“It’s Toni, isn’t it?” Peroni asked. “I’m Gianni.”
Vieri glanced behind him to make sure no one was watching. Then he took Peroni’s hand. “The trouble is, Toni, all that northern crap doesn’t really cut it here. Not sure it does anywhere, frankly. Walk around staring at your BlackBerry and your computers all day and you’re as blind as that stupid Finn to a few things, maybe ones that matter. At least he’s got the excuse he was born that way.”
“The paperwork...” Vieri began.
“... is your problem. This is your case. You get the credit. Tell them you sent me out to see Dinicu’s father on a hunch. It all fell into place from there. You’ve got someone itching to confess to two murders and cut a sentencing deal. No one’s going to ask a lot of questions.”
The inspector nodded.
“And if none of this had worked out? All your hunches came up empty?”
Peroni grinned.
“Then you’d never have been any the wiser. Here.”
He gave him the minion’s notepad, the phone with the recorded exchange in Finnish between Eva Spallone and Sven, and the keys to the unmarked police Fiat.
“I stole the notebook from your guy. A translator might find something useful on the phone. And me and Prinzivalli... it may be more than one beer. You get someone to deal with the car.”
“Fine,” Vieri said and started to turn on his heels.
“Hey,” Peroni called. The man stopped and looked at him. “You should come for a pizza with me and my friends. Falcone, Costa, Teresa. Well...” He shrugged. “She’s more than a friend. You’ll like them.”
Inspector Vieri laughed. It made him look human.
“Oh,” Peroni added.
He reached into his pocket, took out a nougat, held out it for the man from Milan.
“Welcome to Rome.”
Copyright © 2012 by David Hewson
Karen Ovenhouse and the Ruin Snooper
by Peter Turnbull
Since Peter Turnbull’s last appearance in EQMM, he has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and received Barry and Macavity nominations for his EQMM story “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train.” His Hennessey and Yellich series, to which that story belongs, has a new novel, The Altered Case (Severn House/June 2012). A newer Turnbull series, set in London, has its third book (The Garden Party) out this December.
Joseph Kelly, ruin snooper, walked the walls from Baile Hill to Lendal Bridge knowing, as do all citizens of the fair and famous city, that most often the quickest way to get from one part of central York to the other is to walk the medieval battlements. When opposite the railway station, which when it was built in 1870 was the largest structure in the world, he glanced to his right and picked out the angular roof and stone-slabbed platform of the original station, a much, much smaller version, which had been built “within the walls” so that the Victorians’ steaming leviathans entered and exited the station via a small tunnel still visible underneath Queen Street. At Lendal Bridge, Joseph Kelly turned and made his way to the railway station, outside of which he would be able to get the bus he needed to catch. He was a man of middle years, rotund in most people’s view and with a faraway look in his eyes. He wore plus fours and a Norfolk jacket even on the hottest days and presented an image of a man from a different era, an image completed by a box Brownie camera on one shoulder and a canvas knapsack on the other which contained his lunch and a flask of coffee. Atop his head on this warm April day was a battered felt hat.
Joseph Kelly had supported himself throughout his life by doing odd jobs, or by sporadic work on the buses as a driver or conductor. He had once driven a taxi but had given that up when a spate of attacks on taxi drivers served to remind him that beneath the medieval facade of wynds and ghosts and cholera pits, and behind the ecclesiastical splendor of the Minster, and behind the prestigious university, was a violent little town. York has a city charter, but it has not the size nor the dynamism of a true city, so thought Joseph Kelly, but he was born in York and had always been happy to live there. It was during the winter months that he worked, in the main; the summer months he chose to devote himself to this true passion. For Joseph Kelly was a committed “ruin snooper.” The passion he felt for ruins had dominated his life to the exclusion of all else. He had snooped ruins since he was a boy when, fishing rod in hand, he had pushed open a rusty gate on which was a sign which read trespassers will be prosecuted because a sixth sense had told him that fishable water lay in the foliage he could see beyond the gate. His sixth sense had been correct, for he came across a large pond, just too small to be called a lake, in a wood, which teemed with roach and trout and perch. As he sat on the bank that summer’s day he noticed that the foliage which at first had seemed wild and random had in fact the remnants of a formality about it, and that many of the trees were “nonindigenous,” as his geography master would have said. Then he realized that he was sitting beside a man-made lake in the midst of what had once been a magnificent formal garden, probably laid out in the eighteenth century during the Augustan Age of Classicism which had given England such buildings as the Royal Mint and the Bank of England, streets like Regents Street and the Royal Crescent in Bath, and the great gardens like Castle Howard. Joseph Kelly then realized that if the place he was in was a long-abandoned garden, there may, nay must, also be a long-abandoned house. So he left the fish he had caught in the keepnet and went exploring. What he found changed his life. What he found detoured him down a path in life from which he was never to deviate. Joseph Kelly had found his first ruin.
It had been a small house as the great houses go, or went, but it was Augustan. Those columns, those grand staircases, those frescoes, by then rotten and decayed, the lawn taken over by trees, a tree which had grown in the greenhouse and had burst up out of the glass. He had entered the house, a small boy alone in the vastness, probably, he thought, the first person to do so in many, many years. He walked up one flight of a creaking staircase and down the other back, or servant, stairs, exploring, touching history, never knowing what was going to be behind each closed door. That particular house had been Wadden Hall, subsequently demolished, the garden cleared and the fishpond concreted over to make way for a housing estate. But Joseph Kelly had seen it, had wandered its echoing corridors and great halls, and had seen it in its last days of ghostly mystique, when the echoes of its days of former grandeur were faint but discernible. That day he had returned to the pond, released the fish in the keepnet, and returned to York. He sold his fishing tackle and with the proceeds bought a box Brownie and a roll of black-and-white film. Then, a day later, he returned to Wadden Hall and photographed it, inside and out. For the next thirty summers Joseph Kelly had travelled England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but mostly England because it is in England that such abandoned magnificence is chiefly to be found. And knowing that he was visiting buildings which were fast disappearing as the English landscape changed, he set out to document each ruin he visited, using only black-and-white film, using the same box Brownie camera. He had wandered the great halls of yesteryear photographing as he went, and had found things that had been abandoned: a tray of gold and silver coins; another tray of Roman coins, neatly labelled; oil paintings, clearly valuable, which still hung on the walls; huge silver and crystal chandeliers still hanging from ornate ceilings; but if he took anything at all it was only in the form of a photograph. He came to see the houses as living things that allowed him to enter. He didn’t want to violate that trust, or his own integrity, with theft.