Mickey Neri was writhing around on the floor. Martelli heard his desperate shrieks, wondered how badly he’d hit the kid, and shook his head.
“Listen to the little rabbit,” he croaked. “What makes him squeal? The pain? Or knowing what’s gonna end it? You got no balls, boy?”
“You crazy old fucker,” Mickey whispered from somewhere beyond Martelli’s receding vision. “I could give you something. We could both walk out of this.”
“You got nothing for me,” Martelli said simply. “No one’s got a damn thing I can use anymore.” He raised the gun, knowing there was just the one cartridge left and this had to count, because if it didn’t Mickey Neri would somehow walk out of this place alive, and that, surely, was a crime.
Then he coughed some more, coughed and coughed, until the sound of his own breathing entered his ears, grew and grew.
Toni Martelli was choking on his own blood, wondering where this had come from, why the doctors never told him it would end this way. The shotgun still lay on his lap but he hadn’t the strength to touch it. And Mickey Neri had stopped wriggling around on the ground. He was half out in the open now, looking up, a little hope in his eyes. The little jerk wasn’t even hurt.
“What the fuck—” Martelli tried to mumble, but it all came out wrong because his mouth was full of stuff, his head was all over the place.
And the pain…
Different this time.
He looked down at the gun. It was covered in blood. His own. It came out of his chest somehow, poured down the front of his shirt.
He wanted to get angry. He wanted to kill someone.
A woman walked into view from the door. A skinny woman with red hair and a face that made him feel fear.
“Who the fu—?” Toni Martelli began to say.
She had a gun in her hand. She held the weapon purposefully, the way you were supposed to.
Mickey Neri crawled to his knees and looked up as if the light of God was shining out of her bright, glittering eyes.
The woman shook her head, disappointed. The red hair moved slowly in the light of the old apartment.
“You do it like this,” she said, then walked up to Toni Martelli, smiled briefly, coldly into his face, and put a bullet into his brain.
THERE WAS ONLY SO MUCH a man could do with his hands. Brick and glass and rubble tore at Peroni’s fingertips. The coarse, choking dust filled his mouth, solidified in his eyes. Every time he and Falcone tried to snatch something away from Rachele D’Amato’s torn, unconscious body, another piece of debris seemed to fall around them to fill its place. Neri’s house was losing its solidity, just like the world itself. The ancient structure was on the point of collapse, a huge hole rent in its belly. There was so little time. Falcone was grappling with an ancient timber beam that had shattered like an overlong, rotten tooth and now lay across her chest. It refused to move and it occurred to Peroni that maybe this was for the best. In the dark it was impossible to see what part of the wrecked building depended on the rest for support. If they shifted the wrong thing, the fragile remnants of wall around them could so easily topple down too.
He put a hand on Falcone’s arm. “Leo,” he gasped, snatching for breath. “This is crazy. We could bring the whole thing down on her.”
The tall inspector continued to claw at the rubble and brick. Peroni grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. “Leo!”
Falcone stopped. He looked lost just then. Peroni had never seen him this way. It was unnerving. They needed Falcone to keep his cool. The shaky department was beginning to pivot around him. There was no one else. “The rescue people are here. They know what they’re doing. This is their job. Let’s stick to ours, huh?”
Vehicles were arriving all around, fire trucks with shifting gear, their officers moving quietly among the carnage of the blast, trying to assess how best to proceed, paramedics in vivid yellow jackets, wondering where to start.
“She’s breathing,” Falcone murmured. “I can see it—”
Rachele D’Amato was alive, just. Peroni nodded at a bunch of paramedics placing black plastic sheets over several unmistakable forms. “She’s lucky. We got at least three dead already.”
Peroni knew it could have been even worse. If the riot men around the corner had been standing outside their van instead of in it. If the media animals had bothered to stick around to see what this was really about. It was too much for his head to handle right then. This was premeditated slaughter on a scale the city had never known, a calculated act of murder.
Two firemen elbowed past, took a good look at Rachele D’Amato, then yelled at Falcone and Peroni to get out of the way.
“We were trying to help,” Peroni shouted back.
“Nice of you,” the lead fireman retorted, dragging some gear behind them, calling for a back-up team to bring some lifting equipment. “Now give us some room.”
Falcone closed his eyes for a moment, trying to quell the fury. He gripped the man by the shoulder.
“I’m the officer in charge here—” he began to say. Something in the man’s eyes made him stop.
“I don’t care who the hell you are,” the fireman bellowed back. “We’re here to get these people out, mister. If you stand in my way God help you.”
“OK, OK,” Peroni said softly, putting a hand on Falcone, gently guiding him away.
The firemen weren’t even listening. The two of them were on the ground, carefully scraping rubble away from her body, yelling for more gear and paramedics.
Falcone watched them, his face a picture of misery. “Gianni? You got any cigarettes? I was trying to give it up.”
Peroni brushed some of the dust off his sleeves, then did the same for Falcone. The two men were filthy and they’d hardly even noticed. “When it comes to cigarettes, I’m always prepared. Walk with me. I’m flattered, by the way, to hear you using my first name again. I thought, perhaps, we’d never get back to that.”
Falcone followed him to the far side of the road, putting just enough distance between them and the wreck of Neri’s house to be out of the immediate stench of smoke and dust. Three more ambulances tore down the cobblestones and screeched to a halt next to the emergency rescue unit. New teams of paramedics burst out of their brightly lit interiors and started to work the scene. A short line of black cars arrived behind them. Both Falcone and Peroni knew what that meant. The big guys were coming in to pass judgement: men from the security service, the bureaucrats, the hierarchy of the DIA. This was no longer a simple crime investigation. It bordered on terrorism, and that changed the name of the game.
Peroni used his sleeve to wipe some debris off the bonnet of a Renault Saloon and they sat down. He lit a cigarette and passed it over. Falcone’s slim, tanned hands were shaking. He took a couple of drags at the thing then cursed and threw it to the ground.
“You know how much those things cost?” Peroni asked. “I’m the only man in the Questura who buys them straight and honest. No black market stuff for this boy.”
“Yeah,” Falcone grunted. “You and your cock-eyed ideas about honesty. I don’t get it. You were the one man in vice I thought we could trust. Then you go and ruin it all over a woman. What for?”
Peroni cast a sideways glance at Falcone. He was a handsome man, in a hard, emotionless way. This inability to address the real seat of his fears—his apparent concern for Rachele D’Amato—was a rare weakness, one that made him briefly more human. “She was a beautiful woman, may I remind you. A hooker, true, but let’s not leave out all the salient facts. People make fools of themselves from time to time, Leo. There’s a crazy gene in all of us. You convince yourself otherwise. You say to yourself, nah, the job’s bigger than this. Or the marriage. Or the kids. You think: I can just push these thoughts back into the dark where they belong. Then one day, just when you’re least expecting it, the crazy gene wakes up and you know it’s pointless trying to fight. For a while anyway. Because fighting could be even worse. You’re just beating up on yourself. But I think you already know that.”