nor was he flattered by the grey men’s apparent belief that they saw something in Leo Falcone they wanted.

  “Leo,” Viale said quietly, “I have to ask. I know we’ve been through this before. But still … it puzzles me.”

  “I don’t want another job.” Falcone sighed, hearing a note of testiness in his voice. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  They’d been trying to recruit him off and on for a good four years or more. Falcone was never quite certain how genuine Viale’s offer was. It was a standard SISDE trick to hold out lures to men in the conventional force. It flattered them, made them feel there could be a future somewhere else if life got too difficult in the Questura.

  Viale downed the grappa and ordered another. The waiter, who was handing around a very old-fashioned sponge cake as dessert, took the glass and returned with it filled immediately. Viale was a regular here, Falcone guessed. Maybe he had booked the dinner. Maybe he was the boss. SISDE officers never said much about their rank. By rights Falcone was supposed to be matched against someone near his own position in the hierarchy. He didn’t know Viale well. Like so many SISDE officers, the man was infuriatingly anonymous: a dark suit, a nondescript pale face, a head of black hair, dyed in all probability, and a demeanour that embraced many smiles and not a touch of warmth or humour. Falcone couldn’t even put a finger on his age. Viale was of medium height, slightly built, with a distinct paunch. Yet Falcone felt sure there was something more serious about the man than he revealed. Viale didn’t sit behind the same kind of desk Falcone did, nor did he have to tackle the same, incessant trinity of problems: detection, intelligence and resources. Viale was, somehow, a man who made his own life and there, Leo Falcone thought, was something to envy.