He waved the book at them. “Mind if I keep this? I found it in here and, to be honest, I don’t think it’s one of his.”
He pointed to a figure bundled into the corner, gagged, hands tied behind his back, wearing a grubby vest and underpants. Peroni recognized the florid-faced caretaker and stifled a laugh.
“Let me tell you,” Kaspar continued, “this guy is a world-class shirker. Plus he has potty mouth you wouldn’t believe. Beats me how they let him look after a place like this.”
Falcone pushed open the door of the side entrance. There were no Carabinieri there. Only a fresh, light scattering of snow coming down through the growing darkness.
Costa waved a pair of handcuffs in the air. Emily Deacon forced her way in front of him and peered at Kaspar.
“How are things?” she asked him.
He stared through the open interior door, back into the great circular hall, looking as if he were saying good-bye. Then he peered closely at the objects on the table. The book. The radio. The phone. All set in a line.
“Quiet,” Bill Kaspar said, and shuffled the items in front of him, making a random pattern, like three dominoes rattling aimlessly around a board. “Quieter than they’ve been in a long time.”
Natale
TERESA LUPO STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW, WORKING her way through the mountain of dishes Peroni had left in his wake. He’d now retreated to the living room with Nic and Emily, clutching a bottle of grappa, and begun to talk in that low, concerned way she’d come to recognize. Leo Falcone was outside with Laila, working to put a little life back into the disintegrating snowman before better weather came along and melted it into the hard earth.
Teresa had been astonished when Falcone accepted the invitation to Christmas lunch. She was a little surprised she’d gone along with the idea too, but the expression on Peroni’s face when Nic Costa floated the idea meant there really was no other option. Peroni wanted to cook a holiday meal. He wanted to sit down at a table with other people. With a kid, more than anything.
And Falcone… He was a lonely man. He had nothing else to do. So it made sense for him to be outside now, parading around the diminishing white figure, wondering where best to place an old, limp carrot. Laila, who’d been ferried to the farm from the social worker that morning and would be ferried back in the evening, watched with an equal amount of seriousness. The two of them were driving Teresa crazy.
“Lighten up, for God’s sake,” she muttered. Falcone drove her crazy a lot. She’d always known he was an intense, solitary man. But she’d never realized this was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. Watching him walk slowly around the snowman, carrot in hand, looking as if he were about to enter into the most important decision he’d faced in his entire life, made Teresa Lupo feel uncomfortably sympathetic towards a man she didn’t, in truth, much like.
Unable to contain herself any longer, she threw open the window and yelled, “The face, Leo. Try putting it on the face.”
Falcone gazed back at her in despair, sighed, then nodded at Laila.
“The carrot’s not the problem,” the girl said. “The face is.”
Teresa looked at the blasted thing. The face was wrong.
“Well, just do something,” she snapped.
“But…” Falcone protested.
She slammed the window shut, not wanting to hear any more or see it either. There were people on this planet for whom time was a stranger. People who took no notice of the passing years, never stopped once to add them up and work out the sums: what was now possible, what would soon disappear from your grasp once that hand ticked past midnight on another New Year’s Eve.
Peroni claimed he’d found the last turkey in town. She stared at its carcass, a bundle of fleshy bones that resembled a small, stripped dinosaur. God, they could eat. The girl in particular. Peroni’s cousin outside Verona, who’d offered to take Laila in, just for a few months to see if it could work, was going to have to buy a new freezer. Even Nic Costa had tried a tiny taste of the turkey, which Peroni had cooked to perfection, slathered in oil and garlic and rosemary. Costa eating meat. That was something she’d never thought she would see.
She turned back to the window again. The girl was remaking the face, shifting the stark gaze of the creature’s coal eyes straight at the house. Falcone was watching her, finger to his cheek, thinking. About more than a snowman too, Teresa guessed. There’d been a storm hanging over all of them since the events in the Pantheon two days before. The media hadn’t gone to town on the story beyond the plain details: that a killer had been apprehended by the state police. Then the headlines seemed to wane. The papers and the TV people liked stories with beginnings, middles and ends. Bill Kaspar didn’t really fit that profile, not without the blue file of SISDE documents, which Falcone had now taken into his care. And done what with? She half knew. She’d asked him straight out when they were alone together briefly and got that mute, secret stare in return. Falcone had presumably put them in a safe place known only to him, in case any of them needed insurance in the future. All the same, some kind of internal investigation was going on in the Questura at that very moment. Falcone knew a damn sight more about it than he’d let on over lunch. The same was probably happening round at the SISDE offices. And the Americans? She didn’t have the heart to ask Emily Deacon whether she still had a job or not. It didn’t seem right. She and Nic were, if not yet an item, sure to be one soon, Teresa thought. They had that glint in their eyes.
Great, she thought. Nic finally gets a girl and she lives in America, a different world, across a distant ocean. Probably jobless too, though with that beautiful blonde hair and a pretty, magnetic face that went from cool to angry to childlike in the space of a couple of seconds it wouldn’t take long. God, she thought. Can’t men pick them?
After all, Gianni Peroni had picked her and that made no sense at all.
“Who am I kidding?” she murmured, suddenly furious with herself. “I’m the catch of a lifetime.”
She watched Laila place the carrot in the centre of the snowman’s face, turn to Falcone and smile. Such an open, untainted smile, one she’d not managed to get out of the girl however hard she tried. One that, to her alarm, Falcone returned with just as much sudden, unbridled warmth. Then his phone bleated and the old Leo resurfaced. An urgent desire for a glass of grappa rose in Teresa. She walked into the living room, saw Gianni Peroni there, alone on the sofa, head back on a cushion, mouth open.
“Move over, you big lunk,” she grumbled, then shuffled down beside him and poured herself a big glass of the clear stuff.
Those smart, piggy eyes opened and looked at her. “Yes?”
“Yes what?”
“You look like you want to get something off your chest.”
“No, I don’t!”
He shrugged. She was going to have her say anyway and he knew it.
“I wish you were right, Gianni. I wish you could talk someone out of being ill. And Laila is ill, you know. All that stealing. It’s just a part of something else. Being sick. Not quite able to work out what’s real and what’s not.”
“I know.”
He was being infuriating. It was deliberate.
“This cousin of yours. They’re farmers or something? It’s not enough. You can’t just explain the situation and watch the child’s eyes light up listening and then suddenly she goes, ”Aahhh.“ ”
He thought about it. “This is true. But I think she’s a country girl, really. You can see the city harms her. A move might help. Just a step in the right direction. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s Christmas. Can’t we leave all the worrying to one side for a day?”
He was right. It was another of his infuriating habits. No one could cure Laila in a day. But getting her out of Rome, with its vicious round of traps waiting to ensnare even the most street-smart of kids, was surely a good idea.