“What happened to the house after the war?”
She looked at him severely. “I’m not an estate agent.”
“I know that. I just wondered who lived there. You’re a kind woman, Signora, I’m sure. You would want to know your neighbours.”
“No more than they want to be known,” she said primly.
“Of course.”
“Soldiers,” she said with a shrug. “American soldiers, for a while anyway. Nice men. Officers. They had beautiful manners, not like Roman men. They were strangers. I was of assistance to them now and again. I like strangers to go away with fond memories of Rome. As any good citizen would.”
“Of course. And then?”
“You’re asking me who’s lived there for the last fifty years?”
“That would be useful.”
“Huh.”
It was never easy dealing with this generation. They resented something. That the world had changed. That they were getting older within it, powerless.
“Please try to think. A man was attacked there earlier this year. Do you remember?”
“I heard it! Fighting in the street! Here! Not since the war…” She frowned. “The world gets worse. Why don’t you do something about it?”
“I’m trying,” he replied.
“Not hard enough, it seems to me.”
It was a reasonable observation. “Perhaps. But I can’t…” He corrected himself. “None of us in the police can do that on our own. We need your help. Your support. Without that…”
She was a bright-eyed old bird. She didn’t miss a thing. “Yes?”
“Without that we’re just people who enforce the laws made by politicians. Regardless of what anyone thinks. Regardless of what’s right sometimes.”
“Oh my,” she said, smiling, revealing small teeth the colour of old porcelain, a little crooked. “A policeman with a conscience. How they must love you.”
“I don’t do this to be loved, Signora. Please. The house. Whose is it? Who’s lived there over the years?”
“Who owns it? Americans, I imagine. They look like government people to me. Government people who don’t want to say they’re government people. Not that I care. They keep it in good repair. What more can I say? They come. They go. Different ones. Not for long, usually. Just a few weeks, as if it were a hotel. Not long enough to get to know the likes of me. Pleasant men, mind. Always men, too, on their own.”
She was trying to remember something. Costa waited, knowing he couldn’t let this interview run and run, wondering whether there were any other avenues left open to him.
“And?”
“They were solitary creatures,” she said testily. “Not the kind you could talk to easily in the street.”
“All of them?”
“Most.”
“Do you remember any names? It’s possible this man who was attacked was mistaken for someone else.”
“So many,” she said, frowning.
Even the old ones didn’t try much these days. Costa took out his card and gave it to her, pointing out the mobile number.
“If you think of anything. I was probably mistaken in any case. If these men were only here for a short time… I was hoping there was someone who stayed there longer. Some years ago. A man, perhaps, who regarded it as his home.”
The old eyes sparkled. “There was one. Ten, fifteen years ago. I recall now. I think he stayed there for a year. Possibly more.”
“His name?”
“Even less talkative than most of them, from what I remember. Somewhat abrupt I thought, but perhaps that was just his manner.”
“His name?” he insisted.
She shook her head. “How could I possibly know that?”
Teresa had checked. If Number Thirteen was a normal rental property there would be residency records. None existed. It was a bolt-hole for one of the American agencies, surely. They would have a way around all the regulations ordinary citizens had to face.
“I may have a photograph, though,” she added brightly. “Would that help?” She nodded at the gleaming walnut sideboard next to him. It was covered in small, mounted pictures. She passed him one. “You know what time of year that is?”
It was winter. Men, women and children, all in heavy coats, stood in front of the fountain of the tortoises holding lit candles.
“No.”
“Shame on you! Have you never heard of Hanukkah? Why should the Catholics steal all the fun for Christmas?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not a Catholic.”
“How shocking,” she said with a laugh. “Still, I forgive you. We have a little tradition. Every year we take a photograph of ourselves. Just the people living here. By the fountain. Every year. I can show you ones when I was a young girl before the war.” Her eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t the old thing I am now.”
Costa’s brain was working overtime. “He was in the photograph? This American?”
“He didn’t want to be! The poor man was walking home just as we were lining up out there. We insisted. A little vino had been drunk, you understand. He didn’t have a choice.” She paused to let this point go home. “We can be very persuasive when we want to be, you know.”
“I can believe that. When?”
She frowned. “I really couldn’t say. I’ve so many photographs.”
“Possibly ten, fifteen years ago?”
She crossed the room, picked up a couple of photos, took off her glasses to peer at them, then returned with one in her frail hand and passed it to him. Costa scanned the faces there. He looked at the back. There was a year, scribbled in penciclass="underline" 1990.
Bingo.
“YOU WANT TO KNOW who Bill Kaspar is?”
Joel Leapman looked like a man speaking from personal experience, and there was something in his eyes-impending pleasure, or a hint of a nasty surprise around the corner-that Gianni Peroni really didn’t like.
“OK. I’ll tell you. Kind of a soldier. Kind of a spy. A mercenary. A go-between running shuttle between men who, like Kaspar, didn’t really exist either. One of the best. Take it from me. He was the sort of guy you’d follow anywhere, right into hell if that’s where he wanted to go. An American hero, we thought. Not that anyone would ever call him that out loud, you understand. And now we’re going to hang him out to dry. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”
Leapman’s tale confirmed just about everything Emily Deacon had discovered. Back in 1990, William F. Kaspar had been called to lead one of two covert teams into Iraq on an intelligence mission well behind hostile lines. The venture was a disaster. The day after they arrived to establish a forward base inside an ancient monument outside Babylon, the Republican Guard had attacked in force. Dan Deacon was out on patrol with his own team when it happened. Deacon radioed for assistance and was ordered not to engage. Forty-five minutes later, two Black Hawks, backed by fighter support, arrived on the scene. The ziggurat was a smoking shell. From what surveillance could see, Kaspar and his team were dead. Deacon’s crew managed to escape to a deserted farm two miles away, where a helicopter snatched them from the approaching enemy, though one female member was badly wounded along the way.
The mission didn’t exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.
Wars make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.