Rajacic pushed out a chair and beckoned her to sit. “This is Alexa,” he announced. “My niece.”
Peroni looked her up and down. “You mean this is a family business?”
“When he gets some business,” she snapped.
The Serb pointed to the window. “Am I responsible for the weather now? Please. I’ve listened to enough shit for one evening. These people need your help, Alexa. You’re getting paid anyway. You can go with them. Or you can clean up in the kitchen. Which is it going to be?”
“Some choice,” she grunted and took a seat. “What do you want?”
Rajacic reached over and brushed his fingers against her fine black hair. “Hey, zingara. No tantrums. They just want a little advice.”
He looked at Peroni, who pushed the photo across the table. She picked it up.
“I don’t know who the hell this is,” she complained. “Why ask me?”
Rajacic smiled. “A little gypsy blood crept into the family a while back,” he explained. “Don’t ask how. It’s thick blood, huh, Alexa? Like this kid’s maybe. My friends here are asking themselves, ”Where would a girl like this hide out if she were scared and living off the street?“ Can you tell them?”
Her black eyes didn’t give away a thing. “On the street? In weather like this?”
“Come on,” Rajacic wheedled. “They don’t all stay in hostels. They don’t all have pimps looking after them. What if she’s on her own? Where’d she go? What kind of choices have these kids got?”
“Not many,” she murmured, thinking all the same. “What’s in this for me?”
Rajacic leaned over, prodded her in the arm, hard. At that instant he looked the pimp he was.
“You make an old man very happy,” he murmured. “Now get out of here. Before I think of something else.”
THEY’D BORROWED A JEEP from traffic. Costa sat behind the wheel, feeling out of practice, unused to the four-wheel drive which was the only way the treacherous roads were manageable at speed. Most of the narrow through routes in the centro storico had been closed. What little movement there was now funnelled down the main thoroughfares and the broad avenues which ran either side of the river. Alexa knew where to go. They’d checked out a series of sites-a derelict building north of the Pantheon, a squat in Testaccio, a grimy, freezing hostel in San Giovanni-and got the same result in each one, trying to talk to a bunch of surly adolescents shivering in cheap black clothes that couldn’t keep out the cold. They’d look at the girl’s picture and shake their heads. Then Alexa would yell at them in their own language, and still they’d say nothing.
Now the four of them were driving along the Lungotevere on the Trastevere side of the river, slowly checking the huddled bunches of people sheltering by the Tiber. The sluggish current was out of sight from the road here. The flat, broad shelf by its banks, reached by steps from street level, was a popular shelter for the homeless.
Alexa was in the front passenger seat blowing cigarette smoke out of the crack she’d opened the window, not minding the freezing air it brought into the car, looking for where she wanted them to stop. The atmosphere in the car was bad. They all sensed failure.
“These kids won’t talk to cops,” she said. “Why should they?”
“Because this girl needs our help,” Emily muttered icily.
Alexa shook her head. “They don’t know that. They don’t believe a word you say. They think cops spell trouble. With good reason.”
“What do you suggest?” Costa asked.
“Leave it to me. Stay out of the way. I’ll tell them you’re family, looking for her. You got any money?”
Peroni reached over from the backseat and handed her some notes. She looked at them and whistled. “Wow. You could buy a couple of tricks for that. Supply and demand. Lots of the former, none of the latter.”
“We need to find this kid,” Peroni insisted.
She stuffed the cash into the pocket of her bright red nylon anorak and pointed across the river. “There. I know a couple of places. Besides, thinking about it, the wind’s coming from the wrong direction for this side. These kids are destitute. They’re not stupid. Not most of them anyway.”
The jeep moved into the right-hand lane and waited at the traffic lights at the next bridge.
“You’re not his niece,” Emily stated with some certainty.
The woman turned and stared at her. “Says who?”
“I just thought… It was a turn of speech.”
“You mean like ”sex worker“?”
“N-n-o,” she stuttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m his niece. My mother is Stefan’s sister. My old man was a gypsy who climbed in the window one night.” She paused for effect. “That was a turn of speech. They got married. Eventually. Then…”
The jeep moved forward onto the bridge. Alexa looked down towards the river. “Then things fell apart. Not just personal things, you understand. Life. The country. Everything. Pull in somewhere. I can see lights down there.”
Costa parked the vehicle on the deserted pavement. They got out of the car and stood in the snow, shivering. The night was bitterly cold, with a stiff wind whipping through the open channel cut through the city by the Tiber. They were close enough now to see the black, silky surface of the river and a silver moon reflecting back at them, a perfect shining circle. It was dark down there, but there were people around, huddled in the shelter beneath the bridge. Costa could see the tiny firefly embers of cigarettes and smell the bitter smoke of a makeshift brazier.
“Stay here,” Alexa said, “until I call.”
She hesitated before heading for the steps. “There’s something you ought to know. Stefan is my uncle. When we lost the farm-his farm, our farm, everyone’s-I just ran away here. I thought I could make everything right. I thought the streets were paved with gold. You know the funny thing?”
She stared at them, with those black, gypsy eyes, and didn’t bother to hide her bitterness.
“Compared to what it’s like back home now, they are. I sometimes have to remind myself of that when I’ve got some fat businessman wheezing into my face wondering if he’s ever going to get there. I came here… and did what was easy. Stefan used what little money he had to find me, to try to get me to go back. We argued. I won. Which is as it should be because, in the circumstances, I was right. If you’ve got to have a pimp, best it’s your uncle. Best it’s an honest man, and Stefan is. Ask any of his girls.”
Emily looked her in the face and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
The three of them waited while Alexa walked down the steps shuffling their feet in the snow in a vain effort to keep warm. The night had the crisp, biting smell of a hard winter, one that wanted to hang around. The snow would surely resume soon. Peroni glanced down at the sound of voices below.
“What do we do when this doesn’t work?” he asked.
“Keep looking,” Costa replied, “until she runs out of places.” He turned to Emily Deacon. “You don’t need to stick with us. We’re on night duty anyway. You’re not.”
“I’m fine,” she answered.
“You could-”
“I’m fine.”
Peroni caught Costa’s eye and shrugged. “How many people has Leapman got working for him here?” he asked.
She scowled. “I don’t know.”
“Two? Three? Fifty?” Peroni insisted.
She hugged herself tight inside her jacket. “Listen, until a couple of months ago I was a lowly intelligence officer working nine to five in a systems office in Washington. Then I got plucked out to come here. Why? Maybe because I know Rome. Or I speak good Italian. Maybe Leapman thinks I’m owed it because of my dad. But believe me when I say this. I do not know. He doesn’t tell me. He doesn’t listen to a damn word I say. As far as he’s concerned we’re just chasing some lunatic serial killer with a lot of air miles.”
“Maybe we are,” Peroni wondered.
“No!” she insisted angrily. “There’s a logic here. A crazy, distorted logic but it’s rational somehow too. We just have to see it.”