He waved a hand at the glorious night, the city slumbering under a jewelled sky.
“Then it just sneaks up on you and you realize it was there, in front of you, all along.”
It wasn’t the face of a priest. That was the problem. It was the face of a man of the world, one who’d lived a full and active existence before retreating into this dark shell, the anonymous uniform of the calling.
“Magic,” she muttered, wondering if she would follow where she thought he was leading.
He looked at his watch. Her heart sank. “And a city full of churches, Monica. I’d best find one to pray in, don’t you think?”
AN HOUR AFTER THEY LEFT the embassy, Emily Deacon arrived at the Questura. She’d dressed down for the night: black jacket, black jeans, blonde hair loose around her slim neck. She looked younger, like a student just out of college. And relieved too, Costa thought, to be out of the grip of Agent Leapman, even if being reassigned so abruptly had come as a shock.
She stood in the main office next to Costa’s desk, scanning the room. The night shift were hard at work, making calls, sifting through records on computer screens, reading reports. Falcone had put virtually everyone he had on the job. Some fifty men and women had now begun the task of collating information, trawling through CCTV videos, interviewing the people who lived in the apartments over the shops and restaurants near the Pantheon.
“Are you getting anywhere?” she asked.
Peroni glanced at Costa. Earlier, the two men had demanded a discussion with Falcone, wanting to know exactly how much information they should share with the Americans. It had been inconclusive. Falcone had made a good point: it was ludicrous to belabour the question until they found something worth sharing and that seemed some way off. They already knew the CCTV cameras in the Pantheon had nothing. Those in the streets nearby had captured little but the blizzard. Falcone had shrugged and left it at that, then closeted himself upstairs with Commissario Moretti for a private meeting.
“Early days,” Peroni answered hesitantly. “Can I get you something? A coffee?”
The acute blue eyes looked him up and down. “You don’t trust me. It’s understandable. I’d probably feel the same way if it was me. It’s because I’m American, I guess.”
“No,” Costa told her. “It’s just… a little unusual.”
“You have difficulty dealing with the unusual?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s just that sometimes it takes a while to adapt. Police departments are like monasteries, really.”
Peroni snorted. A smile flickered on Emily Deacon’s face.
“Monasteries?” she asked, raising a slender fawn eyebrow.
“Really,” Costa protested. “OK, we let in a few women for show. But these are institutions that keep themselves to themselves, rarely share their working practices with others and suspect all outsiders on principle. Big organizations work that way. The FBI’s the same, surely.”
She thought about that. “There are more women.”
“And the rest of it?” Peroni asked.
“Point taken.”
The two men looked at each other. Peroni kicked over a seat and beckoned to her to take it. Then he went off for some coffees.
She looked at the screen. “What’s this?”
“It’s the database we keep on Balkan criminals,” Costa replied. “It just gets bigger by the day.”
“Our guy isn’t Balkan, whatever that means these days.”
“You know that?”
“I know that. I saw the profiling reports. They had some data on where the man had stayed in the US. All phoney names, phoney credit cards. He did it well. We’ve interviewed people who spoke to him. They all gave different descriptions. He’s good at disguise. He’s good with accents. Sometimes American English. Sometimes UK. Australian. South African. He could handle them all.”
“You have a photo-fit?”
It was the obvious question. Her face said as much. “How many do you want? Leapman has included them in the files he’s sent to your boss. We’ve got them coming out of our ears. Every one different. I mean completely different. I told you. He’s good.”
Peroni returned with the drinks. She looked at the stewed brew in the plastic cups and said, “Do you call that coffee? There’s a place near the Pantheon. Tazza d’Oro. If we have time we could go there. That’s coffee.”
Peroni bristled and in very rapid, very colloquial Italian, the kind a couple of street cops would throw at each other in the heat of the moment, protested. “Hey, kid. Don’t throw your toys out of the pram. You’re dealing with a couple of guys who live here. We know Tazza d’Oro. Since when did they start letting Yankees in?”
She didn’t miss a syllable. “Since they found out we tip properly. Where are you from in Tuscany?”
“Near Siena.”
“I can hear it.” She nodded at Costa. “He’s Roman. Middle class. Doesn’t swear enough to be anything else.” Emily Deacon paused. “Am I earning any trust here?”
“Kind of,” Costa conceded. “You didn’t learn that at language college.”
She nodded. “Didn’t need to. I lived here in Rome when I was a kid. Nice house on the Aventino. For almost a decade. My dad was based at the embassy for most of that time. Then I did an architecture degree in Florence. And you know what’s funny?”
They didn’t say a word. From her face they could tell this wasn’t funny at all.
“Maybe it’s from the last few years I spent in Washington, but sometimes I must still sound American. It just slips out. You can always tell. You always get someone on a bus or somewhere who gives you a nasty look. Or a little lecture about colonialism and how, being Roman, they just know this subject inside or out. Or maybe they just spit in your face. That happens from time to time too.”
“ ”Always“?” Peroni wondered, taking the argument back an important step.
She sipped at the coffee and pulled a sour face. “No. That’s an exaggeration. Just a lot more than when I was a kid. In fact…” She took her attention off them at that moment, began to conduct some inner conversation with herself. “This was a happy place then. I never wanted to leave.”
“The world’s not so happy anymore,” Costa said. “For all of us.”
“Agreed.” She fidgeted on the hard office chair, uncomfortable at having revealed as much as she had. “I’m still waiting for an answer, though. This guy isn’t Serb or Kosovan or anything. So why are you going through all these records?”
Costa explained about the girl who’d escaped from them inside the Pantheon, and how some Balkan connection was probably the best way to find her, since they controlled the street people as much as anyone did. Then he pushed over the photo Mauro had taken. Emily studied the young, frightened face.
“Poor kid,” she said quietly. “Trying to pick your pocket when she must have been scared out of her mind. Are they really that desperate?”
“Sometimes.” Costa hated simplistic explanations. “It’s what they do. There’s plenty of people out there on the streets who’ll scream ”Zingari!“ every time some petty crime happens. We’ve plenty of other crooks too. But the honest answer is: yes, they’re that desperate. And it’s an organized business. With its own structure. Its own rules.”
“Good,” she said. “That should mean you can find her.”
“Maybe we can,” Peroni conceded.
“Will she have family here? Can you track her down like that?”
“Most of them don’t have family,” the big man explained. “Not what we’d regard as family anyway.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the photo. It seemed a good time to ask.
“When Leapman called you in for this assignment,” Costa began, “you could have refused, surely. The fact this man murdered your father means you want him caught. But it also means you’re involved, beyond anything the likes of us would expect. You have… something personal invested here. That could worry me.”