Peroni glanced at his partner, an expression Costa now recognized, one that said: Watch this. Then the big cop walked over and threw an arm around Sandri, squeezing him hard.
“Hey, Mauro,” Peroni growled, and crushed the photographer one more time before letting go. “Your fingers are frozen stiff. It’s pitch dark here with nothing to look at but snow. Why don’t you quit taking photos for a while? You must’ve done a couple of hundred today already. Relax. We could go some place warm. Come on. Even you clever guys could handle a caffè corretto on a night like this.”
The photographer’s round, bulbous eyes blinked back at the two policemen suspiciously. He flexed his shoulders, maybe to shrug off the cold, maybe to get back some feeling after experiencing Peroni’s grip.
“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.”