The Garden of Evil Page 9

  The men in front of the painting looked equally debauched. One, vaguely familiar, seemed more than a little drunk. He stood on the left of the line, with his arm around the shoulders of the man next to him in a tight proprietorial fashion. The other two stood slightly apart, looking like friends in the process of turning into enemies for some reason.

  “They call themselves the Ekstasists.”

  Costa couldn’t take his eyes off them. He gazed at the blank, cruel masculine faces on the screen, trying to imagine what each would look like inside a black military hood.

  “Him,” Costa said eventually, indicating the one on the far left, the man with his arm around the shoulders of his companion.

  The two women officers exchanged glances and said nothing.

  Grimaldi, the lawyer, finally shuffled his chair up to the table and took some interest.

  “The man wore a mask,” he pointed out. “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m not. I’m guessing. You can still bring him in on that.”

  Grimaldi sighed and said, “Ah. Guesses.”

  “He has the same build,” Costa insisted. “The same stiff posture. As if he used to be a soldier. This—”

  “This,” Grimaldi cut in, “is Count Franco Malaspina. Who was a soldier once, an officer during military service, for which he was decorated several times. He is also one of the richest and most powerful individuals in Rome, a patron of the arts and of charity, an eligible bachelor, a face from the social magazines, a fine man, or so a casual scan of the press cuttings might have one think.” Grimaldi hesitated and cast his sharp dark eyes at each of them.

  Costa knew the name. As far as he was aware, Malaspina continued to own the vast private palace which bore his family name, which sprawled through Ortaccio, embracing both the Vicolo del Divino Amore and the Barberini’s studio. He’d surely seen the man’s picture in the newspapers. Could it be simple chance recognition that made him point the finger of blame?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I was just remembering the wrong thing.”

  “Perhaps,” Grimaldi agreed. “All the same, let me tell you a little about Franco Malaspina.”

  THE LAWYER DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO REFER TO NOTES. HE SIMPLY spoke from memory as Costa stared at the photo on Rosa’s screen, an image of a tall, athletic twenty-eight-year-old merchant banker with an eponymous family palace in Rome, homes in Milan and New York, and, said Grimaldi, enough files in the Questura to fill an entire lifetime for most criminals, every last one still open. Malaspina was heir to a fortune that had been built up by his clan over more than three centuries, one that began with the bankrolling of a Pope. He was a true Roman aristocrat of a dying breed, and came from a family with unusual antecedents. Unlike most of the city’s nobility, the Malaspinas had embraced the era of Mussolini, seeing in the dictator opportunity, and not the coarse, proletarian Fascism most other ancient families detected and instantly despised. His grandfather had served as a minister for Il Duce. His own father had been a rabble-rouser on the fringes of right-wing politics, and consequently had been loathed in Rome, a city that was temperamentally left-leaning, until his death in a plane crash five years ago.

  Costa had no recollection of Franco Malaspina being involved in machinations around the parties that formed the continuing, argumentative coalitions at the heart of the Italian state; only the vague memory that he was a notorious player in the money world, one who sailed so close to the wind that the financial authorities had investigated him more than once. Not that these probes had resulted in any form of action, which meant that Malaspina was either innocent or so deeply powerful no one dared yet take him on. There were good reasons for caution. Men of his sort liked to build up fortunes before turning to the Senate and Parliament to lay wider, deeper foundations for their power.

  Rosa identified the others in the photograph; all the men were strangers to Costa, though two names were familiar. Giorgio Castagna was the son of the head of a notorious porn empire, a Roman playboy rarely out of the showbiz magazines. Emilio Buccafusca was the owner of an art gallery that specialised in some of the more controversial areas of sculpture and painting. He had frequently clashed with the law over the public display of work that bordered on the extreme. The previous winter his gallery had provoked public outrage for exhibiting several “death sculptures” by a Scandinavian artist supposedly consisting of genuine human body parts encased in clear plastic.

  After a field day in the media, a worried Questura commissario had dispatched Teresa Lupo to the gallery to investigate. She’d denounced the organs as demonstrably animal in origin, probably from slaughtered pigs. Buccafusca had laughed out loud at the time; now he didn’t seem in the mood. Both men appeared somewhat inconsequential next to the aristocratic Malaspina, though they were all of similar stature, dressed in black, Castagna and Buccafusca with similar pinched and bitter faces.

  There were more photographs, too, from other arts events. Malaspina’s expression—self-satisfied, confident, powerful—was constant throughout. In the early photos the others looked much the same way. Something had happened over the previous few months to change that. There, Costa knew, Falcone would see his opportunity.

  The fourth figure, a man completely unknown to Costa, usually skulked close to the background, and seemed somewhat out of place in such company. He was short, sandy-haired, and chubby, about thirty, with a florid, slack face and an expression that veered, in these photos, from boredom to a visible, subservient fear.

  “Being an avid reader of junk magazines,” Teresa Lupo said, staring at the same image, “I feel I’ve met most of this Eurotrash already. But who’s fat boy?”

  “Nino Tomassoni,” Rosa Prabakaran answered. “He’s the only one here who doesn’t have much money, as far as we can figure out.

