“And now?” She looked as if she wanted to scream at him for behaving like this. She just didn’t dare. “What do I do now?”
He waved an arm around the terrace. “Stay here. You got a beautiful house. You can bring back all those servants you love. I know how much you hate cleaning up yourself. I could never stand the idea of servants. Myself I gave you your head on that one. Maybe I was wrong. Who’d want strangers in their own home? But hell, when I’m gone I don’t care what you do.” He made sure this last point came across clearly. “I don’t care who you see. I don’t care how you spend your time.”
She got up and took off his coat, laying it on his lap.
“You’ll be needing this,” she said.
“Yeah. Tell me one thing, Adele.”
“What?”
“You ever been unfaithful to me? Not that it matters anymore. I don’t care right now. I got bigger things to think about.”
“Why would I do that?” she asked.
“I dunno. For the sex. For the hell of it. Or maybe—” It occurred to him that neither of these would really move a woman like Adele. “Because it suited you.”
“Those are little reasons. Too small to get yourself killed for.”
He laughed. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re a smart girl. That’s what impressed me most about you in the beginning. I never liked stupid women.”
“Thanks,” she muttered.
“Just remember this. Things have got to come out in balance at the end. Some American creep kills one of my men. I do something in return. Someone screws with me. I screw with them. Except I do it better. Bigger. I make it final. I win because that’s how the balance is, that’s my place. This is serious stuff, Adele. You don’t want to go pushing your pretty face into it. Believe me.”
He stood up, walked over to her, kissed her on the cheek. Just one short kiss.
“You just stay here. Watch TV. Make yourself a drink. And when the cops come, you tell them nothing. Say I went fishing. OK?”
Outside a familiar engine was gunning hard. Tyres were burning along the cobblestones of the Via Giulia. Emilio Neri knew what this meant. The first part of the deception was under way.
“Ciao,” he said, and waddled towards the stairs.
IT WAS A COLD, CLEAR NIGHT, bright with stars and the silver disc of a waxing moon. The police convoy, a marked car at its head, blue light flashing, siren screaming, cut straight through the evening rush hour. Falcone rode with Costa and Peroni just ahead of the heavily manned riot van that was the last in the line. The radio was hot with chatter and none of it sounded good. The plainclothes men stationed outside Neri’s had reported the sudden departure of his car just fifteen minutes before. One team had detached itself to give chase but lost the vehicle somewhere over the river. The second saw two more vehicles scream away from a rear alley and were left standing in the street, with no chance of pursuit.
“What are we going to do?” Costa wondered. “Go after him?”
Falcone shook his head. “Go after what? We only have a number for Neri’s own car, and what’s the money on him being in that? Let’s see who’s still in the house. It’s the son I want to talk to first. Wherever he is. Jesus, the timing. How the hell did Neri know?”
Costa and Peroni looked at each other. Falcone had ordered a big operation: ten vehicles, half of them marked. The DIA had two other cars along for the ride, with Rachele D’Amato at the head. It wasn’t going to be easy keeping something of this size quiet.
They turned into the narrow lane of the Via Giulia, rattling across the cobblestones, and saw the flash of cameras, the lights of the TV men, a full-scale media mob waiting on Neri’s doorstep.
Falcone went rigid with fury at the sight of them. He recalled Rachele D’Amato’s promise to Neri that morning. One way or another, she said, his fall from grace would be a very public event. He swore under his breath, peered ahead and saw her car, saw her slim figure getting out and slipping through the pack of hacks, towards the house.
“Stop here,” he ordered. “We don’t want that mob on our backs. And I’d rather not have her getting into the place before us.”
Costa pulled into the side of the road, next to a medieval fountain, and all three of them watched, with rising trepidation, the melee happening in the street. Broadcast crew fought with press journalists, jostling to be close to the action. The first marked police car had arrived and men were leaping out. D’Amato and some of her team stood by as a bunch of burly uniformed officers went through the motions of waiting to be let in then, in the space of a couple of seconds, began attacking the expensive polished wood door with sledgehammers. There wasn’t much room. A small van marked with the logo of one of the minor cable channels was parked directly outside, its back end almost up against the building. The hammer men had to squeeze behind it to tackle their target. The vehicle cramped their action, made it impossible to get the swing they needed.
Then one of them climbed onto the bonnet and took a hefty lunge at the woodwork. The door crumpled. Hands shot through to tackle the locks inside. Rachele D’Amato was over the door first, a couple of DIA men on her heels as the cops stood back, open-mouthed, wondering.
“Shit,” Falcone hissed and started running towards the mob followed closely by Costa and Peroni. When they got there the uniforms were stuck outside the shattered door, looking for direction.
“Next time wait for me,” Falcone barked at them. “Don’t let anyone else in. Don’t let anyone out without my permission.”
Falcone in the lead, they went up the stairs. The DIA crew had a good start on them. The first-floor room, where they’d seen Neri’s hoods that morning, was empty. The butt of a cigarette still smoked in an ashtray. There was a half-full coffee cup on the low table.
Peroni picked it up. “Still warm. They really did cut this fine.”
“They knew what they were doing,” Falcone murmured then stopped. The DIA team were clattering downstairs, arguing among each other until a female voice told them to clam up. Rachele D’Amato walked into the room with her team, stood in front of Falcone and his men, and folded her arms, furious.
“There’s not a soul in the house, Leo. Is the Questura leaking again or what?”
“Don’t start,” Falcone snapped back at her. “Who the hell do you think you are, jumping in ahead of us? And this joke out on the street? You had the nerve to call the media? This is a police investigation. Not yours. The DIA don’t even have warrants—”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “You want to read them?”
He glowered at the documents. “You said—”
“I changed my mind. The information we got from the accountant’s office this morning is like gold dust. We can lock this fat creep away for years, and scores of others too.”
“If you can find him… What do you think the media will make of that?”
“Leo!” she screeched. “I didn’t call the media. No one inside the DIA did. This was as secret as we get. Don’t look to me.”
Falcone stared at her. “No. You people are all so clean, aren’t you?”
“Leo—?”
Costa was on the phone, talking to the ops room. He finished the call. “They’ve found Neri’s car. It just had a couple of his hoods in it. They were riding around, no destination in particular, down in Testaccio. It was just a blind.”
“Where the hell are they?” Falcone demanded. “The son? The wife? He didn’t pack for a family holiday. What’s he doing?”
“Getting ready for a war maybe,” D’Amato suggested. “We still have the house. We’ve got free run of it. We can tear the place apart. It’s a gift.”