He stood back and looked up and down at the shining, sweating man in front of him, quaking in his tight red satin shorts.
“Otherwise it’s just more fisting time in jail, and really I do not recommend...”
The Finn pushed him out of the way and raced across the gym towards the stairs.
They run oddly too, Peroni thought. Arms pumping, legs going up and down like mechanical dolls.
He walked over to the receptionist, watched by the line of wide-eyed, open-mouthed hulks who’d stayed behind and the fat customer now stationary on his exercise bike. There he picked up a couple of fistfuls of nougats from the bowl and stuffed them into his pockets before calling Vieri.
“There’s good news and there’s bad,” he said when he got through to the inspector, still in his office in the Questura. “The Spallone case and the Roma kid are done. Bad is...” He popped a nougat in his mouth. “... you’re going to have to unplug yourself from your BlackBerry and take a walk outside.”
When he got down the stairs he found Sven cuffed, hands behind his back, face pressed against a blue police wagon blocking the narrow street. Prinzivalli was there, seven men with him. Peroni handed out nougats from his jacket pockets.
“I only asked for five,” he said. “You didn’t need to come.”
Prinzivalli watched the hulk make one last effort to struggle, then give up. The Finn looked shocked and a little teary-eyed.
“It’s on my way home. End of shift.” He popped Peroni’s nougat into his mouth. “I thought perhaps this was something I didn’t want to miss.”
“It’s just an arrest,” Peroni answered.
Eva Spallone was being marched down the street in the custody of two women officers leading her firmly but politely by the arm.
“Wife?” Prinzivalli guessed.
“The ice queen of the north,” Peroni murmured.
Moments later, a Lancia saloon drew up behind the van. Vieri got out, face like thunder, with three of his minions from Milan.
Peroni looked at the men holding Sven, nodded for them to let go a little. The hulk looked up, saw the Spallone woman, and started to squawk in broken Italian, “Was her idea! Hers...”
“Tell him,” Peroni cut in, indicating the approaching Vieri.
“Her idea!” he yelled again, at Vieri this time. “Not mine!”
By now the Spallone woman was close enough to hear.
“Shut up, you moron!” she screamed at him. “Shut the...”
She glanced at Peroni, looked as if she felt stupid for a moment. Then the abuse started again, this time in an incomprehensible stream of gibberish, a language so strange Peroni couldn’t begin to guess a single word.
He took out his phone and hit the record button. When she was done he stopped the phone, walked out in front of the van, and said to the officers there, local and Vieri’s crew from Milan, “Listen to me. I want these two taken into separate custody. No chance they get to talk to one another. No shared lawyers.” He held up the phone. “I want a Finnish translator. Call Di Capua and...”
Vieri broke stride and leapt in front of him, then roared, “I am the inspector here!”
Peroni put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Of course.” Then he turned to the men again and said, “The inspector wants these two in custody. No contact. Finnish translator. Forensic are going to seal off the sauna in this place. The Roma kid was killed there, Spallone got beat up. Whatever this woman thinks, there’s got to be some trace left. Check bank records and the financials for this gym of hers. This place was bleeding old man Spallone dry. Talk to the maid. She’s got the Roma kid’s number and called him when Giorgio needed a ride. There’s your link. And the car.” He pulled out the business card Ion Dinicu’s father had given him. “This is an old Mercedes. Dinicu used it as an illegal cab. Spallone was his customer. My guess is, Sven here ferried them away in it after he hit them, then dumped the thing. Find this...” He squinted at the picture and read out the licence plate. “... and we’re in court come Friday. My guess is, start looking around Testaccio.” He glanced at the Finn. “Sven here’s not the brightest button in the box.”
The Finn squeaked.
“And you,” Peroni added, glaring at the hulk in the red satin boxer shorts, “remember. Tell the truth. One word. Fisting.”
They all stared at him in awed silence. Peroni eyed a minion from Milan. The man had his notepad in his hand. He hadn’t written a word.
“I’ll repeat the licence plate once more,” he said. “After that...” He touched Vieri on the shoulder again. “The inspector gets cross.”
They all scribbled it down that time. Peroni looked at Vieri and asked, “Anything else?”
The man’s hair didn’t look as perfect as it had that morning. He was lost for words.
“I’m off shift in thirty minutes,” Peroni added, glancing at his watch. “Take off the fact I never got a lunch break, in truth I’m done now.” He eyed Prinzivalli. “Beer? The usual place?”
The uniform man stripped off his uniform jacket, turned it so the lining was on the outside, and said, “The usual place.”
“Come... with... me...” Vieri ordered, gripping Peroni by the arm.
They walked round the corner, back towards the Campo, and Peroni filled him in on the details along the way.
To the man’s credit, the inspector listened, furious as he was.
When the explanation was done, Vieri shook his head and said, “I could have your job.”
“No, no.” They stopped by the place Peroni had bought his porchetta panino that morning. “I’ve done much worse than this and I never got kicked out then. Besides, I’ve only got a few years left. What’s the point?”
He looked Vieri in the face.
“Anyway, what are you going to say? Fire this man because he tracked down a couple of double murderers on evidence I wouldn’t even walk upstairs to look at? Not when he pleaded with me? I was too busy on my BlackBerry, see. Too tied up watching CCTV and waiting for the mobile-phone records to land in my inbox.” He scratched his head. “Is that how you get on the up escalator in Milan? If so, let me offer some advice. Don’t try it here. Won’t work.”
Vieri stiffened.
“We would have found all this,” he insisted. “When forensic reported, when we got round to the detail...”
Peroni felt a little red light rise at the back of his head.
“You didn’t need the detail. Two dead men, odd socks, same pairs. How many questions does that raise? How many possibilities? They didn’t get up that way. All you have to do is work out how they got naked. Then ask yourself why whoever dressed them didn’t spot the socks were wrong. Really. That’s it.”
The man from Milan was silent, a little down in the mouth.
“You use your eyes,” Peroni added. “Watch what people do with theirs. You know the only person who’s looked me straight in the face all day? That poor Roma kid’s father. He didn’t have anything to hide. He wasn’t choking on some stupid obsession with systems and procedures and idiotic theoretical...”
“Okay, okay,” Vieri interrupted. “Point taken.”
“And yes,” Peroni added, “you would have got there in the end. But this case maybe hangs on our golden boy Sven getting scared enough to cough it all up and put Eva beside him in the dock. Get his confession and before long she’ll realise she can’t wriggle out of it. You won’t have to prove a damned thing. You could have spent months trying to do that, and I’d bet a politician’s pension somewhere along the way Sven would have gone missing, by himself maybe or courtesy of some other hulk Eva was keeping sweet between the sheets.”
Vieri nodded. He seemed to agree.