Peroni gingerly placed a hand on her slender shoulder. “We appear to have a conflict of interest, lady. We’re looking for a missing girl, in case you forgot. Right now we don’t care about finding Mr. Neri’s cooked books. They can wait for another day.”
“We need the son,” Falcone said, then walked over to the long window and gazed down into the street. The hubbub was dying. The media crews were starting to pack their bags. They’d been cheated too. There was a story for them. A failed raid on a city hoodlum. But there was no real action, nothing to splash over the front pages and the newscasts. A bunch of cops hammering down a door in the Via Giulia was second division news. Whoever tipped them off surely knew they would be disappointed, which pointed the finger at Neri himself, though Falcone couldn’t begin to fathom the reason.
He looked at Rachele D’Amato. “You can do what you like here. If you find something that has a material bearing on the Julius case, call me. That isn’t a request. If you delay what we’re doing by a single second I’ll be talking to the media about why we’ve been hampered unnecessarily. We’ve got to look for Mickey Neri and that girl. We’ve got to find someone to talk to.”
She wagged a long, elegant finger at him. “No, no, no, Leo. Don’t try and pass that responsibility on to me. We do DIA business, not yours. Leave some men if you want that.”
“I don’t have the damned men,” Falcone yelled at her, so loud even the cops outside stopped talking for a moment. “Don’t you get it? We’ve a day to find that girl. Maybe less. We haven’t a clue where she might be. We don’t even know where to begin looking. But it isn’t here. It’s not in your damned books. It’s wherever Mickey Neri is.”
Maybe, he thought. Leo Falcone didn’t know anymore. All he understood was that it was important to cling to the human side of the investigation. You only got results by finding the right people and making them talk.
“Leo? Leo!”
Her voice dogged them halfway down the stairs, arguing all the way. Then she turned back to join her team, to get on with the job. Her job. Falcone didn’t get it. Rachele D’Amato had won what she wanted. Neri was on the run. She had carte blanche to investigate every last aspect of the old crook’s empire. What was it to her to repay a little of the debt? Why was this vendetta the DIA had with Neri more important than the life of a teenage girl?
They stormed out of the house, out into the street, pushing past the TV van which was still backed up against the ruined door. The media mob was almost gone now. There were just a handful of cops, in uniform and out, waiting outside, looking uncomfortable, guilty that they’d overheard the argument.
“You can stand down,” Falcone told them. “This is a DIA deal for the time being. Let’s get back to the Questura. See what’s happening with the phones.”
The men nodded. They’d caught the atmosphere.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Falcone repeated as they walked to the car.
“They just got their priorities, Leo,” Peroni observed and got a cold, hard glance for his pains. “Sorry, sir. You can’t expect anything else. The kid and me could go back in there and watch for a while.”
“No point,” Falcone said. “She’ll let us know if she finds something. How would it look otherwise? Besides—” He needed to get this clear in his own head too. “There can’t be a damn thing there that’s any use to us. Neri had this planned, right down to the last detail. He’s making monkeys of us. He’d love it if we stayed in that place, peeking under the carpet, scraping through dust.”
“Yeah,” Peroni agreed. “I can see that. Sorry, I still find it hard trying to think like you people. It’s all so damn sneaky.”
Costa’s phone rang. He stepped aside so that he could hear the anxious voice on the other end.
“Why did Neri set this up?” Falcone wondered. It was all too small. It just caused the police some embarrassment, and Neri had to be above that. The media didn’t even hang around once they realized there was no big arrest coming, no sign of the fat old hood being led out in handcuffs, bundled into a car, head down for the cameras. They’d disappeared altogether.
Apart from the van.
“Boss,” Costa said anxiously. “I think we’ve got something. An anonymous call just came in. Someone looking just like Suzi. No more than half an hour ago.”
“Where?” Falcone asked, still thinking about what had just happened, trying to make some connections.
“Somewhere along Cerchi. Didn’t get an exact position.”
“Quite some road,” Peroni said. “We could spend all night going up and down there.”
Cerchi ran the length of the Circus Maximus, now an empty, stadium-shaped field behind the Palatine Hill, overlooked by the ruins of Augustus’s palaces.
Costa remembered what Teresa had said about Regina Morrison. “Kirk and Mickey could have used old archaeological digs if they wanted to. We can talk to his boss at the university. She should have a list of everywhere he worked.”
“Get her,” Falcone ordered. He reached the car, put his hand on the door, still thinking. “Chase it, Nic. Let’s go there straightaway. This place is dead.”
He looked back at the street. They were parked a good fifty metres from Neri’s door. There wasn’t a TV crew in sight. The van was still there, up at an angle over the pavement.
“See the vehicle at the front door?” Falcone asked. “Either of you notice someone using it? Any of those TV bastards go near at all?”
“Not me,” Peroni answered, puzzled.
Falcone looked at Costa, his mind full of possibilities.
“Me neither,” Costa replied. “What do you think—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The earth began to tremble beneath their feet, cobblestones shaking as if hit by an earthquake. Then came a roar so loud it was unreal, a physical wall of audible fury burying itself deep in their heads.
A fierce, fiery tongue leapt out of the rear end of the van. The vehicle rose off the ground as if tugged towards the sky by an invisible force. For a brief moment the world stood still, then a cacophony of furious noise hit them, followed by a vicious, punishing force as hard as a fist.
When it ended Costa was on the cold hard ground, holding his hands to his ears, stunned, panting too. Peroni leaned against the car, mouth open, looking shell-shocked, gasping for air. And Falcone was running, frantically, as fast as he could, back towards Neri’s house where a firestorm now raged out of the blackened, torn tangle of wreckage that was the van, flames licking greedily up into the shattered remains of the building.
Costa staggered in his footsteps, Peroni behind him. The air stank of smoke and the chemical smell of spent explosives. Car alarms, triggered by the shock wave of the blast, sounded all around. A man was screaming in the gutter, clutching at his stomach. Two others lay still on the ground. A team of uniformed officers materialized from a riot van around the corner, wondering where to begin.
It was impossible to think. Nic Costa looked at the faces of the men around him, faces locked hard in shock, and found it impossible to recognize any of them. In this sudden burst of insanity the world had become anonymous, simply a receptacle for its victims.
The blast had taken out two floors of the building. As the dust and debris cleared Costa could see, in the dim streetlights, entire rooms in Neri’s house now laid open to the elements: tables and chairs, a TV set, a kitchen cut in half by the savagery of the explosion. Flames raged in and out of the severed quarters. Somewhere on the second floor a dark figure danced crazily, as if trying to dodge the blaze that engulfed him, until he fell to the floor, rolled right off the edge and into the dust storm milling around the van.