  He’s an assistant curator at the Villa Borghese.”

  Tomassoni. The name sparked a memory for Costa, one he couldn’t place.

  “The man is probably on the periphery of all this,” Placidi added. “Perhaps he’s barely involved at all.”

  Falcone scowled at her. It was exactly this kind of imprecision in detail that he despised in an officer.

  “His name is on the list,” Falcone pointed out. “If that means nothing, it means nothing for the rest of them.”

  “The list?” Peroni wondered. “You’re accusing these men of some pretty nasty stuff. They are people who like to wear nice suits. And all you have against them is a list?”

  Placidi sighed, then pulled a sheaf of printed papers out of the folder in front of her and stacked them on the table. “They’re more . . . messages really,” she said. “We got another this morning.”

  “You did?” Falcone was clearly unaware of this latest missive and displeased by that fact.

  “It arrived just before I left for this meeting,” she answered with a sudden burst of temper. “I can’t be held responsible for keeping everyone informed about every damned thing. This is the same as the others. An untraceable email from a fake address. Nothing the computer people can work with.”

  She placed the sheet of paper on the table in front of them, not looking at the words. It was a standard office printout.

  Placidi, you cow. What ARE you morons doing? Do I have to spell it out? The Ekstasists. Castagna. Buccafusca. Malaspina. And that stupid helpless bastard Tomassoni. Are they paying you scum enough to let them get away with this? Does it turn you on or something? Can you sleep at night?

  PS: Whatever you think THIS IS NOT FINISHED!!!

  “That’s it?” Costa asked. “That’s your case?”

  “No!” It was Rosa Prabakaran, angry. “That’s not it. We have messages just like this one detailing a string of vicious attacks on black prostitutes, throughout the city, covering a period of almost four months. Where and when and how. We’ve tracked down some of the victims. The poor women are so terrified they won’t tell us a thing. And now”—she nodded back down the alley, towards the studio—“we know why. Those
women are the ones who survived.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Peroni cut in. “You have a string of sexual attacks? And not one of these women will sign a witness statement?”

  “I had one,” Rosa answered. “She described everything. The men. Four of them. What they did.” She paused. “They took turns. The point . . .” She stopped again, embarrassed. “They wanted to see her in the throes of an orgasm. Not faked, the way hookers do. The real thing.”

  Costa thought about the photographs they had found in the studio: shots of women in the throes of either agony or ecstasy.

  “And if they didn’t get what they wanted?” he asked quietly.

  “Then things turned violent. Very violent. These people weren’t paying for sex. Not in the way we know it. They wanted to see something on the faces of these women. They wanted to know they put it there, and capture the moment somehow.” She paused. This was difficult. “The one woman who would talk to us said the men had a camera. That they filmed everything. Her cries most of all. When they felt she was faking . . . they beat her.”

  “All hookers fake it,” Peroni pointed out with vehemence. “What kind of lunatics would do something like that? What do they expect?”

  Costa looked at his friend. Peroni had spent years in vice. In that time, he must have seen some dreadful cases. The expression of shock and distaste on his battered face now told Costa he’d never heard of anything quite like this.

  “Obviously they don’t know hookers,” Costa suggested.

  “They’ve known plenty of late,” Rosa continued. “These are sick bastards. Clever bastards too. I thought I had that girl. Two days later, she walked out of the hospital and vanished. Maybe back home with money. Maybe dead. There’s no way of telling.”

  Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off Susanna Placidi. Costa knew why. A witness in a case like that should never have been allowed to flee, whatever the circumstances.

  “Who do you think the messages are from?” Teresa asked.

  The two female officers glanced at each other. The lawyer, Grimaldi, was silent, staring at the photos on the screen.

  “We don’t know,” Placidi admitted. “Probably someone we don’t know about. Someone on the periphery who thinks it’s gone too far. Or Tomassoni . . .”

  “It sounds like a woman, don’t you think?” Teresa asked. “Listen to the words: ‘Placidi, you cow!’ I’ve been called a bitch a million times by some jerk male. But never a cow. They don’t talk to you like that.”

  “A woman, then!” Placidi screamed back. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  Teresa leaned over, impatient, close to anger. “I said it sounds like a woman. Perhaps it’s meant to. In which case they are clearly overestimating our abilities somewhat. What does it matter? We’ve got DNA. We’ve got forensic coming out of our ears from that mucky room of theirs. Just go and arrest them and leave the rest to me.”

  Falcone sat back, folded his arms, and waited for Placidi to respond. Grimaldi had adopted precisely the same position.

  “We’ve tried to arrest them,” the woman inspector admitted. “We’ve been to the lawyers more than once. The trouble is . . .” She scattered the emails over the table. “This is all we have. The women won’t talk. We can’t . . . The evidence we have is all so vague.”

  Her miserable eyes fell to the table again.

  Teresa turned her attention to Falcone. “Leo, give me an hour with these creeps and a bag of cotton swabs and I’ll put them in a cell before bedtime. There’s a bunch of dead bodies here and they’re itching to talk.”

  He looked at her, then shook his bald, aquiline head.

  “Why not?” asked Peroni.

  Falcone picked up the sheets of messages on the table. “Inspector Placidi told you. These are all we have,” he said. “If they are what they appear, they clearly come from someone inside the group, someone who’s apparently frightened about what his friends are doing. Someone whose name does not appear on these lists, though I wouldn’t wish to rule that out.”

  “So what?” Costa wondered.

  “So alternatively they may be some kind of practical joke,” Falcone went on. “Tomassoni apart, these men are often in the public eye. Publicity attracts cranks. We all know that. They could be innocent.”

  Susanna Placidi banged the table with her fists. “They are not innocent, Leo! These sons of bitches are laughing at us.”

  “She’s right,” Rosa said quietly, confidently. “Taunting us is part of their fun, I swear.”

  “That’s hardly going to get anyone in court, is it?” Falcone observed severely. “A look in their eye. A policewoman’s instinct.”

  “Whoever wrote these emails knows the places!” Rosa screeched.

  “They know the victims, unless you think these women have been making it up and putting themselves in hospital too.”

  “I am aware of all this,” the old inspector replied coldly. “I don’t think for one moment that these are crank messages. From the point of view of Malaspina and his friends, though . . .”

  “It’s a good defence,” Costa agreed. “They do attract cranks.”

  Falcone nodded, grateful for his support. “Furthermore—”

  “No!” It was Teresa Lupo, livid. “I do not wish to hear any more of this. I’ve told you we have the evidence. You’ve told me you have the suspects. Bring these jerks in and leave it to me.”

  She watched their faces. No one spoke until Grimaldi, the lawyer, took a deep breath, then said, “If only it were that easy.”

  “I am here to tell you a simple truth,” he went on. “Inspector Placidi and her team have attempted to do this very thing and failed. Unknown to me or anyone in my department, they arrested all four men named in these messages, without sufficient evidence or adequate preparation. Then they threw these anonymous, unconfirmed allegations at them in the absence of the slightest evidential corroboration, and . . .”

  Placidi’s face was reddening.

  “And now we have to live with the consequences, which are damaging in the extreme,” Grimaldi concluded.

  “I had to do something!” Placidi objected. “I had to take the risk. The women wouldn’t talk when it happened, and two weeks later they had disappeared. We had nothing but these emails. Did you expect me to sit on my hands until some smart-ass from elsewhere came up with something better?”

  Falcone cast a fleeting sideways look in her direction, one Costa had seen in the past. He wondered if Placidi understood how dangerous was the ground beneath her.

  “These are intelligent, important, well-connected men,” he pointed out. “Did it not occur to you that perhaps that was part of their enjoyment too? Feeling untouchable, beyond the pathetic efforts of the law?”

  She said nothing.

  “These men were never going to throw their hands up in the air and offer you a confession, Susanna. Had you thought about it for one moment, you would surely have known that.”

  “There were women getting raped!” Placidi pressed.

  “It now transpires there were women getting murdered,” Grimaldi declared. “Which is all the more reason to do your job properly. Instead, you offended some extremely influential people.”

  Teresa Lupo’s eyes started to dilate with a sudden, growing fury.

  “You also forewarned them of the police investigation,” Falcone continued, “without sufficient evidence even to substantiate a temporary arrest. They now understand fully what we will look for in the way of concrete evidence. They can prepare for that eventuality.”

  Placidi was close to tears. “I didn’t know . . .”

  Falcone looked at the rest of them and then Grimaldi. “You’d best tell them,” he suggested.

  The lawyer took out a notebook from his jacket and consulted it. “Two weeks ago, after being approached by Inspector Placidi’s team, a team of lawyers representing all four of these men went before a magistrate, in camera,” he said. “We had insufficient notice. Malaspina knows the lega
l system. He winds it round his little finger. He has the advantage of being extraordinarily rich and in league with some important figures in the organised crime world too. It is a deadly combination.”

  “And?” Teresa demanded.

  “By the time we were able to assemble a competent team, he was already challenging the legal rules through which we may and may not demand any physical evidence, both fingerprints and DNA specimens, from people who refuse to give them willingly.”

  The pathologist’s large face turned a shade paler. “Rules? Rules? We know what the rules are. Either they give us a sample willingly or I get a piece of paper and force it out of them.”

  It was that straightforward. All Costa needed if any subject refused a DNA sample was the approval of a senior officer in the Questura to take one by force if necessary. Most suspects ceased to resist once they realised they’d be compelled to provide a sample within a matter of minutes.

  Grimaldi’s scowl was that of a man denied something he dearly craved. “Thanks to Malaspina’s lawyers, and our own incompetence, the rules have changed,” he told them. “From now on we may obtain physical material against the will of a suspect only on the basis of a judicial order. So if they object strongly enough, we have to go before a magistrate, where we must make our case. We are, in a nutshell, screwed.”

  The pathologist let loose a stream of Roman epithets.

  Grimaldi waited for her to draw breath, then continued. “The standard routine you have all grown accustomed to using in these situations is now out of the question should any suspect refuse. Unless you can find sufficient firm and incontrovertible evidence to put to a magistrate.” Grimaldi picked up the papers, then dropped them on the table. “Which, having spent the last hour going through what you have here, I must say you do not possess.”